Eric Hoffer: A life devoted to thinking

1. A difficult character

Eric Hoffer was one of the stranger characters in American intellectual history. We don’t know which continent he was born on, and our knowledge about the forces that shaped him is nonexistent. And, in an era when the Ph.D. system prevailed at universities, Hoffer thought and wrote without credentials. He earned his living as a dishwasher, migrant worker and longshoreman.

Beginning in the 1951, he published 10 books, including The True Believer, an examination of the mass movements that shook the 20th century. What caused people in civilized societies to surrender their individual interests and get lost in the mass movements of communism, fascism and Nazism?

Like countless others, Hoffer was interested in those questions. Unlike the countless others, he sought to answer those questions himself.

Hoffer never married. He never had a conventional family or held a professional post. He organized his life so that he would have the leisure to read and think about questions that interested him.

That’s what he valued. So that was the way he lived.

Later in life, he said: “My life is not important. It’s not even interesting. Ideas are all that’s important.”

It’s a striking statement, but it seems almost backwards to me. Hoffer’s life was important because it was an example of how an intellectual life, a life of the mind, can be lived by anyone.

2. The created identity

As Tom Bethel, Hoffer’s only critical biographer, has observed, any account of Hoffer’s life must survive two ironic facts. First, we know nothing about the first part of his life. Second, we know that the stories he told about his early life aren’t true. They are myths.

We don’t know when or where Hoffer was born. We don’t know where he was raised, which cities and organizations shaped him.

We only know the stories he told. According to the stories, Hoffer’s father, Knut, was a cabinetmaker and skilled carpenter who came from Alsace-Lorraine to New York and married his mother, Elsa Goebel. Hoffer claimed to have born there. 

His mother died young — she never recovered from having fallen down a flight of steps with him. Hoffer was 19 when his father died, and the orphan used the money from the worker’s association to go to California. Of course, if you’d hardly ever left your house in the Bronx, a trip across country would be memorable. But the trip was by bus sometimes and by train in other. The trip occurred only in Hoffer’s imagination.

Why did he make up those stories?

Some were told to shut down questions about his identity. Hoffer told the story about falling down the stairs while being carried by his mother and losing his eyesight for several years as a child. He claimed his eyesight was restored with puberty. The story, biologically dubious, had one purpose: to cut off questions about where he went to school or why he didn’t.

The stories he told about his parents and, Martha Bauer, a Bavarian housemaid who raised him, can’t be corroborated. And he told those stories carelessly, changing the details on whim, until he became famous and journalists began to ask questions. Then the story became a kind of resume. It never changed. Hoffer never offered explanations. He stuck to his script. If not literally true, then it could at least be consistent.

While he told some stories as a way of shutting down inquiries about his background, he told others as a way to illustrate insights into human nature. Those stories have the quality of parables.

In the myth, Hoffer took the money he received after his father died and landed on Skid Row in Los Angeles. The only thing he wanted to do was read, study and learn. So he used his money frugally and read books. As his money dwindled, he bought a 25-cent bottle of oxalic acid and planned to kill himself when the money ran out. When the day of crisis arrived, he walked down the railroad tracks to find a place to end it all. Dramatically, he pulled the bottle out and discovered that oxalic acid was horrible — it was as if he’d put hundreds of cactus needles in his mouth. He spat the poison out and walked back to town, finding a job as a dishwasher on the way.

This is dubious biography but wonderful parable. Hoffer was constantly puzzled by human nature, and he was fascinated that some people fear poverty so much they work compulsively. That is, their fear drives them to forget about living life — finding pleasures in ordinary things, including the simple pleasure of learning. Instead of living, these fearful souls work compulsively.

The story suggests a different way of looking at life. If you get past the poisonous fear, it’s simple. You find a job that will provide your next meal. And between meals, there is time to read and learn, time to think for yourself.

Was the story of Hoffer’s suicide attempt true? If you mean literally true, it’s a hopeless question. There’s no way of knowing. But that story is true in the same sense that the parables of the gospels are true. Their truth is in the ability to spark a flash of insight — to help people see the possibilities of a different way of living.

