More "I, Pig"

Jack Muller was a Chicago cop and detective from 1946 until his retirement in the 1980's. I already wrote about his take on the 1968 Democratic Convention riots here.  He worked the 1952 Republican and Democratic Conventions (both were in Chicago that year) and was assigned to Douglas MacArthur at the former.  Muller describes the General as grim earnest and his Party as overly serious if anything. He ascribed it to their having been out of power for so many years.

Muller goes on to describe some debauchery at the subsequent Democratic Convention in August, 1952 and then concludes:

Of course, there was so much of this at the Democratic Convention, I could make a whole book out of it alone. And I'm not against men having their fun. It's just that you'd think nominating a candidate for President would be a little more serious, without being the gun-to-the-head affair it was with the Republicans. What a lot of kids are doing these days against the Establishment bugs me, but if they'd known the kind of 'pigs' who were running and trying to run the country in '52, they'd have started twenty years earlier. I know--it's the cops the kids call pigs. But we only do what we're told--by the Establishment, an Establishment whose rule of thumb is: 'No matter what the laws are, we're above them.' It really shows when they nominate a President.

My dad passed through Chicago almost 60 years ago and saw a parade for Robert Taft, a Republican nominee that year. link  He must have gotten within a few blocks of Muller. It's funny how real-life people and their stories can intersect in the past. But I digress.

"Kick in their asses if you have to"

Jack Muller (1923-2005)

Kids are constantly telling me, for instance, how 'the pigs' caused the 1968 Democratic Convention fiasco in Chicago and the Conspiracy Eight trial which followed. No way. There were no doubt some sadistic policemen brutalizing the demonstrators. Cops are people, and we have our rotten apples. But the majority of us, like the majority of you, would like to come home each night feeling we've done a good job. Only we can't if we're ordered to do a bad job, to act like pigs. 

The 1968 Democratic Convention? Mayor Daley--not the kids--provoked us. It's that simple. Take it from someone on the inside. 

When the Yippies first started coming in and trying to get permits to sleep out in the park and demonstrate, it was our wise Mayor who went right on TV and orated to this effect:
No bunch of hippies and yippies are going to come into this town and take it over. Our police department knows how to handle people who get out of line! 

He made the same waves in private that he did in public. And every policeman, high and low, felt the backwash. 'Daley wants us to keep the Convention quiet at any cost,' one of my superiors told us. 'Kick in their asses if you have to.' 

Not that some of the kids weren't deliberately trying to provoke violence. Not that some of them weren't high on drugs. Not that a lot of them weren't kids at all, but forty-year-old guilt-ridden liberals looking for purpose and excitement. But if you really want to know where it all really started, who is really guilty for the 1968 Democratic Convention fiasco, don't put it on the pigs. 

Blame the farmer.

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Excerpted from "I, Pig Or How The World's Most Famous Cop, Me, Is Fighting City Hall" by Jack Muller (with Paul Neimark) William Morrow & Co. New York, 1971.  The book is out of print but deserves to be republished. I first read it as a teen. I see that it is available used here.