Hayden, Tom

HAYDEN, TOM (1939-2016). One of the most influential of the 1960s student radicals, Tom Hayden personifies one pathway of the New Left generation into the next century. Hayden was born on 11 December 1939 in Detroit, of Irish parentage. His parents were divorced when he was ten. Growing up Catholic in a largely Protestant neighborhood, he sensed the alienation he would feel more acutely when, in 1957, he became a student at the University of Michigan. As a journalism student, Hayden joined the staff of the Michigan Daily and entered the world of student radicalism.

In 1960 Hayden traveled to the West Coast and the South as a reporter for the Daily. Impressed by the Berkeley radicals and southern civil rights workers he met, he returned to Ann Arbor and joined Robert Haber’s efforts to build Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Al Haber and Hayden envisioned a northern counterpart to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The open, decentralized structure of SDS reflected a distrust of authority that became a mark of the emerging New Left and a basis of Hayden’s own ambivalent relations with the movement.

In 1961 Hayden married SNCC activist Sandra Cason. They lived in Atlanta, Georgia, where Hayden worked as an SDS field secretary. Hayden was jailed in Mississippi and later in Georgia and traveled to Washington to enlist aid for civil rights workers. A futile meeting with Justice Department officials deepened his frustration with mainstream politics.

In June 1962 Hayden drafted a seventy-five-page declaration of SDS philosophy and brought together a group of nearly sixty radicals to discuss the document at a retreat near Port Huron, Michigan. Despite tensions between younger and older participants, the group endorsed its central themes: participatory democracy and faith in the power of the people. The shorter version, known as the Port Huron Statement, condemned the Cold War and racism, called for a decentralized government, and endorsed the labor, civil rights, peace, and student movements. In 1962 Hayden became president of SDS, working out of its headquarters in Ann Arbor. Cason returned to Atlanta to rejoin SNCC. Eventually the two were divorced.

In 1964 Hayden and several other student activists moved to the Newark ghetto, where they formed the Economic Research and Action Project and began organizing block associations to deal with problems of housing, welfare, police abuse, crime, and schools. During the Newark riot of July 1967, Hayden urged officials to withdraw the National Guard and published the results of his subsequent investigations as Rebellion in Newark (1967).

Convinced that the fate of Newark’s ghetto was linked to the politics of war, Hayden became one of the first student radicals to protest the war in Vietnam. In November 1965 Hayden visited North Vietnam with Herbert Aptheker and Staughton Lynd, a trip that crystallized his commitment to end the war. Hayden returned to Newark but found it difficult to work within SDS, which had been fractured by competing ideological commitments. Straddling the gap between student activists and liberal power brokers, Hayden was becoming, as Jack Newfield put it, the “Lone Ranger” of the New Left. In 1967 Hayden traveled to Prague to explore peace options with leaders of the National Liberation Front, and he and Rennie Davis continued on to Hanoi and Phnom Penh, where Hayden helped facilitate the first U.S. prisoner-of-war release.

In April 1968, Hayden participated in the occupation of a Columbia University building as part of a nationwide series of campus sit-ins. Later in that eventful year Hayden and Davis worked with the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam regarding plans for a series of protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August. City officials refused to issue permits and Mayor Richard Daley warned of possible violence. In response, the Mobilization Committee decentralized its activities, trained protesters in self-protection, and recruited medical and legal support teams. Nevertheless, the extraordinary violence of what was later termed the “police riot” in Chicago left Hayden and other radicals pessimistic and battle-shocked. Hayden and seven others were indicted on charges of conspiracy and incitement to riot amid a growing clamor for law and order from the new Nixon administration. Politically exhausted, Hayden moved to Oakland, California.

The eight defendants—Davis and Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dave Dellinger, Bobby Seale, John Froines, and Lee Weiner—were brought to trial in 1969 in Chicago in the court of Judge Julius J. Hoffman. Against a national backdrop of rising student rebellion, the defendants attempted to delegitimize the court system, and Judge Hoffman, making no secret of his disdain for the defendants, responded with repressive procedures. Media representations of Bobby Seale chained and gagged in the courtroom left an indelible public image. Seale was imprisoned on contempt charges even before the trial ended, and Davis, Hayden, Hoffman, Rubin, and Dellinger, already facing numerous contempt charges, were found guilty of incitement.

