Review

General Books

Dominick Cavallo focuses his examination of the tumultuous decade of the 1960s on the discontented white youths who participated in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the counterculture. He proposes to answer two questions: why did these manifestations of radicalism occur and what do they mean in terms of American history? Cavallo links the counterculture and the New Left to the American past to show similarities with the American revolutionary period, the romanticism of early American writers such as Henry David Thoreau, and the idealization of life in the Wild West. Other studies of the 1960s have ignored these similarities, leaving the decade "generally unhinged from what went before, and painfully alien to what followed. It remains, therefore, inevitably misunderstood and misinterpreted" (p. 9). In his first chapter, Cavallo assesses three major themes that scholars have used to explain the 1960s youth culture: the Vietnam War, family life in the 1940s and 1950s, and young peoples' desires to fulfill the political and moral values they learned from their parents. Using this thematic approach, he divides his book into three sections called "Sources of Ferment in the Forties and Fifties," "The Sixties in American History I: The Counterculture and Rock and Roll," and The Sixties in American History II: Students for a Democratic Society."	1
Part One examines the complacency of the 1950s, the desire that young Americans had for stability, child rearing practices, and the reasons why some of these young people became interested in challenging the status quo. Here Cavallo invokes the legacies of Jefferson, Thoreau, and Emerson to make connections with Americans' desires for individualism and to construct metaphors of "movement" and "settlement." One of the more intriguing sections, it provides a spirited analysis of the popularity of westerns and their impact on perceptions of manhood. Part Two explores the San Francisco scene of the Diggers, who used theater and acting "to protest American limitations on American freedom" (p. 102), the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, and Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who hopped into a refurbished school bus for an LSD road trip. Turning to rock music, Cavallo shows how musicians Frank Zappa, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, and Bob Dylan controlled their performances and recordings--they "wanted to make both art and money through their music" (p. 166). Their songs were not political; they were anthems to individualism because they had different meanings to different listeners. Here, Cavallo conjures up images of Tocqueville's views of American culture. Part Three provides an overview of the development and early activities of SDS, with Cavallo drawing parallels to political debates, especially those involving anti-federalists, that surfaced in this country in 1776 and 1788 over the kind of government best suited to the United States. He points out that SDS members did not draw inspiration from those eighteenth-century ideas, but rather they exposed "the incongruity between the country's democratic ethos...and an eighteenth-century political system designed...to exclude the majority of Americans from direct decision-making power" (p. 216). SDS also tried to put ideas into action, as with 1964's Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), a movement to organize the poor. Despite good intentions, SDS never developed a vision of their ideal political community and failed to encourage the poor into greater political participation.	2
Suitable for any upper level or graduate course on post-World War II America as well as courses on the 1960s, this book serves as a good companion or alternative to Terry Anderson's The Movement and the Sixties and Godfrey Hodgson's America In Our Time. A bibliography is not included and it would have been useful to students. While too specialized to assign in most introductory American history survey courses, those who teach the entire survey in one semester should consider the book because of Cavallo's approach of linking the 1960s with earlier points in American history. It would help to show students how politics and culture are never neatly confined to one decade. However, while the strength of Cavallo's book lies in his ability to historically situate the 1960s, he is not clear about the ideas that did influence the white radicals. College educated, these young people presumably studied American history and literature—what did they accept and reject? Such a consideration would have made a rich book richer.	3
Theresa Kaminski University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point

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