Remembering Eric Hoffer / November 2016
LEJ's Louisiana
Yours Truly in a Swamp
Monthly e-column @ www.LEJ.org
by
Leonard Earl Johnson,
of Lafayette and New Orleans
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Remembering Eric Hoffer
by Leonard Earl Johnson
November 2016
President John F. Kennedy,
assasinated in Dallas, November 1963
© 2016, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved.
Just a Little While to Stay Here / Topsy Chapman
~ YouTube ~
~ YouTube ~
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| Empty Miniature Porcelain Rocking Chair JFK-Assassination Momento / LEJ.org |
I met Eric Hoffer in San Francisco a few years after the November 22 murder in Dallas of President John F. Kennedy ~ by the fleeting kiss of Oswald's magic bullets.
The year was 1963. The century was still young, but over the middle hump and starting its slide down the ageing side.
The year was 1963. The century was still young, but over the middle hump and starting its slide down the ageing side.
I had been in college in Illinois, and the generation teaching us hailed itself as the proud victors of World Wars One and Two ~ and anything else daring to cross the waves.
America had fallen deeply and tragically in love with war, and eagerly policed the World for the greater good of reasons unclear to us, the young being asked to die for such vision.
By the time I left Illinois for California, America was up to its eyeballs in the Vietnam War, and much of America's youth was in open defiance of our elders ~ who were, after all, trying to kill us.
San Francisco had become the sex, drugs and rock'n roll magnet of that tune-in, turn-on, dropout era.
San Francisco had become the sex, drugs and rock'n roll magnet of that tune-in, turn-on, dropout era.
The Fabled Sixties!
They were a time of fables. Eric Hoffer was a living one. He was the son of German immigrants, and lived his adult years in California as a working longshoreman who wrote books. Not much was known then or now of his early years. His friends from before California never spoke with those after. At least none that I knew.
In the Fabled Sixties, philosopher poets walked freely among us bearing ideas like cargo from far away places with strange sounding names. When I met Hoffer he was at the top of this heap looking for the gangway.
He had no paper birth records, but he told us he was born and raised in the Bronx. His strong German/Yiddish (he spoke both fluently) accent made that believable. Whatever the truth of origin, Hoffer was an outsider ~ the best thing a writer/artist can be.
In the Fabled Sixties, philosopher poets walked freely among us bearing ideas like cargo from far away places with strange sounding names. When I met Hoffer he was at the top of this heap looking for the gangway.
He had no paper birth records, but he told us he was born and raised in the Bronx. His strong German/Yiddish (he spoke both fluently) accent made that believable. Whatever the truth of origin, Hoffer was an outsider ~ the best thing a writer/artist can be.
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| Eric Hoffer sitting by the dock of the San Francisco Bay |
He was a self-educated, hard-headed realist who read and wrote, he said, as a way of experiencing Life.
More than once I found him sitting on the waterfront at the foot of Market Street, talking about Schopenhauer and America's China trade with an audience of other longshoremen and beguiled tourists.
More than once I found him sitting on the waterfront at the foot of Market Street, talking about Schopenhauer and America's China trade with an audience of other longshoremen and beguiled tourists.
His first book, True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements, was published in 1951 ~ a scant six years since the end of World War Two. It grew enormously popular through the following decade, and was widely read and praised by our college professors ~ whom increasingly we suspected of being in a conspiracy to kill us.
True Believer was promoted by no lesser true believers than Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike passed out copies of the book to his war buddies, and when Hoffer heard about this, he remarked with a grin, "It proved to me that this is the kind of book any child can read."
Hoffer, a noted practitioner of extrapolation, was already a minor celebrity in literary circles when L. B. J. heard of him. The gentlemanly Eric Sevareid, one of television's first talking heads, had him on several specials airing on C. B. S. and repeated later on P. B. S., in prime time for an amazing number of hours of intelligent television.
They talked of great ideas, without dancing contests or blood curdling crime stories. They talked about work, war and hardhat politics.
During those conversations Hoffer commented that he thought well of Lyndon Johnson and his escalating war in Vietnam.
