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.