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tom hayden
The Year That Changed Everything: A Personal Memory of 1968
No other year has left such vivid memories for me, though it may be that this year, 2018, will be even more decisive for the future of America
Oct 04, 2018
Fifty years have passed since the one that changed everything for my generation, the crucial turning point when the promise of the 1960s turned to a defeat and despair that still weighs on our thoughts of what might have been. It was a roller coaster year of emotional highs and lows, when unlikely dreams suddenly seemed possible, only to be dashed time and again. It marked the end of my political innocence, born in the magic of John Kennedy's Camelot. No other year has left such vivid memories for me, though it may be that this year, 2018, will be even more decisive for the future of America.
The year began with great hopes that the seemingly endless war in Vietnam might end soon. An anti-war Democrat, the cerebral Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, had challenged President Johnson in the upcoming presidential primary election. Soft-spoken and anything but radical, he impressed on us the necessity of cutting long hair and beards and putting on white shirts and ties to go "Clean for Gene" when we knocked on doors to get out the vote. Given little chance at first, his popularity was suddenly enhanced by developments across the Pacific.
In early February, during the Vietnamese New Year's celebration, National Liberation Front (the Americans called them "Viet Cong") troops attacked throughout South Vietnam, capturing the famed "Citadel" in Hue and other prominent posts formerly thought impregnable. Although their casualties in the so-called "Tet Offensive" were enormous, the Vietnamese struck fear into American troops and their supporters back home. President Johnson had claimed we were winning the war and our enemies would soon be on their knees. There was a "light at the end of the tunnel," he said. Just be a bit more patient and we'd all see it.
But the light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be the headlights of an onrushing train. If the enemy was indeed mortally wounded, it could not have mounted so many attacks in so many places at once, often with the inside help of South Vietnamese Army soldiers thought loyal to the U.S. The American response was to inflict horrible casualties on combatants and non-combatants alike. Since it was often impossible to know which Vietnamese were loyal to us and which were not, it was deemed necessary to kill everyone who might be suspect, destroying whole villages to "save" them. Napalm, a terrifying jellied gasoline that cooked people alive, was dropped indiscriminately.
Shocking photographs surfaced, of young girls running naked from a wall of flames, of suspected traitors being summarily assassinated without investigation of their supposed disloyalty; in one case, in lurid, living color, crimson gushed like a fountain from the head of a man shot at point-blank range. These images, and the Tet Offensive, shocked many otherwise placid Americans and led to a shift in public opinion. Then too, the coffins continued to return home in large numbers, carrying the bodies of sons and husbands, fresh-faced children barely out of their teens, if that.
An anti-war activist, I was 21 then and about to vote in my first election. I began door-belling for McCarthy shortly after Tet, in Superior, Wisconsin, an industrial port city, while I was attending Wisconsin State University there. While most pollsters expected McCarthy to be trounced by Johnson in the first primary election in New Hampshire on March 14, he ran a close race trailing the President by only seven percentage points. Might he have a chance? Opportunistically or otherwise, another critic of the war, New York senator Robert Kennedy, then entered the race. Now, the leading living scion of one of America's most beloved political families was also hammering Johnson from the campaign trail.
With the Wisconsin primary scheduled for early April, I traveled to Madison in late March to meet with other McCarthy organizers. While things were looking up, we had no idea of what to expect on the evening of March 31, when we gathered in the student union at the University of Wisconsin to watch a "special announcement" from the president. First, Johnson declared a moratorium on bombing attacks on North Vietnam; the anti-war pressure was getting to him. Then, we sat in stunned silence while Johnson announced his withdrawal from the race. "I shall not seek, nor will I accept my party's nomination for President of the United States," he said, looking haggard and defeated.
It seemed unreal. Johnson had surrendered; the war would end. I think now of LBJ as the lead victim in a Greek tragedy. But for his hubris in persisting to escalate the Vietnam War, Johnson might have entered the history books as one of America's greatest presidents, carried there by his commitment to civil rights and the elimination of poverty. Instead, he died reviled and almost forgotten. Even then, I felt a bit sorry for him. But that night we dashed by the hundreds into the streets cheering, singing and dancing. No more would the anti-war protestors be chanting "Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" It was bitterly cold in the snowy streets of Madison that night, but none of us noticed. We celebrated with pitchers of beer and drove back to Superior with headaches the next day, happy to have them.
Memphis and its aftermath
On April 2, I voted in my first election ever. With Johnson still on the ballot, McCarthy won an overwhelming victory in the Wisconsin primary. Now, the contest would be between him and Kennedy, and I would have been happy with either of them. But my euphoria was short-lived. Only two days later, civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he'd gone to support striking sanitary workers. Some inner cities exploded in anger. In Indianapolis, Bobby Kennedy braved an angry crowd to urge the non-violence that King had espoused. The next morning a hushed pall hovered over the university student union in Superior. Several of the black students were fighting back tears; knowing the anger they must be feeling. Feared they might hold all whites responsible for the slaying. Shockingly, I also overheard several fraternity boys at one table suggesting that King had gotten what was coming to him. Their dialogue was peppered with the N word and references to "good riddance."
I found it hard to concentrate on schoolwork the rest of that semester. But despite the King tragedy, my overall mood remained hopeful. Students were beginning to exercise power in American universities, carrying out sit-down strikes at prestigious academic institutions like Columbia. Women and gays were protesting discrimination. In France, the students were joining factory workers in a general strike, and in Communist Czechoslovakia, they were deeply engaged in a reform process called "Prague Spring," which promised "Socialism with a human face." Polls began showing that a majority of voters opposed the war, and the victory of either McCarthy or Kennedy seemed almost inevitable.
In May, McCarthy soundly defeated Kennedy in the Oregon primary. But by that time, my allegiance had shifted to Bobby. I was appalled when McCarthy, after his victory in solidly white, middle-class Oregon, suggested that only the ignorant and uneducated supported his rival. It struck me as a putdown of the poor, and racist as well. I was impressed by Kennedy's compassion for the poverty-stricken miners of Appalachia, the Hispanic farm workers of California and their charismatic leader, Cesar Chavez, inner-city African-Americans and the hidden poor on Indian reservations. While McCarthy was eloquent about the fiasco in Vietnam, Kennedy offered more hope of uniting the war protestors with union members, minorities and the poor.
When school ended, I hitchhiked home to visit my family in San Francisco. I arrived in California just as its Presidential primary election was ending on June 5. The last person who gave me a ride told me Kennedy was leading in the exit polls and dropped me off at a campsite near Donner Lake, barely over the border from Nevada. The next morning, the first driver to give me a ride was surprised that I hadn't heard the news. "They killed Kennedy," he said. "Shot him in LA last night just as he was about to claim victory."
During the next week I could barely contain my grief. I watched the news footage of Kennedy on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, bleeding to death. The reports suggested a lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, but I suspected that someone or something must have been behind him. With his big victory in California, Kennedy would surely have sailed to the Democratic nomination and almost certainly defeated his Republican opponent.
Kennedy's funeral seemed surreal. Even Tom Hayden, the SDS radical, was a pallbearer. He had come to trust Bobby, despite the latter's wealth and establishment connections. Kennedy's brother Edward eulogized him simply as a man who "saw wrong and tried to right it, saw pain and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."
While at home for a month, I read constantly--the literature of the New Left. A growing body of New Left analysis, including C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite and G. William Domhoff's Who Rules America? argued that our democracy was largely an illusion. A "military-industrial complex" of interlocking boards of directors containing the same elite players, dominated our politics as a "ruling class." Eisenhower had warned of its dangerous influence in his farewell presidential address. Other books documented the power of this elite over foreign policy, describing how the CIA had overthrown Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, and other elected leaders, to protect the profits of American corporations.
At the same time, most of these writers acknowledged that Soviet "socialism" was certainly no better, and probably even worse, than the corporate capitalism they challenged at home. Their hopes were buoyed by the July publication of Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov's samizdat, On Progress, Peaceful Co-existence and Intellectual Freedom. A powerful critic of Stalinism in Russia, Sakharov suggested a middle way between Communist dictatorships and capitalist inequality. It seemed to be emerging in places like Sweden and Czechoslovakia.
Beginning of the end
Back in Superior, my friends and I watched troubling news on television, when on August 21, Soviet tanks crushed the democratic uprising in Prague. A few days later, the Democratic Convention began in Chicago. While Hubert Humphrey's nomination was a foregone conclusion with Kennedy gone from the race, Eugene McCarthy still had considerable support for a floor fight. I watched with pride as Don Peterson, a Wisconsin businessman I'd worked with on the McCarthy campaign, nominated the brilliant African-American leader Julian Bond as a Vice Presidential candidate. But Humphrey and his chosen running mate, Ed Muskie, were anointed as the nominees by the Party's conservative establishment, who controlled most of the delegates.
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, an old-liner, ran the convention with an iron fist. Protestors gathered outside, some of them "Yippies" (for "Youth International Party") who had nominated a pig for President. But there were many others who still believed in the system and had worked hard for McCarthy or Kennedy. They shouted their opposition to the undemocratic nature of the convention. Like Bull Connor in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, Daley sent his police to gas and club them--an investigative committee later called the action "a police riot."
On the convention floor, Peterson and Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff rose to report that the police were beating people up outside. Mayor Daley audibly shouted a Jewish slur at Ribicoff. Reporters covering the convention were roughed up by Daley's police. The battle inside and out stretched into the night. When it was over, I felt a slow realization that the times we thought were changing would change glacially if at all.
The Fall of our discontent
That fall, my friends and I continued to organize vigils and protests. Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee for President, promised a "secret plan" to end the war while condemning antiwar protestors in the name of what he termed "the silent majority." Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate, was a mixed bag at best, in the thinking of my friends and myself. We admired his earlier stand for civil rights, dating back to 1948. He was also a strong advocate of anti-poverty measures. But he'd stuck with Johnson on the war. I made up my mind to vote for a third-party candidate, the comedian Dick Gregory. But considering the alternative of a Nixon presidency, I still hoped Humphrey would prevail. He didn't; in November, Hubert Humphrey lost by a whisker to Nixon.
Salvador and Luz
At the end of the month, I was invited to attend an event called the Hemispheric Conference Against the War in Vietnam being held in the Canadian city of Montreal. A group of us from Superior joined another from our twin city of Duluth, Minnesota, for a long bus ride to the conference. It was held in a cavernous auditorium with perhaps a thousand people in attendance. Speakers included well-known American radicals such as the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Their rhetoric was loudly anti-American and pro-socialist. The war in Vietnam was described as an imperial venture fought for oil and other resources. The most revered of the speakers was a man I'd never heard of until then. An elderly and elegant gentleman wearing a fine wool sweater and dark-rimmed glasses, he spoke in Spanish, with translation. His speech was strongly-worded, but thoughtful and not merely rhetorical. I was able to shake his hand later and tell him I appreciated it.
His name was Salvador Allende, and he was, at that time, a senator in the Chilean government and the leader of its Socialist Party. Two years later, he would be elected president of Chile, thus setting off a three-year American effort to destabilize his government. He died in the bloody military coup that overthrew him on September 11, 1973. I will always consider it an honor to have met him.
But what I remember most from the conference was the small, sad-eyed young woman from Mexico that I also met there. She had short dark hair and big eyes that seemed to be searching for something far away. In broken and halting English, she told me a story. Her name was Luz, which means "light" in Spanish, but her story was decidedly dark.
Two months earlier, on the night of October 2, she and other Mexican university students had gathered in a great open space called the Plaza of the Three Cultures near the center of Mexico City. They had marched there from several universities to protest the upcoming Olympic Games, which had displaced hundreds of poor Mexico City residents from their homes. Their protest was completely peaceful, but the response of the police and guardsmen sent by the government to control them was not. Snipers fired randomly into the crowd, killing hundreds of students and bystanders. With the size of the crowd, it was difficult to flee. Some of her friends were killed; she watched their blood darken the stones in the plaza before finally escaping the violence.
