Abbie Hoffman: Rebel of the Sixties

I remember living through the fifties and getting along quite well without doing any good. I wasn’t raised in a commie intellectual-type family. I got to see blacks demonstrating outside of Woolworth’s, being carted off to jail in small southern towns. I remember seeing them on TV singing freedom songs and saying there’s something happening in their lives which is not happening in mine right now, maybe there’s something about this working for good, putting your energy into something else than making money or a career (Sloman 289). -Abbie Hoffman

Abbie Hoffman was born Abbot Howard Hoffman November 30, 1936 in Worcester, Massachusetts. His father, John, was one ye

The spring and summer of 1967 brought the hippie movement on the Lower East Side out into the open. Suddenly there were hippies everywhere.

On New Years Day 1968, Abbie and a group of friends were smoking dope and came up with the idea of Yippie. Hippies would become Yippies. Yippies were

It was the use of psychedelic drugs, however, especially LSD that made the radical bohemianism of the sixties so different from earlier bohemian experiences. By the time of Abbie’s arrival in the East Village that paranoia about marijuana had been broken, and people were smoking it openly. LSD was readily available, cheap, and pure (Simon 258). Abbie had begun hanging out with the young hippies and became familiar with the drug dealers and crash pads (Jezer 80).

In the fall of 1955, Abbie began to attend Brandeis College. At Brandeis he found that ideas were to be challenged, altered, and even rejected. To Abbie this confirmed that his instinct to challenge authority was not mere mischief making. At

This started the Yippie! movement. It was not long before everyone knew who and what Yippies were. Abbie did most of the talking for the Yippies. When it became obvious that he was getting nowhere, he joked that for $200,000 he would leave town.

While still working as a psychologist at Worcester State Hospital, Abbie had signed on as a volunteer in H. Stuart Hughes’s independent campaign for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Abbie helped with fundraising and organized a signature-gathering campaign in Central and Western Massachusetts to get Hughes on the ballot. The Hughes campaign collected more than 17,000 signatures to get him on the ballot (Jezer 47). The importance of the campaign for Abbie turned out to be the people it brought together in the Worcester area (48).

ar old when his family arrived at Ellis Island and changed their name from Shapoznikoff to Hoffman. His mother, Florence, was a native of Clinton, Massachusetts (Jezer 3).

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