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conceptions of political practice and social order the main actors brought to the
planning and realization of the convention." He offers us "three separate
stories,
all
ofwhich climax at the convention" to assess the motives, premises
and beliefs of the main actors.
In
his less deconstructed and more empathetic
introduction, Farber promises "narratives unadorned by the historian's
authorial voice."
Abby Hoffmann, Ed Krassner, Ed Sanders, and Jerry Rubin an–
nounced the birth of the Youth International Party on January 16, 1968:
The life of the American spirit is being torn asunder by the forces of
violence, decay, and the napalm cancer fiend . We demand the politics
of ecstasy. We are the delicate spoors of the new fierceness that will
change America. We will create our own reality, we are Free America.
And we will not accept the false theater of the Death Convention. We
will be in Chicago. Begin preprations. Now. Chicago is yours. Do it!
And preparations indeed did begin. Farber presents their manifestoes,
their infighting, their conflicts with the "serious" political leftists ofMobe, and
discusses their understanding of how to use television to amplify the message.
The Yippies, while skillfully learning to use the media, said, "There are
no spokesmen for the Yippies." They "made no demands" of the Democrats
and Republicans, other than that they "cease to exist." They did demand le–
galization of marijuana, an end to
all
forms of imperialism and money, full
unemployment, open and free use of the media, and an eighteenth demand
left blank "so you can fill in what you want." And, of course, they added, "Be
realistic - demand the impossible."
The "serious" left of 1968 - SDS, Mobe, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis,
and David Dellinger appear as well. They spoke in more conventional terms
of putting pressure on the American government to stop the war by a
demonstration in Chicago. Many people worked very hard to bring many
more people to Chicago. What about SDS, the revolutionary vanguard of the
decade? The SDS national office thought the convention protest was too dose
to the [Eugene] McCarthyites,"too open to the possibility of liberal co-optation
... at the spring convention, June 10-14 [1968], in East Lansing, Michigan,
the Chicago protest was ignored." SDS leaders were too busy becoming
"revolutionary communists" to bother about a coalition with such muddle–
heads as were planning the convention protest. Tom Hayden, however, re–
jected such radical purism and fear of mass action. "We are coming to
Chicago to vomit on the 'politics ofjoy' [espoused by Hubert Humphrey], to
expose the secret decisions, upset the night-dub orgies, and face the Demo–
cratic Party with its illegitimacy and criminality.... The government of the
United States is an outlaw institution under the control ofwar criminals."
