They Heard It on the Grapevine...

Like so many people who came of age in the 1960s, I have searched ever since for a book that would tell me what really happened in those tumultuous years, which so profoundly transformed millions of individual personalities, our culture and, in some ways, even our collective unconscious. “Voices From the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press” may not be that definitive work, but it comes closer than anything I’ve yet read to putting the sights, sounds and texture of the ‘60s on paper.

Perhaps “Voices From the Underground” succeeds where so many books have failed precisely because it works with so tight a focus. It is composed entirely of memoirs of writers, editors and publishers who worked in the vast network of underground--that is, non-commercial--journalism during the 1960s and early ‘70s. The reason this approach works as a key to the period--a dirty dozen of war years, 1961-1972, rather than a decade--is that the era was drenched to its bones in language. It was the word that begot the war in Vietnam as surely as it begot women’s liberation, Black Power and the psychedelic revolution. Could one account for the incredible popularity of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, for example, without reference to Tim Leary’s snappy line of advocacy: “Turn on, tune in, drop out”?

If one takes “underground press” to mean journalism that criticizes the Establishment’s point of view, and which publishes news that the mainstream press finds distinctly unfit to print, then one could see America’s underground press beginning with the political pamphleteering that kindled the American Revolution--most notably, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” The Nation, of course, dates back to 1865, and there were other 19th-Century outsider publications such as Brand’s Iconoclast in Waco, Tex. The 1950s, challenged by the totalitarian thinking of McCarthyism and the Cold War, saw an upsurge of brash, free-spoken publications such as Lyle Stuart’s the Independent, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, and the Village Voice. But the most direct forebear of our contemporary alternative press, as it is now called, was Paul Krassner’s the Realist, begun in 1958. Subtitled “Free Thought, Criticism, and Satire,” the Realist offered biting, Lenny Bruce-style critiques of both politics and culture from a left-anarchist slant far beyond the bounds of any single ideology or party line.

In the early ‘60s, printing newspapers became a lot cheaper through the development of new offset technology. The means were in place for the hundreds of alternative papers that would spring up around the nation by the end of the decade; it required only a spark to set those presses in motion, but instead there came a bombshell, or more literally, a million bombshells, in the form of the Vietnam War.

One of the things “Voices from the Underground” makes clear is how profoundly the Vietnam War influenced every countercultural and radical cause of that period, and how thoroughly it permeated every underground paper.

Former Black Panther Emory Douglas, for example, recalls the creation of the Black Panther Black Community News Service: “Huey (Newton) compared the party’s need for a publication with the armed struggle of the Vietnamese people that was going on at that time. . . . He said that the Vietnamese carried mimeograph machines wherever they went to produce flyers and other literature to spread the word about their fight to free their country. The party needed to have a newspaper so we could tell our own story.”

In articles about the hard-core feminist newspaper, titled “off our backs,” Carol Anne Douglas, Fran Moira and Marilyn S. Webb emphasize their vast debt to the anti-war movement. Most of the members of their collective (most of these papers were published by collectives, itself a peace movement phenomenon) had cut their activist teeth at anti-war demonstrations. One of their younger members was Tasha Peterson, daughter of Dave Dellinger, the dean of all peace protesters. What is more, the money with which off our backs was started had originally been raised to pay for an anti-war coffeehouse for GIs. Their first mailing list came from Vietnam Summer, a radical anti-war organization.

As with the Black Panthers, Vietnam influenced not just the actions of these women but the content of their thinking too. Writes one of the paper’s co-founders, Marlene Wicks: “I believed that keeping the paper going was a matter of survival for us all. I felt as if we were in Hanoi and we were going to be bombed at any minute. That wasn’t paranoia. It was really intense. I wanted people to be serious.”

Many of the most notorious early undergrounds, such as the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and East Lansing’s the Paper, grew directly out of the political ferment of the times, but in some ways the most effective criticism of the war came not from the New Left’s politicos but rather from disaffected GIs. During the course of the war, there were over 200 GI anti-war papers, most of them printed off-base, usually in connection with movement coffeehouses (though one publication called OM actually came out of the basement of the Pentagon).

