"I am an original Yippie. A Yippie is a politicized hippie, a protester who has been hit over the head by a cop — and woke up."

Wrote Judy Gumbo, autobiographically, in "Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI."

Quoted in "Judy Gumbo, Who Found Freedom as a Yippie, Dies at 83/She was part of the leftist radical group, which mocked institutional authority with political satire and street theater" (NYT gift link).

I don't remember ever hearing of her, but it says: "Ms. Gumbo was not as well known as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, two of the party’s founders, but she was 'an integral Yippie,' Nancy Kurshan, a Yippie who was Mr. Rubin’s partner for a while, said in an interview."

She's named in this little NYT squib from 1970:

"Mr. Baron Cohen... wrote his thesis on 'the Black-Jewish alliance' and identity politics in the Civil Rights movement. So he was primed to play the puckish Abbie Hoffman."

"'Essentially, he was trying to be a stand-up comedian,' Mr. Baron Cohen said of the man who co-founded the Yippies and preached flower power. 'He was very influenced by Lenny Bruce and he realized that if he could make people laugh, he could get them engaged in the cause.'... [Aaron] Sorkin, who wrote and directed the Chicago 7 film, said that the day Mr. Baron Cohen shot his scene on the witness stand reminded him of the day Jack Nicholson shot his courtroom scene in 'A Few Good Men,' noting, 'Everyone wanted to watch; 120 extras didn’t care that the camera wasn’t on them, they stayed to watch.'

From "Sacha Baron Cohen: This Time He’s Serious/Reviving his Borat character and playing the political activist Abbie Hoffman, the actor feels he 'had to ring the alarm bell and say that democracy is in peril this year'" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

"I saw some geezer shouting into Pete’s microphone, saying we were a load of crap, which got up all our noses."

"Then I saw Pete come up — I’m not sure whether he hit Abbie Hoffman with the guitar, I think he pretended to hit him. Pete yelled, 'Do it again and I’ll kill you.' He wouldn’t have recovered if Pete had hit him on the head with a Gibson guitar. And Pete was never tried for murder, so I gather he didn’t actually do it. It was a kind of a stunt move.... Woodstock wasn’t peace and love. There was an awful lot of shouting and screaming going on. By the time it all ended, the worst sides of our nature had come out. People were screaming at the promoters, people were screaming to get paid. We had to get paid, or we couldn’t get back home."

Said Roger Daltrey, quoted in "WOODSTOCK AT 50/The Who’s Roger Daltrey Is Not Nostalgic for Woodstock/The singer remembers the endless waiting and how 'the worst sides of our nature had come out'/(But also how great Creedence Clearwater Revival was" (NYT).

There's no film footage of Abbie Hoffman barging onto the stage with The Who (who were famously terrible at Woodstock, playing at 5 in the morning), and the NYT tells us Hoffman said "that the focus shouldn’t be on music, but on the MC5 manager John Sinclair, who was in prison on a minor marijuana charge." But there is a sound recording, and it's possible to give a verbatim quote. I'll transcribe for you: "I think it's a pile of shit, while John Sinclair rots in prison." That's as far as Hoffman gets, before Pete Townshend does whatever he does, and the big crowd cheers.

Here's what Hoffman wrote about it in his autobiography:

50 years ago yesterday, Abbie Hoffman threw dollar bills from the visitors' gallery onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

The Nation reminds us.

For a brief moment, [said Hoffman's co-protester Bruce Dancis], “it showed that there was more to life than the dogged accumulation of wealth and riches.” And it was part of a new tactic Abbie was experimenting with: deploying humor, drawing on guerilla theater, to use the media to reach many more people than a protest march would have... Abbie... was searching for new forms of protest, since the media were already cutting back on coverage of street demonstrations, no matter how big they were....

“When we arrived,” Dancis recalled, “Abbie, who looked like a long-haired hippie, got stopped by a guard, who said, ‘You can’t do a demonstration in here.’ Abbie said, “You’re not letting me in because I’m Jewish!’ The guard became flustered.”...

Abbie had something like $100 in dollar bill... At first, there was “stunned silence from the floor. Then some people started cheering. Others scrambled around trying to grab or pick up all the money they could. Others started cursing us and yelling at us, telling us to get the hell out of there.....”...

