In the spring of 1984, I was a hard-charging young assistant professor in pursuit of tenure. The project on which I pinned my hopes was a first-of-its-kind study of how the American news media were covering AIDS, then still in its infancy. My study looked at coverage by the titans of American journalism—the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, NBC. I succeeded in having my research published in a highly respected journal of media criticism, and I subsequently received the praise from both journalists and scholars that led to my securing academia’s Holy Grail.1
After the study was published, however, I received a letter from a gay physician who was not as laudatory of my research as other readers had been. He pointed out that my study was, in fact, woefully incomplete because I had overlooked a huge body of AIDS reporting that had appeared not in the mainstream press but in the gay press.
The guy was right. Like most journalism scholars, I had confined my study to the elite news media. Because of those narrow parameters, I had failed to document that the earliest and best AIDS coverage was not in the Brahmins of American journalism but in the 20,000-circulation New York Native. Not only was the gay bi-weekly a month and a half ahead of the mainstream press in reporting the existence of the new disease, but it also was the first news outlet in the country to tell readers what doctors suspected about how the disease was being spread. A tiny gay newspaper, in short, had out-reported the biggest and wealthiest journalistic voices in the country. In the process—and even more importantly—the Native had saved the lives of an untold number of gay men who read the paper.2
Because I had followed the conventional approach of confining my study to mainstream American journalism, I had ignored the Native’s noble contribution.
That error was the impetus for this book.
My omission more than fifteen years ago alerted me, for the first time, to the contributions that publications outside the mainstream of American journalism can make. Indeed, since receiving that first wake-up call, I have discovered numerous other instances during which dissident publications have not only served their readers well but, in many cases, have also been instrumental in shaping the history of this nation.
Fourteen of those episodes are illuminated in the chapters that follow. And impressive case studies they are:
■ In the 1860s, The Revolution pioneered a radical agenda for women’s rights, having the temerity to discuss such explosive topics—then as well as now—as sexual harassment, domestic violence, and abortion.
■ Between 1916 and 1919, the Chicago Defender helped propel one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in this nation’s history, persuading hundreds of thousands of black Americans to abandon the South and relocate in the North.
■ In the early years of the twentieth century, Margaret Sanger’s publications Woman Rebel and Birth Control Review ignited a social movement that transformed America’s consciousness regarding the controversial issue of a woman’s right to control her own body.
■ During the turbulent 1960s, multiple genres of the dissident press helped spread a social revolution unprecedented both in force and in scope—fueling opposition to the Vietnam War as well as supporting the counterculture, black power, gay and lesbian rights, and women’s liberation.
Because of these and other achievements by the dissident press during the last 200 years, it is absurd to dismiss non-mainstream publications as irrelevant rags and oddball journals, even though that is how most smug mainstream journalists and many myopic media scholars see them.
This book tells a different story. It documents that the dissident American press has, for almost two centuries, served as a robust and effectual force that has had substantial impact on the social and political fabric of this nation. In fact, a strong argument can be made that the dissident press has played a more vital role in shaping American history than has the mainstream press—which, at least in recent decades, has become part of the establishment rather than a watchdog over it.
Before I launch the reader into the history of the dissident press, I want to articulate the dimensions of this project.
My dictionary says that dissidence means “thinking or feeling differently; disagreeing; differing.” Consistent with that definition, all of the publications discussed in this book offered views that differed from those served up by the conventional press. Indeed, in order for a publication to merit the mantle of “dissident,” at least in this book, it not only had to offer a differing view of society but also had to seek to change society in some discernible way. That publication had to set out—intentionally and without apology—to champion a particular cause. The publication’s primary purpose must have been, in short, to effect social change.
This motivation to transform society is a crucial one, as it separates dissident publications from the much larger category of alternative ones. The way I see it, all dissident publications are alternative publications, but many of those alternative publications are not dissident. For example, I see the weekly tabloids that have proliferated in the bohemian sections of American cities in recent decades—such as the Village Voice in New York City, the City Paper in Washington, D.C., and Isthmus in Madison, Wisconsin—as alternative publications that differ from mainstream newspapers. I have not written about those publications in this book, however, because they were not created, at least in my opinion, in order to change society in any fundamental way—they do not represent the voice of any specific social movement. Likewise, I do not include The Masses, the alternative journal of the early twentieth century known for its artwork and literary content, because it did not concentrate on advancing any one particular issue or movement.
Several genres of the dissident press that I highlight involve chapters in the American experience that I believe are important to document, even though those movements ultimately failed to change society to any significant degree. Sexual reform journals, for example, added considerable spice to the late nineteenth century by advocating what they termed “free love,” but they made little real headway toward their primary goal of destroying the sanctified institution of marriage. Likewise, the leading socialist weekly at the turn of the century, the Appeal to Reason, achieved a circulation of a staggering 760,000, but it did not succeed in halting the growth of its major nemesis: capitalism.
