January 30, 2003 HOOVER DIGEST 2003 NO.

1 HOOVER ARCHIVES

The Longshoreman Philosopher

by Tom Bethell Eric Hoffers papers in the Hoover Archives run to many thousands of pages and include journals that have never been published. Hoover media fellow Tom Bethell examines the trove.

In 2000 the Hoover Institution Archives acquired the papers of the American public philosopher Eric Hoffer. The papers fill 75 linear feet of shelf space and contain extensive draft writings and journals by Hoffer, many of them unpublished. They are now open for research. Often known as the longshoreman philosopher, Hoffer worked on the San Francisco waterfront and gained national prominence with his first book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, published in 1951. It was praised by public figures ranging from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Bertrand Russell. Following the events of September 11, some commentators have pointed out that Hoffers analysis of the true believer, although written with the followers of Hitler and Stalin in mi nd, was also applicable to Islamic fundamentalists. The book has since been reprinted. After The True Believer, Hoffer published eight more books. He died in May 1983. His papers were bequeathed to Lillian (Lili) Fabilli Osborne, who met Hoffer for the f irst time shortly before The True Believer was published. Her husband, Selden Osborne, worked on the waterfront and knew Hoffer well. Hoffer became a friend of the family, and Lili persuaded him to keep his papers and rough drafts. She carefully preserved this material after his death and later placed it in the Hoover Archives for safekeeping. Hoffers friend and attorney Cameron Wolfe was essential to me in paving the way to the Hoover Institution Archives, Lili Osborne recalled. She also acknowledged th e encouragement of independent filmmaker John McGreevy and the role of former Hoover archivist Charles Palm, who patiently negotiated with her over a 10-year period. The material was eventually purchased by the Hoover Institution, with support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Lili Osborne, who lives in San Francisco, retains control of the copyright to Hoffers writings.

THE BARE BONES OF A LIFE

Hoffer was born around the turn of the century in New York City. All we know about his early life is what Hoffer chose to tell us. His father was a cabinetmaker. His mother fell downstairs while carrying young Eric in her arms, and two years later she died. When she died he went blind, or partially so. Did the fall cause those things? I dont know, he told a New Yorker writer. Ive been asked these things over and over, and its all the vaguest, the most blurred thing in the world to me. Then, at the age of 15 he recovered his sight and experienced a terrific hunger for the printed word. The year of his birth, usually given as 1902, was almost certainly 1898 (Lili Osborne accepts this as the more likely date). Hoffers parents came to the United States from Alsace, and Hoffer himself spoke with a German accent throughout his life. He never left the United States except for a few hours excursion at the Mexican border. Perhaps the most pro-American public philosopher of his day, Hoffer never had a passport and his birth certificate has not been located. Nothing about his early life has been independently verifiable. His own recollections are the sole source of all that we know. His parents left no documentary trace; he had no brothers or sisters; he attended no school; and the German immigrant Martha Bauer, his surrogate mother after Elsa Hoffers ear ly death, returned to Germany around 1920. I did not cry when they died; they who begot me, nursed me, reared me, Hoffer wrote in an unpublished 1959 note. Though their faces are still alive in my mind I gave them hardly a thought as I wandered up and down the land, dodging hunger and grieving over the world.

Around 1920 Hoffer left for Los Angeles with $300 provided by his late fathers guild of craftsmen. For the next 20 years, Hoffer was either in Los Angeles or on the move in the San Joaquin Valley as a migratory worker. Accumulating library cards along the way (none has survived), he acquired a lifelong reading habit. The only documentary evidence that has survived from that period is his Social Security application, dated June 1937. It attests that Hoffer was then living on Eye Street, Sacramento, and was employed by the U.S. Forest Service in Placerville. His age was given as 38, and his birth date, July 25, 1898. Later in life, even after Hoffer became well known through his appearances on television, no one seems to have come forward claiming to have known him in the earlier part of his life. In one of his last notebooks (unpublished), a ghostly figure does emerge, a migratory worker whose name Hoffer never knew. In the camp, when Hoffer told stories, this man used to listen like the others, but he always seemed unmoved, never joined in the laughter. Hoffer felt his disapproval, and it worried him. Later, when he settled in San Francisco and published books, he bumped into the man on the street. He greeted Eric warmly and said, We are all proud of you. Hoffer was elated and speechless. Then the man said, You are probably a busy man and I must not keep you. They parted, and Hoffer kicked himself for not getting his name and address. After Hoffer moved to San Francisco in 1941, the record of his life becomes fuller, even as it became less varied. Authors, it is said, have bibliographies, not biographies, and this was certainly true of Hoffer. He rarely left the Bay Area in his remaining 42 years. He rented a room on McAllister Street downtown, not far from the San Francisco Public Library, and he stayed there for many years. Then he moved to Clay Street, where he rented another room. It was described by one visitor as a spare, sunless, almos t shabby cubicle, as unrelentingly masculine as the lifelong bachelor who occupies it. Other than the Social Security application, there is no known official record of Hoffers existence before he moved to San Francisco in 1941. A remarkable feature of Ho ffers life is that (accepting the 1898 birth date as correct) he was already 53 years old when The True Believer catapulted him into the public eye. Hoffer signed up as a longshoreman in March 1943. A year earlier he had registered for the draft, at Local Board 96 in San Francisco, and within months was turned down for military service because of a hernia. His selective service card, dated July 1943, shows that he was classified 4A. It was the draft, the war, and the consequent labor shortage on the docks that gave Hoffer the opportunity to join the Longshoremens Union at the age of 45. In the 1940s he lost his thumb in a waterfront accident and was in the hospital for months while it was repaired with grafts from his body. Hoffer worked on the docks for almost the next quarter-century. Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, published in 1969, describes that milieu in diary form. But the unpublished journals and notebooks in the Hoover Archives provide a fuller account, with vignettes, descriptions of conversations

with longshoremen, and thoughts on the union president, Harry Bridges. Hoffers work routine varied, but he counted it one of the great benefits of the union that longshoremen could work when they wanted. His pay fluctuated accordingly. (In 1953, he earned $4,110 on the waterfront and $1,095 in royalties from Harper & Brothers.) By 1956 he was reporting to work three or four times a week, earning more than $5,000 that year as a longshoreman. A 1956 profile in Look identified Hoffer as Ikes Favorite Author. Beginning in 1963, James Day of KQED in San Francisco interviewed Hoffer for a 12-part series on public television; Eric Sevareid followed for CBS two years later. On CBS, Hoffer was full of praise for Lyndon B. Johnson, who then appointed him to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. (Video copies of the KQED and CBS interviews, and the working papers of the presidential commission, are available in the Hoover Archives.) In 1969, Mayor Joseph Alioto appointed Hoffer to the San Francisco Arts Commission. But the San Francisco literary establishment never warmed to Hoffer because he had praised America extravagantly, he told a journalist toward the end of his life. Finally, in November 1971, Hoffer moved to an efficiency apartment in a modern building, with a doorman, on Davis Place. A lifelong smoker, he suffered from emphysema. In 1977 he dumped pipes, tobacco, cigarsmore than $50 worth. The apartment overlooked the docks where he had worked. And there he died. In his last notebook, written in 1981, he recorded: Now and then it moves me to realize that in my last days I am living on the 17th floor of the Golden Gateway, a luxurious apartment building which occupies the site of the first Longshoremens Union hall from which I was dispatched 40 years agoa dreary wet building situated in a typical gutter.

THE WRITER AND HIS PAPERS

Hoffers contact with the publishing world probably began in 1938, when he read an issue of Common Ground, a magazine then seeking to interpret America to immigrants. Hoffer put together his notes in the form of a long letter to the editor, Louis Adamic. In the Hoover Archives there is a 30-page article entitled Tramps and Pioneers, which is probably the article that Hoffer sent. The reply came from Adamics assistant, Margaret Anderson, who said they could not publish it. But she forwarded it to an editor at the publishing house Harper & Brothers. The editor there, Eugene Saxon, suggested to Hoffer that he write his autobiography and submit that. But Hoffer said he wasnt interested in personal writing. There his literary career might have ended but for continued encouragement from Margaret Anderson. Eventually he sent the longhand manuscript of The True Believer to her, and she typed it and sent it to Harper & Brothers. (Three holograph drafts of The True Believer are in the Archives.)

One editor at Harper & Brothers, Evan Thomas, the son of Norman Thomas, considered the book an extremely cynical work and opposed publication. But another, John Fischer, found it an important piece of original thinking and I very much hope we can work out a contract. Published in March 1951, the book was dedicated to Margaret Anderson, without whose goading finger which reached me across a continent, this book would not have been written. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that Mr. Hoffer flings dogmatic judgments in all directions. . . . He also tosses off maxims and aphorisms with the aplomb of La Rochefoucauld himself. One such aphorism, cited then and more recently, summarizes the thesis of The True Believer: Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. In a 1941 letter to Anderson, Hoffer had written: My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Towns are too distracting. In 1949, he wrote to Anderson that, by working [as a longshoreman] only Saturday and Sunday (18 hours at pay and a half) I earn 4050 dollars a week. This to me is rolling in dough. I have no expensive tastes in food, clothing or pleasure. Above all, I have no taste for property. (Letters fr om Anderson to Hoffer are in the Hoover Archives, but their full correspondence has not yet been located. The quotations above appeared in the New Yorker in 1951.) When not on the waterfront, Hoffer would take a regular three-mile walk in Golden Gate Park toward the Pacific Ocean, working out ideas in his head and writing down the completed thoughts in his notebooks. For perhaps 30 years, Hoffer took the same walk, returning to the center of the city by bus. The words, the ideas, come to me in the park, he said in a 1967 interview. I shape them in my head there, and I write them in my notebook. Blind people [his sight had returned in adolescence] write full sentences in their head. Sentences they can see. I still do. But 10 years later, when he was approaching 80, he wrote: In the past I could carry a train of thought in my head for days, formulating and revising, without writing down a word until the thinking was done. At present I cannot write without pen in hand. . . . The old must break with the past and learn anew. The series of notebooks that Hoffer accumulated is perhaps the most important part of the Hoover collection, and of his unpublished writing. There are more than 130 such notebooks, dated from 1949 to 1977. Most of the material is unpublished, although Hoffer reviewed what he had written and mined it for works in progress. A good many of the thoughts and observations included in this large body of work were used in Hoffers later books and articles. But there is also much that is new. Extra cting the latter from so large a manuscript would be a considerable editorial task, but a major new work by Hoffer could result. The early notebooks show that he was at first contemplating a second volume of The True Believer. Of particular interest, in light of subsequent developments, are his reflections on Jews, Arab history, and developments in the Middle East. Hoffer was strongly pro-Israel and was more interested in the Jews and in their influence on history than his published work indicates. Four entries from these notebooks will give the reader a flavor: You must read more about early Islam. The Muslim fanaticism was perhaps of a different nature from Christian fanaticism. The conversion to Islam was altogether different from the conversion to Christianity. (1950) The Muslim sea of open mouths does not roar hatred but clamors for pride. [In Iran], Mossadeghs defiance of the world is manna and ambrosia to souls starved for pride. (1952) The central fact is that the Arabs do not want peace proposals. They dont want concessions. They want Israel destroyed. (1977) Sadats assassination made many things clear. The almost unemotional reaction of the Egyptian masses, so unlike that at the death of Nasser, suggested that the Arabs are affected more deeply by the pride of Arabism cultivated by Nasser than by the Egyptian nationalism and idealism advanced by Sadat. Anti-