As a migrant worker, Hoffer was free to create his own identity, his own myth, without fear of contradicting himself as the story evolved. When he became famous, he didn’t unweave the web of myth. He let the story stand. While he was living, no one called him on it.

As biography, the stories don’t hold up. There was no birth certificate in New York. There were no neighbors in the Bronx to tell childhood stories about little Eric and his parents. There are no records at Ellis Island about Hoffer’s parents.

And so the historical story begins in January 1934, during The Depression, when Hoffer found himself in a camp set up for migrant workers in El Centro, Calif. That’s about 115 miles east of San Diego, and just 36 miles north of Mexicali, Mexico.

A plausible guess is that Hoffer, fleeing Nazi Germany, made his way to Mexico and then simply walked across the border, passing through the small town of Heber, Calif. In the migrant camp, he filled out some paperwork. He listed his birthplace as New York. He listed his birthday at July 25, 1898, which might have been true, although he later claimed he was born in 1902. Hoffer was unsentimental about birthdays, but the date of July 25 seems reasonable enough. I circle it on my calendar every year.

3. Economy: Organizing a life

There are two strands to Hoffer’s life. First, he loved to think. Second, he organized his life so that he could.

Later in life, he tried to explain himself by saying: “My mind must always have something to chew on. I think on man, America and the world. It is not as pretentious as it sounds.”

He thought while picking peas in the fields or loading cargo on the docks. The questions guided his reading. The ideas gradually filled his notebooks. He would write down questions. He’d go to the library, browsing for books that might suggest answers.

To give himself the luxury of thinking, Hoffer made a living as a common laborer. The pay was low, but jobs were always available. Until World War II broke out, Hoffer followed a route through California, working farm to farm. It began in the south, where the crops were planted and ripened first, and progressed north.

The workers, while in the fields, lived in camps, and Hoffer, a great talker, tested his ideas on other laborers. He said workingmen were quick to detect nonsense.

Hoffer claimed that he had a library card in every community in central California. When he would get paid, he said, he would find a room halfway between the library and the whorehouse. His view of sex is out of step with the times, but his description of learning as a powerful natural urge — an appetite — is striking. He often described his drive to do research and to explore ideas as a natural drive, rather than as a high calling.

Hoffer ordered his life in a way that he could conduct these investigations on his own terms, without interference. He avoided entanglements of all kinds — permanent jobs, marriage, housing. 

He cleaned tables and washed dishes. He did some sluice mining after the crops had been harvested. When the U.S. entered World War II, Hoffer settled in San Francisco as a longshoreman.

Even with better pay, Hoffer lived frugally. At first, he rented a room in a boarding house. When driven out by the noise, he rented a single-room apartment.

In the early 1950s, his expenses were about $60 a week. After years as a migrant worker, living in camps and carrying his possessions in a knapsack, a settled room seemed luxurious.

He made a point of avoiding privilege, of anything that had even a hint of being elite. 

He said it took little to make him content: two meals, a little tobacco, a drink, books that held his interest, a little writing. That, to him, was a good day.

It was as if he counted wealth in thoughts rather than dollars. A good idea or two on paper was a good day’s work.

Hoffer made his own leisure — time for reading and writing. He said he worked about eight months a year as a migrant worker. He’d do a little sluice mining in the winter. 

Even on the waterfront, Hoffer would work just three or four days a week earning $70 or $80 in the mid 1950s. He didn’t let his work for wages interfere with his reading, thinking and writing.

He kept a little aside to tide him over through labor strikes. One strike deserves a footnote in the history of American literature: it allowed Hoffer to complete The True Believer.

Hoffer adjusted expenses to income. It was that simple.

4. Writing method

Hoffer worked in little notebooks or on notecards. He tried to get to a simple idea — a principle — that could be expressed on the back of a single notecard.

