| This dissertation addresses the cultural work that was accomplished by the New Left's printed materials---especially its underground newspapers. I argue that New Leftists created an ethos surrounding their publications that socialized people into the Movement, fostered a spirit of mutuality among them, and raised their democratic expectations. Considering the obstacles confronting those who have attempted to build mass democratic movements in the United States, these were important tactical achievements. Additionally, this approach underscores the degree to which the political energy that fueled the Movement arose from the grassroots, as opposed to the national office of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the pageantry and intellectual ferment that accompanied the New Left rebellion in large cities. In this way, this dissertation is part of a larger revisionist effort to reassess the New Left from the techniques and methodologies of social history.;Rather than chronicling the rise and fall of the New Left's print culture, this study uses illustrative examples and case studies to reveal the various ways that printed materials helped to build and sustain the Movement. Chapter One describes how SDS used its newsletters and bulletins to build a democracy of participation within the organization. Chapter Two shows how the first wave of underground newspapers developed and extended SDS's egalitarianism. Chapter Three addresses an admittedly silly episode in the Movement's history---a short-lived rumor that a person could high by smoking dried banana peels---to demonstrate, more specifically, how radical papers inter-associated with one another, reached into the hinterland, and provided entrees into the New Left. The next two chapters concern Liberation News Service (LNS), a radical news agency that dispatched packets of texts and graphics to hundreds of underground newspapers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Chapter Four shows how LNS turned the mediascape into a site of ideological struggle, thereby winning the hearts and minds of countless young Americans. Chapter Five examines a legend shrouded factional dispute within LNS in order to indicate how thoroughly participatory democratic ideals saturated the Movement's print culture by the late 1960s. |
