Time Out Chicago: What led you to join in?
James: I had actually come out of Connecticut and ended up at Lake Forest College and started to be radicalized in that process, influenced by a student nonviolence coordinating committee. I ended up going to Berkeley, found a piece of paper on the ground that said “build the interracial movement at the fore,” ended up back here in Chicago, trying to organize Southern whites in Uptown, where I was when the Democratic Convention was coming to town. Marilyn was also there. SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] basically had these community-organizing programs in a number of cities, and in Chicago, it was in a Southern white neighborhood in Uptown. And we were a little bit opposed early on to the Democratic Convention, because we had this view of long-range, being buried in the community, working with people face-to-face, bringing them around. But things started moving very quickly in the summer of ’68. One of our guys, Rennie Davis, had been to Bratislava [Czechoslovakia, for the meeting between approximately 40 American antiwar organizers and North Vietnamese officials] and was sort of moving into the Vietnam stuff, and by the time the Democratic Convention came around, we were already radical, we were already opposed to racism and sexism and we were anti-imperialists. All of this was taking shape, but we were geared toward that. And when the convention came to town, the mayor had refused to make any concessions to the legitimate concerns of the young protestors, many of whom were Eugene McCarthy-ites, as I recall, and we ended up going downtown to participate. What a polite word that is: participate.
Schultz: You told me you were for Humphrey once.
James: I did not.
Schultz: You said you supported Humphrey in ’64.
James: Oh, way back, I liked Hubert Humphrey ’cause I thought he was kind of a liberal guy, but as I got to know him more… I told you that in the past?
Schultz: Yes.
James: But I wasn’t for him then. But as I did say earlier when we were all here, Hubert Humphrey, as I began to know him more, had basically attacked the left wing of the Farmer-Labor Party. And of course, we were learning from old socialists, old Communists, old civil rights workers, labor organizers, and the world was unfolding pretty quick.
Rose: I was for Humphrey in 1948. [Laughs] When he led the civil rights movement out of the Democratic Convention.
Katz: In ’68, I had left Uptown and I was focusing on the organizing of high-school students and we had working-class kids throughout the city. And that spring, I, along with another woman, worked with Don to organize a spring demonstration, which was the first time. It was in the wake of the King assassination and the burning of the West Side; the first time the Chicago police ever attacked demonstrators. And at that demonstration in April ’68, 400 people were arrested during that day and people were beaten. This was very young people—grammar school kids—and old people, and they beat people into the subway. So I got very involved, not only with the high-school organizing, but with the MOBE [National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam] and—
Schultz: This was spring of what year?
Katz, Mike, Peck: April ’68
Rose: For a while, it was called batting practice.
Peck: So people were allowed to join by then?
Katz: Only the—
Peck: This was like, suburban dentists for peace who came down there.
Katz: Right; it was the very old and very young; 10- and 12-year-old kids. So at that point, I got recruited to the MOBE, and my all 100 pounds became the head of the marshals, head of security—
All: [Laugh]
Katz: —which I’m throwing through the convention. That’s pretty funny.
Peck: That’s nice.
James: I remember that.
Katz: He [James] got indicted. Thank God for sexism—I didn’t. And so really, I was there for two reasons. One, because I was working on the organizing and the security, but also, I had the citywide organization of young people. And what had happened that spring—which was also really important to understanding what went on in the park—was, during that spring, there was a tremendous amount of repression among young people—curfew was enforced, you were harassed on the streets, and there were a lot of us. And as a high-school organizer, there was a lot of antipathy between the cops and the kids, to put it mildly. And that’s really important to understand, because as we talk about later, it was not a very big demonstration [on] Night One and when we were in Lincoln Park. But after the police attacked, it was an opportunity for every kid in the entire city of Chicago who later became members of Rising Up Angry to come and join us in the park, which had been the site of the Summer of Love, where everyone was happy and smoking dope all the time and playing music. It was a good bunch.
James: And that’s such a key thing that you mentioned. People saw it on TV. And that just turned them out. I’ve talked to people over the years who said they first saw the police messing with people on TV when it got reported and then they wanted to come down.
Katz: They wanted to come down.
James: And they did.
Peck: The power of reality programs.
Katz: Right.
Schultz: With older people, television really turned them against the protestors, but when they actually saw it firsthand themselves, they were against the police—it seemed so unfair what they saw.
