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Lyrics:

Won’t you Please Come to Chicago by Graham Nash

Though your brother’s bound and gagged
And they’ve chained him to a chair
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Just to sing

In a land that’s known as freedom
How can such a thing be fair
Won’t you please come to Chicago
For the help that we can bring

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … to get better

Politicians sit yourselves down
There’s nothing for you here
Won’t you please come to Chicago
For a ride

Don’t ask Jack to help you
‘Cause he’ll turn the other ear
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Or else join the other side

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … if you believe in justice
It’s dying … and if you believe in freedom
It’s dying … let a man live his own life
It’s dying … rules and regulations, who needs them
Throw them out the door

Somehow people must be free
I hope the day comes soon
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Show your face

From the bottom of the ocean
To the mountains on the moon
Won’t you please come to Chicago
No one else can take your place

Yes, we can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … if you believe in justice
It’s dying … and if you believe in freedom
It’s dying … let a man live his own life
It’s dying … rules and regulations, who needs them
Throw them out the door

***

The most eye-opening section of Kurlansky’s 1968 (see previous blog) is chapter 3, in which he discusses the importance of violence and the rhetoric of violence in attracting media attention. As a veteran of the 1999 Battle of Seattle (the Seattle anti-WTO protest), I can’t help but agree. If it hadn’t been for a group of Black Bloc anarchists who smashed store front windows at MacDonald’s and Nike, our 75,000 strong protest would never have made the major dailies, much less the six o’clock news. Of course, to give the Seattle police their due, the police riot also attracted significant media attention.

Violence=Publicity

According to Kurlansky, no one understand the importance of the media in movement building better than Mohandas K. Gandhi, who inspired the current non-violent movement. Gandhi went to great lengths to obtain Indian, British, and American coverage of every protest he organized. In fact it was Gandhi himself who first spoke of the value of British violence in enticing the media to cover the Quit India movement.

Kurlansky goes on to describe a police chief who thwarted Martin Luther King’s organizing efforts in Albany, Georgia by studying his non-violent tactics and countering them with non-violent law enforcement tactics. As a result, King’s Albany campaign was a total failure. Because there was no police violence, it received no national media attention. And without media attention, King was unable to pressure Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to enforce federal civil rights laws there.

After Albany, King and other civil rights leaders deliberately targeted towns with hothead police chiefs and angry volatile mayors. Korlansky relates an incident in 1965 in which a King protester named Annie Lee Cooper punched the sheriff and then dared him to hit her. The photo of Sheriff Clark clubbing a defenseless woman made the front page of newspapers throughout the country.

Later in the book, Kurlansky describes the most highly publicized student antiwar protests of 1968. Here again, he stresses that they only took on national importance because of the repressive (sometimes violent) measures government and university administrators (particularly at Columbia University and University of California-Berkeley) took to stop them. Had the authorities merely ignored the student protests and sit-ins, they never would have received the national media attention that made them historic events.

The 1968 Democratic Convention

At Chicago Democratic Convention in August 1968, yet again it was police violence by Mayor Daley’s goons that drew national media attention to what was essentially a harmless prank by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Phil Ochs and other Yippies (Youth International Party). Featured events at the Yippies’ Festival of Light in Lincoln Park (where the police riot occurred), included snaking dancing, poetry, mantras, the Yippie Olympics, a Miss Yippie Contest and Pin the Rubber on the Pope.

In addition to attacking non-violent protesters engaged in civil disobedience (remaining in the park after the 11 p.m. closing time), police also viciously attacked reporters, cameramen, as well as going on a clubbing rampage in the neighborhood (Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner was one of the local residents who was attacked).

All this magically transformed the Yippies non-violent prank into front page news. Though ironically they had to share the limelight with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Violent Soviet repression of Dubcek’s freedom movement also made this event international front page news.

 

To be continued, with a discussion of the Czechoslovakian student/intellectual movement that resulted in Prague Spring and its implications for a repressive American regime in 2010.