Notes from the Underground...Review
PHIT book review
There is very little institutional memory of the Left in America.
Think about it. There is no long lasting Socialist Party as in Europe and no Labor Party that has happily contended for power in England for a century. There aren’t any recognized American Colleges of the Left. Every generation sadly has to re-discover the history of protest and organizing all over again.
Those historically valuable models of success and the useful lessons of failed attempts are simply lost.
People’s History in Texas has spent 50 years collecting stories of the voices for change, because those stories weren’t being told, weren’t being collected, and weren’t being passed on. These stories are sorely needed so that the next generation will understand that they are not the first and they won’t be the last.
[go the New Journalism Project or Lulu to order this book]
Our friends over at the New Journalism Project have published a new collection of historical journalism by Thorne Dreyer that highlights his career of writing left journalism over a span of 60 years. We highly recommend it.
Back in the 1960s folks began resisting the Vietnam War. The mainstream press did not cover the issues nor the marches nor the organizing. Thorne was a key player in the development of the underground press that publicized those efforts. Many of those anti-war activists had also been involved in the desegregation efforts as well.
Thorne Dreyer, a Texan born in Houston, worked with the RAG, Space City and the Liberation News Service. These are valuable resources even today for opposition efforts.
As a side comment, when I take the PHIT documentaries on the road and show them to youngsters in academia, the one thing that absolutely fascinates them is the RAG trilogy. They want to talk about how The RAG was organized, how The RAG worked, how decisions were made, and even how the art got drawn. Young activists today want their own source of information and they are looking to models of the past. They don’t want to replicate the past, but they want to understand the process so they can create the concept anew in a different technological era.
The RAG is a great model of change. At some point the anti-war, anti-racism movement for change morphed into changing the “way we do everything,” as Judy Walther so graphically put it in our Rag Documentary.
In order to get the message out, in pre-internet days, folks created their own newspapers. The Underground Press offered the News of the Day that the mainstream newspapers didn’t see fit to print.
Thorne Dreyer helped start up the Rag. Then he moved to Houston and helped create Space City. He also worked for LNS(Liberation News Service) which was created to assist the growing culture of underground newspapers, by disseminating stories of interest to the movement from around the world. (These days they would call him a serial social entrepreneur and, honestly, in the school of UT Social Entrepreneurship, there should be class “case studies” on these radical underground press creations.)
Please note that the 60s and 70s underground newspapers weren’t illegal, and they weren’t forbidden. The name was just channeling the radical newspapers of the revolutionary movements of the past. Those older radical newspapers were truly underground, truly illegal, and truly forbidden.
Just dipping into the Notes from the Underground, you will find articles on protests about the war.
The all woman sit in at the SS office… This protest befuddled the staff. “Why are you here? We don’t generally get girls.” Please note that SS does not stand for Social Security, or the German SS stormtroopers, but Selective Service—the draft office. The draft was ended in 1973. One might wonder…Why? Hmmm.
Fort Hood: GIs hit the streets. Thorne, in this article, describes Fort Hood anti-war GIs and the Killeen Oleo Strut coffeehouse. Jane Fonda is featured. The Hollywood star supported the march and the protests and the anti-war GIs. To the MPs, she said in her Hollywood voice, “I have never been aware that the Constitution says one has to apply for permission to have freedom of press and speech and assembly.” These days, people associate Jane Fonda with Netflix’s Grace and Frankie. She had a quite different persona in the 60s.
Corn Dog Cornyn. Thorne documents a protest on Iraq Moratorium Day against the Iraqi War in Feb. 2008. Not many people remember that George Bush had a nickname for Cornyn…CornDog Well… step back in history and remember the “Barking Points” of 2008. The War in Iraq, torture, civil liberties…and the push for affordable health insurance for children.
Dip into the book and get on the ground reporting from Miami Beach and the 1972 Republican convention, on the March on Washington, and civil rights protests at gas stations in Austin.
More currently there is an interview with Carl Davidson on the Mondragon Collective. Which just happens to be the biggest cooperative in the world.
Dare I remind folks that you won’t find in this book a comparative literary analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.” Different underground, folks. I think Dostoevsky really meant the “real” underground, like cemetery. Fyodor was a dark and morbid fellow.
You will find some dark moments in Notes from the Underground…it was the 60s and 70s after all… but what you will mostly find is just honest and straightforward New Journalism.