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

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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.

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.