Book Review: Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America

Abstract

Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and Rise of Alternative Media in America. John McMillian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 304 pp. $27.95 hbk.The first chapter of Smoking Typewriters, John McMillian's historical study of underground newspapers during 1960s, opens with a description of national office of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Chicago as it was in middle part of that decade. Day and night, McMillian writes, amid frequently ringing phones, taptap- tap of perhaps a dozen typewriters, and periodic rumble of a nearby elevated train, young reporters and editors worked and slept and ate in a room that one writer at time described as something between a newsroom and a flophouse. On one wall, a picture of a mimeograph machine was captioned Our Founder.The image seems perfect to capture spirit of this critical era, when very young people were asking very hard questions about meaning of power and role of press. As subtitle suggests, McMillian's book focuses not just on SDS but a variety of alternative newspapers that arose during what he calls the Sixties-the era itself, with all of its implications, as opposed to actual decade of 1960s. Popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain (as one radical journalist put it) or like weeds (as Time wrote), papers such Los Angeles Free Press (aka Freep), Berkeley (California) Barb, New York's East Village Other, East Lansing's (Michigan) The Paper, and Austin (Texas) Rag, were central to changes Sixties are remembered for. As McMillian puts it, Along with new gravitas in rock and roll, rising tide of campus-based activism, and outre countercultural style, underground newspapers began contributing mightily to New Left's sense that it stood at heart of a new society.McMillian's study is important. As he notes in introduction, most of work done on Sixties press has been written retrospectively by who were part of it. Certainly, that work is irreplaceable, but as a younger historian who blends a clear appreciation for era with critical detachment of time, McMillian helps us see underground press movement in broader, clearer terms. An assistant history professor at Georgia State University and founding editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture, he knows times well, enabling him to offer an understanding of political and social context with an empathetic-and yet not hagiographic-appreciation.Drawing on archival materials and interviews or correspondence with who were involved, he shows us how underground press emerged in context of those outspoken thinkers and writers who directly challenged American culture and values in 1950s and early 1960s-the beat poets, social critics, novelists, and dramatists who produced work that rested uneasily alongside popular characterizations of Eisenhower era as one of tranquility, optimism, and innocence. Yet study takes us close enough to see motivations and struggles of individual leaders, such as Freep founder Art Kunkin, described as Marxist, half hippie; cherubic teenager Michael Kindman, who helped found Paper at conservative Michigan State; and, particularly, Liberation News Service founders Raymond Mungo of Boston University and Amherst's Marshall Bloom. He also shows us individual activists' contradictions. Thomas King Forcade, national coordinator of Underground Press Syndicate, transformed it from a chaotic and somewhat anemic organization into a legal corporation through increased advertising for member papers. …