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Working and Thinking on the Waterfront
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First published January 1, 1969
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About the author
Eric Hoffer
54Ìýbooks576ÌýfollowersEric Hoffer was an American social writer and philosopher. He produced ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983 by President of the United States Ronald Reagan. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that his book The Ordeal of Change was his finest work. In 2001, the Eric Hoffer Award was established in his honor with permission granted by the Eric Hoffer Estate in 2005.
Early life
Hoffer was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1902 (or possibly 1898), the son of Knut and Elsa Hoffer, immigrants from Alsace. By the age of five, he could read in both German and English. When he was age five, his mother fell down a flight of stairs with Eric in her arms. Hoffer went blind for unknown medical reasons two years later, but later in life he said he thought it might have been due to trauma. ("I lost my sight at the age of seven. Two years before, my mother and I fell down a flight of stairs. She did not recover and died in that second year after the fall.I lost my sight and for a time my memory"). After his mother's death he was raised by a live-in relative or servant, a German woman named Martha. His eyesight inexplicably returned when he was 15. Fearing he would again go blind, he seized upon the opportunity to read as much as he could for as long as he could. His eyesight remained, and Hoffer never abandoned his habit of voracious reading.
Hoffer was a young man when his father, a cabinetmaker, died. The cabinetmaker's union paid for the funeral and gave Hoffer a little over three hundred dollars. Sensing that warm Los Angeles was the best place for a poor man, Hoffer took a bus there in 1920. He spent the next 10 years on Los Angeles' skid row, reading, occasionally writing, and working odd jobs. On one such job, selling oranges door-to-door, he discovered he was a natural salesman and could easily make good money. Uncomfortable with this discovery, he quit after one day.
In 1931, he attempted suicide by drinking a solution of oxalic acid, but the attempt failed as he could not bring himself to swallow the poison. The experience gave him a new determination to live adventurously. It was then he left skid row and became a migrant worker. Following the harvests along the length of California, he collected library cards for each town near the fields where he worked and, living by preference, "between the books and the brothels." A seminal event for Hoffer occurred in the mountains where he had gone in search of gold. Snowed in for the winter, he read the Essays by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne's book impressed Hoffer deeply, and he often made reference to its importance for him. He also developed a great respect for America's underclass, which, he declared, was "lumpy with talent."
Longshoreman
Hoffer was in San Francisco by 1941. He attempted to enlist in the Armed forces there in 1942 but was rejected because of a hernia. Wanting to contribute to the war effort, he found ample opportunity as a longshoreman on the docks of The Embarcadero. It was there he felt at home and finally settled down. He continued reading voraciously and soon began to write while earning a living loading and unloading ships. He continued this work until he retired at age 65.
Hoffer considered his best work to be The True Believer, a landmark explanation of fanaticism and mass movements. The Ordeal of Change is also a literary favorite. In 1970 he endowed the Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Laconic Essay Prize for students, faculty, and staff at the University of California, Berkeley.
Hoffer was a charismatic individual and persuasive public speaker, but said that he didn’t really care about people. Despite authoring 10 books and a newspaper column, in retirement Hoffer continued his robust life of the mind, thinking and writing alone, in an apartment.
Early life
Hoffer was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1902 (or possibly 1898), the son of Knut and Elsa Hoffer, immigrants from Alsace. By the age of five, he could read in both German and English. When he was age five, his mother fell down a flight of stairs with Eric in her arms. Hoffer went blind for unknown medical reasons two years later, but later in life he said he thought it might have been due to trauma. ("I lost my sight at the age of seven. Two years before, my mother and I fell down a flight of stairs. She did not recover and died in that second year after the fall.I lost my sight and for a time my memory"). After his mother's death he was raised by a live-in relative or servant, a German woman named Martha. His eyesight inexplicably returned when he was 15. Fearing he would again go blind, he seized upon the opportunity to read as much as he could for as long as he could. His eyesight remained, and Hoffer never abandoned his habit of voracious reading.
Hoffer was a young man when his father, a cabinetmaker, died. The cabinetmaker's union paid for the funeral and gave Hoffer a little over three hundred dollars. Sensing that warm Los Angeles was the best place for a poor man, Hoffer took a bus there in 1920. He spent the next 10 years on Los Angeles' skid row, reading, occasionally writing, and working odd jobs. On one such job, selling oranges door-to-door, he discovered he was a natural salesman and could easily make good money. Uncomfortable with this discovery, he quit after one day.
