Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation
by Tom McGrath · 3 Jun 2024 · 326pp · 103,034 words
ISBNs: 9781538725993 (hardcover); 9781538726013 (ebook) E3-20240410-JV-NF-ORI Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction Part I: 1980 Chapter 1: The Reinvention of Jerry Rubin Chapter 2: Urban Elite Chapter 3: Milken Chapter 4: Cuisinarts and Perrier Chapter 5: Triumph of the Preps Part II: 1981–82 Chapter 6: The
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, in a way that can’t be overstated, the unequal and unsettled America we live in today. PART I 1980 CHAPTER 1 The Reinvention of Jerry Rubin In the last week of July 1980—with fifty-two American hostages in their ninth month of captivity inside the US embassy in Iran; with
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had decided to become, of all things, a capitalist. In an attention-grabbing op-ed that appeared in the New York Times on July 30, Jerry Rubin explained that he had accepted a job on Wall Street working for the financial firm of John Muir & Co. His new daily focus, Rubin noted
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War soldier. In his third, he came dressed as Santa Claus. All of that, however, was many years—and at least a couple of different Jerry Rubins—ago. Rubin was forty-two now, entering middle age, and the bearded, long-haired, peace-and-love look he’d cultivated in the late ’60s
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and double-digit inflation and other countries sticking it to America to put their faith in something magical. And so, in his own way, was Jerry Rubin. He wasn’t a Reaganite—he was leaning toward third-party candidate John Anderson over Reagan and incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter in the fall—but
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the ’70s. Money and financial interest will capture the passion of the ’80s.” The op-ed did exactly what Rubin hoped: It brought attention to Jerry Rubin. News outlets across the country picked up on what was an undeniably great story: One of the most radical voices of the ’60s enters the
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that two weeks after the op-ed ran, it published a half page of letters to the editor, almost all of them critical. “The ‘old’ Jerry Rubin, as Mr. Rubin himself would surely agree, was hardly a model of intellectual rigor,” one letter writer said. “The new one, however, simply sounds pathetic
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self-promotion and the media’s treatment of him as a spokesman for ideas rather than the huckster he is.” Said a third: “I follow Jerry Rubin’s varied career with interest. Perhaps Mr. Rubin could found a new society: ‘The Weather Vanes.’” The backlash was so harsh that Rubin’s young
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something, not whether it could. Ironically, it was this America—the America of what Time magazine founder Henry Luce had called the American Century—that Jerry Rubin spent much of the ’60s and early ’70s protesting, transforming himself into a professional radical. Early on the issue was America’s involvement in Vietnam
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to do an invitation-only brunch or dinner with and for 20–30 people every week at a great place. • I want a restaurant called “Jerry Rubin’s,” which can be my Elaine’s, and where I can make money, have a base, do my networking, and make money. • I need
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every level. • I want to marry a 25-year-old Jewish American Princess who has money and beauty. • I love (sexual) romance. As it happened, Jerry Rubin’s funk coincided with the beginnings of a downturn in America itself. The unrest of the ’60s, the lost war in Vietnam, and the corruption
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said. It was a dark thought that, for the first time in their lives, many in her generation shared. If, in the summer of 1980, Jerry Rubin was reinventing himself, the same seemed to be true of the ’60s generation—the children of the postwar Baby Boom—more broadly. By 1980 the
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, chose to do something about it. At first it was simply marching and protesting against the war, but before long—as had been true for Jerry Rubin—it became broader and deeper than that: questioning nearly everything about the America their parents and grandparents had built. Its materialism. Its economic system. Its
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Americans frustrated by the status quo—the struggling economy, Jimmy Carter’s perceived weakness—different was what was called for. Six weeks after the election, Jerry Rubin passed the exam to become a stockbroker. While it allowed him to buy and sell stocks on behalf of clients, just as important to Rubin
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new way forward. CHAPTER 2 Urban Elite In the summer of 1980, as Ronald Reagan readied himself to accept the Republican nomination for president and Jerry Rubin readied himself for a new job in the epicenter of American capitalism, a new restaurant was opening in Center City Philadelphia, right on the edge
