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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-trial-chicago-7-180976063/
The True Story of ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’
Aaron
Sorkin’s newest movie dramatizes the clash between protestors on the left and a
federal government driven to making an example of them 
/https:/public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/46/20/4620f931-55ce-4f3a-8cbe-c8975d703cfc/trial-of-the-chicago-7-embed04a.jpg)
The Netflix film features Yahya
Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale and Mark Rylance as lawyer William
Kunstler. (Niko Tavernise / Netflix )
By Jeanne Dorin McDowell
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
OCTOBER 15, 202014
It was one of the most
shocking scenes to ever take place in an American courtroom. On October 29,
1969, Bobby Seale, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party and one of eight
co-defendants standing trial for inciting the riots that erupted at Chicago's
1968 Democratic National Convention, was gagged and chained to his chair for
refusing to obey Judge Julius Hoffman’s contempt citations.
Seale
hadn’t been involved in organizing the anti-Vietnam War demonstration, which
began peacefully before turning into a bloody confrontation with police that
resulted in nearly 700 arrests. He had spent only four hours in Chicago that
weekend, having travelled there to fill in as a speaker. Outraged at being
falsely accused, Seale vociferously interrupted the proceeding, asking to
represent himself and denouncing the judge as a “racist pig.” Hoffman, an
irascible 74-year-old with blatant disdain for the defendants, ordered Seale
restrained. The image of a black man in shackles, rendered by courtroom artists
because cameras weren’t allowed in the courtroom, was circulated by media
around the world.“ His whole face was basically covered with a pressure band-aid,
but he could still he heard through it trying to talk to the jury,” recalls
Rennie Davis, a co-defendant in what became known as the Chicago 8 trial (later
Chicago 7 when Seale was legally severed from the group and was tried
separately.)
This unforgettable scene is
recreated in Netflix’ upcoming courtroom drama The Trial of the Chicago
7, which starts streaming on October 16—52 years after the real proceedings
unfolded in downtown Chicago. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin (The
Social Network, A Few Good Men), the movie dramatizes the infamous, at
times farcical, trial of eight men accused by President Nixon’s Justice
Department of criminal conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot.
Dragging on for almost five months—at times devolving into chaos and political
theater—the trial illuminated the deepening schisms in a country torn apart by
the Vietnam War, tectonic cultural shifts and attempts by the Nixon
Administration to quash peaceful antiwar dissent and protest. The drama and
histrionics in the courtroom were reflected in daily headlines. Protesters
outside the courthouse each day chanted the iconic mantra: “The whole world is
watching!”
The road to the trial began
the previous summer, when more than 10,000 antiwar demonstrators flocked to
Chicago for five days during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The
country was in turmoil, reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King
and Senator Robert Kennedy and the worsening Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson,
beleaguered and defeated by the war, had made the unprecedented decision not to
seek a second term; after Kennedy’s death, Vice President Hubert Humphrey stood
as the heir to the presidential nomination. But the Democratic Party was as
divided as the rest of the nation: The antiwar contingent opposed Humphrey,
while Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy appealed to students and activists on
the left.
“Myself and others in [the
antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society] (SDS)] went to Chicago to convince
the kids in their teens and early 20s who had been campaigning for McCarthy to
give up their illusions about getting change within the system,” says Michael
Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University who is currently writing a
history of the Democratic party. “At the time, we were very cynical about the
Democrats. We didn’t think there was any chance that McCarthy would be
nominated. We wanted to give up the illusion of change through the existing
electoral system.”
Organizers
were planning a non-violent demonstration. But when thousands, many of them
college students, arrived in Chicago, they were met by the forces of Democratic
Mayor Richard Daley and his law-and-order machine—a tear-gas spraying,
baton-wielding army of 12,000 Chicago police officers, 5,600 members of the
Illinois National Guard and 5,000 U.S. Army soldiers. The protests turned to
bloodshed.
Three
of the seven charged in the trial (from left to right: Jerry Rubin; Abbie
Hoffman and Rennie Davis) face newsmen during recess in the
trial. (Bettman / Getty Images)
At the trial 12 months later,
the eight defendants remained united in their opposition to the war in Vietnam,
but they were far from a homogenous coalition. They represented different
factions of “the movement” and had distinctly different styles, strategies and
political agendas. Abbie Hoffman (played by Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin
(Jeremy Strong) were the counterculture activists of the Youth International
Party (yippies), who brought a tie-dye, merry-prankster sensibility to their
anti-authoritarianism. Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Davis (Alex Sharp),
founders of SDS, lead a campus coalition of 150 organizations bent on changing
the system and ending the war. David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch)—literally a
Boy Scout leader—was a pacifist and organizer for the Mobilization Committee to
End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), which had been formed the previous year to plan
large anti-war demonstrations. Professors John Froines and Lee Weiner (Danny
Flaherty and Noah Robbins), who were only peripherally involved in planning the
Chicago demonstrations (sitting at the defense table, one of them likens their
presence to the Academy Awards. “It’s an honor just to be nominated.”) though
they were thought to have been targeted as a warning to other academics who
might engage in anti-war activities. Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) was head of
the Chicago Panthers, which leaned towards more militant methods. [Actually
Fred Hampton was the head of the Chicago Panthers.] The two lawyers
representing the defendants, William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) and Leonard
Weinglass (Ben Shenkman), were renowned civil rights attorneys.
