No One Was Killed: The Democratic National Convention, August 1968

by John Schultz, Todd Gitlin

Overview

While other writers contemplated the events of the 1968 Chicago riots from the safety of their hotel rooms, John Schultz was in the city streets, being threatened by police, choking on tear gas, and listening to all the rage, fear, and confusion around him. The result, No One Was Killed, is his account of the contradictions and chaos of convention week, the adrenalin, the sense of drama and history, and how the mainstream press was getting it all wrong.

"A more valuable factual record of events than the city’s white paper, the Walker Report, and Theodore B. White’s Making of a President combined."—Book Week

"As a reporter making distinctions between Yippie, hippie, New Leftist, McCarthyite, police, and National Guard, Schultz is perceptive; he excels in describing such diverse personalities as Julian Bond and Eugene McCarthy."—Library Journal

"High on my short list of true, lasting, inspired evocations of those whacked-out days when the country was fighting a phantasmagorical war (with real corpses), and police under orders were beating up demonstrators who looked at them funny."—Todd Gitlin, from the foreword

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226740782
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/15/2009
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

John Schultz (1932-2017) was professor emeritus of fiction writing and a member of the graduate faculty in fiction writing at Columbia College in Chicago. He wrote novellas, short stories, and several books of non-fiction. He was the creator of the Story Workshop method of writing instruction which he practiced at Columbia, and the founder of Story Workshop Institute, which brought the same methods to elementary and secondary classrooms.

Schultz covered the 1968 Democratic National Convention for the Evergreen Review and wrote No One Was Killed, an account of both the convention and the clashes between antiwar protesters and Chicago police. He also observed the subsequent trial of eight participants for conspiracy and inciting riot, which he recounted in Motion Will Be Denied, republished as The Conspiracy Trial of the Chicago Seven. Both books are published by the University of Chicago Press.

John Schultz (1932-2017) was professor emeritus of fiction writing and a member of the graduate faculty in fiction writing at Columbia College in Chicago. He wrote novellas, short stories, and several books of non-fiction. He was the creator of the Story Workshop method of writing instruction which he practiced at Columbia, and the founder of Story Workshop Institute, which brought the same methods to elementary and secondary classrooms.

Schultz covered the 1968 Democratic National Convention for the Evergreen Review and wrote No One Was Killed, an account of both the convention and the clashes between antiwar protesters and Chicago police. He also observed the subsequent trial of eight participants for conspiracy and inciting riot, which he recounted in Motion Will Be Denied, republished as The Conspiracy Trial of the Chicago Seven. Both books are published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Todd Gitlin

Introduction to Confrontation

Blocked

I Am Here in Lincoln Park/ Wednesday Midnight Confrontation Attitudes

The Week Before the Convention: Preparatory Confrontations
Julian Bond Meets the Governor of New Jersey
Cops and Media Watch Over the Festival of Life

Platform Committee, Hale Boggs Presiding, Faces the Nation

Sunday: Overthrow

Chicago: The Prague of the West

McCarthy Arrives and Innocence Waits on the Hilton Stairs

Music in Lincoln Park/Invocation

Sunday Night/Overthrow

Monday: The Beast and the Hunt

Grant Park: Boys Capture Union General

Lincoln Park: The Barricade

Grant Park: Awakening in Front of the Hilton

The Ritual and the Hunt

Tuesday: The Demands of Revolution

McCarthy Meets California

Lincoln Park Citizens Meet Their Police Commander

World War II Vets Meet War Resisters

LBJ Birthday Party and Anti-Birthday Party

Attack at the Foot of the Cross

Demonstrators Meet Guardsmen Brothers

Wednesday: War

Vietnam War Plank

The Battle at the Bandshell

The Battle at Michigan and Balbo

Battles in the Loop and Lincoln Park

The Nation Faces the Demonstrators

Thursday: Exile

Morning

McCarthy Speaks and Speaks Again

To the Amphitheatre

War Games

Friday

McCarthy Headquarters Attacked

In the Months Afterward

When the Game Changes

Postscript

Afterword, 2008

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

It was a young Chicago novelist and writer for the radical-left press, John Schultz, reporting for the Evergreen Review, who produced the best book on the riots, No One Was Killed. Schultz . . . captures both the subtle ruptures of mutual contempt between the Yippies and the New Left and the moral indefensibility of the police.”
 

Bookforum - Christian Lorentzen

"Of all the book-length accounts I read of 1960's political and cultural confrontations, none (not even Mailer's Armies of the Night) is more lucid in its understanding of the torments and tropisms of the movements of the streets. . . . This is vivid writing that can stand as pure, suspenseful reportage."

Todd Gitlin

"This book is a gritty, first-person account of the events of Sunday through Friday of Dem Con '68. Though Schultz supports Senator Eugene McCarthy-running on an anti-war platform-for the Democratic nomination, Schultz's sympathies unite him with the protestors in Lincoln and Grant Parks. He takes cracks on the head and tear gas to the eyes and throat to capture sights unique to demonstrators...While No One Was Killed covers some of the blow-by-­blow political maneuvering within the convention...Schultz, advance guard of the put-­himself-there new journalism, realizes sides must be taken and lines drawn."

Chicago Life Magazine - Jon Gugala

A rich  primary source of an event that defined the course of American social,  political, and urban history in the late twentieth century.

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society - Christopher Ramsey

"A more valuable factual record of events than the city's white paper, the Walker Report and Theodore B. White's Making of the President combined."

Book Week - Christopher Chandler

"[Schultzz] has managed marvelously to evoke what happened and what it felt like to have it happen to you. . . . His political thinking wades hip-high through a swamp of mysticism and comes up muddy and bloody, but in the process he refuses to slough off any of those ambiguous perceptions that amount to honesty."

New York Times - John Leonard

A more valuable factual record of events than the city's white paper, the Walker Report and Theodore B. White's Making of the President combined.

— Christopher Chandler

Book Week

[Schultzz] has managed marvelously to evoke what happened and what it felt like to have it happen to you. . . . His political thinking wades hip-high through a swamp of mysticism and comes up muddy and bloody, but in the process he refuses to slough off any of those ambiguous perceptions that amount to honesty.

— John Leonard

New York Times