The Guardian, April 16, 1975
New Left
The National Guardian was a radical, left newsweekly published out of New York City from 1948-1992. The paper was established by James Aronson, Cedric Belfrage, who were committed activists for the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace presidential campaign, as well as John McManus and Josiah Gitt, both liberal newspaper men, though Gitt quickly dropped out. In addition to the Progressive Party, the newspaper also held ties with American communists and the labor movement. The Cold War took a toll on the newspaper, with the decline of the Progressive Party and the rise of McCarthyism in the U.S. During the post-WWII era, the newspaper focused coverage on opposition to the Cold War and militarism, support for emerging anti-colonial struggles around the world, defense of those targeted by McCarthyism, advocacy for the black freedom movement. The newspaper continued to hold a cozy relationship with the Communist Party U.S.A., though it did break with the group over some issues, particularly support for independent political action beyond party control. The 1960s-era brought a new period of political rancor within the editorial ranks of the newspaper. In the end, the periodical changed leadership and renamed itself The Guardian. The Guardian took an increasingly Maoist line, supporting armed struggles against colonialism. During this period, the newspaper attempted to forge ties with SDS and SNCC, writing that "The duty of a radical newspaper is to build a radical movement.” "We are movement people acting as journalists," the Guardian′s staff now proudly declared. In 1970, further ideological fracture lead to the creation of a short-lived rival publication, The Liberated Guardian. In the later-1970s, a more hard-line Marxist-Leninist ideology eroded the newspaper’s reputation for investigative journalism. Readership and support for the newspaper declined through the 1980s and the paper ceased publication in 1992.
In this issue, articles cover the orphan airlift from Vietnam; the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam; Attica; Dominican protests in New York; United Farm Workers organizing in San Francisco; Joan Little; CIA red-squads; auto workers; unemployment; aerospace workers strike; San Francisco “Zebra trial”; government repression against the left; Milwaukee VA protest; the San Quinten Six; housing foreclosures; the Socialist Workers Party; economic recession; the October League; sectarian conflict on the left; Third World liberation struggles; Thieu regime in Vietnam; Soviet socialism; marketplace and letters.
Weekly Guardian Associates, Inc.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
April 16, 1975
newspaper
Yippies at HUAC Hearings (85 images)
New Left/Counterculture
In 1968, in the wake of the police riot outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed Yippie leaders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, as well as other members of the Chicago 7, including Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger, and early anti-Vietnam war activist Robert Greenblatt. A statement by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (NECLC) called the HUAC hearings an “attempt by the Johnson administration to use every mechanism at its disposal to legitimize the action of Mayor Daley and the Chicago police.” Lawyers for the subpoenaed activists included Michael Kennedy and Henry di Suvero of the NECLC, William Kunstler of the Law Center for Constitutional Rights, and Gerald Lefcourt of the National Lawyers Guild.
In classic Yippie fashion, Rubin and Hoffman sought to create a satirical theatrical media spectacle out of their appearances. According to a Harvard Crimson article in February of 1969, “In the fifties, the most effective sanction was terror. Almost any publicity from HUAC meant the ‘blacklist'. Without a chance to clear his name, a witness would suddenly find himself without friends and without a job. But it is not easy to see how in 1969, a HUAC blacklist could terrorize an SDS activist. Witnesses like Jerry Rubin have openly boasted of their contempt for American institutions. A subpoena from HUAC would be unlikely to scandalize Abbie Hoffman or his friends.” Rubin told the Liberation News Service that he “plans to use the hearings as a stage for a theatrical assault on HUAC and as a platform to call for disruptive actions on election day.” During an earlier appearance before HUAC in 1966, Rubin dressed as an American revolutionary and passed out copies of the Declaration of Independence, claiming to be a descendent of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine and declaring "Nothing is more American than revolution." He also blew bubble gum bubbles as committee members questioned him about his communist affiliations, while others offered the committee Nazi salutes. During his responses to committee questions, he highlighted the segregationist pasts of prominent HUAC members, as well as their ties to Pentagon contractors.
