American Fun

by John Beckman

  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,

  that fun was very important.… It was a direct rebuttal of the ethics and morals that were part of the religion of the country; that the Protestant ethic was designed to keep people working in a rat race, that people couldn’t get into heaven, they were told, unless they kept working, unless they tried to keep up with the Joneses—that work had lost its joy and that there was a whole system of values that told people to postpone their pleasure, to put all their money in the bank, to buy life insurance, a whole bunch of things that didn’t make any sense to our generation at all and that fun actually was becoming quite subversive.

  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.

  12

  * * *

  Mustangers Have More Fun

  BY EARLY 1968, the three tributaries of American fun—the commercial, playful, and radically political—were mingling beyond distinction in mainstream American popular culture. Case in point was that spring’s big-budget, major-release movie Wild in the Streets, whose LSD-terrorism plot was invoked by the Yippies to needle Mayor Daley’s office. The movie’s ingenious doomsday fantasy—lavishly edited with split-screen technology and psychedelic stars-and-stripes effects—both celebrates and satirizes the counterculture’s efforts to politicize acid-rock debauchery.

  The actor Christopher Jones, a James Dean manqué who had played Jesse James for two seasons on television, stars as the miscreant teen Max Flatow—a bomb-building, acid-cooking rebel without a cause who lives for sex, flirts with his mother (played by Shelley Winters), and Oedipally dynamites his father’s Chrysler before running away to rock-star freedom. At twenty-two, he has become multimillionaire Max Frost. He has a sprawling mansion in Beverly Hills and ownership of “14 interlocking companies.” A dreamy and commanding Jim Morrison–ish heartthrob, Max is “a leader of men and of little girls” whose multiracial rock band and blissed-out entourage includes a fifteen-year-old Yale Law School grad and his wisecracking drummer, “Stanley X,” played by Richard Pryor. The movie’s election-year satire kicks in when California’s Democratic senatorial candidate, John Fergus (Hal Holbrook), a well-meaning and affable RFK stand-in, recruits Max to promote his cause célèbre of lowering the voting age to eighteen. Commandeering Fergus’s stage, Max promotes his own idea that citizens twenty-five and younger are in the American majority (“We’re 52% and we make big business big”) and that the voting age should be lowered to fourteen—an idea encapsulated in his catchy pop song “Fourteen or Fight.” Max thus wheedles the candidate into a compromise (“Fifteen and Ready”), and so begins a rock ’n’ roll government takeover, thanks to Max’s fan base of teenage “troops.”

  The takeover itself is unstoppable fun. Hundreds of thousands mob the Sunset Strip (reminiscent of recent sit-ins that had defied the strip’s curfews) and stage “the biggest block party in history”—to the shock of geriatrics watching on TV. A rock revolution sparks off in California, where, as a TV pundit opines, “the pursuit of happiness has long been replaced by a headier flight back into pubescence,” but soon it has intimidated all of the nations’ legislatures into lowering the voting age. Max quips that he has become “King,” Stanley X retorts that he has “sold out,” and their irony highlights the movie’s constant references, now comical, now earnest, that link youth suffrage to civil rights and the Revolution: For, indeed, are these starry-eyed youth “citizens” supporting a democracy or a monarchy? Do they want to participate in the nation’s governance or idolize a boyish rock star? The movie literalizes the Pranksters’ “Vote for Fun” in a speech to Congress by Patriot-tricorne-lidded Sally Leroy. The child star turned acidhead/nudist, now the nation’s youngest senator, druggedly beats her tambourine and plays to cheering kids in the gallery: “America’s greatest contribution is to teach the world that getting old is such a drag. Youth is America’s greatest secret weapon.”

  To unleash this weapon, she proposes the minimum age of fourteen for all public offices, including the presidency. (“Amend!” becomes young America’s rallying cry.) To ensure that the grizzled senators give their support, Max and his entourage dump LSD in D.C.’s water supply and wheel them in one by one—bug-eyed, cackling, wildly tripping—for one wigged-out special session. Only Senator Fergus, who prefers being “good old patriotic drunk,” is bummed out by the acid, dismayed to see democracy’s institutional collapse. The rest of the disabled senators are on “a happy trip, a voting trip” that opens the gates for Max Frost’s election—as the 1968 Republican candidate because, as his advisers argue, “They’ve been looking for a hero since they lost Eisenhower.” Anyway, Reagan and Nixon would look “dumb” with long hair, and “nobody’s going to take the country this year with short hair.”

  The joke here, initially, is that both parties are the same, and that rock stars are, in essence, the greatest demagogues. Both parties serve the ruling-class establishment, and Max only needs an expedient way in (he wins by the largest margin in history). But the joke suddenly darkens when Max, as president, out-tyrants even Nixon by becoming a militant fascist-for-fun. He makes thirty the mandatory retirement age and sends everyone over thirty-five to concentration-camp-style “retirement homes,” where they wear blue robes with peace-sign patches and are forced to trip on acid every waking hour. His teenage goon squads notwithstanding, President Maximilian Frost, cruising the open country in his silver Rolls-Royce, enforces a Diggers-style democracy: he disbands the military, Secret Service, and FBI (“Protection—who needs it?”); he gives free food aid to Third World countries; and he uses the nation’s “immense wealth … to create the most purely hedonistic society the world has ever known.” But the results are unambiguously dystopian: Senator Fergus hangs himself from a tree, and his orphaned daughter (a premonition of the hippie-hating punk generation) scorns Max, now twenty-four, fo
r being “old.” This insult haunts him in the closing scenes, when he encounters a band of sneering minors who have taken his lesson to heart: “We’re going to put everyone over ten out of business.”

  Historically, having fun had been an underdog position—it was the practice of Patriots, slaves, and forty-niners who enjoyed and empowered their out-group identities. Likewise, in the 1920s and the 1960s, whether flappers or hippies, Lindy Hoppers or heads, Americans who embraced rising cultures of fun positioned themselves against an established power structure that gave their pleasure an illegal edge. Historically, as this book has shown, that illegal edge defined American fun. It kept it nimble, resistive, reactive. It kept it witty, inventive, evolving. It kept it from devolving into flabby complacency. But Wild in the Streets warns what could happen if youthful fun were to gain both market share and electoral power, if rock revolution became real revolution and youth pursued psychedelic hedonism unchallenged: it wouldn’t be much fun anymore. By this doomsday scenario, the combative attitude that characterizes fun (and deploys it against a closed-minded ideology) could slacken and lose its purpose; sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll would no longer signal rebellion but simply empty mainstream entertainment, and the aggression that historically was channeled through hilarity into forms of civil disobedience could come to behave as dominance, even tyranny, if nothing were there to keep it in check. Whether or not this warning had merit, it spoke to popular worries in 1968: hippie fun had become big business. Once-outlawed breeds of pleasure and license were looking like the norm. The “counterculture,” to this extent, was looking a lot like the “establishment.” And the acid tests, protests, and witty street theater that were amusing sideshows of the mid-1960s were exploding that spring (or so it seemed to many) into full-scale riots. To consumers of Life and the evening news, the fact that fun had become political, as temperance had in the nineteenth century, suggested that one day it could be enforced.