Tom Shactman is a smart, smart man but I believe that he is a Leftist. Earlier biographers, friends, and followers of Hoffer’s, like Calvin Tomkins and Eric Sevareid were quite glowing in their praise for Hoffer as a genius and fresh, untutored voice. Still, Hoffer was a total conservative, and, once the clerisy realized this, outraged were these really irked the Progressive intelligentsia in America. They started denouncing Hoffer in the 60s until today he is mostly forgotten.
Shactman, as a Progressive, would likely, sincerely wonder how Eric Hoffer could be a conservative, and still be a good person. I sense that this hesitancy about Hoffer's alleged brilliance and good moral character indicates that Shactman has some deep reservations about Hoffer.
He imputes Eric Hoffer's character, as far as I can discern, in three ways. First, he decries Hoffer for having fathered Eric Osborne, and, yet not seeming to pay child support to Lili, but I do believe he gave them money when the children were growing up, and left them his estate. Still, it could be that Hoffer was the insensitive, selfish bachelor, that did not support or care for his child, Eric, as he should have. That criticism has some basis.
Shactman labels Hoffer a racist or with racist views about blacks, referring to them as Negroes long after everyone else migrated over to the politically correct term, blacks. Hoffer, as I have written elsewhere, is not a racist, or much of one: he wants race to be irrelevant, he wants us to be colorblind, he wants blacks to be individuals, not worrying too much about group identity, and that by work hard, perseverance, and shedding any concept of being a victim of racism or any other actual or alleged discrimination, each black has the ability to bootstrap his way to success like all Americans can and should being doing.
Hoffer's presupposition is that blacks are equal to anyone else, but the values of racism, groupism, victimhood, learned helplessness and dependency upon government assistance is killing this America ethnic group. Only as self-disciplining and ambitious individuals, like the great Larry Elder and Thomas Sowell, can blacks come into their own, and advance, really advance. Only as conservatives, capitalists and Republicans will they find their salvation, liberation, and prosperity. Anything the Left tells them is race-baiting lies. Those that preach Communism to American blacks are pure racists.
Before I defend Hoffer's character against the third charge that Tom Shactman imputes him with, I would like to quote Shactman from Page 26 in his biography on Hoffer, American Iconoclast: "In Depression America, Hoffer's view of what government should refrain from doing was a contrarian one; jobs were so scarce that even many so-called individualists conceded that the government must step in, at least temporarily, to assist people in finding work, food, and shelter. Hoffer disagreed because his experience taught him otherwise; despite coming from a terrible background, from the 'gutter' in Los Angeles, and yet completely without schooling, he had always managed to find paying work--therefore, he concluded, everyone else could and should be able to bootstrap themselves to survival without governmental assistance, interference, or coddling.
Decades later, Lili Osborne would contend that Hoffer's worldview--the belief in Social Darwinism, the fierce insistence on the need to make one's own way, the lack of feelings of entitlement, and the expectation that one's efforts would result in adequate rewards and would not be reasonably swept away--were common to that first-generation immigrant to the United States, rather than to that of a native-born American. Yet Hoffer thought of himself and quintessentially American."
My response: It could be that in the Depression times it was acceptable for government to step in and assist people, but Hoffer was spot on correct: he was a capitalist, a rugged individualist who believed that he had to make it on his own, to support himself so that he could self-actualize as a writer and philosopher in his spare time. He denied himself material wealth, marriage, family and social life and group-living so that he could live his spartan, ascetic lifestyle in a one-bedroom apartment with no phone, no TV and no car. Hoffer was pure American--and so self-regarded--whether he snuck in as an illegal immigrant or not.
He was not interested in class envy and Marxism, but he was pro-capitalist, pro-liberty and pro-American, but he did not care for the rich—he noted that some of whose spoiled brat sons led the student revolt in the 60s.
Shactman imputes Hoffer with espousing Social Darwinism. Hoffer is no Social Darwinist, and that label is unfair at best, and at worst is a smear on Hoffer's noble character.
Now, I will paraphrase and entry on Social Darwinism from the Oxford dictionaries. Social Darwinism is a theory that Americans are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals. It is now discredited but was used by rich and ruthless capitalists to justify political conservatism, imperialism, and racism and to discourage intervention and reform. The rich, strong, and powerful, nature’s fittest, end up and should end up with most of society's wealth and power, whereas the poor, weak, impoverished masses, nature’s majority of least fit humans, weak and inferior, get what they deserve at the bottom of the heap.
Eric Hoffer did want people to make it on their own, not depend on government handouts. He was a capitalist and promoter of rugged individualism but that is not at all the same as being a Social Darwinist, who do not seem like very nice people. I think Shactman is careless with his labeling Hoffer a Social Darwinist, and I hope I have defended well and honestly Hoffer's reputation.
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