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

Yippies had been publishing manifestos in the alternative press for several months, theunderground media consistently used the term “Yippie” when describing the actions atthe Yip-In. These smaller newspapers had emerged out of the counterculture’s disdain forthe assumed objectivity of the mainstream press, which they felt was in fact biased andswayed by business interests. The more than 1,000 alternate newspapers published acrossthe nation tended instead toward partisan opinions, first-person narrations, andconfessional stories about the war and student movement (Morgan 204-206). 45 Theyrealized that the Yippie message was a new concept for the Left and the hippiepopulations. Writing a “Yippee History” that appeared in the Liberation News Servicejust three weeks after the Yip-In, Jezer notes that the Yippies offer an exciting newmessage for the underground. “In its spirit, its theatre, its antics and its dress,” he writesof Yippie, “is the new potential for an alternative—the possibility of a new and morehuman life-style” (3). Just a few months into the new movement, and, thanks to the Yip-In performance event, already Yippie was being historicized as something radicallydifferent from the hippie and New Left movements: a new mass movement that aimed touse theatre and humor to argue for a new kind of lifestyle, and a new kind of society.With the Yip-In performance, the Yippie concept of revolutionary action-theatermade its formal debut. The event successfully spread the word of revolution across thepages of the alternative press, and launched the idea of Yippie-style direct action into thenational consciousness. The Yippie manifesto “Notes from a Yippiezolean Era” arguesthat Yippie cultural revolution will seduce the youth of America “with happenings,45 See also Abe Peck’s Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (1985) formore on the alternative newspaper movement in the 1960s.111