On the morning of Sunday 18 August, I walked along the western perimeter of Grant Park in Chicago, near where the historic protests took place at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. As someone who came of age learning and writing about such a legendary convention, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated in a chaotic meeting after President Lyndon Johnson suddenly withdrew from the race, it was chilling to walk in those same steps as another convention prepared to play out amid potential protests over US support for Israel’s war in Gaza. The dysfunction on those streets had played a major part in electing Richard Nixon as president in 1968 and, I thought, a similar disorder could well assist Donald Trump’s campaign this year.

For all of Kamala Harris’ momentum since Biden’s withdrawal, the Democrats went to Chicago fearing that their replacement of Biden might not be enough to prevent Donald Trump’s victory. The parallels between 1968 and 2024 were so notable – a presidential withdrawal, vice presidential succession, and an unpopular war that has mobilised the youth and the left, all meeting in the same city – that Harris’ convention seemed almost predestined to follow the same script. To the relief of Democrats – and perhaps the disappointment of others – it did not. Yet perils resonant of those faced by the Democrats in both the 1968 campaign and subsequent elections may still lie ahead.

In 1968, a year of global revolution, Chicago had been a relative oasis until the Democratic convention. America’s Second City was not like other big cities. It had not experienced the deadly riots seen in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, or Washington, DC, even after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April. Urban violence was largely absent. It had hosted 23 previous national political party conventions, more than any other city. There were few hippies or agitators, and the reason for the relative harmony was Mayor Richard Daley. He had been re-elected in 1967 with 73 per cent of the vote, capturing all 50 of the city’s wards, and had chaired the Illinois delegation to the Democratic Convention every year since 1956.

The party chose Chicago – or ‘Czechago’, as protest leader Jerry Rubin called it – as the site of its 1968 convention partly because of the strong security. Daley had at his disposal 12,000 police, 7,500 Illinois National Guardsmen, a similar number of US Army troops, and 1,000 federal agents from the FBI, US Secret Service, and others. The Democrats wanted to be prepared in case of a mass demonstration like the one that had marched on the Pentagon in November 1967. Even the manhole covers were tarred shut to prevent protesters from planting bombs. Daley ordered his police to shoot arsonists and looters – arsonists to kill, looters to maim and detain.

Nonetheless, wild rumours circulated about planned disruptions to the convention: radicals were going to add LSD to the city water supply, people impersonating chefs would drug delegates’ food, fake taxis would take delegates to Wisconsin, and Humphrey’s trousers would be pulled down while he was speaking at the convention podium. The protest leader Abbie Hoffman threatened to send 230 ‘sexy’ members of the Youth International Party to Chicago to seduce delegates’ wives, daughters, and girlfriends.

Hubert Humphrey had been labelled ‘the happy warrior of our generation’, for his passionate advocacy of social justice as a senator from Minnesota and he had built a legacy as a tireless champion of the Great Society programmes and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As vice president, however, Humphrey had become inseparable from the Johnson administration’s war in Vietnam. Appearing on Meet the Press on the eve of the convention, Humphrey sounded more like a man who had conceded defeat than one near the pinnacle of his political career. He knew the chaos and anger that awaited him.

Humphrey arrived in Chicago under cover of darkness, with no crowd to welcome him and no cameras, only a bagpipe band. Eugene McCarthy, by contrast, was greeted by a crowd of 10,000 supporters. Even Mayor Daley – who still hoped the convention would draft Johnson back into the race – wanted nothing to do with Humphrey. Anti-war activists trailed him for most of the campaign, armed with signs like ‘Dump the Hump’ and, in a play on his initials, ‘HHH: Hitler, Hubert, and Hirohito’.

Near the International Amphitheater, protesters set up tents, walked around naked, smoked pot, and urinated and defecated where they chose. ‘We were a public display of filth and shabbiness, living-in-the-flesh rejects of middle-class standards,’ Jerry Rubin wrote in his memoirs. In a little-noticed op-ed in the Chicago Sun Times, not published until 1976, after the statute of limitations had expired, Rubin wrote: ‘We wanted disruption. We planned it. We were not innocent victims… Guilty as hell. Guilty as charged.’ The conflict to come marked the end of peaceful resistance to the Vietnam War. From then on, protesters were increasingly willing to take direct action, not just against American involvement in Vietnam, but against the system that had produced the war.

The protesters in Chicago were not the poor or downtrodden, but white radicals, many from middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds. ‘I supported the Vietcong and selective violence here at home,’ Rubin wrote. ‘Though I am a white middle-class American, who enjoys a good meal and the luxury of comfort, I nevertheless share the feelings of extremist revolutionaries.’ However, Rubin, more inclined to use the convention to cement the celebrity status given to him, did not speak for all other protesters. Many were under 21 and thus unable to vote. They were not there to influence the convention but to state their refusal to accept the American political system.

