Читать книгу History of the Trial of the Chicago 7 - Bruce A. Ragsdale - Страница 49

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Abbie Hoffman Courtesy of Bettman/Corbis.

Abbie Hoffman was one of the most visible and familiar of the Chicago Seven defendants, and his style of cultural politics and confrontation defined much of the defendants’ response to Judge Julius Hoffman and the government prosecutors. The two Hoffmans engaged in verbal sparring throughout the trial, trading one-liners and gaining much of the attention of the press.

Hoffman was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and attended Brandeis University and graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. In the early 1960s, he became increasingly involved in social activism and organized northern support for the civil rights movement in the South. In the mid-1960s, Hoffman moved to New York City and organized political theater. His most famous event was in 1967 at the New York Stock Exchange, where, after notifying the press of their intentions, Hoffman and others entered the visitors’ gallery and tossed dollar bills to the trading floor. As Hoffman and other cultural radicals in New York planned political theater to coincide with the Democratic convention in Chicago, they devised the idea of Yippie!, a barely organized movement that would simultaneously mimic and mock a political party. Their plans for Chicago focused on a Festival of Life, which they envisioned as part music festival and part public presentation of counter-cultural lifestyle, all with the goal of attracting television coverage.

Hoffman and fellow Yippie Jerry Rubin met with the National Mobilization Committee to coordinate demonstrations at the convention, and the Yippie leaders moved to Chicago to negotiate permits for their events in public parks, but the alliance between the cultural radicals and the political organizers was always uneasy.

Hoffman was highly visible in Chicago during most of the convention week, organizing media events and speaking to crowds in Lincoln Park about expected confrontations with the Chicago police. On the night of the worst violence, however, Hoffman was in jail after his arrest for walking around the city with an obscenity written on his forehead in red lipstick. (He claimed he did it to keep his picture out of the newspaper.) Hoffman was among those cited by Mayor Daley’s report blaming the violence on outside agitators, and he was one the eight indicted for conspiracy and intent to incite a riot.

Hoffman was one of the two defendants to take the witness stand, and his extended testimony was a tour de force of his absurdist, subversive verbal style. Hoffman’s performance in the courtroom was equally notable, seldom missing an opportunity to undermine the legitimacy of the proceedings.

Judge Hoffman convicted Abbie Hoffman on twenty-three counts of criminal contempt but sentenced him to a comparatively light eight months in jail. The U.S. court of appeals reversed the contempt convictions and remanded them for retrial before another judge. The government prosecuted five of the contempt charges, and Judge Edward Gignoux convicted Hoffman on two of the charges and found him not guilty of the other three. Gignoux convicted Hoffman of the charge related to an extended verbal attack, complete with Yiddish insults, delivered against Judge Hoffman following the revocation of David Dellinger’s bail and on the charge related to Abbie Hoffman’s appearance in the courtroom in judicial robes, which he flung to the floor. Although Gignoux found that the judicial robe episode did not actually impede the trial, the behavior was “so flagrant, so outrageous, and so subversive" that it rose to the level of “an actual obstruction." Gignoux did not sentence Hoffman to any additional jail time. Hoffman’s conviction on the charge of intent to incite a riot was reversed by the court of appeals, and the government made no effort to retry him.

Hoffman published several successful books, including Revolution for the Hell of It (1968), Woodstock Nation (1969), and Steal This Book (1970). He went into hiding after an arrest for cocaine possession and lived under an assumed identity for nearly six years. Hoffman surrendered himself in 1980, after his successful work as an environmental organizer made his exposure likely. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1980, and he committed suicide in 1989.