If I Had a Hammer...
Branch, Taylor
If I Had A Hammer.. by Taylor Branch I'd make Tom Hayden stop issuing manifestos. (And stick to his gifts for action.) Young Tom Hayden was a smart brat who compensated for a lack of personal...
...war policy, he felt wholly "American" as he talked with Vietnamese soldiers, prisoners, and children in sewerlike bomb shelters...
...His was among the catalytic arrests that brought Martin Luther King to the same jail a week later...
...Most reformers devise more convenient tests of their ideas, and Hayden deserves credit for his temerity, perseverance, and conviction...
...It took more than one trip to Indochina, but he mediated the release of the first three American POWs in 1967...
...I sympathize with Hayden, as my own political expressions tend to be overblown...
...His next book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, will be published by Simon and Shuster in the fall...
...Otherwise he basks in lengthy flashbacks to moments of wild, tainted glory...
...His timing was perfect: the new movement gave the rebel a moral cause...
...He was there with Mark Rudd at the battle of Columbia, with the hippies battling the cops at People's Park, and with the assorted Yippie and Panther defendants at the Chicago conspiracy show trial...
...His work brought much adventure and high honors, including the editorship, but Hayden knew the rewards were grudgingly bestowed...
...They may have hastened the return of an atmosphere in which most Americans find it difficult to imagine a positive contribution from the young...
...Against a thousand inhibitions and fears, Hayden soon landed in the Albany jail...
...we came to declare a crossroads in history...
...But don't buy the book for the "good parts" about the romance with Jane, which began in 1972...
...Hayden buries the story under so much cant and self-conscious analysis ("Thus, the first step was in transferring blame from oneself to institutions .") that I found myself slipping toward the attitude of the Eisenhower-era school administrators...
...Once there, he reacted almost unfailingly with diplomacy and courage...
...His descriptions of Vietnam are absorbing and personal...
...While it is true that SDS leaders were conspicuous in the early Vietnam protests, the antiwar movement included a host of students who never heard of SDS or thought it sectarian from the beginning—not to mention "don't-send-me" types and nonstudents of many kinds...
...On into the Reagan years and beyond, those impolitic excesses will discredit the remarkable, democratic courage of young people in the 1960s...
...To maintain his leadership, he followed the youth culture through its love-ins, its pseudo-revolutions, and its antipolitical guerrilla theater of deliberately alienating the pigs...
...In his memoir, Hayden apologizes at least four times for the indulgent nihilism of the latter days...
...Give them the finger too and swagger into the church...
...he wondered...
...His quoted pronouncements are both stilted and foamy...
...Legitimate authorities behaved nearly as savagely as the Klan...
...Whatever the numerous faults in practice, nonparticipation has never been part of the democratic ideal itself...
...I couldn't get used to the fear growing in me...
...Suddenly, unexpectedly, the more vivid Hayden returns...
...For a time, at least, Hayden recognized that it was not intuitively obvious to most Americans why the freedom being fought for in Vietnam was different from freedom in Mississippi, any more than it was obvious to most learned Jesuits of the 16th century why true religion did not justify the torture of the Inquisition...
...As to this proud moment, the intervening quarter-century has allowed him precious little perspective...
...Chuckle and pretend to agree with them...
...These are only glancing confessions, however, which, is probably why Hayden feels obliged to repeat them...
...To do so, he respected his opponents enough to learn front them and to try to win them over...
...His language stiffens under the howling winds of intellectual purpose...
...Hayden himself spent the transition period between civil rights and Vietnam in Newark, New Jersey, as a community organizer...
...His instincts took him unerringly to the edge of history that most people saw only in hindsight...
...I didn't know how to cope with the raving psychopaths only a few feet away from me...
...From my own recent work on civil rights history, I find Hayden's personal narrative to be modest, his notorious ego authentically swallowed by larger events...
...Hayden recalls the crazy, multilayered emotions of the war with remarkable balance...
...What's more, his understated, nonrhetorical account of that era is the second-most satisfying section of this memoir...
...He should acknowledge the flaw and seek out a trusted, steely editor...
...Hayden tried the innocent reporter approach but was beaten and arrested anyway...
...Two years after the shocking inspiration of the sit-ins, this specious idea allowed students who remained on campus to imitate the novelty of the Southern students...
...Hayden and his colleagues were very young (Hayden was 22 in 1961), and history offers few instances in which young people were so right and their elders so wrong...
...At that early stage, Hayden was one of only two white people in America jailed for making bodily witness against racial terror in both Mississippi and Albany...
...He formed his own California commune, the Red Family, from which he was expelled for various chauvinisms and political defects...
...This trip, more than his prior exploits in SDS, sealed Hayden's estrangement from his own family...
...It was a watershed for King—his first large-scale campaign of civil disobedience...
