PART 6:ACID DREAMS....PEAKING IN BABYLON

Acid Dreams The Complete 
Social History of LSD: The CIA, 
The Sixties, and Beyond 
By Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain

Chapter 8 

Peaking In Babylon 

A Gathering Storm 

There is the story of the Zen master who tells his student, "Don't think of a carrot." Naturally a carrot is the first image that pops into the student's mind. So, too, the establishment media constantly decried LSD and warned in shrill tones of an epidemic of drug abuse sweeping the nation. The net effect of the immense publicity, even though much of it was negative, was to arouse intense interest and curiosity, leading to ever-widening patterns of use. For in an era of generational disaffection the quickest way to spur adolescent action is to say, "Don't do it!"

The evolution of the psychedelic scene was intimately bound up with the media coverage it attracted. Prior to the big publicity barrage, those who lived in the Haight, New York's East Village, and other hip redoubts did not necessarily think of themselves as belonging to an overarching "counterculture." The quantum leap from community to counterculture was precipitated by the first major media event, the San Francisco be-in of January 1967. The organizers of the be-in consciously sought to use the media to send a message throughout the country. On its own terms the event was an astounding achievement: the psychedelic butterfly fluttered through the TV cameras directly into the hearts and minds of America's restless youth. But the ramifications of this sudden exposure were ambiguous, double-edged. As a result of the be-in, Haight-Ashbury became a national symbol. Shortly thereafter the original fabric of the hip community began to unravel as young people responding to the "hippie temptation" (examined in a CBS documentary of that title) inundated the Haight. In fact it was the media doing the tempting, and the acid ghetto was trampled to death during the Summer of Love, leaving a social sewer in its place[Knowing what we know now about the media,we should not be surprised to see them pushing the hippie thing at the youth of America DC]

A similar pattern was repeated in the East Village, where a combination of runaways, tourism, and Mafia heroin destroyed a creative scene that had been many years in the making. The psychedelic pioneers in New York were an informal group of beats, students, and pacifists who frequented an arcane bookstore on East Ninth Street run by Eric Loeb; it sold peyote buttons that were on display in the storefront window in the late 1950's. Street acid was available by 1963, and as more people turned on, the gathering places became more explicit: Ed Sanders' Peace Eye Bookstore, the Electric Circus performance space on Saint Mark's Place, Fillmore East on Second Avenue, Tompkins Square and Washington Square Park. There was also an array of coffee shops, including the Psychedelicatessen, and other conspicuous hangouts offering copies of Inner Space, a psychedelic newsletter published by Lynn House. The topography of New York City made the situation all the more intense, and there was plenty of street action leading up to the be-in at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park on Easter Sunday 1967. The New York be-in, organized by Abbie Hoffman, Jim Fouratt, and others, was inspired by its San Francisco prototype. Thousands of glassy-eyed youths smoked pot and gobbled acid while suspicious cops and TV cameramen surrounded the site. The psychedelic community quickly degenerated after this event, and a series of brutal drug murders in the fall of 1967 marked the end of an exotic social experiment.

The decimation of the East Village and the Haight might have been the final chapter of a unique phase in cultural history if not for the profound impact these communities had on American society as a whole. Like a cue ball scattering the opening shot, the media laser beam broke open the energy cluster that had coalesced in these hip enclaves and spread the psychedelic seed throughout the country. Soon there were love-ins and be-ins in nearly every major city in the US as hippie colonies sprang up across the land. Wherever LSD appeared on the scene, it announced itself in obvious ways: long hair, way-out clothing, funny glasses, and overall freakiness. (Frank Zappa, leader of the Los Angeles-based rock group, the Mothers of Invention, defined "freaking out" as "a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express CREATIVELY his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.") People who turned on were entertained and enlightened by distinctive modes of art, film, dance, poetry, and, perhaps most important, music. The new electric sound, at once lyrical and dissonant, had broad appeal without losing any of its rebellious bite. For the first time in history young intellectuals and the young masses were not only grooving to the same beat but getting high on the same drugs.

"No corporate leader can afford to ignore the changing social, political and intellectual standard summed up in the phrase 'the generation gap,'" lectured David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, to a group of executives at the University of Chicago's, annual management conference in early 1968. By this time Madison Avenue had appropriated hip lingo to sell consumer goods, and snatches of popular songs could be heard in various advertising jingles. Opel promised to "light your fire," while a new brand of laundry detergent was touted as "out of sight." (The hippies, meanwhile, adapted the motto of the mega corporation: "Better living through chemistry.") The mystique of the Haight was ripped off by the bell-bottom salesmen and the promoters of Hair, a box-office triumph that took Broadway by storm in the fall of 1967. "LSD, LBJ, FBI, CIA," sang the cast of this widely acclaimed "tribal love-rock musical" which featured nudity, draft card burning, and an AM chart-buster hailing the day when peace would rule the planet and love would steer the stars. America may not have approved of its flower children, but commercially it ate them up.

The styles associated with psychedelic drugs achieved widespread cultural diffusion throughout North America and the Western world thanks to the ubiquitous reach of the mass media. Even those who did not actually sample LSD were apt to wear their hair longer and partake, however indirectly, of the psychedelic groundswell. But LSD had a much deeper effect on those who actually experimented with the drug. The media fanfare surrounding Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love catalyzed the sudden explosion of the acid scene. Four million North Americans are said to have tried acid in the late 1960's, and the average user, according to an extensive survey by Dr. Sidney Cohen, Richard Alpert, and Lawrence Schiller, was taking a dose every three or four months. Seventy percent of the turned-on set were of high school or college age, and many of them were involved in radical politics at one time or another.

The burgeoning acid scene raised more than a few eyebrows within the intelligence community, and a number of CIA-connected think tanks, including the Rand Corporation,* analyzed the broader questions relating to the social and political impact of LSD. Based in Santa Monica, California, the Rand Corporation played a crucial role in designing strategies for counter-revolution and pacification that were implemented in Vietnam. In the mid-1960's the think tank approach was expanded to include domestic issues; along this line Rand personnel examined the short- and long-term effect of LSD on personality change. A Rand report by William McGlothlin refers to "changes in dogmatism" and political affiliation: "If some of the subjects are drawn from extreme right or left wing organizations, it may be possible to obtain additional behavioral measure in terms of the number resigning or becoming inactive."

* James Schlesinger, former CIA director and Secretary of Defense, is a senior strategic analyst at Rand. Henry Rowen, former Rand president, previously served as head of the CIAís National Intelligence Command

While Rand Corporation specialists pondered whether LSD might be an antidote to political activism, the Hudson Institute, another think tank with strong ties to the intelligence community, kept tabs on shifting trends within the grassroots psychedelic movement. Founded by Herman Kahn,# one of America's leading nuclear strategists, the Hudson Institute specialized in classified research on national security issues. Kahn experimented with LSD on repeated occasions during the 1960's, and he visited Millbrook and other psychedelic strongholds on the East Coast. From time to time the rotund futurist (Kahn weighed over three hundred pounds) would stroll along Saint Mark's Place in the East Village, observing the flower children and musing on the implications of the acid subculture. At one point he predicted that by the year 2000 there would be an alternative "dropped-out" country within the United States. But Kahn was not overly sympathetic to the psychedelic movement. "He was primarily interested in social control," stated a Hudson Institute consultant who once lectured there on the subject of LSD.

