In November 1969, 15-year-old Bobbie Kavanaugh pulled out her best penmanship and wrote a fan letter. Not to some Hollywood heartthrob, but to a social philosopher. On lined binder paper in the most careful script, she told Eric Hoffer about her father.
“He reads and loves every word you write,” she began. “He calls The True Believer his bible and he carries a pocket-book-type version in his hip pocket. He has worn out several books. . . . One day at supper Dad said he dreamt that one day he talked with you, he said it was his life’s ambition. I believe it! So I started thinking—it would cost too much to talk with you on the phone, my dad’s a working stiff—but I thought, if it wouldn’t be asking too much, if you could write to my dad, sort of a Christmas present, and he could write back. Sort of a ‘correspondence.’ (I guess that’s the word!) I wouldn’t ask this of you, if it didn’t mean so much. . . .”
There are almost 50 boxes of letters to Hoffer in the campus-based Hoover Archives, which acquired the commonsense author’s papers in 2000. His fan mail confirms the extraordinary impact of a man who insisted he was ordinary. If he’d ever had a résumé, it would have listed 10 years of odd jobs on L.A.’s Skid Row, another decade doing migratory farm work and panning for gold, and a quarter-century as a dockhand on the San Francisco waterfront.
But Hoffer also read and soaked up knowledge endlessly, wrote pithy books about society and politics, held Wednesday seminars at UC-Berkeley and served on Lyndon Johnson’s Presidential Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. In Hoffer, people from all walks of life found an original thinker who bemoaned intellectualism and championed the common man.
He never attended school. Hoffer was born in the Bronx in 1902 to working-class German immigrants. He learned to read German and English before age 5, but his mother died when he was 7, and shortly afterward he went blind—presumably for psychological reasons. Unaccountably, he regained vision eight years later. From then on, Hoffer devoured every book he could get his hands on, starting with Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. After his father died in 1920, he moved to California.
Wherever he went as a migrant worker, he would take a room “halfway between the books (library) and the girls (brothels),” as James T. Baker reports in Eric Hoffer (Twayne, 1982). Hoffer called his library cards his “credit cards” and accumulated dozens up and down the state. He would copy favorite book passages on index cards, storing many of them in an old card-catalog drawer that now sits in the archives.
Hoffer’s sources reveal the breadth of his literary explorations: Seneca, Churchill, Chomsky, Spinoza, Stendhal, Swift, Aristotle, Bacon, Einstein, Confucius, Euripides, the Bible, Tennyson, Chekhov, Tertullian, Thucydides, to name just a few. And the headings he devised to organize his notes— “virility and decadence,” “the idea of a chosen people,” “asceticism,” “ennui as a motive of activity,” “discovery of mind,” “hope”—show the range of his interests. He also mastered science textbooks and once amazed Berkeley researchers by discovering a remedy for chlorosis in lemon trees.
In the late 1930s, Hoffer started keeping diaries. At Hoover, the transcriptions of Notebooks 1 through 52 fill 1,200 typewritten pages and offer a window on his preoccupations. From Notebook 2: “Is there a specific situation which stimulates an interest in politics and another situation which stirs interest in economic problems? The question is: Given a person who has neither political nor economic rights, what would he crave first?”
Rejected from service in World War II for medical reasons, Hoffer settled permanently in San Francisco in 1941 and became a longshoreman. In his tiny McAllister Street apartment, on a board laid across two chairs, he wrote his best-known book, The True Believer (Harper & Row, 1951), a study of mass movements and the psychology of those who join them. The Hoover collection includes his first penciled outline as well as the full text handwritten in ink.
Some of Hoffer’s thoughts seem eerily apt these days. “A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation,” he wrote. “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. . . . When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for.” Quoting Pascal, he adds that for a doctrine to attract the true believer, it must be “contrary to nature, to common sense and to pleasure.”
Before his death in 1983, Hoffer published 10 more books covering topics from crime to automation, including The Ordeal of Change (1963), widely considered his best, and The Temper of Our Time (1967). But it wasn’t until his CBS-TV interview with Eric Sevareid in 1967 that he became a pop icon. Airing in September, the broadcast drew such high ratings it was rerun in November to an even bigger audience.
Fan mail poured in by the truckload; much of the correspondence in the archives relates to this one interview. Letter-writers confided their personal struggles, believing they had finally found a leading American thinker with a sympathetic ear. One young man said he had dropped out of graduate school at Yale to write a mythic adventure novel with Hoffer as the protagonist.
Sevareid explained his guest’s impact this way: “Hoffer had made millions of confused and troubled Americans feel very much better about their country. He had pulled aside the veils of supposed sophistication and, in new ways, showed them again the old truisms about America and why they remain alive and valid."
Not long after, Hoffer signed a lucrative contract to write a nationally syndicated newspaper column called “Reflections.” He was now welcome in San Francisco restaurants that used to refuse him because he wouldn’t wear a tie. In 1973, President Ronald Reagan awarded Hoffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But fame never really turned Hoffer’s head. He once said of his life, “It is not important. It is not even interesting. Ideas are all that’s important.”
Had it been up to him, in fact, there would be no Hoffer collection. Lili Osborne, his companion for the last 30 years of his life, secretly saved his papers despite his insistence that no one would have any use for them. “I knew that he was unique. I knew that it was important. But he didn’t look upon himself as anything special,” Osborne says.
“It is very hard to write a biography about Eric,” she adds, since Hoffer was tight-lipped about his personal history. The material now at Hoover can only help.
Jeanene Harlick is a reporter at the Santa Cruz (Calif.) Sentinel.