Israeli policies will have a powerful appeal in the Middle East for the balance of the century. It will be suicidal for the Israelis to believe in the possibility of a deep popular change. (1981) Throughout his life, Hoffer would also copy onto file cards quotations from whatever he was reading. The thousands of cards that he accumulated, along with the metal cabinets in which they were stored, represent an attempt to compile the wisdom of the ages in aphoristic form, and they show remarkable energy, self-confidence, and ambition. Looking at them now, one can only marvel that the man who so painstakingly copied out these quotations also worked as a longshoreman. Most of us never get around to reading half the books that Hoffer read, let along stopping in midpage to record the passages that interest us. Shortly before he retired from the waterfront, Hoffer became an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was not looking forward to retirement, and his old friend Selden Osborne helped him out, contacting Norman Jacobson of the political science department. Jacobson arranged for Hoffer to visit campus once a week (in an office at the top of Barrow Hall). Often he would take a handful of his index cards with him and discuss the quotations with the students who showed up. Toward the end of his life Hoffer returned to these quotations and assembled a collection of them, along with his own response or comment. Eventually a manuscript was completed and typed in a large font, to accommodate Hoffers failing eyesight. Titled Quotations and Comments, it consists of 209 pages. By then Hoffer was struggling to write, Lili Osborne notes on an attached sheet, and he was losing confidence in his power of thinking. In the end the manuscript was never submitted for publication. Also worth noting are the manuscripts of early fiction, notably Four Years in Hanks Young Life. The typed manuscript (170 pages) suggests that Hoffer considered it for publication, as he never typed. Several other fiction pieces were adapted in somewhat different form for Truth Imagined, Hoffers memoir (published posthumously in 1983). Hoffers fictional work is undated, but it was probably written in the 1930s. It testifies to his powers of observation and imagination and his storytelling abilities. As he was composing Truth Imagined, it was hard for him to breathe, see, think, Lili Osborne wrote in a 1992 note. But little by little he put this precious manuscript together. He returned to his earliest writings, long before The True Believer. . . . When he sent it off to Harpers, he knew it was the end. There are a number of other unpublished manuscripts of magazine-article length, evidently considered by Hoffer as finished material; there are still other articles that were published in magazines but not included in Hoffers books. Particularly worth noting is the complete set of Hoffers newspaper column, Reflections, which he wrote almost every week for two years (19681969) for the Ledger Syndicate.

THE ENIGMATIC PHILOSOPHER

About Eric Hoffer there is an element of mystery that the material in the Hoover Archives never dispels. He appears, with his talent fully developed, in his first work. Nothing is really explained. The roots from which his genius grew remain concealed. Some scraps of information seem more mythical than real (My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck) and suggest a budding Jack Kerouac more than an Eric Hoffertwo writers who could not have been more different. Perhaps in his index cards more than anywhere else we see traces of the struggle, labor, and selfdiscipline that went into his writing. Hoffer was always identified with the honorific philosopher, and he was one; but he more resembles the philosophers and prophets of old, especially in the high valuation that he always placed on his own independence. He saw himself as one who was free to tell the truth without fear of patron, publisher, department head, or tenure committee. My first book was also my best, and the first thing published, he wrote at the end of his life. I never belonged to a circle or clique. I did not know I was writing a book until it was written. When my first book was published, there was no one near me, an acquaintance let alone a friend, to congratulate me. In a comment on his own abilities, a note of self-disparagement turns into an artful critique of professional philosophy. I could never figure outor probably did not take the trouble to figure outwhat the great philosophical problems are about, he wrote in 1977. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff [and] make a noble living out of it. Above all, Hoffer was a stylist. Perhaps this extended to his dress, with his cloth cap in place and his dark green Filsons jacket, with its pockets galore suitable for the pen and notebooks that he always carried. In print, he was original and lucid, the substance of his argument always given weight by the force of his style. Always self-aware, he recognized this himself. In a late notebook (1977) he wrote: "Practically all artists and writers are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I am going to

"Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Remembered: Guru of the 1950s60s."

Understanding Revolutionary Mass Movements
"Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Remembered: Guru of the 1950s-60s." By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net If you've never heard of Eric Hoffer, you are in for a surprise. Hoffer was rare. He was a laboring man and self-taught philosopher; a Los Angeles skid row tramp who thought and wrote books; a California migrant fruit picker who wrote aphorisms, pithy sayings, with insights into events and trends of our time. He was a San Francisco longshoreman who wrote The True Believer, a best selling analysis of mass movements; a bold man on President Lyndon Johnson's National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, who told African Americans: stop crying about prejudice and pull yourselves and your people out of the ghetto, out of the gutter. He was a passionate man who electrified viewers when interviewed by James Day on San Francisco's education TV station KQED and by Eric Sevareid on CBS TV. Phone calls praising him lit up CBS affiliate switchboards all over the country. Hoffer was rare indeed. His heyday was the 1950s and '60s. His first book clarified the motives and hatreds of dictators Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, and their true believer followers. But in 1968-69, by criticizing African Americans and by praising President Lyndon Johnson, he lost his liberal following, and was no longer everyone's guru. Still, decades after his death, a reappraisal of his life, books, and ideas will surprise and delight readers. Eric Hoffer was born in the Bronx, New York City, July 26, 1902, the only child of Knut and Elsa Hoffer, Alsatian Germans. His mother, a small woman, carried him often, a big baby, in her arms until he was 5 (1907) when, holding him, she fell down a flight of stairs, leaving him with a permanent cleft in his forehead. Two years later she died. Perhaps from the shock, Eric temporarily lost his eyesight and memory from ages seven to 15 (1909-17). He never went to school, did not learn a trade, and was constantly cared for by Martha Bauer, a Bavarian peasant who came over on the boat with his parents and lived with them. This surrogate mother was big, warm, and loving. Her care, fondling, cooking, and telling him of the clever things he did and said made his eight years of blindness and memory loss a happy time. His father, with whom he spoke little, he later speculated, was the village intellectual and atheist, as well as a carpenter and cabinetmaker, who would say about his small library of books, "There's money in the cupboard." When Eric occasionally cried, his father put him on a table near the cupboard where Eric arranged and rearranged the books by size, thickness, weight, and binding color, an experience he thought later somehow helped him to classify and organize notes and ideas. Before his blindness, he somehow learned to read English and German by age 5, probably with his mother's help. At age 15 (1917) his eyesight and memory returned.

Fearing a return of blindness, he read feverishly, mainly in a nearby secondhand bookstore which had just acquired a large library from an estate auction. F. M. Dostoevsky's The Idiot, which caught his eye, he read and later reread because he remembered his father saying of him during his blindness and memory loss, "What can you do with an idiot child?" Martha Bauer returned to Germany in 1919 when Hoffer was l7. His father died in 1920. That year, with $300 left by his father, he bought a train ticket to Los Angeles, California. He landed on skid row and for the next 10 years (1920-30) washed dishes and did odd jobs. "You might say," he wrote, "I went straight from the nursery to the gutter."1 In the depression (1930-41), along with the Okies and Arkies, he followed the crops as a migrant farm worker; panned for gold around Nevada City near Lake Tahoe, was a stonemason and odd job man, always living near small town libraries where he read voraciously in his spare time. About to pan gold in the mountains in late 1936 and anticipating that he might be snowbound, he went to Lieberman's secondhand bookstore, San Francisco, and paid a dollar for the first thick book he saw with small print and without pictures. It turned out to be The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, the John Florio translation (17th century scholar), which, he later said, reads like Francis Bacon's essays and the King James version of the Bible. "It has," Hoffer said, "sentences with hooks in them." He did get snowbound and wrote, "I read the book through three times. How I loved Montaigne's language. I could taste the way he shaped each sentence, and for the first time in my life it occurred to me that maybe I could write things like that."2 Asked later to explain his luck in finding Montaigne and his hit-or-miss stumbling on writers who influenced his thinking, Hoffer replied by quoting Louis Pasteur's remark, "Chance favors the prepared mind." Hoffer quoted Montaigne to fellow crop pickers up and down California's San Joaquin Valley. When problems or arguments arose, they asked him, "What does Montaigne say about that?" In the early 1930s, resting in a federal camp near El Centro with some 200 other jobless migrant workers, he noticed that over half of the men were maimed or crippled, physically or mentally. For the first time he realized that he belonged to a group of misfits, undesirables, who had taken the path of least resistance, the open road. Yet he and they had intelligence, tolerance, good will, and little viciousness. Why had they not made more of their lives? Crossing a barren desert on foot a few weeks later, the answer came to him. Only a pioneering task, like making the desert bloom, could fire their minds and set them to do the impossible. Tramps as pioneers? Misfits transformed, in the Islamic term, into true believers? It seemed absurd. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced. Many pioneers, he speculated, like the men in the camp, could not hold steady jobs; were drunkards, gamblers, fugitives, and outcasts. "If in the end they shouldered enormous tasks, endured unspeakable hardships, and accomplished the impossible, it was because they had to.... Once they tasted the joy of achievement, they craved for more," he later wrote. Hoffer had found an idea, a working hypothesis, an understanding of who he was, the life he lived, and the temper of his time.3

