Steal This Book

Abbie Hoffman 1971

Introduction

In the introduction to Steal This Book, famous 1960s protest organizer Abbie Hoffman describes the work as "a manual for survival in the prison that is Amerika," spelling the country's name incorrectly to show disrespect for the law. First published in 1971, it was rejected by over thirty publishers and then went on to become a best-seller when Hoffman published it himself. The book is a compendium of methods that individuals can use to live freely, without participating in the social order. These tips range in levels of legality from addresses of free health clinics and inexpensive restaurants to ways of cheating pay phones and methods for making explosive devices.

Even in its day, Hoffman's advice was of questionable practicality. Some of his tips, the more complicated ones, involve multiple identities and underworld connections; others, such as switching price labels while shopping, are so obvious that they seem hardly worth writing. As time has passed, most of the loopholes Hoffman exploits in this book have been closed, due in part to the attention this book brought to them. Still, Steal This Book is an important historical document, a lively example of a time when America's youth felt at war with the status quo, and petty crime was considered a justifiable way to stand up against the corruption of the system.

Author Biography

Abbott "Abbie" Hoffman was born November 30, 1936, in Worchester, Massachusetts. His family was solidly American middle class: his father John worked as a pharmacist before opening a successful medical supply distribution company, and his mother Florence was a homemaker. For the early part of Hoffman's life, he followed the social mainstream. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1959 with a degree in psychology and then earned a master's degree at Berkeley. In 1960, at the age of twenty-three, he married his first wife Sheila, with whom he had two children. He and Sheila divorced in 1966.

The social changes that swept through America profoundly changed his perspective. He became involved in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, first volunteering to go to segregated southern states and stand beside blacks who were challenging racist practices and later organizing a cooperative in New York City to distribute crafts made by southern blacks who had been fired for their activism. By the mid-1960s, he shifted his attention to fighting the growing Vietnam conflict. As a leader of the antiwar movement, Hoffman gained a reputation around New York for his organizational skills and his skill at getting the attention of the media. In 1967 he married Anita Kushner, who became his partner in many antiwar activities. He and Anita had one son and divorced in 1980.

In 1968, along with Jerry Rubin and other like-minded activists, Hoffman created the Youth International Party or Yippie Party. The Yippies held several high-profile, antiestablishment protests, including showering the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with money and a mock attempt to "levitate" the Pentagon. They gained international attention as protest leaders at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The convention became a violent spectacle of demonstrators facing off against the police, National Guard, and Army. News footage of Chicago police in riot gear beating teenagers with nightsticks shocked the world. Because of the violence in Chicago, Hoffman and six other organizers became defendants in the infamous Chicago Seven trial. Hoffman mocked the court proceeding as a circus by showing up in costumes and doing handstands, showing a disdain for the establishment shared by many youths of the time.

By the end of the 1960s, Hoffman had receded from public attention. In 1973 he was arrested for taking part in a cocaine deal. Faced with jail time, he instead went underground, traveling under an assumed name. He continued to publish books and magazine articles and took up with Johanna Lawrenson, who would be his companion for the rest of his life. In 1980 Hoffman surrendered to the authorities. The world found out that under the false identity "Barry Freed," Hoffman had been instrumental in working for environmental causes in upstate New York. In light of the community work he had done as Barry Freed, he was given a light sentence.

Throughout the 1980s Hoffman served as an organizer for social causes and supported himself by giving lectures on college campuses. Few of his friends knew he suffered from severe bipolar disorder. In 1989, in the throes of an acute bout of depression, he committed suicide with a barbiturate overdose.

Plot Summary

Survive!

The first section of Steal This Book offers advice on how to live cheaply or freely in America. Doing so is explained as a political statement, a way of showing resistance to the exploitation that Hoffman says is inherent in a capitalist society. This section starts out with tips about "Free Food," covering such diverse methods as crashing a bon voyage party on a steamship, putting a bug on a restaurant plate to avoid paying the meal, shoplifting, and inexpensive recipes. Other parts of this section include advice on "Free Clothing and Furniture," "Free Housing," "Free Education," "Free Money," and "Free Dope."

Some of the methods Hoffman suggests for obtaining free goods and services are presented in the form of lists of social organizations in the business of helping impoverished people, such as community health clinics and food pantries. Other advice comes in the form of suggestions for how to use commonly available objects around the house. Most of Hoffman's tips reflect the book's revolutionary spirit, showing readers techniques for using established services such as busses, phones, hotels, and electricity, without having to pay for them. The details offered in the book range from advice for growing marijuana to lists of which foreign coins will work in vending machines in place of higher-priced American currency.

Fight!

In the second section of the book, Hoffman addresses issues related to the area with which he is most often associated: that of violent and nonviolent social protests. This section includes methods of spreading one's political message, such as operating printing presses and underground radio stations and cutting into the broadcast frequencies of television stations in order to broadcast one's own programming.

A large part of this section is devoted to survival tips to be used during street demonstration. Hoffman suggests when and where to plan demonstrations to get the most media attention, as well as such minute details as sensible ways to dress and what kind of shoes to wear. Much of his advice assumes that protests will turn into violent confrontations; therefore, his advice is geared toward clothes that cannot be grabbed by police officers and strong shoes with which to kick. Gas masks and helmets are also recommended.

This section of the book also deals with weapons radicals can use to defend themselves against the police and, in general, to destroy businesses. Hoffman gives tips about street fighting and knife fighting and reviews which kinds of guns are useful for which situations. He also explains several methods for making crude bombs. There is also information about dealing with the results of demonstrations, including first aid tips and advice for finding free legal counsel. This section ends with some advice about living underground under an assumed name in order to avoid the law.

Liberate!