Hollywood routinely tackles
movies about real-life events, but dramatic storytelling and historical
accuracy don’t always mix. In The Trial of the Chicago 7, Sorkin
intentionally opts for broad strokes to revisit the story of the trial and the
surrounding events. He makes no claims of hewing exactly to the true history,
explaining that the movie is meant to be a “painting” rather than a
“photograph”— an impressionistic exploration of what really happened.
For the sake of good
storytelling, some timelines are rearranged, relationships are changed and
fictional characters are added (a Sorkin-invented female undercover cop lures
Jerry Rubin, for example).
“Before
a film can be anything else—relevant or persuasive or important—it has to be
good,” says Sorkin. “It has to tend to the rules of drama and filmmaking, so
I’m thinking about the audience experience . . .This isn’t a biopic. You
will get the essence of these real-life people and the kernel of who they are
as human beings, not the historical facts.”
Sorkin takes some dramatic
license is in his depiction of the emotional engine that drives the story: the
relationship between Hayden and Hoffman. In the movie, the tension between the
two men is palpable yet understandable given their stylistic differences.
Hoffman—played by Cohen with a surprisingly respectable New England accent
(Hoffman hailed from Worcester. Massachusetts)—is a pot-smoking hippie who
wears his politics on the tip of his tongue. In shaping his portrayal, Cohen
says he came to believe that despite his theatrics, Hoffman was a serious
activist.
“What becomes clear is that
in the end, Abbie is willing to challenge the injustice of the time,” says
Cohen. “[Sorkin] shows that Abbie is willing to sacrifice his life. It was
inspiring to play someone so courageous.”
Within the movement, however,
the yippies were regarded as political lightweights, adept at public relations
and little else, according to Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University journalism and
sociology professor who served as president of SDS in 1963 and 64. “SDS saw
them as clowns with a following that had to be accommodated, but they weren’t
part of strategic planning for what should happen,” says Gitlin, who also
wrote The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.
In
Sorkin’s script, Hayden and Hoffman start out antagonistic and eventually
become comrades. Hayden is depicted as a clean-cut anti-war activist who stands
up when the judge walks into the courtroom (he reflexively forgets that the
defendants all agreed to stay seated) and gets a haircut for his first day in
court. He wants to work within the system and shows his disdain for Rubin and
Hoffman. In reality, Hayden was a revolutionary, co-founder with Davis of SDS
and one of the primary architects of the New Left, He was also co-author of the seminal 1962 Port
Huron statement, a political manifesto and leftist blueprint for creating a
more participatory democracy.
“Had the government not
brought them together at a conspiracy trial, I don’t think Hayden and Hoffman
would have had much to do with each other,” says Gitlin.
In the courtroom, both the
cinematic and the real-life versions, the defendants exhibited solidarity. From
the day the trial began on September 24, 1969, it captivated the media.
Kunstler’s defense strategy was one of disruption, and it worked. On the first
day, Hayden gave a fist salute to the jury. Hoffman and Rubin pretty much spent
the next four-and-a-half months at the defendants table turning the trial into
political theater. Hoffman liked to provoke the judge (Frank Langella) by
calling him “Julie” and blowing kisses to the jury. On one occasion which, of
course, is included in the movie, the two yippies arrive in court wearing
judicial robes, which they removed on the judge’s orders to reveal blue
policeman’s uniforms underneath. Judge Hoffman (no relation to Abbie) was so
angry that he continuously cited contempt. Even Kunstler received a four-year
sentence, in part for calling Hoffman’s courtroom a “medieval torture chamber.”
“There was a lot of
electricity in the air,” recalls Charles Henry, professor emeritus of African
American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who attended the
trial while in college. “What I remember most vividly were Kunstler and
Weinglass, who were doing the talking for the defense at the time, getting up a
couple of times and before they could get a word out of their mouths [Judge]
Hoffman overruled. I thought, ‘This is crazy. How could this happen? This has
to be appealed.’”
The arrest of the eight
defendants during the 1968 protests and the subsequent trial were part of the
federal government’s efforts to punish leftists and organizers of the anti-war
movement. According to Gitlin, once Nixon became President in 1969, his Justice
Department formed a special unit to orchestrate a series of indictments and
trials. “Nixon was throwing down a marker in order to intimidate the entire
anti-war movement. They cooked up this indictment that made no sense,” he says.
