From August 19 to 22nd, the Democratic Party will meet in Chicago, Illinois, to formally nominate their candidate for the 2024 presidential election. With President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the election last Sunday, comparisons are already being drawn with 1968’s troubled Democratic convention in Chicago which saw protests and racial disenfranchisement in the delegate selection process. Heather Hendershot writes that while narratives of history repeating itself can seem attractive, there are some important contrasts between 2024 and 1968. Reformed selection procedures mean that Vice President Kamala Harris is likely to be confirmed as the party’s nominee with little disagreement, and the current Chicago police and City Hall leadership may soften the impact of any protests during the convention.
On March 31, 1968, the incumbent Democratic President, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), made a surprise announcement on national television: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” Now that President Joe Biden has declined nomination for a second term – an announcement made on Sunday via social media, not broadcast TV – comparisons are naturally being made to that earlier historical moment.
Is history repeating?
It’s easy to get caught up in “history is repeating itself” narratives, especially when they seem to offer explanatory power. But we have to be careful. For example, former President Trump survived an assassination attempt just a few days before the Republican convention convened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And back in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were shot dead by assassins in April and June, shortly before the GOP and Democratic conventions. These terrible acts of political violence sprang from historical moments of brutal partisanship, and the coincidence of assassinations then-vs.-now is not altogether random, but it’s still only that – a coincidence – and does not confirm any simple notion that 2024 is “just like” 1968.
So, what can we take away from 1968 that will help us understand the upcoming Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August? I will minimize any predictions, given how quickly the political situation is changing. When I sat down to start writing this piece, former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democratic power players were gingerly maintaining that a competitive vetting process was important, and that Vice President Kamala Harris should not simply be “crowned” as a replacement candidate. Just a few hours later, Pelosi had offered a full throttled Harris endorsement. By dinnertime, Harris had enough pledges from delegates to assure her place on the ticket. And by the time you read this, a new vice-presidential candidate might be in place.
Lessons for 2024 from 1968
So, let’s stick to material that is instructive regardless of any unexpected moves in the Democratic Party’s ongoing political chess game. I’ll tease out just a few details from 1968 that resonate today: the issue of police brutality in Chicago; the relevance of racial issues; and the importance of media coverage as a party struggles to control its image.
When the Democratic convention was held in Chicago in the summer of 1968, the city was run by Mayor Richard J. Daley, a political boss and one of the last machine politicians. He had the police in his back pocket and was committed to maintaining “law and order” in his city. “Law and order” was more common as a Republican talking point, a not-too-thinly veiled reference to the desire to suppress urban uprisings (“riots”), Vietnam protest, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. But Mr. Democrat (Daley’s nickname) leaned into his own authoritarianism and allowed or even encouraged his police force to beat and teargas protestors, journalists, delegates, and hippies. Anyone in the streets of downtown Chicago was at risk of being cracked in the skull with a nightstick.
In a phone call with LBJ, the Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, indicated that protestors got what they deserved, and the president agreed. Although the top men in both parties were on the same page regarding police brutality, Nixon’s campaign drove home the point that Americans could not expect Democrats to run the country if they could not even control their own convention, and that perception took root, helping Nixon defeat LBJ’s vice president Hubert Humphrey that November.
A lesson from 1968 is legitimate here: if the Chicago streets boil over in violence next month, the Trump campaign will weaponize images of that violence against Democrats up and down the ballot. But let’s be realistic. Even if street protests go relatively smoothly, the GOP will likely claim that they did not, aided and abetted by Fox News. Minimizing violence is ideal, but the Democrats cannot control perceptions of Americans receiving their “news” in MAGA echo chambers.
Today, Brandon Johnson is mayor of Chicago. He’s friendly to activists and does not have the police in his back pocket. Still, the city is denying protestors permits and keeping them far from the actual convention site, a page from Daley’s playbook. During the Black Lives Matters street uprisings following the murder of George Floyd, Chicago police made many mistakes, not a good precedent for how responses to DNC protestors might unfold this summer.
