UNDERGROUND PRESS
Attempts to define and write the history of the underground
press in the United States began almost as soon as the term itself was applied to a class of alternative news periodicals
rising to prominence in the mid-1960s. They appeared to
have distinct characteristics, yet proved very difficult to
define as a category separate from alternative newspapers.
The term itself emerged during the 1960s.
A 1994 gathering at DePaul University in Chicago drew
some boundaries between underground newspapers and the
alternative press. Following the first of what would become
the Annual Underground Press Conference, managing editor of Serials Review, Ken Wachsberger, characterized the
term “underground press” as generally referring “to the dissident press of the Vietnam Era.” Its heyday spanned from
1965 until around 1973, but underground newspapers still
existed well into the twenty-first century. Most continued to
express views outside the mainstream of thought. During
the late 1960s, if not later, many of these publications faced
regular government harassment.
Perhaps 1,500 underground newspapers existed in the
United States by 1969, with at least 227 aimed at or written
by U.S. soldiers. However, the voice soldiers who opposed
the Vietnam War did not achieve prominence in the media
history literature until independent scholar James Lewes
documented, in a 2001 Media History article entitled
“Envisioning Resistance: The GI Underground Press During the Vietnam War,” the work of U.S. GIs who started
such underground newspapers as Attitude Check, A Four
Year Bummer, A’bout Face! and All Ready on the Left. Until
Lewes’ offering, the history of the Vietnam War generally
was constructed from military, government, and political
voices, with some critics in the mix.
Generally speaking, underground newspapers aimed to
provide investigative reporting uncovering perceived moral
and ethical wrongdoing by “the establishment.” Such controversial topics as the civil rights movement, the Vietnam
War, the emergence of the gay rights movement, and, in the
last phases of the era, the struggles for justice for Vietnam
veterans, the environmental movement, and the proto-animal right rights movement dominated the periodicals. This
countercultural orientation came along with generally leftleaning politics.
Typically, underground newspapers formed to cover
topics and perspectives that their editors and publishers
contended were neglected by the mainstream press. Usually, they lost their most talented writers and much of their
audience to mainstream media, then imploded. That result
sometimes occurred because of infiltration and disruption
by political foes, or the FBI’s COINTELPRO program,
which existed to spy upon and dismantle opponents of
U.S. foreign policy. Occasionally, key personnel were lost
to arrests for possession of marijuana or other involvement
with illegal drugs.
If those arrests can be counted as attempts to silence
the press, then the most notorious police repression of the
underground press occurred in Cleveland, Ohio, where the
newspapers were perhaps less political but more clearly
countercultural than anywhere else in the United States. In
Cleveland, the underground press was under the influence
of the charismatic street poet and publisher known as d.a.
levy (few people knew his name was Darrell Allen).
While others were publishing political exposés, levy was
publishing translations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
After repeated arrests and police beatings, and at least
one conviction for allegedly uttering public obscenities,
levy shot himself in 1968. Publishers he inspired include
rjs (Robert Jay Sigmund), Al Horvath, and tl kryss (Tom
Kryss). They largely focused on producing poetry and silk
screened prints. Exactly why and how they attracted the
intensity of official mistrust and overt repression remains
a mystery.
One line of thought about the underground press was
that it originated with a tabloid called The Oracle. However, two underground publications shared that name: one
based in San Francisco, and the other in New York City’s
Greenwich Village. And they were not related. Which holds
status as the original remains a question. Those who held
out The Oracle as the original underground newspaper
cited its countercultural orientation, generally left-leaning
politics, and its base of advertising support from personals, entertainment (especially associated with music), and
the commercial sex trade. The latter ads were increasingly
explicit over time.
This definition recognized underground newspapers of
the 1960s as distinctly different in economic support from
the heavily politically subsidized “left” press preceding the
underground era. In that respect, they were also viewed as
separate and apart in values and tone from the rather prudish and stodgy Marxist Party newspapers, which had proliferated and thrived in the United States between the 1920s
on into the 1960s. Competition for audience share from
the underground press largely drove the Marxist papers
into economic collapse and journalistic irrelevance in the
1960s.
Despite this distinction, there were evident bridges from
the “left” press to the underground press. One was the influential role of veteran “left” press freelance reporter Henry
Gitano, better known later as Henry Spira. Gitano was
especially noted as the first U.S. journalist to travel to Cuba
and interview Fidel Castro after Castro ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista. He also is noted for traveling in Mississippi
in the early 1960s with the Freedom Riders, who were registering black voters.
Gitano became Spira while transforming himself into
a New York City high school teacher later in the 1960s.
In 1976 he founded Animal Rights International, which
is remembered as the original U.S. animal rights activist
group. Spira returned to journalism briefly as a contributing editor to the short-lived newspaper, the Humane Family. Toward the end of his life he was an occasional guest
columnist for the monthly newspaper, Animal People. As
a reporter, Spira/Gitano set a standard for investigative
reporting, independent of political propagandizing. As
such, his work exemplified the best of underground newspaper reportage on controversial subjects of the day.
