Monday, October 24, 2016
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'
Anti-war activist, California
lawmaker, and author Tom Hayden leave behind a legacy of speaking truth to
power. (Photo: The Ann Arbor News file)
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 thePort 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."
Tom Hayden
with his 22,000-page F.B.I. file, circa 1979. (Photo: The Los Angeles Times)
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.
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.
This work
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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