The
Trial by TOM
HAYDEN
Despite
the Walker Commission's report asserting the culpability of the police, Chicago
authorities arrested eight antiwar and radical leaders and put them on trial for
conspiracy to incite a riot. Tom Hayden, one of those arrested, recounts his
experiences during a trial that gained national attention. The courtroom
exploded on numerous occasions, defendants shouted at the judge, and lawyers
were held in contempt. Black Panther Bobby Seale was gagged and chained to his
chair by order of the judge. His case was ultimately separated from the other
seven.
Our kids don't understand that we don't mean anything when we use the word "nigger" ... they just look at us like we were a bunch of dinosaurs ... we've lost our kids to the freaking fag revolution.
--Prosecuting Attorney Thomas Foran in a speech after
the trial
Our
crime was our identity.
Even the sympathetic press
misunderstood, billing our case as one of "dissent on trial." So did
Bill Kunstler [Chicago 8 attorney] in the beginning, when he spoke of
repression of "the spectrum of dissent" and implied that we differed
from other Americans only in our political opinions. Although there was a
certain amount of obvious truth in this claim, it always seemed superficial to
us.
The vague nature of the government's case
made us feel we were on trial for something deeper and unspoken. The charges
against us made no sense. We spent endless hours trying to comprehend what the
case was all about.
Against
our common sense the government kept insisting that the trial was not
"political," not about the Vietnam war, not about the Black Panther
Party, but simply the prosecution of a criminal indictment. It was, for the
government, a question of whether we had conspired to cross state lines with
the intention of organizing, promoting, or encouraging a riot. To prove its
case it relied on evidence from Chicago policemen, undercover and FBI agents,
Army and Navy personnel, two Chicago Tribune reporters, and only two
civilians with no apparent police connections....
We became the Conspiracy not because we
did anything together in 1968 but simply because we were indicted together. We
became closely knit because of the trial, and perhaps the government was
relying on this very process for its proof. By intertwining our names through
the testimony (as if the words and evidence reflected the reality of 1968)
while we sat together at the defense table for five months, it might begin to
appear to a jury that we always had been an interconnected unit. But evidently
it never convinced the jury, and it certainly made us feel strange, like
survivors of a shipwreck getting to know one another because we shared the same
raft.
As for concrete evidence of lawbreaking
activity, the government puzzled us further by introducing almost nothing....
Since the evidence of conspiracy and concrete illegal activity was so weak, the
thrust of the government's attack had to be carried out against our "state
of mind. " As we sat through the months of testimony about our
consciousness, we began to realize that the charges against us were really just
as total as the changes we wanted to make in American society. On the
surface there was evidence of conversations, speeches, and plots hatched in the
presence of undercover government agents. Many of these were wholly fabricated;
others were twisted accounts. The accurate ones-those recorded on tape-were
never difficult to justify legally. But just below the surface of the testimony
there was always the implication that we were dangerous and alien to the
America of the jury....
Our
underlying crime, the evidence of which was revealed every day in the
courtroom, was that we were beginning to live a new life style beyond that of
capitalist America. Our defense table was a "liberated zone" right in
front of the jury's eyes. The room itself was a sterile horror, shaped like a
box, the doors smoothly tucked into the walls, neon lighting casting
illumination without shadow, as if people did not exist. Paintings of British
and American historical figures hung above the bench and just below the Great
Seal of the United States. It was a heavy decorum. As many as twenty federal
marshals kept "order," instructing spectators that they could not
laugh, fall asleep, read, or go to the bathroom without forfeiting their seats.
The government's table, nearer the jury, was impeccably clean, the four-member
team invariably dressed in gray flannel or, in the case of Foran, sporty
gabardine suits. The jury, dressed neatly as well, obeyed their orders to say
good morning to the judge but otherwise remained quiet and expressionless
throughout the proceedings. The judge, his old man's head attached to his
floating robe like a bizarre puppet, called for respect in his gravely,
sonorous, vain tone. And there we were, supposedly the victims but somehow the
center of everything: our hair growing longer with each passing month; our
clothes ranging from hip to shabby; joking, whispering seriously, passing notes,
reading newspapers, and ignoring testimony and the rules of the judge;
occasionally looking for friendly jurors' faces but eventually giving up
andjust being ourselves. This behavior was the ultimate defiance of a court
system that demands the repression of people into well-behaved clients,
advocates, and jurors.
The conflict of life styles emerged not
simply around our internationalism but perhaps even more around
"cultural" and "psychological" issues. For instance, music.
When Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, Country Joe, Pete Seeger, and
others tried to sing for the jury, they were admonished that "this is a
criminal trial, not a theater." No one, including the press, understood
what was going on. From the judge to the most liberal journalist there was a
consensus that we were engaged in a put-on, a further "mockery of the
court." They seemed incapable of coming to terms with the challenge on any
deeper level. The court's concession was that the words to the songs, but not
the singing of them, were admissible. But this was a compromise that missed the
entire point. The words of "Alice's Restaurant," Ain't A-Marchin' Any
More," "Vietnam Rag," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone”,
and "Wasn't That a Time" may be moving even when they are spoken, but
the words gained their meaning in this because they were sung. To understand
their meaning would be to understand the meaning of music to the new
consciousness. From the beginning of rock and roll, there has grown up a
generation of young whites with a new, less repressed attitude toward sex and
pleasure, and music has been the medium of their liberation. When Phil Ochs
sang "We Ain't A-Marchin' Any More" in Chicago during the Convention,
it provoked a pandemonium of emotion, of collective power, that spoken words
could not have done. Singing in that courtroom would have jarred its decorum,
but that very decorum was oppressing our identity and our legal defense.
Or,
for instance, sex. Government attorney Tom Foran's post-trial statement about
the "freaking fag revolution" merely confirmed what we could see
throughout. Foran represented imperialist, aggressive man, while we, for all
our male chauvinist tendencies, represented a gentler, less aggressive type of
human being. Schultz kept returning to the phrase "public
fornication" as though the words themselves were a crime, since the
government introduced no testimony to show that Yippies had acted on this
threat (except once in a tree, according to an undercover agent). Allen
Ginsberg was cross-examined as to whether he had "intimate"
relationships with Abbie and Jerry. Physical affection between the defendants
and their friends and witnesses was always noted by either thejudge or the
prosecution for the record. The scene of Bill Kunsder hugging Ralph Abernathy
was particularly offensive to the judge, who declared that he had never seen so
much physical affection in my courtroom."
The
conflict of identity on this level was sharpest during Ginsberg's testimony....
The conflict came out into the open during Foran's cross-examination. Instead
of questioning Allen about anything he had testified to-such as pre-Convention
planning by the Yippies and permit negotiations-Foran asked him to recite and
explain three sexual poems apparently selected by the justice Department agent
at the table, a young, bespectacled, high-voiced, short-haired, blue-eyed young
man named Cubbage. The first was about a wet dream, the second about a
self-conscious young man at a party who discovers that he is eating an asshole
sandwich, the third about a fantasy of sleeping between a man and a woman on
their wedding night. At Foran's request Allen recited each one calmly and
seriously and then tried to answer the prosecutor's sarcastic query about their
religious significance.... When Allen left the stand we were in tears. Court
recessed a few minutes later, and Foran stared at Allen and said, "Damn
fag."
A
third example of the cultural conflict revolved around language. The
government's case was a massive structure of obscene and provocative language
attributed to us by police informers, language that the jury was supposed to
imagine coming from our mouths as they stared at us across the courtroom. Some
of the language was pure invention; most of it was a twisting of words that had
once been used by us. Through the testimony over language, we came to the
essence of the supposed "communication gap" between the generations.
The language of the Establishment is
mutilated by hypocrisy. When "love" is used in advertising,
"peace" in foreign policy, "freedom" in private enterprise,
then these words have been stolen from their humanist origins, and new words
become vital for the identity of people seeking to remake themselves and
society. Negroes become "blacks," blacks become "Panthers,"
the oppressors become "pigs." Often the only words with emotional
content are those that cannot be spoken or published in the
"legitimate" world: fuck, motherfucker, shit, and other
"obscenities." New words are needed to express feelings: right on,
cool, outta sight, freaky. New language becomes a weapon of the Movement
because it is mysterious, threatening to conventional power: "We're gonna
off the pig"; "We're gonna freak the delegates."...
Filtered through the mind of the police agent, language becomes
criminal. The agent is looking for evidence; in fact, he has a vested interest
in discovering evidence and begins with the assumption of guilt. Any reference
to violence or blood, by an automatic mechanism in the police mind, means an
offensive attack on constituted authorities. Our language thus becomes evidence
of ou@ criminality because it shows us to be outside the system. Perhaps our
language would be acceptable if it were divorced from practice. Obscenity has
always been allowed as part of free speech; it is the fact that our language is
part of our action that is criminal. A jury of our peers would truly, have been
necessary for our language to have been judged, or even understood. Or at the
very least, our middle-aged jury should have heard the expert testimony of
someone who could partly bridge the communication gap ....
Finally, the conflict of identities
always involved the racism of the court toward Bobby.