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lost in Vietnam, and it had spurred her to protest alongside her classmates and friends. But as with Poses, as with Jim Kunen, as with Jerry Rubin, opposing the war was only the beginning of her political awakening. The mood on campus was about breaking free from conformity and embracing your individuality
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, he said, a term he’d heard people using around Chicago. Was it marketing jargon? A real estate expression? Was it a deliberate play on Jerry Rubin’s “Yippies,” who’d so disrupted Chicago a dozen years earlier? Rottenberg—no one—seemed to know. Of course, the bigger issue was the deeper
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? Or was it all just a phase, driven by the educated, original-features-loving elite of the largest generation in American history? CHAPTER 3 Milken Jerry Rubin’s attention-getting decision in the summer of 1980 to take a job on Wall Street highlighted the growing energy, among Baby Boomers and within
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was only growing. By the end of 1980, with Wall Street changing, with America’s mood shifting, and with a new generation passionate about, as Jerry Rubin put it, “money and financial interest,” Milken started wondering how junk bonds could transform not just Wall Street, but all of American capitalism. CHAPTER 4
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would be, for Fonda, the solution to a problem. Two years earlier she and her second husband, Tom Hayden—the longtime activist and one of Jerry Rubin’s codefendants in the Chicago 7 trial—had formed an organization called the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), which advocated for an array of liberal
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a studio called Jane Fonda’s Workout opened in Beverly Hills. Within months, just as Jane Fonda had predicted, it was a smash success. Like Jerry Rubin, Fonda had long seemed to march in lockstep with the zeitgeist. In the ’50s, as part of a family that was Hollywood royalty, she’d
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different places. One was the self-help, self-improvement ethic that had emerged out of the late ’60s counterculture. Within the human potential movement that Jerry Rubin had so immersed himself in, for example, there was a major focus on health food, meditation, and yoga. (Rubin admitted once to drinking so much
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the people who read it as an actual how-to book.” By the spring of 1981, as Lisa Birnbach was traveling America, talking about Preps, Jerry Rubin’s life was changing yet again. He and his wife, Mimi, had temporarily split. Part of the issue was Jerry’s growing obsession, in the
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, a someone someone. The goal was to connect as many someones to as many other someones as possible—and to connect all of them to Jerry Rubin. Because connection was currency. “I’m inviting the most interesting people to bring interesting people,” Rubin’s invitation read. When they arrived—each week there
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—the resume. Rubin has never been accused of being subtle. Subtle personalities don’t refer to themselves in the third person. ‘People want Jerry Rubin to be the old Jerry Rubin,’ he says. He’s not. His days with Abbie in Chicago are over. He’s finished with est training and yoga lessons. His
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a capitalist and was taking a job on Wall Street, Rubin had actually left the world of finance to focus on his own company: the Jerry Rubin Salon Party and Catering Service. His goal: to use the salons he was hosting not just to make connections, but to make money through events
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careers, and trying to define themselves as adults, the growing focus on wealth was impossible to ignore. Stuart Samuels, a documentary filmmaker who had helped Jerry Rubin launch his networking salons, would look back at the attitude shift and make an observation that seemed to sum up not only fictional characters like
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dancing; they’d be sipping white wine and Perrier and chatting amiably with all the other young professionals in the room. Overseeing all of it? Jerry Rubin. The “networking salons” that Rubin had launched in his apartment in 1981 continued to grow in popularity, so much so that Rubin’s neighbors, miffed
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didn’t really start rolling at Studio 54 until ten or eleven o’clock at night. The salons—officially produced by what was now called Jerry Rubin Business Networking Salons, Inc.—had become Rubin’s prime focus, and they were a successful venture. On Wednesday evenings from 5:00 p.m.