As a migrant worker, he carried his possessions in a knapsack. He usually had room for a single book. And while he made notes, he couldn’t carry a library of notebooks. So he worked through each notebook, revising the notes, consolidating them, compressing them. He kept the best, rather than keeping them all.

His repeated efforts to work through his material give his writing a distinct flavor. If you read Hoffer, you get a series of conclusions — compressed to aphorisms — rather than a series of arguments with examples. His books suggest, rather than persuade.

He contended that any clear idea could be expressed in 50 words. And so he pared his material down.

Hoffer compared this process of learning with the process of digesting food.

It is like a cow eating grass, he said. The cow does not become grass; the grass turns into cow. “If you want to learn, you have to do it this way,” he said. “I always knew I could educate myself this way.”

He also compared his writing to sluice mining, slowly sifting through an entire streambed of rocky material looking for the weightier, more valuable gold.

When he was a migrant worker, Hoffer would take periodic breaks.

Every few weeks, he would draw his pay, rent a room and, as he put it, would sort himself out. He’d work through his notebooks and visit the library.

Hoffer believed in his own fortune. He conducted his own inquiry. When he went to the library, he would browse, rather than consult the literature. Collegiality — a feeling of community among scholars — is a notion that is missing in Hoffer. To say he didn’t care about what the “serious scholars” thought misses the point. Those relationships were not part of his world.

5. Some major themes

Hoffer was fascinated by the mass movements that led to Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. He was interested in the New Deal that transformed the United States. Why do human beings who seem capable of living and thinking as individuals put aside their own interests and get involved in mass movements?

His investigations led to The True Believer.

Mass movements are difficult to define, but they do have family resemblances. The most remarkable is a quality we usually call fanaticism. True believers are ready to die for a cause. They divide the world into us and them. For us, the most improbable dreams are possible. For all others, there is nothing but hatred, rage and intolerance.

Mass movements seem to be born almost by recipe. The first step is to discredit the existing order. A strong man points to how far people have fallen compared to a mythical past. The second step is paint a picture of how wretched the present is when compared to a glorious future, which is just around the corner.

Unhappy people who are disappointed in their own lot in life join mass movements to avoid facing their own failures. Instead of reforming themselves, they save the world. By contrast, productive people who are engaged in their own lives are more apt to put their stock in public institutions.

 “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves,” Hoffer said. 

Hoffer wondered whether it makes sense to describe mass movements as irrational. And he wondered about a related question: Are religions mass movements?

As he aged, Hoffer changed his mind on that question. The younger Hoffer thought they were. The older Hoffer was not so sure.

6. The costs and failures

Every choice entails some cost. The life Hoffer chose prevented him from having a family, at least in the conventional sense. 

His lack of interest in some disciplines was a handicap as he grappled with complex questions. As Bethel points out, Hoffer wasn’t interested in economics, a field that might have helped him better understand how mass movements are shaped. 

His judgments about the politics of the day were often outrageously wrong. He opposed integration, saying it was a social experiment that wouldn’t work. He defended the war in Vietnam and hailed Richard Nixon as a giant whose place in history was secure.

Much of what Hoffer said and wrote was the work of a crackpot. There is no redeeming “but” to that sentence. Hoffer’s failures are preserved in print.

And yet every year I circle July 25 on the calendar.

7. A distinctive voice

With such a record of disastrous thought, why would anyone bother with Hoffer?

For me, there are three reasons:

First, he introduced me to Montaigne. Hoffer liked to tell about going prospecting for gold in 1936. He had a premonition that he would get snowed in, so he went to a shop and asked for a used book, a big, thick one with small type and no pictures.

He was snowed in and spent weeks with a mind that seemed to be just like his. When Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a 16th century French nobleman, talked, it was if he were talking to him, Hoffer said. 

I was intrigued, bought a paperback edition of Montaigne and for a long time, carried it around like scripture.

The cosmos is too big to comprehend, and human nature is too confused to understand. And yet here was one man, an ordinary mind, making a record of what he thought of it all.

