Jack Engelhard
Jack Engelhardhttp://www.jackengelhard.com

I’ll give up the ending right away.

After all the rioting, soft-on-crime Democrat Hubert Humphrey lost to law-and-order Republican Richard Nixon.

So in case you think the rioting of our day is something new under the sun, think again.

In case you think the American People will take it sitting down, and that the violence gives soft-on-crime Joe Biden an edge, you could be mistaken…if you consider history.

That would be the history of 1968.

That year’s Democrat National Convention in Chicago, late August, changed everything, in a year when everything changed.

It was the year when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy were assassinated…and when the young demanded an end to the war, the draft, the cops, the government, the country. It was a year of sit-ins, and lock-ins and book burnings. Out with Shakespeare. In with Black Studies

The campuses were in turmoil and there were clashes everywhere between police and Hippies and assorted members of the counterculture. Read “The Days of the Bitter End.”

Then they came to Chicago…some 10,000.

Mayor Richard J. Daley was waiting for them.

So were 28,000 law enforcement officers.

These coming to town were the “Flower Children.” One way to look at it, or anarchists, another way.

Mayor Daley saw them the other way, as “paid agitators.”

He saw their handiwork. He saw the rest of the country up in flames.

They had asked for permits that would allow them to demonstrate, mostly against the Vietnam war. He had turned them down.

Not to his Chicago would he let them “Burn, Baby, Burn,”, nor against his police would he allow the demonstrator/agitators to “Kill, Kill, Kill the Pigs.”

To the delegates inside Convention Hall, choosing a nominee, those Hippies were “our kids” demonstrating peacefully, and no doubt some were.

But some came spoiling for a fight…taunting the police, stomping and burning the American flag, and raising the flag of the Viet Cong.

Who lit the flame?

Tough to say, but all agree that a bloody riot took place. Some, on the Right, blamed it on the Hippies. The Left, and the news media, termed it a “police riot.”

There was no doubt that the scuffles were brutal. Portions of it went live over the airwaves. America watched as it was happening. Viewership was at 90 million.

Inside the Convention, delegates vented their rage against Mayor Daley. “Our kids” against “his police.” They demanded that he stop “the Gestapo tactics.”

They sought the nearest microphone to bewail through CBS’s Walter Cronkite – “The whole world is watching.”

Some 650 demonstrators were arrested, nearly 1,000 treated for injuries. About 190 police required medical attention.

It was assumed that Americans were sickened at what they saw, from Mayor Daley and his police. Perhaps…while it was happening.

Things changed, upon further reflection.

The Republican Convention, which occurred several weeks earlier, had gone off without a hitch. No slugfest.

People saw that, too…and voters were left to weigh one against the other…a clear choice.

Chaos vs. law and order. (Fast-forward to Biden vs. law-and-order Trump.)

Mayor Daley reported that the letters he got were in his favor more than 10 to i.

Chicago’s great journalist Mike Royko put it like this – “First, what the Democratic convention did was bring about the election of Republican Richard Nixon.”

Something to consider in case you were wondering which way today’s voters would be inclined.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com