Yippies

YIPPIES. A highly self-conscious creation by Vietnam War protesters in the late 1960s, the “Yippie” phenomenon was never a formally organized party or structured movement. Rather, the term labeled an amorphous group led by anti-war organizers that politicized the countercultural figure of the hippie. The name of the group (and its variations, including “Youth International Party”) was created by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and others following the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. Specifically, Yippies were invented to attract media attention and to gain publicity for anti-war rallies planned to coincide with the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. A Yippie, it was said, was any hippie who was going to Chicago to protest the war. The Yippie phenomenon successfully demonstrated the political content of cultural rebellion.

Yippie war protest was characterized by carnivalesque techniques of burlesque, clowning, and ridicule. As such, it posed a set of problems to the New Left and to formal anti-war efforts, such as the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. On the one hand, the bizarre tactics of Yippies attracted media attention considered crucial to war protest; on the other hand, the anarchic and unstructured nature of Yippie activity made it impossible for the Left to organize and control the group. The nonsense that characterized Yippie protest clashed with the hardheaded seriousness of the antiwar Left.

The name created after the Pentagon march successfully labeled a practice that had been growing in popularity during anti-war rallies. The huge, immovable, and intransigent government machinery responsible for perpetuating the war in Vietnam led many Americans to react with laughter and liberating playfulness. Yippie responses to authoritarianism resembled western European medieval carnival practices. These carnivals were officially tolerated, popular releases held in seasons of church feasts, during which the lower strata of society would mock, ridicule, and figuratively turn upside down the rigid economic and political structures of their society. The rise of modern state capitalism made the destructive potential of such seasonal outbursts intolerable, and the promise of participatory democracy made them irrelevant, and so gradually, through suppression and degeneration, seasonal carnival practices disappeared. Vestiges would nonetheless surface in authoritarian social contexts; for example, American colonial Puritans would report the need to suppress activities such as Maypole dancing in seventeenth-century New England.

Frolic and playfulness were characteristic of many anti-war rallies in this period. At the Pentagon in October 1967 Hoffman led an “exorcism” of demons from the building, surrounding it with young people chanting and singing songs. The juxtaposition of such activities with the armed National Guard troops there to protect government buildings presented a clear package for consumption by print and television news media. Yippie strategists were conscious of the need to present anti-war messages in contexts that the various media would find novel and thus newsworthy. In particular, as television relies heavily on the juxtaposition of images, Yippie protest would often present images of radical contradistinction, such as placing flowers in National Guard gun barrels. Such practices, however, clashed with the antiwar program of the New Left, and pointed to irreconcilable differences between the two strategies. If anything, Yippie tactics pointed to the absurdity of politicking in the liberal sense of the word and argued the closed and totalitarian nature of the American state. Whereas the Left stood for political praxis, Yippies testified to a sense of political insignificance and exhaustion on the part of many Americans in this period.

Yippie carnival tactics were highly visible in the “Festival of Life” held outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and in the absurdist behavior presented by the Yippie component of the Chicago conspiracy trial defense in 1969–1970. Visual and verbal playfulness were hallmarks of the group’s strategy. At Chicago, Yippies nominated a live pig (“Pigasus”) as their presidential candidate; in court, their witnesses sang songs from the stand and Yippie defendants mocked judicial structures of decorum. Although speakers Hoffman and Rubin insisted that the group was apolitical, it was, in fact, more a politicization of countercultural temperament than a distinct political program. It was a coalescence of the era’s antiauthoritarianism, and through its carnival strategy it was highly conscious of the unwritten rules of social decorum and civil behavior that undergird modern democratic society. Although the public phase of the Yippie phenomenon faded after the Chicago conspiracy trial, an organization calling itself by the same name continued to exist and to publish the quarterly newspaper Overthrow as part of the North American Green network. Yippies did, however, maintain a presence in New York City, after the turn of the twenty-first century operating a café and, for a time, a museum. Individuals joined various parades to legalize marijuana and in efforts opposing gentrification of the Lower East Side. The museum of memorabilia and the café closed in 2014.

The New Yippie Book Collective. Blacklisted News, Secret History: From Chicago, ‘68, to 1984. New York: Bleecker, 1983.

Urgo, Joseph R. “Comedic Impulses and Societal Propriety: The Yippie Carnival.” Studies in Popular Culture 10, no. 1 (1987).

Yippie Manifesto by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. https://faculty.atu.edu/cbrucker/Amst2003/Texts/Yippie.pdf