lessening of the problem, any lessening of the oppression, i think, would have made a big difference. so, yeah, i have thought about it, and i do think that his particular brand of presidential leadership was toxic, and it's important, i think, for us now to think about where we are to go back. that's the importance of history, to rewind, to go back and see how this got started and where we began to go wrong and what kinds of remedies we need to take. i think it could have been different. history is all about contingency ies, and we ended up with a person who was strong enough to stand for union and understood the importance of the union, but because of his own personal character, the character issue, was unable to see through the transformation of the south because to him that was against everything that he believed.

>> please join me in thanking annette gordon-reed. [applause] >> annette gordon-reed is a history and law professor at harvard university. she's the author of the hemingses of monticello. her book on andrew johnson is part of the american presidents series. to find out more, visit americanpresidentsseries.com. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> coming up next on booktv, historian john mcmillan recounting the underground newspapers of the 1960s and their effect on the political movements of their time. according to mr. mcmillan, the fbi began monitoring underground newspapers in 1968, and they placed obstacles in the way of

their continued publication. hes the book at -- he discusses the book at city lights bookstore for about 45 minutes. l. >> i'd like to welcome you all to city lights bookstore, a literary landmark since 1953 here in the city of san francisco. we're very, very delighted to have john mcmillan here with us tonight. john teaches history at georgia state university in atlanta, he's also taught at harvard in the committee on degrees in history and literature and also in the undergraduate writing program. 's also the founder finish he's also the founding editor of the '60s: a journal of history, politics and culture, and tonight he's going to be discussing his new book, "smoking typewriters." published by oxford university press. it examines the question of how the new left uprising in the '60s emerged, and i think it

was dramatic events that have been taking place in the mideast and our own uprisings here in wisconsin, to kind of examine the role of new media in insurrection from the l.a. free press to the berkeley barb all the way through the mihm owe revolution and the democratization of the '60s culture through media is explored, and it really offers insight into the development of contemporary movements of social change, so, please, join us in welcoming john mcmillan. [applause] >> thank you so much. i appreciate it. thanks, everyone, for coming out. i'm really happy to be here. it's nice to see some friendly faces and some old friends. i've never managed to live in san francisco, but i've visited here for extended periods, and almost every time i've been in town, i've made a point of coming to city lights, so it's neat to be here in this capacity, i appreciate it. i'm going to -- you know, originally, my plan was to sort of read the first four or five

pages of this book and then have a more wide-ranging discussion. i decided not to do that. i did an event like this last week in atlanta, and in order to read the type, i have to hold the book about this close to my face. i don't know if it's my eyes are dee tier rating because of i'm getting older or masturbation? [laughter] what i'm going to do instead is talk through the introduction very carefully. first, i wanted to pass around a few underground newspapers. obviously, there's some people here who know about the underground press. so i brought along three papers. they're rare, but they're not that rare. you can buy an underground newspaper for 15 or $20 any day of the week on ebay. they're delicate, but not so much you can't handle them. this is the los angeles free press, and it was widely considered to be the first underground newspaper in the '60s. it started running in 1964, and

that issue is from 1965. what's interesting about that one to me is '65, of course, is still a few years before the youth rebellion gets heated up, and that championed an ethos of what i call high bohemian itch. there's --ism. there's advertisements for arthouse cinema, and later the paper would be very much associated with hippies and the sunset strip and riots, rock and roll and things like this. it started out a little more intellectually minded. this paper is the berkeley barb. it's a little more groovy, the summer of 1967. it's also got some tasteful art on the back as well. if you flip through this paper, it's more psychedelically oriented, the politics of confrontation with the police, and just about every, you know, large city, you know,

underground newspaper had a classified ad section. today these things seem kind of run of the mill with the advent of dating web sites and social media. but i think these were considered titillating to readers in the '60s. wanted: a girl 18 and up to cook and clean house for a rock band in groovy beach pad scene. [laughter] he's another one from -- here's another one from an endowed male seeks lusty female or couple for passion. there's also one here that says jesus christ is returning soon, are you ready for the end of the world? people never get tired of sending out that message. this last paper, carter, you might remember. this is the great bird from atlanta, and it was one of the most distinctive papers in the south. this was from 1970, so the headline says hard drugs suck, and i think what they were suggesting is that maybe people should use more

consciousness-expanding drugs, maybe marijuana, a little less cocaine or heroin. but, you know, you see articles on woodstock, on the black panthers and what not. and so each of those papers sort of reflect the movement in different periods. i start this book with the headline from the berkeley tribe dated from december 1969, and in big, bold print the headline says stones concert ends it. and sort of the subheadline are what journalists call the duck. it said, america now up for grabs, and it was referring to this concert that the rolling stones had in december of 1969. and this was supposed to have been a triumphant affair. they appeared with carlos santana and the jefferson airplane, and they had a hard time sort of finding a venue for this show at the last minute, so they did it at altamont speedway. and it turned out to be a disaster.

