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

Even though the media confused the Yippies with their comrades the hippies, as vonHoffman does, they were aware that something outrageous would happen. Hooked byYippie manifestos, short-haired Yippies infiltrating the Convention, or “the secondAmerican Revolution” (Hoffman, “Testimony” 356), the media fell into the Yippies’trap. Abbie Hoffman explains that “Yippie was the name of the myth that created freeadvertising for our Chicago confrontation. We never had to pay for ads. The papers andthe electronic media provided us with free coverage. We stole thousands upon thousandsof dollars’ worth of free publicity using gimmickry” (Soon 146). With humorous threatsof infiltrating the Convention or lacing the Chicago water supply with LSD, the Yippieskept the media attention leading up to Chicago during the spring and summer of 1968.In a sense, the Yippies’ extravagant threats and promises worked too well.Anticipating truly mass demonstrations, the City of Chicago was determined that thescruffy protesters would not de-rail the convention. With America by now no stranger toviolent demonstration, the Mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, demanded anoverwhelming show of force to encourage demonstrators to behave. The week before theConvention, newspapers were reporting that 8,500 Chicago police were called to duty,along with 5,600 Illinois National Guard and over 9,500 army troops also prepared tointervene on the streets of Chicago (Raspberry and Carey A1). The show of force didfrighten some activists. A nervous Vicky Smith, writing for the Liberation News Service,warned of reports of barricades going up in the streets, and hoped that the planned Mobedemonstration would be “a political event, not a massive freakout” (7). With rumors ofhordes of Yippies descending on the city, and army troops with orders to use deadly force160