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The times were tricky in Chicago.

The incumbent president of the United States, a Democrat eligible for reelection, was not the party’s choice to serve another term. As the Democratic National Convention convened in Chicago in 1968, the party’s establishment coalesced behind the incumbent vice president, Hubert Humphrey.

Racial tensions and riots, political assassinations, and a deadlocked war overseas left a sense of powerlessness — and righteous anger — among people across the United States. Americans openly voiced their distrust of the institutions, leaders, and democratic processes.

Under these unfavorable circumstances, Daniel Inouye carried the honor of giving the convention’s keynote address to a broken Democratic Party and anxious country. In that season of chaos, few to none would ultimately project as constructive — or enduring — a vision as Daniel K. Inouye, the junior U.S. senator from Hawaii.

In eras beset with division, Inouye’s timeless vision saw civic engagement with republics and their institutions as a ready answer to periods of crisis and chaos. Less than a month after the Democratic Party met once again at Chicago in 2024 to nominate Kamala Harris, Inouye’s message produces an enduring, cogent message for a universal, nonpartisan faith in civic virtue.

The Selection Of Inouye

The process for finding a speaker started in early 1968, months before the assassinations of either Martin Luther King Jr. or Robert F. Kennedy. The demure Inouye emerged as the party’s answer to questions about where the Democratic Party — and the United States — could look ahead with the attitude projected by Sen. Kennedy.

In conducted in May 1969, Inouye produced a narrative of his selection as the keynote speaker. In January or February 1968, John Bailey, the Democratic National Committee’s chair, called Inouye to ask if he would consider serving as the party’s keynote speaker. He joined a list of a dozen potential speakers.

Meanwhile, other events pressed on the U.S. Senate’s conscience. Following King’s assassination on April 4, riots rocked urban centers across the United States throughout the spring and summer of 1968.

In the U.S. Senate, Inouye represented a Hawaii admitted into the union less than a decade earlier. Upon learning of King’s assassination, Inouye’s colleague, Robert F. Kennedy, for the people of Indianapolis to abstain from rioting.

“What we need in the United States is not division,’ Kennedy told the crowd, ‘what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

In May 1968, Bailey told Inouye that he was one of three finalists.

In early June, Inouye got another call from Bailey. Inouye would become the Democratic National Committee’s choice on June 5. “So the press release was made and the following day everything collapsed,” Inouye recalled a year later.

At 43, Inouye was only a year older than Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968.

As the keynote speaker, Inouye needed to open the convention, setting the stage only weeks after the Republican National Convention in Florida. Bailey and the DNC gave Inouye effective control over the speech’s content and delivery.

Inouye made three fateful choices about the speech: 1) it would be comparatively short by historical standards; 2) it would be directed to those outside the convention’s halls (i.e., nonpartisan); and 3) the speech’s tone would be “somber” and “serious.”

No space was left for traditional partisan frivolity because, as Inouye put it, “I didn’t think we had the luxury of resorting to this type of demagoguery.”

By early August, the assassinations of King and Kennedy, the war in Vietnam, former Vice President Richard Nixon’s ascendant campaign cast long shadows over the Democratic Party.

The Speech

“The keynote address at a national political convention traditionally calls for rousing oratory,” Inouye told assembled in Chicago on Aug. 26, 1968. “I hope to be excused from this tradition tonight. For I do not view this occasion as one for either flamboyance or levity.”

The result was an incredibly nonpartisan address.

With no mention made of Republicans, Inouye rebutted then-former accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for president.

Nixon’s speech, like , fed on a tangible fear for America’s future. The decent and law-abiding citizens of America, many of whom were seeing Chicago Mayor Richard Daley outside the convention’s halls, needed leadership that would end the deadlocked war abroad and restore civil disorder at home.

Nixon appealed to fear, while Inouye appealed to hope. It became an appeal to citizens and their agency as actors in a democratic society of republican institutions. “The issue before all of us in such a time is how shall we discharge,” Inouye argued, “how shall we honor our citizenship.”