In the last section of the book, Hoffman gives specific advice for living inexpensively in four U.S. cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In each, he tells readers where to go for free housing, food, medical care, and legal aid. He also recommends diversions such as theaters, movie houses, and places that hold poetry readings. Restaurants that have free food available or that offer large portions at small prices are also recommended. Each city has some area of advice specific to it alone. The New York section, for instance, tells about sneaking onto the subway for free; in Chicago, Hoffman praises the availability of cheap food; Los Angeles has a section rating the beaches; and his writing about San Francisco emphasizes the city's parks.

Key Figures

Bert Cohen

The title page of Steal This Book lists Cohen as "accessory after the fact." He was the person who did the book's graphic design, giving it the look of an "underground newspaper" of the type published for little money by revolutionaries in the 1960s.

Lisa Fithian

Fithian wrote the foreword to the 2002 edition of the book. A long-time community activist, she is a member of the Direct Action Network and is involved in political issues. She has recently been in the news for her part in organizing protestors at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, an act she shares in common with Hoffman's activities to mobilize the Yippie movement at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. In 2001 she was arrested and held for several days while preparing to protest at the G-20 summit in Ottawa, Canada. After being detained for two days, she was released for lack of evidence.

Al Giordano

Giordano is an activist who worked with Abbie Hoffman. He wrote "Still a Steal," the introduction to the 2001 edition of Steal This Book. Giordano worked with Hoffman on social and environmental causes from 1980, when he was twenty, to the time of Hoffman's death in 1989. During the 1990s, he worked as a journalist for the Boston Phoenix. As a result of investigations into Latin American drug policies, he began a Web site dedicated to reporting on the United States' war against drugs. For several years Giordano was a defendant in a libel suit brought against him by the Bank of Mexico in response to an article about major narcotics trafficking on the property of the bank's owner.

Izak Haber

On the book's title page, Haber is listed as "coconspirator," a term used in law to imply that someone is guilty of working with another guilty party. In fact, it was Haber who first approached Hoffman with the idea of Steal This Book. Much of the material he presented to Hoffman as his research was actually copied verbatim from other published sources. After five weeks of working together, Hoffman fired him, paying him a small amount for the twenty pages of original material he had produced. Haber later published an article in Rolling Stone saying his research had been stolen by Hoffman.

Abbie Hoffman

At the time when he wrote Steal This Book, Abbie Hoffman was internationally famous as a leader of a 1960s youth movement. He was active in various organizations that existed to oppose the Vietnam War and came to media prominence as one of the most visible protesters involved in organizing antiwar demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. The convention became a violent spectacle of demonstrators facing off against the police, National Guard, and Army. After it was over, Hoffman and other demonstration leaders were charged in federal court with having encouraged demonstrators to cross state lines to go to Chicago and for encouraging resistance when police wanted to move protesters away from the convention hall. The trial of the Chicago Seven became a media circus, in part due to Hoffman's irreverent attitude. In the end, five defendants were found guilty, but the convictions were later overturned. A few of the defendants, however, including Hoffman, did spend a few weeks in jail in 1971 for contempt of court. Hoffman wrote the introduction for Steal This Book while in jail.

Hoffman assembled the tips that he offers in Steal This Book from a variety of sources. Most of them are from anecdotal evidence given to him from people he met while working for various protest movements. Others were mailed to him in response to advertisements he placed in underground newspapers across the country. In most cases, Hoffman researched the tips he had been given to assure that the suggested techniques would work and that the services and organizations recommended in the book were legitimate.

Media Adaptations

• The 2000 motion picture Steal This Movie is not an adaptation of this book, as is commonly assumed; actually it is a biography of Hoffman. It was directed by Robert Greenwald and stars Vincent D'Onofrio, Janeane Garofalo, and Jeanne Tripplehorn. It is available from Trimark Home Video.

Throughout the book, Hoffman gives a running commentary on the "survival techniques" about which he writes, telling readers which techniques work well, which do not, and which he is not familiar enough to judge. He is as honest as he can be about the usefulness of each technique and is not at all hesitant to point out myths and misconceptions when he finds them. Although this book is a collaborative effort, Hoffman's is the only name on the cover. Because of this, he takes responsibility for the usefulness of the information it contains. As a result, the information about organizing protest movements and publicizing rallies, which were his areas of expertise, tend to be more fully detailed than segments about such matters as collecting multiple welfare checks or shoplifting.

One area that appears to have been developed imaginatively is the subject of bomb-making. Hoffman never was involved in violent confrontation against the authorities, and no one ever accused him of being involved in violent struggles. Still, the information about building bombs and using guns against the police is richly detailed. The information and techniques outlined in these sections may or may not have come from people who had true experience, but the chance that Hoffman himself verified these experiences is small. To this extent, Steal This Book is not the survival guide it claims to be, but is instead an idealized version of a radical lifestyle.

Anita Hoffman

Abbie Hoffman's second wife was his constant companion at the time that Steal This Book was written, working with him on many of his social activities in the late 1970s until he dropped out of public life in 1973. She was instrumental in the writing and research of this book, and is the woman in many of the book's photographs. Although Hoffman only mentions Anita in the book's introduction, the tips contained in the book reflect the lifestyle they lived together throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Themes

Class Conflict

One basic premise behind the ideas expressed in Steal This Book is that there is a war between different classes of American society. It is this war that justifies the use of criminal measures. Hoffman recognizes moral social responsibilities. As he says in the book's introduction, "Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral."

With the phrase "Pig Empire," he refers to those who have economic power. In defining them as the enemy and claiming the right to use any means to combat the enemy, Hoffman permits all sorts of antisocial behaviors. Stealing is a natural way to weaken an economically powerful enemy, and the book advises many methods to take advantage of international business conglomerates such as the telephone and airline industries. But the book does not discriminate among different levels of economic ownership; small shopkeepers are targeted as often as large corporations, having been defined in the class struggle as "them" versus "us."

