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

egan creating theatrical demonstrations with the media foremost in mind, they feltpressure to provide novelty to continuously counteract the media’s short attention span.Their focus on the media as a means to reach the vast American public was their undoing.Rather than using the media to do their advertising for them, they found themselves usedby the media.The Yippies’ use of the media as their mouthpiece situated them as a brief, flashin-the-panphenomenon, rather than a lasting movement like SDS or the New Left. Whenthe media lost interest, news of the Yippies dropped out of the mainstream press. Thisshortage of documentation is one of the reasons that the Yippies occupy a place on themargins of histories of the 1960s. And because so much of their networking work wasdone through the media, the Yippies found themselves without the ability to organizeeffectively. They had no structures like regional chapters or membership rolls on whichto fall back. The core Yippie leaders, who conceived of every demonstration asrevolutionary action-theater, did not see theatricality in doing the hard work of managingmembership and communications among the Yippie network. Without the media as theirnetworking center, the Youth International Party began to disintegrate, even as the entireNew Left movement began to fall apart.Because the violence in Chicago so shocked the American public and madeheadlines out of the anti-war cause, factions of the anti-war and New Left movementsdecided that further violent protest was necessary to hammer home their political ideals.Militant off-shoots of SDS like the Weather Underground Organization threatenedviolent overthrow of the government and rioted in Lincoln Park during their October,206