Katz: It actually transformed the politics of this city forever. We know what it did nationally, but it created a coalition that I actually believe…
James: That led to Harold.
Katz: Harold Washington’s election in ’83.
James: And now Obama. It’s like the Rainbow Coalition!
Kurshan: Do you attribute some of that to the 1968 Democratic National Convention?
Katz: No, not only do I attribute some of it (’cause I did Harold’s campaign). The coalition that came out of the ’60s, both civil rights and the antiwar folks, and the black and white coalition that came together during that period, was in fact the nucleus of the coalition that elected Harold.
Kurshan: That’s kind of interesting, because there was some thought as the year went on—it became such a fearful situation—that there was some thought, right, Abe?
Peck: Yeah.
Kurshan: —that it would have a negative effect on the city.
Katz: Well, we did worry about that time, as Michael was saying. A lot of us who had one foot in the antiwar stuff and one foot in community development worried that there would be a disproportionate attack on blacks and that there would be a tremendous backlash--
Schultz: Well, you were very worried about that.
Katz: Yes, we were very worried.
Kurshan: Right.
James: Remember, the black community didn’t get involved too much in the demonstration at first.
Rose: I had been, since the middle and late ’50s, involved in the campaign for nuclear disarmament and also for various civil rights operations in Chicago, like fighting the riots in Humboldt Park and so on and getting heavily involved in the civil rights movement and later in the peace movement in Chicago. I was Dr. King’s press secretary when he came to Chicago and that moved me into something called the National Conference for New Politics, which was supposed to bring together the peace movement, the student movement, the civil rights movement. That didn’t work out, but that moved into a campaign of demonstrations at the Pentagon, which were organized in part by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. And then Rennie Davis and David Dellinger asked me if I would become the press secretary for the Mobilization Committee for the demonstrations at the Chicago Convention, since I knew Chicago and its politics. And so I moved from one into the other. It was just a long, 10-12 year transition.
Schultz: Don, you were also at the Conference for New Politics, right?
Rose: Yes, yes.
Schultz: That was the year before in September. That was pretty important; I mean the breakup.
Rose: The breakup of it, but also many of the people led to it. I was perhaps involved in it mostly because some of us had hoped to develop a presidential ticket of Dr. King and Ben Spock; joining the civil rights movement led by King and the peace movement of whom Dr. Benjamin Spock was an exemplar at that moment.
Katz: Where was that?
Rose: At the Palmer House Hotel. We tore up the Palmer House.
James: I remember, I spoke at the Coliseum and Spock and King were on the same bill, and also [labor organizer] Emil Mazey.
Rose: We had a wonderful—a great idea. It was covered nationally. It was just covered hugely, because I got the original announcement of it on the front page of The New York Times, and when it finally happened, it was being covered like a national convention.
Schultz: But it was the middle of the page, right?
Rose: Yes, but that helped our attendance and our finances a great deal.
Schultz: Right.
Rose: The Communist Party, as we know, in its last decade, was supported about 80 percent by the FBI. (Laughs)
Schultz: Hoover didn’t even want it made illegal because that would have meant excluding his agents. (Laughs)
Rose: Let the sister speak.
Kurshan: I was a Yippie organizer for the demonstrations at the ’68 Democratic Convention. I had touched base with a lot of you, I think. I went to the King march in Washington. I met Mike James, I think, in California, actually, in SDS, because I had been in an SDS ERAP [Economic Research and Action Project] project in Cleveland, Ohio, the previous summer, after I graduated from college in Wisconsin. So I was in graduate school in California and was involved in the antiwar movement there, in some of the big confrontation marches at the Oakland Army terminal. And then, just before the summer of ’67, Dave Dellinger called Jerry Rubin (who was my partner) and asked if he would come to the East Coast to help organize the 1967 demonstration at the Pentagon. And Jerry said yes, but he wanted to bring some friends, and Dave loved the idea, ’cause at that time it brought youthful energy, self-creativity and militancy to the situation in New York. And so myself, Jerry Rubin, Karen Wald, Stew Albert, later, moved to the East Coast and we became paid staff members of the MOBE. And at the same time that that was happening, although we were political activists, we were also becoming involved in the hippie subculture and we started smoking dope and hanging out with musicians and poets and artists in California. And when we came to New York, we encountered Abbie Hoffman and a whole other, larger scene there. And our view of the Pentagon demonstration was—well, actually, before we got there, it was scheduled to be, I think, at the White House or at the Capitol or something, and he said, “No, we want to target the war machine.” We didn’t know where the Pentagon was. We had no idea.…
All: (Laugh)
Kurshan: And that was a bit of a problem. But we overcame that. And that Pentagon demonstration was a really important moment in the antiwar movement. And it was an important moment for me, because I got arrested for the first time in my life, along with 806 of us—
Peck: 806 of your best friends.