...Steve Max came to propose another political line...
...Skeptics might disparage the feat as a grandstand move or propaganda ploy, but Hayden's account disarms such suspicion...
...He treats this well...
...The memoirist in Hayden recalls honestly that he could "only faintly explain what disturbed me," but the mellowed radical cannot resist adding a grandiose lament that he had not yet learned how to mobilize a picket line or a fullfledged boycott of graduation ceremonies...
...in the Kennedy White House, where sit-inners and Freedom Riders were not yet welcome...
...As an ambitious, personally dissatisfied editor, he projected his discontents outward from the Ann Arbor campus just as the student sit-in movement spread across the South...
...In a farewell editorial for his high school newspaper in 1957, Hayden buried an acrostic reading "Go To Hell ." Gleeful boasting of this prank soon landed him on the carpet of the squarish school administrators from the Eisenhower years...
...As intensely as he disapproved of U.S...
...As an organization, SDS became nationally prominent only during its self-destruction, by which time no "participatory democracy" was evident in the spasms, and the war went on another five years...
...SNCC Chairman Charles] McDew flipped them the finger, as if they were just another morning nuisance, and walked safely into the church...
...These apologies don't go far enough...
...a black witness who was brave or foolhardy enough to call it murder was himself shotgunned to death...
...He blames the war for ruining the movement, dwells on the grisly provocations, and hints at private enmities among the yahoo crusaders...
...Hayden, only a few months out of college, went straight to Mississippi...
...He also writes sensitively of his relations with his in-laws, Henry and Shirlee Fonda...
...He was part of the first American group to experience the war reality of Hanoi after the North Vietnamese government invited him to visit in December, 1965...
...he writes cautiously and awkwardly of her...
...These and many other crimes failed to attract outside notice at the time, but within the private world of the young civil rights movement they sounded a general alarm, shattering the remaining illusions...
...When he summoned the courage to ask directly about the source of such cheerful discipline, a Vietnamese replied, "When you fight Muhammed Ali, you must concentrate on him, not hope he gets an upset stomach" Half-hearted apologies Hayden promply ignored these lessons during the disintegration of the New Left in 1967-70, which lapped just behind a parallel disintegration in civil rights...
...No sooner did he recover from the shock of it when -he volunteered as an activist/pamphleteer for the Freedom Ride into rural southwest Georgia...
...Young Tom Hayden was a smart brat who compensated for a lack of personal charm with the inventiveness of his early rebellions...
...For a contemporary echo of this gap, one need only glance at Ronald Reagan's contemporary statements on the 1964 Civil Rights Act as opposed to Hayden's...
...Amidst cross-cutting suspicions of every kind—of the Pentagon that the POWs would be brainwashed defectors, of the disoriented POWs that Hayden was a communist assassin, of antiwar activists that Hayden was a tool of the Johnson administration—Hayden maintained his own principles while dealing effectively with antagonists from every extreme of ideology and delusion...
...He also knew how unprecedented it was to have such a political force created by students, his peers...
...In announcing his unsuccessful 1976 candidacy for the U.S...
...However, this account of that pioneer adventure is hybrid in style, with the narrative appeal spoiled by Port Huron's disease...
...He, more than anyone, should know that the youth movement bears responsibility for its political legacy...
...His description of the fear there is aptly spare: "For the first time in my life, I heard people threatening openly and loudly to kill someone on the spot...
...Quite apart from politics or results, his experience in Newark from 1964 to 1967 offers an opportunity for captivating autobiography...
...This led to The Port Huron Statement and the founding of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962...
...He more or less declares that SDS shaped the sixties decade by being the "agency of change" and catalyst of the movement against the Vietnam war...
...While Dick Flacks came to write about Port Huron for a small left-wing weekly, most of us came self-confidently to found a movement," he recalls...
...Now, some thirty years later, Hayden tells us* that his political consciousness was a "blank slate" at the time—which strains credulity a bit, at least for those of us who grew up unaware that The Daily Worker existed, let alone that it inspired parody—but Hayden is convincing in his basic point that his schoolboy politics were more hormonal and generational Taylor Branch is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...As a nice finishing touch for the slide into decadence, he posed afterward for celebrity photographer Richard Avedon...
...Even now, Hayden's recitation of college oppressions is suffused with petty distemper—"cafeteria food was processed . . . housing was hard to find . . . parking was scarce...
...From his cell he dispatched letters inviting activist white students to form a counterpart movement in the North...
...Why don't you hate us...
...Manifesto madness During the late summer of 1961, white Mississippians responded brutally to the first, tentative attempts by students to register black voters in rural counties...
...Generally speaking, his version of the Chicago conspiracy trial and other flashpoints of the radical 1960s is more of a rerun than a reappraisal...
...Shame drove his mother to hide from her neighbors in a motel, and his father, a lifelong accountant at Chrysler, refused to speak with him for a decade...
