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

Preparations for some kind of giant Yippie street action in Chicago met withseveral set-backs that spring. The first was the surprise announcement by PresidentJohnson on 31 March, 1968, that he would not seek a second term in office. Citing a needfor “national unity” in the face of increasing partisanship in the United Statesgovernment, Johnson bowed out of the 1968 Presidential race at a time when his overallapproval rating was a dismal 36%, and only 26% of those polled supported his handlingof the war (Wicker 1, 27). Johnson’s presidency and Vietnam policy was the raisond’etre of the Yippies. After all, one of their founding objectives was “to make somestatement, especially in revolutionary action-theater terms, about LBJ, the DemocraticParty, electoral politics” (Hoffman, Revolution 102). What were the Yippies to do?Should they instead focus on their community work in the Lower East Side, providing abail fund for local activists and negotiating police-hippie relations? In a “state of criticalshock” after Johnson’s pull-out from the 1968 campaign, the Yippies contemplateddisbanding the entire movement altogether (Hoffman, Revolution 104-105).The problem was that the Yippie movement seemed more and more irrelevantwithout its Establishment villain. The only remaining Democratic candidates in thePresidential race at the time of Johnson’s withdrawal were Senators Robert Kennedy ofNew York and Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, both doves who rejected any escalationof the war. Abbie Hoffman and his fellow Yippies did not believe that the underdogMcCarthy could win, and the charismatic Kennedy was a favorite among hippies and theNew Left. The Yippies had no Democratic war-hawk nemesis to rally against. Theirconstituency of Leftist activists was just not as interested in demonstrating against152