TOC: So you were drawn to the convention because you thought there might be some good stories to tell?
Schultz: By July, I was damn sure there’d be some good stories to tell.

TOC: What were the rest of you hoping to accomplish?
Katz: Well, let me say one thing. We were all pretty young and I would say this about maybe John, but definitely Tom Hayden and Rennie had a more sophisticated view of the convention. Because we were, most of us, young enough to be in the process of a great personal transformation, we were not steeped in political history. Rennie and Tom had a much better idea of the cataclysmic clash that would occur at the convention. And probably, Abbie and Jerry did, too.
Kurshan: I did.
Katz: Well, I didn’t. I was still like a year out of college, a year out of modeling for Sak’s, so the idea was somewhat revelationary to me. And that given Daley’s attitude, given the police attitude, given the freak-out of the cops, given April, and given the assassination of King after he made his antiwar speech, which was really critical—
Schultz: At Riverside.
Katz: At the Riverside Church. [New York City]
James: Well, he first gave the speech in Atlanta—was it Atlanta?—where he came out against the war.
Rose: That was at the Riverside Church in 1967.
James: That was before the Coliseum? [Chicago Coliseum]
Katz: Oh yes. That was in ’68. [Note: according to The King Center, the Chicago Coliseum speech in which King criticized the U.S. government’s war policy took place on March 25, 1967, before the speech at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967.] But anyway, they had a better idea of television when there were only four stations in the country and there were four people who interpreted reality.
Peck: But they changed their minds, too. At one point, Tom thought that people wouldn’t come. And this thing moved so fast. I’m reviewing Tom’s book for the L.A. Times and I’m reading the pages pertaining to that time. This thing moved so fast and so much happened—just for context to the story, 1968 was just an amazing year. I don’t want to say “tumultuous” because I hate that word and it’s used in every story written about 1968. But you mentioned King and when we first came in today, we were joking about how we were different people a year after 1968. You could come in a peace freak and leave frothing at the mouth. You could come in a Marxist and go to the farm. There were so many things happening and given that many of us were young, but even for people that were older than us, there were a lot of policy changes going on at the time. It was being invented.
Rose: What was happening in those years—we started planning the convention demonstration in late November or December, right after the Pentagon demonstration. So we started planning these things in December of ’67. And we have to remember, just some of the markers that took place that changed the perspective on who would be coming and what would happen. We had Lyndon Johnson drop out as the candidate.
Schultz: The Tet first.
Rose: The Tet Offensive for those in the war. The Tet Offensive, Lyndon Johnson drops out, McCarthy comes in just a little before that, Bobby Kennedy comes in, Martin Luther King is murdered, Bobby Kennedy is murdered.
Katz: The Black Panther Party.
Rose: All of these kinds of things are going on and each of those had an effect on our perception of what was going to happen and who was going to come to these things. The formation of the Yippies and the Festival of Life and how would they affect what the MOBE was trying to do? The MOBE had once got a million-person march in New York—that was its high point the previous summer, like the spring peace march. So, everything that happened, month by month, sometimes week by week, changed our perceptions.
Schultz: It boosted everything in a different direction. Every expectation was sent one way or another.
Rose: It began as an anti–Democratic Party move. It was not that we were trying to “influence” the Democratic Party. I think that for the most of us, we were trying to destroy the Democratic Party—
Schultz: Or any party.
Rose: And they were correct about that. The fear that we were not necessarily physically violent but destructive of what they were about was quite correct. We were not demonstrators trying to say, “Look, give us health-care planks,” or “Give us an antiwar plank.” We didn’t want planks; we wanted to end the war.
Katz: I think what’s relevant there is that that’s at the core. Because the folks that embodied, or filled out the body of the demonstration, particularly the folks who got there after Sunday night—
Schultz: Yeah, Sunday night, August the 25th.
Katz: Sunday night, August 25th, was the first night that the police attacked and we were a core group.
Rose: When was the park? Lincoln Park.
Katz: The park was Sunday night.
Schultz: Sunday night, August the 25th, happened because of Thursday—Judge Lynch gave his decision against the MOBE and the Yippies; [refusing to allow them a permit to protest] decided against the request for an injunction [to set aside city ordinances closing the parks at 11pm and banning night rallies], which effectively turned the whole thing upside down.
James: And everyone knew—
Schultz: Everyone knew, but the lawyers were really trying, in any case.
Peck: Then they turned him upside down.
Schultz: [Civil-rights lawyer] Dennis Cunningham said he really tried; he really expected to.
Kurshan: I want to go back to the question that was asked.
Schultz: This seemed to discredit the publicly known leaders such as Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and so forth, because they thought that one way or another, that the city would finally come through, as they did in other cities.
Kurshan: So in terms of the Yippies in New York, I’ll say, and the MOBE, what we wanted to see happen there was a confrontation. The confrontation that we originally thought would take place was not necessarily a physically violent confrontation, but we definitely wanted a confrontation. That’s why we called our activities a Festival of Life and theirs a Festival of Death. We wanted to present a clear alternative—to especially young people in the United States—to join in building a revolutionary culture and movement. And as the year transpired, we were less and less sure about—sometimes, we weren’t sure we were going to go; sometimes we weren’t sure if we went, if our friends were going to go, or if we went and our friends went, if anyone else would show up. But eventually, we sort of embraced the fact that this confrontation was going to be a physical confrontation. And we decided to move forward with it and be brave in light of—well, we didn’t know what the numbers were, but you know, 60,000 dead GIs, and a couple million Vietnamese and the black rebellions all over the country, the Orangeburg massacre [three people killed, 27 injured during an Orangeburg, South Carolina, segregation protest], just everything—that we had to be brave and go forward and that if they responded with the violence that they claimed that they were going to respond with, it would demonstrate to the city of Chicago and the world the nature of the system. And that would in fact broaden the movement, and actually, I think that—
Katz: Well, I think that was everybody’s goal.