In addition to advocating stealing from economic entities, the book also gives advice about destroying property without personal gain in the section titled "Trashing," which leads into advice on hand-to-hand combat against the police and using explosives and firearms. Since the privileged classes have the benefit of police protection, and the police have superior weapons and training, Hoffman suggests using any means available, no matter how violent. All of the book's destructive techniques are discussed in terms of the struggle against those with wealth.

Freedom

The identifying characteristic of the target audience of this book is a desire for freedom from social constraints. In the late 1960s and early 1970s rallying cry "freedom" was popular. In the name of freedom, people—usually young people, who had not yet invested much into the social order—dropped out of society, living off what they could gather from handouts and sharing, and stealing when they could. In the drive for economic independence, many young people practiced the tips Hoffman offers in his book long before these tips were gathered together and published. To those who wanted to escape from the "slavery" of the social order, this book offered a promise of freedom.

The tips in the book offer financial freedom by showing readers places they can stay and eat for nothing or close to nothing. There are long lists of social service institutions, especially in the section titled "Liberate!" which focuses on four American cities as case studies. Hoffman covers the basic essentials of survival and other necessities—such as entertainment and education—that can be obtained at no cost. Overall, the book is designed to make life easier for people who desire to be free from the economic mainstream, who do not want to pledge their minds and hearts to employers just to gather enough money to live comfortable lives.

Safety

This book represents an honest acknowledgement that the young people of the sixties were bound to participate in the illegal activities that are mentioned. Rather than assuming they would follow the law or that they deserved to suffer whatever fate might befall them if they did not, Hoffman compiled a guide for those who chose to follow the illegal path, with the hope of guiding them safely through the dangers of outlaw life. The book was shocking to readers and reviewers of the establishment, who saw its primary purpose as being to encourage illegal activities. But a good case can be made that it is meant to look after the safety of young American citizens who would be engaging in illegal activities anyway.

The safety tips in Steal This Book include honest explanations of different types of venereal diseases and places readers can go for treatment; tips about which recreational drugs are harmful and to what degrees; self-defense tips; first-aid tips for those hurt in fights and demonstrations; and nutrition advice for those preparing food on a budget. Because most of the practices described in the book were socially shunned at best and illegal at worst, information about them was difficult to come by in 1971, and therefore the safety of the thousands of youths who had dropped out of society was left at risk.

Style

Zeitgeist

The German term zeitgeist means "the spirit of the time." It is often possible to relate the time in which an author was working to the moral and intellectual trends that prevailed when she or he was writing. For instance, the wealth and hedonism of the jazz age are important clues to understanding The Great Gatsby. In the case of Steal This Book, it would be almost impossible to separate the zeitgeist of 1960s America from Hoffman's writing style. The book is disorganized, repeating some advice and straying off its stated mission at what appears to be the author's whim. For instance, the section on "knife fighting" has little to do with the political subject of fighting off police oppression, assuming that no police anywhere use knives to attack criminal suspects; it is more likely a subject Hoffman had experienced and felt like including in this guide, despite the irrelevance. Because the spirit of the time gravitated toward freedom and rebellion, the book is free to drift toward the sort of irrelevancies that would be considered distractions if included in books written for a different audience.

Topics for Further Study

• Interview people at your school and in your community about tips that can be used to gain free goods and services legally and compile a list.
• Find a Web site run by organizers of political demonstrations, and see if the tips they give for self-protection are different than the ones Hoffman gave in the 1970s. Research and explain how modern demonstrations are different than those in the 1960s and 1970s.
• Prepare a tape of an hour-long broadcast your class would make if you started your own underground radio station.
• Hold a mock trial for someone arrested using the tips for stealing suggested in this book. Have the prosecution make the case for social order and the defense make the case, as Hoffman puts it in the book's introduction, that "corporate feudalism [is] the only robbery worthy of being called 'crime,' for it is committed against the people as a whole."

Tone

Almost as important as the advice given in Steal This Book is the tone that Hoffman takes throughout the work. It is his tone that conveys his attitude. Though the practicality of many of his tips might be questioned, what is clear is that he takes a consistent attitude throughout. This book offered some useful tips and many ideas that were not even realistic when it was first published. Over time, many of the corporate interests Hoffman encourages readers to "rip off" have refined their security measures in order to avoid being victimized by the kinds of malicious crimes he describes. Still, this is a useful document because it conveys through its tone a way of looking at the world that was prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s.

The book's tone is set by the use of the word "pig." Though the word later came to be used mainly as an insult toward police, Hoffman uses it here to describe anyone who is greedy, lazy, and small-minded. His assumption is that these are the attributes shared by those in power, making anyone who is part of the economic system a "pig," and thereby a fair victim of robbery, "trashing," and violence. The word is frequently used to refer to members of the police force, but that is because they are the members of the establishment with which readers would most likely come into contact if they followed the book's guidelines. In general though, the police, corporate employees, politicians, and business owners are all workers for what Hoffman refers to as the "Pig Empire."

Historical Context

Opposition to War

The organized resistance to the Vietnam War in the 1960s grew directly out of the civil rights movement of the 1950s. Up until the 1950s, America was still a segregated country, in spite of the fact slavery had formally ended in 1865. Southern states had laws, informally referred to as "Jim Crow" laws, that refused blacks equal access to the same public services that whites used, including transportation, housing, and schools. In 1957 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black churches and ministers, was formed under the leadership of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to organize protests against racism. The organization welcomed the participation of northern whites, usually college-aged students who volunteered to fight injustice, risking their lives by attending marches and voter registration drives with southern blacks.

Starting in 1965, the SCLC changed its focus to fighting poverty in the North. White participants, including Abbie Hoffman, felt themselves being forced out by the group's new agenda. With the skills they had learned organizing protests, they focused on the growing dissatisfaction over the war in Vietnam.

