HAPPENINGS
527
Lincoln Park regulars, and even a few delegates, celebrities and re–
porters began coming to the nightly showdowns. On Sunday night I
saw a McCarthy girl, sweet in her madras and still worrying that the
police, in their ignorance, might give the country a bad name, turn to a
friend in the park and say, "Oh, I hope they're not going to arrest
Monsieur Genet!" They didn't arrest him, but they gassed him, and
Ginsberg, Burroughs and a thousand less famous citizens. The spirit
of desperate resistance so obvious by August 28 stemmed from being
gassed in the park and searched on the streets more than from the war
in Vietnam.
It was police behavior in Lincoln Park that convinced most every–
body that the long-planned march on the Amphitheatre was unneces–
sary - just do some mass loitering in Grant Park, across from the
Hilton, where the cameras could catch the police response. In other
words, the police created the mood and suggested the tactic which gave
the Mobilization its ultimate success.
"Isn't it fantastic," Hayden asked rhetorically Tuesday morning:
"kids fighting for a park they hadn't even heard of two days ago?
It
means we can stage confrontations any time, anywhere, just by chal–
lenging them for a piece of land."
This is the strategy that he and his closest co-workers have now
settled on: confrontations everywhere to reiterate that the U.S. govern–
ment operates by force and coercion, not consent and participation.
It
is a strategy that captures the mood of a frustrated student generation,
many of whose members now want to participate in street action or even
to wreak violence on such symbols of the American Empire as cops
and university buildings. In theory, mini-Chicagos will win the respect
of blacks and the participation support of young people across the
country. They will also serve to radicalize liberals in the same way that
McCarthy followers were influenced by the Mobilization.
It
is now taken for granted that the Mobilization had a radicalizing
effect on the McCarthy camp. But in fact only a handful of McCarthy
kids ever crossed Michigan Avenue to join the demonstrations in Grant
Park. McGovern people were much more sympathetic, and it was
McGovern himself who was first to visit the room in the Hilton where
injured campaign workers were being treated. McCarthy's Thursday
afternoon speech in Grant Park was listened to critically - boos when
he said he would continue to work "within the system," cheers when
he added, "but outside the two major parties." For me the McCarthy–
camp attitude toward the Mobilization was summed up on the amazed
face of Senator Joseph Tydings, the young liberal from Maryland, as
he watched SDS kids heckle the beaten candidate: "Hey, McCarthy:
