Pigasus was the 1968 presidential nominee of the Youth International Party. And he was a 155-pound pig—though accounts vary regarding his weight, as they do regarding many of the incidents involving the Yippies, whose leaders had a keen appreciation for the power of myth. Indeed by naming their nominee Pigasus, the Yippies punningly combined Pegasus, the heroic winged stallion from Greek mythology, with pig, a slur coined in the late 1960s for police officers and others among the powers-that-be.
The significance of Pigasus resides in those who nominated him: the Youth International Party, which itself was more mythical than material and went by its acronym nickname, Yippie. Like the name Pigasus, the nickname was also a pun. It combined the era’s countercultural phenomenon of the hippie—a name derived from hip, in the sense of cutting-edge and in the know—with the corny old-time exclamation of glee, yippie! The name conveyed a mind-set that, by extension, implied a worldview, the pun thus becoming something of a poem in a single word. Theirs may have been “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,” but they had a bit of Shakespeare’s genius in them too.
The Yippies originated at a 1967–68 New York’s Eve party at the apartment of Abbie Hoffman. Previously an activist for a variety of progressive causes, Hoffman had become disillusioned with established paths of protest and had begun to pursue a route more akin to that of another fringe candidate making a White House bid in 1968, Homer “King of the World” Tomlinson. Like Tomlinson, Hoffman had an intuitive grasp of theatrics—or (as also many suspected of Tomlinson) was mentally ill. Even among supporters of Pigasus, one longtime associate of Hoffman’s attending the pig’s nomination confided to the veteran New York Times reporter Tom Buckley that Hoffman might be a “paranoid-schizophrenic.” While Buckley found Hoffman to be “unquestionably eloquent,” he too felt “even a well-disposed listener senses a certain lack of balance.”1
Among all fringe candidates, how fully they commit themselves to such a futile effort suggests, to a commensurate degree, a lack of balance. Far more important, however, this aspect of fringe candidates reveals that, for conventional candidates, seeking the presidency entails a delicate balancing act. Whether we realize it or not, how well a candidate can balance his or her public and private egos is an essential element of what, in political campaigns, is called “character.”
In the more bemused sense of the term, Hoffman was quite a character. He first came to public attention in 1967, when he and his cohorts entered the visitors’ gallery overlooking the New York Stock Exchange and commenced fluttering wads of one-dollar bills down to the trading floor. The incident made national news since, for some reason, the press arrived with the group, despite Hoffman’s claim (and Tomlinsonian skill in public relations) that his group had not told them in advance.2 The security staff, having sensed something was up, had prohibited the press from entering the gallery. Ultimately, however, this strong-arm tactic backfired. One newspaper reported, “Stockbrokers, clerks and runners . . . stared at the visitors’ gallery. A few smiled and blew kisses, but most jeered, shouted, pointed fingers and shook their fists. Some clerks ran to pick up the bills.”3 Another stated, “Startled clerks, runners and stockbrokers . . . cheered and scrambled when the bills landed.”4 Hoffman aptly summed up the experience: “It was a perfect mythical event, since every reporter, not being allowed to actually witness the scene, had to make up his own fantasy.”5
With the 1968 presidential election on the horizon, Hoffman next focused his news-making and myth-making skills on undermining the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, President Lyndon Johnson, whom Hoffman abhorred for escalating the war in Vietnam. (Although Senator Eugene McCarthy had recently announced his intention to seek the party’s nomination as an antiwar candidate, few believed he had a chance against the incumbent president.) At the New Year’s Eve party that Hoffman and his wife, Anita, hosted, they got to talking tactics with the similarly prankish Jerry Rubin and journalist and author Paul Krassner.6 What most appealed to the group was the notion of a political party that, in the words of Hoffman’s biographer, Jonah Raskin, was “both mythical and mysterious, a paper party with make-believe leaders and an imaginary membership. It was a put-on and a prank, a colossal fiction that soon became a disturbing reality to police chiefs, mayors, and military officers.”7
Raskin himself later became a Yippie, and did so, in a sense, mythically. While driving in the Bronx with Hoffman and Rubin, he suggested that they issue a Yippie manifesto aimed at college students, to attract their support by giving the appearance of having an organizational apparatus. Taken by the idea, Hoffman and Rubin then and there conferred upon him the title of minister of education. When Raskin asked if his position would require approval, Hoffman and Rubin laughed, realizing Raskin still didn’t fully get it. But he soon did. “When my book about culture and empire was reviewed in the press,” he wrote, “I was described solemnly in the Times Literary Supplement as the Minister of Education for the Youth International Party.”8
