From the street to the ballot box
By the middle of 1967, some antiwar activists had begun asking whether protest alone could end the war. Large marches had shown strength but had not changed the president’s course. One response was to turn toward direct action, as in the October actions at Oakland and the Pentagon. Another was to take the argument into electoral politics. The year therefore saw two overlapping efforts: a campaign to deny Lyndon Johnson renomination, and a separate attempt to build an independent political movement. Neither was fully successful in 1967, but together they shaped the following year.
The Dump Johnson effort
The Dump Johnson movement grew mainly among liberal Democrats who disliked the war and believed it was destroying the party’s reform agenda. Its leading organiser was Allard Lowenstein, a former student leader and civil rights worker, who travelled to campuses and political gatherings seeking a candidate to run against the president in the 1968 primaries. His working partner Curtis Gans helped organise local groups through a body called the Conference of Concerned Democrats.
The difficulty was finding someone willing. Lowenstein approached several prominent figures. Senator Robert Kennedy, who had criticised aspects of the war, declined to run at that stage, partly out of concern that a challenge would be seen as personal ambition and could split the party. Senator George McGovern also declined. In the end, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota agreed, and announced his candidacy on 30 November 1967. His campaign belongs mostly to 1968, and it is covered elsewhere. The point for 1967 is that the party’s dissenters had, for the first time, a candidate around whom they could organise. A conference of the Concerned Democrats met in Chicago in early December.
Most political professionals thought the challenge was hopeless. An incumbent president had never been unseated in a primary in modern times, and Johnson’s position inside the party looked strong. Few expected that the result in New Hampshire in March 1968 would be so close.
The New Politics convention
The second effort was the National Conference for New Politics, which met in Chicago from 31 August to 4 September 1967. It was intended to bring together antiwar activists, civil rights groups, labour representatives and the New Left into a lasting political force. Martin Luther King was scheduled to address it, and there was talk of running an antiwar ticket in 1968, with King and Benjamin Spock mentioned as possibilities. Estimates suggest about 2,000 people attended, though precise numbers vary by source.
The convention proved a disappointment. A Black caucus, speaking for a large number of Black delegates, demanded a share of the votes well beyond its numbers and put forward a series of resolutions, including one condemning Israel’s actions in the June war. White delegates were divided, some supporting the demands as a form of justice, others seeing them as dictation. The resolutions passed, and many liberals and Jewish participants were upset. The conference broke up with little agreement about future organisation and no third-party ticket was agreed.
The failure showed difficulties that would recur: the relationship between white radicals and an increasingly assertive Black leadership, the gulf between liberals and the New Left, and the problems of building a lasting alliance out of single-issue activism. The pull of Black Power had changed how many Black activists viewed coalition politics.
Which path?
By autumn, activists faced a choice that divided them. Some, like Lowenstein, argued that working within the Democratic Party was the only realistic way to influence policy. Others, particularly the younger radicals who had helped plan the Pentagon demonstration, regarded electoral politics as a sideshow, a means of channelling dissent into the system that had made the war. A third group wanted a separate party, an idea that the New Politics convention had failed to carry through.
The divisions did not match any simple pattern of age or ideology. Students for a Democratic Society, for example, was increasingly sceptical of liberals, but many of its members would still volunteer for McCarthy in early 1968. Meanwhile, the pacifist and religious wings of the movement often supported both direct action and electoral work.
The road to 1968
The events of 1967 left the main outline of the next year in place. McCarthy would run in New Hampshire, Kennedy would reconsider and enter in March, and Johnson would announce in late March 1968 that he would not seek re-election, an event known as the Johnson withdrawal. None of that was visible at the end of 1967. What had changed was that the antiwar argument now had a route into the Democratic primaries.
The key point is that protest and politics were not separate. The marches created the climate of doubt that made a challenge thinkable, and the failure of marches to change policy pushed people toward elections. The political result, as it turned out, would be very different from what anyone planned.