HOFFMAN, ABBIE

(1936-1989), cultural revolutionary. Hoffman's life is inextricably linked with the history of contemporary American radicalism. A civil rights, antiwar, and ecology organizer, he merged his own identity with social movements and used the mass media to publicize himself and his causes. The struggle against segregation signaled his initiation into politics, and he felt abandoned when the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, of which he had been a part, asked whites to leave. Hoffman, however, instinctively recognized the potential in the emerging hippie phenomenon of the sixties and quickly made a niche for himself in the counterculture. He encouraged youth to rebel against their parents, reject the Protestant work ethic, and experiment with drugs and sex. Utopian and apocalyptic, profoundly serious and intensely funny, he forged a revolutionary style all his own. At the New York Stock Exchange, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Pentagon, he staged theatrical protests that helped dismantle the paralyzing mind-set of the cold war. He was banned from speaking in a dozen states and censored by network television, but he thrived on his notoriety.

Influenced by Herbert Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan, he challenged traditional Marxism and argued that generational, not class, conflict propelled social change, and that changing America meant transforming the mass production of images, not manufactured goods. These notions were tested when he and the yippies disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Charged and tried for conspiracy to riot, he and Jerry Rubin rejected traditional legal strategies and made the trial a cultural happening that polarized the nation and generated rebellion on campuses.

Like other radicals, Hoffman lost his sense of direction when the movement fragmented. Always looking for a hustle, he ventured into the realm of crime. Arrested during a cocaine deal, he went underground and in the guise of a modern outlaw taunted the fbi. As a fugitive Hoffman experienced an identity crisis, but he found a road back to political activity under the alias of Barry Freed, a grass-roots organizer for ecology. Fighting to save the St. Lawrence River, he saved himself and arranged a deal with authorities. He waged cultural warfare against Ronald Reagan's foreign and domestic policies but never regained the stature he had achieved during the sixties. The conservative climate exasperated him, and he fought rearguard actions, insisting that neither he nor his generation had compromised their values.

Unable to reconcile his buoyant persona with his lonely private life, and unable to cope with manic depression—a medical condition he kept secret—he committed suicide. His tragic death revealed his dark side, his divided self, and a moral confusion about his individual responsibility to social movements. At his best Hoffman brought to the American Left a riotous sense of humor, an irreverent iconoclasm, and a brilliant sense of strategy. In a world of competing media celebrities he had crafted himself into an original pop icon of revolution.

Daniel Simon and Abbie Hoffman, eds., The Best of Abbie Hoffman (1990).

Jonah Raskin

See also Chicago Seven; New Left; Radicalism; Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.