Chicago 10 - Page 2 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

The_Jazz · 05-09-2008, 09:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

or you could say that the secession went beyond protest into something else and that prompted the war

but thanks for the caps.
i like hats.

Thank you for pointing out why the hat doesn't fit.

Just to be obscure....

host · 05-09-2008, 11:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Should be obvious.

Makes beating up some hippies rather trivial.

WRONG, Ustwo....

Quote:

http://www3.niu.edu/~td0raf1/1960s/W...ion%201968.htm
Walker Commission on Chicago Democratic Convention and the Chicago Police

Excerpt from Takin’ It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader (1995: Oxford University Press)

Rights in Conflict: THE WALKER COMMLSSION

The commission appointed to investigate the events surrounding the Chicago convention was headed &y Daniel Walker, later governor of Illinois. Among the most significant findings of the Walker Commission was that the Chicago police had provoked the crowd, encouraged by Mayor Richard Daley. They had engaged in what the commission referred to as a 'Police riot. " The following is excerpted from the summary of the report.

During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the Chicago police were the targets of mounting provocation by both word and act. It took the form of obscene epithets, and of rocks, sticks, bathroom tiles and even human feces hurled at police by demonstrators. Some of these acts had been planned; others were spontaneous or were themselves provoked by police action. Furthermore, the police had been put on edge by widely published threats of attempts to disrupt both the city and the Convention.

That was the nature of the provocation. The nature of the response was unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night.

That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat. These included peaceful demonstrators, onlookers, and large numbers of residents who were simply passing through, or happened to live in the areas where confrontations were occurring.

Newsmen and photographers were singled out for assault, and their equipment deliberately damaged. Fundamental police training was ignored; and officers, when on the scene, were often unable to control their men. As one police officer put it: "What happened didn't have anything to do with police work."

The violence reached its culmination on Wednesday night.

A report prepared by an inspector from the Los Angeles Police Department, present as an official observer ...:

There is no question but that many officers acted without restraint and exerted force beyond that necessary under the circumstances. The leadership at the point of conflict did little to prevent such conduct and the direct control of officers by first line supervisors was virtually non-existent.

He is referring to the police-crowd confrontation in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Most Americans know about it, having seen the 17-minute sequence played and replayed on their television screens.

But most Americans do not know that the confrontation was followed by even more brutal incidents in the Loop side streets. Or that it had been preceded by comparable instances of indiscriminate police attacks on the North Side a few nights earlier when demonstrators were cleared from Lincoln Park and pushed into the streets and alleys of Old Town.

How did it start? ... Government--federal, state and local--moved to defend itself from the threats, both imaginary and real. The preparations were detailed and far ranging: from stationing firemen at each alarm box within a six block radius of the Amphitheatre to staging U.S. Army armored personnel carriers in Soldier Field under Secret Service control. Six thousand Regular Army troops in full field gear, equipped with rifles, flame throwers, and bazookas were airlifted to Chicago on Monday, August 26. About 6,000 Illinois National Guard troops had already been activated to assist the 12,000 member Chicago Police Force....

... On August 18,1968, the advance contingent of demonstrators arrived in Chicago and established their base, as planned, in Lincoln Park on the city's Near North Side. Throughout the week, they were joined by others-some from the Chicago area, some from states as far away as New York and California. On the weekend before the convention began, there were about 2,000 demonstrators in Lincoln Park; the crowd grew to about 10,000 by Wednesday.

There were, of course, the hippies---the long hair and love beads, the calculated unwashedness, the flagrant banners, the open lovemaking and disdain for the constraints of conventional society. In dramatic effect, both visual and vocal, these dominated a crowd whose members actually differed widely in physical appearance, in motivation, in political affiliation, in philosophy. The crowd included Yippies come to "do their thing," youngsters working for a political candidate, professional people with dissenting political views, anarchists and determined revolutionaries, motorcycle gangs, black activists, young thugs, police and secret service undercover agents. There were demonstrators waving the Viet Cong flag and the red flag of revolution and there were the simply curious who came to watch and, in many cases, became willing or unwilling participants.

To characterize the crowd, then, as entirely hippy-Yippie, entirely "New Left," entirely anarchist, or entirely youthful political dissenters is both wrong and dangerous. The stereotyping that did occur helps to explain the emotional reaction of both police and public during and after the violence that occurred.

Despite the presence of some revolutionaries, the vast majority of the demonstrators were intent on expressing by peaceful means their dissent either from society generally or from the administration's policies in Vietnam.

