REBEL

1. “Stand By Me”

Rebel 4 “Stand By Me” In 1987, I took my thirteen-year-old son to Stand By Me, a nostalgic film about young boys growing up in the fifties in a small American town surrounded by farmland with railroad tracks running through, building themselves a tightly knit inner world from which they explored the unknowns of life. The movie is an ode to the decade in which I grew up. As we were leaving the movie theater, holding hands, my son looked at me and said, “Gee, what a great time to grow up, Dad. You can’t grow up like that anymore.” The fifties were indeed the best of times for the pursuit of the American dream: After the trauma of two decades—Depression and Holocaust, two wars, the atomic bomb—came a dawn of stability and peace, along with a rising living standard, low inflation and unemployment rates, and an explosion of single-family housing in the newly expanding suburbs. America seemed to be making progress on the still-nagging problem of racism through Supreme Court school desegregation orders. For a minority who cared, McCarthyism had wrecked the Left, but what need was there for radical dissent and doomsday talk in this time of middle-class prosperity? The Cold War was preferable to a hot one, the mere testing of atomic weapons far better than their use. Cuba was still a place for pleasures of the flesh and Vietnam an unknown word in the political vocabulary. For Americans who had come through the embattled thirties and forties, it was a time of respite, when one could finally sit back and enjoy the good things in life, and raise one’s children well. It was in this atmosphere of affluence and affirmation that we, who were the future radicals of the sixties, grew up. In little more than a decade, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew would appeal to our “middle-American” parents to abandon their children. My father and mother, John Francis Hayden and Genevieve Isabelle 1. 1. 5 Garity, were born at the end of the Victorian age, met each other in the Depression, and brought me into the world on December 11, 1939, while Hitler’s armies were marching across Europe. Their forebears—seven of my great-grandparents—journeyed through history’s mists from such barren places as county Monaghan in old Ulster, looking for a better life during the potato famines and British persecutions of the mid-nineteenth century. The “boat people” of their time, they settled the Wisconsin frontier, sent their sons to die in the Civil War, and became peaceful dairy farmers, small merchants and laborers in towns with the Indian names of Nashota and Oconomowoc. My father’s family, composed of Haydens and Foleys, migrated to Milwaukee, where they would eventually root themselves in the emerging Irish-American political structure. An ancient drawing of James Foley’s General Store and Post Office, in a Wisconsin historical magazine, gives a vivid flavor of the community of immigrants. Construction workers resting on their picks and shovels, women holding children, and a small knot of men in conversation are mingled around the big wood porch. James Foley, with a white beard, garbed in a full-body apron, presides over the neighbors at the front door. Someone is pasting up a campaign poster promising PROSPERITY FOR ALL. Atop the store is the Foleys’ house, with a porch where two women are hanging out laundry to dry. A man is sitting in a rocking chair reading the newspaper. A large overhanging tree provides a welcome shade for the goings-on. My grandfather, Thomas Francis Hayden, was a founder and teacher at the Milwaukee Law School, a tax assessor in the city’s 3rd Ward, a justice of the peace, and director of the Northwestern Building and Loan Association. His wife, Mary Ducey Hayden, died of a liver disease at forty-four when my father was just seven years old, leaving three sons and a daughter who were raised by a series of housekeepers while my grandfather worked his long hours. Perhaps because he had little or no mother’s love, my father grew up to be a young man who could not easily show emotion. He either kept his feelings to himself or expressed them through a cynical humor that became his popular trademark. Over six feet tall, slender, and prematurely balding, he dressed in conservative suits and narrow ties. My favorite photo of him shows a smiling...