She was fighting hard to hold back tears as she told me her horrifying tale. I found her inexpressibly lovely and wanted only to tell her things would be all right. She had come to the conference with several other student leaders from the Olympic protest. I told her I had watched the games on television and she brightened when I mentioned the black-gloved protest by two of the United States' finest sprinters, Tommie Smith and Jon Carlos, as they received their medals on the podium while the Star-Spangled Banner blared behind them, a protest similar to Colin Kaepernick's half a century later. Luz, too, had watched it. It was her only positive memory of the games.
I never saw Luz again after that night. On the long bus trip back to Wisconsin, I couldn't get her out of my mind and a song came to me. I wrote it down as soon as I got back home, and later sang it for my friends in the little coffeehouse on campus.
SONG FOR LUZ, 1968
From the bridges of Prague
To the boulevards of Paris
To the dusty streets of Mexico,
And all across my country from Boston to Berkeley
There's a feeling of change in the winds that blow.
There's a generation looking for a new beginning
And a glimmer of hope in the rising sun
And our sparkling eyes and songs prophesize
That a whole new way of life has begun.
And you in your city and I in mine
Are adding our bodies to the protest line
And dreaming of a time when all humankind will be free.
Oh, but in between, so many troubles you've seen.
So many bombs...so many bullets...so many shattered dreams...
In the Three Cultures Plaza you gathered to meet.
They met you, but with snipers, and left your friends all dead in the street.
"Now don't disturb the Olympics," the imperial orders came,
"Anybody who protests will receive still more of the same,
We'll stop your life's flicker and we'll even erase your name."
They released the doves to fly. You watched them in the sky
And you wanted to try to catch what they symbolize.
But your dove couldn't sing. She had blood on her broken wing
And you started to cry, but now dry out your eyes.
For maybe tomorrow you'll wake up and find
The long years of sorrow were worth all the pain
For all of your struggles have been left behind
Though memories remain, it wasn't in vain.
And because of you, and what you've been through,
The ones who are born then will sing in the rain.
I wanted to believe the words of the song were true, but I really didn't feel that way. A month later, a year that began with great hope, ended with little. The New Left would splinter and descend into violence as Nixon escalated the war. Forty years would pass before I would experience again the hope I had before August of 1968, before we would dance in the streets again, as so many did when Obama was elected. Suddenly it was possible to believe again, but the forces of hate and greed did not go quietly into that magic night. They have come back with a vengeance and a cruelty that makes Nixon seem benign by comparison.
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Chicago '68: The 50-Year Lessons America Still Hasn't Learned
The internecine war for the soul of American democracy continues in our own time, as the rage and fear tapped almost 50 years apart by Richard Nixon and Donald Trump have continued to mesmerize successive generations of Americans
Aug 28, 2018
Fifty years ago, anti-war protesters swarmed the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention to reject the Vietnam War, state violence, and injustice. In the process they turned the city into a veritable battleground over the fate of American democracy.
"The whole world is watching!" protesters chanted in response to police violence in August 1968. That one phrase encapsulated much of the radical social justice insurgency of not only that year but also the entire decade of the 1960s. As the nation mourned the April assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and June killing of New York senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, thousands of radical activists came to Chicago to try and shame the Democratic Party into publicly adopting a peace plank that some hoped would lead to an end to war.
The college students, hippies, anti-war activists, and ordinary Americans who traveled to Chicago in the summer of 1968 were, however imperfect, patriots who spoke truth to power and paid the price in blood, arrests, and controversy. While journalists and historians at times point to Chicago as the site of the Democratic Party's defeat and Richard Nixon's subsequent victory in the November presidential election, something more important happened that the nation has yet to recover from.
In Chicago the American Dream collided with brutal truths about war, violence, and corruption. How could the same nation that regarded itself as the freest nation on earth bomb one of the poorest in the name of democracy? Who were the elected officials who rationalized war as the only road toward peace? What role did citizens have in shaping a democracy that seemed to have lost its moral compass?
These remain some of the most enduring questions for our own age, where perpetual war, police brutality, and political malfeasance at the highest levels of government have evolved from the spectacular to the mundane. In 1968 Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's deployment of tens of thousands of law enforcement officials to maintain security and order in the city was derided as "Gestapo tactics" inside the Democratic Convention -- even as a majority of Americans voiced approval of violence as a substitute for justice. By 2014, the sight of police officers in military fatigues and tanks patrolling the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, became the cost of maintaining a hard peace in the absence of justice.
Yet the imperfect idealism that animated protesters in Chicago endures. Forty years after police routed demonstrators advocating a more just society, thousands gathered in Grant Park to peacefully celebrate the election of the first black president in American history. President Barack Obama's two terms in the White House symbolized a measure of hope and progress for the generation who marched in 1968 and those who now stand on their shoulders. Their actions 50 years ago reflect the virtue and value of what Obama characterized as the most important title in our nation: citizen.
Black Lives Matter protests have linked the entire criminal justice system to a system of structural racism and inequality that activists in 1968 confronted on the streets of Chicago. Police brutality and political corruption targeted by demonstrators 50 years ago continue to shape the very face of American democracy. The Justice Department under the Trump administration has steadily eroded criminal justice reforms enacted by Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch that were designed to reduce mass incarceration, eliminate sentencing inequality, and promote effective community policing across the nation -- in an effort to ratchet down racial tensions after urban rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore.
The violent and illegal tactics the police used to crush dissent in Chicago have, in the ensuing half-century, been largely erased in favor of a narrative claiming that radical political extremism had taken over the Democratic Party's left wing. In fact, the protesters outside the halls of power in Chicago represented the mainstream of American political values in their ambition to end war, racism, poverty and violence both domestically and internationally.
Their demands turned into a generational conflict, pitting the Democratic Party establishment represented by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Vice President Hubert Humphrey against an insurgent coalition of youthful activists determined to transform the nation even at any cost.
Daley, a longtime ally of President Lyndon Johnson, deployed an army of police officers to maintain law and order in the city. Tom Hayden, the main author of the influential Port Huron Statement and a civil rights activist who had been beaten in Mississippi while working for civil rights, was perhaps the most well-known political radical in Chicago. Youth International Party (Yippies) leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin attracted further publicity by practicing politics as performance art, including nominating a pig for president in an effort to remark on the absurdity of the American political system.
Authorities were not amused. On Sunday, August 25, the day before the convention opened, Chicago police attacked demonstrators in Lincoln Park, setting the stage for a week of violent clashes. Daley forces targeted journalists covering events inside the convention and on the streets for violent retribution, including correspondents Dan Rather and Mike Wallace, who were assaulted by security guards inside the convention.
In contrast to the unified display showcased at the Republican National Convention in Miami earlier in the month, the Democrats were in chaos. The party's dreams of a Great Society faltered over an increasingly rancorous debate about the Vietnam War. Vietnam raised larger issues about the future of American democracy, especially around the themes of militarism, racism, and materialism that Dr. King had decried before his death and that Bobby Kennedy wrestled with during his short presidential campaign.
Ironically, these issues all converged on Wednesday, August 28, the fifth anniversary of the 1963 March On Washington. That evening over 10,000 demonstrators gathered in Grant Park (later the site of Barack Obama's victory speech in November 2008) clashed with police officers who brutalized men, women and innocents as well as those engaged in violent acts. In response, protesters descended upon the Hilton Hotel, where DNC delegates were staying and television cameras and journalists were headquartered. Vice President Hubert Humphrey watched in despair as police assaulted protesters in clashes that spilled out onto the streets and drew innocent bystanders into a web of violence.
Chicago reminds us of the deep historical roots behind contemporary political divisions. The partisan rancor that marks contemporary American political culture remains rooted in the violently brutal conflicts on display there a half-century ago. The internecine war for the soul of American democracy continues in our own time, as the rage and fear tapped almost 50 years apart by Richard Nixon and Donald Trump have continued to mesmerize successive generations of Americans. Social justice movements, from 1968 to our own time, remind us that the whole world is watching.
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The Cult of Violence Always Kills the Left
And who has all the power, in terms of violence? Our means of violence is very little. The government’s means, the right wing’s means, are very great. So, we’ve got to adopt nonviolence.
Apr 18, 2018
The Weather Underground, a clandestine revolutionary organization that advocated violence, was seen by my father and other clergy members who were involved in Vietnam anti-war protests as one of the most self-destructive forces on the left. These members of the clergy, many of whom, including my father, were World War II veterans, had often became ministers because of their experiences in the war. They understood the poison of violence. One of the most prominent leaders of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV), to which my father belonged, was the Catholic priest Philip Berrigan, who as an Army second lieutenant fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
The young radicals of the Vietnam era, including Mark Rudd--who in 1968 as a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led the occupation of five buildings at Columbia University and later helped form the Weather Underground--did not turn to those on the religious left whose personal experiences with violence might have saved SDS, the Weather Underground and the student anti-war movement from self-immolation. Blinded by hubris and infected with moral purity, the members of the Weather Underground saw themselves as the only real revolutionaries. And they embarked, as have those in today's black bloc and antifa, on a campaign that was counterproductive to the social justice goals they said they advocated.
Rudd, 50 years later, plays the role once played by the priests Phil and Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Heschel. His book "Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen" is a brutally honest deconstruction of the dangerous myths that captivated him as a young man. I suspect that many of those in the black bloc and antifa will no more listen to his wisdom than did the young radicals five decades ago who dismissed the warnings from those on the religious left for whom violence was not an abstraction. Rudd sees his old self in the masked faces of the black bloc and antifa, groups that advocate violence and property destruction in the name of anti-fascism. These faces, he said, ignite his deep embers of "shame and guilt."
"It's word for word the same thing," Rudd said of antifa and the black bloc when we spoke for several hours recently in Albuquerque. "You look on a YouTube channel like Acting Out. It's identical. How can we as white people stand by while the nonwhite people of the world are suffering under imperialism? I think the shame of being white in this society is so great [that] people want to show that they're aware of how terrible the disparities are, and how privilege and oppression distort everything. The urge to talk about violence and commit violence in response is a way of cleansing yourself of that privilege, of the guilt of privilege. It taps into this strain that I've identified as self-expression rather than strategy. That, to me, is the biggest problem."
"The anarchist Andy Cornell makes a distinction between activism and organizing," he said. "Activism is about self-expression. It often is a substitute for strategy. Strategic organizing is about results. These acts of self-expression, which is what antifa does and what we did in the Weather Underground, are exactly what the cops want."
"The slogan 'diversity of tactics' used by the black bloc and antifa is ridiculous," he said. "Even the term 'tactic' is ridiculous. What we need is a strategy. And let's be clear, even when you adopt a nonviolent strategy it will be portrayed by the state as violent. This is what the Israelis are doing at the Gaza fence. I often tell the antifa kids here--there are about four antifa kids in Albuquerque and they hate my guts--this story. There was a spontaneous anti-war demonstration in 2003 by a thousand people in Albuquerque the night the [Iraq] war began. The cops, who support the military, were angry. They attacked the crowd with tear gas and clubs. There were a lot of arrests. The victims brought a civil suit against the police. It did not come to trial until 2011. The police and the city of Albuquerque were the defendants. They were charged with violating the rights of the protesters. It was a jury trial. The jury found for the cops. Why? It turned out the police attorneys brought in a photograph. There were about 200 or 300 people in the photograph. In the front were two people wearing bandannas [as masks]. Just wearing bandannas. They zoomed in on the people wearing the bandannas. They told the jury, 'See these people wearing these bandannas? They're wearing bandannas because they're terrorists. And we knew they were about to attack us. So, we had to attack them.' The jury went for it. We had not yet convinced our fellow citizens of the value of the right to protest. My conclusion: Don't wear bandannas! Every time I see a kid wearing a bandanna, I say, 'You're so beautiful, why cover your face?' They say, 'Well, I have to, I'm a Zapatista.' I say that's nice but this is what happened in 2003 and 2011. It would probably be better for you to not wear the bandanna so they won't think we're violent. And they say, 'You're a stupid piece of shit' or they walk away."
