Hoffman, Abbie (1936–1989)

Abbott “Abbie” Hoffman was a cultural revolutionary of the 1960s who used street theater, satire, and media sound bites to ignite American dissent. Hoffman, along [Page 692]with other New Left leaders, oriented the Hippie youth counterculture toward the anti–Vietnam War movement. Hoffman's brilliant tactics turned political events into media extravaganzas. These included disrupting the New York Stock exchange in 1967, levitating the Pentagon in 1967, clashing with police at the Grand Central Station Yip-In in 1968 and at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, and turning the trial of the Chicago Seven in 1969 and 1970 into a countercultural phenomenon. Hoffman, by the early 1970s, had ascended to national recognition. His outrageous acts and wildly charismatic personality both reflected and funded 1960s radicalism.

Hoffman, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, came from a second-generation, well-to-do middle-class Jewish American background. He attended Brandeis University and experienced intellectual and political growth while studying with Abraham Maslow and Herbert Marcuse, both of whom influenced 1960s radicalism. Hoffman first attended a political protest as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. A few years later he joined the civil rights movement. By 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in which Hoffman was involved, asked whites to step down, leaving him disaffected. He moved to New York City's East Village and began helping teenage runaways, thus initiating his career as a hippie organizer.

His experience with runaways led him to argue, counter to Marxism, that generational conflict, rather than class conflict, was the basis of revolution. The youth, who were already rebelling, could be fashioned into revolutionaries. Hoffman and others created the Youth International Party, preached the political efficacy of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll music, and believed that activism was inherently self-fulfilling. Hoffman's participation in the trial of the Chicago Seven is historical. He used the courtroom as a political theater to broadcast messages of free speech, wealth redistribution, revolutionary joy, and generational warfare. His rhetoric, bombastic yet endearing, earned him respect as a speaker, writer, and youth leader. Many of his ideas are outlined in Revolution for the Hell of It of 1968, Woodstock Nation of 1969, and Steal This Book of 1971.

Hoffman's stardom encountered hard times when he was arrested in 1973 on drug charges. Tired of police harassment and fearing a prison sentence, he went underground. Cut off from family, activism, and notoriety, he experienced an identity crisis and struggled with psychotic episodes. In 1980, after resurfacing, he was diagnosed with manic depression. While underground, he stayed active by writing The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman and becoming an environmental activist under the pseudonym Barry Freed. After eluding the FBI for years, Hoffman resurfaced for a primetime network interview. He served a brief prison sentence and then went back to activism. He continued to fight for change despite never attaining his prior celebrity status. Hoffman, unable to cope with his bipolarism, committed suicide on April 12, 1989.