Formation The Underground Press Syndicate was initially formed by the publishers of five early underground papers: the
East Village Other (New York City), the
Los Angeles Free Press, the
Berkeley Barb,
The Paper (
East Lansing, Michigan), and
Fifth Estate (
Detroit, Michigan). The first official UPS gathering was held at the home of the
San Francisco Oracle's Michael Bowen in
Stinson Beach, California, in March 1967, with some 30 people representing a half-dozen papers in attendance. The meeting was chaotic and largely symbolic, and the concept was amorphous. It was hoped that the syndicate would sell national advertising space that would run in all five papers, but this never happened. As
Thorne Dreyer and Victoria Smith wrote for
Liberation News Service (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.
Walter Bowart and
John Wilcock of the
East Village Other, with Michael Kindman of
The Paper, took the lead in inviting other papers to join.
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 (such as the
Chicago Seed) and immediately joined. 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. The first paper in the deep South to join was
The Inquisition (
Charlotte, North Carolina).
Fluxus West, a
Fluxus offshoot mostly engaged in
mail art and self-publishing activities, founded by
Ken Friedman, was also one of the newest UPS members in 1967.
Expansion By June 1967, a UPS conference in
Iowa City hosted by
Middle Earth drew 80 newspaper editors from the U.S. and Canada, including representatives of
Liberation News Service. 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. An attempt that summer by Bob Rudnick to coordinate and centralize the UPS at the offices of the
East Village Other in New York City failed.
Forcade assumes leadership Soon after,
Tom Forcade took leadership of the organization, opening an office on West 10th Street in New York City, at which UPS curated the underground press collection for regular
microfilming as well as publishing the
UPS News Service. Offices were relocated to
Miami during the summer of 1972 to cover the
Democratic and
Republican Conventions, both of which were held in that city that summer. By the fall of 1973, the syndicate's offices were located at 283 West 11th Street. The magazine's
post office box was Box 386,
Cooper Station, New York, NY. Under Forcade's leadership, UPS would later also publish the
Underground Press Revue.
The UPS and the women's liberation movement 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: 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 finances, 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.
Underground comix Almost from the outset, the Underground Press Syndicate supported and distributed
underground comix strips. Cartoonists and strips syndicated by the organization included
Robert Crumb,
Jay Lynch,
Ron Cobb,
Frank Stack, and
The Mad Peck's
Burn of the Week. Meanwhile, other cartoonists whose work appeared in UPS-member papers, such as the
East Village Other and the
Berkeley Barb, saw their work widely distributed, eventually leading to success in the underground comix industry. Ironically, however, reprints became popular with publishers because underground artists originally had few
claims on their own work. The open-ended permissions given by UPS were exploited by some underground comix publishers, bulking up or entirely filling their own magazines with work whose creators didn't receive any payment even when those publishers made a profit.
UPS becomes the Alternative Press Syndicate The explosive growth of the underground press had begun to subside by 1970, and by 1973 the boom was clearly over. 1995– 1997) specialized in
Native American politics, including issues of peace and ecology. ==See also==