In 2014, the legendary activist, progressive movement strategist and long time California State Senator Tom Hayden (1939-2016), gave a poignant, moving and incredibly prescient address as part of a Climate Leadership symposium that Bioneers hosted. In his remarks, Hayden delved into the history of the New Deal, the movements and drivers that presaged its development and the pressing need for a modern version, a Green New Deal, to be enacted to deal with climate change, the major existential crisis of our time.

His remarks below are essential contextual reading for understanding how we’ve reached the moment we’re in today, where a Green New Deal is making national news, lead primarily by an active and engaged youth movement of newly elected, next-generation policymakers along with vibrant movement activists.

Watch a video version of this talk or listen to Spirit in the Air: Reform, Revolution and Regeneration, an award-winning episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature podcast featuring Tom Hayden.

I learned during a couple of experiences in my life a kind of an answer to the complicated question of where ideas come from. In this movement we’re prone to think ideas come from scientists, and that is correct up to a point. I’ve always thought that ideas came from listening. A lot of people listening to each other is what we’ve been doing today, and it’s not easy to immediately synthesize what you’ve heard, be- cause the listening is a process. We have to be open-minded and remember to not tell people your story unless you’re willing to hear theirs. From an organizer’s viewpoint, you’re always trying to detect: What are people feeling, thinking? What words do they use? It’s a very unscientific approach to language, but it’s been a very powerful force in social movements like liberation theology in Latin America.

The Port Huron Statement

The first of the two experiences I want to discuss is the Port Huron statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, which the history books say I wrote. It was 27,000 words long. It tried to express a vision of our generation in 1961-1962. We had come through the freedom rides and the beginning of what would become the Free Speech movement. About 62 people gathered in Port Huron, Michigan, thanks to the UAW that gave us a room. I wrote the document, it’s true, but in order to write the document, I interviewed tons of people. I wrote it and then it was somehow rewritten in a five-day period. Looking back, I certainly get credit for having set the typewriter and pounded it out and made sure that it was in the mail and all that, but the way I feel about it in retrospect is that the Port Huron statement wrote us – that there was a spirit in the air, it was a consensus in the air. James Joyce said the same thing about his writing 50 years earlier. James Joyce said that what he was trying to write was the unwritten consciousness of his generation.

So, the knowledge, the feeling, the mix is in the generational experience. It’s not in the writer’s head. That’s an old left model where the organizer comes and tells you the line and tries to make it narrow enough to rally you to a certain demand and then moves on. This is more about attempting to get at the actual feelings that people have not yet articulated. I think we’re in the process of articulating those feelings.

Today is one day, a few hours in a process that has been going on since I first heard of solar energy from someone in the Brown administration 40 years ago. It goes way back. It’s deep. There are many ancestors and many previous attempts to express it. I’ve learned that these things do take time and there’s no rushing them even though we have to do things urgently.

The New Deal

The other example that I think is a good one is my reading of the New Deal. The reason I think of the New Deal is because I am a writer first and foremost, a movement activist, a twenty-year participant in the legislative process and I was born at a moment when the New Deal saved my family.

What happened is that my grandfather died in a cannery accident, the fault of the Carnation Milk Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He fell in a vat and was chopped up. He left my grandma with eleven kids. This was during the Depression and she survived and took care of those kids. During that time she was sustained by a $5,000 check from the company with regret for the death of her husband. There was no pension, there was no Social Security, there were no rights for organized labor. Her world fell apart in the late ‘20s, early ‘30s, and I don’t remember all that much about her, but I remember her as being sort of the quintessential nanny, the grandmother and all these kids.

What they were doing in the Depression was huddling up together like students do today, five to an apartment, living through a semester at NYU or wherever. They were selling apples and they were doing odd jobs together and pooling what little they made every day in order to buy food and pay the bills to get to the next day.

They were not political. This is a key point in my sharing with you. I believe, along with C. Wright Mills, that we have to reach people who are in their personal milieu and their problem is that they’re detached from history and social structure; they don’t know what has happened to them; they are in a catastrophe and they are prone, if they’re working people, to think there’s something wrong with them – their ethnicity, their class, their lack of education. They’re not prone to automatically blame an outside aggressor. That would take a level of pride and insolence and insubordination, so to speak, a mutinous mentality that they don’t have. They’re survivors, and they know a lot. I’m not saying they lack knowledge. They know a lot. I learned that too, after leaving the university and going to Mississippi and Georgia and Newark. I learned that poor people know a lot that middle class people do not know unless they come from that background.