NYU: Tom Hayden on His Life as a Political Activist

This post was originally posted at The New Democrat Plus

I was hoping this interview would be about if not mostly about if not the whole thing being about the 1960s. The New Left, anti-war movement, the Vietnam War and everything else from that period. Especially since Allan Gregg was interviewing Tom Hayden. One of the key leaders of Students For a Democratic Society and the New Left in this period. Before Occupy Wall Street was literally born, but the late 1960s version of OWS. But at least half of this interview is about the current Iraq War and 2008 in general. Especially since this interview was done in 2008.

Being that as it may, what Iraq and Vietnam have in common is they are both wars by choices. At least from America’s point of view of getting involved in something that at the very least could be argued had no business being involved in, in the first place. And for what, to build a liberal democratic utopia in a country that doesn’t have any type of democracy up until new pre-2003. And this liberal democratic utopia was supposed to be put together by Neoconservatives in the Bush Administration of all people. Which isn’t that different from what Neoconservatives wanted to do in Vietnam in the 1960s.

The anti-war New Left of the 1960s, were middle-age yuppie Baby Boomers by 2002-03 when the drive for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was put together. When Congress gives President Bush the authority to go into Iraq. Most of the New Left of the 1960s grew up and moderated and became spouses and parents and working good middle class jobs and even starting their own private business. They became capitalists and private enterprisers in the 1980s and 90s and so on. Which was one thing they were trying to get rid of in the 1960s and 70s. People tend to moderate with experience and knowledge.

Read Full Post »

David Hoffman: What The 1960s Did To America

 

Source: David Hoffman

Source: This piece was originally posted at The New Democrat Plus

The 1960s was truly a revolution for American culture and politics. We go from a very conservative collectivist period from the 1940s and 50s to a period where all sorts of groups of Americans were standing up and demanding their freedom. And the freedom to live their own lives for the very first time in their lives. And from that sense at least the 1960s was a very positive time with so many new Americans now wanting and obtaining freedom over their own lives. And a bad time for the conservative establishment that wanted to keep things as is.

The 1960s you have the civil rights movement which was very positive. And not just for African-Americans, but for Latin-Americans, women of all races and ethnicities, as well as gays. And for Americans of all backgrounds now being able to live their own lives the way they want to. And no longer feeling the need or having to live the lives of their parents and grandparents. The 1960s you also have the anti-war movement which led to America finally seeing that the Vietnam War was wrong and that we couldn’t win it.

The negative aspects of the 1960s was of course the violence. We lost two great political leaders in John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. We lost two great civil rights leaders in Martin L. King and Malcolm X. The rise of crime in that decade, the rioting and division of that decade. Things fifty-years later we’re still going through and haven’t recovered from. But revolutions tend not to be all peaceful. There tends to be some casualties in revolutions and the 1960s was no exception to that.

We go from a very stagnant and status quo decade of the 1950s to a revolutionary decade of the 1960s. Where not a lot of new things seemed extreme, except to the establishment that again wanted to keep things as is. Because they benefited most from that America and also believed that was the way for all Americans to live. And if America had to do all over again I believe it would and that it would’ve needed to be done. Because of all the Americans who were denied freedom in America simply because of who they were.
David Hoffman: How The 1960s Changed America

Read Full Post »

David Hoffman: ‘Hippies Remember The Glory Days’

Source:David Hoffman– A 1960s Hippie. (I’m presuming)

Source:The New Democrat 

“To support my efforts to create more clips please donate to me at http://www.patreon.com/allinaday. I am very proud of the TV series I made for PBS called Making Sense of the Sixties. I had the chance to spend a year examining my youth and how I became an active member of the 60s generation. If you are from that generation or a child of the 60s, I think you would find the entire series of value…

From David Hoffman

If you are familiar with leftist publications like Salon, The Nation, The American Prospect, AlterNet, TruthOut and I’m sure I’ve left some other out and the Occupy Wall Street movement and what is left of it today, go back to the 1960s and you’ll see where the members of that movement come from today. Students For A Democratic Society, the counter-culture movement and the anti-war movement and even anti-capitalist and wealth movement of the 1960s are the parents and grandparents of the Occupy today.

