Читать книгу The Trial of the Chicago 7: History, Legacy and Trial Transcript - Bruce A. Ragsdale - Страница 19

Table of Contents

The judicial rebuke of Judge Hoffman prompted only minor notice in the national media that had so closely followed the trial. In many ways the cultural and political moment that defined the trial had passed by the fall of 1972. Even the judges of the U.S. court of appeals felt the need to remind readers of their opinion of how divided the country had been in 1968. The killings at Kent State University in May 1970 had changed forever the youth protest movement, which lost much of its political focus. Left-wing political groups like the Students for a Democratic Society had since splintered, leaving older leaders like Tom Hayden permanently alienated from the increasingly violent agenda of groups like the Weather Underground. The federal government again relied on the Anti-Riot Act to bring charges against anti-war protestors at the Mayday demonstration in 1971, when Abbie Hoffman, John Froines, and Rennie Davis were among those arrested, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit blocked most of the prosecutions, and the same court in 1973 found that the mass arrests of nearly 8,000 demonstrators had violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. The Chicago trial had established no precedent for use of the Anti-Riot Act against political demonstrators. The trial of the Chicago Seven lived on less as a legal milestone than as a cultural marker of dissident youth culture in the 1960s and the political divisions surrounding the Vietnam War.