It’s been 40 years since the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but Peg Curtin can still smell the tear gas.
“It’s such an awful smell,” she said. “It was everywhere, it was nonstop.”
Miriam “Mims” Butterworth, a 1940 graduate of Connecticut College, said the smell of tear gas was everywhere, even wafting into her hotel room. In 1968, events were unrelenting; riots, protests, and assassinations seemed only to accelerate, and even Connecticut, sleepy Connecticut, was not immune from the speed of history.
A lasting, if not the most famous, image from the 1968 Democratic Convention, involved Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, a former governor, lashing out at Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley’s “Gestapo” tactics, as policemen beat protesters with sticks both inside and out of the International Amphitheater, a venue that once played host to a famous concert by Elvis Presley in 1957,
A decade later, seemingly everything in the country had changed, and nothing in America has been the same since.
And for Curtin and Butterworth, both Connecticut delegates to the convention, Chicago 1968 was a fulcrum in their personal politics.
“After 1968, I helped form the Caucus of Connecticut Democrats, the liberal wing of the party,” Butterworth said.
Curtin, on the other hand, shifted more toward the center of the party. “I don’t think [the Democratic Party] has recovered from that convention,” she said.
In 1968 Curtin was working as a secretary at Goodbody, a brokerage firm on upper State Street. A member of the famed Satti wing of the New London Democrats, she had been active in local and state politics, serving as the first female chair of the Connecticut Young Democrats.
She had attended the relatively placid 1964 convention in Atlantic City, that nominated Lyndon B. Johnson on his way to the White House.
At the start of 1968, even after the Tet Offensive began in January, Curtin, then 33, remained a loyal Johnson supporter.
In March, Curtin accepted an offer to spend time in Wisconsin campaigning for LBJ.
She left on March 31, but by the time her plane touched down in Madison, LBJ had already told the nation he would not seek nor would he accept the Democratic nomination.
“We thought it was an April Fools’ Day joke,” Curtin said. “I remember thinking, ‘Who is going to run?’”
Butterworth was 50 years old in 1968 and working as a history teacher, having recently earned her M.A. from Wesleyan University.
Butterworth’s world view had been irrevocably altered as a Conn student, as she was an exchange student at the University of Heidelberg in 1938 and saw for herself the rise of Nazism.
“I vowed to never allow something like that to happen here,” she said.
In 1968 Butterworth was something of what we now call a single-issue voter: Vietnam.
“I did not think we should have been fighting in Vietnam,” Butterworth said.
In late 1967 and early 1968, there was only one anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, the senator from Minnesota.
“We supported him because he was a threat to Johnson,” she said.
The 1968 New Hampshire primary in March legitimized McCarthy as a candidate, as he won 42 percent of the popular vote.
Two weeks later, Johnson was gone.
Because of McCarthy’s success in New Hampshire, Butterworth said it was politically safe to be anti-war.
Curtin was not without a candidate for long, as LBJ’s vice president Hubert Humphrey, another Minnesotan, entered the race.
Although she was against the Vietnam War, Curtin still felt McCarthy was too liberal.
“Vietnam had taken its toll on all of us,” Curtin recalled.
The party’s rive gauche was also the reason she did not support George McGovern, the South Dakota senator who also entered the fray.
Looking back on it, Curtin said that had he lived, she might have supported Sen. Robert Kennedy because of his social policies.
Kennedy, who initially had mixed feelings about entering the race, declared his candidacy on March 16, causing a three-way rift in the anti-war movement.
Butterworth said some McCarthy supporters would have defected to Kennedy had he been the stronger anti-war candidate.
That, of course, changed when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 6.
They didn’t know it at the time, but both Curtin and Butterworth got a preview of the tumult to come at the state convention on June 22.
The head of Connecticut Democrats that year was a Humphrey supporter, John M. Bailey, who was also chair of the Democratic National Committee.
The New York Times described the McCarthy delegates as “a liberal coalition made up largely of housewives, professors, and other political amateurs.”
Nearly 200 McCarthy supporters, including Butterworth, walked out of the state convention to protest what they thought was shabby treatment by the party leaders.
