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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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042489
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04248900.035
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1990-09-17
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NATION, Page 23A Flower in a Clenched Fist
In the tumultuous days of the late 1960s, Abbie Hoffman led
the antic wing of the revolution, where the anarchist politics came
from Mikhail Bakunin, the media savvy from Marshall McLuhan and the
spirit from Peter Pan. He liked to think of himself as a bridge
between the New Left and the hippie counterculture, between "Off
the pigs!" and "If it feels good, do it." He was never more himself
than when he taunted the capitalists by showering dollar bills from
the visitor's gallery onto the trading floor of the New York Stock
Exchange.
Hoffman was 52 when he was found dead last week in his small
apartment in New Hope, Pa. He was fully dressed under the
bedcovers. An autopsy was inconclusive. In recent years, however,
he battled depression. An activist to the end, fighting over the
environment and Nicaragua, he found the complacent hum of the
present no match for the percussive past.
Born in Worcester, Mass., Hoffman studied psychology at
Brandeis University in the placid 1950s, then went on to graduate
work in the headier atmosphere of the University of California,
Berkeley. By the mid-1960s, after a stint as a traveling
pharmaceutical salesman, he was living among the hippies in New
York City and devoting himself to opposing the Viet Nam War.
"Personally I always held my flower in a clenched fist," he once
wrote.
Hoffman was already 31 when he and Jerry Rubin formed an
amalgam of political pranksters into the Youth International Party.
"Yippies believe in the violation of every law," he once told a
crowd, "including the law of gravity." In 1968 they ran a pig for
President. As a lead-up to that year's Democratic Convention in
Chicago, they vowed to spike the local water supply with LSD. The
schemes were mostly put-ons and fodder for the press, Hoffman's
most faithful co-conspirator. It was revolution as street shtick.
Hoffman practiced it more dexterously than anyone else, even
as one of the Chicago Eight, the group of radical activists,
including Tom Hayden and Black Panther Bobby Seale, who were tried
for plotting to disrupt the convention. Hoffman and four others
were found guilty of crossing state lines with intent to riot, a
conviction later overturned.
In 1974, facing a long sentence on cocaine-sale charges,
Hoffman jumped bail. Eventually he settled in a small town in
upstate New York, where he took the name Barry Freed and busied
himself with environmental issues. When Hoffman came out of hiding
in 1980, on the cusp of the Reagan era, he seemed a bit like Rip
Van Winkle, waking up in a new world that was moving not forward
but backward into the somnolent 1950s.
Hoffman pleaded guilty and served time on lesser charges.
Though dismayed by the apolitical younger generation -- "Never
trust anyone under 30," he declared -- he never stopped protesting.
It was Timothy Leary, the advance scout of the LSD generation, who
eulogized Hoffman most deftly last week. "An American legend,"
Leary called him. "Right up there in the hall of fame with rebel
Huck Finn, rowdy Babe Ruth and crazy Lenny Bruce."