In 1931, he attempted suicide by drinking a solution of oxalic acid, but the attempt failed as he could not bring himself to swallow the poison. The experience gave him a new determination to live adventurously. It was then he left skid row and became a migrant worker. Following the harvests along the length of California, he collected library cards for each town near the fields where he worked and, living by preference, "between the books and the brothels." A seminal event for Hoffer occurred in the mountains where he had gone in search of gold. Snowed in for the winter, he read the Essays by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne's book impressed Hoffer deeply, and he often made reference to its importance for him. He also developed a great respect for America's underclass, which, he declared, was "lumpy with talent."
Longshoreman
Hoffer was in San Francisco by 1941. He attempted to enlist in the Armed forces there in 1942 but was rejected because of a hernia. Wanting to contribute to the war effort, he found ample opportunity as a longshoreman on the docks of The Embarcadero. It was there he felt at home and finally settled down. He continued reading voraciously and soon began to write while earning a living loading and unloading ships. He continued this work until he retired at age 65.
Hoffer considered his best work to be The True Believer, a landmark explanation of fanaticism and mass movements. The Ordeal of Change is also a literary favorite. In 1970 he endowed the Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Laconic Essay Prize for students, faculty, and staff at the University of California, Berkeley.
Hoffer was a charismatic individual and persuasive public speaker, but said that he didn’t really care about people. Despite authoring 10 books and a newspaper column, in retirement Hoffer continued his robust life of the mind, thinking and writing alone, in an apartment.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 10, 2009
I think this is out of print, hopefully not, but I got an old copy. Its a collection of his journal entries, ideas, and concepts for a novel over the course of one year as he was working on the Waterfront as a longshoreman. His writing is so crisp, and the ideas so clear. A fascinating man with wholly original ideas.
April 5, 2013
There are few things I enjoy more than reading Eric Hoffer. Another great book full of short insights that make you think.
March 17, 2025
On the Lacunae Riddled Reasoning of the Autodidact
This essay is dedicated to my good friend Charlie Betz, a retired Qualified Member of the Engine Department (QMED) with whom I lost contact with early in the pandemic. He most certainly did not survive it, leaving a hole in my life. R.I.P. Charlie!
________________________________
After graduating from NYU in 1987 I decided to try working on ships as a deckhand, as many of the Beats had done.* This path would allow me to work with my body, freeing my mind for loftier spiritual (e.g. “intellectual�) pursuits; no pencil pushing for me. The isolation would allow me the time to read voraciously, to refine my views in journals, and to eventually become a writer.** Back in the late 80’s, while in a 4-month quasi-military training program at Piney Point, Maryland which taught maritime skills future mariners, I encountered an older engine room worker in the school library who was upgrading his skills to electrician. Charlie was impressed that I had seemingly renounced my college pedigree to become a mariner, like many an optimistic lad in centuries past. After listening to me prattle, he advised me that my decision was probably irrevocable. He implored me to read Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) who was known as the Longshoreman Philosopher on account of his formulating his ideas while working a blue-collar position on the San Francisco waterfront with the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU).
As luck would have it, I was already familiar with Hoffer’s best-known work, a short philosophical tract The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements which had been assigned in an elective course I took as a senior at Stuyvesant HS, “Prejudice and Persecution.� This course was filled with perspicacious overachievers padding their ivy league applications. We zealously discussed Hoffer’s descriptions and generalizations of the type of person who is attracted to mass movements. Published in 1951, the work struck a chord with Americans who were horrified at what the Nazis had wrought and who were wary of the Soviet threat. It impressed those who wanted simple explanations for complex problems and catered to the “what makes a Nazi� dialogue that permeated the news and academia in that era, e.g. the Stanley Milgrim experiments. Although I haven’t revisited this Hoffer work in decades, I can intuit that his generalizations now apply to the malicious nitwits destroying the USA under the guise of MAGA, a cult of supposedly decent Americans*** who revile the other and worship a strong man. The True Believer is probably still an engrossing read, albeit one that reeks of oversimplification and platitudes.
