by John Beckman
Kurt Vonnegut called Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman a “holy clown.” Dashing, wild-eyed, raven-haired Hoffman had been (like Kesey) a college wrestler, also a psychology T.A. at Berkeley, a deeply committed activist in the civil rights movement, and was a divorced father of two boys when, at age thirty-one, in 1967, he moved in with his new girlfriend, Anita Kushner, on New York City’s Lower East Side. Kushner, then twenty-five, had also studied psychology, had also worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and was, in his words, “a born rascal.” Their neighborhood was the center of East Coast radicalism, and soon the couple became its radical royalty, opening their doors to wayward youths and the likes of needle-popping Janis Joplin. Like the Haight-Ashbury, the Lower East Side drew what Hoffman called the latest “waves of immigrants” into its run-down tenement houses: “They came not by sea, but from within America,” and they lived under the same septic conditions. Most of these “immigrants” were disaffected youths, prey to dealers and pimps. The older crowd of activists, like Hoffman and Kushner, mentored them and helped them to get organized. This older crowd also provided free professional services, in an effort to wriggle themselves out of what Hoffman called the “strait jackets” of their careers: “Actors created street theater groups. Lawyers volunteered time for serious busts. Medical students set up a free clinic.” Leaders and organizers learned the ways of the street and in turn became “instigators” of hippie “style and values.” East Village radicals like the clean-cut Hoffman grew their hair as a sign of resistance, and commitment. Not a costume they could wear on the weekends, bushy hair, as Hoffman saw it, welcomed the kind of abuse typically hurled at blacks and Puerto Ricans. During their early months together in New York, Hoffman, Kushner, and their friends ran a free store that was frequently raided by cops. In California Diggers fashion, they didn’t advertise its address; they made interested patrons find it themselves.
In March 1967, they attended Central Park’s Be-In, and Hoffman dressed as a gold-painted Easter Bunny. In April they formed a sixteen-member “Flower Brigade” and marched in a pro–Vietnam War parade; trailing a troop of Boy Scouts from Queens, identified only by flowers and flags, they were set upon by a “Flatbush Conservative Club contingent,” who punched them, kicked them, spat, hurled beer cans, and—rather quaintly—tore up their flags. In May, they booked a tour of the New York Stock Exchange under the Digger code name George Metesky—New York City’s “Mad Bomber” of the forties and fifties. They arrived in a group of eighteen pranksters and showered the trading floor with money that Hoffman had earned as an employee of the city’s Youth Board program. His message was that he didn’t do such work for the money and that, more important, “money should be abolished.” As predicted, they caused a money-grubbing frenzy that briefly stopped the ticker tape. A tourist who had joined them in the prank “got the point”: “I’m from Missouri and I’ve been throwing away money in New York for five days now. This is sure a hell of lot quicker and more fun.”
Hoffman and Kushner got married in Central Park, during New York’s own Summer of Love, and were celebrated by three thousand invitees. And on October 21, during the biggest antiwar demonstration of the decade, they joined student leader Jerry Rubin in diverting some two hundred thousand peace activists from the Washington Mall, across the Potomac, and up to the Pentagon. They intended to “levitate” it and “exorcise” its evil spirits. Though this mystical activity had a solemn purpose—complete with witches and Allen Ginsberg’s Tibetan bells—Hoffman and friends played up its antic side. Anita dressed as Sgt. Pepper, Abbie as a Native American Uncle Sam, and they distributed two truckloads of “water pistols, smoke bombs, Halloween masks, and noisemakers” among the protesters. The water pistols were loaded with disappearing purple ink, a mystery fluid that, in the months before, they had led the straight press to believe was an on-contact psychedelic aphrodisiac called “Lace”—slyly rhyming with the “Mace” that police had threatened to use on the crowd. America watched with rapt attention: Would they levitate the Pentagon? Would Lace cause the biggest orgy in history? All of their witchcraft and pranks and flowers, however, didn’t soften the military’s head-bashing response—an armed offensive on the peaceful crowd that they called “the Wedge.”