Between the creation of the Yippies and the Democratic National Convention in August, the intense turmoil of that year both set the stage and determined its location, as it were, for the nomination of Pigasus. A sampling of front-page banner headlines from the Des Moines Register, a newspaper in the middle of the nation, provides a sense of how most Americans experienced those months:
When the Democrats gathered in Chicago in August for their convention, the syndicated columnist John Chamberlain wrote of the impact of these events, “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the kids who have been pouring into this city to disrupt the Democratic convention. . . . It seemed ridiculous to suppose that the Yippies, with their lapses into low comedy, could ever move in the same league as Trotsky. The Yippies had just their pig, Pigasus, a 200-pound beast which they had brought to Chicago to run for President.” But Chamberlain recognized that the “menace they pose is symptomatic of what the Democrats are up against. . . . The old coalition is disintegrating. Democrats in the South have been becoming Wallacites on the one hand and Republicans on the other,” referring to George Wallace, a former Democrat and Alabama governor, running as a third party candidate advocating racial segregation. “The Negroes are in a pox-on-both-your-houses mood. The McCarthy doves threaten to move off into a fourth party. . . . The richer union members have become suburbanites and hence open to the lure of Republicans.”9
Fractures were also splitting the antiwar and civil rights groups. Unable to reach consensus on tactics, many urged their supporters not to join the protests being planned for Chicago. Still, many protesters did converge on the city, primarily those who identified with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as those attracted to the subversive theatrics of the Yippies, and a large number who arrived earnestly concerned but left dazed and confused—literally in many cases, given the violence that ensued. “Everything runs on emotions here,” one such protester said. “It’s emotion versus intellect, I guess. It’s so confusing.”10
Amid this maelstrom police held back some 250 protesters who gathered outside the Civic Center in Chicago to see the Yippie candidate for president arrive in a battered station wagon and to witness the nomination of Pigasus by Rubin, joined by the pig’s provider, Hugh Romney (soon to be known as Wavy Gravy), a founder of a New Mexico commune called the Hog Farm—and, as they say in law enforcement, “a person of interest” (soon to be discussed in more detail).11
The candidate and his handlers were taken into custody before Pigasus could be placed in nomination. The handlers were charged with bringing livestock into the downtown Loop, for which they faced fines; the pig was charged with being a pig, for which he was sent to the local Humane Society (and probably, subsequently, eaten).
While the theatrics surrounding the nomination of Pigasus assured considerable media attention, the headline of one newspaper article put the event in perspective when it declared, “Yippies Are Sideshow in Chicago.”12 Indeed many in the media were aware that the nomination of Pigasus was style over substance. The Washington Post columnist Nicholas von Hoffman complained to his readers, “The representatives of the media . . . had been sent to interview a pig because their assignment editors were afraid the competition might score a beat on them.” Although von Hoffman was among the most left-wing commentators in the mainstream media, he nevertheless scorned the fact that “Lincoln Park, where the Yippies and the crazies are supposed to be camping out, is overrun with newsmen poking under bushes looking for outrageous quotes.” He cited as an example “Jerry Rubin, one of the Yippies’ raggedy publicity geniuses. ‘We want to give you a chance to talk to our candidate,’ he said, ‘and to restate our demand that Pigasus be given Secret Service protection and brought to the White House for his foreign policy briefing.’”13
Even when making this statement Rubin knew the press knew that he knew what they both were doing. Privately, and later publicly, Rubin gleefully admitted, “Yippies would use the Democratic Party and the Chicago theater to build our stage and make the myth; we’d steal the media away from the Democrats and create the specter of Yippies overthrowing America.”14
Other journalists undoubtedly shared von Hoffman’s contempt for reporting entertaining events as if they were political news. Not wanting to tempt the fates, however, this perspective rarely governed their reporting on Pigasus. The vast majority of articles on the pig’s candidacy participated in the Yippie parody with tongue-in-cheek depictions of the pig as if he were a serious, albeit controversial candidate—as, for example, an unidentified Pigasus supporter (very likely Hugh Romney) saying, “He was born in the slums of a pig-sty, he is many colors, and he is going to be slaughtered.”15
Even after Pigasus had been replaced with a stand-in, no less than the nation’s most august media forum, the New York Times, could not entirely resist such delicious news. After characterizing a later campaign rally for (a new) Pigasus as a “satire of the American political campaign,” it played along by reporting that “the march included several young men dressed in dark business suits and sunglasses of the type that Secret Service men wear. . . . Abbie Hoffman, a Yippie leader wearing a shirt that resembled an American flag, said Pigasus would begin a tour of Europe this week.”16