Kurshan: Well, I can’t speak for everybody.
Katz: Well, I think that from the political folks’ side, and I don’t just mean [Tom] Hayden and the more adult folks, there was a sense that these demonstrations, if there was violence—which we expected because after April, in the black community, and the misogyny of the antiwar demonstrations in Chicago, we did expect violence—that it would expose the nature of the Democratic Party and go beyond the veneer. And I think it reminds me of the conflict to think that those of us who were more political, who were working with working-class kids and who had an alliance with blacks and Latinos in the city—actually, that was attaching with the Yippies—and we felt that the consequences of the frivolity or the fear of the Festival of Life would have long-term consequences on the black and Latino community, which was already—had done a lot of damage already. There was that kind of tension within the demonstrations between the—what did you say, the “fist” folks?
James: Abe said that.
Peck: Between the Heads and the Fists
Katz: Right; the Heads and the Fists. We would say that the long-term organizers, who were at that point, organizing a revolution movement of students—
James: Well, I was kind of with you and the developing of the Rainbow Coalition and that merge came later, but we were already working with blacks and Latins out of Join [the join Community Union] in Uptown. In my own mind, looking back on it, I hated Lyndon Johnson by that time. I remember when he said, “We shall overcome,” and I was so pissed off—what do you have a right to say that for? Now later on, I think maybe he accomplished some stuff, looking at it historically and in a “macro” way, but then, it was just I resented it so much that the Democratic Party would try to claim our language and our movement in that way. I remember really wanting to have a good time in the park. And we did have a good time until the police came in, in Lincoln Park. And that’s when it set it off. And that really set the tone. And we also wanted to influence the McCarthy kids. I don’t know how many people came from out of town. I believe that the blocks of people, the masses of people came from the neighborhoods after it was on TV, and the things started happening.
Schultz: Sixty percent of them came from Chicago.
James: Yeah. Because we went down and tried to get the kids talking about the revolution and peace, the war; the Democrats were not the answer. We wanted to have a good time, smoke some dope in the park, and once the tone was set—I remember John Sinclair [White Panther Party cofounder and manager of the jazz-rock band MC5] and the truck, and the MC5 was playing—
Schultz: They were just trying to play in the park.
James: Just trying to play in the park. And they came in and that turned it. That sent us into Old Town; that sent us into breaking windows, hiding in gangways, police chasing us. It just turned it. And it was like, every chance we got to go back downtown to fuck them up. [African-American comedian and social activist] Dick Gregory invited us to go to his house. We tried to march down Michigan Avenue.
Peck: Well, look, I think we’ve got to be careful about a couple of things. First of all, at various times, we were less virginal than we may be letting on. By August, anyone who was an organizer knew the potential for the police pushing us out of the park. Those of us who went to Soldier Field; those of us who had a cop tell us at City Hall that if he saw one joint smoked in a flock of 10,000 people, they’d clear the park—and if there was ever a sure event in the history of man, that was gonna be it (everyone laughs)—so I want to be a little careful here. I think Nancy really tumbled onto something. Some of us—and again, this isn’t like a division between Heads and Fists, but there were different approaches. I didn’t want to organize anybody at that point. Later on, I wanted to. I wanted to manifest who I was. I believed in be-ins. I believed that what we were then doing in ’67 until the convention—the convention changed me in this way. It made me much more traditionally political. We were a group of people trying to live our lives in a peaceful, communal way. We were trying to demonstrate in a very profound way who were and that there was a better way of living in a culture of greed. We didn’t use the word capitalism at The Seed at that point; we talked about greed. It’s a very important difference, I think. We were spiritual in that sense. Not that other people weren’t; my mom is very spiritual.
James: But it wasn’t long after that you started running our speeches.
Peck: Of course; of course we did, because we were serving the community then. At that point, it was different. At that point, we wanted to demonstrate—you guys are talking about political organizations, including the Yippies, which was a meta-political organization—
Rose: Meta
Peck: If I were saying what we were protesting against, it would be a reference we didn’t have in 1968. We were protesting at the matrix. We felt that—this is more Marcusian than Johnsonian, if you will—we felt that whether some of us used the words repressive tolerance or not, we felt that there was a system and that system really governed every activity that we could do, and that you could only color between the lines. And we said that there was no coloring book. And those of us who hung out at The Seed in those times—or those of us identified as super-hippies or whatever, Yippies, at least in Chicago—profoundly felt the way I’m trying to describe. In fact, there was a split (which I’ll get to) between the New York Yippies and the Chicago Yippies in the park—it was about what it meant to organize. And that was an important split.
James: There was a split, though, in your own group. There was that whole thing. We would talk against those people who wanted to go work on themselves or go to the country.
Kurshan: None of us were like that.
James: No, I know.
Kurshan: We know people who characterized us that way.
Peck: But some of the most militant people at that time—
Rose: If you’d read Paul Goodman in the late ’50s—
Peck: I’ve read Paul Goodman. The point is that we didn’t invent it. I’m just saying that there was a different strand here. The acronyms that we’re citing are very important, but to limit it only to political organizations is a mistake.

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