Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century
by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words
different ideological backgrounds. Wikipedia’s Wales was an Ayn Rand–loving libertarian from Alabama; Anonymous’s Christopher Doyon (a.k.a. Commander X) idolized Yippie Abbie Hoffman and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Julian Assange, as scholar Peter Ludlow observed, couldn’t be neatly “characterized in terms of left versus right so much
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-existential-dread. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT libertarian from Alabama: Lipsky-Karasz, “Mr. Know-It-All.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT idolized Yippie Abbie Hoffman: Kushner, “Masked Avengers.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “individual versus institution”: Peter Ludlow, “WikiLeaks and Hacktivist Culture,” Nation, September 15, 2010, https://www.thenation
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein · 1 Jan 2008 · 1,351pp · 404,177 words
army uniforms, toting plastic machine guns. A “Flower Brigade” of East Village “freaks” (the self-identification for what the dominant culture called hippies), led by Abbie Hoffman in a psychedelic cape, fell in behind a Boy Scout troop. They were attacked by the Flatbush Conservative Club; a mother passed off her baby
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-line screechings of dueling revolutionists. This wasn’t even to mention two entire, contrary, radical constituencies: politicized freaks and the nonwhite. The freaks, led by Abbie Hoffman, held the earnest dialecticians in hardly less contempt than they did men in gray flannel suits. They loved nothing more than to invade SDS strategy
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could do in honor of “the ten thousand activists in Newark who were willing to die to change their way of life” back in July. Abbie Hoffman barreled in and tried to steal the floor. When Martin Luther King spoke, Black Power teenagers who’d been heckling him put out a box
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. A chant broke out from another quarter of the audience: “Hit him again harder! Hit him harder!”; radicalization was breaking out all over. The Pentagon, Abbie Hoffman promised in the pages of the hippie rag The Realist, was nothing: “Get ready for a big event at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago
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got the message. Police were buzzing with word of what the hippies had planned for their city in August. Some kid out of New York, Abbie Hoffman, wrote in the Village Voice, “We can force Johnson to bring the 82nd Airborne and 100,000 more troops to Chicago next August.” The FBI
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’s Eve, puffing weed and musing as they always did on how to overthrow reality itself. Which, this era being what it was, was what Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin ended up becoming famous for. Rubin was from Cincinnati. His dad was a union activist. His favorite uncle was a former vaudeville
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itself—not an external goal or revolution, but living revolution every day.” One morning at the New York Stock Exchange, with his new best friend Abbie Hoffman—the leading levitator at the Pentagon—they dropped money from the gallery onto the trading floor below. The resulting greedy mêlée made the evening newscasts
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own lines. TV crew members outnumbered the snake dancers: “Wa’shoi! Wa’shoi!” they chanted every time a producer asked. Downtown in Civic Center Plaza, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and folksinger Phil Ochs literally unleashed the Youth International Party’s presidential candidate—Pigasus, a greased and ornery insult on four legs
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with a curly tail. Officers chased the animal around the plaza for a half hour, cameramen scurrying, cops greedily fingering their service revolvers, Abbie Hoffman crying, “Our candidate! Don’t shoot our candidate!” Thursday night at 11 p.m. in Lincoln Park, the same thing happened that had been happening
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liberal Chicago Daily News called it “the most vicious behavior on the part of the police” in twenty-five years. The papers also reported that Abbie Hoffman had been arrested for having FUCK written across his forehead. The California delegation was pledged to a dead man. The primary had been so nasty
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in the underground press. By the time the music started Friday, August 15, so many people were there they couldn’t continue to collect tickets. (Abbie Hoffman did his part from a Yippie tent outside the gates, telling people to refuse to pay.) The New York State Thruway was rendered a parking
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to do things in the courtroom—especially the one belonging to Judge Julius J. Hoffman in Chicago, who was to preside over the trial of Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale, and the rest of the alleged “Chicago 8” convention conspirators. The government possessed wiretaps on five of them. The Supreme Court
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judge chewed out Hayden for “shaking his fist.” Hayden replied, “It is my customary greeting, Your Honor.” Prosecutor Schultz began his opening statement. He mentioned Abbie Hoffman, who rose with a flourish and blew a kiss at the jury. The judge, sternly: “The jury is directed to disregard the kiss from Mr
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to display a cross-section of the monstrous personages rending the good order of American civilization: the older guru (David Dellinger); two long-haired freaks (Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin); the by-any-means-necessary Negro (Bobby Seale); two SDS militants (Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis); two radical young faculty members (a chemistry