Most of those intending to join the major protest demonstrations scheduled during convention week did not plan to enter the Amphitheatre and disrupt, the proceedings of the Democratic convention, did not plan aggressive acts of physical provocation against the authorities, and did not plan to use rallies of demonstrators to stage an assault against any person, institution, or place of business. But while it is clear that most of the protesters in Chicago had no intention of initiating violence, " is not to say that they did not expect it to develop.

It was the clearing of the demonstrators from Lincoln Park that led directly to the violence: symbolically, it expressed the city's opposition to the protesters; literally, it forced the protesters into confrontation with police in Old Town and the adjacent residential neighborhoods.

The Old Town area near Lincoln Park was a scene of police ferocity exceeding that shown on television on Wednesday night. From Sunday night through Tuesday night, incidents of intense and indiscriminate violence occurred in the streets after police had swept the park c ear of demonstrators.

Demonstrators attacked too. And they posed difficult problems for police as they persisted in marching through the streets, blocking traffic and intersections. But it was the police who forced them out of the park and into the neighborhood. And on the part of the police there was enough wild club swinging, enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating to make the conclusion inescapable that individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or arrest. To read dispassionately the hundreds of statements describing at firsthand the events of Sunday and Monday nights is to become convinced of the presence of what can only be called a police riot....

The_Jazz · 05-09-2008, 12:16 PM

host, you're seriously going to try to make the case that the autrocity of the '68 Democratic Convention was somehow worse than foraging/killing/raping/property seizures of every single Union army within the borders of the CSA? The Federal government's stance during the entire conflict was that the South remained a part of the USA, which means that noncombatants remained residents of the latter, albeit lawbreakers.

So, beyond some hippie citizens getting whomped by the police (and I'll immediately grant that it was a horrible day in American history and that the Chicago police were in the wrong), how does that compare with gang rapes, stolen property and murders? You don't exactly seem to be sitting on a trump card here. If you are, now's the time to play it.

roachboy · 05-09-2008, 01:06 PM

how is a police action compatible with a military action?
aren't they predicated on entirely different logics?
if the logics are entirely different, then how does the comparison work at all?

The_Jazz · 05-09-2008, 01:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

how is a police action compatible with a military action?
aren't they predicated on entirely different logics?
if the logics are entirely different, then how does the comparison work at all?

The only difference here is scale. The Civil War employed many more actors, but they all began as actively aggitating for an unpopular change.

The logic is the same, especially if the Revolution is inserted into the mix of examples. The British sailed expecting a police action.

roachboy · 05-09-2008, 01:39 PM

i dont think the logics are the same at all---a police action involves citizens and is generally directed against crime, however that is defined, and so is basically reactive. a military action is directed at non-citizens and is generally proactive. the distinction hinges on the protection of rights--police work is for the most part reactive because of the presumption of innocence, yes? military work makes no such presumption.

another way: the two types of action operate in entirely different legal environments.

the confederacy while it existed was separate from the north.
so the civil war was military and not a police action.
the situations in chicago and seattle were police actions.
the most ambiguous situations are along the lines of the coalfield wars, the wars on organized labor, the "war against communism" which blurred these lines...

but i dont see the civil war as a useful element in this thread.
even the patterns of genocide directed at native americans are more ambuguous than the civil war..

The_Jazz · 05-09-2008, 01:44 PM

RB - I'm drawing the line at who's considered a citizen. Lincoln was famous for refusing to recognize that the rebellious states were anything except an inseparable part of the whole. So, if in nothing more than CiC's mind, the CW was at least in part a police action. Not to mention that the first shots were fired by some drunkards in Charleston.

I would argue that the Native American genocides were less ambiguous than you think, considering that the NA's weren't viewed as citizens but at best residents but more often squaters. That said, those may be the most obvious example of what we're discussing, questions of citizenship aside.

I'll agree that we've wandered far afield of the OP and perhaps this is the point that it should drop.

girldetective · 05-09-2008, 01:56 PM

Quote:

"Chicago 10" ? I lived near Chicago at the time and remember it. I never heard it referred to that way. The original eight defendants were Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. Bobby Seale was removed from the case after being bound and gagged in the courtroom. I've heard it referred to as the Chicago 7 and Chicago 8 (before the removal of Seale). So who are the other 2?

The 8's attorneys were also charged in the end - for contempt.

