Nation: WHO WERE THE PROTESTERS?

THEY left Chicago more as victors than as victims. Long before the Democratic Convention assembled, the protest leaders who organized last week’s marches and melees realized that they stood no chance of influencing the political outcome or reforming “the system.” Thus their strategy became one of calculated provocation. The aim was to irritate the police and the party bosses so intensely that their reactions would look like those of mindless brutes and skull-busters. After all the blood, sweat and tear gas, the dissidents had pretty well succeeded in doing just that.

Tatterdemalion Innocents. The strategy had been six months in formulation. Three disparate detachments of the young made up last week’s Army of the Night. There were the self-styled “American revolutionaries”—among them anarchists and Maoists, hard-core members of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam, and Students for a Democratic Society—many of them veterans of the October March on the Pentagon. There was the Youth International Party (yippies), minions of the absurd whose leaders failed last fall to levitate the Pentagon but whose antics at least leavened the grim seriousness of the New Leftists with much-needed humor. And then there were the young McCarthy workers, the “Clean for Gene” contingent who had shaved beards, lengthened miniskirts and turned on to political action in the mainstream, only to see the dreams of New Hampshire shattered in the stockyards of Chicago.

In all, about 10,000 demonstrators showed up, a fraction of the horde that had been predicted by their leaders. According to Chicago police records, 49% of the 650 arrested came from outside Illinois (most from New York and Michigan); the majority were in their teens and 20s and only 91 prisoners were 30 or above.

In the main, they were tatterdemalion innocents with long hair, granny glasses, and a sense of bewildered outrage at the war and the nation’s political processes. Not so innocently, many were equipped with motorcycle crash helmets, gas masks (purchasable at $4.98 in North Side army-navy surplus stores), bail money and anti-Mace unguents. A handful of hard-liners in the “violence bag” also carried golf balls studded with spikes, javelins made of snow-fence slats, aerosol cans full of caustic oven-cleaning fluids, ice picks, bricks, bottles, and clay tiles sharpened to points that would have satisfied a Cro-Magnon bear hunter.

Ironic Fate. Most of the protest leaders stayed in the background. Mobilization Chairman David Tyre Dellinger, 53, the shy editor-publisher of Liberation, who led last fall’s Pentagon March, studiously avoided the main confrontation before the Hilton. His chief aide, Tom Hayden, 28, a New Left author who visited Hanoi three years ago, was so closely tailed by plainclothesmen that he finally donned a yippie-style wig to escape their attentions. Nonetheless, he was arrested. Rennie Davis, 28, the clean-cut son of a Truman Administration economic adviser, took a more active part as one of the Chicago organizers: his aim, he said, was “to force the police state to become more and more visible, yet somehow survive in it.” At Grant Park on Wednesday afternoon, he both succeeded and failed. The police action against the demonstrators triggered the Hilton march, but Rennie—despite his short hair, scholarly spectacles and button-down collar—was literally busted, and later took nine stitches in his split scalp. Yippie Guru Abbie Hoffman, 32, cadged dinner from his four police tails, yipped up a storm in Lincoln Park (where he passed out phone numbers of cops and city officials for telephonic harassment), and was ultimately arrested for wearing a four-letter word on his forehead.

The most ironic fate of all befell Brillo-bearded Jerry Rubin, 30, a former Berkeley free-speecher and now a yippie leader. To protect himself from police strong-arm tactics, Rubin hired a husky, sledge-fisted Chicagoan known as “Big Bob Lavin,” whose beard and bellicosity were matched by his ability at bottle-throwing in confrontations with the cops. Big Bob was gassed by the police, fought them valiantly, but was finally clubbed into submission—carrying with him into jail Rubin’s tactical diary. Only then was it revealed that Big Bob was really an undercover cop, Robert Pierson, 35. Chicago police pointed ominously to such entries in Rubin’s diary as a hand-drawn map of the Hilton Hotel area and a reflection that “we really should attend McCarthy rallies and recruit pro-McCarthys for our marches. This lends us the respectability of a pro-establishment group.” Big Bob’s duplicity did not faze Rubin, who said, when released on $2,500 bail: “Well, at least he was a good bodyguard.”

Wider Division? Chicago was not the end of the road for the militants. Scott Lash, 22, a psychology dropout from the University of Michigan and a McCarthy worker, observed that the Chicago scene left most of the marchers more frustrated and embittered. Scuffing his hiking boots and twiddling his granny glasses, Lash lamented at week’s end: “There’s going to be a wider division in the country than ever. There’s going to be more violence, both by whites and blacks, and I’m willing to be part of it. I wouldn’t have thought this before the convention.”

Mayor Daley asserted that he had evidence of a Communist conspiracy to disrupt the convention. Actually, the “terrorists,” as he called them, made no bones about conspiring to make trouble. But their visible leaders, at least, were disaffected young Americans who professed as much scorn for Communism as for capitalism. Foolhardy and arrogant as their tactics often were, the main goal of the protesters was to express their rejection of both the war and party bossism, and they undeniably made it register in the minds of Democratic leaders. Ironically—and perhaps significantly—the demonstrators’ most effective allies were the police, without whose brutal aid the protest would not have been so striking.