The Trial of the Chicago 7: History, Legacy and Trial Transcript - Bruce A. Ragsdale

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the convictions and remanded them for retrial before a different judge in the district court. After the government presented its case in the retrial, the judge acquitted Froines of all remaining contempt charges.

      In the spring of 1971, Froines was arrested and again indicted on charges of violating the Anti-Riot Act following his involvement in the Mayday Tribe effort to shut down the federal government in protest of the war in Vietnam. The government dropped the charge. Froines worked for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the Carter administration. He later became a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles and, as of 2008, he serves as director of the UCLA Center for Occupational and Environmental Health.

      Tom Hayden (1939- )

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      Tom Hayden Courtesy of Bettman/Corbis.

      As a former president of the Students for a Democratic Society and principal author of the key manifesto of student dissent, Tom Hayden was one of the most prominent leaders of the radical political movements that emerged on college campuses in the 1960s. Hayden was born in Detroit, and grew up in Royal Oak, Michigan, where he attended the church of the radio priest and fervent anti-communist, Father Coughlin. Hayden went to the University of Michigan where he served as editor of the Michigan Daily and covered the 1960 Democratic convention for his school paper. He joined the Students for a Democratic Society, and as president of the group he drafted the Port Huron Statement that outlined a vision of participatory democracy and personal independence. For several years he worked as a community organizer with an SDS project in Newark, New Jersey. Hayden also became increasingly involved in opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War. In late 1965, Hayden made his first trip to North Vietnam, and he later returned to that country and Cambodia to secure the release of American prisoners of war.

      In the months before the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Hayden and his colleague, Rennie Davis, opened an office in Chicago to plan for a massive demonstration comparable to the anti-war mobilization in Washington, D.C., in October 1967. Although participation in the demonstrations never approached the organizers’ goals, Hayden remained as a chief organizer of the week’s events, even as the demonstrators seemed to abandon the focused political agenda that Hayden had advocated.

      Hayden was one of the six individuals cited by a Daley administration report blaming violence on “outside agitators,” and he was one of the eight demonstrators indicted in March 1969. As the defendants planned their strategy, Hayden convinced the defendants to hire Leonard Weinglass, with whom Hayden worked during his community organizing in Newark. Throughout the trial, Hayden was often at odds with other defendants over his determination to maintain a political focus in the trial. Hayden was impatient with what he saw as the unstructured cultural radicalism of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.

      The jury found Hayden not guilty of the conspiracy charge but guilty of the charge of travel with intent to incite a riot. The conviction was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and remanded to the district court, but the government declined to retry Hayden. Near the close of the trial, Judge Hoffman convicted Hayden on eleven counts of contempt and sentenced him to more than fourteen months in jail. The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed those criminal contempt convictions and remanded the charges for retrial before another judge. The government brought only one of the contempt charges against Hayden on retrial, and Judge Edward Gignoux found Hayden not guilty. Gignoux found that Hayden’s statement in court in response to the physical constraint of Bobby Seale was not responsible for the disruption of the courtroom, but rather that the disruption of the trial resulted from “the appalling spectacle of a bound and gagged defendant and the marshals’ efforts to subdue him."

      Following the Chicago trial, Hayden continued his work in opposition to the Vietnam War. While working with the Indochina Peace Campaign in 1972, he met Jane Fonda, whom he married. Hayden unsuccessfully challenged incumbent U.S. Senator John Tunney in the 1976 California primary. He won election to the California State assembly in 1982 and the California Senate in 1992 and served until 2000.

      Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989)

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      Abbie Hoffman Courtesy of Bettman/Corbis.

      Abbie Hoffman was one of the most visible and familiar of the Chicago Seven defendants, and his style of cultural politics and confrontation defined much of the defendants’ response to Judge Julius Hoffman and the government prosecutors. The two Hoffmans engaged in verbal sparring throughout the trial, trading one-liners and gaining much of the attention of the press.

      Hoffman was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and attended Brandeis University and graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. In the early 1960s, he became increasingly involved in social activism and organized northern support for the civil rights movement in the South. In the mid-1960s, Hoffman moved to New York City and organized political theater. His most famous event was in 1967 at the New York Stock Exchange, where, after notifying the press of their intentions, Hoffman and others entered the visitors’ gallery and tossed dollar bills to the trading floor. As Hoffman and other cultural radicals in New York planned political theater to coincide with the Democratic convention in Chicago, they devised the idea of Yippie!, a barely organized movement that would simultaneously mimic and mock a political party. Their plans for Chicago focused on a Festival of Life, which they envisioned as part music festival and part public presentation of counter-cultural lifestyle, all with the goal of attracting television coverage.

      Hoffman and fellow Yippie Jerry Rubin met with the National Mobilization Committee to coordinate demonstrations at the convention, and the Yippie leaders moved to Chicago to negotiate permits for their events in public parks, but the alliance between the cultural radicals and the political organizers was always uneasy.

      Hoffman was highly visible in Chicago during most of the convention week, organizing media events and speaking to crowds in Lincoln Park about expected confrontations with the Chicago police. On the night of the worst violence, however, Hoffman was in jail after his arrest for walking around the city with an obscenity written on his forehead in red lipstick. (He claimed he did it to keep his picture out of the newspaper.) Hoffman was among those cited by Mayor Daley’s report blaming the violence on outside agitators, and he was one the eight indicted for conspiracy and intent to incite a riot.

      Hoffman was one of the two defendants to take the witness stand, and his extended testimony was a tour de force of his absurdist, subversive verbal style. Hoffman’s performance in the courtroom was equally notable, seldom missing an opportunity to undermine the legitimacy of the proceedings.

      Judge Hoffman convicted Abbie Hoffman on twenty-three counts of criminal contempt but sentenced him to a comparatively light eight months in jail. The U.S. court of appeals reversed the contempt convictions and remanded them for retrial before another judge. The government prosecuted five of the contempt charges, and Judge Edward Gignoux convicted Hoffman on two of the charges and found him not guilty of the other three. Gignoux convicted Hoffman of the charge related to an extended verbal attack, complete with Yiddish insults, delivered against Judge Hoffman following the revocation of David Dellinger’s bail and on the charge related to Abbie Hoffman’s appearance in the courtroom in judicial robes, which he flung to the floor. Although Gignoux found that the judicial robe episode did not actually impede the trial, the behavior was “so flagrant, so outrageous, and so subversive" that it rose to the level of “an actual obstruction." Gignoux did not sentence Hoffman to any additional jail time. Hoffman’s conviction on the charge of intent to incite a riot was reversed by the court of appeals, and the government made no effort to retry him.

      Hoffman

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