Interview: Abbie Hoffman
“We risked our lives”
By John Holmstrom
High Times no. 165 May 1989

Abbie Hoffman is best known as a ‘60s political activist-the original Yippie, a member of the Chicago Seven, and author of Woodstock Nation. His classic Steal This Book, has recently been reprinted (available from Contemporary Classics, P.O. Box 15, Worcester, MA 01613, $8.00 plus $2.00 handling) -[Note:This is 1989 information.]. Co-written by HIGH TIMES founder Torn Forçade, it's a complete guide to the real '60s counterculture lifes style. Today, Abbie Hoffman has inherited the mantle as the leading, loudest, most influential media symbol from the political movement of the' Os, largely because he has stayed close to his roots, and is still committed to social change.

	This is one of a series of interviews we're running to mark the 15th anniversary of HIGH TIMES, the endurance of the counterculture, and the memory of Tom Forçade, the founder of HIGH TIMES.

High Times: We get the feeling here at HIGH TIMES that there has been a rebirth of some of the idealism and political activism of the '60s. I was wondering if you feel it, too.
Abbie Hoffman: I've known it for four years-from the growth of the antiapartheid movement on campus. There are now over 200 colleges that have kicked South Africa out of the stock portfolios of their university-some six billion dollars. That's not exactly a career/marriage/yuppie interest. There's over 180 schools that have kicked the CIA off campus in terms of recruiting. Around the country, as I speak at college campuses, I see schools that are fighting curfews, fighting campus controls of newspapers, holding pot protests, protesting the absence of minority programs, fighting a growing racism that's happening on campus-fighting al kinds of battles. At the same time, this generation went three to one for Bush. That's pretty far out.
	I would say we're in a state of great transition. We're passing out of a period of passivity on the part of the citizenry, kind of nihilistic pessimism on the part of the youth, and headed towards a period of increased participatory democracy and increased activism. I would also say that since we lost the Vietnam War, America has been on the decline as an empire, which means things happening in other countries are going to have a tremendous effect on us. So when 85% of Europeans say they want nuclear weapons out of Europe, it's going to impinge upon what's going on in American society. What goes on in Russia and China and South America is going to have a much greater effect on what goes on in America now. We've lost the role of being the policeman of the world. Other countries are going to start telling us what to do, arid telling us what their culture is all about, like how they solve problems like drug abuse, how they solve problems like crime, arid how they solve environmental problems. 
HT: Although we're talking about a new awareness by young people, the only media coverage I see about this is the reporting of the return of hippie fashions.
AH: That's oil the superficial level at which they can relate to the ‘60s-in terms of dress or music because that's the most saleable commodities. The politics is very frightening to them. Well, naturally-it's revolutionary.
HT: It seems to me that, in the '60s, the media helped fuel the youth revolution. It created youth culture celebrities like yourself and Jerry Rubin. Now, the media is ignoring what's going on. They are ignoring campus activism and marijuana protests.
AH: By 1967 or '68, I had spent eight years organizing. The media was ignoring what I was doing for eight years. There were structures in the '60s, even though many were non-linear. There were leaders, even though the FBI knew who they were.
The unfortunate thing is that many young people view the 60s like an MTV video. You know, it's a bunch of chanting, long hair, tie-dye, shirts, flares and rock and roll. On the other hand, far too many of the books written about the '60s are academic and intellectual, when, in fact, the period was anti-intellectual and anti-academic So the Counterculture, the things HIGH TIMES represents, gets extraordinarily shortchanged.
	But the role that the media played in terms of the social changes is tremendously important to understand. Quite frankly, there's a great misconception out there that I did things for the media. I've never in my life done anything for the media. I've spoken to crowds of hundreds of thousands, and I used a microphone, because I couldn't reach them with my voice if I didn't. In the same way , we used the media to enter the fantasy world of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in this country and around the world. We just used it as if it were a big microphone, that's all. It wasn't given to us. We had to steal it and fight for it and be very creative in terms of how we did it. I don't think some of it was very smart, but many of the people in the '60s are the best organizers I've ever met in my life.
	I think it was mostly organic in a generational sense, because we came of age getting our news and information vi television, whereas the captains of industry and the generals in the Pentagon at that time were still linear-still getting their information from newspapers. The understanding of television was tremendously important. In that sense Marshall McLuhan had equal, if not more, impact on the  ‘60s than Karl Marx.
	We can understand the same thing now. If you're in social activism and you don't use and understand computers, telefaxing equipment, and high-speed automated digital dialling, you're out of the ballgame. You can't sit there and pass out a handbill or a button on a street corner in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and think you're creating a national movement. No way. This is one reason why the right moved far more ahead in the ‘70s than the left. There were other reasons too-because they wrapped themselves in religion. But they did master the computer technology.
	Many people on the right, even a Jerry Falwell, will say, "We studied what you did in the '60s." They did. They studied the method. And I don't think, in the social movements today, they really pay attention to our methodology. They're very concerned with debating-whether we picked the right issue or not. They're not concerned with the pragmatics of actually how we did it. I think as we move along, there will be less anecdotal remembrances: "What happened to Jerry Rubin or where is Grace Slick now?" Instead, on the part of a good percent of young activists, there will be a search for: “How did they build an SDS? How did they build national marches in Washington? How did they create strikes in a thousand universities at once across the country?" Now, we're getting to the nitty gritty of it.
	Now, as I look at young people, my main criticism is that they're a little too middle-aged. They're a little too old. They're not reckless enough. They're not daring. They're too scared. They're not risk-taking. They want to be sensible. They want all these things. They want to be nostalgic for youth.
