Political activist Abbie Hoffman was found dead in Bucks County on this week in Philly history
The 52-year-old who became a symbol of defiance spent his last few years in Bucks County, where he was found in the converted chicken coop he had been living in on April 12, 1989.
Abbie Hoffman cast a large shadow for only standing 5 feet, 7 inches tall.
The political activist, originally from Massachusetts but who spent his last few years in Bucks County, became a symbol of defiance during the political and cultural turbulence of the 1960s.
His confrontations with “the Establishment” became a model for political protest and resistance.
He played a major role in Woodstock and protests at Columbia University, two of the big staging fields of the ‘60s political revolution.
He claimed to have been arrested more than 40 times.
In 1968, Hoffman co-founded the Yippie movement, also known as the loosely organized Youth International Party, which protested the Vietnam War and governmental overreach.
But he made his name with the Chicago Seven.
The seven radicals stood trial for conspiring to incite violence and disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which was held in Chicago.
The nearly five-month trial began in September 1969. It turned into a theatrical drama with testimonials from wild-haired hippies and unprecedented antics, including from the judge who ordered a former Black Panther to be bound and gagged inside the courtroom.
Their exploits inspired a major motion picture, The Trial of the Chicago 7, which was released in 2020 and starred Sacha Baron Cohen as Hoffman.
But by the end of his life, Hoffman had become more “yuppie than yippie,” as his Inquirer obituary worded it.
The revolutionary moved to a converted chicken coop in Bucks County in the mid-1980s, which he rented for $400 a month (or more than $1,000 today).
He moved there from New York state amid a losing battle to stop Philadelphia Electric Co. from building a pumping station on the Delaware River in Point Pleasant above New Hope.
By then, he had spent most of his time traveling on commercial jets to speaking engagements, and working the talk-show and book-tour circuits.
All the while, he claimed to have maintained a connection between his revolutionary spirit of the ‘60s and the revolutionary ideas of the late 1980s.
He said he remained in contact with radicals all over the world, and he would lend insight and advice on matters of abortion, women’s rights, environmental concerns, the death penalty, and healthcare.
“I’m more or less identified with the dissidents and troublemakers,” he told The Inquirer in February 1989. “I don’t particularly put a left or a right valence on it. It’s more or less the people who go against the powers that be.”
He was found dead on the night of April 12, 1989, in that rented chicken coop in Solebury Township, near New Hope. He was 52.
The Bucks County coroner ruled his overdose death a suicide.
“The good story is he worked damn hard for the cause of the underdog,” Dale Stauffer, a Point Pleasant bar owner, told The Inquirer after Hoffman’s death. “We need those kinds of people in this country.”