Rudd said that the occupation of Columbia University in April 1968, an occupation that caused him to be expelled from the university, was an example of the kind of strategy that the left has to adopt. This strategy had its roots in the organizing techniques of the labor and civil rights movement.
"The means of transmission were red diaper babies,' he said, referring to the sons and daughters of members of the United States Communist Party. "The red diaper babies at Columbia SDS kept saying, 'Build the base. Build the base. Build the base.' It became a mantra for years. It was all we could think about. This meant education, confrontation and talking, talking, talking. It meant building relationships and alliances. It meant don't get too far out in front. In the spring of 1968 it all came to a head. It was the perfect storm. A few of us knew, now is the time to strike."
"Columbia was a success," he said. "The deed attracted attention. And because of the alliance with the black students, which has never gotten enough media attention in the story of Columbia, we closed down the university. We accomplished our strategic aim, which was to politicize more people and to build the movement. Our goal was not to end the university's involvement with military research. That was a symbolic goal. The real goal was to build the movement. I got into a lot of trouble for saying the issue is not the issue."
But Rudd and other radicals in the SDS soon became, he said, "enamored with the propaganda of the deed." Self-expression replaced strategy. The organizing, which had made the occupation of the university successful, was replaced by revolutionary posturing. The radicals believed that more radical tactics, including violence, would accelerate political and social change. It did the opposite.
"After Columbia, it was failure after failure after failure in SDS for the next year and a half," he said. "Then we doubled down on the failures."
The SDS radicals came under the spell of revolutionary theories propagated by those supporting armed liberation movements in the developing world. They wanted to transplant Frantz Fanon's call for revolutionary violence, Lin Biao's idea of "people's war" and Ernesto "Che" Guevara foco, or insurrectionary center, to the struggle in the United States. The radicals would go underground and carry out acts of violence that would ignite a national war of liberation. This call to arms was seductive and exhilarating, but it was based on a distorted and highly selective account of revolutionary struggle, especially in Cuba.
"Che put forward a phony analysis of how the Cuban revolution was won," Rudd said. "According to him it was won solely by Fidel and Che going into the Sierra Maestra [mountain range]. Armed struggle was the only thing that was important to the Cuban revolution. All other aspects of the revolution, including 20,000 people who were murdered by [dictator Fulgencio] Batista in the cities, the national strikes by the unions, the street protests by women, university students and the Cuban Communist Party were wiped out of history. There was only one thing to do, pick up the gun."
The cult of the gun was disastrous. It distorted reality. It elevated violence as the only real tool for revolution. Vijay Prashad in his book "The Darker Nations" spells out the incalculable damage caused by this cult, including the doomed attempt in 1967 by Che Guevara to form a foco in Bolivia, an effort that would cost him his life. The cult of the gun saw most third-world liberation movements, such as the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria, devolve into squalid military dictatorships when they took power.
"My little segment of the left worshipped Che," Rudd said. "We believed in the propaganda of the deed. We were so sure of our strategy, of leading the armed struggle, that we decided to destroy SDS and build the Weather Underground, a revolutionary fighting force. We decided on a tactic, which was to bring thousands of people to Chicago in 1969 for the conspiracy trial [of radicals such as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden, charged with instigating riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention]. Very few people showed up. We got creamed with beatings, arrests, and even shootings by the cops."
"After that we went from bad organizing to no organizing," Rudd said. "It was purely about self-expression. That self-expression would take the form of bombs. The first thing we did was kill three of our own people."
The premature explosion of a bomb in a New York City townhouse on March 6, 1970, that killed three of Rudd's comrades sobered the radical group. The bomb was to have been placed at an officers' dance at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. It surely would have killed and wounded dozens of people had it exploded at the Army base. The Weather Underground decided to bomb buildings that symbolized centers of power, including the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, the California attorney general's office and a New York City police station, but to call in warnings beforehand so the buildings could be evacuated. The group was responsible for 25 bombings and in 1970 organized the prison escape of Timothy Leary, the famous advocate of psychedelic drugs, for which the group was paid $25,000 by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a collection of drug dealers.
"A lot of Americans can accept their government's violence, but they can't conceive of political violence as anything other than criminal and mentally ill," Rudd said. "And who has all the power, in terms of violence? Our means of violence is very little. The government's means, the right wing's means, are very great. So, we've got to adopt nonviolence. The research of Erica Chenoweth and others has shown that nonviolence is much more efficacious than violence. Gene Sharp approaches nonviolence from a practical rather than a moral point of view. It is the difference between moral pacifism and practical pacifism. The antifa kids are not moral pacifists. They believe in a cleansing moral violence. At its base is a desire to absolve themselves of white guilt."
Rudd cautioned against the danger of intellectualizing the struggle against oppressive forces. He said all resistance had to remain rooted in practical realities and the hard, often anonymous and time-consuming work of organizing.
"As intellectuals, we can talk ourselves into anything," Rudd said. "If we think it's necessary we can probably figure out how to do it. David Gilbert is one of the gentlest people I have ever met. Yet he somehow talked himself into driving a getaway van with a bunch of black guys armed with automatic weapons. Gilbert left his kid at a daycare center, thinking he was going back at the end of the day to pick the kid up. Nobody picked up the kid. This is ludicrous. And that's the point; you can talk yourself into anything. I have a bumper sticker on the back of my car that says don't believe everything that you think."
Rudd is acutely aware of the failure by most liberals to fight for the values they purport to defend. However, the repeated betrayal of the oppressed by the liberal class as it mouths the language of justice should not push radicals to acts of violence. Rather, radicals must make strategic alliances with liberals while being fully aware of their propensity to flee from struggle when it becomes difficult.
"The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] was a sister organization of SDS," Rudd said. "They decided to go to the absolute worst place in the United States, Mississippi, to organize for voting rights. And they did. They lost a lot of people. A lot of people got arrested and beaten. A lot of stuff happened over a three-year period. But they won the right to vote. They organized a non-segregationist democratic delegation called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The real Democratic Party delegation was all-white. The Democratic Party worked out a deal with their allies in the North including the United Auto Workers and other liberals. They would seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Party Convention. They would exclude the segregationists. Busloads of mostly black people went to Atlantic City [site of the convention]. Lyndon Johnson had a change of heart. He feared if he seated the black delegates he would lose re-election. They didn't get seated. That was an ultimate betrayal. Out of this betrayal came the impetus for black power. Black power was supposedly a strategy. But it was no more a strategy than the Weather Underground. It was another form of self-expression."
"I was 18," Rudd said. "I saw heroic SNCC people advocating for black power. The liberals betrayed them. Which side would you be on? Black power rejected the nonviolence of Martin Luther King. It rejected integration. Malcolm X used the slogan 'By any means necessary.' This was seized upon to justify revolutionary violence. It was the same fantasy of revolution. Black power was no more embraced by the black masses than the violence and rhetoric of the Weather Underground were embraced by the white masses. In the end, the white left became the base of the Black Panther Party. The Panther 21 was set up on charges of a bombing in April 1969. SDS in New York, which I was a part of, protested to defend them. Our demonstrations became more and more white. The black base was not behind them. I thought the reason was our presence. I was so steeped in black power ideology I thought the mere presence of white people would keep black people away. That wasn't it. Black power made no sense to most black people. It was suicidal. Huey P. Newton's autobiography, "Revolutionary Suicide," captured it. What kind of a strategy is that? The black power movement was a cultural uprising. But it was not strategic. We fell for this bullshit."
"White radicals felt personally challenged by black power," he said. "Would we be liberals or would we be radicals? Would we go to the base, to the origin of the problem, which is capitalism and imperialism? Would we embrace 'by any means necessary'? Would we overthrow the system? Or would we be liberal reformists? When you're 18 or 20 that's not much of a question. This is why David Gilbert is in prison for the rest of his life."
"What we did was a historical crime," he said of the destruction of the SDS. "At the height of the war in 1969 we decided to close down the national and regional offices and the newspaper of the largest student radical organization in the country. SDS had chapters in 400 campuses. We probably had 100,000 active members. It was crazy. Three of our people died immediately. We inspired copycat actions. One of them happened in the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 1970. An anti-war graduate student died. Eventually, it led to the Brink's robbery in 1981. The worst thing of all, of all the things we did, was we split the anti-war movement over the bogus issue of armed struggle, our right to an armed struggle. This is the same thing as the call by antifa for diversity of tactics, which is a code word for violence."
"The thing about nonviolence is that it works," he said. "But it only works if it's total. The cops put the burden of violence on protesters. Our job is to do the opposite. Our job is to make it crystal clear it's the government and the system that engages violence. We muddy the water when we use violence."
"The left has not hit on a strategy analogous to the far-right strategy, which is to unite ideological conservatives with a base, especially the Christian fundamentalist base," he said. "A base means people show up. They vote. They go where they're told. That was the old union model for the Democratic Party. But with unions depleted we have no institutional or structural base. This is a huge problem. We have to rebuild structures. It's going to take a long time, maybe 20 or 40 years. I'll be 110."
"Antifa claims to be anarchist," he said. "But is not the same anarchism as, say, the Wobblies. Antifa's version of anarchism is you can't tell me what to do. It's self-expression. I fell into the trap of self-expression. Self-expression is narcissistic. It's saying my feelings are so important that I can do anything I want. It's saying once other people see how important my feelings are they will join me. It never works. There's only two kinds of people who advocate for violence--very stupid people, of which I was one, and cops. Which are you? Are you very stupid or are you a cop?"
"I can't communicate with antifa because my own PTSD forbids me to say you are so morally right, so courageous and so morally pure," Rudd said. "You understand how violent the system is. You understand what it's like to be nonwhite. I understand your motives. I applaud you for it. This is the only thing they hear, words that feed their self-adulation."
"I'm a veteran of all of this shit," he lamented. "But that doesn't count for anything. It's all expired."
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Where Are All the Monuments to the Progressive Americans?
The organizers, activists, artists, writers, and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country often go unacknowledged.
Sep 16, 2017
The current controversy over whether to dismantle statues of some prominent Confederate figures is a battle over whom we admire and consider as heroes. It is also a battle over who has power to shape how we view our history.
"Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee," President Donald Trump said last month after the struggle in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. "So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?"
In May, the New Orleans City Council declared monuments of Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard public nuisances and had them removed. In August, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered Confederate monuments removed from the city's public spaces. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, directed the dismantling of a statue in front of the State House of Roger Taney--a Supreme Court justice who was chief author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that ruled that African-Americans could not be American citizens. Earlier this month, in response to student protests, Yale University renamed Calhoun College--a residential complex named for John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina, vice president and influential advocate for slavery--Hopper College, after Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper, a computer pioneer and naval officer. To buttress the symbolism, Yale removed a portrait of Calhoun from a dining hall.
Shouldn't we also honor the organizers, activists, artists, writers, athletes, judges and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country? The New York Times recently published a list of the Confederate monuments that are now subject of controversy in cities across the country.
Not surprisingly, most monuments celebrate political, business and military figures. You can criss-cross the country and find statues, schools, government and university buildings, museums, parks, and streets celebrating presidents, senators, governors, jurists, inventor-entrepeneurs, founders of major corporations, generals and fallen soldiers. But our veneration of them often comes at the expense of recognizing other citizens who had a major role in shaping our nation's history.
