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

they ran into again in Chicago when trying to claim the public parks as their own spacedespite city curfews that demanded they leave at night. The Yippies never had theopportunity to learn how to govern themselves, because the Establishment, in the form ofthe military or the police, stepped in first. Thus they never learned to control the actionsof all the diverse elements of their network. At the same time, even wanting to govern ormanage all the participants in this new alternative society seems like a denial of the basicYippie tenet of “do-your-own-thing.” This kind of contradiction frequently occurs inYippie manifestos, a product of their networked structure that ambitiously tried toencompass a wide variety of viewpoints under the Yippie rubric. The Yippie politicalphilosophy was at times inconsistent, and as a result, their revolutionary action-theaterperformances, which heavily relied on participant improvisation, were highlyunpredictable.It is clear that the Yippies did not very carefully consider the potential difficultiesof holding their do-your-own-thing performance in the public space of the terminal. Theyexpected passers-by to watch or even be persuaded to join the party; for example, Jezershared his popcorn with a young ROTC cadet (“YIP!” 8). The invitation deliberatelyabstained from aggressive language, yet Jezer argues that it was naïve of the Yippies notto anticipate trouble with the police. “None of us considered the cavernous but enclosedterminal a claustrophobic trap,” he writes. “It seemed, instead, a grand place to hold aparty” (“YIP!” 8). And the event went ahead as scheduled, despite tension betweenhippies and police: just the day before at a local precinct house egg-throwing hippiesprotested a police crackdown on hippie crash pads.107