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Foreword SUSAN BROWNMILLER A s Ken Wachsberger continues to collect memoirs from the founders and insiders of the alternative press, the story gets wider and deeper—there is so much to tell! Now we have volume 3 in front of us, but readers should not expect an orderly chronological sequence. If you are familiar with volumes 1 and 2, you know that “orderly” was not a concept with much traction in the counterculture, while in-your-face audacity was a governing rule. So many political issues and lifestyle changes were exploding simultaneously in so many cities. You had to have been there, and luckily for future historians, these contributors were at the heart of the scene. Pride of place in this volume is given, quite rightly, to Harry Haines’s account of several papers that grew out of the GI coffeehouse movement and the general dissatisfactions and unrest on U.S. military bases at home and abroad during the Vietnam War. I was particularly engaged by “We Demand” from a 1971 issue of The Bond that called for “election of officers by vote of rank and file,” “an end to saluting and sir-ing of officers,” and “the right of collective bargaining.” Truly seditious stuff. Distribution—getting their labor of love into the hands of readers—was a problem for all the alternative papers of the era as hawkers frequently were harassed by cops on the street, but the distribution of the GI antiwar papers to soldiers on military bases required some highly creative methods. Bundles sent through the mail were camouflaged to look like care packages from families or church groups back home. Bob Hippler’s narrative of the first ten years of Fifth Estate in Detroit reenters the swirling political currents of the era as Stalinists, Trotskyists, and Maoists fought to influence the paper. External forces, like Lyndon LaRouche and the rise of the mystical religious cults, needed outright debunking, and got it. In an addendum, Patrick Halley recalls the time when Guru Maharaj Ji, the fifteen-year-old “perfect master” from India, set up shop in Motor City and Detroit’s city fathers gave him their symbolic key to the city. Halley personally dealt with the guru at a city council meeting in a pie-throwing action. Another problem identified by Halley afflicted most of the alternative papers: whether or not to achieve financial solvency by running sexploitation ads. Many papers of the era seem to have capitulated, but Fifth Estate did not. xii | Foreword The many evolutions of “Freep,” the Free Press of Columbus, Ohio, are thoughtfully parsed by Steve Abbott, who gracefully admits to guilty-as-charged when the staff women confronted the sexist behavior of the staff men in a purge. Abbott asserts that drugs are underplayed in most accounts of the alternative press, and wishes to correct the record. Weed and hallucinogens were integral to the lifestyle and creative process at “Freep,” but Quaaludes, called “sopors” for soporifics, were regularly denounced in print because their tranquilizing effect on the hippie community undercut the urge for political action. Abbott does a charming riff on the colorful aliases used by “Freep” writers, to make the contributors’ list seem larger, to protect anonymity on a sensitive story, or just for fun. “Ultimately,” he writes, “little of this mattered.” When staff members requested and received their FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act, they were astonished by how much the feds knew. They also learned that the guy who handled their advertising and distribution was an informant. White males who essentially ran the papers always understood that some political reporting and opinion required a voice separate from theirs (see Pablo Guzmán on Palante, the Young Lords paper, and JoNina Abron on the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service), but their collective feelings were hurt when the women they worked with—and lived with and slept with—began expounding on women’s liberation. A special one-time “Women’s Issue” or a “Women’s Caucus” did not stem the rising tide. During the seventies, independent feminist papers sprang up across the country. In this volume, Wachsberger includes accounts of Berkeley’s It Aint Me Babe (extraordinarily influential on the national level despite its short life) and The Furies in Washington, DC. Bob Hippler quietly notes that the Fifth Estate “had no openly gay staffer until I rejoined it in January 1973, having ‘come out’ as a gay person in...

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