In April 1968, Columbia University students opposed to the Vietnam War took over Hamilton Hall, protesting the school’s ties to the United States military and its fraught relationship with the surrounding neighborhood of Harlem. In April 2024, pro-Palestinian Columbia students took over that same academic building. That’s not the only similarity between our current moment and that one. As was the case in 1968, we are in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war — this time, Israel’s US-backed actions in Gaza — with young Americans predominantly leading the anti-war charge. We have a divisive US election, much like in 1968, and there’s even a Kennedy running. In a particularly striking coincidence, this year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) is set to take place this month in Chicago, the same setting for the 1968 DNC.
The 1968 DNC, which occurred after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, is infamous for the televised anti-war protests that were met with vicious police brutality. From August 26-29 of that year, as the Democrats cemented Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president Hubert Humphrey as their nominee, about 10,000 protesters gathered outside the convention to protest Johnson’s Vietnam War policies. Then Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, in anticipation of the protests, mobilized law enforcement ahead of the convention, calling in 12,000 members of the Chicago police, the National Guard, and federal troops.
During the course of the convention, police brutally beat protesters, but things reached a fever pitch on August 28, when the media televised the protests and violence both inside and outside the convention. By the end of the convention, 668 protesters had been arrested and hundreds were injured. The 1968 DNC showcased a massive divide in the Democratic Party and a widening rift in an increasingly polarized nation. Some speculated that the chaos contributed to Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon’s win that November.
To learn more about what happened at the 1968 DNC, the fallout from it, and how that time compares to the one we’re in now, we speak with Heather Hendershot, a professor of communication studies and journalism at Northwestern University and author of When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Heather Hendershot: There's definitely a lot of resonance from 1968 to now, and what I like to say is resonance is not duplication, and it's also not prediction.… You don't study history to look for how it's going to repeat itself; you study history to understand the past and, ideally, to do a better job in the present, to learn something that you can apply and do better moving forward.
As for the specifics of the resonance from then to now, yes, we have war protests going on. There's not a solidified opinion across America against the war. There is definitely some antipathy toward the protesters. Like in 1968, you see the right weaponizing the protests, the right bringing college presidents before Congress and accusing them of promoting antisemitism on their campuses.
To some extent, some of those [college presidents] who are not handling it well are being very responsive to the right, and are worried about being held before Congress and losing the support of their faculty or their board or their trustees because of these vicious attacks accusing them of being antisemites. That scenario, clearly, is different. And there isn’t a draft right now — we haven’t had years of boots on the ground [like in] Vietnam.
HH: I think it is really important to think about Chicago as then versus now. In '68, Mayor Daley is a machine politician. [There’s a lot to suggest] he has the police in his back pocket. The police understand that they are doing what Daley would like in beating the protesters and showing that the city can maintain “law and order,” to use Nixon's language. Today, we have a Black progressive mayor in Chicago. He does not seem to have a harmonious relationship with the police force because he's more progressive than maybe the police force would like.
You also have a major difference today, which is that the Clinton administration, in 1998, established these national, special security events that would be directed by the Secret Service under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security. The Secret Service, in conjunction with the governor and theoretically the mayor's office, is managing the convention as a security event, so you have a different kind of top-down management than you had in '68, when the mayor was “the man.”
HH: It's really hard to overstate how insane things were in America at that point. The Tet Offensive had occurred in Vietnam in January and February, and the catastrophic losses to both sides sent the message to many Americans that not only were they not about to win the war there, as the Johnson administration had been indicating, but that the war was just going to go on and on.
You've also got Martin Luther King being assassinated in April. There are uprisings in about 125 cities with arson, looting, and police brutality, and people are seeing these images on TV. And then, in early June, Bobby Kennedy is assassinated. For many people, he was seen as the peace candidate.
HH: You have delegates showing up who have been Kennedy supporters, and they don't switch to Humphrey. They want to voice their protest at the convention. If Humphrey is nominated, they want him to soften the Vietnam plank and diverge from how Johnson was leading the war. So [some] delegates on the floor of the convention are holding up peace signs. They're staging the protest specifically for TV cameras. They want people at home to see that the Democratic Party is having a genuine debate about this issue.
But it ends up looking like the party is not being democratic because they're not listening to the pro-peace delegates. They try to make the protesters stop, but they can't control the room.
We remember the 1968 DNC for chaos in the streets in Chicago, which there was — there was a tremendous amount of police brutality. On Wednesday, [August 28,] you had the so-called Battle of Michigan Avenue, where police beat protesters on television in the streets and arrest them for 17 minutes straight, while protesters are chanting, “The whole world is watching!”
