So Much to be Angry About: Appalachian Movement Press and Radical DIY Publishing, 1969–1979 by Shaun Slifer (review)

In 1968, Joan Didion made an admission to the readers of the Saturday Evening Post that the only newspapers that did not leave her "in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire" were a.) The Wall Street Journal and b.) the assortment of underground, radical-left leaning, and unmistakably "amateurish" free press publications that by the late 1960s proliferated across the California counterculture. She favored these not because of any particular interest in their subject material—the former especially was of "minimal interest" to her—but rather because they "talk to me directly" not concerning themselves with familiar styles or an institutionally moderate tone common in American media that could feel suffocating after a while, or even mendacious.¹

It is for these reasons that historians who look at Appalachia in that glimmering New Left era will likely be intrigued by Shaun Slifer's So Much to be Angry About, a vivid account of a small movement press operated in Huntington, West Virginia. There, using an A. B. Dick offset printer, a hulking behemoth of a machine common among the free press practitioners before the advent of the Xerox, the Appalachian Movement Press (AMP) ran all manner of subversive material (reporting, labor history, songbooks, children's literature)—all intended to aid in the fight to overthrow the bosses and promote a more equitable society in the mountains. These activist publishers eschewed the standard professional writing/publishing career avenues that, as mostly students at Marshall University, might have otherwise been appealing to them. They opted instead for the immediate commitment to a "working, if relatively scrappy, printshop . . . [w]ith the no-frills mission of 'getting correct and full information to all Appalachians,'" according to one of its founders (p. 6). Historians who are accustomed to more traditional academic treatments of the Great Society and the War on Poverty in the mountains will appreciate this brief and thoughtful glimpse at the genuine, spirited press.

The staff of the AMP may have sworn off frills and professional trappings, but that is not to say that their flurry of activist pamphlets and books were assembled without great care and attention to their content and creative design. Slifer's excellent reporting on how AMP came to be, which comprises the first hundred pages and is based primarily on interviews he conducted with the former publishers, is complemented brilliantly by the over 150 following pages of full color reprintings of AMP offerings. His decision to include so much reproduction echoes one mission of the original AMP: to reprint for the masses essays and information on labor history (occasionally in defiance of copyright law) for general consumption. This was a time much like our own when public knowledge of such history in Appalachia was fading or actively being suppressed. For contemporary AMP pieces, Slifer includes for example two entries by Don West, co-founder of the Highlander Folk School, patron saint of activism for the press, and author of "The Pittston Mentality," a long-form article on the 1972 Buffalo Creek coal slurry disaster that was heavily influenced by the internal colonialism theoretical model then in vogue among Appalachian scholars.

Slifer's history, moreover, has a lot to offer about the way social movements develop their messaging, beyond the technical aspects of the print medium. The AMP's staff—mostly male college students not exclusively from the mountains—did, in certain ways, have to establish their credibility. West, when first approached about their idea for a press, effectively replied "well if you're really serious here's some money. But my guess is y'all aren't, and it's just gonna do more harm than good" (p. 44). Toward the end of the...