DISSIDENT VOICES/COMMON THREADS IV

The fourth generation of the dissident press bulged with five genres dedicated to effecting social change, each with a discrete mission and yet all of them somewhat overlapping as well. Even though these “voices of revolution” followed the well-worn path that their predecessors had been traversing for a century and a half, they nevertheless illuminated several more overarching commonalities relevant to this unique form of American journalism.

THE DISSIDENT PRESS IS PARTICULARLY ACTIVE DURING PERIODS OF SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL TURBULENCE

The labor papers that launched dissident journalism in the United States in the 1820s—the Mechanic’s Free Press, Free Enquirer, and Working Man’s Advocate—reflected the concerns of an awakened working class during a time of rapid change impelled by the first stages of the country’s shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy.

The most prolific period for dissident voices during the 1800s came at the end of the century as the robber barons thrust American industry into the future at breakneck speed. Recognizing that this economic surge had driven urban laborers into squalid tenements and fetid factories, socialist and anarchist publications erupted in a desperate attempt to eradicate capitalism and return the nation to the working men and women who—according to the Appeal to Reason, The Alarm, and Mother Earth—had been forced into industrial slavery.

The most active period in the entire history of the dissident press was the ten years between 1965 and 1975. That single decade gave birth to four of the fourteen genres covered in this book—the counterculture, Black Panthers, gay and lesbian, and women’s liberation presses—and marked the most vital period of a fifth—the anti-Vietnam War press. It is no coincidence that the period was fertile ground not only for dissident journalism but also for upheaval across the spectrum of American life. Political uncertainty surrounded the most unpopular war in U.S. history and the assassinations, in chillingly rapid succession, of John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, social unrest spawned a defiant youth culture, rebellions on college campuses and in urban centers, and social movements led by racial and sexual minorities who demanded changes in an economic system increasingly defined by greed, consumerism, and a widening gap between the Haves and the Have Nots.

DISSIDENT PUBLICATIONS TEND TO BE SHORT LIVED

Of the thirty-three individual newspapers and magazines illuminated in this book, only thirteen survived more than ten years.

This figure shows that the life expectancy of a dissident publication is considerably shorter than that of a mainstream one. Although it is impossible to determine the average life span of the thousands of commercial newspapers published in the United States during the last three centuries, the founding dates of some of today’s leading papers—1851 for the New York Times, 1877 for the Washington Post, and 1881 for the Los Angeles Times—attest to the staying power of the Brahmins of the American press.

One frequent cause of death for dissident publications—along with the lack of resources that results from scant advertising and circulation revenue—is the federal government. Anthony Comstock’s anti-obscenity crusade in the 1870s destroyed the sexual reform press, first by entangling the editors of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, The Word, and Lucifer, the Light-Bearer in court cases and then by sending them to jail—ultimately shortening the lives of Ezra Heywood and Moses Harman. That same government crusade against obscene material—as defined by “St. Anthony”—killed another dissident voice in the early twentieth century when Woman Rebel ceased publication as Margaret Sanger fled to Europe to avoid prosecution for attempting to inform American women about birth control.

The federal government waged another far-reaching campaign against the dissident press in the 1960s and 1970s. The FBI’s Secret War included a broad array of activities—many of them illegal—that contributed to the premature demise of numerous journalistic tribunes of the anti-Vietnam War, counterculture, Black Panther, gay and lesbian, and women’s liberation movements.

For a dissident voice to survive beyond the ten-year threshold, the journalists supporting it often have had to pay a high price. William Lloyd Garrison endured a life of poverty and deprivation, as did his family, to keep The Liberator in print for the thirty-five years until slavery was finally abolished. Robert S. Abbott continued to publish the Chicago Defender long after the Great Migration ended, but he did so only by eliminating the militancy of his editorial content. Dorothy Day published the Catholic Worker for half a century, but even in her old age she suffered the emotional pain of being publicly denounced, because of her opposition to the Vietnam War, as “Moscow Mary.”

IN SEEKING TO END A WRONG THAT IS DEEPLY EMBEDDED INTO AMERICAN LIFE, THE DISSIDENT PRESS OFTEN EITHER PROMOTES OR CONDONES VIOLENCE

Although most readers prefer nonviolent approaches to resolving problems and therefore may cringe at this observation, the necessity of taking up arms to battle the various evils perpetrated against the poor and the powerless throughout this nation’s history was a recurring theme in the dissident press of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Abolitionist and socialist publications merely condoned violence. The Liberator carried articles that encouraged slave revolts, but William Lloyd Garrison, on a personal level, remained morally opposed to violence; the Appeal to Reason on occasion threatened armed conflict—such as in the “Arouse, Ye Slaves!” editorial—but otherwise remained firmly committed to its mantra of “ballots not bullets.”

Anti-lynching and anarchist publications embraced violence unequivocally. When Ida B. Wells told New York Age readers that lynching had become so widespread in the South that “a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” she was not giving decorating advice. And Albert R. Parsons of The Alarm was fully convinced that the violent overthrow of the government was the only way to wrest the United States from the greedy grip of capitalism, with the most memorable element in the paper being the dozens of articles and editorials praising the power of dynamite to level the nation’s social, economic, and political playing field.

Numerous 1960s dissident voices celebrated violence; they saw armed revolution as the only feasible means of eliminating the pervasive racism, homophobia, and sexism that had become ingrained in modern-day America. The Black Panther and the majority of both gay and women’s liberation papers gave their visual endorsement by peppering their pages with images of rifles, pistols, hand grenades, bombs, and clenched fists. Editorial content reinforced the point—the Black Panther called for all racist police officers to be killed, Come Out! denounced the City College of New York as a citadel of “establishment thinking” that should be burned to the ground, and Ain’t I a Woman? urged its readers to castrate men “because they are murderers and destructive and fucked up.”

WHEN A VARIETY OF DISSIDENT PUBLICATIONS SPEAK ON BEHALF OF A MOVEMENT, THE RADICAL VOICES TEND TO EXPIRE WHILE THE MODERATE ONES LIVE ON

An early example of this phenomenon began to unfold in 1868 when The Revolution, with its first issue, insisted that suffrage was only the first step in the march toward women’s rights, so the uncompromising newspaper campaigned hard for such concepts—ones the mainstream press would not even mention, much less support—as enacting laws to ban sexual harassment and domestic violence. The more temperate Woman’s Journal, by contrast, limited its agenda to suffrage and such middle-class reform efforts as establishing women’s clubs and encouraging women to obtain higher educations. The Revolution’s strident voice went silent after two and a half years; Woman’s Journal continued without interruption for sixty-three.

The genres of the dissident press that emerged in the middle to late twentieth century provided several examples of this same tendency. The Kudzu and The Paper, two extremist counterculture papers, were both dead by 1972; the tamer Berkeley Barb survived until 1980. Gay Times, Come Out!, Gay Sunshine, the San Francisco Gay Free Press, and Killer Dyke all called for radical changes in American society, but then withered and died while the moderate GAY continued to publish. Rat, Ain’t I a Woman?, and It Ain’t Me Babe—all militant in their demands for fundamental changes in the role of American women—added three more tombstones to the dissident press graveyard by 1975; more than a quarter of a century later, the less strident off our backs is still alive and well and appearing with total regularity from an office in the nation’s capital—both in printed form and on line.