1968 - Mark Kurlansky [58]
But the most quoted and remembered line of the report was “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” And that was exactly what was happening in the militant movements of the Left as well. Mirroring society, black and white activists were increasingly separated.
By 1967 Abbie Hoffman had become a militant for the privileged whites. He protested capitalism and commercialism by burning money and urging others to do the same. Burning money was not an idea that would resonate with rural southern blacks or urban northern ones. But what was significant to Hoffman was that setting fire to money attracted television cameras, because it was visual. In 1967, when he finally turned his attention to the antiwar movement, his concern was how to get it onto television. In May of that year he formed the Flower Brigade, made up of young antiwar activists with what had become the hippie uniform—long hair, flowered clothing, bell-bottomed blue jeans, headbands, beads—a uniform that seemed to draw cameras. Hoffman, waving an American flag, wore a cape that said “Freedom.”
Hoffman had learned from the civil rights movement that even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless the participants are attacked. The Flower Brigade was designed to get attacked. He trained the members in the defensive crouch that he had been taught in the civil rights movement. And they were attacked, young women beaten, American flags torn out of their hands. It made for powerful photographs, and the Flower Brigade was momentarily the talk of the peace movement. Hoffman told the press that they were poorly equipped from “uptown florists” but had plans to “grow our own.” He boasted that “dandelion chains are being wrapped around induction centers,” where draftees were processed into the military.
Now established as one of the leading “hippies” of New York’s East Village, Hoffman joined a group called the Diggers, founded by a group of actors from San Francisco, the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He explained the difference between a Digger and a hippie in an essay titled “Diggery Is Niggery” for a publication called Win. Diggers, he said, were hippies who had learned to manipulate the media instead of being manipulated by them. “Both are in one sense a huge put-on,” he wrote.
The Diggers were named after a seventeenth-century English free land movement that preached the end of money and property and inspired the idea of destroying money and giving everything away for free as revolutionary acts. Hoffman staged a “sweep-in” on Third Street in the East Village, usually one of Manhattan’s dirtiest streets. The police did not know how to respond when Hoffman and the Diggers took to the block with brooms and mops. One even walked up to a New York City cop and started polishing his badge. The policeman laughed. Everyone laughed, and the Village Voice reported that the “sweep-in” was “a goof.” Later that year Hoffman staged a “smoke-in” in which people went to Tompkins Square Park and smoked marijuana, which was pretty much what everyone had been doing anyway.
“A modern revolutionary group,” Hoffman explained, “headed for the television station, not for the factory.”
Hoffman’s partner and competitor was Jerry Rubin, born in 1938 1968 of Rubin and Hoffman rolling on the floor in drug-induced stupors while founding the Yippie! movement is exactly the opposite of what it appears to be. Instead of being the embarrassing reality leaked to the press by some disloyal insider, it was in fact a planted story. In reality, Rubin and Hoffman had given a great deal of sober thought to the creation of the movement. Hoffman, in his “free” period, wanted to call the group the Freemen. In fact, his first book, Revolution for the Hell of It, was published in 1968 under the nom de plume Free. But after long discussion, the Freemen lost out to Yippie! It wasn’t until later in the year that it occurred to them to say it stood for