*

roachboy · 05-09-2008, 02:14 PM

well, there's a side of me that's inclined to drop it as well, but at the same time, this seems to be the central point of the thread as i understood it--what are the limits of a police action? at what point does a police action spill beyond what should be its limits? personally, i don't think that lincoln's position regarding the csa was more than rhetorical, any more than i think his opposition to slavery was (read the lincoln-calhoun debates for a thorough-going demolition of his view on the matter)--but that's beside the point.

personally, i think that the entire history of american opposition to left political mobilization is an unacceptable blurring of the line between police and military action. it was "justified" by setting up left political militants as outsiders who happened to be physically inside the nation-state physically--whence the fifth column rhetoric. i see the 68 chicago actions as in a direct line with earlier and far more violent acts of de facto war on the political left, one which runs back in some ways to haymarket. (chicago seems in the middle of all this stinkiness for some reason--i kinda like the place, too. i always found being there strange, however, because i knew i was walking around the belly of the beast in many ways)...

the war on the left, particularly in the late 19th-early 20th century was pretty murderous stuff--but it didn't happen in major cities for the most part and was not subject to the bizarre effects of television--which of course the 68 convention actions were, just as was kent state a couple years later--this is not to trivialize the latter actions, but it's hard to imagine the colorado coalfield wars, or the wars against union organizations in west virginia or pennsylvania or around teh automobile industry through the 1940s (river rouge anyone?) happening in a television context--**if**they got coverage (hard to say whether they would have, given the ability of the networks to "miss" most political protest of any scale over the past 20 years)

there is a way in which police violence against citizens whose politics are "unacceptable" to the right is a central and foul aspect of a multi-dimensionally foul history. of course it is not *all* foul, that history--but it is not all *other than* foul either.

and genocide is another matter--whether police or military, it remains genocide. that point, i drop for now.

girldetective · 05-09-2008, 02:16 PM

Quote:

somewhat awful???
sort of?

Its just prep school talk. I tend to think that TFPers use their noodles and often already understand so there is no need to expound on the horrific details; I think we all can picture them.

I already addressed the "sort of" earlier.

I stopped and thought just a moment before typing "somewhat awful". I believe in law and order, and I do believe the 8's intention was to disrupt, and that it was premeditated and that their behavior was deplorable. But I dont believe the punishment fit the crime in the least. I am sympathetic to the protestors and their messages, and to their rights. I believe Mayor Daley took the opportunity to show his force of power to dismantle and squelch to an extreme. What if instead he had allowed them a permit to sleep in the park for a weekend and had provided music and a big party to shake a lot of attention away from the convention? That is What Governor McCall did in OR to avoid a similar situation. The state threw a big hippie party with good live bands and avoided all the injuries, bruhaha, mess, noise, expense, and opposition. It worked. There was a protest, but smaller, peaceful, and to the point. Of course it didnt change anything either.

uncle phil · 05-09-2008, 02:35 PM

again, somewhat awful?

girldetective · 05-09-2008, 02:39 PM

... their behavior was deplorable

dc_dux · 05-09-2008, 03:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

but it's hard to imagine the colorado coalfield wars, or the wars against union organizations in west virginia....

Brings to mind the John Sayles movie, Matewan

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uncle phil · 05-09-2008, 03:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by namako

... their behavior was deplorable

the protesters?

i was IN vietnam at the time, and i APPLAUDED them for their effort...

deplorable, my ass...

if i could have been there, i would have loved to have hassled one of those jack-booted assholes...

the deplorable behavior was on daley's people...

girldetective · 05-10-2008, 04:09 PM

Thanks Uncle Phil for pointing out that I did not make myself clear. I thought I had in a sort of subtle way or that it would be known by osmosis, or I dont know. Anyway, thanks.

My sympathies have always laid with the Chicago 10. I lived near Chicago growing up and even then i read the newspaper. There were dinner table conversations about the trial occasionally and I listened carefully, sometimes asking a question. I was too young to be allowed into the city, but if I had been on my own I would have been there, in Lincoln Park. The best I did at the time though was have a huge crush on Abbie Hoffman. I hung on his every word and learned a lot.

Glad you made it out alive and well.

05-09-2008, 12:16 PM	#43 (permalink)
The_Jazz Asshole Administrator Location: Chicago	host, you're seriously going to try to make the case that the autrocity of the '68 Democratic Convention was somehow worse than foraging/killing/raping/property seizures of every single Union army within the borders of the CSA? The Federal government's stance during the entire conflict was that the South remained a part of the USA, which means that noncombatants remained residents of the latter, albeit lawbreakers. So, beyond some hippie citizens getting whomped by the police (and I'll immediately grant that it was a horrible day in American history and that the Chicago police were in the wrong), how does that compare with gang rapes, stolen property and murders? You don't exactly seem to be sitting on a trump card here. If you are, now's the time to play it. __________________ "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin "There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush "We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

