2 Campaigns--and 2 Larger Quests

Running through the turbulent life of Tom Hayden is a single thread. From his place at the earliest glimmerings of the 1960s to his tenacious campaign for mayor of Los Angeles in 1997, Hayden’s struggle has been to translate moral vision into political reality.

To be sure, Hayden’s values have sometimes been at odds with the country around him. Even today, after 15 years in the California Legislature, many people resent Hayden’s role as a student activist and his marriage to Jane Fonda. Some speak angrily of 1968, when he confronted Chicago police during the Democratic Convention in a display that critics considered immoral, immature and cowardly. Others find his environmental advocacy preachy or aloof.

But parts of Hayden’s credo, even those that initially seemed revolutionary, have weathered easily. His call to participatory democracy, his belief in the social responsibility of universities and his condemnation of big-money politics today are embraced by many in the same establishment that Hayden once scorned.

And Hayden’s Catholicism--the faith of his upbringing, the home of the hierarchy he has long resisted--increasingly seems to ground his beliefs.

“While I’m still an independent--I try to think for myself and not take dictates from any particular hierarchy, whether it’s religious, political or business or media--I’m no longer angry at these institutions,” Hayden, 57, says. “I was angry for quite a while, especially because of the Church’s promotion of the Vietnam War. . . . But the anger has been replaced with fascination, I would even say compassion, which is not to say approval.”

For Hayden, the link between values and action was born of his Catholicism, honed in the student movements he helped pioneer and amplified in his recent reflections on the environment. Now, Hayden’s values are the subject of new scrutiny as they propel the state senator into his latest effort, the campaign for mayor of Los Angeles.

Hayden’s quest to bring his values to public life underscores his passion for politics and his sometimes overbearing personality. It engages his curiosity and his ego, both of which are formidable. It defines his view of himself, as the “anti-politics politician” and as the defender of environmental and political virtue.

Fueled by his own strong convictions, Hayden challenges those who lack the faith and draws on eclectic sources to understand and preach his own evolving gospel.

“The saints in my life would be St. Francis, Henry David Thoreau and probably Crazy Horse,” says Hayden, picking a trio that neatly melds the Catholic, literary and liberal into a personal pantheon. “It’s a blend.”

*

Hayden’s religion took its first shape in Royal Oak, Mich., a solidly middle-class suburb of Detroit. He attended the Shrine of the Little Flower Church and parish school, whose controversial pastor was Father Charles Coughlin. For a young boy searching for an identity, Coughlin was a problematic model.

Although Coughlin’s congregation included just 50 families, he launched a nationwide radio ministry that eventually reached 40 million people a week. That pulpit gave him enormous power, and he wielded it in fiercely controversial fashion.

Locally famous for his heroic resistance to Ku Klux Klan harassment, Coughlin gained national prominence as a preacher of what Catholics call the social gospel, as the Great Depression’s first public advocate for the unemployed and as an early supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But Coughlin gradually revealed himself as a determined anti-Semite embraced by the American Nazi Party. “I take the road of fascism,” he declared in 1936. After America entered World War II, Coughlin was silenced by the Church.

A half-century later, Hayden still is sorting out his feelings about Coughlin, admiring the priest’s early social activism while deploring his rigidity and his fascism.

“He espoused a fierce doctrine that was based on binding you to the Catholic Church by making you afraid of hell,” Hayden says of Coughlin, who espoused the “triumphalism” common among that era’s Catholic clergy--the notion that those outside “Holy Mother the Church” were damned.

“But I had deep trouble with the thought that friends of mine that I was playing baseball with would burn forever in eternity simply because they were born” non-Catholic, Hayden says.

Given a choice between friends and faith, Hayden followed his instincts.

“I put my experience ahead of the doctrine,” he says. “My experience was that my friends were good people. If the doctrine had been more flexible, I might have remained within the fold.”

Instead, he drifted away. But not easily.

He recalls many a late-night conversation with high school friends on the question of what price they would pay for their determination to question authority.

“We had this warning that to question authority meant to burn in hell,” Hayden says. “Was free speech really worth that? These were very serious discussions over pizza night after night in high school.”

By the early 1960s, Hayden was a student at the University of Michigan and increasingly consumed with the unsettling sense that his society was lost.

Although he was hardly the first college student to feel unease, Hayden brought eloquence and organizational talent to his angst. In June of 1962, Hayden and 58 other students gathered on the shores of Lake Huron and put their feelings to paper. The result was the most important document of the leftist politics of the 1960s, the Port Huron Statement. The statement was agreed to by committee but principally written by Hayden.

To this day, there are those who can recite its opening paragraph: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”

What is less well-remembered is that the Port Huron Statement was not just an expression of discontent or rebellion. It also was a call to political values.

“Perhaps matured by the past, we have no formulas, no closed theories--but that does not mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination,” the statement read. “A first task of any social movement is to convince people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but worthwhile.”

That language in part reflected the concern that Hayden and his colleagues had for religion--and the ambivalence that many felt about it.

“You had the key role being played by the ministers in the South,” Hayden recalls. “Dr. King was a minister, but he was critical in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail of ministers who were gradualists and fence-sitters, so there was this dialogue from the beginning about the necessity of engaging the religious community.”

Hayden says he has not read the statement in years, but he still can quote passages verbatim, and he now believes that it was the section on values that has had the most lasting impact.

If Father Coughlin’s social involvement influenced Hayden’s early faith, and if Port Huron in part represented his break from it, the Vietnam War gave force and urgency to his growing dissatisfaction with hierarchy. In particular, the role of the Catholic Church in that conflict tugged at Hayden’s loyalty.

