The Yippies and the power of counterculture

This article The Yippies and the power of counterculture was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, an authoritarian presidency has been accompanied by a brutal crackdown on social movements. While there are strikingly new features of Trump’s reign, many of the assaults on freedom and the persecution of activists have parallels in the histories of U.S. imperialism, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of the right in the 1980s.

And many of the questions organizers are asking today were in debate then. How do you balance militant activism with the need to build a mass movement? What role do creativity, theatrics and joy take in resistance? What does it mean to support those who are facing the brunt of the state’s criminalization of protest?

This is why “Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories: A Life of Activism,” a recent memoir by New Left organizer Nancy Kurshan, comes at a critical moment. Kurshan takes a magnifying glass to her decades of organizing experience in an attempt to pull out the lessons that are most informative for today. I talked with Nancy about her history in revolutionary organizations like the Weather Underground and the Yippies — known for their theatrical antiwar activism — and how she sees their choices years later.

Your book is named after the Oct. 21, 1967 demonstration organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the precursor to the Youth International Party, or the Yippies), in which they claimed they would attempt to psychically raise the Pentagon building into the air. I don’t think you would be surprised that when I first heard that story, it was explained as a type of disconnect: These people really believed they were about to levitate the Pentagon. Can you put the levitation in context? 

We always claimed we did, in fact, levitate the Pentagon, but just not high enough — although I doubt a single one of us thought we would literally succeed. But we did hope to help end the war and, in order to do that, we did need to have those evil spirits expelled by enough people to help change policy. 

For instance, there was a young Daniel Ellsberg watching from an upstairs window of the Pentagon who later became a famous whistleblower by releasing the Pentagon Papers. So maybe we did succeed at driving out the evil spirits or at least hastening that process. Who knows?

As you discuss, this was a much more strategically conceived demonstration than it first appeared, even if it had some elements that weren’t that strategic.

That demonstration in particular was very strategic. We were not yet Yippies when a small group of us arrived in New York to help build a national antiwar protest in Washington. Our strategic goal was to build a larger, more militant movement and one that tapped into the energy of the emerging counterculture. Our little band of youthful agitators argued for the demonstration to be the at Pentagon, as opposed to the usual humdrum protest outside the White House. We wanted a target that made it clear this was not just about an argument of words but about a conflict in which millions of lives were being taken by weapons of destruction — over 2 million Vietnamese lives and 60,000 American GIs. And we wanted our slogan to be: “Shut it down!” 

And we wanted to do this by organizing mass civil disobedience. And the reason I stress mass is because there had already been very orchestrated, “stepping over the line” civil disobedience carried out by a few very wonderful, committed people. But it was time to massify it. And we did it. Hundreds were arrested. It was the largest civil disobedience of the anti-Vietnam war movement to that date. 

The other strategic aspect was we wanted to appeal to the youth of America. The hippie phenomenon was taking hold in many places throughout the nation, and the Pentagon protest was able to project a union of antiwar and countercultural streams. Later the colorful, satirical approach of the Yippies was very resonant with young Americans. 

What would you say is the value of these theatrical and performative protest actions?

Theatrical and performative protest are incredibly valuable. The whole Pentagon protest was a theatrical event, but one particular photo of Super-Joel placing a flower in the musket of a National Guardsman has traveled around the world. 

After Black Panther Fred Hampton and others were assassinated, and the guilty verdict in the Chicago Conspiracy trial came down, Anita Hoffman, Tasha Dellinger and I held a press conference and we burned judges’ robes in front of a banner referencing the Jefferson Airplane’s “We Are All Outlaws In The Eyes of Amerika,” [from the song “We Can Be Together.”] The photo went around the globe. 

During the wars in the 1980s in Central America, we went out in canoes and dyed the Chicago River red and left “bloodied” hands on the walls of the federal building. 

The 1,000 Grandmothers for Future Generations, a climate justice organization that I am a part of, has fantastical, huge puppets — the Water Protector, Flo the Hummingbird, the Fierce Protector and Winds of Change. The names alone are great, but the creatures are fabulous. And people, including children, love them. The incredibly original, creative banners and signs are proof that we are not “paid agitators.” Sometimes the movement’s fabulous art is reflected in the mass media, more often on social media. But always in our hearts and minds. 

Your book includes a deep dive into the Chicago Eight trial, in which eight antiwar activists were prosecuted for allegedly inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, including Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and Black Panther Bobby Seale (although Seale wasn’t present and had no connection). You were involved in court and jail support for the defendants, the kind of organizing that became increasingly important as repression against organizers grew. Can you talk about why this kind of prison solidarity and court support activism are so key, and what other campaigns you’ve been involved in?

