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Yippie High-Yay! COURTESY DANA BEAL
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Dana Beal (with arm on speaker) leads a Yippie rally at the White House (1977).
COURTESY DANA BEAL
LEAFMAGAZINES.COM
Occasionally referred to as “Groucho Marxists,” the Youth International Party (aka the Yippies) were a radical leftist group from the 1960s that used absurd, satirical stunts to make their political points. Among the many counterculture luminaries involved with the Yippies over the years is Dana Beal, a man who was personally recruited by founder Abbie Hoffman and ended up succeeding him as the group’s leader.
AN ACTIVIST IS BORN Growing up in Lansing, Michigan, Beal displayed a passion for social justice from an early age. In August 1963, at the age of 16, he hitchhiked to Washington D.C. to attend Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Two months later he organized his first demonstration against the Ku Klux Klan back in Lansing. At age 17, Beal managed to avoid the Vietnam draft by getting himself committed to a psych ward, then went AWOL and took off for New York City. Once there, he quickly established himself in the Lower East Side activist scene. During the Grateful Dead’s first-ever New York concert in Tompkins Square Park on June 1, 1967, Beal organized the first of many “smoke-in” protests – blazing out the 3,000+ crowd. That August, Beal was busted for selling LSD to a narc, prompting a series of protest marches on his behalf. His support in the community was so impressive that it attracted the attention of another prominent activist by the name of Abbie Hoffman.
MAY 2021
FROM HIPPIE TO YIPPIE Both Jewish, anti-war activists, Hoffman and Rubin met in 1967 in New York while planning an upcoming demonstration in Washington and immediately hit it off. On August 24, 1967, they pulled off their first major media stunt: From the visitor’s gallery at the New York Stock Exchange, they threw out handfuls of one dollar bills onto the exchange floor – interrupting trading and eliciting both cheers Young Dana freed and curses from the brokers below. after LSD arrest. On October 21, Hoffman and Rubin invited Beal and his crew down to D.C. to attend a massive anti-war demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial. Hoffman then led half the crowd across the Potomac, where they encircled the Pentagon and began singing and chanting in a supposed attempt to “levitate” the building. Naturally, the building never moved, but the group had found their purpose. It wasn’t until three months later – while tripping in Abbie’s apartment on New Year’s Eve – that they found a name for their merry band of miscreants when friend Paul Krassner spontaneously shouted out “Yippie!” and they instantly identified with the exuberant exclamation (later elaborated to Youth International Party). On January 16, 1968, the Yippies published a manifesto – inviting activists across America to a massive protest outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August. Dubbed the “Festival of Life,” it was a mock
For more on Dana Beal and the Yippies, listen to Episode #11 of our podcast at worldofcannabis.museum/podcast.
