Will Chicago DNC Hold 1968-Style Protests?

When Craig Sautter, a 21-year-old philosophy student at Indiana University, traveled to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he had a “feeling” that he was in for an “eventful day.”

A series of riots had taken place following the back-to-back assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy just months earlier, and he could tell that simmering tensions were ready to explode when thousands of protesters, police, politicians and delegates gathered in Chicago in August 1968 to choose who would be the next Democratic presidential nominee.

But the young anti-Vietnam War activist was still shocked by what he saw: National Guardsmen armed with bayonets, protesters being dragged from their cars or beaten with batons, and thick clouds of tear gas floating above a crowd of thousands.

“We were mostly middle-class kids or businessmen who were there in suits protesting the war,” Sautter recalled. “We never imagined that the police would attack a group of unarmed people who were just singing and shouting… We were in disbelief.”

In the end, more than 600 protesters were arrested and more than 100 were treated for injuries, alongside 119 police officers.

Scenes of violent clashes in the streets and parks of Chicago were quickly broadcast on television screens across the country and around the world, leaving an unforgettable image of America in chaos.

“People were chanting that the whole world was watching,” added Mr. Sautter, now a professor at DePaul University in Chicago who studies presidential conventions.

The DNC’s return to Chicago in 2024 has led many to look back to 1968 and draw parallels. As then, there will be anti-war protests — this time against the Biden administration’s support for Israel during the Gaza war.

And as was the case then, there was a surprising shift in the Democratic Party leadership. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for reelection months before the convention, while this time President Biden withdrew from the race just weeks before the end.

But experts and veterans of the 1960s protest movement say the differences far outweigh the similarities.

Some of those planning anti-Gaza war protests at the upcoming DNC say they are drawing inspiration from the work of previous activists nearly 60 years ago.

“This is the Vietnam War of our time,” Hatem Abudayyah, a spokesman for the March Against the DNC Coalition, told the BBC. “The attacks on our movement, our students and our organizations are similar to the attacks on the movement that was trying to end 1968… I absolutely see those parallels.”

The coalition includes more than 200 organizations involved in the protests, and its spokespeople said “tens of thousands” of participants are expected.

The scale of the protests prompted the Chicago Police Department to warn that it would not tolerate “violent actors” or incidents of vandalism or crime.

Mr Abudayyah, however, does not believe violence is an inevitable outcome, saying there has been “no evidence of violence” in the 10 months of protests organised by the coalition or its member groups since the Middle East conflict began.

Others have dismissed the comparisons, saying the similarities are rare.

“Other than the fact that they’re in Chicago, there aren’t any,” Elaine Kamarck, a longtime Democratic National Committee member and DNC delegate, told the BBC. “It’s not even close.”

One key difference, Kamarck said, was the “very, very heavy-handed tactics” of the Chicago police, which a federally mandated commission later blamed for a “police riot” at the DNC.

A few months earlier, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley had also issued a “shoot-to-kill” order following the riots that followed the death of Martin Luther King.

“It was hell,” said Ms. Kamarck, who was 18 at the time. “It’s not like that anymore.”

Ms. Kamarck’s assessment was echoed by Marsha Barrett, a professor of American political history at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

“Daley had a very strong control over the police and had a conflictual relationship with the protesters,” she said. “The city had created a situation that had the potential to lead to a major conflict.”

“We don’t have that anymore,” she added.

Chicago police have been in regular contact with DNC protest groups and have pledged to protect their right to free speech, as long as the protests remain legal.

“At the time, the police were supposed to use whatever force was necessary to overcome resistance,” Sautter said.

“The police are now better trained,” he added. “They will not provoke anything unless some form of violence breaks out.”

Among those who witnessed the violence firsthand was Abe Peck, then editor of the Chicago Seed, an underground newspaper linked to the International Youth Movement, or Yippies, which organized events around the 1968 convention.

“We were in our office, which was in a dry cleaners, and all of a sudden our window broke,” recalled Mr. Peck, who later coined the slogan “The whole world is watching.” “Two shots were fired through the window. Luckily, no one was hit.”

When they rushed outside to investigate, Mr. Peck saw only one vehicle: a Chicago police car.

The incident was one of several that marked his experience at the DNC, during which police also “squashed” religious ministers linked to the counterculture movement.

This violence, Mr Peck told the BBC, stands in stark contrast to the current situation.

Social media and the instant dissemination of news could create a public relations disaster if the police were perceived as too aggressive.

“Back then, there was a real delay in getting news out. Now it’s almost instantaneous,” Peck said. “That’s a big difference.”

Don Rose, who in 1968 was a spokesman for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War, one of the leading protest groups, told the BBC that an even more significant difference was the Vietnam War itself.

This war, unlike the one in Gaza, saw tens of thousands of Americans enlisted, many of whom were killed or wounded overseas.

“At the time, the country was much more divided over the Vietnam War. The protests got really big because of the draft,” said Mr. Rose, now 93.

“We were protesting against a convention that was supposed to appoint someone who could end the war with the stroke of a pen,” he added.

The Democratic Party was deeply divided on the war issue, and when delegates arrived at the 1968 DNC, they had no idea who would walk away with the nomination.

When then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey was finally chosen as the nominee over antiwar Senator Eugene McCarthy, some in the audience even shouted “No!”

“The convention was totally divided and at war with itself,” Stautter said. “For (Kamala) Harris and Walz, it’s totally unified.”

Mr. Peck, for his part, said the most recent versions of the DNC can no longer be called “nominating conventions.”

“These are just confirmation conventions,” he said. “They confirm what the citizens of the states did in the primaries. It’s really different.”

Ultimately, Hubert Humphrey lost the 1968 election to Republican Richard Nixon.

Looking back, Mr. Stautter — who will watch the convention on television this year — believes the 1968 protests had an impact on the United States that can never be replicated in 2024.

“People who watched were totally radicalized by it, and many, many more people got involved in the effort to stop the war,” he said.

“A whole generation, whether they were present or not, was marked by it.”