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“The whole world is watching!” That’s what anti-Vietnam War protestors outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention chanted as police beat the shit out of them. It was later referred to as a “police riot.”
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 28, 1968--
Held in Chicago, the protests began three days before the convention started. The mayor warned the protestors that “Law and order will be maintained.” He left out the part “through brutal beatings and mass arrests.”
At the beginning of the year, due to the Tết offensive, respected newsman Walter Cronkite referred to the Vietnam War as unwinnable, saying, “We are mired in a stalemate.” But people weren’t just sick of the draft sending young men off to die for no fucking reason. Lots of crazy shit had been going down in America. In the previous four months both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. RFK had spoken out against the war and stood a fair chance of becoming the Democratic nominee for president, but then he got dead. Instead, they were faced with President Lyndon Johnson’s uninspiring VP Hubert Humphrey getting the nomination to go up against goddamn Nixon in the fall.
The protests in Lincoln Park were festive, but the day before the convention began, on August 25, Mayor Daley sent in a couple thousand cops. Dressed in riot gear, they lobbed tear gas at the peaceful crowd then began beating them with clubs. But the protestors wouldn’t be so easily cowed. On August 28, 1968, they gathered outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel where the convention was being held, and that’s when things really went to excrement.
Referred to as The Battle for Michigan Avenue, police and protestors fought in front of the hotel for a brutal 17 minutes. Cops pushed people through plate glass windows then followed them inside and beat them as they lay on the glass. So much tear gas was used, soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee Humphrey, 25 floors up in his hotel room watching the horror unfold, was affected by the chemical agent. And the cameras rolled. Journalists Mike Wallace and Dan Rather were roughed up by convention security, which was also caught on camera.
The broadcasting of the police riot led to a sea change in American attitudes toward the Vietnam War. For the first time, it was no longer just a hippie thing to protest the war, but was being seen by mainstream society as a pointless waste of lives and money. A year later, eight of the protest organizers were tried for conspiracy and inciting a riot. The trial was a circus with an overly biased judge, and five of the men were convicted of inciting a riot, with one sentenced to four years for contempt of court. All convictions were later overturned on appeal.
The war continued to rage, claiming nearly 60,000 American lives, and causing the deaths of a couple million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.
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