Kurshan: But we hadn’t succeeded in ending the war at that point.
Peck: But we did levitate the Pentagon.
Kurshan: Yes, we did levitate the Pentagon.
Katz: But it is important that you said that, because I think we all did think, before we became deep Marxists the next year, that we could end the war.
Schultz: You were deeper than me.
Katz: Yeah, deeper than you. (Smiles) That’s not hard.
James: We did believe that.
Schultz: That was a very powerful speech—to bring the war to an end.
Kurshan: Yes. We had more of an impact than we thought we had at the Pentagon, but we didn’t realize it. We felt like we were up against a wall.
Schultz: It was certainly very impressive to the administration.
James: Just a quick note on how much impact we had. I was hanging out with the Bears the year after they won the Super Bowl. I was at the 49ers/Bears game in San Francisco and I was at a bar afterwards. And there was an FBI guy named Ray—he was the DeLorean guy. [Automobile magnate John DeLorean was arrested in 1982 during an FBI sting operation.] And we were hanging out, talking. And he basically told us how they thought it was coming down; the whole thing was coming down. And this was years later, but I thought (yells), WE WERE CLOSE! WE WERE CLOSE! (Everyone laughs.)
Kurshan: The next step for us—we really believed that whoever controlled the media controlled the minds and the culture and the politics. And we really felt that the next place that we had to be in the movement was the ’68 convention. So we formed the Yippies—that’s a long story, but we felt like we needed a more militant and also free-spirited group—not exactly an organization, I wouldn’t say.
Peck: Not at all. (Laughs) More like a disorganization.
Kurshan: (Laughs) In order to carry forth the work without always having to confront people about how we looked, how we dressed, how we talked, about our militancy, etc. So we formed the Yippies and decided to go to Chicago. And I think by then we were all revolutionaries—or we felt we were all revolutionaries—and opposed to the war and freaked out that the civil-rights movement hadn’t been more successful.
Peck: I’m very impressed that all these people had plans, because I had no plans.
James: You were a reporter.
Peck: I wasn’t a reporter then. I grew up in New York and I had, I think, what the people who were not being political at the time had, was kind of a year of spinning. I went in rapid succession from being in a Ph.D. program to thinking I was getting married, to consequently freaking out about the Army to joining a Reserve Unit, which was the only Reserve Unit open. I weighed 135 pounds and had Coke-bottle glasses and the only Reserve Unit open was a Green Beret Reserve Unit, so I joined it.
All: (Laugh)
Peck: Despite the fact that the guy, when I had my physical at Fort Hamilton, said to me, “Are you sure you want to do this?” And if I would have said, “Why the fuck don’t you look at me?” he probably would have rinsed me.
All: (Laugh)
Peck: But there I was in this unit and I had then at that point dropped out of the Ph.D. program for various reasons, the girl went away, and I had discovered the Technicolor streets of the Lower East Side of New York. And I went to Reserve meetings with guys on Sundays who would have arrested me during the week. They were all tactical cops with the New York City Police Department. I then went to the Summer of Love in 1967 out in San Francisco and did that whole thing. Came back and I really needed a job. I was 22 years old and I got a job as a textbook salesman in Chicago. I lived at the Mark Twain Hotel on Division Street. And the job went south because I drove the company car to the Pentagon demonstration.
All: (Laugh)
Peck: I want to tell you—I was very disciplined. I didn’t let anyone else drive, because it was the company car.
All: (Laugh)
Peck: It was a bunch of freaks from Headland, which was the local head shop, and I fell into the hippie community here and there was a lot of instant karma going around. And I rapidly became the editor of the Chicago Seed, which was the underground newspaper then.
