It’s likely that few Americans outside the baby boomer clique will pause to reflect on the life of Tom Hayden, who died Monday at age 76.
Hayden’s image, as that of a 1960s radical and ringleader of the antiwar protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, comes from an era that for many Americans feels like ancient history.
But Hayden’s legacy is one that is still felt today in the activism of liberal groups from Occupy Wall Street to the insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders.
As a 22-year-old student at the University of Michigan, Hayden was the lead author of the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the New Left movement that emerged out of the 1960s. At a time of seeming conformity in American society, Hayden and his cohort in the Students for a Democratic Society yearned for something bigger. “We are people of this generation,” the first lines of the manifesto read, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
The document would hit many of the liberal lodestars of the 1960s. It attacked the Cold War mindset of American foreign policy; challenged the nuclear arms race; called for an end to racial discrimination, which remained pervasive and institutionalized across much of the United States; and demanded stronger and “sweeping” governmental efforts to reduce poverty.
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OBITUARY: Famed anti-war activist Tom Hayden dead at 76
But perhaps above all, Port Huron was a cri de coeur against political apathy and for greater individual empowerment and community engagement, or what Hayden called “participatory democracy.”
It came at an opportune moment: when the country’s politics were defined by often stultifying consensus and indifference rather than activism.
“We believed in not just an electoral democracy,” Hayden would later write, “but also in direct participation of students in their remote-controlled universities, of employees in workplace decisions, of consumers in the marketplace, of neighborhoods in development decisions, family equality in place of ‘Father Knows Best’ and online, open source participation in a world dominated by computerized systems of power.”
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Opposition to the Vietnam War would soon become the rallying cry of the New Left, while also radicalizing it, often beyond recognition. The same man who talked of the politics of the possible in 1962 would six years later at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago declare that he had come there “to vomit on the politics of joy … and face the Democratic Party with its illegitimacy and criminality.”
But the benefit of history makes it clear that Hayden’s words and the liberal activism of the 1960s had an enduring impact.
Indeed, at the same time Hayden was being beaten up by cops outside the International Amphitheater in Chicago; inside the hall supporters of Gene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy were engaging in their own form of participatory democracy.
While they lost a hard-fought effort to change the party’s position on the Vietnam War, they pushed for the creation of a reform commission to change the way Democrats chose their presidential nominee. Rather than rely on party powerbrokers and poobahs, going forward, the people — as in Democratic voters — would pick their standard bearer. While little-noted at the time this essential change would create the modern primary system.
This advance would not only make it possible for antiwar candidate George McGovern to win the party nod in 1972; bring Jimmy Carter to the White House in 1976 and provide a political opening for a host insurgent Democratic presidential candidates, from Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown to Howard Dean, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.
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But the ultimate influence of participatory democracy would go much further than that.
Writing in 2012, Hayden would argue self-interestedly, but not inaccurately, that “the ’60s movements stumbled to an end largely because we’d won the major reforms that were demanded: the 1964 and 1965 civil and voting rights laws, the end of the draft and the Vietnam War, passage of the War Powers Resolution and the Freedom of Information Act, Nixon’s environmental laws, amnesty for war resisters, two presidents forced from office, the 18-year-old vote, union recognition of public employees and farmworkers, disability rights, the decline of censorship, the emergence of gays and lesbians from a shadow existence.” These were all products, Hayden argued of the “vibrancy” of participatory democracy.
Hayden would later move from the world of political protest to the world of political deal-making as state legislator in California. There would be those who would argue he’d sold out by seeking to work within the system. But to Hayden’s credit he never lost sight of the idea that what to many seemed unimaginable was in fact attainable.
Even if few today have read Port Huron or think of Tom Hayden as someone other than “that guy who was married to Jane Fonda,” his words and actions helped catalyze a generation of liberal activists. American is a better place for it — and because, in some small measure, of him.
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Michael A. Cohen’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @speechboy71.