The peace movement had reached a crossroads in the spring of 1967, after people took to the streets in unprecedented numbers all across the country to protest the war in Vietnam. Despite this tremendous outpouring of public sentiment President Johnson continued to escalate the war effort. American troop strength swelled to nearly a half-million, and young men were returning in body bags at a rate of five hundred a month. All of this was deeply disturbing to David Dellinger, director of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (otherwise known as the Mobe). Dellinger, an avowed pacifist, was strongly committed to nonviolence, but he questioned whether petitioning the government solely through legal means was an adequate response to the Vietnam debacle. His dilemma was compounded by the fact that the antiwar coalition had grown to encompass a broad range of groups from moderate to radical, each pursuing its own strategy and objectives. The only thing they all agreed on was to meet at the next big event: an antiwar demonstration in Washington, DC, on October 21, 1967, sponsored by Dellinger and the Mobe.
Dellinger feared that anything less than a huge turnout would be depicted in the press as a sign that the peace movement was losing steam. Big demonstrations were essential for media coverage, and the Mobe needed publicity to keep up the momentum. But the prospect of yet another well-mannered, nonviolent event that the government would simply shrug off did not appeal to radical elements. At one point SDS threatened to boycott the protest rally on the grounds that it would "delude" people into thinking they were having an effect on public policy. The Mobe eventually opted for a multi tactical approach that included a call for defiant mass resistance at the Pentagon after the main rally at the Lincoln Memorial. To attract as many young people as possible Dellinger invited Jerry Rubin, the noted Berkeley activist, to New York to help organize the Pentagon action.
Rubin had impressive credentials among radicals and youth groups. He was one of the prime movers of the Vietnam Day protest in Berkeley two years earlier, and he led marchers in an attempt to block troop trains. After spending a month in jail for his political work, he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in Washington. Instead of pleading the Fifth Amendment as most people did when called by HUAC, Rubin entered the hearing room dressed in an American Revolutionary War uniform. "I wear this uniform to symbolize the fact that America was born in revolution, but today America does violence to her own past by denying the right of others to revolution," he told a group of reporters. It was a political ploy designed to make a mockery of the HUAC proceedings; the congressmen were caught off guard, and Rubin's stunt became page-one news throughout the country. The publicity helped him garner 22% of the vote when he ran for mayor of Berkeley the following year on a platform opposing the war and supporting black power and the legalization of marijuana.
As soon as Rubin arrived in New York, he teamed up with Abbie Hoffman, an East Village hippie who'd been a civil rights organizer before he turned on to acid in 1965 courtesy of his roommate, an army psychologist who supplied the LSD. Hoffman got into drugs and grew his curly hair long, but he remained an activist at heart. He was involved in staging the New York be-in during the spring of 1967 -- an event modeled after the first Human Be-In in San Francisco, which had featured Rubin as a speaker.
Hoffman's politics got a lot saucier after he met a group of San Francisco Diggers in June 1967 at a "Back to the Drawing Boards" conference sponsored by SDS. At this gathering, which took place in Denton, Michigan, a Digger spokesman took off his clothes and challenged everyone else to do likewise. When no one budged, he started tossing tables and chairs around while berating the New Lefties in a burst of "do your own thing" rhetoric for being stodgy and unimaginative in their discussions of strategy. For many of the SDS members it was like watching the sulfurous fumes of hell. But not for Hoffman; he just sat there transfixed, absorbing everything he heard and saw. When he returned to New York he began calling himself "Abbie Digger" and opened a Free Store in the Bowery. Hoffman later published Steal This Book, a widely read underground treatise that incorporated much of what he had gleaned from the Diggers.
