The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago

Kelly  0:00  
This is unsung history, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to unsung history on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. On Sunday, March 31, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a televised address from the Oval Office of the White House that the television networks were told was on the subject of peace in Vietnam and South Asia. At the end of the 40 minute long address, Johnson shocked the world, saying, "I have concluded that I should not permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year. With  American sons in the field, far away, with America's future under challenge, right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office, the presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president." Embroiled in the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, and facing a series of health challenges, LBJ had a disapproval rate of 57%, and senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy were challenging him in the primary. Even so, the announcement shocked the nation and the Democratic Party. LBJ's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, entered the primary race in April, too late to appear on primary ballots in the remaining states. So he focused on winning closed caucuses and conventions, and in securing key endorsements. On June 5, Senator Kennedy, who at the time trailed Humphrey and pledged delegates, won the California and South Carolina primaries. After his victory speech that night in Los Angeles, Kennedy was assassinated, further upending the Democratic primary. The Republican National Convention was held in early August that year in Miami, with the nomination going to former Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Although the convention was largely seen as uneventful and even boring, there was a, "mass rally of concerned Black people," in Miami during the convention that aimed, "to show their frustration with the nation's unfair political, social and economic systems." The riot received far less media coverage than the Chicago riots upcoming during the DNC, but 800 National Guard members and 200 sheriff deputies were deployed and three people were killed. Violence had also already erupted in Chicago in 1968. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in early April of that year, 48 hours of rioting in Chicago destroyed more than 250 stores and businesses on the west side. Nine Black men were killed, and another 300 people were injured. More than 2000 people were arrested, and 1000 people were left homeless from the fires. Richard J. Daley, long time mayor of Chicago, knew that anti Vietnam protesters would be coming to Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, and he was ready. 1000s of federal troops deployed to Chicago, ordered to keep the peace on the streets, while the Secret Service was called in to secure the Chicago International Amphitheater, where the convention was held, a large indoor arena southwest of downtown, located adjacent to the Union Stockyards. Protesters arrived in Chicago before the convention even began, gathering in what is now called Daley Plaza downtown, on August 23, where the Youth International Party calling themselves "yippies," nominated a 145 pound pig named Pigasus for President. Pigasus was arrested that night, along with seven yippies. Two days later, on Sunday, August, 25, some 2000 people attended the yippies' Festival of Life in Lincoln Park on the near north side of the city. When attendees refused to obey the city wide 11pm curfew, police officers beat them. The raucous convention itself began the next day, on Monday, August 26, at the amphitheater, tasked with the business of setting a party platform and nominating a president and vice president. On the first day though, alternate slates of delegates argued for recognition, and the convention ran late into the night. 1000s of protesters descended on Grant Park downtown, and at 11pm, police used tear gas to clear them, beating both demonstrators and members of the press. On August 27, CBS reporter Dan Rather, on the floor of the convention hall, was trying to interview a Georgia delegate who was being removed from the proceedings, when, in Rather's words, "Somebody belted me in the stomach during that."  Live television footage showed Rather saying to security personnel, "Unless you intend to arrest me, don't push me, please," before he was manhandled. Walter Cronkite responded, "I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, Dan." Mayor Daley had issued one protest permit for the week, for Wednesday, August 28. Earlier that day, convention delegates in the amphitheater voted down a proposed Vietnam peace plank for the platform. That night, around 15,000 people rallied in Grant Park downtown. Police barricaded them from marching to the amphitheater, keeping them on Michigan Avenue across from the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Footage from the night shows police beating protesters and reporters with batons. Although the TV stations couldn't broadcast live from downtown, they quickly shuttled the shocking footage to the Amphitheater Hall to be shown during convention coverage. Hundreds of people were injured and hundreds more arrested in what became known as the Battle of Michigan Avenue. The next night, Hubert Humphrey accepted the party's nomination, which he won on the first ballot after a debate between Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and South Dakota Senator George McGovern. Humphrey's running mate was Maine Senator Edmund Muskie. In the end, though no one died, 589 people were arrested in the DNC protests, and according to the Medical Committee for Human Rights, more than 1000 people were injured, including both protesters and members of the press. That December, the Walker Report concluded, "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, and 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." On November 5, 1968, Republican Richard Nixon was elected president, winning just 43.4% of the popular vote and 301 electoral votes. Hubert Humphrey finished a close second, with 42.7% of the popular vote and 191 electoral votes. Segregationist George Wallace, running on the American Independent ticket and campaigning in favor of racial segregation on the basis of states' rights, captured 13.5% of the popular vote and 46 electoral votes. Joining me now is Dr. Heather Hendershott, the Cardiss Collins Professor of Communication Studies and Journalism at Northwestern University, and author of, "When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America." 

