This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago (August 26–29), during which the Chicago police, reinforced by the National Guard, violently assaulted protesters gathered in Grant Park. The roughly 10,000 protesters were vastly outnumbered by the armed forces, which included 12,000 policemen, 5,000 members of the National Guard, 6,000 soldiers, including the 101st Airborne, and 1,000 undercover agents that infiltrated the protesters and possibly instigated the violence.[1] Richard Vinen writes that the police put lead shot in their gloves prior to the confrontation and “sprayed teargas with such abandon that Hubert Humphrey could smell it in his room on the twentieth floor” off Michigan Avenue downtown.[2]
The protests brought together various groups—Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panthers, the Youth International Party (Yippies)—all united in opposition to the Vietnam war. The Yippies, more joyous and ludic in their resistance than some, decided that they would nominate a pig for president. They went into the country outside Chicago and bought a pig, which they named Pigasus, and scheduled a rally and press conference on what is now Daley Plaza (then the Civic Center), by the Picasso sculpture. The stunt led to the arrest of the “Chicago Seven,” as well as Black Panther Bobby Seale, who all stood trial in 1969 on various charges, including incitement to riot.
Last Thursday at Maria’s in Bridgeport, a theatrical reenactment of these events, “Flight of the ‘Pigasus,'” was staged as part of a series of events to mark the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, “68 + 50.” Planned by former CR fiction editor Paul Durica, now Director of Programs for Illinois Humanities, the reenactment condensed the moment of the trial and the original rally nominating “Pigasus for President,” with actors portraying the events off to the side of the “courtroom” as they came up during testimony, complete with a live pig.
The performance began with musician Phil Ochs, played by Bill MacKay, on the stand. As he was interrogated and gave his account of the events, they were acted out on the side by a group of actors dressed up as the Yippies. An interesting twist came in the middle, however, when the reenactment broke from the historical record to call living participants to the stand to give their actual eye-witness stories. Judy Gumbo, wife of Yippie Stew Albert, took the stand and, when sworn in with the Bible, said: “Where is God, and what is truth?” Gumbo also claimed that Pigasus was a woman and would therefore have been the first woman president had the police not intervened. James Lato then took the stand and recalled going to find the ugliest pig they could get, and having to fork out the $20 to buy it because Jerry Rubin and the other Yippies didn’t have any money. Finally, Vince Black (formerly Blakey) took the stand and recounted the moment when the pig was given to him on a leash in the plaza and went wild. When the police arrested Rubin and Albert, they supposedly quipped: “Sorry boys, the pig squealed.” Black contradicted the commonly repeated denouement that Pigasus was given to the Humane Society and lived happily ever after on a nearby farm; instead, Black claimed to have heard from a connection within the CPD that they had a BBQ and—well, you know what happens to pigs at BBQs. After he said this someone in the audience began yelling: “Cannibals! Cannibals!”
The event concluded with another revision of the historical record; Phil Ochs had tried to sing his protest song “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” on the stand, but was ushered out of the courtroom. Instead, at Maria’s he stood right up there on the stand and sang the song, the audience happily singing along. It was a creative way to commemorate one of the most famous instances of political theater in Chicago history, an event that foreshadowed the coming police violence. In an interview with The Chicago Tribune, Durica said: “It allows for an opportunity to interrogate those moments: how effective are these methods and techniques in terms of raising public awareness? It’s also a fairly accessible and animated way of approaching a very complicated narrative that still resonates within many communities throughout the city. I hope that this program can inspire us to address the more serious issues emerging from this story.”
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Soon after the events of August 1968, Chicago Review (20.4/21.1) made its own “daring contribution to convention coverage,” in the words of poetry editor Iven Lourie. Arguing that the existing (and extensive) “reportage” offered “little that conveys the atmosphere and quality of the week’s events,” CR offered up the “raw transcript” of reel-to-reel recordings made by a PhD student and folklorist, Bruce Kaplan, “a fantastic tape made in Lincoln Park during the convention.” In a memoir that will soon be published in full, Lourie expands upon his brief introduction to the feature with further detail:
The Fantastic Issue…included a smattering of surrealistic pieces and a pièce de résistance which was a longish text edited from transcripts of a series of interviews from the Democratic Party Convention in 1968 in downtown Chicago. That was the infamous event that brought the Yippies to town to mock and harass Mayor Richard Daley and the party that would nominate Hubert Humphrey to run against Richard Nixon—at the height of the Vietnam War—and lose the election. The Yippies nominated a pig for the high office, and they refused to call off the demonstrations when Daley canceled all permits for demonstrating or camping in the downtown Chicago parks. This led to pitched battles in the streets, tear gas floating all through the downtown office district, the Loop, and battalions of Chicago policemen in riot gear making passes through the parks to clear them with tear gas, batons, and handcuffs when necessary to arrest resistors. The National Guard—platoons of young men around my age at the time carrying Army rifles—were bivouacked in Grant Park. It was a miracle that more people weren’t killed (there was one accidental death when someone was run over by a vehicle), but the injuries were legion…. I engaged my sometime roommate, Bruce Kaplan, who was a genius with a Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder, to walk around the park and do random interviews of participants. I did a few recordings myself, but the work was mostly Bruce’s. I knew Bruce from the Folklore Society at U. of C.—he was one of its leading lights. He helped plan and bring off the mid-winter U. of C. Folk Festival for a series of years in the 1960s, and this was my other extracurricular activity that got me a slice of education not available in the classroom.
Bruce was a Ph.D. student of Southeast Asian studies and Folklore, and he had great expertise in recording “field interviews” and simply a gift for getting people to loosen up and talk on tape. Bruce got interviews with people of wildly divergent views…. There were several dozen interviews, including tape of Black Panther Bobby Seale giving a speech in the park, and we paid a professional transcriber to type all of this out as a text. I then worked with Bruce to edit it down somewhat, and we published it in CR as our own version of Convention coverage, a collage of voices from the edge.
To mark the anniversary of the momentous events of 1968 in Chicago, we’re linking the entirety of that original documentary coverage here: Convention Coverage. The feature concluded with a poem, written on the spot by Burton Lieberman in Lincoln Park on Tuesday night, August 27: “We Serve and Protect.” Here’s a sample from the poem:
motherfuckers—fascist pigs
cocksuckers pigs pigs pigs!
It’s a fascinating text—fantastic even; and fifty years on, the legacies and lessons of 68 seem more relevant than ever.
– Eric Powell, Editor
August 28, 2018