HAYDEN’S POLITICAL AGENDA WAS SECONDARY: HE JUST WANTED TROUBLE

HAYDEN’S POLITICAL AGENDA WAS SECONDARY: HE JUST WANTED TROUBLE

1. HAYDEN AND SDS ONLY WANTED TO STIR UP TROUBLE

David Horowitz, former radical, THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, May/June 1997, http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taemj97s.htm, accessed May 1, 2002.

As principal architect of the Port Huron Statement in 1962, Tom Hayden had helped launch Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which soon became the largest student organization of the New Left. When he called for a demonstration at the 1968 Democratic national convention to protest the Vietnam War, everybody knew it meant a confrontation with the Chicago police that could prove bloody. Ramparts editor-in-chief Warren Hinckle decided to participate by publishing a "wall paper," as Mao’s Red Guards had done during the cultural revolution in China. During the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Chicago’s Mayor Daley had recently ordered his police to shoot looters. A radical street protest would put people’s lives at risk. Because of such considerations, Hayden’s plans attracted only two or three thousand people to Lincoln Park. But that was enough to generate trouble—Hayden’s real agenda.

David Horowitz, former radical, THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, May/June 1997, http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taemj97s.htm, accessed May 1, 2002.

When the dust cleared in Chicago, Hayden and seven other radicals, including the Black Panthers’ Bobby Seale, were indicted for conspiring to create a riot. During the trial, the defendants created a near-riot in the courtroom itself. Seale was so obstructive that the judge ordered him bound and gagged. The picture of a black man in chains was a made-to-order script for the radical melodrama. One of the conspirators, Jerry Rubin, admitted a decade later that the organizers had lured activists to Chicago hoping to create the riot that eventually took place. This fit with the general strategy Hayden had laid out in private discussions with me. When people’s heads are cracked by police, he said more than once, it "radicalizes them." The trick was to maneuver the idealistic and unsuspecting into situations that would achieve this result.
3. HAYDEN PROPELLED THE LEFT WING DEMOCRATS INTO POWER

David Horowitz, former radical, THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, May/June 1997, http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taemj97s.htm, accessed May 1, 2002.

The ensuing melee changed the shape of American politics. The now-famous pictures of demonstrators being bloodied by police, and the chaos on the convention floor, destroyed the presidential chances of Hubert Humphrey and moved the Democratic party dramatically to the left. Four years later, Hayden and the protesters provided the push and the party rule changes that pushed the antiwar candidacy of George McGovern and propelled the party’s left wing into power.

HAYDEN SAID HE WANTED PEACE, BUT HE REALLY WANTED VIOLENCE

1. HAYDEN WAS A GUERILLA BOMBTHROWER

David Horowitz, former radical, THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, May/June 1997, http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taemj97s.htm, accessed May 1, 2002.

Sid Peck, a member of mobe, the pacifist group that issued the call to the Chicago demonstration, later told me with somebitterness that Hayden had been "extremely deceptive" in outlining his agenda for the gathering, assuring everyone that his intentions were nonviolent. Hayden’s duplicity continued throughout the event, causing the radical historian Staughton Lynd to comment that "on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday [Hayden] was a National Liberation Front guerrilla, and on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, he…was on the left wing of the Democratic party." Anyone who knew Tom knew that the bombthrower was the real Hayden.

David Horowitz, former radical, THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, May/June 1997, http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taemj97s.htm, accessed May 1, 2002.

Having secured pacifist cover, Hayden then went to the most radical elements in the Left—those who actively advocated violence as a political tactic—and proposed that they provoke a conflict with the police who would be at the demonstration. According to Hayden’s own retrospective account, he warned one group in New York that "they should come to Chicago prepared to shed their blood," and he told his co-organizer, Rennie Davis, that he expected 25 people to die. He recruited the Yippies, a group organized by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who alarmed Chicago officials by immediately threatening to put lsd in the Chicago water supply. Hayden also met before the convention with the Weatherman faction of sds, which had issued a call for "armed struggle" in American cities. As one of the Weather leaders told me later, Hayden proposed to them that "It might be useful if someone were to fire-bomb police cars."
4. HAYDEN ADVOCATED VIOLENCE

Ronald Radosh, author of Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE, November 27, 2001, http://www.frontpagemag.com/columnists/radosh/2001/rr11-27-01.htm, accessed May 2, 2002.

Some would like to separate the rest of the so-called moderate New Left from the Weatherman. Todd Gitlin, one of SDS’s first leaders, has condemned Ayers as a "failed terrorist," and accuses him of responsibility for destroying what he saw as becoming a mass democratic Left. We are so often told by Gitlin and others that Tom Hayden, who wrote the famed SDS Port Huron statement in the movement’s early days, showed the possibility of a true democratic radicalism. Hayden gave the New Left the alternative of entering into the nation’s democratic political structure and waging a serious political fight for left-wing social policies within the two-party system. It is therefore good that Ayers reminds us of Hayden’s speech to the Weatherman at their Days of Rage, when Hayden told the rioters "Anything that intensifies our resistance…is in the service of humanity. The Weathermen are setting the terms for all of us now." You won’t find this in Hayden’s own memoir, but it gives the lie to those who argue that there is simply no connection between the early humanist New Left and the later Weathermen.
5. HAYDEN TRIED TO MAKE BLOOD FLOW ALL OVER THE CITY

David Horowitz, former radical, THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, May/June 1997, http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taemj97s.htm, accessed May 1, 2002.

At the event, Hayden gave Bobby Seale a platform in Lincoln Park, and Seale addressed the crowd with the suggestive exhortation that "If a pig comes up to us and starts swinging a billy club, and you check around and you got your piece, you got to down that pig in defense of yourself. We’re gonna barbecue us some pork!" Once the violence started, Hayden defiantly incited the crowd to "make sure that if blood is going to flow, it will flow all over the city."