On The Ground , livre ebook

On the Ground
An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S.
edited by Sean Stewart
Copyright Sean Stewart, this edition copyright PM Press 2011.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-455-7
LCCN: 2011927951
Cover design by Simon Benjamin
Interior design by Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org
Printed in the United States on recycled paper.

Image on page i : Liberated Guardian, May 1, 1970.
Image on page ii : East Village Other, vol. 2, no. 4 (1967).
Image on opposing page: Rising Up Angry, vol. 1, no. 10 (1970).
CONTENTS

Preface by Paul Buhle
Introduction by Sean Stewart
1. LIKE MUSHROOMS
Points ofEntry and the Birth of the Underground Press
John Wilcock
Paul Krassner
Art Kunkin
Ben Morea
John Sinclair
Harvey Wasserman
Thorne Dreyer
Alice Embree
Peter Simon
Jeffrey Blankfort
Emory Douglas
Abe Peck
Trina Robbins
Howard Swerdloff
2. BLURRING THE LINES
Participants or Reporters?
Paul Krassner
Alice Embree
Jeffrey Blankfort
Thorne Dreyer
Ben Morea
Howard Swerdloff
Billy X Jennings
John Sinclair
3. YOU COULD MAKE ANYTHING LOOK LIKE ANYTHING
Graphic Abundance
Jeff Shero Nightbyrd
Ben Morea
Emory Douglas
Jeffrey Blankfort
Spain Rodriguez
Ron Turner
4. BALLS-TO-THE-WALL, NOSE-TO-THE-CRINDSTONI
Production, Paste-Up Night, and Office Culture
Abe Peck
Judy Gumbo Albert
Bill Ayers
Emory Douglas
Ron Turner
Jeffrey Blankfort
Thorne Dreyer
Michael Kleinman
5. LSD ON PACE FOUR!
Sales and Distribution
Art Kunkin
Abe Peck
Bill Ayers
Jeff Shero Nightbyrd
Emory Douglas
Billy X Jennings
Skip Shockley
Ron Turner
6. WELL, DOES SHE HAVE COOD POLITICS?
Growing Pains and Increasing Sectarianism
Judy Gumbo Albert
John Sinclair
Alice Embree
Trina Robbins
Spain Rodriguez
Art Kunkin
Judy Gumbo Albert
Abe Peck
Harvey Wasserman
Allen Young
7. THE THINGS THAT WE WANTED TO DO WERE NOT WHAT THEY WANTED TO HAVE DONE
Repression
Al Goldstein
Ron Turner
Thorne Dreyer
Billy X Jennings
John Sinclair
Jeffrey Blankfort
Judy Gumbo Albert
Howard Swerdloff
8. PEOPLE BURN OUT, AND PEOPLE BURNED OUT
The End
Alice Embree
Ben Morea
Howard Swerdloff
Judy Gumbo Albert
Jeffrey Blankfort
Jeff Shero Nightbyrd
Abe Peck
Peter Simon
Allen Young
Harvey Wasserman
9. IT’S A TOTALITY
Legacy
Abe Peck
Jeffrey Blankfort
Allen Young
Thorne Dreyer
Harvey Wasserman
Jeff Shero Nightbyrd
Alice Embree
Bill Ayers
Howard Swerdloff
Al Goldstein
John Sinclair
Ben Morea