“The Church, under President Kennedy and Cardinal [Francis] Spellman, lobbied for the war,” Hayden says. “But the first reports of napalmed children came out of Catholic relief workers. The resistance to the draft came from the Berrigan brothers. It was a very troubling Catholic experience.”

Buffeted by those developments, Hayden discovered his own course, one that emphasized the central role of values in politics while also challenging political and religious institutions with mounting intensity.

“My path to independence left the hierarchy of the Church behind,” he says.

By 1968, the war was a dominant issue in American politics, and Hayden was a leading critic. Determined to fight it and the authoritarian impulses that he saw behind it, Hayden and other demonstrators traveled to Chicago, where they came face to face with Mayor Richard J. Daley and his police force--icons, in Hayden’s view, of authoritarianism and, for the most part, fellow Irish Catholics.

Hayden was arrested and achieved national notoriety as a member of the Chicago 7. Some critics have never forgiven Hayden’s methods and determination to fight the war. For them, Hayden’s resistance was the act of a spoiled young man, not a principled resister. Hayden says his values left him no choice.

*

Hayden’s personal life has presented struggles of its own. After 16 years of marriage, he and Fonda were divorced in 1990.

Asked about his divorce and its place in relation to his Catholicism, Hayden does not answer for a long time. When he does, he starts by saying that it “was the most painful thing I have ever gone through in my life.”

But it was personal pain and fear for his children that Hayden says haunted him, not religious doubt.

“The question to me is not a religious one,” he says. “I don’t agree with the Church on divorce, on abortion. These are intensely private matters, and I don’t think you should have to get approval from the hierarchy for your divorce. But that doesn’t mean that I think divorce is a morally neutral experience. I think it reveals the side of us that fails, which is always there.”

Last year, Hayden, who has since remarried and has taught and lectured on “ecotheology,” published “The Lost Gospel of the Earth,” an exploration of the spiritual basis for environmental protection.

Hayden’s book, a sweeping and sometimes moving account of his environmental views, borrows from the eclectic mixture of prophets to whom he pays homage. Thoreau is quoted, as are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Maya Angelou. The story of Job appears along with the thoughts of John Muir, Zen poet Gary Snyder and St. Francis of Assisi.

Each has a place in Hayden’s theology, but it is St. Francis with whom Hayden seems to identify most strongly.

St. Francis, founder of the Franciscans, elevated his love of nature to a mystical plateau and urged upon his followers a life of radical austerity. He was canonized in 1228, and in 1980 was named the patron saint of ecologists. His emblems include the lamb, fish and birds. He felt called to do good everywhere. He longed for martyrdom.

Hayden denies an urge to be martyred, but he sees himself in the story of St. Francis.

“Francis represented the poor. He represented the environment. He was like a social worker of his time,” Hayden says. “He was a good man and he deserves proper respect. . . . St. Francis is a Catholic hero that I want to bring back. He’s been marginalized.”

Hayden pauses, then adds: “I suppose it takes one to know one.”

His adoption of St. Francis is selective, however. Hayden enjoys Francis’ relationship to the environment, but he hardly is ready to lead a life of radical austerity. He does, after all, live in Brentwood.

Hayden says he believes he can add his own political involvement to St. Francis’ legacy. In fact, as he presses forward with his campaign for mayor, he is running partly as a quest for political office, partly as a moral crusade and partly because he relishes the attention.

Hayden views Riordan as morally suspect, their common Irish Catholic faith notwithstanding. Where Hayden sees himself as connected to St. Francis and the powerless Catholics of the barrio, he castigates Riordan as a Catholic of the same hierarchy that has alienated Hayden for decades. Although even Hayden is forced to acknowledge the mayor’s personal generosity--Riordan has long been a philanthropist--he cites Riordan’s gifts to the church as evidence that the mayor is courting favors. And he sees Riordan’s opposition to a proposal that would require city workers and contractors to make a so-called “living wage” as a symbol of moral hypocrisy.

“To me, this is a city whose power structure is basically composed of the fallen,” Hayden says. “A lot of what they do is about greed and power. I mean, look at the living wage. I don’t know what the mayor paid for the helicopter for the cardinal. Let’s say $400,000. One has to wonder why. But anyone who has $400,000 to buy the cardinal a helicopter should have a few cents left over to help the poor of this city eke out a living wage.”

Riordan, says Hayden, is trying to “lobby his way into heaven.”

Hayden knows his bid for the city’s top job is a longshot. But he believes voters will wait until the end to make up their minds. He believes that not to run would be to acquiesce to a system he finds repugnant. And he is committed to hectoring the city’s mayor right up to the final day.

And yet, Tom Hayden may not be as contentious as he sounds. For inside Hayden, deep within the drive to challenge hierarchies, is a slumbering conciliator, a man seeking to reconcile his heritage with his conscience, his curiosity with his faith.

The same man who once wondered why his baseball teammates would go to hell because they were not Catholic now reaches back to reclaim a piece of his Irish Catholic heritage. The same man who once confronted Mayor Daley’s police now occasionally quotes Daley himself, sometimes with a wry smile. The same man who cringed at Father Coughlin’s rigidity now wonders about the influence of Catholic priests.

“The Irish Catholic politicians are my heritage and my burden and what I am trying to change,” Hayden says, suddenly quiet. “I no longer, in my mind, think of them as my enemy. They’re my people. And I am their descendant.”