The media, then full of posturing by Hitler and Mussolini, led Hoffer to see hundreds, thousands, then millions who formed and backed the Nazis, fascists, and communists as misfits and undesirables, joining mass movements to shed their blemished, spoiled, and fouled selves. This insight was the origin of Hoffer's first book, The True Believer, 1951. How did he get it published? In late 1938 he read an issue of Common Ground, a magazine trying to interpret America to the foreign-born and vice versa. Excited about the magazine's point of view, he sent his thoughts about tramps as pioneers in a letter to the editor (Louis Adamic). Associate Editor Margaret Anderson replied. She could not publish his letter, but liked it and had sent it to Eugene Saxon at Harper & Brothers. Saxon suggested that Hoffer write his autobiography. Hoffer declined. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hoffer volunteered for the army, was rejected because of a hernia, and took the hardest job he could find to help the war effort, as a San Francisco longshoreman (1942-67). Thinking while he worked, mainly nights, and jotting down his thoughts during work breaks, days off, and weekends, Hoffer honed and polished The True Believer, mainly during month-long dock strikes in 1946 and 1948. In 1948 he sent his handwritten manuscript to Margaret Anderson with $100 to cover typing. After it was returned and revised, he asked a candy store owner to wrap the manuscript to mail to Harper. The True Believer, 1951, is dedicated to "Margaret Anderson, without whose goading finger which reached me across a continent, this book would not have been written." Just before the 1951 publication of The True Believer, he was befriended by Selden Osborne, a Stanford University graduate with a Master of Arts degree in political science. At Stanford Seldon Osborn had roomed for awhile with Clark Kerr, later president of the University of California. Selden, a longshoreman, yearned for leadership in the longshoreman's union. An invitation to Sunday dinner at the Osbornes was followed by a lasting friendship with Mrs. Lili Osborne and her children, Hoffer's only near permanent family attachment. The True Believer asks what kind of people a mass movement appeals to and why? A mass movement appeals to those people wanting change because they are dissatisfied with themselves. Blaming their condition on forces outside themselves, they think that to change the world around them will cure their own problems. A mass movement thus offers people a new identity, teaches its followers to hate the present, to be ready to die if necessary for a new, unspoiled, beautiful, perfect tomorrow. Mass movements are thus essentially interchangeable. But America was never captured by mass movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism. In uprooting themselves from Europe to America, from the old to a new country, immigrants changed themselves with a new language, new clothes, and new identity. Hoffer then asked himself: who are the potential converts to a mass movement? His answer was that they are misfits, people searching for a cause to give meaning to their lives. They are the newly poor who remember better days, the newly free who lack a close-knit family or community, temporary misfits such as adolescents or the unemployed, permanent misfits with lasting mental and physical defects, or the estranged with unfulfilled dreams of creativity. Included are the inordinately selfish, ambitious, bored, and sinners burdened by deep guilt.

Hoffer saw three kinds of people who start, lead, and consolidate mass movements: first, men of words (whom he later called "Intellectuals") who start a mass movement. Second are men of action who lead the revolutionary phase of the movement and are usually uncreative, frustrated, self-righteous, petty, and rude. Third are practical men of affairs who take over and, if the movement survives, make leading the movement their careers.4 Hoffer's second book, The Passionate State Of Mind, 1955, from his notebooks of the 1930s and '40s, continued to describe the true believer as one who shakes the world. The true believer has a passionate mind which comes from dissatisfaction with one's self. Such a person is usually uncreative and uses his or her energy only to convulse the world. The weak, Hoffer said, often conquer the strong because their very insecurity drives them to unite and to turn their weakness into strength. In times of great change, the weak become pioneers. Hoffer found hope in people's capacity for compassion, pity, and helpfulness.5 While struggling to write his third book on intellectuals and on change, Hoffer had writer's block. To "start the juices flowing again," he kept a diary during 1958-59, published l0 years later, l969, as Working and Thinking on the Waterfront. His editor asked him to remove uncomplimentary entries about African Americans--their laziness, hard drinking, noisiness, and prostitution. Hoffer refused. His diary comments on the unfolding drama in the third world and continued his obsession with intellectuals (that is, men of words). "The vigor and health of a society are determined," not by intellectuals, but "by the quality of the common people...."6 His fourth book, The Ordeal Of Change, 1963, on the philosophy of history, has his most polished essays, is his best book, but has not been as widely read as The True Believer. His ideas include: 1-Change comes first and then evokes revolution; not the other way around. 2-Third world countries resent and hate the U.S. because they desperately want to imitate us, but to them imitation means submission. 3-The greatest problem facing communist regimes is that people are unwilling to work in a controlled economic system. 4-The modern western world discovered and used science effectively because it saw the God it worshipped, Jehovah, as a master craftsman, a machine maker. Early scientists were on a religious quest to find the laws their God had built into His great cosmic machine. Modern science thus had its genesis in imitating God. 5-Distant hope is an opiate, but immediate hope is a stimulant. Upheavals in communist countries occur when hope first rises. 6-Loving oneself in a healthy way is a prerequisite to loving one's fellowman. Thus we treat our neighbors as we treat ourselves. 7-All of man's great inventions and great insights came from play, from playful moods. The wheel, for example, was a child's toy before it was used for a chariot and wagon.

8-When forced out of corporate society, misfits are capable of becoming pioneers and leaders on the frontiers of human experience.7 By the time of The Temper of Our Times, 1967, and largely through Selden Osborne and University of California, Berkeley, political science professor Norman Jacobson, Hoffer became a Senior Research Political Scientist at Berkeley. He held Wednesday afternoon open seminars during 1964-72, at the height of student protests. Not sympathetic with their excesses, he often scoffed at "history made by juveniles." Also, in 1963 and 1964, he gave 12 half-hour interviews on San Francisco's KQED-TV, broadcast nationwide over the National Educational Television Network. They brought much mail, but he was seldom recognized on the street. The message of The Temper of Our Times, 1967, is that a free people must reject all would-be saviors who tell them their humanness is wrong. Other themes of this book include: 1-Forced leisure can cause havoc when a skilled population is condemned to inaction by automation. Automation, Hoffer reflected, might release creative energy to produce a renaissance. Turn the whole society into a school, he said, where everyone learns what he needs to know, at his or her own pace, where learning never ends, and where everyone can reach full potential. 2-African American problems arise, not from lack of opportunity but from lack of pride. While there are no easy solutions, the only hope is for African American leaders to return to the ghetto to help lead a cleanup and building campaign that will give residents a sense of pride. 3-The modern age is the age of the intellectuals, those who are convinced that the masses are incapable of self-rule, that only they and fellow elites know what the masses need. The best defense against elite rule is to raise the intellectual level of everyone so that no elites exist and everyone is an intellectual. 4-Those who urge a return to nature are wrong. The battle between man and nature is the central theme of history. Man became human only when he broke away from the iron rule of nature. Man-made cities offer the best refuge against nature. We must not let our cities become uninhabitable.8 He retired in 1967 after 25 years as a longshoreman (1942-67). He was also interviewed that year on CBS-TV. Hoffer, who had minor literary fame until then, became an instant national celebrity. CBS-TV interviewer Eric Sevaried visited him in San Francisco in May 1967. At the Fairmont Hotel bar, despite an argument, they understood and appreciated each other. After the meeting, Hoffer, nervous about the interview, called the Osbornes to say that everything would be all right. The next morning, Eric Sevareid wrote, we "ran two cameras on him for two and a half hours while he talked, sweated, gulped water, and talked.... I flew back to Washington absolutely certain that we had in those cans the greatest film monologue I had ever had anything to do with in all my years in television." Eric Sevareid threatened his New York bosses with mayhem if they shortened the program or ran it in other than prime time. Of the broadcast on September 19, 1867, repeated on November 14, 1867, Sevareid wrote, "The switchboards at virtually every CBS station carrying the broadcast lit up like a Christmas tree.... Hoffer made millions of confused and troubled Americans feel very much better about their country."9 In the Sevareid interview, Hoffer praised President Lyndon Johnson, then beleaguered with the war in Vietnam. Johnson quoted Hoffer in a speech. Within two weeks of the CBS interview, Hoffer and Johnson were photographed chatting on the White House lawn. A scheduled 5-minute meeting stretched into 55 minutes.

President Johnson was the second U.S. president to admire Hoffer, after President Eisenhower, who handed out copies of The True Believer to friends. When Hoffer heard about it, he said, "It proved to me...that this is the kind of book any child can read."10 His sixth book, First Things, Last Things, 197l, deals with man's creativity, the dangers and potential of leisure, and the significance of cities. Highlights include: 1-"Man's Most Useful Occupation," is playfulness. Man is at his best when he spends time and energy on the superfluous. 2-The first walled cities provided refuge for human debris blown away from communal nomadic societies. Countries made up of villages are backward; those composed of cities are progressive. 3-The passage of modern youth to adulthood is painful. The problem is that young people no longer have to prove their adulthood. One solution is to put every adolescent to work cleaning up cities. 4-Don't give power to intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse. Don't become a permissive society, a chaotic society, which allows young people to teach before they have finished learning.11 His seventh book, Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973, is on the origin and nature of man. Highpoints are: 1-Beware of the dehumanization of man. Don't let untalented, alienated groups gain political power. 2-Help learners become creative people because they alone remain young and continue to grow. Creativity exists in the masses, should be recognized and nurtured because it offsets all the problems posed by troublemakers.12 In 1978 the Public Broadcasting Service-TV presented "Eric Hoffer: The Crowded Life." He was interviewed and the actor Richard Basehart read from his works. In his eighth book, Before the Sabbath, 1979, he credits Jews with creating optimism, fanaticism, and the western mind. He wondered if the nineteenth century was perhaps the West's golden age. Old age, he wrote, can give one a capacity for enjoying the beautiful things of the world without wanting to possess them.13 His last, ninth book was published in 1982, the year before he died: Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer. Back in February 1970, at age 67, tired of being in the public eye, he said he was leaving public life, cutting back on his activities. "No more columns, no more television, no more pictures, no more teaching....I'm going to crawl back into my hole, where I started....I have become a professional scold, and it is not really me." But he remained active.14 His own best epitaph is in his own words: "It is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks."15 Reviewers and pundits called him a "literary stevedore" ( New Yorker, 1951), a "dockside Montaigne" (Time, 1955), an "epigrammist on the waterfront" (Reporter, 1957), a "secular preacher" (Christian Century, 1963), a "philosopher of the misfits" (Time, 1963), a "docker of philosophy" (Life, 1967), and a "blue-collar Plato" (Newsweek, 1967).