Kelly  12:00  
And so ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to present to this convention the name of Hubert Horatio Humphrey as nominee for the President of the United States.

Speaker 1  12:14  
And the chair declares that Vice President Hubert Humphrey is the Democratic president candidate of the United States.

Hubert Humphrey  12:31  
My fellow Americans, my fellow Democrats, I proudly accept the nomination of our party. We have heard hard and sometimes bitter debate, but I submit that this is the debate, and this is the work of a free people, the work of an open convention and the work of a political party responsive to the needs of this nation. Democracy affords debate, discussion and dissent, but my fellow Americans, it also requires decision, and we have decided here, not by edict but by vote, not by force, but by ballot.

Kelly  13:26  
Hello, Professor Hendershot, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Heather Hendershot  13:29  
Hello. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2  13:31  
Yes. So I want to start with asking how you came to write a book about the DNC in 1968 and the media coverage of it. I know you've written several other books as well. 

Dr. Heather Hendershot  13:42  
Well, there's a couple ways to answer that. One is, I had been working a lot on right wing culture, and I needed to shift gears and think about the Democrats and left wing culture and liberalism, after doing a lot of work on cold war right wing broadcasting and William F. Buckley and so on. And then, more specifically, I actually was doing some right wing research, I was working on Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia, who had been elected in the 60s, basically on the strength of being a segregationist. And he was a fried chicken entrepreneur, and he had chased Black people out of his restaurant with a pickaxe handle, and his son had a gun. And that became like a huge media moment that, you know was, like, nobody said viral then, but you know, to speak anachronistically, it kind of went viral. So he was elected governor of Georgia, and I was at the Paley Center for Media in New York City, and I was just looking at all the the Maddox footage. And he had sort of had a cameo at the Democratic Convention of '68 and I watched that, and it was so fascinating, because the he was running for President, in theory. He was total outsider candidate that wasn't on those people's radar as a real candidate for president, and he dropped out of the race, and the news media covered him in like giving his concession speech in a hotel auditorium, you know, and he's at the podium and saying he's stepping down in the name of the integrity of the voting process and the people of Georgia and all this stuff. And it's very thinly veiled kind of racist moment. And the camera pulls back and there's almost no one in the room. There's like three people in the room. And so he's talking like there's a big crowd, because he's a media genius for a kook and a weirdo, he's a media genius. And then they cut back to Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman in the booth, and he says something like, "Well, Governor Lester Maddox has just stepped down and from his presidential run," a run that no one was particularly enthused about, besides Lester Maddox. And it was a kind of like snarky moment for Cronkite. He was Mr. Neutral, Mr. Objective all the time. And it was part, it was a kind of tipping point moment for me, of like getting away from Maddox and thinking about, "Wow, what happened at this convention and what kind of choices were made in the name of, you know, doing editorial or commentary versus objectivity?" And I had watched all the Maddox stuff at the Paley Center pretty quickly. And I was like, "Well, I have a few extra days in New York for my research trip. I think I'll just re watch the entire Democratic Convention in 1968," you know, as we do right in our spare time. Other people might be like, "I'm gonna go to a show." And I was like, "No, I'm just gonna sit in this room and watch the convention"And it was such a huge moment in American media history and Media Studies scholars, historians point to it all the time, as this crucial moment. Everyone's in the street, the whole world is watching all this kind of stuff. And I realized no one had actually re watched this since it happened, and thought about it and talked about it. And so that was the kind of deep dive moment for me, of like, "Yeah, this is it. This is what I'm working on." 

Kelly  16:44  
To set the stage a little bit, let's talk about 1968 and everything that is happening going into this convention that in some ways, makes it almost feel like this moment was inevitable. So could you just talk some about what all has happened before we get to August, 1968 in Chicago?

