Early life

Tom Hayden was born in Detroit, Michigan, to parents of Irish ancestry, Genevieve Isabelle Garity and John Francis Hayden. He graduated from Dondero High School in Royal Oak, Michigan, class of 1956. He later attended the University of Michigan, where he was editor of the Michigan Daily and, disenchanted by the anti-radicalism of existing groups like the National Student Association, was one of the initiators of the influential leftist student activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). During 1961, Hayden married Casey Cason, a Texas-born civil rights activist who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Hayden became a "freedom rider" in the South and then served as president of SDS from 1962 to 1963.

Radical activism

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Hayden drafted SDS's manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. The objective of the Port Huron Statement was the creation of a "radically new democratic political movement" in the United States that rejected hierarchy and bureaucracy.

From 1964 to 1968, Hayden lived in Newark, New Jersey, where he worked with impoverished inner-city residents as part of the Newark Community Union Project. He was also witness to the city's race riots of 1967 and wrote the book Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response (1967).

In 1965, Hayden, along with CPUSA member Herbert Aptheker and Quaker peace activist Staughton Lynd undertook a controversial visit to North Vietnam and Hanoi. The three toured villages and factories and met with an American POW whose plane had been shot down. The result of this tour of North Vietnam, at a high point in the war, was a book titled The Other Side. Staughton Lynd later wrote that the New Left disavowed "the Anti-Communism of the previous generation" and that Lynd and Hayden had written, in Studies on the Left, "We refuse to be anti-Communist, We insist the term has lost all the specific content it once had."

In 1968, Hayden played a major role in the protests outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. Six months after the convention he and other protesters including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy and incitement to riot as part of the "Chicago Eight". Hayden and four others were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot, but the charges were reversed on appeal.

Tom Hayden made several other well-publicized visits to North Vietnam as well as Cambodia during America's involvement in the Vietnam War, including an especially controversial one during 1972 to North Vietnam with his future wife, actress Jane Fonda. The next year he married Fonda and they had one child, Troy Garity, born on 7 July 1973. In 1974, while the Vietnam War was still ongoing, the documentary film Introduction to the Enemy was released, a collaboration by Fonda, Hayden, Haskell Wexler, and others. It depicts their travels through North and South Vietnam in the spring of 1974.

Hayden also founded the Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC), which operated from 1972 to 1975. The IPC, operating in Boston, New York, Detroit, Santa Clara, mobilized dissent against the Vietnam War, demanded unconditional amnesty for U.S. draft evaders, among other aims. Jane Fonda, a supporter of the IPC, later turned this moniker into a name for her film production firm, IPC Films, which produced in whole or in part, movies and documentaries such as F.T.A. (1972), Introduction to the Enemy (1974), The China Syndrome (1979), Nine to Five (1980), and On Golden Pond (1981). He and Jane divorced in 1990.

Writing about Hayden's role in the 1960s New Left, Nicholas Lemann, national correspondent for The Atlantic, said that "Tom Hayden changed America", calling him "father to the largest mass protests in American history", and Richard N. Goodwin, who was a speechwriter for presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, said that Hayden, "without even knowing it, inspired the Great Society. Staughton Lynd, though, was critical of the Port Huron and New Left concept of "participatory democracy" stating, "we must recognize that when an organization grows to a certain size, consensus decision-making is no longer possible and some form of representative government becomes necessary."

In 2007, Hayden made news for his speech at the wedding of his son Troy, where, as Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker, he "said that he was especially happy about his son's union with actress Simone Bent, who is black, because, among other things, it was 'another step in a long-term goal of mine: the peaceful, nonviolent disappearance of the white race.'"

Political career

During 1976, Hayden made a primary-election challenge to serving California U.S. Senator John V. Tunney. Starting far behind, Hayden mounted a spirited campaign and finished a surprisingly close second in the Democratic primary. He and Fonda later initiated the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), which formed a close alliance with then-Governor Jerry Brown and promoted solar energy, environmental protection, and renters' rights policies as well as candidates for local office throughout California, some 100 of whom would be elected.

