Underground Press

UNDERGROUND PRESS. The underground press flourished in the United States between 1967 and 1973 as a proliferation of predominantly tabloid newspapers devoted to the local coverage of political and cultural movements that swept the nation during that period. At its best, the underground press of the 1960s introduced new forms of critical journalism that reinforced the political actions of the antiwar movement. “Underground” referred largely to the evolving bohemian youth culture, whose habits, ideas, art, and slang were, in 1967, still unexpressed in the mass media of the day.

The underground press movement reflected the regional styles and concerns of US youth whose experience came to be defined with increasing intensity in this period by a debilitating neo-colonial war on the one hand and on the other a growing drug use with its accompanying interest in esoterica and the literatures of resistance from a large variety world traditions. The collective experience was characterized by a powerful sense of alienation from and rejection of US social institutions, with each paper finding its tendency in local history. Most of the antiwar papers were to be found in smaller university cities in what came to be called the “archipelago” of campuses that had strong anti-war movements. Papers in the larger cities, meanwhile, whose readership was usually more diffuse, tended to emphasize cultural, personal, and drug-related questions with one degree or another of political news and agitation added in.

Of the latter, the most prominent was the Los Angeles Free Press, which formed the bridge between the bohemian origins of the underground press in the 1950s and the larger phenomenon of the 1960s. The East Village Other, Chicago Seed, San Francisco Oracle, and Milwaukee Kaleidoscope were examples of that development. Examples of the more “political” papers, that is, those that arose more or less sui generis, without being attached to any organization of the Old or New Left, include the Fifth Estate (Detroit), Berkeley Barb, and Connections (Madison).

There were also the papers that were little more than idiosyncratic—in Boston, Mel Lyman’s Avatar advanced a kind of Stalinist spiritualism—and there were personal literary productions like Cleveland poet d. a. levy’s Buddhist Third-Class Junk Mail Oracle, and Robert Head and Darlene Fife’s paper in New Orleans, Nola Express. Others tried to mediate between the political and cultural tendencies, including the Madison edition of Kaleidoscope, Georgia Straight (Vancouver), the Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta), and Open City (Los Angeles).

For most of its years the underground press survived on a combination of unpaid labor, chiliastic energy, psychotropic stimulants, and the certain sense that its journalists were recording the unfolding of a great social movement whose meaning could not be expressed by other journalists working in more established media. By the same token, the underground press collapsed from a combination of physical exhaustion, an ignorance of the skills required to survive over the long haul in the marketplace, and a sense that the historical moment had passed. As later amply documented, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local “red squads,” which had harassed the underground press from its earliest days, hastened and made more complete its precipitous decline.

Only a handful of publications retained their identity as “underground” rather than “alternative” newspapers after the famous convention of the Underground Press Syndicate in 1973 in Boulder at which this symbolic change in appellation was overwhelmingly endorsed by delegates. At that moment, the well-capitalized, profitable, liberal weekly free tabloids that dominate most big-city markets today, the so-called alternative press, appeared, and the “underground” period came to an end, appropriately, as the war in Vietnam was winding down.

Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World Is Watching. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Lewis, Roger. Outlaws of America: The Underground Press and Its Context; Notes on a Cultural Revolution. London: Pelican, 1972.

Peck, Abe. Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

Rips, Geoffrey. “The Campaign against the Underground Press.” In The Campaign against the Underground Press, edited by Anne Janowitz and Nancy J. Peters. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1981.

Wachsberger, Ken, ed. Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press. Forewords by William M. Kunstler and Abe Peck. 2 vols. Tempe, Ariz.: Mica Press, 1993.

Underground/Alternative Newspapers History and Geography. Mapping Social Movements Website. University of Washington. http://depts.washington.edu/moves/altnews_intro.shtml