Now, at almost age 60, and enjoying an early retirement but longing for recollections of my maritime past, I decided to take another look at one of Hoffer’s lesser known works, the journals that he kept from June 1958-May 1959 while working as a longshoreman on the SF (and occasionally Oakland) waterfront, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront (1969). Although Hoffer worked in the era of pre-containerization, the milieu in which he worked was immediately familiar to me: The need to go to a union hall to “throw in� for work and be dispatched to a ship; the easy banter of the laborers and “labor fakers� during any particular shift, especially those with lulls in cargo loading or offloading; the ships, earlier namesakes of ones I have worked on as both a deckhand and later as an officer for Matson Navigation like the Luriline or Matsonia. All this led to feelings of nostalgia, but also a realization as to the flawed logic, the copious biases, and the unquestioned assumptions that riddle Hoffer’s journals.
To be fair, Hoffer is simply a product of his era replete with all the biases of that era (including the stereotypical biases of the hard-hatted Americans who backed Nixon), biases that would deem a book of alleged higher thought unpublishable today,**** but which give a glimpse in how many Americans viewed the world in 1958. Additionally, these were initially private journals in which Hoffer is hashing out his ideas, warts and all. However, the simple truth is that Hoffer did eventually publish these journals in 1969 and—one can only assume—that he did scrutinize what he wrote before submitting it and that he deemed it suitable for publication. Ergo, a smattering of the “logic� presented below is fair game for tacit mocking. As a modern critic, I see no reason to refute these ideas or aphorisms—the fallacies and assumptions are glaring to the modern reader. I only present them as a lead in to points concerning the weaknesses of autodidacts. Throughout the journals, Hoffer, an autodidact, cultivates a great disdain for the “intellectual,� a term he never properly defines. In this respect, he exhibits the same insecurities that I have witnessed in intelligent home-schooled students who are overly self-conscious about what they don’t know because they don’t want to confront their own educational gaps; usually the parents just let a homeschooled child excel in subjects that interest the child, which fuels this insecurity. Hoffer disdainfully writes:
Both domestic and foreign intellectuals seem to have a vital need for the assumption that the people who run the country are stupid. They are not bothered by the mystery of how stupid America tamed and mastered a savage continent and made it a cornucopia of plenty. (pg. 95).
Or, more telling:
I get my stimulation from both the world of books and the books of the world. I cannot see how living with educated, articulate people, skilled in argument, would have helped me develop my ideas. (Pg. 86).
I have heard the latter sentiment often after a lifetime working with self-proclaimed men* of action in positions useful to society as they heap scorn on those who opt for an education and who—allegedly—have impractical “intellectual� solutions to everyday problems; solutions which weaken the nation. These blue-collar grunts, who often lean libertarian, rail against the “intellectuals� whose educations are—or so they imply—lavishly funded by the government while conveniently overlooking that the US merchant marine is only viable due to a federal subsidy which ensures that there is indeed a merchant marine in a time of national emergency. Thus, the bias and simplicity of thought among so many US maritime and longshore union members.
I, most emphatically, never fell victim to this contradictory fallacy. Unlike Hoffer who wore his blue-collar bona fides proudly and as a justification for the gravitas of his ideas—that Hoffer was a longshoreman and not an academic adds to his mystique—I felt intellectually isolated as a deckhand, not empowered. Although I enjoyed** the blue-collar banter and being part of an entirely functional operation that delivered wares from point A to point B, or who made sure in was on-loaded safely, I longed for an intellectual milieu where everything wasn’t based upon a dogma of functionality and economic concerns, e.g. “Politics is pork chops,� the mantra of my first union which ignores any concerns outside of “wallet issues.� Instead of flourishing in a working-class milieu that was gradually stultifying my intellect, I prepared applications for graduate school in English Literature in order to keep my mind sharp. Could there be any discipline less functional?