thousands of people sort of clamored on top of each other to get close to the stage. someone had the bright idea of hiring the hell's angels motorcycle gang to do security, and they paid them, allegedly, with a truckload of beer. it was a really violent scene, so the hell's angels were brutalizing and beating up spectators and probably would have been less violent if rolling stones had played a little earlier. the concert was being filmed for a documentary called "give me shelter," which you probably are familiar with. anyhow, mick jagger was reluctant to play until it was dark because he thought it he wd look better under the stage lights. it was just a violent, ugly scene, and the rolling stones could only play in fits and starts. there was commotion swirling around them. mick jagger's visibly nervous telling everyone to chill out

and be cool and we're all brothers and sisters, and no one paid much attention. and then the most violent moment happened when an african-american teenager named meredith hunter pulled out a gun. he was being beaten up or punched around, he pulled out a recover, and then -- resol very, and a hell's angel plunged a knife between his neck and his shoulder, and he died there. and people in my field make distinctions sometimes between the early '60s and the late '60s. the early '60s were associate with the the lunch counter protests and the beatles and their lovable mop-top phase and jfk in his youthful vigor, and the late '60s is often associated with urban rebellions and riots and charles manson and political violence and altamont

as well. and what a lot of people don't realize is that that emerged originally in the underground press. and the berkeley tribe gave saturation coverage to this event and stressed how disastrous it had been. and the tribe's journalists were, you know, not merely, you know, they didn't show up purely as journalists, nor did they show up at this concert as participants, but they were both. they were participants and observers. they wrote about the event in a very sort of familiar style with a kind of hip vernacular that emerged from their own culture, and almost everything they wrote about the event struck a very por ten chus tone. they came away deeply concerned about what had happened there and what it all meant. at the same time, the san francisco examiner covered this event, and they completely missed the concert's significance.

in the first articles they stressed there had been no violence, the only problem associate with the the concert was the traffic headache it caused on the interstate. later they mentioned that meredith hunter had died, but they missed the fact that three other people were killed as well. two were run over while camping, and another person drowned while zonked out on drugs in this swift-moving irrigation canal. and really the examiner just fumbled to explain why, you know, 300,000 people would even want to attend a concert like this in the first place. and then when they finally, finally on i think it was december 14th they had an op-ed columnist who stressed this event had been a disaster for the counterculture. but his tone was so priggish and excoriating, it's hard to imagine very many younger readers taking him seriously. he said maybe it's wishful thinking, but to me that altamont rock fiasco looked like

the last gasp of the hippie drug thing. they were the stones, he said, before that most mindless of animals, the human mob. it was just another manifestation of the rock/drugs slobber ri cult to which he could only say good riddance. so i use this event at the beginning of the book because i think it helps us to apprehend the powerful appeal of these underground newspapers for young readers in the 1960s. the tribe's reporters left any pretense of objectivity. they grew out of their own subculture, and then the examiner which, by the way, was the flagship of the hearst newspaper chain used this template they clearly invested this describing this event as a woodstock-style concert, and they got it completely wrong. these underground newspapers started emerging, as i say, in the mid '60s. they represent maybe one of the largest and most spontaneous

growth in the history of publishing. many in 1965 there were five -- in 1965 there were five such newspapers, the berkeley barb and the free press, there was the east village in new york, the estate in detroit and, ironically for me and matt because we went to michigan state, the first campus-based newspaper was in east lansing, michigan. towards the end of 1966 these papers started sprouting up quickly in every pocket and region of the country, and by the end of the '60s, you had literally hundreds of newspapers in every city, campus, community, with a readership that stretched into the millions combined. people sometimes ask how i got interested in the topic. this grew out of my dissertation at columbia. at first i was using these underground newspapers as source material, and i was interested in trying to understand, you know, how it was that the '60s rebellion happened. and to me it's perplexing that so many young people became so

intensely radical, you know, to the point where they not only thought that, you know, the united states is not that the country's move anything a wrong direction can, but rather it needs to be completely reformed. there's something rotten at the core. and by 1969 one survey showed that something like one million college-age students self-identified as radicals. to me that's astonishing. historians have put forth lots of explanations to account for this, demographics have a lot to do with it. the baby boom generation was a large generation. people came of age in a time of unprecedented prosperity. they maybe had a certain sense of their own generational poe potency, a sense that they were uniquely equipped to tackle some of the problems of american public life. there was a civil rights movement which is pivotal and so, obviously, when african-americans were facing down attack dogs and fire hoses and what not they helped

dramatize the power of collective action to bring about social change. people mentioned the cultural narrowness of the cold war era where people are expected to march lock step into gender roles, and then, obviously, the vietnam war had an important radicalizing effect. from 1968 onward with the advent of satellite it's, images were transmitted into people's living room and, of course, the draft was profoundly important. but in addition to all this, historians have found it necessary to look at internal dynamics within the movement to account for its growth and for how it became so stylized. and, you know, until recently the most, the most widely-read work on the '60s was done by people who had lived through the '60s themselves. and by some coincidence, a lot of these scholars had also been numbers of students for democratic society which was the large itself new left group in

