Hoffman, Abbie

HOFFMAN, ABBIE (1936–1989). A cultural revolutionary who came to prominence in the mid-1960s, Abbie Hoffman once wrote that “a modern revolutionary heads for the television station, not for the factory.” Using ridicule and audacity as potent weapons against the political, military, and judicial systems that were helping to prosecute the Vietnam War, Hoffman worked to catalyze the anti-authoritarian sentiments of many young people of the Sixties counterculture into political consciousness and a organizational participation. “Personally,” he wrote in his autobiographical Soon to be a Major Motion Picture (1980). “I always held my flower in a clenched fist. A semi-structure freak among the love children, I was determined to bring the hippie movement into a broader protest.” This politicizing impact upon the drugs-and-rock ‘n’ roll counterculture significantly offset the polarizing impact of his unruly anarchism, as beamed to mainstream America by the electronic media. His hilariously communicated revulsion at the corporate American culture, moreover, had deep impact upon the entire Sixties generation.

Abbott Hoffman was born on 30 November 1936 in Worcester, Massachusetts, the oldest of three children of a Jewish family whose living derived from a family drugstore and then a medical supply company. Expelled from Classical High School in Worcester after a fist-fight with his English teacher (who had called him a “Communist punk” and ripped up a paper Hoffman had written on atheism), he finally graduated from a private academy and then attended Brandeis University, from which he graduated in 1959 with a B.A. in psychology. Hoffman became active in the civil rights movement and was arrested in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, 1964; in 1966 he founded Liberty House, a crafts store in New York City that sold the products created by poor people’s co-ops in Mississippi. It was as an organizer against the Vietnam War, however, that Hoffman won media attention and found a constituency for his brand of protest.

In April 1967, he and a cohort of activists threw dollar bills from the visitors’ gallery to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, provoking chaos as traders scrambled for the money. His wedding to Anita Kushner (his second marriage) in Central Park that August attracted over three thousand people, as did the “be-ins” he helped organize in the park. During the antiwar demonstration of over fifty thousand in Washington, D.C., in October of that year, Hoffman led an “Exorcism of the Pentagon” (surrounding the Pentagon to levitate it by mental force). On New Year’s Day, 1968, Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and other activists proclaimed themselves “Yippies,” and shortly thereafter founded the Youth International Party, a conceptual community that instigated many ‘street demonstrations and media events. These culminated in the “Festival of Life” at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, during which the Chicago police under Mayor Richard Daley indulged in what a government report called a “police riot.” Hoffman nominated a pig, “Pigasus,” for president and was arrested for having “Fuck” scrawled across his forehead.

The violence in Chicago’s streets led to the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial (eventually called the Chicago Seven trial, as Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers was bound, gagged, and railroaded separately to four years in prison for contempt of court). Hoffman’s talent for guerrilla theater gave rise to radical mockery of courtroom decorum (he claimed, among other things, to be trial judge Julius Hoffman’s illegitimate son). Dozens of well-known political and cultural figures testified on behalf of the defendants as the trial became a showcase for Left politics and the counterculture.

Hoffman spent the next years as a full-time agitator, speaker, and writer, logging dozens of arrests and facing serious harassment from police. In 1973 he was arrested for participating in the sale of cocaine to undercover agents. (He always maintained the anticipated profit from the sale had been earmarked to finance movement activities.) Facing a mandatory life sentence with no possibility of parole before fifteen years, he vanished in February 1974 and spent more than six years underground. During these years he endured plastic surgery, suffered from manic-depressive episodes, took on several aliases, and partnered with Johanna Lawrenson, with whom he lived in Mexico and the U.S. Together they undertook some very public environmental activism, Hoffman using the name “Barry Freed,” in upstate New York near the Saint Lawrence River. The organization they founded, Save the River, eventually halted a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan to open up the St. Lawrence River for winter-time shipping navigation through ice-breaking activity.

Hoffman emerged from hiding on national television on 3 September 1980. He served less four months in prison after pleading guilty to a lesser charge. After his release, he became a popular college campus speaker and remained politically active, especially on environmental issues. On November 25, 1986, he was arrested alongside former president Jimmy Carter’s daughter Amy Carter while protesting Central Intelligence Agency recruitment at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst).

Hoffman’s endurance as an organizer and his continued commitment to political causes well beyond the heyday of the 1960s and 1970s were inspiring to many of his contemporaries and instructive, especially, to college-age people of the 1980s.

His suicide on 12 April 1989 shocked most of his admirers and friends. At the time of his death he had been taking lithium and other prescribed drugs to deal with his manic-depressive cycles and injuries from a serious automobile accident of the previous year. The coroner’s report of 18 April found cause of death to have been “massive doses” of phenobarbital and alcohol.

In classic anarchist tradition, Hoffman viewed his radicalism as a way of life and distrusted activists whose lifestyles did not, in his judgment, incarnate their ideologies. His ideas were most effectively presented in direct action, but he wrote a number of books, including Revolution for the Hell of It (1967), Woodstock Nation (1969), Steal This Book (1971), Vote! (1972), To America with Love: Letters from the Underground (1976), and Steal This Urine Test (1988).

Hoffman, Abbie. Woodstock Nation. New York: Viking Press, 1969.

Hoffman, Abbie. Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. New York: Putnam Publishing Group, 1980.

Hoffman, Jay, and Daniel Simon. Run, Run, Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994.

Jezei, Marty, Abbie Hoffman. American Rebel. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

Raskin, Jonah. For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.