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A New Dawn for the New LeftMagic! Uniting the Underground Press

A New Dawn for the New Left: Magic! Uniting the Underground Press [On the eve of the 1967 Pentagon March, 200 newsies representing underground newspapers from all over the United States gathered in an abandoned loft near Washington’s Logan Circle to hear a sales pitch from Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo. But amid the chaos of impromptu poetry readings, frenzied political repartee, and anarchist high jinks, it was well nigh impossible to hear Bloom describe the goals of Liberation News Service (LNS). Bloom and Mungo hoped that the event would be a foundational moment in the evolution of the underground media. But most of those assembled in that loft quickly lost track of the meeting’s purpose. Too much energy, love, and nerve were in the air. Had the horde been able to catch Bloom’s scheme, Mungo later wrote, they would have heard about plans “to provide a link among the antiestablishment presses, to offer hard information to the Movement.”1 But Bloom did not protest too severely. Dressed in scarlet pants and a navy Sergeant Pepper coat, he cavorted with his uproarious guests and burned his draft card with a devious grin. The Washington Free Press ran a meeting postmortem echoed by most in attendance: “What came out of the first gathering was little more than the acknowledgement of the existence of LNS … The community of papers that we hoped would develop, did not …. The scene was absurd.”2 But LNS had struck a chord. The young underground activists gathered in that loft created a rhythm felt by millions of American youth in every corner of the United States. Yet it was not altogether clear that the disparate and esoteric underground could be united.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A New Dawn for the New LeftMagic! Uniting the Underground Press

Slonecker, Blake
Springer Journals — Nov 3, 2015
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17 pages

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2012
ISBN
978-1-349-44789-3
Pages
13 –30
DOI
10.1057/9781137280831_2
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[On the eve of the 1967 Pentagon March, 200 newsies representing underground newspapers from all over the United States gathered in an abandoned loft near Washington’s Logan Circle to hear a sales pitch from Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo. But amid the chaos of impromptu poetry readings, frenzied political repartee, and anarchist high jinks, it was well nigh impossible to hear Bloom describe the goals of Liberation News Service (LNS). Bloom and Mungo hoped that the event would be a foundational moment in the evolution of the underground media. But most of those assembled in that loft quickly lost track of the meeting’s purpose. Too much energy, love, and nerve were in the air. Had the horde been able to catch Bloom’s scheme, Mungo later wrote, they would have heard about plans “to provide a link among the antiestablishment presses, to offer hard information to the Movement.”1 But Bloom did not protest too severely. Dressed in scarlet pants and a navy Sergeant Pepper coat, he cavorted with his uproarious guests and burned his draft card with a devious grin. The Washington Free Press ran a meeting postmortem echoed by most in attendance: “What came out of the first gathering was little more than the acknowledgement of the existence of LNS … The community of papers that we hoped would develop, did not …. The scene was absurd.”2 But LNS had struck a chord. The young underground activists gathered in that loft created a rhythm felt by millions of American youth in every corner of the United States. Yet it was not altogether clear that the disparate and esoteric underground could be united.]

Published: Nov 3, 2015

Keywords: Underground Press; Participatory Democracy; News Service; Black Power; Sales Pitch

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