Wrote Norman Mailer in "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (1960). I've quoted that before, but it's jumping out at me today as I'm looking at all my old posts about Mailer's 1968 book "Miami and the Siege of Chicago." The 1968 book — about the Republican convention (nominating Nixon in Miami) and the Democratic Convention (nominating Humphrey in Chicago, with rioting in the streets) — is something I read in 2016 to prime myself to write about that year's conventions, which were so much tamer than what happened in 1968.
I'm thinking of the book today because I'm reading a New Yorker article about it, "A Great Writer at the 1968 Democratic Disaster," by David Denby. The crazy 1968 Democratic Convention took place exactly 50 years ago this week (August 26th to 29th). Denby writes:
On the night of August 28th... [Mailer] ducks the messy demonstrations for all sorts of reasons, the most salient of which is that he’s not going to write forty thousand words for Harper’s in the next few weeks if he gets clubbed on the head. But he also wonders if he isn’t simply “yellow”—too old and too established to fight....Denby doesn't get much out of his exercise of reading the old book. He kind of brushes off Mailer — we're told he's "much out of fashion now." The essay ends lamely with finding "solace" because "If the country could survive 1968, it will survive Donald Trump, too." Of course, we didn't survive 1968 because Mailer wrote that book, but you can feel solace because the book shows you how bad 1968 was. Yet Denby won't say that 1968 was worse than anything we're dealing with today. That's off script.
He stays inside the Hilton, and observes what he can—a lesson in making the most of a specialized perspective. The Hilton, under siege, is coming apart.
The Hilton heaved and staggered through a variety of attacks and breakdowns. Like an old fort, like the old fort of the Democratic Party, about to fall forever beneath the ministrations of its high shaman, its excruciated warlock, derided by the young, held in contempt by its own soldiers—the very delegates who would be loyal to Humphrey in the nomination and loyal to nothing in their heart—this spiritual fort of the Democratic Party was now housed in the literal fort of the Hilton staggering in place, its boilers working, all motors vibrating, yet seeming to come apart from the pressure on the street outside.. . .The laundry, the elevators, the telephones—nothing in the hotel works well and, in a further indignity, the tear gas unleashed by the police drifts into the air-conditioning system, where it joins the odor of stink bombs thrown by protesters. “Delegates, powerful political figures, old friends, and strangers all smelled awful,” he writes.
Talk about the backwash of the event! This is tragicomedy at a Shakespearean level. The appallingly violated Hilton and its denizens are not only a metaphor for the Democratic Party, they are a metaphor for the nation in a time of war, assassination, riot, and betrayal. Daley turns the police loose. “The police attacked . . . like a chain saw cutting into wood, the teeth of the saw the edge of their clubs, they attacked like a scythe through grass, lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc, their clubs beating, demonstrators fleeing,” he writes. A later investigatory commission termed the excessive violence “a police riot.” At the time, people said, “It’s Vietnam, right here on Michigan Avenue.”
Remember: the secret appeal of politics is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life... and politics quarantines one from history...
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The only difference is today Democrat mayors would tell the police to stand down because they are more openly supportive of violence today.
Since my mother died last year I have neither friend nor family with whom to discuss baseball. :-(
Remember: the secret appeal of politics is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life... and politics quarantines one from history...
Being a progressive quarantines you from history.
Violence is their addiction. The targets change but the oppression and the violence are consistent.
Who sez the 1968 Democrat convention was a disaster? Leftwing Democrats rioting against Moderate Democrats, while Conservative Democrats also bolted to support racist Democrat George Wallace, all of which resulted Democrat Hubert Humphrey losing to Republican Nixon by 1 point?
What's not to like!
When comes to politics, most would rather fight than switch.
Reagan had a lock on Marlboro Country.
Obama was Kool.
I am too young to remember 1968, but to think that within about a 5-6 month period you had LBJ announce he would not run for reelection, MLK assassinated, Columbia U taken over by SDS, George Wallace running for president (he won 5 states!) RFK assassinated and the Dem. convention commences. I do not want to live through that much excitement, ever.
I grew up in a family that only voted for Democrats. My dad was chairman of the Democratic Town Committee. The 1968 Democratic Convention convinced my grandmother who lived with us to vote for "Mr. Nixon" because the Democrats had "lost their senses". My mom refused to vote. Kind of like today's #WalkAway.