#A well-known futurist, Kahn coauthored a book called The Year 2000 with Anthony Wiener, a professor at MIT's Center for International Studies. Wiener had previously received a $12,000 grant from the Human Ecology Fund, which served as a cutout for funding numerous CIA behavior control studies under Operation MK-ULTRA.

The psychedelic subculture and its relationship to the New Left and the political upheavals of the 1960's was the subject of an investigation by Willis Harmon, who currently heads the Futures Department at the Stanford Research Institute (S.R.I). Located in Palo Alto, California, this prestigious think tank received a number of grants from the US Army to conduct classified research into chemical incapacitants. Harmon made no bones about where he stood with respect to political radicals and the New Left. When Michael Rossman, a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, visited S.R.I headquarters in the early 1970's, Harmon told him, "There's a war going on between your side and mine. And my side is not going to lose."

Harmon was turned on to LSD in the late 1950's by Captain Al Hubbard, the legendary super spy, who took a special interest in his new convert. Shortly thereafter Harmon became vice-president of the International Federation for Advanced Studies (I.F.A.S), an organization devoted to exploring the therapeutic and problem solving potential of LSD. I.F.A.S was the brainchild of Hubbard, who undoubtedly leaned on his political connections in Washington to insure that Harmon and his colleagues would be allowed to continue their drug investigations even after the first big purge of above-ground LSD research by the FDA in the early 1960's. During this period I.F.A.S charged $500 for a single session of high-dose psychedelic therapy an arrangement that led some critics to accuse I.F.A.S of bilking the public.

Adverse publicity forced I.F.A.S to disband in 1965, whereupon Harmon, who considered himself a disciple of the Captain, became director of the Educational Policy Research Center at S.R.I. In October 1968 he invited Hubbard, then living in semi retirement in British Columbia, to join S.R.I as a part-time "special investigative agent." As Harmon stated in a letter to his acid mentor, "Our investigations of some of the current social movements affecting education indicate that the drug usage prevalent among student members of the New Left is not entirely undesigned. Some of it appears to be present as a deliberate weapon aimed at political change. We are concerned with assessing the significance of this as it impacts on matters of long range educational policy. In this connection it would be advantageous to have you considered in the capacity of a special investigative agent who might have access to relevant data which is not ordinarily available."

Hubbard accepted the offer of a $100 per day consultant's fee, and from then on he was officially employed as a security officer for S.R.I. "His services to us," explained Harmon, "consisted in gathering various sorts of data regarding student unrest, drug abuse, drug use at schools and universities, causes and nature of radical activities, and similar matters, some of a classified nature."

Hubbard was the ideal person for such a task. He boasted a great deal of experience both in the law enforcement field and in the use of psychedelic drugs. As a special agent for the FDA in the early 1960's, he led the first raids on underground acid labs, and a number of rebel chemists were arrested because of his detective work. The Captain was particularly irked when he learned that LSD in adulterated form was circulating on the black market. To Hubbard this represented degradation of the lowest order. The most precious spiritual substance on earth was being contaminated by a bunch of lousy bathtub chemists out to make a quick buck. The Captain was dead set against illicit drug use. "Impure drugs are very dangerous," he explained, "and the Law takes a dim view of it." He kept a sample of street acid for "comparative purposes" each time he busted an underground LSD factory during the 1960's; most of these outfits, Hubbard maintained, were run by the Mafia.

Even though Hubbard took a lot of acid and was a maverick among his peers, he remained a staunch law-and-order man throughout his life. The crew-cut Captain was the quintessential turned-on patriot, a seasoned spy veteran who admired the likes of J. Edgar Hoover; Above all Hubbard didn't like weirdos especially long- haired radical weirdos who abused his beloved LSD. Thus he was eager to apply his espionage talents to a secret study of the student movement and the acid subculture. After conferring with Harmon, the Captain donned a khaki uniform, a gold-plated badge, a belt strung with bullets, and a pistol in a shoulder holster. That was the uniform he wore throughout his tenure as an S.R.I consultant, which lasted until the late 1970's.

Ironically, while Harmon and Hubbard were probing the relationship between drugs and radical politics, a number of New Left activists grappled with a similar question. Political and cultural radicals from both sides of the Atlantic discussed the drug issue at a conference on "the dialectics of liberation," which took place in London during the summer of 1967. Some were wary of mixing acid and politics. "Don't give LSD to Che Guevara, he might stop fighting," said Dr. David Cooper, a British psychiatrist who feared that drugs might undermine political commitment (the same thesis put forward by the Rand Corporation). But others, such as Allen Ginsberg, saw great advantages in a "politics of ecstasy." The pro-LSD faction insisted that acid was a radicalizing factor and that psychedelics would continue to galvanize the youth rebellion.

Obviously there was a great deal of confusion about LSD and its influence on the New Left. But an assessment of the overall impact of LSD cannot be couched solely in terms of whether acid "politicized" or "depoliticized" those who turned on, for the drug is capable of producing a wide range of reactions. A common mistake with respect to LSD was to attribute the personal effects of an acid trip to something inherent in the drug itself; as a result of this subtle transference, acid acquired the qualities of a particular mind-set or milieu, depending on who was experimenting with it. The love-and-peace vibrations thought to be intrinsic to the psychedelic high were largely an amplified reflection of the unique spirit that animated the mid-1960's, just as the CIA's obsession with LSD-induced anxiety and terror mirrored the Cold War paranoia of the espionage establishment.

Strictly speaking, acid is neither a transcendental sacrament, as Leary claimed, nor an anxiety-producing agent, as initially defined by CIA and army scientists. Rather, it is a nonspecific amplifier of psychic and social processes. LSD "makes you more of what you are," Aldous Huxley concluded. "It gives each person what he or she needs." At the same time acid catalyzes whatever forces are already active in a given social milieu and brings forth those that are latent.

Everyone who belongs to a particular culture shares, in the words of Peter Marin, "a condition, a kind of internal landscape,' the psychic shape that a particular time and place assumes within a man as the extent and limit of his perceptions, dreams, and pleasure and pain." This internal landscape was jolted by a series of earthquakes in the 1960's and early 1970's, and psychedelic drugs intensified and accelerated each phase of the youth rebellion as it developed over the years. The crucial turning point occurred in 1967, when the grassroots acid scene was floodlit by the mass media and young people started turning on in greater numbers than ever before. This period marked the beginning of a new phase of political and counter cultural transition. The media would be deeply implicated in everything that happened thereafter.

In effect, the media catalyzed the widespread use of LSD, itself a catalyst, and the pace of events suddenly flew into high gear. The fuse had been lit in 1965, and now it was as if the second stage of that acid-fueled rocket had blasted into hyperspace. The fallout from the psychedelic explosion was enormous, reaching even those who shuddered at the prospect of turning on. Every sector of the New Left was affected by it, if only by contamination or the rush to denounce it. Soon the acid crazies would run amok, trashing what remained of the old political style and further upsetting the equilibrium of a movement that was already wobbling in the glare of publicity. But if LSD knocked things off-balance, it also gave the New Left "its first- ever dose of real fun," as Mairowitz put it, and a lot of young people wanted a piece of the action.