...Then Hayden's mind intervened...
...From Huron to Hanoi A certain allowance must be made for intellectual intoxication and exaggeration...
...The document introduced a lasting scourge of postwar political language— apocalyptic vagueness—to which the memoir adds Hayden's unique blend of pompous infighting...
...Unfortunately, the tone of Hayden's book shifts in the same way, so that the awed discoverer gives way to the junior Founding Father...
...Almost inevitably, the book introduces a less graceful phase with the story of Hayden's entry into electoral politics...
...Senate, he disgorged a 278-page manifesto...
...Hayden knew it...
...He created a high school journal called The Daily Smirker, a parody of the communist Daily Worker in the spirit of Mad magazine...
...A sense of radical history, a focus on values, and a desire for relevance, taken together, could enrich and reinforce the strength of our common understanding ." In this voice, Hayden subjects his readers to a complete ontology and exegesis of The Port Huron Statement...
...I begrudged him his honors and very nearly forgot my admiration for his sojourn in the Albany jail...
...we were unwanted orphans . . . ." Still, restlessness and unformed dissatisfaction made him an enterprising reporter at the Michigan Daily...
...Reunion: A Memoir...
...Again his instincts put him ahead of the times...
...Many kinds of people resent Hayden for various conflicting reasons, whether as a twit or a subversive or a sell-out, but honest ones should admire his performance here and wish they had done something similar...
...This claim he leaves almost entirely undocumented...
...Although he knew the Maoist Weathermen had gone daffy into anarchist violence, he could not resist giving them a sendoff speech for their "Days of Rage" rampage of vandalism through Chicago...
...The Reunion of his title refers to reconciliations with his parents, and to the slow return of his appreciation for the natural cycles of life, such as children...
...Picture yourself, even today, as a white person who decides for whatever reason to begin knocking on doors in any black central city, offering little more than your ideas for reform, living in a tenement on a mission to adopt and be adopted by a separate culture...
...Again, his first reactions under pressure revealed Hayden's intuitive gift for politics...
...Hayden switched abruptly from a movement of songs and jailgoing to a six-month debate over a blueprint for the overhaul of the world...
...Show them my press card and ask for an interview...
...This is an empty concept...
...By way of advertisement, Hayden took The Port Huron Statement directly to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Once again, Hayden's anticipation made him a political astronaut...
...He ventured into the forbidden zone, and the profound, disturbing wonder of it silenced his analytical pretensions...
...It was a surreal journey behind enemy lines, risking death from American bombers even as he negotiated the release of American prisoners...
...During pleasant teas between air strikes, Hayden puzzled over the Vietnamese citizens who, though maimed or widowed by American ordnance, evinced a friendly curiosity about the U.S...
...Random House, $19.95 than ideological...
...To recommend themselves, they extolled the manifesto's central theme of "participatory democracy" as a leap forward, as though Jefferson and the Greeks had something different in mind...
...Time has allowed Hayden to recover personally...
...Still, making that allowance, the memoir is difficult to swallow for 50 pages, once Hayden is loosed in the pontificatory mode...
...We are invited to believe that such a protest would have been a boon to mankind...
...Those who led or tolerated the brazenly antipolitical exhibitions of the Yippie-Zippie-Panther period might well have lengthened rather than shortened the war by feeding Nixon's middleAmerican Thermidor...
...It reads like a spy novel...
...That was very early in the war—so early that the hawkish press was not yet aroused to call him a traitor...
...In the meantime, since election to the California legislature in 1978, he has found a trade suitable to his lifelong rhetorical faults...
...My guess is that Hayden is a conscientious and skillful legislator— quick, imaginative, and best on his feet, before he has a chance to swell up in thought...
...Hayden tries to have it both ways—having pressed his claim to leadership in the adult world, he accords himself the lenience due a beginner...
...Hayden's roommate at the University of Michigan dressed exactly like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause...
...A state representative executed a local farmer with a pistol in broad daylight at a crowded cotton gin...
...By manifesto, they "covered" the civil rights movement just as Ricky Nelson covered songs by Little Richard...
...Admitting to a seductive ego, he remembers that he was afraid of being called a coward if he declined any rampart thrown up to his left...
...He functioned deftly as a politician and diplomat...
...Whereas the students of the Southern movement were seizing leadership by assuming new risks and sacrifices that their elders denied or refused, the Northern students tried to leapfrog from college to power on the strength of superior brainpower...
...He seems blind to critical distinctions...
...He transplanted the spartan life of the Mississippi registration workers to Newark before the country discovered the ghetto and urban decay...
...Quotes from Camus and C. Wright Mills roll forth...
...Not for the last time, some inner urge compelled him to produce a manifesto...
Vol. 20 • May 1988 • No. 4