One of these days cops are going to get very tired of pimply faced twerps spitting in their faces and beat the shit out of them.
The lefties think they would win a civil war,
I'm sending my brother-in-law, a retired Chicago cop, one of those Trump stars that keep appearing on Hollywood Blvd.
He loves that stuff.
The lefties keep trying to pick the locks on the lion cage.
I do not want to live through that much excitement, ever.
Meanwhile, there was a War on, which kept some of us quite busy. Not all of us, though.
Participants in politics make history.
They may realize that they are observing history also.
I have been in that position a few times.
I wonder how the mob at the Bastille felt.
I think I can guess, with some accuracy, drawing from where I have been.
Street Fighting Man was also released sometime this week, 50 years ago, wiki says. Recorded in spring during Paris and on the shelves in time for America.
Growing up long after, I know the Paris riots preceded Chicago. And in between, a few rock n rollers suggested that there ain't no place for such revolution in their own sleepy old town, so whatcha gonna do about it?
I think baseball was a bigger topic of conversation in 1960 than it is today.
The 1968 World Series was a classic. Tigers come back from 3-1 — beating Bob Gibson — to win.
1968 was the last year before baseball added playoff divisional series in each league. It was a good move since the number of teams had increased with expansion. And 1968 was the last year the mound was 15 inches high. MLB lowered the mound to 10 inches because the decrease in hitting and scoring. Pitching was dominant.
1968 was the last season Mickey Mantle played.
The Chicago riots were entirely Mayor Daley's doing. The police department brass saw what was coming and a lot of them went on vacation at the time of the convention or called in sick to avoid getting blamed.
The Illinois National Guard behaved in exemplary fashion commanded by General Dunn from Peoria. There were no reported "incidents" involving them.
@McCullough,
Good baseball stuff! It was also the first year Denny McClain started snorting Coke in the clubhouse! Bob Gibson was bringing the heat that year.
When cops don't bust heads that need busting, criminals think they can.
The Chicago riots were entirely Mayor Daley's doing
Revisionist bullshit. And all police vacations were cancelled, btw.
Brings back memories of one of my favorite chants: "Dump the Hump".
I’ve never smoked.
Mailer's write-up was much better than the events he was writing about, just a terrific tour de force. Denby doesn't have the sense to recognize who is the master and who the hack.
Many years after the 68 convention Abbie Hoffman and Tom Foran, the chief prosecutor of the Chicago 7, chatted amiably about the goings on outside the Hilton (it was then known as the Conrad Hilton). They had by then both mellowed considerably and had pretty much reconciled their differences. The aging Jewish yippie radical and the Chicago Irish attorney even liked each other, after a fashion. Hoffman admitted to Foran that he had gone to Chicago for the express purpose of staging a riot. To which Foran replied, "I know, Abbie. I know." They both had a good laugh over that.
A lot of people forget or don't know that the day before the big riot in front of the Conrad Hilton on Michigan Avenue there was a lesser but still sizeable and violent confrontation between yippies and Chicago Police in Lincoln Park, by the zoo. This was a virtual set-piece battle between radicals and police, both sides were spoiling for a fight and both got what they wanted. The yippies had been denied a city license to stage a "demonstration" and so, as one might have expected, they ignored orders not to congregate and to disperse. They had no intention of staging a peaceful protest and every intention of raising violent hell. They would have gotten violent whether or not they had received official permission to demonstrate. Of course when the police showed up and deployed into battle lines it was the yippies who struck first with violence by throwing rocks at assorted debris at the cops, taunting them, and charging toward them and making menacing gestures. And, of course, the cops, who were obliged to enforce the law and disperse the rioters, did so with great zeal ... and reciprocal violence. I remember all this vividly. I was nearby, watching.
The Lincoln Park riot was round 1 for the big riot in front of the Hilton, the first act in the drama. Everyone, I mean EVERYONE, in Chicago new that there would be a big battle in front of the Hilton that night. The protesters were ardent for battle and so were the police.
(eaglebeak)
What a year! Lived in D.C. that summer, got tear-gassed in my own apartment because there had been rioting nearby, watched the Dem Convention with my boyfriend and the family of a friend of ours--the father worked for the CIA.
