IT IS ALWAYS TREACHEROUS to proclaim an origin. You can research and research until you feel certain enough to publish your result, and out of the woodwork or clouds or cyberspace comes somebody with an earlier origin, and you are crushed, humiliated. Nevertheless, here goes a try at the origin of the “Alternative Press” that took hold in the 20th Century. I am open to corrections or additions and revising what I say here.
In the 1940s George Seldes began publishing In Fact. Through that periodical he became the Grandfather of the Alternative Press. Amid the hysteria of the so-called “McCarthy Era,” paid subscriptions to the periodical fell off so drastically that Seldes decided to quit with $20,000 left in his bank account.
In the 1950s Lyle Stuart acquired Seldes’s subscription list and began publishing The Independent, a combination throwback to early 20th-Century classical muckraking, socialist commentary, and In Fact style exposés, along with some ribald humor that was calculated to “offend somebody every issue” as Lyle put it. Lyle provided office space for Paul Krassner to put out The Realist, described by Paul as a “journal of freethought criticism and satire.” He was the wild man of the times, proclaiming that on the airplane trip back from Dallas Lyndon B. Johnson screwed or masturbated himself on the corpse of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, and publishing such cover cartoons as the Russian premier and the American president standing over a world in female form with nothing on but their underpants in clear enough preparation about what they were set to do to that world.
In January 1960, copying certain characteristics of the aforesaid periodicals and the early muckraking journals such as McClure’s (featuring the work of such writers as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Ray Stannard Baker), I kicked off The Californian (it had two different titles in the early and later periods of its existence, January 1960-December 1962).
Almost the First Alternative Press Syndicate
The next year, 1961, Lyle and Paul and I met in Las Vegas where Lyle, a master at blackjack, liked to pick up a few thousand dollars at the gambling table. Along with wanting to meet each other in person, we had decided to discuss the possibility of forming an “Alternative Press Syndicate.” We came close to going through with it, but finally decided that each of our styles was so individually unique as to render consolidation too cumbersome.
In the mid-1960s John Bryan, publisher of a string of anarchistic periodicals such as Open City, formed an “Underground Press Syndicate” with, among others, John Wilcock of the Village Voice. That brief enterprise gave way to the Alternative Press Syndicate, with Art Kunkin, publisher of the Los Angeles Free Press, playing a prominent role. Also to be mentioned are the offbeat periodicals created amid the “Hippies” explosion: e.g., the Berkeley Barb and the Oracle.
Any of the periodicals I have mentioned so far would merit at least some credit for the onset of the Alternative Press. But as it turned out, it was The Californian which became the primary model for the periodicals identified as “alternative.” Art Kunkin said he modeled the Los Angeles Free Press on The Californian. At a a convention in San Francisco of the Alternative Press periodicals, Bruce B. Brugmann, editor-publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, announced: “Without Burton Wolfe, none of us would be here today.”
The Demise of the Alternative Press
Alas, the kind of Alternative Press that I envisioned has almost disappeared. Periodicals such as the Bay Guardian and those in the string of New Times publications have become basically consumer and entertainment guides, with some worthwhile articles and essays or columns tossed in to maintain the posture of being other than what they are: alternatives to mass media periodicals. Indeed, in some cities the turnaround is ironic: in San Francisco, for example, the daily Chronicle is the alternative to the Bay Guardian. Sad.
Sometime, if you can find them in a nearby major public or university library, you should read a few copies of the three periodicals that became the forerunners of the Alternative Press of the later Sixties and early Seventies. If you can find any periodical before or since that matches the dynamic quality and the sheer guts of those three, I hope you will provide the name to me. I have read hundreds of past and present periodicals, and I have never come across any that comes close to the bombshell expos és, the depth, the perception, the blasphemy (blasphemy is a truth not accepted by society), the unrepentant honesty, and the no-bullshit quality, of those three unique periodicals. To adopt the swaggering boasts of Cassius Clay/Mohammed Ali,The Californian and Independent and Realist were the greatest. I intend to revive their spirit. In the words of Georgie Porgie Puddin’ Pie in his television commercials for his string of menswear stores, “I guarantee it.”