While Hoffman admired the acid anarchists from San Francisco, he did not share their disdain for using the media as a political tool. "A modern revolutionary headed for the television station, not for the factory," he declared. His eagerness to exploit the TV cameras struck a responsive chord in his newfound friend Jerry Rubin, who was also strongly influenced by the acid scene in San Francisco. ("If everyone did it," Rubin said of LSD, "it would be like heaven on earth.") They got stoned together and shared ideas about building a grand alliance between the bohemian and New Left tendencies. Such a combination, they believed, would provide an inexhaustible source of energy for the Movement. They agreed that the psychedelic subculture could be a significant political force, but if more young people were to be drawn into the protest struggle they would have to be engaged theatrically, via long hair, costume, and clever gamesmanship. With this in mind they set their sights on the upcoming march on the Pentagon.
Rubin had picked up a bit of occult folklore from Michael Bowen, the Psychedelic Ranger from Haight-Ashbury who had organized the San Francisco be-in and turned Rubin on to LSD earlier that year. A five-sided figure, Bowen explained, is a symbol of power, and when the figure is pointed north like the Pentagon building in Washington, it represents the forces of evil. This being the case, Bowen introduced the notion of encircling the Pentagon -- not to capture it or shut it down, as some militants had urged, but to wound it symbolically. The idea of a mass antiwar ritual appealed to Rubin and Hoffman. At a press conference preceding the demonstration, they announced their intention to exorcise the Pentagon's evil spirits by levitating the building three hundred feet in the air until it started to vibrate and turn orange, whereupon the war in Vietnam would immediately cease. Hoffman also threatened to release a mysterious gas called "LACE," allegedly concocted by Owsley, which "makes you want to take off your clothes, kiss people and make love."
Seventy-five thousand protesters assembled at the Lincoln Memorial, including a sizable number of hippie types dressed in colorful costumes. The motley army of witches, warlocks, sorcerers, and long-haired bards who had come to celebrate the mystic revolution lent a carnival atmosphere to the demonstration. After a rousing prelude of speeches and songs, a large contingent crossed the Arlington Memorial Bridge into Virginia and raced toward the Pentagon, waving banners and shouting antiwar epithets. Some were high on acid when they stormed the grim ziggurat. They surrounded the entire building, dancing and hissing in unison, while soldiers stood guard at all five walls. Posters and slogans memorializing Che Guevara, the Latin revolutionary who had been killed in Bolivia a few weeks earlier, appeared on abutments, and a Viet Cong flag, blue and red with a gold star, fluttered in the breeze. And then the promised exorcism began.
"Out, demons, out!" boomed the voice of Ed Sanders, leader of a burlesque folk-rock ensemble called the Fugs, which provided musical edification for the antiwar constituency. On a flatbed truck in front of the high church of the military- \industrial complex, the Fugs worked their "gene-shredding influence" on the crowd. Thousands shrieked their approval -- "Out, out, out!" -- and the stage was set for an ecstatic confrontation.
The demonstration had become a form of ritual theater, a preview of what politics would be like in the post-Haight-Ashbury era. As Norman Mailer wrote in The Armies of the Night, a best selling account of the march on the Pentagon, "Now, here, after several years of the blandest reports from the religious explorers of LSD, vague Tibetan lama goody-goodness auras of religiosity being the only publicly announced or even rumored fruit from all trips back from the buried Atlantis of LSD, now suddenly an entire generation of acid-heads seemed to have said goodbye to easy visions of heaven, no, now the witches were here, and rites of exorcism, and black terrors of the night.... The hippies had gone from Tibet to Christ to the Middle Ages, now they were Revolutionary Alchemists."
Despite their incantations and spells the protesters could not transmute the lead weight of the Pentagon into a golden vision in the sky. But it hardly mattered, for they were celebrating a new kind of activism, a style so authentically unique that it verged on the bizarre. "What possibly they shared," said Mailer, "was the unspoken happy confidence that politics had again become mysterious, had begun to partake of Mystery. The new generation believed in technology more than any before it, but the generation also believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution. It had no respect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step: belief was reserved for the revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what was going to happen next; that was what was good about it."