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: “Fineglass,” “Weintraub,” “Weinruss,” “Weinrob”) and wouldn’t let one witness wear a yarmulke in court (“Take off your hat, sir”). He popped a vein when Abbie Hoffman called himself his “illegitimate son,” but hated David Dellinger (“Derringer,” “Dillinger”) most of all: he was a WASP who’d surrendered privileges the judge so
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third prosecution witness was a college newspaper reporter hired as a spy by the Chicago’s American columnist Jack Mabley. A fourth had worked as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin’s dirtbag motorcycle-gang “bodyguard.” A fifth was a policewoman who’d dressed for her work in Lincoln Park every day in
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burning flares at the cops. Mr. Foran: “Were any of the defendants present?” The Witness: “Yes. Weiner and Froines were at this meeting. So was Abbie Hoffman.” Mr. Foran: “Do you see Mr. Hoffman here in the courtroom?” The Witness: “Yes, I do.” Mr. Foran: “Would you step down and point him
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, the shirt—he just shot me with his finger. His hair is very unkempt.” The hippies’ hippie-ness was on trial; style was a battleground. Abbie Hoffman, asked why they lured innocent youth to Chicago with sex and rock bands, replied, “Rock musicians are the real leaders of the revolution.” Posture was
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Schultz wrote; “askew and gnawed and maybe encrusted with a sliver of earwax,” a proud part of the “unholy clutter,” on the defense table. (When Abbie Hoffman, a very hard worker, took the stand, he said, “Work is a dirty word instead of fuck is a dirty word.”) Humor was a battleground
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used to perform “I Ain’t Marching Any More” at the Festival of Life. He, too, tried and failed to sing. The following colloquy ensued: Abbie Hoffman had “led the crowd in a chant of ‘Fuck LBJ,’ didn’t he?” “Yes, I think he did….” “Now, in your plans for Chicago, did
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reflected every defense outrage and whitewashed every prosecution one. The Times’s Lukas paid careful attention to such unfairness, but his editors pruned him ruthlessly: Abbie Hoffman always “shouted”; Judge Hoffman always “said” (even if it was really the other way around). To much of the public, the presumption was that the
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1: On September 26, during the opening statement by the Government, defendant Hoffman rose and blew a kiss to the jurors. Official Transcript, Chapter One.” Abbie Hoffman got a day in jail for that. He got six days for calling the judge, in Yiddish, shanda für di goyim. (The judge read the
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in August the first time he had been tasked with such “intelligence” duties, harassing a new left-wing magazine, Scanlon’s Monthly, that published an Abbie Hoffman–style prank purporting to be a memo linking Agnew to a plot to cancel the presidential election. Dean was baffled by the assignment; to him
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. On April 23, “in a spontaneous act of love for his honesty and Vietnam stand,” the Yippies endorsed George McGovern. Once they became convinced that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin weren’t out to sabotage McGovern and elect Humphrey in order to heighten the revolutionary contradictions, the McGovern team welcomed their help
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, saying it would become a ghost town if George McGovern became president, scowlingly pointing out that the South Dakotan was supported by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. His aides, who’d thought of him as a conciliatory figure, cringed in embarrassment. He defended himself to the Post: “I’m not trying to
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him to ultra-right-wing supporters like H. L. Hunt, the John Birch Society, etc.,” Nixon wrote his campaign manager, John Mitchell. “The fact that Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Angela Davis, among others, support McGovern, should be widely publicized and used at every point. Keep calling on him to repudiate them daily
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: the same kind of crazy Cubans who had been bombing the offices of left-wingers in New York for years; the same kind who, when Abbie Hoffman had recently spoken at the University of Miami, stormed the stage hurling sacks of flour and garbage. None outside the Beltway, and not too many
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BEACH THE SECOND week in July 1972. One of them was Robert Redford, arriving by train, promoting The Candidate in a mock whistle-stop tour. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin set up housekeeping at the run-down Albion Hotel, where Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles once honeymooned. Everywhere Hoffman and Rubin were
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great political party’s civil war. Somewhere, Richard Nixon was smiling. It had to be close to midnight Monday when the hippie from Arizona grabbed Abbie Hoffman around the waist and hollered, “I’m the first, man!” “The first what?” “The first fucker ever to cast a vote on acid.” (“There goes
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for a convention-eve gala at the Fontainebleau. Their way was strewn with eggs and sixteen-year-olds using their limousine hoods as trampolines. Even Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were embarrassed. They fancied their Yippie spectacles as creative—such as the “puke-in” they attempted on the sidewalk outside the reception
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College: Richmond News Leader, October 20, 1967. Pentagon march: Wills, Second Civil War, 138, 195–201; Langguth, Our Vietnam, 459; Hoberman, Dream Life, 179–80; Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), 42; “Protest! Protest! Protest!” Time, October 27, 1967; Thomas Maier, Dr. Spock: An American
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if he’d turn Christian”: Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 171. “Jesus, we won the fucking city”: Ibid., 74. On April 23, “in a spontaneous act”: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders, Vote!: A Record, a Dialogue, a Manifesto—Miami Beach, 1972 and Beyond (New York: Warner Paperbacks, 1972), 42–44. “We
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of Kansas, 2007), 230. whose children left their handprints: Ibid., 177. “Dirty politics,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote: Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 202. McGovernites were convinced: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders, Vote!: A Record, a Dialogue, a Manifesto—Miami Beach, 1972 and Beyond (New York: Warner Paperbacks, 1972), 73. Now, Humphrey
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DEMOCRACY Robert Redford: J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: New Press, 2003), 353. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin set up housekeeping: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders, Vote!: A Record, a Dialogue, a Manifesto—Miami Beach, 1972 and Beyond (New York: Warner Paperbacks, 1972
1968: The Year That Rocked the World
by Mark Kurlansky · 30 Dec 2003 · 538pp · 164,533 words
widespread agreement on very few issues. In 1969, when a federal grand jury indicted eight activists in connection with the demonstrations in Chicago in 1968, Abbie Hoffman, one of the eight, said about the group, “We couldn’t agree on lunch.” And though rebellion was everywhere, rarely did these forces come together
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to march on the Pentagon. An antiwar activist from Berkeley, Jerry Rubin, was there with a New York City friend from the civil rights movement, Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman managed to grab media attention during the Washington march by promising to levitate the Pentagon and exorcize it by spinning it around. He did
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that New Year’s Eve, according to the official though not entirely factual story, at a Greenwich Village party, the product—so said its founders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin—of an evening of marijuana. “There we were, all stoned, rolling around on the floor,” Hoffman later explained to federal investigators. Even
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that it would get our attention by doing that.” But it was not only politicians in chambers that turned strident to get the button pushed. Abbie Hoffman understood how this worked, Stokely Carmichael understood it, and so did Martin Luther King. In 1968, after a decade of working with news media,
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possibility that hippies, whom the establishment had defined as undermotivated types, were turning into political activists. But these particular hippies were in fact Yippies!, from Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Party, which had always been political. In Italy, students protesting inadequate facilities carried a long red flag from building to building on
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an over-thirty man from Worcester, Massachusetts. In his entire lifetime, perhaps in all of history, there was no year that was better suited for Abbie Hoffman than 1968. It must have seemed extraordinary to him that year that the world had come around to his way of doing things. He used
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only having sex, they were having interracial sex, black men with white women, and there was absolutely nothing that so provoked white racists as this. Abbie Hoffman wrote that white women had been lured into the organization and seduced and were now being thrown out: “I feel for the other whites in
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was exactly what was happening in the militant movements of the Left as well. Mirroring society, black and white activists were increasingly separated. By 1967 Abbie Hoffman had become a militant for the privileged whites. He protested capitalism and commercialism by burning money and urging others to do the same. Burning money
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later in the year that it occurred to them to say it stood for Youth International Party. No one was certain how seriously to take Abbie Hoffman, and that was his great strength. One story tells much about the elusive clown of the sixties. In 1967, Hoffman got married for a
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and giggled uncontrollably. Time magazine covered the wed-in for its July 1967 issue on hippies but did not mention the “beflowered couple” by name. Abbie Hoffman was not a widely known name until 1968. But after the wed-in, without any publicity, the bridal couple went off to the decidedly bourgeois
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should be fought. The young people of the generation, the ones who were in college in 1968, were the draftees. The Haydens and Savios, and Abbie Hoffmans, too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, had not faced a draft. These younger members of the sixties generation, the people of 1968
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the race, and no one was sure what would happen next. “It was America that was on a trip; we were just standing still,” said Abbie Hoffman. “How could we pull our pants down? America was already naked. What could we disrupt? America was falling apart at the seams.” Historians have debated
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. Tom Hayden wrote that he considered Camus to be one of the great influences in his decision to leave journalism and become a student activist. Abbie Hoffman used Camus to explain in part the Yippie! movement, referring to Camus’s words in Notebooks: “The revolution as myth is the definitive revolution.”
