Freshwater
These days, of course, we hear that the American epoch is over. But for a man like Tom Hayden, it had never truly begun.
In almost any direction, it is only a short journey from the city of Royal Oak to the banks of Lake Huron. It is a sublime sight, a testament to the drama of the Northern landscape. The name is retained from the era of French occupation and refers to an indigenous people, otherwise known as the Wyandot.
A few miles south of Royal Oak is the city of Sterling Heights and for a few years in the late-1940s, John Francis Hayden would make this commute to his accountancy job at Chrysler. All the way down, there was a cool, clear breeze off of Lake Huron. An atmosphere of stillness, clarity. He’d served a spell in the Marines. Like so many others, the Pacific had knocked something loose inside of him, something brutal and scared. But now, the country his friends had died for was on the up-swing. Chrysler was part of that. In fact, they were looking to open an assembly plant in Sterling Heights, to build more advanced missiles than the Japanese had used.
By the end of the decade, though, the guilt (and the drink) had got the best of him. His wife and son had fled. At ten years old, Thomas Emmet Hayden, a good Catholic boy from a good Catholic family, was fatherless.
Indeed, Thomas Emmet was surrounded by the Church for most of his young life. Nuns in the classroom and the playground. Learn your verses, fear hell. He got his Sunday sermons from a Depression-era radio personality, a firebrand priest prone to vicious but vague polemics against “the elites”. These sermons made him aware of some rotten core lurking at the heart of the institution, driven mad by fear and misery. This man had seen America collapse around him. Just like Dad.
When Thomas Emmet got to high school, he edited the student newspaper. Seemingly, he was a controversial presence. It was all a bit typical, a boy used to people breathing down his neck gets a taste of power. He edited the school newspaper but they didn’t let him attend the graduation ceremony. One of the theories is that he formatted his farewell column to spell G-O-T-O-H-E-L-L with the first letters of each line. Thomas Emmet left the Church around this time.
Still on that same peninsula, the Northern tip of Michigan, surrounded on all sides by Lake Huron, he attended the state university at Ann Arbor, only thirty or so miles from his hometown. Again, he edited the student newspaper, but the name, Michigan Daily, made it sound like something more. He became involved in political organisations ran by students. At the National Student Association convention of 1960, the woman who would become his first wife, Sandra Cason, roused him from a certain apathy regarding the civil rights of African-Americans. This was the year of Thurgood Marshall’s landmark victory in Boynton v. Virginia, the ruling that kickstarted the Freedom Rides. Cason’s sense of solidarity and duty, in both that speech and the rest of her life, were the making of Tom Hayden.
Far from the bracing air off of Lake Huron, Hayden followed Cason into the heart of the unrest down in swampy McComb, Mississippi. One night, reporting on the Freedom Rides for the National Student News, he is attacked by a group of local white Mississippians, angry at his collusion with this destruction of their way of life, their dignity. He knows what it means when a man has that look in his eyes and that scent on his breath, red-faced and spitting. You don’t pass judgement, you pity the stricken heart and you curl up into a ball. He always thanked God when he passed out, as he did that night in McComb. What the sight of themselves in the mirror will do to men in precarious circumstances. He becomes a Freedom Rider a few months later.
Georgian nights are stinking hot but jail cells stay cold. A good Catholic boy from a good Catholic family stuck in a prison cell thousands of miles from home. But there was an atmosphere of stillness as the jailhouse settled down to sleep, an atmosphere of cold clarity, of chickens coming home to roost. You can’t ignore yourself in a cell. In the troubled calm of Dougherty County Jail, Tom Hayden begins to write what will become the Port Huron Statement, a radical declaration of the principles which will animate the unrest of the 1960s.
It is completed a year later, in conference with the rest of the members of the Students for a Democratic Society and a delegation from the United Automobile Workers at Port Huron, surrounded by freshwater. It was both a break from an older progressive tradition, wedded to Stalinism abroad and all forms of segregation at home, and a challenge to those newer movements unimaginative on issues of wealth and work. Above all, it is a call to spread democracy into all areas of life and thereby, to produce an engaged, thoughtful American, responsible for the shape of the nation to come. Tellingly, the first principle reads:
Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools.
Deliberativeness, honesty, reflection… A child of Lake Huron air and the American Golden Age, Tom Hayden wanted the United States to be a world of clarity and thoughtfulness, its people to be capable of facing themselves.
The Lake Huron breeze coming clear through the passenger window, John Francis tried to use those silent moments before the day began to face himself, to face those things that he had seen and done that he could not attribute to himself or to reality without blinding fear or shame. He had seen the metal horrors of which America was capable, its recklessness with life. They had won and he had been proud. Proud and happy to leave those years behind. Now, they’ve got him cooking books for missile manufacturers and telling him it’s the Golden Age. He couldn’t get all of that straight in his head, couldn’t get the debris of his life straight in his head. But sometimes on those mornings, driving idly along in that wide, deep calm, John Francis Hayden came close.
Thomas Emmet Hayden passed away in 2016 at 76, after a life of political activism and intellectual work. This Tuesday, June 15th, marks the 59th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, which you can read, in full, here.