Dr. Heather Hendershot  17:04  
1968 is a horrific, tearing, terrifying year in America. It opens with a TET Offensive late January into February, where Americans realize we're not winning the war in Vietnam as the Pentagon and the White House under President Johnson had been leading people to believe. You know, since Watts, there have been a series of urban uprisings throughout America, and that intensifies in 1968 in inner cities. When Martin Luther King is assassinated in April, there are what they then called riots, we might now call them urban uprisings, in over 100 cities. And buildings are burned down, people of color are murdered by police in the street, there's snipers. It's just incredible. And you know, after King's assassination, even in Washington, DC, you know, there's massive rioting. So there's that. And then Bobby Kennedy is murdered in assassinated in June, and he had been a pretty strong contender for the nomination. And of course, Lyndon Johnson had stepped down on March 31 once he realized he didn't have popular support. So heading into the convention, you've got, you know, the King and the Kennedy assassinations, the urban uprisings, the TET offensive, and, of course, the rise of the Black Power movement and so on. And so the city is kind of braced for impact. And Mayor Daley in anticipation of possible Black uprisings, because he understood, he didn't get that the protesters were going to be mostly white people. He was terrified there was going to be another crisis in his town. And he just kind of weaponized all the city, and made it into a fortress. So people arrived at that convention, whether they were protesters or delegates or whether they wanted to be nominated for president, kind of white knuckled that it's been a really rough year, and things aren't going to get better here in August. And of course, they didn't.

Kelly  18:58  
So let's talk about Daley. You can't understand anything about this story without understanding the omnipresence of Mayor Daley. Can you talk about the ways that he, you just mentioned he was, you know, sort of weaponizing the city.  He's setting things up, but he, he is just everywhere. His impact is everywhere in what is happening here. 

Dr. Heather Hendershot  19:21  
His impact is everywhere. And even on a literal level, there are photos of him everywhere. You know, you come in from the airport and you look out the window getting into town, and you're going to see, you know, pictures of like, "Daley Welcome to Chicago" just everywhere. Shopkeepers were strongly encouraged to put, you know, these "Welcome to Chicago DNC Delegates" signs in their windows. And if they didn't, they would suddenly be visited by the Health Department, for example, and get shut down or be fined, you know, because he really ran the city with a kind of iron fist. He was a machine politician, and the city was really under his thumb. Daley is kind of a he's one of the villains in my book, along with Nixon, Richard Nixon, which is amazing, right? Because the Republican and the Democrat, but they both did a lot of bad stuff in 1968, but he did, of course, good things for Chicago, and one of its nicknames was, "The City that Works." And this was, you know, sort of before the late 60s, right? But he had avoided a lot of the crises that other cities had faced because of various financial, he was savvy in certain ways, right about the tax base and stuff like that. So in New York City, they're facing like a garbage strike in 1968. Mayor Lindsay clearly is not controlling the city and his crime rate and so on. And in Chicago, things are going better, which I'm making better I'm making air quotes right now. But of course, there's a ton of police brutality and graft and patronage hires, but at least on the surface, it's a city that seems to have less violent crime and better lit streets and cleaner streets. And you know, New York City has piles of garbage everywhere that becomes its media image. Like you turn on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and he's going to be making jokes about garbage in New York City, right? And that's not Chicago. So you don't want to paint Chicago as like the worst place in the world when you talk about Daley, of course, but his presence was just everywhere. So Daley hates the media. That's just a given, right? He he, like so many politicians, he wants them to just report positively on him, right? So he hates the print media. He hates the electronic media that, you know, television news and stuff. Most of the time he doesn't need them because he runs the town, and he just has to put up, you know, billboards to get people to vote, and hire people to go from door to vote, to encourage people to vote, and stuff like that. But he knows the media is just coming to town, and they're gonna portray their picture of his town, and not necessarily the picture he wants. And so there happens to be a telephone worker strike that he happens not to resolve, and we don't have like you could spend months in the Daley archives. I've spent a lot of time in the Daley archives. You're never going to find a memo saying, "Let's not resolve that strike." Nothing's going to be on paper. But the strike was not resolved, and the result of that was there were not enough telephones installed at the convention, and there were not hookups for available for the live broadcasts and networks needed to make outside the convention hall. So they want to record in the streets and in hotels and and, you know, interview the candidates' wives off site and this kind of stuff, standard procedure for conventions. And they can only do live coverage within convention hall because of the electrical workers strike. And Daly knows that this is going to stymie their coverage, and it certainly impedes their capability to cover the violence in the street. And just to be clear, I think we the famous image, one of the most famous images of Chicago '68 is the protesters in front of Chicago Hilton, the Conrad Hilton Hotel, chanting. The whole world is watching while police beat them for non stop 17 minutes, but that was just an amplification and a kind of more extreme version of the violence that had been going on for a week with police beating people somewhat at random. You know, they might beat you because you were hippie or carrying a protest sign, but they might just mace you or hit you on the head just for walking through downtown, you know. And they certainly didn't stay away from people with press passes. If anything, they targeted people with press passes. So, you know, look, most people wouldn't think, oh yeah. 1968 the year of the Great Chicago electrical worker strike, but it really was impactful for that moment at the convention. And shortly after Hubert Humphrey's nomination as president was confirmed, the electrical worker strike was resolved. And Walter Cronkite, again, he is known as, you know, Uncle Walter. That's like, literally, one of his nicknames. He's Mr. Fair and Balanced, this kind of thing. He actually is sarcastic on television, and he goes, "By the most amazing coincidence, the electrical workers strike has just been resolved, at a time when it won't make any difference, given the total, you know, almost total, suppression of free speech here in Chicago," which was not completely true. It was an exaggeration, but he was so frustrated, and so was ABC, and so was NBC by the crisis that the telephone workers strike or the electric workers strike had enabled. So, you know, we're can be pretty sure that, you know, Daley knew exactly what he was doing, not resolving that strike.

