Underground Press - in North America

In North America

In the United States, the term underground did not mean illegal as it would in other countries. The First Amendment and various court decisions (e.g. Near v. Minnesota) give very broad rights to anyone to publish a newspaper or other publication, and severely restrict the government in any effort to close down or censor a private publication. In fact, when censorship attempts are made by government agencies, they are either done in clandestine fashion (to keep it from being known the action is being taken by a government agency) or are usually ordered stopped by the courts when judicial action is taken in response to them. A publication must, in general, be committing a crime (for example, reporters burglarizing someone's office to obtain information about a news item); violating the law in publishing a particular article or issue (printing obscene material, copyright infringement, libel, breaking a non-disclosure agreement); directly threatening national security; or causing or potentially causing an imminent emergency (the "clear and present danger" standard) to be ordered stopped or otherwise suppressed, and then usually only the particular offending article or articles in question will be banned, while the newspaper itself is allowed to continue operating and can continue publishing other articles.

In the U.S. the term underground newspaper generally refers to an independent (and typically smaller) newspaper focusing on unpopular themes or counterculture issues. Typically, these tend to be politically to the left or far left. More narrowly, in the US the term "underground newspaper" most often refers to publications of the period 1965-1973, when a sort of boom or craze for local tabloid underground newspapers swept the country in the wake of court decisions making prosecution for obscenity far more difficult. These publications became the voice of the rising New Left and the hippie/psychedelic/rock and roll counterculture of the 1960s in America, and a focal point of opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft.

In the period 1969-1970 a number of these papers grew more militant and began to openly discuss armed revolution against the state, printing manuals for bombing and urging readers to buy guns; but this trend of the previously pacifistic underground press toward violent confrontation soon fell silent after the brief rise and fall of the Weatherman Underground and the tragic shootings at Kent State. A number of papers passed out of existence at this time; among the survivors a new trend toward middle-class values and working within the system emerged, and the underground press began to evolve into the more moderate, life-style oriented "alternative press."

In 1973 the landmark Supreme Court decision in Miller v. California which re-enabled local obscenity prosecutions after a long hiatus sounded the death knell for much of the remaining underground press (including underground comix), largely by making the local head shops which stocked underground papers and comix in communities around the country more vulnerable to prosecution.

The North American countercultural press of the 1960s drew inspiration from predecessors that had begun in the 1950s, such as the Village Voice and Paul Krassner's satirical paper The Realist. Arguably, the first underground newspaper of the 1960s was the Los Angeles Free Press, founded in 1964 and first published under that name in 1965. In mid-1966, the cooperative Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) was formed at the instigation of Walter Bowart, the publisher of another early paper, the East Village Other. The UPS allowed member papers to freely reprint content from any of the other member papers. Also playing a major role was Liberation News Service (LNS), which was co-founded in the summer of 1967 by Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom. and which "provided coverage of events to which most papers would have otherwise had no access."

Among the most prominent of the underground papers were the San Francisco Oracle, San Francisco Express Times, the Berkeley Barb and Berkeley Tribe; Open City, (Los Angeles), Fifth Estate (Detroit), Other Scenes (dispatched from various locations around the world by John Wilcock); The Helix (Seattle); Avatar (Boston); The Chicago Seed; The Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta); The Rag (Austin, Texas); Rat (New York City); Space City! (Houston) and in Canada, The Georgia Straight (Vancouver, BC). By 1969, virtually every sizable city or college town in North America boasted at least one underground newspaper. During the peak years of the underground press phenomenon there were generally about 100 papers currently publishing at any given time. A UPS roster published in November 1966 listed 14 underground papers, 11 of them in the United States, two in England, and one in Canada. Within a few years the number had mushroomed. A 1971 roster, published in Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, listed 271 UPS-affiliated papers; 11 were in Canada, 23 in Europe, and the remainder in the United States. According to historian John McMillian, writing in his 2010 book Smoking Typewriters, the underground press' combined readership eventually reached into the millions.

The Rag, founded in Austin, Texas, in 1966 by Thorne Dreyer and Carol Neiman, was especially influential. Historian Laurence Leamer called it "one of the few legendary undergrounds," and, according to John McMillian, it served as a model for many papers that followed. The Rag was the sixth member of UPS and the first underground paper in the South and, according to historian Abe Peck, it was the "first undergrounder to represent the participatory democracy, community organizing and synthesis of politics and culture that the New Left of the midsixties was trying to develop." and Laurence Leamer, in his 1972 book The Paper Revolutionaries, called The Rag "one of the few legendary undergrounds. Gilbert Shelton's legendary Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic strip began in The Rag and was republished all over the world.

Probably the most graphically innovative of the underground papers was the San Francisco Oracle. John Wilcock, a founder of the Underground Press Syndicate, wrote about the Oracle: “Its creators are using color the way Lautrec must once have experimented with lithography -- testing the resources of the medium to the utmost and producing what almost any experienced newspaperman would tell you was impossible... it is a creative dynamo whose influence will undoubtedly change the look of American publishing.”

One of the most notorious underground newspapers to join UPS and rallied activists, poets, and artists by giving them uncensored voice was the NOLA Express in New Orleans. Started by Robert Head and Darlene Fife as part of political protests and extending the "mimeo revolution" by protest and freedom-of-speech poets during the 1960s, NOLA Express was also a member of COSMEP (Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers. These two affiliations with organizations that were often at cross purposes made NOLA Express one of the most radical and controversial publications of the counterculture movement. Part of the controversy about NOLA Express included graphic photographs and illustrations of which many even in today's society would be banned as pornographic.

Charles Bukowski's syndicated column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, ran in NOLA Express, and Franciso McBride's illustration for the story "The Fuck Machine" was considered sexist, pornographic, and created an uproar. All of this controversy helped to increase the readership and bring attention to the political causes that editors Fife and Head supported.

