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

theater would fulfill its ultimate goal of persuading the American public to take somekind of radical action.The “potlitical” movement of the Youth International Party was less of a socialmovement and more of a cultural phenomenon. According to the definition given byMario Diani in an article analyzing social movement scholarship, social movements are“networks of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/ororganizations, engaged in political or cultural conflicts, on the basis of shared collectiveidentities” (1). While the Yippie movement contains elements of this definition—itcertainly was engaged in political and cultural conflict—it never really reached farenough to be considered a “plurality of individuals” and it was never cohesive enough todevelop a “collective identity.” Thousands of demonstrators participated in Yippieevents, but even more were involved in the immense anti-war movement, the studentdrivenNew Left, or the large hippie counterculture.Furthermore, the Yippie collective identity was tenuous at best: as a network ofactivists already engaged in other movements, individual Yippies like Dellinger,Krassner, Morea, Morgan, Seale, or Sanders owed their primary allegiance to otherpolitical and cultural identities. For example, Dellinger was first a Mobe leader, apacifist, and a Liberation magazine editor, Krassner a satirist and editor of The Realist,Morea the leader of UATW/MF, Morgan a women’s liberation activist, Seale a BlackPanther, and Sanders a poet and musician with The Fugs. It was really only the coreYippies—Abbie Hoffman, Anita Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin, who fully embraced Yippie204