Steal
This Archive? Abbie Hoffman’s Papers Become a College Collection
Thousands
of letters and other artifacts from the life of the radical prankster of the
counterculture are sold to the University of Texas at Austin.
By
Joseph Berger
Oct.
27, 2019
There
are notes and letters from other icons of the 1960s. Cards from John and Yoko.
A letter from Allen Ginsberg, the poet, offering to help him raise defense
money. A plea by Norman Mailer to the governor of New York, seeking executive leniency
on his behalf.
The
papers of Abbie Hoffman, the puckish activist who gained a national reputation
as a radical hippie, make clear the extent to which the tumult of that era
regularly swirled around him: the showering of the New York Stock Exchange with
dollar bills, the nomination of a pig as a presidential candidate, the
turbulent demonstrations that rattled the 1968 Democratic National Convention
in Chicago.
Now
the trove of letters, manuscripts, photographs, F.B.I. surveillance reports,
Christmas cards and thousands of other papers that memorialize Mr. Hoffman and
his contentious role in American history have been sold to the University of
Texas at Austin by Johanna Hoffman Lawrenson, his third wife and companion for
the last 15 years of his life.
They
will be housed at the university’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History
where some of the items are to go on display Tuesday after a ceremony to mark
the acquisition. Later, after much sorting and cataloging, the rest of the
collection will become available to scholars and students.
“Abbie
Hoffman has not gotten his proper due historically,” Don Carleton, executive
director of the Briscoe Center, said. “He really was a pathbreaking guy in
terms of the street theater approach to gain attention for the causes he
advocated, particularly the anti-Vietnam War movement.”
Mr.
Hoffman, whose infamously anarchic work, “Steal This Book,” included tips on
how to shoplift, might be amused to have his papers end up in so solemn a
setting as a university research library. He was arguably the most emblematic
figure of the youthful protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a man who
helped coin the term “Yippie” and co-founded the group that took that name. But
he was always more of a comic provocateur than an ideologue, specializing in
thumbing his nose at institutions and formalities in zany ways.
In
1970, for example, when he and the other so-called Chicago Seven were being
tried on charges of conspiring to disrupt the 1968 convention, he taunted the
judge, Julius C. Hoffman, for having the same last name by calling him his
“illegitimate father.”
The
Briscoe Center, which has major collections of papers from figures in the civil
rights and antiwar movements, paid Mr. Hoffman’s widow $300,000 for the
collection. The payment was covered by a donor’s gift.
In
an interview, Ms. Lawrenson, a photographer and former fashion model, said she
had been living in a one-room Manhattan apartment with 75 boxes of Mr.
Hoffman’s papers for 30 years, and felt it was time to give them a useful home.
“I’m
hoping the archive will help keep his spirit and his radical legacy alive and
serve as a great resource for scholars studying 20th-century activism and
organizing,” she said. “Abbie dedicated his life to social change, to creating
a more egalitarian, compassionate world.”
Another
archive of Abbie Hoffman’s letters and family photographs was collected by his
younger brother Jack, who donated it about 10 years ago to the University of
Connecticut’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.
The
trial of the Chicago Seven ended with Mr. Hoffman’s conviction for crossing
state lines with intent to riot, but an appellate court overturned that
decision in 1973. The same year, he was arrested on cocaine trafficking
charges, later jumped bail and spent years as a fugitive, living with Ms.
Lawrenson partly in Europe and partly in a remote hamlet in upstate New York,
where, under the name Barry Freed, he campaigned to protect the St. Lawrence
River.
He
surfaced in 1980 with typical Hoffman panache, appearing for a Barbara Walters
interview on national television. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge in the
cocaine case and served a four-month sentence. (Mr. Mailer later wrote Gov.
Hugh Carey seeking a pardon for this offense.) Through most of the 1980s, he
earned a living lecturing at colleges, focusing his activism on environmental
issues. Mr. Hoffman, who had long experienced bouts of depression, was found
dead at 52 in 1989 at his home in New Hope, Pa., an apparent suicide.
Some
of the artifacts in the collection display other sides of Mr. Hoffman’s protean
personality: a sober term paper he wrote at Brandeis University about “Internal
Group Conflict in the Jewish Community of Worcester, Massachusetts,” for which
he received an A grade; a stub of a $150 ticket to Madison Square Garden for
the 1971 so- called Fight of the Century between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali;
several letters defending his authorship of “Steal This Book” in the face of
charges from an East Village buddy that he had stolen the text from him.
One
note in the collection suggests that despite Mr. Hoffman’s reputation as an
anti-establishment prankster, the seriousness of his intentions was apparent to
a broader audience. Former President Jimmy Carter wrote him in 1988, two years
after his daughter, Amy, had been arrested with Mr. Hoffman at a protest over
campus recruiting by the C.I.A., and discussed the delays in securing the
release of American hostages in Iran, who were notably held until the day of
Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. In the note, the former president
absolved Mr. Hoffman of any responsibility for the arrest of his daughter, whom
he referred to as a “strong and independent” woman. All the protesters were
acquitted in 1987.
Robert
H. Abzug, a professor of history and American studies at the University of
Texas, said he was particularly intrigued by documents that outlined the
changes in Mr. Hoffman during his years at Brandeis.
He
came to the school as a relatively conventional student, wearing a jacket and
tie, winning spots on the tennis and wrestling teams, even becoming the tennis
team’s captain. But two unconventional professors, Dr. Abzug said, exerted
significant influence: Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist who advocated social
revolutions, and Abraham Maslow, a psychologist who argued that fostering human
growth and self-actualization was more important than repairing neuroses.
Drawing
on their ideas during rising ferment among the young, Mr. Hoffman felt
liberated and was able to “unleash his personality” and lead “the theatrics
ring of the New Left,” Dr. Abzug said. An example in the collection is a poster
featured during the 1968 Democratic convention protests picturing Mr. Hoffman
with an obscenity scrawled on his forehead and the caption: “The system is
falling apart by itself. We’re just here to give it a little push.”
Mr.
Hoffman’s style, Dr. Abzug said, entertained young people drawn to the
movements of the 1960s and helped break down a stodgy culture as quickly as the
ideas of more serious-minded radicals like Tom Hayden.
“It
would have been a different era without the yeast of the Yippies and his making
fun of a culture that was about to be challenged,” Dr. Abzug said.