Student Protest: The Causes and
Effects
A Review of Put Your Bodies upon
the Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s
Kenneth
Heineman
Author Biography
Born in Lansing, Michigan, Kenneth
Heineman studied at Michigan State University and the
University of
Pittsburgh. He has received a Ph.D. in history. Not only did
he learn about history, but Heineman also works as a
professor of history at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.
Heineman’s other works include A Catholic New Deal,
God Is a Conservative, and Campus Wars.
Contrary to the general misconception, the 1960s protests
occurred not entirely for the sake of ending the Vietnam War.
In his book, Put Your Bodies upon the Wheels: Student
Revolt in the 1960s, Kenneth Heineman, a professor of
history at Ohio University, argued that the more pressing
matter that fumed the student protests all over the nation was
the result of the students’ rebellion against conservatism.
In a conflict between the New Left students and the
Conservative Right generation, the students protested
against the school’s traditional practice “in loco
parentis,” in
which the school takes over the responsibility of the
parents to limit the freedom of the students; and when the
shooting started, the protests escalated to violent and
widespread chaos.1 Though Heineman supported his
argument with detailed accounts of the protests and
statistics, he failed to justify his thesis due to his
questionable
sources. Nevertheless, Heineman proposed an interesting
interpretation of the period, choosing to analyze the conflicts
of the student protests based on class differences and as a
continuation of the radicalism of the communist crisis.
Radicalism in schools was by no means new; however, during
the period of the 1960s, school radicalism mounted to new
heights, epitomizing the very meaning of radicalism. The
first quarter of Heineman’s book attempted to provide a factual
overview of the student protests and its influences and
effects. Beginning with only a few members of nonviolent
organizations such as the Student Democratic Society (SDS)
and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
both groups gained momentum as the Democratic Party lost
control over Vietnam and urban unrest. SDS was originally a
response to parental authority and the Vietnam War; however,
it quickly became a matter of social protest. As the
Vietnam crisis swelled and the federal government initiated
the attacking of nonviolent students, SDS became more
violent. SNCC was a student-created program focused on civil
rights for blacks in the South. In March 1965, President
Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision to deploy combat troops in
South Vietnam caused a surge of student and faculty protests.
From sit-ins to teach-ins, the college campus united in
opposition to President Johnson and the Vietnam War. As the war
grew bloodier, the campus protests became more epidemic as
students began to protest against the draft and
school-involved military research. Alongside the student
protests against the Vietnam War, black activists of the North
took active measures against whites, contrasting with the
non-aggressive black activists of the South. Soon, the
problems in Vietnam brought violence in schools with the SDS
splitting between armed and unarmed. Students began a flood
of active violence as the situation brought “bombing,
building seizures, and assaults against faculty and
students” who
didn’t accept the radicalism of the SDS or Black
Panthers.2 New student protest groups also
emerged with the
Young Americans for Freedom, promoting the idea to
do-your-own-thing, and Boomers, protesting against any
influence
against student sex life. In April of 1970, President
Richard Nixon attacked Cambodia to stop the country’s
assistance
for Ho Chi Minh’s communist regime. The attack brought one
of the most critical events in the history of student
protests: federal murder of rioting students. On May 4,
1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire upon unarmed
students,
killing four students and wounding nine others. The Kent
State incident elevated the crisis as a strike of four million
youth took place soon after the Kent State incident on the
President’s decision to invade Cambodia. The deployment of
soldiers and the attack on Cambodia were accompanied by the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, which led
to rioting in black neighborhoods. Thus with the rise of
violence, New Left radicalism also became more widespread.
Aside from protest against the war and for civil rights,
student culture demanded freedom in school along with the
increase in the participation of universities and colleges,
raising the desire to escape parental restrictions. However,
universities became responsible for regulating students in
their social activities. By taking this responsibility, the
universities initiated a rebellious surge over the entire
campus. With the availability of condoms and other methods of
birth control and ways to avoid sexually transmitted
diseases, university students demanded more freedom,
especially for
sex. With the war raging in Vietnam and the rise in the
civil rights movement, student protests of this confusing era
began as responses to decisions made by the general
conservative rightists. The 1960s protests and cultural
changes can
be seen in two different lights: the interpretation for a
good 1960 and a bad 1960. Those arguing for a good era aimed
at the criticism of the era to be from the incapable rights;
thus, the New Left attempted to straighten what the right
failed to accomplish—its goal in university cultures.