“We were on the cover of the New York Post that afternoon,” Dancis recalled. “The whole notion of the ‘Hippie Invasion of the New York Stock Exchange’ was too much for people in the media to pass up.”...

I wonder if the media today will ever tire of covering street demonstrations — no matter how big they are. Imagine needing to deploy humor and search for new forms of protest. Things were different then. Look at the joy:

Photo credit: Credit Arty Pomerantz/New York Post

And yet Abbie Hoffman killed himself. But it was 22 years later (NYT). He suffered from "manic depression," as it was called back then, but it was supposedly under control. His Chicago Seven co-defendant Tom Hayden explained the suicide this way:

''He was really uncomfortable with becoming middle aged and facing old age without seeing significant social change... He was a perennial youth, a juvenile delinquent with gray hair... I have to think that perturbed him a lot. He was always trying to re-create the 60's and was deeply dismayed he was becoming a prophet in the wilderness of the 80's.''

Chelsea Clinton takes her 2-year-old daughter Charlotte to her "1st protest rally."

The event — in Times Square (in NYC) — was called "Today, I Am a Muslim Too," which doesn't sound like a "protest." Isn't it more of a positive happening, like what we once called a "love-in"?

“Thank you to all who organized #IAmAMuslimToo today – Charlotte’s 1st protest rally. #NoBanNoWallNoRaids,” Chelsea captioned a snap featuring a popular protest sign that shows a woman wearing an American flag hijab.

Speaking of hippies, I remember when clothing made from the American flag was considered a desecration — not pro-America at all. I mean, Abbie Hoffman got arrested for this:



I'm not saying there's no free-speech right to use the flag to express an opinion. I'm just asking why a woman in an American flag hijab reads as a Muslim embracing American values.

In search of a Free Society.

Here's a list of 17 demands presented in a leaflet that was distributed at the protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as reported by Norman Mailer in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968." Boldface mine:

1. An immediate end to the War in Vietnam….

2. Immediate freedom for Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and all other black people. Adoption of the community control concept in our ghetto areas….

3. The legalization of marihuana and all other psychedelic drugs….

4. A prison system based on the concept of rehabilitation rather than punishment.

5.…abolition of all laws related to crimes without victims. That is, retention only of laws relating to crimes in which there is an unwilling injured party, i.e. murder, rape, assault.

6. The total disarmament of all the people beginning with the police. This includes not only guns, but such brutal devices as tear gas, MACE, electric prods, blackjacks, billy clubs, and the like.

7. The Abolition of Money. The abolition of pay housing, pay media, pay transportation, pay food, pay education, pay clothing, pay medical help, and pay toilets.

8. A society which works toward and actively promotes the concept of “full unemployment.” A society in which people are free from the drudgery of work. Adoption of the concept “Let the Machines do it.”

9.…elimination of pollution from our air and water.

10.…incentives for the decentralization of our crowded cities…encourage rural living.

11.…free birth control information…abortions when desired.

12. A restructured educational system which provides the student power to determine his course of study and allows for student participation in over-all policy planning….

13. Open and free use of media…cable television as a method of increasing the selection of channels available to the viewer.

14. An end to all censorship. We are sick of a society which has no hesitation about showing people committing violence and refuses to show a couple fucking.

15. We believe that people should fuck all the time, anytime, whomever they wish. This is not a program to demand but a simple recognition of the reality around us.

16.…a national referendum system conducted via television or a telephone voting system…a decentralization of power and authority with many varied tribal groups. Groups in which people exist in a state of basic trust and are free to choose their tribe.

17. A program that encourages and promotes the arts. However, we feel that if the Free Society we envision were to be fought for and achieved, all of us would actualize the creativity within us. In a very real sense we would have a society in which every man would be an artist.

ADDED: Googling some text, I find testimony from Abbie Hoffman (at the Chicago 7 trial) claiming authorship of the list:

I will read it in the order that I wrote it. "Revolution toward a free society, Yippie, by A. Yippie.

There was a #18 on the list:

And eighteen was left blank for anybody to fill in what they wanted. "It was for these reasons that we had come to Chicago, it was for these reasons that many of us may fight and die here. We recognize this as the vision of the founders of this nation. We recognize that we are America; we recognize that we are free men. The present-day politicians and their armies of automatons have selfishly robbed us of our birthright. The evilness they stand for will go unchallenged no longer. Political pigs, your days are numbered. We are the second American Revolution. We shall win."

