Chicago 10
 

Last night I went to see Chicago 10, the film about the uprising at the Democratic Convention in the 60s. It was good and I recommend it not only for the captivating subject, but because it was entertaining too.

For those of you who dont remember, a group of people instigated/organized a peace rally in downtown Chicago while the convention was taking place. Thousands of people arrived in Chicago and slept in Lincoln Park after being denied a permit. It was a playful, wild, loud, outspoken group of militant citizens whose aim was to be heard and bring a message of freedom and peace for the Vietnam conflict. They were somewhat awful and looked the law in the face and said Fuck You.

Mayor Daley brought in the troops. He gassed them and beat them. He jailed and arrested, and he denied these citizens their right of peaceful protest. He looked them right in the eye and said FUCK YOU.

The movie simultaneously looks at the horrific courtroom that ensued after arrests were made and what led up to them. It is a pretty complete story.

Anyway this got me to thinking about other times when our military or police force has turned against our own en masse. I can think of Chicago, Kent State, and I suppose the Civil War sort of. The Revolutionary War if one looks at "our own" as cultural rather than geograpical. However, Im thinking of on our turf with our own citizens.

Are there other times in history that I am forgetting when our military has been turned against us?

The march on Birmingham, Al, May 1963.
Police Commissioner Bull Connor ordered the police, with fire hoses and K-9 units, to "suppress" the protesters.
http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change%20Pics/hoses.jpg

The WWI "bonus march"

During the height of the depression, 12,000 unemployed WW I vets gathered in DC to protest that they never received the bonus they were promised for their war service.

McCarthur called out the troops, raided their camp...US troops turning on US war vets.

Before it was over, hundreds of the WW I vets were injured and two babies killed.

The "bonus army"

How about one from my neck of the woods--the Battle of Seattle? I'm just thankful no one died.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTO_Min...otest_activity

Don't forget Waco, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Battles of Athens and Ludlow.

http://www.amicuss.net/dohs/ah1_2500...burg_death.jpg

Should be obvious.

Makes beating up some hippies rather trivial.

....the hippies had better protest songs.

the colorado coalfield wars.
the nyc draft riots of 1863---the establishment of the national guard followed from this, and the national guard, before reagan made it an extension of the active military in order to reduce the possibility of instituting the draft, was about repression of internal political struggle.

much of the war on organized labor for that matter--there is a question about the status of private mercenaries on the order of the pinkertons, how one is to think about them--the situation is not that different from the "private security firms" which operate as american military proxies in iraq, for example.

how do you think about the entire military campaign against the native americans? were these peoples inside or outside?

etc.

>>Makes beating up some hippies rather trivial.<< - Ustwo

I dont find beating or killing trivial at all, in any case, re anyone.

US Civil war >>>^10>>>beating up hippies in Chicago.

I just got my hippie beating license renewed, bag limit is 10 per season, but no limit on college know it all hippies if off campus.

beating up hippies?

so if you don't like how someone looks, it's fine to beat the shit out of them.
if you don't like what someone thinks, it's good to watch the cops beat the shit out of them.


i'm sure you've seen this but don't care about it:

Roachboy, I'm pretty sure that I can get you to agree that the level of violence was greater on the battlefields of the Civil War than in Chicago during the summer of '68.

Ustwo has a valid point. The comparison is apples and handgrenades.

in this context, the civil war is a nonsequitor.

if the question was: which was more violent chicago 68 or the battle of gettysburg? then the answer would be germaine--but the question would be so idiotic that the thread would be floating downward in whatever forum it was in.

the only reason ustwo introduced the civil war so far as i can tell was to trivialize the op.

just look at what followed.

This may be a tad off topic.
The military is government.
Every phone conversation I have is being 'listened to'
by what our family now jokingly calls them 'the doughnut eaters'

Just because my mother knew some rather interesting artists years ago,
my sister travelling extensively through eastern and western Europe,
now currently in India,
our entire family has been 'on the list' since 1976

We have felt turned against for a long time, albeit not in a visceral bloody
fashion....yet the visceral nausea of being watched,the feeling
that at any time they might pounce is just as 'real'

RB - The idea was introduced in the OP and the reason that I stayed silent on the thread. It seemed to me as well to be the overly obvious choice to answer the question. If Reconstruction is included as well, I believe the argument is over.

I suppose that I'm a bit confused about the purpose of this thread. Are we conducting a history quiz about violence perpetrated on the public by government personnel? If that's the case, we haven't even scratched the surface. The Zoot Suit Riot, immigrant marches in LA in '03, the Indian Wars (debatably), the Kansas/Missouri border wars, the Tennessee/North Carolina border war, any number of lynchings in the South with at least complicitity by the authorities, Waco, the Japanese Interment, the Trail of Tears, and the draft riots from just about any pre-WWII war all qualify, at least in my mind.