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was expressed in Savio’s “odious machine” speech. Marcuse, a naturalized American citizen who had fled the Nazis, was on the faculty of Brandeis when Abbie Hoffman had been a student there, and Hoffman was enormously influenced by him, especially by his book Eros and Civilization, which talked about guilt-free physical
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true freedom. Marcuse, the aging professor, seemed to warm to the role of guru to the student radicals. He frequently discussed their movements. He warned Abbie Hoffman on “flower power” that “flowers have no power” other than the force of the people who cultivate them—one of the few occasions on which
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Soviet Communist Party newspaper, and Izvestia, the government newspaper, reported at length on the “anti-Soviet agitators” in Poland. Also on March 22, the Yippies—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner—attended a meeting in Lake Villa, Illinois—a gathering of what had come to be known as the New Left
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the following August. Blocking the city traffic with a funeral march as Johnson was nominated was one suggestion. An attack on the convention was another. Abbie Hoffman—rebel, clown, and media genius—was, as always, outrageous. He sat through the meeting smoking marijuana and throwing out ideas. One was calling for an
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” after the Jones poem. An affinity group used intense intellectual debates as an underpinning for carrying out the kind of media-grabbing street theater that Abbie Hoffman could do so well. During the New York City garbage strike, the Motherfuckers hauled garbage by subway from the redolent mountains of it left on
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establishment, the same people who would defend capital punishment in the Chessman case the following year, were appalled by state executions. And the Left, the Abbie Hoffmans and Marlon Brandos, the activists and celebrities who would stand vigil by the California prison, protesting the Chessman execution, had not a word to say
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rarely gets through. Show them through your action, if they don’t understand it, fuck ’em, maybe you’ll hook them with the next action. —ABBIE HOFFMAN, Revolution for the Hell of It, 1968 I SENSED IN MARK an embryo of fanaticism that made me feel slightly irrelevant in his presence.” That
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-thirty crowd, the same ones who insisted that youth trust no one over thirty. Twenty-year-olds never expressed such a ridiculous sentiment. In 1968, Abbie Hoffman turned thirty-two, as did Black Panther Bobby Seale. Hoffman’s colleague Jerry Rubin turned thirty that year, and Eldridge Cleaver turned thirty-three. But
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a student in the late sixties was a different experience from being one in the early sixties. For one thing, there was the draft. Neither Abbie Hoffman nor Tom Hayden nor Mario Savio had been subjected to a draft—a draft that threatened to pull students into a war in which Americans
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promising of the generation, were the worst. New York, albeit many blocks downtown in the East Village, had become the center of a hip counterculture. Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders—who had a group called the Fugs that was named after a word used by Norman Mailer in his
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so famous for its “hippie” lifestyle that tour buses would stop by the busy shops of St. Mark’s Place—or St. Marx Place, as Abbie Hoffman liked to call it—for tourists to view the hippies. In September 1968, East Village denizens rebelled, organizing their own bus tour to a staid
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hippies do absolutely nothing and do it with an inexplicable—surely drug-induced—enthusiasm. Newspapers and magazines often ran exposés on campus life. Why was Abbie Hoffman’s wed-in covered in Time magazine? Because the news media and the rest of society’s establishment were trying to understand “the younger generation
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insisted that tripping be done under the supervision of a friend who did not take the drug but had experienced it before. To many, including Abbie Hoffman, there was a kind of unspoken fraternity of those who had taken acid, and those who had not were on the outside. Disturbing stories began
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album design. Perhaps because of the drug use that went with listening to this music, Sergeant Pepper was said to have profound implications. Years later Abbie Hoffman said the album expressed “our view of the world.” He called it “Beethoven coming to the supermarket.” But at the time, the ultra- conservative John
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York Times continued to give front-page space to the student strike and to describe it as an SDS plan. Hayden was in a building. Abbie Hoffman had arrived. But no one was leading. Everyone was discussing. Each building arranged “strike committees.” The blacks in Hamilton Hall, who had released their
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their trial was this week. By the time it was all clear, the moment had been lost. Nothing kills drama like a thorough explanation, as Abbie Hoffman had pointed out. “May ’68: the beginning of a long struggle.” 1968 Paris student silk-screen poster. (Galerie Beaubourg, Vence) CHAPTER 13 THE PLACE TO
