Tom Hayden adds wisdom of experience to social activism

Editor's note: Bee staff writer Bruce Dancis was a prominent anti-war activist and member of Students for a Democratic Society. He spent 20 months in federal prison as a Vietnam War draft resister. Dancis also has a master's degree in American history from Stanford University. Dancis and Tom Hayden have met a handful of times since being introduced in 1966, most recently at an SDS reunion in the early 1980s.

At 68, Tom Hayden says he's "retired from competitive politics."

Yet the well-known activist, defendant in the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial and member of the California Legislature for nearly 18 years is hardly idle, despite having heart bypass surgery in 2001.

While Hayden has no plans to run for office, that doesn't mean he's given up on shaping the nation's politics.

Hayden currently sits on the editorial board of the Nation and writes for the online Huffington Post. He's founded two Web sites – Progressives for Obama and Stop Funding Torture – and teaches, most recently at Occidental and Pitzer colleges in Southern California. He's also involved in efforts to end the war in Iraq and in other issues, such as sweatshops, globalization "and the effects of it in my own backyard, in Los Angeles, where we have 97,000 out-of-work, out-of-school kids on the street."

Primarily, though, says Hayden in a recent hourlong phone interview from his office in Culver City, "I think my proper role is to reflect and research and write."

He has written six books since 2000, including two released this year, "Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader" (City Lights, $21.95, 592 pages), a collection of nearly 50 years of journalism and autobiography; and (with Ron Sossi and Frank Condon) "Voices of the Chicago 8: A Generation on Trial" (City Lights, $15.95, 285 pages).

Hayden will discuss his books at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Avid Reader at Tower on Broadway in Sacramento.

"Writings for a Democratic Society" covers a lot of ground, both chronologically and topically, from a 1961 open letter recruiting young activists to join the newly formed SDS to a 2007 blog about the Bush administration and the use of torture.

Hayden's life and work place him squarely in the American radical tradition. He's part of a history of dissent that includes the Boston Tea Party, the abolitionist movement and the underground railroad, the populist, progressive and democratic socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, the autoworker sit-down strikes of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s, in which Hayden was both a participant in and chronicler of civil rights struggles in Mississippi and Georgia.

As the principal writer of the Port Huron Statement, the document that launched Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which would become the largest radical youth organization in the United States, Hayden laid out a vision for a new left that would, he and others hoped, change American society. It was a left that would be inclusive of people from all strata of American society, that would fight for racial and economic justice and be based on what Hayden called "participatory democracy" – an ethos of popular engagement and activism that stood in stark contrast to the apathy and helplessness felt by so many young people in the 1950s.

During the turbulent '60s and early '70s, Hayden joined with other radicals in moving "from protest to resistance," wherein civil disobedience, militancy and, sometimes, violence increased as the war in Vietnam continued to escalate, seemingly with no end in sight.

As the war came to an end in the mid-'70s and conditions changed, Hayden adapted as well, turning his attention to electoral politics. After failing to unseat incumbent U.S. Sen. John Tunney in the 1976 Democratic primary, Hayden ran successfully for the California Assembly in 1982.

He represented Santa Monica in both the Assembly and the state Senate through 2000, pursuing a progressive agenda, writing or co-writing more than 100 bills that became laws or regulations. These were often concerned with the environment, endangered species, historical preservation and the humane treatment of animals.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Bruce Dancis, (916) 321-1112.