The Underground Press: A Mosaic History

Anyway, I’m not going to drag on here. Following are passages from a collection of books and publications about the history of the Underground Press of the 1960s. They are like pieces of a mosaic. So read through them all, if you’re so inclined, to get the whole picture.

(The sources are at the end of the tale.)

“Without freedom of speech I might be in the swamp.” – Bob Dylan

The Underground Press: A Mosaic History

An understandable world was coming apart at the “seems” – appearance could not be trusted. The assassinations made no sense. Symbols of security against a communist threat – the CIA and the FBI – increasingly seemed a menace themselves. They were a source of anxiety and insecurity, not only for radical students, but for moderate legislators. Even President Lyndon Johnson was persuaded that the CIA was implicated in John Kennedy’s murder. Even the American flag changed its meaning and became more a partisan than a national symbol. (3)

… The underground press is in part a reaction to the social phenomenon of declining individualism in this country. Young people in particular have resented this trend. Not only the growing megalopolis and the expanding corporation, but also particularly the consolidated school, work against individualism. Thirty to forty thousand students thrown together on the some of the massive campuses in the country became lost in a maze of red tape, bureaucratic structure and impersonal rules. Even high school students, now housed in complexes accommodating as many as five thousand students, find themselves little more than computer numbers. (4)

The underground press, more directly and noisily than any other organ of the New Journalism, has become a force opposing … the society they have influenced. In a journalistic style that includes deep personal sincerity, concern and sensitivity, as well as militant near-illiteracy, it has attempted to raise a voice that will be heard clearly on a different plane from the established media and that will, by its distinctiveness, avoid the narcotizing dysfunction and offer practical possibilities for awakening and acting socially, politically, ecologically. This voice is the most revolutionary and, to those alienated from its audience, shocking that has ever been raised against the status quo and for a new way of life and communication (5)

They reflected a rebellion not only against the national Establishment but also against its conventional mass media. The best of the underground papers did a capable job of criticizing both and of breathing new life into the dead-center American social-political scene of the 1960s. (6)

(Art) Kunkin started the Free Press with a budget of $15 and 5,000 copies of his new paper…. By 1969, only five years later, Kunkin was turning out 64-page issues and claiming a paid circulation of 100,000 …. (7)

Technological change helped open the floodgates of this new wave of media activism. Prior to the 1960s, newspaper copy had to be set laboriously in hot type on a Linotype machine. That required technical training as well as money. But the widespread introduction of offset printing in the early years of the decade made papers cheap, easy and quick to produce. In offset printing, a competent typist can use a standard typewriter to prepare copy, which is then pasted own on flat sheets, photographed and duplicated. The offset revolution made it possible for virtually anyone so inclined to produce a newspaper. In the middle sixties, with a few dollars, a pot of glue, a typewriter and a handful of volunteers to write and lay out stories, several thousand copies of an offset tabloid newspaper could be printed. (8)

… And the advertisers are responding. Ad revenue at the Free Press, for instance, is about $5,000 a week, two-thirds of it from display ads and one-third from classified. About a fourth of the ads come from national advertisers, particularly phonograph record companies. (9)

There evolved an editorial amalgam of cultural rebellion and radical politics. The underground press was born – and it caught on. It spread from California and New York to other states on the West Coast and in New England, into the Midwest, down the East Coast, and into the South. The number of papers published throughout the country jumped from a mere handful in 1964 and 1965 to more than 300 by 1968, over 400 in 1969, at least 500 by early 1970, and to probably more than 800, in some 40 states, by late 1971. (10)

1.)    During the hippie period, 1964-1967, the papers were primarily known for psychedelic art and essays on drug use, sexual freedom and Eastern religion.
2.)    During the radical period, 1967-1970, the hippies were politicized and blended with the New Left and other radical political groups. The papers were heavy with articles about such political folk heroes as the Black Panthers and political organizers in a fairly simplistic stance of counterculture versus the straights. (11)

Underground journalists rejected the empty, monotonous life they associated with bourgeois comforts. Their papers were, accordingly, published chiefly by and for the alienated. As people who noisily derided middle-class values, underground journalists concerned themselves with liberating the body, mind and spirit in “uptight plastic” America. A 1966 issue of the Digger Papers, an occasional publication of … hippies in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, charged that “Middle class living rooms are funeral parlors and only undertakers will stay in them. Our fight is with those who would kill us through dumb work, insane war, dull money reality. (12)

That it turned abruptly in 1967 from an expression of flower-child love, participatory rock music and occult religion to coverage of campus unrest, police confrontation and radical politics further testifies that its nature (the underground press) is to react to the pressures of its young readership. Flower children were thrown in jail for sitting on the pavement in San Francisco, rock musicians were arrested for possession of marijuana in New York City, and underground journalists were beaten and busted for reporting activities of the youth movement all across the country. … The underground press slowly changed from a reflection of the isolated hippie phenomenon into the self-conscious agent of radical politics. (13)