All during the scenes of mayhem, the father who worked for the CIA kept saying, "What the hell's the matter with you kids?"
Of course, we weren't the kids rioting, but we were nuts too. Everyone was that year. I had supported Gene McCarthy, so was furious at Bobby Kennedy for stealing his thunder and completely furious with Humphrey for being so cheerful.
In November my boyfriend and I and some others got arrested in Annapolis (where we went to school) because we were marching around the Governor's mansion yelling things at Spiro Agnew, who had just been elected Vice-President.
The cops were pretty hopped up, and we spent several hours in jail.
But we were little nothings compared to the folks in Chicago.
I couldn't vote that year--too young--but in 1972 I voted for McGovern.
Later on I pulled myself together and became a conservative.
"Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made."
That is a succinct way of putting what's been going on in my head lately. The gulf between what the politicians are arguing about and what is actually happening in the world is huge.
In the 1968 election Nixon was the Peace Candidate. It didn't work out that way.
As soon as Nixon assumed office, our food overseas got a lot better. No more of what we called LBJ Beef, which was leathery.
This is what would have happened if the police had not attacked the protesters in front of the Hilton and had stood by passively: the protesters would have attacked the police and literally run riot up and down Michigan Avenue, breaking windows, overturning cars, destroying storefronts, looting, etc. They wanted mayhem and they were bound and determined to either provoke it or inflict it themselves. As it happened they did both. And the police played right into their hands. Those cops were super pissed off. Their fury toward and hatred of the protesters, especially after the violence at Lincoln Park the night before, was off the charts. The protesters wanted blood and so did the police.
Amazing, no one got killed. NO ONE GOT KILLED.
I lost my cherry that same summer, 68, around the same time as the Chicago convention. On a hot summer night, in a car at a drive-in just outside Chicago, with a beautiful girl with long legs and perfect breasts. It was a dream come true. 68 was an exciting year in many ways and for many reasons, and for better and for worse (don't forget the Tet Offensive in February, e.g.). I turned 18 during the summer, it was wild and crazy and noisy, no one could make sense of what was going on, everything was happening so fast, a tsunami of events, all you could do was ride the wave and try to keep your head above the water. And did I say I got laid?
I'm going to see that girl in a few weeks at our 50th high school class reunion. I haven't seen her in over 30 years. Should be interesting.
the chief prosecutor of the Chicago 7, chatted amiably about the goings on outside the Hilton (it was then known as the Conrad Hilton).
Before that it was The Stevens.
Yeah, also in the summer of 68: the Soviets drove tanks into Prague and crushed the "Prague Spring". I was working a summer job in the buildings and grounds department of Northwestern University, trimming hedges and mowing lawns. The full-time workers for "grounds" were all Eastern European refugees; the "buildings" were postwar German immigrants/refugees. Most of them, Eastern Europeans and Germans, had fought in the war; all had been involved in the war in some way. When I showed up for work that morning in the basement coffee room where we punched in at the time clock, all of them were gathered around a table, drinking coffee and shouting and gesticulating in their respective languages, shouting in broken English because that was the only language they could all communicate in (sort of). They outraged: they HATED the Russians for going into Prague like that. They HATED HATED HATED the Russians. They wanted to go over to Czechoslovakia and take up arms and fight the Russkis. The Eastern Europeans and the Germans at the table were unified in their hatred and anger. My boss, an American, told me and the other student summer hires to go home. "No work today," he said resignedly, gesturing at the agitated crowd around the break table.
1968, man. Wild.
I'm going to see that girl in a few weeks at our 50th high school class reunion. I haven't seen her in over 30 years. Should be interesting.
She's going to be two or three times wider than your memories.
Memories of 68 Dem Convention were mostly how long the show went on into the 3:00 AM hour. Fun fun fun until the nets took theirTV coverage away. Only a few of us stayed up to the end. Daly was touted as the boss of all that happens in Chicago. But the utter chaos turned some people off. I enjoyed it.
Molly says: Later on I pulled myself together and became a conservative.
Many of us did. Looking back, though, the late 60's were a hell of a lot of fun.
Looking back, though, the late 60's were a hell of a lot of fun.
