Trials: Back to Chicago

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It may be extravagant of Radical Organizer Rennie Davis to describe it as "the political trial of the century." But the trial of the Chicago "conspiracy" may well rank as one of the more significant legal confrontations of the decade between authority and dissent. The proceeding, due to open this week against eight radicals accused of conspiring to incite riots at last year's Democratic Convention, represents an extraordinary convergence of all of the political currents that have convulsed the U.S. during the '60s.

The Justice Department displayed an unwonted sense of history—even of theatricality—in selecting the defendants. They represent the total spectrum of dissent and ordinarily, observes Author Michael Harrington, "they would find it difficult to agree on the time of day." As in the conspiracy trial of Dr. Benjamin Spock and four other antiwar activists, some of the Chicago "conspirators" had not met one another before they were indicted.

Among them is David Dellinger, 54, a "revolutionary pacifist" who mourns the passing of nonviolent resistance and chides the younger radicals, most of them oriented to the Students for a Democratic Society, for their hysterical rhetoric. Tom Hayden is a gifted, mercurial writer and organizer who was a founder of S.D.S. Also indicted were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, leaders of the prankishly absurd Yippies, and Davis, the son of a White House economic adviser during the Truman Administration and an organizer for the National Mobilization Committee. Black Panther Bobby Scale came to the Chicago convention almost by chance. He was filling in as a speaker for Eldridge Cleaver, whose parole board refused to let him leave California. The other defendants are John Froines, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon, and Lee Weiner, a Northwestern University graduate student.

Already beatified among protesters as "the Chicago Eight," the defendants are the first to be indicted under the antiriot provision of the 1968 civil rights act. The provision was tacked onto the bill by a conservative Senate coalition led by South Carolina's Strom Thurmond. It may, in fact, be unconstitutional. A host of local, state and federal laws already cover acts of incitement to riot. What the antiriot provision defines as criminal is the "intent" to incite to riot. Thus the law prescribes a fine of $10,000 or five years in prison—or both—for anyone who "travels in interstate commerce or uses any facility of interstate or foreign commerce, including but not limited to the mail, telegraph, telephone, radio or television, with intent to incite riot." The concept of judging a defendant's intent is not particularly unusual; there are such offenses as assault with intent to kill. In dealing with a person's frame of mind regarding civil disorders, however, large and ambiguous questions arise involving the difference between the legitimate exercise of dissent and an unlawful intent to create mayhem.