Tom Hayden
Thomas Emmet Hayden was an American social and political activist, author, and politician. Hayden was best known for his role as an anti-war, civil rights, and intellectual activist in the 1960s, becoming an influential figure in the rise of the New Left. As a leader of the leftist organization Students for a Democratic Society, he wrote the Port Huron Statement, helped lead protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and stood trial in the resulting "Chicago Seven" case.
In later years, he ran for political office numerous times, winning seats in both the California State Assembly and California State Senate. At the end of his life, he was the director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Los Angeles County. He was married to Jane Fonda for 17 years and is the father of actor Troy Garity.
Early life and activism
Tom Hayden was born in Royal Oak, Michigan, to parents of Irish ancestry, Genevieve Isabelle and John Francis Hayden. His father was a former Marine who worked for Chrysler as an accountant and was also a violent alcoholic. When Hayden was 10, his parents divorced, and his mother raised him. Hayden attended a Catholic elementary school, where he read out loud to nuns and "learned to fear hell."Hayden grew up attending a church led by Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest noted for his anti-Semitic teachings, and who was also known nationally during the time of The Great Depression as the "radio priest". Hayden's dismay with Coughlin caused him to break with the Catholic Church as a teenager.
Hayden attended Dondero High School in Royal Oak, Michigan. He served as the editor for the school newspaper, and in his farewell column in the newspaper, he used the first letter of successive paragraphs to spell "Go to hell". As a result, when he was graduated in 1956, he was banned from attending his graduation ceremony and only received a diploma.
Hayden then attended the University of Michigan, where he was editor of the Michigan Daily. At the National Student Association convention in Minneapolis in August 1960, Hayden witnessed a dramatic intervention by Sandra Cason. To a standing ovation she turned back a motion denying support for sit-ins in the struggle against racial segregation: “I cannot say to a person who suffers injustice, ‘Wait,’ And having decided that I cannot urge caution, I must stand with him.” Alan Haber of the fledgling Students for a Democratic Society recruited her on the spot. Stirred by her "ability to think morally express herself poetically," Hayden soon followed her into the left-wing grouping. They married in October the following year.
Despite being attacked by a mob in McComb, Mississippi, while covering the Freedom Rides for the National Student News, Hayden himself became a Freedom Rider. On December 10, 1961, the Haydens participated in one of the many “freedom rides” taking place in response to the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision. After being arrested for his role in the Freedom Rides, Hayden began writing the SDS manifesto from jail in Albany, Georgia.
The Port Huron vision and SDS
Refined and adopted at the first Students for Democratic Society convention in June 1962, the Port Huron Statement called for a "new left" committed, in the spirit of participatory democracy, to "deliberativeness, honesty reflection." The sponsoring League for Industrial Democracy took immediate issue. Although The Statement did express regret at the "perversion of the older left by Stalinism," it omitted the LID's standard denunciation of communism. Hayden was called to a meeting where, refusing any further concession, he clashed with Michael Harrington, as he later would with Irving Howe.Tom Hayden was elected SDS president for the 1962–1963 academic year, but his wife Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden left Ann Arbor, and left him, heeding the call to return to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Atlanta. She later recalled that in contrast to the interminable debates she had witnessed in Ann Arbor, in SNCC discussions the focus was on action and women had a voice. The Haydens divorced in 1965. That year, with other SNCC women, Casey Hayden coauthored "Sex and Caste" since regarded as a founding document of second-wave feminism.
Convinced, in the words of the Statement, that students must "look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice," and with $5000 from United Automobile Workers, Hayden's first SDS initiative was the Economic Research and Action Project. SDS community organizers would help draw white neighbourhoods into an "interacial movement of the poor". By the end of 1964 ERAP had ten inner-city projects engaging 125 student volunteers.
President of the United Packinghouse Workers of America Ralph Helstein arranged for Hayden to meet with Saul Alinsky. With twenty-five years experience in Chicago and across the country, Alinsky was considered the father of community organizing. To Helstein's dismay, Alinsky dismissed Hayden's venture into the field as naive and doomed to failure.
Hayden committed himself to the effort. For three years in Newark, he worked with a community union to organize poor black residents to take on slumlords, city inspectors and others. He was there to witness the 1967 Newark Riots which, in Rebellion in Newark, he tried to place in a larger social and economic context. His profile in Newark attracted the attention of the FBI. “In view of the fact that Hayden is an effective speaker who appeals to intellectual groups and has also worked with and supported the Negro people in their program in Newark," agents recommended that he "be placed on the Rabble Rouser Index.” Conspiracy theorist Jack Cashill who grew up in Newark has noted that speed of publication of "Rebellion in Newark" suggests Hayden's book was pre-written before the riots and that deeper forces had worked for years to catalyze the riots.
Hayden was later to suggest that if ERAP across the country had failed to build to greater success it was because of the escalating U.S. commitment in Vietnam: "Once again the government met an internal crisis by starting an external crisis."
Anti-war activist
In 1965, while still committed in Newark, Hayden, along with Communist Party USA member Herbert Aptheker and Quaker peace activist Staughton Lynd, undertook a controversial visit to North Vietnam. The three toured villages and factories and met with an U.S. Air Force Major Ron Byrne, an American POW whose plane had been shot down and was being held prisoner. The result of this tour of North Vietnam, at a high point in the war, was a book titled The Other Side. Staughton Lynd later wrote that the New Left disavowed "the Anti-Communism of the previous generation", and that Lynd and Hayden had written, in Studies on the Left: "We refuse to be anti-Communist. We insist the term has lost all the specific content it once had."In 1968, Hayden joined the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and played a major role in the protests outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. The demonstrations were broken up by what the U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence later described as a police riot. Six months after the convention, he and seven other protesters including Rennie Davis,
Dave Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy and incitement to riot as part of the "Chicago Eight", a.k.a. the "Chicago Seven" after Bobby Seale's case was separated from the others. Hayden and four others were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot, but the charges were later reversed and remanded on appeal. The government did not re-try the case, and thereafter elected to dismiss the substantive charges.
Hayden made several subsequent well-publicized visits to North Vietnam as well as Cambodia during America's involvement in the Vietnam War, which had expanded under President Richard M. Nixon to include the adjoining nations of Laos and Cambodia, although he did not accompany his future wife, actress Jane Fonda, on her especially controversial trip to Hanoi in the summer of 1972. The next year he married Fonda and they had one child, Troy Garity, born on July 7, 1973. In 1974, he appeared in a brief scene as an ER doctor in the film Death Wish. In the same year, while the Vietnam War was still ongoing, the documentary film Introduction to the Enemy, a collaboration by Fonda, Hayden, Haskell Wexler and others, was released. It depicts their travels through North and South Vietnam in spring 1974.
Hayden also founded the Indochina Peace Campaign, which operated from 1972 to 1975. The IPC, operating in Boston, New York, Detroit and Santa Clara, mobilized dissent against the Vietnam War and demanded unconditional amnesty for U.S. draft evaders, among other aims. Jane Fonda, a supporter of the IPC, later turned this moniker into a name for her film production firm, IPC Films, which produced in whole or in part, movies and documentaries such as F.T.A., Introduction to the Enemy, The China Syndrome, Nine to Five and On Golden Pond. Hayden and Fonda divorced in 1990.