ABBIE HOFFMAN

'Abbott Howard "Abbie" Hoffman' (November 30, 1936 – April 12, 1989) was a self-identified communo-anarchist,^[1] 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 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, with other individuals who became known, collectively, as the Chicago Seven.
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 and radical activism of that decade.^[2]

Biography

Hoffman was born into a Jewish family in Worcester, Massachusetts. After getting kicked out of public school, he attended Worcester Academy, graduating in 1955. He then enrolled in Brandeis University, completing his B.A. in 1959. He later earned a master's degree in psychology from UC Berkeley.^[3]

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.^[4] Hoffman was also successful at convincing many hippies to become more active in the politics of the time.
One of Hoffman's well-known protests was on August 24, 1967; when he led members of the movement to the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The protesters threw fistfuls of dollars (one thousand dollars in small 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". "We didn't call the press," wrote Hoffman, "at that time we really had no notion of anything called a media event." The press was quick to respond and by evening the event was reported around the world. Since then the stock exchange has spent $20,000 to enclose the gallery with bulletproof glass.^[5]

Chicago 7 conspiracy trial

Main articles: Chicago Seven

Hoffman was arrested and tried for "conspiracy" and "inciting to riot" as a result of his role in anti-Vietnam war protests, which were met by a violent police response (widely considered to be a police riot) during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.^[6] 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. Judge Hoffman became the favorite courtroom target of the Chicago Seven defendants, who frequently would insult the judge to his face. Abbie Hoffman told Judge Hoffman "you are a disgrace to the Jews. You would have served Hitler better." He later added that "your idea of justice is the only obscenity in the room." Both Davis and Rubin told the Judge "this court is bullshit."
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.^[7]
All convictions were subsequently overturned by the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court and none served any jail time.

Controversy at Woodstock

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, shouting, "Back off! Back off my fucking stage!" He then struck Hoffman with his guitar, sending the interloper tumbling offstage, to the approving roar of the crowd. Townshend later said that while he actually agreed with Hoffman on Sinclair's imprisonment, he would have knocked him offstage regardless of the content of his message, given that Hoffman had violated the "sanctity of the stage," i.e., the right of the band to perform uninterrupted by distractions not relevant to the actual show. The incident happened during a camera change and was not captured on film. However, 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:
In "Woodstock Nation", Hoffman mentions the incident, and says he was on a bad LSD trip at the time.

Underground

In 1971, Hoffman published ''Steal This Book'', which advised the readers on how to live basically for free. Many of his readers followed Hoffman's advice and stole the book, leading many bookstores to refuse to carry it. He also was the author of many other books like To America With Love and many other (less famous). ^[8]
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 helped coordinate an environmental campaign to preserve the St. Lawrence River (Save the River organization).^[9] 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. During his time on the run, he was also the "travel" columnist for Crawdaddy! magazine.

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. [1]
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 covert, 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.

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.^[10] 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.

Suicide

After being found not guilty, 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 suicide on April 12 1989. At the time of his death, Hoffman was at the height of a renewed public visibility, one of the few '60s 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'' 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, one 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: David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin, Hoffman's co-founder of the Yippies, by then a businessman.
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...."
The ''Times'' report continued:

Bill Walton, the radical Celtic of basketball renown, told of a puckish Abbie, then underground evading a cocaine charge in the '70s, 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 52 at the time of his death, which was caused by swallowing 150 Phenobarbital pills. He had been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder in 1980^[11]; while he had recently changed treatment medications, he had claimed in public to have been upset about his elderly mother, Florence's, cancer diagnosis (Jezer, 1993). 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.
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.^[12]
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 died only three days before he was scheduled to celebrate the second anniversary of his courtroom victory, 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''.

Bibliography

Nonfiction

★ ''Fuck the System'' (1967) {A guidebook to accessing free food, activities, legal aid, etc., in New York City} ^[13]

★ ''Revolution For the Hell of It'' (1968) {Written under the pseudonym "Free"}; reprint edition (2005) ISBN 1-56025-690-7

★ ''Woodstock Nation'' (1969)

★ '' (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)

★ '' 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)

Posthumous nonfiction

★ ''the Best of Abbie Hoffman'' (1990)

★ ''Steal This Book: 25th Anniversary Edition'' (1996)

★ '' (with Jonathan Silvers) (1999)

★ '' (2000)

★ '' with Anita Hoffman (second edition) (2000)

★ ''Steal This Book'' (Four Walls Eight Windows edition) (2002)

Discography

Spoken Word

★ ''Wake Up, America!'' Big Toe Records (1970) http://www.ubu.com/sound/hoffman.html

Media

Interviews

★ Viking Youth Power Hour interview Abbie during the Chicago 7 trials in Chicago 1969

★ Ken Jordan interview from January 1989, published in Reality Sandwich, May 2007

Appearances

★ Featured appearance in the satirical documentary ''Lord of the Universe'', which won a DuPont-Columbia Award (1974). Video preview.

★ ''My Name Is Abbie'', Documentary, Mystic Fire Video, (1998), ISBN 1-56176-381-0

★ ''Growing Up in America'', Documentary on 1960s radicals in the USA, First Run Features, ISBN 6-30456-477-5

References and footnotes

1. Abbie Hoffman: Revolution For the Hell of It (1968) {Written under the pseudonym "Free"}; reprint edition (2005) ISBN 1-56025-690-7
2. Abbie Hoffman Dies New York Times
3. Abbie Hoffman NNDB
4. Abbie Hoffman
5. 1967: Hippies Toss Dollar Bills onto NYSE Floor 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
6. Excerpts from his testimony at the trial can be found here.
7. 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.
8. Brate, Adam. Technomanifestos, chapter 8. Texere, June 2002.
9. http://www.savetheriver.org/news/
10. Children of the revolution The Guardian
11. 'Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel', , Marty, Jezer, Rutgers University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-8135-2017-7 p. xvii: "Abbie was diagnosed in 1980 as having bipolar disorder, more commonly known as manic depression." ISBN 0-8135-2017-7"
12. Abbie Hoffman Committed Suicide Using Barbiturates, Autopsy Shows New York Times
13. Fuck The System. (Online edition of the original)

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