Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 2

Preface

Preface KEN WACHSBERGER A few weeks after volume 1 of the four-volume Voices from the Underground Series came out in January 2011, I was interviewed by Marc Stern, host of “Radio with a View,” the Sunday-morning talk show on Boston’s WMBR 88.1 FM. He asked me why I had chosen to devote so much time to the subject of the underground press, which was the independent, dissident press of the Vietnam era. I thought about it for a few seconds. It’s an existential issue, I told him, and it’s more than the underground press. The Voices from the Underground Series is about the antiwar movement and about reclaiming our history. One day we’re everywhere, in communities all across the country, uniting as patriots to rescue our country from a corporate government run amuck. We were heroes. We ended the war. But by the war’s end, even though the majority of citizens knew our government’s actions were wrong and they wanted out, our citizens were more divided than at any time since the Civil War, in no small part because of the social issues that continue to divide us today even though the nuances have changed. Collectively we freaked out and swung to the right. Far to the right. Here comes Ronald Reagan. Veterans of the antiwar movement, now entering the work force and starting to raise families, began the horrifying process of self-censoring out of fear of “guilt by association.” Their own kids would grow up having no idea that their parents were part of the heroic antiwar movement. I know that because I was teaching at Eastern Michigan University. Their children were my students. They didn’t have a clue. But, as I told Marc, I never stopped speaking about the period. I told my kids, I told my students, and I continued to write about what we had done. My fellow conspirators in the Voices from the Underground Series did the same. Friend, reader, you’re in for another treat. And if your parents or grandparents came of age during the Vietnam era, ask them what they did during the war. Chances are, you’ll hear some good stories. * * * xiv | Preface Books published by academic presses have notorious lag times between the time the text is finalized and the time the books make their public appearance. In the long, ongoing process of updating stories from the first edition of Voices from the Underground—which appeared in 1993 during the George Bush I years—and adding stories that are new to this expanded series of insider histories of underground papers from the Vietnam era, specific stories were finished long before their respective volumes appeared in print. Stories that appear in volume 1 of this new series were finished between 2007 and 2010. Volume 1 came out in 2011. This is no reflection against Michigan State University Press, the publisher of the Voices from the Underground Series; it is a condition that is endemic to the system of book publishing. As contributors were updating their stories, the George Bush II years were coming to an ignominious end, the economy was devastated, and the Republicans were in disarray as they faced well-deserved public scorn. Barack Obama was now president-elect and we were looking forward to at least some breathing space with his upcoming presidency. The country in general was feeling hopeful again, with a few glaring exceptions, most notably those bigots who couldn’t get used to a black guy running the show. But even for the optimists, there was a fear of believing. The revised stories reflect those mixed feelings. The contributions to this third volume were revised and written at the same time as the stories that you’ve already read from the first volume, so they also conclude with reflections on the upcoming Obama years. A lot has changed since then. By the time volume 1 actually appeared in print, two years of the Obama administration had gone by. The taxpayer-financed bank bailout—conceived during the Bush years but carried out during the Obama years—had succeeded in improving the financial statistics that determine the general state of our economy, but the only actual beneficiaries were the banks and other financial managers who had executed the decisions encouraged by Bush that brought the ruin in the first place. The rest of the economy had tanked and wasn’t going anywhere...