Needless to say, neither continuity nor singularity of purpose is worth discussing here. The result, all the same, is an unusually accurate survey of the times and a left-wing political culture where continuity and singularity of purpose were also absent or irrelevant. Since SDS maintained a loose network of chapters on college campuses around the country, the perspectives and the degree of history-making involvement vary from story to story. Chapter topics include short accounts of the Dow-chemical protest and police riot at the University of Wisconsin, a recap of the radicalizing role of Phil Ochs’s protest songs, a community-action project in Cleveland, the legendary wedding ceremony during the administration-building occupation at Columbia, a disjointed account of romance and murder in Austin, and the emergence of women’s liberation.
The book starts off with a lengthy Pekar/Dumm overview of SDS’s history that provides the context for the magpie anthology that follows. What’s different from Geary’s Hoover bio is that there’s no shortage of emotion and passion in this unsung history. Neither do the storytellers avoid the personal weaknesses and moral ambiguities that were part of the package. The ultimate message is hopeful. Amid our Bush-era repression, SDS itself is being revived, and it needs to learn from past mistakes. That’s what Pekar offers — a kind of history text without much precedent — as a primer for that effort. One could do worse.
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