Kelly  24:35  
The media environment of 1968 of course, is wildly different than what we have today. You've mentioned the three stations and that that's really it. They're it. Can you talk a little bit about the way that impacts what we see, what we still have from the convention, what the viewers at the time were seeing, you know? And in your book, you talk about how they, they may have been competitive about ratings, but they weren't so vocal or explicit about the fact that they were competitive about ratings. So it wasn't the kind of thing we have today or every other second somebody's like breaking news turn here. So what did that all look like, and how did that frame the convention? 

Dr. Heather Hendershot  25:16  
Yeah, it's hard for people to imagine today, like three TV networks, PBS, if you happen to live in a place where your TV set gets it, you know, will come a little bit later, right? So basically that CBS, NBC and ABC. ABC is doing only partial coverage. CBS and NBC are doing, you know, what they call gavel to gavel coverage. They gavel in, say, at noon or 5pm it  varies. They gavel out one or 2am maybe 3am like this, stuff can really go on, and the news are there the whole time. So if you want to watch TV at that time, and you're not at the convention, you turn on the TV. It's mostly convention. That's what you have to watch. So you can turn it off and go do something else. Or you can watch the convention. Now, with the Republican Convention, about a month before the Democratic Convention, your numbers have been okay, right? But a lot of people were like, "Yeah, this is kind of boring. We know Nixon is going to be nominated. It's a very controlled show. Nothing too interesting." And so, you know, it was fine from ratings wise, but Chicago was the most watched television event of 1968. 90% of American households tuned in at some point to watch that coverage. 90%! I mean, I what do you compare that to today? Super Bowl, World Series, you know, a couple of big sports events. Of course, on election nights, people, you know, watch a lot of TV. And most Americans watch something like 8.5 hours a day of the convention. I can't, I can't remember the exact number, but a huge amount, a huge amount, right? Uh, because it was the only thing going they were, there was a sense of you were fulfilling your civic duty by watching the convention. But also it was amazing TV, you know, like a lot was happening. And I don't mean to minimize the violence and everything, but just like, it was a lot of drama. You had anti war protesters inside the convention hall and the news people captured all of that at the same time. You've got this sort of monopoly. But it, to my mind, it's a kind of benevolent monopoly on the news, in a way. Okay, I don't, and that's there's a lot to unpack there, but the networks are very aware that they want to serve the public interest, that they are there to do public service, and that impacts how they present the news. And you know, as journalists trained in newspapers or radio, a lot of them coming out of World War II, they have this sense of journalistic ethics, that they're going to be fair and objective and neutral and so on. And they're not going to stress too much about ratings, in theory. Now in practice, the executives behind the scenes, you know, there's a, there's a neck and neck competition with CBS and NBC over the years. NBC kept staying in the lead, and CBS finally gets ahead around 1970, and the networks are making a lot of money selling ad time, you know, during these these shows. And the key thing with the evening news is that people are dedicated mostly to CBS or NBC, and they're either there for Walter Cronkite in the 60s and 70s, or they're there for Huntley Brinkley on NBC, and that's the first thing they watch as they head into viewing at night. And they don't have VCRs or DVRs or phones that they can watch TV on or computers. So a lot of people are going to watch TV every night. And so if you start with Walter Cronkite, you're going to stick around on CBS for the rest of the shows. If you start on Huntley Brinkley at NBC, you're going to stay there. It's like the lead in. So it is tremendously profitable, not only because they sell ads, but because then you stay on for, say, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, these really highly rated shows. And so the news kind of, you know, JFK said, what is it? A rising tide lifts all ships, something like that. Lifts all boats. It's kind of like that with the lead in with the news. So you show up for your kind of, your green vegetables of Well, what happened today in the news, and then you're on to like, Okay, let's see what Marshall Dillon is up to on Gunsmoke.