The struggle between North Vietnam and South Vietnam had gone on mostly unnoticed by Americans since 1949. Americans had given financial and tactical aid to South Vietnam, fearful that a victory by the communist government of the North would lead to a spread of communism all across the continent. President John F. Kennedy sent the first U.S. troops into the region in 1961; in 1964 President Lyndon Johnson used a report of North Vietnamese ships attacking an American ship to have Congress pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, allowing the president to escalate the war. By the end of 1965, 200,000 American soldiers were committed to the region. Years passed and American war-planes bombed Vietnamese villages, American soldiers died in battle, and an increasing number of American citizens quit believing that the abstract idea of stopping communism was a sensible explanation for the destruction. On college campuses, outrage against the war expanded to a distrust and hatred of the government in general. The outrage of the nation's young people was channeled into political action by activists like Hoffman who had participated in the civil rights movement.

The Chicago Seven Trial

In 1968 various antiwar organizations called their members to attend the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to show their opposition to President Johnson, a Democrat, and to Hubert Humphrey, his vice president. Humphrey supported the war and was expected to be the Democratic presidential nominee. The protesters were opposed by overwhelming resistance from the government. Standing up against 5,000 protestors were 12,000 police, 6,000 army troops, and 5,000 National Guardsmen. From August 25 to 29, the streets near the convention center were scenes of violence, as the police, under orders from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, attacked unarmed protesters with clubs, tear gas, and guns. The protesters' chant that "The whole world is watching!" turned out to be true. Watching on television, Americans were in general more sympathetic to the bloodied protestors than the police and their strong-arm tactics. A government report commissioned later to investigate what happened in Chicago coined the term "police riot."

After Richard Nixon was elected on a law-and-order ticket, the Justice Department went about prosecuting the organizers who had encouraged people to come to Chicago to attend the protest. They were charged with conspiring to cross state lines to commit a felony, even though several of the defendants had never met one another or talked to each other before arriving in Chicago. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had been the founders of the Youth International Party, or Yippie which focused on promoting change through raising public awareness with shocking and humorous stunts, such as backing their own nominee for the presidency—a pig from a local farm. Others came from the Black Panther Party, the Students for a Democratic Society, and the National Mobilization to End the War.

Throughout the trial in autumn 1969, Hoffman and Rubin brought media attention to what they saw as the ridiculousness of the government's charges. They arrived in court in costumes, dressed as revolutionary war soldiers and as Chicago police officers, and addressed Judge Julius Hoffman as "Julie." These antics made Hoffman a hero to those who saw the whole trial as a political farce.

In the end, the defendants were found guilty of inciting a riot, with all convictions overturned on appeal. Hoffman was one of the defendants who had to spend a few weeks in jail for contempt of court. It was during this relatively light sentence that he wrote the introduction to Steal This Book, a fact that he alludes to in the book's opening pages.

Steal This Book carried the Yippie attitude of resistance into the 1970s, even as the antiestablishment fervor was fading. Throughout the decades, it has been considered with almost mythical reverence by those who support the cultural revolution of the sixties, even though the advice it gives is seldom practiced.

Compare & Contrast

• 1971: Angered at the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, many American citizens feel the need to resist the prevailing social order, sometimes violently.

  Today: Frightened by the prospect of terrorist attacks, many citizens look to the American government for protection.

• 1971: One of the longest periods of economic growth in the country's history makes it possible for young people to take financial security for granted, turning their backs on the morally unsatisfying pursuit of money.

  Today: The unstable economy makes money harder to come by, which in turn makes it harder to survive off sharing or handouts.

• 1971: Steal This Book takes a position that large, faceless corporations are inhumane and deserve to be robbed.

  Today: Advances in transportation and telecommunication have made corporations multinational and therefore even more impersonal. Nineteen-sixties-like protests are aimed against the G-20 Conference and the World Trade Organization, groups that coordinate world-dominating corporations.

• 1971: Abbie Hoffman writes a guidebook so that readers who are not part of the hippie movement but are interested in participating, can benefit from the informal tips usually passed from one person to another by word of mouth.

  Today: Informal tips like these can generally be found on the Internet.

• 1971: There are two major world superpowers: America, with a capitalist economy that supports private ownership, and the Soviet Union, with a communist economy that is based on government ownership.

  Today: Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the American form of capitalism is the main economic influence in the world.

Critical Overview

Hoffman had trouble finding a publisher for Steal This Book. He insisted the three-word phrase, which had appeared in small print on the back jacket of his earlier book Woodstock Nation, must be the title, even though some publishers would have been glad to print it in spite of its advice for illegal activity, if only it did not tell consumers to steal from them. In all, over thirty publishers rejected it before Hoffman paid to have it published by Grove Press. Even then, many bookstores refused to carry the book, and major distribution chains refused to handle it. Libraries refused to put it on their shelves. In several cases where people committing crimes were found to have Steal This Book among their possessions, prosecutors tried to indict Hoffman as a criminal conspirator.

After a glowing review by Dotson Rader in the New York Times Book Review, sales of the book began to pick up. According to Jack Hoffman, Abbie Hoffman's brother, Rader's review was that the book was most useful when perceived as a way of getting to know its author. In his book Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman, Jack Hoffman quotes Rader's position as saying, "It reads as if Hoffman decided it was time to sit down and advise his children on what to avoid and what was worth having in America. He says that if you want to be free, then America might kill you. You must know certain things if you are to survive." Presenting the book as a source of insight into America's most famous and interesting hippie made the book itself interesting and famous. Hoffman toured the country, appearing on local talk shows to stir up interest.

It was not long after the publication of Steal This Book that the public began to turn against Hoffman. Rumors circulated that he was living a luxurious lifestyle from the book's proceeds, living in a penthouse apartment and socializing with celebrities. Most of the money from the book in fact was donated to the Black Panthers Defense Fund. Though the rumors were unfounded, they cast a pall of hypocrisy over the project. In 1973 Hoffman was arrested for selling cocaine and he went underground to avoid a jail sentence. The arrest seemed to confirm the rumors of an extravagant lifestyle and living in hiding, he was unable to support his book.

