This Is Not the 1968 Convention. Could It Be 1860?

In the leadup to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, historians and pundits persistently drew ominous parallels to the disastrous Democratic convention of 1968, when police brutalized protesters of the Vietnam War and a divided party limped to defeat in November.

But Chicago has hosted more major party conventions than any other city, and there are plenty of other instructive precedents in history to explore. Especially as Vice President Kamala Harris generates excitement among young voters, it’s wise to look back to another Chicago convention, when a new candidate and a grassroots movement mobilized young people and changed the course of history.

In 1860, on the cusp of the Civil War, the Republican National Convention in Chicago not only took a chance on a one-term congressman named Abraham Lincoln, but introduced the nation to one of the largest, strangest and ultimately most consequential campaign organizations in U.S. history: the Wide Awakes.

Wide Awakes were something new in American politics: A massive, anti-slavery youth movement, uniformed in militaristic black capes and armed with torches, organized in “companies” that organized spectacular midnight rallies to protest slavery’s power over democracy. At a time when publicly criticizing slavery could get you egged, beaten or lynched — even in the North — the movement emerged ready to fight back. And some of them decided to make a show of force on the national scene at the GOP convention.

The test of the Democratic convention in Chicago this week is not just whether it will devolve into violence à la 1968, but whether it can galvanize voters like the Republican convention of 1860.

They began far from bustling Chicago, in orderly Hartford, Connecticut.

Launched by five white, working-class teens, they invented a striking uniform and electrified street-level campaigning with militaristic nighttime demonstrations. The founders were mostly in their late teens and early twenties, too young to vote at a time when the voting age was still 21. But they bristled at enemies near and far: the Southern enslavers who wielded massive power in government, the local Democrats who attacked Republicans in the streets and even the elders in their own party, “old fogies” who preached moderation and compromise on slavery.

Borrowing from 1850s slang for someone who was standing up against sleepy complicity, they called themselves “Wide Awakes,” and organized a force that could march, holler…