No One Was Killed : Documentation and Meditation : Convention Week, Chicago--August 1968 [Paperback]

John Schultz (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0966755715 | ISBN-13: 978-0966755718 | Publication Date: November 1969 | Edition: 2

What did happen in Chicago during August 1968 when the Democratic Party staged its Convention to nominate a candidate for President and a series of confrontations-vital, often raw, at times complex -erupted between demonstrating citizens and police and Guardsmen, the Democrats among themselves, and the black community, and the turbulent Convention melee? Novelist John Schultz, covering the Convention as reporter for Evergreen Review, observed almost every confrontation in the parks, streets, at the Hilton Hotel and the International Amphitheater for ten days and nights. No One Was Killed is his clear, impassioned history of what he saw and felt.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A more valuable factual record of events than the city's white paper, the Walker Report [Rights in Conflict] and Theodore B. White's Making of a President combined. -- Christopher Chandler, Book Week

An original and passionate contribution to the study of the continuing American crisis. -- Jason Epstein

John Schultz, in No One Was Killed, has managed marvelously to evoke what happened in Chicago and what it felt like to have it happen to you. He refuses to sluff off any of those ambiguous perceptions that amount to honesty...superior... We know where he was because Mr. Schultz has multiple vision and stylistic intensity commensurate with his feelings, opinions, and perceptions.... He demonstrates rather than insists on his engagement, and tracks each motive down the neural pathway to its origin, in the state and in himself... Because his account is so convincing, he is the one worth arguing with. -- John Leonard, The New York Times

Of all the book-length accounts I read of 1960's political and cultural confrontations, none (not even Mailer's Armies of the Night) is more lucid in its understanding of the torments and tropisms of the movements of the streets ... This is vivid writing that can stand as pure, suspenseful reportage... -- Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties

About the Author

John Schultz: Career Summary

As Writer John Schultz has been interviewed for and appears in the PBS film "Daley: The Last Boss" (January 1996) and the Arts & Entertainment American Justice Documentary "The Chicago Conspiracy Trial" (1994, 1995).

His most recent book is The Chicago Conspiracy Trial (Da Capo, 1993, revised and updated version of Motion Will Be Denied, with an extensive Afterword by the author), about the spectacular trial of eight famous activists indicted for crossing state lines with intent to incite antiwar riots at the Democratic National Convention of 1968.

A two-hour-and-ten-minute BBC radio drama, "The Chicago Conspiracy Trial" (which first aired in the UK in August 1993, and in the US in the fall 1993) was based in part on his book and features John Schultz as guide and historical commentator.

Mr. Schultz's other books include the short novel, "Custom," 3x3 and 4x4 (Grove Press, 1963, 1967): The Tongues of Men includes the short novel "Custom," which was at the center of controversy in the seizure of John Schultz's manuscripts by Customs officials in Laredo, Texas (Big Table, 1969), and No One Was Killed (Big Table, 1969, about the 1968 Democratic Party Convention).

His text, Writing From Start To Finish (Heinemann/Boynton/Cook) was published in August 1982, concise edition issued in 1990. The Teachers Manual for Writing From Start To Finish was published by Heinemann/Boynton/Cook in 1983.

Mr. Schultz contributed dream plays to Dream Theater, Body Politic, 1970-72. The play version of "Custom" was produced at the Body Politic Theater, 1973.

Mr. Schultz was contributing editor of Evergreen Review, a leading literary and cultural magazine in the 1960's.

Now editor of F Magazine, he edited the anthologies f1, f2: Novels in Progress, The Story Workshop Reader, and The Best of Hair Trigger, among others. He has given many readings of his fiction and nonfiction, from the Big Table readings at Second City in the 1960's to recent readings in San Francisco, Chicago, and other cities.

Full interviews with Mr. Schultz were published in Chicago Review, 1977; Writing, Fall 1984.

An interview and reading of portions of a Korean War short novel "Daley Goes Home" were aired on "New Letters on the Air," and placed in the New Letters archive, 1986.

He has published two short novel-length essays: "The Siege of '68" in The Reader (September 1988); and "The Fabulous Presumption of Disney World: Magic Kingdom in the Wilderness" in The Georgia Review (Summer 1988), republished in German in Merian.

Originator of The Story Workshop Approach to The Teaching of Writing Mr. Schultz originated The Story Workshop method of teaching writing in 1965 and has continued to develop and broaden it, developing expository and argumentative as well as fiction writing approaches. He has given presentations frequently at national meetings of the Conference of College Composition and Communication, the National Council of Teachers of English, and other major conferences concerned with the teaching of writing, including two presentations at the Modern Language Association.

Various Work Over the Years 1975: November: He gave one of the featured presentations at the SUNY-Buffalo-NCTE Research on Composing conference.

1977: December: College English published a version of the Buffalo presentation, "The Story Workshop Method: Writing from Start to Finish."

1978: The full-length presentation appears in Points of Departure: Research on Composing, eds. Charles Cooper and Lee Odell, NCTE.

1978-97: Summers: He has been Research Associate with the Department of English, University of California, Berkeley.

1982: He was keynote speaker at the Focus on Writing conference, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

1982: John Schultz's text, Writing From Start To Finish (Heinemann/Boynton/Cook) was published in August 1982, concise edition issued in 1990.

