Jerry Rubin

Jerry Clyde Rubin (July 14, 1938 – November 28, 1994) was an American social activist, anti-war leader, and counterculture icon during the 1960s and early 1970s. Despite being known for holding radical views when he was a political activist, he ceased holding his more extreme views at some point in the 1970s and instead opted for a successful career as a businessman. In the 1960s, during his political activism heyday, he was known for being one of the co-founders of the Youth International Party (YIP) whose members were referred to as Yippies, and standing trial in the Chicago Seven case.

Rubin was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Esther (Katz), a homemaker, and Robert Rubin, a trucker who later became a Teamsters' union official.

Rubin attended Cincinnati's Walnut Hills High School, co-editing the school newspaper, The Chatterbox and graduating in 1956. While in high school Rubin began to write for The Cincinnati Post, compiling sports scores from high school games. He attended Oberlin College, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and later went on to graduate from the University of Cincinnati, receiving a degree in history. Rubin attended the University of California, Berkeley in 1964 but dropped out to focus on social activism.

Rubin's parents died within ten months of each other, leaving Rubin to take care of his younger brother, Gil, who was 13 at the time. Jerry wanted to teach Gil about the world and planned to take him to India. When relatives threatened to sue to obtain custody of Gil, Jerry decided to take his brother to Israel instead, settling in Tel Aviv. There, Rubin worked on a kibbutz, and studied sociology while his brother, who had learned Hebrew, decided to stay in Israel and moved permanently to a kibbutz. Before returning to social and political activism, Rubin made a visit to Havana, to learn first-hand about the Cuban revolution.

Rubin began to demonstrate on behalf of various left-wing causes after dropping out of UC Berkeley. Rubin also ran for mayor of Berkeley, on a platform opposing the Vietnam War, and supporting Black power and the legalization of marijuana, receiving over 20 percent of the vote. Rubin turned his attention to political protest, his first in Berkeley, protesting against the refusal of a local grocer to hire African Americans. Soon Rubin was leading protests of his own. Rubin organized the Vietnam Day Committee, that led some of the first big protests against the Vietnam War. He took part in planning the world's largest teach-in against the war, organized rallies and demonstrations that attempted to stop a train transporting troops to the Oakland Army Base, as well as trucks carrying napalm. The Vietnam Day Committee was a unique early antiwar organization in that it enjoyed large local participation and is believed to be a forerunner to the national movement against the war in Vietnam.

Rubin was one of the founding members of the Youth International Party (YIP) or Yippies, along with social and political activist Abbie Hoffman and satirist Paul Krassner. The Yippies were not a formal organization with a membership list or a direct relationship with constituency but played upon the media's appetite for anything new and different. They were influenced by Marshall McLuhan's ideas on the importance of electronic communication and believed that if radical events were made more entertaining the media, especially television would give them greater coverage.

... [T]he more visual and surreal the stunts we could cook up, the easier it would be to get on the news, and the more weird and whimsical and provocative the theater, the better it would play.

Rubin's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings is a good example of the Yippies’ emphasis on conducting political protest as theater, and drawing as much attention as possible to their dissent by turning it into a spectacle. Rubin was subpoenaed by HUAC in Washington but instead of pleading the Fifth Amendment as was common, he entered the room dressed in a rented 18th-century American Revolutionary War uniform, proudly claiming to be a descendant of Jefferson and Paine. "Nothing is more American than revolution," he told the committee. Rubin, showing a total lack of concern or worries, lightheartedly blew soap bubbles as members of Congress questioned his Communist affiliations. He subsequently appeared before the HUAC as a bare-chested guerrilla in Viet Cong pajamas, with war paint and carrying a toy M-16 rifle, and later as Santa Claus.

As Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain remark in their book Acid Dreams:

Rubin held a post-election party at his home in New York in January 1973, attended by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, after Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern had lost to Republican incumbent President Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. Soon after, Rubin retired from politics entirely, becoming an entrepreneur and businessman.

In the 1980s, Rubin was now more known for being a Yuppie capitalist. Despite no longer maintaining the more radical counterculture views he once held and being regarded as a sellout by some of his former 1960s associates, it has been acknowledged that Rubin sought to use his business investments to promote social awareness. He embarked on a debating tour with Abbie Hoffman titled "Yippie versus Yuppie". Rubin's argument in the debates was that activism was hard work and that the abuse of drugs, sex, and private property had made the counterculture "a scary society in itself." He maintained that:

Wealth creation is the real American revolution. What we need is an infusion of capital into the depressed areas of our country.

A later political cartoon portrayed Rubin as half-guerrilla and half-businessman.