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country were searching for a term to describe an educated and ascendant group of Baby Boomers was harder to say. Sure, it was nice for Jerry Rubin that he might be dreaming of creating one of the most influential companies of the ’80s, but at that moment many Americans were still anxious
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monologue, Rambo hardly talks, instead relying on his physical strength and fitness to save himself. His body spoke for him. Bob Greene’s column about Jerry Rubin and the Yuppies was published in newspapers around the country in the last week of March 1983. But Greene wasn’t the only social observer
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she herself was changing. People with whom she’d once smoked weed and drunk wine now seemed to be disciples of John T. Molloy and Jerry Rubin, wearing pin-striped suits and carrying slim briefcases and talking about building their “networks.” When her friends called her, it wasn’t to say hello
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Crimmins was writing about YAPs in Philadelphia and Roz Chast was mocking young professionals in the New Yorker and Bob Greene was hanging out with Jerry Rubin at Studio 54, a Berkeley-based writer named Alice Kahn was trying to make sense of the exact same phenomenon in the Bay Area. Kahn
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the man in charge, but literally the man around whom everything in their world—the world of junk bonds—revolved. By now, the zeitgeist shift Jerry Rubin had sensed three years earlier—that money and financial interest would capture people’s passions in the ’80s—was only intensifying. The various forces that
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late ’60s, but as the ’70s progressed he noted an increasing apathy and cynicism among his friends. The film ultimately wrestles with the same question Jerry Rubin had been grappling with for a half dozen years: Had a generation sold out, or merely grown up? “I’d hate to think it was
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food to their insistence on high-quality stuff, along the way quoting various Yuppies about their lives, lifestyles, and values. It spotlighted networker-in-chief Jerry Rubin, who said that Yuppies were challenging ossified corporate structures in the same way they’d once challenged college administrators and the traditions of academia. But
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over for the success-driven ’80s. Where once Barbie sported a swimsuit and sunglasses, Yuppified Barbie now looked like she was ready for one of Jerry Rubin’s networking events, with a briefcase, credit cards, business cards, and a suit designed by Oscar de la Renta. Across the country, in California, a
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represented. And ironically, the best place to see those values held up to the light and argued about was in a series of debates between Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. By the winter of 1984, Jerry and Mimi Rubin’s splashy networking events at Studio 54 had run their course, and the
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but for its least fortunate. Ronald Reagan and George Bush will spout the same Horatio Alger stories about striking it big, and that’s what Jerry Rubin does. And that’s why I compare them, ultimately. The Yuppie attitude lacks basic compassion for those that can’t get in on the Big
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in making a million dollars, go see Jerry.” The crowd laughed one last time. In a way, it was hard not to feel sorry for Jerry Rubin. Abbie’s gibes were often more personal and cutting than Jerry’s. Abbie’s lines got more applause. “It was painful for him to always
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in Indiana and shipped the jobs overseas. CHAPTER 19 New Elite In 1980, when he announced to the world that he was now a capitalist, Jerry Rubin had written that, just as rebellion had dominated the ’60s and the search for self had characterized the ’70s, “money and financial interest will capture
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the middle class has trouble holding its own.” PART V 1987 CHAPTER 22 The End of Free Sex So much had changed since 1980, when Jerry Rubin had first announced he was reinventing himself as a capitalist. The country had embraced a new economic philosophy and new economic policies. The educated Baby
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actually be helpful since it would force the country to focus on its real economic problems. Among those disagreeing with the majority was, no doubt, Jerry Rubin. The crash had completely scuttled the IPO he and Mimi were attempting with their networking restaurant company—that dream was now officially dead. Black Monday
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the public mood in 1992 and nominated Bill Clinton, not only a centrist but a Yale- and Oxford-educated Baby Boomer—the Yuppie president that Jerry Rubin had long predicted was coming. After getting elected, Clinton tried to pass national health insurance, but he was bludgeoned for it politically and tacked right
