Never one to tread lightly, Norman Mailer once declared Chicago “the great American city.” It did not strive, he argued, to New York’s global status, yet it managed to outshine “the dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis,” as Mailer derided Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
The Brooklyn-bred literary pugilist made this pronouncement in 1968 as he blew into town for that summer’s Democratic National Convention. Mailer had just been in Miami, where the Republicans trotted out a baby elephant and nominated Richard M. Nixon without much drama.
In Chicago, the circus was of a darker variety. Having drawn the nation into a full-scale war in Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson announced in March that he would not seek re-election. Less than a week later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Then, in early June, Robert F. Kennedy, the Democratic front-runner, was assassinated in Los Angeles. Just a few weeks later, the Democrats headed to Chicago while the country convulsed with grief and rage. Antiwar activists planned a show of force in the city’s streets, only to be met by an unrestrained Chicago Police Department. The ensuing violence played out on millions of television screens, stunning an already battered nation.
This year, the Democrats are gathering in Chicago again, for the second time since 1968. Chicago has changed, and so has America. Yet there are haunting parallels — ideological divisions, antiwar protests, a recent assassination attempt. These audiobooks can help you make sense of the current moment.
“Boss”
By Mike Royko. Read by Charles Constant.
The 1968 Democratic convention was supposed to showcase how Mayor Richard J. Daley had turned Chicago into “the city that works.” But as the event devolved into what would later be described as a sanctioned “police riot,” that image shattered on national television. Royko, a columnist for The Chicago Daily News, describes with forensic precision how Daley brought this city of “ethnic states” to heel, and just how cruel and superficial that transformation was — the doomed South Side housing projects, the halfhearted efforts at police reform that the mayor at least partly undid with his own “shoot to kill” order during the unrest after King’s killing. As a narrator, Constant plays it straight, without hamming up the accents.
“Miami and the Siege of Chicago”
By Norman Mailer. Read by Arthur Morey.
Even as he was chronicling the jostling between Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Eugene J. McCarthy on the convention floor, Mailer was searching for existential truths. “Some went out forever, some went screaming down the alleys of the mad where cockroaches drive like Volkswagens on the oilcloth of the moon,” he writes of the young people congregating in Lincoln Park, his vivid language channeling Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. Mailer is more direct later, as he considers the journalists who have been beaten by police. “The counterrevolution had begun,” he concludes. Superb narration by Morey captures Mailer’s ironic malevolence.
“The Trial of the Chicago 7”
Edited by Mark L. Levine, George C. McNamee and Daniel Greenberg. Read by a full cast.
This remarkable, enthralling production uses official transcripts to faithfully recreate the trial of the Yippies, Black Panthers and anti-Vietnam War activists who were falsely blamed for the bloody mayhem surrounding the convention. The cast includes stars of both theater and screen: J.K. Simmons, Jeff Daniels, Corey Stoll and Norbert Leo Butz, among others. The excerpts are thoughtfully chosen to keep the listener’s attention while underscoring the carnivalesque cruelty of the proceedings, which reached their pinnacle when the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was bound and gagged in court at the direction of Judge Julius J. Hoffman, this dark show’s cantankerous ringmaster.
“The Assassination of Fred Hampton”
By Jeffrey Haas. Read by George Newbern.
Fred Hampton helped found the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in November 1968, the same month that Nixon prevailed over Humphrey. Late the following year, Hampton was killed in a police raid engineered by Edward Hanrahan, a prosecutor and Daley protégé. Haas, an attorney, spent more than a decade fighting to prove that Hampton was murdered by a racist law enforcement establishment, in what one local called “nuthin’ but a Northern lynching.” That effort culminates in this book, which is narrated crisply by the veteran actor George Newbern.
“Fire on the Prairie”
By Gary Rivlin. Read by George Orlando.
One of the finest political histories I’ve come across, Rivlin’s measured, well-paced account of the brief but transformative tenure of Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, is narrated without showmanship by George Orlando. Exceptionally capable and ambitious, Washington was stymied from the start by white revanchists on the City Council, leading to an acrimonious standoff known as “Council Wars,” and he died just a few months after winning re-election, in 1987. Nevertheless, he inspired a new generation of Black leaders — including a young Columbia graduate whose move to Chicago was informed by his admiration for the mayor: Barack Obama.
“Becoming”
By Michelle Obama. Read by the author.
Decades before she became the first Black first lady of the United States, Michelle Obama was Michelle Robinson, a child of Chicago’s South Side. For all the lurid (and inaccurate) imagery in the media of the predominantly Black neighborhood as a landscape of unmitigated despair, there were thousands of families like the Robinsons who came from the South, clawed their way into the middle class and were determined to see their children transcend the barriers of institutional racism. “Becoming” is read beautifully by Obama herself.
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