Tom Hayden Dies at 76

[Peter Lemkin]

Tom Hayden, famed anti-Vietnam war activist, dies aged 76

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Image copyrightAPFamed American anti-war activist Tom Hayden has died aged 76.
Hayden died in his home in Santa Monica "after a lengthy illness", the Los Angeles Times reports.
He was a member of the "Chicago seven" charged with conspiracy over anti-Vietnam war protests in 1968 and eventually acquitted.
Hayden later served in the California state assembly and Senate for nearly two decades. He was married to actress Jane Fonda between 1973 and 1990.
Born in Michigan in 1939, he became an activist during his time at the University of Michigan, where he helped to found Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
While there, he wrote a policy document called the Port Huron Statement, which he styled the "agenda for a generation".
Mr Hayden and the SDS went on to become a major influence on the 1960s protest movement, particularly against the Vietnam war.
"Rarely, if ever, in American history has a generation begun with higher ideals and experienced greater trauma than those who lived fully the short time from 1960 to 1968,'' he wrote in the essay Streets of Chicago.
Image copyrightAPImage captionHayden married famous actress and fellow anti-war activist Jane Fonda in 1973In 1968, Mr Hayden was part of a controversial anti-war demonstration in Chicago, timed to coincide with the Democratic National Convention.
The protest turned violent, with eight people - including Mr Hayden - charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot.
The so-called Chicago seven trial - originally the Chicago eight, before one defendant was tried separately - ran for years, with appeals and retrials. Mr Hayden was eventually cleared of all charges.
In 1973, he married actress Jane Fonda, who was herself an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. She was internationally famous and wealthy, while he was still seen in some quarters as an anti-establishment troublemaker.
Image copyrightAPImage captionBy 1988, Mr Hayden was an elected official at the California assembly, and writing his memoir, "Reunion"He would go on to reinvent himself in the coming decades, moving away from the image of a long-haired student protester.
He turned his attention to mainstream politics in the late 1970s, earning himself a place in the California State Assembly in 1982. A decade later, shortly after his divorce from Fonda, he moved on to the California Senate.
He also became a prolific writer of books and essays, and served as a columnist for several outlets.
Fifty years after he wrote the Port Huron statement, about a generation "looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit", he wrote that the concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite was a "mountain untouched" .
Writing in The Guardian in 2012, he called the Occupy Wall Street protests a "new force in the world".
"The Occupy movement, and kindred spirits from the Middle East to China, is driven by young people who feel unrepresented by the institutions, disenfranchised economically, and threatened by an environmental catastrophe," he said.
"The direct action movement of the early 1960s was similar in nature."
Hayden married actress Barbara Williams in 1993, and had a son, Liam.
Tributes to the iconic protester-turned-politician emerged on social media following his death.
Clara Jeffery, editor of left-leaning investigative magazine Mother Jones, said: "Tom Hayden lived a cinematically full life; any one of these chapters worth a biopic."
Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, said "a political giant and dear friend has passed."
"Tom Hayden fought harder for what he believed than just about anyone I have known," he tweeted.

[Magda Hassan]

Very sad news. He was around for so long and always an activist. Need so many more like him. There will be a ton at his funeral I bet.

[Dawn Meredith]

WOW, so young, just like his old comrade Carl (Oglesby). RIP.

[Peter Lemkin]

What the Port Huron Statement still has to say, 50 years on

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The SDS national council meeting, 1963; Tom Hayden at far left. Photograph: C Clark Kissinger[FONT=&amp]Thursday 14 June 2012 13.00 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 11 May 201623.24 BST[/FONT]

If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.

The Port Huron Statement, 1962

Participatory democracy with its battle-cry "let the people decide" was the call of 60-some young American activists who launched the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 50 years ago this week.
Our 25,000-word document became known as the Port Huron Statement, after the retreat center belonging to the United Auto Workers on the shores of Lake Huron. It was debated and adopted after five inspired days and nights, ending in the starry show of an aurora borealis, named for a goddess of dawn.
The Port Huron Statement resonates to this day for example, in the 17 September manifesto of Occupy Wall Street, which called for a "direct and transparent participatory democracy". The thousands of nurses who recently marched in Chicago for a so-called Robin Hood Tax also declared their explicit commitment to participatory democracy and economic democracy, too. The American historian Michael Kazin, a 1967 member of the Harvard SDS, recently wrote that it was "the most ambitious, the most specific, and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American left". And the longest, he added.
We drew on similar movements in Britain at the time, from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament [CND], which opposed the cold war nuclear arms race, to the intellectuals who gathered around the New Left Review. Few of us were inheritors of Marxist traditions, though as students, we all read and debated Marx, especially his humanist 1844 Manuscripts. Those few who grew up in Communist traditions were shocked and alienated by Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 revelations about Stalinist crimes, and by the Soviet Union's brutal crushing of Hungary's democratic uprising. Those who came from social-democratic traditions felt equally stranded by the apparent absorption of our elders into a labor bureaucracy that supported the escalating Vietnam war and had secret links with the CIA.
Most of those who founded SDS at Port Huron were more "new" than "left". We were homegrown American populists, many inspired by spiritual traditions like those that propelled Dr Martin Luther King. It was the year of reform in the Catholic Church, bringing the first stirrings of liberation theology. It was a moment when bearded young Cubans and South Korean students rose up against our dictators in their countries.
Intellectually, we were drawn more to Albert Camus' The Plague, C Wright Mills'The Power Elite than to Marx, Lenin or Trotsky. Some of us were touched by Doris Lessing. The chronology is important to bear in mind. This was all before the assassination of John F Kennedy, before the publication of Silent Spring, beforeThe Feminine Mystique, before the Beatles, before black power, before LSD and, above all, before the decision to send American combat troops to Vietnam, in 1965. An old world was cracking open and we were the first to try defining what we called "an agenda for our generation".
More than anything else, we were inspired to stand in solidarity with the young black students taking direct action at segregated schools, registration offices, lunch counters, buses and trains in America's deep south. We drew theory from experience, not the other way around. Applying John Dewey's formula of "learning by doing" led us to the concept of participatory democracy.
Fifty years later, the concept keeps rejuvenating itself wherever two conditions are present: first, a deep common desire to take direct action against a moral injury; and, second, the absence of any meaningful remedy to that injustice from the formal institutions of power.
We agreed with Henry David Thoreau that it was not enough to simply cast a vote, though we took risks to make voting rights a reality. Thoreau also preached that a person must vote with their whole life, not a mere strip of paper. And John Dewey added that democracy was wider than a voting booth. We demanded more democratic relations in the patriarchal family, the remote-controlled religious sphere, the corporate-controlled workplace, the developer-controlled neighborhood, and the expert-controlled bureaucracy of war.
A strategic plan arose from acting in this spirit, which was to steadily displace the white southern Democrats from their segregated power base, empower blacks and students as catalytic new constituencies, and realign our government's policies away from the Vietnam war. If we had succeeded, it would have been a better world.
Why did we fail after such bright beginnings?
First, the archives show that JFK's assassination all but assured that Vietnam would escalate. Second, the turn towards war and away from the domestic agenda led to several years of racial rebellions and the formation of revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers, pushing droves of white voters into the Republican party. Third, the military draft led countless young people into resistance and disillusionment with the Port Huron vision of reform. Fourth, FBI and police counterintelligence programs were more than our fragile movements could bear.
Finally, we turned on ourselves in mad sectarian squabbles. Having once reached a membership of 100,000 with virtually no budget, SDS was finished as an organization just six years after it was born.
The lasting legacy, however, is participatory democracy, in both practice and theory the only banner that might unify the rainbow of popular movements from generation to generation.



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[Albert Doyle]

New York Times:


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/us/tom....html?_r=0

[Peter Lemkin]

A speech Tom Hayden gave last year at a conference in Washington, D.C., titled "Vietnam: The Power of Protest."

TOM HAYDEN: I want to start off by saying how many of you I love very much and known for such a long time, and I only hope that there's enough minutes and occasions here for us to get to know each other again, because we have really been through a lifetime. Today, we'll have plenty of time for discussion, for panels, for observations. And at 4:00, we'll gather to march to the King Memorial. And I want to just say a word about that. I know that Ron Dellums is going to speak to this.

But why was thatwhy was that chosen? It's because, in keeping with trying to make sure our history is told accurately, we have to tell it ourselves. And we have to recognize that Dr. King became a martyr because of his stand on Vietnam, not only because of his stand on race, justice, economic poverty. And there's been a tendency over the many decades to make Dr. King a monument to nonviolence alone, and we need to remember that he was attacked by The New York Times and by The Wall Street Journal and by The Washington Post for being out of place. They wanted to put him back in his place and say nothing about Vietnam, take no stand on Vietnam. There were threats that he would lose funding. There were threats of all sorts. And to distort that, to forget that, to ignore that, his monument would be shaped in a certain way to serve certain interests, but not others, is a disservice to truth. And we have to march there and vigil there and commemorate him as a leader and a martyr for all of us, for peace, justice and civil rights, not only in the United States, but around the world, and persist in making sure that his whole story, including the campaign to end poverty in the United States, is told each and every year and in all of our schools and curriculum. So that's the purpose.