Since its publication, Steal This Book has continuously stayed in print. No reviewers have recommended the advice it gives and except for Rader, none has seriously thought of it as way of understanding its complex author. Still, it captures the antiestablishment mood of the 1960s, an era that, even by the time of the book's publication in 1971, was fading into nostalgia.

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at College of Lake County. In this essay, Kelly considers whether Steal This Book is still relevant for readers in the twenty-first century.

Abbie Hoffman's best-known piece of writing, Steal This Book, has one of the most recognized and often copied titles in publishing history. Newspaper articles and books about Hoffman often use some variation on this phrase, such as Steal This Dream and Live This Book. A 2000 film about Hoffman's life was called Steal This Movie, leading many into the mistaken assumption that it was an adaptation of this random crazy-quilt of a book. Hoffman himself, knowing how much of a catchphrase the title had become, cannibalized his own work when he titled his 1987 book about America's antidrug hysteria Steal This Urine Test.

The title is familiar all over the world, but like Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again and Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, it may have more power as a slogan than as an entry point into the book itself. Some critics would have no problem if the book were never read again; it was never written "well," by anybody's standards, and a good case can be made that once the novelty has worn off, the book has outlived any minimal value it had. Others hold onto it, though, as a magic totem that keeps the spirit of its time alive, and they fear its loss would represent yet another blow against free thought and individualism. To them, this is a work that purposely set out to defy all of the rules, and so it would be foolish to judge it by any other book's standards.

The problem with treating Steal This Book as a sacred object and declaring it off limits to criticism is that, though it makes the book less vulnerable, it also renders it less interesting. To say this book sets its own standards is the same thing as saying that we cannot talk about it as a book, and with that kind of restriction people are bound to wander away from it. What is needed is to find a standard by which to measure the book and talk about it.

One of Hoffman's stated goals was to parody the kinds of travel books that commonly show people how to take in an exotic land on a budget. As such, his last section, titled "Liberate," was just right for its time. It gives specific names, addresses, prices, and preferred menu items. Best of all, the world to which it introduced its readers was one of soup kitchens, public libraries, and throwaways, all of the things urban dwellers usually do not notice in their environment and that tourists, far from being directed toward them, are usually advised to avoid. As a satire of the establishment, the book was highly successful, showing the positive side of things the social mainstream feared and disdained, such as poverty and crime. Adding advice about system abuse and drugs to the travel tips, one can see that the book's agenda was to shine a positive light onto anything the straight society tried to suppress. Any objections on moral grounds, then, just fed the satire, making it grow stronger even after the book was already finished.

The problem with reading it like this is that the book becomes a throwaway, as dated and as doomed to obsolescence as the travel guides it parodies. Frankly, there is no big market for travel books ten years old or older: their prices are out of date, they talk about places that have gone out of business, and they almost always have been replaced by newer models with more relevant information. So it is with Steal This Book. Not only are most of the great bargains gone, but also faded from the American culture is that need to point out the establishment's hypocrisy. We live in an ironic age, in which the order of the day, from entertainment to advertising to political rhetoric, is to point out one's own internal contradictions with a wink. True, a good case can be made that the current level of irony might never have been reached without Abbie Hoffman, but being a creator of it does not excuse him from its effects. There is something a little too naive about pointing out that the mainstream culture is hypocritical, as if only the talented few can see it. We are all aware of the hypocrisy. These days, satire needs to be more subtle than portraying the enemy as violent and clueless. For some, this kind of obviousness might be considered a reminder of simpler times, when satire moved at an easier pace. Accepting the book in that spirit, though, puts Abbie Hoffman's revolutionary tribute to youth culture in the same category of nostalgia as silent movies and radio dramas. It is not really satire; if it is about a world from which the reader is comfortably removed, it then becomes camp.

Another way to look at Steal This Book today would be to forget about the humor, which depended on the circumstances of the sixties and seventies, and to concentrate on its value as a guide to orchestrating a successful urban revolution. True, America is less interested in revolution today than it was then, but the general lack of interest does not in itself make Hoffman's advice any less practical. Bombs are still bombs, demonstrations are still public displays of opposition and when the bombing and demonstrations are done, medical and legal aid is still required. Some of his advice has lost its relevance over time—for instance, it is now cheaper and easier for a struggling radical group to post its ideas on a Web site than to print an underground newspaper—but the staleness of those cases is offset by his masterful sense of how to draw media attention even to a small event. Even today's Web sites lack the insight into social protest that Hoffman had, if only because protest today is such a rare occasion, while for him it was an everyday event.

Unfortunately, revolution is serious business, and the book's satirical element works against this. It would be nice to say that satire and revolution, when mixed together, yield a well-rounded, healthy worldview that is smart enough to distrust and yet sincere enough to fight for a cause. The actual result of the merger though can be frightening. The chapters of Steal This Book that deal with guns and street fighting, for instance, fall somewhere in the middle of the book's possible uses. They are too much a product of Hoffman's romantic imagination to be useful as battle training, but also seem counterproductive to social revolution certain to attract the sort of violent response from the government that spells the end for any gang of protesters, however well armed. On the other hand, this is a violent world, and it is hard to take advice about fighting with weapons as a joke, especially as a joke on the dominant culture. Perhaps at the time Hoffman actually believed that guns and knives could be used to overthrow the government, though the knife fighting passages of the book make it pretty clear that he, at least some of the time, used the idea of revolution to play out some 1950s street gang fantasy from his youth. As sound as the book's advice for protestors is, it blurs the line of reality with its glib treatment of weapons. Groups that took up arms against the government did not fare well even before the world became vigilant against terrorist attacks, and they seem particularly delusional now.

