The 20^th century post-WWII period represents an era of increased attention to clandestine activity in the United States. In addition to Cold War paranoia, which cemented the furtive, surreptitious spy as a foundational character within the U.S. pop cultural lexicon, anti-colonial liberation struggles around the globe introduced a newly controversial figure into American public discourse: the underground guerilla. From Uruguay’s Tupamaros to the Irish Republican Army to the infamous Viet Cong, underground warfare, and its associated printed material, captured the imagination of student activists, anti-war soldiers, and Black freedom fighters who opposed U.S. militarism from within their nation’s borders.

Throughout the 1960s and the early 1970s, various countercultural groups began producing what they referred to as “underground newspapers,” forming a vast network of political opposition which infiltrated dormitories, factories, suburban basements, naval ships, and military stockades across the United States. Building the underground press network required solidarity between aboveground and underground elements of anti-establishment movements, and, as historians Derek Seidman, Geoffrey Rips, and Barbara Tischler have chronicled, its producers became the targets of illegal surveillance and harassment by U.S. law enforcement. This panel will focus on the production, dissemination, and political content of clandestine publications during a time of increased underground activity in the United States. We will explore how the Vietnam era’s alternative print culture constructed “the underground” not as a physical space, but rather as a diffuse network of radical media and material passed from one hand to another.

This panel seeks to generate conversation between historians, political scientists, and literature scholars who are interested in clandestine political activity and the printed material it inevitably produces. Three panelists will bring these varied critical methodologies to bear on the study of U.S. underground print culture, which exploded during The Vietnam War in response to a combination of political, technological, and cultural factors: Seth Kershner’s paper will focus on dissemination, examining how U.S. servicemen incarcerated in military prisons managed to obtain underground publications, and took part in covert reading groups, or “schools of rebellion,” through their exchange of seditious printed material. Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande’s paper will analyze “the underground” as a widespread cultural mythology, through an examination of institutional, military, and countercultural how-to manuals that mobilized subterranean space to bolster their divergent political projects. Shawn Driscoll’s paper will challenge our understanding of “the underground” as politically clandestine by examining the press network’s relationship to an aboveground funding agency, The United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF), which constructed itself as apolitical notwithstanding its financial support of subversive printed material.

Finally, this panel will benefit from commentary by historian Dr. David Cortright, who has published extensively on 20^th century peace activism, the U.S. antiwar movement, and his own experience protesting the Vietnam War while on active duty. Ultimately, this panel will provide attendees with an opportunity to discuss the multifaceted history of underground publication and its role in clandestine political struggle.