The Yippies were born on New Year’s Eve 1967, when Abbie, Anita, Jerry Rubin, Nancy Kurshan, and Paul Krassner—stand-up comic and the illegitimate father of America’s underground press—were smoking some high-grade Colombian. Inspired by the Diggers’ recent “Death of Hippie” parade, they sought a political identity—or, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, “a myth”—that would captivate the press by capturing their own purely antic spirit. “Yippie!” was a hurl of crazy joy that could be broken down into Y.I.P., or Youth International Party. “We would be a party,” Krassner wrote, “and we would have a party”—“the kind of party you had fun at,” Hoffman later told the court. “Yippies say if it’s not fun,” Rubin wrote, “don’t do it.” “What does Yippie! mean?” Hoffman asked in his incendiary book Revolution for the Hell of It. “Energy—excitement—fun—fierceness—exclamation point!” Years later, when he was on the lam from the Feds, his thoughts on the subject seemed to deepen: Yippies didn’t seek the “eternal bliss” at the end of capitalism’s rainbow. But nor could he support the utopian bliss he had once witnessed at Antioch College, where ROTC had been banned and students had free rein—communing with teachers, taking drugs, having open sex and “naked swim-ins in the gym pool.” He couldn’t see the fun in it. “Everything was so beautiful, I was completely bored after three hours. The school lacked the energy that comes from struggle.” Yippies pursued the joy of the fray. “With Yippism,” he wrote, “the distinction between work and play collapsed. It blended fun with struggle.” Yippism courted the old American fun: revolutionary struggles, Pinkster Days struggles, argonaut struggles with a reformed middle class. Yippism courted fun with stakes.
By contrast, the Merry Pranksters’ “Vote for Fun” was an idle threat. To the Yippies, some of whom had risked their lives to register voters in Mississippi, American elections meant serious business—just the kind of high-stakes fun they were looking for. So they set their sights on the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Ideally, they would finish off a moribund system, and the work would be outrageous fun.
The Yippie! revolution wasn’t meant to be violent. Not demagogues like Mike Walsh and Company who sicced their b’hoys on decent society, the Yippies imagined a cavalier revolution by which citizens enjoyed themselves to the fullest and allowed all others to do the same. These anarcho-democratic officiants would have wed American individualism with free-loving communalism. Its love child, had it come out that way, would have been Rubin’s “Festival of Life,” a shindig that, as they described it to bemused Chicago Park District officials, would feature a free, cooperative gathering in Lincoln Park. Kids would sleep on the grass, enjoy a hundred rock bands and guerrilla performers, and share their food, bodies, ideas, wampum. The Yippies said they had no interest in marching on the convention; the festival’s open lifestyle would send its own message. They signed the application, which requested portable kitchens and latrines, “For Fun and Freedom.”
But they sent the American media a racier image. If the summer before they had directed traffic to their sexy Lace hoax by inviting reporters to a demonstration (actors squirted each other with Disappear-O and copulated on the spot), now, in anticipation of the convention, Krassner, who had achieved national fame by publishing scandalous JFK material, used a foolproof strategy as their media spokesman: “If you gave good quote, they would give you free publicity.” His wisecracks and one-liners spread their message like pollen, sprouting Yippie chapters on the nation’s campuses. As unscrupulous as he could be when provoking media, even Krassner opposed Abbie Hoffman’s slogan, “Kill your parents!” But Jerry Rubin took it up anyway, and it put his face on the front of the Enquirer: “Yippie Leader Tells Children to Kill Their Parents!”
Jokes
like this were no joke in the spring of ’68, when violent youth revolutions shut down Paris and Prague and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4, caused the decade’s most devastating wave of race riots, a major one occurring in Chicago itself. But the Yippies liked needling the public’s paranoia. That same month, when asked by Mayor Daley’s office why he wanted a street permit, Krassner invoked that season’s hippie exploitation movie, Wild in the Streets, in which kids spike the water supply with acid and overthrow the government. (This didn’t endear Yippies to the Park District.) And yet their political commitment was sincere—and not merely anarchistic. When LBJ dropped out of the presidential race due to unbeatable competition from Robert Kennedy, leaving the Democrats with an antiwar platform, they nearly called off their demonstration. As Abbie Hoffman put it, RFK was “a direct threat to our theater-in-the-streets, a challenge to the charisma of Yippie!” There were even rumors that he had “turned on.” But then when he was assassinated in June, leaving the likely candidacy to LBJ’s pro-war vice president, Hubert Humphrey (and not to Eugene McCarthy, for whom many left-wing hippies had shaved their beards and gone “Clean for Gene”), Yippie! was back in play. Then, when Humphrey trotted out his “Politics of Joy” slogan, it felt as if they were being scooped. Yippie! pulled out all the stops.