the period, and, you know, this is pioneering work that they did, but they tended to, you know, arguably, you know, write about the '60s relying somewhat on their own memories and perspectives and also writing about sds, they talk about the movement from a kind of elite or top-down perspective. these people had left behind a lot of archival materials at the leadership level or national level, but those sources aren't super useful if you're trying to understand how the movement developed at the grassroots level. so by looking at the '60s from the perspective of the underground press, we can account for all of these distortions. these papers were fundamentally community newspapers, so you get a grassroots and local perspective, and be also they were just wildly accessen, so in many cases anyone who wanted to make an attention on the claim of the youth rebellion could do this by writing an article through their underground newspaper. the very phrase, you know,

underground press is a bit of a misnomer. these papers were never technically illegal the way, for instance, in world war ii there were papers that attacked the nazi occupation in france and the netherlands and what not. those were covert if highly illegal. these were wildly available. i think the underb ground press moniker arose because the people who put these together styled themselves as cultural outlaws. but they could be genuinely subversive. in some cases they were, they attacked american culture very sharply, and they sometimes championed the revolutionary overthrow of the united states government. so in some cases they endoesn'terred an incred -- encountered an incredible amount of harassment from police and various authorities. although these papers are critical of capitalism generally, someone pointed out they're a great example of free enterprise. so until the 1960s newspapers

had to be set in hot type, so that was a procedure that was costly and difficult, and in the early '60s we had the advent of photo offset printing, so it was very easy to -- well, what you would do is you would take a picture of whatever you printed on to a paste-up sheet, and it would be reproduced exactly as it was photographed. and so suddenly, you know, for just a couple hundred dollars you could print several thousand copies of an 8 or 16-page tabloid, and then you could sell them for a dime or 20 centss, whatever it was. in spite of this, a lot of these papers were jaundiced to the very idea of profit making, so in 972 someone did a survey that showed 72% of these papers reported they made no profit what so far. and -- whatsoever. and they often weren't of very high quality by professional standards, and to me maybe that's an unfair criteria to

apply, but i'm not interested in aesthetic creations, i'm interested in the way they helped to socialize people into the movement and radicalize people and drew people into their fold and gave readers a sense of connection and belonging to the new left. that's the argument that i try to pursue. the failure of daily newspapers contributed in a lot of ways to the success of the underground press. throughout much of the 20th century, large cities tended to have, you know, several -- multiple different newspapers, but they became valuable properties. so people who could afford to buy them up and consolidate them did. so cities that used to have many papers began to have only one or two. so in a formally -- formerly diverse newspaper world, there was more reason for angry opinions to flourish, and some people thought they were being more poland and consensus-based. the corporate structures were

looking for sophisticated, professionally-trained journalists, and so the news diets of a lot of americans changed. and i think this helps to explain why -- this is one of the reasons why these underground newspapers were so attractive to young people. they claimed for themselves a kind of privilege. they had a sense that only those people who were deeply implicated in the new left rebellion could understand what it was like. you had to be in the rock or drug or protest culture in order to know what was going on, and if you were, you know, a salaried journalist who worked in the suburbs, you somehow weren't quite getting it at some level. they could also be fiercely polemic, these papers, but they sometimes pointed out they did not corner the market on highly ideological agendas. there's a letter in here that i like that was written by alan ginsberg. in 1970, alan ginsberg was a

member of the pan-american center, and part of the mission was to protect the free speech rights of writers everywhere, and he was upset about the harassment these underground newspapers were facing, so he persuaded thomas fleming to release a statement condemning the attempts to stifle the underground press, and this guy, thomas fleming, apparently was not a man at all. he thought they were inflammatory, but he thought they deserved the same free speech protections that anyone else deserved. ginsberg said he was grateful for the statement, but he said i would have taken exception to the adjective inflammatory outside the context of equally inflammatory ideology displayed in, say, readers' digest with its odd language about dope fiends or the new york daily news which an editorial says propose atom-bombing china

counting 200 million people at their own estimate as reasonable or, for that matter, the new york times occasionally enflames my own heart to fantasies of arson. it's a minor quibble with your text, merely to say that i find aboveground language as often inflammatory as w.c. fields. [laughter] that was alan ginsberg in 1970. and finally these papers, you know, they brought people into the movement's fold, they could shore up people's political participation, they welcomed rank and file participation in all aspects of newspaper production. a lot of times they engaged in old-fashioned muckraking, and in the book i try to point to a couple instances where i think these papers outperformed establishment journalists at "the new york times" and "the washington post," you know, because they were often so visible in the communities. they became cause celebres in