One of the most affecting stories in this collection is Harry Haines’ account of the creation and destruction of a GI paper called Aboveground at Ft. Carson, Colo. Hardly the work of Communist agents, as the FBI and Army intelligence believed, it was founded by two Vietnam veterans, Tom Roberts and Curt Stocker, who felt it their duty to let the recently drafted troops know what they were in for--and to warn them that they would soon be “fighting and dying for a government that wasn’t worth the sacrifice of one American life.” It took great courage for men in uniform to assert their First Amendment rights in this fashion, for the military continued to maintain control over every aspect of their lives. Writes Haines: “It was total vulnerability, the kind of vulnerability that the Home Front civilians (workers in a local GI coffeehouse) never quite understood. To be in the army was to be totally vulnerable, observable at all times. And they could do things to you that they couldn’t do to regular human beings outside the Green Machine.” Indeed, after writing for Aboveground for several months, Haines was transferred out of a cushy job at Ft. Carson and sent to Vietnam.

While the Army was using every possible method to pressure the Aboveground staff to cease publication--even sending in agents provocateurs to try to persuade them to commit such crimes as burning down their barracks--the paper was also receiving pressure of a different kind from various Marxist and fanatical left-wing sects, including the SDS Weathermen. These militant leftists grew impatient with the variety of personal concerns that occupied much of the paper--the desire of GIs to grow their hair long, for example, or to be less bullied by officers. Moreover, the leftists were much put out by GIs writing about “Eastern spiritualism, the development of a communal society, and the use of hallucinogens as religious sacraments”--all of which these good party members viewed as “anarchistic and politically unproductive.” According to Haines, “the idea (imposed upon them by the radicals) was to turn the guns around. This plan made more sense to some of the civilian volunteers than to those of us in the army. In 1969, most GIs simply wanted to be liberated from the army, not involved in armed revolution.”

What happened at Aboveground points out a fundamental division that occurred within the underground press, and often within the very offices of the papers themselves. While many underground journalists--those at the unabashedly revolutionary Guardian, for example--believed in the purity of their calling to change America’s politics, others, like the founders of Boston’s Fag Rag, one of the nation’s first gay newspapers, believed just as passionately in their role as gadfly to the nation’s popular culture. Although politics was not ignored as a component of gay liberation, it was lifestyle more than ideology that they were fighting for.

Regarding the split between culture and politics, Allen Cohen’s article about the San Francisco Oracle is most instructive. Born in the drug-hazed utopia of Haight-Ashbury in 1966, the Oracle was one of the most radical of the undergrounds, both in content and in format. The columns of type wandered creatively around the page, and Cohen pioneered the use of a split-fountain printing technique, so that various-colored inks flowed into each other in both the images and the print, producing a striking rainbow effect. Moreover, the Oracle, drawing on the example of the Bay Area’s harmonious multicultural community, pushed forward the idea that the counterculture, as well as the underground publications that nourished it, would attract more followers with a show of positive, life-affirming values than by endless negative carping.

Cohen writes of a seminal conversation he had with visionary artist and collaborator Michael Bowen: “We were sipping coffee and watching a group of angry, sign-carrying hippies . . . storming the Park Police Station in protest of the busting of their commune. We saw the futility of this endless confrontation with authority and decided that we needed to invent a new mode of celebration that would energize change more than anger- and hate-engendering confrontations.”

The Oracle, utilizing articles and poems by some of the finest unconventional minds in the country--Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder--as well as outstanding psychedelic art by world-class avant-gardists such as Rick Griffin and Bruce Conner, insisted on bringing the two poles of culture and politics together. And one of the reasons Cohen was so successful in doing so--and thereby setting a precedent for many of the underground papers that followed--was that he understood the historical lineage that had resulted in these two separate streams of dissent.

