John Mcmillian's Cultural History Summary

John McMillian's lively cultural history offers readers a contemporary perspective on the legacy of the sixties underground press, comprising hundreds of cheaply produced, unevenly written weekly/biweekly “rags” (his term throughout the book) from mimeographed sheets (a copy produced on the precursor to a photocopier) to tabloids, which eventually merged New Left politics with a counterculture communal aesthetic intended to connect, reflect, and advance the youth movement. Reading the book at this point in society, it is almost impossible not to agree with his implied suggestion that the fostering of global connection through the Internet, phones, and social media available today was incubated in the “youth-oriented, antiestablishment newspapers”
12). Such voices as Mungo’s or Forcade’s “championed a kind of standpoint epistemology,” McMillian asserts, which revealed their passion for changing the “system” even while reflecting their privileged race, gender, and (usually) class; such a standpoint manifested itself in the newsrooms as well as on the pages of the underground papers as an ironic double standard (p. 95). While readers should be indebted to McMillian’s research, as well as his subtle analytical efforts to recontextualize the gaps in “inclusiveness” and “participatory democracy” as practiced in the underground press, some might also question the uneven emphasis he devotes to such important observations. Ironically, McMillian seems to have missed--or declined--an opportunity to truly decenter the so-called consensus narrative of the New Left by not doing more with the homogeneity of the movement’s standpoint. McMillian offers early on that while “second-wave feminism was among the most important protest traditions to emerge from the 1960s, strictly speaking, it was not part of the New Left. Very few male radicals developed progressive gender politics in the 1960s. In fact, much of
There is very little discussion, for example, of the impact of the free speech movement at Berkeley on the development of the underground press, a link one would suppose to be crucial for the blossoming of radical youth newspapers. There is not enough discussion of connections deriving out of the black press, particularly in urban centers, such as Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and elsewhere, where the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Black Panthers built on the legacy of publications from the Harlem Renaissance era while also connecting to those of the contemporary black arts movement. Lastly, the book could have been enriched with reproductions of some of the copy and graphics from the publications discussed. The book makes a substantial historical contribution to our understanding of the sixties era, yet it does so unevenly. Perhaps that is the true legacy of the