“We walked over not having proper representation,” she said.
Bailey threatened to have the entire Connecticut delegation go to the convention uncommitted, though in the end, Butterworth was one of nine McCarthy delegates in Chicago, though originally there was supposed to have been eight.
Ribicoff, who supported McGovern in 1968, gave up his seat to a McCarthy supporter, an act that Butterworth recalls fondly.
“Ribicoff was up for re-election and wanted our support,” she said, “but we were grateful for that one more vote for sanity.”
Though it was because of Bailey’s position, the Connecticut delegation along with the hometown Illinois delegates, had prime seats, close to the podium.
Curtin remembers rubbing elbows with Paul Newman, a McCarthy delegate.
“Shirley MacLaine was sitting next to me,” she said.
Both Butterworth and Curtin had prime seats for Ribicoff’s speech slamming Daley, the Chicago police, and “their Gestapo tactics.”
At that moment, Curtin said Daley’s supporters began to stomp their feet and attempted to shout down Ribicoff, to which the senator answered back, “How hard it is to accept the truth.”
“Ribicoff was a gentleman,” Curtin said. “A fair man. He used to come to New London in the summer and stay on Mott Avenue.”
Though there is some dispute over Daley’s reply, it is commonly accepted he called Ribicoff the most colorful of our English profanities.
“Yes, Daley said that,” Butterworth recalled.
For Butterworth, the 1968 convention was a family affair, as she attended with her husband and four children.
Her youngest son, Dan Butterworth, a puppeteer from New Hampshire who has performed at the O’Neill Theater Center, was a history student at Dartmouth that year.
“Chicago that year was a juggernaut of insanity,” he recalls.
Dan spent most of the convention at the protests, some of which were organized by the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin who attempted to nominate a pig named Pegasus.
The protests soon turned violent as police officers in riot gear confronted marchers. Dan recalls a line of protesters moving toward a phalanx of policemen.
“Many of the people there were veterans of the civil rights movement,” he said. “They were trained to sit down.”
According to Butterworth, the police waled on the sitting protesters. Another crisis erupted when protesters turned to escape the police and ran headlong into oncoming marchers, creating mass confusion.
“It was a pretty bad feeling,” he said.
Dorothy James, a professor of government at Connecticut College, said the convention was the boiling over of something Americans do not wish to talk about: class struggle.
“In Chicago, you had middle-class college students who were not going to college and thought they invented sex—some of whom were burning American flags,” she said. “On the other side were Daley’s supporters, who were more working class, who resented protesters who would fly the North Vietnamese flag.”
James said class skirmishes in the Democratic Party never really went away, noting the Hillary Clinton campaign’s attempts to brand Barack Obama as the candidate backed by elitists.
Much of the violence erupted after the party rejected the so-called “Peace Plank,” that called for American withdrawal from Vietnam.
James said Humphrey was seen as a lightning rod for the anti-war crowd. “Though people forget how close the 1968 election was,” she said, “had it gone on another couple of weeks, some people think that Humphrey would have caught Nixon.”
But Nixon, through a coalition of disaffected Democrats in the South and old-guard Republicans, did win.
Connecticut, incidentally, went to Humphrey.
“It was disappointing when Nixon won,” Curtin said. “The country was split.”
Dan Butterworth recalled the disillusionment that followed into the early 1970s.
“The left fell apart,” he said. “It lasted all the way through the Reagan years.”
Butterworth never went to another convention, though she remained active in politics, serving first on the West Hartford Town Council and later as the town historian.
In 2006 her alma mater awarded her the Harriet B. Lawrence Award that recognizes achievements in creating or inspiring notable changes for the good of society through direct service or social means.
Curtin, who said she’s a liberal on local issues, drifted more toward the center in the years following Chicago.
She ended up going to two more conventions: 1972 as a Scoop Jackson supporter, and in 2000 as a Bill Bradley delegate. She will
not be in Denver this week for the 2008 Democratic Convention.
“There aren’t any roll call votes from the floor,” she said. “It isn’t any fun.”