Hoffer, like other self-taught people, loved learning and a good sentence. He cherished thinkers and their books that appealed to him. He despised the communist, fascist, and Nazi intellectuals of the 1930s who wrought so much havoc. He feared intellectuals with political ambitions because of their compulsion to dominate. His remedy was mass education. "Educate everyone so that all are intellectuals and no ruling elites can emerge," he said. Mass schooling would also release the great talents Hoffer was convinced existed in common working people. Another way to release talents would be to encourage playfulness. Hoffer was convinced that the playful mood brought with it creativity. Finally, one is fascinated with Hoffer's theme that humans (men and women) are unfinished creatures who must finish themselves; that is, humanize themselves. Nature attains perfection, but people never do. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but humans are perpetually unfinished. Their unfinishedness sets them apart. Unlike animals, human beings have fewer specialized organs, are born without a built-in tool kit. (Hoffer quotes Thomas Hardy: "Man begins when nature ends. Man and nature can never be friends"). A return to nature is a return to brute force. The ascent of humans was an effort to get out from under the iron rule of nature. Only then did man humanize himself, finish himself with technology. In doing so, he becomes a creator, a half god. To be human is to be free, to create. Hoffer wrote in The Ordeal of Change: "Man's only legitimate end in life is to finish God's work, to bring to full growth the capacities and talents in all of us." Want a good read, one that makes you think, shakes you up, one youll remember and quote from? Read Eric Hoffer, a rare guru of his time and anytime, an American original. References 1. Tomkins, Calvin. Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968, p. 10. 2. Ibid., p. 19. 3. Ibid., p. 18. 4. Baker, James T. Eric Hoffer. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982, pp. 71-77. 5. Ibid., pp. 77-81. 6. Ibid., pp. 81-84. 7. Ibid., pp. 84-88. 8. Ibid., pp. 88-91. 9. Tomkins, op. cit., pp. ix-xi. 10. Ibid., p. 55. 11. Baker, op. cit., pp. 91-95. 12. Ibid., pp. 95-98. 13. Ibid., pp. 98-100.

14. New York Times (February 22, 1970). 15. Baker, op. cit., p. 1. Articles by Eric Hoffer. "Automation is Here to Liberate Us," New York Times Magazine (October 24, 1965), pp. 48-49. "The Awakening of Asia," Reporter, 10 (June 22, 1954), pp. 16-17. "Born '63. Graduated '74. Elected '76," New York Times (March 9, 1976). "The Clamor for Instant Happiness," Los Angeles Times (October 20, 1968). "Comments on the Human Condition," Harper's, 233 (November 1966), pp. 90-91. "Fugitives from the Present," Los Angeles Times (April14, 1968). "God and the Machine Age," Reporter 14 (February 23, 1956), p. 36. "Hidden Currents that Guide Our Lives--The Wisdom of Eric Hoffer," Family Weekly (September 24, 1972), pp. 6-7. "How Natural is Human Nature?" Saturday Evening Post, 235 (January or February 13, 1962), pp. 26-27. "I Savor the Joy of Dull Work," Family Weekly (October 17, 1976), pp. 4-5. "The Intellectual and the Masses," Pacific Spectator, 10 (Winter 1956), pp. 6-14. "A Kind Word for Intellectuals," Los Angeles Times (March 24, 1968). "Leisure and the Masses," Parks and Recreation, 4 (March 1969), pp. 31-34. Livesay, Harold (et al., including Eric Hoffer). "Does America Still Exist?" Harper's, 268 (March 1984), p. 43. "Long Live Shame!" New York Times (October 18, 1974). "The Madhouse of Change," Playboy, 15 (December 1968), pp. 165-168. "The Majority Must Act!" Los Angeles Times (July 28, 1968). "Making a Mass Elite," Holiday, 39 (March 1966), pp. 10-14. "Man's Real Habitat: the City," Los Angeles Times (May 19, 1968). "The Negro is Prejudiced Against Himself," New York Times Magazine (November 29, 1964), 27-34. Letters to the Editor (December 13, 1964), pp. 28-29, 108-109. "Our Century of Juveniles," Los Angeles Times (March 31, 1968). "The Passionate State of Mind," Harper's, 209 (December 1954), pp. 61-63. "The Process of Change," Reporter, 10 (March 2, 1954), pp. 34-35. "Reflections," Weekly column. Los Angeles Times (January 1968-February 1970). "Reflections: Intellectuals Cover Hitler to Oswald," Pittsburgh Press (February 23, 1969).

"The Rise and Fall of the Practical Sense," Reporter, 19 (December 11, 1958), pp. 27-28. "The Role of the Undesirables," Harper's (December 1952), pp. 79-84. "Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely,'" New York Time Magazine (April 25, 1971), pp. 24-25+. "Thoughts on the Brotherhood of Man," New York Times Magazine (February 15, 1959), pp. 12-17. "A Time of Juveniles," Harper's, 230 (June 1965), pp. 16-20. "What I Have Learned IV: Strategy for the War with Nature," Saturday Review, 49 (February 5, 1966), pp. 27-29, 73-75. "What We Have Lost," New York Times Magazine (October 20, 1974), pp. 110, 112, 114, 116-117. "Whose Country is America?" New York Times Magazine (November 22, 1970), pp. 30-31, 117-122, 124. Letters to the Editor (December 13, 1970), pp. 34, 79. "Why Captive Peoples Revolt," New York Times Magazine (August 23, 1953), pp. 12-16. "Why Not Disenfranchise the Educated?" Los Angeles Times (August 4, 1968). "A Workingman Looks at the Boss," Harper's, 208 (March 1954), pp. 48-49. Articles about Hoffer. "Awesome Epigrams," Time, 90 (February 9, 1968), p. 60. Baker, James T. "Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983," Contemporary Issues Criticism, Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984, pp. 234-254. "Blue Collar Plato," Newsweek, 69 (January 16, 1967), p. 92 Burdick, E. "Eric Hoffer: Epigrammatist on the Waterfront," Reporter, 16 (February 21, 1957), pp. 41-44. Collier, Peter. "Eric Hoffer: The Wizard of Was," Ramparts, 6, 15 (December 1967), pp. 65-68. Cooper, Stirling M. "True Believers, Mass Movements and Education," Alternatives in American Education, 2, 1-2 (September-December 1971), pp. 1, 12. Crawford, Kenneth. "Passionate Believer," Newsweek, 70 (October 16, 1967), p. 38. Dunphy, Mary Elayne. "Philosopher Finds Great Store of Talent," Seattle Times(October 14, 1968), p. 6. "Eric Hoffer, Secular Preacher," Christian Century, 80 (May 29, 1963), p. 727. "Eric Hoffer: The Crowded Life," The Schedule, Austin, TX (January 1978), p. 8l. Erickson, Stanford. "Hoffer: Longshoreman, Intellectual," Journal of Commerce and Commercial, 375 (January 25, 1988), p. 8A. Ethridge, James M., and Barbara Kopala, eds. "Eric Hoffer," Contemporary Authors: A BiographicalBibliographical Guide to Current Authors and Their Works. Vol. 15. Detroit: Gale Research Co, 1966, pp. 2ll-212. Evans, Walter A. "Work Is the Country's Salvation": Hoffer," Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 14-15, 1968), pp. 1, 6.

Faber, N. "In His Own Words," People, 9 (January 16, 1978), pp. 29-31. Ferguson, Charles W. "Americans Not Everybody Knows: Eric Hoffer," PTA Magazine, 61, 10 (June 1967), pp. 4-7. Fincher, James. "Docker of Philosophy," Life, 62 (March 24, 1067), pp. 35 ff. "From the Waterfront," Time, 90 (November 17, 1967), p. 66. Frome, M. "Eric Hoffer," American Forests (August 1968), pp. 3+. Gould, Jack. "TV: More of Hoffer...." New York Times (January 30, 1969). Hall, Isabelle McCaig. "Hoffer Blows During Talks on Violence," Morgantown (WV) Post (October 24, 1968), p. 9A. Harte, Barbara, and Carolyn Riley, eds. "Eric Hoffer," 200 Contemporary Authors. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1969, pp. 152-153. "Hoffer, Eric." Current Biography, 26 (March 1965), p. 28ff. "Hoffer, Eric." Current Biography Yearbook 1965. New York: H.W.Wilson Co., 1965, pp. 200-203. "Hoffer, Eric," Political Profiles: The Johnson Years. New York: Facts on File, 1976, pp. 278-279. "Ike's Favorite Author," Look, 20 (June 12, 1956), pp. 40-42. "Johnson Pleased by a Philosopher," New York Times (October 8, 1967). Kemble, Patrick. "On Eric Hoffer," Commentary, 48 (November 1969), pp. 79-82. Koerner, James D. Hoffer's America. LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1973. "Literary Stevedore," New Yorker, 27 (April 28, 1951), pp. 20-22. Nightingale, Earl. "A Comment on Jews," Earl Nightingale Our Changing World, #5285. Chicago: Nightingale-Conant Corporation, 1980. Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Revisited: Books and Ideas (A Dialogue)." Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting, Southwestern Philosophy of Education Society , Volume XLI. Edited by Wayne Willis. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University, 1991, pp. 96-107. Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "Eric Hoffer (1902-83): Books and Ideas on School and Society." CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XV, No. 1 (March 1991), Fiche 1 A06. Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Revisited: Books and Ideas (A Dialogue)," abstract in Resources in Education, XXXI, No. 12 (Dec. 1996), p. 152 (ERIC ED 398 138). Petrosko, Joseph M. "The Alchemy of the Soul: A Study of Eric Hoffer's Thoughts on Creativity," Journal of Creative Behavior, 17, 2 (Second Quarter 1983), pp. 131-145. "The Presidency," Time, 90, 15 (October 13, 1967), pp. 25-26. Russell, Charles. "'Just Like Home,' Remarks Hoffer on Seattle Arrival," Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 14, 1968), p. 12. Tomkins, Calvin. "Profiles: Creative Situation," New Yorker, 42 (January 7, 1967), pp. 34-36+.