Magical Politics 

The peace movement had reached a crossroads in the spring of 1967, after people took to the streets in unprecedented numbers all across the country to protest the war in Vietnam. Despite this tremendous outpouring of public sentiment President Johnson continued to escalate the war effort. American troop strength swelled to nearly a half-million, and young men were returning in body bags at a rate of five hundred a month. All of this was deeply disturbing to David Dellinger, director of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (otherwise known as the Mobe). Dellinger, an avowed pacifist, was strongly committed to nonviolence, but he questioned whether petitioning the government solely through legal means was an adequate response to the Vietnam debacle. His dilemma was compounded by the fact that the antiwar coalition had grown to encompass a broad range of groups from moderate to radical, each pursuing its own strategy and objectives. The only thing they all agreed on was to meet at the next big event: an antiwar demonstration in Washington, DC, on October 21, 1967, sponsored by Dellinger and the Mobe.

Dellinger feared that anything less than a huge turnout would be depicted in the press as a sign that the peace movement was losing steam. Big demonstrations were essential for media coverage, and the Mobe needed publicity to keep up the momentum. But the prospect of yet another well-mannered, nonviolent event that the government would simply shrug off did not appeal to radical elements. At one point S.D.S threatened to boycott the protest rally on the grounds that it would "delude" people into thinking they were having an effect on public policy. The Mobe eventually opted for a multi tactical approach that included a call for defiant mass resistance at the Pentagon after the main rally at the Lincoln Memorial. To attract as many young people as possible Dellinger invited Jerry Rubin, the noted Berkeley activist, to New York to help organize the Pentagon action.

Rubin had impressive credentials among radicals and youth groups. He was one of the prime movers of the Vietnam Day protest in Berkeley two years earlier, and he led marchers in an attempt to block troop trains. After spending a month in jail for his political work, he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (H.U.A.C) in Washington. Instead of pleading the Fifth Amendment as most people did when called by H.U.A.C, Rubin entered the hearing room dressed in an American Revolutionary War uniform. "I wear this uniform to symbolize the fact that America was born in revolution, but today America does violence to her own past by denying the right of others to revolution," he told a group of reporters. It was a political ploy designed to make a mockery of the H.U.A.C proceedings; the congressmen were caught off guard, and Rubin's stunt became page-one news throughout the country. The publicity helped him gamer 22% of the vote when he ran for mayor of Berkeley the following year on a platform opposing the war and supporting black power and the legalization of marijuana.

As soon as Rubin arrived in New York, he teamed up with Abbie Hoffman, an East Village hippie who'd been a civil rights organizer before he turned on to acid in 1965 courtesy of his roommate, an army psychologist who supplied the LSD. Hoffman got into drugs and grew his curly hair long, but he remained an activist at heart. He was involved in staging the New York be-in during the spring of 1967 an event modeled after the first Human Be-In in San Francisco, which had featured Rubin as a speaker.

Hoffman's politics got a lot saucier after he met a group of San Francisco Diggers in June 1967 at a "Back to the Drawing Boards" conference sponsored by S.D.S. At this gathering, which took place in Denton, Michigan, a Digger spokesman took off his clothes and challenged everyone else to do likewise. When no one budged, he started tossing tables and chairs around while berating the New Lefties in a burst of "do your own thing" rhetoric for being stodgy and unimaginative in their discussions of strategy. For many of the S.D.S members it was like watching the sulfurous fumes of hell. But not for Hoffman; he just sat there transfixed, absorbing everything he heard and saw. When he returned to New York he began calling himself "Abbie Digger" and opened a Free Store in the Bowery. Hoffman later published Steal This Book, a widely read underground treatise that incorporated much of what he had gleaned from the Diggers.

While Hoffman admired the acid anarchists from San Francisco, he did not share their disdain for using the media as a political tool. "A modem revolutionary headed for the television station, not for the factory," he declared. His eagerness to exploit the TV cameras struck a responsive chord in his newfound friend Jerry Rubin, who was also strongly influenced by the acid scene in San Francisco. ("If everyone did it," Rubin said of LSD, "it would be like heaven on earth.") They got stoned together and shared ideas about building a grand alliance between the bohemian and New Left tendencies. Such a combination, they believed, would provide an inexhaustible source of energy for the Movement. They agreed that the psychedelic subculture could be a significant political force, but if more young people were to be drawn into the protest struggle they would have to be engaged theatrically, via long hair, costume, and clever gamesmanship. With this in mind they set their sights on the upcoming march on the Pentagon.

Rubin had picked up a bit of occult folklore from Michael Bowen, the Psychedelic Ranger from Haight-Ashbury who had organized the San Francisco be-in and turned Rubin on to LSD earlier that year. A five-sided figure, Bowen explained, is a symbol of power, and when the figure is pointed north like the Pentagon building in Washington, it represents the forces of evil. This being the case, Bowen introduced the notion of encircling the Pentagon not to capture it or shut it down, as some militants had urged, but to wound it symbolically. The idea of a mass antiwar ritual appealed to Rubin and Hoffman. At a press conference preceding the demonstration, they announced their intention to exorcise the Pentagon's evil spirits by levitating the building three hundred feet in the air until it started to vibrate and turn orange, whereupon the war in Vietnam would immediately cease. Hoffman also threatened to release a mysterious gas called "LACE," allegedly concocted by Owsley, which "makes you want to take off your clothes, kiss people and make love."

Seventy-five thousand protesters assembled at the Lincoln Memorial, including a sizable number of hippie types dressed in colorful costumes. The motley army of witches, warlocks, sorcerers, and long-haired bards who had come to celebrate the mystic revolution lent a carnival atmosphere to the demonstration. After a rousing prelude of speeches and songs, a large contingent crossed the Arlington Memorial Bridge into Virginia and raced toward the Pentagon, waving banners and shouting antiwar epithets. Some were high on acid when they stormed the grim ziggurat. They surrounded the entire building, dancing and hissing in unison, while soldiers stood guard at all five walls. Posters and slogans memorializing Che Guevara, the Latin revolutionary who had been killed in Bolivia a few weeks earlier, appeared on abutments, and a Viet Cong flag, blue and red with a gold star, fluttered in the breeze. And then the promised exorcism began.

"Out, demons, out!" boomed the voice of Ed Sanders, leader of a burlesque folk-rock ensemble called the Fugs, which provided musical edification for the antiwar constituency. On a flatbed truck in front of the high church of the military-industrial complex, the Fugs worked their "gene-shredding influence" on the crowd. Thousands shrieked their approval "Out, out, out!"and the stage was set for an ecstatic confrontation.