some cases. their offices often doubled as meeting spots for hippie travelers and for activists, and some, you know, very robust enclaves, you know, a young person could practically earn a living by selling these newspapers on street corners and at rallies and what not. and, you know, as a result of the visibility, another big theme in the book is the fact they encountered a tremendous amount of harassment. and i would point out that, you know, they, it is true that salacious material is very common place in these newspapers, so they were not shy to use dirty words. a key feature of a lot of these papers was underground comics, and they spelled it comix to suggest they were x-rated or suitable for an adult readership. i think they're mostly aimed at teenage boys, frankly, but they could be offensive. images of mutilation and

domination and incest, they were flagrantly offensive, and i think that was the point. especially in the late '60s/early '70s pictures of naked women were common place. and be so it's easy to see how average citizens could be troubled by some of this material. but it was all constitutionally protected, and the supreme court was very clear on this that in order to be declared legally obscene, work has to appeal to -- [inaudible] interests, it has to offend community standards and has to be utterly without redeeming social value. and all of these papers -- first of all, they were so widely read, hard to suggest they violated community standards in every case. but they were also in the broadst sense they were social and political papers, they dealt with social and political concerns, so they ought to have been immune from these obscenity charges, and that was not the case. i would say obscenity and harassment of street vendors was

the main tactic people tried to use to stifle these newspapers. i could not find a single example of a paper that had an obscenity conviction that was ever upheld. also busting people for loitering when they were standing on street corners selling the papers and what not. sometimes these papers were victims of vigilante groups, that great speckled bird, they had someone who fire bombed their paper. in san diego there was a long series of attacks on the underground papers there. the guy from '60 minutes" and "front line" was an underground journalist in san diego, and some guy affiliate with the the minutemen admitted he was involved in this and they had help from the police. the fbi was heavily involved in the underground press. they infiltrated the papers, they kept data on their publishers and printers. here in san francisco an fbi memo surfaced where this function their had the idea that

a lot of these underground papers were getting advertisements from large record companies, and he suggested these companies should be approached and told not to advertise in the underground press. and then very suddenly the bottom dropped out of the ad market for these papers. they started advertising in many cases with "rolling stone" magazine. it's not really an underground newspaper, it was always commercialically oriented. but "rolling stone" would celebrate the hedonistic or -- but it was very critical of the underground and the hippies. so they drew a lot of record advertising. and, frankly, the fbi had some schemes it seemed like out of a james bond novel. they started two short-lived underground newspapers of their own, they were counterfeit papers, and they were meant to promote, you know, moderate viewpoints as opposed to radical ones. and then someone had the idea of creating, you know, a chemical, a foul-smelling chemical that smelled like feces, and the idea

was you could spray this chemical on the bundles before they were distributed and make them unreadable. that's true. so all of this took a real toll on these papers. and yet at the same time i don't blame, you know, there are other reasons for the decline of underground press. i mentioned before that most of them functioned as kind of decentralized collective, and so that meant that everyone who worked for the paper had an equal say in how they should operate or be run. literally, that meant a person could show up in time and say he's part of the underground paper, and he would have as much say in the editorial decisions as someone who had been there for a long time. people found these editorial structures alienating over the long haul. sometimes these papers could be exceedingly coarse, you know, even by the counterculture's loose standards of civility and propriety. they could be angry and inflammatory and give people reason to turn their noses at

the movement. and, frankly, a lot of these papers mirrored, you know, the sexism and the homophobia we see, we saw in the dominant culture in this period. so i give these activists a lot of credit for their moral stance on racism and the vietnam war. by today's cultural, you know, politics, by today's standards they would fall short in some areas as well, so they deprived themselves of talent from women and gays sometimes, and when radical feminism and the gay liberation movement started happening in the late '60s, they gave people good reason to light out for new ideological territory. so all those reasons helped to account for the decline of these papers. and then as i talk about this, i know it sounds like the book is heavily analytical, and i try to do get these points in, be but one of the things i also try to do is also tell some great stories. so there's a narrative component to this book as well. i mean, it literally has elements of, you know, rock and drugs and sex and violence.

i think it should be a bestseller for that reason. there's some funny characters. there's one guy who's just known as an excellent scam artist, and he was said to put jay gould to shame the way he could rip off people. sometimes these underground newspapers fell into factions and disputes, so there would be, you know, conflicts, and some of them, as i say, became violent. one of the legendary figures in the underground press was also one of the biggest dug dealers in -- drug dealers in new york, and he would smuggle literally tons of marijuana into new york. he was sort of a bizarre mystical acid head, and he turned his payer into a bonn tide cult to the point where people were not allowed to leave. a lot of these underground press meetings degenerated into humorous fiascoes or suicides in the book. so i just want to mention there's a story-telling component to the book as well. you know, whenever i look at a

new book, sometimes the first thing i'll do is i'll look at the index to just get a sense of the range of topics that that ae covered. if you go to the hs, you see i write about homoeroticism and hoover, jay edgar. and over at the ls you've got lenin, vladimir and lennon, john side by side. and then over in the s you've got -- well, you've got sex, the sex pistols and sexism. you know, there's a wide range of, you know, topics that i explore. of it's only been out, you know, it's been in stores for a few weeks, but the official publication date was just about a week or so, and i think it's done well in reviews. it's gotten one very negative review from "the wall street journal," but my publicist assures me i have at least one more to look forward to, it's going to get a big piece in "high times" magazine in the next issue.

