Underground Press Syndicate

The Underground Press Syndicate, commonly known as UPS, and later known as the Alternative Press Syndicate or APS, was a network of countercultural newspapers and magazines formed in mid-1966 by the publishers of five early underground papers: the East Village Other, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, The Paper, and Fifth Estate. Walter Bowart and John Wilcock of EVO -- along with Michael Kindman of The Paper in East Lansing, MI -- took the lead in inviting the other papers to join. Initially it was hoped that the syndicate would sell national advertising space that would run in all five papers, but this never happened.

The San Francisco Oracle, The Rag, and the Illustrated Paper (a psychedelic paper published in Mendocino, California) joined soon afterward, and membership grew rapidly in 1967 as new papers were founded and immediately joined. The first paper in the deep South to join was The Inquisition (Charlotte, North Carolina).

The first gathering of underground papers, sponsored by UPS, was held at the home of the San Francisco Oracle's Walter Bowart in Stinson Beach, CA, in March 1967, with some 30 people representing a half dozen papers in attendance. The meeting was chaotic and largely symbolic, and the concept amorphous. As Thorne Dreyer and Victoria Smith wrote for LNS, the formation of UPS was designed "to create the illusion of a giant coordinated network of freaky papers, poised for the kill." But, they added, "this mythical value was to be extremely important: the shoes could be grown into," and the emergence of UPS helped to create a sense of national community and to make the papers feel less isolated in their efforts.

By June 1967, a UPS conference in Iowa City hosted by Middle Earth drew 80 newspaper editors from US and Canada, including representatives of Liberation News Service (LNS). LNS, founded by Marshall Bloom and Ray Mungo that summer, would play an equally important and complementary role in the growth and evolution of the underground press in the United States.

UPS members agreed to allow all other members to freely reprint their contents, to exchange gratis subscriptions with each other, and to occasionally print a listing of all UPS newspapers with their addresses. And anyone who agreed to those terms was allowed to join the syndicate. As a result, countercultural news stories, criticism and cartoons were widely disseminated, and a wealth of content was available to even the most modest start-up paper. First-hand coverage of the 1967 Detroit riots in Fifth Estate was one example of material that was widely copied in other papers of the syndicate. As it evolved, the Underground Press Syndicate created an Underground Press Service, and later its own magazine.

The early papers varied greatly in visual style, content, and even in basic concept -- and emerged out of very different kinds of communities. Many were decidedly rough-hewn, learning journalistic and production skills on the run. Some were militantly political while others, like the San Francisco Oracle, featured highly spiritual content and were graphically sophisticated and adventuresome. According to historian Abe Peck, The Rag in Austin was the first to successfully merge countercultural content with radical politics, and "to represent the participatory democracy, community organizing and synthesis of politics and culture that the New Left of the midsixties was trying to develop."

A UPS roster published in November 1966 listed 14 underground papers, but within a few years the number had mushroomed. A 1971 roster, published in Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, listed 271 UPS-affiliated papers in the United States, Canada, and Europe. According to historian John McMillian, writing in his 2010 book Smoking Typewriters, the underground press' combined readership eventually reached into the millions.

As the underground press movement evolved, women's liberation, initially a non-issue in the male-dominated underground press, became an increasing focus. The UPS passed the following resolutions at its 1969 conference:

1. That male supremacy and chauvinism be eliminated from the contents of the underground papers. For example, papers should stop accepting commercial advertising that uses women's bodies to sell records and other products, and advertisements for sex, since the use of sex as a commodity specially oppresses women in this country. Also, women's bodies should not be exploited in the papers for the purpose of increasing circulation.

2. That papers make a particular effort to publish material on women's oppression and liberation with the entire contents of the paper.

3. That women have a full role in all the functions of the staffs of underground papers.

These resolutions were a harbinger of staff rebellions by women that split several papers, including Rat, where the feminist faction seized control of the paper for several issues. A few papers, already weakened by staff burnout, poor finanaces and other factors, died in the wake of these schisms, while others lost revenue and circulation by barring sexual content and advertisements, which in any event were increasingly being spun off into tabloid sex papers like Screw.

Shortly after the formation of the UPS, the number of "underground" papers throughout North America expanded dramatically. The explosive growth of the underground press did not begin to subside until 1970, and by 1973 the boom was clearly over and most underground newspapers in the US had ceased publication. Their influence resonated through the 1970s and beyond, in scores of eclectic papers founded in small towns and suburbs, such as Long Island's Moniebogue Press and Suffolk StreetPapers, offering general audiences alternative perspectives on local news and culture, and in publications specializing in Native American politics Akwesasne Notes), peace, ecology, etc. Many of the members of the UPS and its successors were founded when the legendary urban underground papers were already dead or dying.

For many years the Underground Press Syndicate was run by Tom Forcade, who later founded High Times magazine. After a 1973 meeting of underground and alternative newspapers in Boulder, Colorado, the name was changed to the Alternative Press Syndicate (APS). APS was an attempt to reinvent the syndicate to compete with the growing network of alternative weeklies networked by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies; but failed, and the AAN supplanted its role.