“Alma Mater”
Charles Saxon, published in The New Yorker April 7, 1973

Last night, historian John McMillian spoke in the first in a series of events, co-sponsored by the Grolier Club and the Lehman Center for American History, that will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Columbia protests in April 1968. His talk, “The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America” was just about as interesting as it the title makes it seem; luckily, Bwoggers Zack Abrams and Isabel Sepúlveda were there to take notes and watch alumni of 60s Columbia attempt to relive the glory days.

Shortly before the scheduled start of the talk, the seats in Butler 203 were already filled and attendees, varying wildly in age, began to line the walls and sit on the floor. The event began rather inauspiciously, with all the lights in Butler 203 shutting off just moments into the introductions. Shrugging off the technical difficulties and lacking a microphone, John McMillian began his talk about the New Left of the 60s and their unorthodox communication methods.

John McMillian opened his talk with his time as a Columbia grad student, unintentionally setting a reminiscent tone that would follow him throughout the night, occasionally to his detriment. He explained that he was drawn to study the 60s because all those who had done so before him had drawn from their own experiences living through the era. He was more interested in looking at other, more overlooked primary sources, which ultimately led to his discovery, and affinity for the underground newspapers that would dominate most of the discussion.

However, he first had to tackle the most essential question of the era: how did the New Left happen? McMillian explained how a variety of factors led to the inception of the movement. For one, its instigators shared common characteristics, coming from an affluent and well-educated background. Another reason is their goal; never before had mostly white activists called for a complete overhaul of what they deemed a society “rotten at its core” in such a large way, showing the world that students could be agents of social change.

We then reached the main subject of the talk, along with McMillian’s 2012 book Smoking Typewriters; which was the inception, proliferation, and eventual decline of so-called “underground newspapers.” McMillian quickly explained the misnomer; while the radical writers and publishers fashioned themselves as culturally subversive rebels, the fact was the papers circulated widely, unlike similar banned material in Nazi Germany. According to McMillian, the rise of photo-offset lithography, a more accessible method of printing papers compared to line casting, allowed these papers to be produced cheaply and easily along with distinguishing themselves stylistically compared to the established daily papers. This development led to the “radical decentralization” of the papers.

McMillian used these newspapers as a primary source because they didn’t succumb to the distortions of other sources at the time, as the grassroots approach of the papers discussed the movement everywhere it existed, which was everywhere. One important point he made was about the philosophy of the papers; the underground journalists felt that the daily papers were morally compromised, and that their articles were just as biased as those of the established media, who labored under a false idea of objectivity. McMillian discussed the coverage of leftist radicals by the Times in more detail when talking about the protests at Columbia.

In 1968, white protesters from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) along with black protesters for the Student Afro Society (SAS) took over several Columbia buildings to protest the administration’s involvement with a weapons research think tank involved with the Department of Defense and therefore the war in Vietnam, along with the construction of a gym in Morningside Park the activists saw as segregated, as different entrances were to be constructed for the University and for the rest of Harlem, due to the elevation of the park.

McMillian described how Steve Diamond, a reporter for the radical newspaper Liberation News Service, was permitted by the students to travel between buildings gathering interviews and sources among the protesting students to write a reliable recap of the events, though McMillian complained that Diamond dramatized the events too heavily. Also described was the friction between the student protesters and their coverage in the New York Times, which they saw as biased since Arthur Sulzberger, the Publisher of the Times, was also a trustee of the University. He ultimately concluded, in essence, that both sources showed their flaws and biases

The talk ended with McMillan discussing his personal political journey from a leftist who sympathized with the protests to more of a “lonely centrist,” complaining that students didn’t see the need for daily newspapers like the New York Times which he reads every day. This statement was confusing, as he had previously spent several minutes of his talk discussing the bias in the coverage of the Times and its corporate corruption at the highest level. He also complained of mass partisanship and the fact that the populace is increasingly unable to discern reliable media sources from “advocacy journalism.”

McMillian then opened up the floor to questions from the assembled audience, who quickly attempted to set the record straight on the protests since many of them were actually there. One man told an amusingly horrifying anecdote about how he hit a NYPD horse with a park bench in order to prevent the horse from trampling the student lying down in the street. Another complained of media bias as a whole, complaining that the entire mainstream media reeked of corporate control and relished the smattering of applause from the assembled audience. While earlier in the talk McMillian disputed the Times’s assertion that student protesters vandalized Mathematics, a former student asserted that they did, in fact, vandalize the building, tearing off doors to aid the barricade and using bannisters as makeshift clubs. McMillian responded in amusement, eventually throwing up his hands and offering few substantive responses.

After the Q&A, the talk disbanded and moved to a reception celebrating the opening of the exhibit “1968: The Global Revolutions” in the Kempner Gallery, located on the 6th floor of Butler in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. The exhibit was absolutely fascinating, with posters, photos, and letters collected from Columbia alumni and the like situated alongside newspapers and other primary sources that firmly situated Columbia’s history during this time period within a tumultuous cultural moment. In letting history speak for itself, this, more than anything McMillan said, showed what truly made the 60s such a watershed moment in US political history. We would encourage everyone to take the time to stop by and take a look for themselves.

Through briefly talking with McMillian during the reception, I found that while he was very knowledgeable about the underground media of the time, he was very unaware of the way that leftists and political radicals communicate and coordinate in the modern era via the Internet. ‘Leftbook,’ a loose assortment of hundreds of Facebook groups devoted to leftist political thought, has hundreds of thousands of members, but McMillian had never heard of it. Though he spent much time researching students, he seemed to suffer from the same biases as many older intellectuals looking down on the younger generation as less knowledgeable and more flawed.

Overall, the event proved to be doubly interesting; not only was McMillian’s talk enjoyable, but watching him confront the very subjects of his research was delightful and surprising. Much of what McMillian praised about the underground papers, namely their wide perspective and first-person experience, was present in the testimonies of the living primary sources.

Image via 1968: The Global Revolutions