[laughter] i'm hoping for better treatment than "the wall street journal." if anyone wants to ask me why that "wall street journal" was unfair, let me know. [laughter] and with that, i'm happy to take questions. thank you very much. [applause] >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> can you tell us about "the wall street journal" spent? >> sure. sure, yeah. how much time do we have? [laughter] they, you know, there's different kinds of bad reviews. you can get a bad review that is unappreciative of the work that you've done, and that would be disappointing. a bad review that misrepresents your views, that says you don't do things you do do, and this was both. it was by a guy named russ smith. he's a person, actually, you

know, i've admired a lot of his work. he was the founder of, i guess, three alternative newspapers, so i make a distinction in the book between the underground press of the '60s and the kind of free alternative weeklies that you see in vending boxes, you know? he claimed in his review that i celebrate these editorial, these decentralized editorial structures, i just criticize them. he says that i don't deal with the role of the fbi -- the fbi seemingly was uninterested in "rolling stone" magazine, but they were coming down hard, apparently, on these underground newspapers, and he said that issue was unexplored. it's specifically explored, i can show you the page numbers. and he said i gave short shoplift to theville an -- shrift to the village voice, and he mentioned a guy named dan wolf who was one of the early editors and explained that he had a light editorial hand and gave his writers a lot of freedom. i say all those things myself in

the book. so he didn't say anything in the review that i didn't say myself. so i thought it was lazy. >> did they read it? is. >> did who read what? >> yell, yeah, the -- well, yeah, i think if you give someone a bad review, you have to do due diligence. he has more errors in his review than i have in the book so far as i can tell. >> [inaudible] >> well, i mean, the other thing -- i don't want to dwell on this too much -- [laughter] you know, it also, the review, you know, there's a suggestion that he's, he's hostile to the idea that these papers should be, you know, critically analyzed. you know, he thinks there's too many footnotes, and i just, you know, and he thought it was ironic that these newspapers were so free wheeling and cavalier and what not, and that i'm analyzing them carefully as a scholar, but, you know, it's a scholarly book in some respects. >> i wanted to ask you one question. one of the things that struck me recently with all of the upset

in the middle east, i keep seeing these newscasters that supposedly erudite people who talk about upsets, all the riots in the streets, and invariably at some point in their discussion of it, they say -- they look at the camera, and they say, imagine if those things happened in the unite. >> uh-huh. >> you're an expert on the '60s, and my question is, don't people remember the '60s? aside from the cliche, don't kids now learn about history and that period? why can that kind of thing be so cavalierly said by somebody that should know better? >> right. i'm so steeped in research on the '60s that it doesn't seem to me that people don't know a lot about it. that might be that i have my own idiosyncratic perspective. the fact that these papers faced such terrible suppression from the police and fbi and everything else, it does surprise me that a lot of people who are protective of free

speech rights seem to overlook or ignore the way these underground papers were harassed, but i think the '60s loom large in our culture. i think a lot of the political views today are a reflection of how people feel from the '90s. -- '60s. do you think there was more harm than good done in the '60,they're likely to be a conservative or republican, and if you think there was more good than harm done, you're probably a liberal or democrat. i think that rings true to my own experience. i do think a lot of the cultural politics that, you know, we face today, they have their origins in the '60s. in the 2008 election, you know, it was fascinating to me to see bill ayers in the news every day. so i think, i think the '60s still looms large in our politics. >> i was wondering if there were

any papers now that you are, you know, think sort of live up to, you know, the underground isle. i have friends at berkeley that are working on slingshot. i think a lot of different papers of political stances that maybe people within that group read it -- >> right. >> so i'm just curious on your thoughts about the current press. >> i mean, there's a lot more diversity now with the internet. the old cliche that everyone with a laptop and an internet connection has their own paper. ironically, you know, even though i'm very critical of the way "the new york times" in the '60s tended to, you know, put across kind of mainstream establish withment values and sort of failed to acknowledge their own bias, their mainstream bias, i still think there's a place for, you know, daily --

professionally-staffed daily newspapers today, you know, maybe even more than ever. so, you know, a paper like "the new york times," i mean, they have a publisher and an editor who try, i think, to the best of their ability to, first of all, they spend a lot of money covering the news, but they also try to figure out what's important and give it, you know, the right amount of weight or proportion, you know? and sometimes they get it wrong. oftentimes i'm sure they do. but, you know, there's this phenomenon people talk about, you know, closure or these information cocoons or people tend to oftentimes just consume media that, you know, reiterates their own beliefs or value or what not. and i see this a lot. i did an experiment a couple months ago -- a little longer than that, i guess. do you remember christine o'donnell, that woman who ran for office in delaware? i remember in the middle of the day once i was surfing on the web, and it came out that she didn't really understand anything about the first amendment, she didn't know what was in it, she didn't know any

