New England Free Press

NEW ENGLAND FREE PRESS. A collectively run “movement” printshop, the New England Free Press (1967-1981) was principally known as publisher/distributor of hundreds of nonsectarian left-of-center pamphlets in the late 1960s and through the ‘70s. It began as an amalgam of small-scale projects of independent leftists living in Boston’s then-rundown South End. The name “New England Free Press” (NEFP) was first used for a very short-lived newsletter connected informally with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The name outlasted the newsletter, as the group began to accumulate printing equipment and do low-cost printing for movement groups in the Boston area.

Part of the project was printing and distributing a magazine called Paper Tiger, which lasted most of 1968. More significant was the beginning of a “literature program” under the impetus of a new collective member, Don McKelvey, who came to Boston in 1968 after having worked on the staff of the SDS-initiated Radical Education Project (REP) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At first simply filling mail orders for REP pamphlets from buyers in New England, the Free Press quickly began selling to anyone anywhere, while also starting to produce pamphlets of its own – some of them reprints from left periodicals, others original.

The printing operation grew dramatically in 1968 with the move to a space (still within the South End, still low-rent) on the fourth floor of a grand old industrial building that once housed a piano factory. The move provided ample room for two presses and other equipment that made it possible for collective members to print, fold, and staple their own pamphlets and to set low prices for them. Workers set their own salaries (rarely more than $40 a week) and made decisions collectively at staff meetings. The “bug” on everything printed by the Free Press said “Movement Labor.”

In 1968-1969, while the Free Press was finding a niche literally and figuratively, the flagship organization of the youthful New Left, Students for a Democratic Society, was careening toward an ideologically driven factional breakup. Out of SDS’s national meeting in Chicago in June 1969 came rival national offices in Chicago (controlled by the “Weatherman” faction) and Boston (controlled by the Progressive Labor Party). The Free Press, with no formal relationship with SDS, had no stake in the internal fighting. Then and later, pamphlets were approved or rejected based on whether they contained useful information, regardless of source.

Quickly, in fact, the Free Press found its fortunes tied to an issue that had been marginal to the SDS fighting, namely, women’s liberation. The Boston area was becoming a hotbed of women’s groups engaged in “consciousness raising” over the myriad ways in which American society disadvantaged women. With its expansive printshop and its near-volunteer workforce of both women and men, the NEFP was uniquely situated to produce pamphlets that a women’s group could obtain for five or ten cents a copy and give out for free.

What really put the Free Press on the map, however, was one particular “women’s pamphlet.” A 274-page booklet, first titled Women and Their Bodies and then Our Bodies Ourselves, was researched and written by a twelve-member group of young Boston-area women. They approached the Free Press, which provided free typesetting (by Don McKelvey) and the expertise needed both to prepare the book for printing and to handle mail orders. (The actual printing was farmed out to a large commercial press, which could do it cheaply on newsprint.) The NEFP was the sole publisher of the book from 1970 to 1973, with 200,000 copies distributed at a price that started at 75 cents and dropped gradually to 25 cents (or 10 cents for groups that planned to distribute it for free). From 1973 on, the book was published commercially by Simon & Schuster.

Topics for Free Press pamphlets were wide-ranging. A catalog from 1972 organized its nearly 300-plus offerings into fifteen sometimes-overlapping categories, including chiefly the following: Female Liberation and the Sexual Caste System (48 items, across the board the best sellers), Imperialism (41), The Working Class (40), The American Political Economy (41), Racism (22), China (19), Latin America (16), and Movement History and Perspectives (22).

The Free Press’s time in the old piano factory ended in the spring of 1973, just as Our Bodies Ourselves was going commercial. Gentrification was encroaching on the South End, aided by urban renewal, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) facilitated a transfer of the old piano building to a real estate firm that would reshape its interior into modern apartments. The BRA paid for the Free Press and the building’s other small-business occupants to move to new quarters, which for the Free Press were a former bank space in nearby Somerville, then a mainly working-class inner suburb.

In its new quarters, the Free Press maintained its identity as a place where people could learn printing skills, which were not a prerequisite for hiring. It also maintained its collective structure, with weekly staff meetings making decisions. This principle of workers’ control was reflected in a mid-1970s decision to affiliate nominally with the Industrial Workers of the World, and the IWW bug replaced the “Movement Labor” bug on NEFP-printed materials.

The years in Somerville saw the Free Press become gradually more creative and skilled in its printing and pamphlet design but, at the same time, less relevant politically. Aside from Our Bodies, Ourselves, most Free Press publications had focused on “what’s wrong.” Increasingly, readers already knew that and were more interested in “what can we do,” about which the NEFP pamphlets on the whole had less to say. At the same time, paper costs and the slightly higher salaries that staff members paid themselves meant that pamphlets had to be priced higher – still cheap but not at the level where groups might buy them in bulk for free distribution.

A stream of new pamphlets continued for most of the decade, but most had modest print runs. More and more of the NEFP’s products went, not to activist groups, but (via campus bookstores) to college students – whose instructors, often, were former student activists. In the Free Press’s dual role as both printer and publisher, the first aspect became more important, as more of the collective’s work consisted of printing books and posters for political and literary groups in the area. The printing was usually high-quality, but it could be done elsewhere. By 1980 the Free Press was running out of energy and mission. In the summer of 1981 two recent staff members arranged the sale of the still-valuable equipment to other alternative printshops in New England and paid off as many creditors as they could.

For a long time, the Free Press existed only in memory. Not until 2018, almost four decades after the closing, did it take on a kind of new life. In that year, two former staff members from the days at the old piano factory, Charlie Thomas and Claudette Piper, created a website (https://www.nefp.online) honoring the NEFP’s history. It lists all the old publications and makes most of them, especially the women’s liberation pamphlets, available for free online. It also presents recollections from a number of the nearly fifty people who, at one time or another, part-time or full-time, shared in the work and history of the New England Free Press.