Mark E. Kann Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1986. 322 pp., 1981, 1980, 1980s, 1979, 1977, 1976, 1970s, 1960s,
To Santa Monica
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"In fact, many activists from the 1960s entered into the business world in the 1970s . . . They became artisans, craftsmen, and entertainers plying the street and tourist trade. They started cottage industries in their homes and garages that sometimes developed, for example, into solar energy or recycling businesses. They sought to live as independent producers and sellers of books, articles, art, and films; and they began new bookstores, magazines, art galleries, and movie theaters. They also founded new social service agencies and nonprofit corporations that catered to pressing human needs for affordable health services, legal services, housing services, and so forth. They sometimes entered into the world of high finance with a women's bank or a socially conscious investment firm or consumer network like Co-op America, which offers comprehensive life insurance to community groups through a plan developed by an employee-owned insurance company that invests premiums in low income cooperative housing. And they often experimented with things like food, housing, or even bicycle cooperatives, editorial collectives, and community development corporations . . . that is toward the virtues of small businessmen that Santa Monica's Harry C. Henshey appreciated a half-century ago." p. 67
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". . . Furthermore, (the business activists) were of the middle class, heirs to the American Dream legacy that pronounced individual daring, intelligence, hard work, long hours, and self-sacrifice the key to success despite adverse odds.
"More so than other leftists, Tom Hayden exemplified a continuing belief in struggling against the odds. His Port Huron idealism outlasted the 1960s and 1970s, showing up again in the conclusion to his 1980 The American Future: New Visions Beyond Old Frontiers {Boston : South End}: "Ours is a great and young nation, living in a yet richer and older world. It is not too late for a new beginning, no longer based on a hostile assessment of nature and others . . . Hope and love still know no boundaries." In fact, Hayden's political ideas had changed very little over the course of two decades. What had changed, however, was his understanding of the American middle class.
"By the mid-1970s, Hayden not only recognized that transformation of student activists into new professionals and new business people; he also sensed that their ideals had rippled throughout middle America to produce "a great shift in consciousness which began in the sixties and continues in less-noticed ways in the seventies." {Tom Hayden and the Tom Hayden for U.S. Senate Campaign, Make the Future Ours, 1976 campaign document.} . . . Hayden decided to seek the Democratic party nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1976 with the notion that the Port Huron Statement, now updated in a campaign booklet . . . would appeal to affluent voters in places like Santa Monica.
". . . Hayden's particular notion of economic democracy spoke directly to the concerns of the middle class. It emphasized people's right to control their lives and future, to assume mastery in their communities and workplaces, and to play a larger part in shaping the services that they produce, distribute and consume. As Hayden recognized, it was powerlessness not poverty at the root of middle class frustrations.
"One Hayden campaign goal was "building a lasting political organization that will go on whether I am elected or not." He was not elected. But he garnered an impressive 1.2 million votes in the primary, more than enough to suggest that his platform did have a social base in California and that a lasting political organization was needed to cultivate it. Undaunted by his 1976 setback in the political marketplace, Hayden manufactured in 1977 the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), a California "grassroots citizen's campaign to take back power over our lives - and create healthy individuals, families, communities, and workplaces." Appropriately, Hayden located CED state headquarters in middle class Santa Monica. There it spawned a local chapter that defined the core ideology and organizational thrust of the Santa Monica left.
The Core Ideology
". . . Local activists generally credited Zane with the energy behind organizing CED, the Santa Monica Fair Housing Alliance, and the city's Democratic Club into the Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights (SMRR) coalition and with masterminding SMRR's 1979 electoral victories. Zane himself was elected to a four-year city council term in 1981 . . ."