While I did encounter more than my share of Foucault-spouting sycophants parroting whatever theory du jour was needed to attain an academic post, I was also surrounded by a group of hyper-intelligent peers who didn’t tolerate lazy thought, absurd generalizations, and who were aware of their inherent biases. Add to this the requirement to read at least one other language in order to gain cultural perspective, and we have the very environment the Hoffer was so keen on denigrating.*** Hoffer, of Teutonic Alsace descent, strangely spoke with a Bavarian dialect and claimed to be fluent in German.**** However, his reading—at least from what I can discern—is exclusively in English. His views are those typical of a second-generation American immigrant who can see no wrong with the U.S.A., even in a Cold War era when it had recently dropped atomic bombs under the simplistic guise that it saved American lives.* His loathing of the “intellectual,� at least in Working and Thinking on the Waterfront has a tone and venom that virtually rivals the Germans loathing of the Jew. One can almost see him working for the Khmer Rouge weeding political prisoners to see whether they have eyeglasses or calluses for the to kill immediately pile. Okay, I’m being a bit harsh and sarcastic, but the Mass Movements that Hoffer correctly castigates in his first book have the same nasty streak of anti-intellectualism. However, I digress. Back to my natural intellectual tendencies.
I remained in maritime the last decade of my professional life and eventually worked as a licensed deck officer in positions where the lucre earned eclipsed what I had made as a mere able-bodied seaman; and I enjoyed the same work comradery that Hoffer did.** Although, I never used my M.A. English degree much, I am grateful for the time I spent in English and German programs—both in the USA and abroad� where lazy thought processes were not tolerated. These programs might have been anathema to Hoffer because they were largely filled with “intellectuals� who presumably did not know how to get their hands dirty, but they were a lifeline for me, allowing me to immerse myself in a milieu not saturated with blue-collar know-it-alls whose grievance list is long and whose assumptions of economic self-reliance are exaggerated to the point of absurdity.
I’d imagine that if I encountered Hoffer on a ship or while night mating as a deck officer that I would be happy to meet a kindred spirit and shoot the shit for a bit. I would ask him what he was reading and try to elicit conversation. And perhaps Hoffer’s ideas would be presented more tightly than they are in his journals where they wander here and there aimlessly as thoughts in journals are apt to do. He never really dissects or elucidates his ideas based on actual expertise. Hoffer writes about weighty subjects in a light style of aphorisms. One can imagine that the first critical reader he encounters is an editor who is editing for marketability, not precision in thinking. Hence, I now regard Hoffer as a typical autodidact who is not clever enough to readily admit what he doesn’t know.
This is not to imply that I dislike Eric Hoffer. He is a moderately conservative thinker who exhibits all the foibles (and worse) of his generation. That he writes in aphorisms only makes the conclusions he reaches suspicious. Thus, his books serve as a timepiece for an era where the white male blue-collar laborer might have had something coherent to say outside of voicing a “yeah or nay� opinion on policy that might affect his wallet. While Hoffer eventually retired from the ILWU and picked up an adjunct faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley due to his celebrity philosopher status, he must have been surrounded by the very intellectuals he so loathed in his journal writing where he could lord it over other thinkers because he worked a manual labor, e.g. useful, job. He must have been way too conservative and bombastic for a student body that could critically reason and parse his aphorisms. Nevertheless, I do appreciate a glimpse into the life of a gentleman longshoreman philosopher who was, first and foremost, a bibliophile who loved to think about what he read:
I must write for the simple reason that writing is vital for any feeling of well-being. I have no marked desire to see my name in print, and I certainly do not owe anything to anybody. (Pg. 147).
Amen, and kudos to a kindred spirit! Thanks for reminding me to enjoy my retirement.
------------------------------------------------------------------
*Many years later, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Gary Snyder over dinner. When I asked how the Beats all came up with the idea of working on ships, he looked at me as one would a simple child. His answer: “To avoid the draft.�
**I’m still working on the writer part at almost age 60.
***They are not.
****E.G.: Think of it: Nowhere at any time has the Negro shown himself capable of creating or operating a free, viable society. (Pg. 110). Methinks Hoffer should read some James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, or Chester Himes who wrote a great novel, If She Hollers, Let Her Go about the Long Beach waterfront.
Though the Hoover Institute and Heritage Foundation would be giddy at some of Hoffer’s notions.
*Or even the many women sailors and mates with whom I’ve worked. Times change.
**To a point. Often it just nauseated me. How many conversations can we have on the merits of a Glock vis a vis a Baretta? Or a connoisseur sailor rhapsodizing about choosing a prostitute by the shape of her lips. . .