What happened next was not something anyone had expected -- in fact, it might never have happened had it not been for the FBI, which attempted to disrupt the antiwar gathering upon learning of a plot to sky-bomb the Pentagon with ten thousand flowers. Peggy Hitchcock (the sister of William Mellon Hitchcock, owner of the Millbrook estate) gave Michael Bowen and friends money to purchase two hundred pounds of daisies for the occasion, but the plan never got off the ground because of a dirty trick by the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover's men answered an ad for a pilot in the East Village Other but never showed up at the airport. Bowen was stuck with more flowers than he knew what to do with, so he turned around and drove back to the demonstration. Distributed among the crowd, the flowers were subsequently photographed by the world press protruding from the muzzles of rifles held by the soldiers guarding the Pentagon.
It was one of the spectacular images of the 1960s: the troops with their bayonets sprouting daisies, frozen in a tense face-off with the antiwar activists. By sundown most of the press had left. The police moved in with tear gas and arrested people -- over eight hundred in all -- and many were brutally beaten. But these tactics did not dampen the spirits of the demonstrators. They were elated by what had transpired. Some felt that it was a watershed event, comparable in magnitude to the Boston Tea Party. "It made me see that we could build a movement by knocking off American symbols," said Rubin. "We had symbolically destroyed the Pentagon, the symbol of the war machine, by throwing blood on it, by pissing on it, dancing on it ... painting 'Che lives' on it. It was a total cultural attack on the Pentagon. The media had communicated this all over the country and lots of people identified with us, the besiegers."
After the march Rubin decided to remain in New York with his girlfriend, Nancy Kurshan. They spent the next few months with Hoffman and his wife, Anita, cooking up new stunts so audacious and compelling that the press would have to cover them. "An event doesn't exist until the media announces it," Rubin asserted. "Once the media announces it, it is an event whether or not it exists." He and Hoffman believed that television was little more than an elaborate mirror game the authorities used to pacify the public. In their stoned reveries they dreamed of switching the mirrors around in order to reflect a different set of images that would shock the viewers, blow their minds, and make them confront the idea that there was a crazy alternative to the straight way of life.
Hoffman and Rubin possessed an uncanny knack for showmanship, a sixth sense for what would capture the imagination of young people. But they needed some kind of focal point, a central theme that would enhance the impact of their efforts. On New Year's Day 1968 they dropped acid together so they "could look at the problem logically," as Rubin put it, and they hit upon a recipe for social change. Mix one part hippie and one part activist, marinade in Marx (Groucho, not Karl) and McLuhan, season radically with psychedelics, and what do you come up with? Paul Krassner, editor of the Realist, a satirical underground magazine, said it first: "Yippie!" -- the battle cry of the Youth International Party. It was a name to conjure with, a rallying point for stoned politicos and militant hippies who had merged the "I protest" of the New Left with the "I am" of the counterculture. "We figured we could create a new myth of the dope-taking, freedom-loving, politically committed activist," Rubin explained. "Some day, we dreamed, the myth will grow and grow until there were millions of yippies.... Soon there will be yippies and a Youth International Party throughout the Western world."
The Yippies didn't go along with the notion that being a serious activist meant you couldn't have a good time. Convinced that boredom was a revolutionary sin, they were determined to make outrage contagious on a mass scale. "No need to build a stage," said Hoffman, "it was all around us. Props would be simple and obvious. We would hurl ourselves across the canvas of American society like streaks of splattered paint. Highly visual images would become news, and rumor mongers would rush to spread the excited word."
The Yippies were political pranksters, and their lunatic style of attack played upon the media's insatiable appetite for anything new or eccentric. They knew the press would give them free publicity as long as they flaunted the holy goof: burning money on Wall Street, appearing naked in church; dumping soot and smoke bombs in the lobby of Con Edison's headquarters; mailing Valentine's cards to persons unknown, each containing a joint. Their bombastic antics were framed as political commercials ("advertisements for the revolution") that would mobilize oppositional consciousness and compel people by dramatic example to change their lives. "Our lifestyle -- acid, long hair, rock music, sex -- is the revolution," Rubin declared.
