Abbie Hoffman

Based on Wikipedia: Abbie Hoffman

The Man Who Tried to Levitate the Pentagon

In October 1967, a man stood outside the United States Department of Defense headquarters and announced, with complete sincerity, that he would use psychic energy to lift the entire building off the ground. He claimed it would turn orange, begin to vibrate, and when it did, the Vietnam War would end. The poet Allen Ginsberg led Tibetan chants to assist him.

The Pentagon did not levitate.

But Abbie Hoffman had made his point. The absurdity of trying to levitate a building was, in his view, no more absurd than the absurdity of the war itself. This was his genius and his method: use theater, comedy, and spectacle to expose what he saw as the deeper madness of American society. He wasn't trying to be taken seriously. He was trying to make you question what you took seriously.

A Troublemaker from the Start

Abbot Howard Hoffman was born on November 30, 1936, in Worcester, Massachusetts, into a middle-class Jewish family. His mother, Florence, came from Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Austria. His father, John, was born in Russia shortly after the failed revolution of 1905—that's the one before the famous 1917 revolution that brought the Communists to power. John rarely discussed his origins. During the Cold War era of Hoffman's childhood, having Russian roots wasn't something you advertised.

The family name itself carried a hidden history. According to family accounts, the Hoffmans were originally named Shapoznikoff. They were lower-middle-class Jewish shopkeepers in czarist Russia, and to escape persecution, a relative named Jacob allegedly obtained or assumed the identity of a German named Hoffman to emigrate to America. He traveled an extraordinary route—through Siberia, then Japan, then to California—before eventually settling in New York and helping other family members follow.

Young Abbie didn't need to learn rebellion from books. He came by it naturally.

During his school years, he earned a reputation as a troublemaker: starting fights, playing pranks, vandalizing school property, and addressing teachers by their first names—a shocking breach of protocol in 1950s America. In his second year at Classical High School in Worcester, he was expelled entirely. The incident that sealed his fate? He wrote a paper declaring that God could not possibly exist because, if He did, there wouldn't be any suffering in the world.

His teacher ripped up the paper and called him "a Communist punk."

Hoffman jumped on the teacher and started fighting him until he was restrained and removed from the school.

He was seventeen years old.

The Education of a Revolutionary

After his expulsion, Hoffman attended Worcester Academy, a private preparatory school, and graduated in 1955. He then enrolled at Brandeis University, a young institution that had only been founded seven years earlier. There, he studied under two professors who would shape his thinking in profound ways.

The first was Abraham Maslow, the psychologist who developed the famous "hierarchy of needs"—the theory that humans must satisfy basic needs like food and safety before they can pursue higher needs like love, esteem, and what Maslow called "self-actualization," the realization of one's full potential. Maslow is often considered the father of humanistic psychology, the school of thought that emphasizes individual potential and the importance of personal growth.

The second was Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist philosopher who argued that modern capitalist society creates false needs through advertising and mass media, trapping people in a comfortable unfreedom. Marcuse believed that true liberation required breaking free from these manufactured desires. Hoffman would later cite Marcuse's influence constantly during his activism, and you can see Marcuse's fingerprints all over Hoffman's theatrical protests—the idea that the system's absurdity needed to be exposed through dramatic, consciousness-raising spectacle.

An interesting footnote: Hoffman was also on the Brandeis tennis team, coached by Bud Collins, who would go on to become one of the most famous tennis journalists in history, covering Wimbledon and the major championships for decades.

Hoffman graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1959 and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue a master's degree. He completed coursework but apparently never finished the degree. In May 1960, he married his girlfriend Sheila Karklin.

From Civil Rights to Guerrilla Theater

Before Hoffman became famous for his antics, he was a serious organizer. He worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as S.N.C.C. (pronounced "snick"), one of the major organizations of the civil rights movement. He also organized Liberty House, which sold items to support civil rights workers in the South.

But the Vietnam War changed his focus, and he began developing a new approach to activism—one that used deliberate comedy and theatrical tactics to capture attention and make political points.

