• Davis, Rennie
• Dellinger, David
• Froines, John
• Hayden, Tom
• Hoffman, Abbie
• Rubin, Jerry
• Weiner, Lee

Perhaps the three most prominent were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, and Tom Hayden, who later married the actress Jane Fonda and served in the California State Assembly from 1982-2000.  They were eventually acquitted on February 18, 1970, but not until going through a trial that included one defendant, Bobby Seale, being bound and gagged and eventually having his case severed from the others turning the Chicago Eight into the Chicago Seven.

“Years later Rubin confessed that he had secretly agreed with the government when in March 1969 it indicted him, along with Hoffman, Hayden, Davis, Dellinger, Bobby Seale, and two others, for conspiring to riot in Chicago.  ‘We wanted exactly what happened,’ Rubin wrote.  ‘We wanted the tear gas to get so heavy that the reality was tear gas.  We wanted to create a situation in which the Chicago police and the Daley administration and the federal government and the United States would self-destruct.  We wanted to show that America wasn’t a democracy.  That the convention wasn’t politics.  The message of the week was of an America ruled by force.  This was a big victory.”—quoted in Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America:  A History of Liberalism in the 1960s, (New York:  Harper and Row, 1984), p. 422 from Milton Viorst, Fire in the Streets:  America in the 1960s, (1979), pp. 458-9.

Portrait of the Chicago Seven

While the Seven Deadly Sins are not part of the Christian Scriptures, they are quite an ancient part of Christian theology and were grouped together in the 6^th Century A.D. by Pope Gregory I.  Pope Gregory I also composed the less well known list of Seven Heavenly Virtues.  Since Pope Gregory I’s time, many Christian theologians have written about the Seven Deadly Sins.  Probably the most prominent of these was St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13^th-century philosopher, who wrote about these sins in his Summa Theologica.

The Seven Deadly Sins have been an inspiration for artists for the past 1,500 years.  They served as the basis of morality plays in the European Middle Ages as well as the subject of a famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch, a 15^th-century Dutch painter, as well as a series of drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a 16^th-century Flemish painter.  In Dante’s Inferno, Dante makes his way through the circles of Hell including the Second Circle for those being punished for the sin of lust, the Third Circle for gluttons, the Fourth Circle for misers, the Fifth Circle for the wrathful and lazy.  English playwright Christopher Marlowe wrote a play “Dr. Faustus” (c. 1592), which uses the Seven Deadly Sins in one of its key scenes.

More recently, such artists as German-born American composer Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht created a ballet-opera on the theme.  And Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist-playwright Thornton Wilder wrote a series of seven one-act plays, each on a different sin.  Some critics have theorized that each of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books “portrays” one of the deadly sins:

• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe portrays Gluttony
• Prince Caspian portrays Luxuria (a more general word often translated as “lust,” but here meaning desire for profit)
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader portrays Greed
• The Silver Chair portrays Sloth
• The Horse and His Boy portrays Pride
• The Magician’s Nephew portrays Anger
• The Last Battle portrays Envy

In addition, such movies as “La Dolce Vita” (1960) (“I have heard theories that Federico Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’ catalogs the seven deadly sins, takes place on the seven hills of Rome, and involves seven nights and seven dawns, but I have never looked into them, because that would reduce the movie to a crossword puzzle. I prefer it as an allegory, a cautionary tale of a man without a center.”—Roger Ebert, “La Dolce Vita,” The Chicago Sun-Times), “The Seven Deadly Sins” (1962) with seven directors each tackling one of the deadly sins:

• Philippe de Broca and Gluttony
• Claude Chabrol and Avarice
• Jacques Demy and Lust
• Sylvain Dhomme and Max Douy (co-director) and Anger
• Jean-Luc Godard and Sloth
• Edouard Molinaro and Envy
• Roger Vadim and Pride

“Bedazzled” (1967) (“Spiggott [the devil played by British comedian Peter Cook] complains as lavishly as any midlevel drone about his arrogant, eccentric boss and the lousy help he’s saddled with. His assistants, the Seven Deadly Sins, include Raquel Welch as a go-go girl named Lilian Lust and Barry Humphries, out of his Dame Edna drag, as a mincing personification of Envy.”—Dave Kehr, “New DVDs,” The New York Times, April 17, 2007), and the thriller “Se7en” (1995) have found the themes of the Seven Deadly Sins fertile ground for creation.

Sometimes lowbrow art can find inspiration in the Seven Deadly Sins.  Some viewers have theorized that the personalities of each of the characters on the show “Gilligan’s Island” are inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins.

The Seven Deadly Sins can also inspire creativity in unlikely places and fields.  “…Jenna [the owner of the Inn at Little Washington] prepares small portions of chocolate mousse cake for ‘Seven Deadly Sins,’ one of the Inn’s signature desserts, which features bite-size morsels of seven different sweets, splattered Pollock-like with seven different sauces.”—Stephanie Mansfield, “A Day Inn the Life…of the Virginia restaurant some call the best in the country, the Inn at Little Washington,” Forbes FYI, Fall ’97, pp. 134 and 136.  There is also Web site with a Seven-Deadly-Sins-inspired tour of the Seattle area.