Reunion: A Memoir. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1988 by Taylor Branch

If I Had A Hammer...

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 charm with the inventiveness of his early rebellions. He created a high school journal called The Daily Smirker, a parody of the communist Daily Worker in the spirit of Mad magazine. 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 than ideological.

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. 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 full-fledged boycott of graduation ceremonies. We are invited to believe that such a protest would have been a boon to mankind.

Hayden's roommate at the University of Michigan dressed exactly like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. 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...we were unwanted orphans..." Still, restlessness and unformed dissatisfaction made him an enterprising reporter at the Michigan Daily. His work brought much adventure and high honors, including the editorship, but Hayden knew the rewards were grudgingly bestowed. 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.

His timing was perfect: the new movement gave the rebel a moral cause. Hayden knew it. He also knew how unprecedented it was to have such a political force created by students, his peers. His instincts took him unerringly to the edge of history that most people saw only in hindsight. Once there, he reacted almost unfailingly with diplomacy and courage. What's more, his understated, nonrhetorical account of that era is the second-most satisfying section of this memoir. 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. 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.

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. Legitimate authorities behaved nearly as savagely as the Klan. A state representative executed a local farmer with a pistol in broad daylight at a crowded cotton gin; a black witness who was brave or foolhardy enough to call it murder was himself shotgunned to death. 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. Hayden, only a few months out of college, went straight to Mississippi. 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. [SNCC Chairman Charles] McDew flipped them the finger, as if they were just another morning nuisance, and walked safely into the church.

"I couldn't get used to the fear growing in me....I didn't know how to cope with the raving psychopaths only a few feet away from me. Give them the finger too and swagger into the church? Chuckle and pretend to agree with them? Show them my press card and ask for an interview?"

Hayden tried the innocent reporter approach but was beaten and arrested anyway. 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. Against a thousand inhibitions and fears, Hayden soon landed in the Albany jail. His was among the catalytic arrests that brought Martin Luther King to the same jail a week later. It was a watershed for King--his first large-scale campaign of civil disobedience. 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.

Then Hayden's mind intervened. Not for the last time, some inner urge compelled him to produce a manifesto. From his cell he dispatched letters inviting activist white students to form a counterpart movement in the North. This led to The Port Huron Statement and the founding of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962. Hayden switched abruptly from a movement of songs and jailgoing to a six-month debate over a blueprint for the overhaul of the world. Unfortunately, the tone of Hayden's book shifts in the same way, so that the awed discoverer gives way to the junior Founding Father. His language stiffens under the howling winds of intellectual purpose. Quotes from Camus and C. Wright Mills roll forth. The document introduced a lasting scourge of postwar political language--apocalyptic vagueness--to which the memoir adds Hayden's unique blend of pompous infighting. "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. "Steve Max came to propose another political line; we came to declare a crossroads in history....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."