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Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader
“His journey is our journey through the tumultuous and disillusioning decades. He is our Everyman, he is us.”— Seattle Post-Intelligencer Praise for Tom “One comes away enthralled by Hayden’s odyssey.”— The Boston Sunday Globe From his earliest days as a Freedom Rider and leader of Students for a Democratic Society, through decades as a state senator, to contemporary notes on the Iraq war, the global South, immigration, and spirituality, Tom Hayden’s writings constitute nothing less than an alternative history of our times. Writings for a Democratic Society is the only book that encapsulates Tom Hayden’s writings over fifty years, a time in which he has been a reflective eyewitness to American history in the making. The book is composed on sections about the new Left of the 1960s, the Chicago 8, Vietnam, electoral politics, gang violence, Ireland, the environment, global justice, and US foreign policy today. “Tom Hayden changed America,” the national correspondent of The Atlantic , Nicholas Lemann, has written. He created the “blueprint for the Great Society programs,” according to presidential assistant Richard Goodwin. He was the "single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement," according to The New York Times Book Review . Forty years later he was described as "the conscience of the Senate." Tom Hayden is the author or editor of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including Reunion and Street Wars .
450 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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About the author
Tom Hayden
88 books29 followersThomas Emmet Hayden was an American social and political activist, author, and politician.
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September 10, 2022
It is almost impossible to think of the New Left and not think of Tom Hayden. A well-known SDS member and the author of the Port Huron Statement, a coherent expression of the objectives of the New Left, he is one of the famous activists of the sixties and a familiar figure to anyone interested in the student protest movement of the decade. Regardless of whether one shares his views on politics and society, his thoughts should be known if one is to call oneself well-informed about the SDS and the New Left. This book offers insight into Hayden's life and ideology.
Thomas Emmett Hayden was a dynamic person with heavy dark eyes, a beaker nose, lopsided split in the chin, and acute dimples at the corners of the lips on his remarkable face with slight acne. He usually stood with his shoulders sagging and slightly bent, as if keeping himself on guard. He was kind, inquisitive, and attentive. He was born in 1940 to Irish middle-class parents in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan. His early education was received at parochial schools because they were Catholic. He attended the University of Michigan in 1957 on a tennis scholarship and majored in English while serving as the paper's editor. He thought of himself primarily as a journalist, although of the involved rather than objective kind, and was writing articles not only for SDS but for such publications as the SDS-affiliated Activist, the Socialist Party's New America, and Liberation in New York.
After being appointed an SDS Field Secretary, he actively participated in the expanding civil rights struggle. With the help of the SNCC voter registration campaign and his natural ability to be in the right place at the right time, he carried out the civil rights strategy for SDS in the South. He sent back regular reports, which the National Office mimeographed and distributed to the campuses. He described the beatings, killings, and horrible lives of the SNCC youths, who were "in more danger than nearly any student in this American generation has experienced" as they attempted to register black voters in redneck country. At the time, his writings about the SNCC were essentially the only ones being published, and they carried the unquestionable authenticity of someone who had not only been there, but also suffered a beating - in McComb, Mississippi, in October - and imprisonment - in Albany, Georgia, in November – alongside the civil rights activists. Hayden's writings reached a considerable campus audience through the SDS, primarily in the form of a twenty-eight-page pamphlet titled "Revolution in Mississippi" distributed in the late fall and through other student publications like the Activist, which once featured a striking image of Hayden's being beaten. Skidmore alumna Betty Garman echoed what other students had said: "These reports were very important to me that's really the reason I went into SDS."
The fact that Hayden dramatically demonstrated the SDS's initial focus on civil rights was important because it allowed the organization to establish a reputation and have an impact that it might not have had if it had chosen, for instance, anti-bomb activism, peace research, academic freedom, poverty, or university reform — all of which were pressing issues and could have seemed to be the "inevitable" catalyst for student activism. Hayden so active in the civil rights movement because it was the one with the greatest moral force, national notoriety, and national influence. This benefitted SDS. It was one indication of how well Hayden and SDS were able to gauge the mood of the students and gain from it.
However, SDS was also aware of the overall mood on campuses that gave rise to the civil rights movement, as Hayden noted in an essay published in the Activist in the winter of 1961 under the title "A Letter to the New (Young) Left". Although it is not a sophisticated essay and had jumbled, half-formed, and uncertain thoughts, it did convey much of what was on the students' minds. Hayden shared some of the foundational liberal values of the time. He was against the bombs, the "population problem," the threatening future of China," "an incredibly conservative Congress," "the decline of already-meager social welfare legislation". However, he also believed, drawing largely on his university experience, that liberal thoughts would not help the youth to understand the problems or suggest anything but slippery, welfaristic solutions. He considered it conservatism with a smiling face in the hands of current policy-makers. In his accepting of traditional liberal goals while also realizing the failure of traditional liberal values, Hayden was voicing what many of his generation were feeling: the liberal tradition in which they had all grown up was progressively losing its legitimacy.
The book sums up Hayden's ideology by stating that his solution to liberalism was radicalism, but one that was actually not that radical. He depicted it as achieving an understanding of the underlying "real causes of the problems of present society and then a practice that demands living outside that society", "the decision to disengage oneself entirely from the system being confronted." In simpler terms, Hayden believed that the SDS radicalism would arise when the students had analyzed and understood who caused the social problems that America was facing and that this understanding would provoke disgust, disenchantment, disengagement, and eventually a willingness to change the System.
