So long Tom Hayden, Give Johnson and Nixon Hell when you see them

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tom-hayden-famed-1960s-anti-war-activist-dies-060614324--politics.html

(I was semi surprised to run across this seemed like it was almost buried in the news)

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I think Nixon and LBJ are already getting hell, and from a professional at the work.

“The awe inspired by the pervasiveness of racism in American life is only matched by the marvel of its historical span in American traditions. The national heritage of racial discrimination via slavery has been a part of America since Christopher Columbus’s advent on the new continent. As such, racism not only antedates the Republic and the thirteen Colonies, but even the use of the English language in this hemisphere.”

– Hayden in the Port Huron Statement, 1962

I recommend this document as a worthwhile thing to re-read, 55 years later. Its ideas gave some focus to the formation of the New Left, and one can see it was also avidly read by CONs whose countermeasures were already falling into place a decade later.

YEah. That made me kinda sad. He was one of the good ones.

Although influential in the articulation of New Left values, he was not the radical that people hoped or feared he would be. This anti-obit was really helpful to me in figuring out where to place him in US history.

Yeah. I know he wasn’t too radical. I knew people who worked for him. But at the time, he was a solid lefty.

Sure he was, but he came to it in the fifties…not in the sixties. So IMO his “leftitude” was of a different style than the leftitude of the sixties counterculture.

Okay.