Credit: Courtesy National Archives, photo no. 6210903
All of this is alarming, but need not inevitably climax with a “police riot,” as an official government report described the events in Daley’s Chicago. Police Superintendent Larry Snelling explicitly states “This will not be 1968,” adding that the department has learned from the 2020 BLM protests.
Clearly, the difference in police and City Hall leadership may make a difference this time around. Further, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker rallied hard to bring the convention to Chicago and aspires to higher office; this may make a difference in how chaotic (or not) things get in August. None of this is necessarily impacted for better or for worse by Biden having stepped down. In fact, it’s possible (again, no predictions) that protestor numbers could shift downward if, for example, groups fighting for reproductive rights or rights for people of color understand Harris as a stronger ally than Biden.
The key historically informed takeaway here is that the Democratic Party needs to convey itself as in control in the streets of Chicago, even though this “control” is technically more in the hands of the police, mayor, governor, and Secret Service than the party itself. A repeat of the rampant violence shown on TV in 1968 would not help convey the Democrats as the anti-authoritarian alternative to Trump’s GOP. Today, of course, any street violence will appear not only on network and cable TV but also in social media posts, where crisis moments may be amplified, and deep fakes and other sorts of deceptions are a real risk. The DNC can produce its own ads, memes, etc. and hope they go viral, but much of this is out of their hands in a decentralized media environment.
The 2024 convention will not see many of the controversies of 1968
In my book on media coverage of the 1968 convention, I stressed that films and photos of police teargassing and beating protestors in the streets do not tell the full story of what happened in Chicago. Equally important were the media images inside the convention hall, where a crisis around Black disenfranchisement unfolded, a helpful story for helping us compare 1968 to 2024.
Procedures for selecting delegates varied from state to state back then, with some allowing open elections, some holding unfair elections designed to keep Black Americans from voting, and some hand selecting delegates at the discretion of state officials. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had challenged Black disenfranchisement from the delegate selection process in 1964; they lost then, but won in 1968, and “regular” delegates were replaced on the Chicago convention floor by Mississippi challengers. Georgia challengers in 1968 achieved only a compromise solution, while challengers from Alabama, Texas, Tennessee, and numerous other Southern states failed completely, as the old school segregationists had not yet all defected to the Republican Party. It all played out on live TV, made the party look bad, and ultimately harmed the Humphrey campaign.
These sorts of media embarrassments have been avoided since the 1970s because now nominees for both parties are pre-selected via the primary process. That means delegates mostly perform a pro forma, morale boosting function at conventions. What off-site viewers see is arguably less democracy in action than a stage managed, symbolic spectacle of democracy in action.
And this is exactly why some Democrats were terrified by the prospect of Biden stepping down and a genuinely open convention occurring with a live selection process playing out on television—and other kinds of screens—entailing chaotic disagreements and multiple rounds of voting. With Harris now all but confirmed as the nominee, however, this sort of political and image crisis is likely avoidable.
The Democrats need to show who they are as a party
If there is anything a political party wants and needs to accomplish with a convention it is not just nominating a candidate (or “crowning” one who has been pre-chosen via primaries) but to show who they are as a party. The GOP conveyed itself in Milwaukee as an authoritarian party beholden to a single, messianic hero. Further, the convention featured speakers who had promoted white nationalist conspiracy theories, even if those speakers did not lean specifically into white supremacist rhetoric on the dais as explicitly as they might in their podcasts or posts on X or Truth Social.
The Democrats will stage a different kind of TV show in Chicago, emphasizing an image of inclusivity—though that image may be undercut by perceptions that Harris was chosen without an open vetting process. Again, it’s dangerous to predict too much here, but one would certainly not expect any challenges specifically linked to racist disenfranchisement. This is a key difference between Chicago 1968 and Chicago 2024, where it seems certain that a Black woman candidate will appear at the top of the ticket. How this will play out on TV sets, computer screens, and smart phones is anyone’s guess. The Democratic party of 2024 is very different from that of 1968, even as the 2024 media ecosystem is fragmented, erratic, and unpredictable.
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