Yippie

The Youth International Party (YIP), whose members were commonly called Yippies, was an American youth-oriented radical and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the late 1960s. It was founded on December 31, 1967. They employed theatrical gestures to mock the social status quo, such as advancing a pig (" Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for president of the United States in 1968. They have been described as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic politics".Abbie Hoffman, Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, page 128. Perigee Books, 1980.

Since they were well known for street theatre and politically themed pranks, they were either ignored or denounced by many of the "old school" political left. According to ABC News, "The group was known for street theater pranks and was once referred to as the ' Groucho Marxists'."

Background

The Yippies had no formal membership or hierarchy. The organization was founded by Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nancy Kurshan, and Paul Krassner, at a meeting in the Hoffmans' New York apartment on December 31, 1967. According to his own account, Krassner coined the name. "If the press had created ' hippie,' could not we five hatch the 'yippie'?" Abbie Hoffman wrote.

Other activists associated with the Yippies include Stew Albert, Judy Gumbo, Ed Sanders, Robin Morgan, Phil Ochs, Robert M. Ockene, William Kunstler, Jonah Raskin, Steve Conliff, Jerome Washington, John Sinclair, Jim Retherford, Dana Beal, Betty (Zaria) Andrew, Joanee Freedom, Danny Boyle, Ben Masel, Tom Forcade, Paul Watson, David Peel, Wavy Gravy, Aron Kay, Tuli Kupferberg, Jill Johnston, Daisy Deadhead, Leatrice Urbanowicz, Bob Fass, Mayer Vishner, Alice Torbush, Patrick K. Kroupa, Judy Lampe, Steve DeAngelo, Dean Tuckerman, Dennis Peron, Jim Fouratt, Steve Wessing, John Penley, Pete Wagner and Brenton Lengel.

A Yippie flag was often seen at anti-war demonstrations. The flag had a black background with a five-pointed red star in the center, and a green cannabis leaf superimposed over it. When asked about the Yippie flag, an anonymous Yippie identified only as "Jung" told ''The New York Times'' that "The black is for anarchy. The red star is for our five point program. And the leaf is for marijuana, which is for getting ecologically stoned without polluting the environment." This flag is also mentioned in Hoffman's '' Steal This Book''.

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin became the most famous Yippies—and bestselling authors—in part due to publicity surrounding the five-month Chicago Seven Conspiracy trial of 1969. They both used the phrase "ideology is a brain disease" to separate the Yippies from mainstream political parties that played the game by the rules. Hoffman and Rubin were arguably the most colorful of the seven defendants accused of criminal conspiracy and inciting to riot at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention. Hoffman and Rubin used the trial as a platform for Yippie antics—at one point, they showed up in court attired in judicial robes.

Origins

The term ''Yippie'' was invented by Krassner, as well Abbie and Anita Hoffman, on New Year's Eve 1967. Paul Krassner wrote in a January 2007 article in the ''Los Angeles Times'':

Anita Hoffman liked the word, but felt that ''The New York Times'' and other "strait-laced types" needed a more formal name to take the movement seriously. That same night she came up with Youth International Party, because it symbolized the movement and made for a good play on words.

Along with the name Youth International Party, the organization was also simply called Yippie!, as in a shout for joy (with an exclamation mark to express exhilaration). "What does Yippie! mean?" Abbie Hoffman wrote. "Energy – fun – fierceness – exclamation point!"

First press conference

The Yippies held their first press conference in New York at the Americana Hotel March 17, 1968, five months before the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Judy Collins sang at the press conference. The ''Chicago Sun-Times'' reported it with an article titled: "Yipes! The Yippies Are Coming!"