To the Yippies the masses of American youth were potential revolutionaries who merely had to be "turned on" by media buttons -- and by LSD. They believed that acid was a subversive instrument, and they urged everyone to take the drug in order to break the mind-forged manacles that bound people to a repressive society. This presumably would lead to an understanding of why a revolution was necessary, thereby accelerating the dawn of a twentieth-century utopia. "Once one has experienced LSD," said Hoffman, "one realizes that action is the only reality." But what kind of action did the Yippies propose? Drugs made them more willing to gamble on their intuitions. "Mostly it's a catch-as-catch-can affair," Hoffman admitted. "You just get stoned, get the ideas in your head and then do 'em."
TV and LSD: both magical and instantaneous, both ways of leap-frogging the long and arduous task of grassroots political organizing. The Yippies had no predefined strategy other than epater les bourgeois (tweaking the nose of the middle class) via media freaking. They rejected the idea of a program as too confining. Ideology was dismissed as "a brain disease." If they had any doctrine at all, it was that people should do "whatever the fuck they want." Rubin described his Yippie vision in the closing passages of Do It!
At community meetings all over the land, Bob Dylan will replace the National Anthem.
There will be no more jails, courts, or police.
The White House will become a crash pad for anybody without a place to stay in Washington.
The world will become one big commune with free food and housing, everything shared.
All watches and clocks will be destroyed....
The Pentagon will be replaced by an LSD experimental farm....
The Yippies were not an organization in the formal sense. They had no membership list, no direct relationship with a grassroots, face-to-face constituency, and it was not clear whether their views represented a majority opinion in hip communities; nevertheless, these TV-promoted gadflys became the most celebrated spokesmen for the youth movement. In this respect the Yippies had much in common with Timothy Leary, whose status as leader of the psychedelic movement was certified by the media rather than by those who actually took LSD. Leary also lacked an organizational base but was adept at manipulating the press, which was one of the reasons the Yippies sought him out. "We had many analytical discussions about the tactical necessity of using the media," Leary recalled. But he was not particularly enthusiastic when the Yippies asked him to endorse their cause. Despite the halfhearted response Hoffman acknowledged his debt to the High Priest of LSD: "I studied his technique of karmic salesmanship."
The Yippies were the first group on the left to define themselves solely through the media projections of their flamboyant leaders. On their own terms they were quite successful. They articulated a spirit of revolt that was alive in young people throughout the country and helped foster an antiestablishment consciousness among some who might not have been reached in any other way. But the Yippie approach was not without pitfalls. As former SDS president Todd Gitlin explained, "When movements become too 'mediated,' it becomes hard to tell the difference between a movement and a fad, a movement and a trend, or just a press conference. The results are pernicious for movements. The line between leadership and celebrity becomes very thin. It's easy for leaders to cross over and become wholly unaccountable to a movement base."
Rubin and Hoffman were the two most famous radical celebrities of the 1960s. Their lust for the spotlight, doubtless the product of personal as well as political motives, drove them to new peaks of self-promotion. But the Yippies paid a high price for a ticket on the publicity loop. As four-star attractions in an ongoing radical soap opera, they inadvertently trivialized the very issues they sought to dramatize. The result was a parody of left-wing politics that may have undermined serious efforts to reform America. "I didn't know if I was headed to Hollywood or to jail," Rubin later confessed. "I purposefully manipulated the media, but on a deeper level I see that it was mutual manipulation. To interest the media I needed to express my politics frivolously.... If I had given a sober lecture on the history of Vietnam, the media cameras would have turned off."
So the Yippies kept pranking and the cameras kept cranking. The most outlandish, abrasive, and extravagant gestures were the surest to be broadcast, and the media, always hungry for novelty, gave leading roles to those who, in Gitlin's words, "seemed like Central Casting's gift to revolutionary imagery." By no means, however, did the Yippies have a monopoly on movement histrionics in the late 1960s. Indeed, their zany youth cult capers were timid in comparison to the militant theatrics of the Black Panther party.
Founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the Panthers first gained attention the following year when they strolled into the California state capitol building in Sacramento twenty strong, with their leather jackets, black berets on blossoming afros, and loaded Magnum rifles and shotguns, to protest a bill forbidding such weapons in Oakland, where the Panthers were based. The ensuing publicity gave them a big boost, and they began to organize chapters in urban ghettos across the country. Initially their focus was on police brutality and self-defense, but soon the Panthers developed a black socialist ideology and a forthright party program that reflected the influence of Malcolm X, who in the final years of his life had rejected anti-white bigotry. To promote the party in the community, the Panthers launched a variety of "survival programs," such as free medical clinics, pest control projects, and free breakfast for poor children (black, brown, and white) on a daily basis -- an idea that had been suggested by the San Francisco Diggers. Meanwhile they continued to cultivate the symbolism of violence. Their overinflated language, menacing leather attire, and radical cool provoked a great deal of attention in the mainstream press, and thousands of young blacks joined their ranks.
The Panthers rejected the goal of assimilation into a system they saw as repressive and inhumane -- a sentiment shared by many white radicals. The black nationalist culture, with its dashikis, tiger-tooth necklaces, and afro haircuts, often espoused values similar to those of the white counterculture: spontaneity, simplicity, respect for individuality and ethnic identity, cooperation rather than competition, and so forth. A number of black activists were also into drugs -- mostly marijuana and cocaine -- for rest and relaxation. Some of the Panthers, for example, liked to get stoned and listen to Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited on headphones. They were particularly impressed by "The Ballad of a Thin Man," which taunted "Mr. Jones," the archetypical honkie who knows something's happening but doesn't know what it is. "These brothers would get halfway high, loaded on something," Bobby Seale recounted, "and they would sit down and play this record over arid over and over, especially after they began to hear Huey P. Newton interpret that record. They'd be trying to relate to an understanding about what was going on, 'cause old Bobby [Dylan] did society a big favor when he made that particular sound."
While the black power movement had a strong cultural component, it never embraced LSD, which made only minor inroads into black society during the 1960s. Reality was already too heavy a trip in the ghetto, and many black militants were unkindly disposed toward the black soul singers and rock stars who expressed a preference for hippie drugs in their music: Sly and the Family Stone, ("I Want to Take You Higher"), Jimi Hendrix ("Are You Experienced?"), the Chambers Brothers ("Time Has Come Today"), the Temptations ("Cloud Nine" and "PsychedeIic Shack"). Certain black radicals, such as A. X. Nicholas, went so far as to denounce these songs as "counterrevolutionary" and urge that they be boycotted by the black community.
Thus it took on added significance when Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information of the Black Panther party, offered to make an alliance with those notoriously wacked-out acidheads the Yippies. "Eldridge wanted a coalition between the Panthers and psychedelic street activists," Rubin explained. So they got together, smoked a lot of grass, and composed a "joint" manifesto called the Panther-Yippie Pipe Dream. "Into the streets!" Cleaver proclaimed. "Let us join together with all those souls in Babylon who are straining for the birth of a new day. A revolutionary generation is on the scene. There are men and women, human beings, in Babylon today. Disenchanted, alienated white youth, the hippies, the yippies and all the unnamed dropouts from the white man's burden, are our allies in this cause." The Black Panther party newspaper later featured an article entitled, "The Hippies Are Not Our Enemies."
The prospect of a genuine coalition between white radicals and black militants sent chills up the spine of the political establishment in the United States, which greatly feared, in the words of former air force secretary Townsend Hoopes, "the fateful merging of antiwar and racial dissension." But the Panther Yippie alliance was more symbolic than anything else, and only nearsighted observers could have thought otherwise. The Yippies were essentially freelance activists whose shadow organization lacked a community base; hence there was nothing for the Panthers to ally with other than an image, a set of fleeting gestures. But the Yippies and Panthers did share certain important attributes. Both knew how to use the media in creative ways to get their message across, and both were excited about the prospects for an explosive year in 1968.