Chicago and the Democratic convention - 30 August 1996

I think we ought to begin with a short passage from my last piece filed from the Democrats' Chicago convention. The convention, and most likely the Democratic Party itself, were wounded beyond recognition by the spectacle seen by stupefied millions, of a Chicago police force gone berserk in front of the biggest hotel in the world. In thirty years of attending presidential conventions, I have seen nothing to match the dumb despair of the delegations inside the Chicago amphitheatre or out on the streets and the city's parks, anything like the murderous ferocity of the police.

They began in mid-evening, clubbing and taming peace demonstrators and an army of jeering hippies, and ended by roaming the hotel lobby like SS men, roughing up astonished guests, marooned families and other innocents, just sitting or walking through the hotel lounges. The only unreal place to be last night was in the convention itself. Cut off from the living world of television, the amphitheatre was a circus in the middle of a plague.

Most of the delegates, it was obvious, had no idea what one grim speaker, a senator from Connecticut, was talking about when he deplored the "Gestapo tactics," on the streets of Chicago. It was a terrifying demonstration of the theory of the man who said the medium is the message. The only people who got the whole message were the millions from Alaska to Florida, from California to Maine who were frozen with terror in front of their television screens.

Well latecomers and beardless youths, will be, I'm sure, mightily relieved to hear that that dispatch was filed on the 26th August 1968, the date of the last convention in Chicago of the Democrats or indeed of any other political party.

From the time that the Republicans and the Democrats became the two main political parties of this country, the Republicans held their first convention in 1856, there were until 1968, twenty nine conventions. Only seven times were they held in another city.

Let's look backward beyond 1968 to the story of this astonishing city, which twenty odd years before it played host to its first convention, was a squatter settlement of two hundred souls on a marsh in the middle of the prairie.

It lay on the corner of a lake half the size of England, which was joined to three other lakes which were linked with canals to the north and east and gave clear access to the Atlantic. There was a Chicago river, but there was a sandbar between it and Lake Michigan. They cut though the sandbar and Chicago had a harbour. A fifteen year old orphan from New York City, an outrageously precocious character, dabbled in real estate and he had a shimmering vision. He began by inventing a new sort of house, a balloon frame, two-by-fours nailed together, the first prefabricated house.

Young Bill Ogden saw as soon as anybody that Chicago, more than any other American town, lay in an ideal spot to realise his vision. Bang in the middle of the continent, smelling the chaff of every harvest, getting the tang of the sea and ships from the lake, the ideal spot to become the largest grain market in the world. Which it did nine years after Mr Ogden dumped thousands of his balloon houses on the village.

Being at the hub of hundreds of spokes, of rude roads radiating to every part of the continent, Chicago was bound also to become the biggest railroad centre in the world. It received the harvests and the livestock from every direction. The Chicago Commodity Exchange is to this day the stock exchange of the American farmer. Within thirty years, right after the Civil War was over, more freighters cruised into Chicago than into the six busiest ports of America combined. But it was the freight train that made Chicago the ideal junction between the harvests of the encircling prairie and the people, thousands of miles in all directions. They said long ago, a cow goes into Chicago as a cow and comes out as a steak or a tennis racquet.

So the real road hub is what made Chicago the easiest place to reach, first by rivers and canals and then from everywhere by train, and so why Chicago became the convention city until the dreadful year of 1968. I say dreadful not only thinking of the frightening Democratic convention, but earlier: the assassination of the murdered John Kennedy's brother, the murder of the Reverend Martin Luther King, the riots at political meetings that had to be abandoned, caused by the hullabaloo tactics of young demonstrators against the Vietnam War, which was just then well underway and beyond recall.

In the intervening hundred odd years, Chicago became not only the mammoth city of the plains, but a cultural centre second only to New York. One of the great orchestras of the world, one of the three or four most distinguished universities, a famous medical school, a remarkable science museum and art gallery. The city of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, of Adlai Stevenson, Carl Sandburg, Dreiser, Saul Bellow, Willa Cather, Frank Norris, James T. Farrell, Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine, Helen Hull's settlement house - a whole generation of fine journalists in the early part of the century.

