John McMillian’s new book, “Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America,” is a lively account of an oft-overlooked aspect of the anti-war movement: the hundreds of radical underground newspapers that proliferated—and then promptly disappeared—between 1964 and 1973. “These papers educated and politicized young people, helped to shore up activist communities, and were the movement’s primary means of internal communication,” McMillian says. A professor at Georgia State University and a founding editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, McMillian is currently working on his next book, which will chronicle the rivalry between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. An edited version of our conversation appears below.

Why the underground press?

I’d always had a strong layperson’s interest in the sixties, going all the way back to high school: Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, the Black Panthers, that sort of thing. And then I noticed that a few scholars who were just a bit older than myself were getting a bit of attention for becoming some of the first historians to write about the sixties without having had any real firsthand experience with the decade; until then, the most influential writing on the sixties had been accomplished by baby boomers. They convinced me of the great need for scholarly work in this field. And so I started reading underground newspapers, simply to get a feel for what radical youths in that decade were doing and thinking. Then I saw the wisdom in doing an academic study of the underground press, as an institution, which hadn’t quite been done before (at least not the way I wanted to do it).

Just so people understand, the underground press was a vast network of loosely affiliated, very radical tabloid newspapers. The “underground” label was always a bit of a misnomer. Unlike, say, the covert and highly illegal newspapers attacking the occupation of France and the Netherlands during the Second World War, the vast majority of radical papers produced during the Vietnam War Era circulated openly. The “underground” moniker arose because some of the first of them—the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and New York City’s East Village Other—appealed to self-styled cultural outlaws. Many of these papers, however, could seem genuinely subversive, openly flouting society’s conventions and, by the late sixties, championing the revolutionary overthrow of the U.S. government.

How widespread was the movement?

A few years ago, Louis Menand pointed out in The New Yorker that underground newspapers “were one of the most spontaneous and aggressive growths in publishing history.” In 1965, there were only five such newspapers, mostly in large cities. But in early 1967 they started popping up everywhere, and by the decade’s end, we had several hundred papers, found in every region of the country, with a combined readership that stretched into the millions. Then in the early nineteen-seventies, when the youth rebellion began to melt away, the underground papers started disappearing as well. It’s remarkable how quickly it all happened.

You devote a chapter to “The Great Banana Hoax of 1967,” i.e. the (alas, untrue) rumor that smoking banana peels can get you high. Can you explain the hoax, and its significance?

In the spring and early summer of 1967, a rumor circulated throughout the counterculture that if you scraped out pith from the inside of a banana peel, dried it out, and then smoked it, you would experience a marijuana-like high. And so this caused quite a stir. Apparently, for a time, lots of people really believed that this worked; others, I think, got a kick out of pretending that it did. It was a way of freaking out the squares. Because really, what was anyone going to do about it? Bananas couldn’t plausibly be made illegal.

A lot of people don’t know that the rumor originated in the Berkeley Barb, and then at first it was transmitted, exclusively, through the underground press. I just thought this was an amusing way of demonstrating how the papers were interconnected.

It sounds like the quality and style of these publications varied pretty wildly.

They really did vary in quality a great deal. Many of these papers were run communally, and the people who contributed to them were suspicious of leadership, hierarchies, and authority. So some underground papers practically made it an editorial policy not to edit. I quote a guy in the book who reflected, many years later, about how strange this was. “You could sit down and say anything that came into your goddamn head, and you could go on for five pages, and every word of it would be printed. Any editor who dared suggest that it should be changed was [considered] a counter-revolutionary.”

Other papers, however, veered from that formula; they attracted talented journalists and demanded quality. Liberation News Service, which is sometimes described as a radical equivalent of the Associated Press, had some top-flight writers and their work was widely disseminated in the radical press.

Some of the smaller papers were special because they had a homespun, regional flavor. And some of the more psychedelically oriented papers, which were often borderline incoherent, could still be very stunning visually. The San Francisco Oracle and the East Village Other had these beautiful, rainbow-splashed pages, and some of today’s best known graphic artists, like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, got their start writing “comix” that appeared in underground papers.


When it comes to popular understanding of the sixties, do you think they role of the underground press has been underestimated?