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“Kiss Me Bobby” and who ripped off his shoes and clothing as though he were a rock star. He became so good at television that Abbie Hoffman enviously called him “Hollywood Bobby.” Hoffman said with frustration, “Gene wasn’t much. One could secretly cheer for him the way you cheer for
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him. —STUDS TERKEL, interviewed by The New York Times, August 18, 1968 People coming to Chicago should begin preparations for five days of energy-exchange. —ABBIE HOFFMAN, Revolution for the Hell of It, 1968 EVERYTHING SEEMED inauspicious for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago at the end of August. The convention center
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down the city,” but Mayor Richard J. Daley dismissed such comments as boastfulness. Now they were coming to Chicago: Hayden and Davis and the SDS, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the Yippies. David Dellinger and the Mobe vowed to bring in hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters. The Black Panthers were
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’t participate. . . . If Blacks got whipped nobody would pay attention. It would just be history. But if whites got whipped, it would make the newspapers.” Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies arrived with a plan, which they called A Festival of Life—in contrast with the convention in the Amphitheatre, which they called
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the Candidate, Pin the Tail on the Candidate, Pin the Rubber on the Pope and other normal, healthy games Many of the items were classic Abbie Hoffman put-ons. Others were not. An actual festival had been planned, bringing in music stars such as Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins. The Yippies had
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months, but the music stars could not be brought in without permits, which the city had been declining to give for months. A meeting between Abbie Hoffman and Deputy Mayor David Stahl was predictably disastrous. Hoffman lit a joint and Stahl asked him not to smoke pot in his office. “I don
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the park could resist filming what was reported as hippies practicing martial arts to prepare for combat with the Chicago police. One crew even caught Abbie Hoffman himself participating; he identified himself as “an actor for TV.” Another event that they did intend to carry out was the nomination of the Yippie
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more he explained, the more it seemed that everyone was starting to look like a pig. But there was a problem: There were two pigs. Abbie Hoffman had gotten one and Jerry Rubin had gotten one, and a conflict arose over which one to nominate. Typical of their differences in style, Rubin
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that these threats were not real but followed through on them as though they were. Unfortunately, there is no record of the police response to Abbie Hoffman’s threat to pull down Hubert Humphrey’s pants. Each Yippie threat, no matter how bizarre, was reported to the press by the police.
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had been invaded. Television images of Soviet tanks in Czech towns were being broadcast. In Chicago, the Soviet invasion was immediately seized as a metaphor. Abbie Hoffman gave a press conference in which he called Chicago “Czechago” and said that it was a police state. It looked like one, with police everywhere
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up because the war plank was so unpopular among delegates that he might be booed on the convention floor, not to mention the streets, where Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies had already announced plans for their own Johnson birthday celebration. Ted Kennedy refused to run, and Humphrey at last got the endorsement
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New York Times, and most of the other print media wrote about the historic significance of the television coverage. This was the Yippie dream, or Abbie Hoffman’s dream. Later he explained to the Walker Commission, the government-appointed task force to study the violence in Chicago, “We want to fuck up
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event, he had probably lost most of those voters on “Goodness me.” By 1968 not many people were still saying “Goodness me.” In later hearings, Abbie Hoffman agreed with Mayor Daley that it was the television cameras that had brought the protesters to Chicago. In September Hoffman boasted, “Because of our actions
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, women, never with names or faces, appear only to offer for sex one orifice or another to the male characters who have such names as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. By the end of the year, women’s fashions were indicating that the times were “a-changin’ ” again. It was only
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Left, though they did not hear from Jerry Rubin because he arrived in a rented Santa Claus costume and refused to change out of it. Abbie Hoffman was arrested for wearing a shirt patterned after an American flag. He was charged on a newly passed law making it a federal crime to
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As he walked out of the press conference, reporters shouted, “What about your police riot?” But the mayor had no comment. The law with which Abbie Hoffman was arrested for his shirt was one of several laws passed by Congress to harass the antiwar movement, as Republicans and Democrats competed for the
