A politics of theatre and registration drives
Many hippies distrusted conventional politics, and many political radicals distrusted hippies. In 1967 a small number of activists tried to join the two. Some did it through public stunts meant to mock authority and attract press attention. Others took the more ordinary route of building a party and trying to get on the ballot. The three episodes covered here are the Pentagon levitation in October, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the founding of the Yippies on 31 December 1967.
The Pentagon, October 1967
The March on the Pentagon took place on 21 October 1967, after a rally at the Lincoln Memorial, and it was mainly a mass antiwar protest organised by the National Mobilization Committee. Within it, a more playful group announced that it would exorcise the Pentagon and make it levitate. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Ed Sanders of the band The Fugs and others were involved in the plan.
The organisers said, tongue in cheek, that the building would rise into the air and its evil would be driven out. They reportedly bargained with officials in advance over how high it could go, and the story of the joke height has been told in different versions. The building did not rise, of course. What the stunt achieved was to bring the language of the underground into a political demonstration, and to produce coverage that a standard rally would not have received.
The confrontation at the building’s steps that evening was serious, with hundreds of arrests over the weekend and some injuries. Not everyone in the antiwar movement welcomed the theatrics. Some felt they trivialised a movement concerned with death and conscription. Others thought they were one of the few ways to reach a wide audience.
Other 1967 stunts
Hoffman, a former civil rights worker who had become associated with the Diggers in New York, was good at publicity. In August 1967 he and a group of friends went to the New York Stock Exchange gallery and threw dollar bills onto the floor, and traders reportedly scrambled for the money. The exchange later screened off the gallery. The stunt is a standard example of how these activists used mockery of capitalism as a form of protest.
Rubin was more of a conventional organiser. In 1967 he ran for mayor of Berkeley on an antiwar platform and lost. He also worked on planning the Pentagon protest.
The Peace and Freedom Party
The Peace and Freedom Party was a more traditional effort. It began in California in 1967 as a coalition of antiwar and left-wing groups, with some civil rights and Black Power activists, and its immediate task was legal: collecting enough voter registrations to qualify as a party for the 1968 ballot. It did qualify in early 1968.
The coalition was fragile, with disagreements over whether to focus on the war or on racial issues and over what role the Black Panther Party would have. In 1968 the party nominated Eldridge Cleaver for president, and other groups backed different candidates, with the movement splitting over the question. Its main significance in 1967 was that it showed the antiwar left trying to move from the street to the ballot.
Founding of the Yippies
The Yippies, or Youth International Party, were launched on 31 December 1967, at a New Year’s Eve gathering in a New York apartment. Hoffman, Rubin, Anita Hoffman, Paul Krassner, Nancy Kurshan and others were involved. The name came first, and the acronym followed. Critics sometimes called the group a hoax and its leaders conceded that it had no formal membership.
The idea was a “party” that would unite hippies and political radicals through festival and satire, and it planned a gathering at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. That was in August 1968 and it belongs to the following year: the clashes with police there, and the later trial of the “Chicago Eight” or “Chicago Seven,” are part of the aftermath. In 1967 the Yippies existed mainly as a statement of intent.
Why it matters
The Yippies drew on the Diggers’ street theatre and on the style of the Summer of Love, while the Pentagon levitation showed that the same style could be brought into antiwar protest. The Peace and Freedom Party showed an opposite approach, working inside the electoral system. Both were responses to the same problem: how to turn dissent into influence when many Americans were uneasy about the war but equally uneasy about the protesters.
Historians still debate how effective these tactics were. Humour and spectacle drew attention, but they also made it easier for opponents to portray the whole movement as unserious. Whatever the verdict, they left a durable model for media-savvy protest.