Writes Cohen: “A political movement that was radical with an extreme democratic openness, mistrustful and independent of political parties or dogmas, anti-authority and non-hierarchical, generally nonviolent, and dedicated to the values of equality, justice, and peace had been forged in the civil rights struggle, the SDS Port Huron Statement, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and the beginning of the anti-war movement.

“A cultural identity that was anti-materialist, idealistic, anarchistic, surreal, Dionysian, and transcendental had been birthed through the Beat literary explosion, the Leary LSD experiments at Harvard, rock ‘n’ roll music, the Haight-Ashbury Renaissance, and the Human B-In. This two-headed rebellion was now the greatest threat to the American status quo since the Depression.”

That threat did not go unnoticed by the guardians of law and order. It is true that the economic and social pressures of publishing an underground paper were such that few papers could last even a decade, and many went under in less than a year. Circulation for most of them was under 10,000, and many were distributed free. On top of that, the often scandalous language, combined with sexually uninhibited and blatantly revolutionary content, often caused printers to refuse to go to press with the copy given to them. But the truth of the matter is that the long arm of the law often tipped the scales toward an early demise.

One of the saddest and most shocking revelations in “Voices From the Underground” is of the war against dissent and free speech that was systematically waged by our government, and especially by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, during the Vietnam era. Almost every paper represented in this collection suffered from some form of government oppression; from first to last page, there are stories of illegal surveillance, infiltration by government agents, harassment and the deliberate incitement of internal dissension. Such tactics were used not only against groups that did indeed seem to threaten society’s peace and safety--gun-toting Black Panthers, for instance--but against women who wanted freedom from sexual harassment and the right to abortion, against gays who wanted the right to drink together in a bar without getting their heads bashed by police and against a whole spectrum of other groups that had the audacity to demand rights already guaranteed them in the U.S. Constitution.

Over and over we read stories of papers being sabotaged by COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program engineered and supervised by Hoover himself. Since most of these papers were run by group decisions, one of the FBI’s favorite tactics was to forge inflammatory letters that would set one faction against another and thus promote an internal blow-up. Harvey Wasserman, writing about Liberation News Service, the AP of the underground press, actually reprints one of these letters (obtained through the Freedom of Information Act) that had been concocted to destroy the authority of LNS’s co-founder, Marshall Bloom. The letter, “written in the jargon of the New Left” (as the author bragged in an internal FBI memo), not only succeeded in discrediting Bloom, who had already been under attack by staffers further to the left than himself; it helped push him to commit suicide.

The accounts of violence against the underground press provoked by COINTELPRO agents--whether it’s Joe Grant of the Prisoner’s Digest International telling how one of his associates was pushed to shoot and kill his wife (even the gun was provided by an undercover agent), or JoNina Abron writing of the FBI’s perpetuation of hostility between the Black Panthers and the United Slaves, leading to the murder of the Panther’s “minister of information” John Huggins--are well-documented and have a solid ring of truth about them. Abron offers an excerpt from the “Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans” (April, 1976) authored by the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations: “Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that. The unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.”

What was the great threat of the underground press? Bob Hippler of Detroit’s Fifth Estate explained it with eloquent simplicity: “I’d always thought that the print media and the people in power were inaccessible, and here was a paper that said things could change. It knocked my socks off.” The great statement of these off-brand newsfolk was that the press belongs to everyone--a simple fact that was perceived by some in our government, especially J. Edgar Hoover, as a great threat to the internal security of the United States.

What “Voices From the Underground” does so well is to show the view from the other side. It is like a look at America through Alice’s looking-glass. You may choose to believe what you see or not, but you can’t help but be thankful for the change of perspective.

Ken Wachsberger, whose only foible is to edit too generously (sometimes letting the memoirists ramble on with irrelevant detail), provides an invaluable second volume, which comprises an annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources, directories of special collections of the underground press and a comprehensive list of titles that are currently available on microfilm.

Such care with the products of the underground press has been long overdue. J. Edgar Hoover may not have liked it, but the events chronicled in “Voices From the Underground” are part of our history, and thanks to these two volumes every American now has the chance to learn of them. Let’s hope they do.