We can’t seem to shake the 1960s. They haunt our politics and presidential campaigns. They are echoed in ideological battles in The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Review of Books and The Nation, and in countless Web sites and blogs.
The issues raised by the Sixties always reappear when we engage in wars and then clash over the meaning of “American exceptionalism” and the extent of its imperial stretch. We have always had underground papers both legal and illegal. William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist The Liberator, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s and Susan B. Anthony’s early feminist The Revolution and Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching Free Speech stand out, and there were also anarchist, trade union and a variety of left- and right-wing papers.
The Sixties underground press was confrontational and uncompromising and found its voice in spontaneous and argumentative independent papers. Nearly every city and college town had its alternative presses. They were often communal efforts, sometimes amateurish but always passionate. Marxist, Maoist, libertarian, liberal, New Leftish, they were brash, utterly disrespectful, and openly provoked, challenged and alarmed traditional centers of power and our guardians of “law ‘n order.”
The military papers’ formats ranged from mimeographed sheets to photo-offset papers, their subjects predictable: demonstrations, riots in army camps, lists of sympathetic lawyers and outside groups. Articles were usually anonymous for fear of punishment.
The underground press had to contend with three major TV networks and daily newspapers — almost all supportive of the war until the late Sixties. One problem the underground presses and Sixties people encountered was that too often they offended people they should have tried harder to reach.
The underground press is gone, but a new generation now has the Internet, social media, cable and independent online investigative sites such as Pro Publica, which once again are inviting the children and grandchildren of the men and women who produced so many valuable publications to take another crack at the powerful and unaccountable.