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philosophically concerned with the rights of the individual.” He wanted a Chicago conspiracy trial and on March 20, 1969, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, John Froines, and Lee Weiner—who came to be known as the “Chicago Eight”—were indicted. Hayden, Davis, Dellinger, Hoffman, and
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own California party. King, Freedom Song, 490–91. 95 wearing only bathing suits. Jonah Raskin, For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 64–65. 96 more than 20 percent white, King, Freedom Song, 502. 97 “might feel bad if you
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15: The Craft of Dull Politics 261 John Updike said, Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 15. 261 “Yippie! was really in trouble.” Abbie Hoffman (“Free”), Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 104. 261 not given to admiring, Hayden, Rebel, 244. 262 as a
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, 1988. Lesher, Stephan. George Wallace: American Populist. Reading, Pa.: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1994. Raskin, Jonah. For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Royko, Mike. Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago. New York: Plume, 1988. Schlesinger, Arthur. Robert Kennedy and His Times
Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation
by Tom McGrath · 3 Jun 2024 · 326pp · 103,034 words
your parents!”—but also for drawing attention to himself and his causes with high-profile stunts. Once in the mid-’60s, Rubin and his friend Abbie Hoffman—with whom he’d go on to cofound the radical Youth International Party, a.k.a. the Yippies—stormed the New York Stock Exchange alongside
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of the people he’d protested alongside in the ’60s, but one person he’d stayed close to—though it wasn’t always easy—was Abbie Hoffman. In 1974, Abbie had gone underground following his arrest on cocaine charges, getting plastic surgery and taking on a new identity, Barry Freed, as he
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evening with Rubin, Greene made reference to the funny line he’d heard from Betsy West—or someone—in the bar, writing: “While [Rubin] and Abbie Hoffman once led the Yippies—the Youth International Party—one social commentator has ventured that Rubin is now attempting to become the leader of the Yuppies
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, the best place to see those values held up to the light and argued about was in a series of debates between Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. By the winter of 1984, Jerry and Mimi Rubin’s splashy networking events at Studio 54 had run their course, and the couple decided to
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candidate will have a social base made up of those same people that were active and were part of the ’60s constituency that Abbie Hoffman and I represented. “I respect Abbie Hoffman as an activist, but it saddens me that he has isolated himself from the very generation that he was active with in
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of 1984 had come from Harvard, Stanford, or Penn. The pre-K to Ivy League to guaranteed wealth pipeline was real. Despite the warm reception Abbie Hoffman might have received among some college students, the focus on money and success was also increasingly visible on college campuses themselves. The shift that had
Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
by Phil Lapsley · 5 Feb 2013 · 744pp · 142,748 words
free phone calls to fuck the Bell System and, with it, the United States government. YIPL was the brainchild of Alan Fierstein and Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman. Fierstein was an engineering major at Cornell University during the late 1960s who had long been interested in the telephone system. Based on his own
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and oppose Nixon in any possible way.” In his travels through the antiwar demonstrations at Cornell, Fierstein made the acquaintance of the famous and flamboyant Abbie Hoffman, who was then in the process of writing Steal This Book, the Yippie manifesto that taught its readers how to get free food, free postage
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of people disliked the telephone company back in 1970, Fierstein included. But what on earth did making free phone calls have to do with opposing Abbie Hoffman’s enemy—that is, the United States government—and ending the war in Vietnam? The answer lay in something called the telephone excise tax. Way
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in Southeast Asia. See? You can make free phone calls and feel good about it. Fierstein recalls that, as a result of his discussions with Abbie Hoffman, “We decided that I would start a newsletter and I would introduce the newsletter to the antiwar community by distributing leaflets at the May Day
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for December 1, 1970. The first underground and college newspaper articles appeared with the new credit card code just two months later. By April 1971 Abbie Hoffman was being interviewed on New York City’s WNET-TV, channel 13, promoting Steal This Book. He read directly from his book into the camera
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. The Republicans and Democrats both had decided to host their national conventions in Miami Beach that summer—the Dems in July, the Republicans in August. Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Party seized the moment by hosting a pair of events in Miami on the same dates; true to form, the Yippie events
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from pay telephones, a presentation on the black box for receiving free calls, and breakout sessions on building answering machines and blue boxes. Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman led a workshop on the legality of phone phreaking and exhorted the attendees to support the Captain Crunch defense fund. A spy from New York
