Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

networked, participatory performance form, the Yippies set out to change the politicaland cultural landscape of the United States in 1968.But the Yippies had an uphill battle ahead of them. The American public was adifficult audience for the Yippies’ kind of in-your-face zany antics. While the Yippiesmight convince hippies and young radicals to partake in theatrical dissent to fight theEstablishment, the Establishment itself was another matter, as an archive of letters sentby American citizens to President Johnson in response to the Pentagon March attest.Received by the White House during the autumn months of 1967, and now housed in theLyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, these letters demonstrate the public’sfrustration with anti-war demonstrators and scorn for the hippie counterculture. Forexample, Alfred Q. Jarrette expresses his disdain for the “Communist directed ralley[sic]” of the Pentagon March by describing the participants as “off-beats,” “crack-pots,”and “drug-addicts” (HU4, WHCF, Box 61). 40 Representative Maston O’Neal fromGeorgia writes to the President to communicate his concern that demonstrators plans toblockade the Pentagon, an “unpatriotic action” that “presents a clear and present dangerto the defense of our Country [sic].” E. Marshall Grinder of Arlington, VA, also agreesthat the Pentagon protesters are unpatriotic, a minority “whose only appeal to reason is tothrow a tantrum in front of some TV and news cameras with some once proud U. S.symbol in the background . . .” While Jarrette conceives of the demonstrators as “crackpots,”and O’Neal and Grinder think of them as an unpatriotic minority, Mrs. John R.Hayden of Delaware calls them “educated fools.” Army Specialist Beverly Wayne Akers,40 All letters described in this and the two following paragraphs are from HU4, WHCF, Box 61, LBJLibrary.94