In late 1966, Hoffman traveled to San Francisco and met with a radical community-action group called the Diggers. The Diggers were anarchist-minded activists who believed in creating what they called "free stores" and "free food" programs—giving things away to build alternative economic structures outside capitalism. They operated anonymously, rejecting the idea of leaders or spokespeople.

Hoffman studied their ideology carefully.

Then he returned to New York and published a book about it, with his picture on the cover.

The Diggers were furious. Peter Coyote, who co-founded the group and later became a well-known actor, explained the problem: "We explained everything to those guys, and they violated everything we taught them. Abbie went back, and the first thing he did was publish a book, with his picture on it, that blew the hustle of every poor person on the Lower East Side by describing every free scam then current in New York, which were then sucked dry by disaffected kids from Scarsdale."

In other words, Hoffman exposed all the ways poor people were gaming the system to survive, and middle-class kids from the suburbs swooped in and used up those resources. This tension—between Hoffman's hunger for publicity and the damage that publicity could cause—would follow him throughout his career.

Raining Money on Wall Street

On August 24, 1967, Hoffman led a group of activists to the gallery above the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The gallery was open to visitors in those days; you could stand above the traders and watch them work.

Hoffman and his group threw fistfuls of money—some real, some fake—down onto the trading floor below.

Accounts vary on exactly how much money they threw. Some say as little as thirty dollars, others as much as three hundred. But the amount wasn't the point. What mattered was the reaction.

Some traders booed.

Others scrambled frantically to grab the falling bills.

Hoffman's point was that he was just making literal what the traders did metaphorically every day. They worshipped money. He was showing them worshipping money.

"We didn't call the press," Hoffman later wrote. "At that time we really had no notion of anything called a media event." But the press came anyway, and by evening the story had been reported around the world.

The Stock Exchange responded by spending twenty thousand dollars—roughly equivalent to one hundred ninety thousand dollars today—to enclose the gallery with bulletproof glass. They were afraid of the next group of activists who might throw something more dangerous than dollar bills.

The Youth International Party

In 1967, Hoffman co-founded what he called the Youth International Party. The name was deliberately chosen so that members could be called "Yippies"—a playful counterpart to the "Hippies" of the counterculture. While hippies preached dropping out of society, Yippies believed in engaging with it through pranks, protests, and media manipulation.

The Yippies weren't really a political party in any conventional sense. They had no membership rolls, no dues, no platform votes. They were more of a brand, a sensibility, a way of doing activism that combined political protest with absurdist humor. Hoffman and his co-founder Jerry Rubin understood something about the emerging television age: outrageous spectacle would get covered, and coverage was power.

Chicago, 1968

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was one of the most turbulent political events in American history. The Vietnam War was raging. President Lyndon Johnson had declined to run for re-election. Senator Robert Kennedy, who might have won the nomination, had been assassinated just two months earlier. The Democratic Party was deeply divided between anti-war activists and the party establishment.

Hoffman, Rubin, and other activists organized protests outside the convention. The Chicago police, under orders from Mayor Richard Daley, responded with extraordinary violence. Television cameras captured police beating protesters, reporters, and bystanders. An official investigation later called it a "police riot."

In the aftermath, the federal government charged eight activists—later reduced to seven when Bobby Seale's trial was separated—with conspiracy and crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot. This was done under provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, in a deeply ironic use of legislation designed to protect civil rights workers.

The Chicago Seven, as they became known, included Hoffman, Rubin, Tom Hayden (who would later marry Jane Fonda), David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner. The trial became a circus.

The Trial as Theater

The trial was presided over by Judge Julius Hoffman—no relation to Abbie, though Abbie joked about the shared name throughout the proceedings. Judge Hoffman was seventy-four years old, a product of an earlier era, and utterly unprepared for what the defendants had planned.

They treated the courtroom as a stage.