So what are we discussing here? Who has the greatest recall of historical events that fit into an ill-defined box?

Melodrama.

The OP dismissed the Civil war as a 'sort a' and I can't think of any time in our history that was even close to that in terms of violence, death, use of government troops against civilians, and destruction to private property.

Someone's never been beaten and gassed at a protest. It's not a cake walk.

Well, I'm not a hippie, I cheer for the police.

But even if I was, how does that compare to Sherman's march to the sea?

Lets get a sense of prospective on this one or I'll be forced to hook up a piece of cake to a cup of tea.

Being possibly gassed and beaten vs. being possibly shot and blown up? Clearly parts of WW2 were worse, but honestly it's an unfair comparison. A better comparison might be to other protests around the world. From places like France where your protest is massive and the police can't do shit to places like China where violent protests are staged by an oppressive, fascist government.

The question is use of force in dealing with our own citizens. Really it doesn't matter what France or China does but what we do to our own. In terms of that, the Civil War was the worst without question. Shot, blown up, executed, starved, burned out, lands and properties seized.

I don't think you could categorize the Civil War as a protest gone wrong. It was more like... well, a civil war.

Clearly you need to go back and reread your history about the immediate causes of the war.

I specifically noted the Civil War in the OP as "sort of" because fighting an ongoing war is different than standing up in an immediate protest.

Ustwo: Im not a hippie either and I believe in law/order. Laws were broken on both sides in the Chicago debacle, and our citizens were beaten and gassed. It was problematic no matter how you look at it.

Ustwo didn't say the causes of the Civil War, he said the Civil War. The war proper was not a protest, but rather a war. I'm surprised at the tone of your post.

Tone? I don't think that I typed in any fashion other than the one I normally use. Would an overabundance of smilies and emoticons make you feel warm, fuzzy and loved? If so, just let me know.

You can't separate the causes from the effect. The war itself, seen in the proper context, was a gigantic protest over states' rights, the Lincoln Presidency, economic disparity between regions and industrialism versus agrariansim (ok, that one's a bit of a stretch).

War is politics by other means. The Chicago Police Riot was a political reaction to a political protest.

It seems like this thread has been fairly de-railed into the realm of what the Civil War was or was not, but I'd just like to state my opinion that the WTO protests don't deserve to be mentioned in the category of "peaceful protests met with overbearing police force." A series of carefully designed stunts created a shitstorm of bad publicity and cloaked the fact that few of the protesters were engaged in any conduct that could be considered "peaceful." Their intent was to shut down the city, to prevent people from engaging in their day to day life and to disrupt the conference as much as possible. They put police officers and uninvolved citizens in dangerous positions and engaged in wanton destruction of private property. The wikipedia article shows that fact fairly conclusively.

Now, I certainly understand that not everyone there was involved in that and I understand that some of the actions which the police department took in response were well beyond what was either legal or appropriate, but this was not a case of innocent protesters suffering at the hands of fascist government. The protected right to protest is subject to reasonable and narrowly tailored time, place and manner restrictions. Many of the WTO protesters (and a lot of the ones who generated the most press) were operating well outside of that right.

"Clearly you need to reread your history..."? How about, "Protests were directly involved in the cause of the Civil War."? I appreciate that you were trying to share information, but there certainly wasn't a need to use somewhat condescending language.
I'll test this theory:
The Great Depression in the US was exactly the same as World War 2.
Does that sound about right? Germany's massive economic depression was, as much as anything else, a cause of World War 2.
From another perspective, the perspective of the dictionary, a protest is an expression or declaration of objection, disapproval, or dissent, often in opposition to something a person is powerless to prevent or avoid. You know the South almost won, right? In other words, it was not powerless in the least.

Horseshit. This is AMERICA, Goddammit. "Free Speech Zones" my chapped Creole ass; the whole gorram COUNTRY is a "free speech zone," every last God-rotted square inch. Any infringement of this right is oppressive, and ought by every moral man/woman who thinks themselves free to be resisted.

I don't get it. Can you restate your point?

"often". Not "always". "often". See the difference.

The Revolutionary War started as a protest. Look at what was happening in the moments leading up to The Shot Heard Round The World. We won. The South didn't.

Given your definition, my contextual argument still stands valid. There's a logical hole in it, though, and I'll give you the joy of finding it.

You said:
Axoim: The Civil War was caused by protest, therefore the civil war was a protest.
World War 2 was caused (in part) by a depression in Germany, therefore World War 2 was a depression.
You're repeating your assertion that an event is defined by its cause more than it's actual happenings and effect. I tried to poke a hole in this assertion by applying it to WW2. I can apply it to something else, if you'd like.

somewhat awful???