***Hoffer never distinguishes between the academic and the intellectual, so if I generalize, it is only in response to his blurred definitions.
****Pretty much the logic of today's MAGA nitwit.
Hoffer’s Wikipedia page points out that his past is shrouded in mystery, that he is somewhat of a B. Traven type figure.
*The true intellectual writers of the 1950’s were figures like Saul Bellow and Ralph Emerson. They better understood both America’s weaknesses and malevolence.
*Though, once I was an officer, I was told not to fraternize with the unlicensed personnel. That I should treat them like little remote-control robots that malfunction.
This essay is dedicated to my good friend Charlie Betz, a retired Qualified Member of the Engine Department (QMED) with whom I lost contact with early in the pandemic. He most certainly did not survive it, leaving a hole in my life. R.I.P. Charlie!
________________________________
After graduating from NYU in 1987 I decided to try working on ships as a deckhand, as many of the Beats had done.* This path would allow me to work with my body, freeing my mind for loftier spiritual (e.g. “intellectual�) pursuits; no pencil pushing for me. The isolation would allow me the time to read voraciously, to refine my views in journals, and to eventually become a writer.** Back in the late 80’s, while in a 4-month quasi-military training program at Piney Point, Maryland which taught maritime skills future mariners, I encountered an older engine room worker in the school library who was upgrading his skills to electrician. Charlie was impressed that I had seemingly renounced my college pedigree to become a mariner, like many an optimistic lad in centuries past. After listening to me prattle, he advised me that my decision was probably irrevocable. He implored me to read Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) who was known as the Longshoreman Philosopher on account of his formulating his ideas while working a blue-collar position on the San Francisco waterfront with the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU).
As luck would have it, I was already familiar with Hoffer’s best-known work, a short philosophical tract The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements which had been assigned in an elective course I took as a senior at Stuyvesant HS, “Prejudice and Persecution.� This course was filled with perspicacious overachievers padding their ivy league applications. We zealously discussed Hoffer’s descriptions and generalizations of the type of person who is attracted to mass movements. Published in 1951, the work struck a chord with Americans who were horrified at what the Nazis had wrought and who were wary of the Soviet threat. It impressed those who wanted simple explanations for complex problems and catered to the “what makes a Nazi� dialogue that permeated the news and academia in that era, e.g. the Stanley Milgrim experiments. Although I haven’t revisited this Hoffer work in decades, I can intuit that his generalizations now apply to the malicious nitwits destroying the USA under the guise of MAGA, a cult of supposedly decent Americans*** who revile the other and worship a strong man. The True Believer is probably still an engrossing read, albeit one that reeks of oversimplification and platitudes.
Now, at almost age 60, and enjoying an early retirement but longing for recollections of my maritime past, I decided to take another look at one of Hoffer’s lesser known works, the journals that he kept from June 1958-May 1959 while working as a longshoreman on the SF (and occasionally Oakland) waterfront, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront (1969). Although Hoffer worked in the era of pre-containerization, the milieu in which he worked was immediately familiar to me: The need to go to a union hall to “throw in� for work and be dispatched to a ship; the easy banter of the laborers and “labor fakers� during any particular shift, especially those with lulls in cargo loading or offloading; the ships, earlier namesakes of ones I have worked on as both a deckhand and later as an officer for Matson Navigation like the Luriline or Matsonia. All this led to feelings of nostalgia, but also a realization as to the flawed logic, the copious biases, and the unquestioned assumptions that riddle Hoffer’s journals.