Kelly  29:10  
One thing that is probably also hard for today's listeners to fathom is the kind of technology that they were using to cover this. And so you talk some in the book, and you have some pictures of these, like, giant backpacks they had to wear to cover on the floor. About that and how, you know, like, yeah, on the floor stuff, they could go down and say, like, "Now, over to you," but they couldn't do that out on the street because of the things you mentioned earlier. 

Dr. Heather Hendershot  29:37  
Exactly. The technological issues are so interesting. I mean, you said, like, backpacks, and that sounds sort of like, oh, a lot of weight on your back. But if you look at the photos, I mean, they have these kind of full body plastic harnesses, almost, that they're encased in to hold up these cameras that are, quote, portable, right? And then they've got these. There's a camera called the creepy peepee. Which is weird of itself, and it is portable in theory. So it's premiered in 1960 and it's about 25 pounds, and that's considered extremely portable. But then in 1968 they premiere their color creepy peepee at the convention, and it's quote portable, and it weighs 60 pounds. And you can go down a rabbit hole thinking about the implications of this, like, how many women are involved as as camera people during the convention, or in TV news in general? It's really hard with a 60 pound camera, right? And they're sort of, then they're kept out of the business for other reasons, right? So the portable color camera is a whole 60 pounds. So there's portability in theory, you know, in the convention hall, but it's still a lot of equipment. And typically you have a separate sound man, say, next to the you have a kind of team of three. You've got the journalists, the cameraman and the sound man walking around on the convention floor. Now out on the streets, you could have a 16 millimeter film camera, which is lighter than these TV cameras, and you don't you either hand crank it, which sounds like the 19th century, but I swear to God, in the 20th century, they had cameras where you put your hand up by your ear, sort of, and spin it around, you know, and you're actually cranking while you shoot. And if you're a cameraman for CBS, you just get used to, like, constantly moving your hand the same rate, even as police try to hit you, or whenever you're running, you're cranking the camera right. Or you could get a battery right, and then you wouldn't have to crank but the trade off would be that batteries, which now are, you know, whatever, a quarter of an ounce right, weighed pounds and pounds back then, so it would add weight to your equipment. So the 16 millimeter cameras and a sound person, you could go out on the street, actually, I'm going to say probably a light person, and then maybe the camera person might even be holding their sound pack where they might be shooting silent. And the light person would turn on a light, because even with ultra sensitive film at night, you needed that extra light. During the day, you're fine, but now you got to turn the light. The police see that, and they're like, "Oh, a light. It's the news!" and they break the light, or they break the lens on the camera, you know, so like, Oh my God. And, you know, in fact, at the Ole Miss White riots against integration earlier in the 60s, Dan Rather, had been there from CBS News and his cameraman would like, they turn on a light shoot for 15 seconds, they would just count like 123, up to 15, and then turn it off and run, and were just hoping that no one would shoot out their lights, no police or snipers, you know, among the rioters, would shoot out their lights in that 15 seconds. So gives you a sense of just how harrowing It was to be out there with that equipment. And I'll just add one last detail about that equipment in the street, is that if, if you're shooting 16 millimeter in the street, you've got to develop that film, you know, which the person who just takes pictures on the phone today doesn't like remember going to the drugstore with a, you know, home movies or photographs, right? But you have to get that film developed. So what they would do this is how they did in Chicago, but in other news situations as well, you shoot the film on the street and you give it to a motorcycle courier, and you've got this guy on a motorcycle zipping back to the convention center, where they've got trailers set up outside, and they go into a trailer, develop the film, edit it and possibly add a soundtrack or or just, sometimes they just show it and Walter Cronkite would narrate over it live as it, you know, unrolled on front, on TVs, on people's home screens. So there's a delay, right? A significant delay because of the the analog nature of the whole process. So it's very like the telephone situation, it's hard for a contemporary person to understand a younger person in particular. I mean, when I'm giving lectures on this, I'll be like, "Okay, here's the situation, here's the deal with with payphones in Chicago." And student will raise their hand and be like, "What's a pay phone?" You know? Like, it's, you know, this, oh, it's a machine you put money in to make a phone call, but only, you know, coins, what? So anyway, that that, that analog, you know, very material, kind of, you know, it's not the cloud, right? That material constraint of the media was so important in 1968.

Kelly  31:41  
You've mentioned that there were things happening, not just outside the convention, which I think is what gets the most attention nowadays, but within the convention itself too, like the peace plank. And what we haven't talked about yet is the credentialing, credential crisis from several of the southern states. Could you talk a little bit about that and the atmosphere inside the convention hall, which was just as fraught.

