UNDERGROUND

...By focusing on the chief architects of the alternative media, people like Warren Hinckle of Ramparts, Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo of Liberation News Service, Tom Donahue of KMPX-FM in San Francisco, and Stewart Brand of The Whole Earth Catalog, among many others, Armstrong imparts a directness and strength of narrative that would have been lost in a less intimate history...

...A former editor of the Berkeley Barb and frequent contributor to alternative newspapers, Armstrong clearly sympathizes with the idealism and whimsicality of the underground journalists whose aim was "nothing less than changing the world," yet his sentiments do not get in the way of the steady analysis he applies to the subject...

...Numerous publications were torn apart by internal bickering and the ambivalence of staff and management toward power and profit-making...

...According to Armstrong, the underground press, once ubiquitous in the big cities and college towns of America, fell victim to three main adversary forces...

...David Armstrong's A Trumpet to Arms tells the story of America's underground press of the 1960s, its flourishing with the cultural and political youth movements of the time, its suppression under Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, and its decline into decadence in the 1970s...

...Acclaiming drugs as mind-expanders, sex and rock music as liberators of the human spirit, the media activists rejected the intellectual radicalism of their "Beat" forebears in favor of an enlightened hedonism...

...As to profit, most of the early undergrounds relied heavily on sex-related advertising and were slow to respond to feminist complaints about their revenue sources...

...All of this skulduggery worked to dismantle the incipient network of underground broadcast media and publications...

...Divested of their radical context, the counterculture's vaunted instruments of liberation could be used as agents of stimulation, eminently salable...

...The youth market boomed...

...The first of the underground newspapers was the Los Angeles Free Press, founded in 1964 by an unemployed factory worker, Art Kunkin...

...That the stylistic accoutrements of the age were so readily assimilable by Madison Avenue suggests that the alternative press mirrored an essentially superficial movement, valuing style above substance, mannerisms over morals...

...yet, in A Trumpet to Arms Armstrong can point to many ideas and endeavors which resisted the trivialization of mass culture...

...Owned and staffed by amateurs, the Freep and its progeny spurned the detached manner of established journals in favor of an exuberant and frankly biased advocacy...

...He commends the investigative achievements of Mother Jones and The Progressive (not inspired by the 1960s, of course, but founded in 1909) and the cultural reportage of the Village Voice and the Boston Phoenix...

...Many of the undergrounds dissolved or fragmented, unable to set up governing structures reflective of countercultural values...

...Richard Raskin (Richard Raskin is a free-lance writer and editor based in Cincinnati...

...But these are the exceptions, publications which survived the storms of political bickering and backlash, with some or all of their original reason for being still intact...

...A second force, long familiar to the American Left, was internal political conflict, particularly the division of militants from those who favored a more passive revolution in consciousness and culture—which is simply to say that the same divisions which weakened the counterculture as a whole hastened the decline of its media...

...radicals and turn them into throwaway consumer items," he writes...

...First were the FBI and the Nixon Administration, which conspired to wage a "secret war" against the underground press organs...

...The truth," as Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist, put it, "is silly putty...

...This is the cynic's perspective...

...Usually they equated cultural with political revolution: If the medium was the message, then rock and roll was potentially as explosive as a Molotov cocktail...

...Where radicals had expected the culture to collapse, they found that it could simply give way, adopting as its own the iconography of its errant offspring...

...Armstrong treats the underground newspapers and their cousins in FM radio, films, and small book presses as irrational artifacts of an irrational, or at least anti-rational, age...

...In Christopher Lasch's phrase, alienation itself could become a commodity...

...It is the already mythical tale of an American generation's passage from activism to consumerism, told through the lives and work of the creators of its print and visual media...

...Thus did the mass merchandising of High Times, Hustler, and Rolling Stone evoke the underground trinity of drugs, sex, and rock...

...Harassment by the FBI, CIA, and other government agencies came to include arrests and assaults on staff members, publication of phony undergrounds—funded by government—as fronts for surveillance, and the ransacking of newspaper offices...

...From the start, the alternative culture was celebrated by an activist, participatory press, self-labeled "underground" as a badge of alienation...

...Mainstream American society has shown that it can absorb a number of once-threatening ideas from...

...Partisan and propagan-distic, these papers broke down the conventional boundaries between writer and reader, reflecting and enhancing the movement's growing sense of communal identity...

...Armstrong's history of the alternative media shows that in large measure a cultural revolution really did occur...

...For some this meant the loss of their readership—and . their publications—leaving sponsors more or less happy to seek out the new, greener fields of strictly sex-oriented magazines...

...Finally, Armstrong attributes the demise of the underground media to the unforeseen resilience of American consumer culture...

...the medium consumed the message...