Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America by John McMillian (review)

In his classic 1978 study of the farmers’ revolt of the 1890s, The Populist Moment, Lawrence Goodwyn argued that insurgent, democratic movements grow, not out of hard times, but by developing a “movement culture.” The movement, in other words, needs to create its own practices, institutions and educational resources that allow its members to escape the dominant culture’s ability to limit what people view as possible alternatives and, instead, see themselves experimenting in new democratic processes. In this history of the underground press of the 1960s, John McMillian portrays the myriad newspapers that grew up in the wake of the New Left and anti-war movement as crucial in developing the era’s insurgent movement culture both in terms of their content as well as fostering a wide-ranging, polyglot discourse and a non-hierarchical, democratic workplace.

McMillian traces the origins of the democratic ethos of the underground press to the most important New Left organization, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its policy of encouraging wide-ranging debate in its various newsletters, bulletins and intra-organizational missives and communiques. Welcoming contributions from anyone, even those outside the organization, the editors of these publications adopted a light editorial hand specifically to encourage as robust a debate as possible; they “especially prized dissenting opinions, iconoclastic proposals, and sharply argued theories—anything at all, in fact, to keep SDS ideas from calcifying into orthodoxy” (24). McMillian captures this spirit of democratic amateurism in describing one paper’s editorial approach: “Editors rarely exercised the discretion that their title implied, for fear of being labeled ‘elitist’ or ‘professional’” (74).

The book focuses on a wide range of topics, including locating such early underground papers as the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Lansing, Michigan Paper, and the Austin, Texas Rag, within their specific communities; the rise and fall of the Liberation News Service (LNS), the underground press’s answer to the UPI; the war against the underground press waged at virtually every level imaginable, from the courts to the FBI, local police and vigilantes; and the transformation of the underground press into the more professional and profit-oriented alternative and community papers of the seventies and beyond. McMillian devotes one chapter to “the great banana hoax,” the urban legend that smoking dried banana peels produces a psychedelic experience. The rumor spread rapidly, largely through the underground press, demonstrating both the creation of a national network of underground papers that let those who might previously have felt isolated in a lonely cultural outpost now see themselves as part of a nationwide cultural/political movement, as well as that movement’s ability to “put on” mainstream society.

Writing with energy and humor, McMillian introduces a large cast of characters, with plenty of heroes, villains, tragic figures and con men. On a larger scale, he portrays the hundreds of papers blooming in cities and on campuses across the country as laboratories in which activists sought to work out the precise meaning of the New Left ideal of participatory democracy.