Shouldn't we also honor the organizers, activists, artists, writers, athletes, judges, and occasional elected officials who fought to make the United States a more humane and inclusive country? What about the pioneers who built movements and gave voice to the struggles for women's suffrage, protecting the environment and consumers, putting an end to lynching, giving workers the right to form unions, and pushing for a progressive income tax, a federal minimum wage, old-age insurance, the 8-hour workday and government-subsidized health care and housing?
When they first advanced their ideas, they were considered impractical idealists, utopian dreamers or dangerous radicals. Now we take these ideas for granted. We all stand on their shoulders.
To create a partial catalogue of monuments celebrating progressive figures, I've drawn on the people profiled in my book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame. I've identified statues located in public places (but not busts of heads or paintings, parks or public buildings), celebrating these progressive figures.
The list focuses on people whose influence was primarily during the 20th century--so Tom Paine, Daniel Shays, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, William Monroe Trotter, William Lloyd Garrison, Mother Jones, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry Demarest Lloyd, John Muir, Ida Wells, Terrence Powderly, Thorsten Veblen and Jacob Riis, among other radicals and reformers, are not included.
A Short Tour of Monuments to Progressives
A statue of Tom L. Johnson, the progressive mayor of Cleveland from 1901 to 1909, is located in Cleveland's Public Square.
A statue of Robert M. La Follette Sr., the progressive Wisconsin governor and senator, sits in National Statuary Hall in the US Capitol. A number of public schools throughout Wisconsin are named for La Follette.
Crusading lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis adorns the campus of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Besides the university, many public schools--including high schools in New York City and San Antonio--are named for Brandeis.
Attorney Clarence Darrow spent most of his career defending radicals and labor activists, but he's most famous for defending evolution in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. A statue of Darrow sits on the lawn in front of the Rhea County Court House in Dayton, Tennessee. It was dedicated on July 14, 2017 and sits opposite the statue of William Jennings Bryan, who beat Darrow in that controversial case.
This statue of Theodore Roosevelt on Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River across from Washington, D.C. is one of many statues and schools named for the trust-busting president. You call also visit three national parks in honor of the environmental president.
The name of progressive philosopher and school reformer John Dewey adorns public schools in Denver; New York City; Warrensville Heights, Ohio; Flint, Michigan and elsewhere, but there are no statues with Dewey's likeness.
A sculpture of urban reformer Jane Addams, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1931), can be found on the campus of Cal State University in Fresno. Schools in Seattle; New York City; Bolingbrook and Moline, Illinois; Long Beach, California and other cities are named for the founder of modern social work.
Students in Sacramento can attend Hiram Johnson High School, and the public can visit the state office building in San Francisco named for the progressive governor, but there are no statues celebrating his life.
A statue of scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois is located at his alma mater, Fisk University. The main library at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, a physics building at Fisk University, and dormitories at the University of Pennsylvania and Hampton University are named for DuBois. Public schools is Chicago, Baltimore, Wake Forest, N.C., and elsewhere are named for him, too.
This statue of Alice Hamilton, a crusading physician who founded the modern field of occupational health, sits in Headwaters Park in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
A middle school in New York City is named for Robert F. Wagner, the progressive New Deal senator who led fights for workers' rights and public housing, but there are no statues erected to honor him.
These statues of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt at the Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York are among the many statues and schools named in their honor. A stunning recent addition to the collection of memorials is The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial along the Potomac in Washington, D.C.
A 12-foot-high, 4-ton statue of Albert Einstein is set at the entrance to the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Einstein is holding a paper engraved with the equations for his major scientific contributions. There are dozens of other Einstein statues in the U.S. and around the world and many schools named after the famous scientist and socialist.
This statue of the pioneering and fearless birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, with a gag over her mouth, stands in Old South Meeting House in Boston. There are no schools named for the controversial socialist and feminist.
A monument to John L. Lewis--leader of the mine workers union and later the Congress of Industrial Orgnizations (CIO)--sits in Monongahela Township, Greene County, Pennsylvania, on a site where 37 coal miners lost their lives in a mine explosion in 1962. There's another statue of the brilliant orator and labor leader at the John L. Lewis Mining & Labor Museum in Lucas, Iowa.
Several statues of Helen Keller portray the socialist, feminist and pacifist as a young girl learning how to speak, like this one located in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, of Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan. The Keller statue in National Statutory Hall in the US Capitol in Washington, DC shows her at a pump, where she spoke her first word, "water." There are many schools around the country named for the founder of what is now called the disability rights movement.
There's no sculpture of consumer and labor activist Frances Perkins, but the US Department of Labor building and the Frances Perkins Academy in New York City are named for the first female Cabinet secretary and a crusading New Deal reformer. However, the governor of Maine recently tried to have the Frances Perkins Conference Room in the state capitol renamed in view of her pro-labor stance.
Famed New York City Mayor and congressman Fiorello La Guardia sits in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. New York's La Guardia High School is one of the premier arts high schools in the country.
Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan and the Norman Thomas '05 Library at Princeton University are named after the leader of the American Socialist Party and frequent presidential candidate, from the 1930s through the 1950s. A plaque at the Princeton library reads: "Norman M. Thomas, class of 1905. 'I am not the champion of lost causes, but the champion of causes not yet won.'"
Swarthmore College named a dormitory after suffragist leader Alice Paul, a graduate of the college. Montclair State University in New Jersey has also named a building in her honor. And you can pay homage to Alice Paul and other women's rights luminaries at the National Park Service's Belmont-Paul National Historic Site.
An apartment building in Philadelphia bears the name of Sidney Hillman, the founder and president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and a key backer of FDR's New Deal program.
A. Philip Randolph, civil rights and labor leader and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, sits in Boston's Back Bay Train Station. Another statue of Randolph was erected in the concourse of Union Station in Washington, D.C. Schools in Jacksonville, Florida; New York City; Philadelphia and Atlanta are named in his honor. Jacksonville renamed one of its streets A. Phillip Randolph Boulevard and an A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum is located in Chicago's Pullman Historic District.
Statues of the radical Minnesota Depression-era Farmer-Labor Party Gov. Floyd Olson, including one in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, have been constructed throughout state.
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, sits outside St. Mary's Catholic Church in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Another Day statue can be found in front of the Solanus Casey Center in Detroit. Dormitories at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois, the University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Loyola University in Maryland are named in her honor. Broadway Housing Communities, a supportive housing project in New York City, opened the Dorothy Day Apartment Building at 583 Riverside Drive in 2003.
The name of actor, activist, singer and linguist Paul Robeson adorns public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and New Brunswick and Trenton, New Jersey. In 1976, the apartment building on Edgecombe Avenue in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan where Robeson lived during the early 1940s was officially renamed the Paul Robeson Residence, and the street was renamed Paul Robeson Boulevard. The main library at Rutgers University, Robeson's alma mater, is named for him. There are no statues, but many busts of Robeson, including this one at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio.
The people of Yakima, Washington honored their native son, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, with a statue in front of Davis High School, his alma mater.
The Los Angeles Unified School District named a school in Wilmington after Harry Bridges, the longtime left-wing leader of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. There's a bust of Bridges in San Pedro, Los Angeles' waterfront district, and the union is currently seeking a home for a newlycompleted statue.
A statue of Langston Hughes--poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer and columnist--sits in the Watkins Community Museum of History in Lawrence, Kansas. Schools in Lawrence; East Orange, New Jersey; Baltimore; Chicago; New Orleans and Fairburn, Georgia are named for Hughes.
New York City named a school after left-wing congressman Vito Marcantonio, who represented Harlem in Congress from 1934-50.
The Ella Baker School in Manhattan, serving pre-K to eighth-grade students, is named for the civil rights organizer.
There's a statue of Theodor Geisel--whose children's books, under the pen name Dr. Seuss, took aim at bullies, hypocrites and demagogues--on the campus of the University of California-San Diego, not far from the Geisel Library.
In 2010, fans of William J. Brennan, Jr., unveiled a statue of the Supreme Court justice in front of the Essex County Hall of Records in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. William J. Brennan High School, named for the author of many far-reaching decisions including Roe v. Wade and the Miranda rulings, is located in San Antonio, Texas. The historic Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City, New Jersey, which had opened in 1910, was named the William J. Brennan Court House in 1989.
Schools named for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the theologian who was active in the civil rights and anti-war movements, are located in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.
A statue of environmental crusader Rachel Carson was dedicated in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 2013. Schools named for Carson are located in New York City; Chicago; San Jose, California; Herndon, Virginia; Gaithersburg, Maryland; Sammamish, Washington and Beaverton, Oregon.
Riverfront Park in Wheeling, West Virginia is home to a statue of Walter Reuther, longtime president of the United Auto Workers and a founder of the modern labor movement. Walter Reuther High School is part of the public school system in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Walter Reuther Middle School is located in Rochester Hills, Michigan.
A statue of Thurgood Marshall--the courageous leader of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, lead lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case and the first African-American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, stands in front of the State House in Annapolis, Maryland. Another Marshall statue stands in front of the federal courthouse in Baltimore. High schools in San Francisco; Dayton, Ohio; and Missouri City, Texas are named for Marshall.
There's probably no progressive American with more monuments in his honor than Martin Luther King Jr. His name adorns many schools, streets, buildings and statues, including this one on the University of Texas campus in Austin. You can also visit the National Park Service memorial to Dr. King along the banks of the Potomac.
The West Chester (Pennsylvania) Area School District named its newest high school after native Bayard Rustin, a key organizer in the civil rights movement who coordinated the 1963 March on Washington.
Okemah, Oklahoma honored its most famous native, folk singer Woody Guthrie (who wrote "This Land Is Your Land") with a statue in its downtown area. Another Guthrie statue is located in Washington state near the Grand Coulee Dam, the subject of several Guthrie songs.
A statue of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was unveiled in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi in 2012. Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School and Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School are located in the Bronx section of New York City.
The Los Angeles Dodgers unveiled a statue of baseball legend and civil rights activist Jackie Robinson outside Dodger Stadium in April 2017. There are also statues in Brooklyn; Pasadena, California; Jersey City, New Jersey; Daytona Beach, Florida; and Los Angeles on the UCLA campus honoring the Hall of Fame player who broke baseball's color line in 1947. Schools in Milwaukee, New York City and elsewhere also are named after Robinson.
A statue of Malcolm X can be found in the former Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, the site of his 1965 assassination.
Chavez Plaza at California State University San Marcos includes a statue dedicated to Cesar Chavez as does the University of Texas at Austin. There are public schools named for the leader of the farmworkers movement in Portland, Oregon; Coachella, California; Phoenix and many other cities.
New York City is home to Harvey Milk High School, named after San Francisco supervisor and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States. A bust of Milkis located in San Francisco City Hall.
Missing Monuments
You won't find statues of some of the nation's most influential radicals and reformers. We may stand on their shoulders, but we can't stand on their statues, because they don't exist.
Here are just a few of those who aren't commemorated in any substantial way: Eugene V. Debs, Florence Kelley, Victor Berger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lincoln Steffens, Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, Lewis Hine, Upton Sinclair, Rose Schneiderman, Roger Baldwin, Myles Horton, Harry Hay, Saul Alinsky, Virginia Durr, Carey McWilliams, C. Wright Mills, I.F. Stone, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Arthur Miller, Jane Jacobs, Jerry Wurf, Barry Commoner, Pete Seeger, Howard Zinn, Michael Harrington, William Sloane Coffin, Allard Lowenstein, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ted Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, and Paul Wellstone.
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Tom Hayden, Courageous Warrior for Peace
The death of Tom Hayden at age 76 marked the passing of a major progressive leader who championed causes from civil rights to Vietnam War opposition to the environment
Oct 30, 2016
When Tom Hayden died on Oct. 23, we lost a courageous warrior for peace and equality. Hayden was on the front lines of nearly every major progressive struggle for more than 50 years. Vilified by the Right and at times criticized from the Left, Hayden remained steadfast in his commitment to social, economic and racial justice.
An activist, political theorist, organizer, writer, speaker and teacher, Hayden was a Freedom Rider in the South during the 1960s; a founder of Students for a Democratic Society; a leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement; a community organizer; a negotiator of a gang truce in Venice, California; the author of more than 19 books; and an elected official in California for nearly two decades.
"Tom made important contributions as a writer and a political leader, but his greatest strength was as a visionary strategist," said Bill Zimmerman, who worked with Hayden in the Indochina Peace Campaign and later managed his 1976 U.S. Senate campaign. "Tom was able to see far over the political horizon, and was then able to create and lead political movements that were often ahead of their time. Whether it was radical opposition to war or mainstream support for candidates, progressive ballot initiatives and necessary legislation, he was a true leader, clay feet and all."
The Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC), founded in 1972 by Hayden and Jane Fonda, who became his wife the following year, was a traveling road show that opposed the war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Daniel Ellsberg, whose leak of the Pentagon Papers helped to end the war, traveled with Fonda, Holly Near and others for two weeks, speaking around the clock against the war.
According to Ellsberg, IPC was instrumental in ending the war. While some in the organization took to the road to organize opposition to the war, others lobbied Congress to cut the funding for combat operations. Although the Paris Peace Accord was signed in 1973, many, including Ellsberg, knew the war was not over.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was pressuring President Richard Nixon to restart the bombing. Congress cut the funding in 1975 and the U.S. war in Vietnam finally ended.
"IPC was a model of grassroots activism and lobbying," Ellsberg said.
Hayden was steadfast in his opposition to the Vietnam War. He made several trips to North Vietnam, calling attention to the U.S. bombing of civilians. On one trip, at the request of the North Vietnamese government, Hayden returned to the U.S. with American prisoners of war. Since the U.S. government refused to recognize the government in Hanoi, the Vietnamese would only release the prisoners to Americans in the anti-war movement.
Advice from Dr. King
A transformative event in Hayden's life occurred in 1960 when he was a college student. He interviewed Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on a picket line outside the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. The picket demanded that the Democratic Party include a strong commitment to civil rights in its platform. King told Hayden, "Ultimately, you have to take a stand with your life."
Hayden took King's exhortation to heart, dedicating his life to the struggles for peace, freedom, justice and equality.
Hayden will perhaps best be remembered for his lead authorship of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, which provided an ideological manifesto for the New Left. The 22-year-old began writing it while in an Albany, Georgia jail cell, after an arrest for trying to integrate a railroad station waiting room during a Freedom Ride from Atlanta.
The iconic document began, "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." It focused on organizing students to oppose the Vietnam War, supporting the civil rights movement in the South, promoting campus student activism, and establishing community projects to fight poverty. The idealistic document concluded, "If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable."
After Hayden moved to Newark, New Jersey, in 1964 to be a community organizer, he did not escape the notice of local FBI agents, who sought increased surveillance of Hayden. They wrote, "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, it is recommended that he be placed on the Rabble Rouser Index."
Hayden's effectiveness was also noticed by J. Edgar Hoover, the notorious director of the FBI. Hoover once wrote in a memo, "One of your prime objectives should be to neutralize [Hayden] in the New Left movement." Hoover's objective was never realized. Hayden continued to serve as a bulwark of the Left.
In 1968, in what a national commission later called a "police riot," law enforcement officers in Chicago attacked and injured hundreds of demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention. Hayden, who helped plan the protests, and seven others were charged with crimes. Although they were acquitted of conspiracy, five, including Hayden, were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot and sentenced to five years in prison. Their convictions were reversed on appeal for judicial bias.
Hayden's work for economic justice and democracy was far-reaching. Marc Weiss, Chairman and CEO of Global Urban Development, worked with Hayden in the Campaign for Economic Democracy, which Hayden and Fonda founded in 1976. Weiss said Hayden "cared deeply about making progressive change for a more peaceful, prosperous, equitable, sustainable, innovative, inclusive, and much better world for everyone."
Legislative Initiatives
Elected to the California State Assembly in 1982 and the state Senate in 1992, Hayden was dubbed "the conscience of the Senate" by the Sacramento Bee. He sponsored or co-sponsored 100 pieces of legislation, including laws to lower college tuition costs, prevent discrimination in hiring, and attach safety controls to guns. In 1993, he sponsored a bill to require electric-vehicle-charging stations and legislation to require the state to find alternatives to refrigerants that destroy the ozone layer.
"Tom had an amazing capacity and commitment to linking environmental issues to local communities and minority community struggles," California Senate Majority Leader Bill Monning said. "He pushed a progressive agenda within the Democratic Party and continued to visit us in Sacramento with legislative ideas to address climate change," Monning added. "We will miss his insight, advocacy, and friendship."
Hayden co-founded Progressives for Obama in 2008. But, Hayden wrote, "No sooner had a social movement elected [Obama] than it was time for a new social movement to bring about a New Deal, lest his domestic initiatives sink in the quagmires of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and a new peace movement must rise as well."
In his contribution to my recent book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, Hayden wrote, "The limitations of the drone war should be clear from any study of history and strategy. Wars cannot be won from secret aerial launches against unknown forces and figures on the ground."
Indeed, Obama's use of armed drones in seven nations has made those countries more unstable and violent. And the resulting civilian casualties serve as an effective recruitment tool for those who would harm the United States.
In 2015, Hayden spoke at a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam. He said, "We gather here to remember the power that we had at one point, the power of the peace movement, and to challenge the Pentagon now on the battlefield of memory."
Hayden was responding to the Pentagon's attempt to sanitize the history of what the U.S. did in Vietnam. "President Obama has reminded us to remember, he said, Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall," Hayden noted. "But not Saigon, not Chicago, not Vietnam. We have to ask ourselves collectively why that omission exists, and realize that only we can restore a place in the proper history of those times."
Exhorting the audience to remember, and to "unify," Hayden bemoaned "our collective refusal to admit that the Vietnam War was wrong and that the peace movement was right."
Humanizing War Victims
Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies said, "I remain inordinately grateful to Tom for what I learned from him - most especially that if you're going to build a powerful movement against a war waged against a nation far away, you have to build into the center of your organizing some understanding of that country, its people, its culture.
"I learned that lesson first about Vietnam, working with Tom and Jane at the Indochina Peace Campaign for a couple of years right out of college." Bennis added, "I worked with others later to build that same understanding into the work we did on Central America, on Iran, on Palestine and beyond."
Many of the themes of the Port Huron Statement resonate today. In 2012, Hayden wrote in The Nation, "The Port Huron call for a life and politics built on moral values as opposed to expedient politics; its condemnation of the cold war, echoed in today's questioning of the 'war on terror'; its grounding in social movements against racism and poverty; its first-ever identification of students as agents of social change; and its call to extend participatory democracy to the economic, community and foreign policy spheres - these themes constitute much of today's progressive sensibility."
Hayden has been criticized by some on the Left for favoring reform over revolution. Most recently, Hayden switched from supporting Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton during the presidential primary. The main reason was his belief that Clinton has a stronger commitment to combatting racism than Sanders, citing the Congressional Black Caucus' (CBC) support for Clinton. In fact, the CBC did not support Clinton. It was the CBC's political action committee that favored her.
In refusing to wait for the general election to support Clinton, Hayden also overlooked Sanders's record on civil rights. A leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Sanders served as president of the Congress of Racial Equality at the University of Chicago, organizing pickets and sit-ins, which led to his 1963 arrest for resisting arrest.
Before his death, Hayden worked with the Peace and Justice Resource Center, which he founded a decade ago. He published The Peace Exchange Bulletin, "critically following the Pentagon's Long War in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, as well as the failed US wars on drugs and gangs, and US military responses to nationalism and poverty around the world."
During Ellsberg's 1973 Pentagon Papers trial (at which Hayden testified), Hayden's book, The Love of Possession is a Disease With Them, was published. Ellsberg was struck by the parallels Hayden drew in the book between the U.S. anti-Indian campaigns and the U.S. "pacification" campaign in Vietnam. The book title, taken from a Sitting Bull quote, is still relevant today as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies protest the Dakota Access Pipeline.
"Yet hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule." -- Sitting Bull, at the Powder River Council, 1877
Hayden's many books also include Radical Nomad (1964), Irish Hunger (1968), Rebellion and Repression (1969), Trial (1970), Tom Hayden: An Activist Life (1981), Irish on the Inside (2001), The Zapatista Reader (2002), Street Wars (2004), Ending the War in Iraq (2007), Writings for a Democratic Society (2008), The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (2009), and Listen Yankee: Why Cuba Matters (2015). His final book, Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement, will be published posthumously by Yale University Press in March 2017.
As we face the daunting challenges of U.S. militarism abroad, militarization of the police at home, and persistent economic and racial inequality, the absence of Tom Hayden is an incalculable loss.
Originally published at ConsortiumNews.com
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Can We Unify?
Oct 26, 2016
Yesterday morning I watched the Democracy Now! clip of Tom Hayden addressing the 2015 Teach in on the power of Vietnam War protest and I was particularly struck by his emphasis on movements finding the way to unity.
As we face the 2016 election those of us in the self-selected, dissatisfied minority who are deeply concerned about the need for change might contemplate Hayden's suggestion of finding a path to unity.
"The deepest motivation I know is love."
Unity does not mean lock-step agreement on every issue or detail, it does mean finding an avenue by which to bring our presently atomized struggles for peace, the environment, racial, social, and economic justice together.
None of our struggles can achieve a lonely objective for change without all the other struggles joining in across lines of class, race and gender. We all know it, but have not been able to bridge the divides by calling for transformative change together.
Thus, we find ourselves in the eleventh hour of deep global crisis with expanding wars - any of which can escalate so that nuclear weapons are used - and climate change which is upon us with stunning rapidity.
It is increasingly clear that all global regimes as currently established are inadequate to the monumental tasks ahead and that people's movements must arise around the world to save the day.
How might this happen?
Here are some suggestions for those of us in the U.S.
Existing organizations that take on pieces of social change work could convene meetings across issues. This might be accomplished if staff meet with each other and begin to delegate representatives to start talking with other groups.
Conversations can be built out in ever expanding circles with engaged activists and community groups so that more and more people find an avenue to participate in the struggle.
Make it easy, not hard. Keep the language open, non-violent and inclusive, not filled with acronyms and jargon. Make every effort to find the points of compromise and agreement as possible, without focusing on the disagreements. Any positive step will build on itself and move the struggle forward. People are hungry for positive change and representative bodies that work - make it happen.
Five or six crucial components must be identified and agreed upon, such as calling for:
- ending all the wars immediately, cut off arms trading, cease bombing, convene nuclear abolition talks as required by the NPT, end military giveaways to police departments that significantly increase the militarization of police, increasing the level of violence in our communities
- halting all invasive energy projects - mountaintop removal, pipelines, fracking
- shifting resources to transition to 100% clean, renewable energy as we already know can be done from the Solutions Project at Stanford University.
- meeting needs: jobs, housing, single-payer healthcare and education are crucial for all of us, our basic needs must be met across lines of race and class and across the planet.
- addressing terrorism by minimizing the conditions (disenfranchisement, violence) by which it takes root and flourishes.
