Voices from the Underground was welcomed into the world of historical and literary nonfiction by those who understood its significance and also loved good literature.
What scholars and activists said about the first edition
“We live in a country that is free, but with an ideological system of astonishingly narrow scope and rigidity, a fact that has led to many efforts to find alternative modes of expression. The publication of Voices from the Underground is a welcome contribution to the process of seeking ways to democratize and invest formal freedom with real meaning.”
—Noam Chomsky, institute professor of linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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“Voices from the Underground allows ‘the people who were there’ to document the role of the underground and countercultural press in the development of political consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s. In their own words and styles, editors and writers offer insights that scholars and students will find indispensable to the next wave of analytical writing on this important period. This is the volume for scholars who want to teach their students about the sixties and the underground press.”
—Barbara L. Tischler, assistant dean of student affairs, Columbia University School of General Studies, and editor of Perspectives on the Sixties
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“Voices from the Underground is an important guide and an inspiration for young journalism students and others who recognize the need for a media of integrity, commitment, depth, and truth; a media committed to the propagation of universal human value.”
—David G. Du Bois, president, W.E.B. Du Bois Foundation, and visiting professor of journalism/Afro American studies, University of Massachusetts
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“Voices from the Underground captures the passion and the promises of one of the most creative organs of the Vietnam Era. In the pages of the alternative papers, activists analyzed everything, argued over strategies, and created visions of how society might be…. [It is] a vital resource for women’s studies by presenting vividly the context in which ‘60s feminism emerged in the U.S. culture and politics.”
—Charlotte Bunch, author of Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action, co-founder of D.C. Women’s Liberation Movement, and director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Douglass College, Rutgers University
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“That crucial period in American social history called the ‘60s already is in danger of being distorted and trivialized in scholarship and journalism based on establishment media. Voices from the Underground rescues for us the primary sources and living texture of the publications that emerged from the protest movement of the Vietnam War Era.”
—Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley
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“The true brief shining moment in American press history was the 1960s’ voices of liberation as reflected in the grassroots press of the day. Ken Wachsberger has brought together a collection of outstanding memoirs of that age in Voices from the Underground: all the more important today when the shining has tarnished and the word ‘liberation’ is lost in the wind.”
—Barbara Grier, author ofThe Lesbian in Literature, CEO of Naiad Press, and former editor/publisher of The Ladder
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“… skillful editing and a welcome range of voices in the chorus. Voices from the Underground includes writers not just from big-city papers on either coast, but from small towns, military bases, even the prisons. Especially prominent are some of the feminist and gay writers who created a revolution within a revolution.”
—Abe Peck, author of Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press and professor of journalism at Northwestern University, from foreword to Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press
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“It is a privilege to be asked to write a foreword to Voices from the Underground…. It is my hope that these fascinating and uniformly well-written pieces enjoy a wide currency, particularly among those who believe that the First Amendment means more than reprinting or broadcasting the words of Marlin Fitzwater or Norman Schwarzkopf.”
—William M. Kunstler, founder, vice president, and volunteer staff attorney, the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York, from foreword to Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press
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“The period of the late sixties and early seventies was a high-water mark for American journalism. For the first time in American history, the vision of Justices Holmes and Brandeis blossomed and bore fruit. A multitude of voices, the essence of democracy, resounded through the land providing a compelling alternative against the stifling banality of the establishment press. What this nation had during the Vietnam War was exactly what the founding fathers understood the press to be all about when they wrote the First Amendment. You are to be congratulated on making a significant contribution to American journalism. I recommend that anyone who truly cares about the nation’s press buy a copy and explore with your writers what journalism was really like when the alternative press flourished.”
—Art Levin, chair, department of journalism, Butler University
What editors said as they rejected Voices for publication
“This is indeed an important collection of underground press histories, and it does come with the right forewords and advance endorsements.”
—Editor, Carol Publishing Group
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“… an impressive piece of scholarship….”
—Editor, Little, Brown and Company Publishers
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“Thank you for submitting Ken Wachsberger’s impressive Voices from the Underground. I’ve hesitated to return it to you because I was busy reading it—it’s a wonderful, authoritative, and much needed collection…. I’m genuinely sorry that we will have to decline it. I am sure the book will do very well…. Good luck!”
—Editor, Thunder’s Mouth Press
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“… couldn’t put it down … extraordinary book … rave rejection….”
—Editor, Pantheon Books
What the media said
“…comes closer than anything I’ve yet read to putting the sights, sounds, and texture of the ‘60s on paper.”
