VANCOUVER YIPPIE!
Vancouver
Yippie! put the “International” in the Youth
International Party.
Besides
turning the Canadian city upside down in the early 1970s, this Yippie
group would have an enduring impact on the international anarchist
movement. Vancouver Yippies combined a witty, imaginative protest
style with creative day-to-day organizing, while producing flashy,
ground-breaking publications. And along the way, they did everything
from invade America, to bring down a right-wing mayor, to build a
people’s park, to play a considerable role in politicizing the
counter-culture and punk rock.
How
It All Began
In the spring
of 1970, a number of students from Simon Fraser University Industrial
Workers of the World branch met with a group of hippie radicals from
the East Vancouver and Kitsilano neighborhoods. Their shared
perspective was a rejection of the rigid, old-style Marxism that had
dominated the left for decades, and an openness to the new
anti-authoritarian, mind-expanding possibilities spawned by the
Sixties. From this meeting came Vancouver Yippie! (also known as the
Northern Lunatic Fringe of the Youth International Party or NLF/YIP).
Yippies were organized in about half a dozen autonomous
communes with humorous names like The Dog House or the Charley
Mansion. The activist core of Yippie! was about 60 to 70 people, but
the group had about 300-500 supporters who would come out to actions.
The first action was a mock smoke-in. After that came the levitation
of Vancouver police headquarters. But these actions were minor
compared to what would follow.(1)
The
Bay Sip-In (May
8, 1970)
Vancouver YIP staged its first major event — “The
Bay Sip-In" to protest the discrimination against hippies by The
Bay department store. The Bay Sip-In turned into a riot when
demonstrators moved from the store and took to the street. The
American consulate was attacked, entered and trashed in the process.
Someone even stole the Great Seal of the United States and the U.S.
flag was taken outside and burned. There were several arrests. One of
the Yippies, convicted of freeing a prisoner and assaulting a cop,
was sentenced to 2 1/2 years by a judge who denounced rioters as
“modern savages.” The judge told him: “Your
offenses, in light of other similar recent disturbances, pose a grave
threat to the whole community.”(2)
The Blaine
Invasion (May 9, 1970)
The
day after the Bay Sip-In, Vancouver Yippie! invaded the United
States. The Yippies were protesting Nixon’s invasion of
Cambodia and the shooting of unarmed students at Kent State. Yippie!,
the May 4th Movement or M4M, and the Vancouver Liberation Front (a
more self-consciously Marxist-Leninist faction) marched across the
Canada-U.S. border, crossing at the town of Blaine, Wash.(3)
Neo-Nazis attacked the demonstration at one point, but were soundly
thrashed. “The Blaine Invasion” involved some 600 people
and created an international incident as the town suffered some minor
damage and a trainload of new automobiles was stoned causing $50,000
damage (1970 dollars).(4) Blaine’s newspaper, The Journal,
called the invasion “one of the saddest and most degrading
incidents suffered by the people of this country since the Alamo.”
As with other YIP-initiated actions, Yippie organizers didn’t
specifically call for property damage or violence, but participants
took the opportunity of the actions to vent their anger at the
system.
Yippie! Is Everywhere
Another
highlight among the many YIP actions that summer was an anti-prison
“Be-Out,” where Yippies tore down a 100-yard section of
wire fence during a protest at Oakalla Prison and invaded the prison
grounds before being pushed back by the riot squad.(5) Yippie
activity both inspired and reflected a concurrent revolt of hippie
street youth (as throughout the late 1960s and early ‘70s,
Vancouver was host to a huge transient youth population) and there
were a number of youth riots that summer unconnected with the group,
but based on the anger generated by police harassment and the insane
pot law.(6) Vancouver was one of the capitals of the hippie world.
Besides the transient hippies, the city had a large home-grown
counter-culture (mostly in the Kitsilano neighbourhood), providing a
sizable base for Yippie organizing, which had a two-point program:
turn straights into hippies; turn hippies into revolutionaries.
Militant action was not the only Yippie tactic. There was a
spirit of theatricality and fun, with props ranging from gorilla
suits to toy machine guns to giant marijuana joints. An irreverent,
colorful Yippie newspaper, “The Yellow Journal,”
published nine issues. The Yippie! People's Defense Fund provided
lawyers and other legal help to the city's often-harassed
counter-culture community. Zaria, a young single mother, ran as
Yippie candidate for mayor, vowing to repeal the law of gravity, and
received a surprising 848 votes.(7) The Kommie Kids collective showed
movies for a small donation. A food co-op was set up and another
collective put on a very popular series of Yippie dances with
Vancouver bands such as Uncle Slug and The Burner Boys.
There
was also an autonomous Yippie group at Vancouver City College (also
known as the Vancouver Silly College Youth International Party),
which gained a majority on student council and editorial control of
the student newspaper The Tower.(8) Two members of this campus YIP
group were expelled for their political activity in 1971.(9) The
college dean told them: “All you’re doing here is tearing
apart this institution.” Meanwhile, a group calling themselves
the White-Collar Yippies, all of them reporters for the mainstream
Vancouver Sun newspaper, obtained a quantity of rubella vaccine from
sympathetic doctors, and staged a guerrilla clinic for the public,
immunizing the health minster in effigy for his refusal to provide
the vaccine to pregnant women. (He finally relented.)
