Books in Brief - Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s - Review

National Review, Dec 3, 2001

Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s, by Kenneth J. Heineman (Ivan R. Dee, 251 pp., $26)

In February 1960, four black students sat down at a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter; by April 1970, the U.S. would be experiencing 5,000 terrorist bombings in a mere 15 months. How did a just civil rights struggle end in the Weathermen and Kent State? Kenneth J. Heineman's study closely follows student activism from its religious and pacifist beginnings to its takeover by a militant,

anti-American New Left. Of particular interest are the book's hard figures, which afford a much- needed reminder that the history of that decade was rewritten by its winners. Flower-powered sexual "liberation," for instance, was accompanied by an unsurprising spike in rape. And the antiwar movement was never the juggernaut Hollywood portrays: In 1967, a majority of UCLA students favored marijuana legalization; only a minority opposed the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, Heineman's conclusion-that "we will continue to feel the effects of the 1960s shock waves until the last Boomers are retired from campus, the newsroom, and political office"- vastly underestimates that era's legacy. By way of the universities, the Sixties poisoned the groundwater of American cultural life. Its teachings now live not just in politically correct fads, as Heineman suggests, but as the merely normal, the expected. Today, what used to be called "radical chic" is neither.

-Emmy Chang