I believe that prison support should play a central role in any vibrant movement challenging the status quo. I don’t think a movement can persist and grow if political prisoners are locked away without support. I was privileged to be part of a campaign to free 11 Puerto Rican independentistas, a campaign that was conducted in Puerto Rico, in Chicago and around the globe. After decades of imprisonment, their sentences were ultimately commuted by President [Bill] Clinton. That never would have happened if it weren’t for a persistent and intense campaign to free them across decades. I saw in that campaign what real loyalty looked like when day after day and year after year, decade after decade, there was a ceaseless attempt to hold the political prisoners in community, to tell their stories, to organize protests, to visit them, to raise funds and to incorporate them into the daily life of the community, primarily in Puerto Rican neighborhoods, but also among other allies.

I was part of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, a campaign in the 1980s and ’90s to end the ongoing lockdown at the United States Penitentiary Marion [now named Federal Corrections Institution Marion], a federal prison where inmates were confined to their cells for 23 hours a day and without normal contact and recreation. I wrote a book about it, “Out of Control: A 15 Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons,” published by Freedom Archives. For 15 years we organized and protested to end mass incarceration and particularly long-term solitary confinement. That was our primary effort. However, we worked along with our Puerto Rican friends and others, incorporating demands to free political prisoners into our work, as they joined in fighting long-term solitary [confinement], which disproportionately fell on political prisoners like the 11. We also together assembled, published, collated and distributed four editions of “Can’t Jail the Spirit,” collections of biographies and photos of all the political prisoners we knew of at the time. 

I applaud the work of groups like The Sentencing Project and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. And when significant charges come down, whether on activists from the movement against Palestinian genocide or the immigration or climate movements, let’s show solidarity and have their backs. 

How did the struggle against white supremacy and for civil rights develop your consciousness as an organizer?

Anti-racism had always been, since high school, at the center of my political thinking. I was a Northern supporter of the Southern civil rights movement and then later, I was part of Students for a Democratic Society. I was committed to building an interracial movement of the poor. I was a middle-class white girl knocking on apartment doors of Black folks who were more hospitable than you can imagine. 

Then along came Malcolm X and the evolution of the civil rights movement into a movement for Black liberation. I heard both Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X speak and I got it: Black people are not the problem, and white people need to organize our own communities to oppose racism. 

My militancy grew in response to the way the Black movement had been treated and the response that ill-treatment generated in younger Black activists of my generation. We noted everything that was going on. The refusal of the Democratic Party to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the brutal murders of [James Earl] Chaney, [Andrew] Goodman and [Michael] Schwerner, and the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had a deep impact on me and many other activists.  

Over your years in organizing, how did you balance militancy and radicalism with the need to build a mass movement? 

Sometimes well, sometimes not that well. It was and is a conundrum wrapped in an enigma. This is a huge topic and I could look at each decade of my life and try to see how I – and we – dealt with that balance. But that would be a whole long piece. So I’ll just touch on it.

Previous Coverage

The day they levitated the Pentagon

I advocated for militancy in the form of nonviolent direct action, as exemplified by the October 1967 Pentagon demonstration. Our advocacy included satire and theater, thus the levitation. But our slogan of “Shut it down!” represented our militant intent, as did our refusal to leave. [The] Chicago ‘68 [Democratic National Convention protests] continued our militant trajectory and we were still able to grow the mass movement. 

Many of the Black youth in the movement were becoming more militant. The Black Panthers were sick and tired of being the victims of white hatred and violence, whether by the police or by racist white folks. So they marched into the Sacramento capitol of California with rifles and declared themselves the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

This was a time of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI COINTELPRO [counter-intelligence program], whose core objective was to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant Black nationalist movement.” It involved overt and often illegal operations aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and neutralizing domestic political organizations. Neutralizing? Scores of dead Black people give meaning to the definition. I was in Chicago when Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated. I walked through the bloody scene where they killed him in his sleep. He was old enough to be my baby brother. 

As Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican and Native (Indigenous, to use today’s language) contemporaries became more militant, we asked ourselves how we should respond. We supported what they were doing. So why wasn’t it appropriate for us to join in? Should we be onlookers or should we be like Old John Brown and his family — white folks who actively opposed slavery with their lives. 

For some of us becoming more militant meant joining the Weather Underground. By doing so, I never expected to become divorced from the mass movement. My passion was deep and I didn’t realize the mass movement would recede so quickly. 

What did that receding of the mass movement look like?

There were collectives around the country, particularly in college towns and other youth communities that persisted. I encountered many of them when a group of us traveled around the country in 1974. But in hindsight we could see that after the ending of the Vietnam War, and the repression of the Black movement, and also of Puerto Rican, Mexican and Native American [movements], the mass movement significantly receded.

By 1976 we in the Weather Underground Organization planned a Hard Times Conference in Chicago, a conference to address the economic recession taking place nationally, in large part to help reinvigorate a mass movement that would link a militant fight to combat racism and sexism together with the concerns of all working-class people. That didn’t work. I wasn’t there because I was delivering a baby at that moment. Large numbers of people showed up from around the country, but there was too much internal division for the convening to be successful. 

We made mistakes but perhaps objective conditions were not ripe. Our youthful passion often overlooked a clear view of objective conditions. We thought if we just worked harder, we could change anything and everything. 