Wakeman, John, ed. "Eric Hoffer," World Authors 1950-70. New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1975, pp. 654655. Reviews of Eric Hoffer's Books (all published by Harper & Row). The True Believer, 1951. 1-Brinton, Crane. New York Herald Tribune (May 27, 1951), p. 13. 2-Garside, E.B. New York Times (March 18, 1951), p. 10. 3-Krugman, H.E. American Journal of Sociology (November 1951), p. 297. 4-Martin, Neil. Christian Science Monitor (April 26, 1951), p. 11. 5-Newman, J.R. New Republic (December 10, 1951), p. 22. The Passionate State of Mind, 1955: 1-Breit, H. "Workingman," New York Times Book Review (April 1, 1956), p. 8. 2-"Dockside Montaigne," Time (March 14, 1955), p. 114-115. 3-Gill, T.A. Christian Century (June 29, 1955), p. 760. 4-Jackson, J.H. San Francisco Chronicle (March 7, 1955), p. 19. 5-Rovere, R.H. New Yorker (May 21, 1955), p. 137. The Ordeal of Change, 1963: 1-Barrett, William. Atlantic (April l963), p. 151. 2-Barrett, William. Critic (June 1963), p. 80. 3-Christian Century (May 29, 1963), p. 727. 4-"Philosopher of Misfits," Time, 8l, 11 (March 15, 1963), p. 109. 5-Pickrel, Paul. Harpers (April 1963), p. 96. 6-Schroth, R.A. America (April 13, 1963), p. 502. 7-Wills, Gary. "Eric Hoffer's True Beliefs," National Review, 14 (June 18, 1963), pp. 502-504. The Temper of Our Times, 1967. 1-Adams, Phoebe. Atlantic (January 1967), p. 550. 2-Berube, M.R. Commonweal (January 27, 1967), p. 465. 3-Brown, Clayton. Library Journal (December 15, 1966), p. 6101. 4-Featherstone, Joseph. "Hoffer as Historian," New Republic , 156 (June 3, 1967), pp. 30-32. 5-Konvitz, M.R. Saturday Review (April 8, 1967), p. 41. 6-Maddocks, Melvin. Christian Science Monitor (January 5, 1967), p. 7. 7-Oberbeck, S.K. Newsweek (January 16, 1967), pp. 90+.

8-Poore, Charles. New York Times, January 5, 1967. Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, 1969. 1-Friedenberg, E.Z. New York Review of Books (May 8, 1969), p. 1100. 2-Garside, E.B. New Yorker (March 1, 1969), p. 70. 3-MacKenzie, Richard. "Man of Sense," National Review, 21 (May 6, 1969), pp. 445-446. 4-Newfield, Jack. New York Times Book Review (February 26, 1969), p. 3. 5-Picht, D.R. Library Journal (February 1, 1969), p. 553. First Things, Last Things, 1971. 1-Flaherty, Joe. New York Times Book Review (July 25, 197l), pp. 3, 12-13. Truth Imagined, 1983. 1-Publishers Weekly, 224 (October 28,1983), p. 63. 2-Williamson, Chilton, Jr. National Review, 36 (February 24, 1984), p. 58. Obituaries of Eric Hoffer. 1-Bethell, T. "Eric Hoffer, R I P," National Review, 35, 11 (June 10, 1983), p. 668. 2-Current Biography Yearbook, 44 (July 1983), p. 43. 3-Current Biography Yearbook, 83 (1984), pp. 466-467. 4-New York Times Biographical Service, 14 (May 1983), p. 563. 5-Newsweek, 101 (May 30, 1983), p. 102. 6-Publishers Weekly, 223 (June 3, 1983), p. 21. 7-Time, 121 (May 30, 1983), p. 88. 8-Turner, Wallace. "Eric Hoffer, 80, Dockside Scholar," New York Times (May 23, 1983), p. 20. TV Interviews of Eric Hoffer. By Eric Sevareid, New York: Columbia Broadcasting Television Network. 1. "Eric Hoffer: The Passionate State of Mind," September 19, 1967. 2. "The Savage Heart: A Conversation with Eric Hoffer," January 19, 1969. By James Day, San Francisco: National Educational Television. 1. "Ordeal of Change," July 31, 1963. 2. "The Role of the Intellectual," August 6, 1963. 3. "The Role of the Weak," August 13, 1963. 4. "The Nature of Man," August 20, 1963.

5. "Man's Struggle for Uniqueness," August 27, 1963. 6. "From the Cradle to Skid Row," September 3, 1963. 7. "The Growth of a Train of Thought," November 8, 1964. 8. "Talent," November 15, 1964. 9. "Automation," November 22, 1964. 10, "The Mysterious Occident," November 29, 1964. 11. "The New Age," December 6, 1964. 12. "Reading and Writing," December 13, 1964. Doctoral Dissertations about Eric Hoffer. 1-Batty, Paul Wesley. "Eric Hoffer's Theory of Mass Persuasion." Ph.D., University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 1970. 2-Carrier, Henry Nash, III. "Eric Hoffer's Conceptual Approach to the Development of American Democratic Leadership." D.A., University of Mississippi, 1973. 3-Hunter, Nevin Doran. "Drastic Change and Mass Movements: The Theories of Eric Hoffer." Ph.D., University of Washington, 1971. For google.com listing of blogs on: bfparker, Eric Hoffer (1902-83), access: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=bfparker%2C+Eric+Hoffer+%28190283%29+&btnG=Google+Search

Eric Hoffer redux

July 25, 1902 - May 21, 1983

Migrant with a message

Who the hell was Eric Hoffer and why should I care? This is a question you might ask if you were born after1951. Eric Hoffer, migrant worker and longshoreman philosopher wrote a book about mass movements and their true believer adherents. The September11, 2001 radical Islamic attack on the United States, aided by the internet, was instrumental in Hoffer once again gaining name recognition, and of his insights and writings resurfacing in the public conversation. His profiling of the rationale and traits of true believers helps Americans understand the radical Islamic movement and the willingness of true believers to commit suicide in order to kill innocent people. Today much of the West is affected as well as victimized by the most serious threat to global security since the fall of Communism. Radical Islamic fanaticism is focused on establishing a global caliphate governed by Sharia Law, essentially offering citizens an opportunity to be slaves of a totalitarian state. Large crowds

have been protesting in Middle Eastern capitals to get out from under the grip of present Middle Eastern despots, and as Hoffer has suggested, such protests are motivated by hope linked to promises of freedom and equality. Their expectations of democracy and economic prosperity after the revolution are often unrealizable, but even worse, the revolutions energized ideals are in danger of being subverted by Islamist radicals promising an even more oppressive polity. From very humble beginnings Eric Hoffer came to epitomize the intellectual foundation of American individualism. He favored only manual work his entire life: dishwashing, prospecting, railroading, logging, migrant farming, and for twenty-five years day-working as a longshoreman on San Francisco docks. A friend described him as a common laborer who had been accidentally blinded as a child, recovered his eyesight, and with utter dedication educated himself solely by his own efforts. He authored ten books in his 81 years including The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, a work that earned him notoriety and a grateful group of followers.

The true believer

In 1951, the year that The True Believer was published, World War II was a fading memory and Cold War events were becoming part of American life; the invasion of South Korea by Communist North Korea was already adding to the nations list of war casualties after just six years of relative peace. In the Preface to The True Believer, Hoffer immediately alerts readers to his theory equating Communists with Nazis: All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind fate and single-hearted allegiance. Hoffer does not profess that all mass movements are identical, but that they share essential attributes that give them a family likeness, such as drawing their early adherents from the same types of humanity, i.e., appealing to the same types of mind.Hoffer clearly states that his use of the term family likeness is a taxonomic classification and the assumption of common traits is not a judgment that all movements are either all good or all evil. He cautions that his observations and explanations are all theories in the nature of arguments and suggestions. Hoffers case equating Communism with Nazism is grounded in their ethical, moral, and psychological principles. The book came on the scene just when conservatives were working to strengthen an anticommunist mindset among the American people and when the nations non -communist left was scrambling to appear anti-Communist without discrediting the leftist ideas and policies of the New Deal and of the immediate post-World War II period. Hoffers fundamental message was that mass movements recruit members who have probably suffered a personal failure and the movement has given them something outside of themselves, like a holy mission, to believe in and fight for. Then these recruits are manipulated thru their failings, fears, and false hopes to blindly follow the fanciful ambitions of the m ovements leaders. Hoffer also offered the opinion that any Communist (and by argument any Nazi or contemporary terrorist) successes were not brought about by trashing the established order but in understanding the power of preaching hope. He further explained that

true believers holy missions are not limited to Communism and Nazism but include fervent religiosity, socialism and ethnic nationalism. In identifying the human shortcomings of true believers Hoffer alluded to the presence of true believers in Americas past and present enemies. His theory of a common thread in mass movements has endured and todays radical Islamist enemy and its avowed holy war perfectly fit the Hoffer model.

Connect the dots.

In this country the spectacular changes since the Civil War were enacted in an atmosphere charged with the enthusiasm born of fabulous opportunities for self-advancement.Where self-advancement cannot, or is not allowed to, serve as a driving force, other sources of enthusiasm have to be found if momentous changes .. are to be realized and perpetuated. In other words, mass movements become substitutes for freedom generated enthusiam, and with this thought Hoffer affirms faith in the superiority of the American way of life anchored in democracy, capitalism, tolerance, equal opportunity, and individualism. It provides a rationale for continuously strengthening national unity against complete and unrestricted government power that would essentially suppress American citizens' constitutionally protected rights.

With the increasing interactions of a global economy and the incredible advancements in communications, leaders and pseudo-leaders have greater opportunities to influence and direct people to act contrary to their own interests. After more than sixty years The True Believer is still an essential guide to the enduring issues of freedom, individualism, and personal responsibility. Knowledge and understanding are a means to retaining one's individuality in human affairs and are a formidable defense against the deceitful haranguing of demagogues, but also keep in mind Eric Hoffers most quoted adage: Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

ERIC HOFFER (1902-83) REMEMBERED: GURU OF THE 1950S-70S. Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Remembered: Guru of the 1950s-70s. Tags: writer, by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

If you've never heard of Eric Hoffer, you are in for a surprise.

