Underground Newspapers and Censorship

Definition: Small-scale newspapers with nonstandard means of distribution that flourished in the United States during the 1960’s and 1970’s

Significance: Underground newspapers informed and amused many readers, but also sparked an offensive of government suppression that helped to destroy them

During the 1960’s to 1970’s more than four hundred underground newspapers were published throughout the United States. They were heirs to a tradition going back to nineteenth century European radicalism and American populist and socialist papers of the late 1890’s and early 1900’s. New York’s Village Voice began as a beatnik underground newspaper in the mid-1950’s. The 1960’s-era underground press was directly linked to the 1964 founding of the highly successful Los Angeles Free Press and the youth and student movements of the mid- to late 1960’s.

By the early 1960’s censorship in the United States had relaxed, particularly in book publishing. This new atmosphere—together with new technology that made less expensive printing possible and growing discontent with mainstream media among youth—offered an opportune time to launch a new breed of newspapers. As rapidly as the papers arose, however, they declined in the mid-1970’s. Changing times and bad management were in part to blame, but government surveillance, harassment, and unlawful attacks by government agencies also contributed.

Government attacks on the underground press were mostly autonomously orchestrated efforts of such bodies as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the White House, the Internal Revenue Service, and local police departments. FBI efforts were part of the bureau’s counterintelligence program, which viewed underground newspapers as part of a radical movement that threatened national security. CIA programs ranged from the agency’s Operation Chaos program—which fostered spying on the underground press and various militant groups—to Project Resistance— which monitored and infiltrated underground newspapers and pressured record companies not to advertise in them.

There were public attacks as well. For example, a U.S. Senate subcommittee probed Liberation News Service’s funding. Senator Thomas Dodd’s 1970 Urban Terrorism Prevention Bill would have made it illegal to publish a periodical advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. Most suppression was done privately, however. Some secret schemes were harassing, arresting, or assaulting newspaper staff members—from street vendors to editors; monitoring the finances of papers and their staffs; releasing false information or publishing fake underground newspapers to discredit real papers; and warning printers or distributors not to handle underground newspapers. For example, government documents show that a New York City distributor handling the Black Panther Party’s weekly tabloid raised his rates after talking with federal agents. Newspapers were also raided for narcotics and their vendors were occasionally rousted.

The Los Angeles Free Presswas targeted by California authorities in 1969 for exposing alleged misconduct by campus police and for revealing the identities of state narcotics agents. The agents and the state filed civil suits against the paper, and publisher Art Kunkin and reporter Jerry Applebaum were charged with receiving stolen property—copies of government documents. Both were convicted and fined, and the newspaper had to spend more than sixty thousand dollars of its limited funds to settle the various lawsuits out of court. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a freshly enacted obscenity ordinance was used to arrest Kaleidoscope editor John Kois, whose car and office were later shot at and bombed. A photographer was repeatedly arrested for disorderly conduct while he was working, and he and Kois were arrested and charged with conspiring with defendants in an antidraft trial that they were covering. Another editor was jailed for four months for refusing to divulge a news source to a grand jury.

In San Diego, California, several underground papers had their coinboxes confiscated in 1969 and 1970; thousands of copies of their papers were stolen, and dozens of their street vendors were arrested for littering and obstructing the sidewalks. Their offices were searched without warrants, ransacked, shot up, and burned. Staffers were arrested; there were also threats of violence, automobile tires were slashed, and a car was bombed.

In Philadelphia, the Free Press in 1970 reported that police threatened staff members with physical violence and beat one person. Police also arrested and detained other staffers, sometimes without charges being filed. The newspaper also reported that police broke into staffers’ residences four times without warrants. The paper was also threatened with armed officers conducting obvious surveillance with as many as six cars at once.

Although underground newspapers usually won their court cases, they typically were driven out of business by their legal expenses. The mainstream media regarded underground newspapers as unseemly, leftist competitors, and remained largely silent on their struggles against government interference. Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward observed that the underground press was accurate in its accusations of government sabotage. However, without powerful defenders and economic resources, the newspapers could not survive in the face of government harassment.