Absolutely. That’s why I wrote the book! To me one of the big questions about the sixties is how the whole thing happened. How is it that so many young people, who came of age in an era of unprecedented prosperity, in a country that was a superpower and that was formally democratic, nevertheless wind up convinced that American society rotten at its core?

According to one survey, in 1969, something like one million college-aged youths self-identified as “radicals.” And then culturally, you had such a seismic shift. (Consider what happened with rock ’n’ roll in just a short span of years.) Needless to say, it would be a logical fallacy to attribute these massive changes to any one cause; in “Smoking Typewriters,” I list a bunch of contributing factors. But I do believe that the underground papers played an important and overlooked role.

Many of these papers popped up almost simultaneously across the country in the mid-sixties. What do you think was the contributing factor to the growth of the movement in that era?

Again, the bohemian and left-wing communities that began coalescing in the mid-sixties provided a rationale for the underground newspapers. But some technological innovations were also crucial. Before the nineteen-sixties, newspapers had to be set in hot type on a Linotype machine —a procedure that was both costly and difficult. But with the advent of photo offset printing, newspaper production suddenly became cheap and easy. All one needed was a competent typist, a pair of scissors, and a jar of rubber cement with which to paste copy onto a backing sheet, which was then photographed and reproduced exactly as it was set. For just a couple hundred dollars, one could print several thousand copies of and eight- or sixteen-page tabloid. The Offset Revolution also allowed for creatively designed layouts, whereby prose could be fitted around swirling drawings and photo collages.


The leaders of the underground-press movement were particularly disdainful of publications like Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. Why?

Part of it, I think, was simple jealousy. The Voice and Rolling Stone were both very successful, well-made, and influential publications. Also, temperamentally, they were both liberal, rather than radical, and according to the New Left cosmology, that meant they would always be treated with considerable skepticism, if not outright hostility.

From a marketing standpoint, Jann Wenner’s approach with Rolling Stone was especially cunning. His magazine was almost always favorable toward the cultural and the commodifiable aspects of the youth rebellion—especially rock ’n’ roll—while thumbing its nose at New Left political activism. With this formula, he was able to lure advertisements from big record companies that had previously supported the underground press.

What do you see as the main reason for the death of the underground-press movement in the early seventies?

Underground papers faced an extraordinary amount of harassment from the F.B.I., politicians, the police, and even some vigilante groups. It’s a big theme in the book. Even though these papers could be salacious, everything they did was clearly constitutionally protected. And in a country that unequivocally guarantees its citizens the right to express themselves freely, and that generally regards that freedom as one of the most important freedoms in the Bill of Rights, it’s striking how swiftly authorities mobilized to try to shut down underground papers, and how imaginative they proved in their efforts.

But the papers might have lasted longer if they’d behaved a bit differently. Many papers functioned as collectives, in which entire newspapers staffs participated in all levels of decision-making. Initially, these decentralized working environments must have held a certain appeal, but most people who toiled within them eventually discovered they could also be burdensome, inefficient, and alienating.

And when the papers were exceedingly coarse, brash, or harshly militant—that is, when they violated even the counterculture’s loose standards of civility and propriety—they gave people good cause to turn their noses at the movement. Also, in their organization and content, most underground papers mirrored the sexism and homophobia of the dominant culture. As a result, they caused unnecessary divisions and deprived themselves of valuable talent.

Nevertheless, as appendages to the New Left, the underground press could not have outlived or surpassed the youth rebellion. Their fate was always intertwined with that of the larger movement.

Which writers or publications today do you see as successors to the underground press movement?

Obviously with the Internet, we’ve recently seen a jailbreak in terms of who can get their voice heard nowadays. Angry and iconoclastic opinions used to be harder to come by; now they’re everywhere. And a lot of what the liberal blogosphere is already credited with—democratizing the media, rapidly circulating information, influencing the agenda of the mainstream press, and building communities among like-minded groups —was accomplished on a much smaller scale some forty-odd years ago by the underground press.

Images of the Chicago Seed and the San Francisco Oracle courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at The University of Connecticut.


Meredith Blake 

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