05-09-2008, 01:06 PM	#44 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	how is a police action compatible with a military action? aren't they predicated on entirely different logics? if the logics are entirely different, then how does the comparison work at all? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-09-2008, 01:39 PM	#46 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i dont think the logics are the same at all---a police action involves citizens and is generally directed against crime, however that is defined, and so is basically reactive. a military action is directed at non-citizens and is generally proactive. the distinction hinges on the protection of rights--police work is for the most part reactive because of the presumption of innocence, yes? military work makes no such presumption. another way: the two types of action operate in entirely different legal environments. the confederacy while it existed was separate from the north. so the civil war was military and not a police action. the situations in chicago and seattle were police actions. the most ambiguous situations are along the lines of the coalfield wars, the wars on organized labor, the "war against communism" which blurred these lines... but i dont see the civil war as a useful element in this thread. even the patterns of genocide directed at native americans are more ambuguous than the civil war.. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-09-2008, 01:44 PM	#47 (permalink)
The_Jazz Asshole Administrator Location: Chicago	RB - I'm drawing the line at who's considered a citizen. Lincoln was famous for refusing to recognize that the rebellious states were anything except an inseparable part of the whole. So, if in nothing more than CiC's mind, the CW was at least in part a police action. Not to mention that the first shots were fired by some drunkards in Charleston. I would argue that the Native American genocides were less ambiguous than you think, considering that the NA's weren't viewed as citizens but at best residents but more often squaters. That said, those may be the most obvious example of what we're discussing, questions of citizenship aside. I'll agree that we've wandered far afield of the OP and perhaps this is the point that it should drop. __________________ "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin "There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush "We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

05-09-2008, 02:14 PM	#49 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	well, there's a side of me that's inclined to drop it as well, but at the same time, this seems to be the central point of the thread as i understood it--what are the limits of a police action? at what point does a police action spill beyond what should be its limits? personally, i don't think that lincoln's position regarding the csa was more than rhetorical, any more than i think his opposition to slavery was (read the lincoln-calhoun debates for a thorough-going demolition of his view on the matter)--but that's beside the point. personally, i think that the entire history of american opposition to left political mobilization is an unacceptable blurring of the line between police and military action. it was "justified" by setting up left political militants as outsiders who happened to be physically inside the nation-state physically--whence the fifth column rhetoric. i see the 68 chicago actions as in a direct line with earlier and far more violent acts of de facto war on the political left, one which runs back in some ways to haymarket. (chicago seems in the middle of all this stinkiness for some reason--i kinda like the place, too. i always found being there strange, however, because i knew i was walking around the belly of the beast in many ways)... the war on the left, particularly in the late 19th-early 20th century was pretty murderous stuff--but it didn't happen in major cities for the most part and was not subject to the bizarre effects of television--which of course the 68 convention actions were, just as was kent state a couple years later--this is not to trivialize the latter actions, but it's hard to imagine the colorado coalfield wars, or the wars against union organizations in west virginia or pennsylvania or around teh automobile industry through the 1940s (river rouge anyone?) happening in a television context--ifthey got coverage (hard to say whether they would have, given the ability of the networks to "miss" most political protest of any scale over the past 20 years) there is a way in which police violence against citizens whose politics are "unacceptable" to the right is a central and foul aspect of a multi-dimensionally foul history. of course it is not all foul, that history--but it is not all other than foul either. and genocide is another matter--whether police or military, it remains genocide. that point, i drop for now. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-09-2008, 02:35 PM	#51 (permalink)
uncle phil comfortably numb... Super Moderator Location: upstate	again, somewhat awful? __________________ "We were wrong, terribly wrong. (We) should not have tried to fight a guerrilla war with conventional military tactics against a foe willing to absorb enormous casualties...in a country lacking the fundamental political stability necessary to conduct effective military and pacification operations. It could not be done and it was not done." - Robert S. McNamara ----------------------------------------- "We will take our napalm and flame throwers out of the land that scarcely knows the use of matches... We will leave you your small joys and smaller troubles." - Eugene McCarthy in "Vietnam Message" ----------------------------------------- never wrestle with a pig. you both get dirty; the pig likes it.

05-09-2008, 02:39 PM	#52 (permalink)
girldetective sufferable	... their behavior was deplorable __________________ As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons...be cheerful; strive for happiness - Desiderata

05-10-2008, 04:09 PM	#55 (permalink)
girldetective sufferable	Thanks Uncle Phil for pointing out that I did not make myself clear. I thought I had in a sort of subtle way or that it would be known by osmosis, or I dont know. Anyway, thanks. My sympathies have always laid with the Chicago 10. I lived near Chicago growing up and even then i read the newspaper. There were dinner table conversations about the trial occasionally and I listened carefully, sometimes asking a question. I was too young to be allowed into the city, but if I had been on my own I would have been there, in Lincoln Park. The best I did at the time though was have a huge crush on Abbie Hoffman. I hung on his every word and learned a lot. Glad you made it out alive and well. __________________ As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons...be cheerful; strive for happiness - Desiderata