Disneyland operates every day of the year, from 8:00 a.m. until midnight. The almost-always open gates are a point of pride for the theme park. It took a presidential assassination to force the park to close early for the first time in history in 1963.
But the second instance was a bit more head-scratching. On August 6, 1970, Disneyland abruptly shut down about five hours early. Around 30,000 visitors were kicked out of the park, and it wasn’t due to a national crisis. The motivating factor was a group of about 300 young “Yippies,” who entered the park with grand plans of capturing Tom Sawyer Island, liberating Minnie Mouse, and cooking Porky Pig.Yippies were not quite hippies, but definitely not yuppies, either. The nickname referred to members of the Youth International Party, a political organization started by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in 1967. Rubin was a graduate student turned activist who had unsuccessfully run for mayor of Berkeley on a radical left platform. Hoffman was a psychologist turned activist who was involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Their Yippies were anti-war, anti-capitalism, and anti-establishment. They were known for their theatrical stunts, which generated tons of media coverage. There was the incident at the New York Stock Exchange, when Hoffman and roughly a dozen followers marched into the visitors’ gallery and began throwing dollar bills onto the trading floor. There was also the time they nominated Pigasus, a 145-pound pig, for president at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In many ways, a splashy demonstration at the number one destination for wholesome family fun made perfect sense for the Yippies.
Except the Disneyland invasion didn’t exactly go according to plan.
The date the Yippies chose for their demonstration was significant: August 6, 1970 marked the 25th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The activists planned to use their time protesting the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Why specifically did they chose Disneyland for this? It was the perfect location for several reasons. For one, the Yippies took issue with a major park sponsor. Bank of America was doubly offensive to the Yippies—it wasn’t just a big, obvious symbol of capitalism but also, in their minds, a virtual sponsor of the Vietnam War. According to David Koenig’s Mouse Tales: A Behind-the-Ears Look at Disneyland, the protest organizers singled out Bank of America in a press release for “financ[ing] war machines.” This was a somewhat popular belief among radicals. In March of 1970, the underground newspaper The Berkeley Tribe ran an “Open Letter From the Revolutionary Movement to the Bank of America.” It accused the corporation of “raping the underdeveloped world” through affiliations with the defense contractors Litton Industries and McDonnell Douglas. The letter was itself a response to the criticism young radicals received after a group of students burned down a Bank of America branch in Isla Vista.
The post How a Group of ’70s Radicals Tried (and Failed) to Invade Disneyland appeared first on FeedBox.