Richard Rovere greeted Eric Hoffer’s first book, The True Believer, an attack on ideology, with this idolatrous description: “a work of almost pure cerebration and intuition…. Hoffer has a mind that inclines to the wry epigram and the icy aphorism.” But that description has been undermined forever: by a news-making effort, General (then President) Eisenhower read this glacial bit of cerebration; read it through; all of it.
Somehow Hoffer survived the cruel fate of having his prose understood by Eisenhower (a fate Emmet Hughes is still trying to live down); he offers us, now, a set of meditations from the migrant worker’s camp and the dockhand’s waterfront. These new essays should dispose forever of the “icy intellect” nonsense. Hoffer is not a Voltaire who has come to terms with lice, not a great detached intellect, but a romantic. In the last century, the Sunday romantic went to Huxley’s lectures, the full-time romantic went to die in Missolonghi. Now the holiday romantic “sits in,” the professional romantic lives with Okies and stevedores. And, as everyone loves a romantic gesture, as staid little old women read Byron and wept, so everyone loves Hoffer. Ike likes him.
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