Читать книгу The Trial of the Chicago 7: History, Legacy and Trial Transcript - Bruce A. Ragsdale - Страница 48

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Tom Hayden Courtesy of Bettman/Corbis.

As a former president of the Students for a Democratic Society and principal author of the key manifesto of student dissent, Tom Hayden was one of the most prominent leaders of the radical political movements that emerged on college campuses in the 1960s. Hayden was born in Detroit, and grew up in Royal Oak, Michigan, where he attended the church of the radio priest and fervent anti-communist, Father Coughlin. Hayden went to the University of Michigan where he served as editor of the Michigan Daily and covered the 1960 Democratic convention for his school paper. He joined the Students for a Democratic Society, and as president of the group he drafted the Port Huron Statement that outlined a vision of participatory democracy and personal independence. For several years he worked as a community organizer with an SDS project in Newark, New Jersey. Hayden also became increasingly involved in opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War. In late 1965, Hayden made his first trip to North Vietnam, and he later returned to that country and Cambodia to secure the release of American prisoners of war.

In the months before the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Hayden and his colleague, Rennie Davis, opened an office in Chicago to plan for a massive demonstration comparable to the anti-war mobilization in Washington, D.C., in October 1967. Although participation in the demonstrations never approached the organizers’ goals, Hayden remained as a chief organizer of the week’s events, even as the demonstrators seemed to abandon the focused political agenda that Hayden had advocated.

Hayden was one of the six individuals cited by a Daley administration report blaming violence on “outside agitators,” and he was one of the eight demonstrators indicted in March 1969. As the defendants planned their strategy, Hayden convinced the defendants to hire Leonard Weinglass, with whom Hayden worked during his community organizing in Newark. Throughout the trial, Hayden was often at odds with other defendants over his determination to maintain a political focus in the trial. Hayden was impatient with what he saw as the unstructured cultural radicalism of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.

The jury found Hayden not guilty of the conspiracy charge but guilty of the charge of travel with intent to incite a riot. The conviction was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and remanded to the district court, but the government declined to retry Hayden. Near the close of the trial, Judge Hoffman convicted Hayden on eleven counts of contempt and sentenced him to more than fourteen months in jail. The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed those criminal contempt convictions and remanded the charges for retrial before another judge. The government brought only one of the contempt charges against Hayden on retrial, and Judge Edward Gignoux found Hayden not guilty. Gignoux found that Hayden’s statement in court in response to the physical constraint of Bobby Seale was not responsible for the disruption of the courtroom, but rather that the disruption of the trial resulted from “the appalling spectacle of a bound and gagged defendant and the marshals’ efforts to subdue him."

Following the Chicago trial, Hayden continued his work in opposition to the Vietnam War. While working with the Indochina Peace Campaign in 1972, he met Jane Fonda, whom he married. Hayden unsuccessfully challenged incumbent U.S. Senator John Tunney in the 1976 California primary. He won election to the California State assembly in 1982 and the California Senate in 1992 and served until 2000.