Customer Reviews

The Paper Revolutionaries

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4 star:		(1)
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This was the first major book published about the underground newspaper phenomenon of the late 1960's and early 1970's. Leamer's book was an objective look at the radical avant garde and the publications spawned by the radical youth movement.

Leamer's book begins with a look at the precursors of the underground press, namely with the socialist press that was suppressed following America's entry into World War I. It should surprise most folks, including many historians, that in the pre-WWI era, there were over 100 socialist newspapers in America, of which half a dozen were dailies.

After WWI, there was a lull of about three decades before there was a new flowering of the radical press in the USA. This trend began with the Guardian which started as the national newspaper of the Henry Wallace for President campaign in 1948. The Guardian was followed by the Village Voice and then by The Realist.

These publications became the role models for the underground newspapers of the 1960's. Underground newspapers were the cutting edge of the revolutionary youth movement and as such were also one of the first areas of the movement to wither and die away following the end of the Vietnam War.

Leamer's work was a survey of the underground press and was based on interviews with a large number of its participants and also a review of many of the leading radical youth newspapers. As such, it is invaluable because it captured the ideas and values of the editors and writers as they really were during the early 1970's and is not some weepy nostalgia for good old days that never were or an attempt at revisionist history. It is also valuable because many of the underground press veterans are no longer with us.

I give this book 4 stars. This is because Leamer was too credulous with claims of "repression" that were made by underground journalists. Also, he failed to realize that the strength of both the radical youth movement and its press derived from mass discontent with a single issue: the Vietnam War. Indeed, within 5 years of this book's publication all but a small handful of the newspapers covered by Leamer's work were defunct.