Publisher Igitur publishing Website www tijdschriftstudies nl Content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3 0 License URN NBN NL UI 10 1 114137 TS 33 juli 2013 p 83 85 Review John McMillian Smoking Typewriters The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of in America Oxford Alternative Media Oxford University Press 2011 277 pp ISBN 978 0 19 531992 7 22 99 Shoestring papers of the strident left are popping up like weeds across the U S TIME magazine noted sourly in July 1966 adding that their subscribers represent a curious coalition of hipsters and beatniks college students and teachers political zealots and the just plain artsy craftsy If TIME was late in paying attention to a rejuvenation of the American mediascape then already seve ral years in the making it did accurately identify a contrast at the heart of the 1960s underground press in America politics vs culture In the years leading up to the violence of 1968 a growing rift became visible between the New Left and the counterculture the politicos and the hippies between the protest move ment and those that followed Timothy Leary mantra to turn on tune in drop out This opposition is also the center piece of John McMillian s study Smoking Typewriters The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America a new attempt to chronicle a movement that because of its very diversity and cloak and dagger tactics is difficult to study within the limits of a single vo lume Accordingly McMillian takes a case study approach which results in a mixed blessing Smoking Typewriters on the one hand fails to be the kind of re visionist history it intends to be as it lacks a macro approach that provides the reader with an overview of the tightly interknit network of underground broad sheets and other radical publications that were published in the second half of the Sixties On the other hand McMillian s case studies are excellent delving deeply into the history of smaller papers that re ceived little to no attention to date such as The Paper 1965 1969 that ran at Mi chigan State University and the Austin based newspaper The Rag 1966 1977 McMillian is hardly the first to chronicle this plethora of underground monthlies and weeklies Robert Glessing described the movement as it was still going on in 1970 while Geoffrey Rips discussed the efforts to suppress the un derground press by the FBI CIA and NSA in an extensive 1981 study from which McMillian borrows the title for his book The most extensive study so far was Uncovering the Sixties The Life Times of the Underground Press 1985 written by former Chicago Seed editor Abe Peck Yet one of the main defects of most of 83 TS MMXIII 33 these academic studies has been the fact that many of their authors actively parti cipated in the movement resulting in historical accounts bordering on hagio graphy McMillian is clearly too young to have been either a politico or a hippie but admits to sympathizing with the assumptions of some of its activists an affinity that shows throughout this enga ging book but does not mar it overly Admittedly a clich and McMil lian is aware of this the starting point of this study is the December 1969 Alta mont Free Concert which infamously ended with one concertgoer being stab bed to death by a Hell s Angel Coupled with the violence at the 1968 Demo cratic National Convention in Chicago and the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr Altamont has been commonly read as the moment Sixties culture fell apart McMillian reads Altamont as a media event one that exemplifies the vast gap that by then existed between the mainstream news papers and the underground press in its coverage of the concert the San Francisco Examiner seemed blissfully unaware of the violence that had taken place only bela tedly noting that one person was killed but that on the whole all appeared peaceful at the concert But local under ground newspaper the Berkeley Tribe which had reporters on the scene told a different story altogether Altamont had been violent from the very start with incessant scuffles between increasingly drunk Hell s Angels and doped up hip pies pervading the atmosphere Further more not one but four people had died during the concert with numerous others wounded The comparison be tween reporting in the San Francisco Exa 84 miner and the Berkeley Tribe points to an essential trait of the underground news paper scene Its reporters photogra phers editors and other staff members envisioned newsgathering as a truly par ticipatory event In the spirit of the New Journalism underground newspaper re porters freely mingled with the scenes they reported on and considered critical distance a maxim of the Establishment press But as McMillian rightly observes underground newspapers were much more than simple mouthpieces for the various segments of the counterculture Locally these newspapers acted as com munity switchboards raising awareness on issues that affected university cam puses and neighborhoods But they also functioned as cultural unifiers as they projected a culture enhancing identi ties affirming social styles and molding a local avant garde When interconnec ted via organizations like the Liberal News Service LNS or the Underground Press Syndicate UPS underground newspapers transcended the local The LNS for example became a leftwing Associated Press a kind of lodestar in the late 1960s Together with the UPS the LNS thus educated politicized and built communities among disaffected youths in every region of the country The first two chapters of Smoking Typewriters delve into the history of the underground press and McMillian justi fiably argues that while many of these newspapers traced their roots to revo lutionary age pamphlets and Second World War resistance publications in reality they had much more in common with labor movement weeklies and abo litionist papers of the antebellum era appeared By 1978 nearly all of the ori ginal publications had either gone com mercial or ceased publication and a new generation of what McMillian calls alt weeklies had appeared More focused on newsgathering and analysis these pu blications lacked the participatory ap proach of the earlier newspapers which were driven by young men and women who saw themselves as activists first and journalists second Smoking Typewriters is an engaging detailed study of a medium that has by and large disappeared from the American mediascape Underground newspapers were not made to last