American Fun (45 page)

“I don’t think I was much of a pacifist after Chicago,” he wrote.

NEVER MIND
Hair,
the so-called Chicago Eight (then Seven) trial was the countercultural performance of the sixties. Guerrilla theater stared
down courtroom farce to decide the civil dispute of the era: the Movement vs. the Establishment. The eight defendants seemed finically chosen to represent the world of dissent: SDS leaders
Rennie Davis and
Tom Hayden (who had authored the “Port Huron Statement”); graduate students
Lee Weiner and
John Froines; portly fifty-four-year-old Christian socialist
David Dellinger; Yippies Rubin and Hoffman; and—briefly—Black Panther
Bobby Seale. “
Conspire, hell,” Hoffman quipped. “We couldn’t agree on lunch.” The most colorful figure, however, was the judge. Seventy-four-year-old Justice
Julius Hoffman, a trickster in his own right, whom Abbie called his “
illegitimate father” and Rubin called “
the country’s top Yippie,” was a blatant right-winger who mugged for the court and openly distorted judicial procedure—refusing to admit the defendants’ “
self-serving” evidence, showily favoring the prosecutors’ motions, and overtly manipulating the jury’s deliberations. But his behavior in this case was nothing new. As one Chicago lawyer noted, Julius Hoffman “
regarded himself as the embodiment of everything federal” and routinely saw the “defense” as the “enemy.”

The Eight were charged with crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, a clause in the Civil Rights Act that had been proposed by a southern senator to prevent out-of-staters from organizing voters. The trial, set in Chicago’s black-steel federal office towers designed by modernist
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was one of the hottest tickets in America. Continual protests raged out front; people lined up for days to get in. The courtroom itself was theater in the round. The spectators were a vibrant and heckling crowd of canny reporters, ornery
hippies,
Black Panthers in uniform, out-of-town luminaries, and starstruck oglers, as well as the defendants’ vocal associates and worried close relations. The marshals, whom the judge kept in constant play, manhandled spectators, defendants, and lawyers. The divided jury—all but one of them women—guardedly expressed their amusement and outrage. And the stars of the show, the colorful defense, maintained their slouchy, slovenly outpost alongside the prosecutors’ businesslike table: they lounged in boots and leather jackets, headbands, armbands, and brightly colored clothes; their backpacks and belongings—food, wrappers, magazines, radical literature, and once a bag of pot “
in a silent dare to the court”—covered their
four pushed-together tables and spilled over onto the courtroom carpet. When they weren’t heckling, stage-whispering, vamping, sleeping, or passing out jelly beans among the spectators, the Eight kept busy writing the speeches and correspondence with which they made their case to the public. Justice Hoffman, for his part, played the trickster with a range of voices and kept the room on edge for months.

One of the trial’s observers,
John Schultz, described it as a campaign to win “
allegiances” through laughter. The Yippie! defendants used
guerrilla theater to heighten the hilarity. Abbie Hoffman and a marshal played tug-of-war with a Viet Cong flag that had been hanging from the defendants’ table. And on the day that Mayor Daley testified, Abbie Hoffman sauntered up to him, Wild West–style, and said, “
Why don’t we settle this right here and now—just you and me? The hell with all these lawyers.” (Even the draconian mayor laughed at this one.) The most significant comedy, however, arose from the proceedings themselves. Reporters who had covered the riots were consistently amused by the prosecutors’ egregious distortions. And anyone sympathizing with the defense enjoyed the government’s and prosecutors’ unfailing lack of humor.
When an undercover cop denied that “Pigasus” was “
satire,” she set herself up for a round of jokes: “Did you support Pigasus?” (“No.” Then: “Certainly not.”) “Did you oppose him?” (“No.”) “You were neutral, right?” (“Yes.”) As Schultz describes it, this “completion of the game was so perfect that the laughter was wide and silent, a part of the game, never letting her know the import of what she had said.”

