Hayden stays a 40 year course

Denver -- Forty years after the chaos of Chicago, Tom Hayden is attending the Democratic National Convention yet again, but this time not as a protest organizer, or as a delegate.

By Friday, Hayden will have made at least five appearances on panels at the Denver event.

"Conventions have been forced into uniformity in order to take advantage of the opportunity for free media," he said. "But on the ground, there is a huge richness of discussion, debate, protests [and] cross fertilization of movements."

Hayden was a lawmaker in the California State Assembly and State Senate in the years from 1982 to 2000, but he's still best remembered by some as one of the Chicago Seven, the group of antiwar leaders who were put on trial for conspiracy and inciting to riot before and during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Many felt that the activists, whose convictions were later overturned on appeal, were made scapegoats by a conservative establishment that was angry with the antiwar left.

Certainly the seven, who came from different parts of the movement, were unlikely conspirators, at least as a group. For example, the best known of them, Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman, were the co-founders of the Yippies, while Hayden was a long-time member and early president of a rather different organization, Students for a Democratic Society. He was also the author in 1962 of that group's founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement.

Hayden told the Echo this week that his ideas have remained fundamentally the same in key respects since those years. "My thoughts are consistent with the early '60s notions of a) participatory democracy as the goal, applied to the public and private sectors, and to opening up the political process," he said, "and b) the notion that change occurs through the agency of social movements which begin on the outside but ultimately alter the mainstream."

Hayden, who was born into an Irish-American family in Detroit in 1939, said that the "Sixties" were "caused by a new generation of young people outside the institutions around the world."

He stressed that while, for instance, President John F. Kennedy's "persona and rhetoric" contributed to the sense that change was in the air, the decade's upheavals came from below.

Hayden said: "The unusual circumstance today is that the spirit and movement of youth is rising inside a context of a presidential campaign."

He believes that "the 'Obama generation' will supply the social activism in America for the coming two or three decades regardless of whether he wins or not."
Of course Hayden, an early supporter from the party's left wing, hopes that Barack Obama does win. However, he hasn't been uncritical. He was one of about 50 well-known progressives who signed a recent open letter to the Illinois senator that, while generally positive in tone, said "there have been troubling signs that you are moving away from the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign."

It ends with the line: "Stand firm on the principles you have so compellingly articulated, and you may succeed in bringing this country the change you've encouraged us to believe is possible."

Asked by the Echo if there have been positive changes specifically in the political process since the Chicago convention 40 years ago, Hayden said: "Yes, of course. Immediately after 1968, the Democrats changed their presidential primary system to a bottom-up model. Half the delegates were required to be women, the draft was ended, the 18-year-old vote established, etc. On a cultural level, a much greater acceptance of diversity exploded in the mainstream."

That tumultuous era has still much to teach later generations, he said.

"The key is to read the primary literature and view the countless documentaries that enable us to understand the '60s," he said.

But he said it is sometimes a big challenge putting the "'60s radicalism into an understandable context of the extremities our generation faced, like the military draft for a war that couldn't be won."

In a similar vein when asked if he'd do anything differently, Hayden replied: "You can't go back to an earlier context."