- placing the needs of the 65 million refugees front and center so that the global humanitarian crisis is alleviated - this cannot be done with guns and bombs, but with providing food, shelter, healthcare, education. If the violence is brought to a halt, maybe people will be able to return home.
Here in the U.S., the Pentagon cannot account for 6.5 trillion dollars as detailed in a report issued this past July. The permanent wars, the war economy and war culture intransigence are impeding needed change. This has to be addressed by the larger community, not just the "peaceniks."
Robert Pollin in Greening the Global Economy, states that an investment of roughly $200 billion/year is what is required to bring our emissions down by 40 percent within 20 years and 80 percent by 2050. Inadequate, and nonbinding pledges such as the COP 21 agreement in Paris will not solve the problem.
The cost of addressing climate change reasonably with many social benefits amounts to Pentagon pennies.
The transformational changes needed by our planet are possible, but as it now stands, global leaders will not do it for us. Organized groups of people must persuade them it is in all our interest to do so and to do this we need to be united in ways we have not been in the past but that is possible to do.
The deepest motivation I know is love: love of people (for our differences and in spite of them) and love of this (still green, but imperiled!) planet and perhaps if we keep that love as our guiding light we can persevere through the necessary struggles and emerge on the other side at long last.
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Remembering Civil Rights and Peace Activist Tom Hayden
Tom Hayden is perhaps best known as the principal author of the Port Huron Statement, the central document of the Students for a Democratic Society, written in June 1962. It declared "we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation."
Oct 25, 2016
Tom Hayden is perhaps best known as the principal author of the Port Huron Statement, the central document of the Students for a Democratic Society, written in June 1962. It declared "we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation."
On the fiftieth anniversary of that document, Hayden, who died Sunday at age 76, spoke at numerous events, revisiting its history. "Recently," he wrote in 2012, "I saw the same spirit I had witnessed in the South fifty years ago--the spirit that inspired the Port Huron Statement--in the actions of undocumented undergraduates risking deportation to stand up for the Dream Act. I saw it in the Wisconsin movement to recall Governor Scott Walker, and in Occupy Wall Street's insistence that 1 percent of the population shouldn't control such a vast portion of the country's wealth."
Hayden, who cut his teeth working in the civil rights movement in the south and in the inner city of Newark, New Jersey, first wrote for The Progressive in January 1962. His article, "Mission in McComb," chronicled his time working on voter registration in Mississippi. "Even when the Negro gains the right to vote," he wrote, "his ordeal is not yet over. He finds that opposing white factions contesting for his support leave him far from free."
In 1969, Hayden was indicted and tried for conspiracy to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. His conviction, as a member of the "Chicago Seven," was overturned on appeal.
In August 2004, Hayden made an impassioned call for demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. "Protest," he wrote, "is a sacred resource of American society. It begins with radical minorities at the margins, eventually marching into the mainstream . . . . Prophetic minorities instigated the American Revolution, ended slavery, achieved the vote for women, made trade unions possible, and saved our rivers from becoming sewers."
Despite his roots in radical organizing, Hayden also sought to work within the system, serving in the California state assembly for ten years, and in the state senate for eight. In 2012, following President Obama's second victory, Hayden wrote in The Progressive: "Sadly, many angry white radical critics of Obama may have isolated themselves even further from this enthusiastic popular upsurge. Reading their intense blogging and listening to their rage on Pacifica [radio], one almost had the sense that they there were disappointed in Obama's success. A quick survey indicates that third party candidates failed to make any difference whatsoever in the elections in battleground states." He continued to advocate for an "inside-outside alliance" between the political establishment and the "party of the streets."
Hayden was a fierce critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and of President Obama's use of drones as a tool of foreign policy, writing, "The tangled path to ending U.S. drone strikes will be mapped through diplomacy, courtroom challenges, activist protests, and pressure on the mainstream media to challenge official secrecy."
Hayden called Walker's victory in the 2012 recall elections "heartbreaking," but not necessarily the last word: "Electoral campaigns are governed by deadlines and voting results, unlike social movements, which can ebb and flow for decades. The pain of a stunning defeat inevitably takes a psychic toll on its participants, similar in ways to a seven-game World Series. It takes time to recover, and some never will. But politics never stops."
Tom Hayden's activism, optimism for the possibility of change, and efforts to pass on his legacy of activism to another generation will be sorely missed.
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Tom Hayden and the Unfinished Business of Democracy
Though an irreplaceable voice for peace has been silenced, his vision will live on.
Oct 24, 2016
The writer, politician, and anti-war activist Tom Hayden died yesterday at the age of 76, a year and a half after suffering a stroke. Now, as they say, he rests in peace--a man who devoted his life to making the world a place where the living can do the same. From helping to found the New Left in the 1960s right up to this turbulent election season, Hayden was a pillar of Democratic politics, a brilliant strategist and political thinker, and a leading advocate for a more just and equal society. Here at The Nation we are especially saddened by the loss of a close friend. A longtime contributor to these pages, Hayden joined our editorial board just weeks before the attacks of September 11, which gave a new resonance to his life's work. He attended most biannual meetings, often in person and sometimes by Skype, until September of 2015. His most recent piece for the magazine, published in April, was a moving essay about why he was supporting Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary:
So here we are, at the end of one generation on the left and the rise of another. Both camps in the party will need each other in November--more than either side needs to emerge triumphant in the primary. We still need the organizing of a united front of equals to prevail against the Republicans. It will take a thorough process of conflict resolution to get there, not a unilateral power wielding by the usual operatives. It's up to all of us.
Though an irreplaceable voice for peace has been silenced, there will be one more reminder of Hayden's unsurpassed ability for making readers understand what it takes to hold the powerful to account. Next spring, Yale University Press will publish Hayden's final book, Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement. For now, here is a sampling of some of the important work Hayden published in our pages.
A month after Ronald Reagan's inauguration as president, Hayden wrote a cover story titled "The Future Politics of Liberalism" (February 21, 1981), which showed that there was much more to his vision of the United States that the limited set of issues that usually falls under the rubric of politics:
We need more than ever a participatory society in which persons of all life styles believe that they matter, instead of the escapist culture that absorbs millions in irrelevance. We cannot contend with the coming of external limits unless we delve more into our rich inner potentials.
It comes down to moving from a wasteful, privately oriented, self-indulgent existence to a more conserving, caring and disciplined life style. The cornerstone has to be a renewal of self-reliance, not the outmoded frontier fantasy of the Republican philosophers, but the reassertion of personal responsibility in everything from conserving resources to decentralizing services to keeping ourselves well through self-care to practicing a "right livelihood" in business. It is a change from planned obsolescence to the production of useful goods that last, from consumer madness to the achievement of inner satisfactions, from the opulence of Jay Gatsby to the frugal self-assurance of Henry David Thoreau.
More important than money and technique in elections is the factor of motivation and vision. The Democrats (or someone else) will return to national leadership when they are inspired again.
The following year Hayden was elected to the California state assembly, where he passed important bills on education and animal rights and participated in a US Commerce Department delegation to Northern Ireland. In 1992, voters promoted him to the state senate, and a few years later he began writing often for The Nation.
"Unfinished Business: Can We Beat the Special-Interest State?" (September 9/16, 1996):
Though for the next few months most progressives like myself will work to re-elect Bill Clinton and a Democratic Congress, it is not enough o beat back the Gingrichites only to return to the Democratic status quo. The next great debate, reminiscent of the sixties, should be over the values and direction of the Democratic Party. The fight will be for the soul of our politics, not a policy-wonk debate about training vouchers for jobs that may not exist. I would begin with a public demand to free the political system from the suffocating grip of special-interest money, thus opening the possibilities of building a sustainable economy and environment for the next generation, instead of dooming them to corporate downsizing, a public sector dominated by prisons and a planet degraded beyond repair.
Too many of our elders in the sixties discarded their rebellious children or remained silent when the time came to take a controversial stand against their government. The question haunts me: now that authority has fallen to this generation, how will we be different from our parents toward those downsized to despair?
Twenty years later, with the Clintons likely to return to the White House, it's still a good question.
More important than money and technique in elections is the factor of motivation and vision.
In May of 1999, Hayden wrote about "The Liberals' Folly" in supporting the Clinton Administration's bombing of Kosovo. Drawing on his memory of the fight against the Vietnam War, Hayden said it was the job of liberalism to critique such military adventures abroad, not to support them when Democrats were in the White House. The "confident expectation of an early military victory," Hayden wrote, "is sinking in a Vietnam-style quagmire. Their political fortunes in 2000 are fast becoming collateral damage."
In 2002, Hayden reflected on "The Port Huron Statement at 40":
Perhaps the most important legacy of the Port Huron Statement is the fact that it introduced the concept of participatory democracy to popular discourse and practice. It made sense of the fact that ordinary people were making history, and not waiting for parties or traditional organizations. The notion was used to define modes of organization (decentralization, consensus methods of decision-making, leadership rotation and avoidance of hierarchy) that would lead to social transformation, not simply concessions from existing institutions. It proved to be a contagious idea, spreading from its academic origins to the very process of movement decision-making, to the subsequent call for women's liberation. These participatory practices, which had their roots in the town hall, Quaker meetings, anarchist collectives and even sensitivity training, are carried on today in grassroots movements such as the one against corporate globalization. The strength of organizations like the early SDS or SNCC, or today's Seattle-style direct-action networks, or ACT UP, is catalytic, not bureaucratic. They empower the passion of spontaneous, communal revolt, continue a few years, succeed in achieving reforms and yet have difficulty in becoming institutionalized. But while hierarchical mass organizations boast more staying power, they have trouble attracting the personal creativity or the energy of ordinary people taking back power over their lives. Participatory democracy offers a lens for looking at all hierarchies critically and not taking them as inevitable. Perhaps the two strands-the grassroots radical democratic thrust and the need for an organization with a program-can never be fused, but neither can one live without the other.
The Port Huron Statement claimed to be articulating an "agenda for a Generation." Some of that agenda has been fulfilled: The cold war is no more, voting rights for blacks and youth have been won, and much has changed for the better in the content of university curriculums. Yet our dreams have hardly been realized. The Port Huron Statement was composed in the heady interlude of inspiration between the apathetic 1950s and the 1960s' sudden traumas of political assassinations and body counts. Forty years later, we may stand at a similar crossroads. The war on terrorism has revived the cold war framework. An escalating national security state attempts to rivet our attention and invest our resources on fighting an elusive, undefined enemy for years to come, at the inevitable price of our civil liberties and continued neglect of social justice. To challenge the framework of the war on terrorism, to demand a search for real peace with justice, is as difficult today as challenging the cold war was at Port Huron. Yet there is a new movement astir in the world, against the inherent violence of globalization, corporate rule and fundamentalism, that reminds us strongly of the early 1960s. Is history repeating? If so, "participatory democracy" and the priorities of Port Huron continue to offer clues to building a committed movement toward a society responsive to the needs of the vast majority. Many of those who came to Port Huron have been on that quest ever since.
Increasingly, Hayden turned his attention to how that quest could be linked up with similar ones around the globe, including among those dispossessed by the forces of neoliberal globalization. After attending the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre, Brazil, in early 2003, Hayden wrote that "an alternative" to global capitalism was emerging in Latin America:
Instead of NAFTA's corporate escape from New Deal-style regulation, the new agenda would be an extension of the most progressive elements of the New Deal to global society, a new social contract in place of market fundamentalism. Globalization from the bottom up. Instead of NAFTA-style agreements that solely protect foreign investors, this alternative model would offer enforceable protections to workers, women and the environment as well-on both sides of the border. Instead of sweatshops and child labor there would be unions and literacy programs. Instead of damming rivers and slashing rainforests, there would be conservation programs for future generations.
As he concluded, "Powerful new coalitions for change are being birthed."
The same week that issue of The Nation hit newsstands, the United States began bombing Iraq. As the war foundered and those promised WMDs mysteriously disappeared, an anti-war movement began to gain steam, and Hayden had plenty of wisdom to offer about how best to proceed. In "How the Peace Movement Can Win" (December 17, 2007), Hayden proposed engaging in a "domestic war" to take back control of the government in the 2008 elections and end the war. The United States was "approaching a similar chasm in public opinion" as the one that tore the country apart in the late 1960s. "With a majority of Americans wanting and expecting a withdrawal from Iraq, the outcome of 2008 may depend on who has the greater will to win."
Another piece worth revisiting is Hayden's essay from the Nation of April 16, 2012, "Participatory Democracy: From the Port Huron Statement to Occupy Wall Street," in which he reflected on the similarities and differences between the two movements a half-century apart:
I don't know whether history begins anew or just repeats its sputtering cycles again and again. What is clear enough is that the Occupy movement began without pundit predictions, without funding, without organization, with only determined people in tents, countless Davids taking on the smug Goliath in spontaneous planetary resistance. While Occupy could not and would not agree on making detailed demands, it did agree, as noted earlier, on "direct and transparent participatory democracy" as its first principle.
There is endless speculation these days about the future of Occupy Wall Street. Since I was pleasantly surprised by its birth, I am not one to predict its growth. I prefer to wait and see. Across the Western world, the smoldering division is becoming one between unelected wealthy and foreign private investors and the participatory democracies of civic societies with their faltering elected governments.
Hayden was critical, however, of what he saw as the Occupiers' unwillingness to sully themselves by working with elected officials to enact at least modified versions of the sweeping changes they proposed. Among the new generation of activists, he said,
there is a broad suspicion of seeking reforms that require alliances with top-down organizations, especially with progressive elected officials. The same dilemmas arose in the '60s in the relationships between SNCC and the national civil rights leadership, and between SDS and the liberal Democrats we blamed for starting the Vietnam War. In retrospect, however, it's impossible to reach a majority, much less the 99 percent, while rejecting coalition politics. Nevertheless, some Occupy theorists seem to believe they can do so. For example, Micah White, a brilliant editor at Adbusters, writes that "an insurrectionary challenge to the capitalist state" will be mounted by "culture-jammers" who create "fluid, immersive, evocative meta-gaming experiences that are playfully thrilling and [that] as a natural result of their gameplay" a social revolution will arise as "pure manifestation of an anonymous will of a dispersed, networked collective." It is as if the pure insurrectionary act, memorialized as performance art, is more important than the construction of any alliances, or any consequences that flow from it.
Ultimately, however, he thought the two movements had much in common:
It is time for a participatory New Deal, to bring the banks and corporations under the regulations and reforms they have escaped through runaway globalization. This year marks the first presidential campaign in our lifetime when the gluttony of Wall Street, the failures of capitalism, the evils of big money in politics and a discussion of fundamental reform will be front and center in election debates. No doubt the crisis that gave rise to Occupy will not be fixed by an election, but that's beside the point. Elections produce popular mandates, and mandates spur popular activism. It's time to organize a progressive majority, and the vision and strategy of Port Huron is worth considering as a guide.
And so it still is. Goodbye, Tom.
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Tom Hayden, 'One of the Great 20th Century Activist Leaders,' Dies at 76
A nation mourns a figure, described by many as 'a leading advocate for a more just and equal society'
Oct 24, 2016
Progressive icon and anti-war activist turned California lawmaker Tom Hayden passed on Sunday at the age of 76.
Hayden dedicated his life to peace, social justice, and activism: from the 1960s, when he helped found the New Left and worked to organize black southern sharecroppers, to building--alongside his former wife, actress Jane Fonda--a California political machine that for decades advanced progressive candidates and measures.
"If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable," reads the conclusion of the Port Huron manifesto, which Hayden drafted in 1962 for the leftist organization Students for a Democratic Society.
In 1982, Hayden was elected to the California Assembly, beginning nearly two decades of service in the Assembly and state Senate. "During his tenure in the Legislature, representing the liberal Westside, Hayden relished being a thorn in the side of the powerful, including fellow Democrats he saw as too pliant to donors," the Los Angeles Times wrote on Sunday.
"He was the radical inside the system," Duane Peterson, a top Hayden advisor in Sacramento, told the Times.
Indeed, before turning to politics, Hayden was a well known student leader and activist. He had a famously extensive FBI file. In one undisclosed May 1968 bureau cable sent at the time of the Columbia University student occupation, the agency wrote: "The investigation of Hayden, as one of the key leaders of the new left movement, is of prime importance to the Bureau."
A year later, Hayden was one of the activists, known as the "Chicago 7," indicted by the Justice Department for conspiracy to incite a riot at the Democratic National Convention.
In addition to politics, Hayden also taught and authored numerous books including his most recent Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement, which will be released posthumously in March 2017.
A prolific writer, he was a longtime contributor to Common Dreams and The Nation, which wrote Monday: "From helping to found the New Left in the 1960s right up to this turbulent election season, Hayden was a pillar of Democratic politics, a brilliant strategist and political thinker, and a leading advocate for a more just and equal society."
In a February 1981 essay for The Nation titled "The Future Politics of Liberalism," which was published in the wake of Ronald Reagan's presidential inauguration, Hayden outlined his idea of a just society, illustrating how economic, social, and environmental elements are all intertwined in that vision:
We need more than ever a participatory society in which persons of all life styles believe that they matter, instead of the escapist culture that absorbs millions in irrelevance. We cannot contend with the coming of external limits unless we delve more into our rich inner potentials.
It comes down to moving from a wasteful, privately oriented, self-indulgent existence to a more conserving, caring and disciplined life style. The cornerstone has to be a renewal of self-reliance, not the outmoded frontier fantasy of the Republican philosophers, but the reassertion of personal responsibility in everything from conserving resources to decentralizing services to keeping ourselves well through self-care to practicing a "right livelihood" in business. It is a change from planned obsolescence to the production of useful goods that last, from consumer madness to the achievement of inner satisfactions, from the opulence of Jay Gatsby to the frugal self-assurance of Henry David Thoreau.
More important than money and technique in elections is the factor of motivation and vision. The Democrats (or someone else) will return to national leadership when they are inspired again.
After the news of his death, many on the left took to social media to mourn the loss of a longtime progressive champion and express their gratitude for his inspiring legacy:
According to wife Barbara Williams, Hayden died after a long illness. He suffered a stroke in 2015 after, as he put it, "tramping around the dark pits of fracking wastewater for two days in the suffocating wastelands of [California's] Kern County." He is also survived by "their adopted son, Liam; Troy Garity, his son with Fonda; and his sister, Mary Hayden Frey," as well as "stepdaughter Vanessa Vadim and her two children," the Times reports.
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Norman Solomon vs. Tom Hayden on Sanders vs. Clinton
Jun 02, 2016
With the California primary fast approaching, Berkeley-based KPFA Radio invited Hillary Clinton supporter Tom Hayden and Bernie Sanders supporter Norman Solomon to debate. Hayden declined to participate in a direct debate but agreed to back-to-back live segments, which aired on May 31. The opening comments from Hayden and Solomon are interspersed below.
KPFA Radio host Brian Edwards-Tiekert: Tom Hayden ... is a veteran activist who spent 50 years in radical and progressive circles including 18 in the California Assembly and Senate.... About six weeks ago in an article printed in The Nation magazine, he came out as a progressive who had defected from the Bernie Sanders camp and intends to cast his California primary vote for Hillary Clinton.... Well, what accounts for the conversion?
Tom Hayden: I didn't defect, I think it was just a headline. What I said was that I was at first supportive of Bernie when he came to Los Angeles for his first rally, I was there, I was supportive. But I was in the category of people who thought that his campaign was worthy, even noble and it would push Hillary to the left. And then as his campaign expanded and became very, very historic, I had to try to take a look at the numbers....
And I've always been very close to my friends and allies in the black community, the Latino community and organized labor and it just seemed to me that the numbers were not gonna be there for him. It was gonna be a close race, it was gonna be a historic race. It was gonna be a race that set a foundation for the Left in the future. But given the math, I didn't think he was gonna make it. And so I started to shift to Hillary and to discussions of the platform and discussions of what to do after this coming week.
And I still think Bernie could win California this week, who's to say. But she'll have the overwhelming support in terms of the popular vote, the pledged delegate vote and the unpledged delegates.
So we're looking at a quandary here where Bernie's the winner on a moral and even a political basis. He's made history, and she's the winner on the mathematical basis. And then you have Trump. So it could be the tightest, most hazardous race in political history and we can't afford to allow Trump to slither through. So that's where I'm at.
Q: Well, I understand the mathematical argument and I think you'd find few rational people who disagree with you that the numbers are extremely daunting for the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Hayden: Right.
Q: But it doesn't speak to the question of why you would choose to cast your ballot for the Clinton campaign if you think your politics are more aligned with the Sanders campaign.
Hayden: It's because all my life I've been involved with racial politics. I was a Freedom Rider in the South. I was the author of books on gang violence, I was a community organizer in Newark, New Jersey, and when I spoke to the Black Caucus, congressional and state, I realized they were going all the way for Hillary and so was the Latino caucus in Sacramento and I asked myself this question: "Do I really want to cast my vote against these people who have been central to my life and to the soul of the country?" And so I went with them. Period.
Q: Our conventional idea of politics is you have a set of principles; you vote for the candidate who best represents those principles. It seems like you're doing a kind of politics by proxy.
Hayden: No, my politics are based on long relationships.
Q: OK, but fair enough, let's go back eight years, the 2008 ballot. African Americans broke 70 percent in favor of a ban on same-sex marriage in California. That didn't make you cast a ballot for Proposition 8 did it?
Hayden: No.
Q: So what's different this time?
Hayden: Well, I mean what's at stake is Trump. Trump is fascism, that's all, so we have to find a way to work it out between Hillary and Bernie.
** ** ** ** **
Brian Edwards-Tiekert: The last time we had Norman Solomon on, his organization had just issued a press release calling for the Bernie Sanders campaign to take clearer positions on questions of foreign policy, and voiced some criticism about remarks Bernie Sanders had said about the potential role of Saudi Arabia in solving regional conflicts. Now, Norman Solomon is set up to be a delegate for Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention.... So, has your thinking about the Sanders campaign changed since we spoke last fall?
Norman Solomon: Well, I think that the critical support that you mentioned was always based on an understanding -- we understood that Bernie Sanders gave us an opportunity to help build a movement. And so in terms of critical support, that's been the case then, it's the case now. I think that a look at what Bernie has been saying in the last many months has shown a positive trend in terms of foreign policy.
He stopped saying what RootsAction.org objected to last summer and fall, which was that Saudi Arabia should quote "get its hands dirty" unquote in the Middle East -- we know that there's enough blood on Saudi Arabia's hands already in terms of intervention in Yemen, for instance -- so this is a work in progress in terms of a campaign. And having been one of the approximately 30,000 people in downtown Oakland yesterday at the rally hearing Bernie Sanders, I have to say that this is a very important campaign and progressive movements are strengthening the campaign and being strengthened by it.
Q: There's an argument that comes from the hard left that this is a bit of a distraction. At this point the Sanders campaign is basically running for a strong second place, for as many delegates as possible at the Democratic National Convention, and what they can achieve there is window-dressing. Sure, he's got almost half the platform committee, but who cares what the party platform is. What do you think you can actually accomplish in Philadelphia?