The demonstration had become a form of ritual theater, a preview of what politics would be like in the post-Haight-Ashbury era. As Norman Mailer wrote in The Armies of the Night, a best selling account of the march on the Pentagon, "Now, here, after several years of the blandest reports from the religious explorers of LSD, vague Tibetan lama goody-goodness auras of religiosity being the only publicly announced or even rumored fruit from all trips back from the buried Atlantis of LSD, now suddenly an entire generation of acid-heads seemed to have said goodbye to easy visions of heaven, no, now the witches were here, and rites of exorcism, and black terrors of the night . The hippies had gone from Tibet to Christ to the Middle Ages, now they were Revolutionary Alchemists."

Despite their incantations and spells the protesters could not transmute the lead weight of the Pentagon into a golden vision in the sky. But it hardly mattered, for they were celebrating a new kind of activism, a style so authentically unique that it verged on the bizarre. "What possibly they shared," said Mailer, "was the unspoken happy confidence that politics had again become mysterious, had begun to partake of Mystery . The new generation believed in technology more than any before it, but the generation also believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution. It had no respect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step: belief was reserved for the revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what was going to happen next; that was what was good about it."

What happened next was not something anyone had expected in fact, it might never have happened had it not been for the FBI, which attempted to disrupt the antiwar gathering upon learning of a plot to sky-bomb the Pentagon with ten thousand flowers. Peggy Hitchcock (the sister of William Mellon Hitchcock, owner of the Millbrook estate) gave Michael Bowen and friends money to purchase two hundred pounds of daisies for the occasion, but the plan never got off the ground because of a dirty trick by the FBI. ]. Edgar Hoover's men answered an ad for a pilot in the East Village Other but never showed up at the airport. Bowen was stuck with more flowers than he knew what to do with, so he turned around and drove back to the demonstration. Distributed among the crowd, the flowers were subsequently photographed by the world press protruding from the muzzles of rifles held by the soldiers guarding the Pentagon.

It was one of the spectacular images of the 1960's: the troops with their bayonets sprouting daisies, frozen in a tense face-off with the antiwar activists. By sundown most of the press had left. The police moved in with tear gas and arrested people over eight hundred in all and many were brutally beaten. But these tactics did not dampen the spirits of the demonstrators. They were elated by what had transpired. Some felt that it was a watershed event, comparable in magnitude to the Boston Tea Party. "It made me see that we could build a movement by knocking off American symbols," said Rubin. "We had symbolically destroyed the Pentagon, the symbol of the war machine, by throwing blood on it, by pissing on it, dancing on it  painting 'Che lives' on it. It was a total cultural attack on the Pentagon. The media had communicated this all over the country and lots of people identified with us, the besiegers."

After the march Rubin decided to remain in New York with his girlfriend, Nancy Kurshan. They spent the next few months with Hoffman and his wife, Anita, cooking up new stunts so audacious and compelling that the press would have to cover them. "An event doesn't exist until the media announces it," Rubin asserted. "Once the media announces it, it is an event whether or not it exists." He and Hoffman believed that television was little more than an elaborate mirror game the authorities used to pacify the public. In their stoned reveries they dreamed of switching the mirrors around in order to reflect a different set of images that would shock the viewers, blow their minds, and make them confront the idea that there was a crazy alternative to the straight way of life.

Hoffman and Rubin possessed an uncanny knack for showmanship, a sixth sense for what would capture the imagination of young people. But they needed some kind of focal point, a central theme that would enhance the impact of their efforts. On New Year's Day 1968 they dropped acid together so they "could look at the problem logically," as Rubin put it, and they hit upon a recipe for social change. Mix one part hippie and one part activist, marinade in Marx (Groucho, not Karl) and McLuhan, season radically with psychedelics, and what do you come up with? Paul Krassner, editor of the Realist, a satirical underground magazine, said it first: "Yippie!" the battle cry of the Youth International Party. It was a name to conjure with, a rallying point for stoned politicos and militant hippies who had merged the "I protest" of the New Left with the "I am" of the counterculture. "We figured we could create a new myth of the dope-taking, freedom-loving, politically committed activist," Rubin explained. "Some day, we dreamed, the myth will grow and grow until there were millions of yippies Soon there will be yip-pies and a Youth International Party throughout the Western world."

The Yippies didn't go along with the notion that being a serious activist meant you couldn't have a good time. Convinced that boredom was a revolutionary sin, they were determined to make outrage contagious on a mass scale. "No need to build a stage," said Hoffman, "it was all around us. Props would be simple and obvious. We would hurl ourselves across the canvas of American society like streaks of splattered paint. Highly visual images would become news, and rumor mongers would rush to spread the excited word."

The Yippies were political pranksters, and their lunatic style of attack played upon the media's insatiable appetite for anything new or eccentric. They knew the press would give them free publicity as long as they flaunted the holy goof: burning money on Wall Street; appearing naked in church; dumping soot and smoke bombs in the lobby of Con Edison's headquarters; mailing Valentine's cards to persons unknown, each containing a joint. Their bombastic antics were framed as political commercials ("advertisements for the revolution") that would mobilize oppositional consciousness and compel people by dramatic example to change their lives. "Our lifestyle acid, long hair, rock music, sex is the revolution," Rubin declared.

To the Yippies the masses of American youth were potential revolutionaries who merely had to be "turned on" by media buttons and by LSD. They believed that acid was a subversive instrument, and they urged everyone to take the drug in order to break the mind-forged manacles that bound people to a repressive society. This presumably would lead to an understanding of why a revolution was necessary, thereby accelerating the dawn of a twentieth-century utopia. "Once one has experienced LSD," said Hoffman, "one realizes that action is the only reality." But what kind of action did the Yippies propose? Drugs made them more willing to gamble on their intuitions. "Mostly it's a catch-as-catch-can affair," Hoffman admitted. "You just get stoned, get the ideas in your head and then do 'em."

TV and LSD: both magical and instantaneous, both ways of leapfrogging the long and arduous task of grassroots political organizing. The Yippies had no predefined strategy other than epater les bourgeois (tweaking the nose of the middle class) via media freaking. They rejected the idea of a program as too confining. Ideology was dismissed as "a brain disease." If they had any doctrine at all, it was that people should do "whatever the fuck they want." Rubin described his Yippie vision in the closing passages of Do It!

At community meetings all over the land. Bob Dylan will replace the National Anthem. There will be no more jails, courts, or police. The White House will become a crash pad for anybody without a place to stay in Washington. The world will become one big commune with free food and housing, everything shared. All watches and clocks will be destroyed . The Pentagon will be replaced by an LSD experimental farm.[pure delusion DC]

The Yippies were not an organization in the formal sense. They had no membership list, no direct relationship with a grassroots, face-to-face constituency, and it was not clear whether their views represented a majority opinion in hip communities; nevertheless, these TV-promoted gadflies became the most celebrated spokesmen for the youth movement. In this respect the Yippies had much in common with Timothy Leary, whose status as leader of the psychedelic movement was certified by the media rather than by those who actually took LSD. Leary also lacked an organizational base but was adept at manipulating the press, which was one of the reasons the Yippies sought him out. "We had many analytical discussions about the tactical necessity of using the media," Leary recalled. But he was not particularly enthusiastic when the Yippies asked him to endorse their cause. Despite the halfhearted response Hoffman acknowledged his debt to the High Priest of LSD: "I studied his technique of karmic salesmanship."