Yep. And exciting. Hardly a dull moment.
New tag: Trump is like the late 60's.
"most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made."
If only. Even as they think history has a logic of its own, progs, not trusting mere logic, do want to make history. Violently. Can't make omelettes without breaking eggs and all that. To the left, we're all kulaks.
Been that way since 1789.
I'd just turned 18, fairly naive farm girl, from a moderate Republican family in Springfield, Illinois. My new boyfriend had gone to Northwestern for a year or two, had long hair, a fabulous moustache and I thought he was was the pinnacle of sophistication. He talked me into getting on a train to Chicago in the late morning so off we went, in search of excitement. We roamed some side streets but never got into the real heat of it. Finally we got scared, ran for the train station to get home before my parents figured out I hadn't been out swimming at the river all day. I remember a couple bloody people running through the station. Haven't thought about it much till today.
Blogger Darrell said...
She's going to be two or three times wider than your memories.
And most of the guys have guts the size of Volkswagens and no hair.
Some events were as histrionic as Mailer's prose. I thought the book was pretty good. Iirc, the very last paragraph was something about how democracy was a failed experiment, but he phrased it in such a way that it sounded really profound. Mailer was wrong about most things, but he was wrong in a stylish way. He really knew how to get over. He stabbed his wife, didn't do any time for it, and most of his friends took his side of the argument........I think back then the police used clubs far more often as a way of crowd control. It works but you weren't supposed to use such tactics against white college kids. They were in a protected class, much like BLM protesters today....The public events of that year definitely sucked, but sex had recently been invented so there were other things to do besides politics and demonstrations. People in public life--and this includes everybody--were remarkably shabby. Hoffman, Daley, LBJ, Nixon, Mailer--all of them were awful.
In retrospect, I think Humphrey was the best of the lot. He was a truly decent man who seems to have been despised by the truly despicable.
Here’s the last paragraph. You tell me if it’s profound:
"Perhaps good Mayor Daley’s jowl was the soft underbelly of the new American axis. Put your fingers in V for victory and give a wink. We yet may win, the others are so stupid. Heaven help us when we do."
No. It's pretty stupid. It's more topspin than toscin, but it sounds cool.
I was thinking more of this paragraph: "Brood on that country who expressed our will. She is America once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled,now a beauty with a leprosy skin. She is heavy with child No one knows if legitimate--and languished in dungeon whose walls are never seen.........She will probably give birth and to what?--the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known?". It goes on quite a bit longer. Yeats was pithier.
Ok enough of this distortion of history. In 1960 I was young EE ,one year out of college , working in military avionics while persuing a masters degree at night. I read Mailer's 1960 essay just a few minutes ago for the first time. That essay is written by a malcontent with a chip on his shoulder. That time was when America was at the vanguard of technical growth and continuing economic growth especially for the labor class. Suburbs were blossoming, the transistor was invading all aspects of our lives, a tv and appliances in every home ,etc. In fact most people my age say they wouldn't trade that time for any thereafter.
Mailer was a small man in more ways than one.
Welcome, Flat Tire!
Need a patch and a friendly pump?
Candace Owens received some measure of media fame recently when the rap star and Mr. Kardashian, Kanye West, positively mentioned her. In terms of changing hearts and minds, Kanye has done more to move the needle than a year of conservative op-ed’s published by all center-right publications combined.
Two things: 1) Imagine the arrogance of white people who can write "a year of conservative op-ed’s published by all center-right publications" but can't "move the needle" insisting they're the experts on race in America that everyone should listen to, and 2) when the Right is so desperate it slathers after someone they insisted was a "jackass" (the guy who said "George Bush doesn't like black people" is your hero now?) they should rethink their game, because their hypocrisy and opportunism are obvious.
”Perhaps good Mayor Daley’s jowl was the soft underbelly of the new American axis.
Well at least he was more subtle about calling people Nazis. But it’s there, just without the capital ‘A’.
Probably in 1968, the memory of the war against the Axis Powers was fresh enough that that was not subtle at all. Godwin arguments are always “profound,” right?
I want to make some corrections here, Ann, because Mailer and the leftist media told so many lies for so many decades. This stuff isn't hard to find, so long as you don't get seduced by the mythmakers.
