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permit. The demonstrators wanted to march from Grant Park to the Amphitheatre, a logical choice as the route from the hotel where the delegates were staying to the convention. Daley could not allow this; he could not allow a demonstration from anywhere in downtown to the Amphitheatre. The reason for this was that getting from downtown to the Amphitheatre required passing through a middle-class neighborhood of trim brick houses and small yards called Bridgeport. Bridgeport was Daley’s neighborhood. He had lived there all his life. Many of his neighbors were city workers who got the patronage jobs on which a local Chicago politician built his political base. Nobody was ever able to tabulate how many patronage jobs Daley had handed out. Chicago politics was all about turf. There was absolutely no circumstance, no deal, no arrangement, by which Daley was going to allow a bunch of hippies to march through his neighborhood.

The argument that everything that happened in Chicago during that disastrous August convention was planned and under orders from the mayor gains some credibility considering an April antiwar march with an almost identical fate. That time also, no amount of cajoling or imploring could get the marchers a permit from city hall. And that time also, the police suddenly, without warning, attacked with clubs and beat the demonstrators mercilessly.

The demonstrators were not what Daley and the police feared most. They were worried about another race riot, having already had a number of them. Relations between the black community and the city government were hostile; it was summer, the riot season, and the weather was hot and humid. Even Miami, which never had ghetto riots, had one during its convention that year. The Chicago police were ready and they were nervous.

At first, refusing the demonstration permit seemed to work. Far fewer hippies, Yippies, and activists came to Chicago than were expected—only a few thousand. Participants estimated that about half their ranks were local Chicago youth. For the Mobe, it was the worst turnout they had ever had. Gene McCarthy had advised supporters not to come. Black leaders, including Dick Gregory, who went himself, and Jesse Jackson, had advised black people to stay away. According to his testimony in the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial the following year, Jackson, who was already familiar with the Chicago police, had told Rennie Davis, “Probably Blacks shouldn’t participate. . . . If Blacks got whipped nobody would pay attention. It would just be history. But if whites got whipped, it would make the newspapers.”

Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies arrived with a plan, which they called A Festival of Life—in contrast with the convention in the Amphitheatre, which they called A Festival of Death. On the weeklong schedule of events listed on their Festival of Life handout flyers were included the following:

August 20–24 (AM) Training in snake dancing, karate, non-violent self-defense

August 25 (PM) MUSIC FESTIVAL—Lincoln Park

August 26 (AM) Workshop in drug problems, underground communications, how to live free, guerrilla theatre, self-defense, draft resistance, communes, etc.

August 26 (PM) Beach party on the Lake across from Lincoln Park.

Folksinging, barbecues, swimming, lovemaking

August 27 (Dawn) Poetry, mantras, religious ceremony

August 28 (AM) Yippie Olympics, Miss Yippie Contest, Catch the Candidate, Pin the Tail on the Candidate, Pin the Rubber on the Pope and other normal, healthy games

Many of the items were classic Abbie Hoffman put-ons. Others were not. An actual festival had been planned, bringing in music stars such as Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins. The Yippies had been working on it for months, but the music stars could not be brought in without permits, which the city had been declining to give for months. A meeting between Abbie Hoffman and Deputy Mayor David Stahl was predictably disastrous. Hoffman lit a joint and Stahl asked him not to smoke pot in his office. “I don’t smoke pot,” Hoffman answered, straight-faced. “That’s a myth.” Stahl wrote a memo