One day, Hoffman and Rubin appeared in court wearing judicial robes. On another occasion, when Hoffman was sworn in as a witness, he raised his hand giving the middle finger. When asked in what state he resided, he replied that he lived in "the state of mind of my brothers and sisters."

Hoffman told Judge Hoffman, in Yiddish-inflected English, that he was "a shande fur de goyim"—a disgrace in front of the gentiles—and added, "You would have served Hitler better." He later declared that "your idea of justice is the only obscenity in the room."

Other defendants joined in. Both Davis and Rubin told the judge directly, "This court is bullshit."

The defense called "cultural witnesses" including the poet Allen Ginsberg, folk singers Phil Ochs and Arlo Guthrie, singer Judy Collins, and novelist Norman Mailer. Hoffman closed the trial with a speech quoting Abraham Lincoln, claiming that if Lincoln were alive, he too would have been arrested in Chicago's Lincoln Park.

On February 18, 1970, five of the seven defendants—including Hoffman—were found guilty of intent to incite a riot while crossing state lines. All seven were found not guilty of conspiracy. At sentencing, Hoffman suggested the judge try L.S.D. (lysergic acid diethylamide, the hallucinogenic drug) and offered to set him up with "a dealer he knew in Florida," knowing the judge was headed to Florida for vacation.

Each of the five received five years in prison and a five thousand dollar fine.

But the convictions didn't stick. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned all of them, citing the judge's handling of the trial. The Justice Department declined to retry the case.

Woodstock and the Who

In August 1969, between the convention and the trial, Hoffman attended the Woodstock festival in upstate New York. During the Who's performance, he grabbed a microphone and tried to speak about the imprisonment of John Sinclair, a political activist and founder of the White Panther Party who had received a ten-year sentence for possessing two marijuana cigarettes.

"I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison—" Hoffman began.

Pete Townshend, the Who's guitarist, was adjusting his amplifier between songs. He turned, looked at Hoffman, and shouted, "Fuck off! Fuck off my fucking stage!"

What happened next is disputed. Townshend reportedly ran at Hoffman with his guitar and hit him, though Townshend later denied attacking him. One eyewitness, a reporter for a local newspaper, recalled that Hoffman was actually hit in the back of the head by Townshend's guitar and toppled directly into the pit in front of the stage.

Townshend later said that while he actually agreed with Hoffman about Sinclair's unjust imprisonment, he would have knocked him offstage regardless of his message. Hoffman had violated what Townshend called "the sanctity of the stage"—the right of performers to play without political interruption.

The incident wasn't captured on film because it happened during a camera change, but the audio survives on the Who's box set "Thirty Years of Maximum R&B."

In his book "Woodstock Nation," Hoffman mentions the incident and says he was on a bad L.S.D. trip at the time.

Steal This Book

In 1971, Hoffman published "Steal This Book," a counterculture guide that advised readers on how to live without paying for things. The title was literal—Hoffman encouraged readers to shoplift the book itself—and many did. Bookstores refused to carry it, making distribution difficult.

The book included sections on growing marijuana, making explosives, and various "free" scams—ways to get food, transportation, and shelter without money. It also contained a section called "Free Communication" in which Hoffman encourages activists to take over the stage at rock concerts to use the assembled audience and sound system for political messaging.

Interestingly, even Hoffman acknowledged limits. "Interrupting the concert is frowned upon," he wrote, "since it is only spitting in the faces of people you are trying to reach." This from the man Pete Townshend had just chased off the stage at Woodstock.

Underground

In August 1973, Hoffman was arrested for intent to sell and distribute cocaine. He always maintained that undercover police agents had entrapped him and planted suitcases of cocaine in his office. Whether this was true or not, he faced serious prison time.

In the spring of 1974, Hoffman skipped bail. He underwent cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance and disappeared.

