Tom and Jane vs. Big Business

They begin a 52-city crusade

It was the biggest antinuclear rally in U.S. history. To the tunes of Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Pete Seeger, 200,000 blue-jeaned, banner-waving protesters thronged Manhattan's Battery Park last week, conjuring up visions of the antiwar days. Bella Abzug was there. So were Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader and Environmentalist Barry Commoner. And so, in another flashback to the '60s, were Actress Jane Fonda and her husband Activist Tom Hayden, this time talking of a nuclear Armageddon. Said Fonda to the cheering crowd: "We have to think of ourselves as Paul Reveres and Pauline Reveres, going through our country town by town, city by city, warning people about the dangers."

The rally, organized by Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), was the largest so far of a series of antinuclear protests nationwide. At least 20 demonstrations are scheduled in the next few weeks, from picketing at a proposed nuclear waste-dumping site near Carlsbad, N. Mex., to a planned sit-in at the site of a nuclear power plant being built in Seabrook, N.H. But for Fonda, 41, and Hayden, 38, the New York City rally was the launching pad for another crusade: their drive to publicize Hayden's anti-Big Business Campaign for Economic Democracy.

Their target is what they call "unbridled corporate power" in America. According to Fonda and Hayden, multinational corporations neglect the public interest in their rush for profits. Their prime example is nuclear power, which they urge be phased out and replaced with Government-subsidized solar energy. Says Fonda, with a catchy show-biz zinger: "It is time to look at crime in the suites, not just in the streets." Protests Hayden: "While we may have democracy in the political arena, we certainly don't in the economic one, where a board of directors has dictatorial powers." Fonda and Hayden --dubbed the "Mork and Mindy" of the left in a column by Conservative George Will--call for participation by workers and consumers in the making of corporate policies. Just how this would be accomplished is unclear even to Hayden. Says he: "We have more of a vision than a blueprint."

During the next month, the pair will take their campaign to 52 cities. They will meet newspaper editors and appear on talk shows and at union rallies. The bills for the $150,000 trip will be covered by the $5,000 fee they charge for speeches before college audiences.

The Fonda-Hayden road show moved last week from Battery Park to Harrisburg, Pa., where it got a rousing reception from 1,000 people at an antinuclear rally. The next day, the couple made a side trip to be photographed across the river from the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, a media event that drew some 40 members of the press, and to talk with nearby residents. Then they headed north for stops in New York City, Manchester, N.H., and Boston, where Fonda delighted more than 1,000 women office workers by telling them that she is making a movie about "a secretary wanting to murder the boss." Everywhere they appeared, they dressed in executive style and toned down their rhetoric from the militancy of the 1960s. Explained Hayden: "The rebels of yesterday are the respectable citizens of today. Ten years ago, Nixon was in power and Spiro Agnew was in office.* --Now Nixon and Agnew are in disgrace and the others went to jail. Look who's left."

Almost everywhere the pair won ovations from overflow crowds. For the most part, the audiences accepted the Fonda-Hayden message about nuclear power uncritically--a fact that caused the Edison Electric Institute to dispatch an "energy truth squad" of two young engineers to follow in their wake and present the industry's side of the nuclear argument. Even some members of anti-nuclear groups resent the attention paid to Fonda and Hayden. "But what can you do when all the cameras are focused on Jane?" asked Charles Garlow, a member of Ralph Nader's Public Interest Research Group in Washington.

Although the Fonda-Hayden tour looks and sounds like a political campaign, Hayden denies that he is either serving as an advanceman for his friend, California Governor Jerry Brown, or setting the stage for a possible run himself against Republican Senator S.I. Hayakawa in 1982. Hayden campaigned for the seat in 1976 but lost in the Democratic primary to Hayakawa's predecessor, John Tunney. To Hayden, running for office would be a logical next step to this year's campaign against Big Business. Says he: "The radical or reformer sets a climate. The politician then comes along and inherits the constituency that the reformer created. My problem is to be both."

* Ten years ago, Hayden, a co-founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.), stood trial as one of the Chicago Seven on charges of provoking riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. His conviction was overturned on appeal.

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