Hoffer was rare: a laboring man and self-taught philosopher; a Los Angeles skid row tramp who thought and wrote books; a California migrant fruit picker who wrote aphorisms, pithy sayings, with insights into events and trends of our time; a San Francisco longshoreman who wrote The True Believer, a best selling analysis of mass movements. He was a bold man on President Lyndon Johnson's National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, who told African Americans: stop crying about prejudice and pull yourselves and your people out of the ghetto, out of the gutter. He was a passionate man who electrified viewers when interviewed by James Day on San Francisco's education TV station KQED and by Eric Sevareid on CBS TV. Phone calls praising him lit up CBS affiliate switchboards all over the country. Hoffer was rare indeed.

His heyday was the 1950s and '60s. His first book clarified the motives and hatreds of dictators Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, and their true believer followers. But in 1968-69, by criticizing Blacks and by praising President Lyndon Johnson, he lost his liberal following, was no longer everyone's guru.

Still, 29 years after his death (1983-2012), a reappraisal of his life, books, and ideas will surprise and delight readers.

Eric Hoffer was born in the Bronx, New York City, July 26, 1902, the only child of Knut and Elsa Hoffer, Alsatian Germans. His mother, a small woman, carried him often, a big baby, in her arms until he was 5 (1907) when, holding him, she fell down a flight of stairs, leaving him with a permanent cleft in his forehead. Two years later she died. Perhaps from the shock, Eric temporarily lost his eyesight and memory from ages seven to 15 (1909-17).

He never went to school, did not learn a trade, and was constantly cared for by Martha Bauer, a Bavarian peasant who came over on the boat with his parents and lived with them. This surrogate mother was big, warm, and loving. Her care, fondling, cooking, and telling him of the clever things he did and said made his eight years of blindness and memory loss a happy time. His father, with whom he spoke little, he later speculated, was the village intellectual and atheist, as well as a carpenter and cabinetmaker, who would say about his small library of books, "There's money in the cupboard." When Eric occasionally cried, his father put him on a table near the cupboard where Eric arranged and rearranged the books by size, thickness, weight, and binding color, an experience he thought later somehow helped him to classify and organize notes and ideas. Before his blindness, he somehow learned to read English and German by age 5, probably with his mother's help. At age 15 (1917) his eyesight and memory returned. Fearing a return of blindness, he read feverishly, mainly in a nearby secondhand bookstore which had just acquired a large library from an estate auction. F. M. Dostoevsky's The Idiot, which caught his eye, he read and later reread because he remembered his father saying of him during his blindness and memory loss, "What can you do with an idiot child?"

Martha Bauer returned to Germany in 1919 when Hoffer was l7. His father died in 1920. That year, with $300 left by his father, he bought a train ticket to Los Angeles, California. He landed on skid row and for the next 10 years (1920-30) washed dishes and did odd jobs. "You might say," he wrote, "I went straight from the nursery to the gutter."1

In the depression (1930-41), along with the Okies and Arkies, he followed the crops as a migrant farm worker; panned for gold around Nevada City near Lake Tahoe, was a stonemason and odd job man, always living near small town libraries where he read voraciously in his spare time.

About to pan gold in the mountains in late 1936 and anticipating that he might be snowbound, he went to Lieberman's secondhand bookstore, San Francisco, and paid a dollar for the first thick book he saw with small print and without pictures. It turned out to be The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, the John Florio translation (17th century scholar), which, he later said, reads like Francis Bacon's essays and the King James version of the Bible. "It has," Hoffer said, "sentences with hooks in them." He did get snowbound and wrote, "I read the book through three times. How I loved Montaigne's language. I could taste the way he shaped each sentence, and for the first time in my life it occurred to me that maybe I could write things like that."2 Asked later to explain his luck in finding Montaigne and his hit-or-miss stumbling on writers who influenced his thinking, Hoffer replied by quoting Louis Pasteur's remark, "Chance favors the prepared mind."

Hoffer quoted Montaigne to fellow crop pickers up and down California's San Joaquin Valley. When problems or arguments arose, they asked him, "What does Montaigne say about that?"

In the early 1930s, resting in a federal camp near El Centro with some 200 other jobless migrant workers, he noticed that over half of the men were maimed or crippled, physically or mentally. For the first time he realized that he belonged to a group of misfits, undesirables, who had taken the path of least resistance, the open road. Yet he and they had intelligence, tolerance, good will, and little viciousness.

Why had they not made more of their lives? Crossing a barren desert on foot a few weeks later, the answer came to him. Only a pioneering task, like making the desert bloom, could fire their minds and set them to do the impossible.

Tramps as pioneers? Misfits transformed, in the Islamic term, into true believers? It seemed absurd. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced. Many pioneers, he speculated, like the men in the camp, could not hold steady jobs; were drunkards, gamblers, fugitives, and outcasts. "If in the end they shouldered enormous tasks, endured unspeakable hardships, and accomplished the impossible, it was because they had to.... Once they tasted the joy of achievement, they craved for more," he later wrote. Hoffer had found an idea, a working hypothesis, an understanding of who he was, the life he lived, and the temper of his time.3

The media, then full of posturing by Hitler and Mussolini, led Hoffer to see hundreds, thousands, then millions who formed and backed the Nazis, fascists, and communists as misfits and undesirables, joining mass movements to shed their blemished, spoiled, and fouled selves. This insight was the origin of Hoffer's first book, The True Believer, 1951.

How did he get it published? In late 1938 he read an issue of Common Ground, a magazine trying to interpret America to the foreign-born and vice versa. Excited about the magazine's point of view, he sent his thoughts about tramps as pioneers in a letter to the editor (Louis Adamic). Associate Editor Margaret Anderson replied. She could not publish his letter, but liked it and had sent it to Eugene Saxon at Harper & Brothers.

Saxon suggested that Hoffer write his autobiography. Hoffer declined. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hoffer volunteered for the army, was rejected because of a hernia, and took the hardest job he could find to help the war effort, as a San Francisco longshoreman (1942-67). Thinking while he worked, mainly nights, and jotting down his thoughts during work breaks, days off, and weekends, Hoffer honed and polished The True Believer, mainly during month-long dock strikes in 1946 and 1948. In 1948 he sent his handwritten manuscript to Margaret Anderson with $100 to cover typing. After it was returned and revised, he asked a candy store owner to wrap the manuscript to mail to Harper. The True Believer, 1951, is dedicated to "Margaret Anderson, without whose goading finger which reached me across a continent, this book would not have been written."

Just before the 1951 publication of The True Believer, he was befriended by Selden Osborne, a Stanford University graduate with a Master of Arts degree in political science. At Stanford Seldon Osborn had roomed for awhile with Clark Kerr, later president of the University of California. Selden, a longshoreman, yearned for leadership in the longshoreman's union. An invitation to Sunday dinner at the Osbornes was followed by a lasting friendship with Mrs. Lili Osborne and her children, Hoffer's only near permanent family attachment The True Believer asks what kind of people a mass movement appeals to and why? A mass movement appeals to those people wanting change because they are dissatisfied with themselves. Blaming their condition on forces outside themselves, they think that to change the world around them will cure their own problems.

A mass movement thus offers people a new identity, teaches its followers to hate the present, to be ready to die if necessary for a new, unspoiled, beautiful, perfect tomorrow. Mass movements are thus essentially interchangeable. But America was never captured by mass movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism. In uprooting themselves from Europe to America, from the old to a new country, immigrants changed themselves with a new language, new clothes, and new identity.

Hoffer then asked himself: who are the potential converts to a mass movement? His answer was that they are misfits, people searching for a cause to give meaning to their lives. They are: --the newly poor who remember better days, --the newly free who lack a close-knit family or community, --temporary misfits such as adolescents or the unemployed, --permanent misfits with lasting mental and physical defects, --or the estranged with unfulfilled dreams of creativity.

Included are the inordinately selfish, ambitious, bored, and sinners burdened by deep guilt.

Hoffer saw three kinds of people who start, lead, and consolidate mass movements: --first, men of words (whom he later called "Intellectuals") who start a mass movement. --Second are men of action who lead the revolutionary phase of the movement and are usually uncreative, frustrated, self-righteous, petty, and rude. --Third are practical men of affairs who take over and, if the movement survives, make leading the movement their careers.4

Hoffer's second book, The Passionate State Of Mind, 1955, from his notebooks of the 1930s and '40s, continued to describe the true believer as one who shakes the world. The true believer has a passionate mind which comes from dissatisfaction with one's self. Such a person is usually uncreative and uses his or her energy only to convulse the world. The weak, Hoffer said, often conquer the strong because their very insecurity drives them to unite and to turn their weakness into strength. In times of great change, the weak become pioneers. Hoffer found hope in people's capacity for compassion, pity, and helpfulness.5

While struggling to write his third book on intellectuals and on change, Hoffer had writer's block. To "start the juices flowing again," he kept a diary during 1958-59, published l0 years later, l969, as Working and Thinking on the Waterfront.

His editor asked him to remove uncomplimentary entries about Blacks--their laziness, hard drinking, noisiness, and prostitution. Hoffer refused. His diary comments on the unfolding drama in the third world and continued his obsession with intellectuals (that is, men of words). "The vigor and health of a society are determined," not by intellectuals, but "by the quality of the common people...."6

His fourth book, The Ordeal Of Change, 1963, on the philosophy of history, has his most polished essays, is his best book, but has not been as widely read as The True Believer His ideas include:

1-Change comes first and then evokes revolution; not the other way around.

2-Third world countries resent and hate the U.S. because they desperately want to imitate us, but to them imitation means submission.

3-The greatest problem facing communist regimes is that people are unwilling to work in a controlled economic system.

4-The modern western world discovered and used science effectively because it saw the God it worshipped, Jehovah, as a master craftsman, a machine maker. Early scientists were on a religious quest to find the laws their God had built into His great cosmic machine. Modern science thus had its genesis in imitating God.

5-Distant hope is an opiate, but immediate hope is a stimulant. Upheavals in communist countries occur when hope first rises.

6-Loving oneself in a healthy way is a prerequisite to loving one's fellowman. Thus we treat our neighbors as we treat ourselves.

7-All of man's great inventions and great insights came from play, from playful moods. The wheel, for example, was a child's toy before it was used for a chariot and wagon.

8-When forced out of corporate society, misfits are capable of becoming pioneers and leaders on the frontiers of human experience.7

By the time of The Temper of Our Times, 1967, and largely through Selden Osborne and University of California, Berkeley, political science professor Norman Jacobson, Hoffer became a Senior Research Political Scientist at Berkeley. He held Wednesday afternoon open seminars during 1964-72, at the height of student protests. Not sympathetic with their excesses, he often scoffed at "history made by juveniles." Also, in 1963 and 1964, he gave 12 half-hour interviews on San Francisco's KQED-TV, broadcast nationwide over the National Educational Television Network. They brought much mail, but he was seldom recognized on the street.

The message of The Temper of Our Times, 1967, is that a free people must reject all would-be saviors who tell them their humanness is wrong. Other themes of this book include:

1-Forced leisure can cause havoc when a skilled population is condemned to inaction by automation. Automation, Hoffer reflected, might release creative energy to produce a renaissance. Turn the whole society into a school, he said, where everyone learns what he needs to know, at his or her own pace, where learning never ends, and where everyone can reach full potential.

2-Black problems arise, not from lack of opportunity but from lack of pride. While there are no easy solutions, the only hope is for Black leaders to return to the ghetto to help lead a cleanup and building campaign that will give Blacks a sense of pride.

3-The modern age is the age of the intellectuals, those who are convinced that the masses are incapable of self-rule, that only they and fellow elites know what the masses need. The best defense against elite rule is to raise the intellectual level of everyone so that no elites exist and everyone is an intellectual.

4-Those who urge a return to nature are wrong. The battle between man and nature is the central theme of history. Man became human only when he broke away from the iron rule of nature. Manmade cities offer the best refuge against nature. We must not let our cities become uninhabitable.8

He retired in 1967 after 25 years as a longshoreman (1942-67). He was also interviewed that year (1967) on CBS-TV. Hoffer, who had only minor literary fame until then, became an instant celebrity. Eric Sevaried visited him in San Francisco in May 1967. At the Fairmont Hotel bar, despite an argument, they understood and appreciated each other. After the meeting, Hoffer, nervous about the interview, called the Osbornes to say that everything would be all right. The next morning, Sevareid wrote, we "ran two cameras on him for two and a half hours while he talked, sweated, gulped water, and talked.... I flew back to Washington absolutely certain that we had in those cans the greatest film monologue I had ever had anything to do with in all my years in television."

Sevareid threatened his New York bosses with mayhem if they shortened the program or ran it in other than prime time. Of the broadcast on September 19, 1867, repeated on November 14, 1867, Sevareid wrote, "The switchboards at virtually every CBS station carrying the broadcast lit up like a Christmas tree.... Hoffer made millions of confused and troubled Americans feel very much better about their country."9

In the Sevareid interview, Hoffer praised Lyndon Johnson, then beleaguered with the war in Vietnam. Johnson quoted Hoffer in a speech. Within two weeks of the CBS interview, Hoffer and Johnson were photographed chatting on the White House lawn. A scheduled 5-minute meeting stretched into 55 minutes. political radicals, 1960s-70spolitical radicals, 1960s-70s(1898-1979). Don't become a permissive society, a chaotic society, which allows young people to teach before they have finished learning.11(1898-1979). Don't become a permissive society, a chaotic society, which allows young people to teach before they have finished learning.11Pres. Johnson was the second U.S. president to admire Hoffer, after Eisenhower, who handed out copies of The True Believer to friends. When Hoffer heard about it, he said, "It proved to me...that this is the kind of book any child can read."10

His sixth book, First Things, Last Things, 197l, deals with man's creativity, the dangers and potential of leisure, and the significance of cities. Highlights include:

1-"Man's Most Useful Occupation," is playfulness. Man is at his best when he spends time and energy on the superfluous.

2-The first walled cities provided refuge for human debris blown away from communal nomadic societies. Countries made up of villages are backward; those composed of cities are progressive.

3-The passage of modern youth to adulthood is painful. The problem is that young people no longer have to prove their adulthood. One solution is to put every adolescent to work cleaning up cities. 4-Don't give power to political radicals like Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Don't become a permissive society, a chaotic society, which allows young people to teach before they have finished learning.11 His seventh book, Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973, is on the origin and nature of man. Highpoints are: 1-Beware of the dehumanization of man. Don't let untalented, alienated groups gain political power.

2-Help learners become creative people because they alone remain young and continue to grow. Creativity exists in the masses, should be recognized and nurtured because it offsets all the problems posed by troublemakers.12

In 1978 the Public Broadcasting Service-TV presented "Eric Hoffer: The Crowded Life." He was interviewed and the actor Richard Basehart read from his works.

In his eighth book, Before the Sabbath, 1979, he credits Jews with creating optimism, fanaticism, and the western mind. He wondered if the nineteenth century was perhaps the West's golden age. Old age, he wrote, can give one a capacity for enjoying the beautiful things of the world without wanting to possess them.13

His last, ninth book was published in 1982, the year before he died: Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer.

Back in February 1970, at age 67, tired of being in the public eye, he said he was leaving public life, cutting back on his activities. "No more columns, no more television, no more pictures, no more teaching....I'm going to crawl back into my hole, where I started....I have become a professional scold, and it is not really me." But he remained active.14

His own best epitaph is in his own words: "It is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks."15

Reviewers and pundits called him a "literary stevedore" (New Yorker, 1951), a "dockside Montaigne" (Time, 1955), an "epigrammist on the waterfront" (Reporter, 1957), a "secular preacher" (Christian Century, 1963), a "philosopher of the misfits" (Time, 1963), a "docker of philosophy" (Life, 1967), and a "blue-collar Plato" (Newsweek, 1967).

Hoffer, like other self-taught people, loved learning and a good sentence; he cherished thinkers and books that appealed to him. He despised the communist, fascist, and Nazi intellectuals of the 1930s who wrought so much havoc.

He feared intellectuals with political ambitions because of their compulsion to dominate. His remedy was mass education. "Educate everyone so that all are intellectuals and no ruling elites can emerge," he said. Mass schooling would also release the great talents Hoffer was convinced existed in common working people. Another way to release talents would be to encourage playfulness. Hoffer was convinced that the playful mood brought with it creativity.

Finally, one is fascinated with Hoffer's theme that men and women are unfinished creatures who must finish themselves; that is, humanize themselves. Nature attains perfection, but people never do. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but humans are perpetually unfinished. Our unfinishedness sets us apart. Unlike animals, human beings have fewer specialized organs, are born without a built-in tool kit.

Hoffer quotes Thomas Hardy: "Man begins when nature ends. Man and nature can never be friends." A return to nature is a return to brute force. The ascent of humans was an effort to get out from under the iron rule of nature. Only then did man humanize himself, finish himself with technology. In doing so, he becomes a creator, a half god. To be human is to be free, to create.

Hoffer's thought to end on is from his The Ordeal of Change : "Man's only legitimate end in life is to finish God's work, to bring to full growth the capacities and talents in all of us." References

1. Tomkins, Calvin. Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968, p. 10.

2. Ibid., p. 19.

3. Ibid., p. 18.

4. Baker, James T. Eric Hoffer. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982, pp. 71-77.

5. Ibid., pp. 77-81.

6. Ibid., pp. 81-84.

7. Ibid., pp. 84-88.

8. Ibid., pp. 88-91.

9. Tomkins, op. cit., pp. ix-xi.

10. Ibid., p. 55.

11. Baker, op. cit., pp. 91-95.

12. Ibid., pp. 95-98.

13. Ibid., pp. 98-100.

14. New York Times (February 22, 1970).

15. Baker, op. cit., p. 1.

Articles by Eric Hoffer.

"Automation is Here to Liberate Us," New York Times Magazine (October 24, 1965), pp. 48-49.

"The Awakening of Asia," Reporter, 10 (June 22, 1954), pp. 16-17.

"Born '63. Graduated '74. Elected '76," New York Times (March 9, 1976).

"The Clamor for Instant Happiness," Los Angeles Times (October 20, 1968).

"Comments on the Human Condition," Harper's, 233 (November 1966), pp. 90-91.

"Fugitives from the Present," Los Angeles Times(April14, 1968).

"God and the Machine Age," Reporter 14 (February 23, 1956), p. 36.

"Hidden Currents that Guide Our Lives--The Wisdom of Eric Hoffer," Family Weekly(September 24, 1972), pp. 6-7.

"How Natural is Human Nature?" Saturday Evening Post, 235 (January or February 13, 1962), pp. 26-27.

"'I Savor the Joy of Dull Work,'" Family Weekly(October 17, 1976), pp. 4-5.

"The Intellectual and the Masses," Pacific Spectator, 10 (Winter 1956), pp. 6-14.

"A Kind Word for Intellectuals," Los Angeles Times (March 24, 1968).

"Leisure and the Masses," Parks and Recreation, 4 (March 1969), pp. 31-34.

Livesay, Harold (et al., including Eric Hoffer). "Does America Still Exist?" Harper's, 268 (March 1984), p. 43.

"Long Live Shame!" New York Times (October 18, 1974).

"The Madhouse of Change," Playboy, 15 (December 1968), pp. 165-168.

"The Majority Must Act!" Los Angeles Times(July 28, 1968).

"Making a Mass Elite," Holiday, 39 (March 1966), pp. 10-14.

"Man's Real Habitat: the City," Los Angeles Times (May 19, 1968).

"The Negro is Prejudiced Against Himself," New York Times Magazine (November 29, 1964), 27-34. Letters to the Editor (December 13, 1964), pp. 28-29, 108-109.

"Our Century of Juveniles," Los Angeles Times(March 31, 1968).

"The Passionate State of Mind," Harper's, 209 (December 1954), pp. 61-63.

"The Process of Change," Reporter, 10 (March 2, 1954), pp. 34-35.

"Reflections," Weekly column. Los Angeles Times (January 1968-February 1970).

"Reflections: Intellectuals Cover Hitler to Oswald," Pittsburgh Press (February 23, 1969).

"The Rise and Fall of the Practical Sense,"Reporter, 19 (December 11, 1958), pp. 27-28.

"The Role of the Undesirables," Harper's(December 1952), pp. 79-84.

"Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely,'" New York Time Magazine (April 25, 1971), pp. 24-25+.

"Thoughts on the Brotherhood of Man," New York Times Magazine (February 15, 1959), pp. 12-17.

"A Time of Juveniles," Harper's, 230 (June 1965), pp. 16-20.

"What I Have Learned IV: Strategy for the War with Nature," Saturday Review, 49 (February 5, 1966), pp. 27-29, 73-75.

"What We Have Lost," New York Times Magazine (October 20, 1974), pp. 110, 112, 114, 116-117.