So long ago as 1920, H L Mencken called it "the literary capital of the United States".

And yet, yet for all its fascinating, mushrooming history and its awesome record in architecture, literature, scholarship, medicine, in the world's memory it's cursed with three or four indelible images: an appalling fire a century ago, a mayor, big Bill Thompson who offered single-handed combat with the king of England, a garish stage for the gang wars of Al Capone, and the setting of the ugly riots that defamed the democratic convention of 1968.

So why did President Clinton – I suppose it was his decision first and last – pick Chicago this year, the first party that dared to recall the devastating scenes of twenty-eight years ago? I was surprised to hear about the choice way back in the winter, but I imagine that since the White House crew, staff, gathered round the core of the Arkansas gang, since they are so young, they must assume that most Americans either never knew or have forgotten about 1968.

If so, they didn't allow for television. If I'd been a member of the Democratic National Committee, I'd have winced through the first three nights of the convention, because several networks were lavish with their visual recall of the 1968 horror and there was, for national consumption, one two-hour programme, very well done, one hour on the breeding and the thriving of the riots – a fuller coverage than we'd had at the time – followed by a second hour on the trial of the eight young ringleaders. In the end, they were acquitted on appeal against charges of inciting to riot, not because they hadn't taunted and attacked the police with everything from obscenities to rocks, but because the presiding judge was a judicial disaster. So eager to find them guilty that he announced a sentencing before the jury came back in. In the end the appeals court found his behaviour "prejudicial" to put it as nicely as possible.

Well this week who should turn up in Chicago but two or three of those old-young defiant hippies, with their coiling, shaggy ringlets, their open shirts, their stubbly beards and clenched fists. They didn't show up with any of these hippy accoutrements. They wore business suits, shirts, natty ties, and might have been mistaken for 1968 estate agents or stockbrokers. Well they were 1996 estate agents and stockbrokers or some similarly conspicuous establishment profession. I suppose it's the most natural thing in the world. In 1968, they were, say, twenty-eight. Today they're in their mid-fifties. They remind me of the ancient saying: a liberal is a socialist with a wife and two children.

Oddly, the other image that has stuck in my mind from this week was the admirable, and greatly resented, coverage of one network of the arrival in Chicago of troops of lobbyists – the same companies we saw, to the distress and anger of the subjects, going abroad yachts to be entertained by the Republicans in San Diego. Some of the same, and all of the same types, were shown arriving in Chicago and going into elaborate parties given for them by the Democrats. Think up any sort of big business you can, really big, big corporations, and you may be sure they had a team being partied in Chicago as they were in San Diego.

The network cameramen had a hard time shooting, I mean filming them. You'd have thought they were intruding on a gangsters' conference, the number of men and women who tried to block the lens with splayed hands. Any other time, of course, they would pay to be on camera. For a typical, neat example, I give you a high officer of a textile company. It gave 100,000 dollars to Mr Dole. It is giving 100,000 dollars to Mr Clinton. Why? To encourage, shall we say, favourable legislation. The man was asked, why? He said, "It gives access".

I hope you're happy that I never went into the ritual of the circus, the script of which could have been written months ago. Mr Clinton was unanimously nominated for a second term. Mr Al Gore, the handsome environmentalist vice president, made a surprisingly successful speech, almost the hit of the convention. He is the most wooden orator in the country, looking at all times like a dressed up cardboard cut-out in a tailor's window – except when he's nodding at some, any wise remark of boss Clinton when he looks like one of those dolls with heads on springs. Nevertheless, he played up this woodenness, mocked himself with some very funny lines, and made a lot of Democrats muse that maybe he was right in having ideas of his own about 2000 AD.

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