What Do I Read Next?

• The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman was originally published in 1980 under the title Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. It captures the story of his public and private life from his birth through the time he lived as an outlaw. The current edition, published in 2000 by Four Walls Eight Windows, has new pictures that were not in the original publication.
• In Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel (1992), Marty Jeter, who knew him from covering Yippie events for an underground newspaper, tells the story of Hoffman's life. Jeter's work is sympathetic and thorough with frequent references to Hoffman's own writings.
• The Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Stewart Brand and Peter Warshall, did what Hoffman attempted to do, but in a nonviolent and anti-confrontational way: it offered the wisdom of the alternative lifestyle to readers who wished to participate. First published in 1968, it has been frequently updated, including The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, published by HarperCollins in 1995.
• While Hoffman was living underground to avoid arrest for his 1973 cocaine charge, he exchanged letters with his wife Anita. They published their correspondences in 1976 as To America with Love: Letters from the Underground. Covered in the book are such matters as Hoffman's fear of being killed by the government, his work on his autobiography, and his growing love for another woman, Joanna Lawrenson.
• Tom Hayden, a codefendant with Hoffman in the infamous Chicago Seven trial, went on to become a state senator in California. He gave his version of the 1960s in his book Reunion (1989), published by Crowell-Collier Press.
• Edward H. Romney is a political conservative who has been financially independent since 1969. His political views are the opposite of Hoffman's, but the advice he gives in Living Well on Practically Nothing is similar to that in Steal This Book. A revised version of Romney's book was published in 2001 by Paladin Press.

Of all of the tips passed along in Steal This Book, perhaps the most telling is the one about getting free buffalo from the government. In that one small episode, Hoffman captured the whole essence of the book and the significance it will have for coming generations. Hoffman advised readers to write to the Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 20420, claiming that the government had some program to give away buffalo to anyone who wrote and agreed to pay their buffalo's freight charge. As a tip, it was not a very practical one; the program had already been discontinued by the time the book was written. A true guide book would have dropped it right there. It was included in the book anyway, as a sort of advertisement for Hoffman and his methods. "So many people have written them recently demanding their Free Buffalo," he wrote, "that they called a press conference to publicly attack the Yippies for creating chaos in the government." Presumably, no matter how many letters the Department of the Interior received asking for free buffaloes, the government was never really in danger of falling into chaos. Telling it this way though, poses a minor bureaucratic situation as a major battle between the government and the Yippies, with the government backing down, defeated by its own rules, reduced to babbling and to publicly acknowledging the power of the Yippies' information sharing.

Hoffman goes on to tell his readers, "Don't take any buffalo s—-from these petty bureaucrats, demand the real thing. Demand your Free Buffalo." He could not have picked a better symbol for his own book. The word "buffalo" was once a slang term for intimidation or deception. Currently, the most common association with the word is of the animal that once roamed the plains until government-sponsored massacres pushed them near extinction. Now it is the Yippies who are nearly extinct, and readers are still left to wonder just how much Abbie Hoffman was trying to buffalo them.

The book's relevance comes down to this: a little bit of a reminder of a dying breed, a little bit of a riddle about the mind of the man who wrote it, and a little bit of the rebellious attitude that we all suppress. It is up to each reader to decide if these add up to something they feel is worth reading, but one thing that seems pretty clear is that there is enough here to make the book worth it for some people, and there will be for a long time to come.

Source:

David Kelly, Critical Essay on Steal This Book, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, Gale, 2003.

Josh Ozersky

Ozersky is a critic and historian. In this essay, Ozersky looks at Steal This Book as a product of the late 1960s and its author, Abbie Hoffman, as a romantic icon of the time.

Students coming to Steal This Book for the first time may find themselves a little perplexed. The current edition of the book begins with three separate introductions, each testifying to Abbie Hoffman's inspirational courage as a revolutionary. Steal This Book is said to be "his most widely read" and "his most notorious." In Hoffman's introduction, he speaks of Steal This Book as "a manual of survival in the prison that is Amerika." What follows is a breezy guide to shoplifting, freeloading, and milking the system, peppered with cartoons. There are sections on building bombs, guerrilla broadcasting, and street fighting, but these are short and not particularly useful. (Hoffman's advises would-be knife fighters to "work out with the jabbing method in front of a mirror and in a few days you'll get it down pretty well.")

More puzzling still is Hoffman's general tone. Despite his subversive rhetoric, Hoffman sounds like nothing so much as a boastful, mouthy teenager, the kid who wears an anarchist symbol on his denim jacket and bores everybody with his self-serving rhetoric. It's impossible to imagine anybody taking this person seriously as a record store cashier, let alone a revolutionary leader. And yet Hoffman's reputation has only grown since his death in 1989. Steal This Movie, a major Hollywood release, came out in 2000.

"True, a good case can be made that the current level of irony might never have been reached without Abbie Hoffman, but being a creator of it does not excuse him from its effects."

But understanding Abbie Hoffman, his book and the man himself is difficult without a solid understanding of the 1960s and his role in them. Despite the fact that he is associated with the baby boom (it was Hoffman who coined the phrase "Woodstock Nation") and figured so prominently in many of the signal events of the counterculture, Hoffman was not a baby boomer himself. Abbie Hoffman was born in 1936, which means that he became conscious of public life in the years immediately after World War II. Those years were ones marked by an unusual brew of anxiety, conformity, and a generalized feeling of moral superiority in America that rankled many. In fact, the conservatism of the Truman and Eisenhower years was highly exceptional, a result of having won the greatest war ever fought and the worst depression in American history simultaneously. Many adults felt that America had the high moral ground in the struggle against Soviet communism, and the moral imperatives of the 1960s, such as civil rights and women's liberation, were not yet on the horizon.

