I, Pigasus

When a real porker ran for president

Chicago was on edge in the summer of 1968. The city had been spared the worst of the urban violence that had afflicted Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in Los Angeles in 1965, and Detroit and Newark in 1967. The Windy City’s West Side had seen some trouble in 1966 and—like nearly every other city in America—an outburst in the black neighborhoods after the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. But Mayor Richard J. Daley had been quick to react in both cases, and the presence of armed soldiers sent the protesters back into their homes before things got out of hand.

Some people thought Daley had overreacted. The mayor was unrepentant. Indeed he doubled down, saying he wished his police chief had issued a shoot-to-kill order against arsonists. “I assumed the orders were given,” he told reporters. “I would assume any superintendent would issue orders to shoot any arsonist on sight.” Arson was a matter of life and death for people caught in buildings. “An arsonist is a murderer and should be shot right on the spot.”

Daley’s words and uncompromising attitude hung over the city—his city, he deemed it—as Chicago prepared to host the Democratic National Convention in August 1968. The Democrats were a mess of emotions: anger over the Vietnam War, dismay after the assassination of King and more recently Robert Kennedy, bitterness at the ability of Democratic bosses like Daley to impose their will on the party against the will of primary-election voters.

Protesters of various stripes planned disruptions of several sorts. College-student supporters of Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesota senator whose challenge to Lyndon Johnson had knocked the president out of the race, hoped their polite presence and reasoned arguments would convince delegates to flip in favor of “Clean Gene.”

Louder and less polite were the cadres of the Students for a Democratic Society. SDS leader Tom Hayden preached the “politics of confrontation,” hoping to goad Daley and the police into violence that would discredit the “establishment.” Hayden was on the watch list of the FBI for having traveled to North Vietnam and for having been a community organizer in the black neighborhoods of Newark that then blew up in the 1967 riots. Hayden published an account of those riots that appeared so quickly afterward that close observers suspected it had served as a blueprint for the violence and arson.

Between the buttoned-down McCarthyites and the radical SDSers on the spectrum of performative politics sat the Youth International Party, conceived by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and some friends at Hoffman’s New York apartment on New Year’s Eve 1967. The Yippies, as they called themselves, were more serious about politics than the hippies of the counterculture but happier— “Yippee!”—than the grimly focused SDSers. “Our concept of the revolution is that it’s fun,” Hoffman told a reporter. “The left has the concept that you have to sacrifice. Who the hell is going to buy that product? A lot of the left is into masochistic theater, if you ask me.”

Hoffman elaborated: “People have been asking me what’s going on. I tell them a Yippie is someone who doesn’t ask what’s going on.” The Yippies were what was going on. “The people in this movement all disagree on everything except that you don’t say ‘no’ to anything. Hippie, Yippie—it’s a trick. Hippies drop out. Yippies say, ‘I can’t drop out of life and do nothing.’ What’s nothing? It’s the first phase of self-awareness. You just go and sit in a closet. But you can’t sit there forever.”

The Yippies called the Democratic convention the “convention of death,” for the party’s complicity in the Vietnam War. They counterprogrammed a “festival of life.” Ed Sanders, another founding Yippie, headlined the agenda: “Dope, Peace, Magic.” He went on, “Poetry readings, mass meditation, flycasting exhibitions, demagogic Yippie political arousal speeches, rock music and song concerts will be held on a precise timetable throughout the week of August 25-30.” Of course there was nothing precise about anything the Yippies did; that was part of the joke. To hype coverage of the proceedings, Sanders promised reporters “free dope and consciousness-altering thrill chemicals for their education and refreshment.”

Paul Krassner, another founder, worked to get under Richard Daley’s skin. Daley had talked the Democratic leadership into holding the convention in Chicago by promising respectability and order. Krassner hinted that the Yippies would introduce LSD into the Chicago water supply, to loosen up the place. He said specially trained and endowed young Yippie males would be roaming the neighborhoods around the convention center and hotels to seduce the wives and daughters of the delegates. Jerry Rubin later expressed pleasure that Daley had risen to the bait. “We knew it would be easy to cause a commotion in Chicago,” he said. “They’re very backward here.”

Krassner was kidding. There were no psychedelics in the water, and the Yippie studs didn’t exist. But another joke did come to pass, as Phil Ochs, a lefty songwriter, recounted in testimony at the trial of the Chicago Seven, a group of Yippie and SDS leaders charged with crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot. Most of the rioting in fact was the work Daley’s police force, which descended on demonstrators with tear gas and nightsticks in what was declared a “police riot” by a board investigating the affair afterward. But Hoffman, Rubin, Hayden and four others were the ones brought to trial.

Phil Ochs was called as a witness. William Kunstler was attorney for the defense.

MR. KUNSTLER: After you arrived in Chicago did you have any discussion with Jerry [Rubin]?

THE WITNESS: Yes, I did. We discussed the nomination of a pig for President.

MR. KUNSTLER: Would you state what you said and what Jerry said.

THE WITNESS: We discussed the details. We discussed going out to the countryside around Chicago and buying a pig from a farmer and bringing him into the city for the purposes of his nominating speech.

MR. KUNSTLER: Did you have any role yourself in that?

THE WITNESS: Yes, I helped select the pig, and I paid for him.

MR. KUNSTLER: Now, did you find a pig at once when you went out?

THE WITNESS: No, it was very difficult. We stopped at several farms and asked where the pigs were.

MR. KUNSTLER: None of the farmers referred you to the police station, did they?

MR. FORAN [for the prosecution]: Objection.

THE COURT: I sustain the objection. No digs at the police.

MR. KUNSTLER: Would you state what, if anything, happened to the pig?

THE WITNESS: The pig was arrested with seven people.

MR. KUNSTLER: When did that take place?

THE WITNESS: This took place on the morning of August 23, at the Civic Center underneath the Picasso sculpture.

MR. KUNSTLER: Who were those seven people?

THE WITNESS: Jerry Rubin, Stew Albert, Wolfe Lowenthal, myself is four; I am not sure of the names of the other three.

MR. KUNSTLER: What were you doing when you were arrested?

THE WITNESS: We were arrested announcing the pig's candidacy for President.

MR. KUNSTLER: Did Jerry Rubin speak?

THE WITNESS: Yes, Jerry Rubin was reading a prepared speech for the pig—the opening sentence was something like, "I, Pigasus, hereby announce my candidacy for the Presidency of the United States." He was interrupted in his talk by the police who arrested us.

MR. KUNSTLER: Do you remember what you were charged with?

THE WITNESS: I believe the original charge mentioned was something about an old Chicago law about bringing livestock into the city, or disturbing the peace, or disorderly conduct, and when it came time for the trial, I believe the charge was disorderly conduct.

MR. KUNSTLER: Were you informed by an officer that the pig had squealed on you?

MR. FORAN: Objection.

The objection was sustained. Humor was still off limits.

Five of the seven human defendants were convicted, but the verdicts were overturned on appeal.

No charges were brought against Pigasus, who at times appeared dazed by the attention. His ultimate fate is lost to history. One of the Yippies described Pigasus as a double threat: “If we can’t have him in the White House, we can have him for breakfast.” By some accounts, members of the Chicago police, after being taunted all weeks as “pigs,” did just that.