Hayden later served in the California State Assembly (1982-1992) and the State Senate (1992-2000). During this time, he was frequently protested by conservative groups, including Vietnamese refugees, veterans of the US military, and Young Americans for Freedom. He mounted a bid in the Democratic primary for California Governor during 1994 on the theme of campaign finance reform, and ran for Mayor of Los Angeles during 1997, losing to incumbent Republican Richard Riordan.

As a member of the State Assembly, Hayden introduced the bill that became Chapter 1238 of the California Statutes of 1987. Chapter 1238 enacted Section 76060.5 of the California Education Code. Section 76060.5 allows the establishment of "student representation fees" at colleges in the California Community Colleges System. The fee has been established at several dozen colleges and it may be used "to provide support for governmental affairs representatives of local or statewide student body organizations who may be stating their positions and viewpoints before city, county, and district governments, and before offices and agencies of state government". Student representation fees are used to support the operation of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges.

During 1999, Hayden made a speech for the Seattle WTO protests. During 2001, he unsuccessfully sought election to the Los Angeles City Council. He lives in Los Angeles and is married to actress Barbara Williams. They adopted a son, Liam, born during 2000.

Hayden serves as a member of the advisory board for the Progressive Democrats of America, an organization created to increase progressive political cooperation and influence within the Democratic Party. He also serves on the advisory board of the Levantine Cultural Center, a nonprofit organization founded in Los Angeles in 2001 that champions cultural literacy about the Middle East and North Africa.

During January 2008, Hayden wrote an opinion essay for the website The Huffington Post endorsing Barack Obama's presidential bid in the Democratic primaries. In that same year, he helped initiate Progressives for Obama (now called Progressive America Rising), a group of political progressives that provided assistance for Obama in his initial presidential campaign.

Hayden is known widely in California as a staunch endorser of animal rights and was responsible for writing the bill popularly known as the Hayden Act, which improved protection of pets and extended holding periods for pets confined as strays or surrendered to shelters.

Hayden is currently running to be one of California's representatives to the Democratic National Committee.

Academic career

Tom Hayden has taught numerous courses on social movements, including a course called "From the '60s to the Obama Generation" at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA, two courses at Scripps College, a sister school to Pitzer—one on the Long War and one on gangs in America, and has taught at Occidental College and at Harvard University's Institute of Politics. He is currently teaching a class at UCLA on protests from Port Huron to the present.

Hayden is the author or editor of 19 books, including The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama, Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader, and his memoir, Reunion, and serves on the editorial board of The Nation.

During 2007, Akashic Books released Hayden's Ending the War in Iraq. In a discussion about the book with Theodore Hamm, published in the Brooklyn Rail, Hayden argues: "The apparatus of occupation is never going to turn into a peacekeeping economic development agency. We need to withdraw our stamp of approval and our tax dollars from supporting the occupation. That doesn't mean that there can't be some attempts at remedies but there should never be used as an excuse to stay."

Bibliography

• The Port Huron Statement (1962)
• The Other Side (1966)
• Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response (1967)
• Trial (1970)
• The Love of Possession Is a Disease with Them (1972)
• Vietnam: The Struggle for Peace, 1972-73 (1973)
• The American Future: New Visions Beyond Old Frontiers (1980)
• Reunion: A Memoir (1988)
• The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit and Politics (1996)
• Irish Hunger (1997)
• Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America (2001)
• The Zapatista Reader (Introduction, 2001)
• Rebel: A Personal History of the 1960s (2003)
• Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence (2004)
• Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times with Contemporary Reflections by Stanley Aronowitz, Richard Flacks and Charles Lemert (2006)
• Ending the War in Iraq (2007)
• Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader (2008)
• Voices of the Chicago 8: A Generation on Trial (2008)
• The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (2009)
• Bring on the Iraq Syndrome: Tom Hayden in Conversation with Theodore Hamm (2007)
• Listen, Yankee!: Why Cuba Matters (2015)

[ Source: Wikipedia ]