The Festival of Life and the Politics of Performance: Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and the Yippie Experiment, 1967-1969

Abstract

This thesis examines the Yippie movement. Yippie was founded by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in 1967 as an attempt to fuse the antiwar politics of the New Left with the theatrics and lifestyle of the hippie counterculture. Drawing from memoirs, underground press coverage, government documents, photographs, and trial transcripts, this project follows the rise and fall of the Yippie movement. Chapter One traces Rubin’s evolution from suburban conformity to antiwar theatrics. Chapter Two focuses on Hoffman’s shift from Civil Rights activism to hippie street theater. Chapter Three centers on the Yippie role in the demonstrations against the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This thesis argues that Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman’s Yippie movement succeeded in joining the antiwar and hippie countercultures in the public imagination, but this theatrical fusion ultimately weakened both movements on the ground. Moreover, it contends that in developing the Yippie movement, Rubin and Hoffman pioneered a novel form of protest and identity, which countered conventional understandings of race and pushed the limits of what it means to ‘drop out’ of society. The Yippie story reveals the creative power of performance in activism and the risks of blending social rebellion with militant dissent. This thesis intervenes in the existing scholarship by analyzing the Chicago demonstrations as a crescendo of the Yippie movement and a verdict on Rubin and Hoffman’s form of activism.