—Los Angeles Times
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“…the most important book on American journalism published in my lifetime.”
—In These Times
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“Voices is an important contribution to the history of contemporary dissent in America. Librarians should promote wide use of this insightful and unique publication.”
—Bill Katz, editor, Magazines for Libraries
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“[F]rom the moment I began reading the introduction [toVoices from the Underground], I was enthralled…. I recommendVoices. I think the reader will find it inspiring, maybe even a little guilt-producing. But mainly he or she will find it fun. It was fun to read all the old arguments between the traditional reformers and the revolutionaries, between the anarcho-syndicalists and the Maoists, between the feminists and the macho types. It was also fun to remember how all those arguments melted together with Eastern consciousness and psychedelic drugs and Black power and uninhibited sex to produce an outpouring of ideas that seemed endless.”
—Ed Bishop, editor, St. Louis Journalism Review
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“one of the top five books in the field of communication for 1993”
—Choice magazine
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“… preserves the little-known and almost forgotten history of the many gutsy and controversial underground newspapers of the Vietnam era…. [U]nique in its examination of publications representing the voices and outlooks of a counterculture that embraced gays and lesbians, radical feminists, socialists, prisoners, students, New Agers, and various minority and ethnic groups.”
—Donna Seaman, American Libraries
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“The often ragtag underground press voiced rising objections against the war in Vietnam; chronicled a resurgent civil rights movement, the apocalyptic counter culture, a vast youth rebellion against establishment morals, politics, economics and styles; and supported anybody, anything, that was different, revolutionary, ‘freaky.’ It provided the matrix that helped bring our small, polite, homophile, confrontational, gay liberation phase. This important, challenging book is a lengthy, exciting collection of personal histories of that diverse experience, ranging from writers who publicly came out later, like Bob Hippler, who worked with Detroit’s Fifth Estate, to those who worked on radical gay and feminist papers: Marilyn Webb of our backs, Charles Shively of Fag Rag, Ginny Berson of The Furies—of papers like the San Francisco Oracle, which burst with not yet labeled-as-such gay spirit. A few of the selections in Voices from the Underground never mention gays, but nevertheless relate heavily to some of our concerns. The accounts of the anti-war servicemen’s publications and the Black Muslim and Black Panther papers have a lot to teach us even today.”
—Jim Kepner, Bay Area Reporter
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“An invaluable collection of the alternative civilian and military press of the stormy sixties, published by a classy small press whose logo is a white rose, commemorating two German students, Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie, who printed an anti-Nazi underground news-paper in 1943 and were then beheaded. Editor Wachsberger has selected insightful essays on the American antiwar media in Volume I, while Volume II is an indispensable guide for scholars and writers. Ask your library to order these volumes. And thanks to Wachsberger, the voices of these principled dissidents will never disappear.”
—Murray Polner, Fellowship Magazine
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“Voices from the Underground is an important book for historians and those interested in learning of a major component in the development of the current Gay and Lesbian movement in this country…. Upon first seeing this 640-page book, I expected to find only passing mention of gays and lesbians. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that over half the articles in this book are stories about the lives of lesbians and gays involved in ‘the movement’ of that time. The efforts of Voices editor Ken Wachsberger are of importance to lesbians and gays wishing to learn more about our movement’s origins. Wachsberger makes sure that gay people’s involvement in the development and operation of many underground papers is not ignored or diminished, as often happens in histories of that time.”
—John O’Brien, Turning the Tide, “A Gay Man’s Perspective”
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“… and it’s fun.”
—Erwin Knoll, editor, The Progressive
And what they’re saying about the revised, updated, expanded 4-volume Voices from the Underground Series
“Books such as Ken Wachsberger‘s Voices from the Underground are becoming increasingly important and valuable as more and more people become interested in 1960s and 70s history. Michigan is a leader in preserving that history and making it accessible to future generations of scholars and activists. In my opinion, this series is a very worthwhile contribution to that effort.”
—Judy Gumbo Albert, feminist activist scholar and original Yippie
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“… an important project. That information needs to be available. I liked the list of GI newspapers and was not aware there were so many.”
—Country Joe McDonald, leader of Country Joe and the Fish
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“In an era when events linger in popular memory for increasingly smaller increments of time, Voices from the Underground serves us all by bringing back to life those rebel shouts and rants, as well as the thoughtful critiques and criticism that marked the 1960s and 70s oppositional press. Without a world wide web or internet to connect and inform those who refused the official version of events, it fell to the intrepid youth of that period to create a lively media that unraveled lies, put forth a vision, and gave a clenched fist and a raised middle finger to power.”