Their publicity tempted the nation’s youth with “a huge rock-folk festival for free” that would restage the Pentagon experience in Chicago. As an answer to the Diggers’ recent “Death of Hippie” parade, they rakishly promised the “Death of Yippie” (“a huge orgasm of destruction atop a giant media altar”), the birth of “Free America,” and promised thirty-some performers and a gamut of constructive activities—“workshops” on drugs, draft resistance, commune building, guerrilla theater, and underground media. They demanded SDS-style participatory politics in theater-of-cruelty language: “It is time to become a life-actor. The days of the audience died with the old America. If you don’t have a thing to do, stay home, you’ll only get in the way.” They admitted that they were still negotiating for a permit and acknowledged the risk of violence: “This is the United States, 1968, remember. If you are afraid of violence you shouldn’t have crossed the border.” But violence wasn’t their bag. Unlike the typical sixties “be-ins,” many of which they had organized themselves, the “Festival of Life” promoted active community in which everybody and nobody was a leader. The festival was also presented as a chance for radicals to bury the water pistol with hippies. Oh, and they nominated their own presidential candidate: Pigasus the Immortal, an actual pig purchased from an Illinois farm.
Things didn’t go as beautifully as planned. The “Festival of Life” was a fine idea, but an urban war zone between roiling Chicago cops (not the nation’s gentlest police force) and revved-up kids from all factions of the movement (Yippies, Black Panthers, SDS, and countless other groups) wasn’t conducive to spontaneous peace and love, certainly not without a permit. Only three or four thousand participants showed up—possibly ten thousand at its culmination. The week leading up to the Yippies’ abortive festival reads like Fear and Loathing in Chicago. The Yippie! “leadership,” true to their message, spent the preliminary days “zonked out of their minds” on hash-oil cigarettes that they prepared for general distribution. They also distributed thousands of Yippie Leader buttons. Tailed the whole time in a “slow-motion car chase,” they eventually asked their undercover shadows for a friendly restaurant recommendation. While demonstrators arrived from across the country in busloads, their lawyers were still haggling with the city for a permit and Yippies staged the first ad hoc march—delivering “peace offerings of apple pies” to the Lincoln Park precinct office. When the Chicago Tribune printed the headline “Secret Yippie Plans Revealed,” Hoffman went them one better and mass-distributed leaked information about the delegates’ accommodations; he labeled it “SECRET PLANS REVEALED” and whipped up a mild terrorism scare. Their candidate Pigasus was nominated with fanfare, and his “wife,” a sow named Piggy Wiggy, was turned out in the park for “a merry, greasy romp” that ended when she was “apprehended by Chicago’s Finest.”
During the week of the convention, against the backdrop of massive demonstrations in Grant Park organized by David Dellinger and the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (“the Mobe”), the Yippies held extraordinary power over the literal-minded authorities. Thousands of National Guard members, for instance, were tasked with defending the water reservoirs to ward off a (scientifically impossible) acid-trip outbreak. The entire police force was put on duty and taunted and baited by out-of-town kids. Hoffman put a Yippie! smiley face on it, summing up the week as a “Perfect Mess” in which “everyone gets what he wants” and “only the system suffers.” In other words, Chicago wasn’t equipped for a “Festival of Life,” and the “system” perceived its anarchically tinged liberties as a clear and present danger. Whether the Yippies were demagogues or jokers, their antics were instrumental in creating this “Mess.” Mounting tensions and pranks were fun, but they must have contributed to the violent outcome, much as they had at the Boston Massacre. At least that is what federal prosecutors would argue.
Said violent outcome erupted on August 25, a Sunday afternoon, when MC5, the proto-punk band from Detroit, had finished playing in Lincoln Park and a mock political rally for LBJ was under way. Hoffman was threatening to defy the city’s orders and send in a truck to serve as a stage when a wedge formation of cops, impatient to enforce that night’s 11 p.m. curfew, came bashing into the crowd with clubs and tear gas. Many crowd members were eager to fight back. Todd Gitlin, the Harvard-educated former SDS president, identified these aggressors as Bowery b’hoys of sorts—real revolutionary muscle:
“greasers,” motorcycle toughs, no-nonsense Chicago working-class teenagers, along with a handful of Chicago organizers simulating them. Even more than the runaway slave-surrogates of Abbie Hoffman’s revolutionary dream, the greasers were as far as you could get from middle-class values and still be white … their presence was a sign to be taken that the white movement was getting serious.