Images of police beatings became the thing that most people would remember or learn about the convention. There is no question that they used excessive force, that it violated the civil rights of innocent protesters, and it was likely sanctioned by Daley himself. There was considerable sympathy for the police too, however. ‘The baiting of the police was incredible,’ Humphrey’s physician, Edgar Berman, wrote later. ‘There was no doubt police brutality in Chicago, plenty of it, but I saw provocation that few men could tolerate.’ A Gallup poll showed that a majority of Americans supported the police, 56 to 31 per cent.

Most protesters believed Humphrey was the wrong candidate at the wrong time. When they were denied access to sleep in parks during the convention, open conflict between them and police broke out. Provocations included spitting in the face of officers, throwing bags of urine and condoms filled with faeces, defacing the interior of the Hilton hotel with human excrement, and dropping beer bottles and cans containing urine and faeces from open windows onto those below. ‘We were dirty, smelly, grimy, foul, loud, dope-crazed, hell-bent and leather-jacketed,’ Jerry Rubin wrote in his memoirs. ‘We pissed and shit and fucked in public.’ Abbie Hoffman also sought to create the greatest political theatre possible in Chicago, and understood that the cost would be borne later. ‘Because of our actions in Chicago, Richard Nixon will be elected,’ he said.

Humphrey’s attention in Chicago was diverted from the protests to even greater problems inside the convention hall, with Eugene McCarthy’s supporters deeply unhappy with the granting of the nomination to the vice president. During his speech nominating the late entrant, George McGovern for president, Senator Abraham Ribicoff went off-script and directly criticised the heavy-handed police tactics being used against anti-war protesters outside the convention. He accused Daley’s police force of using ‘Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.’ The remark infuriated Mayor Daley, who was sitting on the convention floor. Daley, known for his tough, machine-style politics, reportedly shouted back at Ribicoff. Daley stood up and shouted from the floor, ‘Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home!’

In his late-night speech accepting the nomination, Humphrey did his best to calm the chaos both outside and within the hall where there had been a drawn-out battle over the platform between the moderate and liberal wings of the party. While it had been inevitable that Humphrey would become the nominee, Johnson refused to relinquish full control of the process and never allowed his vice president to define his own independent positions.

Humphrey tried to patch up their differences during his acceptance speech. It was not the radical, gauntlet-hurling speech that many wanted him to make. It was, however, an elegant address, a classic Humphrey speech that had something for everyone and drew upon the history of the Democratic Party. He paid tribute to his political heroes, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy. He thanked Johnson, called for party unity, praised Eugene McCarthy, and reminded Democrats that ‘we need a state of law and order’.

Earlier in the convention, he had thought it would be a nice touch to include a quote from St Francis of Assisi. When it was stripped out in a late round of editing, Humphrey did not take issue. He reinserted it from memory during his delivery: ‘Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, love. Where there is darkness, light.’

Hubert Humphrey and the Democratic Party came out of the 1968 convention divided and scarred. In 2024, however, Harris left Chicago with a broadly united party, supported by a series of rousing speeches from the grandees of the Democratic establishment. The ghosts of 1968 had been exorcised; the protests over Israel’s war in Gaza were small and drowned out by the excitement generated by the Obamas, Tim Walz, Oprah Winfrey and all the champions of Harris and the Democratic Party’s vision for America. With a precedent of such unedifying chaos and misery, the Democratic Party was able to excel beyond the stark warnings of history.

After the head-spinning two months since the Trump-Biden debate on 27 June, the assassination attempt and the president’s withdrawal, America may start to experience something more like a traditional presidential race. Both tickets are now official. Labor Day, the first Monday in September, will serve as the starting line for the high season of the campaign. Both sides have agreed to at least one debate – although squabbling over the ground rules continues. Ballots will be finalised, and early voting will begin. While not much about the campaign has been normal up to now, familiar rituals will return.

Kamala Harris will continue to face the challenges of history, however. Harris is a Californian, from San Francisco, who ran a very liberal campaign for the presidency in 2019, and now has to broaden her appeal across the country and political spectrum. Harris ultimately confronts a dilemma experienced by every presidential candidate of repositioning her views and policies for the whole country. Successful presidential candidates win by targeting centrist voters – even Barack Obama ran largely as a moderate in 2008.

Harris might not have needed to assuage angry liberal protestors as the Democrats did in 1968, but American political history offers important warnings about the dangers of continuing a campaign for the presidency from the left. In 1972, for example, George McGovern of South Dakota ran on a campaign of opposition to the Vietnam War, amnesty for draft dodgers who fled the country, and reducing defence spending. That year, the columnist Robert Novak quoted an anonymous Democratic Senator: ‘The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalisation of pot. Once middle America – Catholic middle America, in particular – finds this out, he’s dead.’ McGovern lost in a 49-state landslide to Richard Nixon, losing even his home state. In 2007, Novak revealed that his source was in fact Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, McGovern’s own running mate.