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GE, meanwhile, fell upon hard times under Welch’s handpicked successor, and in 2020 it was delisted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. As for Jerry Rubin: In 1988, he and Mimi had their first child, followed by a second one two years later. Hoping for a quieter place in which to
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1984. Chapter 1 1. with the inflation rate at home: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, bls.gov. 2. In an attention-grabbing op-ed: Jerry Rubin, “Guess Who’s Coming to Wall Street?,” New York Times, July 30, 1980. 3. A few months later, to publicize a massive anti-war rally
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: Pat Thomas, Did It! From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017). 4. For the first time in his adult life: Mimi Leonard Fleischman, interviewed by author, November 2021
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so besieged: New York Times, August 16, 1980. 7. “If you would talk to her about fame”: Thomas, Did It! 8. One day in 1978: “Jerry Rubin’s Change of Cause: From Antiwar to ‘Me,’” New York Times, November 11, 1978. 9. America had transformed itself: David Halberstam, The Reckoning (New York
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for #1: How to Get from Where You Are Now to Where You Want to Be (robertringer.com, 2019). 24. Six weeks after the election: “Jerry Rubin to Direct Development at Muir,” New York Times, January 15, 1981. Chapter 2 1. a new restaurant was opening: “The Rise of Steven Poses,” Philadelphia
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losing”: Stuart Samuels, interviewed by author, January 2022. 5. The crowds got so large: Fleischman, interview. 6. The salons… had become Rubin’s prime focus: “Jerry Rubin’s New Venture,” Fortune, May 2, 1983. 7. “My company will be one of the most important”: “From Yippie to Yuppie,” Chicago Tribune, March 23
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein · 1 Jan 2008 · 1,351pp · 404,177 words
of framing the Democratic convention in Chicago in August as a “Festival of Death” were bereft: “We expected concentration camps and we got Bobby Kennedy,” Jerry Rubin lamented. As for Gene McCarthy, he hated Kennedy as much as Nixon and Johnson did: just like that Little Lord Fauntleroy, scooping up others’ hard
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weed and musing as they always did on how to overthrow reality itself. Which, this era being what it was, was what Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin ended up becoming famous for. Rubin was from Cincinnati. His dad was a union activist. His favorite uncle was a former vaudeville performer. Rubin started
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crew members outnumbered the snake dancers: “Wa’shoi! Wa’shoi!” they chanted every time a producer asked. Downtown in Civic Center Plaza, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and folksinger Phil Ochs literally unleashed the Youth International Party’s presidential candidate—Pigasus, a greased and ornery insult on four legs with a curly
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federal commission later convened to study the violence, “a crowd estimated at 1,500 persons listened to Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party and Jerry Rubin call for revolution in the United States.” Police spies recorded their words. Seale, whose partner Huey Newton’s murder case was wrapping up in Oakland
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students are even more so.” On April 21 alone, there were high school riots in Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island, and New Jersey. That same week Jerry Rubin visited his old high school in Cincinnati (where, as the newspaper editor, he had fervently editorialized for Student Council Clean-Up Week and “worship and
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of them.” The Weathermen declared dialectical victory. As one pointed out, “We’re not trying to end wars. We’re starting to fight war.” Defendant Jerry Rubin told reporters in the federal courthouse cloakroom, “They brought the movement a qualitative step forward.” His Yippie colleague Stewart Albert elaborated, “What if you picked
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cross-section of the monstrous personages rending the good order of American civilization: the older guru (David Dellinger); two long-haired freaks (Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin); the by-any-means-necessary Negro (Bobby Seale); two SDS militants (Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis); two radical young faculty members (a chemistry professor, John Froines
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. But even that was prejudicial: the monkeys in the Jungle Book number were go-go girls. Alice in Wonderland was done up in psychedelic patterns. Jerry Rubin called his indictment “the Academy Award for protest.” Judge Julius Hoffman seemed to relish the notion. “Tell me something,” he asked New York Times reporter
