I was 18 in 1968 and could legally vote for the first time. But it was not the first time I was in a voting booth, nor the first time I pulled the lever to cast a ballot off into the void. My father used to take me with him to our local polling station, and behind the curtain he’d tell me which lever to pull: the one for the Liberal Party line. The candidates were usually the same as on the Democrat line, but the logo next to the party names was different—Liberal was a cracked Liberty Bell. I knew he supported the Democratic ticket, so why did he instruct me to vote Liberal?
Simple: He said he wanted to see more party options. Two major parties did not offer broad enough platform choices (which sounded like his complaint about certain restaurants). The Dems were usually his candidates, too, but he felt strongly that even they had many bad apples. (After all, historically Democrats were pro-slavery and adamantly Jim Crow.)
On the occasion of my first vote, I reflexively voted Liberal, too. I voted for Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. I did not enthusiastically do so, but I did not want to see the infamous red-baiter Richard Nixon assume the presidency. In 1960 he had already come a hair away from beating John F. Kennedy, who I had worked for as a 10-year-old volunteer at the local Democratic Club and the main headquarters across from Grand Central Station.
While most of my friends and co-workers working with me on underground papers (I was art director of the New York Free Press) were angry at Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats for prolonging the Vietnam War, and many took part in the 1968 Chicago DNC demonstrations, I was convinced that my first-ever vote should not go to waste. In principle I supported the Peace and Freedom party, but to vote for its candidate, Eldridge Cleaver, would be one less stone to throw against the real enemy: Richard Nixon.
Watching the love- and joy-fest that was last night’s opening ceremony of the 2024 Chicago DNC, I was reminded how angry, violent and lost my side was in 1968. I didn’t go to Chicago to demonstrate, but rather was tasked with laying out the Free Press pages devoted to the convention and police riot as our reporters phoned in stories of the rampage that bloodied protestors and bystanders alike. Like millions of others, I watched the Chicago melee on television. It was a defining moment in the history of the era.
After the dust and tear gas settled, the rift between old and young had become a canyon. My cohorts who could vote cast meaningless protest votes. But being on the left did not mean I was impractical. I held my nose and voted for Humphrey with the solace that he wasn’t the unthinkable Tricky Dick and just maybe he would live up to his otherwise solid liberal credentials and end the war.
So my first vote ever was not up and down the Democrat ballot, but the Liberal one—as was my father’s, and his immigrant father’s, too. We all lost that one.
