Democrats gather in the Windy City today, Monday, August 19, for the beginning of the Democratic National Convention. When Chicago last hosted the DNC 28 years ago in 1996, it was a happy affair. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will stroll into the United Center this year already secure in their ticket, and they’re certainly hoping for – and, it seems, expecting – a celebration. But there’s a darker side to Chicago’s history with the DNC, and the city itself seems to be preparing for a 1968 redux.
Less Convention, More Pageant
The usual path to becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee is not the road taken by Kamala Harris – but the two trails do run parallel. Generally speaking, one candidate emerges from the primary and caucus process as the winner, having garnered enough pledged delegates to win at the national convention. Sometimes, however, that doesn’t happen. Occasionally, no one candidate wins a majority. In this case it becomes a contested convention, in which delegates will vote and select a nominee. Pledged delegates are still expected to support their candidates. If no clear winner comes out of the first round, however, it becomes a brokered convention, in which pledged delegates are unbound and may choose whomever they wish.
This time, Democrats had a clear winner in the primaries – Joe Biden, the sitting president, who won nearly all of the pledged delegates. But then he withdrew from the race. The party held a virtual roll call shortly after, in which Biden’s delegates then voted for Kamala Harris. So, when the convention wraps up Thursday, Kamala Harris will formally accept the party’s nomination, even though she didn’t win so much as a single caucus or primary and has already been confirmed by a virtual roll call in which the delegates voted early a couple of weeks ago. In other words, this is less convention and more pageant. It’s a chance for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, to show off to voters and the party elite and, with any luck, drum up some additional support ahead of the election.Party Like It’s 1996, or Suffer Another ’68?
Rewind to the year 1996, the last time the DNC graced Chicago. Bill Clinton was well on his way to defeating Republican nominee Bob Dole for a second term in the White House, and Democrats were happy. There was music. There was dancing. Al Gore even tried his hand at a little standup comedy, which went over about as well as the awkward Macarena dance everyone did in the crowd. It was so far removed from the events of the 1968 convention in Chicago, another 28 years earlier, that the two could have taken place in alternate realities.
(Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In August of 1968, the nation was in the middle of the Vietnam War, young men were still being drafted and shipped off to fight whether they wanted to or not, and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had both been assassinated just months earlier – Kennedy while he was running for president on a platform that included ending the war. The party itself was split over the war, and the rhetoric was heated.
The DNC started on August 26 and ran through August 29, and it was plagued the entire time by the anti-war protests that had been going on since August 23. Just before the convention began, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley ordered the police to enforce a curfew to clear out the protesters, and things turned violent. Officers in riot gear tried to run the demonstrators out by deploying tear gas and beatings. Eyewitnesses described the scene as one of “unrestrained bloodshed and chaos,” History reports.
Chaos Bound for Chicago
Today, anti-Israel protesters take the place of the peace activists of 1968, though they’re decidedly more violent even without the police kicking it off. Harris argued with hecklers at an August 7 campaign speech in Michigan. Later, in the Big Apple, protesters set off smoke bombs, fought with police, and stormed an afterparty for Harris’ August 14 rally.
March on the DNC 2024, the organization in charge of more than 200 groups planning to protest the DNC, met briefly on the very day Harris announced her candidacy. The question was whether they should take the same confrontational approach they did with Biden. It took just half an hour to decide “Killer Kamala” (the group’s new name for her) was just as bad as the man they called “Genocide Joe” and that the show must go on.
In Chicago, businesses began boarding up as if they were preparing for a hurricane on Thursday, August 15. Perhaps that’s not a bad way to describe the chaos that is headed for the Windy City: a hurricane of humanity. “We felt it was more prudent to board up, since our customers and their employers have told them to stay home throughout the convention for their own safety,” Scott Shapiro, owner of Syd Jerome, a menswear shop, told a local news crew. His store had been previously destroyed during the riots of 2020, so Shapiro is no stranger to the coming danger – and, of course, Antifa and pro-Hamas groups are expected to make an appearance as well.
Shapiro isn’t the only one boarding up. Plywood barriers are being erected throughout Chicago’s downtown retail sector, and the police are gearing up and canceling days off. Harris and Walz may be ready to party like it’s 1996, but with thousands of protesters already getting started, the rest of the city seems resigned to just surviving.