Solomon: I've been pleasantly surprised by how much across-the-board support there is from progressives. I mean you referred to the "hard left" but I've really heard an enormous amount of enthusiasm from a wide range of people. From groups for instance that I've considered to be way too supportive and non-critical of the Obama administration such as MoveOn and Democracy for America have been very strongly behind Bernie. And on the other hand, even at the Green Party a lot of talk and actually an invitation for Bernie Sanders to run at the top of the Green Party ticket, presuming he's not nominated by the Democrats, and that's a surprising invitation as well.
But I think there's a good understanding that what has happened in the building of this campaign behind a self-described democratic socialist is a sea change in the political discourse of this country. And "hard left" or not, whatever you want to call it, many many people across the broad perspective of progressives understand that a class analysis for the first time has taken center stage in a positive way in presidential politics in this country.
Q: So let's stipulate that without something approaching an 80 percent landslide in California it is highly unlikely that Bernie Sanders will become the Democratic Party nominee. Short of becoming the party nominee, what good will come of the campaign?
Solomon: Well, I think we've already seen that there's a tremendous amount of capacity to organize that people have shown. And Tom Hayden, who we just heard -- who has really saddened me and many other people because he's thrown his lot in with the war hawk and corporatist Hillary Clinton -- has acknowledged himself that there's been enormous coalescence behind Bernie Sanders' campaign and that it's prefigurative of what can be accomplished in the electoral and non-electoral arenas.
That is for us the challenge ahead -- that we need to understand election campaigns are not movements, and that while we can enhance movements with electoral campaigns and vice versa, ultimately it's about building grassroots capability.
And so this remains to be seen. This is not a passive operation to be engaged in elections or anything else. I was disturbed to hear Tom Hayden -- who sadly declined to be in direct debate here and so we're sequential instead of simultaneous dialogue -- he sounded like a horse racer. And progressives should be change makers, not horse racers. We've got to organize continually behind what we believe in, not what we think is a way to go with the math that already exists in the electoral arena or anywhere else.
** ** ** ** **
Brian Edwards-Tiekert: How do you counter the argument from the Sanders camp that he polls better against Donald Trump in match-up polls than Hillary Clinton does?
Tom Hayden: My experience tells me that that's more propaganda than fact because not a penny has ever been spent in negative advertising or campaigning against Bernie. And I think the Republicans like Rove are salivating at the chance to go after Bernie on the usual grounds and I'm skeptical that he would hold up.
Q: What do you think those attacks would look like?
Hayden: It'd be sophisticated and clever and then a fringe of the Republicans would be so off the wall that they would turn people off. But -- it's not gonna happen first of all. She's gonna get the nomination anyway, and then the real showdown starts and we'll see what goes from there, but suffice to say I don't trust the argument that because he does better than Trump in match-ups he would be the nominee and prevail, because I've just never seen any negative advertising used against him. Hillary wants his base so she's not attacking him. And Trump occasionally makes jokes but the Republicans want him.
So, anyway, it's virtually over. It's a very, very narrow race and we'll have to see what we can do to build a united front against Trump.
Q: What about the question of what's beyond the election? The Sanders campaign has mobilized millions of people; it's put together the strongest fundraising apparatus that's ever been behind a progressive insurgency in a Democratic primary. What about the idea of supporting the campaign for the sake of developing some kind of movement infrastructure that persists past Election Day?
Hayden: I strongly support the development of a movement infrastructure; I don't know if the Left is capable of uniting around such a thing. But there certainly will be long-term impact, I think because the early signs are already there of all kinds of people running their own campaigns, I mean somebody's even running a campaign against the chair of the Democratic Party. There's dozens of these campaigns, so --
Q: Timothy Canova, we've had him on as guest several times as an economic analyst.
Hayden: Yeah, it will have a long-term effect that way, whether there are divisions or splinterings, I'm not able to tell you, I just don't know for sure, but it would take Bernie's leadership and some serious central office for it to be more than a phenomenon but for it to be an ongoing Left organization into the future around issues and around candidates.
Q: On the issues: Are you concerned that the Clinton campaign in contrasting itself to the Bernie Sanders campaign has basically couched itself as the campaign of diminished expectations? Everything he's promising but less so and more incrementally.
Hayden: Well, you can view it either way, as she's been moved somewhat to the left by Bernie and the center in terms of American politics has moved in a very progressive direction over the past years since 2008 in particular, so if she's still a centrist, which she is, the center has moved left and she'll have to deal with that, and I think we all have to be grouped around specific movements and causes and have political clout. The Black Lives Matter movement, Presente!, the women's movement, LGBT movement.
Above all I think we're gonna have to reconfigure or reconstitute an anti-war movement which doesn't really exist at the present. And she's been much more hawkish than Bernie, although you never know about these things. But definitely that's the top of my agenda. And I'm working with Barbara Lee's office on some kind of plan because I think it'll need people in the streets, I think it will need the revival of a congressional peace caucus led by somebody like Barbara Lee as well, and unity around foreign policy that's very hard to come by on the Left, but I think it has to be done because that's the only pressure that will contain Hillary from going down the path of the past practices like intervention in Libya and so on.
Q: Right, I mean I think probably for people who are familiar with your work, this would probably be the biggest area of surprise hearing that you're intending to cast your vote for Hillary Clinton. By many measures she is the most hawkish major party candidate left in the race, even when compared to Donald Trump. She supported the invasion of Afghanistan, she supported the invasion of Iraq, she beat the drums of war around Iran and Libya. Even Donald Trump at this point is coming across as more of an isolationist than she is. How do you square supporting her with your principles?
Hayden: Well, Trump is for the revival of torture to the extreme, let's not forget what Trump stands for. And he's a belligerent, irrational candidate, potentially with a nuclear capability. I think what has happened is that she's won the nomination, virtually, and that'll happen soon enough, and plans have to be laid now to construct a new resistance to the wars, and it has to include congressional resistance, and that alone will move her, that alone -- I guess failure in wars might move her too, but that's too frightening to imagine. But that's what we have to do, and it's not happening.
Q: But isn't there a case that if you want the leverage to move her, then give her as strong a run for her money in the primary as possible, throw all your weight behind the Sanders campaign at this moment?
Hayden: You're talking about something that's five or six days away, so let's see, but certainly she's gotten all the push that she can get from Bernie. All the numbers are there. Bernie's platform is pretty good, somewhere between pretty good and very good on regime change and war, so I think we'll have to force her to adjust or contain her impulses that you describe correctly, starting this week, next week in the platform discussion and in the general campaign. I'm not sure why she would become more hawkish in a general election against Trump, but she might resort to that path, you're right, it's a great danger because we've lost the leverage of the peace movement.
** ** ** ** **
Brian Edwards-Tiekert: I guess the question is, you're basically inside the campaign now, you're signed up as a Sanders delegate, so what preparations are underway to have an organization or an infrastructure that will persist past the last primary?
Norman Solomon: At RootsAction.org as well as among a number of other groups, with delegates who are headed to the convention floor in Philadelphia, we're already engaged in a lot of dialogue and organizing. First we need to have ways to reach all of the Bernie delegates, and some of them have yet to be selected. There's a statewide meeting of all Democratic National Convention delegates set for Long Beach in a few weeks, and that -- as we found in Nevada recently -- as a statewide venue can be very important, because there are some delegates yet to be chosen in this state, what they call "at large."
But most crucially, I think, first are the next seven days. A lot of what is going to be possible at the convention will hinge on what kind of momentum the Bernie campaign has going into it. And whether Bernie can carry California on June 7th is tremendously important.
And that's where, again, I'm going to differ with Tom in that while he claimed to be descriptive of the math and the politics in this campaign, it's actually a prescriptive position that he's taking. He's gotten behind Hillary Clinton even before the New York primary, and what we've got to do I think is carry California with as big as possible a margin for Bernie Sanders, so that the extremely hawkish politics of Hillary Clinton and her demonstrated affinity for Wall Street, for instance, her indifference to issues of poverty and universal health care in reality in terms of policies, and so many other things -- that we can challenge that, not only in terms of platform, but, lest we forget, there's this position called vice president of the United States, and it's an open question about whether if Hillary Clinton is the nominee she's going to select somebody from the traditional corporate wing of the Democratic Party hierarchy or whether we can push her, for whatever reasons she might come to fathom, to have a more progressive person on the ticket.
Q: So the vice presidential pick, the party platform which gets determined at the Democratic National Convention -- these are two things the Sanders campaign can influence without actually winning the nomination. What else?
Solomon: A third thing is that what we do in the next few weeks, and what we can do during and after the convention this year, will be prefigurative. And we have a horrible historical record in the last eight years of what happens when progressive groups and individuals defer to the Democrat in the White House. We've had as many bombs dropped under the Obama administration on the Middle East and Afghanistan as by the George W. Bush administration. We have a deep-seated pattern where many people go back to sleep and trust the Democrat who puts his, in the past, his feet up on the desk in the Oval Office. We've got to change that pattern.
And it's very dangerous, at any stage, whether it's now or in Philadelphia or anywhere else, if people defer to Hillary Clinton and the forces she represents. We've got to be willing to speak clearly and honestly about the warfare state, about the corporatist state, and on and on, all the time. And again, that's something we can accomplish ongoing.
Q: That said, if Hillary Clinton takes the nomination, and we have you back in these studios two months from now, won't you be making the case for voting for her versus Donald Trump?
Solomon: In California, I won't care. Because in California, Donald Trump is not a threat to get any of the electoral votes. In perhaps 15 states in this country, where they are genuinely swing states, I think it would be an abomination to assist Trump to become president of the United States. I agree with the position that Noam Chomsky articulated a couple of weeks ago on "Democracy Now," which is if you live in a swing state and Hillary Clinton is the nominee up against Donald Trump, you do what you need to do to prevent, help prevent Trump from becoming president, and as Chomsky said, hold your nose and vote for Hillary Clinton in that situation. But in California, it's not an issue.
Q: You enumerated as one of the areas where the Sanders campaign could make inroads even without winning the nomination as influencing the Democratic Party platform, and I guess the question is: Why does it matter? It's not like a contract, it's not like it binds Hillary Clinton or any congressional candidates to abide by its policy positions. There's been lots of feel-good measures in there before that never came close to making it into policy, even when Democrats controlled every branch of government.
Solomon: Yes, well, what does it matter when we message around the country? A platform is not binding, but when you consolidate a political position and you articulate it and you propagate it around the country, and you say this is a majority viewpoint, that helps -- and so what happens with this platform will be important in sending a message as where the momentum is, where the center of gravity has become.
And the fact that we've got people like Bill McKibben, Keith Ellison, Cornel West, on that platform committee, because of the strength of the campaign behind Bernie Sanders, I think it's an epic change. Also, Jim Zogby as well. We've already seen that, where the New York Times on the front page is freaking out because so many people on the platform committee of the Democratic Party are advocates for Palestinian rights. Imagine that -- so many people who are behind human rights who'll be on the official national party platform committee. So it's a step, it's not a cure-all or the peace equivalent of a silver bullet, but it's an important development.
Q: You talked about the importance of pushing Hillary Clinton to the left. I had a lengthy interview with Doug Henwood, where he pointed out she's been happy to move in whatever direction she's had to at various points in her career. The one thing you can't count on is her staying with that position.
Solomon: Yeah, it goes to that point that what we do now, what we do at the convention and beyond, is prefigurative. And we need a different relationship with people in office. I mean, we started out by talking about RootsAction's critical support for Bernie Sanders last summer, because he was talking about Martin Luther King Jr. but never mentioning the need to challenge what King called "the madness of militarism." And so it goes to: we need to get rid of this idea that because you support a candidate, or were responsible for helping a candidate come into office, then you've got to lie about that person and lie about the positions or distort or soft-peddle or euphemize what they're doing. So I think that is a challenge that we have going forward.
KPFA Radio has posted audio of the full interviews with Tom Hayden and Norman Solomon.
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