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A long, unpopular overseas war. A close and contested race for the Democratic presidential nomination. A groundswell of political interest among American youth.
All of these ingredients combined 40 years ago to create a series of bloody clashes between protesters and Chicago police during the Democratic National Convention.
On Tuesday night, a Columbia College screening of a new film about the 1968 demonstrations and the sensational trial that followed brought out students, activists and people who attended the protests and courtroom drama.
Attendees, including one of the defendants in what is commonly known as the Chicago Seven trial, discussed how those tumultuous events could inform political action today, when so many of the same factors are present.
The film, “Chicago 10,” combines archival footage of the late 1960s with an animated reconstruction of the trial, in which Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and five other demonstrators were tried for conspiracy to incite a riot in the U.S. District Courthouse in Chicago. The title refers to the Chicago Seven - prominent anti-war demonstrators - the two attorneys who represented them, and anti-war demonstrator Bobby Seale, who eventually was tried separately.
The documentary opened the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah, in January, and is scheduled to premiere in selected cities, including Chicago, on Friday.
Animated segments recreate the many wild scenes of the trial, including frequent colorful interjections by Hoffman and other defendants, Judge Julius Hoffman’s order to have Seale bound and gagged, and testimony from witnesses as disparate as Allen Ginsberg and Mayor Richard J. Daley.
Hayden, 68, the founder of Students for a Democratic Society, was in Chicago for the panel and still sounded astonished at the surreal nature of the trial.
“I think if I was a young activist today, I would view the Chicago conspiracy defendants as somewhat bizarre and extreme, because the situation then was bizarre and extreme in itself,” Hayden said.
Hayden said that although there are many differences between 1968 and 2008 - including a lower voting age today, higher casualty rates in Vietnam, and an active military draft in the 1960s - the current political climate has renewed interest in the activism of the late 1960s.
“I think there are similarities between then and now that have reawakened the memory of Vietnam, and that becomes applied to Iraq,” Hayden said.
Laurene Heybach, who attended two sessions of the Chicago Seven trial as a college student and came to the Tuesday night screening, said that the government’s response to anti-war protests has changed.
“Back then the government feared protesters and feared dissent,” said Heybach, now a Chicago lawyer. “They took very seriously the efforts to end the war.
“Now one senses that the government doesn’t fear protests against the war,” she said.
To Hayden, the film and the discussions it inspires are a necessary part of re-educating people about what happened in Chicago in August 1968.
“For me, these buildings aren’t just buildings. They’re places where somebody was pushed through a plate-glass window,” he said. “These parks are not just nice places to relax in. They’re places that were heavily gassed and where emergency shelters were put up for bloody protest victims.
“If the story isn’t told, it will disappear when the last of us passes on.”
