Origins 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.
1965–1973 boom period '' (April 16 – May 1, 1967)
The East Village Other was "formed as a stock company, with Walter Bowart, Allen Katzman and Dan Rattiner each owning three shares", co-founded in October 1965 by
Walter Bowart,
Ishmael Reed, Allen Katzman,
Dan Rattiner, Sherry Needham, and
John Wilcock. It began as a monthly and then went biweekly. 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." During the peak years of the phenomenon, there were generally about 100 papers currently publishing at any given time. But the underground press phenomenon proved short-lived. 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. The underground press' combined readership eventually reached into the millions. The early papers varied greatly in visual style, content, and even in basic concept — and emerged from very different kinds of communities. Many were decidedly rough-hewn, learning journalistic and production skills on the run. Some were militantly political while others featured highly spiritual content and were graphically sophisticated and adventurous. By 1969, virtually every sizable city or college town in North America boasted at least one underground newspaper. Among the most prominent of the underground papers were the
San Francisco Oracle, San Francisco Express Times,
Rags (
San Francisco); the
Berkeley Barb and
Berkeley Tribe;
The Image,
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 Broadside (Cambridge, Massachusetts );
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).
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 mid-sixties was trying to develop." Leamer, in his 1972 book
The Paper Revolutionaries, called
The Rag "one of the few legendary undergrounds". 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." In the period 1969–1970, a number of underground papers grew more
militant and began to openly discuss
armed revolution against the state, some going so far as to print manuals for bombing and urging their readers to arm themselves; this trend, however, soon fell silent after the rise and fall of the
Weather Underground and the tragic
shootings at Kent State.
High school underground press During this period there was also a widespread underground press movement circulating unauthorized student-published tabloids and
mimeographed sheets at hundreds of high schools around the U.S. (In 1968, a survey of 400 high schools in
Southern California found that 52% reported student underground press activity in their school.) 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. Houston's
Little Red Schoolhouse, a citywide 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
C. Clark Kissinger of
Students for a Democratic Society, 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.
G.I. underground press U.S. Army base in Texas. The
GI underground press within the U.S. military produced over four 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 GIs or recently discharged veterans opposed to the war and circulated locally on and off-base. Several GI underground papers had large-scale, national distribution of tens of thousands of copies, including thousands of copies mailed to GI's 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. There were at least two of these papers produced in the combat zone in Vietnam itself,
The Boomerang Barb and
GI Says.
Technological and financial realities 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.
Syndicates and news services 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. During this period, there were also a number of left-wing political periodicals with concerns similar to those 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. Almost from the outset, UPS supported and distributed
underground comix strips to its member papers. Some of the cartoonists syndicated by UPS included
Robert Crumb,
Jay Lynch,
The Mad Peck's
Burn of the Week,
Ron Cobb, and
Frank Stack. The
Rip Off Press Syndicate was launched 1973 to compete in selling underground comix content to the underground press and
student publications. Each Friday, the company sent out a distribution sheet with the strips it was selling, by such cartoonists as
Gilbert Shelton,
Bill Griffith,
Joel Beck,
Dave Sheridan,
Ted Richards, and
Harry Driggs. "provided coverage of events to which most papers would have otherwise had no access." In a similar vein,
John Berger,
Lee Marrs, and others co-founded
Alternative Features Service, Inc. in 1970 to supply the underground and college press, as well as
independent radio stations, with syndicated press materials that especially highlighted the creation of alternative institutions, such as
free clinics,
people's banks,
free universities, and
alternative housing. 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 (APS). After a few years, APS also foundered, to be supplanted in 1978 by the
Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.
Controversies One of the most notorious underground newspapers to join UPS and rally activists, poets, and artists by giving them an 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 the
Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP). 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 Francisco 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.
Harassment and intimidation 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
American Civil Liberties Union 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. '', April 1, 1971. Art by
Bill Narum. Drive-by shootings, firebombings, break-ins, and trashings were carried out on the offices of many underground papers around the country, fortunately without causing any fatalities. The offices of Houston's
Space City! were bombed and its windows repeatedly shot out. In Houston, as in many other cities, the attackers, never identified, were suspected of being off-duty military or police personnel, or members of the
Ku Klux Klan or
Minuteman organizations. Some of the most violent attacks were carried out against the underground press in San Diego. In 1976 the
San Diego Union reported that the attacks in 1971 and 1972 had been carried out by a right-wing
paramilitary group calling itself the
Secret Army Organization, which had ties to the local office of the FBI. 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.
Decline of the underground press By the end of 1972, with the end of the draft and the winding down of the Vietnam War, there was increasingly little reason for the underground press to exist. A number of papers passed out of existence during this time; among the survivors a newer and less polemical view toward middle-class values and working within the system emerged. The underground press began to evolve into the socially conscious, lifestyle-oriented
alternative media that currently dominates this form of weekly
print media in North America. In 1973, the landmark
Supreme Court decision in
Miller v. California re-enabled local obscenity prosecutions after a long hiatus. This 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 Georgia Straight outlived the underground movement, evolving into an
alternative weekly still published today;
Fifth Estate survives as an
anarchist magazine.
The Rag – which was 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. 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.
Lists of underground press papers United States More than a thousand underground newspapers were published in the United States during the Vietnam War. The following is a short list of the more widely circulated, longer-lived and notable titles. For a longer, more comprehensive listing sorted by states, see the
long list of underground newspapers.
U.S. military G.I. papers See Table:
GI Underground Press During the Vietnam War (U.S. Military) Canada •
Canada Goose,
Edmonton,
Alberta •
The Georgia Straight,
Vancouver,
British Columbia •
Guerilla,
Toronto, Ontario •
Harbinger, Toronto, Ontario •
Logos,
Montreal,
Quebec •
Loving Couch Press,
Winnipeg,
Manitoba • '''' (1970–1978), Montreal, Quebec •
Octopus,
Ottawa, Ontario (a.k.a.
Canadian Free Press, ''Ottawa's Free Press'') •
Pop-See-Cul, Montreal, Quebec •
Sexus (1967–1968), and
Allez chier (1969), Montreal, Quebec •
Yorkville Yawn and
Satyrday,
Yorkville, Toronto, Ontario ==India==