They were called the New Left back and people with this really far-leftist mindset at least in America are still the New Left today. People who were not only against the Vietnam War which a lot of the country who was a lot more politically mainstream back then was also against. But they were against the liberal democratic establishment in general. Not the Democratic Party necessarily, but the liberal values that govern America then and today and what the country was founded on. Mostly as it related to our military, law enforcement and foreign policy, but also our economic and political systems.

The New-Left coming of age in college in the 1960s decided they didn’t like America at least how the country was governed and founded. And put together a movement to not only get us out of the Vietnam War, which I would’ve been against back then as well as today. But they wanted to destroy our system and how our country is governed. And replace it with something a lot more social democratic, that is the democrats who were in this group. I mean if you look at Occupy today and then look at the New Left of the 1960s, they are the same people ideologically and culturally and believe in the same things.

Read Full Post »

Ian Ramsley: Sixties Berkeley

Source:Ian Ransley– with a look at 1960s Berkeley, California.

“A few photos of the protests and riots from 1967 – 1970 from a child who grew up in Berkeley in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s who still lives here. Berkeley, California”

Source:Ian Ramsley

The emergence of the New-Left in America of leftist radicals who had socialist anarchist tendencies, that saw it as their duty to take on the conservative as well as liberal establishments in America and to move America further to the Left politically and culturally, a lot of this happened at Berkeley in the late 1960s.

Groups like The Weather Underground and Students For a Democratic Society, Democratic Socialists USA, groups that were basically Occupy Wall Street of the 1960s, the parents and grandparents of OWS, all coming in the scene in America as Baby Boomers were starting and graduating from college and deciding they didn’t like the America they grew up in. And we’re going to try to create a new America.

There was sort of a perfect political storm happening in the 1960s:

The Baby Boom coming of age, a huge generation that was born in the 1940s and 50s, that were growing up in both of those decades, as well as the 1960s.

And then you have the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution in and outside of Hollywood, that the Boomers were part of, as well as their elders in the Silent Generation who were in their late twenties and thirties at this point.

You have roughly 70-80 million Baby Boomers (depending on how you define that generation) who were coming of age in a very turbulent decade. And saw an America they didn’t like or wasn’t as good as they thought it should be. Who were much further left than the Progressives and wanted to remake the country.

That is how you get the New-Left in America and Berkeley was the center of it. A very collectivist establishment era from the 1950s and before, going too far with the Cold War and the Vietnam War (as the New-Left would see it) and with millions of young adults just graduating high school, starting college, graduating college, wanting nothing to do with the military draft and the Vietnam War, other than to oppose it. Who had more in common with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, then they did Jack Kennedy, when it came to politics. Who wanted to live their own lives and not go with the party-line and lifestyle that they parents and grandparents lived. Who were now old enough and organized enough to make their politics well-known.

Read Full Post »

Mitch: Chicago 1968: The Democratic Convention

Source:Mitch– I guess this couple was at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Hopefully they survived the experience.

Source:FreeState MD

“As delegates arrived in Chicago the last week of August 1968 for the 35th Democratic National Convention, they found that Mayor Richard J. Daley, second only to President Lyndon B. Johnson in political influence, had lined the avenues leading to the convention center with posters of trilling birds and blooming flowers. Along with these pleasing pictures, he had ordered new redwood fences installed to screen the squalid lots of the aromatic stockyards adjoining the convention site. At the International Amphitheatre, conventioneers found that the main doors, modeled after a White House portico, had been bulletproofed. The hall itself was surrounded by a steel fence topped with barbed wire. Inside the fence, clusters of armed and helmeted police mingled with security guards and dark-suited agents of the Secret Service. At the apex of the stone gates through which all had to enter was a huge sign bearing the unintentionally ironic words, “HELLO DEMOCRATS! WELCOME TO CHICAGO.”

Source:The Chicago Blog– welcome to Chicago, Illinois.

From Smithsonian Magazine

1968 is when the Democratic Party changed and no longer became a Northeastern progressive party with a Southern coalition, made up of people who basically make up the Religious-Right and Neo-Confederate wing of the Republican Party today. By 1968, the Democratic Party was moving away from the South and becoming the party of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, as well as the Mid Atlantic.