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was a college newspaper reporter hired as a spy by the Chicago’s American columnist Jack Mabley. A fourth had worked as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin’s dirtbag motorcycle-gang “bodyguard.” A fifth was a policewoman who’d dressed for her work in Lincoln Park every day in white hippie bell
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door to Tom Foran and bring his sons and daughters into the revolution” and “turn the sons and daughters of the ruling class into Vietcong.” Jerry Rubin signed his new book—Do It!—to “Judge Hoffman, top Yippie, who radicalized more young Americans than we ever could.” And Tom Hayden said, “Our
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duplicate Fortas coup fizzled out speedily. But Nixon was following Old Blood and Guts’s one standing order: “Always take the offensive, never dig in.” Jerry Rubin was on a speaking tour. On April 10, 1970, he said, “The first part of the Yippie program is to kill your parents. And I
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for the land upon which Kent State was built: a lunatic asylum. President White was flooded with letters saying it was his fault for letting Jerry Rubin speak on campus. Students started talking about the “Easy Rider syndrome,” after the Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda movie about hippies murdered by vigilantes. Townspeople
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the radio in a daily torrent,” from the Washington Post, Life, and the New York Times, working together to “tear our country apart.” He quoted Jerry Rubin on the Kent State campus “one month prior to the confrontation that brought the student deaths there”: “Until you people are prepared to kill your
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parents, you aren’t ready for revolution.” And even so, he thundered, James Reston, in his May 10 column, “saw fit to equate me with Jerry Rubin as an extremist…. And yet they ask us to cool our rhetoric and lower our voices!” Houston Republicans screamed their acclaim. His claim about Reston
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, whose May 10 column mentioned neither the vice president nor Jerry Rubin, was a brazen lie. Reston had focused the piece, instead, on his delight that more and more students were rejecting protest and working within the
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, “in a spontaneous act of love for his honesty and Vietnam stand,” the Yippies endorsed George McGovern. Once they became convinced that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin weren’t out to sabotage McGovern and elect Humphrey in order to heighten the revolutionary contradictions, the McGovern team welcomed their help to register new
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a military base, saying it would become a ghost town if George McGovern became president, scowlingly pointing out that the South Dakotan was supported by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. His aides, who’d thought of him as a conciliatory figure, cringed in embarrassment. He defended himself to the Post: “I’m
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ultra-right-wing supporters like H. L. Hunt, the John Birch Society, etc.,” Nixon wrote his campaign manager, John Mitchell. “The fact that Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Angela Davis, among others, support McGovern, should be widely publicized and used at every point. Keep calling on him to repudiate them daily.” The strategy
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week in July 1972. One of them was Robert Redford, arriving by train, promoting The Candidate in a mock whistle-stop tour. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin set up housekeeping at the run-down Albion Hotel, where Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles once honeymooned. Everywhere Hoffman and Rubin were mobbed by cops
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Greene, on the other hand, “This is America, and someday Richard Daley may be able to earn a place inside the Convention Hall, just like Jerry Rubin. If the Mayor is willing to be patient and to work within the system.” The next day the business was voting on platform resolutions. McGovern
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openness. Then, in a three-hour roll call, Senator Eagleton got but 58 percent, and seventy-nine other “candidates” had votes recorded for them—including Jerry Rubin, Martha Mitchell, Mao Tse-tung, and Archie Bunker. The 1972 Democratic National Convention concluded with what some thought was the greatest speech of George McGovern
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those considered potentially violently dangerous to the U.S. government. (“ALL EXTREMISTS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED DANGEROUS” read a special agent’s memo on John Lennon, Jerry Rubin, and Yoko Ono’s appearance on Eyewitness News in New York to encourage young people to register to vote.) CIA agents got to work proving