of the freedoms that were protected, and she kind of made a fool of herself in this debate. i thought it was interesting. and that night i knew what was going to happen. i went home, i spent about two and a half hours flipping back between msnbc and fox. rachel maddow, bill o'reilly, sean hannity. and msnbc were a great sport with it, they showed it over and over again. and fox really didn't show it. so i think people are, i think, too quick to, you know, find media, consume media that reflects their own subjectivities, so i do think there's space for professionally-o oriented newspapers. amy. >> john, hi. >> hi. >> so one of the things that came up for me as you're talking about imagined communities from the book by benedict anderson in which sort of national -- sorry to go a little academic on you. [laughter]

in which the idea of a sort of national collective consciousness is in part created by print culture. so that thinking of ourselves as americans happens because we read newspapers that call us that. and so i'm wondering how decentralized underground papers helped create a national sense of the movement, the '60s, and then if common denominators went beyond rock and roll, drugs, and so on. >> uh-huh. >> and particularly, then, what relevance that collective weness might have had for the groups that you said kind of left. >> if uh-huh. >>less bianco -- lesbian separatists. >> there are some exceptions, like the berkeley barb and free press were run by individuals in a kind of hierarchical way

originally. there's one called liberation news service that plays a big role in the book. and what they would do is they had journalists who would send out news packets from if where they were located, first in d.c., then new york. they'd send out these news packets to every other newspaper who subscribed, and so, you know, people were reprinting a lot of the material. and this lns made the underground press a site for sort of intermovement communication. and there was also an organization called the underground press syndicate. members of that organization simply sent copies of their papers to every other paper, and they had no concern about copyright or permission to reprint anything. so that was helpful especially for smaller papers that were in smaller cities or campuses that were away from the pageantry and the perment of -- ferment of the big cities. people could still, you know,

get a sense of the common culture that was being created. there was o alcohollalty of outlook and taste that was being generated through these papers that i mentioned. and what was the second part of your question? there is -- i make it a vision, most people make a distinction between the aesthetic wing of the counterculture, people who are expressive in their radicalism and kind of wanted to create a subculture, they drop out. and then there is, you know, there's another sort of political wing that was very interested in finding the right formulas for ending the vietnam war and what not. and then the underground press i think you see there's more overlap or intermingling between those two ten r tendencies. i think divisions between political and cultural people are really hard to discertain, and you see that in the underground press, but you don't see a lot of it in the writing of the '60s until recently. thanks for asking about benedict

anderson. page 98, hayden white shows up. he was the bane of my existence when we taught together at harvard. but i found a way to work him in. yes. >> did any of the individual papers or individuals within the papers go on to evolve and go mainstream or become well known in some other capacity? did they -- >> um, yes and no. there's one underground paper that's been running, you know, consecutively since 1965, it's called the fifth estate in detroit, but it's mutated so far from its original version. late in the '70s you saw the rise of what i call the alternative press, and i see it as a second generation radical press. not radical, liberal. muckraking news sheets, i can't remember the names of the ones in san francisco, the bay guardian is one of them, i guess. these are the papers you see in these vending boxes. and they, you know, they tend to

be very left wing, they give their writers a lot of personal freedom to sort of go their own way, and they allow people to contribute who maybe don't have pedigrees to break into the daily papers. they tend to appeal to young people. they're going after this, you know, 18-34 demographic. they cover the arts very well, you know, rock and roll especially. and so these have some of the same qualities of the underground press. the huge difference is these underground papers were always about movement building. they were staffed and run by people who generally saw themselves as activists first and journalists second. and then this, you know, network of alternative papers is, is maybe the reverse of that. but they were very successful in the '80s and '90s. i mean, they got gang buster results. they were profitable enterprises. i think they're falling on harder times now like a lot of print media is generally. but they play an important role because for a long time before the advent of the internet, they were truly the alternative. they were the alternative to the

mainstream dailies in their cities, and so they had that kind of iconoclastic appeal. >> john, looking at it globally with the internet and the advancement of having global readership, do you think this wikileaks could be considered the biwith product of the underground press? >> in america? or maybe even in if europe? >> i don't -- not really, i don't think so. he, you know -- yeah, i think he has -- obviously, he has a left-wing orientation, and i think people are, you know, if i was a person in government, i would be very threatened by him or concerned about what he was doing. you think he's probably right to be nervous, you know? for his safety. i understand he's a -- [inaudible] guy. there's not a rising social movement today that he's connected with. these papers were sort of joined at the hip with the new left and the counterculture.