The dissolution of the dream and the folding of the Oracle were both important events in the history of the counterculture and the underground press. They were symbolic, and to some extent promotive, of the changes that began to occur in the press and its audience. The papers and their culture began to drift away from gentleness toward more bitter political interests, more militant radicalism and more shock-value sex. This change is not a dreamed-up political act of hundreds of underground editors; it is largely a reaction to the increasing militance of police, university administrators and the “silent majority” against dissent and the values and lifestyles of the counterculture – a militance which culminated in the murdering of students at Kent State in Ohio and at Jackson State in Mississippi. (14)

But before long, people’s park was to become a paradise lost for Berkeley radicals. After the predawn police raid that retook the park, one person was killed and another blinded, setting off street fighting that lasted for days and resulted in martial law. (15)

The flowers left over from the Summer of Love – if, indeed, there were any – withered in the white heat of the Chicago convention. Demonstrators (numbering only an estimated 5,000 to 10,000), delegates, reporters and bystanders alike were gassed and clubbed before the TV cameras in a melee that surpassed all but the most apocalyptic expectations. Six hundred and sixty-eight persons were arrested during the five-day confrontation. (16)

Although relative affluence is coming to some of the underground papers, it’s still largely a bootstrap operation. One writer at the Barb says, “If Max (Scherr) ever got sick, the whole thing would fall apart.” Publication time at EVO is a “free-for-all,” according to Mr. Leggieri; everyone pitches in to make layout decisions and paste up copy. Staff writers at Avatar are getting salaries of $15 a week while the paper pays off the cost of office machines. (17)

Financing an underground newspaper is, at best, precarious. In August 1968, the Underground Press Syndicate asked its 79-paper membership, “Are You Making a Profit?” Only 28 percent replied they were; 72 percent were breaking even or losing money. (18)

… Advertising support comes from the “straight” world. Involved are such corporate giants as Radio Corp. of American, Columbia Broadcasting System Inc., American Broadcasting Co. Inc., and Warner Bros.-Seven Arts Inc. (19)

Rolling Stone made money, although modestly at first. As Rolling Stone gathered momentum, its circumspect youth-culture slant drew advertising away from the underground press. According to Lionel Haines, business manager of the Berkeley Tribe, major record companies suddenly pulled most of their ads shortly after the start of the Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial and the Weatherman’s “Days of Rage.” “We lost $17,000 a month in revenue,” Haines recalled. At the same time, the Tribe lost most of its classified advertising to a new, free-circulation, apolitical shopper called the Classified Gazette. The double punch staggered the Tribe, suddenly unable to pay its printer and its street vendors. “Our circulation dropped from 60,000 in November 1969 to 29,000 at the end of November,” Haines said. Similarly, “within months, with most of the big national ads going to Rolling Stone and the local classifieds going to free shoppers, there was no economic base.” Underground journalists accused Rolling Stone of using its sales pitch to urge record companies to pull their ads from underground papers. Whether or not Rolling Stone did that, record companies did switch their advertising to Rolling Stone, helping to ensure the survival of the underground press’ chief competitor. (20)

Schwartz (president of Laurie Records) says he stopped using a monthly underground magazine because its sexual content got to be too much for him. And Atlantic’s Rolontz dropped the same magazine and a weekly newspaper as well. The problem is not always sex. The ad departments’ taste in media that support marijuana-smoking, drug-taking, draft-dodging, and so on, is also beginning to come to the attention of the boardroom. (21)

Free-wheeling subject matter and illustrations have caused trouble for some underground papers. One thousand copies of a recent EVO issue were seized for alleged obscenity at the order of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. And (policemen) in Cambridge, Mass., picked up 50 young vendors of Avatar. (23)

“We have our problems here too,” says Missi at EVO. “Some of us would like to ease up on ads for girly books, nude movies, and sex aids … But the business manager says these ads pay in advance. ‘And $5 is still $5,’ he says.” (22)

Miami, Florida, was the scene of a nefarious campaign against The Daily Planet. Its editor was arrested twenty-nine times in 1969 and 1970 for selling obscene literature on the streets. Although he was acquitted twenty-eight times, he still had to pay nearly $93,000 in bail bonds …. In March 1969, Open City in Los Angeles was forced to pay court costs and a $1,000 fine on an obscenity conviction. This paper was later vindicated by a higher court, but the punitive defense fees forced Open City out of business. (24)

