Eric Hoffer by Tom Bethell

Author:Tom Bethell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Eric Hoffer, papers, thinker, writer, biography, interview, American, Tom Bethell, longshoreman, philosopher, Hoover Institution
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Published: 2012-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Stacy Cole

“Hoffer was quick to discourage disciples,” Tomkins noted. “His usual method, when a student too obviously sought his approval, was to tell him to go and write down his ideas clearly and explicitly, and preferably on one page.”19

Stacy Cole was Hoffer’s only real disciple—he does not object to the word. He taught American history at Washington High School in Fremont and then at Ohlone College. He started attending Hoffer’s Berkeley seminar in 1968; when it ended in 1972, he continued visiting him in San Francisco almost every week. He kept that up until Hoffer’s death.

Hoffer had spoken at a high school in South San Francisco, so Cole sent him a letter asking if he could do the same at Washington High. Hoffer wrote back and suggested bringing his class to Berkeley. Cole’s class drove up in cars. Hoffer “enjoyed having these 17-year-olds, boys and girls,” Cole recalled. “They were extremely interested in him and his ideas.” After that, Cole returned on his own. From early April of 1968 until the end of May of 1972, he may have missed only four or five weeks. He recalled the seminar:

“Usually seven or eight people showed up. It was a drop-in situation. Some came early and would leave, some came later. After 1969 I would come at about 2:30 and stay till 5. Sometimes public service people would come in seminar groups. The offices were arranged around an anteroom, so 15 or 20 people could be out there sitting on the floor. Hoffer would bring his chair over and sit in the doorway. Three or four students from Stanford came on a regular basis.

Later, the FBI heard that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, an assistant professor at Berkeley at that time, might have visited the class; at one point, agents combed through Hoffer’s papers at Hoover. “Anyone could drop in to Hoffer’s class,” Cole said. “But they never established that Ted Kaczynski was there. Lili asked me if I remembered him. I didn’t.”

Hoffer had no set lecture at Berkeley, Cole recalled. “He might introduce a topic, or someone else might. He could go thirty or forty minutes on a given topic. He loved questions, loved for people to challenge him, loved the interplay of ideas. He would bring a handful of note-cards and would read quotations. They might be from the ancients, or contemporary. I found them not only illuminating and instructive but a guide to my own reading. Now I’ve got thousands of cards of my own.”20

Stacy Cole particularly remembers a visitor in 1971 who sat next to the desk while Hoffer, his chair pushed back, was smoking and listening. The man’s conversation covered literature, art, philosophy, poetry, and history; Cole reckoned he “was in the presence of a man with a first-class mind who had had the advantage of a first-class education.”

Eric introduced him during a break. He was Milton Himmelfarb, an associate editor of Commentary, brother of the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb and brother-in-law of Irving Kristol, the well-known conservative writer.

Evidently he had come to pay a tribute to Hoffer.

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