Civil rights movementObituaryTom Hayden obituary
Campaigner against injustice and critic of the Vietnam warWhen he was running, unsuccessfully, in the 1990s to be governor of California, Tom Hayden, who has died aged 76, complained ruefully to the Los Angeles Times that his image among the voters of his adopted state could be summed up in just four words: “60s radical Jane Fonda”.
He had been married for 17 years to Fonda, Hollywood royalty and a living symbol of what many loved and more despised about the New Left. Although she was many times a millionaire, they lived modestly in a house in Santa Monica that did not even have sea views, and did their own shopping and laundry.
He was indeed a radical in the 1960s and – although the subjects that drew his thoughtful rage and formidable energy varied in the course of his life – a radical he remained. “I’m Jefferson in terms of democracy,” he said, “I’m Thoreau in terms of environment, and Crazy Horse in terms of social movements.”
In 1960, as a sociology undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he was one of 35 co-founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) – perhaps, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the most important of the radical political movements of the 60s in America. He was one of the Freedom Riders chased and beaten by murderous mobs when they set out to desegregate bus travel in the Deep South.
As a civil rights activist in Mississippi he was beaten, and it was in prison there that he drafted what became the 25,000-word Port Huron statement of 1962, the manifesto of SDS that resonated for many of his contemporaries, beginning: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest prosperity, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
Like many in his generation, he was horrified by US involvement in the Vietnam war. Unlike most, he visited Hanoi several times and negotiated the return of some American prisoners of war. In the late 1960s he ran an anti-poverty programme in Newark, New Jersey, and in 1968 he was arrested as one of the Chicago Seven on charges of conspiracy and inciting to riot at the tumultuous Chicago convention of the Democratic party: sentenced to five years on the riot charge, he and his fellow radicals avoided jail on appeal.
In 1973 he married Fonda, whom he had met at an anti-war rally, and turned his attention to electoral politics. He lost several primary elections for high office in California, before being elected to the California state legislature in 1982 and to the state senate in 1993.
Born and brought up in Royal Oak, a white suburb of Detroit, Tom was the son of Irish Catholic parents, Genevieve (nee Garity), a film librarian, and John Hayden, an accountant. After their divorce he was brought up by his mother, and went to Dondero high school.
The family’s parish priest was Father Charles Coughlin, who had preached far-right politics against President Franklin Roosevelt on the radio. From the start, Hayden’s political instincts were opposite to those. (Asked by a reporter if he was a liberal, in later years when that was an unpopular thing for a politician to be called in the US, he replied simply, “I hope so!”)
In 1960, in Mississippi on the highly dangerous mission to register black people to vote, Hayden met Sandra “Casey” Cason. They married in 1961. The experience of campaigning led Cason to contribute to an SNCC position paper (1964) that she and her friend Mary King expanded into “a kind of memo”, Sex and Caste (1965). It voiced the disillusion of white female civil rights workers who went to the south with high ambitions to liberate African Americans but found they were expected to make coffee for their male fellow activists, type out their papers and sleep with them, and it marked a key step in the “second wave” of American radical feminism.
The marriage ended after a couple of years. Cason was a committed Protestant, a quiet woman who shunned publicity and worked unobtrusively for many causes for the rest of her life, whereas Hayden had a notable gift for publicity in the service of many radical causes.
Later in life he did express regret for “romanticising” the North Vietnamese and also for allowing his zeal against the war to turn into anti-Americanism, something of which his political opponents routinely accused him and, especially, Fonda. His gift for self-promotion got him into a lot of trouble even with sympathetic voters, and he complained, not unfairly, that he was criticised by both left and right.
His radical and in particular his democratic instincts, and his commitment to activism, all remained undiminished. Because he thought American democracy was drowning in money, he would accept donations only of less than $250. As a result of the settlement that followed his divorce from Fonda in 1990, he became a relatively wealthy man who could help fund his own campaigns. In 1993 he married the Canadian actor Barbara Williams.
He poured out books, journalism and speeches on behalf of many causes, especially care for the environment and issues of class inequality. After he left electoral politics in 2000 he set up the Peace and Justice Resource Center. Critical as he remained of racial, gender and class injustice, he was proud of his adopted state of California. “The wind is blowing for California,” he told an interviewer on al-Jazeera, “and the wind is progressive.”
In 2001 his unconquered radicalism found an expression that surprised many and infuriated not a few. In a passionate account of Irish history, Irish Inside, he assailed British colonialism, but denounced even more the respectable version of Irishness embraced by many Irish Americans including, as he pointed out, his own parents.
He is survived by Barbara and their son, Liam; and by the son from his marriage to Fonda, the actor Troy Garity.
Thomas Emmet Hayden, political activist, born 11 December 1939; died 23 October 2016
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK2jYrumw9JoaWlpZmS8pMCOa25orJ%2Bieqmt2J2cp2Wfl7a1wcCrsA%3D%3D