Some believed he had made himself a target. Peter Coyote of the Diggers later reflected: "The F.B.I. couldn't infiltrate us. We did everything anonymously, and we did everything for nothing because we wanted our actions to be authentic. It's the mistake that Abbie Hoffman made. He came out, he studied with us, we taught him everything, and then he went back and wrote a book called Free, and he put his name on it! He set himself up to be a leader of the counterculture, and he was undone by that. Big mistake."

For the next six years, Hoffman lived as a fugitive under the name Barry Freed. He settled in Fineview, New York, a small community near Thousand Island Park on the St. Lawrence River. Remarkably, he didn't hide quietly. Under his assumed identity, he became a respected environmental activist, helping coordinate a campaign to preserve the St. Lawrence River. He even wrote a travel column for Crawdaddy! magazine.

On September 4, 1980, Hoffman surrendered to authorities. That same day, he appeared on a pre-taped episode of ABC's "20/20" in an interview with Barbara Walters—ever the master of publicity, he had arranged media coverage of his own surrender. He received a one-year sentence but was released after four months.

The C.I.A. Trial

In November 1986, Hoffman was arrested along with fourteen others—including Amy Carter, the daughter of former President Jimmy Carter—for trespassing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They had been protesting the Central Intelligence Agency's recruitment on campus.

The trial became something extraordinary. The university had a policy limiting campus recruitment to law-abiding organizations. The defense argued that the C.I.A. was not a law-abiding organization.

The judge allowed expert witnesses to testify about C.I.A. activities. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark took the stand. So did a former C.I.A. agent who testified about the agency's illegal war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, conducted in violation of the Boland Amendment—a law passed by Congress specifically to prohibit such operations.

Over three days, more than a dozen defense witnesses—including Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, and Édgar Chamorro, a former leader of the Contra rebels—described the C.I.A.'s role in what they characterized as two decades of covert, illegal, and violent activities.

Hoffman, acting as his own attorney for the closing argument, placed his actions in the tradition of American civil disobedience. He quoted Thomas Paine, the revolutionary pamphleteer whose "Common Sense" had helped inspire 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."

Hoffman concluded: "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, the jury acquitted Hoffman and all the other defendants.

The End

After his acquittal, Hoffman appeared in a cameo role in Oliver Stone's anti-Vietnam War film "Born on the Fourth of July," released in 1989. He essentially played himself—waving a flag on the ramparts of an administration building during a campus protest being tear-gassed and crushed by state troopers. It was a fitting final performance.

But something was wrong.

Despite returning to activism, Hoffman grew frustrated with what he saw as the younger generation's unwillingness to engage. The 1980s were a different era. Ronald Reagan was president. The counterculture had faded. The political energy that had fueled the 1960s seemed exhausted.

Hoffman had also long struggled with bipolar disorder, though this wasn't widely known at the time. The condition, characterized by extreme mood swings between manic highs and depressive lows, can be devastating even with treatment. For someone whose public persona was built on manic energy and theatrical optimism, the depressive episodes must have been particularly cruel.

On April 12, 1989, Abbie Hoffman died by suicide from a phenobarbital overdose at his home in New Hope, Pennsylvania. He was fifty-two years old.

The Impossible Balance

What do we make of Abbie Hoffman?

He was a brilliant tactician who understood how to use media spectacle to advance political causes, anticipating the age of viral content by decades. He was also a self-promoter whose hunger for attention sometimes undermined the movements he claimed to serve.

He was a serious activist who worked in the civil rights movement and fought against what he saw as unjust wars and government overreach. He was also a clown who dressed in judicial robes and offered judges L.S.D.

He believed that laughter could be a weapon against power. He was probably right. But laughter alone couldn't end the Vietnam War, couldn't fix the injustices he saw, couldn't make the Pentagon levitate.

Perhaps his most lasting contribution was proving that protest didn't have to be grim. You could fight for serious causes while refusing to take yourself too seriously. You could mock the powerful by revealing their absurdity. You could, for one afternoon, make the traders on Wall Street scramble for dollar bills and show the world exactly what they worshipped.

The money fluttered down. Some of it was real. Some of it was fake.

In the end, does it matter which was which?