To be fair, Hoffer is simply a product of his era replete with all the biases of that era (including the stereotypical biases of the hard-hatted Americans who backed Nixon), biases that would deem a book of alleged higher thought unpublishable today,**** but which give a glimpse in how many Americans viewed the world in 1958. Additionally, these were initially private journals in which Hoffer is hashing out his ideas, warts and all. However, the simple truth is that Hoffer did eventually publish these journals in 1969 and—one can only assume—that he did scrutinize what he wrote before submitting it and that he deemed it suitable for publication. Ergo, a smattering of the “logic� presented below is fair game for tacit mocking. As a modern critic, I see no reason to refute these ideas or aphorisms—the fallacies and assumptions are glaring to the modern reader. I only present them as a lead in to points concerning the weaknesses of autodidacts. Throughout the journals, Hoffer, an autodidact, cultivates a great disdain for the “intellectual,� a term he never properly defines. In this respect, he exhibits the same insecurities that I have witnessed in intelligent home-schooled students who are overly self-conscious about what they don’t know because they don’t want to confront their own educational gaps; usually the parents just let a homeschooled child excel in subjects that interest the child, which fuels this insecurity. Hoffer disdainfully writes:
Both domestic and foreign intellectuals seem to have a vital need for the assumption that the people who run the country are stupid. They are not bothered by the mystery of how stupid America tamed and mastered a savage continent and made it a cornucopia of plenty. (pg. 95).
Or, more telling:
I get my stimulation from both the world of books and the books of the world. I cannot see how living with educated, articulate people, skilled in argument, would have helped me develop my ideas. (Pg. 86).
I have heard the latter sentiment often after a lifetime working with self-proclaimed men* of action in positions useful to society as they heap scorn on those who opt for an education and who—allegedly—have impractical “intellectual� solutions to everyday problems; solutions which weaken the nation. These blue-collar grunts, who often lean libertarian, rail against the “intellectuals� whose educations are—or so they imply—lavishly funded by the government while conveniently overlooking that the US merchant marine is only viable due to a federal subsidy which ensures that there is indeed a merchant marine in a time of national emergency. Thus, the bias and simplicity of thought among so many US maritime and longshore union members.
I, most emphatically, never fell victim to this contradictory fallacy. Unlike Hoffer who wore his blue-collar bona fides proudly and as a justification for the gravitas of his ideas—that Hoffer was a longshoreman and not an academic adds to his mystique—I felt intellectually isolated as a deckhand, not empowered. Although I enjoyed** the blue-collar banter and being part of an entirely functional operation that delivered wares from point A to point B, or who made sure in was on-loaded safely, I longed for an intellectual milieu where everything wasn’t based upon a dogma of functionality and economic concerns, e.g. “Politics is pork chops,� the mantra of my first union which ignores any concerns outside of “wallet issues.� Instead of flourishing in a working-class milieu that was gradually stultifying my intellect, I prepared applications for graduate school in English Literature in order to keep my mind sharp. Could there be any discipline less functional?
While I did encounter more than my share of Foucault-spouting sycophants parroting whatever theory du jour was needed to attain an academic post, I was also surrounded by a group of hyper-intelligent peers who didn’t tolerate lazy thought, absurd generalizations, and who were aware of their inherent biases. Add to this the requirement to read at least one other language in order to gain cultural perspective, and we have the very environment the Hoffer was so keen on denigrating.*** Hoffer, of Teutonic Alsace descent, strangely spoke with a Bavarian dialect and claimed to be fluent in German.**** However, his reading—at least from what I can discern—is exclusively in English. His views are those typical of a second-generation American immigrant who can see no wrong with the U.S.A., even in a Cold War era when it had recently dropped atomic bombs under the simplistic guise that it saved American lives.* His loathing of the “intellectual,� at least in Working and Thinking on the Waterfront has a tone and venom that virtually rivals the Germans loathing of the Jew. One can almost see him working for the Khmer Rouge weeding political prisoners to see whether they have eyeglasses or calluses for the to kill immediately pile. Okay, I’m being a bit harsh and sarcastic, but the Mass Movements that Hoffer correctly castigates in his first book have the same nasty streak of anti-intellectualism. However, I digress. Back to my natural intellectual tendencies.
I remained in maritime the last decade of my professional life and eventually worked as a licensed deck officer in positions where the lucre earned eclipsed what I had made as a mere able-bodied seaman; and I enjoyed the same work comradery that Hoffer did.** Although, I never used my M.A. English degree much, I am grateful for the time I spent in English and German programs—both in the USA and abroad� where lazy thought processes were not tolerated. These programs might have been anathema to Hoffer because they were largely filled with “intellectuals� who presumably did not know how to get their hands dirty, but they were a lifeline for me, allowing me to immerse myself in a milieu not saturated with blue-collar know-it-alls whose grievance list is long and whose assumptions of economic self-reliance are exaggerated to the point of absurdity.
