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Congress shall make no law . . . abridging . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution)

Chicago 10 tells the story of the trial of the Chicago Seven.

1968 was a very strange time. The Vietnam War was going full bore being fed by the draft. Opposition to the war was just reaching its peak. President Johnson had been forced out of the Presidential race. It was the year in which Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. In many ways it was a dark time in American history.

The Democratic Party (the party of LBJ) held its convention in Chicago. Thousands of war protesters also came to the city, organized by the Yippies and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe). Some of those involved were radical, many were not. Some of the leaders came to act nonviolently, but others vowed to use "any means necessary." In time the confrontations with the police led to violence. A national commission called this a "police riot" because of the role the police played in creating the volatile situation.

In the aftermath of the protests/riots eight men were charged with federal conspiracy and incitement to riot charges: Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. Some were Yippies, some from the Mobe; Seale was a Black Panther, and it's not clear how a couple of the defendants were included in the group. The trial was, even by standards of the day, a travesty. The presiding judge may well have been over his head with this group. The defendants did their best to make the courtroom part of their guerrilla theatre. In the end all were acquitted of conspiracy charges, five were found guilty of riot charges (and sentenced to five years in prison), two were completely acquitted, and Seale was severed from the case. The original Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven. All eight defendants and both defense attorneys (making the Chicago Ten) were sentenced to various terms in jail for contempt of court.

This film covers all of that, but it spends most of the time on the demonstrations. Although it was termed a police riot (and it deserves that designation) the demonstrators were extremely confrontational. The demonstration lacked the ability to control its people which is necessary for nonviolent protests to be effective. There were multiple causes for the violence that broke out.

The portions of the film dealing with the trial are done in animation. Certainly the cartoonish nature fits the tone of the trial. To be sure, it was a very serious trial. It serves to this day as an example of an attempt by the government to stifle dissent. In this case the dissent became part of the trial itself.

Personally, I'd have preferred more of the trial. It truly was a bizarre event, both as jurisprudence and as guerrilla theatre. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were both extremely out of line in their approach to the trial. Bobby Seale is an articulate man who was physically silenced when he spoke about the rights he deserved. The prosecution tried to saddle this group of symbolic defendants with the woes of Chicago. The judge made no effort to hide his sympathy with the prosecution.

There is a constant tension between the need for order and the rights of citizens. It may be questionable if all of those involved in the Chicago protests were within the intent of the phrase "peaceably to assemble," but certainly the idea behind the Bill of Rights takes seriously the idea that the people must be free to bring their concerns to a government that has gotten out of control. That struggle between order and rights is what was central in both the riots in Chicago and in the trial.

Watching all the archival footage of the protests and remembering back to that time, I recalled how important it seemed to people of my generation that we step up and stop our government from what we saw as an unjust war and to bring about fundamental changes in the way government is done. Then I thought back to one of the films I saw at the Palm Springs Film Festival, Children of Glory, about the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. In that film, too, the people took to the streets looking for change. In both cases the government responded by insisting on order. To be sure, the American response was not as violent as that of the Soviets in Hungary, but there is still a commonality. The basis of America's greatness is not the order that it maintains, but the freedom of the people to demand change and to call on the government to answer for what it has done.

While I can't condone all they did, I still consider the Chicago Ten (including the attorneys) as American heroes.