The invasion of Cambodia in 1970 brought a new surge of campus protest, but Senate repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that year seemed to Hayden a signal that the “system was beginning to respond.” At odds with SDS and struggling to come to terms with the trial experience, he moved with Anne Weills Scheer to a collective in Berkeley called the Red Family. Within a year, Hayden’s manipulative personal politics led to his ouster.

Having lost his political and personal support, Hayden moved to Venice, California. He taught extension classes on three Los Angeles area campuses, conducting workshops that produced anti-war pamphlets, slides, and posters. Preoccupied with writing and teaching, he distanced himself from the splintered student movement. In 1972 he began working with Jane Fonda, whom he had first met in February 1971 at a peace rally. They toured the country for the Indochina Peace Campaign and were married in January 1973. Their son Troy was born in July. In November the Court of Appeals reversed the Chicago conspiracy convictions, and in 1974 Hayden was cleared of contempt charges. The end of the war in 1975 found Hayden, as he claimed later, a “ ‘born-again’ Middle American.”

In 1975 Hayden ran against Democratic incumbent John V. Tunney in the U.S. Senate primaries. Although he had abandoned leftist rhetoric by this time, his thirty-seven-percent showing was surprising, given the tenor of the campaign. In 1976 Hayden formed the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), taking on such initiatives as community rent control, peace, and safe energy sources. The CED elected a majority to the Santa Monica City Council and carried into power more than fifty local candidates statewide. During Governor Jerry Brown’s administration, Hayden chaired the state’s solar energy program.

In 1982 Hayden won a seat in the California State Assembly, representing the wealthy Santa Monica district. With financial backing from Fonda, he campaigned on issues ranging from environmental protection to support for small businesses. In the legislature he chaired the Labor and Employment Committee and championed the successful Proposition 65, a sweeping state initiative to regulate toxic substances. In 1989 Hayden and Fonda were divorced.

In the 1992 California reapportionment, the 44th Assembly District, which Hayden had held for ten years, was abolished. Hayden ran successfully for the Twenty-third State Senate District, representing an affluent region stretching from Malibu to the San Fernando Valley and including Beverly Hills and Hollywood. Highlighting campaign finance reform, he made an unsuccessful bid for governor in the 1994 Democratic primaries. Two years later he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, held, ironically, at the old Conrad Hilton (Chicago Hilton), the storm center of the 1968 riots.

For an extended period, Hayden’s politics became increasingly centrist, as he attempted to convert his 1960s idealism into 1990s pragmatism. His bids for political office outraged many fellow activists, but his odyssey from campus radical to California legislator was not unlike the accommodations other sixties radicals made in the nineties; most found it difficult to straddle these very different eras. Although student radicals failed to create a lasting organizational challenge to corporate capitalism in America, many went on to become influential shapers of public opinion—professors, labor leaders, social service advocates, lawyers, filmmakers—and politicians. Thus they helped consolidate the achievements of the sixties in civil rights, women’s rights, peace, environmental regulation, and more open public institutions, at a time when conservative pressure on these liberal landmarks was mounting.

The “Battle of Seattle” in 1999, but also Hayden’s tenure-limited departure from the California legislation, found the once-youthful spokesman of the New Left turning leftward again. He envisioned, perhaps, a new period of direct actio and warmly embraced not only the Wisconsin Uprising, Occupy and Black Lives Matter, but ardently opposed new US wars abroad. His faith in the Cuban Revolution, a true marker of consistency in a section of the erstwhile New Left, remained firm and important to the field of supporters, in Cuba and abroad. Hayden’s embrace of Hillary Clinton and his spurning of Bernie Sanders in the 2015-2016 race for the nomination for the presidency seemed to defy the logic of his larger return to the Left. For Hayden, uncertain and somewhat uncomfortable with the sudden return of a large, youthful socialist movement, it was one last compromise with what he perceived as political reality. He died months after the rancorous and bitterly divisive Democratic convention.

Findley, Tim. “Tom Hayden: Rolling Stone Interview.” Parts 1 and 2. Rolling Stone, 26 October 1972, 9 November 1972.

Hayden, Tom. Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response. New York: Random House, 1967.

Hayden, Tom. Reunion: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1988.

Miller, James. Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Streets of Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Ryder, Paul and Susan Wind Early, eds, Tom Hayden On Social Movements: Four Unpublished Talks and the Rolling Stone Interview. Santa Barbara: Paul Ryder Books, 2019.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.