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better if the company could convict Captain Crunch before the end of the year. That wasn’t looking like too much of a stretch. Despite Abbie Hoffman’s best fund-raising efforts, the Captain Crunch defense fund failed miserably, netting a total of $1. Unable to continue to pay for a private
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. d. Luft, Die at the Right Time: A Subjective Cultural History of the American Sixties (Baltimore: United Book Press, 2009), p. 437. 187 free buffalo: Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book, 2002 reprint, p. 104: “Every year the National Park Service gives away surplus elks in order to keep the herds under its
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District of Florida, No. 24343, May 7, 1968 <db328>. 193 “Fuck the Bell System”: “Fuck the Bell System” was another play on words: in 1967 Abbie Hoffman wrote a precursor to Steal This Book titled Fuck the System, which focused on free and low-cost survival strategies in New York City. 193
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same article was published in a number of college or underground newspapers within a week. 197 “public disservice announcement”: Radio TV Reports, Inc., transcript of Abbie Hoffman appearance on the TV program Free Time with Julius Lester, April 7, 1971, 10:30 p.m. in New York City on WNET-TV <db672
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>. 197 rebuttal from Hoffman: Abbie Hoffman, “Dear Russell (Baker That Is),” YIPL, no. 2, July 1971, p. 3. 198 “two thousand and three thousand subscribers”: Bell, author interview, 2006. 198-199
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, the convention was “postponed and moved to New York where, Yippies said, the laws against phreaking are ‘full of loopholes.’” The Village Voice reported, “At Abbie Hoffman’s invitation he [Draper] flew to Miami to head a phone freak convention, panicked, and flew right out again.” See Robert Sherman, “Phone Phreak-Out
The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
by Emmanuel Goldstein · 28 Jul 2008 · 889pp · 433,897 words
was doing it. There had been a newsletter before 2600 known as TAP, which had started publishing back in the ’70s with the help of Abbie Hoffman and a bunch of Yippies. It was a fun publication but it came out sporadically and eventually stopped altogether in the early ’80s. What people
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of intelligence to begin with. This spawned still more outraged responses. Such was the hacker world of the 1980s. The section ends with tributes to Abbie Hoffman and one of our own writers, both of whom passed well before their time. The Constitution of a Hacker (March, 1984) With every generation of
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some article that originally appeared in one of these books. The only crime taking place is copyright infringement. Remember... (Summer, 1989) Why should we remember Abbie Hoffman? What relationship did he have with 2600? Abbie was, of course, the founder of the Yippies, and the founder of YIPL, which turned into TAP
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it not for the inspiration TAP offered. 229 94192c07.qxd 6/3/08 3:31 PM Page 230 230 Chapter 7 But apart from that, Abbie Hoffman was, for all intents and purposes, a hacker of the highest order. No, he didn’t go around breaking into computers, although we know the
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a reputation for outsmarting the FBI. It’s reported that the FBI gathered more information on Abbie Hoffman than on anyone else in their entire history. That’s something to be proud of. Like a computer hacker, Abbie Hoffman was thought of as a pest by some. His presence was inconvenient and he made
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card call and ask if they knew who had called them from the originating city. Not a good system if you lived with your parents. Abbie Hoffman published a lot of this stuff in Steal This Book, and after Esquire magazine wrote their seminal “Phone Freak” article, a lot of it came
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study of, 392–396 threat of success, 268–271 Hackers (film), 243–245, 535 Hackers (Levy), 235 hackers, philosophy, 207–230 of 1980s, 208–209 Abbie Hoffman, 229–230 birth of low-tech hacker, 382–384 bulletin board systems, 224–227 communications and bulletin boards, 223–224 David Flory, 230 The Galactic
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff · 22 Mar 2022 · 573pp · 142,376 words
, then at the height of their “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” fame. Another panel featured Ralph Metzner, an LSD pioneer, and antiwar yippies Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Paul Krassner. Brand had met Hoffman through John Brockman, and he continued to be attracted to the “psychedelic” side of the Vietnam War protest
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just waste it and I’m leaving now.” The crowd was confused. People were asking, “What just happened? Who insulted the guru?” Under the table, Abbie Hoffman was cackling. * * * Soon after he returned from the drug conference, Brand, Jennings, and Joe Bonner packed up the Truck Store in his camouflage-painted VW
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to marry. A weight was lifted. Although Brand retained a political aversion to the New Left, he made exceptions for people he considered friends, like Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner. Krassner had originally moved to the West Coast from New York when Brand had convinced him and Ken Kesey to edit the