The Yippies were the first group on the left to define themselves solely through the media projections of their flamboyant leaders. On their own terms they were quite successful. They articulated a spirit of revolt that was alive in young people throughout the country and helped foster an anti establishment consciousness among some who might not have been reached in any other way. But the Yippie approach was not without pitfalls. As former S.D.S president Todd Gitlin explained, "When movements become too 'mediated' it becomes hard to tell the difference between a movement and a fad, a movement and a trend, or just a press conference. The results are pernicious for movements. The line between leadership and celebrity becomes very thin. It's easy for leaders to cross over and become wholly unaccountable to a movement base." 

Rubin and Hoffman were the two most famous radical celebrities of the 1960's. Their lust for the spotlight, doubtless the product of personal as well as political motives, drove them to new peaks of self-promotion. But the Yippies paid a high price for a ticket on the publicity loop. As four-star attractions in an ongoing radical soap opera, they inadvertently trivialized the very issues they sought to dramatize. The result was a parody of left-wing politics that may have undermined serious efforts to reform America. "I didn't know if I was headed to Hollywood or to jail," Rubin later confessed. "I purposefully manipulated the media, but on a deeper level I see that it was mutual manipulation. To interest the media I needed to express my politics frivolously . If I had given a sober lecture on the history of Vietnam, the media cameras would have turned off."

So the Yippies kept pranking and the cameras kept cranking. The most outlandish, abrasive, and extravagant gestures were the surest to be broadcast, and the media, always hungry for novelty, gave leading roles to those who, in Gitlin's words, "seemed like Central Casting's gift to revolutionary imagery." By no means, however, did the Yippies have a monopoly on movement histrionics in the late 1960's. Indeed, their zany youth cult capers were timid in comparison to the militant theatrics of the Black Panther party.

Founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the Panthers first gained attention the following year when they strolled into the California state capitol building in Sacramento twenty strong, with their leather jackets, black berets on blossoming afros, and loaded Magnum rifles and shotguns, to protest a bill forbidding such weapons in Oakland, where the Panthers were based. The ensuing publicity gave them a big boost, and they began to organize chapters in urban ghettos across the country. Initially their focus was on police brutality and self-defense, but soon the Panthers developed a black socialist ideology and a forthright party program that reflected the influence of Malcolm X, who in the final years of his life had rejected anti white bigotry. To promote the party in the community, the Panthers launched a variety of "survival programs," such as free medical clinics, pest control projects, and free breakfast for poor children (black, brown, and white) on a daily basis an idea that had been suggested by the San Francisco Diggers. Meanwhile they continued to cultivate the symbolism of violence. Their over inflated language, menacing leather attire, and radical cool provoked a great deal of attention in the mainstream press, and thousands of young blacks joined their ranks.

The Panthers rejected the goal of assimilation into a system they saw as repressive and inhumane a sentiment shared by many white radicals. The black nationalist culture, with its dashikis, tiger-tooth necklaces, and afro haircuts, often espoused values similar to those of the white counterculture: spontaneity, simplicity, respect for individuality and ethnic identity, cooperation rather than competition, and so forth. A number of black activists were also into drugs mostly marijuana and cocaine for rest and relaxation. Some of the Panthers, for example, liked to get stoned and listen to Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited on headphones. They were particularly impressed by "The Ballad of a Thin Man," which taunted "Mr. Jones," the archetypical honkie who knows something's happening but doesn't know what it is. "These brothers would get halfway high, loaded on something," Bobby Seale recounted, "and they would sit down and play this record over and over and over, especially after they began to hear Huey P. Newton interpret that record. They'd be trying to relate to an understanding about what was going on, 'cause old Bobby [Dylan] did society a big favor when he made that particular sound."

While the black power movement had a strong cultural component, it never embraced LSD, which made only minor inroads into black society during the 1960's. Reality was already too heavy a trip in the ghetto, and many black militants were unkindly disposed toward the black soul singers and rock stars who expressed a preference for hippie drugs in their music: Sly and the Family Stone ("I Want to Take You Higher"), Jimi Hendrix ("Are You Experienced?"), the Chambers Brothers ("Time Has Come Today"), the Temptations ("Cloud Nine" and "Psychedelic Shack"). Certain black radicals, such as A. X. Nicholas, went so far as to denounce these songs as "counterrevolutionary" and urge that they be boycotted by the black community.

Thus it took on added significance when Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information of the Black Panther party, offered to make an alliance with those notoriously wacked- out acid heads the Yippies. "Eldridge wanted a coalition between the Panthers and psychedelic street activists," Rubin explained. So they got together, smoked a lot of grass, and composed a "joint" manifesto called the Panther-Yippie Pipe Dream. "Into the streets!" Cleaver proclaimed. "Let us join together with all those souls in Babylon who are straining for the birth of a new day. A revolutionary generation is on the scene. There are men and women, human beings, in Babylon today. Disenchanted, Alienated white youth, the hippies, the yippies and all the unnamed dropouts from the white man's burden, are our allies in this cause." The Black Panther party newspaper later featured an article entitled, "The Hippies Are Not Our Enemies."

The prospect of a genuine coalition between white radicals and black militants sent chills up the spine of the political establishment in the United States, which greatly feared, in the words of former air force secretary Townsend Hoopes, "the fateful merging of antiwar and racial dissension." But the Panther-Yippie alliance was more symbolic than anything else, and only nearsighted observers could have thought otherwise. The Yippies were essentially freelance activists whose shadow organization lacked a community base; hence there was nothing for the Panthers to ally with other than an image, a set of fleeting gestures. But the Yippies and Panthers did share certain important attributes. Both knew how to use the media in creative ways to get their message across, and both were excited about the prospects for an explosive year in 1968.

Gotta Revolution 

Few people realized just how intense things would get in 1968, and no one was prepared for the bewildering series of events that unfolded. With each passing month the political temperature rose a few more notches. First there was the Tet offensive launched by the Viet Cong in February, which belied President Johnson's optimistic predictions of an impending US victory. Twenty thousand Americans had already been killed in action, a hundred and ten thousand were wounded, and still there was no sign that the war would be over in the near future. A "dump Johnson" movement mounted by doves within the Democratic party gathered unexpected momentum when Senator Eugene McCarthy decided to challenge LBJ for the presidential nomination. McCarthy scored an impressive showing in the early primaries, and on March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.