Under Attorney General John Mitchell (John Doman), the government aggressively
pursued the defendants deploying prosecutors Richard Schultz (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt) and Thomas Foran (J.C. Mackenzie). To its credit, the movie
includes, if only suggests, some of these undercurrents.
Sorkin’s introduction to the
Chicago 7 began more than a decade ago when director Steven Spielberg contacted
him to talk about a movie on the trial. The idea was tabled when both men had
other projects in the works, but Sorkin wrote a draft in 2007. He pored over
the original transcripts, read numerous books on the trial and the politics of
the ’60s and spent time with Hayden (who died in 2016) as part of his writing
process. With the tumult of the 2016 election, Sorkin was re-inspired to
examine the story of defiant activists willing to stand up for their political
beliefs. This time around he would also direct.
As it turns out, the events
from this past summer share many parallels to 1968. “We’re seeing the
demonization of protest right now, especially in the midst of this political
campaign,” says Sorkin.
That said, the trial of the
Chicago 7 reflected the era: the cultural and political clashes of the late
‘60s and a Nixonian view of the world as the first federal trial aimed at
intimidating anti-war activists. The judge was not only politically hostile
towards the defendants but, historians say, tone-deaf to what was happening in
the country and seemingly unaware of the symbolism of chaining Seale to a chair
in his courtroom.
On February 18, 1970, the
seven defendants were acquitted of conspiracy charges but fined $5,000 each.
Five of them —Davis, Dellinger, Hayden, Hoffman and Rubin—were convicted of
crossing state lines with the intent to riot. Froines and Weiner were acquitted
of all charges. The seven defendants and their attorneys also received prison
sentences for the more than 170 contempt citations levelled at them by Judge
Hoffman—which ranged from two-and-a-half months (for Weiner) to four years and
18 days (for Kuntsler).
But the wheels of justice
turned, and in 1972, all charges against the defendants were dropped. Among
other reasons, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit cited
Judge Hoffman’s “antagonistic” courtroom demeanor. Charges against Seale were
also dropped. A subsequent investigation and report concluded that the 1968
demonstration’s bloody turn was instigated by the police.
Fifty-two years later, the
movie, like the trial itself, points to the power citizens can exert through
protest in the face of authoritarian rule. “We were facing ten years in jail.
We would get 30 death threats a day while on trial,” recalls Davis, who jokes
that he wasn’t as nerdy as he is portrayed in the movie. “It was very intense,
yet no one ever forgot that we were there for one reason only: our opposition
to the war in Vietnam. We put the government on trial.”
The Chicago 8: Where Are They Now?
Rennie
Davis: Now 80, Davis founded the Foundation for a New Humanity, a
Colorado-based project to develop a comprehensive plan for a new way of living.
Married, he lives in Boerthoud, Colorado and also does personal growth
coaching.
David
Dellinger: Dellinger died in 2004 at 88. The oldest of the Chicago
defendants by 20 years, he was a leading antiwar organizer in the 1960s.
Dellinger wrote From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter.
John Froines: At 81,
Froines is professor emeritus at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health with
a specialty in chemistry, including exposure assessment, industrial hygiene and
toxicology. He also served as director of a division of the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration .
Tom Hayden: Hayden
died in 2016 at 76. A leader in America’s civil rights and antiwar movements,
he moved into mainstream politics and served in the California State Assembly
for a decade and the California State Senate for eight years. He taught at
Occidental College and Harvard's Institute of Politics. The author of 17 books,
he was also director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Los Angeles
County. Hayden married three times, but his most high-profile union was to
actress and fellow activist Jane Fonda for 17 years.
Abbie
Hoffman: After spending years underground, Hoffman resurfaced in 1980,
lectured at colleges and worked as a comedian and community organizer, He died
in 1989 at 52 from a self-inflicted overdose of barbituates due to manic
depression.
Jerry Rubin: Rubin
went on to work on Wall Street and hosted networking events for young
professionals in Manhattan. He died in 1994 at 56 after he was hit by a car
near his Brentwood, California, home.
Bobby Seale: At 83,
Seale resides in Liberty, Texas. In 1973, Seale ran for mayor of Oakland,
California, and came in second out of nine candidates. He soon grew tired of
politics and turned to writing, producing A Lonely Rage in
1978 and a cookbook titled Barbeque'n with Bobby in 1987.
Lee
Weiner: Now 81, Weiner recently wrote Conspiracy to Riot: The
Life and Times of One of the Chicago 7, a memoir about the1968 Democratic
National Convention. In the years after the trial, Weiner worked
for the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai About
Jeanne Dorin McDowell is a Los
Angeles-based journalist and editor.
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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