Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and the New Left Movement
The New Left of the 1960s was not a monolith. It encompassed everything from participatory democratic idealism to anarchist street theater to organized civil disobedience. Two of its most prominent figures — Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden — embodied this diversity, and their subsequent life trajectories illustrated the range of paths that New Left activists eventually took after the movement's decline.
Tom Hayden: The Democratic Idealist
Thomas Emmett Hayden was born in 1939 in Royal Oak, Michigan, and came to political consciousness as a student at the University of Michigan. As the first editor of the Michigan Daily student newspaper, he developed both his writing and his political analysis. In 1960, he joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the organization that would become the central organizational vehicle for the New Left.
In 1962, Hayden was the principal author of the Port Huron Statement, arguably the most important political document of the New Left. The statement articulated a vision of "participatory democracy" — the idea that individuals should have direct control over the political and economic institutions that governed their lives. It criticized both mainstream liberalism (for its Cold War timidity) and Soviet communism (for its authoritarian character) in favor of a genuinely democratic, humanistic alternative.
The Port Huron Statement's influence extended far beyond the antiwar movement. It articulated a political philosophy that informed decades of progressive organizing across issues from civil rights to environmentalism to economic justice. Hayden remained a reference point for American progressive politics throughout his life.
Hayden in Chicago and After
Hayden was in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention as an organizer of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. His role was less theatrical than that of Hoffman and Rubin — he was a serious political organizer, not a performance artist — but he was fully committed to the confrontational politics of the moment.
After the Chicago trial, Hayden followed a path into electoral politics that many of his fellow defendants viewed as accommodation or even betrayal. He married actress Jane Fonda in 1973 and used her celebrity to raise money and awareness for antiwar causes. He ran for the California State Assembly in 1982 and won, serving in the California legislature for eighteen years. His work focused on economic justice, environmental protection, and education reform — translating New Left values into legislative action within the existing political system.
Hayden ran for Senate in 1976 and 1992 and remained an active writer, teacher, and organizer until his death in 2016. He published prolifically, analyzing movements from the New Left to the environmental movement to the Iraq War. He never stopped calling himself an activist.
Jerry Rubin: From Yippie to Yuppie
Jerry Rubin's trajectory was more surprising and, for many former allies, more disturbing. Born in 1938 in Cincinnati, Rubin came to activism through journalism and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the early 1960s. He was a founding Yippie and one of the most flamboyant presences at the Chicago convention and trial. His book Do It! (1970), designed by Quentin Fiore, was a graphic manifesto of revolutionary counterculture.
Yet by the 1980s, Rubin had undergone what he himself cheerfully described as a transformation. He became a networker and entrepreneur in New York, hosting business parties where young professionals could make connections. He wore suits. He worked on Wall Street. He declared that the business world was "the new social change." The man who had run a pig for president was now running a marketing business.
The transformation bewildered and angered many former activists, including Abbie Hoffman, who debated Rubin publicly on the lecture circuit under the billing "Yippie versus Yuppie." Rubin argued, with some consistency, that he was applying to capitalism the same creative energy he had applied to protest — that the counterculture's individualism had always been compatible with entrepreneurialism. Critics saw apostasy and self-delusion.
Rubin died in 1994 after being struck by a car while crossing a street in Los Angeles — a banal end for a man who had lived so theatrically. He was 56.
The New Left's Long Shadow
The diverging paths of Hayden and Rubin mirror the diverging paths of the New Left itself: some veterans went into electoral and institutional politics, others into business and cultural production, others into movement organizing that continued in changed forms through subsequent decades. The New Left did not "end" in 1970 any more than it began in 1960 — it transformed into the environmental movement, the feminist movement, the LGBT rights movement, and the various progressive coalitions that shape American politics to this day.
What united Hayden and Rubin, despite their differences, was the belief that ordinary people had the right and capacity to govern themselves and reshape the institutions that governed them. That belief — participatory democracy by another name — remains the animating idea of American progressive politics.
Read the complete story of the trial these men were part of in our Chicago Seven history, and learn about the civil rights legacy of the case. For the film adaptation, see our history versus Hollywood comparison.