Katz: You had only been here a year then?
Peck: Yeah.
Schultz: When did you become the editor?
Peck: The end of ’67. And the thing that had really impressed me, aside from the usual suspects like rock music—I was progressive and quite liberal, but not really a radical—but what really got me was when I saw people picketing Woolworth’s in 1960. I couldn’t understand it. I was in New York and there was a boycott based on the civil-rights movement in the South, and that really rocked my world. So what happened was one of the formative things journalistically for me was The Realist. To say it was a satirical magazine is like saying that Chris Rock is occasionally funny. It was THE satirical magazine, and it was meta-satirical and running these very Terry Southern–esque, Paul Krassner–esque kind of pieces. Paul, who put this thing out, had been mugged. And he had said that he wanted to leave New York at that point. Paul was a guy who was sitting with Nancy and Jerry and Abbie and Anita in a living room and helped christen the Yippies. And he said he wanted to move out of New York. And I was with a bunch of freaks, a bunch of hippies in Chicago and in the spirit of the time, I volunteered the farm of a rich guy that I knew who had freaked out also.
Kurshan: The farm in Indiana?
Peck: No, it was in Northern Illinois. And I wrote this letter to Paul, and I drew it in with Magic Markers and Crayolas and Etch A Sketches and all kinds of things that were psychedelic, and instead of hearing back from Paul, I got Jerry Rubin in my living room—which had a black light and soap flakes on the floor because they glowed under the black light and all that kind of stuff—telling me about this groovy festival they were going to have in August ’68. So the first piece I wrote for The Seed was actually before I became the editor, about this groovy Festival of Life that was going to happen in Chicago.
Katz: It’s very interesting that we’re on two sides of the table [James, Katz and Don are on one side of the table; Kurshan, Peck and Schultz on the other]. Thinking about ’68 and how we were the—Michael kind of was really more hard core. I would say Don had the cultural underpinnings of the Socialists and yet kind of hard-core politics, Marxists and Leninists, and then, I always thought, these guys [across the table] were the more cultural side. And there was—certainly, there was tension, particularly, there was a lot of tension even going into the convention and at the convention.
Peck: Well, we had the divisions, called the Heads and the Fists.
Katz: Right. And we were the Fists and they were the Heads.
Rose: It’s that song, “The Other Side of the Fence.”
All: (Laugh)
Peck: We levitate above the table.
Schultz: Actually, Don, you were a little concerned that they wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the various groups. And that the MOBE, which was essentially—essentially—a nonviolent operation—there really weren’t any armed guerillas around—
All: (Laugh)
Katz: No, there weren’t.
James: No, it came shortly after that, though.
Katz: A year later.
Schultz: I wrote two books: one, No One Was Killed, about the Democratic Convention itself; and, two, The Motion Will Be Denied, about the Chicago conspiracy trial. And I’m boasting a little bit by saying that they were wonderfully well-reviewed. (Laughs) And I came to it, really, from a long way around, probably from the fact that I’m a Korean War veteran—I actually got there right after the war. I noticed that during the convention, there were a lot of WWII vets that showed up at the parks and would try to talk to the protestors and it was incredible—the young protestors were so much better informed about the war. (Laughs) And they tried to have a lot of conversation and these guys couldn’t get it. There were a few Vietnam guys around. They were mostly still trying to figure out whether they were going to become Vietnam Veterans Against the War or what have you, but they were not trying to tell the protestors, “You’re doing the wrong thing.” There were almost no Korean War veterans there except in the media and in the Democratic Party, and they were the ones who were running up the hill, running up the bridges there on Wednesday the 28th, trying to stop what the National Guard was doing.
Rose: One of the reasons that people were so well-informed was because of something called Teach-Ins, which were developed just for that purpose.
Schultz: Actually, I think that I came to it really more from the literary, story point of view. And when I came back from Korea, nothing in the creative writing programs really made sense. I had a professor at Iowa who told me that he didn’t think sex was excluded from literature because of censorship; it was excluded from literature because it was un-dramatic.