Not to be outdone, Hoffman kiddingly told the LNS, “I plan to turn state’s evidence. I plan to squeal on everybody… I am going to indict my friend Peter Rabbit.” He went on to explain that his strategy was to “get crazy. Craziest motherfuckers they ever seen in this country. ‘Cause that’s the only way we’re gonna beat them. So fucking crazy that they can’t understand it at ALL.” As Hoffman’s biographer, Jonah Raskin related, “Abbie printed and distributed his own subpoenas, which were addressed to “Yippies, Motherfuckers, Commies, Narcos, Saboteurs, Conspirators, Sons of Liberty, Freaks, Guerrillas.” His subpoenas urged everyone to come to the hearings with “pot, incense, yo-yos, molotov cocktails, flowers, energy, black widow spiders, balloons, flags, gold balls, PIGS, music, banners, LSD, flaming crosses, hats, fruit, battleships, life, rice, licorice, slogans, flesh, rocks, lights, noise makers, buttons, cameras, gorillas.”
On the opening day of the hearings - October 1 – the activists and their lawyers engaged in a “stand-in” to protest the proceedings. Attorney Michael Kennedy shouted, “The Constitution is being raped, and we as lawyers are being emasculated in an armed camp.” Hoffman wore a tie-dyed t-shirt with feathers in his bushy hair, while Rubin wore a bandolier of live cartridges and carried a toy M-16 rifle. Members of the newly-formed women’s liberation group, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), including Roz Payne, wore black hats and dresses and carried broomsticks. As Raskin described, “Forming a circle around Jerry, they burned incense, danced, and chanted.”
Jerry Rubin described the the events this way:
“I come to the HUAC hearings wearing a bandolero of real bullets and carrying a toy M-16 rifle on my shoulder. The rifle was a model of the rifles the Viet Cong steal and then use to kill American soldiers in Vietnam.
The pigs stop me at the door of the hearings. They grab the bullets and the gun. It is a dramatic moment. Press and yippies pack us in tightly. The pigs drag me down three flights of stairs and remove the bullets, leaving the gun, Viet Cong pajamas, Eldridge Cleaver buttons, Black Panther beret, war paint, earrings, bandolero, and the bells which ring every time I move my body. My costume carried a nonverbal message: ‘We must all become stoned guerrillas.’
The secret to the costume was the painted tits. Guerrilla war in America is going to come in psychedelic colors. We are hippie-guerrillas.
In HUAC’s chambers Abbie Hoffman jumps up and yells out, ‘May I go to the bathroom?’ Young kids reading that in their hometown papers giggle because they have to ask permission every time they want to go to the bathroom in school.
The message of my costume flipped across the country in one day: an example of our use of the enemy’s institutions – her mass media – to turn on and communicate with one another.”
Over the next few days, Hoffman and Rubin continued to create a spectacle from the hearings. Rubin returned with his bandolier, toy gun, Native American headband, body paint and North Vietnamese flag cape. But it was Hoffman who stole the show. Again, Jonah Raskin explains,
“Gerald Lefcourt later remembered that Abbie did not want to let HUAC steal the media spotlight. ‘He wanted what he was about to be on the evening news, and not what they were about,’ Lefcourt said. He explained that Abbie ‘had the idea of wearing a flag shirt and saying “I’m more American that you.” He was certain that he would be arrested, and that the arrest would make the news and steal the show from the committee. Moreover, he had a hunch that the police would rip off the American flag shirt from his back. Then, they’d be guilty of desecration.’
On the morning of October 4, everything went more or less as Abbie had planned. Anita painted the flag of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) on his back. Then Abbie put on a commercially made American flag shirt and pinned on two of his favorite buttons: one that read ‘Wallace for President: Stand Up for America” and another that said ‘Vote Pig in Sixty-Eight, Yippie.’ He also wore dark glasses that made him look mysterious and a bit menacing as well. Sure enough, on the sidewalk outside the Cannon Office Building, law enforcement officials stopped him, tore up his shirt, and arrested him for desecration of the flag. Abbie spent the night in jail. It was a dreadful experience that only added to his sense of outrage about the whole affair. ‘The law I was arrested under would make everyone who dresses in an Uncle Sam costume and most drum majorettes criminals,’ he wrote in the Epilogue to Revolution for the Hell of It. And he added that he had recently watched Phyllis Diller on TV wearing ‘a miniskirt that looked more like an American flag than the shirt I wore,’ but no one had arrested her.