—Peter Werbe, Fifth Estate staff member since 1966; Detroit radio broadcaster and talk show host
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“The irresistible rise of the Sixties underground press is now being recognized by historians as a unique and remarkable chapter in the long and storied saga of journalism. Ken Wachsberger’s Voices from the Underground tells our story in a special way, providing not only the facts but also the texture. These volumes vibrate with a range of voices–both raw and polished—that accurately reflect the spirit and the incredible diversity of an alternative media that spread across the land like a proliferation of magic mushrooms.”
—Thorne Dreyer, activist, writer, editor (The Rag Blog), and pioneering Sixties underground journalist (The Rag, Austin; Liberation News Service, New York; Space City!, Houston; Pacifica radio, Houston)
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“Ken Wachsberger points out in his introduction to this fine collection that the present generation of bloggers – the new underground press? – seem to be unaware of historical precedent. This was equally true when the first edition of this book was first published. Even then, historical perspective seemed largely the preserve of historians, not of activists and alternative journalists. These volumes offer a powerful corrective to that myopia and force us to consider alternative media as a continuum, as a process of continual reflexivity. For those of us (like me) who were only children when the underground press emerged in the US, these volumes do much to dispel the mists of myth that surrounds its origins. The stories recounted here speak of far more than youthful idealism and rebellion: they invite us to consider the alternative press as work, as an activity located not in some mythical counterculture but in longstanding struggles over media ownership and media representation – in the struggle to make so many voices heard above the din of an increasingly banal corporate media. This collection offers us a rich history of a crucial period of American life. It presents a compelling set of narratives that bring to life the development of the alternative press. Above all, the collection emphasises the vital connectedness of alternative journalism with everyday life. This is an important collection. I do not say that lightly.”
—Chris Atton, Professor of Media and Culture, Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland
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“The Sixties—perpetually referenced, rarely understood—is mostly myth and symbol now, a Rorschach test for how folks choose to live their lives today. Nobody actually counts his days in ten-year cycles, of course, no generation has a monopoly on hope and courage and daring to dream, and no decade has cornered the capacity for confusion and catastrophe. Voices from the Underground helps to rescue that iconic moment from its entanglements and its discontents, and from the lazy haze of nostalgia. With this extraordinary book, Ken Wachsberger has accomplished a deep and finely calibrated examination of an alternative media exploding onto the scene in the midst of an exuberant and turbulent uproar, voices that came alive in the service of peace and justice. Every social movement invents a means of communication that somehow embodies its challenges and aspirations, its limitations and its imaginative horizons. Different times demand different responses, but what Wachsberger captures perfectly is the spirit and the dispositions of mind that drove a talented and creative group of happy warriors to open every door they could find, to mount every barricade with love in their hearts and pens in their hands, to change forever the mediated landscape. Those lessons are eternal.”
—Bill Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Race Course: Against White Supremacy (with Bernardine Dohrn) and Fugitive Days: A Memoir, national officer of Students for a Democratic Society, and co-founder of Weather Underground
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“These are excellent primary sources for researchers and story-tellers engaged in the battle over memory of the Sixties and the era’s legacy today. Those who wish to forget the sixties already are rejecting its lessons, from the quagmire in Afghanistan to the drug wars on our border. The new generation who helped elect Barack Obama will need these lessons for what lies ahead.”
—Tom Hayden, director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center, co-founder of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), former California State Senator, and author of The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama
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A somewhat Gonzo testimonial for Voices from the Underground
Skype and Wiki’s High School assignment, circa 2036
Skype: “Tell me, Grandpa, how did your people, way back when, communicate radical ideas before blogs?”
Gramps: “Well, that is a good story. Long ago, after airplanes were invented but before bots, the internet, cell phones, or personal computers, young people believed that the news media were hiding the truth about the issues that were affecting their lives—like the war in Vietnam, racism, and the third world liberation struggle and their political leaders. So they created a ‘counterculture’ and that counterculture created their own ‘news’ media to report on news stories that were not being reported elsewhere, personal accounts of struggles, and heavy editorial content. With only a ‘mimeograph machine’ or ‘ink-roller printer’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph, we would create, sometimes overnight, a minimedium to express our ideas and to organize for social change. Few of our papers became mass media. Their strength lay not in numbers, but in the notion that anyone could adapt the technologies for their own use—so thousands of these underground papers circulated around the country, waging war against the forces that were waging war against us. Your ole Gramps, when he was just 14, started an underground paper that addressed the dress code, ‘narcs’ at the school, and other issues important to us back then. We were inspired by many of the publications you can see in Voices from the Underground, still the best reference ‘book’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book on the subject. And that is how we stopped the War in Vietnam, fought to achieve racial justice in America, supported the liberation struggle of the people of the third world, and did a lot of other things that you kids ought to pay more attention to, instead of burying your lives in a keyboard and …..”
