CHAPTER ONE
The Enigma of Eric Hoffer
My life is not important. Itâs not even very interesting. Ideas are all thatâs important.
âERIC HOFFER Interview with biographer James Koerner
Eric Hoffer was unknown to the public in 1951 when he published his first book, The True Believer. Almost overnight, the San Francisco dockworker became a public figure. Recognized as a highly original thinker, he became known as the Longshoreman Philosopher. A 1956 profile in Look magazine identified Hoffer as âIkeâs Favorite Author,â elevating this blue-collar working man to the level of President Eisenhowerâs bedside table.
It wasnât just Eisenhower who appreciated Hofferâs intelligence and wit. Public figures, ranging from the author and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to the philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell, praised his work. Since September 11, 2001, some commentators have noted that Hofferâs analysis of âthe true believerâ and mass movements in generalâalthough written with Hitlerâs and Stalinâs followers in mindâapplied equally well to Islamic fundamentalists.
Hoffer worked on the San Francisco waterfront for almost a quarter-century. After The True Believer, he published ten more books; later in life he often (although not always) said that his first book was his best. Then, in one of those only-in-America stories that Hoffer himself so loved, this self-made man, this unashamed patriot and fan of Ronald Reagan, became an adjunct professor at the University of CaliforniaâBerkeley during the Free Speech movement.
Hofferâs place in American politics and intellectual thought is an enigmatic one. Much of his writing was in the form of aphorisms, short, pithy remarks that touched on eternal truths. But he was also capable of the sustained thought and expression that went into The True Believer and his other books and newspaper columns. Hoffer was interested in probing the depths of human behavior and discovering the motivations behind the twentieth centuryâs wars and revolutions. Wary of public praise, he resembled the prophets of the Old Testament, free to make people of high and low estate uncomfortable with his insights.
Little is known about Hofferâs early years. Hoffer offered interviewers a rough outline of his first four decades, but his various versions contradicted each other. His date of birth is uncertain, often given as 1902 but more likely 1898. He claimed his German accent came from Alsatian immigrant parents, but it was often described as Bavarian. And the account he often gave of losing his sight at an early age and then regaining it several years later doesnât fit with some of his other versions or with medical probability. The man who startled readers with his insight into the truths of revolutionary movements took particular trouble to conceal the truth about his own background. Quite possibly, he was born in Germany and never became a legal resident of the United States.
Eric Hofferâs life divides into two roughly equal parts. The first part is from birth to his move to San Francisco after Pearl Harbor. The second is his life in San Francisco. Before Pearl Harbor, without exception, Hofferâs life is documented only by what he said or wrote. It is the same with the research and interviews of others. Hoffer was their sole source. His best friend, Lili Osborne, summarized the difficulty: âAll we know about Ericâs early life is what he told us.â
She didnât mean just the first few years either, but the first thirty-five years. He described his life in those decades many times. But nothing can be corroborated. After he moved to San Francisco, his life is well known from the recollections of those who knew him, from press coverage, magazine articles, televised interviews, and public appearances. The first half is barely documented at all.
Itâs as though he stepped out of the San Francisco fog in the 1940s with stories to tell about his past, but nothing that can be verified. He died in 1983, still in San Francisco.
Lili Osborne first met Hoffer in 1950, perhaps six months before The True Believer was published. Over the next thirty-three years she knew him better than anyone in the world. But, she said: âI never met anyone who knew Eric in his earlier life.â
For a twentieth-century American to have such an utterly untraceable past is beyond remarkable. Itâs bound to raise the question: was Hoffer born and reared in this country? Despite considerable publicity surrounding publication of The True Believerâalong with reviews, Hofferâs photograph was printed in newspapers around the countryâno one is known to have come forward to say that he and Hoffer had once been friends. No one has claimed him as a childhood companion. No one volunteered that he and Hoffer had been associated in any way. Nor did his national television appearances in the 1960s prompt any such claims or reminiscences.
A sharp dividing line does occur in January 1934, when Hoffer joined a federal homeless shelter in El Centro, California. Thereafter, and throughout his time as a migrant worker, he provides us with a wealth of detail that is absent from his account of life in the Bronx and Los Angeles. He still provides no names, but the flood of detail marks an abrupt change that is not otherwise explained.