By the end of the sixties, some underground publishers dispensed with even the Barb’s and the Freep’s sharply compromised views and sold sexuality, simply and purely, for profit. Publications such as Screw, Suck, Pleasure, Kiss, the New York Review of Sex, the San Francisco Ball and the L.A. Star – “Pornzines” as they are called in the trade – arose from the underground in the late sixties, offspring of older radical publications that soon outgrew their parent papers. (25)

In Port Washington, Wisconsin, William F. Schanen Jr. of the Ozaukee Press took on the publication of dozens of Midwestern underground newspapers, refusing to comply with FBI and local advertiser demands that he keep away from allegedly subversive projects. He lost nearly $200,000 per year in printing business and advertising in his three establishment papers because he brought out Kaleidoscope and other alternative papers. (26)

In 1956, local and state police formed their own intelligence network, the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU), independent of federal control. The LEIU hounded groups and individuals it branded “terrorist.” A computerized Interstate Organized Crime Index was established by the LEIU to provide a central data bank for the program. In addition to supplying surveillance equipment, the CIA trained the LEIU’s intelligence units, or Red Squads, in covert intelligence techniques, maintaining a liaison with the LEIU through the Fairfax County, Virginia, Police Department. The FBI worked hand in glove with most police departments. Through them, it helped create several paramilitary vigilante groups that engaged in violent attacks on underground publishers. In addition, the 113th Military Intelligence Group provided money and arms for the Chicago Red Squad, which in turn passed the money along to a paramilitary organization, the Legion of Justice. The Legion became known for its vicious assaults on people who worked at underground papers and bookstores, on New left activists, as well as for its theft of legal files belonging to the Chicago Conspiracy Trial lawyers. This Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit operated almost entirely in secret, with no regulation of its criteria for surveillance, its methods or its use of information. Many covert and illegal activities were encouraged by presidents Johnson and Nixon, whose administration pushed for an unprecedented control over its critics. In addition to coordinating federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the Nixon administration moved to exploit the subpoena power of grand juries. The First Amendment rights of underground writing as free political and artistic expression were ignored. (27)

The FBI also approached advertisers and investigated progressives who provided financial backing for underground papers. The agency wrote spurious letters when it was convenient. In 1969, the Detroit FBI office sent a letter to local advertisers signed “Disgusted Taxpayer and Patron” objecting to the content of one paper. In December 1970, the Mobile FBI office sent an anonymous letter to expose two instructors who were providing money for a student counterculture newspaper. This action was intended to make the journal “fold and cease publication,” to “eliminated what voice the New Left has in the area." The two instructors were put on probation. (31)

Underground Press Syndicate
Box 26, Village P.O., New York, NY 10014 (212) 691-6073

Statement May 13, 1970

By: Thomas King Forcade, Projects Coordinator, Underground Press Syndicate

To: Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Washington, D.C.

The Constitution of the United States of America says, “Congress shall make no law … abridging freedom of speech or of the press.” This unconstitutional, illegitimate, unlawful, prehistoric, obscene, absurd Keystone Kommittee has been set up to “recommend advisable, appropriate, effective, and constitutional (??) means to deal effectively with such traffic in obscenity and pornography.” To this we say, fuck off, and fuck censorship.

This Keystone Kommittee, engaged in a blatant McCarthyesque witch hunt, holding inquisitional “hearings” around the country, is the vanguard of the Brain Police: Mind Monitors, Thought Thugs, Honky Heaven Whores grasping to make thought criminals out of millions of innocent citizens. You ARE 1984, with all that implies. This phony Kommittee begins with the pornography and obscenity existing in the eyes of the bullshit beholders and ends with total state control of the mind of every man, woman, child, hunchback and midget. What pretentious arrogance to presume what colossal nerve to attempt to impose your standards on the public, while you jack off in the censorship room. Fuck off, and fuck censorship.

Either we have a free press ….. or we don’t have freedom of the press.

The Underground Press Syndicate has repeatedly encountered your brand of political repression in the thin but transparent guise of obscenity, despite the obvious fact that the primary content of Underground Press Syndicate papers is political and social writing. This becomes even more obvious when underground papers are compared to the millions of tons of specifically salacious and prurient four-color crotch shot magazines which are readily available in the same cities where underground papers are repeatedly busted for “pornography.” We know where that’s at, and we know where you’re coming from. Beside, arousing prurient interest in America IS a socially redeeming value. So fuck off, and fuck censorship.

A study of daily newspaper found 70 percent of the readership did not believe the papers they read. They thought they were lying. In the past 20 years, over 400 establishment dailies have died, while in the past four years, U.P.S. has gone from nothing to over 6 million readers. A journalism professor in California made a study of his class of 45 students, and found that 42 read the local underground paper; only 1 read the establishment propaganda organ. The head of the American Association of Advertising Agencies warns the straight papers to “get in touch” or they will lose their advertising revenue to the underground press. But they can’t “get in touch,” because they are lackeys of a power structure whose only touch is a Midas touch, which tries to turn war into money, natural resources into money, even whole segments of our population into money.

