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

Source:BBC News- Tom Hayden & Jane Fonda.

“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- Students For a Democratic Society founder 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.

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