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

You know I didn’t see you there.I didn’t see them crack your head or breathe the tear gas air.—Phil Ochs, “Where Were You in Chicago?”In the end, the 100,000 strong army imagined by the Yippies never made it toChicago. Perhaps frightened by reports of the heavy police and army presence, manystayed home. Maybe this great army never really existed in the first place, but only in theYippie imagination. Only several thousand demonstrators actually made the trip toChicago, and not all of them were there as Yippies. Time Magazine described theparticipants:There were the self-styled ‘American revolutionaries’—among themanarchists and Maoists, hard-core members of the National MobilizationCommittee to End the War in Viet Nam, and Students for a DemocraticSociety–many of them veterans of the October March on the Pentagon.There was the Youth International Party (yippies) [sic], minions of theabsurd whose leaders failed last fall to levitate the Pentagon but whoseantics at least leavened the grim seriousness of the New Leftists withmuch-needed humor. And then there were the young McCarthy workers,the ‘Clean for Gene’ contingent who had shaved heads, lengthenedminiskirts and turned on to political action in the mainstream. (“Daley”24)174