As a result, to many young people of Hoffman's generation, America seemed smug and oppressive, its citizens brainwashed by material goods and government propaganda. They dismissed all dissent as "pink" and were satisfied with women, minorities, and the poor kept low. Hoffman's generation was born too late to know the privations of the depression, so America's glee at things like row houses, new cars, and the security of suburbs and corporate jobs seemed merely greedy to them. And it so happened that when the great causes of the early 1960s came along, they were just coming into their early adulthood.

Some, like Tom Hayden of the University of Michigan, applied all the seriousness of cold war civics to creating a "new left," which would oppose the political status quo from a radical but serious-minded and deeply moralistic perspective. At the same time, an apolitical "counterculture" was being formed in places like San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. This movement could hardly have been less political. Although given over to sloganeering and a sometimes-justified paranoia about "the straight world," most hippies sought pleasure in their own lives and had little use for political debate and organization.

Abbie Hoffman was among the first to become well known for fusing both camps, and that is what Steal This Book is all about. Hoffman came to prominence in 1968, when he and several other antiwar activists came upon the idea of organizing an outrageous "festival of life" at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Calling themselves the Youth International Party or "Yippies," they proposed to substitute outrage, street theater, and "cultural revolution" for the tiresome programs offered by the New Left. Hoffman was the most visible of the provocateurs who clowned for the cameras in Lincoln Park, and when Mayor Richard Daley unleashed an army of policemen to attack the protesters, Hoffman was cast into the national spotlight.

It was a place that suited him well. As Steal This Book suggests, Hoffman had no real political program and little in the way even of political rhetoric. What he was good at was playing the gadfly, spouting incendiary rhetoric, and mugging for the camera. (He tried to seize the stage at Woodstock for a Yippie rant, but the crowd booed loudly and guitarist Pete Townshend of The Who knocked him off the stage by bashing his head with a guitar. The "Woodstock Nation" cheered loudly, many going so far as to call it Townshend's greatest solo.) Hoffman was not easily gotten rid of, however, and he became a major media star in those years. In 1969, Hoffman and several other Yippies, along with Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, were defendants in a much-publicized trial of the Chicago Seven. With Hoffman's newfound celebrity to emulate, many New Left activists took to the streets, doing whatever was necessary to get media exposure. "The whole world is watching" was their motto, and the spectacle so repelled most Americans that the New Left was extinguished as soon as the spectacle grew tiresome, which it soon did. Hoffman kept publishing books and his name remained one to conjure with, but he was a walking anachronism after the early 1970s and disappeared from public view for most of the decade.

"Steal This Book isn't really about how to steal food, build a sterno bomb, or start a commune. It's about how to be Abbie Hoffman."

Steal This Book was published in 1970, at the very acme of Hoffman's fame. Steal This Book isn't really about how to steal food, build a sterno bomb, or start a commune. It's about how to be Abbie Hoffman. Not the real Abbie Hoffman, of course, but the mythologized Abbie Hoffman, the clown prince of the New Left, the archetypal radical insurgent. Hoffman's entire public career consisted of the creation of this myth, and in fact Steal This Book was one of the crowning achievements in that career.

Notice that Hoffman seldom talks about himself in Steal This Book. And yet, on nearly every page, his presence is the primary message. Hoffman's other books are written with a similar strategy, but where they relied on political rhetoric and grand sociological themes ("We are the Woodstock Nation"), here Hoffman presents his would-be emulators with an encyclopedia guide for outwitting "Amerika." Seen from without, this is just a faulty manual for petty criminals, written by an incompetent. But from within, Steal This Book is a celebration of the trickster myth, with Abbie Hoffman as the B'rer Rabbit / Bugs Bunny hero who constantly outwits those bigger than him. By making the techniques seem so easily heroic ("Communicating to masses of people … is very important. It drives the MAN berserk and gives hope to comrades in the struggle"), Hoffman invites his readers to identify with his own fantasy of rebellion. Thus, practicing with a knife in a mirror isn't just fantasizing; it actually trains you to become an effective knife fighter.

There is surely something laughable in the transparency of all this. But it doesn't take away from Steal This Book's value as the romantic literature of a distant time and place. As a manual for insurgents, Steal This Book isn't worth the paper it's written on; but as a document of a unique episode in American history, it can hardly be surpassed.

Source:

Josh Ozersky, Critical Essay on Steal This Book, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, Gale, 2003.

Chris Semansky

Semansky is an instructor of literature and writes on literature and culture for various publications. In this essay, Semansky considers the idea of counterculture in Hoffman's book.

Abbie Hoffman's how-to guide for beating the system, Steal This Book, embodies many of the values of the 1960s counterculture, a counterculture that has survived into the twenty-first century, albeit greatly transformed. However, many of the actions that Hoffman advocates in the book, actions that have helped to define the counterculture itself, are no longer possible because of legal and cultural changes in the last thirty years. An exploration of some of these actions will give readers a sense of how much America has changed during this time.

An activist who protested Americans' selfishness and acquisitiveness, Hoffman sought to shape the counterculture movement while providing its sympathizers with the tools to survive. One of Hoffman's recommendations for how to survive in America was to hitchhike. By hitchhiking people could share rides and they did not contribute to polluting the country's air or to furthering America's dependence on foreign oil. Hitchhiking costs nothing and in the 1960s and early 1970s, was legal in most states. It also carried with it a certain allure linked to the image of the free spirit, someone not bogged down by the demands of work, family, and home ownership. During the 1950s, Beat writers like Jack Kerouac in novels such as On the Road helped to popularize hitchhiking with romantic descriptions of road life. During the 1960s and much of the 1970s, it was common to see hitchhikers along highways, thumb up and heading for their next adventure. In the twenty-first century, however, hitchhiking is highly regulated, if not illegal, in most states and on almost every interstate highway, and hitchhiker sightings are decreasing. In the last twenty-some years, the image of the hitchhiker has changed from that of a carefree hippie looking for a free ride to that of a deranged killer looking for his next victim. This change, in part, is a result of the media's demonization of hitchhiking and of the increasing fear many Americans have of strangers, a fear fed by popular culture's representation of hitchhikers in movies and on television as psychotic killers.

