Following
the tumultuous events at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago—in
which thousands of New Leftists and antiwar protesters faced police
in violent confrontations—the Nixon administration responded by
indicting six prominent and two lesser-known activists for conspiracy
to cross state lines with the intent to foment a riot. The resultant
trial would offer nearly five months of sometimes entertaining,
sometimes appalling theater pitting two different visions of America
against each other: an anti-authority, youth-oriented, countercultural
vision represented by the defendants and their lawyers; and a
pro-establishment vision personified by the prosecutors and
especially the presiding judge, Julius Hoffman. Conspiracy
in the Streets
presents nearly 200 pages of excerpts from the trial transcripts,
offering a vivid first-hand account of one of the greatest political
trials of the last sixty years.
The
trial had its origins in the efforts of a coalition of antiwar and
New Left groups to organize a series of demonstrations to take place
in Chicago during the Democratic Convention in August 1968. But
planning for the event ran afoul of the powerful administration of
Mayor Richard Daley, as city officials denied organizers permits to
demonstrate outside the convention hall or in Grant Park, several
miles away. When thousands of demonstrators showed up anyway, city
police forcibly attacked crowds of protestors, some of whom fought
back. By the end of the convention, more than 600 demonstrators had
been arrested, and more than 1,000 had been treated for injuries
either in hospitals or by on-site medical teams, while 192 police
officers had been injured. In the aftermath of the convention, the
report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of
Violence—the so-called “Walker Report”—concluded the events
in Chicago were a “police riot” and Attorney General Ramsey Clark
declined to seek charges against the protest organizers.
But
with the Nixon administration coming into office in early 1969,
indictments were handed down shortly
thereafter against eight of the movement’s leaders. These included
David Dellinger, a 54-year-old pacifist with a decades-long record of
war resistance; Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, who had been prominent
members of the Students for a Democratic Society since the early
1960s; Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party; Abbie Hoffman and
Jerry Rubin of the Youth International Party (Yippie!); and two
relatively unknown local activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines (at
trial’s end, as the judge handed out contempt citations and thought
he had finished with the defendants and was about to begin on the
defense lawyers, he realized he had not yet sentenced Froines,
prompting Froines’ lament, “It’s part of being a media unknown
that even the judge finally forgets you’re here”). The eight were
charged with conspiring to riot despite the fact that Bobby Seale had
never met any of the others and, as Abbie Hoffman would testify, “We
couldn’t agree on lunch.” All the defendants but Seale chose as
their lawyers William Kuntsler, who had a long record of working in
the civil rights movement, and Leonard Weinglass, who was working in
his first federal trial, and when Seale’s lawyer fell ill, the
judge assigned Kuntsler as Seale’s attorney.
As
the transcripts clearly show, Judge Hoffman made little attempt to
conceal his contempt for the defendants and his antipathy for the
lawyers. If the defense sought to use the trial as an effective piece
of agitprop, then they could have ordered Judge Hoffman straight from
central casting. Cantankerous and combative, the judge rushed through
jury selection in less than a day, consistently denied defense
motions, insulted defense attorneys in front of the jury, and refused
to allowed crucial defense witnesses to testify—most egregiously,
former Attorney General Clark, who was prevented from explaining why
he had refused to seek indictments against the defendants. The
judge’s actions reached their nadir when Seale repeatedly insisted
on a delay until he could be represented by his own lawyer or,
barring that, representing himself, and Judge Hoffman responded by
ordering Seale bound and gagged, prompting outrage on the part of the
defense lawyers and the rest of the defendants. Eventually Seale’s
case was separated from the others’.
The
defense team chose to use the trial to present to the jury and the
broader American audience the ideas and values of what was loosely
called “the Movement.” Thus, defense witnesses featured a wide
array of New Left, countercultural, and civil rights
celebrities—including, among others, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg,
Dick Gregory, Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, Timothy Leary, Judy
Collins, and Arlo Guthrie. The testimonies offer abundant examples of
entertaining cultural clashes, as when Ginsberg, asked what he did
when he encountered police at the demonstrations, began to chant
“O-o-m-m-m-m, o-o-m-m-m” only to have the judge cut him off after
two “oommms,” or when Collins or Guthrie began singing, only to
have the judge order them silenced. As
a defense, though, this strategy came across as unfocused, bordering
on incoherent. More effective are the lesser-known witnesses who gave
first-hand accounts of the brutal behavior of the Chicago police and
the intransigence of the Daley administration.
In
the trial’s context, the defendant who shone brightest was Abbie
Hoffman. A veteran of the Southern civil rights movement, Hoffman
emerged in the mid-1960s as a public figure in the New Left
specializing in acts of guerilla theater. The Yippies were his and
Rubin’s attempt to forego the hard work of grassroots organizing
and create a movement from the top down by using the mass media, a
strategy that led them to make outrageous and sometimes irresponsible
statements, like their threat to put LSD in Chicago’s water system.
While not especially effective as an organizing tactic, it often made
for entertaining theater and the trial provided a perfect forum for
Hoffman’s comedic talents. Whether blowing kisses to the jury,
dressing in judicial robes, dropping his last name (so as not to be
confused with Judge Hoffman), or insulting the judge in Yiddish (as
the transcripts make clear, almost all of the defendants’ outbursts
came in response to some especially provocative judicial ruling; in
this case it was the revocation of Dellinger’s bail), Hoffman used
the trial as a forum to make a mockery of the government’s case. As
a witness, Hoffman gave the judge and prosecutor fits, as when, for
instance, he stated that he resided in “Woodstock Nation,” and
when asked where that was located, responded, “It is in my mind and
the minds of my brothers and sisters. We carry it around with us in
the same way that the Sioux Indians carry around the Sioux nation. It
does not consist of property or material, but, rather, of ideas and
certain values, those values being cooperation versus competition.”
Excerpts
of the trial transcripts have been available in paperback form,
especially in the long out-of-print Tales
of Hoffman (Bantam
Books, 1970), a book that in roughly the same number of pages
presents a much fuller account. As Norman Mailer pointedly observed
during his testimony, “Facts are nothing without their nuance,”
and what is missing from this version is much of the trial’s
nuance. Hoffman’s testimony, for instance, is significantly
truncated in this edition, often without indicating what has been
left out. Thus, when Weinglass commented that the prosecutor had
finally understood that much of the Yippies’ rhetoric was not meant
to be taken seriously, the prosecution’s objection prompting the
comment is not included. The present edition also completely
eliminates the ongoing conflict over bathroom privileges, which
symbolized the judge’s petty imperiousness as well as providing a
recurring source of humor.
Jon
Wiener’s introduction briefly sets the trial in context, although
the price of such brevity is often oversimplification, as well as
occasional bad editing and sloppy history. For instance, he says that
Tom Hayden was first elected to the California state assembly in
1992, when in fact it was in 1982, and he gives Jerry Rubin credit
for coining the phrase “Never trust anyone over thirty” when it
was really Berkeley Free Speech activist Jack Weinberg. Tom Hayden’s
afterword provides some interesting reflections on the trial,
although his comments on the current scene probably reflect more
wishful thinking than anything else.
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