The
Gastown Smoke-In (August 7,
1971)
In 1971 came the “Gastown Smoke-in” (also known
as the Grasstown Smoke-In), a Yippie street party to promote
marijuana legalization that quickly turned into a police riot. The
smoke-in was a response (“Operation Whirlwind”) to a
sustained campaign of police harassment (known as “Operation
Dustpan”) of hippies in the city’s Gastown area. Riot
police, including some on horseback, charged the smoke-in crowd of
about 2,000 people, knocking over a baby carriage and beating up
tourists. The confrontation between police and demonstrators lasted
more than two hours, with 79 people arrested, many of them pummeled
with riot sticks. (10) With the aid of a Yippie media campaign
afterwards, this brutality became a national scandal and was the
beginning of the end for the far-right city government, with the
mayor leaving office in disgrace the following year. At a heavily
publicized public inquiry into the riot, police charged it was the
result of a “conspiracy” among members of the Youth
International Party who, they suggested, “are bound and
determined to overthrow all recognized authority.”(11) (The
presiding judge denounced two of the Yippie organizers as
“intelligent and dangerous young men.”) Yippies, and most
everyone else, charged it was a police riot.
All
Seasons Park (May 29,
1971)
Yippie! organized an occupation of the proposed site of the
Four Seasons Hotel next to Stanley Park.(12) “It’s a sad
weekend in Vancouver’s history,” the mayor said when the
park/tent city went up. “This is a breakdown of society.”(13)
Dubbed All Season’s Park (also known as People's Park in honour
of a similar action in Berkeley, Calif.), it attracted overwhelming
community support, with hundreds of people coming to the site each
day to help build the park.(14) All Seasons Park persisted for over a
year until the government relented and scrapped the hotel
development.
How It All Continued
Spent
by this frenzy of activity, Vancouver Yippie! finally arrived at the
end of its (anti-)organizational life after a couple of years. The
broadening anti-authoritarian movement in Vancouver offered numerous
paths for involvement, and individuals were absorbed into
environmental, women’s, community and other activities. The
process was hastened by political differences typical of an era
marked by conflicting political tendencies ranging from Joan
Baez-type pacifism to the armed struggle of the Weather Underground.
After this, many Yippies became ideological anarchists. In
the late 1970s, this produced two innovative publishing projects. One
was B.C. Blackout (the last Vancouver project started under the YIP
name), which became a template for anti-authoritarian community zines
across North America.(15) The other was The Open Road, the
internationally respected journal, founded by a core of Vancouver
Yippies, that reported news of indigenous struggles and anarchist
history and theory in the pop-culture packaging of commercial youth
magazines such as Rolling Stone.(16) (Vancouver Yippies had enough of
a fraternal relationship with their U.S. counterparts that the New
York-based Yipster Times provided its mailing list to Open Road, an
invaluable act of solidarity that ensured the first issue's wide
distribution.)
Vancouver Yippies were active in new
anti-authoritarian groups that formed in the city in the 1970s, most
notably the Anarchist Party of Canada (Groucho Marxist). In the late
‘70s, Groucho Marxists pied several notables, were involved in
street protests and organized cultural events, including the
legendary "Anarchy in Canada" punk-rock concert on July 1,
1978 in Stanley Park. Canada's two most notorious political punk
bands, Vancouver's DOA and The Subhumans, were managed by onetime
Vancouver Yippies.(17)
One legacy of Vancouver Yippie! is the
ongoing Vancouver anarchist movement. The wider anti-authoritarian
movement in the new millennium can also trace some of its key
attitudes and methods to those first Vancouver Yippies.
YIPPIE!
1 Robert Sarti, “Yippies behind rash of street actions
here,” The Vancouver Sun, June 27, 1970
2 “Judge
reads the ‘riot’ act,” The Vancouver Province, Aug.
5, 1970
3 David Spaner, “Invade Amerika!” in
Blacklisted News: Secret Histories from Chicago to 1984, by the New
Yippie Book Collective, 1983
4 “Canadian mob invades
Blaine,” Vancouver Express, May 12, 1970
5 Paul Manning,
“Yippies tear down fence at Oakalla,” The Vancouver
Province, July 13, 1970
6 Paul Musgrove, “Third street
clash erupts in West End,” The Vancouver Sun, July 15, 1970
7
John Griffiths, “Lippy Yippies irk mayor,” The Vancouver
Province, Dec. 2, 1970
8 Lorne & Betsy, “Yippies Burn
School,” The Georgia Straight, Oct. 29, 1971
9 “Students
Expelled and Beaten,” The Georgia Straight, Dec. 16, 1971
10
“Campbell orders Gastown probe,” The Vancouver Province,
Aug. 9, 1971
11 Jes Odam, “Police charge yippie plot,”
The Vancouver Sun, Oct. 1, 1971
12 “4 Seasons protested,”
The Vancouver Sun, May 29, 1971
13 “Fence-builders go to
work at 4 Seasons instant park,” The Vancouver Sun, May 31,
1971
14 “All Seasons Park Lives On!” The Tower, Dec.
5, 1971
15 “B.O. (the smell of freedom) is produced by the
Youth International Party,” B.C. Blackout, June 23, 1978
16
Bob Sarti, “Open Road,” in Only A Beginning, edited by
Allan Antliff, 2004
17 Neal Hall, “Punk’s Alive (and
spitting),” The Vancouver Sun, Nov. 20, 1981
Other
sources
"Sixties History; Days of Rage and English Bay Riots
and Vancouver Anarchist Invasion of the United States" at
http://www.geocities.com/emithsilas/sixtieshistory.html
"Cannabis Culture: Grasstown"
http://www.cannabisculture.com/backissues/mayjune96/grasstown.html
This article was written and produced by the New Old Yippie
Collective August 8 2006