CLOSE-UP I

Solidarity

Continued from preceding page

times in campus distur-
bances. He ended up serving
several days in jail and two
years' probation.

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Feldman became involved
in politics his first year at U-
M, in 1967, working for
Students for McCarthy and
traveling around the country
to campaign. Sen. Eugene
McCarthy was running for
president as a peace can-
didate against Vice President
Hubert Humphrey. Feldman
went to the Democratic con-
vention in Chicago, where he
was beaten by Mayor Richard
Daley's police. "I got bopped
on the head and my life
changed," he said. "From
there, everything else
follows!'
Back at U-M, he became a
leader of the Ann Arbor SDS,
which undertook such guer-
rilla tactics as trashing the
ROTC building, throwing
paint on a Navy recruiter and
dumping dead animals on the
desk of a recruiter from Allied
Chemical, which manufac-
tured DDT.
Feldman was one of eight
people who signed a letter to
the editor of the Michigan
Daily in January 1970
defending the trashing of the
ROTC building. "One window
breaks," it said, "the war goes
on, two windows break, the
war goes on, three windows
break, the war goes on. The
people start breaking more
windows and the war still
goes on. The people get
angrier, they organize, they
build, they put down their
rocks and begin to look for
better weapons. The people
find better weapons, they find
guns, they find unity, they
find strength. They act. Power
to the people!'
University administrators
decided to strike back at the
SDS in 1970. They had
Feldman and nine others ar-
rested in February for the

Abbie Hoffman:
Political Vaudevillian

ARTHUR J. MAGIDA

Special to The Jewish News

S

Put Your Feet In Good Hands.

Applegate Square only, Northwestern Highway at Inkster.
Store hours 10:00 a.m. thru 6:00 p.m. Monday thru Saturday,
Thursday 10:00 a.m. thru 9:00 p.m., closed Sunday.

26

misdemeanor of "creating a
contention" when a General
Electric recruiter visited cam-
pus. The same spring,
Feldman was arrested two
more times in connection
with the distruption of a Du-
pont recruiter's visit and a
demonstration after the con-
victions of the Chicago Seven,
who were found guilty of try-
ing to disrupt the 1968 Dem-
ocratic National Convention.
After graduation from U-M,
Feldman moved to Detroit
with 34 other student
radicals to live, work and
organize. Detroit was chosen,
he said, be c ause of its union
and black power movements.
They put out a newspaper and
spent time talking to kids in
parks about the war, racism
and black power leader
Angela Davis.
"Sometimes you got great
responses from people," he
said. "Sometimes they'd beat
you up and call you a Com-
mie, call you a nigger-lover."
Feldman worked briefly at
a stamping plant and a steel
mill until they found out
about his police record, and
sometimes as a substitute
teacher in Detroit.
In 1971, he found a job at
Ford's Michigan Truck Plant
in Wayne. He has been there
for 18 years.
"I decided that if I was go-
ing to help radically change
my country, I should live and
work with the people who
sang 'Solidarity Forever' and
who had built our country in-
to the wealthiest nation in
the world," he later wrote.
During his years at the
plant, Feldman's romantic
view of the UAW faded and
his vision of a Marxist revolu-
tion evolved into a search for
an American revolution.
In 1986, Feldman began in-
terviewing co-workers about
their lives and their jobs. Last

ome of us first heard
that Abbie Hoffman
had died as we were
listening to the news on the
radio. It was the morning
after Hoffman had been found
dead in bed — fully clothed. It
was this last item that con-
vinced us it was true: Hoff-
man, that wily prankster,
knew that, these days, people
don't die in bed at home clad
in their own clothes, clothes
they had picked out from the
rack in some store or from a

FRIDAY, MAY 12, 1989

. -.6hormer44.ftea.

four-color catalog that
represented by long-distance
a shop they had never stepped
foot in somewhere in Maine
or Wisconsin. No, people died
("expired," in the parlance of
the professional) in white-
walled institutions, wearing
thin, white, institution-issued
pajamas and often with
needles and tubes going into
their body and more tubes
coming out. At 52, Hoffman
beat this rap, as he had beat
many others. The last laugh
— and, indeed, this fellow had
many laughs — was definite-
ly his.