Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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headlined “Bank of America vs. CORE,” it reported on protests against discrimination in hiring at the bank headquarters, where hundreds marched and eleven had been arrested. The cover also included a photo of a sculpture by a local LA artist charged with obscenity—an issue the Freep would cover often.13 Inside the issue readers found a critique of L.A.’s mainstream newspapers; a column by the grand old man of the Beat era, Lawrence Lipton; a “calendar of hip events”; and reviews of Brecht, Baldwin and Nabokov.
The paper was sold on the street by hippies—mostly on Sunset Strip—and from street-corner vending boxes. After a year, circulation was only 5,000, a far cry from Kunkin’s goal: to match the Village Voice’s paid circulation of 27,600. However, his outstanding coverage of Watts brought a dramatic jump in paid circulation—to 25,000—and by the end of summer 1965, Kunkin considered the Freep a success.14 Another measure of success came in 1966, when the Times ran a big feature on the paper. The reporter opened the piece not with an analysis of the paper’s contents or agenda, but rather with a description of “the little girl of 14” reading the paper on Sunset Strip. She had, he said, “the blondest of golden surfer-girl hair”; bare feet, “tight-tight red bellbottoms, and on top she wears a French, frilly-lace, crop-top halter that shows only about 12 inches of bronzed midriff.” And amazingly, she was “holding a newspaper. Not a copy of Tiger Beat, or Teen, or True Romance.” The Times article went on to describe Kunkin, in his “dismally brown sports jacket—no one could accuse him of being a beatnik”—and yet his receptionist was a girl who wore “fashionable sandals.”15
Over the next decade the Freep covered the full range of Sixties issues: anti-war protest, civil rights action, draft resistance, the farmworkers’ struggle, environmental politics. It published Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag.16 It supported the gay rights movement in L.A. enthusiastically. Despite Kunkin’s first-issue declaration that the paper was “liberal,” the Freep consistently opposed the Democrats. “He Who Votes for Lesser of 2 Evils Forgets That He Is Voting for Evil,” a front-page article declared just before midterm election of 1966. The piece challenged the argument made in an essay titled “Young Democrat Answers New Left,” written by Henry Waxman, president of the California Young Democrats (and future hero of liberals for his thirty years in the House). Waxman said the real enemy of progress was “Birchites, Southern rednecks, and old-fashioned conservatives,” but the New Left had “adopted an extreme hostility toward ‘liberals’ and a so-called ‘establishment.’” The Freep replied that LBJ had been elected after promising not to send American boys to fight in Southeast Asia, while liberals had called Goldwater a warmonger—but once in office, LBJ sent 300,000 US troops to “wage war on the legitimate aspirations of the Vietnamese people.”17 In 1968 the paper covered the rise of the Peace and Freedom Party. But the paper’s readers remained divided: in a 1968 “Man of the Year” poll, anti-war Democratic Eugene McCarthy beat Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver—by one vote.18
To his credit, Kunkin rejected attempts to paper over movement problems in print. Once, a reporter submitted an article about a memorial observance of Martin Luther King’s assassination that failed to mention that a Black nationalist had shot at one of the scheduled speakers, or that a guard had accidentally fired into the ceiling of the room. “Why not? Kunkin asked. “We didn’t want to criticize the black movement,” the writer replied. Kunkin responded with incredulity; in his eyes, the incident evinced “the divisions of the black movement, and the inadequate preparations of the guards. This story ought to be written before somebody gets killed.”19 Not long after, two LA Black Panthers were killed at UCLA by Black nationalists.
Of course, the Freep covered popular culture as well. For instance, it ran an outstanding column of TV criticism by legendary fantasy and science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. He described his “credentials” at the outset: “I am not a Communist, a drunkard, a doper, a lunatic, a straight, a hippie, a Democrat, a Republican, an astrology freak, a macrobiotic nut, a subscriber to The National Review, or even a member of the staff of the Freep. I am all alone out here, setting down what I’ve seen and what it means to me.” But “make no mistake,” he declared: “I am not really talking about tv here, I am talking about dissidence, repression, censorship, the brutality and stupidity of much of our culture … the dangers of being passive in a time when the individual is merely cannon-fodder, the lying and cheating and killing … in the sweet name of the American Way.”20
One of the most distinctive elements of the underground press was the cartoons, which were crucial in defining the Sixties sensibility. Kunkin found the right cartoonist for the new era: Ron Cobb, whose work for the Freep was syndicated widely and became emblematic of the underground press, second only to that of Robert Crumb. A former Disney cartoonist and Vietnam vet, Cobb’s unmistakable style featured grim black humor: in one cartoon, a confused man wanders through a postnuclear landscape carrying a broken portable TV, looking for a place to plug it in; in another, on the moon, two Black men in space suits clean up the junk left by previous missions.
The Free Press covered the music scene and reviewed movies, and, like the rest of the underground press, ran the “Dr. Hip Pocrates” syndicated column of drug and sex advice from a Berkeley psychiatrist. But compared to the rest of the underground press, the Freep’s focus was less on the counterculture and more on radical politics. One key example: criticism of Eastern and New Age religion. A few months after the Beatles met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, Kunkin published the piece “Maharishi’s Take on Vietnam: Obey your Leaders.”21 The Freep was a New Left paper rather than a hippie paper.22
But despite its anti-capitalist politics, the paper was not collectively owned or managed. “I wasn’t really concerned with making the paper a representative of the new society,” Kunkin later explained. “What I was concerned with was making it into as strong an influence as possible. My own attitude was that there was nobody else’s name on the line. From one year to the next, there were entirely different people involved.”23 So Kunkin remained the owner as well as publisher and editor.
What about women’s liberation? That topic, and movement, were blind spots for much of the rest of the underground press, where male editors were wedded to the notion that they were in charge, and that freedom meant publishing photos or drawings of naked women and ads for sex. At the San Francisco Express Times, editor Marvin Garson said “‘Women’s Liberation Front’ sounded like a joke, then like a lesbian conspiracy … and finally like a Trotskyist splinter group.” At the Berkeley Barb, editor Max Scherr published a dismissive article on the new Berkeley women’s movement headlined “The Women are Revolting.”24 Those were not Kunkin’s responses. When he invited critics to a public meeting in March 1970, a lot of people (sixty) showed up. “Those representing women’s liberation” were “the most visible, the most numerous, and the most vocal,” he wrote in the following week’s issue. They complained first about the sex ads—which, they said, “depict women in demeaning and offensive ways”—and also about the position, and pay, of women on the staff. Responding in print, Kunkin pledged to help a group planning to launch a “women’s lib paper in LA”—a very good idea. He also promised to publish an agreement with the staff that would include a minimum wage and a fully prepaid medical and dental plan—which sounds amazing today—along with an equally amazing grievance procedure, providing for “an arbitration panel of movement leaders to intervene with full decision-making powers.” As for the sex ads, he said he “would be willing to listen to anyone who had a serious plan to finance the Free Press without resorting to advertising, but doubted that such a plan would materialize.”25
The Free Press did cover some aspects of the nascent women’s liberation movement, especially abortion. “Is Mexican Abortion Dangerous?” a front-page headline asked in 1967—well before abortion rights became a national issue. 26 (The answer was “yes.”) Starting in 1969 it regularly ran stories criticizing the conventional notions of feminine beauty, attacking the institution of marriage, and supporting lesbian rights. And, true to Kunkin’s word, the