It’s true, Paul Newman was nominated for President. I was there in 1968.

Democrat Groups May Unite To Form New Fourth Party

BY JAMES OTT

CHICAGO-Divorces are usually bitter, acrimonious affairs. And a political split from the Democratic party in the wee hours Thursday morning was no different.

More than 300 dejected followers of Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose crusade for the presidency had dissipated only two hours before, crowded the long narrow ballroom on the east mezzanine of the Drake  Hotel and added impetus to a fourth party movement in the United States,

The McCarthys, a collection of suburbanites, college-age youths and New Left liberals, joined in a loose confederation with an assortment of minority associations and listened to pleas for unity from representatives of the already-formed Peace and Freedom Party.

The meeting was called by Marcus G. Raskin,Washington, D.C., who out of accurate pessimism of the outcome of McCarthy’s movement, put together in recent months the committee for the formation of the new party.

In a prepared released titled, “Why The New Party?” which was distributed to all-comers, Raskin said:

“Across the nation there is a general revulsion for the political parties which in reality have built their power on the interests of special groups that have no base among the people, which maintain power through war and cold war, privilege selling and the granting of favors to the few.

“Young people, workers on the line in the factory and in the offices, women, farmers, black and brown people have come to believe that the two political parties are far too deeply implicated in causing the basic problems of American society to do anything toward resolving them.

“The Democratic and Republican parties have allowed the cities to decay, encouraged and sustained a huge military establishment, supported a reckless and morally indefensible colonial war in Vietnam, and diverted the economy for wasteful and dangerous activity.”

Raskin opened the meeting for comments. Actor Paul Newman, author and commentator Gore Vidal and cartoonist Jules Pfeiffer briefly addressed the crowd. A series of speakers raked the Democrats and the Republicans and called for an end to the Vietnam war and racism in the United States.

A proposal that Newman be nominated as president was taken seriously for a few moments out of respect, but it was lost in the press of time. Raskin also heard proposals for a name for the new party but deliberations on this point were postponed.

“The new party,” Raskin said in his release, “is a political effort to avoid violence in the United States by offering a reconstructive alternative. For unless the American political progress opens up to take account of new forces which do not fit the old molds, the American people will find that mass violence by the internal police and the disaffected from all classes of society will become the basic way which people will choose to defend their interests  or break of their misery.

“Although Americans are split by race, class, fear, anger and discontent, there is a growing sense that the pain which people feel individually is shared pain, pain caused politically.  It grows out of a gross misallocation of our intellectual and material resources. It grows out of the destruction of the community. It grows out of the idea that the land of opportunity has come to mean a land of opportunists.

“Middle class people wonder why their streets are filthy, why they are not safe, why the air is polluted, why their cars don’t work, why highways are more important than people, why they pay high taxes for war, why they do not have adequate health services and good education for their children, even though they pay the government so much of what they earn.

“They wonder why and what happened to the 1300 billion dollars that has been spent on defense and war-making since 1945 They wonder why 100 billion dollars was spent to prop up foreign dictatorships that had no base in the people. They wonder when there will be a government that will stop the arms race, a race which the United States has been running with itself for 15 years.”

As at all political meetings, secretaries obtained names and addresses from participants. At 2:25 a.m the time of leaving as set up earlier with hotel management, the crowd moved out of the ballroom and into the streets with a new enthusiasm tinged with pessimism.

This article appeared in The Cincinnati Enquirer on August 30, 1968. At the close of the convention I was returning to my room at the Drake when I heard people shouting from their automobiles and inviting anyone to attend the “new” party gathering. I watched the proceedings by standing on a chair on the side of the ballroom. Vidal was his usual self. He reminded me of Voltaire. Newman was shorter than I expected and his hair was a mass of almost golden curls. Raskin seemed to have good intentions but looked like a rabble-rouser from where I stood.