This ongoing trial of the government’s (minus Judge Hoffman’s) lack of humor delivered a verdict on the riots themselves. The people—represented by the Yippies—were exercising their freedom to crack a few jokes, to pull a few pranks, as Americans had been doing for centuries. So long as they weren’t hurting anyone, they were well within their rights. But the government’s dullness in the face of humor—resorting to violence instead of to wit—showed what tyrants they had become. And it showed their failure at playing the
dozens.
David Stahl was the young deputy mayor who had “stalled” (Abbie Hoffman’s pun) in awarding the permit, arguably creating the conditions for a riot. At issue in his testimony was whether he took “
seriously Abbie and Jerry’s statement
about tearing down the city.” When he said that he did, and Hoffman and Rubin “laughed quietly together” at the table, he seemed to come to his senses: Should he defend the government or his personal dignity? Should he take the fall like Attorney General Bunker in Carson City’s great landslide case? When the questioning attorney gave him a second chance, asking, “Does Mr. Hoffman often speak in jest?” Stahl got it right: “I believe,” he finally said with a smile, “that’s a matter of broad public knowledge.” This display of temporary sanity earned him laughs from “both sides.”

Judge Hoffman, always the master jester, knew better than to step into the Yippies’ trap. Too old and smart to play the straight man, instead he played “Mr. Magoo,” as the defendants took to calling him. He willfully mangled their lawyers’ names—especially that of
Leonard Weinglass, whom he routinely called “
Fineglass,” “Weintraub,” “Weinrus,” and “Weinrub.” And unlike the tetchy prosecutor Foran—who complained of the courtroom’s annoying “
mirth”—he mildly rebuked and smirked at the defendants while asking the recorder to note their high jinks. But he held back his whopping punch line for the end, when, while the jury was deliberating, he delivered an uncommonly brutal list of 175 counts of contempt, earning the ultimate seven defendants a combined sentence of fifteen years and five days behind bars. Judge Hoffman’s most vicious prank, however, was reserved for the only black defendant,
Bobby Seale—whose special elimination reduced the “Chicago Eight” by one.

Though Seale was a professional drummer and stand-up comic, he didn’t condone the other defendants’ horseplay. From the beginning he wanted to win through “
revolutionary discipline.” In October, when the court refused to wait for Seale’s lawyer to recover from gallbladder surgery, Seale chose to defend himself and grew increasingly incensed with Judge Hoffman’s prejudicial treatment, demanding “
constitutional rights” and not “jive bargaining operations,” a position the defense lawyers corroborated. Invoking a single case in which a defendant in a murder trial had been restrained after threatening the judge’s life, the judge had Bobby Seale gagged and shackled to his chair. When he could still be heard demanding his rights through the gag, his mouth was sealed
with adhesive tape. In a year when mainstream white America was widely alarmed by the furious Panthers, Hoffman’s graphic binding of its founder like a slave was the trial’s most resounding stunt.

Bobby Seale was then tried separately and sentenced to an unprecedented four years for contempt.

On December 29, 1969, in the final hours of the sixties, Abbie Hoffman testified for himself. In explaining how Yippie! came about—that it was meant to be “
the kind of party you had fun at”—he made it clear that this was a solemn idea. Hoffman had told Rubin, he testified,

At the end of the trial, when five defendants were convicted of the major charges, Abbie Hoffman, one of the guilty parties, addressed his statement to the forefathers pictured above the bench. “
I know those guys on the wall,” he said. “They grew up twenty miles from my home in Massachusetts. I played with Sam Adams on the Concord Bridge. I was there when
Paul Revere rode right up on his motorcycle and said, ‘Pigs are coming.’ ”

As it had been for Paul Revere, on his motorcycle, American freedom is at its most exciting when it is being threatened—whether that perceived threat comes from the government or from the people: at that moment Old Glory cracks like a whip, to the right and to the left.
Conservative Americans declared their patriotism to the nation’s reigning authority—as did the two hundred or so “hard hats” who, in May 1970, achieved brief star status for bashing student protesters and raising the flag the kids had lowered for the
Kent State massacre. But the
trickster politicians of the 1960s—scofflaws like the Pranksters,
Diggers, and Yippies—pledged their allegiance to unchecked freedom and waved American flags in support of “fun—fierceness—exclamation point!” In 1969, awaiting his conspiracy trial, Abbie Hoffman was the first American to be charged under a new law against desecrating the flag, for wearing the same stars-and-stripes shirt that he had been sporting for years. He told the appellate court that he had been off to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee and had worn the shirt “
to show that we were in the tradition of the founding fathers of this country, and that that committee wasn’t.”