However; those arguing for a bad era pointed out the
confusion and
violence of the period. They criticized the leftists for
using the 1960s circumstances as excuses for radicalism and
absolute chaos. Nevertheless, the 1960s saw a schism in
culture, generation, ideals, and goals.
In the second quarter of the book, Heineman recreated the
escalation of the tension and eventually the explosion of
protests. The protestors caused not only turmoil and urban
unrest, but also separation of the New Left from the Right.
Students often antagonized the working-class whites with
economic and elitist stereotypes. Even though the working-class
whites were similar to students in their attitudes toward
war, the students blindly opposed them as they were seen to be
of higher status than the students. Religiously, the Roman
Catholics had minimized participation in campus activism. The
Irish Catholics were the most prominent type of Catholics in
the radicalism of the New Left due to their enrollment in
college, allowing them deferment from the draft. Their
position in the New Left activism was also due to their
anti-anti-Communist beliefs as most Irish attended
universities, which employed professors who upheld radical
ideals.
Following communist radicalism, the New Left tried to
differentiate themselves from the Old Left by opposing white
workers and turning to the lower class for radicalism.
However, the New and Old Lefts were similar in their
criticism of
the United States of being an imperialist power. The
radicals often idealized foreign revolutionaries such as Ho Chi
Minh and Joseph Stalin, who epitomized the Communist ideals.
The New Left students often opposed the older generations
as they tried to separate themselves from their parents,
showing off their rebellious nature. Even with the tension
against elitists, children of white-collar, working class
parents were more prone to be supportive of radicalism than
those of blue-collar because of their financial situation.
Ultimately, more elite radicals have the resources to bail
out of trouble, thus creating more opportunity and more
freedom to spread their radicalism. By 1967, the creation of
CALCAV, an organization of various religions in support of
student protests, marked the support of some religious groups
for radicalism; however, Pentecostals, fundamentalists, and
more traditional Protestant clergy favored the Vietnam War.
The American army showed “class divisions that separated
affluent Scarsdale from blue-collar Queens,” with eighty
percent of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam with
blue-collar origin.3 The student protests split
the nation
in many ways from religion to economics to age.
Heineman explains the explosiveness of the protests in
violent confrontations, which calmed to an eventual end in the
third quarter of the book. For the pursuit of opposing in
loco parentis, radical students at Berkeley began the Free
Speech Movement on October 1, 1964. A policeman attempted to
arrest Weineberg who started the movement but was detained
for thirty-two hours by a mob of students. Aside from
trapping the police car in the mob, students began giving
lectures
and speeches, using the car as a podium. Furthermore, the
students began to have sex on the sidewalk and street.
Weinberg proclaimed his famous statement, “don’t trust
anyone over thirty,” which would be adopted by the
Boomers.4 It signified the beginning of the
student protest as an age issue with the new generation in
opposition to the old generation. Initially, many students
supported Johnson’s reluctance in attacking North Vietnam and
some wanted an increase in the United States’s military
action; however, Berkeley rebelled against the war as the
students physically intimidated navy recruiters. The radical
student group, SDS, began to call for a movement “from
protest to resistance,” encouraging violent action from
students.5 Radical SDS members attacked opposing
students and seriously wounded several policemen. As a
response to this rise in violence, the Madison police injured
several SDS members and arrested more. This caused the
tension to escalate as students of the University of Wisconsin
vowed to destroy their campus. SUNY-Buffalo University also
saw an increase in student rebellion through open drug
consumption. The SDS reached into the area and created their
own liberated zone of what they acknowledged to be the Free
Republic of Buffalo. Aside from localized radicalism, Kent
State attempted to publicize their radicalism. The students
of Kent State invaded a speech by Nixon with shouts for the
victory of Ho Chi Minh and some inappropriate name-calling.
Nixon managed to pull a win in the next election by his
desperate announcement of promising a withdrawal from the war.
Yet, even then, rioting still ran rampant from coast to
coast with many Columbia SDS members attempting to open a
communist front in the United States through violence. This
explosion of student protests was ended by the withdrawal of
the troops from Vietnam and the public’s desire to end this
chaotic period.
Lastly, in the final chapter, Heineman describes the effect
of the 1960s: its scars and its legacies. The student
protests of the 1960s left a great heritage in the United
States’s history. Politically, the Democratic Party, which was
originally created for the benefit of the “workers and
socially conservative white Southerners,” transformed to
gain the
support of more wealthy elite class.6 Conversely,
the Republican Party, a party of the wealthy, adopted the
support of the lower class. The United States recovered from
the student protest and the rise of boomers and the
conflicts of the 1960s that was the period, but couldn’t
leave unscathed.