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the Sausalito houseboat community. Brand had not been able to shake the idea of a book on the new world of digital information. In 1971, Abbie Hoffman had written Steal This Book, an irreverent countercultural attack on the capitalist system. Hoffman died in April of 1989, and that fall Brand toyed with
The Unicorn's Secret
by Steven Levy · 6 Oct 2016
New York and Philadelphia, armed with chalk, smiles, pot, hash, acid, and the sense that America is quickly dying.” The other brothers were Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Realist editor Paul Krassner, and psychedelic artist Marty Carey. Einhorn helped disrupt a Eugene McCarthy press conference. To those at the conference wondering who was
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know a little bit more, when we travel a little bit further.” When celebrity Yippies came to town, Ira acted as unofficial advance man. At Abbie Hoffman’s whistle-stop tour of Philadelphia, Ira hosted a news conference, then introduced him at a lecture hall. A Drummer reporter noted of Ira’s
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English department at a California college; Michael Woal also teaches. Of those known as Yippies, Jerry Rubin promotes events at New York’s Limelight nightclub, Abbie Hoffman remains active in politics, and Allen Ginsberg is still Allen Ginsberg. The first poem in his recent collection, White Shroud, contains this stanza: Did the
The Hacker Crackdown
by Bruce Sterling · 15 Mar 1992 · 345pp · 105,722 words
an immediate end to the war in Vietnam, by any means necessary, including the psychic levitation of the Pentagon. The two most visible Yippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Rubin eventually became a Wall Street broker. Hoffman, ardently sought by federal authorities, went into hiding for seven years, in Mexico, France
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grew much darker as the glory days of the 1960s faded. In 1989, he purportedly committed suicide, under odd and, to some, rather suspicious circumstances. Abbie Hoffman is said to have caused the Federal Bureau of Investigation to amass the single largest investigation file ever opened on an individual American citizen. (If
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this is true, it is still questionable whether the FBI regarded Abbie Hoffman a serious public threat—quite possibly, his file was enormous simply because Hoffman left colorful legendry wherever he went). He was a gifted publicist, who
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to spread this knowledge, and the gall and nerve actually to commit petty theft, but the Yippies had these qualifications in plenty. In June 1971, Abbie Hoffman and a telephone enthusiast sarcastically known as "Al Bell" began publishing a newsletter called Youth International Party Line. This newsletter was dedicated to collating and
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new developments in hacking. They thus find themselves PAYING THIS GUY'S RENT while grinding their teeth in anguish, a situation that would have delighted Abbie Hoffman (one of Goldstein's few idols). Goldstein is probably the best-known public representative of the hacker underground today, and certainly the best-hated. Police
The Pentagon: A History
by Steve Vogel · 26 May 2008 · 760pp · 218,087 words
aide to the secretary of the Army, 1967–68 Captain Phil Entrekin, commander of C Troop, 1st Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment at the Pentagon, 1967 Abbie Hoffman, marcher at the Pentagon, cofounder of Youth International Party (Yippies) Norman Mailer, marcher at the Pentagon, author of The Armies of the Night Bill Ayers
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militant demonstrators carrying everything from water pistols and walkie-talkies to canisters of tear gas and billy clubs. Other agents reported on the whereabouts of Abbie Hoffman and H. Rap Brown, two of the most notorious protest organizers. Overhead, military reconnaissance aircraft circled the demonstrators. Meanwhile, from twenty-three listening posts set
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its umbrella—“Ghandi and Guerrilla” and most everything in between, as Mobe chairman David Dellinger said. A healthy dose of comic absurdity was thrown in. Abbie Hoffman, cofounder of the radical Youth International Party (Yippies) and a showman in the tradition of P. T. Barnum, announced plans to use the psychic energy
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and let these people abuse them,” Graves said. “I frankly thought it was cowardly.” Out, demons, out! Elsewhere, the crowd was more entertaining than ugly. Abbie Hoffman, wearing a tall Uncle Sam hat, went about his effort to levitate the Pentagon, but did not get far. He and his wife, Anita, split
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, 122–3. The march on the Pentagon Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces. A healthy dose AP article in Fayetteville Observer, 15 Oct. 1967; Abbie Hoffman, Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, 131–2. Not everyone Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces, 235; Army AAR draft, 1–2; NYT
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10/22” MDW AAR, 29, CMH. Captain Phil Entrekin Entrekin, author interview. Ernie Graves Graves, author interview. Out, demons, out! Elsewhere, the crowd Marty Jezer, Abbie Hoffman, American Rebel, 118; Hoffman, Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, 134. Nearby in the North “Exorcising the Pentagon,” on the Fugs’ official Web site
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Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;