Dr. Heather Hendershot  34:44  
The atmosphere inside the convention hall was so fraught. It was so crazy. You know, you go in and you would go through past security, and they were making women open their handbags and, you know, you had these credential cards, and so people felt kind of  frisked, as it were, you know, they felt like security been too heavy before they even got in. If you were carrying signs to hold up for, you know, to stop the war or anti Humphrey signs or pro, usually, McCarthy signs, they typically at the door, the security would say, like, "Oh, you can't go in with that. We just can't have any kind of promotional material on the floor," but if you showed up with Hubert Humphrey T shirts and buttons, they let you go right in. So the rules, you know, didn't apply because Daley, Mayor Daley was in favor of, you know, Humphrey getting the nomination, although he's also secretly an LBJ or he was an LBJ booster at the same time. That's a whole separate story. So anyway, you've got this heavy security. You go in, and then people are immediately dealing with challenges by delegates. So basically, you have what you call the regular delegates. Those are people selected to come to Chicago, cast votes for a particular candidate. It hasn't been decided ahead of time, like it would be today, right? And not uncommon at conventions, just particularly extreme in '68, but not uncommon in the past, to have challenging delegates who say, "Look, we there wasn't a fair election in Alabama or Mississippi, and so we would like to be seated as an all instead of the regular delegates who were sent for, say, Georgia." And I mentioned less dramatics earlier in Georgia, the system for choosing delegates was the governor would just pick them. In Mississippi, you could vote for delegates, but they systematically prevented Black people from voting, for delegates or for anything else in Mississippi. So you have these challenges showing up, and Mississippi does pretty well in '68 because famously, in 1964, a group of challenging delegates shown up. The one of the most famous figures from that moment is Fannie Lou Hamer, this really powerful Black woman from Mississippi. So they show up and they are not given seats at the convention. They're not given votes, they're sent away. But the Democrats say, "We'll do better next year." So in '68, when challengers show up. They say, "Oh yeah, come on in." They throw out the Mississippi delegates, replace them by the challenging delegates. Then Alabama says, well, "We also, you know, didn't have a fair process," right? And they lose. In fact, there are, I believe, about 17 delegate challenges, if I'm remembering correctly. They're mostly from southern states, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, they all lose except for Mississippi, and Georgia has a kind of compromise where the delegates are seated alongside the right the regular delegates, and they each get, everyone gets half a vote instead of a full vote. And that's why Lester Maddox was like, "I'm out of here," and he stepped down, you know, and other Georgia delegates left too. So what's fascinating from the news media angle is that the the networks covered this really well on the first day. They covered the Georgia crisis really well. And I think in part, that was because Lester Maddox was like a villain from central casting, and Julian Bond, who headed the Georgia delegation the challengers was a, you know, a handsome hero from central casting. Like, it was really good TV to cover this story. And it was kind of an easy story to explain. The next day, there's an Alabama challenge, and the story was really complicated. There were two challenging groups that were had were different from Alabama. So you've got the regular delegates the two challenging groups. And I think the networks are like, "This is too hard to cover." CBS switches over to just covering the possibility that Teddy Kennedy might be drafted as a, you know, to to run for president at the last minute. So here's where I in the book, I kind of point to where the networks did a really good job, covering Georgia, pretty good, and then covering, say, Alabama, other daily challenges, not so good. And I'll just add as a, as a footnote here, that, you know, in Texas, the challengers were not only Black people, but also Latinx people, Latino and Latina people, heavy population in Texas, and that wasn't really covered at all, because I think at that point in time, people of color meant Black people. And so the idea that there were other, you know, ethnicities, people of color who have, like, had concerns about the convention was just like, not on the network's radar, and to some extent, on the American people's radar.

Kelly  39:08  
 I want to talk a little bit about the really what comes out of the convention. So there are immediate impacts in 1968 in the way the Democrats are viewed and how the election goes but then there are also longer term effects in terms of, like, how conventions are done going forward. 

