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Reviews
| Battleground Chicago, by Frank Kusch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 224 pages. $16.00, paper.
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| Frank Kusch's Battleground Chicago stands out in the now voluminous literature on the tumultuous American 1960s as a work notable especially for its originality and its objectivity; two qualities that mainstream works on the decade all too often lack. Kusch's work is original as its major use of primary sources is interviews with eighty former members of the Chicago Police Department. His work is objective because he lets them speak—and even lets them hoist themselves on their own petards—while giving perspective of members of the anti-Vietnam War movement, supposedly victimised by the "Pigs" in the week of the 1968 Democratic Party Convention. He interprets his material with balance and generosity to all sides involved, and certainly does not exonerate the police force. In this way, the book models history's traditional strengths as a discipline while also respecting the tenets of the "new" history, offering history from the point of view of those who forced the "condescension of posterity," as E. P. Thomson famously wrote of the English white working class. |
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Kusch's book begins with an extensive contextualization of the events during the week of the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. He carefully sifts through the shift from civil rights protests to anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and the history of the police treatment of those demonstrators. He is excellent explaining how the war pretty much destroyed the chances of the Democratic Party winning the Presidency in 1968. He presents vivid portraits of LBJ, of Robert Kennedy (to whom he is especially sympathetic), and of Hubert Humphrey—who supported Mayor Daley's actions even though, "in his shower at the Hilton," he was bothered by tear gas from the battles in the park outside (p. 97). |
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This contextualisation is, however, at its best when Kusch interrogates the attitudes of the Chicago Police Department. He presents these men as seeing themselves as sturdy protectors of homespun American values who joined the police force because it represented security and a good pension for their families. The police officers recalled that in the 1960s, relations in the city "turned nasty." As former officer Henry Norbakken recalled, "Even things that I liked, that I respected, were being denigrated like never before. Nothing was sacred. We had these peaceniks calling people who served their country in arms 'baby killers'" (p. 27). The police spouted concerns for common American—and human—decencies. |
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The author further confirms that the anti-war movement had been infiltrated by deeply unsavoury elements. Radical H. Rap Brown urged African-Americans, "Don't love him to death. Shoot him to death." Kusch's discussion of the Yippies is particularly trenchant: "the Yippies made it clear early on that they were going to provoke anarchy in Chicago" (p. 47). As their leader demagogue Abbie Hoffman declared, "We will burn Chicago to the ground. We will fuck on the beaches; we demand the politics of ecstasy; acid for all." Yet during Kusch's excellent discussion of the week of demonstrations, he is very sympathetic to radical Tom Hayden, who, following an early attack, spent the rest of the week in disguise. Teachers may thus wish to use Kusch's work as an example of balancing perspectives in history. |
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Kusch's final chapter is perhaps the most valuable, and might even be useful standing alone from the remainder of the text. Here, he provides a lengthy interpretation of the events he has introduced and described in the rest of the book. The Walker Report of December 1968 recounted the events of the week of the Democratic Convention as a "police riot," thus enabling the image of the Chicago Police as "pigs" to become widely accepted. Kusch has no compunction but to criticise the police where it is appropriate (a vignette of the hapless Winston Churchill, grandson of the British wartime Prime Minister, being firmly questioned outside his hotel is hysterical). Yet Kusch continues to demolish myths. From the week of demonstrations, there were only 668 arrests. There was much "de-arresting," with police vans taking demonstrators as far away from the convention as possible. The operation was largely successful. However, Kusch decimates the reputation of the press, showing, for example, how a minor incident involving Dan Rather was repeated again and again on CBS to show the police in the worst possible light. Mayor Daley is shown in very negative terms, determined to maximise his own political capital by having the strongest possible opposition to the demonstrators, with the police department caught up in the Mayor's machine. In the end, though, it is Kusch's portrayal of the police as staunch defenders of working-class values that is most challenging for both teacher and student. In an excerpt especially fitting for historical exploration and analysis, Officer Eddie Kelso suggested that "They [the demonstrators] were all into free love and peace, yeah, right! They cried out against the Vietnam War but were urging their own kind of warfare right here at home. And their enemies were real Americans who worked hard every day to build this country, who paid their taxes, who kept their neighbourhoods clean, and wanted a better life for their children than they had themselves" (p. 152). Kusch deftly presents Chicago '68 as a class struggle between the working-class police and the spoilt middle-class youth. He concludes with a stunning sleight of hand. One officer, Nick Geldon, who had attended a funeral the following week for his cousin who had been killed in Vietnam, recalled, "The world has turned its back on us. The government, everybody. And we had all these people who refused to serve, who laughed and ridiculed our service and spit on our flag." Here, Kusch uncovers a powerful irony: as an arm of government itself, the police fought the anti-war demonstrators, yet it was the police's people—white ethnics—together, of course, with poor African-Americans who bore the brunt of the terrible war the demonstrators sought to end. |
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Thus, this book can be used in all sorts of ways. It is a model of carefully considered history writing. As such, it provokes teachers and students alike into challenging assumptions about who was on the "right" and who was on the "wrong" side in the 1960s. It is a remarkable case study of American Liberalism turning against the working class. This book is thus highly recommended for general undergraduates at sophomore and higher levels and for advanced history majors. With these groups, lively discussions should ensue about the very fundamentals of American democratic life. The interviews with members of the police force offer a crucial counterbalance to primary sources readily available from writings and interviews of various demonstration leaders. In our pursuit of a comprehensive historical account, white male working-class heterosexual police officers have valuable contributions to make, and their perspective deserves to be heard, together with everybody else's. |
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| University of Portsmouth, Hampshire |
Kevin White |
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