You talked about your move away from the “straight left,” which was the term for the less theatrical and subcultural organizing left, in part because the cultural values of young people were coming up against the entrenched social conservatism you were fighting against, and this made many of the more buttoned-down leftist tactics seem antiquated. What was the value of this countercultural movement in terms of resisting the war and structural injustice? 

I lived in several different situations, but the most extraordinary was the Bachenheimer houses on Parker Street in Berkeley. The complex was a cluster of houses that went on rent strike for a couple of years. Bachenheimer was the name of the landlord/slumlord in charge of overcharging and under-repairing everything.

The rent strike meant much more than simply not paying rent. We, like so many others, had rejected the traditional materialistic values of U.S. society and were looking for more meaningful, cooperative and creative ways of living. We treated the houses as if they were our own, tearing down walls and rehabbing as desired. The backyards of the buildings ran together and there was a large outdoor common area.

The rent strike was a collective decision and action taken by all the Bachenheimer houses. We weren’t out to con the landlord. On the contrary, we believed that people had the right to decent and affordable living conditions, and we put our rent checks into an escrow account every month — payable when and if Bachenheimer brought the houses up to code. 

The nature of that community was not lost on the FBI. My FBI file [obtained through the Freedom of Information Act], indicates that: “This department had not had any success in developing any sources or informants … in the 2200 block of East Parker, Berkeley, California. … Because the residents of this block are ‘hippie type individuals,’ their attitude towards any type of authority or law enforcement official is somewhat negative, therefore, communication with them is also somewhat limited.”

I wonder if any left organization was better guarded against snooping FBI agents or undercover informants than the Bachenheimer houses. Although the rent strike may have been exceptional, there were communities of similar character all around the country.

Do you continue to see value for radical movements in the development of a counterculture as important?

I suspect that the melding of the antiwar movement and countercultural hippies probably led to the most successful influence on disaffected working-class youth [of any recent movement]. I can’t prove it, but I doubt anyone can disprove it. My family was solidly middle class by the 1960s, but I encountered countercultural working-class youth in Kent, Ohio as well as in Berkeley, California, the Lower East Side of New York, the Twin Cities, Minnesota, and in Manchester, New Hampshire, all of whom were antiwar. They were not that different from people I knew as a young child in Brooklyn. 

I also met with deserters from the U.S. Army in Sweden and worked with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In fact, resistance to the war inside the military, and organizing on the outside at coffee houses set up near military bases, was essential to ending the war and most of the participants were working class, albeit not only white folks. Tremendously aided by the music of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan but also the Rolling Stones; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff and so many others. 

That assessment of the past hasn’t changed. Yes, many people both from the political movement and the counterculture returned to the mainstream, but in doing so, many maintained, in varying degrees, the values and thinking of the political/cultural movements. The civil rights movement was probably the grandmother/grandfather of them all, but it can be argued that the counterculture advanced notions of sexual liberation that, although shot full of male supremacy, or perhaps partly in reaction to that, then led to the birth of the women’s and gay liberation movements. You could argue similarly about the current climate movement. The seeds were there in the counterculture.

And the antiwar movement, unique in that it led to the eventual, massive alienation from the war machine, is still having reverberations today. The war in Vietnam remained popular much longer than the current war on Iran. That is echoes of the so-called Vietnam Syndrome.  

So I suggest that the mainstream has actually been moving towards us. Perhaps a slow evolution but a change in direction. And of course subsequent movements were critical — Occupy and Black Lives Matter. All these movements encourage changes in consciousness. And what we are seeing in this era, is the counter-revolution, if you will. In other words, the collective “we” has had a great influence which is why there is such a fierce response. It’s hard to tease out the different elements but it’s clear that all the mass struggles of our people have planted seeds that have blossomed in subsequent generations.

I returned to Vietnam in 2013 as a guest of the Vietnamese government, in thanks for helping end the war. It was the first time that I completely internalized that yes, we had made a positive difference. 

What kind of advice do you have for organizers today who are asking questions about the role of cultural struggle?

Don’t give in to cynicism. The current powers that be would love nothing better. When asked if I’m hopeful, I like to quote the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” I take it to mean we have to see the reality for what it is, not through rose-colored [glasses]. But we have to continue to act. 

My wish is to see some massive nonviolent actions — I like the ideas people are putting forth of a general strike.

But there are many other tools in the tool box as well. Find your own voice and use it in whatever way you see fit. Ask yourself what you think needs to be done, and consider what your own talents and inclinations are.

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Let’s continue to deepen our connections in the communities where we live, at the same time as we keep an eye on and respond to world events because the people in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Cuba are our sisters and brothers. We are all connected and they have been paying a heavy price.

Let’s build a big tent. Don’t get hung up on small differences. And let’s not throw anyone under the bus. Let’s continue to embrace the most vulnerable, and that includes the undocumented folks and trans people. We can build a big tent and do all that. 

The time is now. The place is here. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

This article The Yippies and the power of counterculture was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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