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

House archive; and images of the near-naked cast of the Living Theatre’s Paradise Nowcavorting with marijuana-smoking audience members.Because the decade of the 1960s marks the coming-of-age of the Baby Boomgeneration, that vast demographic born into post-World War II prosperity and Cold Waranxiety, the archive of the 1960s abounds in nostalgia and memoir. Many authors writingabout the 1960s in general, and 1960s activism specifically, remember their own personalexperiences of the decade. Marty Jezer, whose pieces on the Yippies in the alternativenewspaper WIN: Peace and Freedom through Nonviolent Action and the Liberation NewsSeivice are the earliest Yippie histories, writes fondly of his fellow activists in AbbieHoffman: American Rebel (1992). 4 Abbie Hoffman’s own Soon to be a Major MotionPicture (1980), or Tom Hayden’s Reunion: A Memoir (1988), reminisce about the headydays of the hippie counterculture, the excitement of protests against the Vietnam War,and the passionate politics of student groups.One such group was the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), part ofthe New Left movement that advocated for participatory democracy and student power inplace of the labor Left’s socialism. Todd Gitlin, now a professor of journalism andsociology at Columbia University, and author of the monumental and detailed TheSixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), was active in the anti-war movement duringthe 1960s and also served as SDS President (1963-1964). Historian Maurice Isserman,co-author with Michael Kazin of the more accessible America Divided: The Civil War ofthe 1960s (2000), also worked for SDS (1968-70). Poet and historian Jonah Raskin,4 Marty Jezer is also known as Martin Jezer, especially in early works. He appears as “Martin Jezer” on theYippies’ Chicago poster.8