Macabre View Of Chicago

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31770, 29 August 1968, Page 11

Macabre View Of Chicago

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright)

CHICAGO, Aug. 28. The only people who can possibly feel at ease at the Democratic Party’s national convention are those who have been to a hanging, writes Russell Baker, of the New York Times News Service.

All the macabre trappings are here, except the rope and the condemned; and a case might even be made for these

by accepting the political coroner’s verdict that the Democratic Party is giving itself the business by letting this particular spectacle go out over the miles of communications cable strung through Mr Richard Daley’s chambered mayoral fortress. For the rest, the analogies are uncomfortably clear. Battalions of nervous cops gallop through the streets in squadrons of menace calculated to intimidate any unrest that might deter society in the collection of its debt

Keepers of the vigil in this case, mostly young people—try to sleep on the park grass and. for this im-

pertinence, get their skulls cracked and their ribs kicked by the gentlemen whom Mr Daley calls “the finest police force in the country.” Using the public grass after midnight can be a dangerous provocation to a policeman bent upon keeping the masses docile while grim business is being conducted. The grimmest of Democratic business is conducted, of course, in the grim hours between midnight and dawn. Hangmen and politicians work best when the spirit is at its lowest ebb.

As at executions, public witnesses are rigorously limited in the convention hall and, as usual at such affairs, there is a complex of security check points at which the witnesses are subjected to hostile police scrutiny, credential examination and possible frisking. The International Amphitheatre in which the convention is being held is, appropriately, adjacent to an abattoir. It is white—the true colour of evil, in Herman Melville’s view, and the favourite colour of death-cham-ber decorators. It has the architectural sprawl and stolidity of a prison.

To arrive at the site one travels with a suitcase full of credentials past factories, under railroad tracks and down “respectable” streets lined with small bungalows and respectable people waving American flags, passes along six or seven blocks of police barricades behind which all evidence of unpoliced humanity has disappeared, and, at length, penetrates a high fence topped with barbed wire. Electronic credential scanners control admission to the hail’s ante-chambers. They are usually out of order; but the guards here tend to be merciful and rarely turn anyone over to the Chicago police. i

All these things, of course, are physical superficialities which, by themselves, would scarcely account for the unnatural mood here. In the view of Mr Lester Maddox, the Democratic Party’s most distinguished fried-chicken salesman, all this, in fact, simply represents what a Southern friedchicken entrepreneur yearns for when he calls for “law and order.”

What puts iron into the analogy, however, is the behaviour of the Democrats themselves. They are, most of them, a bare breath from panic, the panic of men who sense that something utterly unpleasant and perhaps terribly final is about to be done to them down by the abattoir. You see them at their noontime breakfasts talking about the chance that Ted Kennedy can be drafted for the Presidency. This seems fantasy in a class with the Queen’s Coronation day pardon for Mack the Knife; and the fact that so many pass the time dreaming of it speaks of the general state of mind. In such an atmosphere, sell-out and double-cross become the standard ethic.

Senator George McGovern, whose candidacy was manufactured by the Kennedy forces, discovers suddenly that his creators have fled back to Kennedy. Vice-Presi-dent Hubert Humphrey, who tried to please everybody, harvests hisses and boos by the bushel, but never a cheer.

Senator Eugene McCarthy, whose candidacy revealed the depth of Lyndon Johnson’s weakness, finds himself a parish for telling the party the truth it did not want to hear. Some of the older hands went through all this in 1948, lived to see Mr Harry Truman pass a miracle, and now comfort themselves with the assurance that it can be done again with Mr Humphrey. This, of course, is Death Row talk, and the question is why the mood of the convention dwells so uncharacteristically on thoughts of the great beyond. Just a few weeks ago these very Democrats were chortling in their soup about the prospects of waging one more campaign against Mr Richard Nixon. Even then, of course, they conceded that a campaign in defence of the Johnson Administration would be hard. But now, in three days at Chicago, they have nearly persuaded themselves that it will be hopeless. It is not easy to account for the lightning transition from courage to despair. Not many of them, surely, can ever have been to a hanging, and so the macabre doings in Chicago can hardly have stirred memories of old nightmares.

It is possible, of course, that they sensed at first sight of Mr Daley’s arrangements the pattern that was developing here, and merely reacted as normal men would.

After all, a man’s first hanging is the hardest, particularly if he suspects it may be his own.

Protesters Quelled

( N .Z .P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) CHICAGO, Aug. 28.

For the second consecutive night the Chicago police used tear-gas to remove 1500 demonstrators against the Vietnam war from Lincoln Park as the crowd stood in a circle round a wooden cross singing, “We Shall Overcome.” The final warning to leave the area or face arrest came at 12.30 a.m., 1) hours after the park—the rallying point for demonstrators during the Democratic Party’s national convention should have been dosed.

The police, wearing gas masks and carrying shotguns, marched forward in a straight line, pressing back the crowd one step at a time. Policemen standing on a truck behind the advancing line tossed tear-gas grenades into the midst of the Hippies, yippies and other demonstrators, who hurriedly departed.