Democracy is in the streets

by Jim Miller

On June 12, 1962, sixty young activists met in Port Huron, Michigan, to draft a manifesto for their generation. The document they produced, The Port Huron Statement, helped spark a dramatic rebirth of the left in America--and ignited a decade of dissent. In this book, James Miller vividly re-creates the turbulent history of the people and ideas that shaped the New Left, and America, during the 1960s. Focusing on politics and philosophy as well as personalities, Miller chronicles the careers of both the most publicized radical leaders and the less well known theorists and activists of the decade: C. Wright Mills, the sociologist who became the prophet of the powerless to a generation of students; Al Haber, the reluctant visionary who became the first president of Students for a Democratic Society; Richard Flacks, the intellectual who combined theory and practice in a new strategy for the American left; Sharon Jeffrey, who walked her first picket line at the age of five and whose dreams