When he was growing up, ’60s student radical, veteran social activist, and politician Tom Hayden gave barely any thought to his roots. His parents had all but erased their Irish identity during their hard-fought assimilation into the American middle class. And the identifiable Irish-Americans he did see, like anti-Semitic radio demagogue Father Charles Coughlin (who was actually Hayden’s childhood parish priest) and thuggish, autocratic Chicago mayor Richard Daley, embodied the worst Irish-American stereotypes. So when Hayden thought of his ethnicity at all, he envisioned himself in opposition to it.

With his new book Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America (Verso, $25), Hayden explores the interweavings of his own ethnic and political history, specifically his discovery, in 1968, that being Irish-American was hardly incompatible with being leftist. Reached in Los Angeles, Hayden spoke to the Phoenix about overcoming the stultifying effects of assimilation and drawing on one’s Irish identity in the fight for social justice.

Q: You were initially only dimly aware of your Irish background.

A: I grew up very differently from most Irish in Boston. The Irish Catholics there grew up in and stayed immersed in that subculture. But even in the Boston area, I found that there are many people who were brought up with little knowledge of their Irish heritage, even though their family was strongly Irish Catholic and went to the St. Patrick’s Day parades. There’s a tendency even there to put the concept of assimilation first and foremost. It’s kind of a peaceful form of ethnic cleansing. You become more and more American by reducing your Irishness to merely a symbol of your past. Your future is American, and your past is Irish. When I grew up, it didn’t really occur to me that I was Irish. My identity had an emptiness, which was one of the main complaints of the rebels and radicals of the ’60s. Life was offering us nothing but authoritarian pronouncements and empty talk from politicians. We were looking for meaning, and [for me] the meaning of being Irish had been erased.

Q: And a lot of those authoritarian pronouncements came from Irish-Americans like Joe McCarthy and Richard Daley.

A: Yeah, the Irish that I encountered were the outcome of the extreme assimilation process. They’d become super patriotic instead of merely patriotic. Super law and order. Super obedient. I’d had enough of the authoritarian. I was rebelling against it. But I made the common mistake of believing that I was rebellious in spite of being Irish. [I thought] you had to leave any trace of Irishness behind in order to become independent, think for yourself, to support civil rights, to oppose Vietnam. I was a radical without memory.

Q: So when did you recover that memory?

A: My epiphany came when I saw these marchers in Northern Ireland singing "We Shall Overcome," marching into the dogs and tear gas and police batons in Derry. I suddenly realized that if I was looking for an identity, these people were part of it. But who were they? And why had half my life gone by without my parents conveying to me that I was Irish?

Q: So what advice would you give Irish-Americans who’ve assimilated to the point that Irishness has been reduced to paper shamrocks and green beer on St. Patrick’s Day? How does one go about "re-inhabiting their history"?

A: Instead of assimilating into your own disappearance, assimilate into the whole world the way [former Irish president] Mary Robinson has. Here’s a Northern Irish human-rights attorney and feminist who became president of her country and then became UN human-rights commissioner. That’s quite remarkable! And I believe that [came about] not because she was white and European, but because she was Irish. I think it’s because of the so-called developed countries at the UN and in Europe [that] the Irish are seen as the most like the colonized world, most likely to be sympathetic on the question of human rights in Chiapas or [for] the Palestinians, and independent of the United States on nuclear issues or the death penalty. And yet, because she’s Irish and European, she’s acceptable to the big powers. So she’s found a way of being "global Irish," which is quite different from being Irish or Irish-American.

That’s the positive message I’m trying to convey. When Ted Kennedy gives a speech for civil rights, I want people to say, "Isn’t it great that he takes a stand for social justice. And you know what? It’s because he’s Irish." When that happens, the meaning of being Irish will have finally changed.