Fifth Estate was started by
Harvey Ovshinsky, a seventeen-year-old youth from Detroit. He was inspired by a 1965 summer trip to
California where he worked on the
Los Angeles Free Press, the first
underground paper in the United States; Harvey's father, inventor
Stan Ovshinsky, knew the editor of the
Free Press,
Art Kunkin, from their years as comrades in the Socialist Party. The first issue was published on November 19, 1965. leaving a group of young people (teenagers or people in their early twenties) to run the paper.
Peter Werbe, a 29-year-old
Michigan State University dropout who had been with the paper since March 1966, took over as editor. The staff sent delegations to Vietnam,
Cambodia and
Cuba. The massive defeat of
George McGovern and the election of
Richard Nixon for a second term with an increased vote damaged the movement — many underground papers ceased publication and
alternative news agencies such as the
Liberation News Service, and the
Underground Press Syndicate were beginning to collapse. The
Fifth Estate was mentioned in the national press when one of its reporters, Pat Halley, threw a shaving cream pie at
Guru Maharaj Ji in 1973. Though the guru forgave him publicly, two of his followers attacked Halley a week later and fractured his skull. In 2002, the center of the magazine shifted from Detroit, Michigan to
Liberty, Tennessee when long-time contributor Andrew Smith (who wrote under the name Andy Sunfrog) took over the main editorial duties of the magazine, although long-time Detroit staffers like Peter Werbe remained involved. ==See also==