Underground press
In specific recent (post-World War II) Asian, American and Western European context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India and Bangladesh in Asia, in the United States and Canada in North America, and the United Kingdom and other western nations.
Both Protestant and Catholic nations fought the introduction of Calvinism, which with its emphasis on intractable evil made its appeal to alienated, outsider subcultures willing to violently rebel against both church and state.
The French resistance published a large and active underground press that printed over 2 million newspapers a month; the leading titles were Combat, Libération, Défense de la France, and Le Franc-Tireur.
While the countercultural "underground" papers frequently battled with governmental authorities, for the most part they were distributed openly through a network of street vendors, newsstands and head shops, and thus reached a wide audience.
In Melbourne Phillip Frazer, founder and editor of pop music magazine Go-Set since January 1966, branched out into alternate, underground publications with Revolution in 1970, followed by High Times (1971 to 1972) and The Digger (1972 to 1975).
Other publications followed, such as Friends (later Frendz), based in the Ladbroke Grove area of London; Ink, which was more overtly political; and Gandalf's Garden which espoused the mystic path.
The paper Black Dwarf published a detailed floor-by-floor 'Guide to Scotland Yard', complete with diagrams, descriptions of locks on particular doors, and snippets of overheard conversation.
He also listed many of the regular key topics from those publications, including the Vietnam War, Black Power, politics, police brutality, hippies and the lifestyle revolution, drugs, popular music, new society, cinema, theatre, graphics, cartoons, etc.
[citation needed] These publications became the voice of the rising New Left and the hippie/psychedelic/rock and roll counterculture of the 1960s in America, and a focal point of opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft.
The North American countercultural press of the 1960s drew inspiration from predecessors that had begun in the 1950s, such as the Village Voice and Paul Krassner's satirical paper The Realist.
[20] Gilbert Shelton's legendary Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic strip began in The Rag, and thanks in part to UPS, was republished all over the world.
John Wilcock, a founder of the Underground Press Syndicate, wrote about the Oracle: "Its creators are using color the way Lautrec must once have experimented with lithography – testing the resources of the medium to the utmost and producing what almost any experienced newspaperman would tell you was impossible... it is a creative dynamo whose influence will undoubtedly change the look of American publishing.
[27] These papers were produced with the support of civilian anti-war activists, and had to be disguised to be sent through the mail into Vietnam, where soldiers distributing or even possessing them might be subject to harassment, disciplinary action, or arrest.
Paper was cheap, and many printing firms around the country had over-expanded during the 1950s and had excess capacity on their offset web presses, which could be negotiated for at bargain rates.
[31][a] Most papers operated on a shoestring budget, pasting up camera-ready copy on layout sheets on the editor's kitchen table, with labor performed by unpaid, non-union volunteers.
Typesetting costs, which at the time were wiping out many established big city papers, were avoided by typing up copy on a rented or borrowed IBM Selectric typewriter to be pasted-up by hand.
[citation needed] In mid-1966, the cooperative Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) was formed at the instigation of Walter Bowart, the publisher of another early paper, the East Village Other.
Some of the cartoonists syndicated by UPS included Robert Crumb,[32] Jay Lynch,[33] The Mad Peck's Burn of the Week, Ron Cobb, and Frank Stack.
[35] Each Friday, the company sent out a distribution sheet with the strips it was selling, by such cartoonists as Gilbert Shelton, Bill Griffith, Joel Beck, Dave Sheridan, Ted Richards, and Harry Driggs.
[35] The Liberation News Service (LNS), co-founded in the summer of 1967 by Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom,[36] "provided coverage of events to which most papers would have otherwise had no access.
One of the most notorious underground newspapers to join UPS and rally activists, poets, and artists by giving them an uncensored voice, was the NOLA Express in New Orleans.
Charles Bukowski's syndicated column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, ran in NOLA Express, and Francisco McBride's illustration for the story "The Fuck Machine" was considered sexist, pornographic, and created an uproar.
[40] Many of the papers faced official harassment on a regular basis; local police repeatedly raided and busted up the offices of Dallas Notes and jailed editor Stoney Burns on drug charges; charged Atlanta's Great Speckled Bird and others with obscenity; arrested street vendors; and pressured local printers not to print underground papers.
[41] In Austin, the regents at the University of Texas sued The Rag to prevent circulation on campus but the American Civil Liberties Union successfully defended the paper's First Amendment rights before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In an apparent attempt to shut down The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, editor James Retherford was briefly imprisoned for alleged violations of the Selective Service laws; his conviction was overturned and the prosecutors were rebuked by a federal judge.
In Houston, as in many other cities, the attackers, never identified, were suspected of being off-duty military or police personnel, or members of the Ku Klux Klan or Minuteman organizations.
In 1976 the San Diego Union reported that the attacks in 1971 and 1972 had been carried out by a right-wing paramilitary group calling itself the Secret Army Organization, which had ties to the local office of the FBI.
[44] The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted surveillance and disruption activities on the underground press in the United States, including a campaign to destroy the alternative agency Liberation News Service.
Howard McCord published Malay Roy Choudhury's controversial poem Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar i.e., "Stark Electric Jesus from Washington State University" in 1965.
The poem has been translated into several languages of the world; into German by Carl Weissner, into Spanish by Margaret Randall, into Urdu by Ameeq Hanfee, into Assamese by Manik Dass, into Gujarati by Nalin Patel, into Hindi by Rajkamal Chaudhary, and into English by Howard McCord.
