Abbie Hoffman's account of the Diggers' guerrilla-theater performance at the New York Stock Exchange on 24 August 1967. Hoffman and some other future Yippies infiltrated the heart of American capitalism and began showering $1 bills on the trading floor below, in addition to tearing, eating, and burning money. Prior to forming the Youth International Party in December 1967, Hoffman and his associates identified as the New York branch of the Diggers, who were a San Francisco-based group of radical activists and guerrilla-theater performers. The account appeared in Hoffman's 1980 autobiography Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, which was posthumously republished as The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman in 2000.
Museum of the Streets
The first time you may have seen me was in the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange, hurling money on the brokers below. Of course, you didn’t actually see me because no photographs of the incident exist: newsmen are not allowed to enter the sacred temple of commerce.
It all began with a simple telephone call to the Stock Exchange. I arranged for a tour, giving one of my favorite pseudonyms, George Metesky, the notorious mad bomber of Manhattan. Then I scraped together three hundred dollars which I changed into crispy one-dollar bills, rounded up fifteen free spirits, which in those days just took a few phone calls, and off we went to Wall Street.
We didn’t call the press; at that time we really had no notion of anything called a media event. (And to make one very important point, I never performed for the media. I tried to reach people. It was not acting. It was not some media muppet show. That is a cynical interpretation of history.) We just took our places in line with the tourists, although our manner of dress did make us a little conspicuous. The line moved its way past glassed-in exhibits depicting the rise of the industrial revolution and the glorification of the world of commerce. Then the line turned the comer. Suddenly, we saw hordes of reporters and cameras. Somebody must have realized a story was in the making and rung up one of the wire services. In New York the press can mobilize in a matter of minutes. Faster than police, often.
We started clowning, kissing and hugging, and eating money. Next, some stock exchange bureaucrats appeared and we argued until they allowed us in the gallery, but the guards kept the press out. I passed out money to freaks and tourists alike, then all at once we ran to the railing and began tossing out the bills. Pandemonium. The sacred electronic ticker tape, the heartbeat of the Western world, stopped cold. Stock brokers scrambled over the floor like worried mice, scurrying after the money. Greed had burst through the business-as-usual façade.
It lasted five minutes at the most. The guards quickly ushered us out with a stern warning and the ticker tape started up
The reporters and cameramen were waiting for us outside:
“Who are you?”
“I’m Cardinal Spellman.”
“Where did you get the money?”
“What are you saying? You don’t ask Cardinal Spellman where he gets his money!”
“How much did you throw?”
“Thousands.”
“How many are you?”
“Hundreds—three—two—we don’t exist! We don’t even exist!” As the cameras whirred away we danced, burned greenbacks and declared the end of money.
Bystander: “This is a disgusting display.”
Me: “You’re right. These people are nothing but a bunch of filthy commies.”
The story was on the air waves that night and our message went around the world, but because the press didn’t actually witness the event they had to create their own fantasies of what had happened inside the money temple. One version was we threw Monopoly money, another network called it hundred-dollar bills, a third shredded money. A tourist from Missouri was interviewed who said he had joined in the money-throwing because he’d been throwing away his money all over New York for several days anyway and our way was quicker and more fun. From start to finish the event was a perfect myth. Even the newspeople had to elaborate on what had happened.
A spark had been ignited. The system cracked a little. Not a drop of blood had been spilled, not a bone broken, but on that day, with that gesture, an image war had begun. In the minds of millions of teenagers the stock market had just crashed.
Guerrilla theater is probably the oldest form of political commentary. The ideas just keep getting recycled. Showering money on the Wall Street brokers was the TV-age version of driving the money changers from the temple. The symbols, the spirit, and the lesson were identical. Was it a real threat to the Empire? Two weeks after our band of mind-terrorists raided the stock exchange, twenty thousand dollars was spent to enclose the gallery with bullet-proof glass. Someone out there had read the ticker tape.
[...]
Taken from The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman.
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