THE SCANLAN’S MONTHLY STORY (1970-1971): HOW ONE MAGAZINE INFURIATED A BANK, AN AIRLINE, UNIONS, PRINTING COMPANIES, CUSTOMS OFFICIALS, CANADIAN POLICE, VICE PRESIDENT AGNEW, AND PRESIDENT NIXON IN TEN MONTHS William Gillis November 2005 ii ©2005 William Gillis All Rights Reserved iii This thesis entitled THE SCANLAN’S MONTHLY STORY (1970-1971): HOW ONE MAGAZINE INFURIATED A BANK, AN AIRLINE, UNIONS, PRINTING COMPANIES, CUSTOMS OFFICIALS, CANADIAN POLICE, VICE PRESIDENT AGNEW, AND PRESIDENT NIXON IN TEN MONTHS BY WILLIAM GILLIS has been approved for the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and the College of Communication by _________________________________________ Patrick Washburn Professor of Journalism _________________________________________ Greg Shepherd Interim Dean, College of Communication iv Acknowledgments Were it not for the guidance, encouragement, and good cheer of my advisor and thesis committee chair, Patrick Washburn, this thesis would not exist. Many thanks also to Joe Bernt, who like Pat took interest in the Scanlan’s project from the very beginning, and pointed me in interesting and fruitful directions; and Bill Reader, who provided good advice about where to take this project—and my life—after completing my degree. I must thank Tom Hodson; without his efforts on my behalf, I surely would have left Scripps for another program. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues Andrew Huebner, Andy Smith, and Betsy Vereckey for taking interest in the project, editing the manuscript at various stages, and sharing ideas. Finally, a very special thank you to my parents. Their support—financial and otherwise—made this possible. v Table of Contents Page Chapter 1: Off the Ramparts and to the Barricades……………………………………1 Chapter 2: Pay the Buck and Turn the Page………………………………………...18 Chapter 3: “You Trust Your Mother But You Cut the Cards”…………………….37 Chapter 4: The Magazine the President Hated So Much…………………………..58 Chapter 5: Guerilla Warfare in the U.S.A. (and Canada)…………………………..76 Chapter 6: Farewell to Scanlan’s……………………………………………………..100 Appendix: Illustrations………………………………………………………………124 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..140 Abstract 1 Chapter One Off the Ramparts and to the Barricades In his 1974 memoir If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, former Scanlan’s Monthly co-editor Warren G. Hinckle III summarized the magazine’s ten-month, eight-issue appearance on U.S. newsstands from March 1970 to January 1971: During the short-lived Scanlan’s carnival I became engaged in [a] ridiculous battle with Spiro Agnew over the alleged pirating of a suspect memorandum from his office; was censored in Ireland; upbraided by the Bank of America for instructing love children how to counterfeit its credit cards; sued for one million dollars by the Chief of Police of Los Angeles; threatened by Lufthansa Airlines for an innocent editorial prank which they claimed cost them dearly, and also some other things happened.1 Few, if any, critics have accused Hinckle of understatement during his consistently controversial forty-year career in journalism. But some of the “other things” that happened to Scanlan’s were extraordinarily atypical. Besides the curious events he described above, the publication was also subject to a nationwide boycott by lithographers and printers who refused to work on the magazine’s eighth issue and threatened to sabotage it because it was “un- American,” as well as the seizure of that issue by Canadian police and U.S. Customs authorities. Scanlan’s also managed to infuriate President Richard Nixon, who requested an FBI investigation into its accusations against labor leaders whom Nixon invited to a meeting at the White House, demanded a lawsuit against the magazine, and ordered an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 1 Warren Hinckle, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 363. 2 audit of Scanlan’s and its stockholders. If a magazine’s achievements can be measured in part by whom and how many it infuriated in the shortest amount of time, then surely Scanlan’s deserves to be honored. In the midst of such special attention, Scanlan’s managed to print some of the most provocative muckraking journalism of its time. It tackled a bewildering array of topics: atrocities by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, the murder of a member of the Black Panther Party, Mexico-U.S. marijuana smuggling, the role of CBS in a failed invasion of Haiti, Mark Twain, the environment, Charles Manson, Russian pornography, the Mafia, counterfeit credit cards, and domestic guerilla warfare. Scanlan’s also published the first examples of Hunter S. Thompson’s now- celebrated “Gonzo journalism,” and two years before anyone outside of Washington, D.C., had heard of Watergate, it called for President Nixon’s impeachment. Scanlan’s’ escapades as well as its content were widely covered and reviewed in mainstream newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Columbia Journalism Review, New York, and Commonweal. Esteemed writers such as Tom Wolfe, Sol Stern, Studs Terkel, Graham Greene, Thomas Fleming, Jerry Mander, Richard Severo, Murray Kempton, and Auberon Waugh thought enough of Scanlan’s to write for the magazine. Scanlan’s was also an innovator. It eschewed advertising (when Scanlan’s did run an advertisement, it paid the advertiser, not the other way around), and relied completely on newsstand sales and subscriptions for revenue. It almost succeeded; before its disastrous eighth issue, the magazine was close to breaking even financially. 