Inactive: Thomas C. Reeves
Yippy History
The Youth International Party, known as the Yippies, was created by Abbie Hoffman, Anita Hoffman, and Paul Krassner in 1967, near the height of the tensions involving Vietnam and the social and racial issues that were exploding almost daily all across the country. The Yippies were extreme leftists who enjoyed condemning America, raising hell, and promoting moral, sexual, and political anarchy.
In January, 1968 Yippies invited the Far Left from around the world to converge on Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was to be held. After the chaos and bloodshed that ensued, the Chicago 7, including Yippies Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, went on trial for conspiracy to incite a riot. From September 1969 through February 1970, the defendants, their attorneys, and a bungling and biased judge, turned a courtroom into radical theater and excited the media everywhere. The Yippies became world famous symbols of resistance to almost everything that most American citizens held dear. Members and sympathizers held annual pot parades and published newspapers like Overthrow. Hoffman scattered dollar bills on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to express his scorn for capitalism. In 1968, Yippies ran a pig named Pegasus for President.
After the conclusion of the Vietnam War, the Yippies declined rapidly. One leading member, Jerry Rubin, became a Yuppie, and he and Abbie Hoffman toured college campuses arguing about the values of the Sixties Revolution. Hoffman committed suicide in 1989, and the movement he championed sank into obscurity. Until recently.
In 1973 the Yippie hierarchy began operating out of a three story building near the Bowery. Over the years their rent escalated from $675 a month to more than $8,000. By 2004, according to the New York Times, the two dozen or so veteran Yippies still in New York, and the handful of others scattered across the country, were unable to pay their bills. So a partnership was formed between Yippie Holdings and an advocacy group called the National AIDS Brigade. It purchased the East Village building for $1.2 million. A non-profit organization will be formed, and the $11,000 a month mortgage will be paid off by transforming the building into a Yippie museum and an advocacy center to fight the transmission of AIDS. The partnership plans to use the property as equity to get loans, and hopes to build an additional story on the roof to acquire more funds. In short, the farthest realm of the counterculture, by these actions, has at long last endorsed capitalism. Yippies as businesspeople and landlords.
These actions raise at least two questions. First, what will be featured at the Yippie museum? Photos of zany pranks and riots, to be sure, but what else? Police records? Handcuffs and billy clubs collected after encounters with the law? Old bottles of face paint? A stuffed Pegasus? Will the operators have to pass out pot to draw tourists? It somehow doesn’t sound very exciting or profitable.
Secondly, how much will the taxpayers have to shell out to keep the museum and advocacy center operating? Anything about AIDS can draw sympathy from the Left, and in New York practically all of the politicians are Democrats. My guess is that in time ways will be devised to channel public funds into the support of this monument to what leftists think was a heroic age. Perhaps the initial grant will be titled “A tribute to change.” Or how about the Bobby Seales web page title: “From the Sixties…to the Future”?
A Kerry Administration might well channel even larger funds into the project. Kerry still shows signs of his years as an anti-war activist, and his Senate voting record is to the left of Ted Kennedy’s. Indeed, if the Democrats win in November, will we see a Yippie cabinet member--in a new Department of Sexual Energy? Will January 22, the day on which Roe v. Wade was issued in 1973, become a national holiday? Perhaps Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York, site of the Woodstock Concert, will be made a national shrine. Times may become so good that the Yippies and their AIDS Brigade partners will purchase a second building and jack up the rent.
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