Dr. Heather Hendershot  39:27  
Yeah, you've got short term and long term fallout from the convention. And you know, in the short term, in the immediate short term, you've got Mayor Daley saying, "We did a great job. My police are the best police in the world. It was totally fair." And he is defending his city, and he makes a weird film called, "What Trees Do They Plant?" because his point is that I think that protesters are very destructive. They are tearing down trees, whereas I'm building things and planting trees. But it's a kind of elaborate title to figure out, or whatever. Anyway, he's keeping Chicago in the news. And he thinks he's clearing his name and showing his police did a great job, but really he's keeping the story alive that there was chaos in Chicago, and ultimately he is helping Hubert Humphrey lose and Nixon win, which is bonkers, because Daley is such a hardcore Democrat. One of his nicknames is Mr. Democrat, okay? And Illinois has long been seen as, you know, an important state for the Democrats, in Chicago, strong for Democrats. And I'm sure that he would have preferred LBJ as the candidate, and he really would have preferred Bobby Kennedy, right? And because he was a Catholic, because he was against the war, he kind of, he wasn't super public about that opinion, because he was a team player. But he wasn't a team player right after the convention, when he wouldn't shut up about what the police did and tried to say, you know, they did what they're supposed to do, all this kind of stuff. So that's immediate, short term. And you know, Nixon kicks off his campaign with a ticker tape parade in Chicago. It's, I mean, chutzpah, right? It's insane. And he wants to show like, "Yeah, I have the streets of Chicago much better in control than Humphrey did. I've got ticker tape going on over my head," and he's getting all these beautiful, you know, publicity shots in the media right after the convention. You know, they barely cleaned up the, you know, the mess on the streets from the convention, and suddenly it's full of ticker tape, because Nixon is there, and it's wild. So he, in part, thanks to Daley for keeping everything you know going about this debates about the convention, Nixon kind of weaponizes the idea that the Democrats can't even control their own convention. How that can they control the country? And the convention, clearly, you know, helps him to win. And then, moving forward, he leans into the idea that the media is against him, which he had done before Chicago, which, you know, when he think it was 1958 when he said, "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore." You know, he lost his his race in California, and then he's back in 1960 right? But he always had an idea that the media were against him, and he probably would have leaned into that even with if Chicago had gone great, but it kind of gave him extra ammo to do that throughout his time in office. And then he would have his vice president Spiro T. Agnew go out and give speeches against the media as kind of his mouthpiece. And he famously called, you know, the the network news and all the newspapers "nattering nabobs of negativism" and attacked them for being elitist, and so that was really wild throughout the late 60s and early 70s. But it's an idea that the right wing kind of grabbed and ran with it like a football, you know, the Heritage Foundation, all these, you know, think tanks and so on that would come along, really could use that kind of cultural warfare angle to weaponize for their own fundraising. So of course, you have you have women's rights, you have gay rights, you have Black rights, you have all these issues, abortion, later that the right is going to use very powerfully, but they can also use the idea of liberal media bias very powerfully, and that's an idea that comes out of Chicago, that there's a liberal slant in the media. And, you know, I argue that the convention mainstreamed the idea of liberal bias in the media, because before the before the convention, it was a kind of right wing extremist idea. National Review thought that. William F. Buckley thought that. Most people thought they were centrists, and it nationalized that idea. So it wasn't just a segregationist idea, you know, in the deep south that the media was, you know, the enemy became more of a national kind of feeling among a lot of people, conservatives and even some liberals.

Kelly  43:35  
Chicago has been chosen again in 2024 as the site of the Democratic National Convention. And of course, there are some parallels between 2024 and 1968, student protests, things like that. And so I think people have been worried about, you know, is this the same? I think probably, from everything we've been saying there, it's very clear there are ways that this is quite different. But I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that and the ways that what we saw in 1968 certainly would not be covered the same way today, but it's very unlikely to be the same kind of thing. 