3 Longevity alone is not a measure of a magazine’s importance. Scanlan’s’ insistence on taking on and not backing down from power doomed it to an early death. But it was also that commitment to troublemaking muckraking that made the magazine great. Yes, it failed, but it failed spectacularly. The magazine, the characters who ran it and wrote for it, and its rise and fall were anything but dull. What’s more, Scanlan’s’ brushes with the U.S. government demonstrate the extent of the Nixon administration’s war on the dissident press. In later years Hinckle liked to say that it was the magazine that Richard Nixon hated the most. Whether Nixon truly felt that way cannot be proven, but his rancor for the magazine is well established. The story of Scanlan’s is a sobering lesson on how government power can be wielded to harass, and in some cases silence, the free press. Yet for all its famous names and notoriety, Scanlan’s is largely a forgotten publication. Those few who have heard of it probably first came across the title, as this author did, while reading about Thompson. The two major articles he wrote for Scanlan’s, “The Last Temptation of Jean-Claude Killy” and “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” were re-printed in his 1979 anthology of articles, The Great Shark Hunt.2 Today, a search for “Scanlan’s Monthly” in an Internet search engine yields hundreds of hits, of which the overwhelming majority are Web sites or pages devoted to Thompson. Following Thompson’s suicide in February 2005, Scanlan’s was cited in dozens of obituaries and summations of his career. As Scanlan’s co-founder Sidney E. Zion, now a 2 See Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979). 4 New York Post columnist, put it, “So it took Thompson’s shot in the head and the stories of his life to get Scanlan’s back in the paper.”3 Though Scanlan’s Monthly was mentioned in many Thompson retrospectives in February and March 2005, usually it was only referenced and not described, or assigned pat adjectives such as “edgy,” “maverick,” and “short- lived,” as well as “forgotten” and “obscure.”4 Even worse, its title is often misspelled “Scanlon’s”; even the San Francisco Examiner, which employed Hinckle for years, made that mistake shortly after Thompson’s death.5 Scanlan’s also has been erroneously referred to as a “literary journal,” a “short-lived sporting and contemporary magazine,” a “feisty, short-lived weekly,” and an “antiwar magazine.”6 Douglas Brinkley, who edited two volumes of Thompson’s correspondence and knows far more about Scanlan’s than the average Thompson eulogizer, wrote misleadingly in the introduction to one of those volumes, 3 Sidney Zion, “Searching in Vain for the Gonzo Legacy,” New York Daily News, February 24, 2005. 4 See Kyle Sheahen, “Magic Aura Defines Western Heroes,” Cornell Daily Sun, March 17, 2005 (accessed on line at www.cornellsun.com); Chris Morris, “Fear and Loathing,” Billboard, October 22, 1996 (accessed on line at www.erin.utoronto.ca/~tlauw/jcusack/artcles/article_2. html); Randolph T. Holhut, “The Gonzo Legacy of Hunter S. Thompson,” American Reporter, May 20, 2005 (accessed on line at www.american-reporter.com/2,650/81.html); Stephen Schwartz, “The Suicide of Counter-Culture,” The Weekly Standard, February 23, 2005 (accessed on line at www. cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/22/opinion/main675547.shtml); and Mikal Gilmore, “The Last Outlaw,” Rolling Stone, March 24, 2005, 46. 5 See P.J. Corkery, “Hunter Thompson: The Last Prank,” San Francisco Examiner, February 23, 2005. Robert Sam Arum made the same mistake in his 1981 book Gone Crazy and Back Again: The Rise and Fall of the Rolling Stone Generation. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 164-166. 6 See Matt Shirley, “Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005,” Berkeley Beacon, February 24, 2005 (accessed on line at www.berkeleybeacon.com); “Warren Hinckle” (biography on “The Great Thompson Hunt” Web site), accessed June 14, 2005, at www.gonzo.org/hst/ friends.asp?ID=3; Arum, Gone Crazy and Back Again, 164; and Earl Shorris, “A Nation of Salesmen: Cautionary Tales from the Life of Homo Vendens,” Harper’s, October 1994, 47. Shorris’s description is perhaps the oddest, since he actually worked in Scanlan’s’ San Francisco office.