The demise of LBJ was a great victory for the New Left, but the euphoria passed quickly. Four days after Johnson's abdication Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. The death of the nation's most gifted civil rights leader sparked the worst domestic strife since the Civil War. There were riots in a hundred and twenty-five cities nationwide, including Washington, DC. Forty-six people died, more than twenty thousand were arrested, and fifty-five thousand federal troops and National Guardsmen were deployed to handle the emergency. In the wake of the ghetto uprisings a nervous Congress passed the so-called Rap Brown amendment, making it a federal crime to cross state lines with the intent to start a riot. This law would be used in subsequent years to prosecute antiwar activists.[I was only 12 when King was killed,but looking back it seems the MSM played down the strife and rioting in the cities.I do recall the Chicago rioting at the convention but a 125 cities? nope they suppressed that.DC]

Violent confrontations became a normal occurrence in 1968 not only in the ghettos and barrios of America, but also on college campuses throughout the country. The first pitched battle between students and police took place at Columbia University in New York City, the media capital of the world, when the local S.D.S chapter led a series of actions beginning in late April and lasting for several weeks. Hundreds were injured during the protest, which sent shock waves reverberating through all of academia. "This is a ferocious but effective way to be a student to be educated," said former S.D.S president Carl Oglesby. "The policeman's riot club functions like a magic wand under whose hard caress the banal soul grows vivid and the nameless recover their authenticity a bestower, this wand, of the lost charisma of the modem self: I bleed, therefore I am."

Hundreds of campuses in the US enacted similar confrontations in the coming months. But academic insurrections were by no means exclusively an American phenomenon. During the late 1960's student radicals took to the streets in nearly every country in Western Europe, as well as in Japan, South Africa, Canada, Turkey, Latin America, and a number of Eastern bloc nations. The most dramatic upheaval occurred in Paris in May 1968, when left-wing activists at the Sorbonne succeeded in triggering a nationwide strike that threatened to topple the Gaullist government.

During the peak of the Sorbonne uprising a group of artists and cultural workers got together to discuss how they could best show their support for those who were engaged in running battles with the police. Among those present at the meeting was Julian Beck of the Living Theater, an experimental performing troupe that traveled extensively in Europe. Controversy always surrounded the Living Theater, for they were among the boldest and most innovative experimenters of the 1960's. Their performances included rituals of love, affirmation, nonviolence, and communality drawn from various mystical and contemporary sources: Artaud, the kabbalah, the continuous use of drugs. The thirty members of the Living Theater frequently tripped together and often performed while high on LSD. "We were willing to experiment with anything that would set the mind free," Beck explained. "We were practicing anarchists, and we were talking about freedom in whatever zones it could be acquired. If drug trips were a way of unbinding the mind, we were eager to experiment."

The Living Theater was already heavily into drugs when the police chased them out of New York City in the early 1960s after many of them had been arrested during pacifist demonstrations. They fled to Europe on a wing and a prayer, hoping to avoid the legal hassles that plagued them in the States. Wherever they traveled on the Continent, the Living Theater interacted with the thriving acid subculture that took root in the mid-1960's. In each city they mingled with turned-on artists, poets, dropouts, and other nonconformists who shared their anarchist vision and provided them with cannabis and acid. The Living Theater, in turn, helped to spread the psychedelic creed as they moved from one locale to another. [so basically they were communist parasites looking for a host to live off,even though their life did not amount to much,they wanted hand outs DC]

Amsterdam was the touchstone, the magic city where every drug was readily available. It was also the home of the Provos (short for Provocateurs), a large anarchist tribe whose political art happenings anticipated the style and essence of the San Francisco Diggers. The Proves took Amsterdam by storm in 1965 when they plastered peace insignia's across the city streets along with their own logo, an upside down apple, which represented the modem Johnny Appleseed implanting the seeds of a liberating culture. They unrolled reams of newsprint like carpets through the streets of Amsterdam to protest the "daily newspapers which brainwash our people." They also staged pro ecology rallies and elected several of their pot-smoking members to the city administration[REMEMBER...APPLE=intelligence as in CIA DC]

Provo groups sprang up in Milan, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Brussels, and Antwerp (a transit point for shiploads of Congolese grass) as the drug scene spread rapidly throughout Europe. London emerged as a major psychedelic center in the summer of 1965. Acid was also plentiful in Munich and Berlin, where hippies were called Gammler. Rome had its capellones who liked to get stonati by ingesting hallucinazione. LSD trickled into Paris, Zurich, Madrid, and the Greek Isles, and a Czech expatriate reports that young people in Prague were turning on to acid in the months prior to the Russian invasion in August, 1968. As Beck put it,

LSD carried with it a certain messianic vision, a certain understanding of the meaning of freedom, of the meaning of the as yet unattainable but nevertheless to be obtained erotic fantasy, political fantasy, social fantasy a sense of oneness, a sense of goodness, a marvelous return to the Garden of Eden morality . That's why we thought if you could put it into the water system, everybody would wake up and we would be able to realize the changes we were dreaming in terms of societal structures. People wouldn't be able to tolerate things as they were any longer. They'd realize that something is wrong out there, something is wrong inside me, something is too beautiful, too indescribable, too irresistible to put off any longer.[You know I took 50-100 acid trips myself from 73-76, and I never once thought it a good idea to turn on the whole world,I was always too busy enjoying myself and wondering how such a very small piece of window pane could get you so high,and debating if Pink Floyd was eating acid when they recorded the Dark Side of The Moon, which by the way is the all time best music to trip to DC]

During their travels the Living Theater befriended many leaders of the student movement in Europe, who were also concerned about new self hood, new human beings, new possibilities. But the hard-core politicos were not overly enthusiastic about psychedelic drugs. "We pushed reefers on them all the time," Beck recalled. "They were getting high, but not enough." Most left-wing activists in France, Germany, and Italy saw drugs as a pleasant diversion at best; they never thought the most effective way to organize people was to turn them on. As a general rule there was far less overlap between the drug scene and the New Left in Europe than in the United States. This became apparent to the Living Theater when they returned to North America in the summer of 1968, after four and a half years of self-imposed exile.

Much had changed on the cultural and political front in the US during this period. The peace movement, having grown by leaps and bounds, was now a mass movement. Polls showed a majority of Americans disapproved of the administration's Vietnam policy. As opposition to the war became more respectable and mainstream, the New Left as a whole edged toward a more radical posture. The V sign for peace gave way to the clenched fist, denoting a change not so much to violence as to militancy. An increasing number of activists came to view the war not as an error in judgment or an aberration of American foreign policy but as the latest in a series of imperialist interventions in many countries. The emphasis on vigorous street tactics and a sweeping anti-imperialist analysis set the young radicals apart from the reform- minded liberals and moderates who after years of bloodshed in Southeast Asia finally decided to give peace a chance.

Buoyed by the surging popularity of the antiwar cause and the heightened tempo of the black rebellion, many people began to take for granted a context of political extremity. Predictions of the coming revolution were rampant, and much of the New Left assumed it was on the threshold of a political transformation that was actually way beyond its means. Indeed, it was hard for radicals not to get carried away as the decade rocked to a bloody climax in 1968. They had forced LBJ into early retirement, and now the whole lousy system seemed to be teetering on the brink. A few shouts, a few kicks, a good hard shove in the right place, and surely Babylon would fall.

This was the unspoken assumption behind the Yippies' decision to stage a massive demonstration at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago during the last week of August. At the heart of the Yippie scenario was a "Festival of Life" that would offer an enticing alternative to the "death politics" inside the convention hall. Plans for the festival included a variety of counter convention activities: a nude grope-in for peace and prosperity, a joint-rolling contest, the election of Miss Yippie. All the top rock and roll acts would perform, the hippest poets would recite the best poems. And what demonstration would be complete without a bell-festooned contingent of holy men leading the protesters in life-affirming incantations? There'd be free food for everyone and workshops on drugs, communes, guerrilla theater, first aid, and draft dodging.

It was an ambitious scheme for a group of dope-smoking misfits who had no political organization to speak of. But the Yippies knew they had the media at their beck and call, and they hoped hype would make up for what they lacked on a grassroots level. They tantalized reporters with visions of a Chicago inundated by a million stoned freaks who would force the Democrats to conduct their business under armed guard. The Yippies, meanwhile, would nominate their own presidential candidate a pig named Pigasus, whom they vowed to eat after he won the election. This, the Yippies maintained, would reverse the normal procedure in which the pig is elected "and proceeds to eat the people."

Of course, the Yippies realized that nowhere near a million people would turn up for the demonstration, but exaggeration was the crux of their organizing strategy. They inflated the figures to attract more publicity, hoping to create a snowball effect and draw a large crowd. "We competed for attention like media junkies after a fix," Rubin admitted. "Television [kept] us escalating our tactics." Whereas a sit-in or a picket line might have made headlines a few years ago, now it took bloody heads and tear gas to get coverage on the evening news. In the months preceding the convention the Yippies flatly predicted violence and spiced up their rhetoric to keep their audience enthralled. "We will bum Chicago to the ground!" "We will fuck on the beaches!" "We demand the Politics of Ecstasy!" "Acid for all!" "Abandon the Creeping Meatball!" And always: "Yippie! Chicago August 25-30."

A handful of Yippie stalwarts worked long hours at an ad hoc office in New York, printing tens of thousands of posters, leaflets, and buttons as part of the PR campaign for the Festival of Life. Getting stoned was standard operating procedure among office staffers, and their fanciful literature carried their dope-induced hallucinations. They kept in touch with young people throughout the country by issuing sporadic press releases that were picked up by the Liberation News Service and disseminated to three hundred underground newspapers. 

The Yippies were preparing monkey-warfare hijinks and other street theater actions, but their plans did not call for organized violence or rioting on the part of demonstrators. Nevertheless, they made no secret of the fact that they relished the possibility of a showdown with the "pigs." By forcing a confrontation the Yippies hoped to reveal the "true nature of the beast," as the saying went, and make the fence-sitters take sides. This, they believed, would automatically benefit the radical cause. "It's not the Republicans and Democrats," Rubin asserted, "it's what America is doing and what it stands for and against. And when that becomes clear in every living room in this country, wow our side's gonna win."

Victory for the Yippies was nothing less than "total revolution" or something like that. Just what they actually meant by "revolution for the hell of it" or how such a thing would come to pass was never very clear, but it hardly seemed to matter. They were confident that their moment of shining glory had arrived. "We want the world and we want it now!" sang Jim Morrison of the Doors (who took their name from Huxley's The Doors of Perception} in what became the anthem of the young rebels who dismissed any notion of temperate or deliberate change. Those who combined youthful anger with un-trammeled experimentation had little patience for the politics of the long haul. Things had developed so quickly and so far beyond expectations that the only honorable course was to take every idea to the limit, to indulge every form of excess. Surely all this energy would lead to something amazing, something chaotic, a crisis so massive that it would sweep aside the gray-haired masters of war and bring the government to its knees. For a generation "born to be wild," anything less seemed like a cowardly evasion of destiny.[Looking from 2016,they look like useful idiots,tools,and out of touch,which is ironic because that is what they were accusing their elders of. Time has betrayed them DC] 

And it wasn't just the Yippies who entertained this fantasy. Caught up in their own inflated rhetoric, almost everyone associated with the New Left began to lose track of what was politically feasible. Radicals blithely spoke of revolution as if it were just around the comer, a historical certainty as imminent as tomorrow's sunrise. And why not? The flamboyant images of revolt were everywhere in the daily papers, in the underground press, on the TV news. In a society thoroughly bombarded by media images, who could tell what was real? Stoned or otherwise, the baby boom rebels were tangled in a net of reflected events, a hall of mirrors; they related to a distorted picture of reality that filtered through the cracked looking glass of the mass media. By focusing on highly charged incidents and giving the greatest airplay to the wildest and most aggressive gestures, the commercial media reinforced and accentuated the social chaos. Add to this confusion the sudden explosion of the acid scene in the wake of the Summer of Love, and one begins to get a sense of the hallucinatory nature of this period.[ONE WORD=MOCKINGBIRD DC]

The revolutionary fervor of the late 1960's was amplified by the widespread use of LSD and other hallucinogens. These drugs tended to blur the distinction between the imaginary and the real, so that daily life for frequent users became infused with the exaggeration of a mythic dream. Many political activists who got high regularly behaved as though they were living in the midst of a revolutionary situation.

"The effect of LSD was really heavy," acknowledged John Sinclair, former head of the White Panther party in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "Acid blew all sense of proportion, all sense of a frame, to smithereens. I mean it just blew the frame right out of the picture . It gave you a sense of infinite possibility. You could do anything if you just did it totally! You could walk right into the sky." Sinclair now considers this attitude foolhardy. "All your big decisions were made on LSD. And while that might be an exciting way to operate, it's not the most intelligent way. To think that your personal consciousness can overcome historical forces is a mistake."

Sinclair first turned on to psychedelics in the early 1960's, after reading Ginsberg and the beats. Known among his peers as a poet and jazz aficionado, he got involved with the Detroit Artists Workshop and started turning on more frequently with his creative clique. After the Detroit riots in 1967 Sinclair began to study the literature of the black power movement. "Anything to the right of Malcolm X just wasn't happening," he asserted. At the time there was a lot of acid floating around. "In my case it was the idealistic poetry stuff coupled with the black militant stuff and the turned-on black jazz artists," Sinclair recalled, "and all those things came together in my little psyche, 500 mikes a week, and POW! After one particularly stunning LSD experience, I got to the point where I felt that writing and poetry and all that was cool, but it was really important to develop some sort of instrumentation to make it relevant on a larger scale."[The next paper i do from Miles will be on 'The Beats'..they were all intelligence assets DC]

Sinclair credits LSD with facilitating the transition from the secretive, cabalistic mentality of the beats to the collective orientation of the 1960's. "When the beatniks started taking acid, it brought us out of the basement, the dark place, the underworld, the fringes of society . all of a sudden one was filled with a messianic feeling of love, of brotherhood . LSD gave us the idea it could be different. It was tremendously inspiring. We thought this would alter everything. We were going to take over the world. This was the general belief. It was the LSD . Acid was amping everything up, driving everything into greater and greater frenzy."