The New Nation concept

The Yippie "New Nation" concept called for the creation of alternative, counterculture institutions: food co-ops; underground newspapers and zines; free clinics and support groups; artist collectives; potlatches, "swap-meets" and free stores; organic farming/permaculture; pirate radio, bootleg recording and public-access television; squatting; free schools; etc. Yippies believed these cooperative institutions and a radicalized hippie culture would spread until they supplanted the existing system. Many of these ideas/practices came from other (overlapping and intermingling) counter-cultural groups such as the Diggers, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Merry Pranksters/Deadheads, the Hog Farm, the Rainbow Family, the Esalen Institute, the Peace and Freedom Party, the White Panther Party and The Farm. There was much overlap, social interaction and cross-pollination within these groups and the Yippies, so there was much crossover membership, as well as similar influences and intentions.

"We are a people. We are a new nation," YIP's New Nation Statement said of the burgeoning hippie movement. "We want everyone to control their own life and to care for one another ... We cannot tolerate attitudes, institutions, and machines whose purpose is the destruction of life, the accumulation of profit."

The goal was a decentralized, collective, anarchistic nation rooted in the borderless hippie counterculture and its communal ethos. Abbie Hoffman wrote:

We shall not defeat Amerika by organizing a political party. We shall do it by building a new nation—a nation as rugged as the marijuana leaf.

The flag for the "new nation" consisted of a black background with a red five pointed star in the center and a green marijuana leaf superimposed over it (same as the YIP flag).

The Chicago History Museum shows a different flag for the new nation. It is not the marijuana leaf. It has the word NOW under what looks like the all-seeing eye on a pyramid seen on the back of a dollar bill.

Culture and activism

The Yippies often paid tribute to rock 'n' roll and irreverent pop-culture figures such as the Marx Brothers, James Dean and Lenny Bruce. Many Yippies used nicknames which contained Baby Boomer television or pop references, such as Pogo or Gumby. (Pogo was notable for creating the famous slogan: "We have met the enemy and he is us"—first used on a 1970 Earth Day poster.)

The Yippies' love of pop-culture was one way to differentiate the Old and New Left, as Jesse Walker writes in ''Reason'' magazine:

At demonstrations and parades, Yippies often wore face paint or colorful bandannas to keep from being identified in photographs. Other Yippies reveled in the spotlight, allowing their stealthier comrades the anonymity they needed for their pranks.

One cultural intervention that misfired was at Woodstock, with Abbie Hoffman interrupting a performance by The Who, trying to speak against the incarceration of John Sinclair, sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1969 after giving two joints to an undercover narcotics officer. Guitarist Pete Townshend used his guitar to bat Hoffman off the stage.

The Yippies were the first on the New Left to make a point of exploiting mass media. Colorful, theatrical Yippie actions were tailored to attract media coverage and also to provide a stage where people could express the "repressed" Yippie inside them.Jerry Rubin, ''Do It!'', page 86. Simon and Schuster, 1970. "We believe every nonyippie is a repressed yippie," Jerry Rubin wrote in ''Do it!'' "We try to bring out the yippie in everybody."

Early Yippie actions

Yippies were famous for their sense of humor. Many direct actions were often satirical and elaborate pranks or put-ons. An application to levitate The Pentagon during the October, 1967 March on the Pentagon, and a mass protest/mock levitation at the building organized by Rubin, Hoffman and company at the event, helped to set the tone for Yippie when it was established a couple of months later.

Another famous prank just before the term "Yippie" was coined was a guerrilla theater event in New York City on August 24, 1967. Abbie Hoffman and a group of future Yippies managed to get into a tour of the New York Stock Exchange, where they threw fistfuls of real and fake US$ from the balcony of the visitors' gallery down to the traders below, some of whom booed, while others began to scramble frantically to grab the money as fast as they could. The visitors' gallery was closed until a glass barrier could be installed, to prevent similar incidents.

On the 40th anniversary of the NYSE event, CNN Money editor James Ledbetter described the now-famous incident:

There was a clash with police on March 22, 1968, where a large group of countercultural youths led by the Yippies descended into Grand Central Station for a "Yip-In". The night erupted into a violent clash with police that Don McNeill of ''The Village Voice'' called a "pointless confrontation in a box canyon". A month later, Yippies organized a "Yip-Out," a be-in style event in Central Park that went off peacefully and drew 20,000 people.

