Chicago 1968: When it all changed

By David M. Shribman GLOBE CORRESPONDENT AUGUST 25, 2018

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A half-century ago this weekend, in a convention city ruled by bosses, anarchy eclipsed democratic process and made it feel, in the moment, irrelevant: 650 people arrested, 100 protesters treated in hospitals, 49 police officers treated for injuries. Those wounds for the most part healed, but their memory would reshape the Democratic Party, elevate a new generation of liberal leaders — and set in motion a countermovement that would catapult Richard Nixon to the presidency five months later, provide oxygen to a conservative movement that seemed moribund after the Barry Goldwater debacle only four years earlier, draw the blue-collar core of the Franklin Roosevelt coalition into the Republican Party and propel Ronald Reagan, and eventually Donald Trump, into the White House.

Divided bitterly by the Vietnam War but still clinging to its New Deal heritage, the Democrats limped into Chicago for their quadrennial presidential nominating convention in a year of dissent and despair. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were dead and the insurgent presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy was in tatters. The Russian invaders were in Czechoslovakia and the scene in the streets of Chicago, 4,500 miles from embattled Prague, broadcast to the world images of an American calamity.

Nothing the martinets of the political establishment who gathered in the convention hall knew or assumed would survive the week. For by the time the Democratic National Convention was over, the old order had crumbled, crashing to the ground as, in the phrase the protesters chanted, the whole world was watching.

And though we live now in a time of deep divisions, the United States has not for 50 years seen anything like the fissures laid bare that week in 1968, when many of the political realities we live with today were given birth. It was only fitting, moreover, that this conflict would take place in Chicago, a vital seat of commerce and politics and the last redoubt of a desiccated Democratic machine that stood as a symbol of a politics of a time long past.

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