Kathianne
08-26-2023, 01:14 PM
I vaguely remember the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago. My uncle was a lieutenant and had to get stitches from some encounter there. All of the assassinations, even Wallace being shot and paralyzed did make for a very confusing vision of where the country was going during elementary and upper elementary years.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-is-often-a-nation-divided-politics-election-gop-voters-debate-unrest-9100042a?st=2k941f26mybev4t&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
OPINIONCOMMENTARY
America Is Often a Nation Divided
U.S. politics today is ugly and broken, true enough. But the good news is that it was worse in the past, and it will get better again.
By Karl Rove
Aug. 25, 2023 3:03 pm ET
America is deeply divided. Our politics is broken, marked by anger, contempt and distrust. We must acknowledge that reality but not lose historical perspective. It’s bad now, but it’s been worse before—and not only during the Civil War.
Let’s look backward and start with the mid-1960s to early ’70s. The nation was bitterly divided over civil rights, the “sexual revolution” and an increasingly unpopular war in Southeast Asia.
The just and peaceful civil-rights protests of the 1950s and early ’60s were often met with state-sanctioned violence. Then Harlem exploded in 1964, followed by a riot in Philadelphia. Watts went up in flames in 1965; Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco the next year. A total of 163 cities—including Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, N.J., New York and Portland, Ore.—suffered widespread violence in the “Long Hot Summer” of 1967. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. Riots broke out in more than 130 American cities, with 47 killed in the ensuing violence. Two months later Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
That same year the nation’s most prominent segregationist, George Wallace, running for president as an independent, won five states in the Deep South. In 1972 he came in third for the Democratic nomination, 1.8 points behind the winner in total primary vote.
Beginning in 1965, the country was rocked by demonstrations over the Vietnam War, many of them student-led. In some instances, governors sent in the National Guard to restore order. After guardsmen killed four students in 1970 at Ohio’s Kent State, protests broke out on 350 campuses, involving an estimated two million people. Thirty-five thousand antiwar protesters assaulted the Pentagon in October 1967. An estimated 10,000 tried shutting down the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Four years later, thousands tried the same at the GOP convention in Miami Beach. The U.S. experienced more than 2,500 domestic bombings in 18 months in 1971-72.
Two presidents were driven from office during this period. Lyndon B. Johnson opted against seeking re-election in 1968 because of the war. Richard Nixon, facing impeachment over Watergate, resigned in 1974.
...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-is-often-a-nation-divided-politics-election-gop-voters-debate-unrest-9100042a?st=2k941f26mybev4t&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
OPINIONCOMMENTARY
America Is Often a Nation Divided
U.S. politics today is ugly and broken, true enough. But the good news is that it was worse in the past, and it will get better again.
By Karl Rove
Aug. 25, 2023 3:03 pm ET
America is deeply divided. Our politics is broken, marked by anger, contempt and distrust. We must acknowledge that reality but not lose historical perspective. It’s bad now, but it’s been worse before—and not only during the Civil War.
Let’s look backward and start with the mid-1960s to early ’70s. The nation was bitterly divided over civil rights, the “sexual revolution” and an increasingly unpopular war in Southeast Asia.
The just and peaceful civil-rights protests of the 1950s and early ’60s were often met with state-sanctioned violence. Then Harlem exploded in 1964, followed by a riot in Philadelphia. Watts went up in flames in 1965; Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco the next year. A total of 163 cities—including Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, N.J., New York and Portland, Ore.—suffered widespread violence in the “Long Hot Summer” of 1967. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. Riots broke out in more than 130 American cities, with 47 killed in the ensuing violence. Two months later Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
That same year the nation’s most prominent segregationist, George Wallace, running for president as an independent, won five states in the Deep South. In 1972 he came in third for the Democratic nomination, 1.8 points behind the winner in total primary vote.
Beginning in 1965, the country was rocked by demonstrations over the Vietnam War, many of them student-led. In some instances, governors sent in the National Guard to restore order. After guardsmen killed four students in 1970 at Ohio’s Kent State, protests broke out on 350 campuses, involving an estimated two million people. Thirty-five thousand antiwar protesters assaulted the Pentagon in October 1967. An estimated 10,000 tried shutting down the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Four years later, thousands tried the same at the GOP convention in Miami Beach. The U.S. experienced more than 2,500 domestic bombings in 18 months in 1971-72.
Two presidents were driven from office during this period. Lyndon B. Johnson opted against seeking re-election in 1968 because of the war. Richard Nixon, facing impeachment over Watergate, resigned in 1974.
...