Abbie Hoffman
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| Abbie Hoffman | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 30 1936 Worcester, Massachusetts |
Abbott Howard "Abbie" Hoffman (November 30, 1936 – April 12, 1989) was a social and political activist in the United States, co-founder of the Youth International Party ("Yippies"), and later, a fugitive from the law, who lived under an alias following a conviction for dealing cocaine.
Hoffman came to prominence in the 1960s, but practiced most of his activism in the 1970s, and has remained a symbol of the youth rebellion of that decade.
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[edit] Biography
Hoffman was born into a Jewish family in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he attended Worcester Academy and graduated in 1955.
[edit] Early protests
Prior to his days as a leading member of the Yippie movement, Hoffman was involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and organized "Liberty House", which sold items to support the Civil Rights Movement in the southern United States. During the Vietnam War, Hoffman was an anti-war activist, who used deliberately comical and theatrical tactics, such as a mass demonstration in which over 50,000 people unsuccessfully attempted to use psychic energy to levitate The Pentagon until it turned orange and began to vibrate, at which time the war in Vietnam would end.<ref name="TeachingEarthDay">Abbie Hoffman. Teaching.com (1997). Retrieved on 2006-04-01.</ref> Hoffman was also successful at convincing many hippies to become more active in the politics of the time.<ref name="TeachingEarthDay"/>
One of Hoffman's well-known protests was on August 24, 1967; when he led a group opposed to capitalism (and other things, including the Vietnam War) in the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The protestors threw fistfuls of (mostly fake) dollar bills down to the traders below, some of whom booed, while others began to scramble frantically to grab the money as fast as they could. Hoffman claimed to be pointing out that, metaphorically, that's what NYSE traders "were already doing". The NYSE then installed barriers in the gallery, to prevent this kind of protest from interfering with trading again.<ref>Blair, Cynthia. 1967: Hippies Toss Dollar Bills onto NYSE Floor. It Happened In New York. Newsday. Retrieved on 2006-04-01. For Hoffman's account of the events of the day, see his 1968 book Revolution for the Hell of It: The Book That Earned Abbie Hoffman a 5 Year Prison Term at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (reprint edition New York, Thunder's Mouth Press:2005) ISBN 1-56025-690-7</ref>
[edit] Chicago 7 Conspiracy Trial
See main article Chicago Seven
Hoffman was arrested and tried for conspiracy and inciting to riot as a result of his role in protests that led to violent confrontations with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.<ref>Excerpts from his testimony at the trial can be found here.</ref> He was among the group that came to be known as the Chicago Seven (originally known as the Chicago Eight), which included fellow Yippie Jerry Rubin, Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner and future California state senator Tom Hayden. Bobby Seale's trial was severed from the others, who then became the Chicago Seven.
Presided over by Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation to Abbie, which Abbie joked about throughout the trial), Abbie Hoffman's courtroom antics frequently grabbed the headlines; one day, defendants Hoffman and Rubin appeared in court dressed in judicial robes, while on another day, Hoffman was sworn in as a witness with his hand giving the finger.
Hoffman and four of the others (Rubin, Dellinger, Davis, and Hayden) were found guilty of intent to incite a riot while crossing state lines. At sentencing, Hoffman suggested the judge try LSD and offered to set him up with "a dealer he knew in Florida" (the judge was known to be headed to Florida for a post-trial vacation). Each of the five were sentenced to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.<ref>Douglas O. Linder "The Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial" (found at http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Chicago7/Account.html) gives a detailed description of the trial, the events leading up to it, the reversal on appeal and the aftermath.</ref>
All convictions were subsequently overturned by the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court and none served any jail time.
[edit] Post-Chicago protests
At Woodstock in 1969, Hoffman interrupted The Who's performance to attempt a protest speech against the jailing of John Sinclair of the White Panther Party. He grabbed a microphone and yelled, "I think this is a pile of shit! While John Sinclair rots in prison. . ." The Who's guitarist, Pete Townshend, unhappy with the interruption, cut Hoffman off mid-sentence, snarling, "Fuck off! Fuck off my fucking stage!" He then struck Hoffman with his guitar, sending him tumbling offstage. Townshend later said he actually agreed with Hoffman on Sinclair's imprisonment, though he made the point that he would have knocked him offstage regardless of his message. The audio of this event can be heard on the The Who's box set,Thirty Years of Maximum R&B (Disc 2, Track 20, "Abbie Hoffman Incident").
According to Hoffman, in his autobiography, the incident played out like this:
| If you ever heard about me in connection with the festival it was not for playing Florence Nightingale to the flower children. What you heard was the following: "Oh, him, yeah, didn't he grab the microphone, try to make a speech when Peter Townshend cracked him over the head with his guitar?" I've seen countless references to the incident, even a mammoth mural of the scene. What I've failed to find was a single photo of the incident. Why? Because it didn't really happen.