Unlike the Weather Underground, Hayden turns out to have advocated for a non-violent and not that radical radicalism. His radicalism is more of a reformism that, in his words, aims to draw on what remains of the academic and political communities of the past instead of aimlessly and desperately revolting against them. He did not envision an overthrow of the Establishment. He wanted to "visualize and then built structures to counter those which we oppose", not demolish the old structures without having figured out how to build new ones kn their place. He believed that the main battle that the radicals had to fight was against accepting every action of the government easily, not for installing a new regime.
Despite the flaws in his ideology, Hayden appealed to more student activists than the terroristically inclined Weathermen. Had the SDS leaders managed to centralize the organization's vision and objectives around his ideas, SDS might have achieved more and would not have degraded into a disorganized cohort of angry young men talking big about overthrowing "the pigs" and committing useless acts of urban insurgency.
WRITINGS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY casts light on Tom Hayden as a person and activist. This book is great for anyone who wants to know more about this well-known New Left leader.
Thomas Emmett Hayden was a dynamic person with heavy dark eyes, a beaker nose, lopsided split in the chin, and acute dimples at the corners of the lips on his remarkable face with slight acne. He usually stood with his shoulders sagging and slightly bent, as if keeping himself on guard. He was kind, inquisitive, and attentive. He was born in 1940 to Irish middle-class parents in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan. His early education was received at parochial schools because they were Catholic. He attended the University of Michigan in 1957 on a tennis scholarship and majored in English while serving as the paper's editor. He thought of himself primarily as a journalist, although of the involved rather than objective kind, and was writing articles not only for SDS but for such publications as the SDS-affiliated Activist, the Socialist Party's New America, and Liberation in New York.
After being appointed an SDS Field Secretary, he actively participated in the expanding civil rights struggle. With the help of the SNCC voter registration campaign and his natural ability to be in the right place at the right time, he carried out the civil rights strategy for SDS in the South. He sent back regular reports, which the National Office mimeographed and distributed to the campuses. He described the beatings, killings, and horrible lives of the SNCC youths, who were "in more danger than nearly any student in this American generation has experienced" as they attempted to register black voters in redneck country. At the time, his writings about the SNCC were essentially the only ones being published, and they carried the unquestionable authenticity of someone who had not only been there, but also suffered a beating - in McComb, Mississippi, in October - and imprisonment - in Albany, Georgia, in November – alongside the civil rights activists. Hayden's writings reached a considerable campus audience through the SDS, primarily in the form of a twenty-eight-page pamphlet titled "Revolution in Mississippi" distributed in the late fall and through other student publications like the Activist, which once featured a striking image of Hayden's being beaten. Skidmore alumna Betty Garman echoed what other students had said: "These reports were very important to me that's really the reason I went into SDS."
The fact that Hayden dramatically demonstrated the SDS's initial focus on civil rights was important because it allowed the organization to establish a reputation and have an impact that it might not have had if it had chosen, for instance, anti-bomb activism, peace research, academic freedom, poverty, or university reform — all of which were pressing issues and could have seemed to be the "inevitable" catalyst for student activism. Hayden so active in the civil rights movement because it was the one with the greatest moral force, national notoriety, and national influence. This benefitted SDS. It was one indication of how well Hayden and SDS were able to gauge the mood of the students and gain from it.
However, SDS was also aware of the overall mood on campuses that gave rise to the civil rights movement, as Hayden noted in an essay published in the Activist in the winter of 1961 under the title "A Letter to the New (Young) Left". Although it is not a sophisticated essay and had jumbled, half-formed, and uncertain thoughts, it did convey much of what was on the students' minds. Hayden shared some of the foundational liberal values of the time. He was against the bombs, the "population problem," the threatening future of China," "an incredibly conservative Congress," "the decline of already-meager social welfare legislation". However, he also believed, drawing largely on his university experience, that liberal thoughts would not help the youth to understand the problems or suggest anything but slippery, welfaristic solutions. He considered it conservatism with a smiling face in the hands of current policy-makers. In his accepting of traditional liberal goals while also realizing the failure of traditional liberal values, Hayden was voicing what many of his generation were feeling: the liberal tradition in which they had all grown up was progressively losing its legitimacy.
The book sums up Hayden's ideology by stating that his solution to liberalism was radicalism, but one that was actually not that radical. He depicted it as achieving an understanding of the underlying "real causes of the problems of present society and then a practice that demands living outside that society", "the decision to disengage oneself entirely from the system being confronted." In simpler terms, Hayden believed that the SDS radicalism would arise when the students had analyzed and understood who caused the social problems that America was facing and that this understanding would provoke disgust, disenchantment, disengagement, and eventually a willingness to change the System.
Unlike the Weather Underground, Hayden turns out to have advocated for a non-violent and not that radical radicalism. His radicalism is more of a reformism that, in his words, aims to draw on what remains of the academic and political communities of the past instead of aimlessly and desperately revolting against them. He did not envision an overthrow of the Establishment. He wanted to "visualize and then built structures to counter those which we oppose", not demolish the old structures without having figured out how to build new ones kn their place. He believed that the main battle that the radicals had to fight was against accepting every action of the government easily, not for installing a new regime.
Despite the flaws in his ideology, Hayden appealed to more student activists than the terroristically inclined Weathermen. Had the SDS leaders managed to centralize the organization's vision and objectives around his ideas, SDS might have achieved more and would not have degraded into a disorganized cohort of angry young men talking big about overthrowing "the pigs" and committing useless acts of urban insurgency.
WRITINGS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY casts light on Tom Hayden as a person and activist. This book is great for anyone who wants to know more about this well-known New Left leader.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews