HopeD Frank Duveneck, Jr., painting by Elizabeth Boott Duveneck

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— Read on www.loc.gov/resource/pga.07666/

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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.  

    

 

 

 

I wrote the article below for the August 28, 1968, edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer. Brady Black, executive editor, assigned me as one of a team of five reporters to cover the convention. The protests, police brutality, stink bombs, threats, and mobs represented a new low for America. 

America Converges on Delegates At Chicago

By JAMES OTT

CHICAGO-Democrats from the farm, small town and big city got a first hand look at the United States Tuesday, in all of its bizarre expression, and suddenly the mood of the national convention changed from excitement to sober duty.

Perhaps the convention excitement never could reach proportions of earlier conventions, with the deadening effect of the predictions of street warfare. But delegates, many on vacation, trouped into this nation’s third largest metropolitan area with a festive air. They drank and saw Chicago’s nightlife for two days, and then, convention ’68 changed radically.

The holiday atmosphere broke late Sunday night and early Monday morning when groups of 500 to 1,000 Hippies, chased by police, charged down Michigan Avenue. The howling mob, with hair flying in the breeze and a few waving Viet Cong and North Vietnamese flags, scattered over the full breadth of the boulevard.

Seven hours of speeches and credentials fights, lasting until 2:43 a.m. Tuesday, took a heavy toll among delegates. Already their “neck muscles” were beginning to weaken, according to presidential contender Eugene McCarthy’s analogy of the nomination process and the bullfight. He said it would be “a trial by ordeal”, and he was right.

Other experiences led to the shocking realization of the U.S. today

Every day now, on rented buses, delegates leave their hotels on Michigan Avenue’s “million dollar mile,” riding through Southside’s Black ghetto. The buses rumble over the streets through the bleak stretch of onetime mudflats to the convention amphitheater.

There they see that Carl Sandburg’s city of big shoulders wears epaulets. The omnipresence of police, wearing riot helmets and holstered billy clubs, has a stupefying effect on the delegates and the press. Nowhere, except in the armed fores, do people see that many armed men, upwards of 50 policemen can be found congregating at many of the key locations around the amphitheater.

All the influences–the milling and demonstrating “hippies” the threat of black rebellion, the police and nearby presence of the National Guard and the Federal troops, the endless checks for credentials, the normal political push and pull, the lack of sleep–these influences are coming to bear on the delegates.

As one might expect they are getting skittish like so many thoroughbred horses who know that a fire is heading their way. Some observers said it had the effect of opening up the convention, the delegates rethinking their earlier commitments with a mood of possible change.

Here in Chicago the delegates are prisoners who are deluged with personal contacts and by the media who present the views of the major candidates. At no other time in the campaign have the delegates been forced into positions of a full hearing of all sides. The thinking is that it can have a radical effect.

 

 

 

 

The people in this article will never read what is said about them. They only see newspapers on corner racks or hear headlines blared by some newsboy.

These people are the unwanted, misfits of society who roam the streets by day and sometimes by night. You can see them shuffling along ahead of you on the streets. They are ragged, dirty and unshaven–the lonely faces in the crowd.

Often you wonder, perhaps, where they stay at night.

The jail at City Hall is open to them. At least five or ten a night sleep on park-type benches or on the floor inside the locked doors. This is the summer group; there’s more in the winter when the nights are cold.

The jail’s not much, but it’s home to them.

A few years ago there was a man who virtually made the jail his home. He stayed there almost every night for three years. He was old, crippled and senile.

As a man, police said, he was kind and very reticent. But he had one salient failing. He never bathed. One night a police officer, who could not take the odor anymore, took him aside and told him he must take a bath. The officer escorted the old man to the shower room and saw to it.

The fellow never came back after that night.

The lodgers at the jail come from all over the country: Texas, Georgia, New York, California. Some are transients and they’re, of course, always heading for a job somewhere. These are the ones who have some spirit and pride.

A typical conversation with one of these men is this:

-Where are you from?

-Texas.

-Where are you gong?

-North, to get a job.

-A Texas wrangler, huh?

-Yeh.

He smiles with obvious pride.

Jailers started allowing a few vagrants into the jail in the 1940s. Small missions used to keep them in ‘flophouses” before that, but now their doors are closed to them too. The police do not know of one ‘flophouse’ in the city.

There is one requirement to get in: Name and hometown. The return is a roof overhead. Generally that is all. Sometimes there’s food, what’s left over from the prisoners. But that’s not regular.

The food at the jail is not what you would call rib-sticking. Coffee and bologna sandwiches–one each at lunch and supper–and a hard sweet roll at breakfast.,

The lodgers begin to trickle in about 9 p.m. and some stroll in as late as 2:30 a.m. But they all must leave by 5:45 a.m.

As a general rule, the lodgers are quiet, like the old man who never bathed. They seldom say anything other than, “Can I stay for the night?” Still more seldom do they cause any trouble. When they do, they must be thrown out, and obviously they don’t want that.

One veteran police officer described them like this: “They all seem beaten. They have no interests in life and live only from day to day. They are usually old and either physically or mentally handicapped. And they have nowhere else to go.”

A cursory glance at the lodgers’ record book shows one facet about them which repeats itself day in and day out. They are all Anglo-Saxons, at least by the names given, even among those who are just passing through.

They are Browns, Smiths, Williams, Jones, Burtons, Williamsons. But last week a “John Milton” from Tennessee registered for the night.

Lodgers range in height from tall to short, but police who have been watching them for years say you never see a fat one.

—written by the author more than fifty years ago during a year’s duty as a police reporter on assignment at Central Station in Cincinnati City Hall. The article was published in The Cincinnati Enquirer, which proudly accepted the Pulitzer Prize recently for local reporting.

 

 

 

 

 

The Northrop B-2 in maintenance is as fascinating as it is in flight. I saw one during the maintenance process, which typically lasts at least a full year. In this USAF photograph a technician is working on the fuselage above the cockpit on a skinned-down version. The B-2 awaits a number of applications including the final layer of radar-absorbent materials, which look like a thick coat of rubber.

The B-2 Spirit is also known as the Stealth Bomber because of its low observable stealth technology.  The aircraft is stealthy due to a handful of factors, including the carbon-graphite composites used in the structure, the various material applications, the angles of the flying wing design, and certain maneuvers that make it difficult for the aircraft to be identified by radar.

The USAF operates 20 B-2s. The original procurement was for as many as 132 aircraft, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s put a huge dent in the program. The prototype was converted, bringing the number to 21. However, a crash in February, 2008, of the Spirit of Kansas after taking off from Andersen AFB in Guam brought the number back to 20. The crew in that accident escaped. The probable cause was determined to be moisture in the B-2’s Port Transducer Units during air data calibration, which sent distorted information to the air data system. As a result flight control computers calculated inaccurate air speed and a negative angle of attack, which caused the B-2 to pitch upward 30-deg. during takeoff..

(Information on the cause of the crash comes from a comprehensive report on the B-2 in Wikipedia.)

There are 80 pilots qualified to fly the B-2s. What a crew of lucky airmen!    

Chapter One of a coming-of-age novel based in the late 1950s. Please read it and give me your impressions and recommendations.

Deadline for Murder