“You Know Something Is Happening, but You Don’t Know What It Is”

C. Wright Mills died on 21 March 1962. Three months prior to Mills’s untimely demise, activist Tom Hayden was appointed to write a manifesto for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) convention at the United Automobile Workers camp in Port Huron, Michigan. The sixtythree-page document, which came to be called “The Port Huron Statement,” had a special appeal for middle-class intellectuals and university

students. The statement criticized mindless anticommunism as well as the Soviet ideology and social structure.