Wiki: “Thanks, Gramps. Gotta go upload. We’ll come by again next week. You can show us how to roll one-paper joints with one hand and other fabulous tricks from back then.”
—Ron Kuby, civil rights and criminal defense lawyer, publisher of The Raven, Roosevelt Jr. High, Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1970-71
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“What a boon to historians! Ken Wachsberger’s Voices from the Underground is crucial to an understanding of the literary and political history of the 1960s counterculture movement. This valuable resource must stay in print, if only for academics who wish to study the amazing phenomenon of the alternative newspapers, put together by amateurs, that sprang up across the country in those fervent years. Wachsberger’s material, largely in the form of ‘how we did it’ memoirs, is rich in personal histories and anecdotal details that are collected nowhere else.”
—Susan Brownmiller, feminist historian, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape and In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution
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“Voices from the Underground shows that the rebellions of the 1960s came from a broad cross-section of society, including millions of workers who were sick and tired of corporate exploitation. Paul Krehbiel‘s article, ‘New Age: Worker Organizing from the Bottom Up,’ does an excellent job of showing the commitment, understanding, creativity, and militancy of workers’ protests of that era. Most important, New Age was one of the very few progressive publications that linked workers’ struggles in one union with those in other unions and other industries, and with the social justice issues of the day. It spoke the language that workers understood, and as a result, it helped to build real rank-and-file solidarity in many unions and industries. Paul’s article brings back memories of our own battles in Pittsburgh. Kudos to Voices from the Underground for preserving this important history!”
—Kent Buchholz, former chief steward and organizer, United Electrical Workers (UE), Local 610, Pittsburgh
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“Voices from the Underground takes us inside the 1960s to a world of vibrant ideas and actions about war, life, work, justice, and equality. The astounding breadth of alternative journalism that grew from those political challenges fueled a life-changing movement. Gems abound, and certainly remarkable about Voices is the reminder just how large the working-class and class struggle loomed. One such gem is Paul Krehbiel’s account of New Age, a rank-and-file workers’ newspaper in heavily working-class Buffalo, New York. Paul’s chronicle highlights the remarkable efforts of a group of young progressive workers to radicalize their co-workers and build unity between them and the movements for social justice and peace in Vietnam. For anyone interested in the real history of the 60s, Voices from the Underground is a must read, and a fun read, too!
—Howard Kling, Executive Council, International Labor Communications Association; and Director, Labor Education Services, University of Minnesota
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“I am impressed by this collection: the contributors describe their underground newspaper work in a way that‘s honest, informative, but grounded in the personal, sans polemics! The forewords and prefaces put the era itself into perspective. I‘d been chagrined that our activism in the 70s and 80s hadn’t changed everything. We thought we could stop wars, reverse the arms race, end the ‘isms.’ We didn’t. But this collection reclaims my respect for our efforts, which fueled our long-term commitment to working for justice in each sphere of our lives.”
—Barbara Beckwith, National Writers Union-Boston Chapter co-chair, author of What Was I Thinking? Reflections on Everyday Racism
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“Let me say from the start that this is the most thorough and comprehensive book in print about the underground newspapers of the 1960s. Ken Wachsberger, the editor of the volume, sees the papers of the Vietnam Era as the forerunners of today‘s radical blogs and so he means his book to be relevant for the current generation and it is indeed greatly relevant to today…. All of the essays in Wachsberger’s volume are immersed in history and are intellectually vigorous. Reading them feels like being thrown back into the 1960s itself. Suddenly an essay will take one back to June 1967, or August 1969, and so the book as a whole feels vivid, immediate, and intense. It’s a real case of déjà vu…. Wachsberger’s wonderfully alive and lively book is scheduled to be followed by three more volumes about the underground press, and so the series as a whole promises to be the definitive work on the subject of the underground press, at least for our time.”
—Jonah Raskin, The Rag Blog
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