Another line of thought about the origins of the underground press framed them as existing throughout U.S.
history. San Jose State University journalism department founder, Dwight Bentel, defined them as publications flourishing in many different places and times almost since the
advent of mass circulation itself. In an article appearing in
a 1976 issue of the Berkeley, California-based underground
newspaper, Samisdat, Merritt Clifton traced the origins of
underground newspaper publishing back to Isaiah Thomas,
whose defiance of the Stamp Act after 1765 helped to incite
the American Revolution. Thomas’ engraver, Paul Revere,
he argued, was the first underground newspaper cartoonist for his famous engraving of the Boston Massacre. In
this respect, Paul Revere can be viewed as ancestral to the
career of wildly popular underground cartoonist-turnedcountercultural-icon, R. (Robert) Crumb, who, among his
other accomplishments, influenced animated filmmaking
with his movie, Fritz the Cat.
Political reporting by Robert Scheer in his independent
news magazine, Ramparts, was generally recognized as
outstanding even by the right-leaning mainstream news
periodicals of the day. Some of his more memorable writings centered on the Vietnam War and CIA activity in Latin
America.
Claiming no relation to Robert Scheer, Max Scheer,
founded the Berkeley Barb. At its peak, it was the most
widely distributed underground newspaper in the United
States. The Barb originated as one of several attempts by
liberal and radical Berkeley intellectuals to undermine area
readership dominated by the distinctly conservative Berkeley Daily Gazette, Kensington Hilltop Mirror, and Oakland
Tribune.
Another Berkeley intellectual, Len Fulton, founded the
nationally distributed Small Press Review, which is still
published monthly. He also created the Dustbooks publishing empire. While Fulton and others generally foundered
economically, the Barb caught lightening in a bottle by
employing underground poet John Thompson, who signed
his articles “j poet.” Thompson is noted for igniting the
Free Speech Movement that appeared to detonate the epoch
of campus activism.
From that point forward, Max Scheer seemed to have a
knack for finding the young writers who were most closely
associated with whatever phase of activism or countercultural activity was just about to explode in the limelight. As
a result, he managed to position the Barb as the newspaper
of record when it came to covering the peace movement,
the emergence of the Black Panther Party (which had its
own underground newspaper), and just about anything else
going on in Berkeley that was controversial.
However, the Barb paid notoriously poorly. Eventually, disgruntled staffers broke with Sheer. Some formed
the Berkeley Tribe, a look-alike publication that cut deeply
enough into the Barb’s support base to encourage Scheer
to downgrade the quality of the newspaper’s content. He
began focusing on publishing sexually oriented material
that supported sex trade advertising.
Although the Barb produced several journalists who
went on to mainstream distinction, by the mid-1970s the
Barb no longer enjoyed any sort of journalistic standing. Among the reporters becoming prominent are Steve
Wasserman, who became editorial page editor for the Los
Angeles Times, and Dave Haldane, an award-winning Los
Angeles Times investigative reporter.
While the Berkeley Tribe was a substantial rival to the
Barb, its major journalistic rival in the San Francisco Bay
area was the Bay Guardian, edited by Hunter S. Thompson.
Dozens of others came and went, including the San Jose
Redeye.
Berkeley was the largest center of underground press
activity in the United States. Other major centers were Los
Angeles, Detroit, and Madison, Wisconsin, where the scene
seemed to evolve out of labor newspapers, which had a local
tradition.
Underground newspapers seemed to endure in communities where there was a clear need for an alternative
voice. Consequently, they thrived in New Orleans, where
Robert and Darlene Head for a decade produced the NOLA
Express, and in Austin, Texas, where Hal and Caroline
Wylie produced The Gar.
The Detroit scene produced the beginning of the end of
the era, in one sense, when increasing reliance on music
industry advertising eventually led the publishers of Cream
to realize that their audience might be more interested in
rock-and-roll than in politics. As the era of campus activism
waned, with the end of the Vietnam War-era draft, underground newspapers tended to evolve into the “alternative
press” of today, consisting of ad-heavy weekly entertainment periodicals, distributed free, with often relatively little
serious news content.
Further Reading
Armstrong, David. A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in
America. Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, Inc., 1981.
Glessing, Robert J. The Underground Press in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.
Johnson, Michael L. The New Journalism: The Underground
Press, the Artists of Nonfi ction, and Changes in the Established Media. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1971.
Peck, Abe. Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the
Underground Press. New York : Pantheon Books, 1985.
Romm, Ethel Grodzin. The Open Conspiracy: What America’s
Angry Generation Is Saying. New York: A Giniger Book,
published in association with Stackpole Books, 1970.
Merritt Clifton
Debra A. Schwartz