About the Interviewees
Index of Names
Radical America , vol. 3, no. 1 (1969). Title page artwork by Rick Griffin. Editor Paul Buhle enlisted Gilbert Shelton as guest editor for this popular all-comics issue of the SDS "Magazine of American Radicalism."
PREFACE
Paul Buhle
T he underground press, lacking corporate support of any kind, largely local and grassroots even in its limited advertising base, yet flourishing for a half-decade in the United States, is nevertheless one of the great wonders of modern cultural politics. The creativity of local editors, artists, writers, and others (including this writer, mainly as a hawker of underground papers on a campus mall) did as much to advance the antiwar movement as any other force. In the process, they or rather we, including naturally the millions of longhaired readers as well changed journalism, battled repressive laws, and had a mighty good time in the process. Looking back from forty years or so, it was the best time of our lives.
The title of this priceless collection’s first chapter, "Like Mushrooms," recalls a populistic bumper-sticker slogan of uncertain political character from the eighties: "They Must Think I’m a Mushroom; They Keep Me in the Dark and Feed Me Bullshit." But perhaps the sensibility in this book better fits a popular slogan held aloft by activists in Wisconsin during the straggles of Spring 2011, against right-wing governors and legislators: "S CREW U S AND W E M ULTIPLY!"
The contributors and readers of the underground press may have been, as a group, the most comfortable generation materially in U.S. history, but we nevertheless felt screwed. The locked-down character of American culture, from the fifties, had not eased all that much even by the mid-sixties. Anything disliked could be called "Communist" and dismissed without a second thought, not only by segregationist rednecks in their own locales but by the New York Times reporters and editorial writers, whenever the subjects of a U.S. military occupation anywhere in the world did anything at all to try and end the occupation. The Beatles had appeared on the scene, following the rise and fall of early rock ‘n’ roll, but popular culture was still dominated by the mostly idealized lives of the rich and powerful. Even the growing availability of the pill, altering the lives of young people, did not immediately change attitudes, especially public attitudes, toward sexual repression and the double standard.
Then something happened. Or to put it better, all hell broke loose but (mostly, make that overwhelmingly) in a good way! Historians and memoirists are still trying to sort out the reasons, and they will not likely make a single, convincing case because no single case exists. For a little while there were overwhelming demographic contrasts between the readership often if by no means always long-haired, committed to the acceptability of social drug usage (if not personal use) and nonmarital sex but not the acceptability of war and the "straights" of Middle America, and in many places young versus not-so-young. So much of America including most of the South and rural districts, not to mention religious college campuses did not read the underground press, that to generalize would be suspect. But millions did, simply because the underground papers suited their interests and perceived needs. For those who were potentially to be in Viet Nam, or had a brother, lover, or friend likely to be sent there, it was also a matter of life and death to get the news and insight somewhere.

"The underground" as a term may be found in many places across several centuries, but there can be little doubt that the most widely used identification, up to the middle of the twentieth century, identified anti-Fascist forces behind enemy lines of the Second World War, in much of Central and Eastern Europe, also large parts of Asia, where resistance movements largely led by Socialists and Communists engaged in illegal acts, at the cost of torture and murder if apprehended. The underground, not quite yet identified as such, had begun after Hitler’s 1933 takeover in Germany and climaxed with the defeat of the Axis.
Popular culture, especially the Hollywood film of a certain type, celebrated the courage and self-sacrifice of the resisters. Humphrey Bogart famously gave up Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca for the sake of the antiFascist cause, but hundreds of resistance fighters in other films, hundreds of others in popular fiction, made worse sacrifices, while real-life members of the underground were slaughtered by the tens of thousands. Not long after the defeat of Germans and Japanese, the Cold War mood minimized the role of the underground, insisting that Allied troops had little assistance from behind the lines, and anyway the Resistance was tainted with Communist sympathies almost everywhere (an accurate charge). "underground" in that usage seemed to fade, and its companion "resistance" was applied to movements bent on overthrowing governments unfriendly to U.S. interests. ("Suicide missions," a term of heroism in anti-Fascist and war films, popped up again decades later with the heroic suicide-missioners now mocked as fanatics: who else would consider such a thing?)
It was a bit surprising, then, to see nominally apolitical victims of the McCarthy Era, almost a decade later, to declare that they had gone "underground" against the censors of comic books. The occasion, a removal of comics not acceptable to the "Comics Code" (policed by an agency of the Catholic Church), sent the editors of MAD Comics into a high dudgeon of satirical art in 1955. A strip published shortly before MAD Comics became MAD Magazine (thus a black-and-white publication, no longer "comics" and not susceptible to censorship) showed an otherworldly figure who needed to be underground, effecting escaping the likes of Joe McCarthy and the FBI. Humor, real humor, had been forced underground.

Gothic Blimp Works, no. 8 (1969). Up from under. Spain Rodriguez takes on the Comics Code.
Not everyone would have noticed this decidedly vernacular gesture. The editor and prime mover of MAD Comics, Harvey Kurtzman, was himself about to abandon MAD for a series of failed experiments in more daring satire. But young readers (I count myself among them) definitely noticed. As a decade went by and the largest generation in history passed through adolescence, the itch for a different, more daring and also more intimate, publication than Time or Life or Playboy, became steadily more evident. John McMillian whose history Smoking Typewriters is the most recent and one of the more scholarly overviews of the underground newspapers suggests that the mimeographed publications of young radical organizations of the early sixties, along with the daring satirical magazine published by Paul Krassner, The Realist, led the way.
They certainly had a role. But McMillian seems to have missed several other related phenomena that also preceded the new wave and likewise made the underground press possible. The first was the satirical magazines published on campuses for generations, acquiring a new daring after the Second World War. Post-World War II GIs, and those with far more bitterness coming back from the Korean War, led or joined efforts to satirize all manner of current literature, college deans, sexual behavior, and other aspects of middle-Americ