What began as a turf war, in this case between the cops and these “Park People,” would be broadcast for America over the next three days, when the fight culminated in and around Grant Park, as the great, gory showdown in the cops-and-dissenters game that had begun four years earlier in Mississippi and Berkeley. Gitlin also gives a colorful account of the cops, whose astonishing lack of scruples and restraint knocked the wind out of the nonviolent movement:
They charged, clubbed, gassed, and mauled—demonstrators, bystanders, and reporters. They did it when there were minor violations of the law, like the curfew; they did it when there were symbolic provocations, like the lowering of an American flag; they did it when provoked (with taunts, with rocks, and, at times, they claimed, with bags of shit); in crucial instances, like the assault outside the Hilton Hotel Wednesday evening, they did it when unprovoked.
Amped up on adrenaline and lack of sleep, Hoffman kept heading back into battle. He had been clubbed and clobbered many times by police in his years as a political organizer, and he had always emerged on the side of rough civility, but the events in Chicago finally soured him. On the big day, Wednesday, the cops interrupted his breakfast with Anita and Paul Krassner; he had scrawled “FUCK” on his forehead with lipstick, to keep his pictures out of the papers. They seized him, hauled him “right across the table, through the bacon and eggs,” and embarked on a thirteen-hour tour of the city’s precincts and jail cells—“without food, phone calls, or lawyers,” he remembered, “while cops beat the shit out of me.” He “laughed hysterically through the beatings,” being “so winged-out from not sleeping and all the tension.” They succeeded, in the end, in hiding him from his lawyers and preventing him from joining the Michigan Avenue throng.
“I don’t think I was much of a pacifist after Chicago,” he wrote.
NEVER MIND Hair, the so-called Chicago Eight (then Seven) trial was the co
untercultural performance of the sixties. Guerrilla theater stared down courtroom farce to decide the civil dispute of the era: the Movement vs. the Establishment. The eight defendants seemed finically chosen to represent the world of dissent: SDS leaders Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden (who had authored the “Port Huron Statement”); graduate students Lee Weiner and John Froines; portly fifty-four-year-old Christian socialist David Dellinger; Yippies Rubin and Hoffman; and—briefly—Black Panther Bobby Seale. “Conspire, hell,” Hoffman quipped. “We couldn’t agree on lunch.” The most colorful figure, however, was the judge. Seventy-four-year-old Justice Julius Hoffman, a trickster in his own right, whom Abbie called his “illegitimate father” and Rubin called “the country’s top Yippie,” was a blatant right-winger who mugged for the court and openly distorted judicial procedure—refusing to admit the defendants’ “self-serving” evidence, showily favoring the prosecutors’ motions, and overtly manipulating the jury’s deliberations. But his behavior in this case was nothing new. As one Chicago lawyer noted, Julius Hoffman “regarded himself as the embodiment of everything federal” and routinely saw the “defense” as the “enemy.”
The Eight were charged with crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, a clause in the Civil Rights Act that had been proposed by a southern senator to prevent out-of-staters from organizing voters. The trial, set in Chicago’s black-steel federal office towers designed by modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was one of the hottest tickets in America. Continual protests raged out front; people lined up for days to get in. The courtroom itself was theater in the round. The spectators were a vibrant and heckling crowd of canny reporters, ornery hippies, Black Panthers in uniform, out-of-town luminaries, and starstruck oglers, as well as the defendants’ vocal associates and worried close relations. The marshals, whom the judge kept in constant play, manhandled spectators, defendants, and lawyers. The divided jury—all but one of them women—guardedly expressed their amusement and outrage. And the stars of the show, the colorful defense, maintained their slouchy, slovenly outpost alongside the prosecutors’ businesslike table: they lounged in boots and leather jackets, headbands, armbands, and brightly colored clothes; their backpacks and belongings—food, wrappers, magazines, radical literature, and once a bag of pot “in a silent dare to the court”—covered their four pushed-together tables and spilled over onto the courtroom carpet. When they weren’t heckling, stage-whispering, vamping, sleeping, or passing out jelly beans among the spectators, the Eight kept busy writing the speeches and correspondence with which they made their case to the public. Justice Hoffman, for his part, played the trickster with a range of voices and kept the room on edge for months.
