During an August 24, 1967 action that targeted the New York Stock Exchange, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin dropped a few hundred-dollar bills from the viewing area above. The goal was to create a mass-media spectacle in order to highlight the connection between the military-industrial complex and corporate war-related profits. Fellow activist Jim Fouratt hatched the idea, and Hoffman executed it with Jerry Rubin. “At first, they didn’t want to let them in because they were a bunch of hippies,” Paul Krassner recalled. “Then Hoffman said, ‘We’re a group of Jews and you don’t want to be accused in the media of being anti-Semitic, do you?’ So they got in, and the trading ticker-tape stopped.” Then, on New Year’s Eve 1967, Hoffman, Rubin, Fouratt, Ed Sanders, Paul Krassner, and other activists cofounded a political “organization” called the Youth International Party, aka the Yippies, while they were planning a protest of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Krassner coined the group’s name. “Y was for Youth,” he explained, “because there was a generation gap, and the I was International, because this kind of revolutionary consciousness was around the world, and P was for Party, in both senses of the term. Yippie! The moment I said it, I felt it would work. It was a form of marketing an attitude.” These prankish tactics provided free publicity for the demonstrations, but, unfortunately, the riots that ensued in Chicago resulted in conspiracy charges against the organizers, known as the “Chicago Eight.”

From Chapter 15 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

The attempted levitation of the Pentagon was a famous protest/prank that brought together the politicized wing of the counterculture and the hippies who were more invested in cultural revolution. The levitation stunt was a joke, but one with serious undertones that helped publicize their antiwar protest, the first of its kind in Washington, DC. “If you don’t like the news, why not go out and make your own?” Abbie Hoffman wrote in Steal This Book. “Guerrilla theater events are always good news items and if done right, people will remember them forever.” Even Pentagon officials joined in on the levity when the organizers sought a permit to levitate the building. “Well, don’t raise it higher than twenty-two feet, because that’s the height of our ladders,” they were told by a bemused official, who finally bargained them down to three feet. “So then we were able to go out and tell the newspapers that the Pentagon said that we could ‘only’ raise it three feet off the ground,” Paul Krassner said. “It was a great quote. It was funny, and it served as an organizational tool of media manipulation—in order to inform people about the demonstrations that were going to take place that October at the Pentagon.” The proto-Yippies staged two different media events filled with humorous hooks that they dangled in front of journalists, who took the bait. One was held at Abbie and Anita Hoffman’s apartment across from The Dom, and the other press conference featured a demonstration of the levitation at the Village Theater, complete with wires used to raise a small model of the Pentagon. While Sanders and others chanted, it rose high above the stage like a cheap magic trick.

From Chapter 15 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore