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Canada •

THE OF THE SIXTIES

By Maxine Ruvinsky

Comparative Literature Program

McGiII University,

April,1995

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research

in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy.

(c) Maxine Ruvinsky 1995.

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ISBN 0-612-0B153-2

Canada • ABSTRACI

This thesis describes the underground press of the sixties in the , from the beginning of the movement in mid-decade to its apparent demise in the early seventies. 1 use articles from the underground papers to iIIustrate the nature of the underground press and apply literary and socio-cultural theories and thinking to the phenomenon in order to chart and analyze its rapid development and speedy disappearance early in the seventies. 1focus on the joumalistic represented by the papers. By joumalistic idealism, 1mean the belief that society could be improved if its iIIs were expo~ed by conducted in the public interest - the founding faith of the daily press in America. In this sense the underground papers recalled the earlier ideals of

• • RÉSUMÉ

Cette thèse décrit la presse clandestine aux États-Unis dès le commencement du mouvement des journaux secrets dans les années 60's jusqu'à sa mort apparente vers le début de la décennie suivante. J'utilise des articles des journaux clandestins aussi bien que des idées et de:; théories littéraires et socio-culturelles pour illustrer l'essence du mouvement et la façon dont il se reflète dans la langue et la littérature des journaux, afin de comprendre son développement rapide et sa disparition évidente au début des années 70's. Je me concentre sur l'idéalisme qui démontre ces journaux clandestins. Par ce terme "l'idéalisme journalistique" je veux dire la conviction que la société serait améliorée si ses malheurs étaient dévoilés et démasqués par un journalisme qui fait preuve de civisme - une conviction qui représente la pierre angulaire de la presse quotidienne en Amérique du Nord. Dans ce sens-là, les journaux clandestins ont réanimé les idéaux précédents d'une presse libre dans une société démocratique. Je conclus que l'idéalisme journalistique de la presse clandestine des années 60's a été maîtrisé, contenu et travesti, mais non détruit. Néanmoins, parmi les questions que pose cette thèse, les plus profondes sont celles de nature hégémonique et celles des mouvements populaires pour la justice sociale ­ plus particulièrement, celles des problèmes qu'ont vécu les journaux concernant le statu quo et ses autorités officielles. La ralionale théorique pour traiter l'écriture journalistique d'un genre littéraire (plutôt qu'une sorte de moyen de communication) c'est justement d'en faire ressortir certains des codes dont dépend l'écriture journalistique pour communiquer la signification (et non pas seulement les informations) d'un texte.

• • TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1 REVIEW OF THE L1TERATURE 13 THEORY AND METHOD 28 SECTION A 1. THE RISE 41 2. THE CONTEXT 53 3. THE CAUSES 64 4. THE 76 5. DISCOURSE OF THE FIFTIES 83 6. THE DISMAL OVERGROUND PRESS 98 7. THE GENERATIONAL GAP 107 SECTION B 8. NATURE OF THE UNDERGROUND PRESS 128 9. POLITICS VERSUS CULTURE 159 10. THE NEW JOURNALISM 196 SECTION C 11. THE FALL 217 12. WHO KILLED THE UNDERGROUND PRESS? 229 SECTION D 13. THE LEGACY 254 14. IMPACT ON THE ESTABLISHMENT PRESS 261 15. LEGACY OF THE ESTABLISHMENT PRESS 276 16. WHITHER OBJECTIVITY? 295 17. NOTES ON NOSTALGIA 318 CONCLUSIONS 336 • BIBLIOGRAPHY • 1 INTRODUCTION

The rise of an underground press was only one expression of the youth culture that burgeoned in the sixties, following the baby boom of the post-war period. The youth culture, and its underground papers, were a worldwide phenomenon, even though only four countries experienced prolonged baby booms after the Second World War (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).' This work will deal almost exclusively with underground papers in the United States, where in fact the vast majority were situated. There are, however, scattered references to Canadian underground papers (of which there WElre about a dozen), which 1treat broadly as part of the American phenomenon. The patterns that emerged in this study of the American underground press are evident as weil in the Canadian papers, albeit on a much smaller scale. As weil, underground articles in both countries were routinely reprinted regardless of country of origin, largely through Iwo American underground wire services, the Underground Press Syndicate and Liberation News Service. It was the American papers, in any case, which set the larger political agenda for their northern counterparts, around the major social-justice issues of the day, including the Vietnam war and the . At the peak of the phenomenon in 1969, there were over 500 underground papers (over 400 of them in the United States) with at least 4.5 million readers worldwide.2 The so-called "first-wave" papers, following the lead of the already established Village Voice and Liberation, emerged in 1964 and 1965 and included: the () Free Press, the (Berkeley) Barb, the (New York) , the () Fifth • Estate, and the (East Lansing) Paper. Soon to follow were, among many • 2 others, the () Oracle, the () Seed, the (Austin) Rag, the (New York) , the (San Quentin) Outlaw, the (Washington) Quicksilver Times, the () Space Ci~, the (Cambridge) Old Mole, the (Jackson) Kudzu, the () El Gallo, the (Madison) Kaleidoscope, the (San Jose) Red Eye, and the () . The underground press was also related to older muckraking magazines Iike Ramparts, which Iike the Voice provided a model for the earliest underground upstarts and their investigative efforts. Communications vehicles related to the underground press but not strictly synonymous with it included video services such as Newsreel, G.!. papers Iike the Bond, and issue- or group-specific papers Iike the Black Panther, the Gay Activist, Win (published in New York by the War Resisters' League), and Newsletter. There were also hundreds of dissenting papers in high schools alone.3 The underground papers experienced rapid growth, both in terms of the pace at which new papers sprouted and in terms of circulation growth. The East Village Other for example saw its circulation grow from 5,000 to 65,000 in four years; by contrast, it took the established Village Voice 14 years to achieve comparable circulation growth.4 The underground papers became the voice of the youth movement, providing a communications Iink between geographically diverse communities. They reflected the values of the and the in their insistence on the need to radically reform American society. The text that follows includes analyses of the writing in the underground papers, but not in order to rank them in terms of quality. am concerned instead with what the articles meant at the time, with how and in what context they were "readable" to the large minority represented • by the sixties counterculture. 1do not emphasize the differences between • 3 individual papers on a consistent basis, but pay special attention to the larger phenomenon of a split among the undergrounders between the more "political" papers and the more "cultural" ones. The analysis focuses on the underground press in its relation primarily to its arch­ adversary, the establishment press and the establishment values it represented. 1also pit the common wisdom about the sixties papers, the official history that regards them as ephemeral and largely without jO\Jrnalistic value, against another, and 1believe more accurate, "history". ln terms of the phenomena of a counterculture and New Left of the sixties, the focus here is necessarily narrow. While the subject of the underground press raises many interesting sociological and philosophical questions about the tumultuous decade, most are beyond the scope of this thesis; they function, rather, as background material. These include the related developments in other media, such as film and fiction writing and especially populdr music, in "Iifestyles" changes such as the back-to­ the-land movement of the rural- founding , and in the influence of Eastern philosophies among the counterculture - to name a few. 1deal primarily by way of contrast with the daily press, although 1 make reference to broadcast media in order to place the phenomenon in perspective, and generally wherever such usage sheds light on the workings and meaning of the sixties underground papers (for example in discussion of the "yippies," who made the television version of the sixties ""). The sixties counterculture was based on shared music, history, rituals, values and most essentially: language. The sixties radicals opposed the language of the fifties, replacing establishment talk with oppositional terms (not police officer or even cop, but "pig", or in the • aggregate, ''The Man"). They also rejected the phraseology employed by • 4 the "radicals" of the previous (though there were "transitional" sixties figures from the beat generation, including poet and journalist-writer Norman Mailer)5, replacing beat terms of approval (like hip and cool) with their own (like groovy and far-out). But the language of the sixties papers was also language of the sixties streets: the underground press of the sixties was written very much in the vernacular. As ail movements for change, the underground press and the counterculture generally, had to substantially re-invent language to appreciate and convey radical meaning. The term "underground" press is something of a misnomer, for if the sixties papers were undergrounds, they were certainly history's best publicized ones. Unlike the war-time undergrounds fighting Naziism and fascism, for example, for whom secrecy was imperative, the sixties undergrounds gloried in confrontation and provocation of establishment authority and sentiment. The sixties undergrounds were essentially anarchistic in origin: papers sprung up as quickly as they folded, without any over-all plan or (acknowledged or formai) leadership. In fact, the attentions of the establishment press came as a surprise, by their own accounts, to most of the young people involved. The attentions of police agencies, on the other hand, fortified the already archly oppositional stance of the counterculture toward the "straight" (or establishment) world. The young people who worked for the underground press, when they were harassed trying to sell papers on the street, or hauled into court to defend themselves against obscenity or illegal-distribution charges, took the attention of the authorities as evidence they were on the right track (to effecting, or forcing, social change). They took encouragement, in other words, trom the hostility of the opposition. For a truly • underground or covert press, revealing of their plans or direct • 5 confrontation with "authorities" would certainly mean disaster.6 The term "underground" most Iikely "stuck" to the sixties papers largely because of establishment efforts to suppress them and because of the sale of iIlicit drugs (mostly marijuana and hashish) that helped finance the papers in some cases and to the countercu1tural ritual of "dope" smoking. Despite these telltale differences of the sixties papers, they belong more properly to the tradition of a dissenting press rather than to that of an underground one. On the other hand, authorities did regard the underground press and the counterculture generally as a threat to the status quo and its institutions, and initiated its own covert operations to suppress them. ln one directory of underground papers, the editor applied the designation "underground" to any publication expressing views left enough of centre that they would not appear in the establishment press.7 The papers do fit the Oxford English dictionary definition of an underground press as the "production of unconventional and experimental publications" and more centrally as publications "aiming to subvert the established order" - both counts on which the underground press of the sixties eminently qualified. 1will consider the underground press as those papers that emerged in the sixties and which, by membership in the underground wire services, enjoyed reciprocal reprint rights. 1treat dissenting papers that already existed by the decade of the sixties as precursors, antecedents and in some cases models (though the underground press tended to break molds rather than settle into them). 1exclude the high-school and university papers, though they shared the countercultural values of the underground press, because they were dependent on the grants and other largesse or tolerance of the educational institutions within which • they functioned, and evinced appropriately more "drab" styles of • 6 opposition. B Finally, 1exclude the "new journalism" of the decade, which has come to be associated with a kind of slick-magazine journalism that had little to do with the underground papers, especially since it did not challenge or even address the mainstream daily press and its longtime credo of objectivity. Much attention is devoted in the text that follows to this credo of objectivity and the counter-value of subjectivity espoused by the underground press. Suffice it to say here, by way of introduction, that objectivity referred to the mainstream belief in an objective reality which, mirror-Iike, yields facts, which were presumed to exist in the "real world" and add up to the truth; while subjectivity referred to the undergrounders' belief in personal involvement as the only way to discover the facts left out (of the mainstream press accounts), and hence the truth. ln my frequent references ta capitalism, 1will mean that system of social organization based on and characterized by concentrated and centralized ownership of the means of production along with wage-Iabor for the "working class". By idealism 1will generally mean altruism (rather than its older or classical philosophical meaning, which indicated the belief that ideas underlie or form reality, though the latter, 1want to note here, is not opposed to but rather implicated in the former). Journalistic idealism, which presupposes a belief in the power of the (written) word (to effect change or influence its direction), may of course be opposed to both materialism and realism. For the present purpose the distinction between realism and materialism is of secondary importance. In the case of the sixties underground press, the idealism that insp;~ed the venture not only opposed the materialism (as commonly understood to indicate an excessive concern with and devotion to material possessions) of mainstream society but as weil contested the "realism" of the • establishment; it propagated, in other words, a different version of the • 7 rea!. Thus, the countercuitural term "unreal" expressed more than "unbelievability"; it also condemned the situation or phenomenon to which it was applied as adjective. To characterize something as "unreal" was not to deny that it existed, but to affirm that it ought to be otherwise. By the decade of the sixties when the underground press emerged, the mainstream daily press was also in a process of transition. had by then become monopolistic enterprises through concentrated ownership. Journalism was becoming professionalized, attracting a different c1ass of aspirants into its ranks. These trends in the newspaper business served to further transform the fact, once an article of faith, into an exchangeable article or commodity. 1will argue that these trends helped precipitate a severing of the ''tacts'' from the truth they were supposed to represent.9 ln the mainstream press environment of the sixties, newspapers needed very large circulations to survive, and while this is usually regarded as justifying the search for the lowest-common denominator in terms of content - the story or account that would upset no one - 1regard the phenomenon as more complex: the attachment to non-controversial journalism arose not only in the context of capitalist "competition", but as weil in a deficit of idealism or sense of purpose. Thus concentrated ownership of 's newspapers was both the engine of industry profits (hence, survival) and at least part of the reason for its abysmal performance (in terms of the public interest). The rugged vagaries of capitalist economics are fairly new historical phenomena; the ideal of press freedom, on the other hand, has roots centuries old; indeed these may be tracer' back to the English revolution of the 16405, when published Areopagitica: A Speech for the Libertv of Unlicensed • Printing. While the arguments for a free press were differently based • 8 through the centuries (whether as for Milton, on the divinely apportioned faculty of reason, for the nineteenth-century utilitarians on a notion of the greatest good for the greatest number, or for John Stuart MiII's and more recent beliefs in the value of unrestricted public discourse) the rightto a free press was recognized as a cornerstone of democratic society.l0 If one Iistens to what newspaper people say (about newspapers and democracy), one might imagine the ideal survives intact. If one compares, on the other hand, the stated ideals of the press to its praclices, it is c1ear there have been radical changes in the meaning of the ideal as weil as in its relationship to (newswriting) praclice. 11 The main research text is preceded by two introductory sections: the first provides a review of the Iiterature; the second serves to note methodological and theoretical considerations that inform the text but are not addressed directly in it. The main body of the text is organized in 17 chapters, within four main sections. Section A, The Rise of the Underground Press, deals with, in seven chapters, the following basic themes: the emergence and rapid growth of underground newspapers in the United States; the intellectual and social contexts of the fifties, against which the underground eut its teeth; the sociological "causes" of the phenomenon including the demographic bulge represented by the sixties generation; the Vietnam war as the Iightning rod of resistance for the counterculture and its press; the discourse of the fifties in greater philosophical detail; the dismal state of the overground or establishment press, to which the efforts of the underground were at least partially addressed; and finally, the widening language gap between the post-war "baby boomers" and the generation • of their parents. • 9

Section B, The Nature of the Underground Press, proceeds in two long chapters and a concluding short one. The first chapter of this section introduces for analysis excerpts from the underground papers with special reference to their counter-institutional value of subjectivity. The second chapter deals in more detail with the much noted phenomenon of a "split" among the papers between the more politically and culturally oriented. The section concludes with a brief description of the sixties "new journalism," which ostensibly shared the attachment of the undergrounders to the value of subjectivity, but only the value of individual or subjective style, and, 1will argue, as a new brand of objectivity. Section C, The Fall of the Underground Press, proceeds in two chapters. The first considers the rapid decline of the underground papers, which were history by the early seventies, while the second addresses the evidence of government suppression, in effect asking: Who killed the underground press? Section D, The Legacy of the Underground Press, contains five chapters addressing in turn: the alternative press that grew up after the demise of the underground papers and which was their ma;_,r legacy; the impact of the undergrounders on the overground press; the legacy of the establishment press in terms of its development according to its own capitalist logic; a final consideration of the objectivity of the mainstream and contemporary efforts to revive its meaning; and a brief look at the "protective" uses of the nostalgia that so often marks remembrances of the phenomenon and which stand to obscure its historical meaning. The text ends with a short chapter • recapping the major conclusions reached throughout. • 10 NOTES - INTRODUCTION

1. Landon Y. Jones, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (New York: Ballantine, 1980) 23.

2. Abe Peck, Understanding the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985) 'XN.

3. Peck, 'XN.

4. Peck, 183.

5. See Allen Ginsberg, PLanet News 1961-1967 (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968); and Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam, 1959).

6. For more on historical underground papers, see the following:

Issac Kowalski, A Secret Press in Nazi Europe: The Story of a Jewish United Partisan Organization (New York: Shengold, 1969). Kowalski was one of the tirst organizers of the Vilna ghetto. His trials included penetrating a Lithuanian-German printing plant where he managed to steal enough parts to set up two complete printing presses, which were hidden in the ghetto itself. Despite the fact almost ail his friends were captured and killed by the Nazis, and despite the dead-or-alive bounty of 100,000 German Reich marks over his head, Kowalski survived the war, and later worked as a joumalist and in publishing.

Especially interesting is Robert Damton's The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982), which describes the production and diffusion of iIIegalliterature in prerevolutionary France. Though the subject is far removed in chronological time from the underground press of the sixties, the book abounds in interesting parallels, perhaps because both iIIicit presses oceurred at the crossroads of cultural and social transformations. And both were perpetuated not by an elite, but by a group of the unwashed and newly uppity masses. Damton, for example, writes in his introduction to the text that his purpose is to reconstruct "pieces of a world that fell apart in the eighteenth century." He continues: 'That may sound rather grand as a way to introduce a book about Grub Street hacks, pirate • publishers, and under-the-cloak peddlers of forbidden books. But the • 11 subject is more important than it may seem; for a great deal of Iiterature . has been forbidden throughout the course of history".

Oscar E. Millard's Underground News (Hartford, CT: McBride, 1937). This book tells the story of La Libre Belgique, an underground Belgian newspaper that made First World War history. La Libre Belgique was published from 1914 to the end of the war by Belgian patriots during the German occupation of Belgium. According to at least one historian no brighter page was ever written in the history of journalism.

Frank Rosengarten's The Italian Anti-Fascist Press (1919-1945) (: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968) describes the dissident journalism of those who opposed the fascist press, and who thrived underground for two decades until the end of the Second World War. Rosengarten analyzed the resistance press in terms its ideas and programs in an attempt to reveal how these reflected the various ideological components of anti-fascist thought, how they were linked to resistance movements in other countries, and how they influenced the political climate of postwar Italy. Like the sixties dissidents, the Italian anti-fascist press offered various interpretations according to their different political stripes, but shared a common enemy. Many of Italy's postwar leaders also developed their talents in this underground press, another parallel to the sixties journalists.

7. James P. Danky, Underqrounds: A Union List of Alternative Periodicals in the Libraries of the United States and Canada (Madison: State Historical Society ofWisconsin, 1974).

8. Roger Lewis, Outlaws of America: The Underground Press and its Context: Notes on a Cultural Revolution (: Pelican, 1972) 59.

9. Herbert Schiller compared the commoditization of labor in the Industrial Revolution to the commoditization of information in the 50­ called Information Revolution. See: Mass Communications and American Empire (New York: Kelley, 1969).

10. See John Keane's book The Media and Democracv (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991). Keane argues against the cali by ''free-market'' advocates for complete deregulation of the media and for a publie­ service model of journalism. The demand for deregulation is false, • Keane argues, because it supposes that deregulation will make the • 12

media more competitive and beller satisfy "customers". The contention is false because the so-called competition in fact erodes real competition, given that the investment required to enter the market in the first place is prohibitively high for most would-be entrepreneurs. Such a program would lead not to more , but to even more integration between the industrial and financial sectors of the economy.

11. 1am thinking here of the routine and routinized "story meetings" in newsrooms that pass for intelligent discussion of the issues at stake. For example, during a 1995 story meeting at the bureau of the Canadian Press on the subject of the independence referendum and how best to cover it, the bureau chief suggested that English coverage tended (and tends) to ignore any arguments for (or facts in support of) sovereignty. One reporter (weil known for her anti­ sovereigntist views) argued that "issue" pieces were unnecessary because "the facts speak for themselves" (meaning that sovereigntists were c1early in the wrong in a big way). My question to that reporter: "If the facts speak for themselves, what is it exactly that you think Vou are doing?" - was met with stunned and then suspicious silence. In fact, the reporter in question could espouse such an evidently and almost belligerently naive view because it is the official or authorized view of the English media in Quebec. Some weeks later 1 wrote a piece ensuing from interviews with the PQ Employment Minister Louise Harel and Manpower Minister Jeanne Blackbum, citing both women, especially the former, on why they thought independence would allow beller manpower and employment arrangements in Quebec society. The piece was deemed "biased" and rewrillen by the bureau chief, who deleted ail of Blackbum's quotes and ail but one of Harel's, and then ran the piece (which by the final rewrite consisted largely of background on how Quebec had refused to participate with federalists in debate on the subject) without a byline. • • 13 REVIEW OF THE L1TERATURE

Comparatively liUle has been wriUen about the underground press of the sixties in the United States, relative at least to the abundance of (mostly popular) books on various other aspects of the decade itself, including student politics and the New Left, , hippies and alternative Iifestyles. 1have relied most heavily on two of the few existing anthologies of underground press writing for source materia\. Notes from the New Underground (edited by Jesse Kornbluth and published in 1968) is an anthology composed exclusively of excerpts from the underground papers of the sixties. Notes from the New Underground represents the earliest effort to document the writing in the underground papers. It features articles from a fairly wide sampling of underground papers, from the Boston Avatar in the East to the in the West. It includes pieces contributed by members of the "older" generation, such as poet Allen Ginsberg, novelist William Burroughs and professor Paul Goodman. The essays cover a wide range of concerns, from Eben Given's on philosophy in ''The Wakening of the People" and the 's proposai ''Toward a National Beg-in: Crawl for Peace". to more scholarly efforts Iike Rutgers professor Richard Poirier's "Learning from the Beatles". In fact, the single unifying characteristic of the anthology is the various contributors' shared oppositional stance toward establishment authorities and values, and the conviction of the need for radical changes in American politics and society. ln ail the anthology gathers 42 articles, most originally published in 1967, from 18 sources: seven articles reprinted from the East Village • Other, six each from the Berkeley Barb and the Boston Avatar, four from • 14 the Village Voice, three from the San Francisco Oracle; !WO each from Helix, a , Washington underground; the underground paper Communication Company, in Corte Madera, California; and the London­ based British underground paper . The remaining 10 pieces come from 10 different sources. Of those remaining 10 sources, half were underground papers launched in the sixties: Kaleidoscope, from Chicago; the ; the Canadian Free Press, which was based in Ottawa and changed its name to Octopus soon after its launch; Maverick (Iater called Salt of the Earth) published in the San Francisco area; and finally, a publication called Inner Space, which was produced by the "", the movement's acting anarchists in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Of the final five pieces, three are reprinted from sources not strictly speaking part ofthe sixties underground press: Paul Goodman's "The Diggers in 1984," was reprinted from the investigalive magazine Ramparts (by permission of Random House, which had published it as part of a book of Goodman's essays), which began publishing decades before the birth of the sixties underground press; "Learning from the Beatles" by Rutgers professor Richard Poirier was reprinted trom the decidedly overground Iiterary journal Partisan Review; and reprinted from the basically overground cultural journal Evergreen Review was a piece enlitled "The Power of Non-Polities or the Death of the Square Left" by Ralph J. Gleason, a jazz reviewer, founder of the rock-news magazine and co-sponsor of the . The final !WO pieces are a broadsheet distributed Oct. 6, 1967, in Haight-Ashbury to accompany a community-based funeral for the hippie • movement; and an eloquently moving essay on anli-war demonstrators by • 15 one Jonathan Chandler, entitled "The Pentagon Affair and the Exorcism of Innocence." Chandler's article, among the best the anthology has to offer, is unfortunately uncredited. Though it appears by title in the anthology's table of contents, it is not acknowledged in the credits, and no note in the text betrays its origin. An editor's note preceding the text of the article describes Chandler only as an honors student and the product of a forward-Iooking prep school. Of the 42 pieces in the anthology, then, five originated in publications other than underground papers. Finally, however, if the strictest definition of the underground press is applied, the four pieces from the Village Voice, which functioned more as a model and precursor to the underground papers than as an underground paper per se, would have to be excluded, bringing the proportion of the anthology's "underground" articles to a low estimate of 33 out of 42, or a high one of 35 if Chandler's mystery piece and the hippie-funeral broadsheet are included.1 The Underground Reader is the second anthology 1relied most heavily on for sources. Edited by underground press figures Thomas King Forcade and Mel Howard, the book was published in 1972. It does not consistently provide original (or any other) publication dates, though the introduction to the anthology states that ail the articles were taken from underground papers within the previous five years. In a brief foreword (entitled: Forward!), Mel Howard writes that he and co-editor Thomas King Forcade, "laid out The Underground Reader in more or less chronological order." Though while preparing the bock, the editors had access to hundreds of underground papers "from ail over the world", most • of the anthology's 46 selections are taken from American underground • 16 papers. The anthology does, in most cases, specify the underground papers the articles were originally published in. (It also includes a selection of cartoons from the underground papers.) The only overlap between this and the Kornbluth anthology is the single article "Poisoned Wheat", written by poet and playwright Michael McClure. The article, actually a poem, was written in 1965 for the San Francisco Oracle, according to this anthology. (,According to Kornbluth it was first published in the Oracle in August 1967.) The Underground Reader, despite its failings in documentation, nevertheless provides a substantially more inclusive range of material, with virtually no selections from the sympathetic but basically overground press, save a single piece reprinted from the older Guardian weekly. The total 46 selections are reprinted from 27 different sources, five of these from outside the United States: one from the Canadian (­ based) underground Georgia Straight; one each and Iwo, respectively, from the London-based undergrounds, Friends, , and International Times. The anthology includes four articles from Win, produced by the War Resisters' League in New York and three each from: SunlDance, the organ of the ; Black Panther, published in Oakland, California, by the political organization of the same name; the , which issued its releases anonymously though the militant group operated largely from New York; the "psychedelic" San Francisco Oracle and the commercially successful Los Angeles Free Press. There are Iwo selections each from the New York Rat and the San Francisco Express Times, and one each from the following 14 underground papers: the Ann Arbor Argus, which began as a campus publication produced in • Ann Arbor, Michigan; the famous Berkeley Barb, produced in Berkeley, • 17 California; the break-away ; the ; a publication called Countdown associated with Tom Forcade of the Underground Press Syndicate; the Earth House Hold (which 1have been unable to trace); Freedom News, published in Richmond, California; New York's East Village Other, Guardian, Liberation, and Other Scenes; Quicksilver Times in Washington, D.C.; South End in Detroit, Michigan; and the White Panther Community News Service (which was likely a single-issue precursor to SunlDance, the organ of the White Panther party). Finally, the anthology includes four unsourced excerpts. One is an article by beat poet Allen Ginsberg entitled "Declaration" urging abstinence from the drug known to countercultural users as "speed" (amphetamines usually injected); the article, according to the anthology editors, was widely reprinted in underground papers of the time. The second is a poem, one in a series of "Revolutionary Letters" writter: by beat poet Diane Di Prima, and Iikened by the editors to "functional ". The third, entitled "Proclamation," is attributed to "The Indians of Alcatraz," addressed to "Indians of Ali Tribes," and was according to the editors issued in November 1969 in San Francisco. The final unsourced selection is entitled "Redstockings Manifesto" and is described by the editors as one of the tirst militant statements of the early Women's Liberation groups. Among then established writers who published in the underground press, The Underground Reader includes: James Baldwin (with "Letter to America" published in London's Peace News); William Burroughs (with "Storm the Reality Studios" in also London-based Friends); poet Gary Snyder (with "Smokey the Bear Sutra" in the Berkeley Barb); and Eldridge • Cleaver (with the essay, ''To My Black Brothers in Vietnam" published in • 18 the Black Panther. Other well-known figures who contributed to the underground selections cited in the anthology include: architect Buckminster Fuller with "The Declaration of Cultural Revolution", published in the East Village Other), and Harvard professor and drug guru , with "God's Secret Agent" - an ode to the inventor of LSD (Iysergic acid diethylamide), that drug known affectionately to its many imbibing countercultural fans as "acid" - appropriately published in the San Francisco Oracle. The Underground Press Anthology, also edited by Tom Forcade and also published in 1972, proved somewhat less useful. It contains 22 mostly very short pieces from the underground papers between 1967 and 1971. It provides sporadic documentation about the articles' originally publishing papers, no original dates of publication and no c1ues (by way of introductory or background material) to same. 1did find here, however, two interesting articles from the sixties underground press, included neither in the reader cited above, nor in the Kornbluth anthology. The first was a piece considered an underground classic, written by

~. sociologist , entitled ''The End of the " (published by Liberation News Service sometime in December 1969 and widely reprinted); and a cynically disillusioned piece about sixties activism and official news by underground journalist and activist Marvin Garson, entitled ''The Staged Sixties" (originally published in the underground paper Northwest Passage, in Bellingham, Washington). Other-- anthologies of articles including some culled from the underground papers include: Fire! Reports from the Underground Press (1970); The Hippie Papers: Notes from the Underground Press (1968), edited by Jerry Hopkins; How Old Will You Be in 1984? Expressions of • Student Outrage from the High School Free Press (1969), edited by • 19 Diane Divoky; The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution (1970), edited by MitchGiI Goodman; The American Experience: A Radical Reader (1970); The New Left: A Documentary History (1969), edited by Massimo Teodori; and The Sixties Without Apology (1984). There are also related single-author anthologies, including: 's Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism (a book published in 1969, which collects 14 pieces wrilten for overground magazines between 1962 and 1968 covering the events of those years); Julius Lester's Revolutionary Notes (a collection of the writer's articles and columns first published in the Guardian); and 's Guitar Army, a collection of Sinclair's writings for the underground press before and after his 1969 conviction for possession of marijuana. ln terms of secondary sources, there is similarly only a handful of reliable volumes that focus on the underground press of the sixties as (a kind of) journalism. This handful includes books about the underground press in countries other than the United States. The emergence of an underground press was an international phenomenon, but the bulk of the world's sixties underground papers were located in the United States, and it was there the phenomenon was (predictably, given the "advanced" capitalist nature of its newspaper industry) most pronounced. Prime among these is Robert Glessing's The Underground Press in America (1971) which covers fifteen years of underground publishing in the United States. It is based on interviews with people who participated in the sixties underground press and on the analysis of 30 of the 439 underground papers Iisted in an appended directory. Glessing also • briefly considered some 500 to 1,000 high school underground papers, • 20 which are not included in the directory. Glessing approached the underground papers as the agents and organs of major social-justice struggles of the day. Laurence Leamer's The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Press (1972) undertakes an exhaustive review of the underground press of the sixties in the United States. The book also provides a worldwide listing of underground papers (based on the membership Iists of the Underground Press Syndicate), according to which there were: 128 U.S. papers and 12 in Canada; 47 in Europe (23 in Britain, six in France, four in the Netherlands, three each in Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and two in Belgium); eight in Latin America (five in Argentina and one each in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia); nine in the Asia-Pacific region (four in Australia, three in New Zealand and two in China). Michael Johnson's The New Journalism (1971) is in a way mistitled, since the usual reference of "th'3 new journalism" is to that brand of slick magazine journalism promoted by Tom Wolfe in the sixties. Johnson, Iike some other writers both sympathetic to the movement and naively optimistic about its chances for survival, included so much in the category of the underground press, perhaps in a bid for greater credibility, that ultimately the analysis lacks the substance evident in the work of Glessing and Leamer. Johnson's book is lacking in primary sources and in both documentation and verification. Roger Lewis's book on the underground press of the sixties, Outlaws of America: The Underground Press and its Context (1972), is a similarly flawed account of the phenomenon. It too expresses a naive view of the underground papers' arch-adversary, The Establishment, and • a naive, even overwhelming, optimism atiout the future of the • 21 underground press and sixties culture. Indeed, his purpose in writing the book, Lewis wrote, was to make evident "the full authority as weil as the beauty and power of the underground press." Ethel Grodzins Romm's The Open Conspiracy (1970) surveys the various Iiterary and historical antecedents and progenitors of the sixties underground press, and provides excerpts from the underground papers and the related movement press. The book also surveys the cultural and political scenes of the sixties and assesses their content. Romm viewed the underground press's refusai to "cloak its outrage" as its most radical characteristic. Raymond Mungo, who ran Liberation News Service, rendered a highly personal and nostalgic narrative of the underground press in his book Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service (1970). Abe Peck, former editor of the underground Chicago

Seed, took a more sober view of the phenomenon, and mourned the 1055 of the idealism that had inspired the rise of the rogue press. His Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (1985) also projects a more jaundiced Iight on the phenomenon than do works written in the early seventies, near the time of the phenomenon's height. It is the latest and perhaps most popular book on the subject. Geoffrey Rips's book The Campaign Against the Underground Press, also written years after the fact (1981) is no simple description of the phenomenon, but an attack on the forces arrayed against it. The book is a monograph by Rips, rounded out with several articles (including one by sociologist Todd Gitlin), and a foreword by Allen Ginsberg. It documents the thesis that the underground press did not simply die; it was instead murdered by establishment forces including the government • and its policing and intelligence agents. The book contains reproductions 22

• of FBI documents authorizing and directing immoral, illegal and unconstitutional activities against the underground press. Other books on this subject include M. H. Halperin's The Lawless State (1977), Paul Cowan's State Secrets (1974), Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching (1980), and Richard E. Morgan's Domestic Intelligence (1981). Sources less germane h"ave also served to place the phenomenon in perspective. These include the following: David Armstrong's A Trumpet to Arms: in America (1981) provides a historical record of the alternative press. Armstrong traced the roots of a dissident or alternative press back to the writings of in the eighteenth century. The book emphasizes the active role of alternative media, suggesting that in addition to monitoring events, alternative media also create them. The range of "alternative" publications considered is wide, including for example, the Berkeley Barb, a genuine sixties underground, along with the consumer-oriented New York magazine. Armstrong also considered video documentaries, cable TV and some (listener-sponsored) FM radio stations as part of the "alternative" media. Lauren Kessler's The Dissident Press: Alternative Journalism in American Historv, published several years after Armstrong's book, takes a wider historical view, analyzing various dissident presses from before the civil war. But Kessler defined alternative more narrowly, to refer to more openly dissident and marginal publications. The book covers in succeeding chapters: the black press, the utopian press, the feminist press, the immigrant and foreign-language press, the working-class radical press (including populist, anarchist, socialist and communist varieties), and the war resisters press (covering both world wars and the • Vietnam war). Kessler commented only briefly on the underground press • 23 of the sixties, as part of her discussion of the utopian, feminist and war resisters press. Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literarv was published in 1961, before the advent of the sixties underground papers. It chronicles the experience of the left-wing writer in America from 1912 to the early 19405. The book focuses on literary America's flirtation with communism through a relatively small group of writers representing the Iiterary left wing. Merton Dillon's The Abolitionists (1974) analyzes the role of the erstwhile "radicals" in the period before the civil war, examining the relationship between black and white abolitionists in terms of the development of racism in subsequent decades. The American Radical Press, 1880-1960 (1974) is a collection edited by Joseph Conlin. The items are supplemented by introductory essays written by scholars in the field, in addition to a general introduction written by Conlin. There are 100 essays, with some addenda, on 119 periodicals. Conlin attempted to provide a comprehensive view of the radical press in America between 1880 and 1960 in terms of the history of rather than the history of the radical press. The Little Magazine (1946) by authors Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen and Carolyn Ulrich, relays the history of the 50-calied "little magazine" in the United States - large in intellectual substance but smail in circulation. The survey provides much anecdotal detail about a selection of those non-commercial magazines including The Little Review, The Dial, The Masses, and the Partisan Review. It also provides an exhaustive index of more than 500 little magazines published in English • since 1891. • 24 Finally, there are some works on the sixties generally that have devoted some attention to the underground press of the decade specifically. These include: Edward Morgan's The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America (1991), which views the underground newspapers as the social glue of the sixties generation, much as the straight press is viewed as the social glue of straight society. He treated the underground journalism of the sixties as mirroring the defining characteristics of the counterculture and New Left as a whole, including an insistence on subjectivity, the rejection of mainstream society and values, and the search for personal and communal Iiberation. ln his earlier book about the sixties, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1977), Morris Dickstein also devoted a chapter to the underground press (though he also termed the phenomenon the new journalism). In the chapter entitled "The Working Press, the Literary Culture, and the New Journalism," Dickstein focused on the journalistic philosophy underlying the enterprise, taking special aim, as the sixties underground journalists themselves did, at the facts. There are a few books about particular publications, but these are of Iimited use here largely because they describe the eventual success of the publications in capitalistic rather than journalistic terms. These include the following: Robert Sam Anson's book Gone Crazy and Back Again: The Rise of the Rolling Stone Generation (1981) draws a tight parallel between the rise and fall of the sixties counterculture and the fortunes (consislently rising as it turned out) of the rock magazine Rolling Stone. Robert Draper wrote a much more detailed account of the magazine's history, Rolling • Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (1990). Kevin McAuliffe's The • 25 Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the Village Voice (1978) relates the history of the Village Voice, which is generally recognized as the prime progenitor of the sixties underground press. Studies of the kind of new journalism associated with Tom Wolfe generally ignore the underground press, though the !WO developments were contemporaneous. Tom Wolfe in The New Journalism (an anthology edited by Wolfe and E. W. Johnson and published in 1973) took a contemptuous view of the underground press. The anthology presents 23 samples of the new journalism (including !WO penned by Wolfe) from a variety of writers including Gay Talese, Michael Herr, Truman Capote, Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joe McGinniss and Joan Didion. The term "new journalism" also referred to the so-called non-fiction novel. John Hollowell, in his book on the subject (Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel, 1977) compared three examples of the non-fiction novel: Truman Capote's ln Cold Slood, Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kooi-Aid Acid Test. The following directories have been particularly useful: Undergrounds: A Union List of Alternative Periodicals in the Libraries of the United States and Canada. The book lists about 2,500 tilles, and gives basic information Iike present and former places of publication, commercial sources of microform copy and an indication of whether the publication is indexed in the Alternative Press Index. In addition to the U.S. and Canadian tilles, the book includes some English, French and German tilles. The list was compiled from 180 Iibraries with individuallibrarians deciding whal to include. Its listing is nol Iimiled to • newspapers but does include more newspapers than magazines. Il also • 26 includes, however, many tilles, such as Dissent, Journal of Social Issues, and Sing Out!, which are not direclly related to the underground press movement of the sixties. The operative definition of alternative here appears to be any small-circulation publication. The listing provides a cumulative table of contents issued annually. The Guide to the American Left (1970), compiled by Laird M. Wilcox, is an elaborate bibliography of writings on the cultural environment of the press. Richard A. Schwarzlose's Newspapers: A Reference Guide (1987) regards the underground press of the sixties as having emerged from the Vietnam war resisters and the civil rights movements. The book cites both anthologies used in the current work, those edited by Kornbluth and Forcade. It recommends several books on the dissident press generally: Lauren Kessler's The Dissident Press; Merton Dillon's The Abolitionists; Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left and David Armstrong's A Trumpet to Arms. The guide also suggests that the underground is still alive, operating under the more respectable name of the alternative press. Alternative Papers: Selections from the Alternative Press, 1979­ 1980, was published in 1982. The book includes about 200 articles from about 100 sources in 11 issue or subject areas. The selections from the alternative press in 1979 and 1980 are grouped together under headings Iike nuclear power, third world, repression, and lesbians and gays. Gail Skidmore and Theodore J. Spahn's From Radical Left to Extreme Right (1987) provides a bibliography of periodicals of protest, controversy, advocacy or dissent, with content-summaries. Il is the third edition of the book; Iwo previous editions were issued in 1967 and 1986. For a fuller explication of the scope of the Iiterature, the reader • should consult the attached bibliography. • 27

NOTE8 - L1TERATURE REVIEW

1. Acknowledgement of copyright credits in the Kombluth anthology contain Iwo errors, that is they refer to Iwo articles that do not appear in the texl. The first erroneous tille is "8gl. Pepper" and the second is 'Where?" Originally, 1Iisted eight articles reprinted from the Berkeley Barb, instead of the actual six. When the overall numbers, compared to the text, failed to correspond, 1recounted the articles credited to the Barb and discovered the "extra" pieces. There is an article in the Kombluth anthology entilled "8gl. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Political Club and Band" (listed as such in the index, but shortened to "8gl. Pepper's Political Club and Band" in the text itself), but it is reprinted from the East Villag9 Other, not the Barb. There are no titles beginning with the word ''where.'' 8inr..e the Iwo tilles are adjacent in the reprint acknowledgemt1nts (i.e. "8gl. Pepper," 'Where?"), it would appear a reasonabla deduction that this iIIusory piece enlitled 'Where?" originated as an editor's or proofreaders's note, Iikely about the ongin of the 8gl. Pepper piece - an error that subsequenlly made its way into the credits as a title.

• 28 • THEORY AND METHOD The methodology employed in the following work is primarily low­ tech. There is no fancy number crunching or the kind of content analysis that seeks quantitative evaluation. The methodology is entirely qualitative. More specifically, it is an attempt to reason in a deconstructivist fashion: 1seek in this work to expose and undermine the binary oppositions favored by a structuralist approach. 1have sought the gaps in the narrative and chronology of the underground sixties press and tried to construe their meanings and over-all significance in terms of the language and Iiterature of the press. The analysis is also broadly comparative: 1have for example compared what was written about the underground press to what the underground press wrote about itself; the mainstream description of events of the sixties to the countercultural Interpretation of those same events; the views of chroniclers writing at the time of the phenomenon with those writing when it was already history; and the optimistic views of the undergrounders about the future of the press to the historicized view of that press as of Iittle seriousness or significance (and this as the reason for its demise). 1have arrived at many of the basic themes of this work - the relation of idealism to capitalist hegemony, for example - precisely by concentrating on the gaps in the narrative, the facts left out. The major motivation behind such a course of analysis as method was, to begin with, the desire to rescue or retrieve from receding history those left-out facts, and hence a revised version of the significance of the phenomenon. The work of the analysis, however, led me to a more complex understanding: of the language of the press as a kind of second-order language that goes beyond reflecting the gap between language and experience (and the culturally encoded • "meanings" implicit in the gap) to re-produce and reinforce the gap. 29 While the theoretical underpinnings of the work are varied, the • present work is indebted to (it attempts to build upon) earlier thinking on the subject largely within the domains of literary and socio-cultural analysis. The work is also informed by the large body of research and commentary in media and press criticism and communications lheorizing. These figureless prominently in the current work, however, because they do not for the most part operate on the level of meaning, but rather adopt a fairly naive view toward language and Iiterature per se (similar to the views that inform the language of the press itself). The current work ensues from the question: What happened to the journalistic idealism of the sixties underground press? Such theorizing does not, indeed can not, address this question, which is ultimately directed at furthering an understanding of a deeper phenomenon: the curiously opaque or "automatic" perversion and severing of the Iink between theorx (or ideals) and practice, and the broader related (as consequence) phenomenon commonly expressed as the loss of meaning. There is of course an immense body of work on this subject, only a fraction of which 1mention here, those fractions implicit in the analysis that follows. That analysis begins by applying (Iater, extending) deconstructivist principles to the language and Iiterature of the press. It thus adopts (and enacts) Michel Foucault's urging for a broadening of Iiterary study to include the field of discursive practices as a whole, and for a reinstatement of rhetorical analysis. Thus 1have "re-searched" the various texts (what the underground press wrote about news events and about itself, compared to what the establishment wrote about news and itself, for example) to question the gaps in the narrative in the attempt to arrive at a deeper understanding of the language of the press, its effects and its means of production. 1have also relied more specifically on • Foucault's Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (1961) for an implicit 30 • "template" of authority as that derived from statl~s (as the authorization to re-present authority), rather than &tatement, or in the language of the press, as that derived from form (who and what authority re,presents) rather than content (what authority says and does). The goal here is to unmask such authority as iIIegitimate. (Foucault argued in the book, which described the construction of such authority in the medical field, as the imposition of positivism on medicine, but with similar purpose: to expose suchauthority as falsei and de-meaning since it paints the authority of the doctor as magical and places it beyond reason, and hence beyond question.)1 ln attempting to elucidate the nature of the establishment press's still-reigning credo of objectivity, 1have tried to apply the analytical insights of Roland Barthes, especially as explicated in his essay, "Myth Today".2 Here, Barthes catalogued seven rhetorical forms of (bourgeois) myth in his discussion of myth as depoliticiz'?d speech: inoculation, privation of history, identification, tautology, neither-norism, quantification of quality and the statement of fact. ln my critique of the press's naively representational theory of language and meaning, 1have relied on Jacques Derrida's assessment of such theory as a kind of metaphysical system because it is entirely dependent on a first principle, which because it remains unquestioned, functions as the foundation for construction of a hierarchy (similarly unquestioned) of meanings.3 1have relied on a basic position of post-structuralist thought: that al1 concepts are inextricably involved (that is, they participate) in the indeterminate process of signification. 1have rejected, however, certain nihilistlc tendencies in some "postmodemist" criticism that works to de­ politicize meaning (usual1y in the guise of opposition to an "unwarranted • privileging" of the subject).4 1have fol1owed instead the lead of Terry 31 • Eagleton in his urging of a revived (political) criticism. As Eagleton noted, although the process of signification is indeterminate, within the play of signifiers, "certain meanings are elevated by social ideologies to a privi­ leged position, or made the centres around which other meanings are forced to turn." These foundational (privileged) meanings then come to be regarded as the source (unquestioned first principles) in a hierarchy of meanings.5 Thus the potentially fertile process of signification is attenuated, and thus the repressive rule of false authority is facilitated, prefiguring the process whereby such rule (hegemony) leads to the containment, as opposed to the communication, of meaning. Authority, as Eagleton has noted of first principles generally, is defined largely by what it excludes. 6 My analysis is thus aimed at under­ mining the binary opposition of terms (primarily establishment versus dissident or underground) in order to expose the real meaning of both terms as political and to show how the supposedly opposite terms secretly inhere in each other: they have meaning in relation to each other and in their respective relation to the "real" events they address. 1assume, following Saussure, that the sign is always conventional, but 1also assume, following Barthes, that the healthy (or valid) sign is the one that does not pretend to the status of first principle, by posturing as natural or inevitable and denying its necessary historical or cultural relativism. My analysis shares in the radical anti-positivist critique of human knowledge associated with, among others, Jurgen Habermas. Modern science and positivism generally are built on assumptions that claim to be value-free (and that claim to have value because they are value-free) but that deconstructive analysis can expose as value-Iaden or "interested".7 It is also informed by Habermas's conviction that theory and practice . • should be intimately Iinked (an implicit defence of ideals, if not idealism) 32 • and that this Iink has been perverted by the implicit appartianing ta reason itself of purely instrumental functions, which enables the conceptualization of increasingly efficient means, but at the same time dis-ables conceptualization of ends (more precisely the worth or value of those same ends). Thus the (unstated) ends remain unquestioned. In societies based on science and technology, such a state of affairs not only mystifies the relationship between means and ends, but further, prohibits large-scale ("public") questioning of both.8 ln terms of journalistic language and literature more specifically, 1 have relied on Walter Benjamin's conception of "information" as a new mode of communication, and one inimical to traditional "storytelling".9 Information "Iays claim to prompt verifiability" and appears "understandable in itself', and its wide dissemination in the form of mass media shares decisively in responsibility for a decline in the practice (if not the "status") of storytelling. 10 1treat the disillusionment of the sixties undergrounders in my attempt to elucidate the nature of their initial idealism. 1am indebted here to Eagleton's commentary on such disillusionment (though he referred largely to the 196B French student revolt,11 rather than to the underground newspapers of the sixties in the United States) as a spur to the development of post-structuralist thought: "Post structuralism was a product of that blend of euphoria and disillusionment, Iiberation and dissipation, carnival and catastrophe, which was 196B. Unable to break the structures of state power, post-structuralism found it possible instead to subvert the structures of language. Nobody, at least, was Iikely to beat you over the head for doing so. The student movement was f1ushed off the streets and driven underground into discourse. Its enemies, as for the later Barthes, became coherent belief-systems of any kind ­ in particular ail forms of political theory and organization which sought to analyze and act upon the structures of society as a • whole.,,12 33 • After the radical polities (including the profusion of underground papers) of the sixties failed to effect the desired social change (that is, in proportional relation to the original high hopes) ail systematic thought became suspect; the conceptualization of meaning was feared as in itself repressive and the idea of waging war on an entire "system" rejected in favor of more decentralized initiatives: "For many post-structuralists, the worst error was to believe that such local projects and particular engagements should be brought together within an overall understanding of the working of monopoly capitalism, which could only be as oppressively 'total' as the very system it opposed. Power was everywhere, a ... force which seeped through every pore of society, but it did not have a centre any more than did the literary text. ,,13

The idea that the system as a whole could not be combatted (because there was in fact no "system as a whole"), did not however lead to more substantial critiques of the nature of social change, at least not within post-structuralist terms. In fact, the new politics of the fragments, in the events of Interpretation, favored positions as dogmatic as the earlier attachment to a "total" politics. "Just as the older forms of "total' polities had dogmatically proclaimed that more local concerns were of merely passing relevance, so the new politics of the fragments was also prone to dogmatize that any more global engagement was a dangerous illusion. Such a position, 1have argued, was born of a specific political defeat and disillusion. The "total structure' which it identified as the enemy was an historically particular one: the armed, repressive state of late monopoly capitalism, and the Stalinist polities which pretended to confront it but were deeply complicit with its rule. Long before the emergence of post-structuralism, generations of socialists had been fighting both of these monoliths.,,14

Though post-structuralist thought may be cited in order to justify • avoiding political questions (as a justification in other words for a-political 34 • analyses), its initial impulse (and consequence) succeeded in enlarging the traditional intellectual frameworks for considering concepts such as truth, meaning, knowledge, and reality, by exposing the naively representational theory of language on which these traditional ideas rested. It al50 led to radical uncertainty about the value of meaning, since the post-structuralist view held the signified to be always shifting, and "reality" as a construct of discourse. How then, could knowledge of reality be approached in discourse? How could discourse even be made to discuss more than itself? And in what way could any interpretation (of "real-world" events or the texts that address them) be deemed superior to any other? Was history itself simply an illusion fostered by contemporary discourse? Such apparently radical questioning resulted in a brand of skepticism (of shifting fashionability) that 1reject in my analysis of the underground press. This skepticism 1view as a perversion of founding post-structuralist thought: It implicitly demands absolute meanings for abstract terms and thus negates the idea of meaning as inevitably relational and forever shifting. In fact, such skepticism (about the potential meaning of words) reverts to pre-structuralist attachment to certainty and the "totalizing" conceptions from which such certainty is supposed to ensue. The very idea that discourse is its own prisoner (that it is by definition dis-connected from its subjects in reality) is dogma. Moreover, it is hardly a new form of dogma: the New Criticism of the fifties and sixties also sought to divorce texts from contexts, albeit from an apparently more "naive" perspective on language. Herbert Marcuse propounded a more substantial critique of the relationship between discourse and reality in The Aesthetic Dimension. Here, Marcuse elaborated a theory of revolutionary ideals (of utopian • freedom) which included a rejection of the Marxist dismissal of art (as the 35 • subjective). He claimed instead that the authority of art derives precisely from its indictment of established reality and its implicit urging that the actual value of ideals is in their enacting. ln a more recent appraisal of the value of ideals, Robert Pirsig (author in the sixties of the countercultural classic and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) argued that quality is equivalent to morality: "... Ouality is morality. Make no mistake about it. They're identical. And if Ouality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world. The world is primarily a moral order. ,,15

Finally my analysis is indebted to the work of British Iiterary and culture critic Raymond Williams. 1share Williams's concern with the need for a common (as opposed to global) culture, as expressed in ail his work, but most specifically elucidated in his Culture and Society.16 Here, Williams emphasized the close relationship between artistic and social development. The viewpoint is British - the book examines mostly the work of British intellectuals on British society (from 1780 to 1950) - but the interpretations are more widely applicable to society generally. Here, Williams argued for a working-class ideal of society against the bourgeois conception of capitalîsm's "rugged individual" (as the source of social value).17 ln The Long Revolution, Williams continued the line of inquiry begun in Culture and Society. Here Williams advanced as a preferable alternative to the rugged of the American Dream the counter-ideal of a collective and unalîenated individuality, what 1think of as a reciprocal form of existentialist individuality.16 ln and Literature, Williams presented the thesis that a central system of practices (hence of meanings and values) operates and dominates in ail societies • at any given time. He argues further, however, that no dominant order 36 • precludes the possibility of new meanings, values and practices (which he calls "emergent" forms), or the implicit challenge they represent to the dominant order. 19 "What has really to be said... as a way of understanding the character of the dominant is that no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts ail human practice, human and human intention. This is not merely a negative proposition, allowing us to account for significant things which happen outside or against the dominant mode. On the contrary, it is a fact about the modes of domination, that they select from and consequently exclude the full range of human practice. What they exclude may often be seen as the personal or the private, or as the natural or even metaphysical. Indeed it is usually in one or other of these terms that the excluded area is expressed, since what the dominant has effectively seized is indeed the ruling definition of the social." 2D

While 1have taken this thesis to heart in my analysis of the sixties underground press, 1have focused primarily on the language of that press and of its adversary, the establishment press, rather than the "events" of the sixties, in my attempt to force the gaps in the narrative to yield new insight. In this respect, 1want to mention a closing word of indebtedness to Marc Angenot's essay "Hégémonie, dissidence et contre-discours,,21 with regard to my invention and use of the term "id-entity" in the text that follows. 1use the term generally to mean a process wrongly viewed as a thing (id-entification as tantamount to "thingification") but also in a larger and more strategie sense: to drive a theoretical wedge between the ideas of "thing" and "process," (or a man and his qualities) and avoid reasoning that builds on the contrary assumption implied by the usual "identity" as "associated things". 1first began worrying about the meaning of the term "identity" after reading Angenot's essay, which advances an idea of • hegemony itself ~ the impossibility of an Other legitimacy. 37 • NOTES - THEORY AND METHOD

1. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l'âge c1assigue (Paris: Plon, 1961). Tr. Madness and Civilization (New York Random, 1973).

2. Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973) 143-155.

3. In Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestem UP, 1988) 154, Derrida directly addressed ''the problem of the responsibility of intellectuals in their relations to the press. Not in order to recommend retreating into the interior of the Academy, even less to accuse the press in itself or in general, but on the contrary to cali for the maximal development of a press that is freer and more rigorous in the exercise of its duties. In fact, 1believe that professional joumalists are more demanding in this regard than are those intellectuals who make use of newspapers as instruments of a power that is Immediate and subject to few controls."

4. 1refer by postmodemist criticism to that which begins by assuming some kind of radical break in the nature of society, signified by many terms, including the mass, spectacle-oriented, consumerist society; also the post-industrialist, and even post-capitalis~ society. In terms of the nihilistic strands 1oppose in my own analysis, 1am thinking of those suggested (and largely rejected) by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his book The Postmodem Condition: A Report on Knowledge (: U of Minnesota P, 1984).

5. Terry Eagleton, Literarv Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) 132.

6. Eagleton, 203: Though "critical discourse has no determinate signified, it still excludes a lot, disqualifying certain kinds of discourse as invalid or illicit. Ils apparent generosity at the level of the signified is matched only by its sectarian intolerance at the level of the signifier. Regional dialects of the discourse, so to speak, are acknowledged and sometimes tolerated, but you must not sound as though you are speaking another language altogether. To do so is to recognize in the sharpest way that critical discourse is power. To be on the inside of the discourse itself is to be blind to this power, for what is mOie natural and • non-dominative than to speak one's own tongue?" 38

• 7. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon, 1971) and Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon, 1973).

8. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Comell UP, 1981) 250-251. Jameson noted that the means/end opposition: "... although it seems to retain the term [value] and to make a specifie place for value, has the objective result of abolishing value as such, bracketing the "end" or drawing it backinto the system of pure means in such a way that the end is merely the empty aim of realizing these particular means. This secret one-dimensionality of the apparent means/end opposition is usefully brought out by the Frankfurt School's altemate formulation, namely the concept of instrumentalization, which makes it c1ear that rationalization involves the transformation of everything into sheer means (hence the traditional formula of a Marxist humanism, that capitalism is a wholly rationalized and indeed rational system of means in the service of irrational ends.)"

9. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, 1968) 83-109. According to Benjamin (88): "... with the full control of the middle class, which has the press as one of its most important instruments in fully developed capitalism, there emerges a form of communication which, no matter how far back its origin may lie, never before influenced the epic form in a decisive way. But now it does exert such an influence. And it tums out that it confronts storytelling as no less of a stranger than did the novel, but in a more menacing way, and that it also brings about a crisis in the novaI. This new form of communication is information."

1O. Benjamin, Illuminations 89: "Often it [information] is no more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries was. But while the latter [storytelling] was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is indispensable for information to sound plausible. Because of this it proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling. If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs.... Every moming brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to use without being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information."

11. Eagleton, 141-142: "In 1968 the student movement had swept • across Europe, striking against the authoritarianism of the educational 39 • institutions and in France briefly threatening the capitalist state itself. For a dramatic moment, that state teetered on the brink of ruin: its police and army fought in the streets with students who were struggling to forge solidarity with the working class. Unable to provide a coherent political leadership, plunged into a confused melee of , and infantile behind-baring, the student movement was rolled back and dissipated; betrayed by their supine Stalinist leaders, the working-class movement was unable to assume power. Charles de Gaulle retumed from a hasty exile, and the French state regrouped its forces in the name of patriotism, law and order."

12. Eagleton, 142.

13. Eagleton, 142-143.

14. Eagleton, 143.

15. Robert Pirsig, Lila: An Inguirv into Morais (New York: Bantam, 1991) 111. Pirsig's argument includes the idea that "values create objects" and so reflects the radical empiricism of earlier crities, such as William James. (1 do not mention James in this section on theoretical considerations because 1have addressed his radical empiri~ism in the body of the text).

16. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London: Penguin, 1958).

17. In this respect 1want to cite here, to iIIustrate what 1 mean by bourgeois individualism (a topic treated more substantially in the text), an old review of Williams's book written by Irving Howe in the New Republic 140.17 (23 Feb. 1959). Howe appeared to be faulting Williams for spreading his culture a bit too common. "Even in societies toward which they can be friendly, intellectuals, if they are to remain intellectuals, will probably have to be crities, irritants, outsiders, living by the values of minority culture." Such criticism defends nothing (certainly not the "values" of "minority culture") so much as the (continuing) elite status of the critic.

18. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1961).

19. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, • 1977). • 40 20. Williams, Marxism 125. Here, Williams (113-114) also argued for the value of oppositional views: ''The reality of any hegemony, in the extended political and cultural sense, is that while by definition it is always dominant, it is never either total or exclusive. At any time. forms of alternative or directly appositional polities and culture exist as significant elements in the sacietv... Il would be wrang ta averlook the importance of works and ideas which, while clearly affecled by the hegemonic limits and pressures, are al least in part significant breaks beyand them, which may again in part be neutralised, reduced or incorporated, bul which in their most active elements. nevertheless come through as independent and original."

21. Marc Angenot, "Hégémonie, dissidence et contre-discours," Études Littéraires 22. 2 (Autumn 1989).

• • 41 THE RISE OF THE UNDERGROUND PRESS

The widely accepted account of the sixties underground press movement in the United States has it growing from a handful of so-called "first-wave" papers in 1964 and 1965 to a high point in its 1969 heyday of about 500 papers with a readership of 4.5 million.' The actual number of underground papers published in the United States in the late sixties and early seventies, however, is nearly impossible to determine: "Some published irregularly, many were short-Iived, and none was registered with the Audit Bureau of Circulation. One chronicler of the underground press found 457 papers published in 41 states and the District of Columbia in 1970. The Underground Press Syndicate ... estimated that it served 400 newspapers with a combined readership of 20 million in 1969.,,2

According to writer Laurence Leamer, the Los Angeles Free Press was the only underground paper with circulation figures listed in the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Leamer also noted that while journalistic tradition held it as common and valuable practice to over-estimate circulation

wherever possible, the underground editors were 50 inexperienced, 50

oppositional and anti-establishment, and "50 terribly unbusinesslike" that many among them may have "through ignorance", under-estimated their circulations. 3 Leamer estimatecl in his book on the sixties underground press (published in 1972), that by the narrowest possible definition of the phanomenon's size - membership in the Underground Press Syndicate ­ there were at least 200 underground papers with a total circulation of 1.5 million. Using the mass magazine formula of estimating six readers for • each magazine, Leamer suggested an upper readership figure of 9 • 42 million. If related publications were included (such as high school press and rock music papers) the total circulation figure would double, swelling to about 3 million with (by the times-six reckoning) some 18 million readers. 4 Writer Roger Lewis, whose book on the underground press was also published in 1972, claimed that UPS figures in 1970 showed the service counted approximately 140 American member papers (and 60 international associates in Canada, England, Holland, Italy, Argentina, France, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Germany).5 While estimates of the number of papers rar.;je from a low of 200 to a high of 500, readership figures vary preposterously, from 2 million (according to the conservative overground ) to 30 million, according to Lewis, who did however caution that the figure represented everyone who happened to come in contact with an underground paper, rather than to sales.6 Figures citing millions of readers (readers considered as anyone who came into contact with an underground paper) are obviously inflated in terms of measuring circulation as a normal indicator of "success", but they are also, in another sense,, Iikely not far from the truth: ln the decade when young people experimented with varieties of communal living, varieties of sharing, and when in this context few among the counterculture raised an eyebrow at the sharing of food, living space, or even sexual partners, it is unlikely anyone got uptight, to use the vernacular, about shared newspapers. Robert Glessing's seminal 1971 work included a directory of 460 American underground papers (107 ofthem in California and 64 in New York). Glessing cautioned, however, that his listing, compiled from • several other directories and including some 100 publications not Iisted in • 43 those directories was "as complete a roster ... as could be compiled at publication time." The directory began with a proviso: ''The swift pace of events which characterizes underground journalism makes it impossible to offer a complete or current listing. As this last was being put together at least fifteen underground papers were being started and an equal number were ceasing publication. Some of the papers Iisted are no longer publishing, but have published within the past twelve months. Because of the highly irregular publishing schedule of high school underground sheets, no effort has been made to include the estimated 3,000 papers in this category.,,7

Though Glessing actually considered the underground press a longer-term phenomenon, one that had begun in the mid-fifties with such as the Village Voice and , his directory Iists primarily underground papers that began in the sixties. The admittedly snapshot nature of his estimate actually makes it a more reliable source for the present purpose than the perhaps overly enthusiastic ones of other chroniclers of the sixties underground press also writing in the early seventies, near the time of the phenomenon's height (such as Johnson and Lewis), who tended to embrace peripheral publications and events as part of the underground, perhaps in a bid for greater importance or legitimacy. These writers saw themselves as part of an ongoing revolution, and if they concerned themselves with methodology, this is not apparent in their work. Glessing's "snapshot" is also a more reliable picture than those offered by later writers looking back at the sixties press years after its demise, such as Abe Peck, himself a former editor of the underground Chicago Seed. Peck later went on to work for mainstream media and did not write his book about the underground press in America • until 1985. Quite aside from the notorious unreliability of human memory • 44 and the play of time on the of events, Peck and others writing from hindsight (Kessler for example, writing in 1984) had after ail to rely on the earlier works for their own views on what did and what did not belong in the category underground press. Peck, who Iike Glessing and most other chroniclers, did not consider the high school press as part of the phenomenon, nonetheless estimated their number at nearly 1,000 - a third of Glessing's estimate. Finally, in addition to using various and random methods of measurement, writers on the sixties undergrounds defined the term underground somewhat idiosyncratically. Peck for example used a wider operational definition of underground, including as part of it the muckraking magazine Ramparts (which Glessing did not Iist in his directory). Ramparts magazine was not part of the underground press movement as defined here, though it may rightly be claimed as a precursor and a model of investigative reporting. The classic muckraking magazine began as a small-circulation Catholic magazine and became a popular leftist monthly with a circulation of 250,000 only in the mid-sixties, thanks to its firsthand reports from Vietnam and its exposes revealing the extensive premeditation of U.S. involvement there. 8 On the other hand, Glessing did include the satirical magazine The Realist, founded in 1958, in his directory, while Peck considered the magazine not an underground paper proper, but rather the true parent of the sixties undergrounds. Like Peck, Glessing included the (Oakland, Calif.) Black Panther, and the military paper The Bond. In fact, in his directory, Glessing used code lellers to distinguish four categories of underground paper (C for college or campus publications, comprising 49 of the total 460; M for military ones, with 58 of the total; Bl for black papers with only four • papers; and CH for Chicano, with 10 of the total). Interestingly, Peck • 45 cited Gay Activist, not mentioned by Glessing. This may indicate that the gay cause became respectable in radical circles, that it became a political issue, only after the fall of the underground press, rather than emerging as one of its contemporaneous voices. Similarly, Glessing mentions only one feminist paper (Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement in Chicago). Though third-wave feminist publications are traditionally traced to the sixties underground press movement, the feminist press did not get under way until later, and then more as a reaction to the a- of the sixties undergrounds, than as a facet or continuation of the former's supposedly blanket radical

approach to political issues. Peck mentioned Peace Newsletter, al50 not mentioned by Glessing, though G1essing's Iist included five papers with the word "peace" in their tilles, three of them military. 9 According to Glessing, the term underground press originated with the early sixties and rush of anti-establishment papers: "underground" referred to the illegal drugs associated with the papers, often as the primary means of financing the ostensibly anti-profit enterprises, rather than to the papers themselves. The New York Guardian described itself as radical rather than underground. Others preferred the tille "revolutionary". The Los Angeles Free Press, the most commercially successful of the sixties undergrounds, considered itself an alternative rather than underground paper. The Village Voiee, considered the father of the undergrounds, referred to itself as a trendmaker. Even Tom Forcade, coordinator of the Underground Press Syndicate, rejected the term underground, though somewhat facetiously: "Underground is a sloppy word and a lot of us are sorry we got stuck with il. 'Underground' is meaningless, ambiguous, • irrelevant, wildly imprecise, undefinitive, derivative, • 46 uncopyrighted, uncontrollable, and used up," said Forcade. 1o

A 1967 article in Esquire magazine c1aimed the terrn underground created "a romantic spell."l1 Fortune, identifying the underground press by audience, said that audience included: "Hippies and doctrinaire Leninists, anarchists and populists, the'campus cong' and peaceful communards, militant confrontationists and mystics, Bakuninists and humanists, power seekers, ego trippers, revolutionaries, Maoists, rock bands, and cultural guerrillas.,,12

While Peck and Glessing agreed on the so-called ''tirst wave" papers in the United States, Peck considered these as following the lead of the already established Village Voice and Liberation, Glessing included Liberation but not the Village Voice, in his Iist of bona fide sixties undergrounds. The first wave papers included the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, the (New York) East Village Other, the (San Francisco) Oracle, the (Detroit) Fifth Estate, and The Paper in East Lansing, Michigan. Soon to follow among the many others were the (Chicago) Seed, the (Austin) Rag, the (New York) Rat, the (San Quentin) Outlaw, the (Washington) Quicksilver Times, the (Houston) Space City, the (Cambridge) Old Mole, the (Jackson) Kudzu, the (Denver) El Gallo, the (Madison) Kaleidoscope, the (San Jose) Red Eye, and the (Boston)

Avatar. 13 At least 400 would then appear a reasonable estimate of the number of underground papers launched in the sixties in the United States, not counting high-school papers or older alternative papers. The number would be lower if a strict definition is applied (papers launched • after the so-called first wave papers and in their i1k) and higher if left- 47 • 14 Iiberal, but basically overground, publications are included. If only by the banal yardstick of size, the underground press was a contender. It did not of course represent a threat to daily newspapers, however, since none of the underground papers published daily editions. Nevertheless by 1971, the underground press included: "... the largest-paid-circulation weekly in Georgia and one of the largest in California; the two biggest weeklies in Berkeley; and important papers in Chicago, Detroit, , Boston, and towns and cities across the United States. ,,15

Less uncertainty exists with regard to the growth of the sixties undergrounds, both the rate at which new papers were founded, and the rate of circulation growth. The rate at which new papers sprouted does not take into account the many that folded after only several issues, but neither does it mitigate the evidence of rapid growth. The number of underground newspapers joining Liberation News Service went from 50 to 100 to 300 in the space of several months.16 Glessing's proviso to his underground directory listing itself attests to the phenomenon's rapid growth. As for circulation growth, papers that lasted until1969 saw their readership figures grow at rates the straight press could not hope to approximate. Circulation at New York's East Village Other, founded in 1965, grew from an initial 5,000 to 65,000 in four years. The by-then "established" Village Voiee, by comparison, took 14 years to equal that circulation.17 ln 1965 when it was founded, the Berkelev Barb sold 5,000 or fewer copies a week, but it increased sales to 85,000 copies a week by the summer of 1969 (when gross profits were estimated at $264,840).18 The establishment Berkeley Gazette, by comparison, sold 14,299 19 • copies. • 48 The Los Angeles Free Press, the paper that launched the sixties underground press movement in the United States and became its greatest success in commercial terms, was founded in 1964 by its editor/publisher Art Kunkin, a former machinist, free-lance photographer and student of Manhattan's New School for Social Research. The weekly eight-page, 5,000-edilion tabloid was modelled slightly to the left of the Village Voice. The Free Press grew to sixteen pages with a circulation of 9,000 in Iwo years. By the summer of 1969, it was the most successful underground paper in , with a weekly circulation of 95,000, a staff of 32 and a gross annual income over $450,000. 20 Most undergrounds of course enjoyed more modest, if any, profits. The Paper and the Fifth Estate, for example, while both first-wave papers, remained less significant voices, inasmuch as circulation indicates significance, with circulations of 3,000 and 1,000 respectively. According to Glessing, the average weekly underground started with several hundred readers and sold about 5,000 copies weekly by 1969. The more successful underground papers published weekly, but most published monthly or even bi-monthly; very few attempted daily publication and none succeeded. Most of the successful weekly undergrounds operated on a total budget of $500-$1 ,000 per issue. 21 Many if not most of the underground papers were highly dependent on the copy and graphies provided by the Iwo alternative news services, the Underground Press Syndicate and Liberation News Service. The services provided national news coverage to smaller papers and brought together editors and activists in a series of movement conferences. The Underground Press Syndicate was founded in 1966 by Allan and Don Katzman of the East Village Other. The syndicate had five • original member papers - the so-called "big five" - Manhattan's East • 49 Village Other, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, The Paper, (which grew up as an alternative campus paper and folded in 1969), and Detroit's Fifth Estate. 22 The founding members agreed to exchange copy with one-time reprint rights and to hire a central advertising agency and divide the profit. The format agreed upon the following year included a free exchange of materials and reciprocal subscriptions for ail members to member papers. This underlay and reinforced the underground's informai attitude toward copyright laws. Initially the syndicate, with help from director John Wilcock and other notables of the underground press, established itself in Arizona, moving to in 1969. At its third conference, in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969, "there was a shotgun stand-off between White Panthers and police. It was, perhaps, an indication of how seriously the police regard U.p.S.,,23 At that time, UPS estimated weekly readership of the underground press in America at about 2 million. That represented 1 1/2 million more readers since 1966. UPS created Concert Hall Publications in Glenside, Pennsylvania, to serve as an advertising representative for 79 of the top unc'erground papers. By the summer of 1969, Concert Hall was placing naélrly $40,000 a month in advertising insertions in underground papers. 24 "If they went out of business, fifty underground papers would go down with them," Marvin Garson, former editor of San Francisco's Good Times, said of Concert Hall, which solicited ads exclusively for underground papers, including from record companies, and motorcycle and camping-equipment manufacturers. 25 The syndicate also published a directory containing ad rates and subscription priees, as weil as general news and information about the underground press, and though irregularly, a newsletter offering • information about member papers and advice on legal and financial 50

• problems. It also maintained a distribution agency and put underground publishers in touch with regional printers and retail outlets. As weil, director Tom Forcade published Orpheus magazine, a non-profit venture which while not owned by UPS, carried articles from the underground papers, and functioned as a kind of reader's digest for the counterculture. The magazine had a stated circulation of 24,000 in the late sixties and was supposed to be published bimonthly but ran more like quarterly.26 The syndicate thus worked Iike a wire service, while also performing some of the functions of publishing house, advertising agency and information clearinghouse for the underground press. 27 Liberation News Service was founded in October 1967 Gust before the March on the Pentagon) by Raymond Mungo and Marshall Sloom, who had been trying to run and radicalize the United States Student Press Association. Initially based in Washington, LNS later moved to New York. It began providing news, articles, illustrations, photographs and comic strips on a bi-weekly basis and became the nervous system of the underground press. At the dispute in 1968, LNS was the only news medium to have reporters inside the university during the confrontation, and so the only one able to provide a first-hand account,28 The service supplied its members twice weekly with packages including news and commentary, poetry, photography and underground comics, provided by journalists who formed a loose network of underground reporters, photographers, and cartoonists, mostly in the United States. Sy 1968, mailings of LNS packages were getting large and going out three times a week, again reflecting the rapid growth of the underground press and perhaps its growing status among the straight press. 29 Liberation News Service had about 500 subscribers, but only • 150 of these were underground papers. The balance was composed of • 51 establishment subscribers, though a subscription to LNS cost an underground paper $15 a month, while an establishment subscriber paid up to $1,000. ( did not subscribe, for example, while the Columbia Broadcasting System and Look magazine did.)30 The service was run by Mungo and Bloom unti11968, when it began to be taken over by ostensibly more radical political groups.

According to 50me critics, LNS, founded as a competing news service to UPS, was more "radical" or adversaria! than its predecessor, which by 1970 was regarded by some as disorganized and corrupt. Others, however, argued the opposite case - that UPS was the more radical or "political" of the !wo. As weil, LNS was itself also accused of corruption. Though LNS took basically a New Left position on the issLles,

it al50 kept its distance from New Left organizations. Il rejected a proposed affiliation with Students for a Democratie Society, for examphll, because it did not want to become a mouthpiece for the New Left elite.:11 But LNS did not last long, indeed it barely survived the decade's close. In 1969, Mungo and Bloom left the news service to found a communal farm in Vermont where Bloom (apparently depressed over an impending court appearance for ) would later commit suicide. Liberation News Service, with about 300 subscribers at that point, became a member of UPS. (This would not have represented a significant gain in circulation among the counterculture, since most underground p..p"lr~ already subscribed to both services).32 Both syndicate and service offered items unavailable in the straight or overground press, and printed news and opinion suppressed or ignored by the overground. The common wisdom has it that these services helped provide a common identity for the underground papers, • which were expected in turn to work at the local level exposing 52

• interlocking vested interests, for example making connections between the Vietnam war, the university and organized crime (including the crimes of official organizations, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation).33 This journalistic philosophy, however, did not necessarily make it past the abstract, because of the expense involved in investigative reporting, and the fact that the vast majority of underground papers were staffad by non-professional journalists and never had more than shoestring budgets to deal with. 34 A third service, the Aframerican News Service, was founded in 1968 in by the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee. ThE' ANS, which specialized in black-power news, originally engaged in an exchange with LNS. Il was not long, according to Mungo, before ANS began to crowd out LNS "in ghetto newspapers Iike Cleveland's Plain

Truth and Albany's Liberator. ,,35

• • 53 THE CONTEXT OF THE UNDERGROUND PRESS

Much of the prevailing History has it that no real tradition of a dissenting or radical press existed in North America until the mid-sixties except for the Village Voice and I.F. Stone's Weekly. Neither the sixties undergrounds nor their precursors, however, originated dissent or dissenting publications in America; both had existed nearly from the beginning of the country's press history.38 Thus this view - of a radical press emerging only atter the Second World War - is not only mistaken, but also, 1will argue, mistaken in a pointed way, a way that has consequences, not only in terms of how one views History, but more importantly in terms of how one acts on, or in terms of, its narrative. The view of the sixties press as the start of something entirely new is part of official History (that written by History's winners) and it isolates the sixties underground press from, instead of placing it within, its appropriate, that is to say its actual, context of dissent. What this History hides (no conspiracy to hide is required) are not the much bemoaned failures of the sixties underground papers, but precisely, their IIttle heralded successes. At the same time, it is in defending the legitimacy of the sixties undergrounds that critics are likely to cite the Village Voice as vanguard. Curiously, this too has the belated effect of helping to disappear what 1will argue was the true nature of the sixties press as a single, though singular, chapter in the long and rather distinguished history of America's dissident press. Perhaps this phenomenon has more to do with the nature of hegemony than with that of the sixties underground press specifically, or the dissident voice (the VOiC8 of the • Other) generally. 54

• The weekly Village Voiee, almost invariably cited as the prime precursor of the underground press, the grandfather of the sixties papers, was founded in 1955 by editor Dan Wolf, publisher Ed Fancher, and contributor and financial backer Norman Mailer. The paper is rightly credited with pioneering the way for the underground papers and functioning as an immediate model for at least some of the sixties upstarts. Yet it also benefiled from their rapid growlh, increasing its own circulation prodigiously - from 20,000 in 1964 to 75,000 in 1967, and 150,000 in 1970. While sympathetic critics also credited the Voiee with developing journalistic talent and defended its coverage of politics, music and art, the paper was scorned as Olliberal Ol (a very dirty word among sixties radicals) by its more radical and less solvent progeny among the undergrounds. This may also be regarded as part of the Oldisappearing Ol phenomenon, because by rejecting their antecedents, radical movements weaken themselves, not their opposition. The Voice reported on New York's scene and on the then-new cultural phenomenon of the beats. It also published muckraking stories and editorial opposition pieces on the exeesses of big business and big government. It opposed McCarthyism and other outbreaks of anti-communism, which was the fundamental credo of post­ war America. In fact, when the Voice hit the streets of Greenwich Village in October 1955, carrying a banal mix of art and culture features, community news and movie reviews, people assumed it was a Communist paper. Communist ideology and language was alive then, however, so that to regard the paper as Communist, was simply to regard it as aberrant, much as the essentially anarchist underground press of the • sixties is so regarded today. Nevertheless, according to John Wilcock, • 55 the Voice's first news editor, later the editor of several underground papers and a ubiquitous figure in the underground press movement, the characterization of the Voice as either Communist Q.C underground was at best misleading: "It was absurd, but because of the deep fears in American life after the McCarthy period, the Voice got the reputation for being a far-out, freaky paper. Almost despite itself the paper ended up tha grandfather of the underground press."37

From the perspective of those running the Village Voice, the rebellion against the straight press that the new paper represented entailed a much narrower range of revoit (than that evinced in the sixties undergrounds); its critique was not as all-encompassing as its enemies supposed, nor nearly as all-encompassing as the later radical undergrounds believed it ought to have been. Voice publisher Ed Fancher described the paper as concerned with a minor revoit, what he called "the revoit of the urbs" - basically the struggle by Greenwich Village community organizers to preserve the greenery of the neighborhood against the interests of developers and real-estate agents, and perhaps against modernity itself.38 This budding concern to preserve the natural environment set a precedent for the later evolution of the , as did other issues first covered by the Voice in an albeit more "suburban" style. The paper itself was nonetheless scorned as liberal (rural and romantic) by its (urban revolutionary) underground press progeny. The Voice oozed nostalgia: it was housed in a quaint wooden structure that Leamer wrote "might have been built for the archetypal crusading nineteenth-century newspaper.,,39 Finally, the Village Voice took for granted certain practical • exigencies, such as those answering to the desire for (financial) survival - 56

• a trait not shared by the later underground papers, for whom commercial success was at best suspect: il represented in itself a kind of ccp-out or sell-out. Not only the Voice, but as weil the later more bona fide undergrounds that grew successful and able to meet their printing bills because of their large circulations, like the East Village Other and the Los Angeles Free Press, were regarded as not quite radical by their poorer and vastly more numerous counterparts. 40 Fancher claimed that the Voice did ail its own first-hand reporting, and believed that undergrounds, and ail other newspapers, should do the same. This journalistic value constituted a critique of mass journalism, which was moving in the other direction, that is toward routine erosion of the journalistic base in a bid for economic "rationalization". Ironically, the great motley crew that made up the bulk of the underground press movement took this important critique (the injunction to do first-hand reporting) as just another sign of the Voice's anti-radica\ nature. For among the bulk ofthe underground, an opposing value - that willingness to share material was a fundamental part of press freedom - held ground. The irony is that the Voice's policy of first-hand reporting (regarded by the undergrounders as conservative, with ail the disdain that epithet expressed) was at once the major reason for its disfavor among the presumedly more radical underground papers and a radically substantive critique of the straight press. Moreover, it was the Voice that introduced a no-holds policy on language usage in reporting of news, a characteristic that subsequently was adopted by the underground press (with certain caveats to be explored later) and with and for which the underground press became associated and remembered. 41 Radical publications in North America originated neither with the • underground press of the sixties nor with its precursors in the fifties. • 57 There was already a long history of radical publications by the end of the Second World War. Probably the oldest radical publication in the U.S. is the Nation, which had been publishing since 1865. Max Eastman's New York magazine The Masses and Emma Goldman's Mother Earth both began publishing in the early years of the twentieth century. , begun in 1909 by then senator Bob LaFoliette, remains among the best alternative monthlies currently publishing. Legendary journalist I.F. Stone founded his leftist one-man investigative paper, J.F. Stone's Weekly. in 1953 and single-handedly wrote and edited it until 1971, when it ceased publicaiion. Stone's weekly took critical aim at domestic policies and the conventional press, in addition to opposing the Vietnam war. Stone invented and pioneered in his small-circulation weekly (about 5,300) an original brand of investigative journalism and provided a model for early alternative magazines like the monthly Liberation, started in 1956. Though Stone's technique remained unequalled (he turned the injunction to read between the lines into technique), he traced his own journalistic roots or influences back to the muckraking of Uplon Sinclair early in the century. A committed socialist, Sinclair (1878-1968) was much caught up with his political convictions and concern for , in both his novels and non-fiction work. His The Brass Check, a highly criticaltreatise on journalism published in 1919, cited his own experience in the profession. Sinclair was one of a small group of writers that included Samuel Hopkins Adams, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, David Graham Phillips, Charles E. Russell and a single female, Ida M. Tarbell, who made up the core of the muckraking movernent in the first decade of this • century. Their articles appeared in popular magazines and were 58

• complemented by editorials and cartoons, and very much as in the sixties underground press movement, were supported by a culture of dissent (though with somewhat greater counter-institutional support than the muckrakers of the sixties underground press would enjoy). Between 1SJ3 and 1912, a virtual handful of muckraking journalists produced nearly 2,000 magazine articles on widespread corruption in public Iife and business practice. McClure's Magazine spearheaded the early muckraking movement, but other mass-publication magazines, including Collier's and Cosmopolitan, soon followed. 42 Though the early-century muckraking articles appeared in magazines and later books rather than in newspapers, the purpose of the muckraking journalists was similar to that of sorne of the sixties undergrounders. A good example is the muckraking sixties underground paper Hard Times, formerly called Mayday, edited by Andrew Kopkind and James Ridgeway with Fred Gardner and Ralph Nader as consulting editors, which was praised by one critic as "the most intelligent and genuinely informative muckraking paper" published among the sixties underground press. 43 The goal in both cases was to stir the populace to action by exposing the lies of its high functionaries and the social problems these lies were designed to hide or obscure. The journalistic idealism that characterized the muckrakers' work - the belief that

corruption O:1ce revealed would lead to appropriate changes - was shared by the sixties press. One writer commented about Lincoln Steffens that his: "... exposes of municipal graft were overtly designed to create action by stirring up civic pride. Throughout there was a hopefully optimistic note of moral awakening... Steffens began to refer to his solution as 'practical Christianity.' It was the spirit which led the individual to • consider the good of the whole community. This was real 59

• democracy. Its motivating force was love which would overcome selfishness and would be the avenue to reform and democracy.,,44

This parallels the avowed press philosophy of the sixties undergrounds, minus the familiar expletives and taunting tone. The same business ethic was blamed for corrupting government, its instruments, and ultimately public opinion and the people themselves; the same ideal of love was regarded as the ultimate cure. And even though the early muckrakers sound almost quaint, compared to the raging of the sixties dissidents, the same disillusionment also followed for the muckrakers when their efforts appeared to have failed to bring about the desired changes, or at least to the extent of the original desire: The disillusionment, in terms of affect, was inversely proportionate to the original idealism. In his Autobiography published in 1931, Steffens bemoaned the death of the muckraking tradition, blamed himself for his original idealism and renounced both the muckraking and the idealism that had inspired il. He went so far as to cali muckraking only "a reflex of an old moral cutture."45 ln the early muckraking era, many journalists also tried their hand at novels. That era did not distinguish as this one does so strictly between the two forms (fiction and non-fiction), at least not in terms of the purpose of the work (as the New Critics in America would do during the period of that school's greatest influence, from the 1930s to the 1950s). David Graham Phillips's novel, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, espoused the author's feminist beliefs through the story of a country girl who "rises above prostitution" to become a successful actress. (From a more radical perspective, one couId of course argue that the logic of • capitalism makes of the successful actress merely a better paid prostitute, 60

• or of the successful wife, a largely unpaid one.) It was published in 1917, six years after the writer's murder in New York at the hands of a man who believed himself maligned in Phillips's earlier novel The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig. published in 1909. Phillips's writing on the inequality of women has been credited with laying the groundwork for the U.S. Constitution's Nineteenth Amendment, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in voting for president, vice president and for representatives in the Senate and Congress. Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle created a publishing commotion when it came out in 1906. It got Sinclair an invitation to the White House from then president Theodore Roosevelt and influenced the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act. The Jungle, a grim depiction of Iife in the Chicagc siockyards wherein the hero, Siavic immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, suffdrs unrelenting degradation at the hands of the capitalist system before turning to socialism, also helped establish the tradition of novels advocating social reform. The really interesting question here is not why Sinclair chose the form of a novel to espouse his socialist beliefs, but rather why that tradition appears so totally discredited without so much as a funeral, or even a postmodernist slaying. The idea of the postmodernist rejection of meaning as a radical shift is untenable when viewed in context of the Iiterature of dissent: Lincoln Steffens "explained" his ultimate disillusionment with muckraking by calling its inspiration the "reflex of an old moral culture." Yet muckraking was revived in the thirties, though its primary location became books rather than magazines. Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons, about the stock market, published in 1934, is a good example. The book followed a series on the same subject published in • the early thirties in The New Yorker.) Perhaps one reason this revival is 61

• not generally regarded as such, or the reason that the muckraking tradition appears broken, is that the thirties in American Iiterature were also the high point of 50-calied proletarian Iiterature, strongest but not Iimited to the United States, that sympathetically portrayed the working class and Its problems in an econcmically depressed era. Many of the writers in this genre were actively involved in the Communist party, and even those that were not still spoke a recognizably similar "language," believing for example that they had a responsibility to engage and further the "class struggle" - a term that, Iike capitalism itself, would lose currency among the sixties radicals. This genre of writer included many who were not journalists, such as fiction writers, radio broadcasters and documentary filmmakers. Even the propagandizing pamphlet - a journalistic form supreme given its "timeliness" - enjoyed a renaissance in the thirties. 46 Thus there did occur a broadening of muckraking into various forms. Though the intellectuals of the thirties (in Europe as in America) were often regarded as Marxist and although many were, the term often also expressed IiUle more than "a general sympathy with socialism, or more specifically with Soviet Russia.,,47 Radical journalistic forms revived in the "Red" decade of the thirties were published throughout the Second World War and the . Dissident publications Iike the Catholic Worker, founded in 1933, had long resisted war and promoted , cultivating an audience of Christian socialists. In fact, that publication was opposing the Vietnam war for years before most Americans became aware of il. (Of course, in the nature of orthodox criticism, the magazine was criticized for preaching to the converted, both before and after its conversion into Ramparts, but it was rarely credited with raising consciousness of the war.) The Catholic • Worker and other IiUle known radical publications were writing about the • 62 situation in that part of the world for IWo decades before the birth of the sixties underground press - from the time of France's defeat in the Indochina war of 1946-54, through America's Vietnam war, which began in 1954 and ended not in 1973 with the Paris agreement allowing for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, but only in 1975, with a Communist victory. The leftist (Iater the New York Guardian) was founded by IWo newspapermen in 1948 to support Henry Wallace as presidential candidate for the newly formed Progressive party. (In 1946, Wallace was editor of the Iiberal weekly New Repub\ic). In the sixties, the Guardian published information on developments in Vietnam and constituted one of the few independent, non-governmental, sources of information on the war. In 1965, it reported on the destruction of farms, hospitals and other traditionally non-military targets after then-president Lyndon Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam. 48 The mimeographed publications of the fifties, the so-called "litUe magazines", also took up the gauntlet of an earlier radical press. Though some historians regard the litUe magazines as a kind of \ink to the underground press of the sixties, an important difference resides in the intended readership. The \iUle magazines appealed to a smaller audience, and were largely an outgrowth of the anti-political beat culture, whose writers represented a sort of intellectual but "non-missionary" Iiterary elite. The sixties undergrounds were instead aggressively political, largely populist, and on top of that, opposed to ail kinds of authority, often including the authority of standards of any sort, especially Iiterary ones. The sixties undergrounds for the most part not only did not consider themselves "literary", but as weil would have regarded the • epithet at very best suspiciously. 63

• Some critics, Iike Peck, considered The Realist the prototype of the sixties papers, its true parent rather than one antecedent or model among others. Though the sixties undergrounds adopted a more earnest and angry tone than the outrageous irreverence characteristic of The Realist, both shared an undisguised delight in outraging, and both certainly intended to shock the establishment and authority sentiment. The Realist was started in 1958 in New York by , a onetime Mad magazine freelancer. Mad magazine, which targeted both the establishment and its earnest adversaries, had first appeared in 1952 as a comic book, but changed to magazine format in 1955, when comics were being blamed for causing juvenile delinquency.49 Krassner also wfote for men's magazines Iike Playboy to earn the money to publish The Realist - another important parallel to the sixties undergrounds, which were by and large staffed by unpaid volunteers who earned money elsewhere, some of them in the overground press (probably more in the drug-salling business), to keep the papers going. The sixties undergrounds rarely matched the outrageous satire of The Realist, but both preferred shocking, offending and outraging authority figures to imparting "information" or even offering alternative views or strategies to (by definition sympathetic) readers. Krassner penned the famous piece about then vice-president Lyndon Johnson sexually abusing the corpse of John Kennedy after the lattor's assassination .. a publishing feat that pushed the magazine's circulation over 100,000.50 • 64

• CAUSES OF THE SIXTIES UNDERGROUND PRESS

With ail these antecedents and parallels, what distinguished the sixties radical press from its precursors, why does it appear special or different at ail? 1hesitate to speak of causes for the sixties underground paper, because as is the case when seeking causes for the sixties generally, the question hides a loaded assumption (Ioaded because while virtually ail questions contain at least Iwo assumptions - that the question is worth asking and that it makes sense to ask it since there is conceivably an answer - not ail assumptions are equally questionable.

The müiS the conteined assumption appears beyond question, the more it disinvites discussion or frames possible answers, the more that assumption is rightly regarded as hidden and thus ripe for exposure.) To ask, in other words, why "the sixties" or its underground press should have occurred or did occur, is already to regard the phenomenon a!> aberrant: vaguely mistaken and ultimately incomprehensible. One could ask instead what caused the passivity of the generation that came of age in the prosperous fifties. Although there were of course intellectuals, especially sociologists, who asked just this question, they were considered radical, even dissident, in their own academic milieu. For the general population, the passivity of the fifties does not appear to require explanation: it fits with History. From this perspective, of official History, it is the passive fifties - which though prosperous economically had also just inherited the Holocaust and Hiroshima-Nagasaki - that begs explanation. It was ie: part the overriding denial of the fifties that the youth rebellions of the sixties confronted. As weil, the restrictive style of the rr"ss media, and specifically its refusai ta cover the youth culture, • prophesied the birth of yet another dissident press. 65

• Given these reservations about the "causes" of the sixties underground press, the question nonetheless remains: Why this surge in radical or dissenting newspapers at that particular time? The single most cogent answer is demographics. What most made the difference in the sixties generation - what in fact made some kind of upheaval, some blip on the screen of History, inevitable - was simply the sheer power of its numbers. The post-war fertility boom that began in 1946, when the United States experienced its largest one-year gain in population ever in its history, caught demographers, who were then predicting a flattening out of population growth, very much by surprise and lasted about 15 years. This boom was not a universal - or even widespread - response to the end of the Second World War. Besides the United States, only three other countries - Canada, Australia and New Zealand - had prolonged baby booms. By 1964, ihere were 75 million people in America under the age of 20, and they represented 40 per cent of the total population. America's 5-17 age group increased by only 52,000 in the forties, but by 8.3 rniiiion in the fifties. Americans under age five numbered nearly 11 million in 1940; 16 million in 1950, and 20 million by 1960.51 Youth movements, Iike protest movements and radical publications generally, have of course been an integral, if f1uctuating, part of American society from its origins. But in the sixties the strength the movement gained in the sheer numbers of the demographic bulge (referred to by some demographers as the pig in the python) made youth an effectively separate community in certain ways, one that would come to present itself as in direct competition with adults. 52 Il was not that the generation was "special" - an insidious idea that • accompanied the disillusionment after 1968, as it had the flowering of that 66

• generation's protest. The "hip" (or activist, or dissident), opposition among the sixties generation was probably no more, or at least not much more, than any previous generation. The vanguard in any generation forms a roughly simitar proportion of the total population - that is, it forms a distinct minority. As one underground newspaper staffer put it: "Nowadays we talk about the 19605 Iike everybody was involved. But it really was a minority thing. There were only three to five per cent of us who were actively engaged in questioning and experimenting with the underpinnin!~s of the status quo. The whole society was being called into question and nobody had done that since the 19305."53

If the percentage of the hip in the sixties genaration had formed a majority, or even a more sizable minority, a very different History would be read today. Though not special in itself, the sixties generation does represent a special case because its radical minority was simply too large to be comfortably ignored (by the establishment). Yet the idea of the sixties generation as "special" has somehow become part of History, and it is insidious because it has the effect of de­ historicizing and de-politicizing the activism of the sixties. It encouraged (and encourages now middle-aged) members of the "sixties" generation to spend their more mature year~, wherever these are not devoted to the scramble for enough (in the way of material goods) or the squandering of consumerism, wondering what went wrong and pining for the days when they felt "special." It implies that what was special about the sixties generation was some Inherent personal quality, whose 1055, Iike the 1055 of youth, cannot be reversed and 50 is not worth addressing, rather than the unique historica) moment, and opportunity it actually was. This idea also encouraged the sixties generation to make less use of the opening • than it might have in the sixties, and might yet in coming years, for that • 67 generation still comprises the largest single segment of the current population. Though the sixties people were not "special" in themselves, they certainly enjoyed special advantages. It was the most educated generation ever in American history. Baby boomers entered universities in unprecedented numbers, and total spending on higher education rose from $742.1 million in 1945 to $6.9 billion in 1965.54 It was on the university campuses that many of the sixties generation learne.d, not only the skills required to run newspapers and protest campaigns, but as weil the historical and ideological background that encouraged them to notice widespread repression and injustice in History and relate it to their own contemporary social problems. The idea of social justice - and the history of struggles to achieve it - that became available to students (through a radical minority of fifties professors and writers) became a shared goal and part of the language of the underground papers. This "bias" in the underground press was not only accepted, it was one of the most important reasons for its existence ­ to oppose the class-based "objecti~ ity" and uncaring of the establishment press. The availability of educated youth helped make possible the flowering of the underground press, which in turn fed the growing radicalization of student youth. University fraternities and sororities lost

about half their populations between 1964 and 1972. 55 The sixties generation also enjoyed easy money. The baby boom coincided with an economic boom, which Iike the birthrate explosion represented a superlative in economic expansion in American history. The economic bcom of 1945 to 1973 was the longest in American history, interrupted only by occasional recessions. It left a generation of the • middle-cls:;s young people, raised in the forties and fîfties to take • 68 affluence for granted, into a confrontational ''face-off' with the generation of their parents, in whose own memories loomed the financial hardship suffered during the Depression. These different attitudes toward money was one of the foundations of the c1eavage that came to be known as the generation gap.56 The baby boom, moreover, did not simply coincide with the economic boom - it was an integral part of il. Public service announcements and magazines touted the birthrate as the patriotic harbinger of new jobs and opportunities. In 1955, Time editorialized: "Gone, for the first time in history is the worry over whether a society can produce enough goods to take care of its people. The lingering worry is whether it will have enough people to consume goodS.,,57

ln 1958, at the boom's height, Life magazine ran a euphoric article about the little citizens as prodigious consumers, a market from heaven. The article calculated for example what a baby, in its first year alone, represented as a potential market for goods - an estimated $800. The cover headline, along with a cover photo of dozens of children, read: Kids: Built in Recession Cure - How 4,000,000 a Year Make Millions in Business, and inside: Rocketing Births: Business Bonanza.58 The availability of cheap money also enabled the growlh of the underground press and the counter-cultural institutions that surrounded and supported il. For the underground press that grew up in the sixties was only one anti-establishment structure among an array of such structures (they could be called actual counter-institutions, which is what they might have become if they had evolved beyond infancy as more than a generallegacy of social activism). Ali these structures supported the • anti-establishment Iifestyles of the radical young. • 69 There were anti-authoritarian free schools and free medical clinics, food and services co-operatives, crash pads, and even drug distribution networks, in addition to underground papers. These counter-cultural structures were not just the symbols of youth revolution, they were also the substance of il. They provided not simply a common mythology, but also the very means of subsistence. Besides the drama and togetherness they afforded, and for which they are remembered, these pre- and counter- institutional structures offered food, shelter and employmenl. Gitlin makes this point repeatedly in his book on the sixties: that these changes were in the same Real World, not just in the collective imagination of the youth movement - and they represented, as weil as potential markets within the capitalist system, a threatto the logic of capitalism itself. Nostalgia for the sixties tends to obscure how these counter-institutions (what Raymond Williams might cali "emergent forms") stood to threaten established ones. 59 The baby boomers were the first generation to be raised with television. There were fewer than 6,000 television sets manufactured in the United States in 1946; by 1953 production had grown to 7 million sets a year. 60 By 1954, there were 32 million television sets in America. 61 By the end of the decade, 86 per cent of American homes had television sets and by the end of the sixties decade the market was saturated, with sets in 98 per cent of homes by 1967. "The exponential growth curve of television was steeper than that of any other technological innovation of the century - including the telephone, radio, and automobile. ,,62

The advent of radio had already by the late 1920s changed American patterns of news consumption. Newspapers were no longer the • only or even most important source of news. But as radio was expanding 70

• news delivery, newspapers were not changing accordingly; they were unable to deal with the information overload. It was the magazines, especially Henry Luce's weekly newsmagazine Time, founded in 1923, that filled the vacuum, providing news coverage with depth, explanation, analysis, and context. Time used graphies and historical background to explain events in ways that radio (though it whetted people's appetite for news) could not do, and newspapers simply were not doing. According to Halberstam, Time also, in the process: "... broke the rather suffocating norms of Am'3rican journalism, and eased the profession into a more natural style of storytelling."S3

Interestingly, though Luce stepped into the vacuum created by the newspaper's inability to deal successfully with the changed market for news created by radio (as it would later fail with respect to television), Luce himself never claimed objectivity: "Listen, 1don't pretend that this is an objective magazine. It's an editorial magazine from the first page ta the last and whatever cames out has te.' reflect my view and that's the way it is. ,,64

Indeed Luce, who also founded the business monthly magazine Fortune (in 1930) and the picture magazine Life (in 1936) among other publications and who often espoused his own conser'lative views in his publications, took the then-controversial position that objective reporting was not possible. The advent of television also meant a 1055 of advertising revenue for newspapers. In the single year 1954, CSS television doubled its gross billings, becoming "the single biggest advertising medium in the world."

With the rise of tele 'ision al50 began the trend to news as entertainment, • or the trend to the devaluation of news: • 71 "The real money was in television and above ail in entertainment. mass circulation magazines, which up untilthe early fiflies had been the conduit of national mass advertising ... were suddenly in serious trouble, within little more than a decade they would be dead or dying.... Television was about to alter the nature and balance of American merchandising and journalism. ,,65

The now dubious advantage of television appeared as an inventic.n little short of miraculous to the parents of the boomer babies, who f10cked to buy sets. E. B. White said of television in 1938 that it would be "the test of the modern world." "In this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of thatl am quite sure."es

Despite continuing debates on the evils of television, ("evils" may seem a strong word to apply to television for the current generation of information-hip, but there are many among an older, and albeitless educated generation, who still cali it the Devil's Box) the fact remains television is a technology - it is a communications medium that could be used for various purposes and contents - for "a disturbance of the general peace" or a "saving radiance in the sky" - and even perhaps, as White did not consider, both simultaneously. Thattelevision is used instead to deepen the institutionalization of consumer capitalism should lead critics to critique the consumerist ethos of North American society, not the isolated technologies -the television set, the newspaper, or for that matter the shopping mali - that ethos reflects and employs in the process and service of its own perpetuation. • • 72 One critic argued that television made the sixties generation hard to organize politically, because it was already organized in the consumer society.S7 This may be true but it obscures related and more fundamental facts: that television was only one of the tools employed in the service of consumerism, it did not singlehandedly cause or create consumerism - in other words that consurnerism was at least as responsible for the developme,'t ('f television (through the "old" money invested in the technology) as television was responsible for the progress of consumerism; that the sixties ethic opposed precisely the already rampant consumerism of fifties materialism; that the quintessential sixties experiments in political organization proceeded, did occur, whether despite the economic pressures of television programming or in attempts to L.se the medium for countercultural messages or views. Gitlin made the point against technological determinism in passing when he wrote of radio, the "old" technology, being displaced by television in the fifties and sixties, that it fostered the creation of rock culture because it was "a medium in search of a message."68 On the other hand, the sixties underground journalists did make use of then current technological advances, which in turn facilitated the proliferation of the underground press. The numerous alternative or dissenting publications of the 1950s were small mimeographed papers (like Beatitude in San Francisco). It was after the introduction in 1964 of cold-type offset printing, that the underground press really took off. The technology had only recenUy been adopted by the overground daily press. Most critics credit it with enabling the "street-corner press" of the sixties. Il allowed access ta print media ta, as one critic put it, "virtually • anyone with a kitchen table, an X-acta knife, a ruler and a felt pen".69 The • 73 world's first cold-type offset plant for a daily newspaper was built in Middletown, New York, in 1956: "As it drew visitors from ail over the world, the attention was focused on the offset press with its magazine-quality reproductions of photographs on cheap newsprint. But the innovative possibilities for the protest press lie in the 'cold­ type.' ... It [the camera] takes one picture of everything which quickly becomes a plate for the offset press. Once the young journalists found they could use offset for less money than mimeo~raph after about 2,000 copies, they were on their way." 0

Offset, compared to the older letterpress technology, was relatively easy to learn and required a smaller investment to begin production. Cold-type composition involved an easy-to-operate keyboard that could be used by anyone who could type. OId letterpress typesetting by comparison required a six to twelve month training period. Leasing of IBM Selectric typesetting equipment was affordable (about $500 a month), while one Linotype or Intertype machine for letterpress typesetting was expensive (about $20,000) and could not be leased. Though no underground paper was able to afford its own printing equipment (a few did try), the undergrounders, unlike their overground cousins, shared production expenses. Underground production directors established typesetting centres available to movement papers. San Francisco's Good Times once supplied composing facilities for six of the area's underground papers. The Guardian and Other Scenes in New York made similar efforts at sharing resources.71 The development of multiple publishing centres that the new technologies allowed (as opposed to the prohibitive costs of a publishing plant) was the key to the proliferation of underground papers. By 1966: "... offset reproduction with its multiple publishing canters • and inexpensive, easy-to-operate cold type composition • 74 equipment had made the publishing of small newspapers financially feasible for anyone with a few hundred dollars and a political or personal cause."n

The new printing technology also allowed experimentation with newspaper graphies. Some papers, Iike the Oracle in San Francisco, used the technology to set the trends that would lead to the "psychedelic" art so much associated with the sixties and its underground publications.73 The Oracle and other "head" papers - ones that took visual experimentation to extremes - invented new ways to use the technology, as often as not with necessity as mother: "Oracle's imaginative designers were the first to discover the split-fountain possibilities of the four-unit offset press, and issues nine through twelve of their paper were produced with six and eight colors bled and registered together.,,74

ln 1968 the underground press also took advantage of the then fairly new technology of Telex, which had been introduced at that time to a few college newspaper offices. It allowed copy to be cabled from anywhere in the world that had access to the technology. It meant news copy could thus be acquired instantaneously - it was also cheaper than telephones and came with a carbon copy. Ray Mungo of LNS wrote enthusi~stically of Tele\ that it "does not charge a monthly rentai fee, so that even the most insolvent enterprise can have one and pay only for time used."75 Mungo called Telex the major reason for the establishment of a European news service (out of a house in Oxford) - once again raising the technological determinist fallacy. Ali Mungo is really saying by "crediting" the technology is: We could do it, so we did. In other words, the technology made a certain advance possible, but the "advance" was an • ideological one, conceived in terms of the political situation. The advance • 75 consisted in the convergence of the desire with the ability to spread radical or oppositional ideas and information to more people across greater distances.

• • 76 THE VIETNAM WAR

As for more ideological cause for the sixties papers, it has become a truism that the Vietnam war constituted the trauma of the sixties generation, a brutal awakening from the early sixties slumber years of naive idealism. The war bitterly divided a generation that was not only more cohesive, more aware of itself as a group apart the" previous generations (for demographic reasons, including that they represented and were wooed as a market) but also one that sincerely believed youth could and wouId change the world. Yet it also provided the galvanizing focus for the sixties vanguard, gave substance and direction to their youthful idealism and enthusiasm. One must wonder how much more effective the changes provoked in the sixties might seem or even be today (that is how much more they might have changed the balance of social justice) without the generational angst and divisiveness, not to mention the loss of young Iife, set in motion by the Vietnam war. And yet it was for protesting and resisting the war that the sixties underground papers deserved the most, and most unreserved, praise. Although the war was an issue for virtually ail but the "f1akiest" of the sixties undergrounds, certain publications were particularly tied up with covering it and the protests against il. These included Philadelphia's Distant Drummer, the Berkeley Barb, the Washington D.C.-based Hard Times and New York's East Village Other. Of these, only the Barb was a circulation heavyweight, and only Hard Times was run by professional journalists. These papers did important work in exposing what the overground press ignored or suppressed. The straight press coverage of • Vietnam was by comparison, and even without comparison, dismally bad. • 77 The "news" of the March 16, 1968 massacre of 347 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, in what came to be known as My Lai, was not reported until nearly !WO years after the events in question. The total number of Vietnamese civilians killed by American soldiers in the massacre remains arguable. One official historical estimate - from the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia - put the number at 347, but other sources put the figure much higher, with Newsweek for example reporting on Dec. 1, 1969, that 567 civilians were slain in the "military action.,,76 The New York Times reported the same figure in a January 27,1970, front page story. The story was not on the official record until close to two years after the event occurred, with the publication of Washington, D.C.-based free-lance reporter Seymour Hersh's book on the subject, in 1970. In fact, the history of attempts to publish the My Lai story provides a strong indictment of the overground press, especially considering that accounts of atrocities committed by the "enemy" Vietcong were commonly published by the straight press. The news originated with a Buddhist church investigation l,;;'lit interviewing survivors. National Liberation Front radio broadcasts and NLF publications in Paris reported the news promptly, but the overground American press suppressed il.nOne Ron Haberle is reported to have shown photogr..phs of the massacre at an Ohio Rotary Club meeting long 78 before the press was forced to cover the events. Former American soldier Ronald Ridenhour, after investigating and conducting interviews with witnesses for six months after the incident, wrote a letter detailing his findings to the American president and numerous congressmen, and to officiais in the state and defence departments. Ridenhour's missive met • with official discouragement, and Iwo months later, he took the story to a 78

• Iiterary agent, Michael Cunningham, who sent an outline of it via telegram to Life, Look, Newsweek, Harper's and Ramparts. Only Ramparts bit, but Ridenhour backed down, saying he did not want the story to appear in a radical magazine.79 Attempts to offer the story to the Boston and New York overground newspapers, as weil as to the two major wire services and at least one of the television networks, met with the same disinterest. Cunningham laier noted: "No one wanted to go into il. We were trying to give the story away."oo It was not until September 1969 that the story first appeared on the front page of the Columbus Enguirer following the digging efforts of reporter David Leonard. Still, the overground press (including the news services) failed to pick up on the story. While this did not appear to surprise the media crities, it did the Pentagon, with one Pentagon lawyer commenting: "We were amazed that story never went any place ­ absolutelyamazed."Bl Hersh began investigating the story in October 1969, and attempted to sell the story in several overground publications including Life and Look, but none expressed interest. When Hersh did manage to sell the story, it was to the Dispatch News Service, which ran the item on Nov. 13, 1969. Even then, 13 of the 45 papers offered the story refused il. But this did constitute "breaking" the story, and virtually ail major media competed to cover it once Dispatch News (long defunct) bought and ran Hersh's story. Once the service ran it, the story was "safe" - its publication by a wir!3 service indicated the story would no longer be suppressed by authorities, and "cleared" the story for publication in ail • other major media. 1 • 79 But this was still nearly two years laler. It may indeed take thal long to unearth and nail down an investigative story, to gel il into publishable shape, but My Lai was not an investigative story of this brand; it was an event, a military massacre, with surviving witnesses - in the language of the newsroom, a "spot news" event supreme. Who "broke" the story of My Lai? - the combined efforts of a virtual handful of people in opposition to forces of the government, the military establishment, and the major media combined. Though it is now generally acceptable to criticize the straight media coverage of the Vietnam war, it apparently remains less acceptable to note the !Jltimate vindication of the underground press's war coverage. A Columbia Journalism Review article in 1986, for example, praised David Halberstam and others who reported in Vietnam for major American media, and also lauded Hersh for his investigative efforts, but it does not mention the underground press, which had been criticizing straight coverage for years by then, and the special efforts of writers for the underground press Iike Andrew Kopkind of Hard Times. This may suggest at least that information about the underground press of the sixties was already hard to oblain by 1986.82 The undergrounds often lacked the means (including the funds and the "connections" to establishment sources) to do first-rate investigative work like Hersh's. While they were simultaneously unlikely to be approached to buy the story (if Ramparts was too radical for Ridenhour, the Washington, D.C. underground Hard Times was certainly beyond the pale) they did offer radical interpretations that included, rather than studiously ignoring, the role played by U.S. imperialism in its Vietnam • involvement. The war was, according to the government and the straight • 80 media, just another tireless attempt to preserve democracy against the cascading dominoes of communism. ln addition, the undergrounds had been claiming high civilian casualties in Vietnam for years, not as infrequent or even frequent "mistakes" but as the inevitable result of the kind of (guerrilla) warfare being waged. When the New York Times sent one of its own, the distinguished journalist Harrison Salisbury, to Southeast Asia two years after the United States started bombing North Vietnam, Salisbury's report flatly contradicted official U.S. optimism about the war's progress and inadvertently confirmed what the underground papers had been writing since the bombing began: "Contrary to the impression given by U.S. communiques, on­ the-spot inspection indicates that American bombing had been inflicting considerable civilian casualties.,,83

ln 1971, after publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times (released to the press by war planner Daniel Ellsberg) revealed the American government's deliberate long-range war plans, and inadvertently (that is for any one who cared to notice) that the anti-war movement and its press had been right about the lies and official deceptions of the government and the straight press, the East Village Other editorialized: "They called us every name in the book - fools, hippies, trippi'1s and yippies - yet the fact remains, we were right."S4 There was also an anti-war press, which included papers, though not strictly part of the undergro'Jnd press as defined here, that had the war as their reason for being, papers thi::!t were exclusively about the Vietnam war, and some established specificcllly to oppose the war. The anti-war press included the War Resisters League and Vietnam Report in • New York, Counterdraft in LA, News Notes in 81

• Philadelphia, Peace and Freedom News in , and Peace Brain in Chicago. The last two papers were run by Gis on military bases. 85 By 1969 there were 60 GI antiwar newspapers, including five with international distribution.86 The early civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. provided the other major political focus for the sixties undergrounds. The movement was not about bl<èck civil rights exclusively. King was in fact planning a multi-racial poor people's march for anti-poverty legislation when he was murdered in 1968 in Memphis, Tenn., by James Earl Ray. Gitlin estimated the number of civil rights demonstrations in 1963 at 930. These occurred in 115 cities in 11 southern states, and saw the arrests of 20,000 demonstrators.87 According to Jack NewfiE-ld, a Village Voice writer, the civil rights movement, which he regards as a precursor to the New Left, began on Feb. 1, 1960, when four university students in Greensboro, North Carolina, "sat in" at a whites-only downtown Woolworth's lunch counter, waiting to be served coffee. Blacks were permitted in the merchandise aisles of the same store, where, presumably, money had no color. Scores of students joined the non-violent "sit-in" thus launching what would become an abiding strategy of sixties protest movements. The sît-in was for the sixties radicals, in Newfield's words:

"...• él moral, rather than economic or political protest, a kind of mass vomit against the hypocrisy of segregation ... a spontaneous, unplanned activist contagion ... an assertion of individual freedom ... a heroic innovation, fulfilling the students' taste for drama and novelty. Behind the sit-in technique was the pacifist ethic of placing one's body in moral nonviolent confrontation with an existing evil. The Freedom rides, the pilgrimages to Mississippi, the community-organizing projects, are ail an extension of this • principle.of direct moral confrontation." 88 • 82 The sixties underground press itself shared this emotional tone of protest, of "mass vomit against hypocrisy", and permitted, indeed encouraged, the expression of moral disgust in print as a sign of the writer's subjective involvement, that is, his revolutionary fervor. But that sixties generation of the morally outraged met with a Democratic government under John F. Kennedy, an administration that promised much but actually delivered little. Some crilies regard this combination as one important ,reason for the sixties explosion of protest, and for the extent of disillusionment by decade's end proportionate to the original high hopes. Gitlin called the Kennedy administration the "incarnation of normal polilics and the liberal promise" - an incarnation that represented the death toll for Iiberalism and the Old Left. Though Kennedy was idealized by some in the years after his assassination, Gitlin writes, between 1961 and 1964, crucial years for the civil rights movement, the federal government proved a iukewarm ally at best - "tantalizing with the promise of change, timid in performance - a volatile mixture indeed."ag Gitlin believed the Kennedy promise and cali to ideals was for the sixties generation a phase in their childhoods, before their coming of aga. Vietnam represented their adolescence. 90 Another writer on the sixties claimed that Kennedy's election in 1960 raised hopes and when his assassination in November 1963 dashed those hopes, an underground press arose to serve a disillusioned co' mterculture calling for polilical and cultural revolution. 91 • • 83 DISCOURSE UF THE FIFTIES

The sixties underground papers were partly a response to the social discourse of the preceding decade. Like '''e sixties undergrounds, the counterculture generally had its roots in the very environment and history it attempted to jettison. The sixties radicals should be viewed as continuing and augmenting the earlier, quieter (much lonelier) dissidence of the fifties. The sixties rebellion need not be, indeed should not be, regarded exclusively as the rejection of that (preceding) generation, much less as the rejection of an entire line of dissenting discourse. The roots of the campus based New Left, for example, extended back into the socialist organizations to the turn of the century. Students for a Democratie Society saw itself as definitively breaking with the Old Left (nonetheless taking its very name from its oppositional stance toward its Immediate antecedent). Yet it began as the student wing of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, which in turn could trace its own lineage ta the Intercollegiate Socialist Society of 1905. The society's first president was Jack London and it counted old-style muckraker Upton Sinclair and venerated journalist of the old school, Walter Lippmann, among its proponents. 92 Not only the New Left, but also the youth culture of the sixties, developed out of its immediately preceding environment, though its conscious stance was simitarly, and unreservedly, oppositional. Gitlin described the rise of the sixties radicals as the "subterranean" youth culture of the fifties "coming of age".93 White the theme of the beats as forebears of the sixties hippies, or cultural radicals, is common, the essential difference is that the fifties • beats were largely inward looking, and in their own way, elitist. The term • 84 hippies was in fact coined by the beats who originally meant it as a putdown, to refer to the only haIf hip.94 The pre-baby-boom beats of the fifties were a much smaller phenomenon, numbering only several thousand in the United States.95 Moreover, th"'y were antipolitical. As Lawrence Liplon put it in his book on the beats, their characteristic reaction was to dissociate, not to march. 96 The beats were viewed, rightly, by the straight society of their time as a minor social phenomenon. This is not simply a matter of numbers, although that is important; it is a!so a matter of the philosophical premises of the beat movemenl. The beals did not regard themselves as a vanguard for straight society and did not argue that others should live or think as they did. Rather, theirs wa~ a Iiterary movement that included a romantic rejection of modernity. Moreover, the beats viewed themselves as a kind of Iiterary and artistic aristocracy, and seemed to enjoy their status as an elect few that nobody elected. The beat movement was not an attempt to change society in a head-on confrontation on moral issues, (though transitional figures Iike poet Allen Ginsberg did favor the idea of personal revolution leading to ) but rather one to preserve (for individuals) an earlier American dream of rugged individualism against the massification of society and the inroads of Progress; the beats hoped to survive modernity by opting out of il. They were the cultural dissidents of the fifties, and together with the Dld Left, prefigured the later split between the culturally and politically oriented underground papers of the sixties. For Jack Kerouac, generally regarded as the creator of the beat movement and an abiding central figure of it, there is really no comparable figure among the sixties radicals. The sixties counterculture • was more Iikely to seek "leadership" in musical icons than in writers or 85

• 97 intellectuals. But ail leaders were somewhat suspect. "Don't follow leaders," sang folksinger Bob Dylan, purveying a message the sixties radical s, especially the culturally oriented, and among those none more than the hippies, would take to heart. Some of the beat figures became transitional figures, people with raots in the beat culture of the fifties who also gained recognition among the sixties counterculture. Even those figures most easily or commonly associated with the sixties rebellions .­ Iike Timothy Leary with his turn on, tune in, drop out message, or Ginsberg with his support for political causes - still represented transitional rather than leadership symbols. In fact, the very concept of leadership went against the anarchistic grain of the sixties radicals; they distrusted and rejected it. Even the New Left, though it embraced "politics," downplayed political hierarchy in favor of the ideal of "togetherness," while the cultural radicals devised moveable families (and feasts) - not only the rural communes but also the urban crash pads of the sixties. The ideal of family togetherness had not of course originated in the sixties, but rather with the nuclear family of post-war America, where it served to bolster that nuclear family (as opposed to the traditional extended family) against "the centrifugai pressures Inherent in Mom and Dad's division of labor".98 Yet the transition from Beat to hippie culture did occur rapidly, as cultural changes go, and the changes were reflected in the kind, range and style of dissident culture and its publications: "In the five short year& from 1961 to 1966 the Beat generation had switched from coffee houses to parks, its memb&1 <; slept in communes not hotel rooms and found graphie expression for their Iife style in iabioid newspapers not Iittle magazines. It was an opening up and a breaking out of the restrictions of the black and white era, and • two underground publications, the San Francisco Oracle • 86 and the East Village Other, expressed the breakthrough with more inventiveness and imagination than any underground publications before or since. ,,99

Like the beats of the fifties, the hippies of the sixties had a special idiomatic language. In the late fifties the beat word "hep" was no longer "hip," the word that replaced it by 1959; by 1961 the word "hip" was already in its turn running out of currency.l00 The beats, however, did not necessarily use this idiomatic language, certainly not exclusively, in their writing and their "little magazines". For those invoived in the sixties underground press, on the other hand, writing in the vernacular, as the sixties radicals talked, was a laudable practice, identitying the writer with a countercultural devotion to anti-hierarchal social relations. If the beats can yet be viewed as precursors tu the hippies, they can also be just as legitimately seen as the successors of American following the radicals of the 1920s. (The Iiterary roots of the beat movement can of course be traced even further back to poets of the previous century such as Walt Whitman; Whitman is a figure also cited as journalistic precursor by the sixties undergrounders, perhaps because of Whitman's attempt to start and run an independent paper, the Freeman, in 1849.) But also perhaps because of the celebration of self expressed in Whitman's poetry. In any case, bohemianism, though a fluctuating phenomenon, did not originate with the sixties hippies. It was an influx of radical thinkers and artists i~O Greenwich Village in the early 1900s that established the reputation of that district (of New York's lower Manhattan area) for bohemianism. 101 ln the heyday years of Greenwich Village (1912 to 1930) fi'Jures Iike Mabel Dodge, Max Eastman, Eugene • O'Neill and Maxwell Bodenheim set the tone of radicalism in the • 87 community, near Washington Square, then known as New York City's "Left Bank. ,,102 The attitude of the Iiterary establishment of the late fifties toward the beats was unapologetically unsympathetic. The establishment disdained writers Iike poet Gary Snyder, who became the hero of beat king Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. The beats, perhaps because of their desire to be taken seriously by mainstream scholarly culture, were "savaged from the heights of Partisan Review" with the review's Norman Podhoretz damning the entire movement as one of "brute stupidity and know-nothingism.,,103 The journalistic experimenters of the sixties, on the other hand, did not come up for any such kind of review, certainly not in Iiterary publications, and not in journalism reviews either, since that is a tradition that was established only during the sixties. Yetthe Beats did in some respects prefigure the cultural raclicals, or hippies, of the sixties, for whom personal style represented a kind of substance, a kind of seriousness. Kerouac's On the Road professed and celebrated notions of personal freedom as a kind of escape from History. The next generation of the hip voted with their thumbs, so to speak, and taking the narrative as injunction, hitch-hiked their various ways across America. The fifties was the first post-war decade, and the salient features of that decade were Western prosperity, the beginnings of the Cold War with the Soviets and the proliferation in what was then known as the Third World (and now called developing countries) of nalionalliberation movements to end colonial rule. But it was also a time of disenchantment in the United States, when nineteenth-century ideologies rang hollow or not at ail, and nothing had yet arisen to replace them. Once again, from • this perspective, the dismal anli-intellectual conformity of the fifties begs • 88 more in the way of explanation than the outrages and excesses of the sixties hippie revoit. The cultural breakdown of the familiar, or tradition, early in twentieth-century North American Iife, commonly traced to the switch from a goods-producing economy and workforce to one providing services and information, is also sometimes cited as a reason for the sixties underground press (when this is viewed as evidence of breakdown, i.e. from an establishment point of view). The changed economy of the twentieth century had long been blamed for a newly noticed problem that went by the unassuming name of "bigness" and was held responsible, by critics in both private and public sectors, for major societal problems Iike the breakdown of social bonds between producers and consumers (though would later argue in The Third Wave for a new synthesizing economic class: the prosumer). This bigness, it was held, alienated workers and created economic waste and inefficiency. Other critics Iinked the Iingering effects of the Industrial Revolution to the sixties rise of feminist and gay Iiberation movements, to increasing crime and to the proliferation of cuits and religious evangelism. 1D4 Explanations for sixties radicalism from a viewpoint more sympathetic to radicalism, holds that fifties Iiberalism had already exhausted itself with the New Deal, and that the Integration into academic, labor and other hierarchies of older intellectuals and dissenters of the thirties and forties, produced a "vacuum" then filled in the fifties by the widespread anti-intellectualism usually regarded as anti-communism and I:oe!:t represented by the communist (read: intellectual) witchhunts of the infamous senator McCarthy and his era. Liberalism of the fifties appeared mute on the major problems of the post-war period, including • nuclear proliferation, the Cold War and worldwide anti-colonialism, not to • 89 mention the progress of "the mass society" and its attendant iIIs at 1 home. °S The "failure" of communism followed fram the betrayal of communist ideals in the communist reality of Stalin's Russia; it was a failure of belief in the possibility of an alternative system. Plenty of writers went on defending communism in the fifties. But after 1956, when Khrushchev's campaign against Stalinism had revealed the worst of Stalin's regime, both ideals and illusions (that the ideal was worthy, and that the reality could "measure up to" the ideal) were difficult to maintain. Senator Joe McCarthy and hi. House of Un-American Activities Committee whipped anti-communism into frenzied fighting shape, with the essential help of the press. 106 By 1~57, the American Communist party had no more than 6,000 members. Its peak membership was 60,000­ 80,000 during and following the Second World War. Even as late as 1950, the party still had 43,000 faithful. 107 The period from the end of the Second World War to 1960 saw the defeat of the Iiberal left, but it also saw the rise to power of corporate Iiberalism and its guiding assumptions, which of course included anti­ communism. The reigning discourse and political climate of the fifties was conservative or right of centre, rather than a-political, as it is often perceived or described in retrospect. 1OS The sixties undergrounds were so different from the fifties ethos and so unrelentingly oppositional, that it is easy to forget that fifties Iiberalism and passivity, not to mention fifties conservatism, also constituted and contained an ethic. Finally, while r.':Ë(1~ of l' ie radical left were suffering in the fifties from the guilt of having supported the Communists once the horrors of Stalinist rule were revealed, many of the radical right were also suffering from what Richard • Hofstadter has coined "status anxiety."l09 90

• The right gained power in the fifties through its "consensus" intellectuals in the universities, who were integrated with government hierarchies through academic journals. The An'glo-American magazine Encounter was proven financed by the Central intelligence Agency, and the proof printed in the hyper-prestigious New York Times on April 27, 1966. Stephen Spender, a leading member of the group of Marxist poets of the thirties that included W. H. Auden, was co-editor of Encounter from 1953 until 1965, when he left following disclosures of CIA funding. He was also a co-founder of the magazine Index on Censorship in May 1972. 110 Even so, a revival of critical thought did take hold in the fifties, not in the press but in the universities, and its standardbearers were not historians, politicians or journalists, but sociologists, with leading figures like C. Wright Miiis resuscitating the flagging, where not utterly "discredited," traditions of Karl Marx and . ln The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (1948), Mills argued that the working class and its trade union leaders had been co­ opted; they aspired to membership in the elite themselves instead of furthering the critique of American capitalism. In White Collar (1951), Mills examined the expansion of the middle class in industrial societies. While most Marxists of the thirties believed the middle class was doomed to extinction, those on the right predicted that a new middle class of white collar employees would replace the old one made of professionals, tradesman and small independent producers. (The American middle class of the early nineteenth century was largely composed of small­ property owners, with about 80 per cent of the employed white population self-employed producers; by 1940, only 18 per cent were self­ • employed.)1" The right was of course right about this. But then why • 91 would it have been wrong, since it was the right that owned and represented capital? If it "predicted" the coming of a new kind of middle c1ass, it was only conceiving in advance of strategies to deal with the problems that Marx had predicted for capitalism as a ruling system. If industrialization and capitalism had already effected the wholesale expropriation of "self-employed producers" (no conspiracy required), turning them into "employees" (wage-slaves in the sixties vernacular) by 1940, then the owners of industrial capital must needs have regarded this development favorably - business as usual and only common (instrumental) sense; in fact: progress. The transformation - the new white collar middle c1ass - would also make sense from a more personal perspective of the owners. From his own perspective, the rich and powerful industrialist would n&turally have wanted those immediately below him in the pecking order, his managerial employees, to come from the same new middle c1ass, which could serve as a buffer, rather than from the more obviously and severely dispossessed majority of the working class which might still be inclined to despise him and what he represented (their own dispossession). The capitalist rulers, acting simply on the capitalist ethos, practically invented the white collar middle class. (That is, if the new middle class had not come into existence, the ruling class would have had to invent it.) Journalists rounded out the system, the prizefighters of the bourgeoisie. The point is lhat the self-employed producer was not transformed by industrial capitalism into the white-collar middle class, but was instead extinguished, and the scope and reach of hegemonistic domination extended to a "new" majority working class. ln his examination of the upper class in The Power Elite (1956), • Mills argued that while the United States revered democratic forms and 92 • spouted classless ideology, it did indeed have a ruhng elite (composed of politicalleaders, business magnates and military honchos). Most interestingly, he rejected describing this situation in class terms - the language of the thirties and forties - arguing that the term ruling class confused political with economic realities and in fact contained the theory that the economic c1ass rules politically. On the eve of the sixties, when Mills published The Sociological Imagination (1959), the sociological critique was weil established, even if C. Wright Mills himself "stood largely ignored, an almost desperate figure.,,112 Arguing for the dangers inherent in the rapid massification of American society and urging the need for local organizations that could help individuals gain control over public policy, even reminding social scientists of their responsibility to engage those problems, the book was weil received. It found sympathetic readers in the general revival of radical social thought and the burgeoning of protest movements associated with the sixties. Whether Mills was responding to the student protests of the sixties or simply found sympathetic ears there, is a moot point. (Whether the sixties caused Mills or Milis helped cause the sixties is an uninteresting debate, skewed by the blindspots of a cultural belief in causality itself.) Suffice it to say they were associated. 113 It is the language of this sociologicat debate that had actually changed, though most critics (from traditional disciplines) seemed not to notice. The rejection of Marxist terminology appeared as prelude to the rejection of Marxist ideology. By the sixties, Marxist terminotogy sounded hollow: " ••• 1didn't feel free to say that capitalism was not the name 1was looking for in 1965.... 1refused to cali it [the system] capitalism because capitalism was for me and my • generation an inadequate description of the evils of America • 93 - a hollow, dead word tied to the thirties.... 1talked about the system not because 1was afraid of the term capitalism but because 1wanted ambiguity, because 1sensed there was something new afoot in the world that we were part of that made the rejection of the old terminology part of the new hope for radical change in America.,,114

Similar changes in social ethos, reflected in language and Iiterature, evolved throughout the decade of the fifties. David Reisman's The Lonely Crowd, published in 1950, presented a "dialectic" of inner­ directed holdovers from the nineteenth century devoted to the Protestant ethic versus other-directed masses of the twentieth, devoted to conformity. (From the point of view of the present discussion, these opposites seem more aspects of the same phenomenon than opposites.) ln The Organization Man (1956), William H. Whyte blamed the lack or loss of an entrepreneurial spirit on the over-managing and over­ manipulation of the masses. Less radical critics than these agreed that hopes for genuine community were crushed by the monster of "mass" society. Attacks on the consumer society also appeared as the decade progressed: Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957), 's The Affluent Society and John Keats's The Crack in the Picture Window (1957), were some of the best-known examples.ll5 Paul Goodman, in Growinq Up Absurd, (1960) spearheaded an impassioned attack on the reigning American ethos, calling its culture phoney and its educational system a stupefying attempt to fit paople for stupefying lives. And yet ail of this "protest" or dissidence or deviation from the mainstream, for ail its assiduous avoidance of "a vulgar Marxism", was directed against a situation that was basically only the end result and • logical extreme of capitalism: a devotion to instrumental values, an ethic 94 • that capitalism may have "perfected" - inasmuch as capitalism solves the problem of having no (Iogically defensible) ethic of its own by disappearing the concept of intrinsic worth, and substituting "instrumental" value. Instrumental value itself is a kind of contradiction in terms: an instrumental value is not a value at ail but precisely a means. The only conceivably intrinsic value in capitalism is capital, and capital presupposes capitalism. Instrumental value disappears value as a transcendent concept, and so as a basis for comparison, by defining value as the means of production and then even more narrowly, as the medium of exchange. Worth is made mute because it cannot be counted, measured in quantifiable terms. The problem is not, however, with the idea that the legitimate worth of a thing can be at least partially expressed in quantifiable terms, worth for example 99 cents; the problem is not ultimately with the idea of worth being quantifiable, but with the idea of worth itself being ultimately exchangeable, which would in turn support the idea that the only way to compare (to gage or evaluate relative worth) is to quantify, and only secondarily, the idea that what cannot be quantified is without worth.) The dictionary meanings of the word "value" show how the contradiction inheres in the definition, with for example, value defined first as intrinsic worth and secondarily, as utility.116 It is usage that defines a word (its meaning) in practice; in capitalist society, value means the priee of a thing and/or its utility, and not intrinsic worth. So the language of capitalism entails at the least a diminishing of the potential meanings of value. The sinister twist, the power that the capitalist ethos enjoys, its • apparent reality-strength or theoretical and operative strength, comes • 95 from the fact that it produces an attenuated consciousness and then can point to the products of this attenuated consciousness (to the kinds of things from this attenuated perspective that are produced and to the .methods whereby they are produced, and finally to a picture of the world as something with no intrinsic worth but only instrument

Immediate predecessor, 50 the cycles of the status quo appear "natural" ­ unintended, hence innocent. Change itself appears "only" optional (that is, not necessary, simple "pie-in-the-sky" wishful thinking), or, when it is apparently unavoidable, as a threat ta stability, rather than as the necessary (both logicaliy and praclicaliy or homeostatic-aliy) function of • stability that it is. • 98 THE DISMAL OVERGROUND PRESS

The sixties undergrounds were also finally a reaction to the straight press itself. Portraying the undergrounds as some meaningless lifestyle bliiJ that had nothing to do with the state of the straight press is the simplest way to discredit it and avcid the necessity for a more radical critique. The nature of the underground press facilitates its de-valuation in History, for the underground papers of the sixties did not critique or even contest the straight press so much as they rejected it. David Hilliard, speaking during the sixties as the Black Panther Minister of Information, promised to freeze ail news to the mainstream media. At one point in the late sixties, Hilliard announced: "From now on, we will use the underground press because those are the people who are moving with the revolution.,,1l9

The diggers of San Francisco's famous Haight-Ashbury district were the movement's anarchists, and they too regarded mainstream media as part of the problem. They opposed capitalism with propaganda by the deed: by stealing food from markets to serve free to ail comers, organizing free medical clinics, clothing oullets, crash pads, and cultural events like free theatre for the counterculture people who could not afford 12o the priee of admission to mainstream American culture. Their attitude to the straight press reflected this belief in . In terms of the straight press, the diggers believed in remaining striclly anonymous. In fact, the real or mythical diggers leader Emmett Grogan once appeared in simultaneous local newscasts in several cities to help drive home this point. As Gitlin put it, the diggers ''wanted to expose the media as fraudulent" while making the new society. Since they did not see the • straight press as a possible ally in this endeavor, they might decide on • 99 occasion to use it as a "public address system" but otherwise regarded it 121 as an integral part of the problem, not the solution. The yippies, on the other hand, including leaders and , pronounced themselves such (Iater the name was said to have originated as an acronym for Youth International Party), on Dec. 31, 1967. They wanted to use the media consistently to spread countercultural values. In fact, they became celebrities through their collaboration with the straight media. "... Rubin and Hoffman went to great lengths to commandeer the media, which had their own reasons for playing along ... [but] their siren song of hip-Left harmony was a consummation with alogie. Since revolutionaries couldn't count on enough real allies for a revolution, they conjured images ... that permitted them to elude, for a while, the difficulfjes of practical politics.,,122

Yet this rejectilJn of the straight press did contain a critique of the establishment press, ir,1eed its rejection was motivated by such a critique. Liberation News Service. for example, explained its stance toward the straight press after the Pentagon march: "Liberation News Service provides a totally different a\ternate medium for those of us who are fed up with hearing there were 'some 25,000 to 40,000 demonstrators' when we ourselves saw at least twice that many; hearing them say the 'police acted with appropriate restraint' when we saw the guy next to us getting his skull busted just because he had ; hearing that we ... are 'sincerely working for peace' and that we are 'supporting and defending democratic government in Vietnam' when we see our government destroying a countryside, waging an undeclared war of attrition on helpless women, children and farmers in the name of one totalitarian puppet regime after another, with no sane end in sight."123 • • 100 ln his book on the Hell's motorcycle gang, Hunter S. Thompson argued that the gang was "virtually created" by Time, Newsweek and the New York Times and then disseminated and endorsed by the mass media as a whole. Thompson wrote that the Times reported on an alleged gang rape that never occurred, and criticized the mass media for what he thought amounted ta: "... the art of printing a story without teking legal responsibility for it. The ward alleged is a key ta this art. Other keys are 'so-and-so said' (or 'claimed'), 'it was reported' and 'according ta'.... The result was a piece of slothful. emotionally biased journalism ... but the Times is a heavyweight even when it's wrong, and the effect of this article was to put the seal of respectability on a story that was, in fact, a hysterical, politically motivated accident.,,124

Thompson's Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga was an attempt at least in part to correct the reportage of the straight media. His technique (subjectivity, or getting close ta the action and staying with it long enough to see it from the inside, sa to speak) was also regarded as part of the New Journalism, though a similar technique had long been known as plain "digging" in the straight press. (Plain digging, however, had by the sixties become so expensive in the eyes of straight mass media managers, and was in fact so little supported by them, that it may weil have appeared a new phenomenon ta the young journalists of sixties countercultural stripe.) Thompson blamed what he regarded as a distorted picture of the motorcycle gang on the straight media itself.125 1. F. Stone, typically way ahead of the pack, struck a more radical critique. He complained that the trouble with the straight American press was not the absence of dissent but the absence of ~. ''The fault 1find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. It is the absence of news. With a dozen or sa • honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very liUle • 101 news. Their main concern is advertising. The main interest of our society is merchandising. Ali the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling. The average publisher is not only hostile to dissenting opinion, he is suspicious of any opinion Iikely to antagonize any reader or consumer. ,,126 .

People did not read Stone's weekly for "news" of the latest natural or political disaster - they could already get this sort of coverage from the overground press or from television news. They read it (in very small numbers) for Stone's uncommon ability to define the news differently. This approach allowed Stone to criticize newswriting regardless of its source. He did not "side" with any official, or for that matter, unofficial view. Indeed Stone habitually saw more than the proverbial two sides to every newspaper story or issue. He insisted instead on the more difficult task of thinking for himself, which incidentally illustrates the value of the reporter (as perhaps any social critic) as outsider.127 The very nature of the professional or conventional press was changing during the sixties, in retarded and continuing response to the triumph of television over a generation weaned on it. Journalism was becoming professionalized, and as a profession attracting sorne of the country's elite, those graduated from the most prestigious schools. David Halberstam in his c1assic work on the newspaper industry, wrote: "It was going from the old Chicago Page One school - write it and write it fast, and don't worry about the implications - to a new, far better educated, more sophisticated generation.,,128

The arr!val of television news did nothing to improve the quality of newspaper news; for television news reinforced what one critic called "the

cult of the discrete - and discreet - fact. ,,129 Although television news was • much criticized for its timidity and superficiality, it was also argued that the • 102 Nixon administration's war with the press managed to obscure even more serious deficiencies of ail mass media coverage, including newspapers. "Starting with the escalation of the Vietnam war and culminating in Watergate, it required the most massive government deception and malfeasance to prod the into the mildly adversary role its enemies were quick to attack.,,130

Press critique, however, certainly did not erupt on the North American scene with the baby boomers of the sixties. By then, the tradition of press critique was already weil established, and already dichotomized, having grown from two conflicting ideals, one that embraced the status quo and the other that embraced change, about the purpose of the press. While the Iibertarian theory, on which Jeffersonian democracy is based and which the muckrakers early in the twentieth century took at face value, held the job of the press was the exposing of social iIIs to public view, other critics espoused the "social glue" theories of the press that said the press existed to maintain society, to keep changes, at least those unintended by society's managers, to a minimum; this view was taken even more at face value. Consider for example the codifying of this establishment press by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton. These sociologists noted three central functions of the mass media: status conferral (whereby media confer status on and legitimize the authority of individuals, organizations or movements); social norms enforcement (to induce conformity to those norms); and a so-called narcotizing dysfunction that left people passive in the face of any tendency to question or resist either authority or conformity to it,131 The idea that the press had a responsibility, especially in face of • the challenge or threat of television news, to provide more background, • 103 more analysis, more explanation of the whirlwind events of the post-war world, was promoted by a venerated journalist of the very old school, Walter Lippmann, 75 years old in 1965, who believed and argued that journalism had to explain things, and to do that, it had to "embrace ideas."132 The long-comfortable anti-intellectualism of the press, so much part of the business that it was taken for granted as a kind of positive value (a phenomenon common to ail professions perhaps, as in ail professions are conspiracy against the layman) was first critiqued by one, and a high and mighty one, of straightjournalism's own. The sixties undergrounds viewed the situation more simply: the straight press was not having a hard time trying to adapt to more complex times and explain more complex wars or issues; it was, whether by sins of commission or omission, Iying baldfaced. ln his 1967 book, The Artillerv of the Press, James Reston, eminentjournalist and "Timesman," wondered about the new journalism, the sixties, the new environment. Given television, should papers do more analysis and introspection and less "hard" news? Should reporters or editors have more or less power? "Reston sometimes wondered, during moments that he regarded as slightly heretical, if the world was not becoming too complex and serious a place to be left to the reporting of newspapermen. ,,133

Reston saw the problem of covering Cuba, for example, as one of getting at deeper causes that were hard to portray because they were in effect buried in a context that escaped content. "In Cuba the crumbling of the Batista government had made headlines, but the social inequality and unrest under previous regimes had been inadequately displayed in the • press, Reston thought, although the exact solution to these • 104 journalistic shortcomings was not entirely clear even to Reston. ,,134

ln a harsher review of Reston's book, however, Andrew Kopkind then of the underground paper Hard Times, argued that the trouble with Reston's analysis was that he and his buddies in the overground press had an unbreakable engagement with things as they were. The sixties radicals saw Reston as a hypocrite: talking change but actually opposed to it. By the decade of the fifties, the media, specifically its narcotizing dysfunction, was often blamed for the complacent and "silent-majority" conformity commonly associated with the post-war decade. Yet from a more radical (in the sense of a more fundamental and so more critical) perspective, the other Iwo functions cited by Lazarsfeld and Merton, could also be regarded as dysfunctional, that is as unintended, and presumably undesired, consequences. Fifties critics had blamed the media, including the press, for inducing and encouraging the passive conformity that kept the average citizen from participation in political Iife. Sixties critics struck first at the press's status-conferral function, and at the very authority the press was supposed to legitimate. By the decade of the sixties, complaints about the straight press centered on its abysmal failure to investigate at ail rather than its so-called dysfunctions and distortions. This was as apparent to journalists of the straight media world as to the radicals and their underground papers. Michael Arien, a journalist and media critic who wrote for the New Yorker, noted in the mid-sixties that although there was a certain amount of press distortion on news from Vietnam, something else \vas going on more difficult to dissect. The distortion, • while it existed, could not be the main thing, Arien thought, because: 105

• "... somehow the concept of press distortion implies a demonology that for the most part just doesn't exist. What really seems to be standing in the way of an accurate reflection of Vietnam right now isn't that the press is ïying' or not telling ail it knows. It's partly that much of the press, especially the wire services and television, just doesn't have either the time or the inclination to investigate the various parts of the Vietnam piclure.... And, more importanl, when they do gel hold of one of lhese parts, neilher mosl of lhe newspapers nor most of television seems to be able 10 do anylhing more wilh illhan 10 lreal il as an isolated piece of delail ... cul off by lhe rigors and conventions of journalism from lhe evenls and forces lhal broughl it into being, cul off, 100, from the evenls and forces lhal il will in lurn animale.,,135

From lhe perspeclive of lhe sixties underground press, the above consliluled an apology for the failures of lhe slraighl press more than an explanation or probe of ils deficiencies. Even Arien seems unsure aboul lhe "demonology" lhal would explain lhe failure of lhe press to investigale or ils willingness to dislort. This supposed demonology does not exist, for example, only "for lhe most part." (Ooes lhis mean lhere.§Œ isolated inslances where the demon of distortion is at work? Ooes this not indicate thal even Arien, who was essentially rejecting his own unstated assumption lhat 10 criticize is 10 engage in conspiracy, considered the possibility that someone somewhere mighl have instrumental reason to distorllhe "news".) ln fact, the overground press did lie (often as "innocenlly" as by repealing without investigating the lies of the government) and did withhold information about the war (nol only from the public but as weil from its own reporters in Vietnam). If when the newspapers did "get hold of one of these parts" (presumably, information contrary 10 official views) they were "unable" to treat it more • comprehensively than as isolated information, the simplest explanalion is • 106 that the method was not comprehensive: the "news" appeared isolated because it ~ isolated.

• 107

• THE GENERATIONAL LANGUAGE GAP

The baby boomers' oppositional retationship to the generation of their parents, given the demographic strength of the boomers as a sort of critical mass, was bound for head-on collision by the beginning of the sixties. l36 A basic difference in values was involved. For Americans who grew up in the thirties and forties, monetary success was the practical and operative measure of value. The Protestant work ethic and the tradition of thrift were "self-evident" to people who survived the Depression and war years. When their offspring began to question this reasoning, arguing that while the economic situation was "generally" good, it was hardly equitable, and that this inequity was at the heart of an unjust "system", it must have seemed to an older generation that the young had lost ail sense of reality. The sixties generation (in addition to growing up in a completely different "real" environment from that of their parents) intentionally tried to nurture this different reality and reality-sense, certainly in its choice of Iifestyle, above ail in its choice of recreational drugs. One often overlooked facet of the sixties is that the drugs worked, just as alcohol had worked for generations of White Americans before (or for that matter just as it had ''worked'' on Native Americans).137 The presumed intent and consequences of the ''work'' were what differed. Alcohol was for drowning sorrows; marijuana and hashish, and especially the so-called hallucinogenic drugs, were for transcending them. This is arguable of course: the sixties radicals may have only been drowning their sorrows with the added advantage or payoff of the feeling or illusion that they were also transcending them. But one thing is certain: • the two generations employed different philosophies of drug use whether 108

• in terms of intent or justification, and this difference is abundantly reflected in the language used to describe the effects of the drugs. For example, the alcoholic cocktail of the fifties helped its imbiber to ''wind down" (forget history); the marijuana or hashish joint of the sixties helped its user to "get high" (or transcend history, though not usually by questioning or rewriting it, but more oftenby maintaining ideals and illusions aimed at the future, including the ideal that the future is now).I38

For those who had Iived through the soup kitchens and labor strife of the thirties, great fortunes - however amassed - were landmarks of hopefulness, they appeared natural and inevitable, and presaged a bright economic future for ail, or so the trickle-down theory of capitalism posited. Moreover, this "optimism" was not a simple negation of the horrors of the Second World War, it constituted the actual technology of that denial. Sixties parents who cited the Depression years to justify their own political and social conservatism (however sincere) faced off with the sixties young, among whose vanguard such conservatism (which addressed not at ail the Second World War) appeared at least as obtuse and uncomprehending as the "excesses" of the young. Finally, sixties parents compared their own fifties prosperity to their own Depression pasts; sixties youth meanwhile compared their prosperous present to their dreams of a future both prosperous and just. (Not ail were prosperous in the fifties of course and the differential class positions of the various dissident youth movements showed in their language and their practices: the proud political activism of blacks, for example, as opposed to the rural romanticism of the middle-class white rural-commune-founding hippies.) According to one writer sympathetic to the sixties youth rebellion, • the generation that came of age during the dirty thirties was largely 109

• incapable of understanding this sixties youth revoit because that generation was composed of moral cowards, afraid to confront their own lives. Looking at the youth malaise would mean looking at their own lives, and such a mental endeavor would, as this writer put il: "... entai! recognition of the schizophrenia of their own lives. They would be confronted by their compulsion to put labour before living, their alienation from the work process, their acceptance of the lowest possible quality in ail forms of media, and their tireless consumption of every possible commodity and product for appearance's sake. The refusai of the young to accept unrewarding jobs and the responsibilities of mortgage, status, social competition and formai marriage enrages them. ,,139

Clearly, this is a romanticized view of the generation gap in service of a romanticized view of the favored contingent that Iived on the young and unconventional side of the divide. There was actually more schizophrenia (if such is understood as logical inconsistency) in the lives of the baby boomers than in those of their parents - who were not after ail working at jobs for rewards other than money, and who moreover considered themselves lucky to be able to avoid the material deprivation of the thirties, which had marked their own lives in a way no amount of ideology ever could Oust as the boomers would be more affected by the brutal events of the late sixties, than by the revolulionary ideology of the movement). Il was the sixties offspring, who took financial means for granted, because they ~ granted, who drove themselves round the bend thinking they had a choice, and a revolutionary choice at that, to make about their lives. Aiso this business of "throwing off' the oppressor, the unrewarding jobs, or for that matter, entirely unrewarding whole lives, is somewhat disingenuous. It is not, after ail, as if jobs used to be • rewarding and no longer were by that generation. As weil, while Lewis 110 • and other critics appear fond of the idea that this refusai by the young to follow in the footsteps of their parents "enragt'-d" the previous generation, most evidence, discounting for the moment the emotions raised by the return of their young in body bags from Vietnam, supports the conclusion that these same parents were more mystified and disillusioned themselves than they were enraged. On the other hand, much of the criticism of straight society expressed (or merely assumed in that expression) in the sixties underground papers, (regardless of whether or not and to what extent the criticism was justified) was calculated to enrage, and at the very least to repuIse, not its readers, but its non-readers: the establishment of Mom and Dad. Most underground papers would have considered the ability to outrage "straight" readers as a mark of rhetorical success, and given the generational conflict, there would have been nothing i1logical in such reasoning. The very term "schizophrenia," that the critic cited above appeared to regard as the exclusive prerogative of the fifties generation, was coined only fairly recently in psychiatry, in turn itself a young branch of medicine that traces its own history only to the eighteenth century, when doctors and social reformers began to concern themselves with conditions in insane asylums and the treatment of inmates. (50 much for science versus politics, philosophy versus activism, and so many other such dichotomous schemata). Slowly, the new views of mental iIIness began to replace the old, and long-held, belief that the bodies of the mentally ill were inhabited by the Devil or other evil spirits; with humane treatment, the inmates's conditions improved, and doctors, and eventually people generally, noted the connection; but they did have to note it, to learn il, to ~ that sick humans and other animais improved with humane treatment: • it was not always self-evident. Indeed neither is such humanism 111

• universally self-evident today - plenty of people seem still not to have got the message, and even many in the medical profession who might be reasonably expected to share such a humanistic outtook still resist the knowledge that its own history proffers. 14O Finally, and more fundamentally from a Iinguistic and Iiterary perspective, the "schizophrenia" that the writer claims marked the lives of the older generation (rendering it incapable of seeing things as the young did) does not describe the mental Iife of a particular gerieration (though one could perhaps argue in terms of degree that the culture of a given generation was more schizoid than that of another) so much as it does the mentallife of humans generally, because mentallife involves language, and language is a quintessentially schizoid system. Language is a system or process for the creation of meaning, and the process is inherentty dualistic, dividing the world into that which is (and cannot ultimately be spoken, at least not "as is") and that which is spoken or written (and is conversely not synonymous with what is, what the words "re-present.") Language, then, only reflects reality, with the attendant dangers of distortion and the necessary divide of omission, or absence: to speak the word is to bring into literai existence that which is absent, at least beyond language as gesture; language is an attempt to know first order reality (knowable if at ail only directly, that is in a mystic sense); it relates the word to the thing and so tries to mediate, in the sense of negotiate, reality. Is this why metaphor is so powerful? A word re-presents a thing, or symbolizes it, or stands in for it; a series of words effects the same kinds of operations at a deeper, less visible and more complex level. Only in trans-Iinguistic terms, that is in translating from one language to another, is one word actually said to !!!mm another word, • and translation is an art precisely because it involves the creation of • 112 meaning. It is not just that literai, word-by-word translations render gibberish rather than sense, but more, that they are not actually possible, because different language-systems contain different lexicons and different syntactical sub-systems. Compare for example the different ways in English and French to describe or order categories of bodies of water: A river in English refers to a body of water that empties into the sea, while a stream is a current of water that does not; in French, the difference between "fleuve" and "riviere" is more complexly based, founded on a different conceptual framework. White "fleuve" is generally translated into English as "river", and "riviere" as river or stream, the meanings of the French words are not primarily based on the either-or reckoning of whether or not the body of water heads to the sea or to another large river. The word ''fleuve'' is defined (translated) first as a large river, and secondarily as one flowing into the sea, but also secondarily as flood and stream, and may be used additionally in a figurative sense (as in "a river of blood" or to describe the "roman fleuve", a novel spanning several generations). White the word "riviere" may be translated as river or stream, a third French word, "ruisseau" (translated as stream, brook, creek or rivulet; and figuratively as gutter) is necessary to convey the meaning of the English word "stream". The advances in philosophy of language, indeed the overriding concern of philosophy with language since the beginning of the twentieth century, stem from the recognition (commonly traced to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) that different (different cultures) do not simply speak differently about the same reality, but by the differences in their languages, perceive a different reality. If the culture - the sum total of the thinkable - is that which ensues from perceptual reality, amounting to a • kind of perceptual reality codified by (in) the common language, then 113

• language may also be considered as a means of perception and to extend the analysis, a continuing method of production of those means. 141 Words then, like drugs (meaning here mind-altering substances), appear to take their meanings from the environments of their usage, and only incidentally from other words. Yet this process, of incidental meaning, is virtually endless. Words in themselves, out of any context, can refer only to other words. When words are used in context, any context, the meaning is invariably in the speaker (or hearer), writer (or reader), producer (or receiver) of the words, and in the larger cultural context of the given language and Iiterature, that is, that a given language and Iiterature allow or make possible. The map is confused with the territory in the second-order reality system of language. In the beginning was the word as meaning: words produced a new kind of beginning, or a beginning of something new. It is not a long shot from there to the idea that in order to make a beginning one needs words, to the idea that words have effects, consequences (one facet of meaning), not only in terms of their ability to manipulate situations or other individuals, but as weil in terms of manipulating the self-conception and thus the self. The now commonly recognized power of language in effecting change (by evoking memories, uncovering "secrets", for example) is the seminal groundwork in the psychoanalytic process, itself early referred to simply as the "talk cure." Freud's psychoanalytic insights revolutionized literary theory and analysis because they laid bare certain dynamics of consciousness (stemming from the dualily of consciousness) that could hardly be ignored for any serious consideration or use of language: The quintessential duality of consciousness is mirrored in the constituent duality of language. Language, ultimately dualistic, tries to get at consciousness, essentially • unitary (meaning not that it cannot contain conflicted elements, but only 114

• that it is whatever it is until one aUempts to name it, and as soon as one does name it, it becomes something else again). ln addition to the already cited reasons for and reots of the rapid proliferation of an underground press in America, it is important to remember that the phenomenon was only one part, one facet (and Iikely not the most important, certainly not the most important from the radicals' viewpoint) of a wide cultural transformation under way in the sixties. As Jacob Brackman put il: "Given a new youth, a new bohemia, a new iconoclastie humor, a new sexuality, a new sound, a new turn-on, a new abolitionism, a new left, a new hope and a new cynicism, a new press was inevitable.,,142

Why rebellion did not occur on a wide scale in fifties is for one writer at least, "an enigma of history.": "That the New Radicalism flowered after the death raUle of McCarthyism and during a period of remarkable prosperity contradicts most theories about the nature of social discontent and rebellion.... My own suspicion is that rebellion explodes not when repression is at its worst, but when it begins to ebb, when the possibility of something beUer is dimly glimpsed. The American and the Hungarian took place when conditions were beginning to improve. The same is true of the birth of the New Left here, it happened after Khrushchev's visit to America and after the Iiberal victories in the 1958 congressional elections.,,143

Great issue couId be taken with the above paragraph in terms of its historical narrative, but that is not the point here. Aside from the "reasons" already cited (including the demographic boom), which the above does not take into the account, the analysis iIIustrates a failure to appreciate the fifties in a positive sense - by which 1do not mean that it • ignores what was "good" about the fifties, but that it notices only that the 115

• fifties were not about the revolution, and fails ta notice that they were about something else: denial of a recent past that did not "jibe" with suburban optimism and of the very ideals that were supposed to have explained the "need" for a second world war. Neither the facts of the Second World War, nor the ideals cited as reasons for its necessity, corresponded to Iife in post-war North America, which still included widespread poverty and denial of human rights. Moreover, ail things considered, the rapid rise of the underground press is hardly enigmatic. What, on the other hand, is there to explain the fact that by the turn of the decade, the number of underground papers had fallen dramatically (according to Peck, to haIf its 1969 highwater mark of 500), and that by 1973 the phenomenon had virtually withered away.

• • 116 NOTES - SECTION A

1. Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985) X!'J.

2. Lauren Kessler, The Dissident Press: Alternative Journalism in American Historv (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1984) 150. Kessler does not give sources for her figures, but almost certainly took the number 457 from Glessing, who was among the few writers on the underground press to provide any kind of complete listing, and upon whom, for accurate figures at least, many other writers have relied.

3. Laurence Leamer, The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Press (New York: Simon, 1972) 14.

4. Leamer, 14-15.

5. Roger Lewis, Outlaws of America: The Underground Press and its Context. Notes on a Cultural Revolution (London: Pelican, 1972) 63.

6. Newsweek 13 Jan. 1969. (Lewis: 63).

7. Robert Glessing, The Underground Press in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1971) 178.

8. Kessler, 149. See also Neil Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers (New York: Bantam, 1971).

9. Peck, 183.

10. Tom Forcade, "The Underground Press Loves You," Oroheus Aug. 1968: 18. (Glessing: 4).

11. Michael Lydon, ''The Word Gets Out," Esguire Sept. 1967: 168.

12. "Student Activists: Free Form Revolutionarlas," Fortune Jan. 1969: 108.

13. Peck, 183. • 14. Lewis, 63.Q4. • 117

15. Leamer, 14.

16. Raymond Mungo, Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service (Boston: Beacon, 1970) 42.

17. Peck, 183.

18. Glessing, 84.

19. Gitlin, The Sixlies: Years of Hope, Deys of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987) 343, and Glessing, 10. Michael Johnson, in The New Joumalism (Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 1971) 17, actually cites a slightly higher figure ­ 90,000 - for the Berkeley Barb by the summer of 1969. But Johnson's figures are generally higher, and there is an element of boosterism in his book, so 1 have relied in this instance on Glessing and Gitlin, who agree on the 85,000 figure, though Glessing, whose book was published in 1971, does not specify year as Gitlin, whose book was published in 1987, does. In any case, the difference of 5,000 is not large enough to mitigate the point: the underground press enjoyed circulation growlh that the straight press, whose readership was declining, could only envy.

20. Gitlin, Sixties 343. Michael Johnson, 13. Johnson uses slightly higher figures, for example citing circulation of 100,000 by 1970.

21. Glessing, 36-37, 84-85.

22. Johnson, Michael L., The New Joumalists (Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 1971) 15.

23. Lewis, 62.

24. This according to UPS leader Tom Forcade, quoted in Glessing, 72.

25. Marvin Garson, quoted in Glessing, 72.

26. Glessing, 72-73.

27. Glessing, 73. • 28. Glessing, 74. • 118 29. Mungo, Famous 42. This is Mungo's Interpretation of course - that the interest of major media indicated the increasing credibility of the underground papers. It may have had just as much to do with Mungo's naivety and the straight press's laziness, as with actual changes in the way the underground was regarded by the overground press.

30. Glessing, 73-74.

31. Mungo, Famous 38.

32. Michael Johnson, 19.

33. And in Canada, the RCMP.

34. Lewis, 63.

35. Mungo, Famous 42.

36. In fact, wrote joumalism professor Lauren Kessler (72): "More than 350 years after the Puritans attempted to create their vision of a perfect world, Americans were still searching for utopia." Nineteenth-century antecedents included those protest movements and publications begun in the 1830s and 1B40s by American radicals who had adopted the European philosophies of utopians Iike Owen and Fourier and formed societies under the banner of these variou!; philosophies. For the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s, it was eastem religions Iike that formed the ideological bases in many cases for the founding of communities. Rural communes were founded in the sixties and seventies ail across the country, even continent, some based on agriculture or cottage industry, others on artistic or spiritual ties. Like most of their nineteenth century predecessors, few of the sixties communes lasted long and few started their own publications. Notable exceptions include, in addition to several national magazines and joumals addressing radical concems, The Whole Earth Catalog, which published information on the necessaries of a self-sufficient Iifestyle and offered articles on new ideas and the founding and progress of new communities, and such other publications as Seriatim, which called itself "The Joumal of Ecotopia", Communities and Altemative Futures, which focused on utopian scholarship. • 37. John Wilcock, quoted in Leamer, 21 . • 119 38. Leamer, 21.

39. Leamer, 21.

40. Glessing, 84.

41. Glessing, 14. "The Voice was the tirst newspaper in the history of modem American joumalism to consistently report news with no restrictions on language, a policy widely adopted by underground editors to shock the authority structure. The Voice was also the tirst paper to give unsung and unpublished authors from the Village's substantial bank of creative talent a chance to be heard. Over the years, the Voice's Iist of contributors is a Who's Who in topical American joumalism. Just a handful of those contributors to the Voice were Michael Harrington, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, Nat Hentoff, Katherine Anne Porter, Allan [sic] Ginsberg, Joseph Lyford, Anais Nin, Jack Newfield, Vance Bou~aily and Donald Carpenter."

42. John Harrison and Harry Stein, eds., Muckraking Past Present and Future (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1973).

43. Michael Johnson, 145. .

44. David M. Chalmers, The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers (New York: Citadel, 1964) 78.

45. Carey McWilliams, "The Continuing Tradition of Reform Joumalism," Muckraking: Past Present Future, Harrison and Stein, eds. (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1973) 122.

46. McWilliams, "Continuing," 123-124.

47. T. B. Bottomore, Social Criticism in North America (: CBC Publications, 1966) 23.

48. Kessler, 148.

49. Gitlin, Sixties 35.

50. Ron Verzuh, Underground Times: Canada's Flower-Child • Revolutionaries (Toronto: Deneau, 1989) 12-13. • 120 51. Landon Y. Jones, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (New York: Ballantine, 1981) 22-23, 39.

52. Louis Filler, Vanguards and Followers: Youth in the American Tradition (Chicago: Welson Hall, 1978).

53. Ken Lester, a Georgia Straight staffer who later founded an anarchist journal in Vancouver called Open Road, quoted in Verzuh, Underground 247-248. Jack Newfield also noted of the New Left that Iike the counterculture generally, it involved a relative few of the people in the sixties generation, probably no more than 250,000. See Newfield, Prophetie 16.

54. Gitlin, Sixties 21.

55. Gitlin, Sixties 353.

56. Gitlin Sixties 12-17.

57. Time 10 Jan. 1955. Cited in Jones, 41.

58. Life 16 June 1958. Cited in Jones, 41.

59. Gitlin, Sixties 214.

60. Jones, 47.

61. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf, 1979) 130.

62. Jones, 47.

63. Halberstam, Powers 62.

64. Luce, quoted in Halberstam, Powers 62.

65. Halberstam, Powers 130.

66. E. B. White, One Man's Meat (New York: Harper, 1942). A collection of White's columns of the same title in Harper's. Cited in • Jones, 47. • 121 67. Jones, 40-53.

68. Gitlin, Sixties 38.

69. Verzuh, Underground xii.

70. Ethel Grodzins Romm, The Open Conspiracv (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1970),27,29.

71. Glessing, 42-43.

72. Glessing, 41.

73. Johnson, 15.

74. Glessing, 41.

75. Mungo, Famous 42-43.

76. Newsweek 1 Dec. 1939: 35.

77. Columbia Joumalism Review (Winter 1969-70): 3; and Scanlan's magazine (May 1970): 73.

78. Robert Cirino, Don't Blame the People (New York: Vintage, 1971) 280.

79. Cirino, 281. The sub-story of Ridenhour's reluctance to let Ramparts have the story is an intriguing one, but beyond the present scope. Suffice it to note here that it is a fairly safe bet that Ridenhour believed the story would lose credibility through its printing in an opposition paper.

80. Michael Cunningham, quoted in Richard L. Strout, Christian Science Monitor 24 Nov. 1969: 1; and by Kenneth Reich, 26 Nov. 1969): 11.

81. Los Angeles Times 11 Dec. 1969: IX:8.

82. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social Historv of American Newspapers (New York: Basic, 1978) 219. According to • Schudson, the Columbia Joumalism Review, founded in 1962, was "the • 122 only serious journal of press critieism which is not intimately connected to the adversary culture of the sixties." See also: James Aronson, Deadline for the Media (: Bobbs, 1972) 93-122, 299-300.

83. Cited in Kessler, 152.

84. Cited in Kessler, 153.

85. See Andy Stapp, Up Against the Brass (New York: Simon, 1970).

86. Kessler, 150-151.

87. Gitlin, Sixties 129.

88. Newfield, Prophetie 43-44.

89. Gitlin, Sixties 133.

90. Gitlin, Sixties 191-192.

91. Michael Johnson, 10-11.

92. Gitlin, Sixties 110.

93. Gitlin, Sixties 191-92.

94. Gitlin, Sixties 211.

95. Leamer, 21.

96. Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians (New York: Messner, 1959).

97. Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (New York: Scribner's, 1971).

98. Gitlin, Sixties 15. Like the hippies, the New Left attempted to substitute peer group for family group. Gitlin wrote (107) that SOS was Iike a "... surrogate family, where for long stretches of time horizontal relations of trust replaced vertical relations of authority."

99. Glessing, 39.

100. Francis Rigney and Douglas Smith, The Real Bohemia (New York: • Basic, 1961). • 123 101. Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America (New York: Covici-Friede, 1933).

102. Allen Churchill, The Improper Bohemians (New York: Dutton, 1959).

103. Quoted in Gitlin, Sixties 49.

104. Marvin Harris, America Now: The Anthropology of a Changing Culture (New York; Simon, 1981).

105. Newfield, Prophetie 25.

106. James Boylan, "Declarations of Independence," Columbia Joumalism Review Nov.-Dec. 1986: 29-45.

107. Gitlin, Sixties 72. In Canada, anti-communism was also widespread after 1946, when a clerk named Igor Gouzenko was exposed as part of a Russian spy ring.

108. T.B. Bottomore, Crities of Society; Radical Thought in North America (New York: Pantheon, 1968) 52: "... it would be a mistake to regard the fifties as unpolitical; it was simply a time in which the political offensive was taken by thinkers and politicians of the right"

109. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963).

110. See Christopher Lasch, "The Cultural Cold War," in The Agony of the American Left (New York; Vintage, 1969) 98-110; and George Theiner, ed., They Shoot Writers Don't They (London: Faber, 1984), an anthology of pieces trom the magazine Index on Censorship.

111. Bottomore, Crities 61.

112. Leamer, 22.

113. Bottomore, Crities 61: MiIIs's ideas "... were in part a response to the revival of a radical student movement and ... were accepted as expressing the concems and beliefs of the students and the younger • intellectuals." • 124 114. Paul Potter, A Name for Ourselves (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) 101.

115. Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade: America 1945-1955 (New York: Vintage 1960). See also Gitlin, Sixties 19.

1':6. Standard Dictionary (New York: Funk & Wagnalls): value: n. 1. the desirability or worth of a thing; intrinsic worth; utility. 2. Often pl. Something regarded as desirable, worthy or right, as a belief, standard, .or precept: the values of a democratic society. 3. The rate at which a commodity is potentially exchangeable for others; a fair-retum in service, goods etc., worth in money; market price; also the ratio of utility to price; a bargain. 4. Attributed or assumed valuation; esteem or regard. 5. Exact meaning; signification; import: the value of the words ''will'' or shall".

117. Leamer, 21-22.

118. Cited in Lipton, (New York: Messner, 1959) 20.

119. Cited in Lewis, 57.

120. Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972).

121. Gitlin, Sixties 235.

122. Gitlin, Sixties 235.

123. Liberation News Service 23 Oct. 1967. Cited in Peck, 77.

124. Hunter S. Thompson Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York: Random, 1967) 51-52.

125. Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels 51-52.

126.1. F. Stone, The Haunted Fifties (New York: Random, 1969) xxi.

127. 1remember watching Stone on television sometime in the latp. sixties, addressing some New Left rally or demonstration, and speaking • about the press. He told the young audience that generational rebellion • 125 might be justified or unjustified, fertile or ephemeral, but that it did not by or in itself constitute news.

128. Halberstam, Powers 346.

129. Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic, 1977) 131.

130. Dickstein, 131.

131. See Paul F. Lazaôsfeld, Robert K Merton and Elihu Katz, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955) 15-17. See also: Fred S. Siebert, et al., Four Theories of the Press (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1956); and Melvin DeFleur and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Theories of Mass Communication (New York: Longman, 1966).

132. Halberstam, Powers 372.

133. Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: World, 1969) 471-72.

134. Talese, 473.

135. Michael J. Arien, Living-Room War (New York: Viking, 1969) 109.

136. Generational cycles did not of course begin with the sixties generation. There was already by the decade of the sixties an evident generational cycle to social protest and criticism in twentieth-century America, with peaks in the Progressive era early in the century, (followed by the hedonistic Jazz Age, but also the Iiterary bohemianism of the 19205), and the reformers of the 19305 - the so-called Red decade - which gave way to the era of McCarthyism and the Cold War, before the upstarts of the sixties. (See Bottomore, Social 30-39). What complicates the lineage and works to destroy a sense of history or precedent or connectedness to the powers of resistance, is that while one can note generational peaks in a general way, the nature that protest assumes, and the language it employs, change as weil.

137. 1 omit here what may not be obvious to the reader - that the • everyday use of marijuana and hashish may also be viewed - and was • 126 viewed by some of the counterculture - as a retum to the traditions of native American Indians.

138. Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment (New York: Doubleday, 1970) 91. In this book, Mead treated the generation gap of the sixties and sixties culture itself as a new phenomenon, a new cultural style, which she called prefigurative (13): "To distinguish these three cultural styles 1am using the words postfigurative, when the future repeats the past, cofigurative, in which the present is the guide to future expectations and, and prefigurative for the kind of culture in which the eiders have to leam from the children about experiences which they have never had." (p. 13).

139. Lewis, 57.

140. It is a resistance, moreover, that will one day make some of the contemporary orthodox treatments for cancer, for example, appear in retrospect at least grotesquely ignorant and inhumane, if not criminal.

141. To illustrate the difficulties this philosophical advance in the nature of language creates for a previously simple (self-contained) understanding of language, a rather lengthy detour on the nature of definition may serve:

The hashish and marijuana "drugs" favored by the sixties radicals were produced from various parts of the Indian hemp plant. Yet marijuana is defined (in Funk & Wagnalls) first as that same plant ( sativa), with the additional description: ''whose dried leaves and f10wer tops yield a narcotic smoked in cigarettes." Hashish is meanwhile described by the same dictionary as ''the tops and sprouts of Indian hemp, used as a narcotic and intoxicant" But what is a narcotic? What can it be used for, and when is it used as an intoxicant? narcotic: n. 1. Any of various substances, as opium, morphine, and codeine, that in medicinal doses relieve pain, induce sleep, and in excessive or uncontrolled doses may produce convulsions, coma and death. intoxicate: V.t. 1. to make drunk, inebriate. 2. to elate or excite to a degree offrenzy. 3. To poison, as by bacterial toxins, serum injections, drugs, alcohol, etc. • Is not then alcohol a kind of drug? Not according to the dictionary: • 127

alcohol: n. 1. a volatile, inflammable colorless Iiquid of a penetrating odor and buming taste, C2H50H, one of the products of the distillation offermented grains, fruit juices and starches; the two principal forms are ethyl alcohol (ethanol) and methyl alcohol (methanol). Then what exactly is a drug? drug n. 1. Any substance, other than food, intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of disease in man or other animais. 2. Any article or substance recognized in the U.S. pharmacopoeia. 3. Any narcotic; also, any substance or chemical agent, exclusive of food, employed for other than medical reasons to obtain a given physiological effect or to satisfy a craving. Thus: The ward is not defined by its placement in a supposed, and supposedly orderly, system of words, which is further supposed to simply mirror reality, but by the disorderly relations of control and power extant in the society where the word lives (where it is used). Thus alcohol is not primarily a drug (because it has no conceivable "medicinal" purposes) while marijuana and hashish are iIIicit drugs (ironically, because while their analgesic properties are weil known, they are not controlled by a medical establishment).

142. Jacob Brackman, ''The Underground Press" Playboy Aug. 1967: 151.

143. Newfield, Prophetic27.

• 128

• THE NATURE OF UNDERGROUND PRESS

The idealism of the underground press was hospitable to a wide range of elements, from both political and cultural traditions, as reflected in the larger youth counterculture and protest movements. It included strands or elements from fairly divergent streams of thought: anarchism, socialism, pacifism, existentialism, humanism, transcendentalism, bohemianism, and mysticism.' The sixties press and the counterculture generally were peopled with militants and revolutionaries, students and hippies, dopers and Vietnam vets, mystics and runaways. The characteristic content of the underground papers - in terms of "acceptable" subject matter - also ranged wide over the metaphorical map. Even a cursory analysis of, for example, the Kornbluth anthology's contents iIIustrates the aspiring "ali-inclusive" nature of the underground press. Along with its preponderance of articles from some of the best­ known American undergrounds, the anthology contains three foreign­ sourced (English-Ianguage) pieces. Two are interviews with Beatles band members Paul McCartney and George Harrison, conducted by one identified simply as "Miles", "a well-known British underground journalist and London reporter for the East Village Other".2 The interviews originally appeared in the April and May 1967 issues, respectively, of the British underground paper, International Times. In these interviews, both musicians discuss their interest in Oriental philosophy with relation to the youth movement. The third article is a critique of the hippie movement and its philosophy of love written by John Kelsey, originally published in • the Canadian Free Press, out of Ottawa. (This paper published only 129

• briefly under that title, and was renamed Octopus shortly after its inception. )3 The writers inciude a majority of virtual unknowns (who remained unknown) along with several established writers, generally from the older generation, then gaining reputations for a variety of styles and concerns as disparate as those of poet Allen Ginsberg, referred to in the editor's note as "the grand old man of the underground" and novelist and former junkie William Burroughs. Ginsberg contributed "Renaissance or Die,04, which urged a revolution of consciousness through the widespread imbibing of the chemical LSD. Burroughs wrote an anti-drug testimony entitled "Academy 23: A Deconditioning."s Aiso included is a piece by novelist Tom Robbins, from the younger generation, entitled "To Dance."s A brief defence of dance, the article suggested that dance is a fundamental human need that began "as a co-ordination of motor impulses with universal energies which man only instinctively perceived."7

The excerpts vary widely in style and content, and within categories, for instance within the category of bona fide underground versus leftish but basically overground publications. They include within the first category, the throw-down-the-gauntlet optimism of Eben Given's

"The Wakening of the People, ,,8 along with the bitter political defeatism of the (unsigned editorial) raving in the Berkeley Barb's ''Toward a National Beg-in: Crawl for Peace"s; or, within the second category, Rutgers

professor Richard Poirier's scholarly essay "Learning from the Beatles, ,,10 which appeared originally in the fall, 1967 issue of Partisan Review, along with political essayist and poet Paul Goodman's attempt at futuristic • satire in ''The Diggers in 1984,,11, reprinted from People or Personnel and • 130 Like a Conguered Province, with permission of Random House, Inc., but originally published in the September 1967 issue of Ramparts magazine. The undergrounds were not fundamentally different from the overgrounds in how they broadly defined news, in what they conceived of as news (with certain exceptions to be taken up shortly). They did, however, introduce certain novel subject matters as newsworthy. Still, the underground press innovation was not primarily a conscious redefining of news, as for example was the case in I.F. Stone's weekly. In the many areas where the undergrounds were likely to report on the same events as the straight press (given its more Iimited financial and institutional resources) they did so from philosophical perspectives antithetical to those of the overgrounds. Because the underground press was established in opposition to the straight press, the Iwo factions regarded many of the same subjects as constituting "news" - political events including statements by political figures and exposes, natural and political disasters, movement and counterculture events, drug use, profiles of the prominent, arts and music reviews - though from a different perspective. For example, the undergrounds covered campus protests routinely, while the straights covered demonstrations only when they turned violent. While the undergrounds wrote about where the best drugs were available and about drug experiences, the straights wrote about the drug problem tearing the fabric of society. Some of the kinds of coverage ~ new, but not so radically opposed to the (supposedly) implicit values of establishment newswriting (which from a Iiterary or philosophical perspective remained naïve) that they couId not be easily introduced in later decades to the establishment press. Coverage of youth culture is the most obvious case, routine in many current overground papers, • though introduced only in the sixties to the establishment press. Other 131

• examples include the personal testimonial article on inner growth or mystical experiences of the sixties undergrounds, which became the "people piece" of the straight press and the underground ads touting opportunities for personal and sexual contacts in the sixties papers, which became the (tamed) personal ads of the straights. The essential difference is in how the article-forms were read or understood, and thus how they were portrayed, in other words on their Iiterary, cultural and social context: in the sixties undergrounds as politically relevant, part of the youth movement; in the establishment press of the sixties and of later decades, as politically relevant only in terms of the threat or potential they represented to establishment concerns (such as profits), or beliefs. Thus white the underground press was not particularly novel or innovative in defining news (the kind of content it called or recognized as news) it did introduce sorne topies as newsworthy that had been ignored by the overground press, and that, Iike the personal ads and the people pieces, were adopted by the mainstream press in later years, indeed that became staples of the mainstream press. The establishment press, however, adopted such novel subjects or formats not primarity as a means of self-improvement, but rather in an ongoing bid to stem the already (by the sixties) decades long decline in newspaper readership. One often noted innovation of the sixties press was its serious coverage of popular music. The underground newspaper found a natural ally in rock-n-roll music, and introduced popular music as a newsworthy topic. The language of rock music had done much to forge countercultural identity; in the underground papers, rock reviews provided subject material for underground writers (coverage of the music scene was important for ail the undergrounds, a central focus for sorne), and • record companies provided advertising dollars. John Sinclair, a writer for 132

• the underground press both before and after his conviction in 1969 for possession of marijuana, believed rock music itself would lead to revolutionary consciousness, and managed a rock-n-roll band to put his philosophy into action. 12 too shared a common language with the underground .press. Not only the lyrics of the Beatles, but as weil those of folksinger Bob Dylan, became such currency, such code among the counterculture, that they could and did appear often and without attribution in the copy and headlines of the underground press. 13 While the straight press in the sixties was undergoing a move toward "professionalization", the undergrounds provided a newswriting forum or venue for marginal writers, that is not simply young talent as yet unestablished or even recognized, but writers from groups who were socially marginalized. Not the least significant novelty of the undergrounds was precisely this provision of a forum or venue for newswriting from and for "disadvantaged" groups (not, for the moment, including women). The straight press for example had been traditionally off limits to black and other "ethnic" writers. There is of course a long history of a black press in the United States, but it was, like the undergrounds of the sixties, emphatically not part of the mainstream. In the sixties, aspiring black journalists who were not employed by or involved with the black press, were stilliargely limited to underground papers, as were other "ethnic" minorities. 14 Indeed, the reason for minority papers throughout press history had always been that these so-called marginal groups could not find a voice or theïr reflection within in the mainstream press. The sixties • underground papers were no different in this respect, but they were much 133

• harder to identify or ignore, because they crossed Iines of class and color, though not to any significant degree, of gender. Finally, the underground papers introduced a virtual revolution in newspaper graphies. In fact this experimentation constituted the most readily visiple innovation of the sixties undergrounds, and one that may have affected later graphies in straight papers much more than any re­ thinking of news content or even newswriting style. The refusai of the underground papers to run copy in traditional columns (or for that matter in traditional colors) represented the underground's categorical rejection of the staid format and graphies of the establishment press, though here as elsewhere in the underground press, experiments were often mothered by necessity in addition to belng conscious attempts to oppose the straight overground press. Nevertheless the straight press did "borrow" from some of the experimentations of the sixties undergrounds, becoming concerned with graphies and especially the use of white space, or rather with the recognition of white space as part of the effect of the printed page. East Village Other journalist Allan Katzman, a poet who had started the EVO in 1965 along with painter Walter Bowart and journalist John Wilcock, and the only founder still with the paper four years later, claimed it was the tirst of the undergrounds, or any other newspaper for that matter, to conceive of a newspaper as an art form. Katzman regarded the straight press as a dead form because of its visual or graphie conservatism. The East Village Other did introduce a lot of the graphie innovations, for example liberal use of color and white space, and especially the running of headlines and articles in spirals, circles, and virtually any shape or figuration other than the standard newspaper • column. 134

• The East Village Other may have been the first, but many others followed, and it was the San Francisco Oracle that would take the idea to its extremes, becoming identified with the "psychedelic" graphies of the underground papers and the psychedelic art of the sixties generally, which art was as Iikely to appear on posters or on re-tooled hippie vehicles, especially rehabilitated buses, as in the underground press proper.'s The rejection of staid graphies in favor of ongoing experimentation reflected the rejection by the counterculture generally'of authority per se. This passionate rejection of authority formed part of the bedrock of the countercultural ethos. The idea that "authority" could be identified and then rejected or overturned was the basic belief from which many of the experiments of the sixties, including those of the underground papers, could and did ensue. "Look out kid," sang Bob Dylan. "Don't matter what you did. The man in the coon-skin cap wants eleven dollar [or eleven-dollar] bills. You only got ten. ,,16

A related article of faith for the underground papers was a highly emotional repudiation of traditional Iiberalism, which was accused of hypocrisy for not seeing (or at least saying) how, or even that, the issues were related. White this rejection of Iiberalism (this consistent reference to it) was more apparent in the so-called political papers associated with the New Left, it was also expressed more obliquely in the more culturally oriented papers, with for example more "psychedelic" graphies, and less attention to any kind of recognizable news content, less overall fixation on words and thinking. Yet the basic critique, of the hypocrisy of their (liberal) eiders, was a pervasive "overbelief' among both cultural and political radicals, and • was expressed by both not only in their respective underground papers, 135

• but as weil in the f1esh, in their mutual rejection for example of everylhing from traditional fashions and Iifestyles ta legal marriages and sacrosanct monogamy. A tendency ta focus (in narratives of the counterculture and underground press) on such epiphenom('!na as hair and clothing styles masks the essentially revolutionary aspect of the sixties generation, its questioning of fundamental values and the institutions that represented them. It also under-emphasizes the strength of the generation's belief in capacity for change, a belief sa strong that it imagined it could instantaneously overturn centuries of institutionalized and gendered attitudes by aggregate facts or deeds of individual insight or enlightenment. The sixties press, or counterculture generally, identified this Authority, against which it honed its strength for experimentation and its capacity for change, with the generation of its parents and the ready­ made rules of the fifties. In this sense the Iiberation-mindedness of the sixties radicals does owe something ta the fifties - it was against and in terms of the pervasive conformity and denial of the preceding decade that the sixties radicals were able ta articulate their own struggles. They rejected the rules of the fifties with a vengeance, and created a new linga. For every rule of their upbringing, the sixties radicals invented a contrary, oppositional one: Instead of Obey Authority, Fuck Authority; instead of Control Vour Emotions, Let it Ali Hang Out; instead of Conform ta the Group, Do Vour Own Thing. In terms of the injunction ta control one's emotions, remember that in the fifties, simple anger, much less outrage expressed or acted upon, was considered an abnormal and destructive emotional response per se (that is regardless of its cause or • expression). • 136 .A chasm opened up between the language of the counterculture and that of the mainstream Authority it opposed: "We talk about sharing ... they talk about making a profit. It's a race against the other side.... The other side is the old order or authority or whatever10U want to cali il. And 1 don't think we've got much time.'"

The sixties radicals expressecJ anger through Iiberal use of obscenity, which ~ used freely in the underground press (though perhaps not as pervasively or unthinkingly as its unsympathetic critics believe), just as it was in the streets and on the campuses during protest events.,a The Iiterature of the underground press, then, reflected the language of the movement, much more directly than the overground press reflected the language of its constituents. (An interesting exception in the latter case is the stylistic freedom accorded columnists, who are permitted to write rather more easily in the vernacular of the "ordinary" reader of the mainstream press.) Many retrospective views of the sixties press take this expressed anger as a sign of the immaturity of the underground journalists; but they omit the constructive, constitutional and potentially transformative nature of this anger. David Hinkley, a sixties radical (who remains an activist, and went to work for Amnesty International in the seventies), described a campus protest during the sixties, one he credits for his personal political transformation and for reinforcing his budding activist convictions. Hinkley, who had left military training camp at the University of California, Los Angeles, to join the draft resistance movement, was discussing a student strike at San Francisco State university over the firing of a black teacher. When cops in riot gear arrived on campus, Hinkley, who worked • at the Iibrary, wanted it to close down in protest over the police presence • 137 and activity on campus. The library refused and Hinkley quit. In Hinkley's words, remembering the event for a researcher: "It was Iike a war zone. 1couldn't believe it. From then on, 1 was right there with them in the picket Iines.... We got hit with billy clubs.... There were six hundred police there every day for Iike the nex! five months. The goddam tactical squad, the highway patrol, mounted police, park police. And they had ail those jerky guys that went around in blazers and carried high-school history books and pretended to be part of the student body.,,19

Obscenities, what to critics of the underground press appeared evidence of the latter's non-seriousness or immaturity, was for the undergrounders themselves also an occasion for humor. As Hinkley remembered: "... Iike when they tried to clamp down on the language at the rallies. People would say fuck this and fuck that, and there'd be a police announcement: •By the power vested in me by the people of the state of California, 1order you to desist, and you are not to use this language in public.' And everybody would turn around on cue and yell, 'Fuck you!' ,,20

So that the use of obscenities in the underground papers may also be regarded as technique: If the grown-ups were not to be impressed by well-considered or well-written arguments against the war or racism and poverty at home, but could be put into a tizzy by the mere use of literai obscenities, then clearly the use of obscenities ''worked'' and was the way to go. Il was not, after ail, so much that the papers were filled with obscenities, as History has it, as that obscenity was regarded as much legitimate as any other expression; such usage was "normal" for the young activists, just as it was a mark, often a frightening one, of • "abnormality" for the generation of their parents. • î38 ln fact the ward ''fucking'' as an adjective became a staple of sixties linga, and not necessarily ta express anger or dissent, but more often as a substitute for the establishment's innocuous ward "very" (as in "fucking amazing" or ''fucking unreal".) The rejection of polite or establishment language was a trademark of the underground press, so that not only did profanities 'replace more staid expressions of anger or emphasis, but also whole entities were renamed: Police officers were pigs; ail Establishment authority figures, but especially those that represented the law, were The Man; the governor of the state of California was Rat Fink Reagan. Some critics believed the underground press used obscenities because it aimed to disgust, (rather than to convert readers to its p')int of view, which would presumably have constituted a more laudable mainstream goal).21 But the undergrounders were not for the most part seeking converts; they already believed themselves the revolution in embryo. Though the establishment may weil have experienced the obscenities of the underground press as direct assaults on the sensitivities and preservation of mainstream culture, to then regard this as the purpose of the underground press is to see it in terms of overground standards, not in terms of its own readership, for whom the obscenities expressed disgust and (in print) validated that same disgust. The sixties underground papers were disgusted not with the swear words that left their parents wondering where they had failed, but with the entirety of authority, in other words, with the culture of the fifties it had inherited. Whatthe underground papers shared implicity with the overground ones was the belief thatthe press had the power to do both - disgust or convert its readers, and maybe even convert by arousing disgust. Obscenity after • ail is in the eye of the beholder, and for the counterculture, the facts of the 139

• United States in Vietnam, of poverty and abuse of civil rights at home, and of the straight press's refusalto oppose, engage or even admit to these problems, constituted more obscenity than any number of profanities the underground press might use in allempting to describe or oppose il. The underground press was pro'Jdly, defiantly anti-professional, rather than simply amateur. Il was wrillen for ideals rather than money. Most of the people involved in the underground press, with notable exceptions (like Todd Gitlin and Andrew Kopkind, for example) were not trained as journalists and did not go into journalism later on. This counters the "star-system" retrospective view of the sixties press as the place where journalists of some fame "got their start". Journalistically speaking, the underground papers were not simply non-professional, they were commilledly anti-professional, mistrustful of ail professions as part of the establishment they believed they could overthrow. They saw the underground press as a fundamental breaking with the traditions of journalism, even a kind of anti-journalism, as witness Katzman's conception of the underground press as a new art form rather than a new informational medium, or Paul Kirby's description of the Logos, the underground paper he founded in Montreal, as a new form of theatre.22 ln fact, the underground press gloried in self-deprecating humor about its own lack of professional standards, savvy or status. Raymond Mungo, co-founder of LNS, wrote in his autobiography of the underground sixties press that while the news service availed itself of the help of secret sympathizers in the straight world, for example using on occasion the photo printing facilities at , the relationship was not • mutual. 140 • 00... although LNS used a considerable amount of talent and machinery from the Post, 1am pleased to say we 0023 never lost a man to il. We were never even solicited.

The underground press, white it took pride in remaining witfully ignorant of the normal business methods of newspaper accounting ­ another mark of its rejection of the establishment - did however, accept and was dependent on some advertising; the most commercially viable among the underground papers welcomed and pursued advertising dollars. The over-riding anti-professionalism of the underground press helps to explain why the use or rejection of advertising, and possible alternative bases of financial support, did not emerge as major issues among the underground press. 1. F. Stone, called by one critic a oofounding father of the underground ethosoo,24 did not accept advertising in his weekly, and emphasized the importance of this financial strategy as a crucial element of his editorial independence. Here is how one writer of that time squared the contradiction, how he rationalized or justified the use of advertising in underground papers, based on the idea that the advertisers and readers of a given underground were part of the same : ''The ads tend to solidify the public which they are addressing and act, with the letters to the editor, as a sort of forum for the paper's audience.... Most of their advertisers are closely aligned with their views, so that they worry IiUle about the withdrawal of advertising money.0025

This is no different from the advertising rationale of the straight press, though the straight press would describe it in different terms, for example arguing that without ads, it could not stay in business. Yet newspaper ads inform people of what they can buy, and provide a forum for no one but the advertiser. (That the remarkably unwiUing victim­ • perpetrators of consumerism are then invited to write letters to the editor 141

• ought to be regarded as rather more sales gimmick than editorial largesse, much Jess public forum.) As for the alignment of views between advertisers and readers, that is easily as much the case in the overground press as in the underground press. The difference in perspective il; telling: the writer is saying that the undergrounds do not have to worry about loss of advertising dollars because the advertisers are on the side of the revolution. Yet record companies (who provided the largest and most reliable source of advertising revenue for the underground papers) advertised in the undergrounds because it was their best deal, the cheapest and most effective way to reach the intended audience, not because they were consciously fomenting revolution, whether or not individuals within the business were sympathetic to the cause (of revolution). ln a critique of the straight press, though, advertisers are blamed for forcing editorial opinion, slant and comment into line with their narrow commercial interests. The radical idea that newspapers, on account of their Iifeblood dependence on advertising dollars, are selling not news to readers, but rather readers to advertisers (that is, they deliver a market) does not emerge in the cited analysis, which leaves, theoretically at least, the advertisers in control and the editorialists dependent on their continuing sympathies. The advertisers in the underground papers do not threaten to withdraw ads, then, because they agree with or do not mind the paper's editorial bias or its content. But this is a situational explanation: The advertisers' sympathies or the newspaper's content can change with different issues; it is not based on principle, as Stone's certainly was. This kind of analysis buries the issue (of advertising), but • also serves to iIIustrate its hegemonic scope. 142

• ln fact, later on in the same book, the writer implicitly, though again Iikely unwittingly, defended the light of the advertiser to exert control over the content of the (supposedly in need of repair) straight press, when he .tried to explain why what he called the new journalism was, and was more Iikely to continue to be, found in magazines than in newspapers: "Newspapers have been traditionally slower than magazines to open themselves to any kind of unconventional or experimental journalism, largely because newspapers have a dominantly local audience which must not be offended lest they go bankrupt from loss of advertising support. ,,28

Underground papers also served local markets, though they regarded themselves as participating in a worldwide revolution. Moreover, even in its own terms, this analysis makes Iiltle sense. Magazines also depend on ad revenues, though from a different kind of advertiser, a more national, and presumably richer and more powerful one. The Berkeley Barb carried nearly 40 per cent advertising at an open rate of $5.00 per column inch, then above the average inch rate for underground papers. Most underground papers carried about 30 per cent advertising and 70 per cent editorial matter, and only the biggest commercially successful ones attracted national advertisers, for whom the successful undergrounds represented a much cheaper way to advertise rock albums than did television or big market magazines. "You can run fortYpages eight times in underground papers for what it would cost for one page in Playboy," Barry Morrison of Mitchell-Morrison, Inc., who handled ABC Records, commented in the late sixties. 27

Paid subscriptions presented only 10 to 15 per cent of total • circulation for most undergrounds; more established left papers averaged 143

• 40 per cent in paid subscriptions (as total of circulation). The vast . majority of underground papers, however, did not expect to s!.:r'vive indefinitely, or even long, and normally sold by the copy, trrough retail outlets or street vendors. 28 The easiest kind of ads for underground papers to procure were the ,;ex-oriented classified ads. For example: "Incredibly straight male, 44, athletic, c1ean wants to meet lascivious, beautiful chick for sneaky-poo games. 1look Iike something between Marion Brando and Mickey Mouse with Montgomery Clift and Peter Lorre for cousins. Please lovely, lewd damsels, show me where your head is. Cali ...... Ask for'Uptighl.' ,,29

Most of the underground papers did not have circulations high enough to be represented by the UPS sponsored Concert Hall organization for national ads; they settled for any local advertising they could gel. The procuring of national advertising was al50 made difficult by inconsistency in ad rates among various underground papers. Their opposition to conforming in any way with the straight press presented a sales obstacle for efforts Iike Concert Hall, but it was pan of the undergrounds' disinterest in the profit end of newspapering. Accounting and bookkeeping procedures were almost non-existent, and there were virtually no salaries for staff at most underground papers. Of the underground papers that attempted weekly publication, most had a Iifespan of one year to eighteen months. 30 Publishing an underground paper was a risky-at-best financial proposition. When UPS asked 79 of its member papers in August 1968 if they were making a profit, only 28 per cent said yeso The others were breaking even or losing money.31 Because the radical political goals were more important to them than paying theïr bills (or making a profit), they • mostly published on a week-to-week basis. If they wanted to succeed 144

• (Iast), they followed the marketing blueprints of the successful undergrounds Oï the overground press. But most simply preferred being editorially free and economically unsound.32 A lack of consistency in the underground press, a further crucible of its anti-authoritarianism, was also a function of its anti-professionalism, and more specifically, of its means of production. There was rapid and nearly continuous turnover among staff at underground papers, where people simply came and went with the issues, which themselves were published haphazardly, almost randomly. Some of the first wave papers that became commercially successful were more stable, and more consistent, and some of the less stable undergrounds did make attempts at professionalism, for example attempting to have their papers distributed along with mainstream ones, such as Playboy (which was never busted for nudity or obscenity.)33 The run of the mill underground simply did not aim for consistency, which was not regarded in itself as a virtue. Why should it have been when most of the undergrounds were concerned with neither longevity nor even survival? What was pleasing to the sixties radicals was "far out" (removed from the mainstream) or "psychedelic" (proceeding from and/or reflecting states of consciousness outside or opposed to "normal" ones). "Consistent" meant boring. So if an underground paper came into existence, lasted a few months with everyone involved "grooving" (enjoying themselves and each other) and then folded, that was no problem. unless an "uncool" individual felt it was a problem, but that individual would then be propagating a "bummer" (a "downer" or bad time). The undergrounds papers rejected anything that smacked of • authority. They opposed discrimination across the board. Johnson 145

• writing in 1970, cited Raymond Mungo's work as an example of good writing in the underground press and as representative of the "best styles": "His [Mungo'sl quest for truth rather than simple facts (whatever the limitations of that Ideal, the attempt to speak for a new generation of people, and the commitment to an ideal of personal, empirical, morally minded and creative reportage and commentary - ail are the emblems of the best underground press writing and of much of the New Journalism." 34

Defences of the quality of writing in the underground papers tend to support the political motivation of the writer, rather than the content or style of the articles. The characteristic deficiency of the underground papers, however, was not so much the lack of good writing, as the lack of reportage. If the underground papers as a group had done more in the way of substantial first-hand reporting, rather than or in addition to rhetorically opposing the conservative views of the straight press with hyperbolic editorializing (though this is a problem shared in spades by the straight press) and followed it up with official responses, they might have been able to raise a lot more hell locally than they did. As weil, even if the official sources refused them information or response they gave freely to the straight press, the underground journalists could at least have pushed the repression of the government and its establishment press into the open, among a wider public. They might even have gained some allies there, as Kirby did for Montreal's Logos with sympathetic observers at the Montreal Star. The more interesting question is why the underground press people did not get around to this discovery on their own. • 146

• Here, their youth and inexperience really does provide a kind of partial answer: they simply did not know how, not how reporting was actually done, not how to compare sources and read between the Iines, none of it, and they regarded such knowledge itself as counter­ revolutionary, part of the establishment, not part of the revolution. Perhaps one of the reasons for the crackdown by authorities on the underground papers was their fear that the undergrounders would eventually get around to this discovery, this evolution in their journalistic philosophy. What irony that the establishment should have had more faith in the power of reportage than the undergrounders themselves. The sixties counterculture was preoccupied with "transcendence" of ail sorts - consciousness raising at the in Big Sur, Zen and other forms of meditation, sense-awakening therapies Iike , communal living experiments to transcend "possessiveness", body work Iike that of Ida Rolfs structural Integration experiments, even special diets Iike the macrobiotic (which in its misapplication Iikely produced a lot of children with rickets). Sorne of the cultural revolutionaries of the sixties wanted to transcend language itself - Iike the New York group t:,at called itself the Motherfuckers, and through its street theatre anà mor:\..-political events hoped to embody direct statement in action. So too was the underground press concerned with a kind of transcendence; the sixties papers attempted to transcend the very rationality or infrastructure of language: grammar, syntax and other "rules" of Iiterature (written language) carried no great importance in the average undeïground paper.

An aspiring editor who took issue with these apparentiy finer points of form was more Iikely to be viewed as "uptight" than praised for • competence. Of course the straight press, if compared to itself thirty 147

• years ago, is al50 less vigilant today in that respect. The average North American newspaper is Iittered with common grammatical errors, but without a point; this devaluation for the straight papers is not a mark of initiative, not a consciously assumed position or attempt at change, but simplya reflection of the devaluation of the newspaper generally (and perhaps, as 1shall argue, language itself). Clearly, the sixties press rejected authority in word just as the counterculture rejected it in deed. But this is a much more complex phenomenon that it at fîrst appE'3rs. For how does one reject author-ity (the act of authoring) in word, in writing? The underground press rejected the legitimacy of establishment authority, but the overall mistrust of authority per se (the possibility of legitimate authority) that this blanket mistrust entailed re-presented a potentially fertile contradiction in terms, an inherent dialectic, one mined by Iiterary theorists and philosophers since at least the beginning of this century, when the logical positivists introduced the idea that language was the only proper subject matter of phiiosophY,35 and in fact one inherent in philosophizing (as a method of intellectual production) since Plato. The fruit of this contradiction was a new sub-Ianguage, or Iingo, and a new understanding. For example, a common exchange on meeting among sixties radicals went Iike this: "Hey man, what's happening?" To which the respondent would reply: "Hey man, you tell me and we'lI both know." This was a friendly way of re-establishing the faith, of admitting that no one seemed to know and that was ail right. It was "up front" and countered the fîfties injunction to Be Polite as weil as its measurement of maturity by the ability to hide one's feelings, especially one's ambivalence • or the fact or feeling of ignorance. • 148 But perhaps the single most radical characteristic of the underground press was its counter-institutional embracing of subjectivity, both as a fundamental journalistic value in opposition to the objectivity credo of the straight press, and as technique. In (writing) practice the straight press's adherence to objectivity implied certain "rules", such as for example that the writer had to avoid use of the first person, singular or .plural. In the underground press, use of first person was entirely acceptable, and signified in part the writer's intention not to stand on or hide behind status. The sixties undergrounds were by and large big on subjectivity but low on quality control. The phenomenon was essentially participatory (rather than hierarchical or task oriented), which meant in practice that one need not have mastered the basics of expository writing or reporterial technique, to write or report for the underground press. In fact, the majority of writers for the hard-core and short-Iived undergrounds did not even aspire to mastery - atleast not as far as language is concerned, and Iikely not with regard to other areas either. Their particular talents were more Iikely to gain expression in the other kinds of social activism they were inevitably involved in. ln other words, the underground press took the "value" of democratic participation to heart, honoring alike the personal views of its writers and pseudo-writers, that is their right to hold and express their views, rather than the views themselves (since the basic view - down with the establishment - was shared by ail participants) and certainly not the ability or eloquence, or lack thereof, with which the participants tried to render these views in writing, or for that matter in speech. Spoken rhetoric of the sixties also found its way into texts, with speeches Iike • Martin Luther King's to Pentagon marchers or anti-establishment ravings 149

• Iike Abbie Hoffman's brief "babies for breakfast" speech to protesting students. 36 It is as if the editors and writers of the underground press felt that the only way to ensure non-hierarchical power relations within their budding counter-institution was to categorically refuse to discriminate, including to discriminate on the basis or in matters of quality. Certainly, no individual was to gain more "status" from writing in the underground press than from reading il. In a curiously vague anti-agenda, Los Angeles Free Press editor Art Kunkin expressed the desire for: "... a primarity reader-written paper where, when people expressed their opinions, there would be a dialogue with them, and finally the emergence of a program (and lJarty) from what students and so forth were talking about. ,,37

This same taboo - against discriminating on the basis of quality ­ was described by one writer who considered it the underground press's most striking feature as a refusai to "cloak its outrage.,,36 It refused to be polite or defer to authority, and the rejection of writing or reporting standards that was part of this refusai hardened into a kind of anti­ standard and a mark of revolutionary fervor. This made the "serious" writer appear somewhat suspect, white it made ail standards or attempts to evaluate competing standards, worthy of suspicion, a tendency that Iived on in the publications that formed part of the legacy of the underground press, but also a tendency already present in the culture long before the sixties in the sense of the societal urge to consensus and the individual's fear (If "standing alone" or expressing an opinion not supported by others. Il represented a kind of "in your face,,39 withholding of respect, or the marks of it, for establishment authority. • 150

• This devaluation is crucial to an understanding of the motives of the underground press and the counterculture generally. The sixties generation grew up believing and believing in the rhetoric and reality of the American Oream. When they discovered the depth of deceplion and hypocrisy this rhetoric contained (compared to the reality of actualliving conditions, including those "experienced" through television or newspaper news), sixties radicals rebelled with ail the passion, to the point of 'obstinacy, associated with youth itself. This devaluation (of standards of quality) led to a devaluation of striving - "if it feels good, do it" and its unstated corollary: if it does not feel good, if it is difficult, it is not worth doing - which is essential to understanding how the movement for change was self-Iimiting (as perhaps ail movements for change may ultimately bel· By rejecting the older generalion - "never trust anyone over thirty" ­ the sixties radicals lessened their chances to avait themselves of potenlial allies. They also set themselves up for disillusionment, since the day would come when they too would pass beyond the fateful age. They were absolutely supremely confident in the revolution, after which ail the isms, including age-ism, it was supposed, would naturally atrophy. The subjectivity of the underground papers may also be viewed as a kind of defence (against words, or against the possibility of being duped by words). Their refusai to embrace any kind of standard of writing or reporting represented a kind of absolute relative-ism - the idea that one person's opinion was as well-founded as another's, so long as they were both part of "the revolution." Mainstream press standards were "id­ entified" with the enemy. The cavalier freedom of choice in the malter of identifying writers of articles in the underground papers - with bylines that • included only first names, names invented especially for the occasion of 151

• the article or no bylines at ail - spit in the face of the mainstream press, which took and continues to take its bylines and other traditions in uniform earnest. The subjectivity of the underground press was also operational, that is it functioned as a kind of technique, with some salutary and some not so salutary results in terms of reportage. On the up side was that the subjective stance encouraged a critical eye on official sources (underground journalists were almost congenitally suspicious of establishment sources, and so were more Iikely to attempt to verify information that to the straight press would appear entirely transparent, since the straight press routinely accepts information from "official" sources, without verification, and indeed did and still does regard this as a mark of its strength - evidence of its network of official sources). The underground press of sixties had no "pretensions" to so-called "objectivity," most commentators agree.40 ln fact, the undergrounders did not simply forgo pretensions to objectivity, but moreover rejected outright the very concept of objectivity and tried to replace it with the counter­ concept of subjectivity. John Wilcock, who deserted his job as a reporter for the overground New York Daily Mirror to become an underground editor, said that the underground press showed in its reporting: "... singular audacity in digging up its own facts, getting its own fads going, and creating its own mythology. While the establishment papers moronically or insidiously accept every body count, government snow job and press agent puffery that comes in over the wire, the underground press relies on men from Vietnam, empirical evidence on the streets and in the ghettos, and personal confrontations." 41

On the down side (of subjectivity as method) was the fact that the • underground papers also accepted second-hand information, from their 152

• own news services and from other publications that voiced the same countercultural views. 42 Village Voice publisher Ed Fancher claimed that the Voice did ail its own reporting and that other papers should do the same. But what was important journalistic critique on Fancher's part - the insistence on first-hand information, on reportorial method - was not shared or Iikely even grasped by the average underground paper. For example, the undergrounders by and large thought Fancher's insistence on first-hand reporting, his unwillingness to "share" copy, was unbrotherly and greedy - they certainly did not see it as a journalistically principled opinion and a bona fide critique of the straight press. But the underground press also did the kind of first-hand reporting Wilcock referred to, and in this respect was justified in its reaction to the "objectivity" of the straight press. Some sympathetic writers (Johnson is a good example) praised the writing (literature) of the underground press as a whole, for its supposed analysis of truth versus facts, but the writing and reasoning were on the whole actually fairly facile, and certainly nothing new to journalism. Walter Lippmann43 had been saying insightful and critical things about the press for years that ought to be regarded as properly radical. For starters, Lippmann did consider the gulf between theory and practice, and advanced some ideas on the subject, including the idea that the eternal struggle for the reporter is not that between competing versions of the truth, but rather that between the devotion to truth per se and the urge to get on in the world (to advance one's career).44 New York Times journalist James Reston was more the kind of Iiberal that radicals loved to hate. Reston's book The Artillerv of the Press, (published in 1966) also argued, as journalists had since • Jefferson, that America, especially given its post-war power on the • 153 international stage, needed not a more conservative, co-operative or compliant press, but rather "a relentless barrage of facts and criticism, as noisy but also as accurate as artillery fire.,,45 The job of the reporter, Reston believed, was "not to serve as cheerleaders" for its "side", but to .describe and even explicate the rapidly changing realities of international strife, to explain not just its effects, but as weil its causes. This Reston referred to as a "redefining" of news. Andrew Kopkind, in the sixties a co-editor of one of the best underground investigative papers Hard Times, in a review of Reston's book took the author to task for being a dyed-in-the-press Iiberal. Kopkind wrote that the trouble with Reston and other old-style liberals was that they had an unbreakable engagement with society and the press the way these already existed. Their talk of improvement was never more than talk, since personally, they were pleased with their respective positions in the establishment, Kopkind argued. The quality of writing in most of the underground papers was highly inconsistent, not only from one paper to another, but as weil from one issue to another of the same paper. Not only the exigencies of publishing (finding the "bread" to put out an issue and fend off atlacks from authorities) but as weil the devotion to non-hierarchical relations made consistency fairly unthinkable whether as goal or critique: there was no generally accepted !;~andard of what constituted good newswriting because this in itself would have implied hierarchy, and to the undergrounders it smelled too much Iike objectivity. The underground press allegiance to personal or subjective style often produced unreadable diatribes that went no further than self-display. But it also often contained and presented the seeds of a consciously • formulated stand critical of both self and society. The devotion to 154

• subjectivity, to its value, also contained an implicit critique of objectivity, and occasionally informed the kind of budding critiques of objectivity later perfected by feminist writers.4S The serious side of the devotion to subjectivity meant that a writer (not just a speaker) could also admit to fallibility, put her cards (her opinions or biases) on the metaphorical table.47 What this meant in terms of reportage was that powers of observation that elicited strong emotion on the part of the reporter, could

al50 be transmitted to the reader. Norman Mailer's account of antiwar activity in The Armies of the Night was a widely read and deservedly praised example of this "subjective" journalistic style. The underground papers implicitly targeted the objectivity of the mainstream press first as reportorial technique, where it was supposed to

produce or ensure detached (uninvolved emotionally) and 50 balanced, news accounts. For the undergrounders ail this devotion to the illusory ideal of non-involvement was repulsive in itself as antithetical to the involved and communal style of the sixties radicals; it also reinforced the hierarchical separation of the reporter from the readership and implied that to write about what one knew (a positive injunction for fiction writers) would necessarily lead to a flawed, unbalanced, news story. This devaluation of the individual subject meant effectively that newswriting discouraged writing on topics about which one had strcng feelings or convictions (which would also tend to be topics about which the serious writer had special knowledge). This is an in,unction to be silent, not to speak, and also implied a taboo against meaning: Only those who "mean" nothing by what they say ought to be allowed to speak. It fairly legislates meaninglessness. Practically, the objective view meant that young writers in the • straight press would be disqualified from writing about the youth 155

• movemenl. By ruling out the reporter's point of view, the objective view produced a "style" (the famous "cool" objeclivity) that was, as far as radical youth were concerned, inimical to the emotional intensity raised by the issues, especially the Vietnam war. To the counterculture this kina of "objectivity" was perverse and enraging - and 50 it refused in its own press to speak moderately about a living nightmare. The Underground press, for example, eontained a lot of so-called of "feel" pieces - the inversion of the straight press's dispassionate accounts. For the underground papers, emotional detachment on the part of the writer or reporter could only reduce or even impair that reporter's ability to understand the meaning or importance of a given story, and ultimately also reduce the writer's effectiveness in influencing the response of the reader. The undergrounders regarded emotion, then, as a valuable kind of information. The more "journalistic" the papers, the more they constituted (or at least the more they could be read as) a critique of the mass press, and the more their concerns appeared similar to whatever self-criticism the straight press engaged in. 48 But the objectivity of the straight press was generally regarded by the undergrounders as a smokescreen, because it hid the ideological assumptions that largely determined the "spin" on a story (from what overall perspective it would be seen and told), delimited the kind of teporting that would be done, and obscured the importance of "personal" interests (career and financial interests) of professional reporters and the mainstream press. Jack Newfield of the Village Voiee criticized the mainstream press (both liberal and conservative) for its "rhetoric of objectivity," which obscured: "... a belief in welfare capitalism, God, the West, • Puritanism, the Law, the family, property, the two-party • 156 system, and perhaps most crucially, in the notion that violence is only defensible when employed by the 5tate.,,49

And yet the objectivity of the straight press did not really hide these beliefs, it simply took them as absolute and so put them beyond question. The journalistic belief in objectivity was a foundational value, on which ail other values somehow hinged. It was finally something more than a .value; it was as much an article of faith as subjectivity was for the underground press. This, it seems to me, is what the undergrounders were really angry about - what they considered the false values of the mainstream - and it is in this sense that the implicit critique presented by a belief in subjectivity constituted a radical viewpoint, for it unmasked the objectivity of the establishment ~ an article of faith (rather than an argument). ln practice, the belief in objectivity meant that views contrary to the mainstream would be filtered out or ignored. Effectively this meant that the mainstream press, staffed largely by white middle- and upper-class males, would reflect its own viewpoint and rule out those of other by definition "non-mainstream" interest groups, women or blacks, for instance. In other words, the difference between traditional objectivity and oppositional subjectivity as characteristics of the mainstream and underground press respectively, fairly ensured that the worst oversights in reporting would be in the overground press coverage of the underground press and the movement itself. Just as History rewrote the political struggles of the sixties from a mainstream perspective, the establishment press of the day rewrote it as News. The "insider" mentality of the mainstream press required and encouraged the reporter's dependence on official or institutional sources, thus fostering an ethical bias that posed as • neutrality while making opposition in itself appear biased. 157

• Ironically, the underground press also stood ta be blinded by its faith in subjectivity, as a foundational value. Subjectivity, however, at least presented more potential for the achievement of communicable meaning than the mainstream belief in objectivity, since novel insight or understanding ca" not be said ta ensue from the abjects of inquiry themselves, but only from the interaction of the subject with the abject of inquiry. Bath the overground and underground press of the sixties were equally likely ta disregard or de-emphasize facts that were opposed ta or stood ta oppose their respective foundational values or beliefs. For example, the New York Times coverage of the 1967 March on the Pentagon reported low estimates of demonstrator numbers supplied by the police. It focused on arrests, including the arrest record of protest leader Dave Dellinger, on permit deadlines and the supposed rowdiness

Q'i protestors. But it ignored the war-related issues that inspired the protest and that the protest was about, in other words the subject of the demonstration. The underground Liberation News Service instead mixed in its account of the march: "... freak and radical perspectives, polities and celebration, and, most of ail, demonstrators' experience.... Demonstrators were hailed as politically correct and morally superior. ,,50

Bath overground and underground press wrote narrative. The undergrounders called their narratives truth on the basis of emotional and intellectual conviction, in other words by appealing ta subjectivity or the value thereof; the overground press claimed also ta be writing the truth, but in its objective formulation of "just the facts" and on the basis of its impersonal style, in other words by an appeal ta objectivity. Yet if the • narrative must include facts, that narrative is always ta a certain extent • 158 .already implicit in the choice and ordering of facts, and especially in the facts left out. The point as one critic put it, was not that the underground papers told the whole story but that they told a story which included certain S (oppositional) facts that the mainstream press left out. ! Todd Gitlin, in an article comparing coverage of a 1965 SOS demonstratiol1 in the New York Times and the National Guardian, noted: "It would be de rigueur to observe that the Guardian's coverage was ideological. The Times's coverage was no less 50.,,52

To the degree that the underground press presented a critique of journalistic method, it believed that subjectivity would lead to more accurate and readable reporting. The same belief in personal empowerment informed the New Left's belief in "expressive" politics and its usefulness for participatory democracy. Like the counterculture generally, the underground papers stressed individual involvement throughout the production process as an attempt to overcome rigid divisions of labor.53 Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman believed that straight media reportage (though he was referring primarily to television news, this view was shared by the underground press) instead of representing reality, distorted il. The whole purpose of the yippies' media stunts, Hoffman wrote, was to "shatter the pretence of objectivity" and "rouse

viewers from their media stupor. ,,54 But the yippies still had to perform according to media standards ofwhat constituted a newsworthy stunt and at the same time fit within the censor's definitions of acceptable. Thus they were trapped, as Gitlin put it, "in a media loop." They were: "... dependent on media standards, media sufferance and goodwill. These apostles of freedom couldn't grasp that • they were destined to become cliches." 55 • 159 THE SPLIT: POLITICS VERSUS CULTURE

The underground papers were reportedly split by an ideological dichotomy that opposed politics to culture - a dichotomy that is taken for granted by virtually ail chroniclers of the underground press, and most of the counterculture commentators of the day, but one which has fairly recent historical reots. Such a dichotomy, for example, would have been impossible (unimaginable) for Nietzsche. "It never occurred to [Nietzsche] to separate his historical sense from his sense of art. They were not Iwo senses but one... [this explains Nietzsche's] acuity in divining the order and rank of cultural things ...[and] prescribes that culture be studied and judged as Iife's continuous evaluation of itself, the evaluation being understood as never finding full expression in the 'operating forces' of a culture, but as never finding expression at ail without reference to these gross institutional facts. ,,56

On the most superficiallevel, the historicizing of this split (in terms of naming the papers one or the other, and the underlying belief thatthis split was a negative phenomenon atleast partiy responsible for the downfall of the dissident press) und~rplays both the degree of dissension among the staff of underground papers (on cultural-versus-political and other similarly dichotomous Iines), as weil as the degree to which the dichotomy, implicilly and pervasively held among the society in general but not consciously addressed, already "informed" the underground press ethos, since the counterculture itself was fundamentally anti-political (it too believed change in power relations was necessary, but it saw old style polities as unequal to the task). Norman Mailer is reported to have stopped writing his column for the Village Voice after 18 issues, because • he had differences with \he editors. The editors wanted to make a • 160 commercial success of the paper, (a political goal) while Mailer wanted it to be outrageous (a cultural one).57 The split, according to some sixties narratives, was between the cultural and the radical, with one writer calling it the split between the heads and the fists. For yet another commentaior, the tension was between those sixties radicals who believed in "prefiguring the new, post­ revolutionary society" and those who believed in "fomenting radical

political change. ,,58 The phenomenon of "splitting" did not of course originate with the underground sixties press. According to earlier ideological versions of the phenomenon of the split, the basic division was not cultural versus rsdical or political, but reformist versus revolutionary.59 ln one form or another, it has attended ail (narratives of) protest or revolutionary movements, ail movements directed at change. This bifurcation, though it may be useful to establishment powers seeking to invalidate and so contail'1 the overall protest, is actually more complex than the old rule of divide and conquer. For it is also a feature of any kind of cultural articulation, is in fact a feature of consensual (as weil as revolutionary)

models of society or the press. GO The dichotomy informs both revolutionary and consensual models of society, just as the phenomenon of splitting long pre-dates the sixties press, because both are necessary in the process of articulation. Generally speaking, and remembering that these labels do not indicate air-tight compartments or categories, the cultural undergrounds emphasized visuals, especially the unconventional use of color and image, making the point that these preceded words in importance, giving voice to a basic mistrust of language. The cultural papers were printed in • many colors and were as Iikely to run a piece in spirals as in columns, 161

• actually more likely to run it in spirals. The "typical" cultural underground paper printed stories about Eastern religions, dope news, and drug testimonials, and was known in the vernacular as a "head paper" (for the indulgers in marijuana and hashish smoking, known as potheads, or heads for short), and was read primarily by the hippie set. Despite its opening salvo, its initial appeal for a paper that would transcend the dichotomy and so make the revolution, the Oracle Iike the other cultural undergrounds, was regarded by the more overtly political critics of the counterculture as having rejected politics. The Oracle, the cultural paper supreme, hoped in its founding éOspiiat!ons to ovp.rcome the supposed split. On New Year's Day, 1967, the Oracle called ail members of the counterculture to the movement's first mass g:'3thering, the Golden Gate Be-In, to announce the coming of its first issue and to celebrate the new paper, which was to represent "a union of love and activism previously separated by categorical dogma and iabel mo~gering."61 There at the Be-In, it believed could occur a spontaneous union of: "... hippies and pacifists and Marxists and Diggers and activists and Beats and resisters and freaks and Trots and gurus and poets".62

ln the rise to fame of the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury district later that year during the - which brought together thousands of hippies to celebrate peace, love, freedom and countercultural drugs - the Oracle left Iittlé. doubt as to its true countercultural position. 63 While the cultural underground aimed for aesthetic pleasure above ail in the look of the newspaper, the politically oriented Berkeley Barb • (which had grown up with the at the Berkeley • 162 campus and like the other political papers was read by student and other activists) disdained serious concern with "visuals". thereby earning its well-deserved reputation as the ugliest paper in America. The political underground papers, however, came closer to a traditional journalistic model in their emphasis on content or literai appeal over the visuals bias plumbed by the cultural papers. Events as they unfolded at the Be-In prefigured the split, or at least the hardening of the split. Political yippie activist Jerry Rubin showed up, fresh from jail after having been charged with defying a court order. Rubin harassed the hippie multitude on the question of the Vietnam war ­ but with little effect, a fact that infuriated the Barb's , who could not understand and would not condone having let the opportunity to do political consciousness raising and organizing among so many pass unused. The arguments at the Be-In between the hippies and the Berkeley activists provide the earliest evidence of ideological tensions between the cultural and political radicals. For the Oracle and its hippie readership, personal revolution was the necessary prerequisite to social revolution. Personal revolution meant essentially radical changes, in line with radical belie,fs, in Iifestyle: tune in, turn on and drop out, and thus create the new society. Political protests and demonstrations, no matter how inventive (or how much coverage they attracted from the local television station), the hippies believed, could only create more tensions and prolong the war and other evils. "To this the Barb and Berkeley people countered by saying that the government wasn't about to let any mass alternative society develop. And even if it did, it wouldn't end the war, • racism or poveriy." 64 163

• Several months after the Be-In, similar tensions erupted at the flrst UPS convention, in the spring of 1967. The cultural set saw itself as leading a revolution in consciousness that would turn America around. They saw consciousness as equivalent to reality. The politicals, on the other hand, admitted different and generally more "materialist" social forces to reality. This philosophical (rather than ideological) divergence was the essence of their dispute with each otller. Looking backward, however, it seems ',hat both aHachments (that is both beliefs, in the cultural and the political a~; blueprints for salvation, paths to freedom) were more a function of the entire counterculture's dawning understanding of the forces arrayed against it, both political and cultural, its dawning disillusionment. Thus the radicals argued with each other to avoid understanding, becoming painfully aware, that even with a union of politics and culture (which after ail was an idea more advanced within the counterculture than within the mainstream) the establishment was not about to let a revolution "just happen"; that what they were really up against was other individuals, other subjects, not simply a non-human structure or a dictatorial minority. The view that underground papers failed because of ideological C:ifferences among their countercultural participants expresses a historicized view of the underground press and its famous splintering. This view underestimates the diversity and many-faceted nature of the counterculture, and the fact that in this, the counterculture was more Iike the mainstream culture than it thought. Both culture and counterculture were spaced out along a wide spectrum of belief. That meant the counterculture could also accommodate hype and rip-off artists, hostility • and violence. (Also of course that mainstream writers or thinkers were • 164 capable of the compassion, insight and intellectual or emotional powers that the counterculture took as its own prerogative.) Underground papers may be thus categorized as either political or cultural for the purposes of analysis, but such categorizing should be recognized as such, that is as attempts to provide analytical frameworks, rather than as valid descriptions in themselves of the papers or their self­ conceptions. In other words, the categories of cultural versus political represent a way of thinking about the underground press of the sixties; rather than a living insight into its peculiarities. This is especially true for works written long after the fall of the underground press, as compared to the narratives of commentators writing at the time, when the press was a going concern. Yet both contemporaneous and later writers recognized and employed the distinction in their analyses. The historicized view of the underground press paints a picture of this split as more of an "id-entity", more discrete and even more real ­ more id-entified or "thingified" - than the complex process it actually was. The idea th:.t the cultural agitation (and papers) precipitated the phenomenon of the underground press, with the political papers following in theïr footsteps, is part of this historicized view. If 1had to choose sides on this "issue", however, 1would opt for this historicized view that the cultural preceded the political, but 1would also argue that this is a description applicable to ail social change (in the sense that "cultural" views inevitably become "political" when a sizable portion of the population shares them. Class and gender are obvious examples.) The reality of course was not so simple. The first underground paper in America, for example, and the one that would become the largest, the Los Angeles Free Press, contained a mix of political and • cultural matcrial, and emulated the style and look of the Village Voice. • 165 Yet its founder Art Kunkin, who had worked for socialist magazines before launching the Free Press, hoped the paper would work to "build a local movement base."es The paper bore Kunkin's own stamp:> it was in favor of radical political change. The second underground paper founded in America, the Berkeley Barb, was even more "political" - a virtual proselytizing agent for the campus-based New Left, with no claims to covering the New Culture. On the other hand, the culturally oriented East Village Other and San Francisco Oracle - the two papers founded next, after the Free Press and the Barb - remained true in their pages to the cultural radicalism from which they grew. The Underground Press Syndicate - begun by these four papers and two others (the Detroit Fifth Estate and East Lansing's The Paper) grew more from a primarily cultural activism, than from any recognizably political agenda. One contemporaneous critic described the structure of UPS as largely the product of a "Ioose, anarchistic cultural radicalism.'066 Liberation News Service, which had originally hoped to straddle cultural and political radicalism, nonetheless considered itself more political than its predecessor UPS, and was moreover, soon after its founding, taken over by yet more political (Marxist) elements. A close look at the history of the two underground news agencies in the United States tends to support the contention that the (political) movement began as the counterculture; that the beginnings of the underground press emerged from primarily cultural concerns that were taken over by more political agendas later. At the tirst UPS convention in San Francisco in the spring of 1967, (only months after the rift between the culturals and the politicals became visible at the Be-In founding of the Oracle) the Berkeley politicals were vastly outnumbered by the cultural • set, commonly known in their most radical (and certainly most visible) • 166 incarnation as hippies. At that convention, the Oracle suggested renaming UPS the Tribal Messenger Service, in line with its apocalyptic anarchism. 67 The Barb's Max Scherr had as much trouble there as Rubin had had at the Be-In trying to introduce discussion of topies as "heavy'" as the Vietnam war into the hippie atmosphere of sweet and good dope. As weil, avowedly political papers like the Barb were a minority of UPS's original 25 member papers.68 It is also true, however, that the papers themselves muddied the literai distinctions - distinctions that were to begin with crude shorthand at best. For example, , in Austin, Texas, described itself as having "... definite nonideological connection with the left-wing love, flower and freedom sect, anarchistic division of S.O.S. [a contention that according to Rag editor Thome Dreyer]. "had freaked national S.O.S. out".59

Initially, the structure of UPS reflected the convictions of the "hip" (anarchistic cultural radicals), and it maintained "a spaced-out style."70 Nevertheless, as the underground press grew. some sort of co-ordination and organization became increasingly necessary, especially as the service did serve to inspire and maintain a common sense of purpose among the underground papers, both political and cultural. The syndicate's Tom Forcade was weil aware of the ideological split, but he certainly did not expect it to cause the downfall of the entire underground press movement. In fact, he predicted its growing success: ''The underground press is crouched Iike a Panther, dollars and days away from daily publication and thus total domination in the print media. In the past 20 years over 400 establishment dailies have died. After the underground press goes daily, they'lI die Iike flies. ,,71 • 167 • Mungo and Bloom started the competing Liberation News Service in 1967, at an initial meeting in Washington the day before the March on the Pentagon, with political aspirations to cover movement activities. The service also hoped to unite the underground papers, but at that meeting, Walter Bowart of the East Village Other (which was at that time helping to run UPS) propagandized for the older . Mungo wrote later of that meeting: "And so it went. The college editors ·.vere interested mostly in campus revolution, the pacifists in ,he war, the freaks in cultural revolution and cultural purity.... A few fist fights broke out between warring factions of the antiwar forces.... Our glorious scheme of joining together the c.ampus editors, the Communists, the Trots, the hippies, the freaks, the pacifists, the S.O.S. kids, the black militants, the Mexican-American Iiberalion fighters, and ail their respective journals, was reduced to ashes. Our conception of LNS as a 'democralic organization' owned by those it served, was clearly ridiculous; among those it served were, in fact, many whose very lives were devoted to the principle that no organization was desirable.,,72

Yet by early 1968, LNS was sending ou: news packets three times a week to more than 360 newspapers, magazines and radio stations. It did include a wider range of members than simply the membership of UPS, though slightly more than haIf (183) were colleg~ papers, and among the remainder were publications not strictly "underground" such as Jewish Currents and Viet Report.73 Overall, LNS did maintain closer relations thar. UPS did with the political mo~ement. But LNS tried to juggle or balance its political and cultural radicalism for the remainder of its relatively brief existence. Within the organization were both kinds of radicals. Moreover as events heated in the late six"es, with the Pentagon March, increas,ng campus • "unrest" and escalation of the Vietnam war, this basic difference assumed • 168 divisive proportions. Nature poetry and drug testimonials appeared worse than useless to political radicals both within and outside of LNS. As weil, among the undergrounders themselves were those philosophical spirits (perhaps an eternal minority) who remained acutely aware of the split, its complexities and its implications. The commentary that follows appeared in Orpheus magazine, whichwas establishect by Forcade of UPS, the supposedly f1akier, more cultural faction, of the two underground press services. Yet the authors were clearly appealing for more political awareness among cultural radicals: "Many [in the underground press movement] had been f10wer children. Their prophetie insights had been clubbed to the ground by the cops and had been marketed to the populace by the masters of co-optation. But though the trappings proved cooptable, the vision was not. It was how you achieve that vision that demanded reevaluation. It could not come in isolation from society. You could not escape external reality - it would bust you sure. And even if you could create a heaven-on-earth, a pocket of utopia, what about the rest of the world? What about those who did not start from a position of material privilege, for whom doing-your-own-thing was unthinkable?,,74

By the summer of 1968, LNS was badly divided between the politicals and the cultural radicals, a divisiveness that culminated in the move by the political radicals to New York City for a fresh start. The conflict (which Mungo described as between the Virtuous Caucus and the Vulgar Marxists),75 came to a head that summer. Mungo and Sloom of LNS, which had been considered and considered itself a political faction in relation to UPS, themselves lost ground to the avowedly more political factions of LNS. The two erstwhile politicals sealed their new less­ political-than-thou.status with a move to a farm in Vermont (along with • LNS equipment and about $5,000 from an LNS benefit). A contingent of • 169 the "vulgar marxists" showed up the same night of the move, beat up on Sloom and others, then extracted a cheque for $6,000, which ultimately was seized by the state of Vermont. For a while both the New York and Vermont versions of LNS continued publication. Sut the virtuous caucus set in Vermont grew less and less productive until it died with a whimper in February of 1969. When Mungo visited LNS in New York shortly after abandoning the. Vermont farm and its version of LNS (Sloom killed himself .. that year) he was saddened, as he described in his book Famous Long Ago, by what seemed to him a movement reduced to just another ugly system. For the cultural radicals, evil and violence were always out there, part of a different tribal culture. In a kind of Manichean version of the duality uf good and evil, the cultural radicals simply denied the existence of evil in their own community or subculture, attributing it exclusively to straight society. What happened when violence or other forms of "evil" interrupted the hippie anarchist dream was anybody's guess. Here is how one writer described ' free Altamont, California concert (the antithesis of the concert that had been peaceful), where: "Hell's Angels [motorcycle gang members began] clubbing people, allegedly killing one black youth. A picture in Rolling Stone ... shows Iwo husky Hell's Angels brutally attacking an obese naked man with pool cues. In a semicircle around the Angels stand the children of the New Culture. Their faces are filled not with anger or horror or mere Indifference but with mild curiosity - this is not their world; this cannot affect them; this must be the exotic rite of some other tribe. '1 was standing Iwo feet away,' says Greil Marcus, formerly associate editor of Rolling Stone. 'People reacted by saying 'wow, violence, far-out.' Nobody did anything. Hundreds of kids raised their hands in the peace • sign, and 1felt Iike throwing up." 78 170

• The root problem evinced here was not some grey ideological dispute with consequences no greater than which of the ideological contenders would win the literai argument - but rather, a primai emotion, anger, and how that emotion remained a troublesome reality for the cultural radicals who generally treated it as a foreign entity to be wished away, or "transcended" by the "" of denial - in sum, a true legacy' of the fifties. In the case of anger, the countercultural radicals' attempt to transcend or overcome such negative emotion, was synonymous with its denial of the roots, or reasons, for tl1at anger. This kind of "transcendence" was every bit as Iimiting as the presumedly immoral denial of the establishment enemy. Moreover, the transcendence project was utterly ineffective when faced with actual violence: there was no way for the radicals to "understand" or react appropriately to, an evil that according to their philosophy simply did not exist. A University of Wisconsin psychologist who examined three students who had witnessed police violence at a campus demonstration (one had also been the victim of this police violence) concluded that ail three had suffered "psychotic reactions." "Faced with a situation in which anger was entirely appropriate and in which feelings of rage couId no longer be suppressed, they were both confused and horrified by their own aggressiveness. They had not learned to accept anger as part of their personality and when they could no longer deny its existence, they were overwhelmed by anxiety." 77

The split was always more of a Iinguistic than an actual differentiation, and perhaps this is why arguments for either "side" seem somehow to underline the "correctness" of the opposing one. Gitlin, a politico, and one of the best writers for the sixties underground press, • described the characteristic cultural versus radical split this way: 171

• "At the risk of oversimplifying the currents of 1967: There were tensions galore between the radical idea of political strategy - with discipline, organization, commitment to results out there at a distance - and the countercultural idea of living Iife to the tullest, right here, for oneself. 78

And yet, what happens "out there" stands to affect what happens "right here" (indeed one way to define news is as whatever happens out there that stands to affect many "right here", that is as individuals); just as what happens here, in the private Iife of the individual(s) becomes the stuff of "out there." Perhaps Gitlin's tendency evident here to ascribe greater reality to out there than to in here explains his largely dismissive attitude toward the beats, who represented a Iiterarv movement primarily, or more precisely those beats, like American poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, who remained on the "scene" in the sixties movement (arguing against the dichotomy) and to whom Gitlin refers as "old beat­ turned-countercultural hands" who believed: "... devoutly in a confluence of politics (on behalf of the outside and the future) and (on behalf of the inside and the present) ... but the Haight-Ashbury merchants, rock impresarios, and dope dealers who financed the Oracle, and the hip influentials who starred in the media, were antipolitical purists. For [former Harvard professors Timo'hy] Leary and [Richard] Alpert, ail political systems were equal oppressors and power-tripl')ers. Political news was game-playing, a bad trip, a bringdown, a bummer. ,,79

Abbie Hoffman, a cultural purist, also hoped for some sort of reconciliation between the two supposed camps. In Woodstock Nation,80 Hoffman advocated a cultural revolution, one that would mix art and politics but retain such icons of the sixties as long hair, recreational drugs, • and rock music. But Hoffman excluded the political theories of the SDS. 172

• The revolution, for Hoffman as for many of the generation, was symbolized if not epitomized by the 1969 Woodstock . For the cultural radicals, the revolution had to be based on the supreme value of love but it also had to be defended, and for this contradiction, the hippies had no answer. For Gitlin and the politicos, on the other hand, Woodstock was a ritual of consumption. It was not that GiUin and company failed to understand or recognize the value of expanded consciousness. It was that for him, as for other politicos, these matters proved of iimited practical or strategie use from the perspective of old-style politics.81 The irony here is that in certain respects, the counterculture was .!l:!Qm radical than the New Left, which superficially at least shared more with the Old Left it saw itself as disowning, than the hippies or cultural radicals did with the culture they categorically rejected. Where the politicos wanted, following Marx's dictum, to change the world, the hippies continued the tradition of Emerson, Thoreau and Rimbaud - they wanted to change consciousness and thus the world. Yet both branches (and most variants) of sixties activism sought the same goal, social change. So that the fundamental question, how to change the world, is actually begged once the dichotomy (in this case cultural versus political) is formally, whether or not consciously, accepted (when people begin to see and think in terms of it, when it informs and shapes thought). The real question is how the terms and the processes they refer to are related and how these change. It would appear that both individuals and movements need to define themselves to sorne extent in opposition (to other individuals or movements) - by what they are not.82 The New Left took the old (liberal) left as the opposing force, its • real opposite, and looked down on hippies as relatively inconsequential 173

• except in terms of their usefulness in swelling the numbers at political rallies and other activities. At the same time, the Iwo "sides" shared some basic philosophical principles that muddies the dividing line. Gitlin describes an "expressive side" to the whole counterculture, which was part of the New Left. This expressive side, along with political strategies, was: "... rooted in the subterranean ethos of the Fiftier" and in a longer-run revoit against the containment of feeling and initiative in a society growing steadily more rationalized. ,,83

That same expressive tendency was in effect "a revoit against ail formai boundaries and qualifications" because these were seen as

rationalizations for i1legitimate power. 84 "The New Left's disruption of established procedure was a counterpolitics to the managed world of institutions - a system which professes the glory of democracy while its bureaucratie rules mask the ways in which correct procedure ... mask systematic violence.... On both sides, channels become identity."ss

For the hippies' more radical critique, the bureaucratie procedures did not simply "mask" what was wrong with capitalist society and culture, they were part of il. Thus the counterculture in its most extreme forms rejected ail aUempts to order individuals, to subsume groups of them under pinnacles or banners of any sort, because the methodology and end result of such projects were inevitably hierarchical. Both groups, nevertheless, were expressing (if not always enacting) a fundamental rejection of hierarchy. The New Left harbored countercultural values­ what Gitlin calls the "expressive" quality - just as the counterculture assumed many of the political values of the New Left. Like the • counterculture generally, the New Left: • 174 "... rebelled against an impersonal society by refusing to respect the normal boundary between private feeling and public position."86

Though it is true thatthe political underground papers, Iike the Barb and the Free Press, emphasized the instrumental polilics of New Lefl activism, while the cultural papers Iike the Oracle and the East Village Other stressed the "expressive" aspects of the counterculture, the two factions also shared fundamental countercultural and polilical values ­ contrary to the idea of the underground press as dichotomous, or (only) two-sided. In fact, .:le New Lefl cited a new "expressiveness" as one of its own defining characteristics; and the counterculture took on faith that there were beller (human) relations possible than those predicated on a capitalist ethos. As weil, in terms of the people involved, the distinction was hardly airtighl: hippies did allend demonstrations and protests and members of the New Lefl smoked marijuana and rejected certain cultural features of establishment society, such as "possessivenes!''' in personal relationships (for example heterosexuallovers living openly out of wedlock). Finally, both contingents on either side of the supposed divide demonstrated their political and cultural beliefs by their looks and Iifestyles (the cultural), as weil as in street protests and underground papers (the political). While the underground press expressed and otherwise reflected the split, it also helped to coalesce the politicos and the hippies. An expression of that coalition, that common ground, was the emergence in the latler part of the decade of , the most famous among them being R. Crumb's "Mr. Natural" and 's • "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers." Both appeared on the scene in 1968 175

• and set the tone (for underground comlx) by mocklng everything, leaving nothing sacred; they celebrated hlp as radical and radical as hip.87 Sa that the political and the cultural wings of the movement defined themselves not only in opposition ta each other, but as weil in concert with each other, that is on the basis of a common ground of meaning.88 Bath, after ail, were dedicated ta effecting fundamental changes in mainstream America. Gitlin noted the harmonious unity or coming together of the political and the cultural during the June 1968 People's Park events at Berkeley. The ever politically astute Gitlin himself described the evants of People's Park as "a trace of anarchist heaven on earth."es Finally, there were plenty of challenges ta the radical political and countercultural status quo that did not fall under the rubric of political versus cultural (though from a dichotomous view they may be sa subsumed). For example, there were socialist and feminist challenges at some papers, some of which led ta outright rebellions (though perhaps these only at the more successful papers, those that had already built collateral in financial resources and readership, and sa had something ta lose). Staff members at the Berkeley Barb, angry with editor-owner Max Scherr for what they called his violation of movement values including his running of sex ads and concern with personal financial profit, named him a capitalist pig (the worst sort) and started their own paper, the Berkeley Tribe. Other examples included the break-up of the original Liberation News Service and its takeover by presumedly more militant leftists, and the occupation of the New York Rat by radical feminists who had • denounced the papers contents as sexisl80 • 176 The two "sides" shared a belief in the basic "goodness" (of individuals) and the theory, in some form, that society warps the individua!. The differences were matters of emphasis. For the New Left, this was expressive polities, with its implicit theory: "... that the structures of private feeling begin before the individual, in capitalist acquisition and, the patriarchal family; public in its origins, private feeling should therefore be expressed where it belongs, in public. ,,91

The countercultural faith, meanwhile: "... was that a polities of universal expression would make the right things happen - and be its own reward.,,92

A ph:!osophical dilemma is embedded here in an ostensibly political one. Gitlin argued that the question for SOS was how to change the world, not what to think about il. But what one thinks about the world (how one represents the world in the interior language of thought) does change it, because it helps determine how one sees or appreciates it, and thus the range of available response and behavior to and in it, including in addition to how one acts within it, what one thinks, says or writes about il. Belief (in or of whatever) ultimately defines the contours of the cultural (which is why it makes sense to define culture as the Iimits of the thinkable). It is not belief QJ: reality which ultimately determines the outcome of a given endeavor, but the degree of correspondence between them. William James argued more than a century ago that in certain ways belief created reality: "... belief (as measured by action) not only does and must continually outstrip scientific evidence, but ... there is a certain c1ass of truths of whose reality belief is a factor as weil as a confessor; and that as regards this class of truths faith is not only Iicit and pertinent, but essential and indispensable. The truths cannot become true till our faith • has made them 50.,,93 • 177 However one names the supposed split, external pressures worked to exacerbate, rather than articulate, the divisions, polarize rather than reconcile them. (This is not to suggest that ail differences are or should be ultimately reconcilable, but rather that it makes sense in any case to be aware of the substance of the difference; polarizing differences is a way of negating them, both philosophically and in terms of consequences.) For the underground newspapers of the sixties, external pressures included financial hardship and nearly conlinuous harassment by authorities, the weekly arrests of staff members for distributing papers without a licence (which was of course impossible to procure) or on trumped up drug busts, and the lime and money lost on obscenity trials. The question 1want to pose here is not why by the end of the decade some of the staffs at underground papers had "degenerated" into internai squabbling, into defining themselves solely by their internai differences (after ail, the forces arrayed against them were not about to engage with them in any ideological disputes), but rather how the papers managed to survive as long as they did. The question is not why there were differences of opinion between staff members, but why these differences emerged as focal, paramount, when they did (generally just before the paper's final demise). The idea that the undergr::'und press was destroyed by its own "failure" to coalesce under one or another banner is historically inaccurate, and thus misleadin~ Ir. :ô~ms of its historical significance. Il may however remain true, as many have argued, that the split prefigured the failure of both New Left and counterculture to survive: a New Left unable to outgrow the crushing of the student movement of the sixties and • a counterculture absorbed by the mainstream culture. • 178 ln some ways, the split between the cultural and political radicals was as old as the nineteenth-century split between the anarchists and the Marxists. The latter seem correct perhaps in terms of strategy, while the former appear more cohesive in terms of idealism. Political strategies, however, seem to rob movements for change of the very idealism required to create that (utopian) change. This dilemma appears as a version of the debate over whether the end justifies the means; but a naive interpretalion of this very debate exclu des from view or for consideration the fact that means also are ends and can change the original end (the original goal) by their being (enacted). The foregoing does not imply or suggest any , even though the naive view of the ends-versus-means debate is often enough expounded in the interests of repressive governmsnts or other elites; for it is also often enough expounded as weil in the interests of the oppressed mass. Ali that can be fairly gained here then, is the acceptance of the fact that no interest is (by definilion) innocent (meaning disinterested or without intent as weil as consequence), and perhaps, an injunction to a certain critical turn of mind that regards as warranted suspicion of ail superficial interpretations of means, ends and interests. The cultural-political split in the underground press of the sixties restates the ancient and eminently philosophical question about Reality: is it matter or a.nergy (spirit)? For the culturals, consciousness and reality were one and the same, while the politicals regarded reality as composed of more "thingful" id-entities, more as they would view it, realistic, forces. Yet the social forces cited by the political radicals become nearly as ephemeral (as the spiritual ones cited by the counterculture) if once one questions their reality, that is if one tries to id-entify those supposedly • more materialistic forces. As Friedrich Engels put il: • 179 "A revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon ­ authoritarian means if such there be at ail; and if the victorious party does not wish to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. ,,94

The American Left also took up this argument in the period after the First World War, after the cultural radicalism of the Masses failed to accomplish the revolution. In fact the kind of narrower political radicalism of the New Masses may be viewed at least in part as a reaction, maybe even an over-reaction, to the defeat of the previous cultural radicalism, its

"failure" to bring about the desired change. 95 There is a feminist perspective on this politicallcultural split as weil, noted by Gloria Steinem in an introduction she wrote to Marilyn Waring's book, If Women Counted: 96 a double standard whereby politics is what happens to men, and culture what happens to women. This also sheds some Iight on the overall devaluation of the cultural, for its association with the feminine. The adage, "the personal is the political" was a feminist adage, not a molto of the sixties counterculture or its press, as is sometimes supposed. From a feminist perspective, the dichotomy is clearly overcome: the cultural is the political. It makes sense too that this seeing past the dichotomy should find its strongest echo in a feminist perspective, since the dichotomy may also be viewed as the personal or individual as opposed to the social or political, and it is on the basis of this intimate aspect of individuality (gender) that the political oppression of women is defined, enac:ted and re-enacted. The feminist perspective, however, was Iittle involved in the • radic.alism of the sixties papers, which remained in outlook as weil as 180

• practice, largely a-feminist, or pre-f~minist as Steinem would say (rather than overtly anti-feminist, which would have indicated at least some awareness of the perspective). The SOS manifesto, for example, proclaimed at its first organizing meeting in 1961 :n Port Huron, Michigan, might have been an opening salvo in the most conservalive of political projects for its nearly complete identification of humanity (or "the individual") with the male of the species: "We seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation governed by Iwo central aims: That the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for this common participation." 97 .

A-feminism was also an abiding, if largely unconscious and invisible, feature of the counterculture. In a lengthy and fascinaling four­ way conversation assembling Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Timothy Leary and , published by the San Francisco Oracle in its February 1967 issue, Ginsberg and Leary steer narrowly clear of a fundamental disagreement on the political-versus-cultural debate.98 Not only does feminism never come into the discussion, (which lasts for 62 pages in print), but more stunningly, during one part of this exchange, Leary uses the word "menopausal" to describe the mental acuity of the worst of mainstream culture as basically incapable of comprehending his own presumable profundity. This gaffe (though not defined as such, since none of the four men noticed it) occurs shortly after Ginsberg, here at least representing the more political interests of the movementlsubculture, begins pressing Leary, the ultimate guru of counterculture hip (the author of drop out, tune • in, and turn on) on what to do about the "heat" descending on the Haight- 181

• Ashbury scene. Snyder has just finished saying that he does not want to reject hi!';tory or the sacrifices of people in the political wing of the sixties movemenl. Leary chi mes in with his version of let them eat cake, sayirig "1 think we should get them to drop out, tune in, turn on.,,99 Ginsberg says yes, but "they don't know" what that means. Leary seems to agree but actually says: "1 know il. No politician, left or right, young or old, knows what we mean by thal." There follows a curious eruption of anger, wherein Ginsberg projects his own rage, telling Leary not to be so angry. Leary denies that he is angry, and Ginsberg cuts him off again, launching into a lengthy plea for political awareness: "Yes you are [angry]. ... Everybody in Berkeley, ail week long, has been bugging me ... and [Richard] Alpert ... about what you mean by drop out, tune in, and turn on. Finally, one young kid said, 'Drop out, turn on and tune in.' Meaning: get with an activity - a manifest world activity ­ that's harmonious with whatever vision he has.... Iike it's no different from the newspaper vision, anyway. 1mean, they've got the newspaper vision. Then, secondly, they're afraid that there'lI be some sort of fascist Putsch. Like, it's rumored lately that everyone's gonna be arrested. So that the lack of communicating community among the hippies will lead to some concentration camp situation, or lead ... as it has been in Los Angeles recently ... to a dispersal of what the beginning of the community began.,,100

Leary responds with characteristic and telling simplicity: "These are the old, menopausal minds." 101 Tom Robbins (then part of the younger generation, and not yet established as a popular novelist), writing for the underground paper Helix, also used the word menopausal to describe minds beyond hope of enlightenment in a piece paying tribute (of ail things) to the art and ritual • of dance as a way of being in the world: "Dance is a fundamental human • 182 need. To deny that need is to become hostile, neurotic and menopausal.,,102 Overt anti-feminism was also prevalent in the political movements of the counterculture, a state of affairs that did not go unnoticed by female participants. As early as 1964, Ruby Doris Robinson, one of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) black founders, presented a paper to the group protesting the inferior status of women in the organization. "The only position for women in the SNCC is prone," was the infamous response of black leader Stokley Carmichael.,,103 At a 1966 convention of the primarily white Students for a Dsmocratic Society, women also presented a women's Iiberation plank, oni)' to be, as one observer later wrote "pelted with tomatoes and thrown out of the convention.,,104 ln a book offeminist essays, editor sought

to document the essential anti-feminism of the New Left. lOS Perhaps curiously,106 awareness of anti-feminism in the movement was not reflected in the underground press until the later sixties. It was not until1969, for example, that women working for the underground press presented a resolution to the Underground Press Syndicate conference calling for the elimination of male supremacy and chauvinism in the content of antiwar and countercultural newspapers, for equal opportunity for women on the staffs of those newspapers, and for editorial support or commitment to coverage of the issue (of feminism). The three resolutions were passed by voiee vote and the entire exercise reported on in the underground Spectator. 107 n,e Spectator had also earlier that month covered ;he women's Iiberation demcnstratiQr1 at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, where women "f1ung bras, girdles, steno pads • and dish cloths into a Freedom Trashcan".lD8 • 183 To complicate matters further, the pervasive a-feminism of the underground press and its countercultural readers was accompanied by massive changes in certain kinds of sexual mores, changes 50 fostered during the sixties that the decade has become nearly synonymous with the 50-calied . One writer argued that such freedom in sexual matters: "... has probably not been permitted since the tribal era... Whether the deep-seated nature of sexual oppression and exploitation has changed is another matter and, necessarily, a subject for debate. The dispute is accurately reflected in the underground press and the magazines that are associated with il. ,,109

Analysis of the writing in the undergrount! press refutes this view, at the very least in terms of what constitutes (from whose point of view) accurate reflection, or by implication adequate debate. Feminism, as issue, was largely ignored in the underground press, though this may be more properly regarded as an expression of its a-feminism than of its anti­ feminism. Indeed, it was the feminists of the next decade who engaged in adequate debate on the issues of sexism and sex stratification, partly if not largely, in response to their failure to find a voice in the sixties papers. The underground press (with of course relatively rare but laudable exceptions), was not simply unaware of the radical implications of a feminist critique, it was, more prosaically, rYl1 (conceived and produced) by men, with women playing largely helpmate roles. It was al50 the case that one reason the sixties rebellion seems to have evaporated is that it was abandoned by the women whose political awareness had been ~:Iwakened, but who were unable to find a voice for this new awareness in the underground papers or among the men running • the show. (It is also, 1hope, not untoward to add that the men of the • 184 underground papers were enjoying the free "love" and sex - that is love and sex without marriage or other payment - of the sixties, and so would have been disinclined to notice the ways in which the freedom they embraced constituted and perpetuated a position of unfreedom for women. They were, in other words, unwilling to blow that abundance of free sex, and thus unlikely td pursue a train of thought that would make of the. implicit advantage an explicit dilemma.) A- and anti-feminism were not new of course to Iiterature or the press. Some of the notable writers (novelists) who contributed to the underground press, simply took their "literary" anti-feminism and translated it into a "journalistic" or "critical" brand. William Burroughs's misogyny did not seem then or now to present any kind of moral problem for him; Norman Mailer, the essential n~lW journalist, addressed the issue of feminism directly in his piece for the overground Harper's magazine, in reply to the publication of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Though Mailer tried to fault Millett, he did finally admit the general validity of her argument, if grudgingly.ll0 Third wave feminism began to make itself felt only after, not during, the sixties. The feminist paper off our backs was founded in February, 1970, for example. 111 The first direct feminist challenge to the underground press came on Feb. 9, 1970, when the New York undergrour,ù paper the Rat published an all-women's issue, including a throw-down-the-gauntlet piece by Robin Morgan entitled "Goodbye to Ali

Thal. ,,112 Though feminist publications emerged en masse only in the seventies, feminists themselves had not only protested throughout the late sixties against the blind sexism of the movemellt - they had also • deserted the various groups of the New Left to estabHE'lî their own. The 185

• National Organization of Women (NOW) was founded in 1966; during 1968 and 1969, feminist groups were launched in at least 40 American cilies; in 1968, five feminist publications including the first national newsleller, The Voice of the Women's Liberation Movement, were founded by a coalition of Chicago women's groups.113 The proliferation of feminist publications began in 1970, which saw the launching of 73 newslellers, approximately one-quarter of these affiliated with regional chapters of NOW. By the lime Ms magazine published its first regular issue in the summer of 1972, third-wave feminists were producing some 500 publications. Though these were not ail newspapers (they included newslellers, magazines and journals as weil) the rapid rate of growth parallels that of the sixties undergrounds.114 And yetthe feminists of the sixties, while they reacted to the anti­ feminism of the sixties underground press, were descendants not of that turbulent decade but of the previous century. Third-wave feminists were part of the sixties generation, and read agenda-selling (and even perhaps "wave" creating) books of the fiflies like Belly Friedan's Feminine Mystique and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, butthey were prominent in the underground papers neither as writers nor as editors. Their ideological ancestors were the feminists of the 1840s, and like them, the new feminists also emerged from the major reform movements of their day: civil rights, antiwar, and student rights. In fact, this may help explain why, looking backward, third-wave feminism appears to have originated with the sixties movement. The uncritical and widespread acceptance of this view, however, works to concealthe deepest feminist roots: It makes feminism seem perpetually new, like just another one of those crazy ideas of the sixties, another parallelto the • sixties underground press, which also suffers in retrospect from a • 186 "historicized" view that severs the phenomenon from its polilical roots in socialism, anarchism, and ironically, democracy. Of course, the idea of third-wave feminism as a merely stylistic offshoot of the merely stylistic sixties also serves to "male-wash" the sixties underground press, implying that the latter was more hospitable to feminism than it actually was. Feminists started their own publications in the seventies for the same reasons that the counterculture did so in th

(V:lticul:;' , significance (as ail other phenomenal; so that to engage in an intellectual struggle for the meaning of that press becomes: an unwarranted "privileging" of the subjecl. While this view appears above • reproach, with its patina of complete disinterest, it of course does 187

• "privilege" a particular response in the social sphere (which whether or not it emerged from a self-interested perspective nonetheless serves, as consequence, quite particular interests, those of the current power holders): It implies a particular "take" on the "real" or external world, justifying a particular response, simply, that it makes no sense to atlempt to change the press (or anything else). Moreover, this postmodernist rejection of potential meaning is untenable even before its application to the projection screen of reality, for it neglects to notice that in the mere perception of a phenomenon is already, in postmodernist terms, an unwarranted privileging of the subject. Fitlingly, a citation from Germaine Greer, from a piece she wrote for the British underground Oz in July 1969, answers from the past to this insipid brand of do-nothing fatalism: "It is commonplace to remark that a politically decided elite may use the force of this generalized discontent [of the underground] to establish a more repressive system still, but 50 far the difference between Boishevik revolution, Maoist revolution, Trotskyist revolution and revolution for the heil of it, has only resulted in grotesquely confused skirmishing within the Underground. The Establishment, however, will hope in vain that the Underground will destroy itself: the signs of internai dissension are the signs of continuing life; complacency and inertia are qualities prized only by the Establishment.,,116

The underground press was called naive (when it expressed optimism) or alternately, paranoid (when it complained of being harassed). These are misinterpretations with a message. For example, the anti-business stance of many of the underground papers was regarded as evidence of the entire movement's naivety (did it think money grew on trees?), though that stand was not undertaken naively. Their • anti-professionalism was similarly interpreted as mere unprofessionalism. • 188 The radicals thought they could change things, just as the early muckrakers did, by exposing the ilis of American society and confronting the public with the knowledge of those ilis. For this, they were dismissed as naive; but they were also dismissed as paranoid when they cornplained of (well-documented) harassment by authorities. Moreover. if it is true that the young radicals were really so naive as to believe in democracy and a free press, then what but hypocritical to cali the establishment that had been feeding them these lines about their great white culture? The sixties generation had been taught that it lived in a free world, in fact The Free World, but it discovered for itself a yawning discrepancy between the establishment's reality and its rhetoric. Was it naive for American students on American campuses to believe that the government would not go so far in its attempts to contain rebellion as to shoot students down on their own university campuses? Ware the students of Kent and Jackson state universities naive not to expect to be murdered on their way to class by government forces? If one says that this is naive, one has also to admit to the murderous designs of the government elite as weil within the range of normal. Similarly in the case of hippies, who with their utopian project appeared clearly more naive than the politicals but also presumably less threatening: they still represented enough of a threat to mainstream society and culture to warrant repression. They were living evidence that opting out of the mainstream society (to sorne degree) to found an alternative one ~ possible, and to the degree that it was possible, it had the potential to spread. Hegemonic control depends on the lack, invisibility and failure of alternatives (including the most basic alternative: resistance). It depends • on individuals and groups of individuals believing they have very few and • 189 Iimited, if any, choices about their lives, who largely accept this version of reality, and then by acting as if their choices or input or words "don't matter", create and perpetuate lives of diminished choice (of diminished freedom). 1do not mean of course that hegemonic rule does not impose "real" burdens, restrictions and hardships, only that the sine qua non of alternatives ta hegemonic rule is some kind of Self - an Other Id-Entity. ln a book that uses personal interviews with sixties veterans to chronicle the sixties experiments and what became of them, David Wallechinsky quotes one young man telling the story of a great experience - his very tirst of sexual intercourse. In the event, the story is told, the girl in the !wosome of this encounter, for some reason not explained, fainted. The boy, being young and entirely unexperienced, thought the girl was dead, that he had done it wrong and accidentally killed her. Now that is naive. 117 The New Left was just as naive as the hippie counterculture, maybe more so. According ta Gitlin, Iwo political styles clashed in the early sixties, one the managerial and liberal style of the Kennedy administration, the other the participatory and radical style of the New Left. "Managerialliberalism might have kept the upper hand and dampened the insurgent political culture if it had delivered on its promises. But it defaulted. And therefore Iwo political cultures, each claiming the same political ground, were on a collision course.,,118

But a collision course is one be!ween Iwo relatively equal powers facing off. (A doe headed on the highway for a Iwo-tonne truck is headed for oblivion, not collision.) Certainly, as Gitlin noted, managerial liberalism did not deliver on its promises. But why ever would it have? • Delivering on its promises would have meant losing the upper hand and • 190 so the batlle (for social control). That is why the establishment did not do it (deliver). The New Left activists were insurgents and the establishment put them down - what could be more natural, more to be expected? If the tendency to believe the promises of the estabiishment was naive (on the part of the anti-establishment); it must also be admitted that establishment motives and establishment promises were cynical. It could be argued fair'ly that the underground press was naively enthusiastic about technology, about its political ramifications, about the fact that it had political ramifications. Liberation News Service's Raymond Mungo, writing as late as 1970, waxed euphorie about Telex, noting it was owned by International Telephone and Telegraph Company, the same company that played a critically important role in what would become known in the United States as the Chilean "scandai" - the CIA-backed overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Mungo could not have known of course about a coup that had not yet occurred, but his enthusiasm for In's Telex and its "cheap" rates does evince a basic political naivety about multinational corporations and their activities. The controversy over the involvement of a presumably a­ political corporation in the foreign affairs policy and dealings of its government led to Senate hearings on multinationals. A Canadian critic, Stafford Beer, described the Chilean scandai in terms of the business-as­ usual ethic that had dominated the American foreign policy scene since the fîfties, criticizing not the United States alone, but the entire industrialized world or "the West", what Beer himself called rather more transparenlly the "rich world": "As 1see it, the rich world would not allow a poor country to use its freedom to design its freedom. The rich world eut off • vital supplies - except for the armaments that eventually • 191 reduced La Moneda to a smoking shell. The rich world eut off vital credit, so that there was no hard currency - except for the i1legal flows of it that financed the contrived paralysis of the distribution system to justify the coup.... Allende understood that his country was losing its freedom in the oppressive grip of that external system, and went and said as much to the United Nations. The free world, as it Iikes to cali itself, heard what he said and waited until his own prophetie words were fulfilled: 'They will only drag me out of La Moneda in wooden pyjamas.' At that point it offered mute protests, and set about recognizing the military junta.,,119

Anthony Sampson, author of The Sovereign State of ln, tacilly agreed on this aspect of the scandaI. He called it a "familiar epic of big business trying to dominate small republics". But what really made it disturbing, Sampson wrote: "... was not just that it was out of date and out of keeping with official American policy, particularly after Vietnam. It was also that the plot emerged from the core of a corporation that presented itself as one of the most sophisticated and modern-minded in the world; and which, as a multinational, continually stressed its •good cilizenship' in ail parts of the world - a J'0licy which seemed indeed essential to its survival." 12

This would also appear to indicate a brand of naivety, and one similar to that of the underground papers. Mungo's enthusiasm for ln was naive because it was uncritical, based on ignorance of the facts (about In's corporate history when compared to its corporate rhetoric). Sampson on the other hand knew the ''tacts'', and yet remained naive in a less obvious way. The above passage shows that what seemed incomprehensible, or in need of explaining to him, what disturbed him, was the discrepancy between the language and the actions of the governmentlmultinationals, of the government-business alliance that had • created the economic boom of the post-war period. Sampson's naivety is • 192 based not on ignorance of the facts, but on an unstated and not consciously logical, faith in language (as an "innocent" and true reflection of reality). From a journalistic perspective, Sampson's brand of naivety is much preferable: it puts the facts on record and enables, even if it does not always succeed in encouraging, further investigation, whether from the perspective of "real" historical events or their subsequent historicizing in particular texts or more general cultural influences. Here is how the "objective" view goes - the one, to continue a i1ne of reasoning, that like language itself merely or innocently reflects reality ­ a disinterested transcript or copy of what Really Happens. The following is taken from the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia and cited as an example of "high objective" style for the purpose of analysis.121 According to this view the political situation in Chile at the end of the nineteenth century was good, and the 1973 coup was the fault of the Chilean government, or a function of its internai affairs, without reference to interference from the United States. "Exploitation of minerai resources, accompanied by industrialization brought prosperity. Politically, Chile was one of the most stable and democratic nations in South America. In 1970 Salvador Allende Gossens, a Marxist, was elected president. His attempt to transform Chile into a socialist state ended in 1973 with a bloody military coup, in which Allende lost his life. A repressive military junta, headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, was in control into the 1980s. Political activity and civil ri~hts were suppressed and elections deferred until1989." 22

\nitially, the most arresting feature of the above narrative is the description of how "Allende lost his Iife" in a bloody military coup. From the objective view, Allende's murderers are faceless and nameless, other • than their status as "military." Since Allende died in a military coup, it • 193 must have been one or more military coup participants who did him in. (Compare for example the again "objective" assumption despite serious gaps in that narrative that former U.S. president John F. Kennedy was murdered by a single individual.) Curiously, one does not immediately wonder, certainly not from this objective narrative, who killed Allende. The stylistic viewpoint of objectivity seems to obscure the event and disappear the subject of the murder, that which claimed AIIende's Iife. In this sentence, only the object (of the murder, Allende himself) is named. (Of course because this is a sentence, unnamed subjects mayas weil not exist and in literai fact do not.) On the other hand, Allende is the subject in the subordinate clause "in which Allende lost his Iife." Here, Allende functions as the subject (agent) of the action "Iosing" - it was Allende himself and not a military coup who lost a Iife. Still, one may fairly ask: How and where did Allende lose his Iife? Had he been looking for it long before realizing it was lost? And how did he know objectively that it ~ lost? The intent here, is not, at least not primarily, simple facetiousness. These questions are meant to show that, and perhaps something of how, the objective style or technique is bound by the dictates of objectivity to a certain level of inaccuracy (vagueness or abstraction) as weil as to an apparently unavoidable tendency to sow confusion. After ail, these are precisely the kinds of questions that might trouble a reader to whom the language is foreign (and Iikely to the degree that the language is foreign.); which implies further that the "readability" of the objective style depends on prior and deep conditioning to particular cultural overviews or assumptions. For it is just this kind of figure of speech, along with other • related Iinguistic and syntactical aspects of a given language, that render 194

• themselves so invisible, unnoticeable, for those who share it as mother tongue, and so entirely complex and various for those who do not. Further analysis suggests that objectivity's tendency to disappear the subject (consistentiy implied but only sometimes named) is a cumulative, degenerative phenomenon. The passive tense (used almC'st exclusively in the encyclopedia paragraph cited above) may also be used as a technique of objectivity, one of the ways in which objectivity can work rhetorically, to produce meaning; as for example in the last line, "political activity was suppressed" where again the passive form obviates the need for a subject. The use of abstract nouns in place of transitive verbs is another: "Exploitation of minerai resources brought prosperity" says nothing of who did the exploiting nor of who prospered, and implies that both exploitation and prosperity are impersonal and undifferentiated realities (that apply equally or nearly so to the entire population) and more importantly, that they are realities unrelated to each other (a quintessentially anti-Marxist and anti-socialist oversight). The stylistic techniques of objectivity work to hide or "disappear" the very facts that are c1aimed to be the essence of objectivity, and from which alone its presumed status as close to Truth is believed to derive. More prosaically, objectivity eliminates "ordinary" subjects, in favor of a subject beyond scrutiny, by posing as narration from no one's point of view. It disembodies or "guts" narration. (It could of course be argued that the passive voice, abstract nouns in place of transitive verbs, and other techniques of objectivity have uses other than to hide, dissimulate and disappear, and certainly this is true. But the essential evaluation to be made when judging journalistic or non-fiction work is not primarily the • level of consistency within the work or tex!, but the level of consistency 195

• between the work and the real-world evenls Ihey purport 10 relaIe, describe or evaluate.)

• • 196 THE NEW JOURNALISM

The term new journalism was used variously to refer to a number of different kinds or groups of writers and writing. Often it was applied to books about some characteristic aspect of the counterculture. Johnson, for example, cited as an example of the new journalism Nicholas von Hoffman's We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against, a book about the disintegration of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene. Von Hoffman was at the time he completed the book in 1967, a reporter for the 123 Washington Post, and a former reporter for the Chicago Daily News. Sut Johnson also used the term to refer broadly to, and sometimes almost interchangeably with, the unwashed underground press. Other critics used the term to refer to the whole range of writerly defections from the sixties mainstream. One literary crilic defined the new journalism as the: "... broad spectrum of underground writing - political, countercultural, feminist, pornographic and so on - that dealt with cultural developments ignored, distorted or merely exploited by the established media.,,124

Other commentators used the term to refer to the non-fiction novaI. Truman Capote may even have originated the tag, when he used it to describe his own non-fiction work ln Cold Slood, which undertook a novelistic reconstruction of a "news item" about a murder committed by Iwo drifters. Other non-fiction novels that would be remembered as new journalism, followed, Iike Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kooi-Aid Acid Test. Some critics also used the term to include or refer to the latest • strand of muckraking journalism in book form with works (ail of the • 197 following were published between 1965 and 1969) such as Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, a study of the failure of the auto industry to make cars safe; Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, about the disaster inherent in uncontrolled population growlh; 's Rebellion and Repression, about the political struggles of the New Left; James Ridgeway's The Closed Corporation, an expose of the mutual involvements of universities and the military-industrial complex, which motivated a lot of student activism; and Joe McGinnis's The Selling of the President 1968, about the election of Richard Nixon. 125 The term became most commonly used however to refer to that sixties brand of slick New York magazine journalism canonized by Tom Wolfe in his book, The New Journalism, an anthology with a fifty-page introduction. This new journalism appeared in overground publications like New York and Esquire magazines, along with newer and "hipper" but still basically overground publications Iike the Village Voice and Rolling Stone magazine. It did not appear in the bona fide underground press, and had almost nothing to do with the straight daily press (that is, the new journalism that showed up in alternative publications of ail sorts, did not run in establishment newspapers, for whose editors the new style remained, as journalism, quite beyond the pale.) Whatever else it was, the new journalism was not the underground press. Wolfe himself was at pains in the lengthy introduction ta his anthology ta argue against any association with the underground press movement. According ta him, sometime in the late sixties, the new journalism got confused, and much ta his disgust, with the subjectivity and especially the advocacv of the underground papers. As Wolfe described • it: 198

• "With the rise of the New Left you began to see more and more journalists of the technically most old-fashioned sort, such as Jack Newfield of The Village Voice, calling themselves New Journalists.... Fortunately this phase seems about over; even Newfield has abandoned the position. But 1think it really came to an end about the third time Newfield grouped himself with Jimmy Breslin as Us Two New Journalists. This must have made Bîeslin's f1esh crawl."126

The arrogant disdain that Wolfe lavished on Newfield, he extended to the New Left particularly, and generally to any writer trying to take the sixties, or any subject matter, more seriously than as style. For Wolfe's new journalism was a bid for literarv rather than journalistic recognition or success. His definition of the new journalism was in fact opposed to the

kind of subjeclivity employed 50 weil by Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night (a contribution included in Wolfe's anthology only grudgingly), where the writer appears as a central character through whom the events are filtered, but not to the point of overshadowing or excluding those events. In fact the anthology carries Iittle else in that vein of "Mailerian" subjectivity. Though regarded by some as the prototype of new journalism, Wolfe's work, based as it was on superficial conceptions of journalism, realistic fiction and even of the sixties as sociology, succeeded in none of these areas. "Compared to Mailer, compared to ail the great realists he admires, Wolfe has no sense of what makes society work... . Wolfe's distortion of the New Journalism is rooted in his misreading of the sixties, when polities truly came to the fore.... Even if we allow for the willed overheating of Wolfe's prose ... it becomes obvious that Wolfe has no notion of the kinds of social forces that impel both manners and morals and polities, no feel for what Trilling calls •a • culture's hum and buzz of implication'.... It reqlJired • 199 perhaps a figure from the fifties, someone caught between that hinterland of irony, ambivalence, and reflection and the neW culture. This is why it fell to Mailer rather than Wolfe to become the quintessential New Journalist, to report most deeply on what was happening, both inside and outside his own head. ,,127

Wolfe, who held a PhD from Yale in American studies, opposed advocacy and polities in the underground press just as he opposed moralism in Iiterature. Moreover, he opposed the very subjectivity that he appeared to be upholding. It was a new kind of objectivity (as status) that Wolfe was really after: "One of the greatest changes brought about by the new breed of journalists has been a reversai of this attitude [that Iiterature serves up morallessons or great thoughts] - so that the proof of one's technical mastery as a writer becomes paramount and the demonstration of moral points becomes secondary. This passion for technical brilliance has lent them a strange sort of objectivity, an egotistical objectivity but an objectivity of sorts in any case." 120

ln other words, the new journalist proved his mettle by intending nothing (surely nothing as uncool as morality) at ail and succeeding at it brillianUy. This is an eminenUy safe banner to be hoisting: If one entertains no principles beyond technical brilliance, one may never be called on to defend them or required to risk or sacrifice other matters in their stead - neither in Iife, nor on the page. As if dimly aware of the rocky terrain this definition of the new objectivity opens onto, Wolfe, in the next passage, and perhaps to avoid being stranded there without beliefs, values, intentions or meanings of any sort, invoked the "scene" as the "true datum": "When one moves from newspaper reporting to this new form of journalism, as 1and many others did, one discovers • that the basic reporting unit is no longer the datum, the • 200 piece of information, but the scenc-, since most of the sophisticated strategies of prose depend upon scenes. Therefore, your main problem as a reporter is, simply, managing to stay with whomever you are writing about long enough for the scenes to take place before your own eyes. There are no rules or craft secrets of reporting that will help a man pull this off; it is completely a test of his personality.,,129

Wolfe went on to conclude that reporters who had qualms about barging in on people's lives and about the effect their writing might have on their subjects should avoid the field of the new journalism because they would inevitably turn out second-rate work, "biased in such banal ways that they embarrass even the subjects they think they are protecting.,,130 Wolfe believed that the "most important Iiterature" then being writlen in America was "in the form that has been tagged. however ungracefully. the New Journalism.,,131 This is a remarkable statement. For if it is true that non-fiction is the most important form of Iiterature. but not for its "higher truths" or "moral lessons" or other insights. then on what other first principle is its privileged importance based? To say that non­ fiction is the most important kind of Iiterature is to imply an ultimate Iiterary value, on the basis of which both fiction and non-fiction may be judged and compared. Wolfe would Iikely have to answer that the ultimate value of the new journalistic writing was its technical brilliance. But in accomplishing what? Surely a kind of truth. yet there is a great difference in the truth value of journalistic writing. in which the truths. to be recognized as such. must be verifiable outside the narrative of the Iiterary form. in the real world so-called. In fictionalliterature. the truths must be internally • consistent only within the narrative (that is once granted the appropriate • 201 suspension of disbelief). But the most important difference between them starts earlier than that, in the conceiving of the literary work. That is, the journalistic work lays claim to verifiability while the work of fiction lays claim to believability. Moreover, the ultimate value of journalistic Iilerature depends largely on its basic verifiability - invented news is perfectly admissible in fiction, but a serious breach of ethics in journalism. Journalism, then, does not seek a higher truth, but only one admiUing of verifiability. Ta cite, as Wolfe did, the fictional test of internai cohesion (which he calls the scene, on which the style is based) as a reasonable standard ta apply ta journalistic writing, is ta assault the theoretical and potential value not only cf (verifiable) truth, but also of (relative) meaning. Vet Wolfe's gloating over the supposed displacement of the novel was disingenuous at best. He maintained that when the new journalists (defined as those he includl'!d in the anthology) first went into journalism, they had no notion of the watershed changes they were up ta, that they were creating a new kind of journalism. Wolfe himself, in a 1963 article for Esquire magazine, protested that his own foray into the new journalism was largely unintentional. Somehow, with the stylish sixties, came the idea that it might be possible to write journalism that would "read like a novel".132 But these early experimenters in the new journalism never dreamed that the work they would do in the sixties, would ''would wipe out the novel as Iiterature's main event.,,133 "1 know they never dreamed that anything they were going to write for newspapers or magazines would wreak such evil havoc in the Iiterary world ... causing a panic, dethroning the novel as the number one Iilerary genre, starting the first new direction in American Iiterature in half a century.... Nevertheless, that is what has happened. Bellows, Barth, • Updike - even the best of the lot, Philip Roth - the novelists • 202 are ail out there right now [1973] ransacking the Iiterary histories and sweating it out, wondering where they stand.,,134

This is not exactly how things turned out of course. Philip Roth was Iikely too busy supporting the founding of the magazine Index on Censorship to be ransackingthe Iiterary histories sweating over his relative status in the exalted world of Literature. Vonnegut, a novelist Wolfe did not even mention, was Iikely too busy keeping up with and responding to the burning of his novel Siaughterhouse Five, to be wondering where he stood; it must have been largely and rather uncomfortably clear where he stoOd. 135 The new journalism according to Wolfe was ail style, and what he called the aesthetic dimension of reporting was paramount. In fact, for Wolfe, reporting was the distinguishing feature of journalism as Iiterature, and ofjournalistic style, but the privileging of reporting in the analysis was made in ultimate defence of objectivity. The very origin of the new journalism, its "causes", were for Wolfe rooted emphatically in style, not in any debate or even discourse on objectivity. The new journalism rose because people were tired with the earlier more boring version, not for any political or ideological reasons, Wolfe argued. "When [readers] came upon that pale beige tone, it began to signal to them, unconsciously, that a well-known bore was here again, "the journalist,' a pedestrian mind, a phlegmatic spirit, a faded personality .. .. This had nothing to do with objectivity and subjectivity or taking a stand or "commitment' - it was a matter of personality, energy, drive, bravura ... style, in a word. ,,136

The new journalism. however viewed, was inimical to the underground press. Ostensibly, the new journalism. Iike the underground • press, targeted the fact as a supposedly distinct and self-explanatory • 203 phenomenon, divorced from interpretation (or possible meaning). This positivist vision meant in practice that only the facts that were self­ explanatory (to the class that the straight press addressed) would show up in print. But in Tom Wolfe's new journalism, it was actually the subjective in and of itself that was emphasized, not the subjective as a surer means of getting to a deeper or even Other truth, but devotion to the subjective as a signal of non-interference with the mainstream credo of objectivity. For example, while Wolfe appeared to be righteously certain about something he called the aesthetic dimension of reporting (which, remember, has nothing to do with craft or skill or even content), he had absolutely nothing to say about what journalism ought to be (except of course somehow "aesthetic", whatever that might mean). ln terms of subject matter, the underground press was still about social conflict. The new journalism associated with Tom Wolfe was generally more about style than substance, often about no more than the writer's own style. It could be used very successfully to convey a sense of presence as in Mailer's Armies of the Night, or not so successfullv, to overshadow content, as in Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. But in terms of subject matter, the new journalism showed even better than the underground press, because it did so more consistently, where a self-conscious but a-critica\ devotion to "subjectivity" could lead: to a totalizing attention to and concern with the writer's own sense impressions and particular viewpoint. Wolfe's brand of new journalism was also assiduously a-political, and as such inimical to the underground press ethos. Wolfe himself disdained the more politically oriented writers of the underground press • (like Jack Newfield of the Voice), who asserted not only subjectivity in ail • 204 forms but also the search for community and a critical stand toward the straight press and straight society. 137 What the underground press and the so-called new journalism shared were the kind of narrative techniques that traditional journalism had always avoided: not only subjectivity, interpretation and advocacy, but as weil certain devices common to fiction writing and generally looser (more open-ended or experimental) use of language, including the allowing of obscenities. To its critics in the mainstream press, the new journalism was known pejoratively as para-journalism, and regarded as a blip on the screen of objectivity, and though it may have been enjoying a brief vogue in the late sixties and early seventies, it remained ultimately beyond rehabilitation for its attempts to dethrone the fact. In discourse, the new journalism was disapproved of for its Iiberal use of narrative technique, which had reporters: "... compressing time, combining quotes, and taking other Iiberties with the facts in order to convey a •higher truth' about the subject under discussion."138

Both the new journalism and the underground press embraced a kind of subjectivity, but the underground press, breezily overriding the two, intentional and affective, so-called fallacies so despised by the New Critics, regarded the (human) subject (whether as writer or reader or source) as an entity capable of both intentions and feeling. Tom Wolfe's new journalism avoided the intentional fallacy but embraced the affective, with his faith in "technical brilliance" as a sort of "egotistical objectivity" and his rendition of the journalistic report as a "test of the writer's personality". Wolfe's analysis actually revived the New Critics' disdain for the • "subjective," for the only subjectivity that matters in this brand of • 205 journalism is the writer's own, and the writer in this case refers to one of a select group and not to writers generally. In this privileging of a particular kind of subject, the new journalism was just as akin to mainstream journalism as to either the underground press or fictionalliterature, inasmuch as the devotion to style tends to eclipse the importance of content. The writers of the underground press also at times focused on subjectivity to the exclusion of content, but not as a matter of stylistic intent. Wolfe's brand of new journalism was regressive (which does not mean there was no good journalism that went by the title new journalism) because it substituted for objectivity as a kind of first principle, a narrowed version of the value of the subjective (as the value of an individual style).

• • 206 NOTES - SECTION B

1. Newfield, Prophetie 16.

2. Jesse Kombluth, Notes trom the New Underground (New York: Viking, 1968) 85-92, 93-98.

3. Verzuh, Underground 23.

4. Allen Ginsberg, "Renaissance or Die," East Village Other 10 Jan. 1967. (Kombluth: 54-58).

5. William Burroughs, "Academy 23: A Decondilioning," Village Voice 6 July1967. (Kombluth: 110-114).

6. Tom Robbins, "To Dance," Helix 4 May 1967. (Kombluth: 99-100).

7. Robbins, Kombluth 99.

8. Eben Given, "The Wakening of the People" Avatar 1 Sept. 1967. (Kombluth: 26-29).

9. "Toward a National Beg-in: Crawl for Peace," unsigned editorial, Berkeley Barb 9 June 1967. (Kornbluth: 298-300).

10. Richard Poirier, "Leaming from the Beatles," Partisan Review Fall 1967 (Kombluth: 66-84).

11. Paul Goodman, "The Diggers in 1984," Ramparts Sept. 1967. (Kombluth: 8-15).

12. John Sinclair, Guitar Arrny (New York: Douglas, 1972).

13. Gitlin, Sixties 201. Not only did the phrases of popular music enjoy common currency among the underground, they also inspired actions. For instance, sometime in the spring of 1967 a group of hippies took a makeshift "submarine" filled with yellow balloons, f10wers and wine, on a parade through Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and some of New England, in an action both promoted (as ''the Yellow Submarine Action") and subsequently reported on, by Win, the paper published by the War • Resistors' League. This is how Win editor described the e· 207

affair in the Spring 1967 issue of Win (Forcade, Reader: 5-8): "We had yellow balloons, and tootlely f1utes, and f1owers. We did look very strange (remember: this was before the first be-in), but hundreds tumed out, and we ail had a glorioustime. We leamed how to make cops grin back that day, and how to make spectators feel something besides anger or guilt. The sound truck conked out when we reached the pier, so we also discovered how to have a rally without any speeches; that in itself was revolution."

14. The over-representation of Jews in the underground press, as in the New Left, (in the sociological sense, that is compared with the percentage of Je'....s in the overall population) is a notable exception but one beyond the scope of the present work. See for example: Stanley Rothman and Robert S. Lichter, Roots of Radicalism: Jews. Christians and the New Left (New York: Oxford UP. 1982).

15. Glessing, Sixties 22.

16. Until this writing, 1had always taken this line to mean "eleven-dollar bills" rather than eleven (one-dollar) bills. The difference is interesting because while the latter Interpretation implies simply that the kid did not have enough dollar bills, the former indicates that what the man in the coon-skin cap requests does not in fact exist.

17. David Depoe, quoted in Verzuh, Underground 96. Depoe was speaking in the summer of 1967, as a battle was shaping up in Toronto's Yorkville (often referred to as Canada's Haight-Ashbury of the sixties), between the hips, who wanted to turn the area into a sort of People's Park, and city hall, which was already alarmed at the influx of long-haired young people seeking a good time and the meaning of Iife, and sought a means to rid the city of them. The battle peaked in a confrontation between hippies and police trying to remove them bodily from the streets of Yorkville. The confrontation became the subject of Robin Spry's National Film Board half-hour doeumentary Flowers on a One-Way Street. DePoe was a hippie leader and the son of broadcaster Norman DePoe.

18. Romm, Open Conspiracy.

19. David Hinkley quoted in David Wallechinsky, Midterm Report: The e Class of '65 (New York: Viking, 1986) 395. • 208

20. Wallechinsky, 395.

21. Verzuh, Underground 109.

22. Paul ~irby, quoted in Verzuh, Underground 245.

23. Mungo, Famous 38.

24. Michael Johnson, 4.

25. Michael Johnson, 5.

26. Michael Johnson, 149-150.

27. Barry Morrison, quoted in Glessing, 91.

28. Glessing, 90-95.

29. Jack Angleman, The Underground Press (Las Vegas: Ram Classics M-T, 1969) 147. (Glessing: 92).

30. Glessing, 96.

31. Glessing, 96.

32. Glessing, 95-96: "In summary, the economic organization of underground publications becomes more overground as the publications grow in circulation and staff. They make the money necessary to pay the printer, the telephone company. and the distributor in any way they cano When they can't make payment, they cease publication temporarily - often perrnanently. The underground press is unquestionably the least professional effort in the publishing business, but its proprietors claim their editorial strength lies in their seeming weakness. Unable to find advertisers to pay for one color, they go ahead and run six colors in one issue. Unconcemed with copyright laws and legal restrictions, they print any stories they get their hands on. Often excluded from second-class mailing privileges by the United States Postal authorities, they print every obscenity and four letter word • in the book and some not yet in the book." • 209

33. Allen Ginsberg, "Outline of Un-American Activities: A PEN American Center Report," The Writer and Human Rights Toronto Arts Group for Human Rights, ed. (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1983) 92.

34. Michael Johnson, 22.

35. G. J. Warnock, English Philosophy Since 1900 (London: Oxford UP, 1969) 43-45.

36. Making Sense of the Sixties, transcript of a six-part television series by WETA-TV, aired Jan. 21, 22 and 23, 1991. Transcript produced by Journal Graphies of New York City in 1991.

37. Art Kunkin, quoted in Peck, 23.

38. See Romm, Open Conspiracy.

39. It seems to me this expression originated in the eighties. In any case it was not part of the re-invention of language in the sixties.

40. Michael Johnson, 14.

41. John Wilcock, Countdown Feb. 1970. (Johnson: 6-7).

42. Glessing, 14.

43. Lippmann was editor of the New York World from 1929 to 1931 before he began writing a widely syndicated column in the New York Herald Tribune, which moved to the Washington Post in 1962. Lippmann, who died in 1974, also wrote books; see for example his and the News (New York: Harcourt, 1920).

44. Boylan, 45.

45. James Reston, The Artillerv of the Press (New York: Harper, 1967) vii.

46. Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful (New York: Random House, 1970) 206. • 47. Dickstein, 137. • 210 48. At 's Omphalos,for example, there were arguments about a perceived concentration on international news at the expense of local news, an issue that was already longstanding for the overground press. See Verzuh, Underground 127.

49. Jack Newfield, "Journalism: Old, New and Corporate," The Reporter as Mis!: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy, Ronald Weber, ed. (New York: Hastings, 1974) 56.

50. Peck, 75.

51. Edward Morgan, The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1991) 207-208.

52. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: U of California P, 1980) 46­ 53. Quoted in Peck, 25.

53. See Edward Morgan, 208 and Lewis, 13.

54. Abbie Hoffman, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (New York: Putnam, 1980) 114.

55. Gitlin, Sixties 236-37.

56. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Doubleday, 1950) 191.

57. Michael Johnson, 7.

58. Edward Morgan, 205.

59. See Marc Angenot, "Hégémonie, dissidence et contre-discours," . Études Littéraires 22.2 (Autumn 1989).

60. T. B. Bottomore, Critics 50. Bottomore, for example, credited the growth of critical thought in Canada after the Second World War to, on the one hand, political movements (like the CCF - Commonwealth Federation), and on the other to a renaissance of French-Canadian culture. • 61. Gitlin, Sixties 208. • 211 62. Leamer, 43.

63. Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashburv: A History (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone, 1984).

64. Leamer, 44.

65. Art Kunkin, quoted in Leamer, 27.

66. Leamer, 45.

67. Leamer, 44.

68. Leamer, 44.

69. Thome Dreyer, 'The Rag," Other Scenes Apr. 1967: 3. (Leamer: 45).

70. Leamer, 45.

71. Tom Forcade, quoted in Leamer, 45.

72. Mungo, Famous 19.

73. Leamer, 46.

74. Thome Dreyer and Victoria Smith, ''The Movement and the New Media" Orpheus 2.2: 21.

75. Leamer, 47.

76. Leamer, 49.

77. Seymour Halleck, ''The Toll Youth Pays for Freedom," Think Sept.­ Oct. 1969: 21.

78. Gitlin, Sixties 213.

79. Gitlin, Sixties 208.

80. Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation (New York: Vintage Books, • 1969). • 212 81. Gillin, Sixties 352.

82. This reflects of course Saussure's analysis of language itself as a system of signs, wherein the relation between the sign and its referent is arbitrary or conventional, with each sign having meaning solely by virtue of its difference from ail other signs.

83. Gitlin, Sixties 134.

84. Gitlin, Sixties 134.

85. Gitlin, Sixties 135.

86. Gitlin, Sixties 123.

87. Gitlin, Sixties 288.

88. 1want to note here a counter-Saussurean insight, and suggest that signs, by virtue of their arbitrary differences, have not meaning, but ralher intelligibility, and that meaning is a "higher" (more complex and more evolved) entity, related (applicable) not primarily to Iinguistic signs, but to human situations (including of course the sign-systems employed in the service of meaning).

89. Gillin, Sixties 355.

90. Edward Morgan, 205.

91. Gitlin, Sixties 135.

92. Gitlin, Sixties 135.

93. William James, "The Sentiment of Rationality," Selected Papers on Philosophy (London: Dent, 1917) 153. To iIIustrate this point, James used the example of a man climbing in the Alps who gets into trouble and can save himself only by a daring leap over a perilous depth. He argued that the man's belief was the most important conditioning and predictive factor of his ultimate survival or demise: if he believes he can make it, he will try; if believes he cannot, he will not. In both cases, though, the man is acting on the basis of belief, on "assumption • unverified by previous experience". James concluded: • 213 "In this case (and it is one of an immense class) the part of wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its object. There are then cases where faith creates its own verification.

It seems to me one need not go so far as faith to make the point that beliefs (about reality) condition and so help determine the range of possible outcomes (of a given endeavor). Both the extent of belief (or conviction) and the extent of reality (as the more or less harsh exigencies of the endeavor) stand to "determine" the outcome; both, moreover, have "real" effects. It is the degree of correspondence between belief and reality that matters, that determines the viability of a given potential. The question (of viability) arises in the first place because an individual, while she can contain or embody belief, cannot contain or embody the whole of reality. Thus if reality is indeed constructed, that construction is the product of "discourse" between belief and reality - from the perspective of the sixties radicals, the product of an ongoing conversation between the "inside" and the "outside". This dynamic holds as weil within the second-order "reality system" of language, so that the individual construction of meaning (or comprehension) is also arrived at through discourse between belief (what one dimly "means" or desires in the interior language of thought) and "reality" (what one is able to articulate in that same interior language).

94. Friedrich Engels, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1950) vol. 1. Cited in James Joli, The Anarchists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP) 110, and Leamer, 50.

95. See Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left (New York: Harcourt, 1961) 217.

96. Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economies (New York: HarperCollins, 1988).

97. Students for a Democratie Society, Port Huron Statement (New York: SOS, 1962). Cited in Glessing, 61-62. This unconscious anti­ feminism suggests that the a-feminism of the sixties press antedated serious or substantial third-wave feminist critique and awareness of • same in the sixties political movement for change. On the Port Huron • 214 Statement, see also: Steve Wasserman, "A Manifesta Lost in Time," Progressive Dec. 1982: 32-36.

98. Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder and Alan Watts, "Changes" Oracle Feb. 1967. (Kombluth: 121-183).

99. Leary, "Changes," Kombluth: 125-126.

100. Ginsberg, "Changes," Kombluth: 125-126.

101. Leary, "Changes," Kombluth: 126.

102. Tom Rabbins, ''Ta Dance," Helix 4 May 1967. (Kombluth: 99).

103. Stokley Carmichael, quoted in Kessler, 83.

104. Kessler, 83.

105. Robin Morgan, Sisterhood.

106. 1 say "perhaps" because the underground press itself only got going in the mid-sixties, several years after the founding of a variety of left-wing, mostly student-based organizations, which would help ta explain its apparently lagging self-critique. At best, feminist political awareness was a relatively late development within the altogether brief history of the underground papers.

107. 'Women and the Underground Press," Spectator 29 July 1969: 15. (Glessing: 65).

108. 'What's with the Women?" Spectator 1 July 1969: 7. (Glessing: 65).

109. Lewis, 32.

110. Norman Mailer, "Prisoner of Sex," Harpers Mar. 1971: 41-46. (Lewis: 38).

111. Gitlin, Sixties 364.

112. Robin Morgan, "Goodbye ta Ali That," (New York) Rat 9 Feb. • 1970): 1+. (Forcade, Reader: 215-224). • 215 113. Kessler, 81-83.

114. Kessler, 84.

115. Kessler, 84.

116. Germaine Greer, "The Million Dollar Underground," Oz July 1969. Reprinted in Greer's collection of essays The Madwoman's Underclothes (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1986) 16. Greer's estimation of the meaning of the split (between the political and cultural wings of the movement) is strangely reminiscent of Engels' view on sectarian squabbling among ''the proletariat".: "... old man Hegel said long ago: A party proves itself victorious by splitting and being able to stand the split" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (1 vol.) New York: International Publishers, 1968) 686.

117. Wallechinsky, 22.

118. Gitlin, Sixties 13.

119. Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom (Toronto: CBC Publications, 1974) 99.

120. Anthony Sampson, The Sovereign State of ITT (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1974) 267.

121. Concise Columbia Enevclopedia was tirst published in New York in 1983 by Avon Books, a division of the Hearst Corporation, by arrangement with Columbia University Press.

122. Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (New York: Avon, 1983) 162.

123. Michael Johnson, 133-134.

124. Dickstein, 132.

125. Michael Johnson, 144-146. Johnson, for example, included the following books in the category new joumalism, a term he used almost synonymously with the underground press. See: Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed (New York: Grossman, 1965); Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968); Tom Hayden's • Rebellion and Repression (New York: World, 1969); James Ridgeway's • 216

The Closed Corporation (New York: Random, 1968); and Joe McGinnis's The Selling of the President 1968 (New York: Trident, 1969). Even books far removed from the (overtly) political issues of the time - James Watson's The Double Helix (New York: Atheneum, 1968), about the discovery of DNA, for instance - were sometimes cited as examples of "the new joumalism".

126. Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson, The New Joumalism (New York: Harper, 1973) 43.

127. Dickstein, 142-143.

128. Tom Wolfe, New Joumalism 50.

129. Tom Wolfe, New Joumalism 50.

130. Tom Wolfe, New Joumalism 51.

131. Tom Wolfe, New Joumalism unnumbered page in preface.

132. Tom Wolfe, New Joumalism 9.

133. Tom Wolfe, New Joumalism 9.

134. Tom Wolfe, New Joumalism Ibid., unnumbered page in preface.

135. The magazine Index on Censorship was founded in 1972 in London to publicize the fate and publish the work of censored or persecuted writers intemationally. In 1973, Kurt Vonnegut's novel Siaughterhouse Five was bumed in a school in Drake, North Dakota, and the less visible phenomenon of simply banning books from school libraries became a regular occurrence in the seventies. See George Theiner, They Shoot Writers. Don't They? (London: Faber, 1984).

136. Tom Wolfe, New Joumalism 17-18.

137. Edward Morgan, 204.

138. Peter Stoler, The War Against the Press (New York: Dodd, 1986) • 96. • 217 THE FALL OF THE UNDERGROUND PRESS

The demise of the underground papers that began in the late sixties was so rapidly accomplished that the phenomenon was history by the middle of the next decade. There were still over 400 underground papers publishing in the United States in 1971,1 but by 1978 the number was reduced to only 65, with more than a third of these founded after 1973. 2 Economic "scarcity" had returned and the idealism of the sixties papers and the sixties activists appeared to have withered on a common vine. Countercultural fashions were absorbed through merchandising white countercultural structures collapsed as their communities disbanded. Establishment systems were, or at least appeared, intact. Though the Underground Press Syndicate did not officially change its name to the Alternative Press Syndicate until 1973, the decline of the underground papers throughout the United States had begun sorne years earlier, in the late sixties. The Los Angeles Free Press, which had grossed an estimated $1 million in 1969, thanks largely to its being 50 to 60 per cent ads (with sex ads comprising the bulk of the total), reached a circulation plateau early in 1970, with readership in the Los Angeles area actually declining. The year 1969 had brought continuing labor problems, including an attempt to unionize, and publisher Art Kunkin, disliked and referred to by undergroundjournalists as "the pig publisher," (Kunkin was rumored to be earning a salary hefty even by establishment standards) finally sold the Free Press in 1971.3 The Berkeley Barb was also experiencing labor problems along • with commercial success, including a faited attempt by staff to buy the 218

• paper from owner Max Scherr and a 1969 strike. Scherr, who Iike Kunkin, was also making substantial profits while his staff subsisted on "movement" wages, sold the paper in 1970.4 The San Francisco Oracle, the beautiful loser of the sixties undergrounds, went into rapid decline and folded in 1967, its circulation falling from a summer high of 100,000 to half that number by the fal!. Unwilling and unable to descend from its psychedelic vision to the level of commercial profit, the Oracle died with the Summer of Love, whose end had returned the Haight-Ashbury ghetto to its previous unordained poverty.5 The East Village Other, which had also grown successful with 50 per cent advertising, also thanks largely to its sex ads, and a circulation high of 65,000 in early 1969, survived pastthe turn of the decade before fading out of existence. But it had lost its character as an underground paper and by 1970 hac half its circulation outside the New York City area, while within the metropolitan area the Village Voice was outselling the East Village Other by three to one. 6 There were other papers that appear to have died of disillusionmenl. For papers that functioned as co-operatives or , and that remained unwilling to sell out their movement ideals, also opted out of the underground press movement around the turn of the decade. Boston's highly political underground paper Old Mole summed up, in a 1970 article on its experience in 1he movement, its reasons for deciding to cease publication. The article engaged in self-criticism and said of the counterculture as a whole: "It is our doubts about our own legitimacy that makes us carry every conclusion to its extreme; and our sense of isolation and impotence that makes us go from one extreme to another. That, and our persistent feeling that there must • be one right strategy somewhere.,,7 • 219 A bitter factional dispute among staff at LNS in spring of 1968, shortly after the service had moved to New York City, led to founders Mungo and Sloom leaving and trying to set up the service from a farmhouse near Montague, Massachusetts. They formed a short-Iived operation that ceased publication in January of 1969. Sloom, depressed over an impending jail sentence for draft evasion, committed suicide in November of 1969.8 With notable ease and rapidity, the remains of the countercultural press, and even countercultural fashion and thought, were absorbed during the decade of the seventies into the mainstream culture. The more outrageous underground papers ceased publishing (many existing as "community" papers weil into the seventies before fading out of sight) while the commercially viable papers were taken over by establishment publishers. Sy 1977, the Village Voice had arrived overground, that is, it was "establishment" enough to be acquired (in an acrimonious battle) by Australian publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch.9 The commercialization of some of the sixties underground papers proceeded in tandem with the commercialization of the other infant­ structures of the counterculture. Rock music, for example, was also commercialized. While in the fifties and early sixties small independent record companies (like Sun Records in Nashville) played a pivotai role in spreading the language of rock, by 1970, the music had been taken over by the major companies. 10 As early as 1966, Newfield, while himself believing that society would become increasingly more radical, had warned that the New Left agenda faced two "yawning pittalls": "One is the rising tide of domestic McCarthyism, which is • paralleling the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The other • 220 is the culture's spongelike ~enius for either absorbing or merchandising ail dissent." 1

Perhaps because of the rapid absorption of the underground press and the counterculture into the larger mainstream society (and the deflating disillusion this provoked in the sixties radicals), the death of the underground papers appears more "natural" or unquestionable than warranted. In other words, perhaps the apparent suddenness of the phenomenon's rapid decline encourages a naive approach to the subject, including a tendency to attribute the fall of the sixties press largely or even exclusively to the culture's mysterious but presumably "natural" "spongelike genius". On the other hand, that the owners of the most successful underground papers resisted staff attempts to turn the papers into the kind of co-operative enterprises that their foundational hip Left ideology would have required, suggests that the demise of the underground press irlVolved more struggle than that implied by the deceptively simple explanation "absorption." The entire period of the late sixties marked an increase in violence, and a change in movement activities, one Gitlin noted was reflected in the language of the counterculture, with a shift from "protest" to "resistance" and then to "revolution".12 He described the entire period of the late sixties as a "cyclone in a wind tunnel". "Little justice has been done to them in realistic fiction; perhaps one reason is that fiction requires, as Norman Mailer once said, a sense of the real. ,,13

By 1967, the year of its summer of love and its hippie funeral, the Haight Ashbury community was routinely torn by violence, including rape, and so were other communities Iike it across the country.14 And by 1972, • the "halcyon summer of 1967" was already "long past": • 221 "The innocent idealism of hippie was ripped off, at one level, by the bell and button salesmen, and by the promoters of Hair on another ... 1967 was a mellow high when everything seemed easy, as weil as possible. There is still great hope in the movement but the naivety is gone. Even Timothy Leary now sees the necessity of picking up the gun in specifie instances. ,,15

The official police violence that attended the March on the Pentagon, on October 21 and 22, 1967, was a leitmotif. It signified the intention of authorities to suppress dissent by the time-honored means of brute force, to dispense with democratic rhetoric and engage in the more dangerous means (from the point of view of the government's potential

1055 of public support) of visible (indeed, broadcast) armed force against its own citizens. Norman Mailer would later do justice to the events surrounding the march (in Armies of the Night, published about six months later, in May 1968) and the almost visceral significance of the confrontation. The use of force against protesters, however, did not occasion a mainstream rise in sympathy for the counterculture, as the counterculture may have imagined, but rather an increase in support for the government, which showed by its willingness to use repressive means to silence opposition, that though America might be losing the war in Vietnam, it meant to win the one at home. By the turn of the decade, the counterculture was rapidly becoming a historical subculture, while student-based activism, perhaps still disbelieving, teetered in the face of official violence. By 1970, the turn to violence was weil established. A conservative estimate put the number of major bombing attempts Iinked to the white left at about 250, or one a day, in the nine months between September 1969 • and May 1970.16 Violence was also rampant in the country's black • 222 ghettos. The Kerner Commission Report on Civil Disorders, published March 1, 1968, described violence consuming the black ghettos and concluded that America was moving "toward Iwo societies - one white,

one black - separate and unequal.,,17 A good case could be made for 1968 as a critical turning point, the year the sixties counterculture sustained a kind of hemorrhage from which it would not recover. 18 The year began with the devastating Tet offensive of the enemy Viet Cong and ended with the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency during a still-escalating Vietnam war. But the Jan. 30 Tet offensive - which brutally belied optimistic reports from mainstream media about the war's progress - stunned American military leaders and began to turn public sentiment against the war. It also stunned famed overground journalist Walter Cronkite into going "subjective." Returning from assignment in Vietnam following the Tet offensive, Cronkite wrote and delivered a special half-hour CBS report, in which he broke radically with the traditions of objectivity. He editorialized, arguing that the war was a lost cause, that escalation could not turn it around nor more troops save it, that it was time to get out of Vietnam. History may (profitably) doubt the significance and effect of a single broadcast, but Washington did not. "Cronkite's reporting did change the balance; it was the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman.... In Washington, Lyndon Johnson watched and told his press secretary ... that it was a turning point, that if he had lost Walter Cronkite he had lost Mr. Average Citizen. ,,19

Though it may have appeared to younger and countercultural journalists that Cronkite had shed his objectivity, even renounced it,20 • Cronkite's response may also be viewed as a thoroughly traditional one, • 223 an attempt to cali the mainstream credo of "objectivity" to task, and to put into practice a defining characteristic of newswriting objectivity, that of first-hand reporting (or the exclusive or nearly so use of primary sources) - that is, its basic value as an eye-witness account. The trauma of the countercu\ture unfolded in the spring and summer of 1968, as public nightmares followed each other in dizzy succession. The killing of black civil rights leader Martin Luther King in Memphis on April 4 was followed by country-wide rioting. Several weeks later came the Columbia University student strike, with buildings seized, classes suspended and 720 demonstrators arraigned.21 . The student strike paralyzed the university in an attempt to force it to cut its lies with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a twelve-university consortium that carried out military research for the government. Student activists also wanted to stop the construction of a gymnasium - protesters called it "gym crow" - that was to "form a kind of buffer" between and the university community.22 The straight press worked to contain the controversy by siding with the university administration and ignoring both its cooperation with the military and its owning of siums. 23 A May 1, 1968, front-page article by New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal expressed sympathy for the university administration, with which it had close ties. The next day, students demonstrated in protest against the article and the Village Voice ran articles by Nat Hentoff and Jack Newfield criticizing the pro-establishment piece, which had become something of a cause celebre, and Times coverage generally.24 The counterculture generally and the underground press specifically, regarded and portrayed the Times as: "... a monstrous organ of the Establishment that, in attempling to whitewash ils sister institution ... had • arranged the facts and conveyed a tone in much of its • 224 reporting that vilified the student demonstrators and had not given equal prominence to the causes of their dissatisfaction or to the brutality of the police. ,,25

Nearly 100 people had been injured by police during the Columbia

riots, including .il Times reporter whose "head wound - from handcuffs being used as brass knuckles - required twelve stitches." 26 On June 6, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot to death in Los Angeles just after his victory in the California primary. The Democratic convention that took place in Chicago later that summer (Aug. 25-29) came complete with televised police brutality against demonstrators, passers-by and reporters alike. 27 For many of the sixties counterculture, the convention signalied the official rape of movement idealism.28 Gitlin wrote that he remembered thinking during one episode of street violence at the convention: "At last. We've shown they can only rule at gunpoint. The world is going to see.,,29 He also described experiencing, along with the fear and horror, a strange sense of satisfaction, that the establishment had shown its true colors. There was the "thri\l of knowing", he wrote: "...that the cameras had picked up the action, not only on the streets but in the convention hall, where [mayor Richard] Daley's goons manhandled Dan Rather and Mike Wallace, and an uncharacteristically ruffled Walter Cronkite lashed out at the security 'thugs'. Wasn't it obvious that the viewers were going to see matters the way we did ... that they would conclude that these rampagin~ police. defending a corrupt polilical system, discredited it?"

Instead, the polis showed, most people sided with the police, and believed the violent suppression of protest was necessary and right. Some even thought the police should have been rougher. 31 And even though anti-war sentiment had by the late sixties become widespread in • America, the anti-war movement (Iargely synonymous with the • 225 counterculture) had also become the country's most hated political group - hated even by those in the mainstream who, Iike the counterculture, opposed the war. 32 ln a Sept. 25, 1968 piece entitled "Casting the First Stone" in the San Francisco Express Times (one widely reprinted in the underground papers, including in the New York Rat) Gitlin criticized police brutality at the Chicago convention, but he al50 targeted countercultural leaders for a share of the blame. The whole debacle reminded him, Gitlin wrote, of the "decency of Iiberalism, however disenfranchised".33 The SDS, which had come together in Ann Arbor, Michigsn, in the early sixties, fell apart at the Chicago convention. After Chicago, the New Left retreated to Iiberalism - the common root of both the old and new lefts. "New Left radicalism was a vine that had grown up around Iiberalism, they had sprung from the same energy and soil of possibility, and although by now the two represented different cultures, different styles, different ideologies, Iike it or not they were going to stand or fall together. ,,34

According to Gitlin, the new left was "outorganized" during the seventies and eighties and was dismissed along with the sixties decade. The movement disintegrated, or as "... optimists would say, became

realized in - distinct interest groups. ,,35 For more pessimistic observers, the New Left had moved from romantic idealism to primitive authoritarianism, collapsing in factional disputes. 36

The year 1968, the year "of the barricades," 37 as one writer put it,

had been 50 violent and chaotic, that it seemed, as yet another scribe depicted it, to have "shorted out the whole decade." What followed appeared to Michael Herr, a wire service reporter in Vietnam during the • war, as a "mutation, some kind of awful 1969-X." ln fact, Herr wrote, the • 226 Vietnam war and the counte'rcultural war had become so entirely associated; that on his return to America in 1968: "Out on the street 1couldn't tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The Sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn't even have to fuse.... What l'd thought of as Iwo obsessions were really only one, 1don't know how to tell you how complicated that made my life. Freezing and burning and going down again into the sucking mud of the culture, hold on tight and move real slow.,,38

ln his book Dispatches, Herr described the post 1968 environment, and how he started missing the sixties before they were over: "It wasn't just that 1was growing older, 1was leaking time, like l'd taken a frag from one of those anti-personnel weapons we had that were so small they could kill a man and never show up on X-rays. Hemingway once described the glimpse he'd had of his soul after being wounded, it looked Iike a fine white handkerchief drawing out of his body, floating away and then returning. What floated out of me was more like a huge gray 'chute, 1hung there for a long time waiting for it to open. Or not. ,,39

Some critics cite the year 1969 rather than 1968 as the point of no return for the entire counterculture. By 1969, the year of the famous Woodstock music festival, a post-Woodstock era had already begun, and Woodstock, Iike Vietnam, was everywhere. The Woodstock festival, which though chaotic had remained peaceful, was followed by the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert, where one man was stabbed to death by the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.4O Three months before the Woodstock festival (in White Lake, New York) had come the forcible eviction of "squatters" by police from Berkeley's People's Park (on May 15, 1969). • The brutal suppression by police, acting on the authority of the university • 227 officiais, of People's Park, if it did not end the movement, at least marked the end of "the sense of white exemption. ,,41 And if the "sense of white exemption" began to fail in 1969, with the suppression of People's Park, it was obliterated a year later, in May 1970, with the killing of students on campus. On May 4, 1970, during a demonstration sparked by then president Richard Nixon's announcement of the "non-invasion" of Cambodia, the National Guard opened fire on students, killing four and wounding nine. Less than two weeks later, on May 15, two students were killed and nine wounded by police gunfire at the black Jackson State College. Many cited these killings as the official death notice of the movement,42 These years and those that followed had their claims to trauma but they appear in retrospect, and compared to 1968, as secondary or subsidiary variations on a theme. In 1971, for example, the New York Times began publication of classified documents - the Pentagon Papers ­ detailing the history of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam. In 1972, came the scandai over a break-in at Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate complex. ln 1973 - the year often cited as the official death date of the counterculture, if not the underground press - a formai peace agreement was signed in Paris to end the Vietnam war and a committee was established by the U.S. Senate to investigate the Watergate affair. The year 1973 also saw the founding of the - made up of bankers, industrialists, scholars and politicians, from the United States, Canada, Western Europe and Japan.43 The commission was established to defend and maintain hegemonic control against the challenges of the sixties and seventies - not only the New Left anti-war movement, the • feminist and black civil rights movements, but also labor militancy and • 228 high unemployment at home, and oil crises and increased economic rivalry on the international scene. Amid this turmoil, the commission was founded to maintain the Western world's elite control over international systems. In the wisdom of the Trilateral Commission, the sixties had been a decade of excess in ail things, including democracy. In fact, the commission characterized the sixties as a time of "democratic

distemper. ,,44 The foundations of the postwar period's corporate capitalism had been eroded in the sixties. It is no surprise that the corporations fought back. Neither is it surprising that after 1968, U.S. politics began a shift to the right with a reassertion of right-wing hegemony. The democratic vision of the sixties had threatened powerful elites at home, and movement activities had threatened system stability. The reassertion of hegemony would entail the scapegoating of the counterculture and almost incidentally, the exacerbation of ail the evils targeted by the sixties radicals. According to one commentator, Nixon was the first presidential candidate to use the sixties as a convenient scapegoat for systems

failures, and to appeal in general to anti-sixties sentiment. 45

• • 229 WHO KILLED THE UNDERGROUND PRESS?

There is some reason to believe that the sixties underground press failed or died due to its own inadequacies. There are, in other words, some "rot-from-within" explanations for the phenomenon's demise. The disillusionment and loss of idealism that the counterculture underwent as it confronted an increasingly violeni establishment, took a heavy toll, appearing for some at least to have precipitated nothing more revolutionary than social paralysis. Mungo, writing as early as 1970, described his own disillusionment with the countercultural movement and the apparent loss of the vision characteristic of the early sixties: "The movement was not flowers and doves and spontaneity, but another vicious system, the seed of a heartless bureaucracy, a minority Party vying for power rather than peace."46

Gitlin was less sentimental and more angry about the loss of idealism, or more precisely, about the failure to act that it seemed to precipitate. The underground press came in for special mention in the apportioning of blame. In a December 1969 piece for Liberation News Service entitled "The End of the Age of Aquarius" Gitlin wrote: "If there is so much bad acid around, why doesn't this contaminated culture, many of whose claims are based on the virtues of drugs, help its own brothers and sisters? Why do the underground papers leave it to the media narcotizers to deplore the damaging possibilities of bad drugs? ... Freedom, in the aggregate, turned out to be a spectator sport. The Age of Aquarius was invented by the same hypsters who believe that television invented the'global village.' Maybe it did, but then it was the same mean village which Sinclair Lewis wrote to death, a town of petty gossip and quiet desperation.... [He wonders] whether the youth • culture will leave anything behind but a market.''''7 • 230 By its a-feminism, the underground press Iimited the force of its critique and weakened its editorial and Iiterary strength. Similarly, creeping anti-intellectualism within the counterculture and underground press weakened the papers' grip on their future. Anti-intellectualism had always been latent in America, and according to some crities, even the McCarthyism of the fifties expressed attitudes that could be traced back through American history, right to the Salem witch trials or the Alien and Sedition acts. 48 Newfield, apparently alone in a wave of unbridled optimism, foresaw how this rooted anti-intellectualism could destroy the last remains of the movement and the counterculture. Writing in 1967, Newfield noted that in the middle of an escalating Vietnam war, there seemed to be a resurgence of "paranoid know-nothing sentiment" across the country: "My fear is that if the war drags on, and there are 400,000 American troops in Vietnam at the start of 1967, then ail of America will begin to close down, just as the nation turned in on itself during the Korean war, or as France became repressive during the last stages of its seven-year conflict with Aigeria. If this happens, then ail bets are off on the future of the New Left. Its elite will be drafted, its organizations pilloried and red-baited, its idealism shattered, its mentality turned underground. The first smell of this new McCarthyism is already in the air, burning the nostrils and poisoning the lungs. ,,49

ln terms of visual content, the underground press experimentation with graphies led to the expressive abundance typified in the graphies and visuais of the underground press, which were often excellent, with for example the San Francisco Oracle experimenting with and pioneering techniques that would later be adopted by the straight press. It also, however, sometimes rendered copy barely readable. A piece from the • Berkeley Barb, for example, already fairly incoherent was made barely • 231 readable (for its "creative" use of graphies). The article opened with type set not in columns but in shapes made of words like coercion and career, and with the shapes themselves spelling out the word death in capital letters, a "technique" repeated eight times before the article branched out

into more ''free form" patterns). 50 ln terms of Iiterary content, while the devotion to subjectivity often produced some of the best writing of the underground variety (often enough in the "granddaddy" Village Voice), the average underground paper was just as likely to take subjectivity so far that it obscured content entirely. ln overall terms of content, however, the underground papers "served" their various communities better than the establishment papers did theirs. There was a much more demanding relationship between paper and reader (as witness Gitlin's calling the papers to task over escalating drug use amid, it was rumored, the provision by authorities of bad drugs to street dealers) than in the overground press, which continued to function as if the assurances of official authorities were synonymous with truth (or for that matter, as if alcohol and tobacco could not be :onsidered drugs). The quality of writing for many of the undergrounds was inconsistent from issue to issue - sometimes superb, sometimes plainly awful. But the underground press at least had a point of view, while the overground went on defending its establishment "objectivity" with more-of-the-same disembodied articles from on high. Moreover, even if the underground papers were low quality, they still had a right to exist. But whatever the relative merits and demerits of the underground papers, they did not die because of presumed low quality. First, low quality had left many a dismal overground newspaper standing long after • it displayed any signs of life - so there is no direct or simple link between • 232 quality and commercial survival. (Indeed, there are those who would argue that rather the opposite association prevails). Moreover, the low quality of the underground papers does not in itself explain the rapid rate of the decline. For if the papers were such poor quality, they did not rapidly become more so; in fact, they improved over time, as might be expected, and would Iikely have continued to improve if they had survived. The commercial demise of the underground press had more to do with the "Iogic" of the economic situation. Though establishment newspapers Iiked the rhetoric of press freedom, the economic facts of the newspaper business by the decade of the sixties actually precluded most if not ail of the values implied by a belief in press freedom, including for example diversity. Ironically, because the underground papers were diverse and competitive, they could not cornpete with big city dailies, which by the sixties were weil on their way to becoming exclusively monopoly enterprises, papers that in fact had oflen survived themselves only and simply because they enjoyed a monopoly in their market region. A more reasonable explanation for the decline of the underground papers is that they stopped publishing because the communities they served had also disbanded. Another theory has it thatthe underground press did not simply die, it was murdered. "Sometime in the mid-Seventies, 1heard Herbert Marcuse tell an approving Berkeley crowd: 'The movement did not die, it was murdered.' That was too simple, 1think ... the repression was vivid ... but the movement collaborated in its own demise. ,,51

Gitlin may be right that Marcuse's statement is too simple; on the other hand it is not a pervasive view. The only first-hand effort to • document this murder was Geoffrey Rips's The Campaign Againstthe • 233 Underground Press 52, published in 1981. White most analyses of the death of the underground press cite the end of the Vietnam war, an economic downturn and the failings of the "naive" underground press, they tend to under-emphasize the phenomenon's rapid rate of decline and omit the fact that the underground press was harassed. Critics sympathetic to the underground press in fact maintained that the high death rate and rapid rate of attrition was largely due to the harassment of the underground press. According to the UPS, as early as 1969, sorne 60 per cent of its member papers had suffered government interference, including wiretaps, legal costs, attempted infiltration by government agents, interruption in distribution, often because of harassment of their printers or customers, even bombings and bomb threats.53 According to Rips: "... the withering of the underground press was not entirely a natural decline. Alternative presses, whether serious journals of adversary politics or counterculture avant-garde papers, were targets of surveillance, harassment, and unlawful search and seizure by U.S. government agencies. ,,54

Rips's book is a 120-page monograph rounded out by four articles, including one by Gitlin, and a foreword by Ginsberg. The book, based on a three-year study of government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, contains reproductions of actual FBI documents including proposais and directions for secret immoral, illegal and/or unconstitutional activities to crush the underground press. Rips's book reveals how Cointelpro, a domestic spying program established by the FBI in 1956 originally aimed at members of the Communist party, was later expanded to include civil rights and anti-war • activists. Cointelpro planted stories in the straight press seeking to 234 • discredit war dissenters. Through the program, the FBI encouraged local police to harass dissidents and infiltrate anti-war organizations. ln 1967, the CIA initiated Operation Chaos, purportedly designed to determine the extent of foreign influence in the anti-war movement. The operation included surveillance, disruption and attempted infiltration of the movement, including especially the underground press. It was the following year, in 1968, that then FBI director J.Edgar Hoover instructed the CIA to begin surveillance and produce a detailed survey of New Let! publications. Hoover wanted the names of the publications, the names of their staffs and printers, and the sources of their funding. In 1970, then president Richard Nixon established the Interagency Committee on Intelligence, which set up a program (called the Houston Plan) of electronic surveillance and break-ins aimed at infiltrating both antiwar groups and their publications. ln October 1981 a gathering of seventy writers, including Ginsberg, met in Toronto at a conference called "The Writer and Human Rights." While the gathering focused on the role of censorship mostly in Central American struggles, Ginsberg addressed the murder of the sixties underground press specifically. Concentrating on 1968 to 1972, Ginsberg described how the FBI, CIA and other police agencies systematically sabotaged and harassed the underground papers - and were continuing to apply the same kind of measures to the alternative press in 1981.55 Local police forces cooperated with the federal agencies to destroy the underground press, which they saw as the unifying force of the dissenting counterculture. Harassment took many forms: dissuading printers and distributors from accommodating underground papers; leaning on advertisers (including Columbia Records) to stop advertising in • the undergrounders; disrupting distribution by arresting street vendors for • 235 vagrancy; jailing underground writers, editors and publishers on charges of drug possession, obscenity or inciting to riot. Federal-agent plants among the countercultural papers and spread by those agents and agencies completed the picture. The flavor of the campaign against the counterculture and its underground press is evident in the following example, an FBI directive to local police agencies across the country. The directive, summarized below, was issued in response to an earlier bulletin, issued Nov. 5, 1968, requesting suggestions for counter-intelligence actions against the New Left. Issued before the election of Nixon, and about the same time as the Chicago convention riots, the bulletin offered 12 ideas for law enforcement agencies to help them participate in the harassment campaign. The following suggestions could be used by "ail offices", the directive said. 1. Preparation of a leaflet using the most "obnoxious" possible photos of New Left leaders, "designed to counteract the impression" that SOS and other New Left groups represented a majority of university students. 2. "The instigating of or taking advantage of personal conflicts or animosities existing between New Left leaders." 3. ''The creating of impressions that certain New Left leaders are informants for the Bureau or other law enforcement agencies." 4. ''The use of articles from student newspapers and/or the 'underground press' to show the depravity of New Left leaders and members." The articles were to be sent to "university officiais, wealthy donors, members of the legislature and parents of students who are active in New Left matters." 5. "Since the use of marijuana and other narcotics is widespread among members of the New Left, you should be alert to opportunities to have them arrested by local authorities on drug charges." 6. ''The drawing up of anonymous letters regarding • individuals active in the New Left." The letters were to be • 236 sent to the individuals' parents, neighbors and parents' employers, in the hope this "could have the effect of forcing the parents to take action." 7. Anonymous leUers or leaflets on New Left members or sympathizers in the university - primarily faculty members or graduate students. These were to be sent anonymously to university officiais, members of the appropriate state legislature and the press. They were to be signed only, "A concerned citizen" or "A concerned taxpayer." 8. "Whenever New Left groups engage in disruptive activities on college campuses, cooperative press contacts should be encouraged to emphasize that the disruptive elements constitute a minority of the students and do not represent the conviction of the majority. The press should demand an immediate student referendum on the issue in quest·"Ion... 9. "There is definite hostility among SOS and other New Left groups towards the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). This hostility should be exploited whenever possible." 10. To undo the aUempts of New Loft groups to set up coffee houses near military bases, by alerting "friendly news media" and to bust them on drug charges whenever possible. 11. "Consider the use of cartoons, photographs, and anonymous leUers which will have the effect of ridiculing the New Left. Ridicule is one of the most potent weapons which we can use against it." 12. "Be alert for opportunities to confuse and disrupt New Left activities by misinformation. For example, when events are planned, notification that the event has been cancelled or postponed could be sent to various individuals." (Including of course, the underground press, where such planned events were routinely advertised and promoted.)56

If the murder by authorities of the underground press is under­ emphasized, so is the collaborative behavior of much of the overground press.57 From an ethical journalistic perspective, the harassment of the • underground papers shames the straight media. It was the straight press • 237 as a whole (for some brave souls among the establishment press did rise to the occasion) that should have defended the underground's right to publish and criticized the government's police actions against them. The underground press was itself aware of the hypocrisy of the overground media. At the UPS convention in 1969, Tom Forcade wrote and distributed (mimeographed) copies of a proposai appealing to the overground press to support the undergrounders' constitulional right to publish.58 Forcade also wrote on May 13,1970, to the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography then taking place in Washington, D.C., to complain about the harassment of the underground press, harassment he claimed had begun with the news service's very founding in 1966. Forcade aimed his wrath primarily at the commission, but he also clearly blamed the establishment press for its failure to defend the underground's rights to freedom of expression: "You politically self-ordained demi-gods have decided to jam two copies of the Reader's Digest into every shithole in America, with your dried-up, perverted, ugly, bland, middle­ aged, hypocritic, jack-off, psychopathic, totalitarian, unsexed, dictatorial, Bank of America, warped, hyena, rancid, muck of your own decaying existence you make me puke green monkey shit. ... And the straight media is equally responsible, for they bear the guill 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. ,,59

The straight press, representing straight society, had resented the "challenges" to its authority from the rag-tag underground press and even more its taunts, which were outright and impolite rejections of everything • the establishment press stood for. By the time he wrote this memo, • 238 Forcade had already appealed in vain to the overground press for support. His missive to the obscenity commission left no doubt as to what the underground thought of establishment media. Forcade compared the supposedly obscene and pornographie contents of the underground press to the presumably more acceptable pornography of the straight 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 polilical 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. Besides, arousing prurient interest in America IS a socially redeeming value. So fuck off, and fuck censorship."60

ln addition to police harassment and Interference from city administrations, the underground press had to deal with the hostility and occasional derision of the straight press, although the comments of the straight press on the underground tended to lack the passionate abandon evident in those of the latter. One overground publisher, for example, described the underground press as "... a million tadpoles, only a few of which grow into frogs". They would appeal, he predicted, only on a short­ term basis and only to: "... those still not mature enough to complete the growing­ up process... It is the voice of anarchy, of frustrated revolution."el

At its best, the straight media had always been a double-edged • sword. Recognition from the overground press was the kiss of death for • 239 hard-core undergrounders - a sign that the underground press was in danger of being co-opted. The pleasure principle of the hippies and beats before them did not seem anti-revolutionary unlil it was taken up by the straight press. Once it could be included in the straight press, such content was already codified for consumption, already incorporated for marketing. Some among the undergrounders were flattered when the straight press paid attention to them or began taking them seriously. When Mungo writes that by 1968, LNS was getting attention from straight papers too who wanted their copy, and that the corporate entities Iike the New York Times and CSS news went to LNS for information - he takes this as a sign of respect. He is no longer concerned about being co­ opted; he has lost his oppositional or critical edg.,. If Mungo's attitude was typical, and it appears 50, then the "success" of the underground press, wh;ch came as a surprise to its operators, was also its fallure. B2 When the attentions of the media heavyweights went to the heads of movement leaders, the establishment media became problematic for the whole movement, both political and countercultural.

''To become a political force was to become media fodder: a fact at once inescapable, important and confusing. Plainly the media helped define the collective sense of reality which underlay politics.... Administration spokesmen periodically blamed the press for insufficient patriotism, but the worst of the news of the Vietnam war [which was printed in the underground press] ... wasn't fit to print in The New York Times. 53

Sy the late sixties, counterculturalleader Tom Hayden had also • begun to talk about alternatives not including becoming "obsessed with • 240 finding ways to make the antiwar cause respectable" to editors at the Ji!M§,.'064 The overground press ought to have defended the rights of the underground press. White the overground newspapers (in addition to other media) may have outdone themselves "trumpeting the new youth culture," they did nothing to defend its civil rights.65 ln fact, the harassment of the underground press should have been a concern for ail citizens, but most especially the straight press. Instead, the straight press, the "friendly" media in the FBI memo terms, helped the other authorities in disrupting countercultural (including New Left) activities ~nd the underground press that reported and promoted them. Of course, from the point of view of the authority press, there was a dangerously thin line between discrediting cOLlntercultural ideas (the intended consequence of intelligence gathering and harassment) and spreading them (an attendant risk, or possible dysfunction). To treat the underground papers as deserving of constitutional press freedom and rights would have been at once to go against their own establishment interests and also to lose the usefulness of the underground press as fodder. One final reason to ask who killed the underground press, not to accept that it simply died on its own, is the fact that the underground paper people, as late as 1972, had no idea they were about to go under. This supports Marcuse's thesis that the underground press did not die a natural death, but was instead murdered by the capitalist press, whose ethos it threatened. If the underground press were dying, would not its practitioners have noticed the decline? Instead they were largely optimistic about its survival and growing influence. By the end of the • decade, proponents and supporters of the underground press were • 241 predicting a great future, when the press would be dead in the water by three years later. The optimism of UPS director John Wilcock speaking in 1967, and predicting revolutionary changes not only in the underground press, but in society as a whole, was still understandable. At that stage, Wilcock foresaw: "... a network of short-range pirate radio stations outside FCC jurisdiction - a sort of Radio Free America ­ broadcasting underground to the feUered, yearning masses. Katzman dreams of a giant Consumer's Union paper, which would undermine the dichotomy between employers and workers, uniting ail consumerhood, a living entity independent of state and producers.,,66

But the same buoyant optimism was undiminished years later. Johnson, writing in 1971, thought the overground press had already become more Iiberal because of the underground press and was now more conscientious. He believed overground magazines, including Playboy and Harper's, had effected changes in style, in the general direction of the New Journalism (by which he meant ail alternative publications, including the underground press, not the exclusively slick­ magazine new journalism associat;:,d with Tom Wolfe). As for the wild underground press itself, Johnson confidently envisioned growing demand for the Underground Press Syndicate's product, its "kind of journalism," and a significant expansion in the near future. 67 "Granting the short span of time since then [1964], and the complications chaining ail experiments and , much of this dream is on the way to realization; for dozens of underground radio stations are surviving and broadcasting throughout the country and the underground press continues to publish consumer information and news of food conspiracies to help readers avoid exploitation by the huge • American marketing system. ,,68 • 242 Johnson expected to see more of the underground press's kind of journalism in magazines rather than newspapers: "... although the underground newspapers should continue to be a seedbed of experiments and a force for breakthroughs in freedom of subject matter, if there are any really significant barriers left to penetrate....the best New Journalistic writing is defining a new genre of Iiterature which is both informational and artlstic and, hopefully, that genre will develop and find more writers in the near future. It is extremely relevant to the overdue transformation of American culture through a journalistically educated public." 69

These Iines show that even after the turn of the decade, Johnson believed the revolution, at least in journalism, had already happened and ail that remained was for this enlightened and educative journalism to filter down into society as a whole. Lewis was also unrealistically optimistic, and in fact ruled out the one possibility that actually ma~erialized:

"What is clear is that the underground press is firmly entrenched and unlikely to disappear, even under pressure. in the event of ali-out repression in the future, enough people are trained in production methods for a truly underground press to survive.,,7D

ln fact, Lewis, writing in 1972, was already writing the eulogy for the underground press. The "great acidhead papers" Iike the San Francisco Oracle:

"... have long since folded. Their graphies were the finest the underground has yet produced, but the papers could not survive as attitudes changed. Fortunately the artistic techniques that they pioneered are kept alive in the illustrations of papers such as the Chicago Seed, the • Georgia Straight and the ."n-- 243 • Lewis also believed that the phenomenon was not reversible and that the underground press had already succeeded in raising political consciousness. "Whereas five years ago social awareness tended to develop in college or in the final year of high school, today fourteen-year-olds are protesting against the war in Southeast Asia and other insanities.',n

This tone of optimism, as with so many other books written in the early seventies, suggests that at least at the beginning of the decade ­ and dospite the campus murders - the counterculture believed the revolution was ongoing. According to Lewis, some dissenters began in 1970 "talking in terms of revolution within ten years." Even though the term underground was essentially a misnomer in the early days, by 1971, an underground press did exis!: "In 1971, a very real underground existed within the United States and amongst exiles in Cuba, Aigeria, North Vietnam, London, Paris, Sweden, Germany, Canada and Chile. The energy and exuberance of the press makes one feel that America will rise to a 'new morning.' It is an optimistic affirmation that recognizes that revolution exists as much as a state of mind as in tangible physical form. In America mind and body are coming together.,,73

Given the evenf.s of the late sixties, this optimism appears in retrospect as a kind of psychological preparation for disillusionment, a justification on top of the denial, a kind of getting ready to be content with imaginary results, as in revolution as a state of mind. Of the aftermath of the Kent and Jackson state killings, Lewis commented: ''The following year was a period of discussion, retrenchment and reappraisal, punctuated by the invasion of Laos, the death of George Jackson, and a series of black prison rebellions. Movement activity shifted in emphasis • from the campuses to the prisons and there have been • 244 some serious attempts to establish bases in the white working class. What rnight follow is open to conjecture. People aren't playing games anymore.,,74

The narrative becomes ever more "rhetorical" as the radicals refuse to see or accept what is happening, almost as if feeling that would be a betrayal of their ideals. Lewis writes: "A race seems to be developing in which capitalism is attempting to coopt the counter culture before the counter culture can undermine capitalism. It is evident that, despite the straight world's patronizing and sometimes desperate attempts at cooption, dissent has become a Iife-style for large sections of the young. In a society that seems to place no limit on the acquisition of material wealth and has built-in obsolescence as an economic article of faith, it was inevitable that the middle-class young would eventually reject the notion of work for work's sake.,,75

Even the yippies, the electronic gurus of the revolution, fell prey to this unwarranted, indeed sleepy but dangerous optimism about the movement. The Yippies, who made the television news version of the revolution, shared the same goals as other segments of the movement, but it was already a development of Integration, of people thinking in terms of the existing society, not the revolutionary alternative. And yet the Yippie ethos: "... followed directly from the belief that the turned-on baby­ boom generation was already 'the revolution' in embryo; that what the media were calling its 'lifestyle' prefigured a kind of small-c communism remaining only to be taken up by the rest of sluggish America.,,76

For during, and even after, the brutal administration-sanctioned and televised violence of the Democratic convention, the counterculture, and especially its media-recognized representatives, refused to recognize • the reality - of police repression and police-state methods - that their • 245 press and street rhetoric had been so long accustomed to inflating for effect: almost as if the counterculture continued to identify the repression more with their own rhetoric and (~specia\ly hyperbole, than with the externa! facts of that same repression. (1 mean nothing more esoteric than billy clubs and tear gas bombs). The ideal viewer (that is, one with a fair mind, an empathic nature 'and given to reasoning, with no vested interests, personal idiosyncrasies and preferably, no personal history) could have been counted on to see the matter and its ethical import as Gitlin did and as self-eviden!. The actual viewer, however, was part of the same mainstream the counterculture disdained, and the basic range of response coincided with the mainstream worldview, and was fairly predictable. The interesting phenomenon here (in terms of the ideal's progrFlss) is not that the televised police violence failed to vindicate the movement or even win it sympathll, from mainstream public or press, but rather, that the counterclliture thought, perhaps even expected on a subconscious level, that it wOl.'ld. If thl~ sight on national television (which by 1968 was the favored medium, above newspapers, for news consumption of a majority of Americans) of police beating demonstrators did not win over the establishment to the countercultural cause, it might at least, and at last, have been apparent how much less effective the angry articles of the underground press could be in achieving the same goal. For those who supported the brutal police action, the demonstrators themselves, indeed the fact of opposition itself, was the problem - if demonstrators had not been there so willing to protest, the police would not have had to beat them into agreement with law and order. Moreover, the underground • press was not primarily or even largely about influencing the mainstream • 246 press or mainstream opinion - any more than the establishment press was about influencing youth culture. A Canadian underground editor told a special Canadian Senate commillee in 1970 that Toronto's underground Harbinger - which had just been tried and found guilty of "possession of obscene matter for the

purpose of circulation" TT and fined $1,500, an amount that equalled its total operating budget for three iS8ues - was pretty much eternal: "Harbinger will probably continue to exist as long as doors are locked, as long as we have banks, as long as we inject our beef with stilboestrol, as long as we continue to sell people rice that has no food value because they have milled off the layer of the rice that contains food value. As long as people are locked up in jails, Harbinger will exis!. ... People are gelling screwed and we are just trying to change tha!. That's ail. ,,78

One senses the frustration and the double-entendre of Wetzel's commentary. The Harbinger that Wetzel predicted would endure forever was the harbinger of resistance, not the motley collection of underground newsp~pers of the sixties. Vet in defending the essential nature of dissent and the press that represented it in the sixties, Wetzel too was actually discussing not the future of his or other underground papers, but, already, their legacy.

• • 247 NOTES - SECTION C

1. Tom Forcade, "Obscenity, Who Really Cares?," Countdown 1971: 160. (Forcade, Reader: 159-172). Aiso cited in Geoffrey Rips, The Campaign Against the Underground Press (San Francisco: City Lights, 1981) 81.

2. ''The Members," Altemative Media 10.2 Fa1l1978: 28-30.

3. Leamer, 56-57.

4. Leamer, 580$0.

5. Leamer, 51.

6. Leamer, 51.

7. "Life in the Movement," Old Mole 5 Dec. 1970: 6-8. (Leamer: 118­ 123).

8. Glessing, 74-75.

9. Kevin McAuliffe, The GrEla! American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the Village Voice (New York: Scribner's, 1978).

10. Charles Gillet!, The Sound of the City (New York: Outerbridge, 1970).

11. Newfield, Prophetie 155.

12. Gitlin, Sixties 281-282.

13. Gitlin, Sixties 242.

14. Gitlin, Sixties 219.

15. Lewis, 49.

16. Gitlin, Sixties 401. • 17. Gerald Howard, ed. The Sixties (New York: Simon, 1982) 510. • 248 18. The year 1968 was also significant intemationally. It was the year of the French student revoit and the Prague Spring. (See Bourges, Hervé, ed., The Activists Speak (London: Cape, 1968). The underground press appeared buoyed by signs of movement gains, and in some cases reflected this optimism with efforts to attract more mainstream attention or least wider audiences. The London underground paper IT (Intemational Times), for example, began in 1968 shifting emphasis from its staple rock musie and dope prices to appeal to a wider audience. Gitlin (281) and Lewis (85), also mention this phenomenon. Globally, too, 1968 markeà the beginning of the right's resurgence on a tide of anti-democratie sentiment. Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring and conservative govemments began gaining power around the world - Brezhnev in the former , Helmut Kohl in West Germany, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, and in America.

19. Halberstam, Powers 513-514.

20. Halberstam, Powers 513-514.

21. Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: World, 1969) 512.

22. Talese, 512.

23. Gitlin, Sixties 308.

24. Hentoff was a critie and novelist who had written critically of Rosenthal's editorship of the New York Times New York staff. He had also been assigned by the Times Sunday Book Review te review a book co-authored by Rosenthal. See Talese, 485.

25. Talese, 515.

26. Talese, 515.

27. Gitlin, Sixties 327. More than five demonstrators were injured for every police officer. A govemment commission on violence established in its wake documented the barbarism. See Daniel Walker, et al., Rights in Conflict [Report by director of the Chicago Study Group, to the • National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence] (New • 249 York: NAL, 1968). The report's chronicle of events was based on 3,437 statements of eyewitnesses and participants, 180 hours of motion picture film, 12,000 still photographs, official records and news accounts.

28. Of the violence at the convention, there had been signs. Fully six months before the convention, on March 22, 1968, yippies had called for a celebration of the spring equinox at Grand Central station in New York City. Some 6,000 people showed up, some of them feeling less than benign, chanting slogans like "bum baby bum". Police ended the happening by charging without waming into the crowd. Village Voice reporter Don McNeill, who had also been beaten by police after showing them his press credentials, was horrified by the police brutality but also blamed the yippie organizers for failing in their leadership responsibilities. "It was a pointless confrontation in a box canyon," McNeili wrote in the Voice, "and somehow it seemed to be a of Chicago." See Don McNeill, "The Grand Central Riot: Yippies Meet the Man," Village Voice 28 March 1968. Reprinted in Geoffrey Stokes, ed., The Village Voice Anthology, 1956-1980 (New York: Morrow, 1982) 102-106; and in McNeill's Moving Through Here (New York: Knopf, 1970) 208-214.

29. Gitlin, Sixties 331.

30. Gitlin, Sixties 335.

31. A Gallup poli taken in the first week of September 1968 showed 56 per cent approved of the police action while 31 per cent disapproved. The Gallup Poli, Vol. 3 (New York: Random, 1972) 2160. A University of Michigan Survey Research Center poli two months later showed that only one-quarter of respondents thought police used excessive force, white one-third thought they should have used more. See: John P. Robinson, "Public Reaction to Political Protest, Chicago 1968," Public Opinion Quarterly 34.2 (Spring 1970): 2.

32. American Joumal of Sociology 78.3 (Nov. 1972): 513-36. Cited in Gitlin, Sixties 335.

33. Gitlin, Sixties 337. In fact, when Gitlin visited the Rat offices in New York soon after the article was published, he was treated to a dressing • down by a group of Motherfuckers for basically being counter- • 250 revolutionary and soft on Iiberals. Il seems to me he should have been critieized for assuming that mass actions were the way, for assuming the world is divided into leaders and followers, not for seeking refuge in Iiberalism. The whole counterculture could have been blamed, or better made aware of, the wilful naivety of many of their positions, ineluding the Motherfucker stand on Iiberals just as much as Gitlin and MeNeill's anger with "leaders". The wilful naivety was more than wilful naivety, it was close to full-blown denial.

34. Gitlin, Sixties 334.

35. Gitlin, Sixties 421-22.

36. , SOS (New York: Random, 1973).

37. David Caute, The Year of the Barricades: Joumey through 1968 (New York: Harper, 1988).

38. Michael Herr, Dispatches (i\lewYork: Knopf, 1968) 258.

39. Herr, 259.

40. Gitlin, Sixties 407. Gitlin noted: "People's Park, even if not the outskirts of Eden, had been ,In attempt to create; Altamont - even Woodstock - was a ritual consecrated 10 consumption."

41. Gitlin, Sixties 361.

42. Howard, 512.

43. Holly Sklar, The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (Montreal: Black Rose, 1980).

44. Edward Morgan, 267.

45. Edward Morgan, 264-65.

46. Raymond Mungo, Total Loss Farm (New York: Bantam, 1971) 11.

47. Todd Gitlin, "The End of the Age of Aquarius," Liberation News • Service 6 Dee. 1969. Reprinted in Thomas King Forcade, ed., • 251 Underground Press Anthology (New York: Ace, 1972) 100-111. Also cited by Gitlin himself, Sixties 407.

48. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963).

49. Newfield, Prophetie 156.

50. "Mutants Commune," unsigned editorial, Berkeley Barb 18 Aug. 1967. (Kombluth: 30-50).

51. Gitlin, Sixties 415.

52. Geoffrey Rips, The Campaign Against the Underground Press (San Francisco: City Lights, 1981).

53. John Burks, "The Underground Press," Rolling Stone 4 Oct. 1969: 17.

54. Rips, 45.

55. Ginsberg, "Outline," The Writer 95-98.

56. This memo is reproduced in Rips, 61-63. Other books dealing with this topic are: M. H. Halperin et al., The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies (New York: Penguin, 1976); Paul Cowan et al., State Secrets: Police Surveillance in America (New York: Holt, 1974); Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: U of Califomia P, 1980); and Richard E. Morgan, Domestic Intelligence: Monitoring Dissent ln America (Austin: U ofTexas P, 1980).

57. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: U of Califomia P, 1980). The book is an inside look at political opposition in a society saturated by mass media. Drawing on his experience as pr'9sident of SDS in 1963-64 and on interviews with activists and news reporters, Gitlin analyses the effect that mass media (".average of New Left issues had on the New Left itself. He argues that media attention tumed leaders into celebrities, estranging them from their movement base. • According to Gitlin, the media defined a series of "referAnlial frames" for • 252 the New Left and the anti-Vietnam war movement that succeeded in casting them tirst as trivial (naive) and then as illegitimate (paranoid). The book also analyses mass media treatment of anti-nuclear and other protest mov~ments of the seventies.

58. Glessing, 73.

59. The memo is reproduced in Rips, 94-95.

60. Rips, 94.

61. Then Southam publisher Patrick O'Callaghan, quoted in Verzuh, Underground 212. The choice of metaphor is also perhaps revealing (whether or not the publisher was conscious of the association) since O'Callaghan lived in Canada, where the word ''frog'' is widely used as a standard siur on French Canadians. (An American editor of similar poliUcal stripe might have chosen a different metaphor, one that would have echoed barely conscious hatred of Black Americans.)

62. Mungo, Famous 42.

63. Gitlin, Sixties 232.

64. Gitlin, Sixties 289.

65. Gitlin, Sixties 205.

66. John Wilcock, quoted in Jacob Brackman, ''The Underground Press," Playboy Aug. 1967: 155. Aiso cited in Michael Johnson, 19.

67. Michael Johnson, 18, 149-150.

68. Michael Johnson, 19.

69. Michael Johnson, 150-151.

70. Lewis, 64.

71. Lewis, 50. • 72. Lewis, 56. 253 • 73. Lewis, 178.

74. Lewis, 23.

75. Lewis, 27.

76. Gitlin, Sixties 235.

77. Verzuh, Underground 107.

78. Hans Wetzel, to the 1970 Canadian Special Senate Committee on Mass Media, quoted in Verzuh, Underground 114.

• • 254 THE LEGACY OF THE UNDERGROUND PRESS

Th·, most direct legacy of the underground press of the sixties is the multi-form alternative press that developed throughout the late seventies and continues to flourish. Some of the so-called alternative publications bore slight resemblance to the ragged angry tabloids of the sixties - the community weeklies or entertainment "rags", for example, that had originated with the sixties counterculture but abandoned journalistic idealism in favor of profit after the fall of the underground press. Virtually ail major North American cities now support such weekly tabloids (which are often "free" to the consumer, that is, financed by ads). They vary widely in terms of editorial stance and quality; indeed they may be considered as a group largely because they share a tabloïd format and by reason of what they collectively are not: the dinosaur local daily press. The "alternative" press now also includes magazines, journals, newsletters and for the computer-initiated, electronic bulletin boards. Among the varieties of alternative press, some publications have retained Iittle of a radical nature, and indeed appear more as a legacy of a fragmented market than of the sixties dissident press. Others, however, do try to maintain and improve upon the critical and investigative approach of the best of the undergrounds. Often they serve as a critical eye on the local newspaper, in a world of one-newspaper cities. And if these direct descendants of the sixties papers were stand-alones by the mid-seventies, rather than part of a growing • phenomenon, they were also the Iink to the profusion of alternative 255

• publications - the true legacy of the underground press of the sixties - that grew up in the late seventies and early eighties. Certainly, some of the new papers that initially tried to replace fallen underground papers shared nothing with the sixties papers, indeed were denials of what that radical press stood for. Leamer, writing several years after the fall of the Oracle, noted with an edge of bitterness, that the area quickly sprouted an "alternative" paper in the wake of the Oracle's demise: "Now San Francisco even has a Haight-Ashburv Tribune, a paper ostensibly in the tradition of the Oracle. Il is a 25-cents-a-copy sex sheet full of nude young long-hairs, peddled to tourists longing for a souvenir of the Love Generation.',1

The true alternative press is distinguished not by its format but by its motive ideal or purpose (assuming that that ideal or purpose is reflected in its content). Once again, alternative publications are most easily distinguished or detined by what they are not. According to Eric Utne, founder of the alternative digest Utne Reader: "... alternative press publications are not the journals of record. They're biased. They don't pretend to be objective. New ideas surface in the alternative press tirst, not in coverage by trend-watching journalists, but in speculative musings or passionate polemie from the thinkers and visionaries themselves. The alternative press is where the emerging culture tirst reveals itself.',2

The alternative press also shares the journalistic idealism of the sixties undergrounds. In his tirst subscription solicitation, magazine founder Eric Utne had written: "If you rely solely on the mass media for your news, • you might believe that idealism is dead, and that ail • 256 those who were committed to change in the '60s and '70s have joined Wall Street, found Jesus, or simply faded away. It's not true.... What the mainstream press doesn't understand is that the counterculture was the seed of 211 emerging culture that is now quietly and steadily transforming every institution in the land. And the central nervous system of this culture - the alternative press - is reporting, documenting and encouraging these changes with more impact than the conventional press has yet realized and to a readership growing faster than anyone can imagine."3

Utne claimed that the controversial issues of the eighties ­ everylhing from Reaganism and Central American wars to the AIDS epidemic and the globalization of American culture - were ail reported on, discussed and debated in the pages of the alternative press before hitting the mainstream press. Thus while not the radical press of the sixties, the alternative press that grew up following the underground press's demise operates on a similar motive and retains its basic anti-establishment stance. The rurallifestyles magazine Harrowsmith for example -the alternative publication success story 01 the seventies - mixed how­ to's of rural self-sufficiency with environmental exposes. Two staffers from Ramparts started Mother Jones magazine, one of the most successful American alternative magazines ever, named for the nineteenth-century labor organizer Mary Harris Jones. By the late 1970s, the magazine had 200,000 subscribers.4 The Utne Reader counted 2,000 "change-oriented" publications in the United States in 1984 when it ran its tirst bimonthly issue. And if these publications were not as "radical" in content, tone or appearance, as the underground papers of the sixties, they were also anti­ • establishment enough to be recognized as such by the mainstream 257

• press. In 1984, for example, the real Reader's Digest magazine threatened to sue the Utne Reader if it persisted in promoting itself as the reader's digest of the alternative press. (The Utne Reader desisted.) Shortly after this incident, Time magazine threatened to sue for the magazine's use of a red border - a stylistic device it claimed was patented. The Utne Reader ignored the threat and

Time backed off. ô The point is that both these overground and conservative publications rushed to disassociate themselves from the "alternative". The Utne Reader enjoys a current circulation of over 300,000, and is available electronically (through Internet). Indeed the alternative press as a whole appears much more comforta!Jle with and willing to embrace the new technology than the traditional press. 6 Alternative practitioners or thinkers of ail kinds, for example, are more in evidence in su,.h as computer forums and bulletin boards, than they are in the establishment, still paper-based news publications. White there are a variety of reasons for this development, the most significant would appear to be the fact that such electronic forums are not yet sufficiently corporatized and bureaucratized to "screen out" alternative or individual, rather than corporation-sponsored, views and information. White some of the establishment press is avaitable in edited­ down form electronically, the news thus delivered electronically does not deter in content or style from the same paper-based news ­ except perhaps that it is even more "bite-sized" and lacking in the depth or analysis that newspapers are expected to provide on a more consistent basis than for example television. InUlvidual writers, • meanwhite, have approached the computer-based electronic media • 258 as an opportunity for the expression of alternative views, with regard not only to specific content or stories, but as wellto a different conception of news. The Utne Reader was nominated for a National Magazine Award for general excellence in 1988 and 1992. It also started and awarded the first annual Alternative Press Awards in its September/October 1989 issue.7 The fact the magazine was intended largely to monitor and reprint the best of the alternative press itself indicates that the phenomenon of an "alternative" press had grown considerably in size as weil as status. "In the ten years of the Utne Reader's existence, we've seen the alternative press steadily move in from the margins and claim an ever wider role in mainstream political and cultural debate.,,8

At the time of this writing, a new alternative magazine, called the , had just begun publishing. "The editors recognize that a new generation of ', newsletlers, tabloids, and magazines has taken over where the underground press of the '60s left off. Their goal is to help deserving publications break out of the obscurity of the low-budget, do-it-yourself publishing world. Reviews, commentary and columns supplement reprints and excerpts of articles from alternative publications such as the anarchist-communist magazine Organise!, the community tabloid The Madison Edge, the pro-choice newsmonthly The Body Politic, the punk music and opinion ' Lookout, and the bioregional/Green journal Mesechabe.,,9

Despite the fact that alternative publications seem forever and • perpetually under the financial gun, most of the alternatives that 259

• were publishing in are still publishing years later, with some 1984 10 notable exceptions including the Guardian, which published its last issue in 1992 after 44 years of crusading journalism.'o Some commentators regard the alternative press as a more commercially viable, even a rehabilitated, underground press. One critic suggested that the underground press was still alive in the seventies and simply "functioning under the more respectable name of the alternative press"." An anthology of selections from the alternative press in 1979 and 1980 included some 200 articles from about 100 sources covering 11 subject areas.'2 According to other observers, the underground press of the sixties did not so much disappear as become fragmented. Radir:a! or oppositional publications took a single-issue, rather than comprehensive, approach to the issues. Peck argued that there were as many dissident papers in the eighties as there were during the sixties, but he also noted the divisive, discouraging effect of that change to single-issue focus. The idea that the underground press did not die is contradicted by the evidence already presented here. (There is an assumption implicit, of course, in this view, since if the underground press never died or disappeared, it makes no sense to ask how.) Though the underground papers did perish, the journalistic idealism that inspired them survived. Thus journalistic alternatives did not disappear - indeed, quite the contrary. 80th views, then - that the underground press did not die but instead took a bath and changed its name, and the view that the press did not so much die as become fragmented - while managing to avoid the story of the government's • harassment of the underground papers with the essential help of the 260

• mainstream press, also appear truthful in the sense that they concede and even support the claim that the major legacy of the underground press is the alternative press that followed. Thus the historicized version of the underground press and its legacy neatly sidesteps both the government's harassment of the underground papers at the time and the credit (not forthcoming) due those papers. Such official views also de-emphasize the rebellious nature of the sixties underground papers and the scope of the phenomenon as weil as the success of the underground in forging alternatives. Yet accounts of this sort appear to achieve their effects primarily by what they leave out - for example, that the press was harassed. The underground press of the sixties was also followed by the establishment of journalism reviews, usually begun by young journalists working in the straight press during the sixties, and perhaps shamed or at least concerned by what the decade of the sixties and the underground press revealed about the establishment and its press. The journalism reviews, however, appear to be less a direct legacy of the underground press, (if only because of their earnest tone and evident respect for the institution of the press, sentiments entirely foreign to the undergrounders) than a response to the political repression of the sixties per se and the establishment press's failure to COYer same. Following the 1968 Democratic convention, for example: "Scandalized journalists in Chicago, spurred by editorial blue-pencils as weil as police billy clubs, started a Chicago Journalism Review to criticize their papers, and similar efforts sprouted in New York and • elsewhere." 13 • 261 IMPACT ON THE ESTABLISHMENT PRESS

As for the impact of the underground press on the establishment papers, the radical experimentation that characterized the former appears to have changed the straight press only cosmetically. This makes pertect sense, since the central or defining motivation of the straight press ­ profits - has not changed, and if it had, it would not be the establishment press. Interestingly, what ail the alternative-publication efforts lack is the one quality that keeps the establishment press going - that is its daily publication. (Of course, from this perspecti,le, that quality appears rather more as a rationalized monopolization of resources, than a genuine quality or value.) ln terms of direct influence on the overground press, the underground press of the sixties pioneered innovations, techniques and approaches that were later adopted and refined by the straight press. Following the example of the underground paper - that visual impact mattered - the straight press introduced its own graphies changes, including increased attention to the use of white spacfl as weil as the use of photo montages and other eye-catchers. Newspaper layout and graphics generally did become more aesthetically pleasing, while cartoonists made inroads into political satire. The motivation however, had little to do with self-criticism or the desire to experiment, but was rather one measure among others adopted by the establishment press in a more or less (politically) uncomprehending and profit-motivated attempt to arrest the (decades-old) decline in its readership, to stop the hemorrhage, especially of younger and female readers. Similarly, the advertising success of the underground press also • influenced that of the overground. Fashions initiated by underground 262

• radicals were adopted Iwo or three years later by the overground, though by the time the establishment press was promoting "alternative" styles (of dress, for example) these alternatives were promoted as a means of conformity, rather than as means of announcing one's intention not to . conform, that is of rejecting the establishment's authority and values. The straight media converted long hair, for example, from a protest statement to a symbol of conventional masculinity.14 The underground press also helped to loosen up somewhat the language permitted in establishment newswriting, though a far cry from the no-restrictions-on-Ianguage policy introduced by the Village Voice and often taken to absurd extremes by 50me of the underground papers. Somewhat 1005er (more personal or intimate) writing style is now permissible in the overground press, especially in feature writing. Even political writing in the current establishment press favors a somewhat freer "style", at least in terms of language. But the motive was once again profit, and in terms of substance, the mainstream press is still writing for a low-literacy reader and from an almost exclusively astablishment perspective (that is, it relies routinely on "official" sources and viewpoints). The alternative press, on the other hand, assumes a highly Iiterate readership (defined as readers capable of independent and critical thought) and tends to create its own authorities in terms of sources. In this sense, there is more "social mobility" among the underground presses than among the mainstream, where authority is by definition traditional (since the mainstream aims at preserving ll1e status quo while the alternatives seek to change it). If the impact of the underground press is sought through the later or continuing influence of the alternative press that is its major legacy, • that impact appears greater and provides further insight into the 263

• establishment press. The underground press to begin wilh raised awareness of issues previously ignored by the mainstream press. The alternative press continued this tradition and so has forced the mainstream press, to widen somewhat, and however grudgingly and disingenuously, the range of its own coverage. Freelance writer Tom Miller, who wrote for the undergrounds in the sixties, said about writing for the overground press in the eighties: "Stories 1would have done for the underground press J'm now doing for the daily papers. So either "m slowing down or they're catching up.' 15

Mainstream newspapers now borrow Iiberally from the alternative press, reprinting its articles or commissioning its writers. "The mainstream press has always poached upon smaller publications for fresh ideas and new talent. That's one of the alternative press's major accomplishments; bringing to Iight issues and viewpoints ignored by the mainstream media, thereby embarrassing highly paid reporters and editors into paying attention.,,16

The Clinton administration recenlly seized on the idea of a "politics of meaning" (the idea that a deprivation of meaning was an appropriate focus of politics) from Michael Lerner. editor of the alternative magazine Tikkun, to explain its own policies. '7 An article by Nation writer Alexander

Cockburn was reprinted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. 18 The article argued that America has not a Iwo party system but rather Iwo branches of a single "chamber of commerce" party and that slavery had been reintroduced in the United States. Considering that it now takes Iwo wage earners to earn the same middle class Iifestyle provided by just one wage earner in 1965, as weil as the facts of union busting and attacks on personal freedom in the workplace, Cockburn conciuded that the current • American system amounts to . By reprinting Cockburn's • 264 article, the conservative establishment Star Tribune served up this exotic dish to Middle America - and in potential numbers of readers seven times the entire circulation of The Nation. Other fairly recent examples of the straight press picking up on alternatives include a social criticism piece chastising the media. Written by Bruce Handy (a regular contributor to Utne) initially for the satirical fu2ï magazine, the piece was reprinted in that bastion of establishment journalism, the New York Times Magazine. In its 60th anniversary issue, the overground news magazine Newsweek commissioned pieces by longtime alternative writers Iike Gary Wilis (who produced a retrospectivs of the sixties) and Cornel West (usually a contributor to alternative publications Iike Dissent, Z Magazine and Tikkun) to sum up the decade of the eighties. West's article identified a market mentality - the overriding belief that ail human activity should be directed at profit making - as the root of America's social problems. 19 ln an article on the alternative press, Utne editor Jay Walljasper wondered whether, as the mainstream media Iiberalize, the alternative paper~; will die out, victims of their own success. Probably the oldest alternative magazine in the United States, The Nation had to hold a fund­ raiser in 1994 to continue publishing. It had lost 3,000 subscribers since the inauguration of President Bill Clinton. In These Times magazine also almost closed up shop in 1993, and was rescued by a fund-raising campaign. To the concern of the alternative editors - will the straight press do so much poaching, adopt so much of the alternative ethos, admit so many of the previously unfit to print subjects of that press, that the alternatives themselves will no longer be necessary - 1offer an alternative question: Would the mainstream press continue to widen coverage, • entertain non-traditional news topies or make even cursory attempts to 265

• reflect a broader public than the largely white middle-class rnales who own and work for it, if the alternatives did not remain a thorn in their side? Ultimately the purpose of the alternative prt'ss is not threatened by major media picking up on them because thair purpose is p.nd always has ·been different from that of mainstream media corporations. Indeed, why else ought they to be regarded as alternative? "The mainstream press exists to make a profit. If the marketing department deter.mines that more attention to gays, greater coverage of grunge rock or even increased environmental investigations will boost circulation, ratings or advertising revenues, then that's what will be done. There's Iittle of the monolithic ideological control in the media that sorne believe exists. Profitability - not politics - drives most decisions.... The purpose of the alternative press is something differenl. Profits rnay hi:lppen, particularly on some of the alternative weeklies in major cities, but the return on investments of capital ... is typically less than on an interest-bearing checking account. The payoff in alternative journalism cornes in helping to change the way people think about the world.... The mission of ...lternative journalism is to challenge the basic assumptions of our modern, Western, technological, capitalist culture." 20

Although the above analysis lacks something in political astuteness (the drive of profitability is after ail a political motive, and given the complete Integration in a capitalist economic system of the profit­ driven press, does constitute a fairly monolithic ideological structure) the basic point stands: So long as the alternative press sticks to its purpose, the mainstream press cannot render it obsolete. Finally, this idea of being victimized by success really makes sense only in terms of a romantic model of opposition thinking (rather than critical thinking). It makes sense only in terms of defeat as somehow heroic (they were "too good" for this world). From a different and more pro-active viewpoint, the • achievement by the alternatives of their stated purpose - even to the point 266

• of making themselves unnecessary - should be regarded as success not failure. The view that such an eventuality WOL!ld constitute failure arises, 1 suspect, from an unwillingness to be "contaminated" by the unfolding complexities of the enterprise, a desire in other words to remain ideologically pure rather than to chance getting its hands dirty. Moreover, if the mainstream press were to be so improved by the combined influence of the many alternatives, one concomitant development would presumably be a widening and enlargement of the journalistic base, by inclusion of the erstwhile radicals. 21 If the mainstream poaching on the alternatives for new ideas and talent is a good thing, then the only sense in which the alternatives could be viclimized by the growth of this phenomenon is if they failed to receive remuneration for their work. Here the danger in the widespread "alternative" view that profits are necessarily bad (or at least indicate a loss of idealism, a tendency to "sell out") becomes obvious. This misapprehension (about profits as a kind of extant evil) is a stunning example of the underground press's ideologicallegacy, and illustrates the self-destructive tendency in its brand of romanticism. For it is not "profits" in themselves that are responsible for widespread social injustice and suffering, but rather their mean and inegalitarian distribution (or perhaps, more accurately, the lack of distribution, or hoarding, of profits). If profits were fairly shared in a society, they would moreover cease to be primarily indicators of status and could be instead employed for the production of social value. (Of course, capitalism itself, being inextricably dependent on concepts of hierarchical status to replace value, would not survive such ideological transformation. It would be socialism.) I.F. Stone, approached for advice by Eric Utne when the latter was first trying to • launch the Utne Reader, urged those who wished to question or 267 • challenge the status quo to read the establishment press. 1agree, but would add that to read it is not necessarily to buy it, much less buy into its consumerist ethic. In consumer capitalism, individual purchases are political decisions, which means that they represent arenas for political actions. Those who wish to challenge the status quo, 1would argue, should read the establishment press in Iibraries and share copies. This would represent a kind of economic subversion: If the establishment press is written for its advertisers and other economic-political masters, let them pay for il. To live under capitalism while clinging to a fuzzy romantic notion of somehow escaping its contamination through a devotion to literai resistance alone (thal is, to fail to recognize economic coercion as political coercion and cct accordingly) is to condemn oneself to a state of chronic though "pure" ineffectuality. To accept, on the other hand, that (one's own) money does matter (politically), is to at least admit subversive economic strategies into view, make them visible or conceivable and hence at least within the realm of possibility. If literai agitation for radical (fundamental) change appears to remain in some strange and stubborn way naive, perhaps the paralyzing "disillusionment" of the late sixties radicals helps to explain why: The radicals retained an intellectual attachment to theïr ideals, but also remained attached to their illusions. The extent to which ideals may be realized, however, appears possible only in inverse relation to the extent to which illusions are forgone. From this perspective, the "disillusionment" of the sixties radicals remains to be completed and thus increase their effectiveness. Finally, while the establishment press may be doing more poaching from the alternative publications, the original coverage is still happening in those alternatives. Most alternative thinkers and writers first published • in the alternative press Gust as in sixties), and most of the big stories 268

• broke into print in the alternative magazines, long before the mainstream caught on to them, that is, long before they could be expected to "seIl'' (be packaged or framed so as to appeal or be acceptable to mainstream culture).22 For the establishment press still has a hard time with issues reporting, and is still trying to package news stories in little boxes or categories that work to oppose, not creale or deepen, meaning. A m€lrked characteristic of tl1e alternative press, on the other hand, is its iss.J.3-orientation, placing "news" in context. The alternative papers have been criticized for their dependence on advertising revenues, with Gitlin, for example, describing "alternative weeklies wobbling uneasily between investigative reporting and shopping tips. ,,23 The pristine solution to the bugbear of advertising is of course to forgo the ads and their revenue, as I.F. Stone long ago argued and practised. Aside from some single-individual papers (like Ralph Moss's Cancer Chronicles, written, edited and published by Moss from New York City) the option offorgoing advertising is one taken up rarely. Ms magazine made the leap in 1990 after 16 years of being punished by adve.1isers for its non-conformist content, and following an expose on advertising by Gloria Steinem. 24 The pressure of advertisers for so-called "value-added" arrangements (that is, the pressure from advertisers to have editorial staff provide along with the ad space purchased, product­ sympathetic "articles") remains to compromise, where it does not negate, editorial independence. Given the dependence of magazines (especially so-called women's magazines) on ad revenues, the term "compromise" appears weak indeed. Moreover this threat to editorial independence extends to the daily press: "Some advertisers of 'people products' are also feeling emboldened even when dealing with serious media. Columbia Pictures (part of the Sony empire) recently • threatened to withhold ads from the Los Angeles Times as 269 punishment for a scathing review of a Schwarzenegger • movie (though it's rumored that the Times got even by reporting a prostitution scandai involving Columbia executives).,,25

It appears true that alternative publications carry different sorts of ads (they are unlikely, for example, to carry advertisements for silicon breast implants) but that does not make them, theoretically, more editorially independent. While 1do not wish to downplay the stranglehold that the advertising-editorial Iink exerts on di.... erse and free expression, 1 do wish to point out that the establishment press, including the daily press, is hardly immune from such criticism. "Many journalists, who are paid to see trends, think they see an alarming one in their own industry. With newspapers facing tough times financially, ihey see an increase in the tendr.ncy of newspapers to cater to advertisers or pull their punches when it cames ta criticizing advertisers in print. ,,28

The other usual criticisms of the alternative press, however, are hackneyed indeed: They criticize alternatives for not being mainstream or establishment. Victor Navasky, editor of the Nation (publishing since 1865) dismissed such criticism with the following mimicking comments, that sound facetious only when one is aware of their "alternative" source: "Their circulations are too small, they preach only to the converted, they are perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy, their shrill tone is calculated ta Iimit their audience to the faithful, and they lack credibility.,,27

The underground press flushed certain issues into the open, including getting Iibel and obscenity laws on the legal table, for example, 28 and up for public discussion. It broadened the scope of coverage, not only of what people accepted as ''fit'' to print, but also what they considered interesting or of issue. This forcing of issues is carried on by • the alternative press, making visible numerous issues (police brutality is a • 270 good example) that were far beyond the pale in the establishment journalism of the fiflies. The underground press also introduced coverage of "cultural" mallers, making culture "newsworthy" (that is, promoting the idea of culture as of political significance). The best of this kind of writing, however, is still happening in magazi"es rather than daily newspapers, where this "literary" bias or trend is still much resisted. (By"literary", 1do not mean simply a bias in favor of "good writing," however defined, but a more sophisticated approach to both language and issues that would include, overall, an enlarged tolerance for uncertainty and be partiy dependent on and partly responsible for the existence and presupposition of a substanlially Iiterate readership.) ln terms of content, the mass media pays more allention today than it did in the fifties to youth, but its major allentional focus is still dictated by markets, so that there are still more articles about the baby boom generation as it moves along, than about the currenUy young generation. When the articles do focus on Generation X (as it has been dubbed in the media) it is as part of a larger and more traditional media focus. When poverty and crime skyrocket among high-school students, for example, the story is treated as a crime story, with the standby "breakdown in social values" as context. Sorne of the Iiberalizing changes in the establishment media, it should be noted, have occurred as a more indirect influence, that is of the cultural renewal of the sixties generally, rather than of the underground or alternative press per se. The so-called sexual revolution of the sixties, by opening up the taboo subject socially, practically forced the door for the establishment press to approach the formerly taboo subject. Of course the • fact the straight press did introduce such coverage indicates the subjec! • 271 was no longer quite so teboo. The establishment daily press, moreover, continues to treat sexual subjects from its traditional flatriarchal focus. Finally, even the sixties underground press, for ail its "dirty" words, suffered from a merchandised view of the presumed sexual Iiberation of the period. As Germaine Greer noted: "The so-called sexualliberation of our time seemed to me then, and seems to me still, to be the intensification of the focus on self-pleasurin\:j, and is fundamentally masturbatory, hence its reliance upon external stimuli which work on sexual fantasy. The appeal of self-gratification as the kel to self-realization was and is its adaptElbiiity to marketing. ,,2

Similar obscuring of issues is evident in the recent trend to add or enlarge wpmen's or Iifestyles sections. While it may indicate a somewhat enlarged interest (if not ability) on tha part of the establishment press in cultural matters and sodal trends, such changes are limited by their motivation or purpose. They are undertaken as attempts to stem the decline in readership (and so advertising revenues), which decline was led by women. Moreover, such coverage is inevitably couched in personal rather than (as opposed to) political frameworks. The Iifestyles or women's sections of newspapers, for example, run articles that concertedly treat women as individuals with common "interests" (as in "hobbies"), but these supposed concerns of women are based on an overriding ethic or from within a context of traditional (patriarchal) "femininity." They fail, in other words, to address the real interests of real (actual) women. When women are considered as an economic class (for example in surveys monitoring their "progress" in the workplace), such coverage appears on the news pages. Otherwise, women's "interests" are ghettoized in the women's pages. Thus, while the women's and Iifestyles sections are more extensive • in today's establishment press than they were in the sixties, the • 272 (establishment) frame for this coverage is actually deepened (that is, its conditioning effects on the reader, or for that matter the writer, become even more invisibly insidious, and so, more effective). It may perhaps remain less obvious that the de-polilicizing of women as an socio­ economic class is easily effected in the mainstream press precisely because il extends the press's also traditional refusai to recognize or name class issues per se. Perfectly useful sociological terms Iike social . class, not to mention specifie working-class concerns, are still routinely absent from the pages of the mainstream (middle-class) press. The less direct influence of the sixties as a period of cultural renewal (rather than that of the underground press per se) also served to widen coverage somewhat in the overground press, bringing a lot of ideas that were radical in the sixties to become acceptable to a sizable minority today. The notion to legalize recrealional drugs, use ofwhich was negligible when the sixties began and widespread by the close of the decade, is one example. The underground papers undoubtedly played a part in this Iiberalizing of thought about drugs, by reflecting the generalion's experience - but the drug experiences themselves played a much more direct role. (The underground press and current alternative press legitimate issues for their readers, just as the mainstream press does, by coverage.) Nevertheless, while this evolution (a greater interest in and openness about the possibilities of "mind-altering" substances) is a legacy of the sixties generally rather than of its underground press, the establishment press prejudice regarding the favored drugs of the sixties radicals (Cannabis) remains unexamined and, when compared to its • recent hyping of "Iegal" mind-altering substances, such as Prozac and the 273 • other so-called SSRls (specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors), pathetically hypocritical.30 Thus, interestingly, this legacy of liberalized thought about drugs has not paid off polilically. Marijuana and hashish remain iIIegal drugs in Canada and the United States, both countries where study commissions advocated their legalization. The overground press was also influenced to some degree by the minority of underground journalists who went to work for establishment media organs after the fall of the radical press. These journalists may exer! influence on the straight press through their presence there (assuming they retain some countercultural awareness), but they also face the (very real if not explicit) pressure to adapt themselves to the establishment "ethic". Thus they had and have a chance to influence the press, but they also stood and stand to be influenced by il. This was not of course a dilemma originated by the sixties press, but rather one inherent in the capitalist press and emphasized or highlighted by the sixties press because of the relative strength in numbers of that generation. 1note here once again Lippmann's contention that the real tension for the journalist, the living choice, is not left or right, subjectivity or objectivity, but devotion to truth against devotion to career, to "getting on in the world". ln fact, the opportunity to change or influence the direction of establishment entities or ideologies would appear somewhat larger in professions other than journalism (since journalists, as noted, must as others in the so-called intellectual classes, be deep­ conditioned so as to prevent their supposed influence from influencing any one in anli-establishment directions). As leaders among the • movement veterans returned in the seventies to the professional routes 274

earlier predicted for them as middle-class whites, many brought their radical ideas with them, and these ideas had more chance to gain a foothold in professions that had not, Iike journalism, been hide-bound for decades by its capitalist imperative of objectivity. Radical minded lawyers of the sixties introduced legal aid, for instance. Some staffers from the sixties underground papers not only went to work for the overground press, but also gained status there. For example, some of the writers for Rolling Stone magazine, deemed during the sixties unfit for the conventional newsroom, ended up in prominent positions in the straight press. These included: Hunter S. Thompson (who went on to write for the Jersey Shore Herald; Michael Lydon (Newsweek), David Felton (Los Angeles Times), Joe Eszterhas (Cleveland Plain Dealer) and Howard Kohn (Detroit Free Press). During the sixties most of the straight press ignored or ridicul~d the magazine.31 Ali things considered then, the establishment press has grown somewhat more inclusive and Iiberal - whether by innovations of the undergrounds adopted by the straight press, by infusion of counterculturally minded journalists, or as a reflection of the Iiberalizing societal tendencies of the sixties as a whole. But the changes are largely superficial. In matters of substance, on the other hand, the current establishment press is still much bound by the old basic formulas of objective journalism. Moreover, the establishment press changed and continues to change only by trying to adapt, and then only grudgingly, to the evidence of continuing declines in reader numbers. (This is an unconcerted approach since there is no unifying vision behind or motivating the changes. They are undertaken with a kind of cavalier, maybe-this-will-work attitude. In terms of the journalism produced or • encouraged or explored, the only will involved is the will to make money, • 275 and even more narrowly, from the point of view of the individual employee, the will to hang on to one's job as one's colleagues lose theirs.) The underground press helped loosen the style of newswriting and the look of a daily newspaper, but it did not change its basic agenda. There is of course no reason to have believed it would. Indeed, that helps explain why alternative publications continued to arise through the seventies and eighties despite the pseudo-Iiberalizing or poaching of the mainstream. The demand for alternatives brought into existence present-day publications Iike ln These Times, Mother Jones, and Z Magazine; it also explains the persistence of older journals of dissent Iike the Nation and the Progressive.

• • 276 THE LEGACV OF THE ESTABLISHMENT PRESS

Finally, the establishment press changed in ways that cannot be traced to the influence of the underground or alternative press; that is, it changed in ways consistent with its own logic and the "progress" or deepening of its own establishment-media ethic, rather than as a response to or result of the undergrolll:d press. That is why changes in the establishment press appear negligible - because they are very largely not changes in the sense of change of direction, but rather a consolidation and "progression" over time of standard unchanged capitalist press ideology. ln terms of content and coverage, the focus of the press remains narrow. In fact, one critic's complaint about the hide-bound nature of the daily press in 1969, remains a justified criticism of the press a quarter of a century later. It hardly sounds outdated. Media critic Michael J. Arien (who believed that the fiction of the sixties appeared somehow more realistic than journalism, especially fiction by the "nervier" writers Iike Mailer) wrote in 1969 that despite the seriousness with which daily media are regarded and despite a widespread tendency for people to defer to media representations for their own versions of reality: "Daily journalism, in fact, seems to have changed very Iittle over the last few decades - as if nobody quite knew what to do with it (except for adding more white space, syndicating Clayton Fritchey, and ïivening up' the women's page), as if its conventions were somehow sternal. ..,,32

1suggest that Arien is more correct than he imagined; il is not as if nobody knows what to do with daily journalism; it is instead true that nobody knows what to do with il. Vet media criticism, most especially that • coming from media workers themselves, tends overwhelmingly to fly by • 277 the same rote, the same empty code word, of objectivity. Media critic Peter Stoler criticized the establishment press for practising safe journalism as opposed to good journalism. In his 1986 book The War Against the Press, Stoler conceded that media outlets were giving in to the pressures against investigative reporting, even avoiding material that might require substantial investigation, in order thereby to avoid discovering anything that stood to arouse the wrath of the powerful.33 His book was not self-critical however (not critical of the institution of the press) and placed the blame for this state of affairs on the malf!lasance of big government, bifJ business and an unsuspecting and uncaring public.

The book is basicaily ::l plea for public support for the news media now that it faces the same harassment the underground papers faced in the sixties. The situation (and Stoler's critique of it) is further complicated by the fact th"l .he establishment press is itself big business, ar.=! in its integration in a capitalist economy functions (addresses and reflects) more as an arm of government-and-business "authority" than as a reflection of the various voices of the people. There is of course a deeper perversion inherent in this dilemma, namely that a democratic government is supposed itself to represent the people. Stoler argued in fact that the public was not simply failing to support the press through political ignorance or apathy, but that having lost confidence in and respect for the press, was moreover out to punish a. Between 1976 and 1986, nearly 85 percent of the 106 major libel verdicts by U.S. juries were defeats for journalist-defendants, and about 24 of those verdicts awarded more than $1 million in damages. The public - as represented by these juries - wants to punish the press, Stoler • concluded.34 278 • ln the mid 19705, reporters were still regarded respectfully, even Iionized occasionally with stories Iike Watergate. But 10 years later, the public regarded the press suspiciously at best. The National Opinion Research Center in the United States found in 1976 that at least 29 per cent of the American people retained confidence in the press, but by 1983, the figure had fallen to an all-time low of 13.7 per cent. 35 Nevertheless, by 1986, American daily newspapers continued to enjoy hefty financial status. They were in fact: "... monopolies in ail but some three dozen U.S. cilies, which means that they can cali their own shots on such mallers as advertising rates and subscription costS.,,36

Curiously, Stoler failed to entertain any possible relation between the fact of severe monopolization ~I concentrated ownership of the nation's newspapers, and the public's presumed displeasure, lack of confidence in, or desire to punish the press. (Indeed, advertisers are theoretically in a much beller position than the public to "punish" the press, by withholding the ad revenue that is the industry's life blood. Of course the advertiser is more Iikely to use this potential threat to lower the costs of advertising space and command sympathetic coverage in news stories, than to stand on principle in mat:ers of the public interesl.) If the public really wanted to punish the press, it would have ta make a point of ceasing to read il. Even 1would agree that is impossibly idealistic, net because the public would not agree to stop reading the press (since it already in large numbers has done that), but that such a move, even if it could be organized or concerted, would attain no worthwhile goal. The only thing to hold to ransom in such an endeavor would be the public itself. In fact, it would serve simultaneously to deprive the public of

information and override (by codifying and institutionalizing) its 1055 of • right to same. Since the ad space in a newspaper (inadvertently) pays for 279 • the news hole of that same paper, since in other words it is the advertising dollars that "deliver" the news, in exchange for access to the reader/buyer, perhaps the solution, from the public's viewpoint is to become more demanding of both advertisers and press. The tip of a decline in public confidence in the press, Stoler argued, began in the sixties, before it had achieved the rationalized monopolization it currently enjoys. (1 say rationalized because concentrated ownership of the press, once the subject of weighty committees, is no longer an issue. It has been realized, become reality.)37 The decline began, Stoler claimed, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. "Courted by Kennedy, the press came into the 1960s on a wave of popularity.... But following Kennedy's assassination, the popularity of the press began to pail ... because the press became more probing, less likely to accept what it was told at face value.,,38

Vet Stoler advocated that the solution to this loss of public respect, the way for the press to win back the public trust, was for it to get tougher (with official sources) and more investigative. The contradiction in this line of reasoning is obvious: The press in this view is supposed to have become more skeptical, more "probing" with the assassination of Kennedy and the finally inconclusive findings and their relegation to case history of the commission set up to investigate the assassination. Then, Stoler noted, the public began to hate the press because it became more probing. How then is it to win back the public trust and support with yet more investigative and aggressive reporting? Stoler advocated for the press a variety of ways out of the public interest wilderness and back into the oublic's esteem: It should engage in • more self-scrutiny; the best defence is a good offence; the press should • 280 get more, not less, aggressive in digging up the news. The trouble with this analysis, while it appears to be advocating that the press accept responsibility for the problem, is that it avoids entirely the more fundamental pressures of the press in a capitalist economy, including press dependence on advertising dollars, and the fact that the press, economically speaking, sells readers to advertisers rather than news to readers. 39 A more establishment source (than Stoler, or any individual commentator), on the basis of a 1984 survey, simply denied there was any crisis in the press. Times Mirror, one of America's media giants, which owns papers, magazines, television stations, book publishing companies, computer software companies and training programs, undertook an "in-depth" study of public attitudes toward news media. The survey found that people believed news media had "credibility", defined as believability, and argued against any public crisis of confidence in newspapers. Instead, it found that the public "... does not, in fact, spend a great deal of time thinking or talking about the press.,,40 It might as weil have said the public simply does not spend a lot of time thinking or talking about anything at ail. While this may weil be true, it does not constitute a denial of the alleged crisis, especially when contrasted with the measurable decline in readership, which was for the press at teast what presented evidence of crisis. It does however accurately reflect the economic interests of the media corporations and the situation, actually obtaining, where except as potential consumers, the public simply does not figure in the media equation. The public interest, though variously defined, is mute in the pages of the press, most often in deference to the same old coyer story of objectivity. The rhetoric of public interest, on the • other hand, does get occasional play (especially when the press wants to • 281 convince people of its essential role therein, theoretically speaking). If the individual letter-to-the-editor writer wished to take issue with the press on such matters, she would be free to do so, since such a critique or challenge would be entirely subjective (that is, worthless). "Under Nixon, newsmen, particularly those whose writings displeased the President and his people, were subject to tax audits, FBI investigations, and, if they happened to be broadcasters, to Iicense challenges. Nixon's campaign was not ineffective; his assault made many newsmen run scared, or at least tiptoe softly.,,42

ln her book, The Chilling Effect in "TV News: Intimidation by the Nixon White House, 43 Marilyn Lashner also argued that the Nixon administration cowed the "TV networks into a non-critical point of view, through a variety of weapons including broadcast regulations, licence challenges, lawsuits, tax audits, and FBI investigations. Lashner analyzed more than 250 attacks on the media and 400 television commentaries and newspaper columns from 1969-1974. But she concluded that Nixon's attacks had more effect on video editorializing than on newspaper columns - that "TV news staff were more intimidated, and more susceptible to intimidation, than newspaper staff. "By orchestrating a barrage of anti-media efforts, the Nixon White House was able to chili dissent in political commentary delivered on network television evening news programs, a feat that it was not able to accomplish in nationally-syndicated columns in newspapers. While newspaper columnists - Tom Wicker, Joseph Kraft, James Kilpatrick, Clayton Fritchey, James Reston, Jack Anderson, David Border and more - were focusing on White House affairs with consistency, a clear and restless eye, and sometimes thunder and fury, the analyses that television commentators reserved for the White House were writ in • poetry and balm.,,44 • 282 Of course this may also indicate explanations other than a presumed superior morality at newspapers - the idea that newspaper people are or were somehow braver, or more concerned with and less confused about free press ideals. It could indicate as weil, for example, that government authorities focused their restrictive attentions more on television commentary than on that in newspapers because - since many more people were watching television than reading newspapers - it was a more "cost-effective" and longterm strategy. The logical extreme of this line of reasoning from the point of view of a government intent on social control through control of information is of course the achievement of widespread illiteracy, another scenario weil on its way to completion.45 Another aspect of the difference between television journalists and newspaper ones, in terms of their ability to withstand "external" pressures, is that this difference is already intimately related to the differences in form between the two kinds of media. The form and format of a newspaper allow for a greater range of individuality (both within the ranks of its reporters and in terms of coverage). Reading is already potentially more effective in producing or ellcouraging critical perspectives than television viewing. The act of reading requires the ideational participation of the reader: the newspaper provides words, it is the reader who completes the picture with internai imaging (to produce meaning). Television does not require such active intellectual participation or co­ operation; the viewer is more vulnerable to words delivered with televised images - another reason government pressures would logically be directed more at television "commentators" than newspaper ones. As weil, the credo of objectivity, in the case of television, apfJi;ar,; to inhere in the very technology of photographie images: The camera • does notlie. Finally, the individual newspaper reporter enjoys a latitude • 283 in framing and writing a story - a wider choice of perspective - which is denied the television reporter, who is synonymous with his image. Other books, for example William E. Porter's Assault on the Media"6 published nearly ten years before Stoler's book, also analyzed the harassment of the straight press. Porter's book, an account of the efforts of governmental authority over a period of about five years to intimidate, harass, regulate and in other ways damage the news media in their functioning as part of the American political system, also catalogued and documented a series of initiatives (taken by the Nixon administration) to curtail freedom of the press and twist the media to its own purposes. These initiatives included wiretaps, tax audits, antitrust suits and in the case of broadcast media, challenges to their broadcast licences. Porter concluded that these measures created an atmosphere in which the U.S. Supreme Court could establish dangerous precedents for justifying prior censorship and disclosure of news sources under duress. ln The Big Chili, Eve Pell argued that censorship of the news media mushroomed in the eighties and that criticism of government and other elite authority by journalists and others was not allowed to go unpunished.47 Pell charged the Reagan administration, corporate America, and religious conservatives with subverting free speech and the public's right to know. The book provided an overview of censorship activity in the United States at the time and examined such issues as government secrecy and harassment, attempts to weaken the Freedom of Information Act, extralegal efforts by conservative groups to ban books and other materials from schools and libraries, and the use of libel suits to intimidate the press. Pell cited numerous examples of the abuse of libel laws by the rich and powerful to punish those who dared to criticize or • otherwise oppose the activities and the ideas of the ruling elite. • 284 Of course government harassment of the press was hardly a new phenomenon. It certainly did not begin with the assassination of Kennedy, the Nixon administration assaults or even the Vietnam war (though these events may weil be regarded as having precipitated a fortification and over time a normalization of the tendency). The history of the press in America is replete with chronicles of press struggles for freedom against the powers of the government; indeed, the adversarial function of the press with regard to government is part and parcel of its foundational ideology. The specifie Nixon-era episode of media chillthat Stoler, Lashner and others have described is largely a legacy of the increasingly strong hold of a business ideology that accompanied the deepening integration of newspapers as big business in the capilalist system. In other words, the adversarial stance of newspapers toward government did not make the transition, did not keep pace with, larger economic changes of which the press was part, so that the press never learned to adoptthe same altitude toward business "rulers" as it had toward official representatives of government and government itself. How could it, when it was itself big business? The press still does a fairly good job of watch-dogging the government (though it could do much belter if it encouraged more invesligative work), but its economic integralion in the capitalist economy and its id-entification with big business ail but preclude a critical eye on transactions regarded as purely economic, rather than (as opposed to) also political. Moreover, since economic and political realms are integrated (integral), the press's faiture to act as watchdog in the business world compromises its ability to do so in the world of government as weil, not so much through the threats of business interests (to withdraw • advertising revenue for example) as through the blindness imposed by • 285 the viewpoint (that government and business are separate, and that the latter is not the province of the press, except in the very much separate "business" section, which never carries labor news). Once again, the gap between theory and practice is reproduced, and the normalizing of the gap (the acceptance of it as not only inevitable but also and more fundamentally, un-contradictory or un-problematical) is fortified in ideational and finally perceptual terms. Although the progressive rationalization of straight press ideology (to fit with the reigning economic ethos) is its own legacy, there is one respect in which the sixties underground press is implicated in this development. For the establishment press's failure to grapple with the contradictions (between its stated ideal and its actual practice) was also its failure to defend its ideals. Its failure to defend the constitutional rights of the underground press in the sixties was one that would return to haunt. Although the defence of constitutional rights is largely a legal matter, the press also bore a responsibility - to publish the facts of government harassment. Moreover, while it has become fashionable at least among newspaper people to despise lawyers on principle, the fact is there were a lot more lawyers who went to bat for the beleaguered undergrounders than there were establishment publishers, or even for that matter journalists, who did so. And this handful of legal defenders faced the same widely enculturated acceptance of the gap between theory and practice as did the press. The difference is that some legal practitioners made the attempt, thus furthering in however small a way a critical appreciation of ­ rather than "constitutional" blindness to - the negation of the ideal through habituai practice.) If the establishment press (as a whole, for there were exceptions) had stood up for the rights of the underground papers (at the • very least by reporting on the harassment incidents), they might have • 286 stood a better chance of resisting when the government got around to harassing them. If they had supported the right of the underground press (to publish), there might have been potential allies (among the public as weil as the alternative press). Butthey had already shown the government it could get away with blatant suppression of rights to free speech, among other civil rights. Thus Stoler's appeal for public support, for the public to rally to the defence of a free press, while no doubt sincere and well-intentioned, rankles; it reads to me as so much whining. It was ail rightto suppress rights to freedom of expression when the victims of such suppression were the underground rabble. But it ought to be a matter of grave concern to the public atlarge, the plea implies, now that the establishment press faces the same kind of assaults on and erosions of its "own" freedom. (Afler ail, the would also objectto Iynchings, and no doubt with high "moral" language and recourse to "ideals", were the chosen victims to be white male gentiles.) Media criticism books are legion, and most get around to recommending thatthe press adopt higher standards of competence and ethics.48 Butthey do not oflen critique the objectivity that constitutes the sole proposed ethic in contemporary newsrooms, nor address the process whereby the stated (literai) ethic is compromised or negated in the practice. Even books Iike Jody Powell's The Other Side of the Storv, which takes the critique somewhat further than most (Powell argued that the most dangerous bias in the press is not political but economic, news "judgment" based on what is saleable) do not go far enough. Powell's book was published in 1984, by which time the blurring of the line between news or information and entertainment was weil entrenched. By • the 19805, the threat of "one-newspaper cities" (even the phrase, which • 287 once ignited fierce commentary among the press and the public, now sounds quaint, almost unreal, as if it referred to ancient history) was no longer threat, but rather accomplished fact. Newspapers no longer even pretended to compete with other newspapers; they competed with television news, white television news itself competed for air space with television entertainment, and this by relentless packaging of the news !!§ entertainment. Is it any wonder that by 1984~ American polis showed the public rated the press almost as low as the executive branch of the government? Stoler also noted that throughout his 1968 election campaign, former U.S. vice president Spiro Agnew criticized a supposed Iiberal bias in the press. Discussing the right wing idea that the press displays a Iiberal bias, Stoler wrote: "The problem is not at ail that the American news media lean to the left. The problem is that they are being pulled from the right." 49

This pull from the right argument appears justified (supported by the evidence cited), but it requires qualification. For successive American administrations also withheld information directlv from the public through its own media, for example by raising the prices of government publications or charging for ones that were formerly available free. 5O During his tenure, Ronald Reagan reduced the scope of the U.S. Freedom of Information act and imposed Iifetime censorship on thousands of officiais with access to classified information. (The Canadian act also made information harder, not easier, to get from government sources.) Access to information laws, moreover, are not of interest primarily to the press, as may be imagined. Stoler himself noted, though he did not draw the same conclusion, that journalists and civil • Iibertarians combined made up only five to 10 per cent of FOI requests. It • 288 would appear reasonable to suggestthat using the FOI requests (that is, filing the requests) is one way for the press to government interference in its freedom "to report the news." Even if the requests failed (by way of royal run-around) to elicit the desired information, at leastthe fact of the government's stonewalling could be documented.51 ln any case, the harassment of the straight press in the years following the sixties decade and the general shifl to the right in the straight press (whether, Iike Eve, the press fell or was pushed) are no legacy of the underground press, but rather of the forces arrayed against it, of the forces that harassed the underground press while the straight press, when it was not helping government police agencies, stood by and watched. Stoler also argued thatthe Vietnam war radicalized the press. But what did he mean by "radicalize"? Only that, by the end of the Viet Cong's famous Tet offensive of 1968, most journalists agreed the war was

a lost cause. 52 Stoler failed to distinguish between the rank-and-file reporters of the press (many of whom had regarded the war as a lost cause long before the Tet offensive, but were prohibited from writing sol and its managers (representing its owners). James Boylan, who did take into account this differentiation (between the workers and owners of the press), agreed the war radicalized reporters. But Boylan did not ignore or allemptto avoid the facts of the bailles these radicalized reporters had to fight (and most oflen lost) in their own newsrooms and againsttheir own manager/editors, and thus, Boylan was able to provide a more cogent analysis. In a 1986 article for the Columbia Journalism Review (on which publication he served as the first editor) Boylan commented atlength on the varielies of • punishment meted outto reporters who refused to act as cheerleaders for • 289 the war by pretending the war was going weil when it was going badly. Moreover, Boylan did not treat the phenomenon as monolithic; he cited examples of both stories suppressed and stories printed despite official disfavor. For example, he noted the New York Times standing up to then president Kennedy, after Kennedy suggested in 1963 to the paper's then­ new publisher (Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.) that David Halberstam, reporting from Vietnam, was due for re-assignment since he appeared to be "too close to the story, too involved". The junior Sulzberger stood his ground and kept Halberstam on assignment in Vietnam "beyond his

scheduled recall to make the point clear. ,,53 At Time magazine, where Henry Luce was at the time still in control, it was, Boylan noted, "a different matter entirely"; "New York editing softened a Charles Mohr cover story on Madame Nhu, the force behind South Vietnam's presidential throne. Later, a story filed by Mohr and [Merton] Perry started: 'The war in Vietnam is being lost.' Headquarters suppressed it in favor of something optimistic written thousands of miles from the scene. Moreover, within a month the Time press department printed Iwo attacks on the Saigon correspondents. Perry resigned and went over to Newsweek, where he stayed until his death in 1970; Mohr moved to the Times. ,,54

This iIIustrates more concretely than theoretical arguments the very real relationship be!ween the economic and politica\ meanings of a given journalistic dilemma. Back in the sixties, rogue journalists were able to "go over" to the paper or publication down the street or across town if they felt or believed themselves compromised by the editorial demands of their employers. In the nineties, with concentrated ownership having reduced the journalistic base, both in terms of repertorial and editorial staff as weil as total number of publications, there are fewer and fewer options: there • are few publications to go over to, certainly within a given city, and when • 290 there are, hiring freeze is the order of the day. Thus a rationale which appears (and is offered, by media managers) as "simply" economic reality, has effects that are eminently political: the effects ensuing from a decrease in the options of dissent. It is entirely beside the point that establishment papers were not automatically transformed by the presence of dissident or defecting journalists - the "What good would it do?" refrain - nor that this state of affairs exists without any plot or conspiracy required to bring it into existence or to explain it. Stoler, who was senior correspondent for Time magazine when he wrote his book, claimed that coverage of Watergate also radicalized the press, but simultaneously alienated the media trom the public and the government. Stoler's unfortunate tendency to conflate entities that are profitably (from an analytical perspective) distinguished (public with government and press owners with press workers, for example) led him once again to an obfuscating conclusion: that coverage of both the war and the Watergate affair "alienated" the public and the government. The assumption here is that confidence in authorities (including The Press) ought to be accorded on the basis of abstractions (such as truth and democracy) that the press is supposed to represent (supposed in the sense of assumed, as weil as in the ethical sense), rather than on the basis of specifie performances: so that to note or speak of an instance in which the press or the government has erred (according to its professed ideals) is to be an enemy ofthese institutions and what they are supposed to represent (truth and democracy). Finally, it is easy to see how the exposing of the Watergate affair "alienated" the government, but if it "alienated" the public - by encouraging loss of confidence in the (actual) politica\ process and the politicians and officiais who ran it ­ • surely such loss of confidence was warrantlild, at the very least as the • 291 necessary spur to some attempt at discerning the truth and modifying the "system" of democracy to bring it home to its professed ideals. Boylan also noted that despite the turnaround following the Tet offensive (when it became permissible for mainstream reporters to report facts that contradicted official information, and for opinion pieces to criticize the war), one of the most memorable instances of investigative reporting "had to fight its way into the press." Seymour Hersh's free-lance story on the My Lai massacre was rejected by both Life and Look magazines, finally making it into print only "via syndication by the Dispatch News Service, an organization ail but created for the occasion."ss Publication of the Pentagon papers, in June 1971 was for the press "a high tide in institutional defiance." Tl",e courage of the Times in deciding to publish the papers (as weil as that of the other papers that took up publishing the documents after the Times was prevented from continuing to do so by order of government, including first the Washington Post and following its prevention from publishing by government order, the Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Times, among others) is justly lauded. The press did not discharge its dutYin this instance naively - it had plenty of lawyers' warnings. Yet the courage and integrity of the straight press in this matter led to another phenomenon less noted but essential to an understanding of the nature of hegemony and its "language", specifically, the manner in which (without conspiracy) oppositional views and values are absorbed and devitalized, with History functioning as environment: "During the !wo weeks that publication [of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times] was stopped - with a prior restraint of a kind never before imposed on an American newspaper - attention shifted to the legal battles and never • returned fully to the substance of the secret documents. By • 292 the time the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Times, a decision in which only three of the justices upheld the First Amendment with any enthusiasm, the Pentagon Papers had entered history as a case rather than as an expose."sa

The question "What is wrong with the press?" - is so thoroughly embedded in unexamined assumptions (including that there are two sides to every issue, and one is right while the other is wrong) that its asking most usually affords the would-be critic a choice (in terms of answers) between two facile fictions: the press as a conglomeration of heroic romantic individuals fighting for the right and true against a venal and Iying government in cahoots with an irresponsible business establishment, gr the press as a self-seeking power-mongering sub­ government ("another vicious system") out to impose its monolithic meaning on the hapless stooges who read (and believe) il. The underlying message, the conditioning effect, of such polarization of fictions also leaves the individual journalist with one of two choices in terms of self-imaging, and hence behavior when faced with a particular moral dilemma: the reporter either indulges in "heroic" self-sacrifice for the Cause or submits to abiding resignation based on eternal and wilful ignorance. This either-or thinking obscures another, and vastly more realistic, possible conclusion: that individual efforts and acts of courage on the part of the press (as on the part of the public) do matter and they are nor:"!theless subject to the same process of absorption (faced by ail "dissident" views, that is those that threaten the interests of the ruling elite by advocating and seeking to precipitate change, including the views trumpeted in the sixties underground press). Moreover, this kind of polarized thinking is also applied to the individual, thus "personalizing" rather than politicizing (in the sense of • elucidating) the issues: the search for truth or comprehension becomes • 293 the less exacting search for effigies. James Reston's book on the artillery of the press, for example, was roundly criticized by the more "radical" commentators of the undergroundpress as incurably Iiberal (and justifiably so, since the criticism focused appropriately on what Reston left out of the account). Yet it was the same Reston who during the discussion preceding publication of the Pentagon Papers (the debate . about whether to publish) led the pro-publication forces in the Times newsroom.57 An apparently widespread human urge or tendency to id­ entify abstractions such as good and evil, to seek personifications of these abstractions (to be able to divide the world and ail its entities into good guys and bad guys who will refrain from complicating malters by remaining in their designated slots as re-presentatives of good and evil) is intimately related to this phenomenon of absorption through a de-toothing of language (a denuding of its ability to convey meaning). The repeated disappointments, the idea that language (ideas or views spoken or wrilten) has failed to effect changes in reality, has led first to an essential severing of language from reality, and then to a perversion, whereby language functions as a second and separate order of reality, which is no longer expected to share any kind of essential relation to reality (including truth). That is why ail movements for changs must reclaim language, insist on some relation between language and reality, a relation which might be broadly described (rather than defined) as meaning. The effecting and deepening of this gulf between language and reality is internally institutionalized or re-constituted (by individuals), and as a collective phenomenon (one affecting many individuais) is nearly synonymous with the sociological process known as normalization. This progression ultimately takes the floor out from under critical thinking ­ • prefiguring its actual impossibility. The logical outcome, or logical • 294 extreme, of such a progression (in terms cf the nature of the language and literature of the press) is a press deprived of adversa,.)', and a government that no longer needs to invoke lawyers' warnings, lawsuits or prior restraint to intimidate the press and keep it from "reporting the news" because the conflict or contradiction (between theory and practice, the ideal and the aclual) is no longer perceived as problemalic, and finally, no

longer perceived al ail. 58

• • 295 WHITHER OBJECTIVITY?

The underground press may have raised the banner of investigative reporting and set an example with its Vietnam coverage, but this did not filter into the mainstream press, despite individual reportorial efforts. Instead, the mainstream press developed a kind of high-tech news, what one writer called supernews, in its traditional attempt to ward off change. The standard for investigative reporting, according to James Boylan, first editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, was journalism that "couId stand the test of history" and it was jeopardized by the establishment press's supernews. "In Central America, American journalists have exposed serious shortcomings in American policies and clients, but over the years the government has successfully overcome such details and has won its main points, to the extent that by 1986 official premises - that, for example, a government in Central America constitutes a major security threat to the United States - underlay many news stories. Such assumptions were effectively tested by reporting frolT' Vietnam; in the case of Central America, by contrast, supernews had made it possible for official policy to triumph over mere fact." 59

Contemporary political reporting in the establishment press (as for example 1994 coverage of the restoration-of-democracy caper in Haiti) is thus a reactionary legacy of the powers that be which negates the activism of the sixties press. Mainstream news coverage of America's indefatigable political struggles for "democracy" in foreign and less-armed lands echoes straight coverage of the sixties press, not the dissident or critical positions of the sixties press. ln fact, the straight press is still years behind in the flushing out • and coverage of controversial issues even when these concern its 296 • "domestic" policies. The concern over possible health hazards fram electric power lines and electric appliances was an open controversy in scientific circles (and publications) for more than twenty years, for example, before it "hit" the mainstream periodical press in 1989, when articles in both the New Yorker and Time m13gazine discussed the effects of technologically generated electromagnetic fields on human health, effects that may include suppression of the immune system, childhood leukemia, and other forms of cancer. Paul Bradeur's three-part series in the New Yorker went further (though still 20 years late), by considering the implications of such research, inciuding the tremendous costs involved in overhauling an entire nation's power-distribution system - not to mention the possible profusion of lawsuits for health damages or property devaluations that would occur if the controversy became widespread or authorities went on record about the dangers. Brodeur's article also documented the (Iargely successful) public relations attempts of utility corporations and other lobby groups to keep the issue out of the mainstream press. GO Some critics credit the underground press with precipitating a kind of "small boom" in investigative reporting - the ciassic example usually cited being that of the Watergate scandai, a story broken by two

Washington Post reporters. If this is 50, it was a very "mini" phenomenon indeed. The popular wisdom has it that the press, through diligence, uncovered and exposed the (1972-1974) Watergate break-in scandaI. In fact, the American press as a whole woke up to the story late in the game. Most of the establishment press barely covered Watergate.51 Though the establishment press was facing continuing erosion of readership during the sixties, and despite the example of the underground • papers and older dissident press, or even of Watergate itself for that 297

• pl?~haps malter, it changed only under duress, doing more pseudo­ investigative stories, more features on cultural coverage. To actually invest in investigative journalism, however, would have involved the straight press in fundamental opposition with its own guiding assumptions about objectivity as a simple reflection of the (unquestioned and so uncontested) authority of establishment spokesman, including of course the government. Mainstream reporting now allows more subjective, participant­ observer, perspectives, but mostly for soft news and also largely in malters of style or form rather than content. The prohibition of personal pronouns except for the third person pronouns, for example, remains a standard one in the establishment press (except for columnists). As weil, while it is now permissible for the mainstream reporter to appeal to, or altempt to arouse, emotion in the reader, the attempt must be skilfully executed to avoid suggesting or implying opinion or critical thought of any description on the part of the reporter, and the range of emotion or thought thus provoked remains narrow indeed. The altempt to engage the reader's involvement is after ail a primary task of ail writing (at least ail writing meant to communicate) so that the attempt by the mainstream reporter to do so without upsetting anyone is proscribed and iII-fated from the start. Moreover, this approach negates the substance of the work of the underground reporters, who were avowedly and proudly biased, while it mimics the intimacy of underground writing. In other words, it perverts the value of subjectivity.62

According to one media critic, objectivity remains an appropriate goal for journalists, though the meaning of the word has taken some • daring somersaults in the process of remaining or at least appearing to • 298 remain viable. In his A Historv of News, Mitchell Stephens described objectivity as a term journalists began using in the twentieth century: "... to express their commitment not only to impartiality but to reflecting the world as it is, without bias or distortion of any sort. ,,63

Of course the development of the concept of objectivity did not begin in the twentieth century, even if the term first began to be widely used then. Moreover, the meaning of the word is certainly contestable. ln fact, contemporary sociologists view the early penny press of the previous century as the first newspapers to practise objectivity in news reporting, but the nature of that objectivity was adversarial. The penny press that arose in the 1830s following the demise amid economic "setbacks" of the labor newspapers, did not speak for the enshrined authority of narrow party or commercial interests as the older elite press had. Taking up the purpose of their labor-based forebears, the penny papers voiced the ideals and aspirations of the working classes. Before the 1830s, objectivity was simply not an issue; newspapers were expected to be partisan. 54 Michael Schudson, in his classic sociological study of news reporting,55 also situated the birth of the concept of objectivity (as an egalitarian one) in the penny press of the 1830s. Schudson asked not whether newspapers were objective, but rather why the question now appears so transparent, "why that question is so familiar',.66 Indeed, the very idea of "news" was the product of the Jacksonian era, one that arose with political democratization, the rise of the urban middle class and an expanding . Schudson questioned the common Iinking of the idea of objectivity with the beginnings of the Associated Press wire service, organized in • 1848 by a group of American newspapers to take advantage of the newly • 299 invented telegraph. The common inference here is that because AP served a wide range of papers with differing political views and allegiances, the idea of objectivity arose as a kind of bare bones ''factual'' lowest-common-denominator method, gradually adopted as the journalistic ideal by the press as a whole. As Schudson writes, however, Iittle evidence exists to substantiate this theory, and even by the turn of the century, "there was as much emphasis on telling a good story as on getting the facts."67 The information or "objective" model of newswriting arose in the late nineteenth-century days of yellow or sensationalist journalism with the rise of the New York Times, which in 1896: "... began to climb to its premier position by stressing an 'information' model, rather than a 'story' model, of reporting. Where the Associated Press was factual to appeal to a politically diverse clientele, the Times was informational to attract a relatively select, socially homogeneous readership of the weil to do. As in the Jacksonian era, so in the 1890s, changes in the ideals of journalism did not translate technological changes into occupational norms so much as make newspaper ideals and practices consonant with the culture of dominant social classes." 68

The belief in objectivity - the idea that facts are reliable while values are suspect and thus the two should be segregated - is of course the belief in a value. But the fact-value split itself was not a view widely appreciated, much less held, by journalists before the First World War.69 Indeed, Schudson argued that it was only in the years after the war that objectivity became ideology. Before then, facts in themselves were regarded as things in reality, rather than statements about reality. lt was the propaganda of the war and the rise of the "public relations man" after it, that put an end to the naive empiricist model of reporting (though no • doubt naive empiricist reporting continues).7° The objectivity of the • 300 twenties and thirties represented, for the substitution of a faith in facts, "an allegiance to rules and procedures created for a world in which even facts were in question."71 David Halberstam wrote of the Washington Post under Eugene Meyer during the thirties, that the Post was not a good paper "by classic journalistic standards." Meyer came from an earlier age, Halberstam wrote, when one owned a newspaper for the editorial megaphone it provided: "He did not see journalism as a profession of reporting, only the New York Times in that era had a large and expensive staff of reporters assigned to coyer the world. In those days few sensed that the real power of journalism was the power to define, the power to coyer or nol to coyer. News was not yet viewed as subjective: ail events were perceived as of predetermined importance, the presence of a reporter added no particular dimension. ,,72

The continued development of government-managed news and the rise of a national security establishment after the Second World War revived objectivity as the achievement of a "progressive" historical fiction. By the sixties, when the underground press and adversary culture attacked authority, the idea and ideal of objectivity had become ideology for the mainstream press: it represented the triumph of 'facts' (however contested) over the perceived partisanship and sensationalism of an earlier press. It was this de-historicized revival of the fact that the sixties underground press challenged. According to Schudson, writing in the early seventies, that radical questioning of objectivity ''will not soon be forgotten," for il: "... revitalized traditions of reporting that the objective style had long overshadowed. The ideal of objectivity has by no means been displaced, but, more than ever, it holds its • authority on sufferance. ,,73 • 301 Yet for media critic Mitchell Stephens, writing in the late eighties, that challenge does indeed appear forgotten. Stephens conceded that journalists do not simply "mirror" the world for their audiences, that merely directing attention to one fact (one facet of a story) over another, as for example in the choice of lead or opening paragraph of a newspaper story, represents a kind of bias: "Reporters may initially be in the position of the messenger. .. But. .. reporters do begin, and where they begin and where they end and how they travel from beginning to end, helps condition their audience's response to the news.,,74

Yet his analysis remained, from a linguistic or Iiterary perspective, naive. Even the idea that the reporter at least initially enjoys the "innocent" position of messenger does not hold. The reporter asks questions, her experience and her convictions determine what kind of questions she will ask, to whom she will direct these questions (usually official sources, or if not official sources, then not to be taken too seriously, as in the soft news feature), and how she responds or whether she even notices unanswered questions or conflicting "bits" of information. More importantiy, though, Stephens conceived of the effect of this built-in bias as something that "conditions" the audience's response, rather than something that first conditions the reporter's response and so affects the reportage itself, for example by what information is left out (what questions are not asked). The tendency is still away from questioning and toward unquestioning according to "objective" standards. Stephens quoted media critic Robert Karl Manoff's pithy summation: "No story is the inevitable product of the event it reports, no event dictates its own narrative form. News occurs at the conjunction of events and texts, and while events create the • story, the story also creates the event."75 • 302 Interestingly, however, Stephens appears not ta take Manoffs pithy summation entirely seriously..Stephens concluded in his own analysis that the attachment ta "a working definition of objectivity" is still useful, since it allows reporters ta function without "the feeling of having sinned" against the dictates of objectivity. While Stephens advocated an "objectivity for realists" as a guide ta everyday journalistic method, and opposed the "unreachable ideal of objectivity", he nonetheless recognized the complexities of such a project (objectivity for realists).76 He recognized, in other words, but did not attempt ta ariiculate, the implicit philosophical dilemma at the heart of the ideal of objectivity.: "The effort modern reporters make ta reach ... for the unreachable ideal of objectivity not only involves them in something of a sham but forces them ta surrender what can be a powerful weapon in the search for understanding - an above-board point of view.... In learning ta fetch and dig, have journalists not lost much of their ability ta bite7"n

Though Stephens was clearly arguing for a more aggressive press, his "objectivity for realists" actually compounds the Inherent dilemma. For if objectivity is taken ta mean, as it clearly is here, a devotion ta discovering and telling the truth about a particular event or situation despite the writer's personal thoughts, views or feeling about that truth, the initial task nevertheless remains ta discover the truth. Objectivity for realists works only where the truth is uncontested (in which case it would not need ta be "discovered" in the first place). Thus it does not lead ta a furthering of objectivity as method, which is its implied, and 1believe, sole value. In short, objectivity for realists begs the question. As ideology it serves the more insidious end of putting the truths of the mass media beyond the realm of questioning, that is, beyond contesting. By assuming that the ideal is unattainable, Stephens couched the • argument in a framework that accepts the gap between theory and 303 • practice as inevitable, and that thus serves to only further gut the critique of objectivity - because the ideal implies a value judgment (what ought to bel that the supposed solution - objectivity for realists - obscures. What about objectivity for idealists? Or subjectivity for realists? Ultimately, Stephens suggested that the solution is not more subjectivity, but more facts. Thus his critique of objectivity, while apparently intended to recall the press to its ideal (of objectivity), ended by modifying that ideal to a kind of lowest-common-denominator status - just as History had the origins of the ideal. From this perspective, journalistic literature that was once criticized or rejected as "not objective" may now be discarded as "unrealistic." ln terms of practice, the solution of objectivity for realists, neither presents, implies nor invites reformed or modified method aimed at achieving or putting into practice, the ideal. Stephens cited Samuel Johnson's observation that the press "affords sufficient information to elate vanity, and stiffen obstinacy, but too little to enlarge the mind." He nonetheless concluded that in the 200 years since Johnson died: "... the arrivai of several vigorous new information technologies and the growlh of a system of reporting based on the journalistic method have enabled the news media to offer their audiences not only considerably more information but considerably more reliable information ... where journalists today can practice the journalistic method in relative freedom, their audiences are the recipients of masses of data.,,7e

Vet there is no inherent journalistic value or ideal that corresponds to "masses of data"; neither is there anything inherently valuable in the masses of data themselves. Indeed, the abundant availability of "data" presents no advance in press ideology or practice, but rather presents it • with another problem, commonly known as information overload. Implicit • 304 in the approval of such data abundance and the technologies that have facilitated the phenomenon, is a further obfuscation (however unintentional) of the very concept of objectivity; so that where objectivily may formerly have operated as a substitution or synonym for truth, that substitution is extended to "data": data = objectivity = truth. Indeed "data" (presumably the disembodied bits of "information") in this literai exercise is the apotheosis of objectivity, since its source, id­ entified as the machinery by which data is transmitted, may remain "uncontaminated" by one or more (human) subjects. In this way, investigation (and so the possibility of contestation) is bypassed entirely. On a more prosaic level, if the technological changes to which Stephens referred (as enabling expansion of the journalistic project) "rationalized" the journalistic method, facilitating production and allowing the journalis! to provide "masses of data", these same changes are also associated with less salutary effects. They fortify the idea of disembodied information as somehow more "objective" (more ''true''), less vulnerable to contamination than ''writing'' by particular human subjects. They tend to negate the supreme journalistic value of being there, that is of the eye­ witness account, and simultaneously the value (inherent in) of conflicting facts or accounts. They promote instead the maintenance of an addiction to authority (for the press, the need to believe in authority sources). Finally, these technological "improvements" have allowed newspaper owners and managers to erode the journalistic base (of reporters and writers along with the print-room staff) while justifying this tendency with business-solvency arguments (wherever, that is, that arguments in favor of such changes arise any longer for discussion.) The net effects for the press of the so-called information revolution • are fewer foreign bureaus or correspondents and fewer journalists • 305 reporting from the scene ("Can you do it on the phone?" - is a routine concern of editors when confronted with proposais for stories other than those which can be produced by lurching from news conference to news conference). The defence for this trend (on the part of press owners and managers) is the need to remain financially competitive (with other capitalist newspapers).79 Thus the rationale is narrowly economic (representing the economic interests of the few over the many). Yet if the many have no voice (because it is "too expensive"), then the influence of the press is self-avowedly the influence of the few, and further presumes that part of the purpose of the press is to keep the many stupid and mute ­ the antithesis of both (stated) mainstream and alternative press ideology. The suffering of the many (from deprivation of meaning) thus appears as entirely incidental while allowing reporters to provide massas of data objectively, that is without "the feeling of having sinned". Stephens concluded that on balance, while the audience may remain vain and obstinate, the chances that the press "might succeed in enlarging a mind would seem to have grown."90 It may be true generally that the chance (or theoretical possibility) has grown, but the implied conclusion (that the opportunity has been seized) constitutes a defence of the ideal of a free and "objective" (as truthful) press (the press as it ought to bel. It does not, however, provide a defence of (nor even address) a specifie press, the current capitalist press. In other words, it defends the right and value of press ideology; it does not examine the ideology nor compare it to the actual state of the capitalist press. It reproduces (in the second-order reality system of language) the gap between theory and practice, making that gap appear at best inevitable and insurmountable. The meaning of the term objectivity has been institutionalized, its • mascot is information, which is composed of data. A free press would not • 306 need to concern itself with objectivity. Il could devote itself instead to truth, butthat would appear, and would certainly be labelled, unworkable, naive, impossibly idealistic. Where objectivity initially meant a kind of truth, and a kind of redress, its modern variant perverts and ultimately negates the possibility of (knowing or discovering) the truth. Objectivity was challenged by subjectivity in literary theory generally, as in journalism, during the sixties. In the sixties, journalism and poUties both took on the kind of immediacy that had been the trademark in the fifties of the realms of art and criticism. In the sixties, the romantic faith in the self and in subjectivity that was already evident in beat culture and the poetry of the fifties, came to the forefront, where it was revived with a vengeance. "Where the critic of the fifties would appeal to the cultural tradition, the critic of the sixties was more likely to seal an argument with personal testimony. Those two heinous Fallacies proscribed by the New Criticism, the Affective ­ what the work felt like - and the Intentional - whatthe artist himself had in mind, were resurrected with a vengeance, as both literature and criticism took on a more subjective cast." 81

The loss offaith was not in objeclivity, but in truth-telling, in the possibility of speaking the truth, and finally in the possibilities of speech per se. If the reporter's point of view is necessarily relative, in what could truth consist? Although this sounds like a bona fide critique, it is actually empty. For the reporter's point of view (whether dictated by a belief in objectivity : subjectivity) is relative simply to other viewpoints.. The truth (for the press, always the truth about something), on the other hand, is not so much relative (to other truth claims) as it is a relation between the literaI reality (the writing) and the real-world situation or event it purports • to describe. (If 1am hit over the head with a hammer, 1am unlikely to • 307 wonder whether the pain is real. If 1read that person A hit person B over the head with a hammer, however, 1may weil wonder whether this is true. The slippery nature of language perhaps encourages the confusion of language with reality, of map with territory. In the preceding example, for instance, when 1wonder whether it is true that person A hit person B, 1am wondering whether this alleged event reallv occurred.) What objectivity indicates is the id-entification of truth (as against the essential relational nature of truth). It is not truth (for the truth is what it is whether one knows, accepts or Iikes it) that is compromised by a devotion to objectivity, but the ability to know the truth. In social terms, it is not truth that is monopolized (as if it could be) behind the screen of objectivity, but the power of speech. This loss of the power to speak (by which 1mean of course the power to intend or mean something by one's spoken or written words, rather than the power to vocalize or make noises) hinges as a progressive (degenerative) phenomenon on the loss or degradation of memory:

"The modern transformations in consciousness brought about during the last century by mass communications and consumer society seem to be changing the form memory takes. This change evokes the legend of the Chinese emperor who decreed for himself the exclusive use of the pronoun 1. The modern media have now donned these imperial robes, speaking while everyone else Iistens.... instead of directly making history, people watch the screen to see what is happening. The contemporary erosion of people's capacity to think for themselves and the monopolization of meaning by media seem to be succeeding at what the legendary emperor could only have imagined."s2

ln the same article from which the above passage is excerpted, David Watson noted that at the current rate, about 90 per cent of the • world's languages will die out during the next century. Watson viewed • 308 individual memory as a knot in the web of collective memory, which is by

definition shared (as opposee •..J official or objective history that is by definition disembodied). Collective memory, Watson wrote, forms a "psychic commons" that sustains a sense of human community. Watson viewed this erosion of memory as a phenomenon emerging in Western Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. By the early years of the present century, he argued, American business leaders, facing mass labor unrest, realized they had to control not only production but as weil consumption. The new capitalist citizen had to be conditioned to buy the industrial products of an emergent corporate market system.53 Watson was right to conclude that this media­ driven market system will destroy meaning beller than censorship or propaganda ever couId, with modern communications poised to absorb individual and collective memory, ultimately creating a global monoculture. The struggle against power or oppression (for freedom), as Czech novelist Kundera wrote, is thus largely the struggle against forgelting.84 The question or problem of journalistic method (in altempts to adapt itself to always shifting circumstances, including technological ones) is not whether a given journalistic account is objective, but whether it is true. Even by the most generous interpretation of the press's "objectivity" (as fairness), objectivity is a value applicable to opinion pieces, not to news accounts. The language and Iiterature of the press cling to the ideal of objectivity because the people of the press despair of their ability to discover, know or tell, the truth. This despair is the basis of the inability to engage the ideal and its implied practices. The functioning • or operative model of the press (as a whole) is thus actively anti- • 309 investigative. Ils true motto is not: When in doubt, check it out, but rather: When in doubt, leave it out. The myth of objectivity (that it provides a reasonable facsimile for truth) is a myth that informs not only writing, but that also applies, and more fundamentally, to reality (as experience). In his book The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak suggested that the dominant myth of objectivity degrades subjective, including visionary, experience, and called for a more subjective approach not necessarily to writing, but to reality.85 Were the press able to take this injunction to heart, it might concern itself more properly with discovering the truth (as opposed to painting itself beyond question as regards that same truth by habituai id­ entification with authority sources or voices). From this perspective, the critique of objectivity appears not as the hard-nosed realist approach (as it is almost always presented by its defenders) but as a rather more esoteric phenomenon. Why criticize the mainstream press for its attachment to objectivity, say for example in sixties coverage of the Vietnam war? Why not criticize it instead for its lies about the war? By criticizing the press for its attachment to objectivity, the would-be critic accepts the mainstream's definition of the word and concept of objectivity, in effect allowing and facilitating a loss of mE:aning. Criticizing the press for objectivity when it lies is a way of avoiding that a particular brand of press lie has become routine (normalized). It gives Iying the more respectable name of objectivity. Recent critiques of objeetivity from journalists and journalism professors iIIustrate how the critique of objectivity was transformed, from critique into acceptance of a certain amount of Iying, how the term and • concept was diminished (at the very least by a thinning in the range of 310

• possible meanings) and now functions as jargon that obscures the potential analytical value of the idea (of objectivity). The contrary ideal of the underground and alternative press, subjectivity, is of course based ultimately on the anarchist belief in the primacy of individual freedom (and thus on the value of the individual). But this anarchist individualism is not the traditional "rugged" individualism of the capitalist press - that is, individualism for the ruling class, or freedom for a few particular individuals based on the unfreedom of the many. (In the very simplest terms: profits for the owners and wages or wage slavery for the workers.) The rugged individualism of capitalism appeals to many who do not enjoy its prerogatives because it implies that by individual effort the individual can attain a higher rung on the ladder of relative self-interest. It assumes in other words that freedom is a kind of zero-sum game, a limited resource, where the portion of one's own individual "freedom" is necessarily garnered at the expense of that of other individuals. This implicit reasoning (in the belief in or devotion to rugged individualism) applies not only to the supposedly vulgar desire for money or material goods (the freedom to have more, freedom as more), but as weil to the desire for "more" self-expression (as status) in the second-order reality system of language. Thus in an appraisal of Frank Luther Mott's history of American magazine journalism, a reviewer for the Libracy Journal can appear to be (can be interpreted as) defending the value (an't even sanctity) of the individual based on (anti-individualistic) hierarchical relations: "Such striking examples of individuality and vision as the Little Review, the Fugitive, Editor and Publisher, and the New Republic are treated as weil as Better Homes and • Gardens and the Yale Review. In each case, the periodical • 311 proved to be the lenglhened shadow of at least one gifted writer. "es

Other individuals who transcended the grasp of the straight press, Iike John Reed, were outsiders and loners. 87 ln his biography of the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, Robert Rosenstone sought to reveal the troubled, self-contradictory impulses that motivated Reed, whose Iife appears not as any kind of lengthened shadow of a "superior" individual, but rather as one long rebellion against established views and unquestioned values. 1. F. Stone provides another and perhaps even better example of individualism that does nottacilly underwrite the idea of the value of an individual as a hierarchical id-entity. ln an article in Our Generation, litled "Anarchism, Feminism, Liberalism and Individualism," L. Susan Brown brillianlly explored the differences between Iiberal and anarchistic versions of individualism, and elucidated the basic dilemma of Iiberalism as one of Inherent contradiction with regard to the value of the individual. es Brown began by arguing that the widespread treatment of anarchism as a humanistic variant of Marxism misses the Iink between anarchism and Iiberal idealism. What Iiberalism and anarchism hold in common is a commitment to (and to the value of) individual autonomy. Indeed, what distinguishes anarchism from other communistic philosophies is the former's "uncompromising and relenlless celebration of individual self­ determination and autonomy."as Individual freedom is primary, but this is not the rugged individualism of capitalist relations of domination. Brown opposed the existentialist individualism of anarchist political philosophy to the instrumental individualism of the capitalist variant. She also argued that • anarchism has more in common than generally recognized wilh Iiberalism. • 312 With this kind of analysis Brown was calling the Iiberatory roots of Iiberalism to task, pointing out the Inherent conflict in Iiberal ideology. She cited as embodying the spirit of existential individualism. liberais, however, are not anarchists: "While they assert the importance of individual freedom and autonomy, Iiberals also maintain that the human individual is a competitive owner of , both in terms of real property and in terms of owning 'property in the person.'1lO The Iiberal believes that individuals own their bodies and the associated skiIls and abilities - 'labour power' - that accompanies their bodies. The right to buy and sell such labour power, like the right to buy and sell real property, is considered essential and inviolable by Iiberal thinkers. In Iiberal thought, there is no practical difference between owning property and owning oneself."91

Thus the Iiberal belief in property is founded on and reflects instrumental individualism. It conceptualizes possessive individualism as the prime unifying charaeteristic of Iiberalism. Brown opposed to this conceptualization, existentialist individualism and argued that the Iiberal's possessive or in:itrumental individualism is dualistic and inherently contradietory (that is, according to the stated goal of Iiberalism as the Iiberation of the self). ''The Iiberal belief in property, both real and in the person, leads not to freedom but to relationships of domination and subordination. This faith in the appropriateness of owning, buying and selling property, both real and in the person, 1 cali instrumental individualism.',92

Thus, Brown argued, while existentialist individualism aims at freedom as an end in itself, instrumental individualism aims at freedom as a means to an end: the furthering of individual interests, not the furthering of individuals. Capitalist relations, wherein individual skills are property to • be bought and sold, pits individuais against one another (in a competition 313

• for material goods and status) and leads inevitably to a kind of hardening or solidifying of the hierarchical relations and so domination founded on the conception of individualism as instrumental individualism. Thus Iiberal individualism perpetuates and promotes, because it is based upon, instrumental property relations. Anarchism shares with liberalism a belief in individualism but rejects the latter's belief in property and competitive property relations. (It also shares the anti-elitism of collectivist political movements like communism, but rejects the authoritarianism of such movements.) It is liberalism's devotion to two conflicting views of the human individual - as an end and as a means - that leaves that

philosophy "constantly in a state of unresolved crisis. ,,93 If for the Iiberal, that government is best which govems least (acccrding to the Jeffersonian model of democratic government), for the anarchist, the ideal government is that which governs not at ail (as in Thoreau).94 The usual distinction or dichotomy - of right politics as favoring individual rights versus left politics favoring collective ones - obscures the real dilemma of liberalism. (1 use the term liberalism here again to refer to its most basic Iiberatory impulse). Feminism is the weak Iink in this chain of reasoning, the "ism" that puts in bas relief not only the Inherent dilemma of Iiberalism, but that as weil of anarchism. And this fact iIIustrates once again the indispensable value of feminist criticism as the template for dominative hierarchical relations. For what is an individual? As Brown noted, even Proudhon's "devastating anarchist critique of private property and the State" left women out. In a footnote, and in one of the only references to women in his book What is Property?, Proudhon argued for the primacy of individual freedom. He did not however ask himself what is an individual, • but instead assumed a definition of the individual as one of the male of • 314 the (human) species. Thus the fact of female individuality (of female individuals) becomes for Proudhon the sex "barrier" and it was for him insurmountable: "Consequently, far from advocating what is now called the emancipation of women, 1should incline, rather, if there were no other alternative, te exclude her from society." 95

While other anarchist critics, the so-called fathers of anarchist thought, such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, supported the emancipation of women in word, they failed to recognize the analytic value of the feminist viewpoint and thus did not (indeed, could not) incorporate an explicit critique of sexism in their work. 96

Feminist anarchists Iike Emma Goldman 97 of course challenged this anti-feminist anarchism where it Iived. Such a-feminist or anti­ feminist anarchism relied on the idea of the "nature" of women. That is, it presupposed in females, where it did not take entirely for granted, a "natural" urge to serve (or "nurture" as it is more commonly put) and a concomitant and also presumedly "natural" dependence. But for Goldman, freedom was necessarily won by the individual, not conferred by the State or its decrees, however liberal sounding. "True liberty is not a mere scrap of paper called 'constitution,' 'Iegal right' or 'Iaw'. It is not an abstraction derived from the non-reality known as 'the State.' It is not the negative thing of being free from something, because with such freedom you may starve to death. Real freedom, true liberty is positive: it is freedom to something; it is the liberty to be, to do; in short; the liberty of actual and active opportunity." 98

For Goldman, women were to fight for and win freedom 2.§ individuals (that is they were to behave as individuals whether or not such • designation was decreed, recognized or even tolerated by the social 315

• structures within which they functioned). They ought, Goldman believed, to refuse to co-operate in relations of domination and subordination. Prerequisite to the possibility of such a refusai was the ability to recognize oppressive relations especially in their (internalized) form of social strietures. For these strictures, by their assumption of a "natural" woman, confused the sex designation of individuals as either female or male (a transcultural reality) with the antithetical roles assumed appropriate to those genders within a given culture. Thus no "argument" for the continuing reign of patriarchy need be formulated (unless of course one considers "those that have power shall keep it" as some form of argument, which Y/ould in any case only deprive the word argument of any meaning - another phenomenon weil on its way to completion.) The assumption that a woman (or a child, for that matter) is something other than an individual "naturally" preclL'des where it does not entirely stymie the potential and actual ability of a given individual woman to develop as an autonomous being, to be free and act freely (that is without external or internai compulsion). Thus Goldman advocated as the final step of the process, of winning of freedom by individual women, disobedience to ail forms of coercion. ln her struggle to define the individual anarchistically (as a free identity), Goldman also noted the antithetical relation of true individualism (which she Céllled individuality) to the rugged individualism of capitalism (and so helped to preserve the meaning of the word against the hegemonic project that includes and depends upon the restriction and ultimate "ownership" of meaning): "Individuality is not to be confused with the various ideas and concepts of Individualism; much less with that 'rugged individualism' which is only a masked attempt to repress and defeat the individual and his individuality. So-called • Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the • 316 trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit, which process is known as •education. ",99

America, Goldman believed, provided the best example of a society where this meaning of individualism reigned - wherein individualism means the freedom of an elite minority gym: the majority of the people (the non-elite) or even the "right" of a "stronger" individual over a presumedly weaker one. Thus the social oppression of the many (including ultimately the elite oppressor) is justified in the name of the (rugged) individual. The true meaning of freedom, for Goldman, included, indeed rested on, a categorical rejection of instrumentalism, and thus of authority (except of course self-authority or autonomy): "Man's true Iiberation, individual and collective, lies in his emancipation from authority and the belief in il.,,100

The system of wage slavery that is industrial (and post-industrial and managerial) capitalism "proletarianizes" society as a whole, for by the very act of selling one's "Iabor", one enters into ideological relations of dominance. "The proletarianization of our time reaches far beyond the field of manuallabour; indeed, in the larger sense ail those who work for their living, whether with hand or brain, ail those who must sell their skill, knowledge, experience and ability, are proletarians. From this point of view, our entire system, exceptin~ a very ,Imited class, has been proletarianized.,,1 1

Even this Iimited class, 1maintain, suffers a sort of deprivation, not, granted, a material deprivalion, but a deprivalion nonetheless, of the intellectual, emotional and spiritual self (or individual). For in order to remain members of a Iimited class, that is to continue to enjoy its material • advantages, requires of those so situated (or aspiring to be so situated) a • 317 continuing and unquestioned belief in authority, that can only diminish the possibilities of the self and self-authority. Critical to the maintenance of the instrumental individualism that sustains capitalist ideology (of ail varieties, that is ail ideologies under capitalism) is a sleight-of-hand substitution of terms, much Iike the establishment press's substitution of the term objective for the term true or the appropriation of the meaning of an individual (as one in possession of a self that may be bought and sold): the replacement of the idea of value itself (as existential worth) with the concept of status (as exchangeable or instrumental worth).

• • 318 NOTES ON NOSTALGIA

The legacy of the underground press to some is the sellout, and the disillusionment that followed - the idea that no "special" quality immunized the sixties generation from moral turpitude. The revolution-as­ soap-opera had failed, many believed, because its brightest stars "sold out" their ideals. Rolling Stone magazine provides a good example of what the term sellout was meant to indicate, from the perspective of the disillusioned. It also iIIustrates the distorting power of nostalgia and helps to distinguish between the loss of illusions and the loss of ideals, entities often conflated and confused in narratives of the sixties rebellion. Rolling Stone, founded in 1967 and devoted to rock music as the central pillar of , had always been more of a hip capitalist publication than a member of the unwashed underground. From its inception under founder Jann Wenner (21 when he started the magazine) the magazine's visual format and the narrative structure of its articles (indeed, the very fact that the prose - loose but intimate, spiced with swear-words and slang - was primary, with visuals taking secondary place) was relatively traditional, though the magazine addressed a new kind of music and served a new kind of readership. Rolling Stone became an indispensable part of the music scene, with circulation growing to 250,000 in its first five years. 102 Wenner himself had once worked for the radical monthly magazine Ramparts, but by the time he founded Rolling Stone, which peddled a largely cosmetic version of the movement and its longed-for revolution, he disdained political activism. "You might say that my polities are the • promotion of good vibes," he told one writer in 1972.103 319 • Early in 1970, the magazine did embrace politics, though Wenner himself abhorred violence and believed that resistance, even of the print or literai variety, was unnecessary and foolish, since the (presumably hip) young were bound to outlive the older generation and take over social control (a variation of the young generation as the revolution in embryo). Movement writer Gene Marine was commissioned by the magazine in its April 2, 1970 edition to write an article on the Chicago conspiracy trial - an article that was later hailed as the best on the subject in the underground or overground press. In the piece, Marine illustrated the pain involved in the disillusionment of the underground press and the counterculture it addressed: "You can be as revolutionary as you Iike, or as disillusioned. You can know ail there is to know about pigs from Oakland to Chicago, which is ail there is to know about pigs, because those are the places where they really earn the title. You can be as convinced as you Iike that the system will never, ever, really allow the individualloving human being to be free. You can know the capitalist thing has got to go, you can get your head into the ecological conscience, you can see ail the present messes and the possible poetries. But if you grew up in America, then somewhere, down deep inside, there's a crazy irrational piece of you that really believes it will somehow come out allright [sic] in the 5upreme Court, that even though the executive and legislative branches were corrupt years ago, the judicial branch - the 5upreme Court - will be fair and honest." 104

ln the same issue were featured a Chicago testimonial from Allen Ginsberg and a political essay on the commercialization of FM radio by Greil Marcus, formerly the magazine's associate editor. lD5 But the magazine's venture into politics hurt sales, with thousands of copies of the edition returned despite the publication's healthy national advertising portfolio. A second "political" issue a few months later, following the • campus murders at Kent and Jackson state universities and the • 320 Cambodian invasion, met a similar fate. Rolling Stone retreated to its standby focus on music and "lifestyle" radicalism, including dope news. Today Rolling Stone remains a raging financial success. By 1981, however, after its 1977 move to New York, not a single writer remained from the old days. "Has Rolling Stone changed as drastically as America beIWeen 1967 and 1990?" asked one writer,l06 answering that now there is an internai struggle at the magazine, the unhappy fruit of IWo decades of moral agonizing, from the 1967 Love-In to the 1980s Big ChilI. The magazine now serves a different generation and while it maintains about one million subscribers, its pivotai newsstand readers constitute only 25 per cent of its circulation. The term sellout was also applied to a Canadian underground paper, in Vancouver. Successful by establishment (commercial) terms, the Straight is the lone survivor of the sixties underground papers in Canada. For many, the term sellout applied "in spades" to the paper, once the leader of undergrounds. Il covers soft news, mostly entertainment, is packed with ads, is distributed as a free weekly and enjoys circulation of over 40,000. According to founder, owner and editor-in-chief Dan McLeod, the Straight is in beller financial shape than ever. 107 Here is how McLeod unabashedly described his modus operandi: "We're trying to narrow ourselves to an area we can

make profitable. ,,108

• • 321 To former staffers of the once underground paper, who see McLeod as selling out his ideals, the editor deserves no praise for keeping the paper alive at the expense of its radical political content. This critique is straightforward enough. However, when the critique focuses on the loss of the "old" Georgia Straight, a curious emotional inversion appears to occur. One critic, for example, claimed to be astounded by the "hypocrisy" of the Georgia Straight's twentieth anniversary celebrations: "It's not even the same paper. ... As if you can totally change something, making it a totally irrelevant, totally spineless, gutless, worthless entertainment rag and then pretend it is a continuation of a combative, participatory, relevant [newspaper]. Jesus, it only took them twenty years to totally domesticate the Georgia Straight. ,,109

There does not seem, however, to be any pretence about the paper's (eminently establishment) stand or purpose - at least not on the part of McLeod, who was always more interested in profit than his staff were, as the stormy history of the paper's progress in the sixties abundantly illustrates. Neither is McLeod pretending to be anything other than delighted with the paper's financial survival and current success. What his critic calls domesticating the paper, to its owner is simple business solvency. But most important, what, from this nostalgic view, could possibly constitute the terms of victorv? If the Straight had died Iike the other underground papers, it could be fondly remembered, one supposes. Nostalgia operates as a distorting filter for the sixties radicals, distorting that group's own memories of the underground press. But this nostalgia requires victims, it requires individuals upon whom to project problems that are eminently social rather than individual, problems that arise and • exist in the organizing of community rather than in individual strengths or • 322 weaknesses. Dan McLeod does not present an argument for or against anything, he simply iIIustrates the "success" value of conformity; in terms of establishment values he (Iike the other publishers and editors of the underground press later accused of having sold out) is a living tautology. By enemy-izing the Iikes of McLeod, however, nostalgie radicals perhaps hope to keep their disillusionment from contaminating their ideals. The obfuscating imperatives of nostalgia, finally, are not entirely the ''fault'' of the erstwhile radicals themselves. Staffers at the sixties Georgia Straight did fight McLeod's agenda. There were various challenges within the context of the Straight newsroom (including a feminist occupation of the newsroom to produce the Straight's only feminist issue.) lt was disgruntled Straight staffers who abandoned the paper to found an alternative, the Georgia Grape. Mordecai Briemberg, one of those who defected to the underground Grape, (and who continued to roll with the punches, later becoming a writer and broadcaster for co-op radio in Vancouver), believes that the establishment press worked (and continues to work) to distort the memory of the sixties, and the meaning of its activism. He said the establishment media were trying to convey: "... a sense that it was a freak movement in history, that most people who were part of it have changed their ideas about il. They are trying to disconnect people from that authentic experience of optimism and social possibility in order to better control them simply by making them more despondent about what human beings can dO."11O

1agree with Briemberg, with one qualification: The conveyance of this idea has required on the part of the individuals who comprise the establishment press not so much effort as massive abdication. The impression of the sixties and sixties press as a freak phenomenon does not need to be intended in any conspiratorial way in order to be • conveyed. It simply requires on the part of individuals an overriding 323 • intention to fit in or succeed in terms of what already exists, what Lippmann called the desire to get on in the world. Briemberg's perspective nevertheless remains valuable. From this viewpoint, the legacy of the underground press is part of an ongoing, historical, culture of dissent. It showed what people with liUle training could and did accomplish in the field of journalistic dissent. The idea that dissent died with the sixties is part of the suppression of dissent, a legacy of the straight press and society, despite the turning inward of the counterculture veterans - known as the New Age - after the sixties. "In the early Seventies, the journey to the interior preoccupied a good haIf of my old movement friends.... It was our Ghost Dance. Systems that some took up for the temporary Iicking of wounds, or anesthesia, for others became subslitute faiths, self-enclosures extending the movement's now obsolete self-enclosure."II'

The sociallegacy of the underground press - its legacy in terms of what it willed, or intended, to create - was increased awareness of the ignored aspects of American society - racism, militarism, police and political repression, social injustice. The underground press did not create the problems it covered, or the response that coverage elicited. Its primary intellectuallegacy was polilical consciousness-raising. The New Age is the receptacle and extenuation of this turning inward, proscribing as it does an assiduously apolitical spin on the issues, and promoting purely individual solutions (which work of course only in inverse relation to the magnitude of the individual's problem and address not at ail the nature of the social relations at the root of the problem.) As such, it is no legacy of the underground press, which brought a critical framework to newswriting. The New Age concentration on individual solutions scuUles the political in favor of the persona!. It reinforces social • isolation and a-political analyses by proceeding from a more primitive • 324 stage of political awareness - of the personal as distinct or separate from, and finally as a kind of disillusioned substitute for, the political. Gitlin called the New Age a form of absorption "that pleases pluralists as much as it infuriates the apostles ofa humanity reborn. ,,112 But Gitlin also noted that the sixties are not finished, and that the spark of resistance remains, with new movements for change waiting to happen. What makes the form of these new movements unpredictable is the fact that ail movements for change must to some degree re-invent their language, reclaim and recreate it again and again. In fact, Gitlin wrote, new pockets of resistance were bound to emerge, but such movements: "... do not necessarily spring from the old social categories or speak the old languages ­ at least not if they are alive to their moment."113

If there is a lesson for journalistic integrity in this story of the underground papers of the sixties, it is that those who wish to live by (practise) valid ideals must be ready to sacrifice sedating illusions.

• 325 • NOTES - SECTION D

1. Leamer, 51.

2. Eric Utne, "Our Story," Ume Reader Mar.-Apr. 1994: 56.

3. Utne, 52.

4. Verzuh, Underground 215-216.

5. Utne, 53.

6. 1 had an interesting experience in this regard one day early in September 1994, when 1was asked by an editor at the Canadian Press to translate a story into English from the Journal de Montreal. The story relayed how the separatism fight had gone high-tech with an exchange between contending parties appearing on an Internet news group exchange. The adolescent nature of the "electronic debate" was about as new as Confederation itself. It had the original ''writer'' inciting ail "loyal Canadians" to take up arms against sovereigntists should Quebec choose to separate from Canada, and his respondent advising him that if he didn't Iike the situation in Quebec, he could always take the 401; the original writer then responded in kind, advising his adversary to go back to France. Here's the journalistically interesting part: The Canadian Press, the country's national wire service "co-operative", with over 100 member papers across the country, has no access to the Internet. In order to avoid advertising that fact, 1was forced to write an unbylined story as a straight "pick-up" from the Journal piece, even though 1had managed to contact one of the electronic debaters and interviewed several other people about the story. Instead of investigating, 1 ''fudged'' (or obscured) the fact that 1was telling less than 1knewand had found out. Moreover, 1was, ironically, translating into English the French translation of the original (English) - the global language of the global Internet. (1 have since proposed a story on Who Owns the Internet, but may not get to write it, at least not under the auspices of CP, since the "issue" is Iikely the "turf' of another CP writer.)

7. Utne, 54-55. • 8. Jay Walljasper, Utne Reader 182. • 326 9. Jeremy Oison, Utne Reader 134.

10. Utne Reader, Mar.-Apr. (1994) 56-57. The magazine cited nine other examples of alternative publications that had ceased publication since 1984:

- Across Frontiers. Before the fall of the Communist bloc, this magazine was a vital source of news on political movements in . It also published writing from samizdat journals. - Clinton Street Quarterly. The quarterly ran Iiterary pieces, essays, humor and social and political reportage and opinion. - Medical Self-Care, an alternative-health and self-care publication. - Greenpeace, which ran environmental news. - Nuclear Times, which died in 1992, after the end of the Cold War, substantial nuclear arms cuts, the end of in South Africa, and a shaky peace in Central America. - Design Spirit, a Brooklyn-based magazine for architects that published quarterly during its brief existence in the early nineties. It stressed the spiritual and environmental aspects of design. - New Options, a one-man publication, eight-year newsletter that folded in 1991. Editor wanted to break through leftlright ideological frames, and took on many topies. - Michigan Voice, the brainchild of Michael Moore, was a working-class magazine, unfailingly irreverent and critical of the economic system. - Tarrytown Letter provided a forum for new ideas. It was a newsletter, founded by Bob Schwartz that dealt largely with the ideas of those he thought were culture's true revolutionaries. Presented the work of thinkers Iike T.S. Kuhn, and Joseph Campbell.

11. Richard A. Schwarzlose, Newspapers: A Reference Guide (New York: Greenwood, 1987) 143.

12. Elliott Shore, Patricia J. Case and Laura Daly, eds., Alternative Papers: Selections trom the Alternative Press, 1979-1980 (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1982).

13. Gitlin, Sixties, 336.

14. Glessing, 147. • 15. Tom Miller, quoted in Peck, 313. • 327 16. Walljasper, 182. 17. See Tikkun 9.4 (July-Aug. 1994) 24-34, for a "roundtable" discussion of the politics of meaning and the criticism that such is not a suitable political focus. Participating in the roundtable discussion were: . Todd Gitlin, Hazel Henderson, Robert F. Drinan, Michael Lemer, Mary Edsall, Peter Gabel and .

18. Walljasper, 182-183.

19. Walljasper, 183.

20. Walljasper, 183.

21. Walljasper, 183.

22. ''Ten Events that Shook the World: The Biggest News Stories of the Past Decade Appeared First in the Altemative Press," Utne Reader Mar.-Apr. 1994, 58-74. The top ten stories cited: - 'The Fall of Communism and Rise of Nationalism, and Coming of Devolutionism," by Thomas S. Martin. Excerpted from Utne Reader (Nov/Dec. 1988); reprinted from Progressive Review (Feb. 1988). - "Environmental Crisis and the Green Movement," by Jonathon Porritt. Excerpted from Utne Reader (Nov/Dec. 1989); reprinted from the Scottish magazine One Earth (Winter 1988). - "AlOS and the Gay Response," by Edward Comish. Excerpted from Ulne (Aug/Sept. 1986). Reproduced with permission from The Futurist (JanlFeb.1986). - 'War and the ," by E. P. Thompson. Excerpted from Utne (June/July 1985) from the book Beyond the Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982). - "Gender War," by Robert Bly. ln Utne (Dec. 1984-Jan. 1985); reprinted from speech by permission of author. - "Reaganism, Racial Tension and the Rise of the Underclass," by Comel West. Excerpted in Utne (SepVOct. 1991); also published in Dissent (Spring 1991). From the book Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). - 'West Meets East," by April Wolff. Excerpted in Utne (Nov/Dec. 1987). - "Baby Boomers Come of Age and Generation X Sounds Off," by Julie Phillips. Excerpted in Utne (May/June 1988); from Seattle Weekly (Nov. • 19,1986). • 328 - "Globalism," by David Morris. Excerpt in Utne (Nov/Dec. 1988). - ''The Computer Revolution" by Wendell Berry. Excerpt in Utne (Mar.- . Apr. 1990). Appeared in Breadloaf Quarterly/New England Review (Autumn 1987) and in Harper's (Sept. 1988).

23. Gitlin, Sixties 431.

24. Gloria Steinem, "Sex, Lies and Advertising," Moving Beyond Words (New York: Simon, 1994) 125-168..

25. Steinem, Moving 162.

26. G. Pascal Zachary, Wall Street Joumal 6 Feb. 1992. See also: Jon Swan, "The Crumbling Wall," Columbia Joumalism Review May/June 1992: 23.

27. Navasky quoted in Verzuh, Underground 218. See also: Victor Navasky, ''The Role of the Critical Joumal," Nation 8 June 1985: 698­ 702.

28. The Vancouver underground Georgia Straight for example is thought to have been at least partially responsible for getting vagrancy laws out of the Criminal Code. See Verzuh, Underground 251.

29. Germaine Greer, The Madwoman's Underclothes (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1987) xxiii-xxiv.

30. It. the early sixties authorities had not yet co-opted drugs. In the nineties, it's in the bag: Drug companies make millions off insanely destructive cancer and AlOS drugs while the Quebec legislature passes a motion unanimously to renounce the greedy uncaring pharmaceutical companies (Dec.1, 1993). Sociologists follow with interest the progress of a Iittle town in Oregon, where of a total population of 800, 600 people are on Prozac, while the mass media busies itself with the most sensational (rather than routine) evidence of the drug's abuse and abusiveness. A psychiatrist trying to promote a newer version of Prozac (trade-name Zoloft) tells me the UN health organization WHO has taken a position on the bright new antidepressants: Anyone who has more than two depressive "incidents" should be prescribed these drugs for life, as a matter of "medical" authority. When 1try to check this out, the story evaporates. The head of the Canadian Psychiatrie Association has never heard of this resolution, and neither has anyone • at WHO. The story that should have run but never did would have • 329 investigated these tacts, naming the said psychiatrist. Instead, 1get to write, about a year later, what 1cali the dip-stick version of the Prozac story: the condescending "Iifestyles teature" based on the testimony of happy Prozac imbibers, ail temale, whose indulgence no doubt allows them to maintain stultifying and self-destructive home and work lives on which the status quo, constantly reinforced in the Big Mirror of the major media, depends.

31. See Robert Draper's Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored His\Q!:ï (New York: Doubleday, 1990).

32. Michael Arien, Living-Room 108.

33. Peter Stoler, The War 205.

34. Stoler, 11.

35. Henry, W. A, "Joumalism Under Fire," Time 12 Dec. 1983: 76.

36. Stoler, 6.

37. The same is true of individual joumalists, where the normalizing of concentrated ownership is intemalized (and must be intemalized to allow the individual reporters to produce the kind of copy required by their media owners). Concentrated ownership is no longer viewed as problematic because it obtains. Many times, in many conversations with colleagues, 1have raised this issue. The usual response is a disbelieving shrug (What planet did she come trom?) accompanied by the words: 'Weil, 1mean, that's the way it is.

38. Stoler, 7.

39. Mark Czamecki, "Readers tor Sale," This Magazine Aug. 1984: 11­ 14.

40. Stoler, 182-183.

42. Stoler, 167.

43. Marilyn Lashner, The Chilling Effect in lV News: Intimidation by the Nixon White House (New York: Praeger, 1984). • 44. Lashner, 46. • 330 45. See: Joseph Gold, Read for Your Life: Literature as a Lite Support System (Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry, 1990).

46. William E. Porter, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years (Minnesota: U of Michigan P, 1976).

47. Eve Pell, The Big Chili (Boston: Beacon, 1984).

48. Jody Powell, The Other SiM of the StOry (New York: Morrow, 1984).

49. Stoler, 134.

50. Stoler, 178. The same thing happened in Canada in the eighties and the move elicited insightful criticism from Don McGillivray, one of this country's most under-sung joumalists.

51. Stoler, 176.

52. Stoler, 64-68.

53. Boylan, 33.

54. Boylan, 33.

55. Boylan, 36.

56. Boylan, 37.

57. Boylan, 37.

58. On Thursday, Sept. 8, 1994, shortly after a story broke about Canada's blood screening system and its inadequacies (which were responsible for more than a thousand people contracting the AlOS virus) 1was sent by my bureau chief at the Canadian Press to the Oueen Elizabeth hotel to try to track down Canadian Health Minister Diane Marleau, who was giving the keynote speech to a conference on aging. 1had not been covering the story, but had a Iist of questions from a reporter in Ottawa, who was covering the story, to ask Marleau. l was then to relay by CP message wire to the Ottawa bureau Marleau's responses to the questions. Marleau was incapable of answering any of the questions, but that did not prevent her from speaking. Since "1 • don't know" or even "1 don't know but 1'11 find out" is apparently not an • 331 acceptable or appropriate answer from political functionaries, Marleau said instead, not once, but three times: "1 want ta reassure the Canadian public that the blood supply was never in jeopardy." When 1 asked Marleau 'Weil then how did a thousand people get the AlOS virus?" she answered: 'Weil, 1don't know what happened before Nov. 4 (1993, when she became health minister) because 1wasn't there, but l ' do want ta say ta the Canadien people that the blood supply system was at no point in jeopardy." This may appear of little consequence, since people generally by now expect their politicians ta speak as trained seals and utter the most bald-faced and self-evident trash, and are rarely disappointed. What ought ta appear more significant, however, is how this lie about the blood supply system made it into an unbylined CP article out of Ottawa on Monday, Sepl. 12, the day of the Quebec election. The quote formed the second paragraph of the story. No criticism, no commentary, no quote from an oppositional source stood in the way of this lie. It is at least conceivable (tram the most generous perspective 1 can muster) that whoever wrote the article believed that the lie would speak for itself (Marleau is known among Ottawa's CP reporters as the dumbest woman in cabinet) - that people would read it and know once and for ail that the health minister is intent on Iying to the public. But even if this fiction stands ta absolve the reporter in question, it does not negate the conditioning effects of newspapers repeating lies uncontested, even in the form of attributed quotes from authorities, on the newspaper reading public. This "technique" normalizes the Iying of politicians ta the public. By such "techniques", and examples are unfortunately sa legion as to be routine rather than legendary, the press, though surely not single-handedly or "knowingly", aids and abets the process whereby language is severed from the possibility of meaning.

59. Boylan, 45.

60. Joyce Nelson, Sultans of Sleaze: Public Relations and the Media (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1989) 150-151.

61. Stoler, 83. See also: Lashner, 62 and Michael Schudson,' 'Watergate: A Study in Mythology," Columbia Joumalism Review May­ June 1992: 28-33.

62. There are no studies ta show how weil this superficial change worked - that is what newspaper readers think about it or how they • respond ta il. It did not work, however, ta stem the decline in • 332 readership. 1 personally find this tone of false intimacy and camaraderie, rampant among establishment reporters, most c10ying and . distasteful.

63. Mitchell Stephens, A History of News (New York: Viking, 1988) 264.

64. See Dan Schiller's Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Joumalism (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1981).

65. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic, 1978).

66. Schudson, Discovering 4.

67. Schudson, Discovering 5.

68. Scnudson, Discovering 5.

69. While the development of the fact-value split was one with reots in the seventeenth century, when it began to grow "... increasingly unfashionable to see the universe or world or nature or 'the facts' as implicating values" it was only with the twentieth century that the "fact­ value split became a truism and that the split began to entail the helplessness of reason in dealing with any values but the calculalion of means to ends." Wayne C. Booth, Modem Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974) 14-15.

70. In the sixties, two influenlial books fortified the view of reality as socially constructed. These were Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962); and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Realitv (New York: Doubleday, 1966).

71. Schudson, Discovering 7.

72. Halberstam, Powers 182-83.

73. Schudson, Discovering 10.

74. Stephens, History 264. • 75. Karl Manoff, Reading the News (New York: Pantheon, 1986) 228. • 333 76. Stephens, History 266.

77. Stephens, History 268.

78. Stephens, History 270.

79. James D. Squires presented a lucid socio-economic analysis of the newspaper business in his book Read Ali About Il: The Coroorate Takeover of America's Newspapers (New York: Random, 1993).

80. Stephens, History 270.

81. Dickstein, 136.

82. David Watson, "Against Forgetting: Without Memory, Stories Die, Utne Reader Mar.-Apr. 1994: 112-115. (Reprinted from The New Intemationalist, Sepl1993).

83. David Watson, 114. Watson's critique is directed primarily at television. Since the emergence of the corporate market system, he argues, television has become the key instrument for consumer culture worldwide: ''Television f1attens, disconnects, and renders incoherent people's own experiences and history. Its seemingly meaningful pastiche of images works best to sell commodities - objects devoid of any history. But most importantly, lV also affirms the whole universe of commodity consumption as the only life worth living. Wherever the set is tumed on, local culture implodes.... Though it is sold as a tool that could preserve memory, television utterly fragments and colonizes. What remains is a cult of the perpetuai present, in continuai giddy motion. ... Perspective evaporates. Historical memory is now becoming what was televised, while the commons of the mind is receding."

84. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Viking, 1981).

85. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1969).

86. Ervin Eatenson, Library Journal 94 (1 Feb. 1969): 550, in a review of Frank Luther Mott's A History of American Magazines (Cambridge: • Harvard UP, 1957). • 334 87. Robert A. Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York: Random, 1975). Reed was bom in 1887 in Portland, Oregon. He was almost 33 when he died in 1920 (of typhus in Moscow. He was buried at the Kremlin). His book (published 1919) is considered the best eyewitness account of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Reed helped found the communist Labor party in the U.S. He was part of the bohemian scene in Greenwich Village, and a friend of Lincoln Steffens and Walter Lippmann.

88. L. Susan Brown, "Anarchism, Feminism, Liberalism and Individualism," Our Generation 24.1 (Spring 1993): 22-61.

89. L. Susan Brown, 23.

90. Here Brown is citing C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) which treats Iiberalism as possessive individualism.

91. L. Susan Brown, 24.

92. L. Susan Brown, 24.

93. L. Susan Brown, 26.

94. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho- (London: Pluto, 1989) 21.

95. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (New York: Dover, 1970) 246.

96. See Mikhail Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin (New York: Free Press, 1953) 326; Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Montreal: Black Rose, 1989); and Alexander Berkman, ABC of Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1977) 29, where Berkman argues that for the anarchist ''freedom can exist only in a society where there is no compulsion of any kind."

97. Emma Goldman, probably the best known of the early anarchists in America. Goldman criticized sexism from an anarchist perspective. She wrote and spoke in the United States from the tum of the century until her iIIegal deportation to Russia in 1919. She died in exile in Canada in • 1940. • 335 98. Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969) 67.

99. Emma Goldman, Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (New York: Schocken, 1983) 112.

100. Emma Goldman, Red Emma 120.

101. Emma Goldman, Red Emma 222.

102. Leamer, 162-163.

103. Jann Wenner, quoted in Leamer, 163.

104. Gene Marine, "Chicago - And Beyond," Rolling Stone 2 Apr. 1970: 50.

105. Leamer, 163.

106. Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (New York: DIJubleday, 1990).

107. Verzuh, Underground 220-221.

108. Verzuh, Underground 221.

109. Ken Lester, former Georgia Straight staffer, quoted in Verzuh, Underground 222.

110. Briemberg, quoted in Verzuh, Underground 223.

111. Gitlin, Sixties 426.

112. Gitlin, Sixties 438.

113. Gillin, Sixties 38. • • 336 CONCLUSIONS

The rise of the underground press of the sixties in the United States answered to and refiected the rise of a burgeoning political counterculture. As many crities have noted, the sixties generally were a time when polities came to the fore. The underground papers that emerged in mid-decade helped Iink geographically diverse individuals and communities; they helped to create the movement and rapidly became its major voice. The movement itself, however, was a response to official repression (a response based on enlarged political awareness that allowed people to recognize the repression as a political matter). It was experience, not underground newspapers, that radicalized a minority of people during the sixties decade. This applies not only to the underground journalists (who legitimated and reinforced political resistance in their writing) but as weil to people generally, including overgrour.d journalists. For example, people who were beaten by police at war protests during the 1968 Democratie convention, including straight reporters, were Iikely to be disturbed by the experience, whatever their views on the war or the counterculture. For such an experience made manifest in a personally painful way, the gap between the ideals of democracy and the facts of repression. While it was (is) the experience/recognition of repression that radicalizes people, it is Iiterary resistance that attempts to elucidate and articulate the meaning of that radicalism, and by so doing reinforces and furthers that meaning. History portrays the underground press of the sixties as an aberrant phenomenon; it also concentrates on the divisions among the underground papers and its "failures" while de-emphasizing its cohesion • and its success, measured not only by the success of the underground • 337 papers but as weil by the growth and spread of alternative publications following the demise of the underground press and the countercultural movements of the sixties. Most commentaries on the sixties radicals and their press focus unrelentingly on style as content. Gay Talese for example "explained" the youth revoit against authority as having gained notice or ''fleeting influence" through "some mysterious combination of electronics and histrionics in a synthetic age.,,1 Like Wolfe's Interpretation of the new journalism as exclusively a matter of style, such Interpretations de­ historicize the meaning of the underground press of the sixties in particular, and the voices of dissent generally. ln terms of the quality of Gournalistic Iiterature in) the underground press, 1have argued that the underground press, with ail its inconsistencies and fertile confusion, did no! die because of its deficiencies, and further, that even if it were as bad as its critics say, it wouId still have (and have hadj a right to exist. Moreover, the underground papers would have improved in quality overall if they had survived, in fact did improve in the form of the alternative publications that are the phenomenon's major and most direct legacy. Finally, History has a way of obscuring the recognition of quality in the underground papers by refusing to record that press, or admit it to History. The Village Voice serves to iIIustrate this process, and the fact that no conspiracy is required to set the process in motion. The Voice won recognition for its journalistic efforts, deservedly so since it was the Voice which led the way in taking the first steps to a less restrictive language policy in newspaper writing. While it is true that the Voice adopted this policy in a more coherent fashion (to further its journalistic • development) than the underground press generally (which adopted a • 338 similar policy in order to oppose Authority), that is not the only reason the Voice can now be cited as providing more (consistently) better journalistic writing than the average underground did. For History does not seek to preserve that which seeks to re-write History. Perhaps much of the good writing that there was in the underground papers is lost to History, not codified in its pantheon, because it was not associated with an individual paper that like the Voice survived (financially, while maintaining some critical difference from) the capitalist press environment. The alternative "quality" of the Voice, moreover, remains constituted in this difference, not in the fact that it survived financially, as a capitalist History must needs interpret il. The underground press did not simply fade away, it was suppressed. And while it may have fallen, the sixties underground press did not fail. It achieved its purpose, which was to give voice to radical criticism and the desire for radical change. Its major legacy was the alternative press that grew up in its wake, but its idealism and activism, or their legacy, is also expressed more indirectly, as a sociallegacy of the same idealism that precipitated the underground papers. Following the civil rights and anti-war activism of the sixties, came a proliferation of community based groups tha! embodied the idealism of the earlier period, and with considerably more lucidity - the feminist, anti-nuclear and gay­ rights movements of the seventies and eighties are some obvious examples.2 The impact of the underground press on the establishment press was largely cosmetic, and in terms of content, negligible. Mainstream daily newspapers are visually more pleasing than they were in the sixties, somewhat 1005er and more playfullanguage is now permitted, and • coverage has widened somewhat - there is more substantial coverage • 339 (though still very much lacking) of the gay-rights movement now for example than there was of the counterculture by the straight press during the sixties. These changes have occurred, however, largely in response to the continuing loss of readership of the establishment press, and more peripherally, because massive social movements for change were occurring and could not easily be discounted as not-newsworthy. The most substantial changes for the establishment daily press, therefore, have occurred in line with its own capitalist logic, not in line with the advocacy journalism of the sixties. Though the overground press adopted some of the language and look of the sixties press, it rejected the content of that press and shared none of its idealism. The sixties journalists atlacked the ideology of objectivity, but that ideology appears to have returned with a vengeance, along with a new technology (the computer networks) that are bound to be the site of future batlles over access. Individualism made a brief comeback in the sixties, but in the nineties has a worse reputation than ever (for its nearly across-the-board reference to the ruggad individualism of capitalism). There was enough idealism in thG sixties to make defences of investigative reporting at least readable to the mainstream press; the nineties newsroom is abjectly cynical about investigative reporting. In fact, it is a mark of "professionalization" in the contemporary newsroom to have given up on investigative efforts - or even questions, that is, to regard such efforts as motivated by a valid ideal, but in practice, unpracticable. ln other words, the gap between ideal and practice is accepted as inevitable or "natural" and so not problematic (since a problem is a mental operation that presupposes a solution; if a problem has no conceivable solution, it is not a bona fide problem, but simply an unhappy fact.) • Objectivity remains the single stated ideal of the straight press, but even 340

• where the term is any longer in usage, it is still employed with no sense of the term's complexity or history, and certainly with no hint of reference to the substantial critiques of objectivity during the sixties. The net effects of this capitalist press logic include a press even more despised by the public than it was in the sixties; even more vulnerable to Iibel suits and other legal measures, as weil as their threat; wherein a profoundly enculturated anti-investigative bias obtains, in response to the fear of arousing official disfavor; with a severely "streamlined" journalistic base; and finally, a press suffering from a virtual absence of the "competition" that was supposed (it used to be argued) to ensure diversity in the nation's newspapers. By virtually ail accounts, including those of "insiders", the contemporary newsroom is in a sad state indeed. Yet it has been in such astate since before the advent of the underground press of the sixties. As early as 1959, the establishment press was criticized for maintaining, through a diet of half-truths and distortion, a chronic condition of credulily among the receiving and media-deferring public.3 Ben Bagdikian, writing a3 early as 1972, admirably summarized the nature and scope of the pr.:>blem: "Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is Iike trying to play Bach's Saint Matthew Passion on a ukulele: the instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer.... Some of the demoralizing practices in newspaperdom range from idiocy to mere habit.'04

By 1ge4, media critics were reiterating Lippmann's insight (usually without reference to it), explaining the major problem of the press - the greatest obstacle to its ''freedom'' - as one of careerism among ils • reporters: 341

• "The greatest danger today is not the ideological predisposition of reporters, as many believed during the Viet Nam War, but rampant careerism.... A lot of the younger journalists have grasped the popular image of journalism in this new age and are in it for the celebrity, the money and the power. ,,5

More recent criticisms of the daily press already considered, also revert to previous defences of the press by advising such as objectivity for realists (essentially more facts, not new or other facts) and a public campaign to defend the private rights of the mass press. One particularly paranoid critic of the underground and alternative press regarded these publications as a kind of social pestilence, a foreign substance that stands, if not stamped out, to contaminate American society and institutions. Francis M. Watson, in The Alternative Media: Dismantling Two Centuries of Progress, introduced his book with the following comment: "This study of the alternative press examines one of the principal wellsprings of cultural pestilence. The designation, alternative press, ref!ects the common denominator of a host of otherwise disparate publications, ail of them committed to the radical alteration or elimination of the traditional American institutions. Thus malevolent - iII-wishing - is a precise description of this sector of the press. ,,6

Watson cited three basic reasons for undertaking the work: first, that many true-blooded Americans remain unaware of the threat posed by alternative media, of the "existence and scope of the alternative press"; second, that the establishment press is being contaminatea by the alternatives, having "consistently publicized and often eventually advocated the views and the campaigns proposed by the alternative press"; and finally, that the individuals and organizations targeted by the • alternatives are "usually unaware" that they are targeted and so fail to • 342 respond to the threat in time, that is, leaving the cancer of "alternatives" to spread. Watson added that he hoped the book would prove useful "to those charged with responsibiiities for the success of private enterprise

and the other institutions of a free society. ,,7 Yet even this most uncomprehending of critics underlined, albeit unwittingly, the continued importance of idealism to the project of the press. Watson was clearly frustrated by the conviction in their ideals apparently and avowedly enjoyed by the alternatives, and in the passage cited below, expresses a curiously personal resentment against what he regards as the alternatives' attempt to associate themselves (against the mainstream) with idealism per se.: ''Those who have advocated the alternatives have invariably done so under the banners of the loftiest and most fervent idealism.... And too often, the E'~orts of the traditional institutions of society to block each new .alternative' campaign have been justified with arguments of practical, not idealistic considerations.... Having pre-empted ail virtue, the alternative movement simply cannot tolerate opposition based on a claim of idealism and must marshal ail forces to obliterate anyone so rash as to insist that an .alternative' cause is unjust or unethical.,,8

Unfortunately, Watson did not take himself to task on this matter: He did not, for example, cite a particular "alternative" cause and argue that it was unethical while claiming to be the contrary. His statements are opinions (statements not supported by evidence or reasoning), not arguments. In fact, the book purports to be an investigative effort in the service of the status quo - Watson hoped to provide authorities with information that would help them keep tabs on the alternative press so they couId keep its perspectives from gaining a larger hearing. In view of the concerted efforts by government and policing authorities to suppress • the underground and alternative press, Watson's appraisal of that press • 343 as a creeping, dissimulating and largely secretive or conspiratorial phenomenon and one moreover with the power to "obliterate" its critics, is almost laughable. "Revolution now" - the motto of the underground press - is fairly straightforward; the underground press never tried to position itself as anything other than an enemy of the establishment. Yet Watson too believed himself in the right, that is, he believed himself speaking for an idea\. C1early, for Watson, that ideal was the . status quo. But the status quo, conceptually speaking, can not constitute a valid ideal, becausb it "contains" no argument, but only the pseudo­ argument (hence, pseudo-ideal) that what already is equals what should be. The (theoretical) validity of an ideal is based on its content; the argument it makes (the reasoning it marshals) ensues from its overall and prerequisite understanding that what is might be and in specific cases certainly ought to be, otherwise. Of course, a lack of fairness is common in establishment criticism of the sixties undergrounds, as of other radical movements. After ail, no one e~pects the straight press to be or act idealistically, to use the press to spread radical ideas. Its purpose is the contrary: to discourage and suppress radical sentiments and reasoning in itself as weil as among the population at large. The alternative is judged in terms of what ought to be, while the status quo is compared only to what is (as unalterable reality). The establishment daily press clearly - and daily - negates in practice the ideals its professes (or at least imagines stand to justify its existence). Although this potential is largely negated by the system of capitalism in which the newspaper exists, 1have been concerned here with what 1consider a much deeper phenomenon, that which makes the situation itself appear un-problematic: the widespread and apparently • deepening gulf, both conceptual and actual, between ideals and practice. • 344 For even sympathetic chroniclers of the sixties press evince an unrealistic (nostalgic) appreciation of the nature of idealism. Abe Peck, who though a member in good standing of the underground press wrote his much-quoted book on the subject only in the mid-eighties, argued that an alternative press had survived. What is "inescapably different" from the undergrounds of the sixties, he argued, is that now, the collective energy and confidence have declined. ''Too many lack the spark that comes with thinking your ideas are actually changing the world," Peck wrote.9 ln this apparently sympathetic appraisal, however, the theoretical necessity of idealism (in movements for change) is actually ceded. For by this implicit Interpretation of idealism as a kind of pristine window­ dressing, Peck supports Iwo contradictory understandings of its worth: the value of idealism (of thinking your ideas can change the world) versus the "unreality" of idealism, as if its value consists in the protective illusion or even delusion it provides, of thinking ideas can change the world, as opposed to the actual elucidation of ideals, the using of those ideals to change the world. 1have tried here to advance a contrary view of the sixties underground press as a single chapter in the history of dissenting publications in the United States, and to present their opposition to the mainstream as an attempt to recall America to its own founding radical ideal of democracy. Though the sixties papers spoke a different language, they too opposed capitalism, not in an attempt to jettison or negate the value of democracy, but because they believed as earlier critics had, and contemporary critics do, that capitalism precludes and negates democracy. A free (democratic) press in a capitalist society is a • contradiction in terms. • 345 The journalistic idealism of the sixties underground press was its belief (eminently traditional in America's free press ideology) that society could be improved if its iIIs were exposed (made visible). Its emphasis on content was in fact a long-espoused value of its adversary, the establishment press. What happened to the journalistic idealism of the . sixties underground press is also the central question of this work. The answeris as varied as the people who participated in the sixties movement generally, and in its underground press more particularly. For some, the idealism that once provided direction never recovered from the official rape of that idealism. In other cases, the idealism matured and continues to bear fruit, though not necessarily in the form of journalistic writing. Like previous movements for change, the phenomenon of the sixties press underlined the essential problem of how to achieve change as one intimately related to the gap between theory or ideal, and practice. The problem was how to make the personal political. The sixties struggles against privilege and oppression expressed a convergence of the personal and the political; the radicals sought personal Iiberation and the just society; these were not separate goals, and that was the point of the nmovementn. Thus, it is hardly surprising that: n... the central dilemma experienced again and again by 5ixties activists was posed by their combination of prefigurative and instrumental politics: how can one act in a way that is both true to one's vision and politically effective.. 1110

The sixties press grew out of the idealism, energy and community of its large youth culture. The energy of the counterculture was usurped (used up in fighting brutal repression) and its communities, and the • newspapers that served and represented them, were destroyed. The • 346 idealism that inspired the underground papers of the sixties (which inspired experimentation in other areas as weil) was raped. Energy and community have met a similar fate throughout history: the repression of dissident opinion, and the control of information generally, is a constituent goal of ail goveming elites and even more generally of ail civilizations (which are as Walter Benjamin noted simultaneously records of barbarism). Yet idealism is a more troublesome entity for the forces of social control (than even energy and community), since it is born again in every generation. Each generation must be inducted into the status quo in order for the status quo to prevail. Unless meaning can be ultimately destroyed (through the destruction of collective and individual memory) idealism will remain a problem for those charged with or embracing the imperatives of the status quo, just as the effecting of ideals (the enacting of them) will remain a problem for those who harbor ideals. It is official History, not discourse, that makes idealism seem misguided throughout History. Just as offset printing enabled the explosion in the sixties of underground papers made on somebody's kitchen table, the availability of desktop publishing on home computers presents an opportunity today. Yet the seizing of the opportunity depends on the ideals that inspire the usage, not, primarily, the available technologies employed as instrument. The technological advances represented by offset printing were after ail . employed not only by the underground press, but as weil by the tabloid entertainment "rags" and the established daily press. Along with the new wave and punk rock music that followed the popular music of the sixties generation, came new underground-Iike publications, the fanzines or • zines as they are known. The zines too are city-based and serve a local 347 • counlercullural community, though of relatively smaller numbers than those of the sixties. These too suffer the hackneyed criticism of mainstream press and crilics for not being the mainslream press or aspiring to il; and sadly, also from a portion of the sixties veterans (ostensibly for not being "political"). One critic even suggested that the fanzines might become the underground of the nineties, but that they also

might, Iike the sixties papers, become "the victims of their own idealism".Il Yet idealism is the very basis of movements for change. The technologies of the so-called information revolution change the instrumental options of idealism, a fact certainly not lost on people (young and old) now moving entirely away from paper-based news and toward burgeoning "electronic" networks. The Internet now services millions of people (of generally middle-class status) worldwide. If ideals of press freedom, however, are not smployed in determining the future shape of public media, then the remarkabl.g potential of worldwide electronic communications will not amount to an advance (in terms of the ideal). Wilhoul a concerted battle for the rights of equal access to the global networks and within the press for a revived devotion to truth (rather than the protective cover of objectivity), the Inlernet (and the "information highway" generally) will become an even more untouchable version of the establishment press; moreover, it will Iikely be controlled by the owners of the eleclronic hardware (rather than the journalis:s who produce the content, which situation would at least contain the possibility that some form ofjournalistic principle might be brought to bear on the shape of the new media). People are already using the newest information technology, while rights of access remain inegalitarian and the ideal of a right to access is insidiously eroded. 12 Even the characterization of the new • media as an "information highway" negates their radical potential; the • 348 concept commoditizes information as the Industrial Revolution commoditized labor. (What use is a highway if you can not afford a car? And why should people have a rightto the private commodities "cars"? The concept redefines the tools of access as a matter of private competition rather than public concern, through its prior re-definition of information as a private matter: You getthe information you can pay for. What could be more "natural" in a'capitalist context?) Many questions are raised by the current work, many areas indicated for further research, including a comparison of the underground sixties press in the United States and in Canada, as part of the body of work on the nature of hegemony and its workings; more research on public-opinion polis to flesh out whatthe polis oversimplify (for example thatthe 1968 pollthat suggested the violence of the Democratie convention was approved of by a majority of Americans); further research on the underground press in Quebec (global traffic on the global Internet is after ail generally conducted in the global ), which begs volumes of ii:; own. But the most pressing area of further research indicated by the present study consists in or follows from these questions: What might the new information-technologies environment offer in terms of creating alternatives to the daily establf-;hment press? What kind of openings do these technological novelties represent in terms of redefining news and news production? Ithink the answers will have to be various, if they are to be answers at ail. For example, while llike the idea of a global network ofjOlJrnalists runnil1g a co-operative news organizalion on Internet (a sort of high-tech free-lance Iiberation army), 1believe an exclusive concentration on electronic-based news would backfire: it would be • tantamountto ceding the territory covered by the ideal (of freedom of • 349 speech and information), because it would suggest that those currently without the means to buy a computer and make use of the Internet's masses of data are not worth considering. It would undercut the ideal pf egalitarial'l access and simultaneously pave the way for the net's takeover by anti-journalistic hardware owners, with no hint of balanced powers in the form of even merely professed public-interest issues. Finally, the current work has led me to a more radical appreciation of the nature of language generally, and of the press specifically. The conceptual gap between theory (or ideal) and practice parallels the actual gap between language and reality, map and territory. If language is viewed as a kind of virtual reality system, the particular language of the press can be regarded as functioning to reinforce a kind of second-order dissociation of language from experience (that is, the press codifies or systematizes the gap between language and experience in its "mother tongue"). Further, the news, which is the raw data of History, also functions (as History itself) as environment. The initial gap between language and experience is in some senses unavoidable: Language does not inevitably mirror experience, but it does inevitably mediate il. (The fact that language does not automatically mirror or reflect experience is of course one of the reasons that writers keep writing.) The language of the press further mediates experience by its imposition of a particular framework viewed as the boundaries of reality. (Ali conceptual frameworks do this of course, but not ail frameworks are as narrow as that of the press. Moreover, effective analytical frameworks are effective precisely because they push the Iimits of the framework, encouraging the emergence of a broader one. The familiar feeling of Iightning insight that accompanies an apparently • sudden solution to a complex conceptual problem, results, 1believe, from • 350 this exceeding of the Iimits posed and assumed in the original analytical framework. Perhaps that is why Albert Camus expressed his belief in the value of press freedom with reference to the degradation of the idea of Iiberty.)13

1have argued that the specifie capitalist press mediates conceptual experience primarily by attenuating it (as do the other major integrated monopoly "languages" of capitalism). Its purpose is not to "enlarge a mind" but to subjugate it, to keep it from finding and using its voice. That is why ail movements for change (and even more generally, ail new generations) reclaim language as an essential part of their resistance. The process of reclaiming language is an ongoing one. (To cali a police officer a pig in the sixties, for example, was to reaffirm the collective will to resist oppression; to cali a police officer a pig today is to malign pigs.) The personal is the political - was the birthing insight of the sixties radicals and theïr press, though the adage was coined by feminists, for whom it held special (specifie) significance. How to enact the personal as political (or understand the political as personal) remains the technological question for ail Iiberatory projects. It is the persistent self­ asking of this question that conslitutes the emancipatory project of the sixties. The ongoing posing of this question represents not ignorance (not a deficit of understanding) but empowerment, which is, as one critic noted, "both a personal and communal experience.,,14 Il makes no sense to argue that the sixties press ''failed'' because it did not overthrow the establishment. It is the establishment, from this perspective, that has failed (to advance or defend a valid ideal). Thus thG question, how to enact the personal as polilical, remains the most important ongoing • social, philosophical and Iiterarv legacy of the sixties underground press. • 351 NOTES - CONCLUSIONS

1. Talese, 512-13.

2. Carl Boggs, Social Movements and Political Power: Emerging Forms . of Radicalism in the West (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1986) 39.

3. See Thomas Stanley Matthews, The Sugar PiII: An Essay on Newspapers (New York: Simon, 1959).

4. Ben Bagdikian, The Effete Conspiracy (New York: Harper, 1972) 15­ 16.

5. Georgie Anne Geyer, "Joumalists: The New Targets, the New Diplomats, the New Intermediary," The Responsibilities of Joumalism, ed. Robert Schmuhl (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1984) 76.

6. Francis M. Watson, Jr., The Altemative Media: Dismantling Two Centuries of Progress (Rockford: Rockford College Institute, 1979) 2.

7. Francis Watson, 2.

8. Francis Watson, 96.

9. Peck, 293.

10. Edward Morgan, 282.

11. Verzuh, Underground 225.

12. Robert Brehl, (Reprinted in the Montreal Gazette, 14 Oct. 1994) front page. "Despite talk of an information highway, half the world's population - 3 billion people - have never made a phone cali, delegates to the Tele-Com '94 conference heard this week."

13. Albert Camus, Resistance. Rebellion and Death (New York: Knopf, 1961) 88. "... freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the graduai degradation of the idea of liberty." • 14. Edward Morgan, 283. • BIBLIOGRAPHY

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