Tom Hayden
AKA: Hayden · Thomas Emmet Hayden
The Record
Hayden edited the student paper at the University of Michigan. In 1961 he went south to report on the voter registration drive of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was beaten and jailed for it. He came back convinced that American democracy did not reach the places where power sat.
He held the pen on the drafting committee for what became the Port Huron Statement. Fifty-nine members of Students for a Democratic Society adopted it at a United Auto Workers camp on Lake Huron in June 1962. Its central term, participatory democracy, came to him from his Michigan philosophy teacher Arnold Kaufman. Its picture of a comfortable, bureaucratic, alienating mass society came from Mills.
The Statement is not a Marxist document and the archive does not present it as one. It states plainly that its authors are in basic opposition to the communist system. It earns its place in this record for two other things. It moves the agency of change from the working class to the university. It also supplies the vocabulary the organisation used for the next seven years. Then the people holding that vocabulary split over what to do with it.
Hayden served eighteen years in the California legislature. Of the people in this file, he took the institutional road furthest. His career is the clearest single test of what the long march produces.
Relationship Ledger
Eugene Genovese reviewed Cammett in Studies on the Left in 1967. The journal, founded at Wisconsin in 1959, is where corporate liberalism was developed, and its editorial circle put Genovese alongside Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd. This is where the Gramsci line meets the American New Left. Source: For a New America: Essays in History and Politics from Studies on the Left, 1959-1967
The Port Huron Statement, principally drafted by Tom Hayden, was adopted by Students for a Democratic Society at Port Huron, Michigan, in June 1962. Source: A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times
SDS adopted America and the New Era at its June 1963 convention, a year after Port Huron, carrying the corporate-liberalism analysis developed at Studies on the Left into the organisation’s own programme. Source: A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times
Referenced in
Records whose text names Tom Hayden. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.
- The long march through the institutionsis mentioned in
- The SDS split, Weatherman and RYM IIis mentioned in
- Critical pedagogy and the schoolsis mentioned in
- C. Wright Millsis mentioned in