With the emergence of what I call the Green Party wing of the Democratic Party, that is represented by the so-called Progressive Caucus in Congress that you see today in the Green Party, but also in Occupy Wall Street, the Democratic Party now had a major, left-wing in it. And this is how the Democratic Party lost the White House in 1968 because Classical Liberals on their Right and Progressives on the Center-Left in the party were now divided between the New-Left in the party made up of Socialists-Anarchists, as well as Communists. The group called Students For a Democratic Society then was what Occupy Wall Street is of today.

The Democratic Party lost in 1968 because they were divided by their two wings on the Left: The FDR/LBJ Progressive coalition, with this new coalition that’s called the New-Left, people who are against war (at all costs) but are in favor of using violence to get their message across. Who are against American capitalism and corporate America, but in favor of the New Deal and Great Society, but would expand into what’s known in Europe as the welfare state. What the Green Party today calls the Green New Deal.

The Green Deal would be a whole host of new Federal Government social programs to finish off of what the New Deal and Great Society didn’t accomplish.

The New-Left then made up of Students For a Democratic Society and Occupy Wall Street today, are not Pacifists in the sense that they are against violence and would never use violence. They just don’t want violence coming from their government, but are more than willing to use it against government or people in society. That represent what they do not like about America, like private corporations.

1968 is basically when the Democratic Party basically became three political parties: New Democrat Liberals, the center-right, (where I am) the FDR Progressives or what’s left of them, and Occupy Wall Street today or the Green Party. That sees the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as the same party, but with different names.

And even as split as the Democratic Party was back then, they still came within a state or two of winning the 1968 presidential election. But they would’ve done much better without the split happening all in one party.

Read Full Post »

Daniel JB Mitchell: Campus Unrest in Late 1960s & Early 1970s at UCLA

Source:Daniel JB Mitchell– with a video about Professor Angela Davis.

“These news clips show the inauguration of Chancellor Charles Young in 1969 despite concerns about student demonstrations. Not long after his inauguration, the chancellor was confronted with the Angela Davis controversy, also shown.”

From Daniel JB Mitchell

As much as the Occupy Wall Street movement of today has tried to change this, the late 1960s and early 70s was the height of the New-Left in America. A coalition of Socialists, Communists and Anarchists.

In other words: the Green Party today people who aren’t part of the center-Left in America. But people who came of the age in this time period in favor of civil rights and the Great Society. And against the Vietnam War, but also against American capitalism and big business.

If the reason for UCLA or the State of California for firing Professor Angela Davis was because she threatened the administration at UCLA and called for mass-violence, etc, then that would be one thing. And they would have real reason to fire her. But that wasn’t why she was fired, at least from everything that I’ve seen so far. She was back then at least a self-described Communist who was teaching philosophy at UCLA. Who was calling for the release of men that she saw as political prisoners in California state prisons.

The 1960s was a crazy radical time. Especially compared with the very conservative establishment status-quo decade of the 1950s culturally. And by 1968 or 69 and perhaps especially in California where radical leftist movements tend to get started, it was even more so. And it looked like the country might be falling apart over Vietnam and other cultural issues.

The emergence of the New-Left that Professor Davis was obviously was part of is now on the scene and they want to take America apart and create a different type of country, that is more collectivist and communitarian and even socialist and less individualistic.

1966 was the exception to this social revolutionary period in California, where Mr. Status Quo Establishment Conservative Ronald Reagan is elected Governor of California. And one of the first things that he does as Governor in 1967 is take on the campus radicals in California. And goes a step forward and takes on a radical professor in Angela Davis and has her fired at UCLA.

California takes it a step forward then that and tries to make a criminal out of her and get her sent to prison. And charge her with a court shooting in the Oakland area that she wasn’t part of. When you take on the establishment, they can hit you back. Which is what happened to Angela Davis.

Read Full Post »

Jake Hammond: ‘Students For a Democratic Society: To Change The World’

Source:Jake Hammond– welcome to black and white America.

“Here is a video I made for a Vietnam project in my history class.”