On the eve of Election Day a widely published wire service report on alternatives to the Democrats’ Humphrey, the Republicans’ Nixon, and third party contender Wallace included two paragraphs that combined the candidacies of Eldridge Cleaver and Dick Gregory, and four paragraphs on Pigasus.17
After the election Pigasus’s two foremost campaign aides, Hoffman and Rubin, continued to “steal the media away” from the government. When on trial with other protest leaders charged with conspiracy to incite a riot in Chicago, Hoffman and Rubin mocked the judge’s authority by appearing one day wearing black robes identical to his. This “thea’trick” (as one scholar later termed their techniques) earned them news coverage that ranged from Montana’s Billings Gazette (and included a posed wire service photo of the two, smiling back to back in their robes) to a headline in the New York Times, “Two of Chicago 7 Don Black Robes.”18
Hoffman and Rubin similarly stole the show from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during its investigation of the violence at the Democratic convention. When summoned to appear before this panel, which during the 1950s Red Scare was the potentially career-ending bane of progressives, Hoffman showed up wearing his American flag shirt and was promptly arrested for desecrating the flag. He continued to turn the incident into theater by proclaiming, “I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.” A federal appeals court ultimately overturned the verdict.19
Rubin, for his part, avoided controversy over his shirt by not wearing one when he and Hoffman appeared before HUAC, opting instead to accessorize his bare chest with love beads, jingle bells, a belt of bullets slung over his shoulder and a toy rifle. Though he had to leave his ammo outside the committee room, the authorities engaged in no other headline-grabbing actions against his attire. So the duo had to ad lib, which Hoffman did by jumping up from his seat during the hearing, pointing to a member of the Capitol Police and exclaiming, “Mr. Chairman, that man has a loaded gun! They took ours away, but your team kept theirs.”20
While HUAC had already lost the authority it had commanded during the Red Scare, the antics of Hoffman and Rubin tapped the final nail in its coffin. Shortly after Nixon’s inauguration as the winner of the 1968 election (he first rose to prominence as a member of HUAC), the committee sought to rebrand itself as the House Committee on Internal Security. No one bought it. In 1975 Congress eliminated the committee.
After President Nixon found a rationale to end the Vietnam War in 1975, Hoffman and Rubin proceeded along separate paths. For a time both continued to make public appearances. In 1978 Rubin married a former debutante and moved into a high-end Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan. He then formed a nonprofit that organized “how to” events, later worked for a Wall Street brokerage firm, then moved to Los Angeles and formed a company that provided a networking service for individuals seeking to make business connections. He died in 1994 at age fifty-six, after being hit by a car when jaywalking.
Hoffman went underground in 1974 to avoid facing charges of selling cocaine—lots of cocaine. If convicted (and the sting operation had him nailed), he faced fifteen years to life in prison. After plastic surgery, he fled to upstate New York, where he successfully masqueraded as Barry Freed. In 1980, realizing the animus against him had largely abated, Hoffman theatrically reappeared on network television with the celebrity interviewer Barbara Walters. Surrendering to the authorities the following day, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison, most of which he served on a work-release basis. Over the ensuing years Hoffman staggered between seeking a role for himself in current political protests and seeking to self-medicate his increasingly profound psychological problems with illicit drugs. On April 12, 1989, now fifty-two years old, Hoffman committed suicide by drinking a glass of Scotch in which he had dissolved 150 capsules of phenobarbital.21
Even though the upheavals of 1968 were erupting at the left wing of what had been the Democratic Party’s longtime coalition, the events sent shivers through the Republican Party as well. In 1969 both parties enacted changes in their nominating procedures that shifted considerably more weight to the primary elections.22 The upshot, of course, was that the nomination of presidential candidates became more democratic, thereby reducing the risk that any group within the party would feel left out. The long-shot risk, however, was that party leaders might find it virtually impossible to make deals in order to preclude nominating a candidate who was anathema to them.
Not unrelated to the consequences of these changes in party rules is a broader view expressed in 2014 by Professor Elodie Chazalon (coiner of the term thea’trick). “It is hard to state positively that the year 1968 is a crucial one in U.S. history,” she wrote. “Nevertheless, 1968 obviously marked the blooming of forms of resistance and ways of doing politics. Such a ‘cross-pollination’ and blurring of the boundaries . . . show that 1968 stands, if not as the most innovative year in terms of social progress, as a training ground . . . emphasizing poaching and trickery as core elements.”23