Aside from raising 13 children, 85-year-old Macy Morse of Portsmouth has spent much of her life working for human rights. Morse’s political involvement began in 1960 with her work on John F. Kennedy’s campaign, and continues to the present day. She attended the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention that was held in Chicago. As an alternate delegate, Macy was in the thick of the action. 

“I supported Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota,” Morse says. “He was one of the outspoken senators opposing the war in Vietnam. He spoke up against it in 1967 and was persuaded to run for president against Lyndon Johnson. I was elected alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. We went out and attended the sessions every day in the stockyards. I had to wear an ID badge and put it in a machine so I could get in and out of the stockyards. Security was all over the place. They stopped me for not having my badge, and wouldn’t let me go until they’d taken me outside the stockyard building and into a trailer. They held me there until they got somebody from our delegation to come and verify who I was.

“Sometime later my father said to me, ‘The FBI got you, huh?’ I was astounded and said ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘They picked you up in Chicago.’ I don’t know how he found out. He was in Oregon and I was in New Hampshire, and I hadn’t told anybody. I think the FBI went to his door to find out who I was and what I was about.

“There were a lot of scary moments and lot of great moments at the convention. Eugene Daniel was a state official from New Hampshire, and also a delegate. He was very prominent in the Democratic Party at that time. He got on a bullhorn and shouted out our hotel window, “Police brutality!” The police were beating people up, and calling in the National Guard. Daniel got in a lot of trouble for that.

“I was an alternate delegate, so I didn’t go onto the floor like delegates do. If something happened to a delegate, and they got sick or unable to participate, then I would take their place. It gave me a lot of time to do things I wanted to do. On our way to the stockyards we would pass Grant Park, where the student protesters were gathered.

“At the park, the local police were helmeted and had batons. They’d formed a line in front of the park to hold the students back. One evening we were walking back to the hotel, and I said, ‘I’m going to go across the street and join the students.’ I asked a couple of the other delegates if they wanted to go, but they declined. I went anyway, and I talked to the students.

They were challenging me for supporting a Democratic candidate. They all said, ‘It doesn’t work. The system doesn’t work. All the candidates take money from oil. It doesn’t make any difference which one you pick.’ The group of students was from Wisconsin, and they were well educated.

“Suddenly, everybody was on their feet and there was a lot of yelling. The National Guard was coming down the street. They had Jeeps with barbed wire squares on the front. If anybody got in the way of the Jeep, they got pushed away by barbed wire. There were huge trucks with troops in them. The police moved out as the National Guard came in and took their place. The soldiers had rifles with fixed bayonets on them. It was a very difficult, scary situation.

“All the students were on their feet, screaming obscenities, among other things. I’m sure they were upset and terribly scared. The park was packed with kids, I have no idea how many. These seven young male students I had been talking with formed a circle around me within this pushing, matting throng of young people. The whole time that the shoving and pushing and shouting was going on, they protected me, and I felt absolutely removed from what was going on outside of that circle. It was an eerie feeling for me. They’d been arguing with me and didn’t want me to be doing what I was doing, yet they protected me from any harm.

“That night, Peter and Mary from Peter, Paul and Mary came out of the park and sang to help calm the students down. Once they got them fairly quieted down, Eugene McCarthy himself came out and spoke to the students and thanked them for being there. He said to take care not to get injured.

“It was very disheartening because after all of that McCarthy didn’t get the nomination. (Hubert) Humphrey got the nomination and ran against Nixon, and Nixon got into office. That was the last time I worked for a Democratic candidate. I’ve worked in other ways to make changes, but I felt disillusioned after that. “A lot of effort went into reaching out to people to bring them into the political system. When we would go to a mobile home park or a housing project, I couldn’t get a single person registered. The reason, they all said, was the system didn’t work. And you know, they’re right. They had reasons. I remember talking to an old couple in a housing project. They said, “We have Social Security, and we get by on that.” They didn’t want to bother to try to do anything else. I guess it would have been useless, in their life, to make any changes.

“I think you feel helpless unless you do something. I don’t do it to know how effective I am. I don’t do it with that purpose in mind. I do it because it’s the right thing for me to do. I really feel that way.” 

After this interview, Macy Morse walked from her Portsmouth apartment to Market Square and joined the Iraq War protesters who gather there every Friday. She is active in several political organizations and has played a major part in founding an environmental exchange program between Portsmouth and Severodvinsk, Russia, two cities with nuclear shipyards.