Who Were the Yippies?
The counterculture movement of the 1960s did not always present a united front politically. Many who embraced the peaceful elements of the hippie lifestyle were not especially anxious to confront the ‘system’ head on. Other factions, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), were often all too ready to use physical force and the power of the masses to achieve political goals. Between these two camps were members of the Youth International Party, more commonly known as the Yippies. Founding members of the Yippies included Abbie Hoffman, his wife Anita and Jerry Rubin. The Yippies were more likely to use guerrilla theater or public pranks to bring attention to their causes. Although the Yippies were more radicalized than the hippies, most members and associates drew the line at organized protests and sit-ins. Inspired by the humor-filled rants of Abbie Hoffman, Yippies created absurdist political manifestos suggesting incredible acts of civil disobedience. Suggestions of placi
Even today, more than three decades later, there is a wide variety of opinions as to who they were and who they represented. Yippies were not a formal organization but a loosely-linked group that existed throughout the United States, mainly in the larger cities. The movement was one of those things which has spread quickly by imitation, much the same as the beatniks and zoot-suiters of earlier generations and today’s non-conformists. When yippies in one locale were asked what they stood for and believed in, the answers would be vastly different from those in another locale. But still there were large numbers of yippies, and they presented problems to communities and institutions of higher education. Disrespect for law and order and for school operation was common, and there were frequent yippie riots. People saying they were yippies generally dressed so they could be so identified: men with long hair, beards, or unshaven, and women with outlandish dresses. Their colorful clothing was u
Were they as Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall (in The COINTELPRO Papers) lampoon ‘largely a mythical organisation’ founded by the self-defined anarchists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Were they, as Donald White in The American Century contends, children of the affluent society who wanted to do anything to be free but ‘theirs was a freedom lacking in rationale, and they had no clear vision of the alternative society that they wanted to buid.’ Were they as Julie Stephens concludes (in Anti-Disciplinary Protest) rejecting all “modern” forms of ‘logic and causality, discipline, order, work, consumption and both internal and external regulation’? The Yippies found few friends in the academy. If they were no more than self-indulgent phantoms rejecting modernism, how are we to understand them? This paper will attempt to critically examine the Yippies as a political and cultural phenomenon in the context of Cold War America at war overseas and at home. Why did Dylan sing ‘your sons and daug
