Revisiting the riotous year of 1968.
The news from around the world is of polarization, and conflict, incivility and rancour. Weren’t things better in the good old days?
How about 50 years ago, when ecstatic Trudeaumania swept the land?
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, recently elected to succeed Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberal Party and thus the newly-installed prime minister, called a snap election for June 25, 1968, hoping that the screams of teenage girls at his appearances would translate into votes at the polling booth.
He got his majority. It was neither as large as John George Diefenbaker’s crushing victory 10 years earlier, nor as large as Brian Mulroney would achieve 16 years later. The margin of victory was not as impressive as Trudeau’s loyalists in the national media insisted, but the manner of the victory made it memorable.
The night before the polls, at the St-Jean-Baptiste parade in Montreal, an amalgam of angry Quebec sovereigntists hurled bottles and debris at the prime minister in his reviewing stand. It was a massive parade, with some estimated 400,000 people on the streets (one quarter of Montreal’s population). Trudeau stood his ground in the reviewing stand as his security detail attempted to squire him away. It would be hard to imagine, say, Joe Clark or even Justin Trudeau making a such a show of defiance. (Diefenbaker may well have picked up the bottles and hurled them back.)
The memory of the riots remains more than the election. Canada has lots of elections. Riots are rather rare, especially political ones. But in 1968 it was not riots that were rare; indeed, in was remarkable that Canada’s riots, true to form, were relatively tame. It was a riotous year.
It is hard to imagine now what 1968 was like. Hands are wrung over the polarization of our politics, and the incivility of our common life. Fair comment to be sure, but it bears noting that in 1968 the unpleasantness of today would have been welcome in light of the violence that was spilling into the streets. In the summer of 1968, it was an open question about whether a peaceable common life would prevail.
America was aflame after the twin assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in April and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in June. The riots in Washington, D.C., were particularly intense in April and went on for four days; some dozen people were killed, stores looted, public building vandalized. The national capital was burning. So deep were the wounds that the 1968 riots were to scar some Washington neighbourhoods for decades to come.
Later that same summer Chicago would burn, block after block, as the world was watching the Democratic National Convention. Conflict in the streets between the police and the protesters made it seem as if America was at war with itself.
Rioting was a regular part of urban life in the United States. Nearly 25 years later, subsequent generations were shocked by the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. In 1968 they would not have been.
Overseas, “May 1968” and all that went under that banner brought France to the verge of revolution. Students joined striking workers and the very survival of the Fifth Republic, then only a decade old, was thought to be at stake. Charles de Gaulle fled Paris secretly to consult with the military leadership. Would it be necessary to deploy troops to maintain order? Would they agree to be so deployed? In the event, De Gaulle defused the immediate crisis by agreeing to new elections.
There were peaceful mass protests in various European countries, but the prospect of violence was haunted the atmosphere.
In communist Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring threatened the regime, and the Soviet Union invaded to tighten the grip of the evil empire on its satellites. Prague’s streets were retaken with lethal force.
In Canada, political violence would not become a regular part of life, though targeted terrorism would continue. The St-JeanBaptiste riots did not bring forth a military response, but two years later the FLQ crisis did, with Trudeau declaring martial law against an “apprehended insurrection.”
For years after the St-JeanBaptiste riots, security was nervous about Trudeau appearing at parades. I remember 10 years after the riots, going as a boy to the Stampede Parade in 1978. Trudeau served as a parade marshal. He rode a horse and cleverly took his son into the saddle with him. Who would throw anything at a little boy? In any case, the parade was peaceful.
Today, lawless protests take place at pipeline sites, and threats of illegal disruptions are made. But we are a long way from a mob hurling bottles at the prime minister. True, some years back environmentalists spiked trees to protest logging, but no cities burned.
Present behaviour is not excused by comparison to past misbehaviour, but it is salutary to remember. Fifty years ago in peaceable Canada, the problem was not rhetorical violence, but the real thing.