Heineman attempted to provide an overview of radical student
protest and social unrest, including the cause and the
result of the protests. The cause of the student protests
came from not the Vietnam War, but from the universities’
parental authority over an increasing amount of students.
The increase occurred due to the army draft and the
opportunity for deferment for university drafts. Heineman
combined the rioting protests with the counter culture
movement, arguing that they are both responses against the
increasing participation in universities. Rejecting the
traditional belief that the Vietnam War was a direct
catalyst for mass chaos, Heineman proposed that it only
increased
the riots that were originally focused on the universities’
parental authority.
Arguing for a new thesis, Heineman makes the assumption that
the student protest polarized the nation. Heineman limited
the New Left for the Jews, middle-class workers, youth, and
liberal religious clergy; while the rights and the Old Left
included the wealthy, the conservative clergy, and the older
generation. The incidents of the year 2001 prompted a harsh
reminding of the problems in the United States, pitching the
nation into a war, which many students criticized. Heineman
took the modern criticism against war and responded with his
interpretation of the period of mass riot and chaos.
Heineman’s stereotypes of the polarization became the basis
of his argument for his entire interpretation.
Heineman’s radical interpretation met harsh criticism for
his stereotypes and his lack of valuable sources for his
statistics. Introducing the rise of the radicals during the
1960s, Heineman used statistics based on “some 120 memoirs,
pseudo-histories, histories, and polemics,” only a few of
these offered any concrete facts.7 Other critics
noted that Heineman interpreted the SDS to be initially
corrupt in contrast to the traditional belief that the group
gradually sank into anarchy. Also, Heineman argued that the
conflicts in the 1960s of the New Left were merely “a
continuation of the 1930s communist Old Left.”8
He believed that the student protests were largely due to the
participation of the communist left in rejection against the
imperialist right, thus leading to the extension of the
communist problem. Heineman claimed to focus on the student
protests; however, he combined the protests with counter
culture and the civil rights movement, creating an unfocused
and scrambled interpretation of the period. Although the
three events occurred at the same time and are consequences
of each other, Heineman utilized both the counter culture
and the civil rights movement to confuse the issue of
student protests, arguing for morality as well as for racism
and
for the rejection of traditional ideologies. Overall,
Heineman created a scattered overview of the 1960s with
multiple
focuses based on questionable sources.
The 1960s student protest posed a watershed in United States
history by completely altering the political spectrum. The
Democratic Party and the Republican Party switched sides
with opposite supports and focuses. Heineman also “argued for a
cultural revolution”9 as the counter culture
forced a more lenient authority over the students with radical
reforms on the issue of sex.
From a conservative-oriented United States because of the
threat of the spread of communism, the 1960s created a focus
on more liberal and leftist perspectives. From civil rights
to anti-anti-communism and anti-imperialism, the student
protests “created a wave of effect” to bring the focus on
activism.10 The 1960s left a legacy through the
alteration in the political spectrums and altered the
universities’ role on students’ private social behaviors.
Ultimately, Heineman interpreted the student protests of the
1960s to be “a response to the parental authority of
universities” sparked by Vietnam War failure and urban
unrest.11 The students weren’t looking for the
end to
the Vietnam War, they were looking for ways to avoid
participating in it. The students were not focused on the new
radicalisms, they were rejecting conservatism. The protests
polarized the nation with an increase in support of the New
Left and civil rights. The 1960s could be summarized to be a
period of violence, chaos, sex, drugs, and radicalism with
rebellious behavior against old generation conservatism.
review by Robert Chang
- Heineman, Kenneth. Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels:
Student Revolt in the 1960s. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
Publisher, 2001, 106.
- Heineman, Kenneth 57.
- Heineman, Kenneth 76.
- Heineman, Kenneth 107.
- Heineman, Kenneth 94.
- Heineman, Kenneth 225.
- Kors, Alan C. Sex, Drugs, Jews, and Rock ‘n’ Roll. Nov
2001. May 2006. .
- Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels: Student Revolt in the
1960s. May 2001. Online. May 2006.
.
- Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels: Student Revolt in the
1960s. May 2001. Online. May 2006.
.
- Kors, Alan C. Sex, Drugs, Jews, and Rock ‘n’ Roll. Nov
2001. Online. May 2006.
.
- Heineman, Kenneth 113.
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