As in all the battles for unofficial freedom examined in this book, the sixties fight over the meaning of America was exhilarating and brief, and it delivered many casualties. Some fell to drugs—like
Neal Cassady, who overdosed walking Mexican train tracks, or
Emmett Grogan, poignantly, who OD’d on the train to
Coney Island. Some ran from the law, like Abbie Hoffman, who spent many years as a fugitive from the
FBI, and some ran from themselves, like Jerry Rubin, the once self-proclaimed “
P. T. Barnum of the Revolution” who later became, rather fittingly, a self-proclaimed Yuppie. Many were injured and killed in protests, but hundreds of thousands more were killed fighting the
Red scare in Southeast Asia. These two conflicts—the civilian and the military—had at least this much in common: their results at the time looked disastrous, futile. And yet the Yippies’ crowd actions in 1968, and their courtroom antics in 1969, for all their fun and ostensible frivolity, made America reconsider its
commitment to freedom—to its limits, its dangers, its pleasures, its
struggle
—without asking its citizens to sacrifice their lives. While the U.S. government was defining democracy abroad with napalm drops and carpet bombing, the Yippies were defining it with fun at home. Equipped only with irony,
satire, and farce, they stirred up fights that stress-tested the nation’s most powerful institutions.

Like the commercial amusements of the
Gilded Age and the “joyous revolts” of the Jazz Age, the fierce freedoms and antics of the 1960s counterculture carved a new flowing “tributary” into the mainstream of American fun. Nineteenth-century innovators like Barnum and Tilyou founded an entertainment empire that still dominates the American
experience: Broadway, Hollywood,
television, Vegas, Disneyland,
spectator sports,
video games, and so on. In their genius for promotion and mass production, they poured the cement for commercial ventures—nay, pleasures—that inform a major part of the American experience. Likewise,
Jazz Age innovators like
Buddy Bolden and
Mae West modeled high-spirited popular rebellions that got average citizens out of their seats, dancing like fools and shooting their mouths off: their liberation of the unruly American self stimulated a resistive, mainstream youth culture that renews itself with every generation: with folk, with rock, with
punk, with
rap. And in the sixties playful innovators like the
Merry Pranksters,
Diggers, and Yippies blew the lid off American freedom. They initiated a radical new American politics that inspires even disempowered citizens to challenge the system, to rewrite the rules, and to enjoy the hell out of political participation. Their playful tone and love of irony has inspired dissenters ever since: nonviolence, they insisted, isn’t enough; the people need to flaunt their freedom with jokes, pranks, costumes, music; as did the Sons of Liberty, they found their freedom was best expressed through fun.

Yippies stayed in the news during the early 1970s, most notably for throwing pies at bigwigs, but their grips on the media and the youth culture slackened. Before long they were just another sixties relic.

And yet their “revolution for the hell of it” transcended their historical moment. As connoisseurs of “struggle,” “participation,” and “fun,” they understood the basic principles that got
Paul Revere on his motorcycle. Even more than the Merry Pranksters and Diggers, they brought these principles to the nation’s attention and made them relevant again. The historian Gerard J. DeGroot, echoing those who dismiss the Sons of Liberty’s high jinks, sees only frivolity in the Yippie! program. “
The recipe for revolution was effortless and simple: having fun, dressing up, and getting high would somehow create a better world.” But there was nothing effortless about it, nothing simple. “Revolution for the hell of it” was truly infernal. It meant walking directly into the furnace of power—the
New York Stock Exchange, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Pentagon, the federal courtroom, the “wedge” of police—and throwing a kamikaze party. As Abbie Hoffman testified
to Judge Hoffman, “fun actually was becoming quite subversive.” The vision of such civil impudence—like dumping tea in Boston Harbor—is as inspiring now as ever. As Americans have shown from the nation’s beginning, having fun in the house of power can indeed create a better world.