All: (Laugh)
Peck: I don’t know about his sex life…
Schultz: Well, as young as I was, I said, “It’s certainly been very different for me.” But they had the same attitude toward war—same attitude toward the nastiness of war and so forth. So the idea was, you were supposed to do things by suggestion, by indirection. This was not the way it was, nor the way that literature was going to be. So, it really started with the birth of the—well, the Beats were part of it, but really, the Beats were just part of a broader cultural term in this country, a cultural revolution here. It included everything—music, painting, theater, literature and in ’56, you had Ginsberg’s trial in San Francisco, the trial of “Howl,” and the decision in its favor. You had the Warren Court decisions in favor of Tropic of Cancer, and so on. So I was really more a part of all that and the University of Chicago, where I was at that time—I’d been in New York and then came to Chicago. The issue of Chicago Review that was devoted to the Beats was suppressed by the board—something that the University of Chicago does not want to remember.
Rose: Richard Stern.
Schultz: Yes, Richard Stern. But one dean, Edgar Wilkes, was certainly very embarrassed by the whole affair and worked his way back to some definition of freedom of speech for the university. But that became Big Table. And Big Table was a pretty important generative magazine. Paul Carroll was the editor of it and I published in it. And then I was picked up by Evergreen Review, which was really at the forefront of this revolution, although Big Table was really ahead of Evergreen, and they took their signals from Big Table.
James: The New Left Review.
Schultz: That was an English publication.
James: But there was another one out of the University of Chicago.
Peck: Studies on the Left?
James: No, that was Madison, but there was one out of the University of Chicago, too.
Rose: New University of Thought.
Schultz: New University Thoughts. All these things were really part of a more general cultural thing—what was going on in the arts, what was going on in the civil-rights movement, what was going on in education. And I became more involved in what was going on in literature, arts, theater—a lot of theater and in the journalism that might be developed. So I did an interview—some of you may remember Robert F. Williams? [president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP, and author of Negroes with Guns] He came to Chicago and taught—he was really a strong advocate for self-defense.
Kurshan: Oh, Robert Williams. Oh, my God.
James: He was a Deacon.
Katz: The Deacons for Defense.
Rose: North Carolina.
Schultz: Monroe, North Carolina.
Rose: And then Cuba.
Schultz: Well, he didn’t really want to go to Cuba, but he had to.
James: There were a lot of revolutionaries that ended up down there.
Schultz: Well, anyway, I did the interview with him and then I started f Magazine. But instead of f Magazine coming to its first fruition, the interview with Robert F. Williams was published in Studies on the Left, and it got an awful lot of play. First of all, it was an advocacy of self-defense. Williams, so far as I know, never went beyond just that—self-defense. And then he got trapped in Monroe, North Carolina. It really just excited the FBI beyond reason, his approach. (Laughs) And then, my interview, which seemed to give it public play. So I went to Mexico, where I hoped to get a lot of writing done, but I seemed to be followed. The road from Mexico City to Pottsboro [Texas]. I’d gone to meet an old friend who I’d known a few years before and I thought he might be able to help us. And on the way, there were these cars that would pull out behind us from side roads. So I later found out that Pottsboro was the landing spot for planes coming from Cuba. And Williams was in Cuba then—he’d been forced to run from the United States to Canada and then from Canada to Cuba. So, we got there, I didn’t even find my friend and I had to go back to Mexico City. This went on until finally, coming across the border to come back into the United States, I was stopped—which, basically was a very involved story, which I wrote about in a story called “Border Crossing”—and they seized my manuscripts. And they actually read them over the phone to the federal judge in the area who said that if he didn’t want to take it home to his mother and read it, then it was obscene. (Laughs) And this went on and on. There was a great distrust of Korean War veterans because of the way that about two-thirds of them seemed to have been turned around in the prisoner of war camps and one of the things they asked me was, had I been a PW [prisoner of war] in the Korean War. And I said, “Definitely not.” And they seized the manuscripts, but I finally got them back.
James: All I knew was that John taught at Columbia College.
Schultz: I got involved at the Merit School on the North Side. I was very much involved at Second City, a playwright. And I came to develop the story workshop approach methods. I came to Columbia College. [Former Columbia College President] Mike Alexandroff asked me to come there, I joined up and began to be very interested in applying fiction-writing techniques to nonfiction, particularly political stories—the idea of taking a point of view and using imagery and so forth, character development—to create a story that might be more true to the events themselves. It was somewhat the way anthropologists said you need to declare your own point of view in order to be able to understand society and where you stood when you observed such-and-such.

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