The notion of progress — and whether the country could truly progress — bounded together in a singular idea of citizenship untethered by fear. The citizen, as steward of a republic, needed to engage in a democratic manner which was constructive, not destructive, to their environment.

“Man the social animal has always craved order,” ruminated Inouye. “(Man) has made the most essential function of his government the maintenance of some level of order. Chaos and anarchy have never been more than preludes to totalitarianism.”

To be clear, Inouye opposed the inherent injustices of racism, the immorality of war, and the anarchy of blind opposition to democratic institutions.

This is a video copy of Inouye’s speech, republished here with permission from the University of Hawaii West Oahu’s and the :

“Let us not tempt those who would hide the evil face of racism behind the mask of law and order,” exhorted Inouye.

While necessary to guarantee a functioning society, law and order were not a justifiable mask for those who rejected hope.

If Inouye harbored one fear, it was an apathetic indifference to the causes of societal ills. Where apathy sparked anger and destruction, Inouye feared “the beginning of a cancerous growth of doubt, suspicion, fear and hatred that will gradually infect the entire populace.”

With biblical flourish, Inouye called on Americans to resist the temptation to turn away from the hard work of making the country a better place: “Let us also resist the temptation to apathy. We can never cure the causes of violence with indifference.”

Violence, whether expressed in the form of anger after a leader’s assassination or following a free and fair election election’s outcome, was not the answer.

To build that President Johnson partially realized through the , societies needed to empower citizens who responsibly stewarded republics of law and order.

Republics like the United States and their communities required both the 1) ideas and energies of the young and 2) the talents and participation of the responsible. Such actors, or citizens, were not only protesting the faults of the past.

The Vietnam War needed to end. The civil disorder needed to subside. Citizens needed to steward a republic that might heal from the wounds of 1968.

“Let us plant trees and grow new opportunity,” Inouye declared. “Let us build not only new buildings but new neighborhoods.”

Described by The New York Times as “unusually candid,” did not hide the nation’s problems. Instead, it directly aired America’s grievances without resort to hate or fear.

The message’s stoic pragmatism was valiant, and perhaps too far ahead of its time. Even if Inouye was right, his appeals became retrospectively tragic. One individual who had watched Inouye in 1968 never forgot his remarks. “Inouye struck a good balance,” President Bill Clinton wrote in his 2004 memoir, “but things were too far out of kilter to be righted by the power of his words.”

Inouye’s Call for Citizenship

Three days after Inouye’s address, a secret caught a conversation between President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Humphrey.

Johnson wanted Humphrey to select Inouye as his running mate. Johnson knew no one could say a bad thing about Inouye. Inouye was an answer to every problem that Humphrey faced and a natural foil to Nixon. Everyone in the Democratic Party — including segregationists — liked Inouye.

“I don’t know why,” Johnson told Humphrey. “But they all — they just — I think one thing is that they just look at him and see that he — they can’t fuss at him and say he doesn’t love peace. God knows he wants peace more than anybody, and it’s quite a contrast with [Nixon’s running mate] Agnew and [the] civil rights thing and Nixon.”

Humphrey did not pick Inouye. While Inouye won a second term in 1968, Humphrey lost the U.S. presidential election by a small margin. Inouye served as Hawaii’s U.S. senator until his death in 2012.

Beyond election cycles dominated by hope and fear, Inouye’s practical remedy offers a productive and perpetual program for solid, simple politics. It’s easy to fall for fear. It’s much harder to take responsibility for one’s fate in a complicated society laden with bills and other burdens.

In a place like Hawaii, Inouye’s exhortations can take a local dimension for those frustrated with the regular hums of apathy, corruption, anger, and resignation. Inouye’s stoic message of critical, substantive engagement with the political process for productive ends was a true argument for real, organic democracy.

To meet tricky times, we don’t need ignorant fear or naked hope. We need citizens.