No one had heard of Eric Hoffer until he published The True
Believer (1951), a set of reflections about mass movements and
those attracted to them. He was also known as the Longshoreman
Philosopher. From 1943 to 1967 he worked under Harry Bridges, the
labor boss on the San Francisco waterfront. After The True
Believer he wrote a number of books, mostly short, consisting
of his articles or aphorisms. He became an adjunct professor at
U.C. Berkeley at the time of the Free Speech movement and was
interviewed by Eric Sevareid for CBS. He died in 1983, his age
probably 85.
But we know very little about his life before the mid-1930s.
That is where the mystery comes in. We know that he moved to San
Francisco soon after Pearl Harbor and rented a room in a low-rent
district. There he wrote The True Believer, using a plank
for a desk. Before that he was a migrant worker in California’s
Central Valley—stoop labor picking fruit and vegetables.
In 1934 he showed up at a federal homeless shelter in El Centro,
California, close to the Mexican border. A trucker drove him there
from San Diego, where he was so hungry that he ate cabbage “cow
style” at a wholesale food depot. Where was he before San Diego? I
believe there is great uncertainty. It may be that he had crossed
the border from Mexico.
Hoffer never married but about a decade ago his long-time lady
friend, Lili Osborne, made his papers available to researchers at
the Hoover Institution, Stanford. In summer visits to Hoover, I
went through those papers and now my book,
Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher is out
(published
by the Hoover Institution Press). It includes photographs and some
unpublished writing by Hoffer.
Earlier, I interviewed Hoffer himself; both shortly before
Ronald Reagan’s election and then a few months later. I also
interviewed some of the few who knew him well, including Lili
Osborne and her son Eric. Another close friend was Stacy Cole, a
professor at a community college in Fremont. He was associated with
Hoffer over a 15-year period. Also featured is Lili’s husband,
Selden Osborne. He and Hoffer worked together as longshoremen and
Hoffer called him a “true believer.” He was in the room with Hoffer
when he died.
Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at Hoover, was interested in
Hoffer and compiled an index to his books. Once he asked me if I
was writing a biography of Hoffer. I said that if you don’t know
much about the first 35 years of a man’s life, “biography” may be a
misnomer.
Three books about Hoffer were published in his lifetime. The
first, by Calvin Tomkins, was based on a New Yorker
profile in 1967. Tomkins told me that when he interviewed Hoffer,
“the things he said about his early life did sound quite shadowy,
but he was a great talker and he made it all seem authentic.” James
D. Koerner, with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, wrote a second
book (Hoffer’s America, 1973). Hoffer “plainly dislikes
talking about his early life,” Koerner wrote. In fact, “quite a bit
of it is simply unknown to him.” To a doctoral student, Hoffer
said: “I am uninterested in my distant past. I have probably told
everything worth telling.”
Hoffer said he spent the first 20 years of his life in the
Bronx. But everything he said could fit onto two pages. Nothing can
be confirmed. He never gave his Bronx address, never went to
school, identified no friends. He said he went blind for eight
years, hence no school. Then he recovered his sight. Ancestry sites
have turned up nothing and when Lili’s son Eric once told Hoffer
that he felt like “hiring a genealogist in New York to look up your
father,” whose name was Knut, Hoffer replied:
“Are you sure you really want to know?” Like there was some dark
stuff.…I don’t know. There’s stuff happened that he didn’t want
anybody to know. He had a real casual and dreadful way of letting
something slip. “Are you sure you want to know?”
Hoffer spoke with a strong German accent. He told people that
Knut came to New York from Al-sace-Lorraine. But young Eric went
there, too, and found that their lilting accent was quite unlike
Hoffer’s more guttural Bavarian. He tried looking through the
“Ellis Island stuff” but could find no trace of Knut Hoffer.
In a late notebook Hoffer wrote that young Eric believed him to
be his father. Stephen Osborne, Eric’s older brother, agreed. But
when I asked Eric Osborne himself for a comment at the time of
Lili’s funeral, he said: “I guess I had better leave that
unanswered. Both of those guys [Selden and Hoffer] are a part of me
and I loved them both.”
Young Eric agreed that Hoffer’s account of his early life didn’t
add up. He thought Hoffer’s case might be comparable to that of B.
Traven, the mysterious German author of The Treasure of the
Sierra Madre, whose identity is still unknown. (B. Traven was
a pen name.)
But most significant was the response of Lili Osborne. She could
be intimidating, and I worried that she might throw me out when I
expressed skepticism about Hoffer’s early life. Instead she
welcomed the idea and said she had always thought of him as an
immigrant. She had no definite knowledge. She did say that “all we
know about his early life is what he told us.” She also said that,
although she had known Hoffer for 30 years, she never once met
anyone from his earlier (pre-True Believer) life.
TO ME, THE CLINCHER CAME with a discovery about “Martha,” a
German woman who supposedly came with Hoffer’s parents from Europe
to the Bronx. As a child he slept in her bed, and when he went
blind she guided him about. But in Hoffer’s early accounts of his
life, for example in The Reporter in 1951, there is no
Martha. She appears in 1957, in an article by Eugene Burdick, who
later co-authored two best sellers, The Ugly American and
Fail-Safe. Then Martha becomes a fixture in Hoffer’s later
accounts. I believe she was a later invention.
Lili also told me that when The True Believer
manuscript was written but before publication, he submitted it to
Rabbi Saul White in San Francisco for his approval. He was told
“that he should proceed.” The fate of Israel became an obsession
for Hoffer. The indications that he was Jewish are discussed in my
book. One of the most striking is that he could speak Hebrew. He
claimed that he learned it “on skid row in Los Angeles.” He was
also familiar with German textbooks on botany and chemistry, and
these, too, he studied on skid row. That is hard to believe.
Stephen Osborne said that more important than the puzzles about
Hoffer’s life is “what he wrote.” That is true. But we all like a
mystery. The True Believer was not seen as a conservative
book. But by the 1960s-especially after his Berkeley experiences-he
became what we would call a neoconservative.
Read any of Hoffer’s books (most are available from Hopewell
Publishers in New Jersey). Hoffer took enormous trouble over his
writing, sometimes rewriting ten times or more. The disappointment
is that he never finished his book on intellectuals. He worked on
it for years. But some of his thoughts are assembled in my chapter
8. A couple of examples:
The intellectual knows with every fiber of his being that all
men are not equal, and there are few things that he cares for less
than a classless society. No matter how genuine the intellectual’s
altruism, he regards the common man as a means.
A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual’s sense
of worth as an automated economy is a threat to the worker’s sense
of worth. Any social order…which can function well with a minimum
of leadership will be an anathema to the intellectual.
