Hornbooks of the 1960s
Peck, Abe
Hornbooks of the 1960s UNCOVERING THE SIXTIES: THE LIFE & TIMES OF THE UNDERGROUND PRESS by Abe Peck Pantheon Books. 364 pp. $22.95 hardcover. $12.95 paperback. Abook about the underground press...
...To the millions of young Americans who during the 1960s were openly dissatisfied with their country and their lives, they were the hornbooks of dissident politics and alternative culture...
...We turned rumor into fact and exaggerated fact to serve our politics...
...Underground" is a misnomer for this journalistic phenomenon...
...On the other hand, as Peck shows, the underground press was an audacious attempt to cope with exceptional events...
...Writers who wanted to move the young in a political direction were seduced in the end by the do-your-own-thing hedonism of the countercultural milieu and often confused political action with personal kicks...
...Now a professor of journalism at Northwestern University, Peck reviews that experience with the critical perspective of a professional journalist committed to his craft...
...As a history of the press and its relationship to the broader radicalism of the time, Peck's narrative is complete...
...By the time American troops were withdrawn, most of the papers had disappeared...
...The first underground papers were started in 1965 by veteran leftists who perceived in the bohemian radicalism of the day an opportunity to score political points...
...Overall, Peck's critique of the underground press is harsh but fair...
...Despite this cavil, Abe Peck has done us a service by raising the question of journalistic standards...
...But, as Peck shows, the papers failed for more complicated reasons: disdain for ordinary business practices, staff burnout, government harassment, and the sexism and ideological polarization that short-circuited the broader movement as well...
...Abook about the underground press perforce must describe that nexus of activism, lifestyle, and art that so engorged the radical movement of the 1960s...
...And he has given us an honest account of the underground press of the 1960s, with all its flaws and its triumphs...
...As editor of Seed during the late 1960s, Peck was at the center of the movement...
...Papers like the Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, the Austin Rag, and Abe Peck's own Chicago Seed screamed their advocacy of revolution, sexual freedom, and psychedelic utopianism...
...His understanding of what those heady times were like gives the book authority...
...Entranced by their own Utopian fantasies, many papers ignored the squalid and destructive reality of their own countercul-tural turf...
...On the crucial events of the day—the war, racial upheaval, the environmental crisis, dissident politics, and the disaffection of the young—the underground press was far more astute in its coverage...
...Peck makes interesting comparisons between the way the establishment and the underground press handled news...
...There are moments in history when we need the righteous sensationalism of an underground press never afraid to headline, President Lies...
...Black militants and self-proclaimed white revolutionaries were virtually sacrosanct...
...A program of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll would rally the baby-boom generation to the revolutionary cause and the country would be transformed...
...Sometimes objectivity, balance, and all the other conceits of the journalist's craft obfuscate fact...
...We rarely checked our sources or sought balance in our accounts...
...In Uncovering the Sixties, Peck examines the underground press from two useful, if contradictory, viewpoints...
...A few, like San Francisco's colorful Oracle, were devoted exclusively to consciousness change...
...Nothing in the inherited liberalism of the time prepared anyone for the Vietnam war...
...He rightfully charges it with a narrow, misogynist interpretation of sexual freedom...
...At the same time, Peck has retained a progressive stance...
...The underground press learned its history and its politics on the run...
...Marty Jezer (Marty Jezer is writing "The Politics of Illusion, " a history of the Bohemian Left...
...it did attempt to steer alienated youth towards politically constructive communitarian goals...
...He castigates it for a reluctance to look objectively at its own, to criticize the ethical behavior of movement activists and organizations...
...At once personal memoir, historical account, and journalistic critique, Uncovering the Sixties is sympathetic and clearheaded, the best study of the underground press available now...
...Yet, as a former underground staffer myself, I cop to Peck's charges of shoddy journalistic practices...
...Some of the papers that followed, like New York's Rat, were primarily political...
...It did not create the youth revolt...
...Their contributors were the makers and shapers of news...
...internecine struggle was one inevitable result...
...it was quite a hallucination...
...This is no big-chill denunciation of radicalism past...
...The war in Vietnam gave the papers their central focus and engendered a spirit of intensity, crisis, and apocalypse...
...their passionately subjective reports from the front lines of confrontation and change were what made the radical movement move...
...Stoned politicos saw what they wanted to believe and concluded that the country was on the cusp of revolution...
...But I'm not as convinced as Peck seems to be that so-called professional standards make for better reporting...
...Peck, I believe, underestimates the influence of psychedelic drugs on even the most political of papers...
...A product of the fusion of post-beat countercultural bohemianism, antiwar protests, and New Left politics, the hundred and more weekly newspapers that constituted the underground press were the most widely read radical publications in the history of the American Left...
...Most papers tried to unite politics and lifestyles...
Vol. 50 • February 1986 • No. 2
