L-R: Lee Weiner, John Froines, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis,
Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and David Dellinger.
Who else but Jerry Rubin would tell a large crowd of college kids that their failure to get thrown out of school was evidence of their failure to truly learn?
That delightfully wild slice of advice was one of several similar zingers that the infamously flamboyant antiwar agitator, Youth International Party co-founder and, at the time, member of the Chicago Seven would serve up in Seattle on the date in focus here. On that early Saturday afternoon, Rubin (1938-1994) addressed an overflow crowd of roughly four thousand in the University of Washington’s Husky Union Building (HUB), where he pontificated on the Chicago Seven trial, among other then-controversial topics.
The Chicago Seven were, of course, a group of antiwar activists then on trial in federal court in Chicago for interstate conspiracy to incite a riot in that city during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Along with Rubin, the other defendants in the internationally publicized trial were Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989), Tom Hayden (1939-2016), David Dellinger (1915-2004), Rennie Davis (1940-2021), John Froines (1939-2022), and Lee Weiner (b. 1939).
Rubin first gained nationwide fame sufficient enough to attract such a crowd to the HUB when, as a younger and more austere antiwar activist at the University of California at Berkeley in May 1965, he organized the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), an ad hoc coalition which then held a massive antiwar teach-in attended by an estimated 30,000 people. The VDC teach-in was one of the first major public expressions of protest against the U.S. military presence in Vietnam, then rapidly being escalated. On December 31, 1967, after his antiwar tactics had grown more strategically absurdist, Rubin (along with Hoffman and several others) co-founded the Yippies, a group of intentionally irreverent ideological pranksters, later self-designated with mock pomposity as the Youth International Party.
Rubin was invited to speak at UW by Michael Lerner (1943-2024), a former VDC comrade of Rubin’s at Berkeley who was then a 27-year-old visiting UW philosophy professor. While teaching Philosophy 110, an introduction to Karl Marx and New Left avatar Herbert Marcuse, Lerner was then attempting to organize a new UW antiwar group to fill the void left there by the nationwide implosion of Students for a Democratic Society (including the UW chapter) the preceding summer. Lerner hoped that Rubin’s appearance in Seattle would be a sufficient catalyst for such a group.
One should note here that, as the Chicago Seven trial unfolded, many among the American antiwar movement had begun to consider Rubin a liability to the cause, viewing his increasingly theatrical anti-authoritarianism as counterproductive to more serious and studious arguments against the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex in general. Nevertheless, no one seemed at the time to deny that Rubin, despite his apparent self-infatuation, was an unusually charismatic and therefore catalytic public speaker, as amply evidenced by his HUB speech, in which he proved by turns equally flippant, poignant, and provocative.
For example, the flippant Jerry Rubin, on the proceedings in Chicago: “The court is like a classroom. We’re there to see if we’re bad or good. At the end of the trial we’ll get a grade.”
The poignant Jerry Rubin, on the prosecution’s deeper motivations: “The Establishment is afraid of youth. But the only weapon they have against us is punishment. The court system is a messenger for the political system, and people are beginning to see that the political system in America is a farce.”
And the provocative (and here previously paraphrased) Rubin, urging the students in the audience away from superficially liberal passivity and towards genuinely radical activism: “If you’re still in college today, you haven’t done enough. Because if you had, you’d have been thrown out by now.”
After Rubin returned to Chicago to resume his role in the conspiracy trial, Lerner’s gambit soon worked: two days after Rubin’s HUB appearance, Lerner hosted the first formal organizing meeting for the Seattle Liberation Front, a group whose own local Yippie-like antics would soon, for better or worse, guarantee Seattle its own aggressively radical and courthouse-bound Seven.
Sources: “Conspiracy Seven’s Rubin Speaks Here Tomorrow,” University of Washington Daily, January 16, 1970, p. 1; Richard Simmons, “Rubin Plays Youth Or . . . Consequences,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 18, 1970, p. 11; Bruce Olson, “‘Future on Trial,'” University of Washington Daily, January 20, 1970, p. 3; Susan Stern, With the Weathermen: The Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman (Doubleday & Company, 1975; Rutgers University Press, 2007); Dennis P. Eichhorn with Cynthia King, “Seven-Up Seattle style,” The Rocket, May 1987, p. 23; Walt Crowley, Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle (University of Washington Press, 1995).