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-eve gala at the Fontainebleau. Their way was strewn with eggs and sixteen-year-olds using their limousine hoods as trampolines. Even Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were embarrassed. They fancied their Yippie spectacles as creative—such as the “puke-in” they attempted on the sidewalk outside the reception. (“The problem being
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more radical”: Reeves, President Nixon, 72. Radical high schools in NYC and New Jersey: “Schools in City Shut by Protests,” NYT, April 22, 1969, 38. Jerry Rubin in Cincinnati: Anthony Lukas, Don’t Shoot—We Are Your Children! (New York: Random House, 1971), 322–25. By May, three of five administrators: Godfrey
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’d turn Christian”: Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 171. “Jesus, we won the fucking city”: Ibid., 74. On April 23, “in a spontaneous act”: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders, Vote!: A Record, a Dialogue, a Manifesto—Miami Beach, 1972 and Beyond (New York: Warner Paperbacks, 1972), 42–44. “We feel the
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, 2007), 230. whose children left their handprints: Ibid., 177. “Dirty politics,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote: Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 202. McGovernites were convinced: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders, Vote!: A Record, a Dialogue, a Manifesto—Miami Beach, 1972 and Beyond (New York: Warner Paperbacks, 1972), 73. Now, Humphrey shifted to
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Redford: J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: New Press, 2003), 353. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin set up housekeeping: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders, Vote!: A Record, a Dialogue, a Manifesto—Miami Beach, 1972 and Beyond (New York: Warner Paperbacks, 1972), 28, 42
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Press, 2003. Hodgson, Godfrey. America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon—What Happened and Why. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Hoffman, Abbie, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders. Vote!: A Record, a Dialogue, a Manifesto—Miami Beach, 1972 and Beyond. New York: Warner Paperbacks, 1972. Irvine, Janice M. Talk About
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
by Marc Weingarten · 12 Dec 2006 · 363pp · 123,076 words
to domestic resistance against the war, using their flair for street theater and human mobilization in ways that the first-wave protesters could not fathom. Jerry Rubin, a former journalist and aspiring socialist who had participated in the earliest Free Speech Movement marches that had coalesced around the University of California campus
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city. Despite Mailer’s hand-wringing, it seemed that the latent New York establishment gallivanter in him would prevail. The march, as David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin had envisioned it, would start with a mass rally at the Lincoln Memorial and then work its way across the Potomac via the Arlington Bridge
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Mailer, a test of his own resolve to fight the power, but in the end, he was resigned to his role as belletrist rebel. Even Jerry Rubin had to admit that “there was a part of me that knew he would have lost his effectiveness if he’d become a Yippie. Norman
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the feasibility of a Mailer candidacy. Among those present were New York writers Peter Maas and Gloria Steinem, Village Voice writer Jack Newfield, Pete Hamill, Jerry Rubin, boxer and Mailer confidant Jose Torres, and Breslin. Mailer quickly learned a crucial lesson of politics: appeasement of one faction leads to alienation of another
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder · 1 Sep 2008 · 1,336pp · 415,037 words
away from large losses. 12. The Youth International Party (Yippees), a prankster group of anarchist activists, nominated Pigasus the Pig as their party candidate. Leader Jerry Rubin said, “Why vote for half-pigs like Nixon, Wallace, and Humphrey, when you can have the whole hog?” at a speech to the University of
1968: The Year That Rocked the World
by Mark Kurlansky · 30 Dec 2003 · 538pp · 164,533 words
demonstration in Washington, with protesters gathering at the Lincoln Memorial and then crossing the Potomac to march on the Pentagon. An antiwar activist from Berkeley, Jerry Rubin, was there with a New York City friend from the civil rights movement, Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman managed to grab media attention during the Washington march
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’s Eve, according to the official though not entirely factual story, at a Greenwich Village party, the product—so said its founders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin—of an evening of marijuana. “There we were, all stoned, rolling around on the floor,” Hoffman later explained to federal investigators. Even the name Yippie
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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