The history of the word "politicize" — from 1968 to 2015.

May 1968: "S.D.S. is out to politicize the campus."

September 1973:  "It was not simply a matter of increasing numbers, but of the highly politicized manner in which additional blacks found their way into Harvard — overcoming nearly a century of racial and sociological barriers to a sizable presence at Harvard. Militancy and political threats perpetrated by Negro students in 1968-70 paved the way for major alterations in Harvard's recruiting and admissions policies. This resulted in a fivefold increase in black enrollment, but the politization surrounding this development plagued virtually all aspects of black-white relationships, dividing blacks and whites in to mutually exclusive communities." From "The black experience at Harvard," by Martin Kilson.

August 1976: Back when Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer, was getting the Democratic nomination: "Planters [Peanuts] has been the focus of recent efforts to politicize peanuts, such as the recent Democratic National Convention to 'borrow' its Mr. Peanut mascot. 'Mr. Peanut is an apolitical figure'..."

January 1979: Pope John Paul II in Mexico City: "You know that liberation theology is a true theology... But perhaps it is also a false theology, because if one starts to politicize theology, apply doctrines of political systems, ways of analysis which are not Christian, then this is no longer theology."

September 1980: "On the Lower East Side in the late 60's, his aim was to politicize the hippies, not to make the larger world an adjunct to the counterculture." From a review of a new book by Abbie Hoffman.

December 1986: "In 1966, Mao turned to radical Shanghai students to trigger the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long upheaval intended to politicize every facet of Chinese life."
 
November 1992: Hugh Hefner is quoted: "I think the real question is why, after a sexual revolution began in the 50's, did the women's movement seize upon an anti-sexual theme.... A significant part of the hurtful side of feminism is failing to understand how a hurtful childhood can shape you, and instead trying to politicize all behavior. There's really no benefit to viewing sex as the enemy. The sex act is some of the best of what we are, as family, and as a civilization. The notion that sex and violence are connected like law and order is untrue. They are polar opposites. One is hurting; one is hugging."

January 1994: "Do you ever wonder if it was a mistake to politicize the private lives of politicians? Bill Clinton was rumored to have a Gary Hart-ish sexual life, yet he's turned out to be quite supportive of women's rights." From a Q&A with 3 female reporters.

May 1996: When Democratic Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts said that the Defense of Marriage bill was motivated by politics, he was accused of a "desperate attempt to politicize what is not a political issue."

September 1999: After shootings in a Fort Worth church, Texas Governor George W. Bush signed legislation permitting guns in churches, Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore started asking ''How can we allow guns in churches?'," and a Bush spokesman said: "Americans are tired of politicians trying to politicize every tragedy.'' 

December 1999: "Our political leaders must be judged on how they treat everyone, including the least fortunate. We must ask ourselves: do we solve problems or simply push them away, politicize them and criminalize them?'' said Hillary Clinton, about homeless people, whom Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was having arrested for sleeping on the streets.

April 2000: "Holding congressional hearings now would only further politicize this tragedy [of Elian Gonzalez], further inflame the passions, and do nothing to resolve the future of the child.... We should not allow this situation to degenerate further into which political party can benefit the most. Americans have made it clear that they do not want to see this issue politicized," wrote Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

October 2004: "There have been faith-based efforts in America for years and years. There hasn't always been an effort to politicize it," said presidential candidate John Kerry speaking to a group of black pastors.

February 2012: "I think there’s been a chord struck over this issue, this issue of political organizations who are trying to politicize women’s reproductive health," said Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.

October 2015: President Obama, after another mass shooting: "Somebody somewhere will comment and say, Obama politicized this issue. Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic."

"The Islamic State is failing at being a state."

"The Islamic State’s vaunted exercise in state-building appears to be crumbling as living conditions deteriorate across the territories under its control, exposing the shortcomings of a group that devotes most of its energies to fighting battles and enforcing strict rules. Services are collapsing, prices are soaring, and medicines are scarce in towns and cities across the 'caliphate' proclaimed in Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State, residents say, belying the group’s boasts that it is delivering a model form of governance for Muslims."

Yeah... well... Woodstock Nation didn't really work out as a nation. Was that even the point? Isn't it more of a state of mind? The actual physical conditions of human health, safety, and welfare can be atrocious, but if you really believe...

"Woodstock Nation" has its own Wikipedia entry:

... More generally, however, the term is used as a catch-all phrase for those individuals of the baby boomer generation in the United States who subscribed to the values of the American counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The term is often interchangeable with hippie, although the latter term is sometimes used as an oath of derision...

Ha ha, I laugh derisively. As if "Woodstock Nation" isn't a term of derision. 

Anti-Walkerites on the eve of the recall performed an "Om the Dome" ritual at the Wisconsin Capitol.

"Oma Vic McMurray, who runs a home childcare center and has been active in the effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker, instructed the crowd on breathing techniques and led a practice group 'Om.'"

McMurray says the community chant was meant to be a time to "consciously connect on a spiritual level so that we could raise the energy and have faith that this will be a good week for Wisconsin."

Connie Nadler says she felt the symbolism of the moment. "It was quite touching. I was at the connecting point where we were stretching to reach and connect to the other end of the line. The Capitol police were there and were real encouraging. People rushed from the street to help" complete the circle.

Reminds me of Allen Ginsberg at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968:



And, especially since a building was involved, it takes me all the way back to 1967 and "Levitate the Pentagon"....

[A] group of hippies was trying to exorcize the Pentagon. The brainchild of Abbie Hoffman, the plan was for people to sing and chant until it levitated and turned orange, driving out the evil spirits and ending the war in Viet Nam. The Pentagon didn't move.

Related: "What do you think Abbie Hoffman would do to stop the Koch brothers?"

"We want a society where your birth certificate is your passport, and everything is free."

That's a quote from Abbie Hoffman, from a 1971 article in The New York Times called "Ripping Off, The New Lifestyle." I ran across it this morning as I was preparing to teach United States Department of Agriculture v. Moreno (1973), a case about a 1971 amendment to the food stamp program that kept unrelated persons from qualifying as a household. The Supreme Court saw it as "a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group" — that is, hippies — which is not a legitimate governmental interest.

If you want to get a feeling for why Congress freaked out about hippies, go read that article. It's hilarious and disturbing. There's the commune called The Orphanage that has a sign on the wall reading: "The Best Things in Life Are Free — If You Steal Them From the Bourgeoisie." They collected unemployment, welfare, and food stamps (which they sold). The preferred method of getting food was shoplifting.

Ripping off — stealing to the uninitiated — is rapidly become as much a part of the counterculture as drugs and rock music.... [H]undreds of young people live solely off goods they are able to liberate from private enterprise and funds they manage to extract from the Government. Thousands more supplement conventional income with frequent forays, as often for the sheer joy of bilking hated institutions as for the plunder itself.

... College graduates who once might have dreamed of, say, a law partnership, now fantasize knocking over a Brink's truck....

Behind the new morality of theft without guilt is a radical ideology — some would call it a rationalization — which sees America as a society based on the rip off, its most respected citizens businessmen who have most successfully held up the most people... "The dictionary of law is written by the bosses of order," writes [Abbie] Hoffman. "Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral."...

Youths line up at unemployment insurance offices, happily explaining they can't find work because potential employers object to long hair, and at supermarket checkout counters where the signs say, "We Accept Food Stamps."

"Programs intended to help deserving poor folks are perverted to subsidize hippie communes," charges California Gov. Ronald Reagan. "Poverty-stricken mothers stand in line at the market to buy meager amounts of beans and dried milk, and watch shaggy dropouts use food stamps to pay for steaks and butter." ...

Here, the NYT notes the amendment to the food stamp law that was held unconstitutional in Moreno.

Is ripping off piecemeal revolution, an unorganized conspiracy of hit-and-run assaults on capitalism, or is it simply criminality without the extenuating circumstances of forced poverty?

The NYT had to ask! They consulted a sociology professor, Irving Louis Horowitz, who gave them this incredible quote:

"There's no longer any distinction between political dissent and deviant behavior.... The two are becoming one, and obviously the merger is going to lead to strategies that are traditionally considered criminal."

"But when blacks riot in the ghettos, is it a crime or a political act?... When young radicals steal from corporations that are involved in price-fixing, tax evasion and false advertising, is it a crime or a political statement? Ripping off is essentially a moral outcry. The ambiguity is where morality ends and petty thievery begins."

Ah! Sociology professors. What would we do without them?