Many of the papers faced official harassment on a regular basis; local police repeatedly raided and busted up the offices of Dallas Notes and jailed editor Stoney Burns on drug charges, charged Atlanta's Great Speckled Bird and others with obscenity, arrested street vendors, and pressured local printers not to print underground papers. In Austin, the regents at the University of Texas sued The Rag to prevent circulation on campus but the ACLU successfully defended the paper's First Amendment rights before the U.S. Supreme Court. In an apparent attempt to shut down The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, editor James Retherford was briefly imprisoned for alleged violations of the Selective Service laws; his conviction was overturned and the prosecutors were rebuked by a federal judge. The offices of Houston's Space City! were bombed and riddled with bullets and its advertisers shot up and threatened by nightriders identifying themselves as members of a local Ku Klux Klan group.

During this period there was also a widespread high school underground press movement circulating unauthorized student-published tabloids and mimeographed sheets at hundreds of high schools around the US. Most of these papers put out only a few issues, running off a few hundred copies of each and circulating them only at one local school, although there was one system-wide antiwar high school underground paper produced in New York in 1969 with a 10,000 copy press run. And Houston's Little Red Schoolhouse, a city-wide underground paper published by high school students, was founded in 1970.

For a time in 1968-1969 the high school underground press had its own press services, FRED (run by Clark Kissinger of SDS, with its base in Chicago schools) and HIPS (High School Independent Press Service, produced by students working out of Liberation News Service headquarters and aimed primarily but not exclusively at New York City schools). These services typically produced a weekly packet of articles and features mailed to subscribing papers around the country; HIPS reported 60 subscribing papers. In 1968 a survey of 400 high schools in Southern California found that 52% reported student underground press activity in their school.

The GI underground press in America produced a few hundred titles during the Vietnam War, some produced by antiwar GI coffeehouses, and many of them small, crudely produced, low-circulation mimeographed "zines" written by a draftee editor opposed to the war and circulated locally off-base. Three or four GI underground papers had large-scale, national distribution of more than 20,000 copies including thousands of copies mailed to GIs overseas. These papers were produced with the support of civilian anti-war activists, and had to be disguised to be sent through the mail into Vietnam, where soldiers distributing or even possessing them might be subject to harassment, disciplinary action or arrest. The idea of smuggling a full size printing press into South Vietnam was mooted but determined to be too dangerous to attempt. As an alternative, a few GIs based in South Vietnam were issued small kits to enable them to produce little hektograph-type zines.

The boom in the underground press was made practical by the availability of cheap offset printing, which made it possible to print a few thousand copies of a small tabloid paper for a couple of hundred dollars, which a sympathetic printer might extend on credit. Paper was cheap, and many printing firms around the country had over-expanded during the 1950s and had excess capacity on their offset web presses, which could be negotiated for at bargain rates.

Most papers operated on a shoestring budget, pasting up camera-ready copy on layout sheets on the editor's kitchen table, with labor performed by unpaid, non-union volunteers. Typesetting costs, which at the time were wiping out many established big city papers, were avoided by typing up copy on a rented or borrowed IBM Selectric typewriter to be pasted up by hand. As one observer commented with only slight hyperbole, students were financing the publication of these papers out of their lunch money.

According to Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker, the underground press movement in the United States was "one of the most spontaneous and aggressive growths in publishing history." But, the underground press phenomenon proved short-lived. By 1973, many underground papers had folded, at which point the Underground Press Syndicate acknowledged the passing of the undergrounds and renamed itself the Alternative Press Syndicate. That organization soon collapsed, to be supplanted by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

During the 1960s and 1970s, there were also a number of left political periodicals with some of the same concerns of the underground press. Some of these periodicals joined the Underground Press Syndicate to gain services such as microfilming, advertising, and the free exchange of articles and newspapers. Examples include The Black Panther (the paper of the Black Panther Party, Oakland, California), and the Guardian, New York City; both of which had national distribution.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted surveillance and disruption activities on the underground press in the United States, including a campaign to destroy the alternative agency Liberation News Service. As part of its COINTELPRO designed to discredit and infiltrate radical New Left groups, the FBI also launched phony underground newspapers such as the Armageddon News at Indiana University Bloomington, The Longhorn Tale at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Rational Observer at American University in Washington, D.C. The FBI also ran the Pacific International News Service in San Francisco, the Chicago Midwest News, and the New York Press Service. Many of these organizations consisted of little more than a post office box and a letterhead, designed to enable the FBI to receive exchange copies of underground press publications and send undercover observers to underground press gatherings.

The Georgia Straight outlived the underground movement, evolving into an alternative weekly still published today; Fifth Estate survives as an anarchist magazine. The Rag—which published for 11 years in Austin (1966–1977) -- was revived in 2006 as an online publication, The Rag Blog, which now has a wide following in the progressive blogosphere and whose contributors include many veterans of the original underground press.

Most others died with the era. Given the nature of alternative journalism as a subculture, some staff members from underground newspapers became staff on the newer alternative weeklies, even though there was seldom institutional continuity with management or ownership. An example is the transition in Denver from the underground Chinook, to Straight Creek Journal, to Westword, an alternative weekly still in publication. Some underground and alternative reporters, cartoonists, and artists moved on to work in corporate media or in academia.

Ray Mungo, in his classic memoir of the American underground press, Famous Long Ago, gave a cynical explanation of the origins of the typical underground newspaper: "Lots of radicals will give you a very precise line about why their little newspaper was started and what needs it fulfills and most of that stuff is bull. You see, the point is they've got nothing to do and the prospect of holding a straight job is so dreary that they join 'the movement' and start hitting up people for money to live, on the premise that they're involved in critical social change blah blah blah."