The Underground Press Syndicate is fighting this, and winning, and you are terrified because we are robbing the power structure of its replacements. Your are a dying breed, because young people love the underground press, live it, and know that it speaks the truth. But you walking antiques are constantly trying to stomp out our freedom of the press – uptight Smokey the Bears of the totalitarian forest, rushing around with shotguns for shovels, trying to quench the fires of freedom. But the fire is out of control, and we will not be brought down. America’s Children for Breakfast program – youth genocide – is not working. To it we say, fuck off, and fuck censorship.

You politically self-ordained demi-gods have decided to jam two copies of Reader’s Digest into every shithole in America, with your dried-up, perverted, ugly, bland, middle-aged, hypocritic, jack-off, psychopathic, totalitarian, un-sexed, dictatorial, Bank of America, warped hyena, rancid, muck of your own decaying existence you make me puke green monkey shit.

In opposition to this, our program is liberation – total freedom – and we are totally committed to carrying out this program. A dictatorial structure cannot withstand the absolute power of a media that can turn out a half million people at Woodstock or a million people to sit on Nixon’s back porch until the war ends. And we will no more passively accept the suppression of that voice than we will of our bodies.

We are the solution to American problems. We are revolution. These papers are our lives, and nobody shall take our lives away with your goddamned laws. We are tomorrow, not you. We are the working model of tomorrow’s paleocybernetic culture, soul, life, manifesting love, force, anarchy, euphoria, positive, sensual, communal, abandoned, united, brotherhood, universal, organismic, orgasmic, harmonious flowing new consciousness media on paper, coming from our lives in the streets. So fuck off, and fuck censorship.

We are in charge of our own lives, and we bear allegiance only to our own Free Nation. We hold your ancient myths of sterile blue laws in utter, scum bag contempt for jamming up the river of human progress, trying to hold back, push back, compartmentalize, ram down our throat your death trip of thought control, the last perversion of Babylon. And the straight media is equally responsible, for they bear the guilt of the crime of silence, the crime of inaction as they watch and cheer while their media brothers in the underground press go down the drain of lost freedom of the press. They mouth empty words and they are total hypocrites.

There can be no free country without a free press, and if there be no free country, then there will be no country. There is no difference and no separation between what is happening to the underground press and what is happening to the Black Panthers or any other group which opposes America’s last crazed epilepsy. The Underground Press Syndicate has been harassed unrelentingly since it was founded in 1966, yet it has grown from just 5 papers and less than 50,000 circulation to over 200 papers and circulation over 6 million. For every paper destroyed by a bust, 10 more have taken its place, and if the message of that is not clear, then you must surely have to learn it by experience.

Congressman Joe Pool, late HUAC chairman, said, “The plan of this Underground Press Syndicate is to take advantage of that part of the First Amendment which protects newspapers and gives them freedom of press.” Bob Dylan says, “Without freedom of speech I might be in the swamp.” I say, “Write On!”

I do not agree with a word that you say, and I will defend to my death my right to say it….

The Cast of Publications

3. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers, (New York: Basic Books Inc. Publishers, 1978)  pp. 177-178
4. Robert J. Glessing, The Underground Press in America, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970) p. XIII
5. Michael L. Johnson, The New Journalism, (Wichita: The University Press of Kansas, 1971) pp. 3-4
6. Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of Mass Media, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1978) p. 379
7. Francis M. Watson, The Alternative Media: Dismantling Two Centuries of Progress, (Rockford: Rockford College Institute, 1979) pp. 32-33
8. David Armstrong, A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1981) p. 32
9. Glessing, p. XIV
10. Richard Stone, The Underground Press Succeeds by Intriguing Rebels and Squares, (The Wall Street Journal, March 4, 1968) p. 1
11. Armstrong, p. 60
12. Everette E. Dennis and William L. Rivers editors, Other Voices: The New Journalism in America, (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1974) pp. 139-140
13. Armstrong, p. 45
14. Glessing, p. 60
15. Johnson, p. 40
16. Armstrong, p. 47
17. Armstrong, p. 125
18. Stone, p. 96
19. Glessing, p. 96
20. Admen Groove on Underground, (Business Week, April 12, 1969) p. 84
21. Armstrong, p. 175
22. Business Week, p. 84
23. Business Week, p. 84
24. Stone, p. 15
25. Geoffrey Rips, The Campaign Against the Underground Press, (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1981) pp. 84-85
26. Armstrong, p. 166
27. Rips, p. 97
28. Rips, pp. 75-76
29. Rips, pp. 61-63
30. Rips, p. 83
31. Rips, pp. 70-71