Meanwhile, Gov. Ronald Reagan went on to become President of the United States in 1981. And that was the same year the fantasy of "knocking over a Brink's truck" came true. A friend of a friend of the Brink's robber-murderers is now President of the United States, and people who don't like him like to ascribe radical ideas to him, but in fact he's a little younger than the Baby Boomers like me who, en masse, warmed to the ideology of Abbie Hoffman, et al., back in 1971. The radicalism of today is tame stuff compared to what was freely spouted and admired back then.

The dumbest Americans: "those born from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s."

WaPo reports:

Compared with every other birth cohort, they have performed the worst on standardized exams, acquired the fewest educational degrees and been the least attracted to professional careers....

Early Xers are the least bookish CEOs and legislators the United States has seen in a long while. They prefer sound bites over seminars, video clips over articles, street smarts over lofty diplomas. They are impatient with syntax and punctuation and citations -- and all the other brainy stuff they were never taught.

Is that dumb or a different way of being smart?

IN THE COMMENTS: Jeff with one 'f' said...

Talk about moving the goalposts. The last I heard the Baby Boom was defined as those born between 1946 and 1964. Now this clown wants to cut the generation in half to make the Xers look bad? Please.

We talked about that back here when the subject was whether Barack Obama, born in 1961, counted as a Boomer. [DATE CORRECTED.] I say he is not. To be a Boomer, you need to have grown up in the post-war afterglow, when parents and communities were psyched about living a normal, conventional family life. You have to have seen what the world was like before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Kennedy Assassination, before Vietnam. If you experienced the Beatles when you were a teenager, you're a Boomer. If you had disco, you're not.

AND: Palladian said...

"Is that dumb or a different way of being smart?"

It's called the influence of the Sixties, man! Even though the Boomers caused the Sixties, they were lucky enough to have had a pre-Sixties education and exposure to pre-Sixties culture. Not so for the poor younger folks, whose brains were permanently damaged by firsthand exposure to the catastrophe of the Age of Aquarius.

I too suspect that the dumbness attributed to the X-ers was produced by the culture of the previous 2 generations. It's not just the Boomers. We were sucking up that culture and promoting it, imbuing it with the power of the young, but people like John Lennon and Bob Dylan were not themselves Boomers. They were born in 1940 and 1941, respectively. Timothy Leary was born in 1920. Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926. Abbie Hoffman was born in 1936.

What am I trying to say? We didn't start the fire.

"What's a good-looking girl like you doing in a corrupt society like this?"

Note passed by Abbie Hoffman, during the Chicago 7 trial, to (female) courtroom artist Andy Austin.

The death of a yippie: "Still me. Still me."

Stew Albert, one of the original Yippies, has gone:

Stew Albert, who with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and a handful of similarly scruffy, leftist anti-establishmentarians formed the Yippie party to protest the Vietnam War, mock institutional authority and nominate a pig, Pigasus, for president, died on Monday at his home in Portland, Ore. He was 66....

[He] caused considerable laughter after Yippies were arrested after nominating Pigasus outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 [when he quoted] a policeman's comment while he was in jail: "I have bad news for you, boys. The pig squealed on you."...

For the last 21 years, Mr. Albert lived in Portland, where he wrote articles and books, ran a Web site and participated in organizations fostering racial harmony.

Last Friday, in his next-to-last blog entry, he wrote, "My politics have not changed."

A blog? How about a link?

Here's Stew Albert's Yippie Reading Room. Ah! Here's the blog. Nice to see Yippies use Blogger. You have to scroll down a ways to get to his last post:

"Day in the Life: Super crazy thing. The hospice nurse had to do more. Still me. Still me."

"Still me" is a great last line, with a profound double meaning. If you can write that you are still you, you retain your identity. But dying, you are being stilled, and dead, you will be still, silent, forever. The "still me" goes on forever.

The second to the last post, one day earlier reads:

Draining fast food
Gotcha going nowhere
It's still the sea around us
So award tells me
Moving fast
Don't move it tonight
I prefer it clean

Day in the Life: My politics have not changed. Stew

His politics are the same, the last political statement, very general and abstract. The day before, the last specific political comment:

Fall

Fell over flat first thing in the morning
so now there is a bit of hospice in the mix
your Arabs fell further
they voted for Hamas
even two life times might not be enough

Goodbye to Stew Albert.