i think what he's doing is interesting, and i haven't really made my mind up about it. >> hi. i was just curious if you could say more about how you did your research and if you talked to most of the people who founded these presses and what that was like. >> you know, i'm lucky that a lot of these underground papers have been preserved in this microfilm collection, so i spent a lot of time in new york and also in the library in the basement going through microfilms. in some ways that made my research easy, but then i also discovered a lot of manuscript sources that vice president been used before -- haven't been used before. one thing i'm proud of in the book is i have brought a lot of primary sources to light, and i found some man you -- manuscript collections, and i have a significant number of interviews with underground press people. a lot of these people have been

so helpful, they're excited to see their story told. it's been neat to build relationships with some of these underground press people. there's someone back there. this is pretty tame for a city lights reading. i thought there'd be, like, a jug of wine being passed around. [laughter] >> you mentioned about the sexism -- >> uh-huh. >> now, i was in the san francisco/berkeley area in '67, '68, and i remember all these long-haired kids selling the berkeley barb or the san francisco oracle. and you'd see these middle-aged guys going back to the suburbs, and they'd stop, you know, and buy -- >> uh-huh. >> -- by the barb or whatever for the sex ads. >> yeah, right. >> and, of course, we'd all laugh at them because we wouldn't pay for it, you know? [laughter]

we would share it, and we'd say, hey, we're surviving on the money we're making selling the berkeley barb to these guys who hate us, and we hate them. [laughter] does your book go into the economic -- i mean, basically, a lot of -- we came to the conclusion that a lot of these subversive ideas in the paper were being supported simply because of the sex ads or whatever, you know? >> yeah. i mention that briefly, and what you're saying is exactly correct. i mean, especially by the late '60s and early '70s, especially in the big cities, you know, these sort of randy, back-page sex ads drew attention from the people from the bushes that you probably -- suburbs that you probably didn't like. they started founding their own apolitical porn magazines. there's several examples of that in the early 1970s. so there's a sense that, yeah, these papers were losing a little bit of their relevance,

or it was wrong to, you know, draw so heavily from -- they were becoming more apolitical in that sense. so i think your observation squares with what i've heard from other people as well. >> i know your book is about papers in the united states, but did you find that there were underground papers like this in europe as well? >> there were. i don't write about them a lot but they were all throughout europe. i think they were more substantial in the u.s. in terms of readership and what not, but i think it's called the international times is the first paper in the europe. they were also, some of these european papers were part of that underground press syndicate. if you were lucky enough to score an interview with janis joplin, you could be reprint inside a paper in europe. i just don't write about them all that much except for a couple canadian papers show up. thank you very much.

yeah. >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> i only drink red wine usually, but i think i'm going to have beer tonight. i think i'm going to go to a bar with a couple of my old friends, but you guys are welcome to come along if you want. thank you so much, i really appreciate it. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> for more information visit the author's web site, john mcmillian.com. >> booktv has 48 hours of nonfiction authors and book programming every weekend on saturday from 8 a.m. to monday morning at 8 eastern. l to get the complete weekend schedule e-mailed to you every week, sign up for the booktv alert at booktv.org, or text the word book to 99702.

standard message and data rates apply. booktv, top nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. >> i have this enormous following, and you're a kind of cult figure, and i was trying to figure out -- [laughter] is there any recent historical figure that you think you are analogous to? i mean, feel free to throw off the restraints of modesty the. >> i mean, 10,000 people are coming together because they want to, i mean, because they're drawn to the same vision as each other, and they want to spend a day thinking about and reflecting on the incredible progress we've made in the last 20 years against what is a true crisis this our country, this issue of educational inequity and what more each of us needs to do individually and collectively to solve the problem. so it's not really -- >> but you will be treated as a

kind of rock star. [laughter] >> you know what? the sad reality is, i mean, maybe we would all wish, but, you know, there'll be my critics and my friends, and it'll be fun. but, you know, it's not all a love fest. >> i, i think the closest analogy i could come up with was the marine corps. [laughter] tough to get in, and then they send you to really nasty places, right? [laughter] and be i was wondering, you know, how in the movies there's always that moment in that kind of movie where the one tough guy meets the other, and ask they're staring at the other, and the one says, wait, were you in nam? and i wondered -- [laughter] is there an analogous moment when two teach for america alums get together, and they say where'd you serve? south bronx. [laughter] and then -- [applause] they show each other their teach

for america tattoos. [laughter] i mean, i'm joking, but there is a kind of -- you are creating a kind of, i mean, the marine corpses alumni represent are a kind of movement representing a certain attitude towards the world, you know? >> this is exactly the idea. i mean, this is the big idea, you know? and teach for america really isn't about -- we are about teachers are critical, but teach for america's about building a movement among our country's future leaders to say we've got to change the way our education system is fundamentally. and i think, and your article in the new yorker about, about the formation of movements just captured the whole theory of change of teach for america. i mean, this is about the foundational experience of teaching successfully in ways that, you know, i think we're creating a corps of people who