I’d imagine that if I encountered Hoffer on a ship or while night mating as a deck officer that I would be happy to meet a kindred spirit and shoot the shit for a bit. I would ask him what he was reading and try to elicit conversation. And perhaps Hoffer’s ideas would be presented more tightly than they are in his journals where they wander here and there aimlessly as thoughts in journals are apt to do. He never really dissects or elucidates his ideas based on actual expertise. Hoffer writes about weighty subjects in a light style of aphorisms. One can imagine that the first critical reader he encounters is an editor who is editing for marketability, not precision in thinking. Hence, I now regard Hoffer as a typical autodidact who is not clever enough to readily admit what he doesn’t know.
This is not to imply that I dislike Eric Hoffer. He is a moderately conservative thinker who exhibits all the foibles (and worse) of his generation. That he writes in aphorisms only makes the conclusions he reaches suspicious. Thus, his books serve as a timepiece for an era where the white male blue-collar laborer might have had something coherent to say outside of voicing a “yeah or nay� opinion on policy that might affect his wallet. While Hoffer eventually retired from the ILWU and picked up an adjunct faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley due to his celebrity philosopher status, he must have been surrounded by the very intellectuals he so loathed in his journal writing where he could lord it over other thinkers because he worked a manual labor, e.g. useful, job. He must have been way too conservative and bombastic for a student body that could critically reason and parse his aphorisms. Nevertheless, I do appreciate a glimpse into the life of a gentleman longshoreman philosopher who was, first and foremost, a bibliophile who loved to think about what he read:
I must write for the simple reason that writing is vital for any feeling of well-being. I have no marked desire to see my name in print, and I certainly do not owe anything to anybody. (Pg. 147).
Amen, and kudos to a kindred spirit! Thanks for reminding me to enjoy my retirement.
------------------------------------------------------------------
*Many years later, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Gary Snyder over dinner. When I asked how the Beats all came up with the idea of working on ships, he looked at me as one would a simple child. His answer: “To avoid the draft.�
**I’m still working on the writer part at almost age 60.
***They are not.
****E.G.: Think of it: Nowhere at any time has the Negro shown himself capable of creating or operating a free, viable society. (Pg. 110). Methinks Hoffer should read some James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, or Chester Himes who wrote a great novel, If She Hollers, Let Her Go about the Long Beach waterfront.
Though the Hoover Institute and Heritage Foundation would be giddy at some of Hoffer’s notions.
*Or even the many women sailors and mates with whom I’ve worked. Times change.
**To a point. Often it just nauseated me. How many conversations can we have on the merits of a Glock vis a vis a Baretta? Or a connoisseur sailor rhapsodizing about choosing a prostitute by the shape of her lips. . .
***Hoffer never distinguishes between the academic and the intellectual, so if I generalize, it is only in response to his blurred definitions.
****Pretty much the logic of today's MAGA nitwit.
Hoffer’s Wikipedia page points out that his past is shrouded in mystery, that he is somewhat of a B. Traven type figure.
*The true intellectual writers of the 1950’s were figures like Saul Bellow and Ralph Emerson. They better understood both America’s weaknesses and malevolence.
*Though, once I was an officer, I was told not to fraternize with the unlicensed personnel. That I should treat them like little remote-control robots that malfunction.
July 4, 2019
Interesting look into the mind of a writer I had never known of before, definitely intend to find his other works.
December 30, 2017
A laborer philosopher who stays very close to the reality and value of honest hard work. Perhaps my biggest takeaway: ..........the future is speeding up dramatically having sizable impact on not only history but on philosophy.
Written in 1959, at times the thinking seems flawed & a somewhat dated archaic view of, by example,Negroes and women. But still a valuable read; both a historical perspective and a reminder that movements define philosophy as much as philosophy leads to movements.
Written in 1959, at times the thinking seems flawed & a somewhat dated archaic view of, by example,Negroes and women. But still a valuable read; both a historical perspective and a reminder that movements define philosophy as much as philosophy leads to movements.
February 8, 2022
Both fascinating and frustrating. Worth a read.
September 4, 2016
Not only did this book teach me a lot about intellectuals as politicians, but the diary format gave an intimate feeling of how his writing went.
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