I grabbed the microphone all right and made a little speech about John Sinclair, who had just been sentenced to ten years in the Michigan State Penitentiary for giving two joints of grass to two undercover cops, and how we should take the strength we had at Woodstock home to free our brothers and sisters in jail. Something like that. Townshend, who had been tuning up, turned around and bumped into me. A nonincident really. Hundreds of photos and miles of film exist depicting the events on that stage, but none of this much-talked about scene. |
In "Woodstock Nation", Hoffman mentions the incident, and mentioning that he was high on LSD at the time.
In 1970, Hoffman published Steal This Book, which advised the readers on how to basically live for free. Unfortunately many of his readers followed Hoffman's advice and stole the book, leading many bookstores to refuse to carry it.<ref>Brate, Adam. Technomanifestos, chapter 8. Texere, June 2002.</ref>
[edit] Underground
Hoffman was arrested in 1973 on drug charges for intent to sell and distribute cocaine. He always proclaimed that undercover police agents had entrapped him into a drug deal and planted suitcases of cocaine in his office. Hoffman subsequently skipped bail and hid from authorities for several years.
Despite being "in hiding", during part of this period, under the name "Barry Freed", he successfully helped coordinate an environmental campaign to preserve the St. Lawrence River (Save the River organization)<ref>http://www.savetheriver.org/news/</ref>. In 1980, he surrendered to authorities and received a one year sentence. On September 4, 1980, he appeared on 20/20 in an interview with Barbara Walters. Hoffman continued to be an influential radical journalist, contributing to the radical Ramparts Magazine.
[edit] Back to visibility
In November 1986 Hoffman was arrested along with eleven others, including Amy Carter, the daughter of former President Jimmy Carter, for trespassing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The charges stemmed from a protest against the Central Intelligence Agency's recruitment on the UMass campus. Since the university's policy limited campus recruitment to law-abiding organizations, Hoffman asserted in his defense the CIA's lawbreaking activities. The federal district court judge permitted expert witnesses, from a former Attorney General to a former CIA agent, who testified about the CIA's illegal Contra war against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in violation of the Boland Amendment.
In three days of testimony, more than a dozen defense witnesses, including Daniel Ellsberg, Ramsey Clark and former Contra leader Edgar Chamorro, described the CIA's role in more than two decades of dirty tricks, broken promises, illegal and often violent activities. In his moving closing argument, Hoffman, acting as his own attorney, placed his actions within the best tradition of American civil disobedience. He quoted from Thomas Paine, "the most outspoken and farsighted of the leaders of the American Revolution": "Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. Man has no property in man, neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow."
As Hoffman concluded: "Thomas Paine was talking about this spring day in this courtroom. A verdict of not guilty will say, 'When our country is right, keep it right; but when it is wrong, right those wrongs.'" On April 15, 1987, convinced that the CIA had broken international law and committed higher crimes, the jury found Hoffman and the other defendants not guilty.
[edit] Suicide questioned
After effectively defeating the CIA in a public courtroom, Hoffman prepared for a cameo appearance in Oliver Stone's anti-Vietnam War movie, Born on the Fourth of July. He essentially played himself in the movie, waving a flag on the ramparts of an administration building during a campus protest that was being teargassed and crushed by state troopers.
The movie was released on December 20 1989, more than eight months after Hoffman's purported suicide on April 12 1989. For a man who had soaked up the media spotlight, it was rather uncharacteristic of Hoffman to not be around for his own opening. At the time of his death, Hoffman was at the height of a renewed public visibility, one of the few 60's radicals who still commanded the attention of all kinds of mass media. He regularly lectured audiences about the CIA's covert activities, including assassinations disguised as suicides. His Playboy Magazine article (October, 1988) outlining the connections that constitute the "October Surprise" brought that alleged conspiracy to the attention of a wide-ranging American readership for the first time.
A week after Hoffman's death, a thousand friends and relatives gathered for a memorial in Worcester, Massachusetts at the temple he had attended as a child. Two of his colleagues from the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial were there, including David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin, Hoffman's co-founder of the Yippies, by then a businessman and entrepreneur.
As the New York Times reported: "Indeed, most of the mourners who attended the formal memorial at Temple Emanuel here were more yuppie than yippie and there were more rep ties than ripped jeans among the crowd. . .
"Bill Walton, the radical Celtic of basketball renown, told of a puckish Abbie, then underground evading a cocaine charge in the 70's, leaping from the shadows on a New York street to give him an impromptu basketball lesson after a loss to the Knicks. Abbie was not a fugitive from justice, said Mr. Walton. Justice was a fugitive from him."
