Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1

Preface to the Voices from the Underground Series

Preface to the Voices from the Underground Series KEN WACHSBERGER T his book and the other books that make up the Voices from the Underground Series are about the underground press of the Vietnam era. An earlier publication containing some of this material and called Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press was published in 1993. Not long after it came out, I spoke at a conference in Chicago called the Underground Press Conference. The writers and editors and poets and publishers who attended it were the heirs to those of us who fought against our own government during the Vietnam War. They were, as I described them, our intergenerational peers. The corporate media were quick to label their community as “the zine scene,” but many of them rejected the term and preferred “underground press” because it provided them a psychic connection to their sixties-period ancestors, whom they knew of only by reputation. It was to them that the contributors to Voices from the Underground dedicated our stories. As the keynote speaker, I was there to provide a historical and physical connection. What I discovered was the most positively energetic community I had witnessed since I was writing for Joint Issue, from Lansing–East Lansing, Michigan, in the early 1970s. Today, as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, we are in the twilight of print journalism as we know it. My longtime daily newspaper, the Ann Arbor News, published its last edition on July 23, 2009, after 174 years. Other papers are facing extinction or have already folded. Meanwhile, our dissident press is the blogging community. In my reading of Daily Kos and Huffington Post and other blogs of the political Left, as well as books written by some of the better-known bloggers, I haven’t heard any of them use the term “underground press” to describe their community or their form of political expression. I suspect most of the younger bloggers—those in their thirties and younger, plus many in their early forties—have no idea of their historical roots as independent media. Nevertheless, they are our intergenerational peers as well. I am honored that Markos Moulitsas, founder and publisher of Daily Kos, accepted my invitation to write a foreword to this volume. It is to him and to the other new media progressives that this series is in part dedicated. xxvi | Preface * * * The idea for Voices from the Underground came out of a brainstorming session I was having somewhere in the second half of the 1980s with a friend of mine, who at the time was a publisher of books and magazines for the library profession. He said he thought it would be fascinating to publish an article by someone who had actually been on the underground press. “What I’d like him to write about is what it was like. What kind of police harassment was there? How was the paper financed? How were decisions made?” I told him I had written a series of articles for Joint Issue’s successor, the Lansing Star, in 1976 that told the history of the Lansing–East Lansing, Michigan, area underground press to the present. I showed them to him. And he read them. He learned that our history went back to 1965, when a young National Merit Scholar named Michael Kindman quit his job as editor of the State News, Michigan State University’s student-run, but board-of-trustees-controlled daily newspaper, and started a paper called The Paper. The next year, The Paper became one of the founding five members of Underground Press Syndicate, the most important network of underground papers in the country during the Vietnam era. In 1970, I became involved in the antiwar movement when I was busted in the student union at Michigan State during the student strikes that followed the four murders at Kent State University. I dropped out of college at the end of the next semester and became a staff member for Joint Issue, a successor underground paper to The Paper. An early memory of mine is of standing on the corner on campus at Michigan State in the middle of the winter of 1970–71 selling Joint Issues for 15 cents, then 20 cents, then 25 cents apiece to pay the bills. I believed that time could have been better spent researching and organizing and writing poetry, so during the summer of 1971, I led a campaign...