Lyndon Johnson smarting inside the White House over draft-age youths dancing in opposition to his war ~ not only in San Francisco, but right under his own White House windows ~ did not let his tv-set cool before he booked Hoffer for a five-minute photoshoot that stretched into an hour-long, jaw-and-gum-flap session.
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| Hoffer with L. B. J. at the White House, 1967 |
Reporters leaned in close to hear the longshoreman Eric Hoffer, a New York born German-American nonbeliever Jew, and the Texas-American vasalating member of the obscure sect of the Disciples of Christ, Lyndon Johnson, finding they shared a ten-gallon hat chock full of what they thought were good ideas.
Alas, the World came to see those ideas differently ~ as delusional at best, self-serving at worst, and in either case very costly in lives and treasure. Empire wars eventually suck the homeland dry. Military strategists call this "attrition."
My college friends and I watched the early part of those Vietnam days on television sets in Carbondale, Illinois. The vertical hold button on ours was tricky. The nation was entering its first of the many flickering wars of attrition that plague us yet today.
* * *
After an academically questionable eight
or nine freshman years,
Southern Illinois University president, Delyte W. Morris,
personally booted me out,
and San Francisco welcomed me in.
* * *
In San Francisco, Hoffer ate his breakfast at Ben's Epicure, a Polk Street cafe where I came to work as a cook. Our ages were roughly 70 and 26.
Hoffer mused that his visit with "the man," L. B. J., in "the house," the White House, might have put his soul in exploitation.
Probably it had, I reckoned. It was a time of exploitation.
"Dance lithely," he told me, "they all are."
Hoffer visited the White House a second time in 1982, when Ronald Reagan (a Johnny-come-late foe of youthful dancing) presented Hoffer with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. No small achievement for two elderly would-be Union men sitting inside the White House. Hoffer died the next year, at 80.
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To my knowledge, Hoffer never retracted his support for the Vietnam War ~ even after it had clearly failed. The hard fact remained that the war was good for shipping, sailors and longshoremen, Hoffer's people.
From its early days there were Union members against going to war in Vietnam, of course, and this number increased as the war's failures grew painfully obvious.
Hoffer suffered the loss of the intellectual followers who had originally catapulted him to fame, and at one point he "dropped out." Oddly arguing that he had not wanted to be a spokesman. (The troubadour Bob Dylan had recently said the same thing.) The Fabled Sixties were complicated.
He told me at the time of his publicly announced retirement from first the wharf, then lecturing at the University of California, Berkeley; and then writing his newspaper column: "I knew when to catch the train, but it is harder to know when to get off."
These days, I am Hoffer's age then; and I get on and off the train in Louisiana. It is what my ticket says to do.
Hey, Eric, you self-reliant old cuss, you were spot on right! It has been quite a tricky dance. And I want to take one more turn around the dancefloor.
Your comments and corrections are welcome: Comments
Copyright, 2016, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
Copyright, 2016, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
Contact me at Subscribe@LEJ.org if you want on the list - that may get e-mailed.
If you wish to read any month's column go to www.LEJ.org anytime. They are posted on the first of each month and polished for the next few years.
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Lagniappe du Jour:
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~ YouTube ~
"Ohio"
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
* * *
True Believer:
Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements
by Eric Hoffer
~ Wikipedia ~
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Little Boxes / Malvina Reynolds~ a song of the times ~
~ YouTube ~
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Neil Young |
| Longshoreman and Author Eric Hoffer and President Lyndon B. Johnson White House, 1967 |
~ YouTube ~
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Your comments and corrections are welcome
Copyright, 2016, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
Your comments and corrections are welcome
Copyright, 2016, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Go here For
 * * * If you wish to read any month's column go to www.LEJ.org anytime.
They are posted on the first of each month and polished for the next few years.
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| Royal at Kerlerec, Faubourg Marigny, NOLa / Janis Turk |
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LEJ's Louisiana, Yours Truly in a Swamp
is a monthly e-column @ www.LEJ.org,
and periodically at
Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans,
publication of the
publication of the
It is written by Leonard Earl Johnson of Lafayette and New
Orleans, Louisiana
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© 2016 Leonard Earl Johnson,
All Rights Reserved
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posted by LEJ's Louisiana | 6:32 AM
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