Handout
Jerry Rubin and the Youth International Party
Kathrine Boesen
Session 3.
Jerry Rubin and the Youth International Party.
This handout is a tool in order to get a better sense of how the Yippies and especially one of the
more prominent Yippie leaders Jerry Rubin thought.
The quotes and considerations are mostly Rubin’s own. The quotes are included on this handout in
order to provide a brief understanding of the state of mind of Jerry Rubin during his activist days,
his justifications for doing what he did and an understanding of the way his rhetoric has been a tool
in protesting and provoking the established system of government and society in general.
The two following quotes show how Rubin feels the established political left wing has passed its
opportunity for successful action and why civil disobedience is a necessary tool for advocating
one’s case:
‘"For years I went to left-wing meetings trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Finally I
started taking acid, and I realized what was going on: nothing. I vowed never to go to another leftwing meeting again. Fuck left-wing meetings!"’ (Clecak: 605/6
‘When a country’s institutions stifle its thought and poison its moral health, civil disobedience is the
only recourse ... We must say to Johnson, Inc.: If you want to go on killing Vietnamese you must
jail Americans.’ (De Groot: 103/4)
In January 1968, the Yippies released an initial call to come to Chicago, called "A STATEMENT
FROM YIP":
"Join us in Chicago in August for an international festival of youth, music, and theater. Rise up and
abandon the creeping meatball! Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth-seekers,
peacock-freaks, poets, barricade-jumpers, dancers, lovers and artists!
"It is summer. It is the last week in August, and the NATIONAL DEATH PARTY meets to bless
Lyndon Johnson. We are there! There are 50,000 of us dancing in the streets, throbbing with
amplifiers and harmony. We are making love in the parks. We are reading, singing, laughing,
printing newspapers, groping, and making a mock convention, and celebrating the birth of FREE
AMERICA in our own time. "Everything will be free. Bring blankets, tents, draft-cards, bodypaint, Mr. Leary's Cow, food to share, music, eager skin, and happiness. The threats of LBJ, Mayor
Daley, and J. Edgar Freako will not stop us. We are coming! We are coming from all over the
world! ... "We will be in Chicago. Begin preparations now! Chicago is yours! Do it!"
The following are all excerpts from Rubin’s book DO IT! Scenarios of the Revolution:
‘Yippies would use the Democratic Party and the Chicago theatre to build our stage and make the
myth; we’d steal the media away from the Democrats and create the spectre of ‘yippies’
overthrowing Amerika.’ (Rubin: 83)
Handout
Jerry Rubin and the Youth International Party
Kathrine Boesen
Session 3.
‘The myth of yippie will overthrow the government. The myth makes the revolution’ (Rubin: 83)
‘Marihuana is compulsory at all yippie meetings. Yippies take acid at breakfast to bring us closer to
reality. Holden Caulfield is a yippie. The old Nixon was a yippie; the new Nixon is not.’ (Rubin:
86)
‘But there’s one word which America hasn’t ruined. One word which has maintaned its emotional
power and purity. America cannot destroy it because she dare not use it. It’s illegal! It’s the last
word left in the English language! FUCK !! ... The Filthy Speech Movement had been born.’
(Rubin: 109-10)
‘The yippies are Marxists. We follow in the revolutionary tradition of Groucho, Chico, Harpo and
Karl. What the yippies learnt from Karl Marx – history’s most infamous, bearded, longhaired,
hippie commie freek agitator – is that we must create a spectacular myth of revolution. Karl wrote
and sang his own rock album called ‘The Communist Manifesto’. ‘The Communist Manifesto’ is a
song that has overthrown governments. (Rubin: 116)
Suggestions for further reading and bibliography
James P. O’Brien, ’The Development of the New Left’, Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, Vol 395 (1971), pp. 15-25. (Available from JSTOR)
Phina Lahav, ’Theater in the Courtroom: The Chicago Conspiracy Trial’, Law and Literature, Vol.
16 (2004), pp. 381-474. (Available from JSTOR)
David Deleon, ’The American as Anarchist: Social Criticism in the 1960s’, American Quarterly,
Vol 25, (1973), p. 516-537. (Available from JSTOR)
Stanley Aronowitz, ‘When the New Left Was New’, Social Text, No. 9/10, The 60s without
Apology, (1984), pp. 11-43. (Available from JSTOR)
Peter Clecak, ’The Revolution Delayed: The Political and Cultural Revolutionaries in America, The
Massachusetts Review, Vol 12, No. 3, (1971), pp. 590-619 (Available from JSTOR)
Gerard J. De Groot, ’The Limits of Moral Protest and Participatory Democracy: The Vietnam Day
Committee’, Pacific Historical Review, Vol 64, No.1 (1995), pp. 95-119. (Available from JSTOR)
Douglas O. Linder: ‘The Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial’:
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Chicago7/Account.html
Jerry Rubin, ’DO IT! Scenarios of the Revolution’, (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1970)
Eleonora De Crescenzo
Ca' Foscari Venice University
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe
A new phenomenon, in 1968, baffled the american imagination: the
transformation of the "promising middle-class youth with all the advantages"
into what was popularly known as "the hippie."
In 1964 Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Neal Cassady and the Marry Pranksters took the road on a
psychedelic painted school bus, the “Furthur”. This journey, reported by the vivid new journalism
style of Wolfe prose, will drive them across the country, on a crucial experience the will set the
imaginary of the psychedelic movement for generations to come.
Time Line
1938 In Switzerland Albert Hofmann synthesize for the first time LSD-25 while looking for a
blood stimulant
1951 CIA is known to experiment on LSD, with Project MK-Ultra the drug is given to unwitting
subjects
1955 Howl by Allen Ginsberg is published
1957 On the Road by Jack Kerouac is published
1959 Allen Ginsberg tries LSD at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. LSD
enters US literary counterculture.
1959 Kesey volunteers to try LSD in a university program and works at the Veterans Medical
Center in Menlo Park
1960 Harvard University's Timothy Leary establishes the Psychedelic Research Program
1962 One Few Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey is published
1963 Timothy Leary is fired from Harvard and his Program dismissed
1964 Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Neal Cassady and others of the "Merry Pranksters" travel from
California to New York on the school bus “Furthur”
1965 Kesey's first marijuana arrest
1966 6 October. LSD is declared illegal in California
1966 31 October. Acid Test Graduation in San Francisco
1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco Golden Gate Park, prelude to the summer of love
1967 Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is released
1968 LSD is declared illegal in the US
1968 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests by Tom Wolfe is published
Bibliography
Faggen,Robert. "Ken Kesey, The Art of Fiction No. 136". The Paris Review. Spring 1994
Holmes, John Clellon. "This Is the Beat Generation," The New York Times, November 16, 1952
Stevens Jay. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. Grove Press 1998
Szulc, Tad. “The CIA's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” Psychology Today November 1977
Wolfe, Tom. “The Birth of 'The New Journalism'; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe” New York,
February 14, 1972.
Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1968.
Film
CBS Documentary: How To Go Out Of Your Mind - The LSD Crisis.
(Series of interviews with Timothy Leary about the psychological effects of LSD)
Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood. Documentary film: Magic Trip. (2011)
(Original footage recorded during the 1964 trip)
Session 3
Cecilie Kjølholt
University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
1
Guy Ernest Debord (1931-1994),
The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
Theorist, artist, philosopher, filmmaker,
writer.
1950: Member of the Lettrist International (a
postwar, neodada, anti-art organization
consisting of intellectuals and students) in
Paris.
1957: Self-proclaimed leader of the
Situationist International.
General beliefs of this movement revolve round a rejection of subjectivity and personality, as
the ‘free individual’ is unable to flourish within the corrupted framework of society. As a
result of modern capitalism and industrialization, everyday life is limited by ‘the scarcity of
free time’ and has become ‘a colonized sector’ reserved for the privileged no individual
fulfilment. SI aimed at creating ‘a superior organization of the world’ that would enhance in
people ‘a sense of self-consciousness of existence’.
American author Greil Marcus on the situationists:
‘They were an attempt to fashion a new version of daily life – a new version of how people
organized their wishes, pains, fears, hopes, ambitions, limits, social relationships, and
identities, a process that ordinarily took place without consciousness’ (Marcus 5).
According to Guy Debord himself, SI was an artistic avant-garde group that contributed to
theoretical as well as practical sides of a new revolutionary contestation already in motion.
1967: Publication of The Society of the Spectacle
The book is structured as a sort of manifesto and consists of 221 theses, compiled into 9
chapters. Debord is obviously influenced by the political philosophy of Marx, as well as 20th
century Existentialism, mainly Sartre. One might say that one of the sentences in thesis 1 sums
up the main point of the entire book:
‘All that once was directly lived has become mere representation’ (Debord 12).
Debord argues that the history of social life can be viewed as a downgrading from
being having appearing
This is due to the fact that the commodity has ‘completed its colonization of social life’.
Relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people. Thus, nobody
notices that they are living a ‘non-existence’; relying not on reality, but on a reflection of
reality (hence the photography ‘J’aime ma camerá’, which Debord used in one of his movies,
illustrating the idolization of what is mere reflections, images).
Session 3
Cecilie Kjølholt
University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
2
Hence, according to Debord, what we inevitably see in the world is a mere reflection of
ideologies.
What is the spectacle?
OED definition: A specially prepared or arranged display of a more or less public nature (esp. one
on a large scale), forming an impressive or interesting show or entertainment for those viewing it.
Professor Jonathan Crary defines it as being ‘the imposition of an illusory unity into a more
heterogeneous field’ + ‘a totalizing and monolithic concept that inadequately represents a
plurality of incommensurable institutions and events’.
Debord talks about two kinds of spectacles. 1) a concentrated model 2) a diffused model. It is
the diffused model of the spectacle that flourishes in the United States – in the form of an
(omnipresent) abundance of commodities.
The spectacle is ubiquitous and functions as a never-ending present; nothing ‘lasts’,
everything is constantly replaced by something new (consumerism). This circular movement
creates a space where past and future simply cannot exist, and the ‘spectator’ is thus living in
an encircling illusion that is constantly regenerating itself.
‘Society is the embodiment of particular worldviews but is presented as a natural
environment, as a terrain for (and not already a expression of) ideology’ (Gilman-Opalsky).
-------- o --------
Bibliography and suggestions for further reading:
Cassano, Graham; Dello Buono, Richard Alan. ‘Crisis, Politics and Critical Sociology’. Boston:
Brill, 2010.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 2008 (tenth printing).
Debord, Guy. Comments on The Society of the Spectacle. London – New York: Verso, 1998.
Durham, Meenakshi Gigi; Kellner, Douglas. ‘Media and Cultural Studies. Keywords’. Revised ed.
Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2006.
Jappe, Anselm. ‘Guy Debord’. London, England: University of California Press, 1999.
McDonough, Tom. ‘Guy Debord and the Situationist International – Texts and Documents
edited by Tom McDonough’. Cambridge, Massachusetts - London, England: October, The MIT
Press, 2004.
McDonough, Tom. ‘The Situationists and the City’. London: Verso Books, 2009.
Session 3, Professor Russell Duncan
Josefine Eckstrøm Lave, University of Copenhagen.
Synopsis: Social Crisis in the Summer of Love Poster Art
The Power of the Poster
‘The poster… yells to people in the street and is heard and understood all over the world. At the
same time, it is the official announcement and the anonymous, illegal proclamation. The poster is
hand-made in limited numbers… it tells about war and peace, art, fashion and market. It lights up
and speaks the resented truth. The poster is history, culture, and art… in itself. The poster lives
only one day, but tells the history of an era. ‘ (Erik Meislund of the Danish Poster Museum)
5 poster artists to remember:
1. Wes Wilson – ‘I decided I could break new ground’
2. Stanley ‘Mouse’ Miller (Worked with Alton Kelley  so-called ‘Mouse Studios’)
3. Alton Kelley – ‘When Mouse and I saw a poster we thought was really far out, we’d say,
“Now we’ve gotta do one that good”’
4. Rick Griffin – ‘Rick, like the rest of us, was on a mission to turn the world on’ (Vocalist
Jerry Garcia from Grateful Dead)
Poster 2 By Wes Wilson for gig in San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium
Poster 1 By Mouse Studios for the Grateful Dead at the Avalon Ballroom
5. Victor Moscoso – ‘Everything I learned in school, I reversed’
Session 3, Professor Russell Duncan
Josefine Eckstrøm Lave, University of Copenhagen.
Poster 3 By Rick Griffin for The Grateful Dead
Poster 4 By Victor Moscoso for The Blues Project at The Matrix, 1967
Key words: psychedelic art, LSD, expansion of consciousness, peace, sex, The Matrix, Avalon
Ballroom, The Grateful Dead, freedom, spirituality and rock n roll.
Sources:
1. Grunenberg, Christopher (Ed.), Jonathan Harris (Ed.). ‘Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social
Crisis and Counterculture in 1960s: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counter-Culture in the
1960s’. Tate Liverpool Critical Forum.
2. Miller, Timothy. ‘The Hippies and American Values’. University of Tennessee Press 1991.
3. http://www.plakatmuseum.dk/
4. http://exhibits.denverartmuseum.org/psychedelic/the-artists
IP Berlin: Europe and the US in the 1960's - Coming Together or Coming Apart?
Session 3: The Summer of Love and Protest: European and American Youth Culture in the 1960s
Tine Charlotte Due
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Remembering the Counterculture:
Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock
Woodstock Music and Arts Fair 1969:
- Took place from 15-17 of August 1969 in White Lake, NY.
- Organized to make a profit, unlike the Monterey Pop Festival in1967, which
was non-profit.
- Originally set to take place in Wallkill, NY, but was thrown out of the town by
IP Berlin: Europe and the US in the 1960's - Coming Together or Coming Apart?
Session 3: The Summer of Love and Protest: European and American Youth Culture in the 1960s
Tine Charlotte Due
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
the local community.
- Organizer Michael Lang was contacted by Elliot Teichburg with an idea for a
new location.
- Took place on Max Yasgur's 600-acres of dairy fields.
- 500.000 people attended Woodstock. Organizers expected 50.000 to begin with.
- Became free when organizers were overwhelmed by the large number of
people and forced to choose between finishing the stage or checking tickets.
- Was a financial disaster, but a cultural success.
The movie Taking Woodstock:
- Movie from 2009, directed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee.
- Based on Taking Woodstock written by Elliot Tiber, born Elliot Teichburg.
- Elliot never made it to any of the concert and that is why the movie does not
include concerts.
- Greatly visually inspired by Woodstock, a documentary from 1970.
- Ang Lee has taken characters from the documentary and placed them in his
movie in order to add realism and authenticity.
- Ang Lee found it difficult to find extras as today's youth has too much
determination in their eyes, unlike the young people who attended Woodstock
who had a mellower expression. The extras were cast months in
advance in order to quit working out and to grow long hair.
- Ends with references to Altamont Festival, which took place in December
1969, where a man was stabbed to death during the Rolling Stones concert.
Woodstock today:
- Woodstock is considered the culmination and the high point of the hippie
movement, whereas Altamont is considered the end - the loss of innocence.
- Even though Woodstock has been romanticized into three days of peace,
love and happiness, the reality is that most of the time there where chaos.
- A stamp was made in 2009 at the 40th anniversary of the festival, proving
that Woodstock has a place in our collective memory and is worth remembering.
Allen Cohen on the youth movement in 1967:
“[Michael] Bowen and I had become concerned about the philosophical split that was
developing in the youth movement. The anti-war and free speech movement in
Berkeley thought the Hippies were too disengaged and spaced out. Their influence
might draw the young away from resistance to the war. The Hippies thought the antiwar movement was doomed to endless confrontations with the establishment which
would recoil with violence and fascism. We decided that to strengthen the youth
culture, we had to bring the two poles together.”1
1
http://s91990482.onlinehome.us/allencohen/be-in.html
IP Berlin: Europe and the US in the 1960's - Coming Together or Coming Apart?
Session 3: The Summer of Love and Protest: European and American Youth Culture in the 1960s
Tine Charlotte Due
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Bibliography and Suggestive reading:
Taking Woodstock 2009
Woodstock (Documentary) 1970
Woodstock: Director’s Cut (Documentary) 1994
American Experience: The Summer of Love , PBS (Documentary) 2007
Elliot Tiber, Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert and a Life (New York:
Square One Publishers, 2007)
Allen Cohen on the youth movement 1967:
http://s91990482.onlinehome.us/allencohen/be-in.html