A liberal campaign and candidate can be easy for an astute Republican opponent to decry as irresponsible. In 1984, former Vice President Walter Mondale of Minnesota ran on a campaign of raising taxes and improving the federal deficit by lowering defence spending. His charismatic opponent, Ronald Reagan, knew what to do. Quoting Mondale’s rival in the primaries, Reagan said the former vice president ‘has just promised everything to everybody with no thought of how it’s going to be paid for’. Presenting Mondale as reversing positions he held during the Carter years, Reagan quipped: ‘But just when you’re beginning to lose faith, you find there is some constancy. The old Mondale increased your taxes, and the new Mondale will increase them again.’ Mondale also lost in a 49-state landslide, winning only his home state.

McGovern and Mondale were doomed because they did not pivot to the centre. All other Democratic nominees in the modern era have run their autumn campaigns largely as moderates who could bridge both sides of their party while also making inroads with independents and some crossover Republicans.

The precedent of 1968 also raises the unavoidable fact that only one sitting vice president has won the presidency in the past century. The reason is because, as Hubert Humphrey found, of the awkward task of running on both change and continuity simultaneously. The candidate must excite the party’s base without alienating their political patron. When the media honeymoon ends, they need fresh policy proposals to maintain the excitement level – and that’s where potential conflict creeps in that can be capitalised on by the other side.

Yet the best guide for the Harris campaign may ultimately be Hubert Humphrey’s run in 1968, a reminder of that year’s lasting importance. Like Harris, Humphrey was originally from the liberal wing of the Democratic party but his four years with Johnson forced him to shift closer to the centre and into the difficult role of being the chief defender of an unpopular administration. The issues of the 1968 campaign were also not the preferred subjects for Democrats: an unpopular war, concern about the economy, inflation, and rising crime. Richard Nixon had no personal prestige invested or past positions to defend and he could easily present himself as a better alternative. Democrats, on the other hand, had controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House since 1961.

Humphrey initially struggled under the weight of his association with LBJ as he sought the presidency. Every comment was measured against Johnson’s statements by those looking for any perceptible difference between Humphrey and the sitting president – a figure who also remained very much in charge during his final months. And if Humphrey suggested a new idea, a critic could easily ask why it had not been implemented over the previous four years. Humphrey could not escape, even as he tried; anti-war protesters hounded him throughout the campaign as a surrogate for LBJ, even though his positions on ending the Vietnam War were closer to the views of the protesters than those of Nixon.

Harris confronts similar issues of finding the right balance between continuity and change, especially in the shadow of an unpopular president. Humphrey ultimately realised that his position as vice president and his campaign strategy would doom him if he carried on. Late in the 1968 campaign, a few weeks before the election, he adopted a new approach.

Democratic consultant Vic Fingerhut argued that Humphrey should stop talking about foreign policy, which had been a Republican strength since the Eisenhower years. He should not mention the war in Vietnam, because it would be a reminder to voters that, because it started under Democrats, Republicans would be better positioned to end it. He should stop the appeals to perceived elites, who would come around eventually since they had nowhere else to go. Instead, Humphrey should exploit nostalgia by reminding voters what Democrats had done historically with the economy, jobs, education, and social security.

Humphrey shifted away from Johnson and returned to his roots, presenting himself as heir to a longer tradition of Democrats from the New Deal onwards. The gap in polls narrowed and, as the campaign drew to a close, it appeared that Humphrey could win. Though he ultimately lost, the conjecture of what could have been had he pivoted earlier spread. In retrospect, had Humphrey emphasised traditional Democratic domestic policy strengths when he was unexpectedly thrust into the campaign in April, his campaign could have coalesced around a clear and compelling theme much sooner. By focusing on domestic issues and allowing Johnson to manage the unpopular Vietnam War, Humphrey might have avoided a rift with the president, too. Like Nixon was able to, he could have minimised discussion of the war, spotlighted the achievements of Johnson’s Great Society, and outlined how he would continue those initiatives, potentially strengthening his campaign and avoiding early missteps.

Can Harris make a meaningful pivot to the centre, and to the middle of the country, which Democrats have largely conceded? Thus far she has risen to the occasion, but her steepest climb lies ahead. She needs to quickly present herself as a politician fit to be in the company of the pantheon of progressives descended from FDR and his shaping of the modern Democratic Party.

In Chicago, America properly saw Harris for the first time. She was no longer on a crowded primary debate stage as in 2020 or simply backstopping President Biden as she did the last four years. Her energy and enthusiasm were infectious and she will influence the party – and a political system in need of some optimism – for many years to come. I watched delegates and VIPs arrive in Chicago demonstrating a palpable level of energy not seen in American politics for years. Kamala Harris is no Obama, and Democrats should not look to replicate the excitement of 2008. What I saw from her was much closer to the spirit of the 1968 ‘Happy Warrior’, Hubert Humphrey, a spirit which, if sustained, may carry her to the presidency.