Dr. Heather Hendershot  44:07  
Exactly. I mean, you've got the media angle, right? You just noted like coverage is going to be different. Everyone's walking around with a film camera in their hands, not just, you know, three networks, but like people in the streets. So you've got that difference. With Kamala Harris as the presumptive nominee, some people say, "Well, it's like when LBJ stepped down in 1968." Well, it's not. It's like that because the president, the sitting president, declined to run for election again, and you know, the Vice President is is running instead. So okay, that's similar, but, you know, LBJ didn't, wasn't very keen on Hubert Humphrey. He wasn't as supportive as he should have been. And Humphrey was really kind of, he was in trouble because he wouldn't distance himself from LBJ's war platform, and he wouldn't soften and kind of open up to the way the doves at the convention wanted him to reframe the Democratic platform, and that would have made a huge difference for him. Now with Harris, you have, you know President Biden is, is very, very supportive of her, and that's going to continue, and he's not going to be secretly thinking, "If only I could just fly in on a helicopter and be nominated the last minute," which was seriously LBJ idea. And Richard Daley made him a giant, giant birthday cake. His birthday was the second day of the convention. He makes this giant cake so LBJ can come in and, by acclimation, be named the nominee and then eat his birthday cake. And Anita Bryant, who won't mean anything to your younger listeners, but she was, you know, this very wholesome, very, very conservative, anti, ultimately, anti gay activist singer, she sings the national anthem on the second day of the convention, and then she sings Happy Birthday to LBJ. And these giant, giant plastic candles kind of come out of the floor while she's doing this, like she's on a giant birthday cake. All right? So it's pretty wild. Obviously, LBJ wasn't nominated. The Secret Service was like, "It's not even safe for you to come here," right? So he never, they had a helipad ready for him on the roof of the convention center, and he never showed up, and the cake, presumably, was went to the mice. I don't know what happened at that giant cake. I'd love to know that story. That's I wanted. I only could find an elderly baker who made that cake for the convention. I'd love to know the story. But clearly, we have a very different kind of thing happening in terms of, say, power dynamics, right? And Biden is going to speak on the first night and set the tone for that for the convention. And that's really, really important. So as much as we are in a very difficult situation in America that sometimes feels like 1968, it's it's a wholly different scenario. And even, you know, with there will be many protesters in the street in Chicago. Many of them will and probably more than in '68. Ultimately, in '68 only 10,000 protesters shown up. Showed up. Some people said the numbers a little higher, but, you know, they expected 100,000 people. They got 10,000 we're gonna have a lot of people in Chicago this year, and a lot of them are going to be protesting Gaza, and the way the administration has reacted to the war and so on. And it's natural to kind of spin some parallels there. It's helpful to keep in mind that a fairly recent poll found that it was 1% of Americans who saw Gaza as like, the most important issue during this election. Now I'm not saying it's not an incredibly important issue. I'm just saying like that's some kind of gauge of public opinion. And in 1968 heading into the convention, I believe I might be off a point or two, but something like 59% of Americans saw Vietnam is the number one issue. So you've got about, you know, 60 to one ratio between, you know, Vietnam concern in '68 and got the concern now for better or for worse. So, you know, I'm not in any way underplaying the importance of, you know, the concerns people have about Gaza, but is is such a wholly, wholly different situation.

Kelly  48:11  
So this book is just fascinating. There's so many other stories that we haven't gotten a chance to talk about. Can you tell listeners how they can get a copy? 

Dr. Heather Hendershot  48:20  
Oh, sure, you can order it from the University of Chicago Press or a local bookstore near you, or online. It's all over the place. The paperback came out, I think, in January or so, so, save three or $4 that way. There's an e book. And it was, it was named one of the New Yorker's, like, best books in of 2023 so I'm just like, super delighted about that. Was just, I was so honored by that.

Kelly  48:45  
Great Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Heather Hendershot  48:49  
I'll just say one final kind of interesting thing is that, you know, since for some time, we've not seen gavel to gavel coverage of these conventions, and they become these very highly managed shows put on by the by the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. And we just sort of see key speeches, and it's very limited coverage. And you really have to go to C span to watch the whole thing, to get close to gavel to gavel coverage. And I think as a as a televised event, this is going to protect be particularly interesting and impactful this year. And if you talk to me a month ago, I was said, "Well, it's going to be pretty canned on the Democratic side," because their their planners were basically looking to do as much prefab footage as possible, in some ways, like during the pandemic, like in 2020, just a lot of video clips from around the country, de- emphasize what was happening on the convention floor. And, of course, they don't want to emphasize protests in the streets, right? That's, you know, anti DNC, you know, anti Kamala Harris and Biden in some ways. So, you know, they're not going to the Democratic Party is not going to be thrilled about any camera stuff they're seeing in the street, probably. Inside the convention hall, though, they're really rethinking how they're going to stage the whole thing. And I think there's going to be a lot more live stuff that we're going to see. They're not going to worry as much about stage managing the show. It will be stage managed. But what I mean is there, and there won't be a ton of spontaneity, but it won't have that canned, lots of pre made video clip kind of feeling, I believe. I could be wrong that we anticipated for this year, that worked really well in 2020 that but might not have worked if Biden had been the nominee right, because it would have been seen as like you're just hiding Biden, because he's not qualified for this job anymore, that we have concerns about his age and so on. So they don't have that issue anymore, and they can therefore show the Democratic convention as a sort of spectacle of democracy, and I don't mean that in a negative way, you know, in a positive way, in a very different way than they would have if they didn't have this candidate change. 

Kelly  51:00  
Heather, thank you so much for speaking with me. I really enjoyed your book, and I've just loved learning more about 1968 and the DNC.

Dr. Heather Hendershot  51:09  
Well, thank you so much for having me. It was great joining you today.

Teddy  51:27  
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