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that all future trials of blacks be held with an all-black jury. Cleaver was to be nominated as the party’s presidential candidate, with Jerry Rubin as his running mate. Cleaver’s new wife, Kathleen, a SNCC worker, was to be a state assembly candidate, as was Black Panther Bobby Seale
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Party newspaper, and Izvestia, the government newspaper, reported at length on the “anti-Soviet agitators” in Poland. Also on March 22, the Yippies—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner—attended a meeting in Lake Villa, Illinois—a gathering of what had come to be known as the New Left, the youth
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. Twenty-year-olds never expressed such a ridiculous sentiment. In 1968, Abbie Hoffman turned thirty-two, as did Black Panther Bobby Seale. Hoffman’s colleague Jerry Rubin turned thirty that year, and Eldridge Cleaver turned thirty-three. But the college students of the late sixties were different from those of earlier in
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,” but Mayor Richard J. Daley dismissed such comments as boastfulness. Now they were coming to Chicago: Hayden and Davis and the SDS, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the Yippies. David Dellinger and the Mobe vowed to bring in hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters. The Black Panthers were to have a
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seemed that everyone was starting to look like a pig. But there was a problem: There were two pigs. Abbie Hoffman had gotten one and Jerry Rubin had gotten one, and a conflict arose over which one to nominate. Typical of their differences in style, Rubin had picked a very ugly pig
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of the Youth International Party would be Rubin’s very ugly pig. Hoffman, still angry from the dispute, stood in the Chicago Civic Center as Jerry Rubin said, “We are proud to announce the declaration of candidacy for president of the United States by a pig.” The police then arrested Rubin, Hoffman
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names or faces, appear only to offer for sex one orifice or another to the male characters who have such names as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. By the end of the year, women’s fashions were indicating that the times were “a-changin’ ” again. It was only back in March that
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. Cohn-Bendit had the same view. He said, “The Americans have no patience for theory. They just act. I was very impressed with this American Jerry Rubin, just do it.” But at Columbia, where the students had been so successful at getting attention, they were feeling the need for an underlying theory
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. The House Un-American Activities Committee conducted its own hearings, subpoenaing Tom Hayden and others from the New Left, though they did not hear from Jerry Rubin because he arrived in a rented Santa Claus costume and refused to change out of it. Abbie Hoffman was arrested for wearing a shirt patterned
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with the rights of the individual.” He wanted a Chicago conspiracy trial and on March 20, 1969, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, John Froines, and Lee Weiner—who came to be known as the “Chicago Eight”—were indicted. Hayden, Davis, Dellinger, Hoffman, and Rubin openly
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the car or Mercedes the girl?” The New York Times, June 16, 1986. 353 “the Europeans have the theory” Lewis Cole, interviewed June 2002. 353 “Jerry Rubin, just do it.” Daniel Cohn-Bendit, interviewed March 2003. 354 he would say “de Gaulle.” The New York Times, June 13, 1968. 354 “Or even
The Unicorn's Secret
by Steven Levy · 6 Oct 2016
a crosstown hop that could well stand as definitive of his present existence, Ira rode in the phone company executive’s limousine to former radical Jerry Rubin’s apartment, where he would stay the night. The two sixties’ veterans rapped until two. The next day, Ira saw futurist Alvin Toffler, whom Einhorn
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chief diplomatic officer. He was able to boast kinship with the superstars of the movement. He often visited New York City, hanging out at activist Jerry Rubin’s East Village apartment with the founding fathers of Yippiedom. It was a movement Ira liked; as Rubin wrote in his 1970 tome, Do It
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train from New York and Philadelphia, armed with chalk, smiles, pot, hash, acid, and the sense that America is quickly dying.” The other brothers were Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Realist editor Paul Krassner, and psychedelic artist Marty Carey. Einhorn helped disrupt a Eugene McCarthy press conference. To those at the conference wondering
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also had other things to offer besides talk: In Mug Shots, a 1972 book on the counterculture, Ira identifies himself as the person who gave Jerry Rubin his first hit of acid. (Rubin’s recollection is otherwise.) Ira once claimed that the SDS called him to task for “turning on all the
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potential disaster. “C’mon Abbie,” said Ira, the peacemaker, “I’ve got two soft pretzels waiting for you back there. No sense you getting busted.” Jerry Rubin’s visit was less successful. After an afternoon rally, the feisty Yippie, in his trademark polo shirt and jeans, went to Einhorn’s apartment in
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of mind-altering drugs, included an essay by Ira in his book Psychedelics. He was on a first-name basis with Allen Ginsberg, buddies with Jerry Rubin. Locally, he was the man called on by the city’s premier newspaper to summarize the view of his generation (Einhorn’s article was entitled
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. It looked very bad for Ira. Even some of Ira’s closest friends suggested that he might do well to plead guilty. Among them was Jerry Rubin, who after their 1969 argument had reconciled with Ira in the mid-seventies. The day Ira had been released on bond, Rubin—in the wake
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her melodic accent stemmed from her childhood in Hawaii), was instantly struck by Einhorn, who regaled her during the transcontinental journey with his friendships with Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, and Baba Ram Dass, the heroes of the sixties. As Einhorn’s escort, she would meet them all. “I was very
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saw other women, wrote his Tesla article for Co-Evolution Quarterly, lunched with phone-company friends at La Terrasse, bought a new Toyota Corolla, visited Jerry Rubin in New York, and forged a relationship with Jonathan Moore of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which ultimately would result in his becoming a
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guests included Bill Cashel of Pennsylvania Bell. The Crimson was quick to lionize this most unusual fellow, who looked like a hippie, claimed friendship with Jerry Rubin and the corporate elite, and boasted that “My new consciousness was reinforced by LSD, dope, and the loving I was doing.” Ira also took the
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the principals. To some, it stood as a troubling eclipse of some of the finer values curried in two decades of liberation and self-realization. Jerry Rubin, the former Yippie and Chicago Seven defendant, puts the matter bluntly: “Ira betrayed everything I stood for and possibly everything that he stood for,” he
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for Century 21. Michael Hoffman is the head of the English department at a California college; Michael Woal also teaches. Of those known as Yippies, Jerry Rubin promotes events at New York’s Limelight nightclub, Abbie Hoffman remains active in politics, and Allen Ginsberg is still Allen Ginsberg. The first poem in
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and Washington, DC. The Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), an antiwar coalition formed in 1965 by several young radicals including Yippie and future Chicago Eight member Jerry Rubin, had blockaded troop transport trains in Berkeley and the nearby city of Albany, and picketed military commanders visiting San Francisco. They identified Oakland’s induction
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Stone, #90, September 2, 1971 Memoirs of a Wretched Weekend in Washington One of my clearest memories of that wretched weekend is the sight of Jerry Rubin standing forlornly on the steps of a marble building near the Capitol, watching a gang fight at the base of a flagpole. The "counter-inaugural
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, who at least have a figurehead. The Washington protest was a bust, despite the claims of the organizers. . . and for reasons beyond mud and rain. Jerry Rubin was right: it was probably "the last demonstration" -- or at least the last one in that older, gentler and once-hopeful context. On Monday night
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other nominations, representing factions of the McGovern coalition. Not even for their own candidate would they discipline their desire. Once control was broken, delegates nominated Jerry Rubin, Ralph Nader, Archie Bunker, Mao Tse-tung, and many others. Ironically, it was the Wallace delegation from Alabama, not the McGovern group from New York
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more than six years on the run. Before turning himself in, Hoffman sat for a prime-time television interview with Barbara Walters. Another radical leader, Jerry Rubin, had recently chosen a different path. In 1967, Hoffman and Rubin had tossed dollar bills over the balcony at the New York Stock Exchange as
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John Lennon and Yoko Ono, ed. G. Barry Golson (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), p. 8. “Politics and rebellion distinguished the ‘60’s”: Jerry Rubin, “Guess Who’s Coming to Wall Street,” New York Times, July 30, 1980. the highest-paid banker … earned about $710,000 a year: Roger E
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