It was a powerful, irresistible example. And so for a while, I thought Montaigne’s thoughts, quoted them and then tried to sort out what I thought on the questions he’d raised. He left nothing out. He wrote of sex and suicide, religion and reason, the necessity of virtue and the ridiculousness of reputation. It was a way of getting an education.

Second, I do not pretend to know how the human mind works, and I suspect that different individual minds work in remarkably different ways. And I remember the amazement I felt when I read Hoffer and realized his mind worked, at least in some ways, like mine.

For some of us, ideas accrete. They build slowly, through our reading or reporting or just noticing. For us, productive chains of thought don’t often occur in a flash — though they apparently do for others. To use Hoffer’s analogy, working on an idea is like sluicing for gold, panning up sludge and sediment from a streambed and slowly, patiently waiting for the weightier gold to sink to the bottom of the pan.

Hoffer could work with a mind like that. I realized I could too.

Third, Hoffer was original. It’s hard to imagine anyone else thinking some of those thoughts he recorded. Crackpot thoughts, certainly. But also some profound, troubling thoughts that didn’t occur to anyone else.

Perhaps it was his idiosyncratic way of working, but some of his trains of thought seem to be expressions of a unique personality. If you hear a few bars of Mozart, Handel or Elgar, you sometimes know who wrote the music, even if you can’t identify the piece. It’s the same with Hoffer’s writing. There’s an individual personality behind the writing that is instantly recognizable.

Since Darwin, the great tide of thought in the West has been to place man within nature — not as a being separate from it. But if human beings are part of nature, why can’t they be better explained by science? The laws of nature of are predictable. Can we really say that about human nature?

There were many great minds during my lifetime and they asked many good questions. But some of the most intriguing, it seems to me, were asked in Hoffer’s peculiar voice.

8. A life of the mind

In talking about Hoffer’s legacy, people invariably mention The True Believer. But I find myself reading his diary entries, his aphorisms and the mythical stories he told about himself.

Before his first book was published, before he was known, he wrote to an editor at Common Ground, a magazine that interested him. He received a reply from another editor, Margaret Anderson. In a revealing letter, Hoffer told her that he wrote about familiar things: work, business, money, hunger, suicide, the Bible, food, clothes, highways, trains.

“I don’t know whether the essays have any merit,” he said. “But they undoubtedly strengthened in me a habit of detached observance.”

That, in a nutshell, was Hoffer. He made a habit of observing and then reflecting on those observations.

If you talk of “examined life,” most people would think of Socrates.

Socrates, at least the man portrayed by Plato, is a bit lofty for me. I have an easier time with Hoffer.

More than his books, what’s valuable about Hoffer was the example of the way he lived.

In much of the world, being an employee can be something akin to being a serf. Countless people use their talents to achieve someone else’s goals. We work at our jobs until the well is dry and there is nothing left for ourselves. We are exhausted before we even consider our own interests.

Against that trend stood Hoffer, a cantankerous man who earned his living with his hands, all the while thinking fresh thoughts about human nature.

He lived a life that showed how people — any person — could live a full life of the mind.

9. Bibliography

There is only one critical biography: Tom Bethel, Eric Hoffer: The Longshorman Philosopher, Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2012.

For those interested in Hoffer, this is the essential book. This essay is wholly indebted to it.

Three earlier books compiled the stories Hoffer told about himself: Calvin Tomkins, Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968; James D. Koerner, Hoffer’s America, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing, 1973; and James T. Baker, Eric Hoffer; Woodbridge, Conn: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

Journalists avoid single-source stories for a reason, and, until Bethel wrote his biography, people tended to take these accounts that Hoffer gave of his life at face value. And yet some of the myths told about himself are first rate, as good as some of the parables in the gospels or in Leo Tolstoy’s 23 Tales.

Hoffer’s own books are:

The True Believer, 1951

The Passionate State of Mind, 1955

The Ordeal of Change, 1963

The Temper of Our Time, 1967

Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, 1969

First Things, Last Things, 1971

Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973

In Our Time, 1976

Before the Sabbath, 1979

Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer, 1982.

Truth Imagined, 1983