Put Your Bodies Upon The Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s (American Ways Series) [Hardcover]

Kenneth J. Heineman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1566633516 | ISBN-13: 978-1566633512 | Publication Date: February 20, 2001

What began at colleges in the sixties as a rejection of parental authority and the Vietnam War rapidly evolved into a social movement, one with lasting influences in diverse areas of American life. As anti-Communist and Great Society Democrats lost control of the Vietnam War and the unrest in America's inner cities, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the chief organization of the campus-based New Left, gained strength, ending the decade with 100,000 members. From political protest, SDS and its faculty and intellectual allies moved to violent confrontation with university and government officials. Sit-ins, building takeovers, riots, and strikes hit more than 300 of the nation's 2,000 campuses in the 1960s. Between January 1969 and April 1970, young radicals bombed 5,000 police stations, corporate offices, military facilities, and campus buildings. Twenty-six thousand students were arrested and thousands injured or expelled while engaged in protest activities. Meanwhile 57,000 youths, many of whom lacked the financial means to attend college and secure draft deferments, died in Vietnam. Against a backdrop of student protest, the campus drug culture blossomed. In Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels (a quote from Free Speech leader Mario Savio), Mr. Heineman plays no favorites in indicting foolishness and absurdity on both left and right. While his account may make us wonder what happened to our common sense in those years, his assessment of the causes and consequences of the sixties revolt is impossible to evade. Heineman's sensible survey of student protest in the 1960s neither celebrates upheaval nor condemns the reform impulse. As a result, members of both camps can read his chronicle of events at Berkeley and elsewhere with nostalgia and for insight. —Dallas Morning News

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Writing on the 1960s and its constituent parts the New Left, Vietnam, etc. has become a cottage industry, but there is certainly room for a balanced, nuanced overview of that enigmatic era. Unfortunately, this is not it. Heineman, an Ohio University historian and author of Campus Wars and other works, contends that the turbulence of the 1960s was a form of class conflict. On one side were privileged students at elite universities (and also radical black organizations) who, along with their supporters among intellectuals, the clergy and the media, were rabidly anti-American and disdainful of the nation's values. On the other side was the white working class, hardworking and patriotic, willing to serve in Vietnam but reviled and ridiculed by the radical elite and so alienated from them. This is an interesting thesis, with more than a little truth to it, but here Heineman, rather than analyzing it, merely announces it. Missing is any real examination of the complex social and historical factors that led so many young people at the time to question so much, replaced by oversimplified explanations, broad generalizations, irrelevant information and questionable assertions. What is left is a caricature of radical students arrogant, hedonistic and nihilistic, prone to romanticizing violence. There is truth here as well, but partial truth, for an era as complex as the 1960s cannot be so easily summed up. Thus, while an interesting if peculiar polemic, regrettably this falls far short of being a useful historical guide.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this wide-ranging but scattershot assessment of the 1960s in America, historian Heineman argues that the student protest movement divided the nation by pitting one social class against another and left a legacy of moral relativism and civic apathy. In separate chapters, he discusses the organized student protest against the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the countercultural movement, and the part played in these struggles by political activists, many of whom have since repudiated their radical activities and become conservatives. Despite Heineman's initial claim of evenhandedness, the author revels in his attacks on the activists of the decade who have not recanted their beliefs, and he repeatedly attempts to score points against the student radicals by exposing excesses, prejudices, and ironies in their actions (sexism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and racism). His barbs sometimes hit their mark, but this is largely a polemic against the student radicals of the Sixties rather than a study of the period. Better books on the subject include Barbara Tischler's anthology, Sights on the Sixties (LJ 6/15/92), and such memoirs as Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1989), Peter Collier and David Horowitz's Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (LJ 3/15/89), and Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (LJ 9/1/94), which supports the cultural criticisms Heineman makes.AJack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (February 20, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566633516
• ISBN-13: 978-1566633512
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,145,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poor treatment of subject, March 13, 2005

By 

Michael L. Wilson (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Put Your Bodies Upon The Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s (American Ways Series) (Hardcover)

The first alert should have come with the absence of footnotes. No self-respecting scholar would assemble facts supposedly making a case without citing sources.

Disappointment in "Throw Your Bodies Upon the Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s" grows as Kenneth J. Heineman paints the radical student movement as a destructive monolith. The movement's efforts in the fields of civil rights and the women's movement are judged as harshly as the violent aspects of student activism.

Head-scratching passages infect the prose like weeds:

** On the disproportionate share of blacks fighting in the Vietnam War, Heineman writes: "SDSers may have posted pictures of Stokely Carmichael on their dormitory room walls, but they still allowed working-class blacks to go to Vietnam in their place." His point being what? Heineman fails to realize that SDSers wanted to end the war so that neither blacks nor whites would die in Southeast Asia.

** "In 1965, (Monsignor Charles Owen) Rice, writing in the diocesan newspaper, the Pittsburgh Catholic, contended that the United States was the aggressor in Vietnam." If Heineman had acknowledged the Vietnam War as a nationalistic struggle -- the accepted viewpoint of respected scholars -- perhaps he would not have been so offended by a view of the United States' role as aggression.

** "Both (Democratic Congressman Gaylord) Nelson and (William) Proxmire had worked with the Madison left in the 1950s to unseat Senator Joseph McCarthy."
And for that, Mr. Heineman, they should be praised, not criticized.

** " ... polls in 1966 and 1967 showed that 40 percent of the public did not believe citizens had the right to protest against the Vietnam War." This might be the most chilling passage in the book. For a professor, who by definition must champion freedom of expression, to cite a datum that so contradicts a linchpin of a free United States is mind-boggling.

** "Eighty percent (of those arrested at a riot in Chicago) tested positive for LSD, marijuana and hashish." Mr. Heineman undoubtedly means "or hashish" instead of "and hashish." This might be considered a minor error, but the lack of scrutiny apparent in this example undermines the credibility of every fact Heineman cites.

** Carl Bernstein's father "had been a Communist lawyer in the 1930s and 1940s." Besides being irrelevant, this fact implies that because of Bernstein's father's politics, the Watergate scandal should have been excused.

** From a statement of former Yale University president Benno Schmidt, decrying the political correctness movement on U.S. campuses: "A university is a place where people have to speak the unspeakable and think the unthinkable and challenge the unchallengeable." Mr. Heineman's use of this passage is ironic, although probably unintentionally so. Here he refutes most of what he has been trying to say for the previous 215 pages -- that college-aged men and women in the 1960s and 1970s should have shut up, cut their hair, and willingly gone off to Southeast Asia to kill or be killed.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Offers a different perspective on Cold War history, April 10, 2002

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Put Your Bodies Upon The Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s (American Ways Series) (Paperback)

An intriguing coverage offers a different perspective on Cold War history. Kenneth Heineman's Put Your Bodies Upon The Wheels outlines the 1960s student revolt which evolved into a social movement with lasting influences. The author examines the ideas which fostered protests, considering how these efforts succeeded in dividing the nation along racial and cultural lines.