From Jake Hammond

If you want to compare Students For a Democratic Society today with another left-wing organization, Occupy Wall Street, Democratic Socialists of America, perhaps Community Party USA would be the closest. But except for maybe the Communists, you don’t see a militant component in the New-Left today, because most of their members are white-collar, hipster yuppies, who probably want nothing to do with jail and love their personal and economic freedom in America. And are really just part of Occupy or some other New-Left group because they think it’s the cool thing to do and this is what the cool people are doing.

Source:Students For a Democratic Society– 2008 SDS rally.

I actually believe as a current affairs blogger that todays Occupy Wall Street movement was born in the 1960s as part of what was called the New-Left. Because if you look at where Students For a Democratic Society were for back then and what they are trying to accomplish then and today, the end of war and that basically means all war, this movement is exactly what a person whose called a dove looks like and is.

A dove is someone who tends to take a soft approach when it comes to areas like national security and foreign policy, law enforcement, areas where government sometimes involves itself in the personal lives of individuals.

Doves were around pre-1965, but they really came alive in the 1960s with the Baby Boom Generation. And some of their kids today that is part of the New-Left who actually grew up, are part of the Occupy Wall Street movement today that’s again anti-war period. But also believes in things that Social Democrats call social justice: creating an economic system that of course is government based that would work to see that there’s economic equality throughout the country. That no one has too much and no one has too little.

The reason why the Democratic Party even has a left-wing today (or what others call Far-Left) is because of the New-Left (Socialists and Communists of the 1960s and 70s) because pre-1965 or so, the Democratic Party was made up of Center-Left Progressives, as well as Center-Right Conservatives, and even Far-Left Neo-Confederates in the South. But there weren’t Socialists in the Democratic Party for the most part back then. The New-Left changed that in the late 1960s and going into the 1970s.

Read Full Post »

Tom Hayden: ‘Did Anti-War & Lifelong Democrat Tom Hayden Send Generation a Huge Message?’

Source:BBC News– New-Left political activist Tom Hayden and his then wife actress Jane Fonda.

Source:The Daily Journal 

“Hayden died in his home in Santa Monica “after a lengthy illness”, the Los Angeles Times reports.

He was a member of the “Chicago seven” charged with conspiracy over anti-Vietnam war protests in 1968 and eventually acquitted.

Hayden later served in the California state assembly and Senate for nearly two decades. He was married to actress Jane Fonda between 1973 and 1990.

Born in Michigan in 1939, he became an activist during his time at the University of Michigan, where he helped to found Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

While there, he wrote a policy document called the Port Huron Statement, which he styled the “agenda for a generation.”

From BBC News

“DemocracyNow.org – We speak with Tom Hayden, principal author of the Port Huron statement 50 years ago, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The statement advocated for participatory democracy and helped launch the student movement of the 1960s. Tens of thousands of copies of the 25,000-word document were printed in booklet form. The youth-led movement changed the very language of politics and its impact is still being felt today. Hayden is a longtime activist and former California state senator.”

Source:Democracy Now– New-Left political activist Tom Hayden.

From Democracy Now

Every generation in America is different, but from really the founding of the American Federal Republic in the 1770s, to up to the early and mid 1960s, America was dominated by a social collectivist culture about what it meant to be an American.

And then we go through the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s and even with that you have this generation of Americans who were born during that period (1925-41) who were growing during the Great Depression of the 1930s and then World War II during the 1940s and then the 1950s comes with America returning to prosperity, but with a generation of Silent babies who weren’t satisfied with that prosperity, who wanted more for themselves and for Americans who were left out of that prosperity, especially women and minorities.

This is the generation of Americans that Tom Hayden is from and represents as someone who was born in 1939 and grew up in the 1940s and 50s and went to college in the 1960s and lived through the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement that happened later in that decade. Who saw and viewed an America that didn’t work for everyone, especially themselves.

And then you have the Baby Boomers who came of age in the 1960s who joined this New-Left political movement that was about total equality between the races and between men and women, who were also antiwar. Who also wanted a new America, a new form of government, new economic system, to create an American socialist state that would work for everyone and even use violence in some cases to achieve those political goals.

Read Full Post »