Rubin's differences with Hoffman were on principle rather than completely personal. However, it was acknowledged that his evolving views did not sit well with Hoffman. When Hoffman died by suicide in 1989, Rubin attended his funeral.

Jerry Rubin appeared posthumously in the 2002 British documentary by Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self. He appears in episode part 3 of 4. This segment of the documentary discusses the Erhard Seminars Training, also known as The est Training, of which Rubin was a graduate. In his autobiography Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven Rubin dedicates a chapter on his experience of taking the est Training. He explains why est appealed to him, even though he had initially resisted it:

Something theatrically revolutionary was happening at est. In the 1960s we had used political guerrilla theater to get people to see beyond their roles. Now Werner was creating a psychological theater provoking people into self-confrontation. Whenever people discover themselves, they grow and learn − and that has to be revolutionary. (My act is liking something only if I can call it "revolutionary".)

Rubin also appeared on Saturday Night Live's second episode of its first season. He was announced as "Jerry Rubin, Leader of the Yippie Movement." The sketch is a fake commercial for wallpaper featuring famous protest slogans from the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., "Make Love, Not War", "Off the Pig!", "Give Peace a Chance", "Hell No, We Won't Go!", etc.). He ends the sketch by parodying a famous radical slogan as "Up against the wall-paper, posters!" (with the last word bleeped out in a reference to Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers).

Rubin's anti-establishment beliefs were put down in writing in his 1970 book, DO IT!: Scenarios of the Revolution, with an introduction by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver and unconventional design by Quentin Fiore. In 1971, his journal, written while incarcerated in the Cook County Jail, was published under the title We are Everywhere. The book includes an inside view of the trial of the Chicago Seven, but otherwise focuses on the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, LSD, women's liberation and his view of a coming revolution.

In 1976, Rubin wrote the book Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven, which contained a chapter about his experience at an Erhard Seminars Training (EST) session, later included in the book American Spiritualities: A Reader (2001) edited by Catherine L. Albanese. In Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven, Rubin claims a rational society cannot be built by people who are out of touch with themselves and can't even run their own lives rationally. Real political change will not happen unless people transform their own personal reality, and their own relationships. Much like Arthur Koestler in his collections of essays The Yogi and the Commissar, Rubin argues that political work and self-development has to go hand in hand. It was important, he said, that people lived the society they hoped to create.

As explained in Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven Rubin experimented with many self-improvement techniques to overcome his own personal defects, everything from the est training, hypnotism, meditation and yoga to rolfing, acupuncture, the Arica School, Gestalt therapy and the bioenergetic analysis of Wilhelm Reich's pupil Alexander Lowen. In a review of the book Derek VanPelt comments on Rubin's self quest:

Rubin, though a crude writer, takes it all in from a fairly skeptical viewpoint and reports in entertaining, thoughtful, and sometimes funny prose. The depth and sincerity of his search is apparent, and his call for a cooperative relationship between new consciousness and new politics is one of the more promising prospects of the seventies.

In 1980, Rubin authored a self-help book with his wife, Mimi Leonard, entitled The War Between the Sheets: What's Happening with Men in Bed and What Men and Women Are Doing About It. It was not well received.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, Rubin reinvented himself as a businessman. Friend and fellow Yippie Stew Albert claimed Rubin's new ambition was giving capitalists a social consciousness. In 1980 he began a new career on Wall Street as stockbroker with the brokerage firm John Muir & Co. "I know that I can be more effective today wearing a suit and tie and working on Wall Street than I can be dancing outside the walls of power," he said.

In the 1980s, he became known for his promotion of business networking, having created Business Networking Salons, Inc., a company that organized parties at the Studio 54 and Palladium nightclubs in Manhattan, where thousands of young professionals and entrepreneurs met and shared ideas. Near the end of his life, Rubin became interested in the science of life extension and was heavily involved in multi-level marketing of health foods and nutritional supplements. "In 1991, he and his family moved to Los Angeles," according to an Observer.com profile of him, "where he became a successful independent marketer for a Dallas-based firm that sold a nutritional drink called Wow!, made with kelp, ginseng, and bee pollen. Ironically, Bobby Seale became one of his salesmen."

On November 14, 1994, Rubin was struck by a motorist as he attempted to cross Wilshire Boulevard, in front of his penthouse apartment in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, California. It was a Monday evening and weekday traffic was heavy, with three lanes moving in each direction. One motorist swerved to avoid Rubin, but a second driver, immediately behind the first, struck him. He was taken to the UCLA Medical Center, where he died of a heart attack two weeks later. He is interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.

State Senator Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), Rubin's fellow Chicago Seven member, said after the latter's death:

He was a great life force, full of spunk, courage and wit. I think his willingness to defy authority for constructive purposes will be missed. Up to the end, he was defying authority.