He was the first person to be prosecuted under the new federal statute that made it a crime to deface or defile the flag. U.S. Attorney Benton Becker argued that the flag was ‘symbolically the United States of America,’ and that the government had ‘a legitimate interest in maintaining the sanctity of its symbols.’ Gerald Lefcourt defended Abbie on First Amendment grounds: wearing the flag was a form of symbolic speech, Lefcourt argued. His client had never intended to dishonor the flag. Morover, there was no physical violence, no personal injury, and no provocation to the public. ‘The communication of ideas is what the country is all about,’ Lefcourt told the court. ‘If we don’t protect the communication of ideas, then we’re leading ourselves down the path of serious trouble to a repressive society.’
On the witness stand, Abbie explained that he wore the American flag shirt because ‘I was going before the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives and I don’t particularly consider that committee American, and I don’t consider that House of Representatives particularly representative; and I wore the shirt to show that we were in the tradition of the founding fathers of this country.’ He was found guilty of desecrating the flag and was sentenced to a thirty-day prison term, although an appeals court would subsequently reverse the lower court’s decision. 'Your honor, I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country,' he said after he was sentenced.”
As Hoffman was arrested outside the HUAC hearings, Jerry Rubin comically shouted at police, “Communists,” for not arresting him, as well. Two months later, at another round of HUAC hearings in December, Rubin wore a Santa Claus costume “in a direct attempt to reach the head of every child in the country.” Hoffman refused to testify in front of HUAC.
The photos in this set were taken by Roz Payne on October 3 and 4, 1968, and include images of Abbie Hoffman and Anita Hoffman’s arrest, Jerry Rubin in costume, Hoffman talking to Paul Krassner, a dinner with lawyers and other miscellaneous shots from the courthouse scene.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
Liberated Guardian, vol. II, no. 5, September 1971
New Left
The National Guardian was a radical, left newsweekly published out of New York City from 1948-1992. The paper was established by James Aronson, Cedric Belfrage, who were committed activists for the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace presidential campaign, as well as John McManus and Josiah Gitt, both liberal newspaper men, though Gitt quickly dropped out. In addition to the Progressive Party, the newspaper also held ties with American communists and the labor movement. The Cold War took a toll on the newspaper, with the decline of the Progressive Party and the rise of McCarthyism in the U.S. During the post-WWII era, the newspaper focused coverage on opposition to the Cold War and militarism, support for emerging anti-colonial struggles around the world, defense of those targeted by McCarthyism, advocacy for the black freedom movement. The newspaper continued to hold a cozy relationship with the Communist Party U.S.A., though it did break with the group over some issues, particularly support for independent political action beyond party control. The 1960s-era brought a new period of political rancor within the editorial ranks of the newspaper. In the end, the periodical changed leadership and renamed itself The Guardian. The Guardian took an increasingly Maoist line, supporting armed struggles against colonialism. During this period, the newspaper attempted to forge ties with SDS and SNCC, writing that "The duty of a radical newspaper is to build a radical movement.” "We are movement people acting as journalists," the Guardian′s staff now proudly declared. The Liberated Guardian formed out of a workers strike at The Guardian newspaper in New York City in the Spring of 1970. The Liberated Guardian was notable for it strong stand in favor of armed struggle. An ideological and political split within the ranks of the Liberated Guardian staff led to the newspaper’s demise in late-1973. The original Guardian pressed on and took on a more hard-line Marxist-Leninist ideology in the late-1970s, eroding that newspaper’s reputation for investigative journalism. Readership and support for The Guardian declined through the 1980s and the paper ceased publication in 1992.
This special issue of the Liberated Guardian includes a variety of articles that explore the murder of George Jackson and the circumstances surrounding his killing.
