Lessons from History
By George Heinrichs
For the past four years, May means the start of the 1968 Democratic Convention project for the 10th graders. The students spend weeks preparing for the project, researching the convention, their characters, and the issues central to the 60s; the war in Vietnam, Civil Rights, the rights of protestors, and policing. Then, over three class periods, the students reenact the chaos that was the convention. The delegates negotiate and vote, the protestors rabble rouse and recite poems, and the journalists record the proceedings, trying to relay to the American people what exactly is happening. In one class’s convection, there was a riot after the delegates manipulated the protestors into not protesting in order to hold a nominating vote for Hubert Humphrey and John Connally. In the other class, a protestor was killed, and George McGovern was made the nominee on a platform of escalating the war in Vietnam. Both classes decided that, based on the proceedings of their convention, the Democrats would lose to Nixon in the general election.
For each student, there is a moment in the convention where they are no longer pretending to be a historical figure, and they start to truly pursue what their character would want. A journalist hears an uncautious delegate speaking about another politician and says, “Oooh, I should record this!” A protestor hears of a vote and says, with genuine shock, “Why won’t they hear us?” In one convention this year, a student playing a delegate said, with unaffected frustration, “Can’t the protesters just be quiet and let us do our jobs?” This is the power of having students act as characters from history. It is easy to judge figures from the past, but once you have the incentives that a past figure had, it becomes easier to see why history unfolded the way that it did. The goal is not to justify the past but to better understand it. The students go into the convention thinking it’s a farce; they leave, seeing it as a tragedy.
In the project, there are no real winners. Each group of students plays out what could have happened if only other people had listened to them or followed their lead. If Lord Mayor Richard Daley hadn’t called in the police. If the protestors hadn’t marched right in the middle of a negotiation. Counterfactuals like this fill history. What if Robert Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated? What if the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, had spoken up about how he truly thought the war was going rather than having it sit unread in a secret report until a whistleblower brought it to the public’s attention? These questions can be informative, and they help us analyze history. But what I want the students to take away from the project is not a lesson in history but a lesson from history. A lesson on what happens if people find themselves unable to talk and listen to each other. A lesson on how even people who could agree can find themselves divided. There is still disagreement on what the 60s and the war in Vietnam mean for the country, but you cannot change the past. You can just hope that a new generation can learn enough to escape the gravity that pulls people and events into an orbit around a shared tragedy.