are absolutely determined to expand the opportunities facing kids in the most absolutely, you know, economically disadvantaged communities, you know, who are pouring themselves into their work and trying to put their kids on a different trajectory, and be, you know, having varying levels of success. they realize through their firsthand experience the challenges their kids face, the potential they have. they realize it's ultimately possible to solve the problem, and that experience is not only important for their kids, but it's completely transformational for them. and i think, of course, they're all going through this together. and i think with a common set of convictions and insights and just a common health of commitment -- level of commitment to ultimately go out and effect the fundamental changes we need to see to really solve the problem. >> how many -- you've got how many alumni now? is. >> we've got 20,000 alums. >> you consider your alumni to

be as important as your active teachers if you're thinking of it in movement terms. >> yep. >> how many alumni do you need before you think you have a kind of critical mass? >> um, well, you know, i guess you never know, you know, what will lead this to the tipping point. [laughter] >> you just bought yourself a good five more questions with that. [laughter] >> i think -- i don't know, you know? is this is growing exponentially at this point. a mere, you know, five years ago we had 8800 alums, and today we have 20,000, and if we can continue the growth trajectory that we're on, we'll have more than 40,000 by a mere five years from now. and i guess i look at what's happening in some communities where we have a critical mass of teach for america alums, i mean, communities where we've been placing people for, in some cases, 20 years; new orleans, washington, d.c., oakland, california, in houston, texas, and any number of other places,

in the newark, new jersey, where very different things are happening today. for many different reasons, but if you took the alums out of the picture, i think you'd take away a lot of the leadership in those pictures. >> does the teach for america movement have an ideological personality? is. >> i think that people come out of this and, you know, we probably have a bunch of -- you know, we have a diverse community, and people come into it viewing the issue that we're taking on in different ways and from different sides of the political spectrum. i think people come out of it sharing, largely sharing a few views. one, i think people come out of it knowing we can solve the problem. it's not that the kids don't have the potential and the parents don't care. i mean, if you look at gallup polls, and i'd be interested in seeing another one now that i think the prevailing ideology has started to shift a bit.

but as of about three or four years ago, most people in our country thought that the reason we had low educational outcomes was because kids weren't motivated in low-income communities and parents don't care. our core members know for a fact that's not true. they see their kids working harder than any kids work, and they see their parents do care when they're, you know, brought into the process. so they come out of it thinking when the kids are met with high expectations, given extra support, they do well. and they also come out of it realizing that there's no silver bullet in this. meaning -- >> we're going to get to that. >> are yeah. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> we're here talking with bridget about her new book. can you tell us what it's about? >> it's about the rise of radical islam throughout the world. we are witnessing right now an islamic movement driven by the radical minority in the islamic religion that's trying to cause

problems around the world through terrorism. and bringing back their islamic -- [inaudible] so that's what the book talks about, it talks about the history of radical islam, what it's doing in europe right now, what's happening in the united states as well and why we need to be mobilized to understand where the threat of radical islam is coming from and what we can do to protect our society. >> and what are some of the findings that you have? >> well, we are finding out that the radical islamic terrorist cells are very well organized whether in europe or in the united states or australia. they are networking together, they are linked together through the internet. we are finding out that al-qaeda, which means the base in air arabic, is nothing more than an umbrella organization with many other islamic organizations that come underneath it that share similar goals. lately, we have been hearing a lot about the muslim brother hood considering what's happening in egypt. the muslim brotherhood is the mother ship, basically, that launched all these terrorist

activities. it was founded in 1928 and has 70 offshoots of islamic organizations including al-qaeda and hamas. so a chapter in the book is dedicate today the muslim brotherhood project and in particular to the project for north america. >> and tell us about your background. how did you become an expert in terrorism in the middle east? >> well, i was porn and raised in lebanon -- born and raised in lebanon, and my 9/11 happened to me personally in 1975 when the radical islamists blew up my home, bringing it down burying me under the rubble. i ended up in a hospital for two and a half months and live inside a bomb shelter underground for seven years of my life hiding to survive. i became very concerned about national security. even as a child. i grew up, and i went to, i moved to israel, became news anchor for world news. i wanted to understand what's happening around the world, and what contributes to certain things around the world, certain movements. i worked as news anchor for

world news from 1984 until 1989, and as i reported on world events back in the '80s, i started connecting the dots and realizing that the name of the perpetrators were always the same. the names were always the same. ahmed, muhammad, hussein, ali, christians and jews, colonel higgins, the twa, the pan-am flight, and i can go on and on. and i started connecting the dots and realizing that what i used to think was a regional problem between a majority of muslim middle east trying to expel or kill the minority christians and j well,ews had ba worldwide problem, but the world was not connecting the dots. when i came to the united states, i left everything behind me. september 11th changed everything for almost all of us in the united states and the world. the way we travel, the way we live. yonn