LITMIR.BIZ

TOM HAYDEN: POLITICAL ANIMAL

      (1939–2016)

      From SDS to Occupy Wall Street, students have led movements demanding a voice. We believe in not just an electoral democracy, but also in direct participation of students in their remote-controlled universities, of employees in workplace decisions, of consumers in the marketplace, of neighborhoods in development decisions, family equality in place of Father Knows Best and online, open source participation in a world dominated by computerized systems of power.

      T.H., “PERSONAL STATEMENT: FIFTY YEARS LATER, STILL MAKING A STATEMENT,” THE MICHIGAN DAILY, 2012

      Forty-some years after the fact, round about 2005, I had the chance to tell Tom Hayden that back in the ‘60s when he lived in a Berkeley commune called the Red Family, I had had a mad crush on him. The truth is I fell into infatuation the moment I heard his voice on KPFA-FM reading the text of his 1962 Port Huron Statement that laid the basis for the peace-justice-equality movements of the 1960s. But it wasn’t until the later ‘60s that he moved to Berkeley. His arrival—much-touted in Bay Area political circles—was almost too much for my twenty-one-year-old hormones to handle. I attended a teach-in on Canada-bound draft avoidance so I could look at him. But there sat his girlfriend on the panel, ever so lovely and sophisticated in her super-wide navy bellbottoms.

      I saw him again at a planning meeting at Bill Miller’s house in the Claremont district during the citywide 1969 uprising in protest of the university’s fencing of a plot of land citizens had crafted into a people’s park. Just a handful of us came to the meeting, and Tom reported that he had learned from his Deep Throat within the Berkeley Police Department that a mass bust was in the works. I was spellbound sitting just a breath away from him, listening, taking his presence in. Indeed, I got arrested at the bust along with some 400 others in May of 1969, was carted off to Santa Rita Detention Center in a windowless prison bus, was corralled into a claustrophobia-producing solitary cell with a bevy of some fifty terrified, exceptionally loud, and disorganized women, and in the end was saved from more lengthy prison time by left-wing pro bono lawyer Bob Treuhaft.

      Then in June, the month after the People’s Park uprising, there was a new demo on the Berkeley campus. That was the moment I realized that we long-timers in the streets had unwittingly, by all appearances through tacit psychic connection, developed a group method in which we would come together, burst apart, come together, then burst apart again depending on if the police were on the attack or not. But this new crop of protesters … well, they were proving to be an insipid shade of naïve green. As summer vacation was upon us, they had arrived in our skillful midst from all directions to have their “Berkeley Experience,” and they knew exactly jack shit about how to maneuver as a unified mass. Tom was there under the Sproul arch doing his best to direct this herd of cats—with no success at all.

      As you can plainly see, I didn’t have a lot of quality contact with the object of my adoration in Berkeley. Stay tuned, though: decades later he would change the course of my life. By 2005 he was married to a spirited Canadian actress named Barbara Williams. He’d survived a heart attack and was ever so aware of the fleeting nature of life. He had traveled to New Mexico for a Christmas reunion with his family from the days when he was married to Jane Fonda. We were crossing the parking lot of the Santuario de Chimayó, and I made my confession. We both had a good laugh.

      Is Tom most notorious for his role in starting Students for a Democratic Society in 1961? Or for his civil-rights activism in the South and in Newark? Or for being the theoretician of the Chicago 8 along with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Lee Weiner, and John Froines? Is he most known for his work as a progressive California State Assemblyman and Senator? Or for his twenty-plus books? Is he most recognized for the ground-breaking work he did with street gangs in Los Angeles? Or perhaps for marrying Jane Fonda? The answer could depend on your politics: some may think his (by 1979) 22,000-page, three-foot-high FBI file is the definition of immortality. Whatever the answer, it is clear that Tom was born to give of himself wholly.

      He was, in fact, born in 1939 in Royal Oak, Michigan to Genevieve and John Hayden, both of Irish descent. After graduating from Dondero High School, he went on to the University of Michigan, where he was editor of the Michigan Daily. At the time, the National Student Association still held sway with its Cold-War, anti-communist politics. Tom joined with others to found the Students for a Democratic Society, and he was its president in 1962 and ‘63. During this time, he also traveled through the South as a Freedom Rider to desegregate public areas like train stations, and he was the central drafter of SDS’s Port Huron Statement. Its first sentence opened the door to the students and intellectuals who were to burst upon U.S. consciousness: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” Indeed, its ambition was to kick-start “a radically new democratic political movement,” one based in participatory rather than representative decision-making. The essay quickly became a founding document of both the emerging student movements and the New Left.