28 Facts About Yippies

Youth International Party, whose members were commonly called Yippies, was an American youth-oriented radical and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the late 1960s.

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin became the most famous Yippies—and bestselling authors—in part due to publicity surrounding the five-month Chicago Seven Conspiracy trial of 1969.

Yippies held their first press conference in New York at the Americana Hotel March 17, 1968, five months before the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Yippies believed these cooperative institutions and a radicalized hippie culture would spread until they supplanted the existing system.

Yippies often paid tribute to rock 'n' roll and irreverent pop-culture figures such as the Marx Brothers, James Dean and Lenny Bruce.

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Many Yippies used nicknames which contained Baby Boomer television or pop references, such as Pogo or Gumby.

At demonstrations and parades, Yippies often wore face paint or colorful bandannas to keep from being identified in photographs.

Yippies were the first on the New Left to make a point of exploiting mass media.

Abbie Hoffman and a group of future Yippies managed to get into a tour of the New York Stock Exchange, where they threw fistfuls of real and fake US$ from the balcony of the visitors' gallery down to the traders below, some of whom booed, while others began to scramble frantically to grab the money as fast as they could.

The Yippies used media attention to make a mockery of the proceedings: Rubin came to one session dressed as an American Revolutionary War soldier, and passed out copies of the United States Declaration of Independence to people in attendance.

Several other Yippies – including Stew Albert, Wolfe Lowenthal, Brad Fox and Robin Palmer – were among another 18 activists named as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the case.

Vancouver Yippies invaded the US border town of Blaine, Washington, on May 9, 1970, to protest Richard Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of students at Kent State.

Columbus Yippies were charged with inciting the rioting that occurred in the city on May 11, 1972, in response to Nixon's mining of North Vietnam's Haiphong harbor.

Frequent 'national' complaint among Yippies was that the New York 'central HQ' chapter acted as if other chapters did not exist and kept them out of the decision-making process.

At one point, at a YIP conference in Ohio in 1972, Yippies voted to 'exclude' Abbie and Jerry as official spokespersons from the party, since they had become too famous and rich.

In 1973, Yippies marched on the Manhattan home of Watergate conspirator John Mitchell:.

Yippies regularly protested at US presidential inaugurations, with a particularly strong presence at the 1973 inauguration of Richard Nixon.

Yippies demonstrated at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit, as well as the subsequent 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, where 99 Yippies were arrested:.

The demonstrators, members of the Youth International Party, or Yippies, completed the spree through downtown by jumping into the reflecting pool at City Hall in the sweltering Dallas heat.

Yippies organized marijuana "smoke-ins" across North America through the 1970s and into the 1980s.

Infamous Baltimore Yippie John Waters became a renowned independent filmmaker, once claiming in an interview that the Yippies influenced his irreverent sense of style: "I was a Yippie agitator, and I wanted to look like Little Richard.

In 1970, Detroit Yippies went to city hall and applied for a permit to blow up the General Motors building.

On November 7, 1970, Jerry Rubin and London Yippies took over The Frost Programme when he was the guest on the popular British host's TV program.

In 1976, national Yippies took a cue from Isla Vistans, backing Nobody for President, a campaign that took on a life of its own in the post-Watergate malaise of the mid-70s.

Milwaukee Yippies published Street Sheet, the first of the anarchist zines later to become so popular in many cities.

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In 1983, a group of Yippies published Blacklisted News: Secret Histories from Chicago '68, to 1984, a large, 'phone-book sized anthology' (733 pages) of Yippie history, including journalistic accounts from both alternative and mainstream media, as well as many personal stories and essays.

Yippies is charismatic and has an instinctive grasp of the dramatic gesture, but can be infuriating on a one-to-one level.

Yippies continued as a small movement into the early 2000s.