"Whose Country is America?" New York Times Magazine (November 22, 1970), pp. 30-31, 117-122, 124. Letters to the Editor (December 13, 1970), pp. 34, 79.

"Why Captive Peoples Revolt," New York Times Magazine (August 23, 1953), pp. 12-16.

"Why Not Disenfranchise the Educated?" Los Angeles Times (August 4, 1968).

"A Workingman Looks at the Boss," Harper's, 208 (March 1954), pp. 48-49.

Other Books and Articles about Hoffer

"Awesome Epigrams," Time, 90 (February 9, 1968), p. 60

Baker, James T. "Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983,"Contemporary Issues Criticism, Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984, pp. 234-254.

"Blue Collar Plato," Newsweek, 69 (January 16, 1967), p. 92

Burdick, E. "Eric Hoffer: Epigrammatist on the Waterfront," Reporter, 16 (February 21, 1957), pp. 41-44.

Collier, Peter. "Eric Hoffer: The Wizard of Was,"Ramparts, 6, 15 (December 1967), pp. 65-68.

Cooper, Stirling M. "True Believers, Mass Movements and Education," Alternatives in American Education, 2, 1-2 (September-December 1971), pp. 1, 12.

Crawford, Kenneth. "Passionate Believer,"Newsweek, 70 (October 16, 1967), p. 38.

Dunphy, Mary Elayne. "Philosopher Finds Great Store of Talent," Seattle Times (October 14, 1968), p. 6.

"Eric Hoffer, Secular Preacher," Christian Century, 80 (May 29, 1963), p. 727.

"Eric Hoffer: The Crowded Life," The Schedule, Austin, TX (January 1978), p. 8.l

Erickson, Stanford. "Hoffer: Longshoreman, Intellectual," Journal of Commerce and Commercial, 375 (January 25, 1988), p. 8A.

Ethridge, James M., and Barbara Kopala, eds. "Eric Hoffer," Contemporary Authors: A BiographicalBibliographical Guide to Current Authors and Their Works. Vol. 15. Detroit: Gale Research Co, 1966, pp. 2ll-212.

Evans, Walter A. "Work Is the Country's Salvation": Hoffer," Seattle Post-Intelligencer(October 14-15, 1968), pp. 1, 6.

Faber, N. "In His Own Words," People, 9 (January 16, 1978), pp. 29-31.

Ferguson, Charles W. "Americans Not Everybody Knows: Eric Hoffer," PTA Magazine, 61, 10 (June 1967), pp. 4-7.

Fincher, James. "Docker of Philosophy," Life, 62 (March 24, 1067), pp. 35 ff.

"From the Waterfront," Time, 90 (November 17, 1967), p. 66.

Frome, M. "Eric Hoffer," American Forests(August 1968), pp. 3+.

Gould, Jack. "TV: More of Hoffer...." New York Times (January 30, 1969).

Hall, Isabelle McCaig. "Hoffer Blows During Talks on Violence," Morgantown (WV) Post(October 24, 1968), p. 9A.

Harte, Barbara, and Carolyn Riley, eds. "Eric Hoffer," 200 Contemporary Authors. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1969, pp. 152-153.

"Hoffer, Eric." Current Biography, 26 (March 1965), p. 28ff.

"Hoffer, Eric." Current Biography Yearbook 1965. New York: H.W.Wilson Co., 1965, pp. 200-203.

"Hoffer, Eric," Political Profiles: The Johnson Years. New York: Facts on File, 1976, pp. 278-279.

"Ike's Favorite Author," Look, 20 (June 12, 1956), pp. 40-42.

"Johnson Pleased by a Philosopher," New York Times (October 8, 1967).

Kemble, Patrick. "On Eric Hoffer," Commentary, 48 (November 1969), pp. 79-82.

Koerner, James D. Hoffer's America. LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1973.

"Literary Stevedore," New Yorker, 27 (April 28, 1951), pp. 20-22.

Nightingale, Earl. "A Comment on Jews," Earl Nightingale Our Changing World, #5285. Chicago: Nightingale-Conant Corporation, 1980.

Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Revisited: Books and Ideas (A Dialogue)."Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting, Southwestern Philosophy of Education Society, Volume XLI. Edited by Wayne Willis. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University, 1991, pp. 96-107.

Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "Eric Hoffer (1902-83): Books and Ideas on School and Society."CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XV, No. 1 (March 1991), Fiche 1 A06.

Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Revisited: Books and Ideas (A Dialogue)," abstract in Resources in Education, XXXI, No. 12 (Dec. 1996), p. 152 (ERIC ED 398 138).

Petrosko, Joseph M. "The Alchemy of the Soul: A Study of Eric Hoffer's Thoughts on Creativity,"Journal of Creative Behavior, 17, 2 (Second Quarter 1983), pp. 131-145.

"The Presidency," Time, 90, 15 (October 13, 1967), pp. 25-26.

Russell, Charles. "'Just Like Home,' Remarks Hoffer on Seattle Arrival," Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 14, 1968), p. 12.

Tomkins, Calvin. "Profiles: Creative Situation,"New Yorker, 42 (January 7, 1967), pp. 34-36+.

Wakeman, John, ed. "Eric Hoffer," World Authors 1950-70. New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1975, pp. 654655.

Reviews of Eric Hoffer's Books (all published by Harper & Row)

The True Believer, 1951.

1-Brinton, Crane. New York Herald Tribune (May 27, 1951), p. 13.

2-Garside, E.B. New York Times (March 18, 1951), p. 10.

3-Krugman, H.E. American Journal of Sociology(November 1951), p. 297.

4-Martin, Neil. Christian Science Monitor (April 26, 1951), p. 11.

5-Newman, J.R. New Republic (December 10, 1951), p. 22.

The Passionate State of Mind, 1955: 1-Breit, H. "Workingman," New York Times Book Review (April 1, 1956), p. 8. 2-"Dockside Montaigne," Time (March 14, 1955), p. 114-115. 3-Gill, T.A. Christian Century (June 29, 1955), p. 760. 4-Jackson, J.H.San Francisco Chronicle (March 7, 1955), p. 19. 4-Rovere, R.H. New Yorker (May 21, 1955), p. 137.

The Ordeal of Change, 1963: 1-Barrett, William. Atlantic (April l963), p. 151. 2-Barrett, William. Critic (June 1963), p. 80 3-Christian Century (May 29, 1963), p. 727. 4-"Philosopher of Misfits," Time, 8l, 11 (March 15, 1963), p. 109. 5-Pickrel, Paul.Harpers (April 1963), p. 96. 6-Schroth, R.A. America (April 13, 1963), p. 502. 7-Wills, Gary. "Eric Hoffer's True Beliefs,"National Review, 14 (June 18, 1963), pp. 502-504.

The Temper of Our Times, 1967.

1-Adams, Phoebe. Atlantic (January 1967), p. 550. 2-Berube, M.R. Commonweal (January 27, 1967), p. 465. 3-Brown, Clayton. Library Journal (December 15, 1966), p. 6101. 4-Featherstone, Joseph. "Hoffer as Historian,"New Republic , 156 (June 3, 1967), pp. 30-32. 5-Konvitz, M.R. Saturday Review (April 8, 1967), p. 41. 6-Maddocks, Melvin. Christian Science Monitor(January 5, 1967), p. 7. 7-Oberbeck, S.K. Newsweek (January 16, 1967), pp. 90+. 8-Poore, Charles. New York Times, January 5, 1967.

Working and Thinking on the Waterfront,196. 1-Friedenberg, E.Z. New York Review of Books(May 8, 1969), p. 1100. 2-Garside, E.B. New Yorker (March 1, 1969), p. 70. 3-MacKenzie, Richard. "Man of Sense," National Review, 21 (May 6, 1969), pp. 445-446. 4-Newfield, Jack. New York Times Book Review(February 26, 1969), p. 3. 5-Picht, D.R. Library Journal (February 1, 1969), p. 553.

First Things, Last Things, 1971. 1-Flaherty, Joe. New York Times Book Review(July 25, 197l), pp. 3, 12-13.

Truth Imagined, 1983 1-Publishers Weekly, 224 (October 28,1983), p. 63. 2-Williamson, Chilton, Jr. National Review, 36 (February 24, 1984), p. 58.

Obituaries 1-Bethell, T. "Eric Hoffer, R I P," National Review, 35, 11 (June 10, 1983), p. 668. 2--Current Biography Yearbook, 44 (July 1983), p. 43.

3-Current Biography Yearbook, 83 (1984), pp. 466-467. 4-New York Times Biographical Service, 14 (May 1983), p. 563. 5-Newsweek, 101 (May 30, 1983), p. 102. 6-Publishers Weekly, 223 (June 3, 1983), p. 21. 7-Time, 121 (May 30, 1983), p. 88. 8-Turner, Wallace. "Eric Hoffer, 80, Dockside Scholar," New York Times (May 23, 1983), p. 20.

TV Interviews of Eric Hoffer

By Eric Sevareid, New York: Columbia Broadcasting Television Network. 1. "Eric Hoffer: The Passionate State of Mind," September 19, 1967. 2. "The Savage Heart: A Conversation with Eric Hoffer," January 19, 1969.

By James Day, San Francisco: National Educational Television. 1. "Ordeal of Change," July 31, 1963. 2. "The Role of the Intellectual," August 6, 1963. 3. "The Role of the Weak," August 13, 1963. 4. "The Nature of Man," August 20, 1963. 5. "Man's Struggle for Uniqueness," August 27, 1963. 6. "From the Cradle to Skid Row," September 3, 1963. 7. "The Growth of a Train of Thought," November 8, 1964. 8. "Talent," November 15, 1964. 9. "Automation," November 22, 1964. 10, "The Mysterious Occident," November 29, 1964. 11. "The New Age," December 6, 1964. 12. "Reading and Writing," December 13, 1964.

Doctoral Dissertations about Eric Hoffer.

1-Batty, Paul Wesley. "Eric Hoffer's Theory of Mass Persuasion." Ph.D., University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 1970.

2-Carrier, Henry Nash, III. "Eric Hoffer's Conceptual Approach to the Development of American Democratic Leadership." D.A., University of Mississippi, 1973.

3-Hunter, Nevin Doran. "Drastic Change and Mass Movements: The Theories of Eric Hoffer." Ph.D., University of Washington, 1971. END.

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