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

water of Chicago with LSD and to burn the city to the ground, and promises to “fuck onthe beaches!” (Hoffman, Revolution 102). While the Yippies never did any of thesethings, their public statements conjured up a vision of a vast movement working forrevolution. The myth was that this tsunami of radicalism was already in motion,sweeping up participants across the nation as it moved toward Chicago. History showsthat this myth did its work: thousands attended the Grand Central Station Yip-In, tens ofthousands more demonstrated in Chicago. It is evident that people did get swept up by theidea of tongue-in-cheek radicalism. In fact, the power of the Yippie myth is at work evennow, motivating me to explore the actions of the Yippie movement and investigate theirlegacy for activists today.Chapter OutlineBuilding on my brief contextualization of the Yippies and performance in thischapter, my next chapter more fully situates the Yippies within the political context of thelate 1960s, focusing especially on their relationship to the student New Left movementand the anti-Vietnam war movement. Using the 21 October, 1967, March on thePentagon as my main example, I argue that the Yippies married the peace movement’snotion of network organizing, the New Left’s concept of participatory democracy, andthe hippie’s philosophy of “do-your-own-thing” with their own version of madcaptheatricality to create a new kind of political activism—revolutionary action-theater. Irely on contemporary social histories of the hippies to explore hippie cultural philosophy,use SDS’s “Port Huron Statement” and philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional42