Yippies: Founders, Chicago ’68, and the Chicago Seven Trial

The Yippies were members of the Youth International Party, a countercultural protest group founded in late 1967 that fused hippie culture with radical politics and used absurdist media stunts — throwing dollar bills onto the New York Stock Exchange floor, attempting to “levitate” the Pentagon, nominating a pig for president — to oppose the Vietnam War. Their confrontation with police at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago produced the federal conspiracy prosecution known as the Chicago Seven trial, and their co-founders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin became two of the most recognizable protest figures of the era.

Who Founded the Yippies

The group took shape on New Year’s Eve 1967 at the St. Marks Place apartment of Abbie and Anita Hoffman in New York City. The core founders were Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, Anita Hoffman, and Nancy Kurshan. Krassner, the satirist behind the counterculture magazine The Realist, coined the word “Yippie” during the planning session. Anita Hoffman then worked backward to invent the formal name “Youth International Party,” reasoning that mainstream outlets like the New York Times needed something that sounded like a real organization. The word “party” was chosen for its double meaning, political and social at once.¹

Their immediate goal was a “Festival of Life” to counter the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which they labeled the “Convention of Death.” Their first manifesto, released January 16, 1968, called on 500,000 young people to descend on Chicago to “celebrate the birth of FREE AMERICA.” Early meetings drew in Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, folk-rock musician Ed Sanders of The Fugs, and journalist Keith Lampe.¹

What the Yippies Believed and How They Operated

The Yippies rejected what they considered the joyless methods of the established antiwar movement — the marches and speeches organized by the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, the dense intellectual critiques produced by Students for a Democratic Society. They operated through spectacle instead. Ed Sanders called it “the politics of ecstasy.”² Hoffman described his method as a synthesis of Beat writing, Dadaism, and Marxist criticism.³

Influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s writing on mass media and by the San Francisco Diggers, they believed that in a television age the image was the message. Their strategy was to stage bizarre, colorful events that couldn’t be filed into normal news categories, forcing broadcasters to show something that would reach viewers who had tuned out conventional protest.¹

The group had no membership rolls, no dues, and no hierarchy. Anyone who showed up was a Yippie. TIME estimated hard-core membership at about 400 in 1968, though leaders claimed a following of 250,000.²

Their platform mixed the earnest and the absurd on purpose. It called for an end to the Vietnam War, the legalization of psychedelic drugs, free food, community control of a disarmed police force, an end to “the domination of women by men, and children by adults,” and free health services including birth control and abortions. The economic vision emphasized cooperation over profit.⁴ Alongside those planks were demands for the abolition of pay toilets and “a heart transplant for L.B.J.”² Sincerity and satire were meant to be indistinguishable.

The Stunts That Made Them Famous

Throwing Money at the Stock Exchange

On August 24, 1967, months before the Yippies formally existed, Abbie Hoffman led roughly 20 activists — including Jerry Rubin, Jim Fouratt, and Keith Lampe — into the visitors’ gallery of the New York Stock Exchange, having told guards they were tourists. They threw handfuls of real dollar bills onto the trading floor.⁵ Traders briefly stopped work and some scrambled for the cash. Hoffman burned a five-dollar bill on the street afterward. No one was arrested.⁶

The stunt drew wide coverage in the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post, which put it on the afternoon cover.⁶ Some outlets incorrectly claimed the money was fake or that trading losses ran into the millions. Two weeks later, the Stock Exchange spent $20,000 to enclose the gallery in bulletproof glass.⁵

Levitating the Pentagon

On October 21, 1967, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam drew an estimated 75,000 people to the Lincoln Memorial, with 35,000 to 50,000 marching on to the Pentagon.⁷ Hoffman, Rubin, and artist Michael Bowen used the moment to attempt an “exorcism” of the building. Hoffman had publicly declared that the Pentagon would rise 300 feet in the air, turn orange, and vibrate until “all evil emissions had fled.”⁸

Ed Sanders chanted invocations, Ginsberg led mantras, and Mayan healers sprinkled cornmeal. Protesters placed flowers in the gun barrels of military police, producing one of the era’s defining photographs. Nearly 700 people were arrested for civil disobedience.⁷ The building did not levitate. Ginsberg later said the Pentagon “was symbolically levitated in people’s minds in the sense that it lost its authority which had been unquestioned and unchallenged until then.”⁸

The Grand Central Yip-In

On March 22, 1968, the Yippies staged a “Yip-In” at Grand Central Terminal, billed as a spring welcome and a networking event ahead of Chicago. Between 3,000 and 6,000 people came. Some climbed the information booth, broke the hands off the four-sided clock, and unfurled a banner reading “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!” Officers from the Tactical Patrol Force charged the crowd with nightsticks without issuing a dispersal order, according to witnesses including a New York Civil Liberties Union representative, who called it a “police riot.” Fifty-seven people were arrested and at least 20 required hospital treatment. One man, Ronald Shea, suffered permanent nerve and tendon damage after being shoved through a glass door.⁹

Chicago 1968

The defining Yippie moment came in August 1968. For months the group had promoted a “Festival of Life” in Chicago’s parks — rock concerts, theater, communal celebration — as an alternative to the “National Death Convention” inside the International Amphitheatre, where Democrats were preparing to nominate Hubert Humphrey. Among the planned provocations was running a pig named “Pigasus” as the Yippie candidate for president.¹⁰

Mayor Richard Daley refused permits for the gatherings, and the city deployed 12,000 police alongside National Guard troops. Over several nights, police and demonstrators clashed violently in Lincoln Park and Grant Park. Officers used tear gas and clubs against crowds that included protesters, journalists, and bystanders, and television cameras broadcast the confrontations nationwide. The federal Walker Commission later characterized what happened as a “police riot.”

The Chicago Seven Trial

On March 20, 1969, a federal grand jury indicted eight protest leaders on charges of conspiracy and of violating the Anti-Riot Act of 1968 by crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot. The original defendants — the “Chicago Eight” — were Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale.¹¹ Each faced up to ten years in prison.

The trial opened on September 24, 1969, before Judge Julius Hoffman in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and it became one of the most disorderly proceedings in American legal history. The defendants treated the courtroom as an extension of their protest: blowing kisses at the jury, wearing judicial robes and stomping on them, draping a Viet Cong flag over the defense table, and using constant profanity.¹¹

The most dramatic episode involved Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, who demanded to represent himself after his chosen lawyer was unavailable. When Seale repeatedly called Judge Hoffman a “pig,” “fascist,” and “racist,” the judge ordered him bound, gagged, and chained to his chair in the courtroom. On November 5, 1969, Judge Hoffman severed Seale’s case and sentenced him to four years for contempt, reducing the group to the “Chicago Seven.”¹¹

On February 19, 1970, the jury acquitted all seven of conspiracy. Froines and Weiner were acquitted entirely. Hoffman, Rubin, Dellinger, Davis, and Hayden were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot and sentenced to five years in prison and $5,000 fines. Judge Hoffman also cited all seven defendants and their attorneys on 159 counts of criminal contempt, with sentences ranging from a few months to more than four years.¹¹

On November 21, 1972, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit unanimously overturned all the criminal convictions. The panel found that Judge Hoffman had failed to properly screen jurors for bias, had improperly excluded evidence, and had shown “open hostility” toward the defense. In January 1973, the Department of Justice announced it would not seek a retrial. The contempt charges were later retried before a different judge, resulting in thirteen convictions but no further jail time.¹¹

What Became of the Founders

Abbie Hoffman

Hoffman came to radical politics through civil rights work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee before turning to counterculture activism in 1966.¹² His books Revolution for the Hell of It (1968) and Steal This Book (1971) became countercultural touchstones. More than 30 publishers rejected Steal This Book, so Hoffman raised $15,000 from friends and published it himself through an imprint called Pirate Editions. Bookstores largely refused to stock it and newspapers refused to advertise it, yet it sold more than 250,000 copies in its first seven months.¹³

In 1974 Hoffman was arrested on cocaine charges, which he called a police frame-up. He skipped bail, underwent plastic surgery, and spent six years as a fugitive under the alias “Barry Freed,” organizing environmental campaigns during that period.¹² He surrendered in 1980 and served four months in prison on the cocaine charge.¹⁴ He died by suicide on April 12, 1989, at age 52. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Jerry Rubin

Rubin came out of UC Berkeley, where he co-founded the Vietnam Day Committee and helped organize what was described as the largest teach-in in American history, drawing roughly 30,000 people to Sproul Plaza.¹⁵ In August 1966 he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee dressed in a Revolutionary War costume, an early piece of political theater.¹⁶

His later trajectory became one of the most discussed reinventions in American counterculture. In the 1970s he explored the human-potential movement, including yoga, meditation, est, and bioenergetic therapy.¹⁷ By the 1980s he was wearing suits and working on Wall Street, organizing networking seminars for young professionals. His biographer Pat Thomas argued that Rubin’s business efforts focused on areas like solar energy investment, against the “sellout” narrative.¹⁸ He died on November 28, 1994, at age 56, from injuries sustained after being struck by a car while jaywalking in Los Angeles.

Paul Krassner

Krassner was already established in the counterculture press by the time he helped found the Yippies. A former child violin prodigy who performed at Carnegie Hall at age 6, he founded The Realist in 1958, a magazine of what he called “investigative satire” that carried no advertising and reached a circulation of 100,000 at its peak. Its contributors included Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Woody Allen. He died on July 21, 2019, at age 87.¹⁹

Anita Hoffman and Nancy Kurshan

The two women who co-founded the group received far less recognition than their male counterparts. Anita Hoffman created the formal name “Youth International Party” and was present at every stage of the founding.¹ Nancy Kurshan, who had organizing experience with SDS and the Vietnam Day Committee, was part of the movement’s core leadership but received “virtually no acknowledgement of that role at the time by the media and even other ‘leaders.'” Kurshan and Anita Hoffman were photographed burning judges’ robes after the Chicago Seven verdict. Kurshan later published a memoir, Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories, as a corrective to the historical erasure of women in the Yippie movement.²⁰

FBI Surveillance

The Yippies and their leaders were targets of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which ran from the mid-1950s through 1971 to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” domestic political groups the bureau considered threats. Abbie Hoffman was specifically subjected to what has been described as “illegal surveillance and harassment” under the program.²¹ In 1969, the FBI created and anonymously distributed an antisemitic flyer depicting Krassner, Hoffman, Rubin, and SDS leader Mark Rudd inside a swastika, titled “Lampshades, Lampshades, Lampshades,” which suggested the “elimination of these Jewish leaders.” An internal FBI memo described the flyer as a “facetious suggestion.”²²

Legacy

As a formal organization, the Yippies were essentially defunct within three years of their founding.³ Their tactical influence lasted longer. They established the idea that a well-designed media spectacle could reach more people and shift public perception more effectively than a march or a pamphlet, and Hoffman’s “war of symbols” became a template for later activist groups. The confrontational, visually driven tactics of ACT UP during the AIDS crisis drew directly on the Yippie playbook.²³ The folk singer Phil Ochs, an ally of the movement, offered a darker summary: the Yippies were “merely an attack of mental disobedience on an obediently insane society.”

1
University of Chicago Press. The Whole World Is Watching
2
TIME. Youth: The Politics of Yip
3
Encyclopedia.com. Yippies
4
Roz Sixties. Yippie Manifesto
5
Smithsonian Magazine. How the New York Stock Exchange Gave Abbie Hoffman His Start in Guerrilla Theater
6
The Nation. It Was 50 Years Ago Today: Abbie Hoffman Threw Money at the New York Stock Exchange
7
Bill of Rights Institute. March on the Pentagon, October 21, 1967
8
Smithsonian Magazine. How a Rag-Tag Group of Acid-Dropping Activists Tried to Levitate the Pentagon
9
The Village Voice. The Grand Central Riot: Yippies Meet the Man
10
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Youth International Party
11
Federal Judicial Center. The Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial
12
PBS. Newsmakers: Abbie Hoffman
13
ArtsJournal. Abbie Hoffman: Steal, Distribute
14
University of Virginia Law Library. Chicago Seven Member Abbie Hoffman: Trial for Conspiracy and Inciting Riot
15
KQED. Looking Back at Jerry Rubin, the Yippie Turned Yuppie
16
History, Art and Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. Bums, Beatniks, and Birds
17
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Jerry Rubin
18
Berkeleyside. Yippie Berkeley: Jerry Rubin’s Life and Times, According to Pat Thomas
19
NPR. Paul Krassner, Comedian Who Captured the Zeitgeist of the ’60s, Dies at 87
20
CounterPunch. Make Trouble Not War: Nancy Kurshan Tells Her Story
21
The New York Times. Steal This Movie
22
KCUR. Remembering Paul Krassner, Journalist and Co-Founder of the Yippies
23
Waging Nonviolence. The Day They Levitated the Pentagon