Battleground Chicago Frank Kusch (University of Chicago Press)
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These are regular guys who fought in World War II and Korea, lived in the bungalow belt, and found themselves on the fault line during one of the tectonic cultural shifts of the period. And every time one of them is quoted, the story comes alive. It’s hard to read their accounts of those days—even with their blatant prejudices flying in your face—and not feel some sympathy.
Former officer Joe Pecoraro: “When I came on, the attitude toward the police was very respectful. But that changed; the people changed; the Vietnam War changed everything.” Indeed, the war soured the prosperity-driven optimism of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society (not to mention his presidency), helped wreck New Deal coalitions, and left the country marooned in resentment—generation versus generation, black versus white, liberal versus conservative, hawk versus dove.
Kusch quotes a number of officers who felt they were put in a no-win situation by Mayor Richard J. Daley, who, among other things, closed the parks at 11 PM, forcing police to clear them and putting thousands of people on the streets with nowhere to go. One cop even casts Daley as a witting provocateur, saying the mayor “wanted to see a situation where we were going to beat the hell out of the demonstrators.”
In his preface to the new edition, Kusch claims he’s taken heat for giving these men the opportunity to go on the record. The view of the police as monsters has become establishment history, he says, and anything that smacks of revisionism is met with “vitriol.” But, as he writes, the book is less an attempt to “exonerate the actions of the police… than to explain them within a historical context and remove much of the hyperbole and mischaracterizations….” In other words, he wanted to at least give them the chance to let loose.v