In retrospect Sinclair wonders whether the CIA was behind the acid craze. "They're the ones who had it," he says. But the notion that LSD might have been part of a government plot was the furthest thing from Sinclair's mind when he moved to Ann Arbor with a coterie of radicals in early 1968 and formed the White Panther party. One of their main objectives was to spread the revolutionary message to high schools throughout the Midwest with the help of a politically dedicated rock and roll band, the M.C.5, which Sinclair managed. "School sucks," declared the White Panther manifesto. "The white honkie culture that has been handed down to us on a plastic platter is meaningless to us! We don't want it! Fuck God in the ass. Fuck your woman until she can't stand up. Fuck everybody you can get your hands on. Our program of rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets is a program of total freedom for everyone. And we are committed to carrying out our program. We breathe revolution. We are LSD-driven total maniacs in the universe."[same liberal crap we are hearing in the streets in 2016 DC]

When Sinclair heard about the Yippies' plan for Chicago, he thought it was fantastic. "I could never see what was more important than cultural activity, what people did each day to reflect the way they thought and felt about things," he said. "To me that was really political." For a while the White Panthers even considered becoming the Michigan chapter of the Youth International Party. They were, after all, natural allies; like the Yippies, Sinclair was high on the revolutionary potential of drugs and the druggy potential of revolution. The Festival of Life was particularly appealing to the White Panthers, who liked the idea of merging rock music with politics. It was also an opportunity for the M.C.5 to perform before a national audience. Thus, on grounds of politics and promotion, the Panthers wholeheartedly endorsed the Yippie festival.

With the Democratic Convention only weeks away, the Yippies persisted in needling Mayor Daley as much as possible. They circulated a list of demands including the legalization of marijuana and LSD, the abolition of money, the disarming of the Chicago police, and not to be overlooked a statement in favor of general copulation: "We believe that people should fuck all the time, anytime, whomever they wish." When the Yippies slyly let it be known that they intended to put LSD in the water supply (a scenario cooked up by the CIA fifteen years earlier), Daley ordered a round-the-clock guard at the local reservoirs. Hoffman and Rubin countered by threatening to dispatch Yippie girls dressed up as whores, "but young, you know, and nice," who would pick up convention delegates and slip acid into their drinks (another scenario reminiscent of CIA escapades during the Cold War). Moreover, thousands of protesters would run naked through the streets while "Yippie studs" seduced the delegates' wives and daughters.

Apparently these fictive threats touched a raw nerve somewhere and were taken quite seriously by Daley's men. The Yippies were humiliating the old fogies by reminding them of their fading sexuality as well as heaping scorn on their patriotic ideals. Rubin again: "We were dirty, smelly, grimy, foul, loud, dope-crazed, hell-bent and leather-jacketed . We were a public display of filth and shabbiness, living in the-flesh rejects of middle-class standards. We pissed and shit and fucked in public . We were constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man . Dig it! The future of humanity was in our hands!"

There was no "fucking in the streets" as the Yippies had promised. But even the thought of such erotic impudence was enough to jack up the angry riot squads and the secret service goons who had assembled in Chicago. Mayor Daley prepared for the acid heads and the foul-mouthed subversives by turning the city into an armed camp. He ordered twelve thousand police to work overtime, and hundreds of undercover agents were deployed on "special assignments." There were also six thousand National Guardsmen ready for action, and an equal number of regular army troops complete with bazookas, barbed-wire jeeps, and tanks. Then he issued a discreet warning: come to Chicago at your own risk.

Daley's intimidation tactics succeeded. In the end only about ten thousand protesters showed up, far fewer than the Yippies had expected. The much-heralded Festival of Life commenced on Sunday, August 25, the day before the convention. The protesters met at Lincoln Park, where acid was passed around in the form of spiked honey. A free rock concert had been announced, but all the musicians stayed away except for Phil Ochs and the MC's. Then the police moved in and started arresting people. Tempers flared on both sides, and the Festival of Life soon became a Festival of Blood.

The street fighting continued for the next five days while the Democrats deliberated inside the convention hall. The confrontation reached a dramatic crescendo during the middle of the week. Thousands of demonstrators massed along Michigan Avenue in front of the Conrad Hilton, where Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, was staying along with many of the convention delegates. It was late at night, but that portion of the street was floodlit for the sake of television. The crowd took up the rousing chant, "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching."

The National Guard in full battle dress moved into position with M-1 rifles, gas masks, and machine guns mounted on military vehicles. Tear gas was thrown and a gruesome melee ensued. The police attacked with indiscriminate fury, clubbing and macing young and old, male and female, protesters and innocent bystanders. News reporters and photographers were beaten along with the rest, while the powerful lamp of an army helicopter shone down through billowing clouds of orange smoke. Dozens of patrol cars flashed blue siren lights, and the silhouettes of mangled bodies were barely visible in the stroboscopic mist.

"For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst acid trip I'd even heard rumors about," said Hunter Thompson. "It permanently altered my brain chemistry, and my first new idea when I finally calmed down was an absolute conviction there was no possibility for any personal truce  in a nation that could hatch and be proud of a malignant monster like Chicago. Suddenly it seemed imperative to get a grip on those who had somehow slipped into power and caused the thing to happen."

Young people throughout the country shared Thompson's sense of urgency, as they watched the unmuzzled savagery of the police on television. (The Walker Commission later attributed the mayhem to a "police riot.") Over a thousand demonstrators had been injured, and one youth died during that tumultuous week. But even more significant than the number of casualties was the profound impact these events had on the New Left as a whole. The Battle of Chicago drew a line across the political landscape, marking the symbolic end of the resistance period and the turn toward revolution. It proved once and for all that the pernicious system was beyond any hope of reform; it would have to be completely dismantled. In the wake of Chicago, many activists concluded that peaceful means of protest, no matter how noble or well-executed, were not enough to eradicate the evils of America; social institutions grounded in violence would resort to violence if any serious challenge to the status quo was mounted.

The Yippies came away from Chicago strengthened in their resolve to fight the establishment by any means necessary. They felt they had won a great victory, and in some ways they were right. The ruthlessness of those in power had been laid bare for all to see in what was perhaps the most memorable media event of sixties protest culture. But the Yippies overlooked a very basic fact: getting TV coverage did not necessarily mean getting their message across. While the street brawl may have shocked some viewers into sympathy for the demonstrators, every poll indicated that a vast majority of the public applauded the brutality of the Chicago police.

To the average citizen the Yippies epitomized the calamitous upsurge of wayward youth gone anti-American and wild. Their obnoxious behavior offended millions who would no longer look upon student protest with indifference, much less with favor. But it wasn't just the Yippies who were putting people on edge. Not since the Civil War had life in America been so disorienting and confusing, so terribly violent, as it was during the late 1960's. Everything seemed to be spinning out of control. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the ghetto riots, the campus strikes, the soaring crime rate, the spread of drugs, the black power movement all these factors raised genuine fears that American society was coming apart. And then along came Richard Nixon, the law-and-order candidate, who promised to put the Commie-hippie-freaks in their place. Nixon won the '68 election in the streets of Chicago when the madness of an entire decade spilled into the living rooms of a nation of bewildered onlookers.

"Chicago, I think, was the place where all America was radicalized," wrote Tom Wicker of the New York Times. "The miracle of television made it visible to all pierced, at last, the isolation of one America from the other, exposed to each the power it faced. Everything since Chicago has had a new intensity that of polarization, of confrontation, of antagonism and fear."

To be continued...next...
Season Of The Witch