HT: The kids today don't seem to be able to do it themselves. They expect the mainstream culture to create a youth culture for them.
AH: The demographics are slanted against them. The economics are slanted against them. But again, generations don't make change. It was a very small minority, given the whole population, that resisted oppression and resisted the Vietnam War. In 1968, the most popular book on campus was The Money Game. It's a yuppie book. The most popular Americans were Nixon and John Wayne.
	I don't think the majority of good citizens liked it when the Sons of Liberty, in 1775 in Boston where I come from, shot at the British in Lexington and Concord. I think they were angry. They wanted the ships to run on schedule. They wanted to be tough on crime-the Redcoats were the cops.
	So, this is what it is. It's a small group. And it's very important to pass this on to young activists-that we didn't have everybody on our side. We had enough. That's what I tell them. We had enough people to make change. But we had to work very hard. We had to take enormous risks. We had to think beyond careers and marriage. We risked our lives. We had a historical perspective-that there were people taking tougher risks in the '50s, and many more in the '30s.
	You know, I think this is quite an exciting, astonishing time to live through. I mean, I wish I was young again, frankly. One thing I'd do if I was young would be to go to Russia, because I would want to help break down the Cold War and understand what it feels like to be in a society that's having a youth revolution.
HT: What do you remember about Tom Forçade?
AH: Well, he made a significant contribution to the cultural revolution.
HT: Do you remember your first dealings with him?
AH: I guess it was in the establishment of UPS (Underground Press Syndicate), when he was trying to syndicate the underground newspapers, of which there were about 5,000 at the time, and bring advertising into those papers. I remember him, of course, in 1971 and '72-we had tremendous arguments about his role in Steal This Book and how much money he should get. Then in 1972, at the Miami convention when Yippie was splitting in two we had a bunch of arguments.
HT: When was YIP (Youth International Party) formed?
AH: December 31st, 1968. It was formed with a number of ideas in mind, but most technically as an organization to get people to come to the convention in Chicago that summer. It was a natural development after the levitation of the Pentagon in October of 1967. There were many, many of us that worked on that who thought it was extraordinarily effective, that our organizing techniques were correct, and that we should keep organizing the counterculture into a political movement and bring it to Chicago.
HT: I don't remember the levitating of the Pentagon.
AH: There was an anti-war demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial in October 1967, at which there were about 120,000 people. About 50-60,000 of those split off and attacked the Pentagon. The object was to surround it. Those of us in the counterculture were saying five-sided figures in all religions were evil. So if you circle around it, it would exorcise the Pentagon of all its evil demons.
	The Pentagon had to bring out the National Guard by the thousands, with fixed bayonets and helicopters and armored carrier vehicles to defend the Pentagon against its own people. But we were there overnight, thick and thin, with a lot of head-bashing. I was arrested at least three times in one day there. Occasionally a rock or a button or a shoe was thrown at the Pentagon, and we knew things were getting a bit more militant.
The levitation wasn't a regular sit-in or anti-war rally-which we had about 1,000 of between 1964 and 1967. This was a significant event in the anti-war movement. Around the world, photos of that were absolutely stunning, because the biggest symbol of war is the Pentagon. So to have 50,000 people attacking it, surrounding it, to see it defended by its soldiers, gave people around the world, especially the Vietnamese, an incredible-my God, America is in a state of civil war! The people are marching against their own institutions!-that's what was happening.
HT: Were you involved in the formation of the White Panther Party?
AH: Sure. They were the Yippies. They were just doing it locally and trying to follow some of the models of decision making that the Black Panthers had. They all said they were Yippies, too.
HT: Who where the Motherfuckers?
AH: They were not Yippies.  They would be insulted if I called them Yippies. They were a street organization on the Lower East Side, 1966-67-68, and even up to ‘69. They played a role at Woodstock. They were located in the Lower East Side and were a small, nefarious, I guess you could use the word if you want, anarchist group.
HT: I know Tom Forçade was involved in Woodstock with the groups that got money out of the Woodstock promoters for the counterculture. Were you involved in that?
AH: I was the key leaner. This is all described in my book, Woodstock Nation, but yes, I was the one who went to the Woodstock promoters and said, "You're borrowing from street culture, there's a lot of street groups here and also we can help. We can help with crowd control. You're way off on your estimates. Far more people are coming than you expect, and we want some money."
	But it was great fun being there, and it unfortunately can't be repeated, but that's the way it is with the greatest cultural event of the century. You can only have one. I think that's extremely important in understanding the '60s. Although today, I can point to many groups and singers who are far more radical than any of the groups that played at Woodstock-U2 is radical, Michelle Shocked, Billy Bragg, Lou Reed, Tracy Chapman, most reggae music, there's tons of good political stuff out there-when we had our music in the '60s, we had to fight for it. We had to fight to hear rhythm and blues. We literally had to fight to get it into the park because all the institutions in America were out to repress it. So it lent itself to a general feeling of revolution and resistance and therefore became our music.
	So it isn't how much protest is going on, and how much good activist or socially concerned music there is, it also has to be measured against what the background is. We made a big break from the 1950s and the witch hunts and the sexual repression of the period-the tremendous anti-liberation period we lived through-far more repressive than the 1970s or ‘80s.
HT: The 1970s were pretty wide open, actually.
AH: They were wide open, they were permissive, but there was not resistance and defiance. It was just permissive because people were a little shell shocked with Watergate, the end of Vietnam, the Arab trade embargo-they were just shell shocked. They were permissive but it wasn't a resistant, insurrectionary period. No. That was the '60s.
	Hopefully we'll see it in the '90s. I mean, you always got to hope. What the hell else is there?