In his book ''A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America'', author David Armstrong points out that the Yippie hybrid of performance art, Guerilla theatre and political irreverence was often in direct conflict with the sensibility of the 60s American Left/peace movement:

The Yippies' unorthodox approach to revolution, which emphasized spontaneity over structure, and media blitz over community organizing, put them almost as much at odds with the rest of the left as with mainstream culture. Wrote (Jerry) Rubin in the '' Berkeley Barb'', "The worst thing you can say about a demonstration is that it is boring, and one of the reasons that the peace movement has not grown into a mass movement is that the peace movement—its literature and its events—is a bore. Good theatre is needed to communicate revolutionary content.

House Un-American Activities Committee

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies in 1967, and again in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Yippies used media attention to make a mockery of the proceedings: Rubin came to one session dressed as an American Revolutionary War soldier, and passed out copies of the United States Declaration of Independence to people in attendance.

On another occasion, police stopped Hoffman at the building entrance and arrested him for wearing an American flag. Hoffman quipped for the press, "I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country", paraphrasing the last words of revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale; meanwhile Rubin, who was wearing a matching Viet Cong flag, shouted that the police were Communists for not arresting him also.

According to '' The Harvard Crimson'':

In the fifties, the most effective sanction was terror. Almost any publicity from HUAC meant the ' blacklist.' Without a chance to clear his name, a witness would suddenly find himself without friends and without a job. But it is not easy to see how in 1969 a HUAC blacklist could terrorize an SDS activist. Witnesses like Jerry Rubin have openly boasted of their contempt for American institutions. A subpoena from HUAC would be unlikely to scandalize Abbie Hoffman or his friends.

Chicago '68

Yippie theatrics culminated at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. YIP planned a six-day Festival of Life – a celebration of the counterculture and a protest against the state of the nation. This was supposed to counter the "Convention of Death." This promised to be "the blending of pot and politics into a political grass leaves movement – a cross-fertilization of the hippie and New Left philosophies." Yippies' sensational statements before the convention were part of the theatrics, including a tongue-in-cheek threat to put LSD in Chicago's water supply. "We will fuck on the beaches! ... We demand the Politics of Ecstasy! ... Abandon the Creeping Meatball! ... And all the time 'Yippie! Chicago – August 25–30.'" First on a list of Yippie demands: "An immediate end to the war in Vietnam."

Yippie organizers hoped that well-known musicians would participate in the Festival of Life and draw a crowd of tens if not hundreds of thousands from across the country. The city of Chicago refused to issue any permits for the festival and most musicians withdrew from the project. Of the rock bands who had agreed to perform, only the MC5 came to Chicago to play and their set was cut short by a clash between the audience of a couple thousand and police. Phil Ochs and several other singer-songwriters also performed during the festival.

In response to the Festival of Life and other anti-war demonstrations during the Democratic convention, Chicago police repeatedly clashed with protesters, as many millions of viewers watched the extensive TV coverage of the events. On the evening of August 28 the police attacked the protesters in front of the Conrad Hilton hotel as the demonstrators chanted " The whole world is watching". This was a "police riot," concluded the US National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, stating:

"On the part of the police there was enough wild club swinging, enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating to make the conclusion inescapable that individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or arrest."

The conspiracy trial

Following the convention, eight protesters were charged with conspiracy to incite the riots. Their
trial, which lasted five months, was heavily publicized. The Chicago Seven represented a cross-section of the New Left, including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

In his book, ''American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt'', John Beckman writes:

Never mind '' Hair'', the so-called Chicago Eight (then Seven) trial was the countercultural 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."

Several other Yippies – including Stew Albert, Wolfe Lowenthal, Brad Fox and Robin Palmer – were among another 18 activists named as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the case. While five of the defendants were initially convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot, all convictions were soon reversed in appeal court. Defendants Hoffman and Rubin became popular authors and public speakers, spreading Yippie militancy and comedy wherever they appeared. When Hoffman appeared on '' The Merv Griffin Show'', for example, he wore a shirt with an American flag design, prompting CBS to black out his image when the show aired.