1983: the Teachers Manual for Writing From Start To Finish was published, (Heinemann/Boynton/Cook).

1993: He was keynote speaker at the Fairfield University Revival Institute for Teachers.

1990: He was co-executive producer and narrator of The Story Workshop videotape "The Living Voice Moves" (1990) which features Betty Shiflett and her Advanced Fiction Class.

1992: He was co-executive producer and narrator of The Story Workshop videotape "Story From First Impulse to Final Draft" (1992) which also features Betty Shiflett and her Advanced Fiction Class.

Misc.: He has conducted Story Workshop training programs for the Chicago Board of Education, the Dallas Community College District, and other colleges, and Writing Across the Curriculum Workshop programs with the Dallas colleges and the Council for Independent Colleges.

Until September 1995, he was head of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing and of the Master of Arts program in the Teaching of Writing, and chair of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College. He is now Professor Emeritus of Fiction Writing and member of the graduate faculty in Fiction Writing.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 310 pages
• Publisher: John Schultz Assoc; 2 edition (November 1969)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0966755715
• ISBN-13: 978-0966755718
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,037,634 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best account of Chicago '68, March 24, 2000

By 

Dean Blobaum (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No One Was Killed : Documentation and Meditation : Convention Week, Chicago--August 1968 (Paperback)

The events in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention vividly displayed the social divisions and conflicts of the Sixties. Thus it's an event that can serve as an entryway into understanding the period.

No one book can do justice to Chicago '68, but this one comes the closest. John Schultz takes you inside the International Amphitheatre where the convention was taking place as well as into the parks and onto the streets where the protests were. He captures the nightly confrontations at curfew time in Lincoln Park with cinematic clarity. Schultz's narrative sticks close to the street action, close to the acts of demonstrators, rather than the activities of the soon-to-be-famous so-called leaders. Read this to sense the full-bodied flavor of Convention Week 1968.

Lots of books on the Sixties are steeped in nostalgia and never cut through the foggy mists of time. This one is the original article, it will show you what it was to be there.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good read and timely, September 2, 2004

By 

Larry VanDeSande - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: No One Was Killed : Documentation and Meditation : Convention Week, Chicago--August 1968 (Paperback)

With protesters at the Republican National Convention reviving the practice of civil disobedience in September 2004, it might be time to relive a portion of our past where those tactics were regularly used.

"No One Was Killed" is one of the better reads about the week-long protests and police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago that produced the famous "Chicago 7" trial of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others.

The aura of that time is strongly captured by John Schultz, who paintakingly used historic records to recreate the events of that tumultuous week in "Boss" Richard Daley's Chicago.

One excerpt from the book captures an event that other books on the subject missed. At one point during the week, Hoffman led a group of protesters down a closed alley, where they became trapped by a wall on one end and Chicago cops & National Guard troops on the other.

Schultz compares it to a similar event that occurred during a protest in Mexico, where the government troops shot and killed the marchers. Thus, the title "No One Was Killed", an ironic twist on one of the bloodiest political campaigns in American history.

If you like history, politics or radicalism, or you have nostalgia about the 1960s, you will enjoy this book. I read it as a protester in the 1970s and it fueled my passion. It may or may not do that today but it will help you understand how something called the "generation gap" unglued America during the 1960s in what many of us then called the Second American Revolution.

5.0 out of 5 stars Revisiting the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention police riots, March 3, 2008

By 

John A. Field - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No One Was Killed : Documentation and Meditation : Convention Week, Chicago--August 1968 (Paperback)

A new film released this week entitled "Chicago 10" is generating nationwide interest in the police riots against protesters which took place during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. John Schultz's eye-witness account of what happened is not only a gripping description of what he saw--the gassing and bashing of kids, hippies, yippies, and new left radicals by the police--but also a perceptive analysis of why Mayor Daly and top police authorities who ordered the violence were never held accountable for the savegery they unleashed.
Schultz also shares with us the feelings and attitudes of Chicagoans who didn't participate in the protest marches but wanted to understand why the police unleashed wholesale violence again the marchers. "The middle class...wanted to find out that either the kids did not provoke the cops and the cops were unconscionable bullies,or that the kids were irredeemable anarchists. Their minds were not capable of coping with the fact that the cops were unconscionable bullies, and the kids did provoke them." We also learn that many of the protesters were free agents improvising as they went along, not the puppets of Yippie leaders who attempted unsuccessfully to organize them and were later tried for inciting the riots. "They tried to sing 'We Shall Overcome,' but it was a dead issue for these kids who regard violence as just another flicker of the serpent's tongue."
Schultz was gassed and clubbed on numerous occasions and points out that the police acted like wild men even after the worst of an evening's violence had concluded. "The cops stormed into improvised hospitals--such as the Church Federation on Michigan Avenue--and jerked transfusion needles out of arms and, broken bones or no broken bones, crammed the wounded into vans."
This is a disturbing, exciting, perceptive and beautifully written book. Schultz explains why the police correctly believed they would get away with their brutal behavior, and how their arrogance radicalized many of those who participated in the marches, including dozens of journalists and cameramen who were beaten. Hopefully this account of the Chicago police riots has prevented and will continue to prevent similair outrages from taking place in other American cities when citizens hold rallies and protest marches.