But it's important to think about how, [on that same night, the chaos] was also happening inside the convention hall. Dan Rather of CBS news was slugged…. Mike Wallace from CBS is knocked down; he's almost trampled, and then he is arrested.
HH: Before the convention, the idea that there was liberal-media bias, that was not the norm as an opinion; that was, to some extent, a regional complaint. Pro-segregationists in the South did not like how the Civil Rights Movement was covered, and how Birmingham was covered, and the fire hoses being shown and turned on civil rights activists. They thought the media was against them. And then you had people who were either inside or outside the South who were extremists, or just very far right, someone like William F. Buckley, who, in his magazine, National Review, argued that the media was infused with liberal bias.
But the mainstream opinion before the 1968 DNC is that the media, CBS News, The New York Times, that these venues are striving for the highest journalistic standards. They're striving for as much objectivity as they can. They're trying to be balanced in their reporting.
After the convention, the notion that the media is infused with liberal bias becomes much more nationalized and mainstreamed. It catches hold with Nixon's so-called silent majority and becomes something that the right, in particular, has weaponized ever since.
HH: The majority of Americans didn’t think what they saw on TV, like the Battle of Michigan Avenue, was police brutality. They thought the media covered it wrong. This was an idea that Mayor Daley in Chicago promoted and Nixon amplified. They thought that networks should have shown the protesters provoking the police, and that if they'd shown that part of the story, viewers would have seen that the protesters deserved to be beaten, which is very poor logic.
You don't deserve to be beaten for shouting profanities at the police or even throwing objects at the police. But the attack ended up being more on the media than on the Chicago police. Nixon ran on that, and even after he is elected and in office, he keeps amplifying the idea that the media is against him.
HH: You had a majority of people, in surveys taken afterwards, either saying the police used an appropriate amount of force or that they should have used more force. That was over half the country. That’s the commonly cited data, though what you hear less often is that they specifically polled Black Americans, as well, who did not hold that same attitude. Black Americans said, "Yes, this was police brutality. Yes, this was excessive force.” But the white majority felt that it was not excessive.
HH: The protests in the street were very much dominated by younger people. You have members of Students for a Democratic Society; you have the hippies, and the Yippies [of the Youth International Party]; you also have an anti-war crowd of college students, some of them in coats and ties, some of them very, quote, "respectable-looking people."
HH: That's a huge difference, and it's so important. In '68, Daley had not resolved an electrical workers' strike, which made it [virtually] impossible for the news to do live coverage in the streets. There were people out with 16-millimeter cameras who, technically, could have taken footage in the street, but their cameras were often struck down by police. The people were struck, and so were the cameras.
As you say, now everyone's got a camera in their pocket, so we are going to see all these images from the street that, in '68, the networks showed rather sparingly.
It's important to emphasize that people right after the convention were angry at the networks, scapegoated them, and said, "Why did you show us all these images?" [But the networks] held back for days. They under-covered the violence. This time, disruption or disorder or violence or positive protest and positive expression of political dissents, all of this range of imagery will be shown, and it would be impossible to shut that down short of finding a way to destroy the internet.
Inside the convention hall, there's a great deal of capacity for control. It appears there are many people in the Democratic National Committee, the planners of the convention, who would like to replicate what went well for them during COVID, which was a lot of footage that they shot ahead of time, going from state to state and having a very controlled, sort of stage-managed media presentation, and then live speeches, acceptance speeches, important symbolic speeches, and so on.
Outside, it is completely wide open.
HH: If you're talking about the media, I would say one thing that happened in '68 that would be great not to replicate is that the media portrayed the Republican Convention as a very, very orderly, stage-managed affair. They got low ratings because it was kind of boring.
Everything dramatic that happened in Miami with the Republicans in '68 happened behind the scenes: Nixon making sure he got the nomination; Nixon conferring with Senator Strom Thurmond and other right-wing Southern political figures and crafting what was called the Southern Strategy to get the South behind him and not George Wallace, the segregationist who was running. But nobody saw that on TV, and nobody really had a sense that there were any problems in Miami.
But there had been a riot near the convention that was related to it; that was a protest uprising. A number of Black people were killed. It just wasn't covered as related to the convention.
And then the Democratic Convention was chaos. So the outcome in terms of public perception is: Republicans are orderly, together; these are the people who can get us out of Vietnam. Democrats: disorderly, chaos; they can't get us out of Vietnam. That was the perception that the media didn't intend to create, perhaps, but it's part of what they created nonetheless.
HH: Hopefully, the fact that everyone can use a phone, text, and share images will have a positive impact — and an impact no one could have foreseen in 1968. That level of sound and image-capturing and -spreading could happen, and it could be very positive. It really depends on what's amplified, what goes viral, what sticks and what doesn't stick.
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