The change in attitude towards hitchhikers also reflects the public's suspicion of anyone they perceive as trying to obtain something for free. The image of the hippie as a benign and spaced-out freeloader was already well formed in the public imagination by the end of the 1970s. However, during the Reagan administration of the 1980s, the hippie became a joke, a symbol of national shame, product of a troubled era with impossible ideals based on the sharing, rather than the hoarding, of resources.

If hitchhiking has fallen out of practice because the political climate of the country has changed, then trying to "get one over" on corporate America has changed because of increasing corporate vigilance and technological change. Many of Hoffman's recommendations on how to extract free services such as telephone calls are now untenable. For example, spinning two pennies counterclockwise into the nickel slot of a pay phone to mimic the action of two nickels does not work because local calls are no longer ten cents, and because the mechanism for pay phones has been digitized. Likewise, shoplifting, a practice to which Hoffman dedicates a number of pages, is now considerably more difficult due to the proliferation of surveillance cameras and store use of electronic data tags.

The American public's attitude towards corporations has also changed. In 2002, almost half of all Americans own stock either directly or through their pension funds. Cheating the telephone company or shoplifting from a major department store then is not simply stealing from the rich, but also stealing from oneself. America is more corporate now than it was in 1970, and more Americans, whether they like it or not, are part of the corporate fabric of the country. The link between large corporations and the average citizen has been made abundantly clear in the last two years, when millions of people saw their retirement funds collapse after the bubble in Internet stocks burst, and multi-billion dollar corporations such as World Com and Enron went bankrupt.

Many of Hoffman's recommendations on how to fight the government and corporations, though arguably more important now than ever before as corporations continue to expand, are also becoming increasingly untenable. Protesters can still print underground newspapers and start up low-powered pirate radio stations, as he recommends, but the advent of the Internet has made these strategies relatively insignificant. Anyone with a gripe and an Internet connection can now put up a Web site for less money than it would cost to print a broadsheet. The primary task that faces protesters trying to get their word out via the world wide web is marketing. With literally billions of websites online and tens of thousands of new ones being created each day, attracting the attention of already message-saturated readers is a formidable task.

The advice that does remain relevant today is Hoffman's description of how to plan and stage a street demonstration. His suggestions on how to secure permits and how to dress for a demonstration and prepare for possible responses from authorities are still useful, and many of them were implemented during demonstrations in Seattle against the policies of the World Trade Organization in 1999. However, Hoffman's recommendations for using flash guns, tear gas, mace, and Molotov cocktails, while foolhardy in 1970, are almost suicidal today, as law enforcement officials are ready to pounce on the perpetrators of any act of public violence in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Indeed, September 11 has radically changed the shape of America's counterculture, which is literally built on the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. Arguing that the United States is at war with terrorists, the current administration is developing a system, the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, that would collect data from private companies and public agencies on every living American, making it easier for the government to profile and track the actions of its citizens, and—it claims—to identify foreign terrorists. Similarly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation compiled a massive file on Hoffman during his life, tracking his activities as an environmental activist and free speech advocate. This file, most of which has been released under the Freedom of Information Act, is available on the World Wide Web, as is the complete text of Hoffman's book.

Although much of the information in Steal This Book is outdated, its spirit of protest against the status quo remains strong; so strong in fact, that most libraries do not carry copies of the book (selling 250,000 copies in its first six months), even though it was a bestseller when it was first published and remains a classic of counterculture literature. Many of the bookstores that do carry it keep the book locked behind a glass case, so that enterprising "shoppers" do not heed the title's command. The book's many tips on how to survive a culture that is more focused on individual rather than community gain were sent in to Hoffman after the publication of his book Woodstock Nation.Steal This Book was written while he was in Cook County Jail awaiting charges stemming from his protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. As such, Steal This Book is as much an encyclopedia as it is a how-to book, and Hoffman's voice is the voice of a generation determined to change business as usual.

Source:

Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on Steal This Book, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, Gale, 2003.

Sources

Hoffman, Abbie, Steal This Book, Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002.

Hoffman, Jack, and Daniel Simon, Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1994, p. 179.

Rader, Dotson, Review of Steal This Book, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, July 15, 1971.

Further Reading

Becker, Theodore L., and Anthony L. Donaldson, Live This Book: Abbie Hoffman's Philosophy for a Free and Green America, The Noble Press, Inc., 1991.

This is one of the few sources that seriously considers the philosophical and spiritual bases for Hoffman's brand of media manipulation. Written after his death, the book takes into account his whole life, including his post-sixties political organizing under an assumed name.

Farber, David, Chicago '68, University of Chicago Press, 1995.

The events in Chicago of 1968 were important in American history and in understanding the full significance of Abbie Hoffman's place in it. This book is a scholarly explanation of the dynamic forces involved, including a detailed explanation of Hoffman's Yippie philosophy.

Isserman, Maurice, and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, Oxford University Press, 2000.

"Arguing that the United States is at war with terrorists, the current administration is developing … the … (TIA) program, that would collect data from private companies and public agencies on every living American, making it easier for the government to profile and track the actions of its citizens, and—it claims—to identify foreign terrorists."

The authors take a balanced, scholarly look at the political turmoil of the decade, careful to avoid common mistakes of romanticizing the hippie movement or unfairly blaming it for society's ills.

Sloman, Larry, Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Counterculture Revolution in America, Doubleday, 1998.

This oral history compiles hundreds of interviews from people who knew Hoffman and presents their impressions of him in their own words.