The Yippie movement

The Youth International Party quickly spread beyond Rubin, Hoffman and the other founders. YIP had chapters all over the US and in other countries, with particularly active groups in New York City, Vancouver, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Tucson, Houston, Austin, Columbus, Dayton, Chicago, Berkeley, San Francisco and Madison. There were YIP conferences through the 1970s, beginning with a "New Nation Conference" in Madison, Wisconsin in 1971.

On the final day of the Madison conference, April 4, 1971, hundreds of riot police broke up a block party organized by local Yippies to cap the event, resulting in a street clash between Yippies and police.

Street protests

During an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C., on November 15, 1969, East Coast Yippies led thousands of youths in the storming of the Justice Department building.

On August 6, 1970, L.A. Yippies invaded Disneyland, hoisting the New Nation flag at City Hall and taking over Tom Sawyer's Island. While riot police confronted the Yippies, the theme park was closed early for only the second time in the park's history (the first being shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy.). As many as 23 of the 200 Yippies attending were arrested.

Vancouver Yippies invaded the US border town of Blaine, Washington, on May 9, 1970, to protest Richard Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of students at Kent State.

Columbus Yippies were charged with inciting the rioting that occurred in the city on May 11, 1972, in response to Nixon's mining of North Vietnam's Haiphong harbor. They were acquitted.

YIP was a member of the coalition of anti-Vietnam War activists who, over several days in early May 1971, tried to shut down the US government by occupying intersections and bridges in Washington, D.C. The May Day protests resulted in the largest mass arrest in American history.

A frequent 'national' complaint among Yippies was that the New York 'central HQ' chapter acted as if other chapters did not exist and kept them out of the decision-making process. At one point, at a YIP conference in Ohio in 1972, Yippies voted to 'exclude' Abbie and Jerry as official spokespersons from the party, since they had become too famous and rich.

In 1972, Yippies and Zippies (a younger YIP radical breakaway faction whose "guiding spirit" was Tom Forcade) staged protests at the Republican and Democratic Conventions in Miami Beach. Some of the Miami protests were larger and more militant than the ones in Chicago in 1968. After Miami, the Zippies evolved back into Yippies.

In 1973, Yippies marched on the Manhattan home of Watergate conspirator John Mitchell:

... five hundred die-hard Yippies staged one last march on the Mitchell home, no longer the Watergate but a grand apartment building on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. "Free Martha Mitchell!" they chanted. "Fuck John!" When the Mitchells finally appeared at the window to see what all the commotion was about, the stoners cherished their last "eye-to-eyeball confrontation with Mr. Law 'n' Order." To commemorate the moment, they placed a giant marijuana joint on the Mitchells' doorstep.

Yippies regularly protested at US presidential inaugurations, with a particularly strong presence at the 1973 inauguration of Richard Nixon. Yippies also demonstrated at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit, as well as the subsequent 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, where 99 Yippies were arrested:

Smoke-ins

Yippies organized marijuana "smoke-ins" across North America through the 1970s and into the 1980s. The first YIP smoke-in was attended by 25,000 in Washington, D.C. on July 4, 1970. There was a culture clash when many of the hippie protesters strolled en masse into the nearby "Honor America Day" festivities with Billy Graham and Bob Hope.

On August 7, 1971, a Yippie smoke-in in Vancouver was attacked by police, resulting in the Gastown Riot, one of the most famous protests in Canadian history.

The annual July 4 Yippie smoke-in in Washington, D.C., became a counterculture tradition.

Alternative culture

Yippies organized alternative institutions in their counterculture communities. In Tucson, Yippies operated a free store; in Vancouver, Yippies established the People's Defense Fund to provide legal help for the often-harassed hippie community; in Milwaukee, Yippies helped launch the city's first food co-op.

Many Yippies were involved in the underground press. Some were the editors of major underground newspapers or alternative magazines, including Yippies Abe Peck (''Chicago Seed''), Jeff Shero Nightbyrd (New York's '' Rat'' and ''Austin Sun

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