If either the existence of these advocacy publications or their accomplishments are unfamiliar to you, do not despair. Thousands of such non-mainstream publications have been either ignored or relegated to a sentence or two in the standard histories of American journalism. Indeed, even the handful of histories of alternative journalism that have been published have overlooked most of the publications illuminated in the pages of this book. In short, then, all but a few scholars of journalism history have treated these presses with the same dismissive attitude that the mainstream press of their day regarded—or rather disregarded—them.3
For each of these presses crusaded for change so radical that the establishment press was not willing to provide a forum for the discussion. As dissident journalist Upton Sinclair observed early in the twentieth century, America’s largest and best-known newspapers generally do not champion fundamental social change but, in reality, construct a “concrete wall” between the American public and alternative thinking.4
So, many of the men and women who have sought to transform society in significant ways have been forced to create their own channels of communication in the form of their own particular brand of dissident journalism.
Those activists-cum-journalists often paid a high price for their social insurgency. In almost every case, the malcontents who edited and wrote for these publications suffered economic deprivation, as they were denied both the advertising revenue and the circulation revenue that support mainstream media. Many of these agents of change also had to endure the emotional pain of name-calling, harassment, intimidation, and public ridicule. Some of them also paid the heavy price of freedom itself, as creating their journalistic venues was so threatening to American society that it landed them in jail.
Throughout the chapters in this book, I have been particularly interested in the human story. I have, in other words, been concerned with the personal as well as the public lives of these women and men who demonstrated the courage to defy conventional standards of behavior and to endure hardship, humiliation, and abuse for the sake of principle. Because of the importance that many of these nonconformist journalists placed on individual freedom and self-reliance, the persons who come to life in these pages often display strong personalities—they lived life large.
In a few cases, in fact, a single individual was such a commanding force in creating and then leading a specific genre of the dissident press that I have written the chapter primarily as his or her biography. In several other chapters, a particular newspaper so dominated a movement that I have focused almost exclusively on that one publication. In the remaining chapters, the specific genre of the dissident press at hand is observed through the matrix of several publications; in no instance, however, have I created a mind-numbing list of the dozens or hundreds of publications that sometimes have supported a particular effort to change society.
As the pages that follow will show, the willingness to rebel against convention in the hopes of improving the quality of life for all people has not merely existed in the nature of individual Americans—men as well as women—but from time to time has erupted from its slumber and emerged in the form of a dynamic dissident press. In telling the stories of these courageous and visionary enemies of orthodoxy, I have quoted extensively from their writing. I have been committed to creating a narrative that draws on their own words not only because dissident journalists write with passion, and sometimes with eloquence, but also because I believe their words can speak to the present generation, across the gulf of time, with undiminished relevance. Their struggle for economic security, social justice, personal liberty, and freedom of expression remains part of the noble human effort that continues today.
Structurally, the bulk of this book consists of fourteen largely independent case studies that I have grouped into four broad chronological periods: the early to middle nineteenth century, the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, and the middle to late twentieth century. At the end of each of these four sections, I have inserted an essay that identifies and briefly discusses some of the distinctive characteristics shared by the genres of the dissident press that rose to prominence in that particular period—and, ultimately, the dissident press writ large.
A concluding essay looks at the current and future landscape of journalistic dissent in America, with particular attention to the rise of zines during the 1980s and the communication revolution that is taking place today because of the Internet.
As my final statement before beginning the reader’s odyssey into the dissident press, I want to remove the cloak of scholarly detachment that I try to wear through the remainder of this book and speak for a moment—with something of an authorial flight of fancy—about how I have come to see, during the years since I wrote that apocryphal article about early AIDS coverage, the women and men who have pioneered in the journalism of nonconformity.
The persons illuminated in this book labored on the social frontier, clearing new ground and sowing new ideas. They were powered by burning convictions and a faith so strong that they were willing to sacrifice their time, their energy, their material well-being, and their own health. But sometimes—not always, but sometimes—they helped to bring about the social change that drove their very being.
On occasion, the change rushed forward at torrential speed; far more often, the process was so slow that it was almost imperceptible as these tribunes of a better tomorrow gradually wore away the granite structure of the past—tiny grain by tiny grain.
Some of these dissident journalists were blown off course by what was almost always formidable opposition. They were smashed on the rocks of tradition, and they faded from the public eye and mind. They were a speck, an oddity, an item of ephemera on history’s rarefied scrolls.
But other of these spirited revolutionaries proved strong enough, single-minded enough, and fortunate enough to witness the new thought or new approach that they championed rise from a ripple to a wave to a universal force that swept away all their enemies and succeeded in becoming part of the American consciousness.
When that happened, they changed the world.