First, the Weathermen nearly murdered a city attorney. They were on their way to kill a judge and were targeting courthouses too. That does matter, right? In other cities they and their criminal colleages had already killed police and tried to kill judges and bomb courthouses. Forget all the monday morning quarterbacking about which sect was responsible and which wasn't: they were coordinating a revolutionary cell movement and all were aware and culpable. The city attorney was paralyzed for life: Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones (another future colleague of Obama, and another terrorist bomber, who go millions of TARP funding while his bomber wife was made a judge and law professor in New York) composed and sang songs mocking the young man's inability to walk afer they paralyzed him.
The Weathermen set off a major bomb destroying a police memorial before the riots. The only reason they didn't succeed in killing hundreds, maybe be thousands of people throughout their careers was, as the historian Harvey Klehr (I think) put it, only incompetence. That doesn't make them innocent. Starting with Chicago, they should have been charged with attempted murder and left to rot in prison. Hitting people on the head with a metal pipe is attempted murder.
The police did not, as Mailer so dramatically put it, unleash rage on them. The protesters had been attacking the police with bats, pipes and bricks -- for days. Jesus, days. The police acted to defend convention goers, lawyers, judges, citizens, EMTs, and their fellow officers.
All culpability for all of the violence lies entirely with the Weathermen, clever words written by sicko liars in 20-pound glossy literary magazines stuffed with ads for high shelf bourbon and wristwatchs that would cost a policeman's salary notwithstanding.
@ Tim in vermont. Good call on Godwinism. Deep in Ann's bones there is some of that malcontentism hidden as "profound" prose.
The Chicago riots were entirely the doings of spoiled, poorly educated and arrogant brats who’s heads were so far up their ass every time their lips moved they thought they saw daylight.
I’ve never been much of a fan of Norman Mailer’s writing, but wow that’s a really great quote.
I turned 9 earlier that year and remember the chaos and social upheaval quite well. It was an interesting time to come of age and wake up to the world around you. “Interesting”. To say the least.
I watched my city burn and that FOObama free as a bird guilty as sin Bill Ayers later encouraged that children should kill their parents to jumpstart the revolution.
Vile evil man. Until I was older I never realized how much I internalized this violent history I lived thru. My dad took my for a ride in the burned out shells of some neighborhoods a few years later.
Psssttt there’s your “Russian interference right there.”
George Bush doesn't like black people"
That was BS.
"The only difference is today Democrat mayors would tell the police to stand down because they are more openly supportive of violence today."
It was the Chicago cops who were the aggressors, who initiated violence. They were beating up people indiscriminately, anyone in their path. It was a police riot.
"One of these days cops are going to get very tired of pimply faced twerps spitting in their faces and beat the shit out of them."
Those pimply-face twerps are exercising their Constitutional right to protest. Whether you disagree with them or not, (or whether I disagree with them or not), they have that right. The cops who are beating them up are the tyrannical agents of King George our founders sought to extirpate, as best they could, with the Bill of Rights.
But, the Bill of Rights is a dead letter today.
"Meanwhile, there was a War on, which kept some of us quite busy. Not all of us, though."
Yes. A pointless, baseless war based on a lie, in defense of nothing...just as our current wars are.
To Robert “human freedom” is nothing, based on a false consciousness. I don’t know whether we should have been in Viet Nam, but I do know that Cook doesn’t believe in “human freedom” unless it is the freedom to the state to crush the souls of its inhabitants so that nobody gets jealous of anybody else. An impossible standard, BTW, because people are always going to jealous of power imbalances too, and communism has no answer for that beyond impossible fantasy.
Will there still be pilfering when communism is finally achieved comrade?
No! Everything will have already been stolen under socialism.
Robert Cook: nobody cares if your pet anarchist wants to get a ride from mommy to act out downtown about the revolution.
These people set off bombs, assassinated cops and judges, beat cops with pipes and threw bricks at them. And they announced in advance that they were doing it. They said the streets would run with pig blood. They advertised for people to kill cops in their "underground" newspapers. Nobody got punished for saying anything. They weren't even convicted for the murders and attempted murders they committed.
They worked with Maoists, Stalinists, Che, the Red Army, the PLO and other Islamic terrorist groups.
If you know nothing, say nothing. You know?
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