The Canonical Life
In summary, this is Hofferâs early life as he described it to journalists, biographers, and historians who interviewed him in the decades after he became a public figure through publication of The True Believer:
He was born in New York City, his parents having come to the United States from Alsace-Lorraine at the turn of the century. A German woman called Martha Bauer accompanied his parents and all four lived in the Bronx. Hoffer never gave the address. His taciturn father, Knut, a âmethodical, serious, German cabinet makerâ or âself educated carpenter,â brought books with him from Europe, but Eric had âhardly any conversation with my father all my life.â1 Once, Knut took the 11-year-old Eric to a concert in New York and they heard Beethovenâs Ninth Symphony, but no other details are given.2
A âvillage atheist,â according to his son, Knut Hoffer had âall the paraphernalia, all the books that a German intellectual ought to have. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, books on medicine, the works.â3
These books were kept in a cupboard with glass doors, and Hoffer remembers pulling out the books and classifying them according to size, color, and language. He spoke German in the home and he taught himself âto read both English and German at the age of five.â4
His mother, Elsa (a small woman), was in the habit of carrying Eric (a large child) around the house. One day, when he was six, she fell down a flight of stairs while she was carrying him. Two years later, she died and Hoffer went blind. His blindness lasted for eight years. When asked, âDid the fall cause those things?â he responded, âI donât know.â5 Hoffer also didnât remember the fall itself, nor could he recall whether his sight returned suddenly or gradually. In an early account he said that he went âpractically blind,â followed by a âgradual improvement.â
His father had no money for doctors, and Ericâs blindness meant that he ânever attended school or received any sort of formal education.â6
Martha Bauer was a âBavarian peasantâ and his German accent came from her.7 Young Eric slept in her bed. âWe always slept together, always.â As to the restoration of his sight, he doubted at times whether he welcomed it. Before, he had been fed, cared for, and loved by Martha. âThen I got my sight back and there wasâseparation.â8 She also told him that all his family was short-lived and that he would die at age forty. âI believed her absolutely,â he said.9
Hofferâs biographers, Calvin Tomkins and James Koerner, describe only one scene outside the family house. It was a second-hand bookstore on the same block in the Bronx. It had acquired a library from an estate, and in the years after his sight returned Hoffer treated it as his library. There, he became âsomething of an expert in botany.â10 His father would leave him a little pocket money on a shelf and sometimes, to keep the bookstore owner happy, Hoffer would buy the book he was reading.
He was âseized with an enormous hunger for the printed word,â and developed âthe bad habit of swallowing any book I liked in one gulp instead of savoring it slowly.â He was reading ten or twelve hours a day, in a hurry because he didnât know if he would go blind again.
âReading was my only occupation and pastime. I was not a normal American youthâno friends, no games, no interest in machines, no plans and ambitions, no sense of money, no grasp of the practical.â11
In the bookstore, he saw Dostoyevskyâs The Idiot. The word was familiar because his father had once said within earshot: âWhat can you do with an idiot child?â12 It is the sole comment that Eric attributed to his father. Hoffer said he later read the novel a dozen times.
Martha Bauer returned to Germany in 1919 and Hofferâs father died in 1920. His death remained ârather hazy in my mind.â But Eric received $300 from Knutâs fraternal society, and he decided to move to California. He had heard that it was a good place for poor people. When he left, according to Koerner, he took along âa huge basket of books that he had bought at the second hand bookstore.â In a letter to Margaret Anderson, to whom he dedicated The True Believer, he said that he brought with him âseveral trunks full of books.â
He made his way to skid row in Los Angeles, where he âlived life as a tourist.â Because he believed Marthaâs claim that he would die at forty, any plans were pointless.
His life was books, blindness, recovered sight, more books, and nothing but books. Except for his parents, the only person identified is Martha Bauer. Outside the house, no one at all is identified. His mother is not described or quoted. As to the father-son relationship, the only comment each made about the other, in Hofferâs account, seems to have been âidiot childâ and âvillage atheist.â
Los Angeles in the 1920s
Hoffer said he stayed in Los Angeles for ten years. He took a cheap room near the public library, paid rent in advance, and began to read.13 In fact, he spent âevery minute reading.â14 Hoffer knew how to live frugally, but when the money was gone he sold his books and a leather jacket. Then he âbegan to go hungry.â15
His hunger episode appears in every account of his life. He is on Main Street, staring through a pet shop window. Two pigeons engage in a courtship ritual and Hoffer becomes so absorbed that he forgets his hunger. Then he is aware that he had forgotten it, and this inspires him.16 âHunger wasnât so terrible. It wasnât so mysterious after all.â He enters a nearby restaurant where he offers to scrub pots and pans in exchange for a meal. The owner accepts, and a fellow dishwasher tells him where he can get a job.
The State Free Employment Agency is Hofferâs next snapshot. He repeated the story often. It was a big hall with maybe five hundred men sitting on benches; in a b...