This is a way of saying that the struggle for memory and for history is a living thing. It's ongoing. It does not end. Even today, people are debating and reassessing the history of abolition of slavery, the role of slave resistance, the role of the Underground Railroad, the role of the abolitionist direct action movement, the role of the radical Republican politicians, the role of international politics in what came about, and the rolehow it was derailed by the assassination of President Lincoln, the ending of the possibilities of Reconstruction, which were not taken up again until 1960, and the coming of Jim Crow. Each generation has to wrestle with the history of what came before, and ask: Whose interest does this history serve? How does it advance a legacy of social movements? How does it deny that legacy? We don't know.

But we do know that we are here for the very first time as such a broad gathering of the movement against the Vietnam War. It's been 50 years since Selma, 50 years since the first SDS march. So, it was a time that changed our lives, nearing a second Reconstruction before the murders of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy. Then came the budget cuts, the end of the war on poverty. Then came the Watergate repression. And we became a generation of might-have-beens. Like Sisyphus, our rock lay at the bottom of the hill.

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. We have to resist their military occupation of our minds and the minds of future generations. Memorymemory is very much like rock climbing, the recovery of memory. Each niche towards the summit is graphed inch by bleeding inch and has to be carefully carved with tools that are precise in order to take the next step. Falling back is always possible. But as Dr. King himself said on his last night, there is something in humans that makes us aspire to climb mountains, to reach that majesty, if only for a moment. We are mountain climbers.

President Obama has reminded us to remember, he said, Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall. 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. We suspect that there was a reason, that it has to do with the programming of amnesia, that there are very powerful forces in our country who stand for denial, not just climate denial, but generational denial, Vietnam denial. There are forces that stand for ethnic cleansing, but not just ethnic cleansing, but also for historic cleansing. And that is what has happened. It serves their purpose because they have no interest in the true history of a war in which they sent thousands to their deaths and, almost before the blood had dried, were moving up the national security ladder and showing up for television interviews to advertise what they called the next cakewalks. Only the blood was caked.

There came a generation of career politicians who were afraid of association with the peace movement, who were afraid of being seen as soft, who saw that the inside track was the track of war. Our national forgetting is basically pathological. Our systemspolitics, media, cultureare totally out of balance today because of our collective refusal to admit that the Vietnam War was wrong and that the peace movement was right. In the absencein the absence of an established voice for peace in all the institutions, the neoconservatives will fill the foreign policy vacuum. Am I right? Will it not? Will it not advise both parties? I think, though, that American public opinion has shifted to a much more skeptical state of mind than earlier generations, but the spectrum of American politics and media has not.

So we can never forget that, of course, it was the Vietnamese resistance and their sacrifice that led to our awakening, along with the civil rights movement at home. It began with handfuls of young people, black students who led Freedom Rides, sit-ins. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the first to resist the war. Julian Bond, who's sitting here, was rejected after being elected to the Georgia Legislature. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing titles. It also began with the Vietnam Day Committee in Berkeley, growing out of teach-ins, out of SDS, that called the first march, the draft resistance. There had never been a peace movement like the one in 1965 that arose out of the civil rights movement and came just weeks after Selma. At least 29 would die at the hands of police while demonstrating for peace.

I'd like here to introduce Luis Rodriguez and Rosalio Muñoz and Jorge Mariscal from the Chicano Moratorium, where four died, including Gustav [Montag], Lyn Ward, José Diaz and Rubén Salazar. Rubén Salazar was an early Juan González. Rubén Salazar was a great reporter for the Los Angeles Times who served as a journalist in Vietnam before he started critical reporting on the streets of Los Angeles. And he was shot by the sheriff's deputies. I don't know if he's here, but is Alan Canfora here? Alan, please stand. Alan was wounded at Kent State. Four died at Kent State, two at Jackson State two weeks later. And every year, these two groups of people have observed memorials, have fought for their place in history, are coming up on their 50th anniversary commemorations and are here today to learn from us, as we've learned from them, the importance of organizing, organizing, organizing around the politics of memory. So, thank you for being here, and we will remember. We will not forget.

We will not forget the eight who sacrificed their lives by self-immolation. We will not forget the students who helped end the war by shutting down so many campuses. We will not forget the veterans who took the risk of standing up to their commanding officers and resisted from within the military. We will not forget this because this was something like a Du Bois characterization of the general strike by slaves who, through noncooperation, walked off plantations across the South when they saw the futility of any other alternative and chose to simply walk away and join the Union army. What happened at the end of the Vietnam War is that people walked away. The campuses shut down. Four million students walked away. The military was described by Marine colonels in military histories as being on the verge of collapse. They walked away. The counterculture walked away. We all walked away.

It might have been otherwise, if King and Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated. We might have been united, at least for a moment, at least for a moment. We might have elected a president. We might have ended a war. But instead, we were relegated to wondering what might have been. We lost any basis for our unity, and thus we have not come together since that time. The question for us is whether today we can unify, when we never could unify before. Can we do that for the memory of our movement and for the meaning that it holds for future generations? I hope so. I pray so. Thank you.