"On a more traditional note, Rabbi Norman Mendell said in his eulogy that Mr. Hoffman's long history of protest, antic though much of it had been, was in the Jewish prophetic tradition, which is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
Hoffman was only 52 at the time of his death, which was caused by somehow swallowing 150 Phenobarbital pills. He was said to have been upset about his elderly mother (Florence)'s cancer diagnosis,[citation needed] and to have suffered from bipolar disorder (Jezer, 1993) or a manic-depressive illness. His death was officially ruled a suicide, but many who knew him refused to believe that he had willingly taken his own life, particularly when he was so concerned about his mother's health and well-being.
As reported by the New York Times, "Among the more vocal doubters at the service today was Mr. Dellinger, who said, "I don't believe for one moment the suicide thing." He said he had been in fairly frequent touch with Mr. Hoffman, who had "numerous plans for the future."
Hoffman's drug infused body had been found in his apartment in a converted turkey coop on Sugan Road in Solebury, Pennsylvania. At the time of his death, he was surrounded by about 200 pages of his own handwritten notes, many about his own moods, yet there was no suicide note.
Hoffman died only three days before he was scheduled to celebrate the two year anniversary of his courtroom victory over the CIA, and less than three months into the presidency of George H.W. Bush, the former CIA director he had eluded in the mid-1970s.
His life was dramatized in the 2000 film Steal This Movie, in which he was portrayed by Vincent D'Onofrio.
He was portrayed (by Richard D'Alessandro) in the anti-war protest rally scene at the Washington Monument in the 1994 movie Forrest Gump.
[edit] Personal life
He was a graduate of Brandeis University where he studied under Herbert Marcuse, a leading Marxist Critical Theorist associated with the Frankfurt School. In 1960, Hoffman married Sheila Karklin and had two children. They divorced in 1966.
In 1967, Hoffman married Anita Kushner. They had one child, america Hoffman, deliberately named using a small "a" to indicate both patriotism and non-jingoistic intent. Although they were effectively separated after Abbie became a fugitive starting in 1973 and he subsequently fell in love with Johanna Lawrenson in 1974 while a fugitive, Abbie and Anita were not formally divorced until 1980.
[edit] Quotes
"Avoid all needle drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon." -- Steal This Book
(On the popularity of his book Steal This Book) "It's embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the best seller's list."
"A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station."
"The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain't going." -- in Chicago, while eating bacon and eggs in a coffee shop, to officers arresting him
"I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as 'cute'."
"Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire."
"The '60s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great."
"I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars."
“America is the land of the free. Free means you don't pay.” (From his book Revolution for the Hell of It.)
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” (From his book Revolution for the Hell of It.)<ref>IMDB bio</ref>
"You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists."
“Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.”
"I don't think my goals have changed since I was four and I fought schoolyard bullies."
"Political Pigs, your days are numbered. We are the second American Revolution. We are winning. Yippie."
"Conspiracy? Hell, we couldn't agree on lunch." -Abbie during the Chicago 7 Trial
(To Judge Julius Hoffman during the Chicago 7 trial, in Yiddish): [You are] "a shandeh far di goyim." (a disgrace, shame, embarrassment, in front of the gentiles)
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Nonfiction
- Fuck the System (1967) {A guidebook to accessing free food, activities, legal aid, etc., in New York City}
- Revolution For the Hell of It (1968) {Written under the pseudonym "Free"}; reprint edition (2005) ISBN 1560256907
- Woodstock Nation (1969)
- The Conspiracy: the Chicago Eight Speak Out (with Noam Chomsky, John Froines, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Lee Weiner, Bobby Seale and Jerry Rubin) (1969)
- Steal This Book (1971)
- Vote! - A Record, A Dialogue, A Manifesto - Miami Beach, 1972 And Beyond (with Jerry Rubin and Ed Sanders) (1972)
- To America With Love: Letters From the Underground with Anita Hoffman (1976)
- Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (1980)
- Square Dancing in the Ice Age (1982)
- Steal This Urine Test (1987)
- More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Nuclear Waste Transports (pamphlet, unknown year)
[edit] Posthumous Nonfiction
- the Best of Abbie Hoffman (1990)
- Steal This Book: 25th Anniversary Edition (1996)
- Preserving Disorder: The Faking of the President 1988 (with Jonathan Silvers) (1999)
- Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman: Second Edition (2000)
- To America With Love: Letters From the Underground with Anita Hoffman (second edition) (2000)
- Steal This Book (Four Walls Eight Windows edition) (2002)
[edit] Discography
[edit] Spoken Word
- Wake Up, America! Big Toe Records (1970) http://www.ubu.com/sound/hoffman.html
[edit] Footnotes
<references />
[edit] References
[edit] Books
- Jezer, Marty (1993). Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-2017-7. p. xvii: "Abbie was diagnosed in 1980 as having bipolar disorder, more commonly known as manic depression."
