From the Vault of Art Shay: Witness To The Persecution
By Art Shay in News on Mar 14, 2012 6:00PM
\<em\>Time\<\/em\> magazine opened and closed their eight-page story with big pictures of mine, but somehow overlooked my favorite. \"Welcome Democrats,\" according to David Mamet—who covered the Convention as his first assignment—was the one picture that summed up the war between the army, police, Hippies and confused delegates. He bought a vintage 16\"x20\" print from me to hang over his writing desk. \"It reminds me of where I came from, every morning. The quintessential portrait of Chicago in extremis.\" Over the years he\'s bought a few original prints for political friends. (© Art Shay)\r\n
Of all people, it was Jesse Jackson who fomented the most trouble. When the police and Hippies were standing each other off that twilight on Michigan Avenue, he sent in four mule-drawn cotton wagons to remind one and all of a previous page of American history. The sidewalk and gutter crowd naturally mad way for the klutzy wagons, moving back, back, until they broke the windows in the Hilton\'s first floor shops. When the police heard the glass shatter, they went berserk, batons swinging at unprotected heads, exulting in the pain, blood and joy of maiming. (© Art Shay)\r\n
A veteran policeman who read my early account of the above in the Chicago Tribune resolutely compounded the fiction that Hippies had thrown bags of excrement from upper windows aiming for the cops\' heads. \<em\>Time\<\/em\> magazine sent three people looking for this evidence and could find none at street level. If such crap was hurled, it never reached its target. (© Art Shay)\r\n
The heroic, baton-swinging cop at the left who drew blood from three defenseless kids, as shown, has recently been identified (with the help of a good scanner) as Officer Andy Martorano. He is now a (retired) commander. (© Art Shay)\r\n
On the first night of the action in Lincoln Park, a Hippie holds on to his cigarette while being dragged through the grass near the Chicago History Museum. (© Art Shay)\r\n
Famed authors Jean Genet, right, Allen Ginsberg, center, and William Styron, all tear-gassed in Lincoln Park, clean up at the Lincoln Park Hotel. (© Art Shay)\r\n
Dozens of arrests were made for the misdemeanor of objecting to police batons aimed at heads during peaceful demonstrations. (© Art Shay)\r\n
On the first night of action in Lincoln Park, the police, behind a National Guard tank, cleared the Hippies out per Mayor Richard J. Daley\'s 11 p.m. curfew. This picture opened \<em\>Time\<\/em\>\'s story and was later used in a \<em\>Life\<\/em\> book as \"one of the greatest pictures of the past 100 years.\" It also ran as \"the 1968 picture of the year:\" its 1969 partner being a close-up Neil Armstrong took of man\'s first footprint on the Moon. His own. The specks of light are teargas canisters. (© Art Shay)\r\n
Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey returns to the executive suite at the Hilton after a rousing TV speech at the International Amphitheatre. I have always felt that, had HHH not come back to the hotel and instead went into Grant Park to talk to the kids uncertainly camped out and chanting, he could have picked up the half million or so votes it would have taken to beat Nixon. He later confessed he was afraid of violence in the park. I have always felt that JFK would have risked anything to commune with the kids on national TV. HHH could have watched himself speaking any time. (© Art Shay)\r\n
Putting on the police, Hippies mocked what Daley\'s police feared—a drugged-out city with poisoned water supply. (© Art Shay)\r\n
Parading against our country\'s increasing militarism, the Hippies lofted Vietnamese flags and anti-war posters. (© Art Shay)\r\n
My full page \"closer\" for the \<em\>Time\<\/em\> story showed demonstrators clambering illegally up the famous equestrian statue. (© Art Shay)\r\n
Without missing a cigar puff, two cops reel in a demonstrator. (© Art Shay)\r\n
This is the face of impregnable Chicago Mayor Daley succeeded in presenting to the world. As the Hippies chanted, \"The whole world is watching.\"\r\n(© Art Shay)
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his archives, Art reflects on the last time tensions between police and protesters exploded, as Chicago prepares for the NATO summit.)
With the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago, there is a flurry of revived interest in my pictures of the 1968 Democratic Convention. President Obama moved the G-8 summit to Camp David, halving the new photo opportunities. But still the calls from agencies and magazines come in… history repeating itself?
I don't have to pull down the well-researched committee indictment against the rioting police. I'm in the report, but all I have to do is look down at the three center fingers on my right hand, clubbed into insensitive, bent digits by the baton of a cop whose number I was copying down in the battle zone park across from the Hilton. He was wielding his baton mercilessly at a young, elusive college woman, aiming to draw blood from her suburban head protected only by an already red-dyed high school babushka. I was merely a target of opportunity for daring to point my Leica at this uniformed asshole as he swung, grunted and danced with the unbalanced effort of malfeasance.
The first Hippie I met was none other than Abbie Hoffman at the then-Y on Wabash near the Hilton. I pointed my camera at his wounded face, still puffy from six hours in police custody. "They grabbed me because of this." He pointed to his forehead on which the large word "FUCK" had been self-mercurochromed.
Welcome, Democrat.
Interrogated while being alternately beaten by three bullyaks, Abbie said he at first denied planning to poison the lake. "Then these guys got so preposterous I confessed to wanting merely to piss in the lake and poison everyone in Chicago." That's when they started punctuating their blows with grunts of "fag," "Hippie Commie," and worse.
He wouldn't let me shoot his picture for Time Magazine, "because no matter what you say, they'll take the police point of view... Republicans."
He did let me buy him the eggplant special for supper, a pre-Avatar sick shade of blue-green.
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.