The system doesn't always work perfectly, but what happened in Seattle is a perfect example of why what you suggested works just as poorly. The right to protest FREE OF CONSEQUENCES is constrained by all of the other laws that govern this nation. You don't get a free pass to trespass or commit assault or vandalize property simply because you're doing so with the intention to send a message to someone or other. Now, if you engage in those activities and are willing to accept the consequences of illegal activities that occur during your protest, that's fine, but your right to protest doesn't give you the right to infringe on the rights of others without reprimand or penalty.

The entire first amendment, remember, was intended to prevent the government from enacting laws prohibiting people from assembling or assembling-that whole notion of prior restraint. It was never intended to allow people to do whatever they wanted and it has never been interpreted to mean as such.

1. well, the civil war is a pretty big sorta unless you are thinking that the secession meant nothing--but if it meant nothing, then there wasn't a whole lot of point to the war, really--the question of which production regime would in the end be dominant could have been sorted out by other means and the question of slavery was ancillary, if you think about it.
even the endless war against the native americans was more ambiguously of the set that includes the elements "state force used against its own citizens."

=================
2. this:
is
at the point where
tips over into trolling.
and done without style, i might add.

if you're going to troll, ustwo, have some style. jesus.

i mean, who still tries to get mileage from being bent about "hippies" in 2008?
================
3. on the wto: i assume that you're dancing around the notion of the black block, frosstbyte.
personally, i don't care if a political action shuts down a city--a political action **should** be able to shut down a city since the city belongs, ultimately, to the people.

my problem is that i don't agree with the version of direct action behind the black block: i am not of the school that understands the amount and violence of contact with the police as an indicator of the correctness of your politics.
so while i'd defend the right of the black block to act, i wouldn't participate in it.

that said, in other contexts, i would have *no* problem with shutting down a city on the part of a political action and i see *nothing*about private property rights that should in any way limit political action. period. i would prefer that such action be coherently directed, as i think anyone would. i think it is entirely possible that a political action can direct its actions coherently, because there is no relation between a political action and a riot--except as you see the two collapsed into each other on television--but who owns the networks, and where do their interests lie?

btw: what are you so bent about seattle for? did you own a starbucks?

rb, the Sean Bell protests here the other day were designed to stop the city. They marched to the bridges and tunnels and prayed in front of traffic. If I was a bridge and tunnel person I would have been greatly annoyed by the extra traffic snarl they created. It would not have made me more sympathetic to their cause, but more aggravated since they impinged on my ability to get home.

I saw some of them march down Broadway a small clump of people, not many really. I realized what the shouting and chanting was because a police van was following them.

Days before that it was the May Day organized protests in Union Square walking down Broadway to Foley Square.

If it's not some group, it's the tourists.

While I do understand that there is something to be said for getting your voice and position heard, it's a little much when you live in the city and every inch is a fight every day.

You were whining and being melodramatic with your 'They came for the' post, sorry, I call'em like I see them. You were already calling me a troll before them with this ...

the only reason ustwo introduced the civil war so far as i can tell was to trivialize the op.

No, I bought up the US Civil War because it was the most direct and strongest use of force ever to be seen by the US military on US civilians.

I enjoy making fun of hippies in any thread though, its a guilty pleasure of mine.

I'm a pretty big hippie. While Ustwo and I may not see eye to eye, I suspect that, should I be the victim of police brutality at a legal and peaceful protest, he'd shed a tear.

[threadjack]what defines a hippie?[/threadjack]

I'd like to know because i've been called one many times.

"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?

I think you missed my point, will. The South tried to withdraw from the Union IN PROTEST (caps are for you, roachboy). It was a protest move, and one they thought would work. They didn't expect to "fix the system" but they attempted to withdraw from it in protest. That protest turned into a war when the South made it clear that any attempts to stop the withdrawl would be met with armed resistance.

Just like Waco. Or the Whiskey Rebellion. Which both qualify under the definition we've been given.


I'm not even going to try to pick apart the WW2 assertion since I know you don't believe it. On the other hand, I do very much stand behind mine - at least until you find the hole I left for you.

well, comrade, you could say by crunching cause/consequence in that way that the protest is more general than the secession and so brought about the war--or you could say that the secession went beyond protest into something else and that prompted the war--or you could say that the conflict between modes of production for overall dominance caused the conflict that caused the protest that prompted protest to move into secession to trip a war...but unless you are going to implicitly also argue that, say, black block actions in seattle a decade ago or the actions of the sds in chicago are tantamount to the secession of the southern states and formation of the confederacy, this seems like a problematic analogy to me.

just saying.

but thanks for the caps.
i like hats.

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

Just to be obscure....

WRONG, Ustwo....

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.

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.

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..

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.

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

*

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.

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.

:cringe:

again, somewhat awful?

... their behavior was deplorable

Brings to mind the John Sayles movie, Matewan

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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...

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.