Transitional Decades

...Virtually from his very first pages, Heineman also places excessive emphasis on sexual promiscuity and drugs, almost making them the central themes of protest...

...The long, gaudy, depressing '70s reinventedAmerica," Schulman writes...

...Moreover, except in an occasional sidebar, no reference is made to the nonradical student movements of the period—to the throngs of "Clean-for-Gene" (McCarthy) partisans or other peaceful demonstrators alongside the smaller cadre of radicals...

...We are told that radical professor Staughton Lynd's parents "had been Leftist sociologists in the 1930s and [Henry ?.] Wallace supporters in 1948...

...No less annoying are Heineman's constant references to the family backgrounds of individual protest leaders...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Professor of public management, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University It feels, frankly, a bit weird to read professional historians'accounts of events one has personally experienced...

...By contrast, Bruce J. Schulman of Boston University has produced a work that shines both as evocation and interpretation...

...Schulman's main theme is that the '70s represented a transitional period...

...that the film Jaws began the practice of movie tie-ins using T-shirts, toys, and fast- food promotions...

...This reasonable reading, however, is not merely marred but destroyed by Heineman's woefully incomplete picture of the decade...

...But the market—in particular, starting new businesses—became the favored means for personal liberation and cultural revolution...

...His relentless machine-gun spray of vignettes and stories fails to give the reader any real sense of how the radical student protests evolved from the civil rights demonstrations of the early '60s— which kept at least one foot in the John F. Kennedy/Peace Corps culture—to the anti-Vietnam sit-ins, and finally to the totalitarian ideology and violence that hurtled the movement toward self-destruction...

...The society that emerged has "preserved a '70s emphasis on authenticity and freedom, on political transformation through personal liberation...

...But Imean to pay The Seventies the ultimate compliment when I say I will recommend it to my own teenage daughters...

...that direct-mail fundraising was pioneered in the 1970s by the National Conservative Political Action Committee...

...In Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels Kenneth J. Heineman of Ohio University serves up a shrill, hysterical, streamof-consciousness description of the student protest movement...

...Sundry other fascinating details are largely irrelevant...

...and of Kramer vs...

...Enough time has elapsed to render potentially valuable the historian's dual role: evoking a period for those to whom it is indeed history, and interpreting it from the perspective provided by the passage of time...

...Bruce Schulman's The Seventies, happily, is well-organized, well-written and insightful...

...Meineman's overall assessment of '60s student protests is sensible enough, if hardly original (actually, it corresponds with a common view back then): Spoiled upper-middle-class rebels cut themselves off culturally and politically from the national mainstream, dooming their efforts to bring about change and setting in motion a conflict between themselves and working-class Americans very different from the one they promoted between workers and employers...

...It effectively brings the decade to life, and it offers an analysis of what transpired that benefits from the perspective of a larger historical context...

...For example: Actress Shirley MacLaine, who supported the campus protesters, "later claimed that she could talk to the spirits of the dead...

...But, to use a phrase that came into vogue after the decades that are the subjects of these books, those of us who lived through the 1960s and '70s need to "get over it...

...and even that the reference to somebody who "gets it" (always associated in my mind with the most offensive Silicon Valley Internet bubble) grew out of the Esalen Institute, that hotbed of '70s California psychobabble...

...Yes, there was a lot of drug abuse in the '60s, and it would be astonishing if sex were not on the minds of teenagers in any time, but there was certainly a good deal more to the student movement than that...

...In a sort of scatological tour, we are informed that in 1963 Mississippi Freedom Summer civil rights volunteers spent their evenings "having sex in a field in the countryside," and that "the [white] women engaged in sexual intercourse with the black men...

...In 1964, at the Berkeley Free Speech protests, "students set up makeshift tents around [a police] squad car, with many taking the opportunity to have sex on the street and sidewalk...

...And two of the revolutionaries who robbed a Boston bank in 1970 "had received Federal financial aid to go to college...

...He reminds us, for instance, that Kevin Phillips invented the word "Sunbelt" in The Emerging Republican Majority...

...The Seventies is a superb one-volume treatment of an era that, as Schulman notes, is more interesting and important than its reputation...

...The author uses both political and cultural history (including movies and music) to illustrate the decade's two important trends, feminism and what he calls the "Southernization" of America...

...Feminism's momentum is captured in the story of the National Organization for Women...

...of Billie Jean King's tennis victory against the haughty, middle-aged Bobby Riggs...

...The decade took some of the values of the '60s— individual liberty, antielitism, respect for racial and gender differences—and rehoused them in a politics still with us today that is far more conservative, with a distrust of government and de-emphasis of the plight of the downtrodden...

...that radical graduate student Maurice Zeitlin's parents "were 1930s-era Leftists...

...Kramer, a film starring Dustin Hoffman as a dad who seeks custody of his child in a divorce...

...Locals in Buffalo, New York, frequently referred to the State University campus there as "Tel Aviv Tech" because of its many Jewish students...

...Surely one can criticize student moderates for allowing themselves to be duped by their more extreme counterparts without ignoring their efforts or disparaging the idealism they displayed...

...of Alan Alda's personification of the new "sensitive" male...

...lnPut Your Bodies Upon the Wheels student protests of the "Where Have All the Flowers Gone...

...Southernization is a story of political and ideological realignment, as well as of the spread of country music and its culture beyond its traditional borders...

...Young people seeking to understand the student protests of the '60s will need to look elsewhere than in the chaotic Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels...

...and that Kent State radical leader Howie Emmer was "the son of middleclass Ohio Communist Party organizers...

...His book recalls the '60s only ostensively, adopting the worst of the decade's manic, disorganized tone...

...that a parent of Malvina Reynolds (who wrote the anti-suburbia song "Little Boxes") had been "a founder of the American Communist Party...

...days merge into those of the "Street Fighting Man" age practically without distinction...

...Intriguing, too, are Schulman's reverse "where they come from" stories, telling us the origin of phrases and cultural phenomena that began in the '70s but remain with us today...