Liberated Guardian Worker's Collective
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
September 1971
underground press
Liberated Guardian Supplement, April 15, 1971
New Left
The National Guardian was a radical, left newsweekly published out of New York City from 1948-1992. The paper was established by James Aronson, Cedric Belfrage, who were committed activists for the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace presidential campaign, as well as John McManus and Josiah Gitt, both liberal newspaper men, though Gitt quickly dropped out. In addition to the Progressive Party, the newspaper also held ties with American communists and the labor movement. The Cold War took a toll on the newspaper, with the decline of the Progressive Party and the rise of McCarthyism in the U.S. During the post-WWII era, the newspaper focused coverage on opposition to the Cold War and militarism, support for emerging anti-colonial struggles around the world, defense of those targeted by McCarthyism, advocacy for the black freedom movement. The newspaper continued to hold a cozy relationship with the Communist Party U.S.A., though it did break with the group over some issues, particularly support for independent political action beyond party control. The 1960s-era brought a new period of political rancor within the editorial ranks of the newspaper. In the end, the periodical changed leadership and renamed itself The Guardian. The Guardian took an increasingly Maoist line, supporting armed struggles against colonialism. During this period, the newspaper attempted to forge ties with SDS and SNCC, writing that "The duty of a radical newspaper is to build a radical movement.” "We are movement people acting as journalists," the Guardian′s staff now proudly declared. The Liberated Guardian formed out of a workers strike at The Guardian newspaper in New York City in the Spring of 1970. The Liberated Guardian was notable for it strong stand in favor of armed struggle. An ideological and political split within the ranks of the Liberated Guardian staff led to the newspaper’s demise in late-1973. The original Guardian pressed on and took on a more hard-line Marxist-Leninist ideology in the late-1970s, eroding that newspaper’s reputation for investigative journalism. Readership and support for The Guardian declined through the 1980s and the paper ceased publication in 1992.
These pages are from an 8-page supplement focused on revolutionary art, COINTELPRO and FBI files, and debate within the anti-war movement over strategy.
Liberated Guardian
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
April 15, 1971
underground press
Fuck Communism
Anti-Communism and Irreverent Obscenity
In 1963, Paul Krasner and John Francis Putnam collaborated to produce this satirical poster and distributed it through the free-thought magazine, The Realist. The poster pokes fun at anti-communist fervor, combined with the politics of obscenity, which were an integral part of the era. Typography for the poster was done by Putnam, who also wrote a regular column for the magazine, "Modest Proposals." Krasner was the founder and publisher of the magazine.
American author, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote a brief reflection on the poster:
Foreword
by Kurt Vonnegut
Paul Krassner, 63 at this writing (1996), old enough to be my baby brother, in 1963 created a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein's e=mc2. With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM.
At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. In the most humanely influential American novel of this half century, "The Catcher in the Rye," Holden Caulfield, it will be remembered, was shocked to see that word on a subway-station wall. He wondered what seeing it might do to the mind of a little kid. COMMUNISM was to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable. To call an American a communist was like calling somebody a Jew in Nazi Germany. By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn¹t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.
What hasn't been said about that poster, and surely not by Krassner, is that its author was behaving harmoniously with most of the Ten Commandments, the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States and the Sermon on the Mount. So, too, were his now-dead friends Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, roundly denounced and even arrested for bad manners and impudence, and now mourned and celebrated as heroes, which indeed they were, in this important book. They were prophets, too, at the service of humanity in jeering, like the prophets of old, at mean-spirited hypocrisies and stupidities and worse that were making their society a hell, whether there
was a God or not.
And this book is emphatically not nostalgic, but raffishly responsive to the here and now. Nor are decades like chains of knockwursts, sutured off from one another at either end. To think of them as such, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s and so on, is merely a mnemonic device. The only 1960s people are those who died back then. Everyone alive today has no choice but to be, like Paul Krassner, a 1990s person. Krassner does a good job of that. So should we all.
I told Krassner one time that his writings made me hopeful. He found this an odd compliment to offer a satirist. I explained that he made supposedly serious matters seem ridiculous, and that this inspired many of his readers to decide for themselves what was ridiculous and what was not. Knowing that there were people doing that, better late than never, made me optimistic.
Paul Krasner and John Francis Putnam
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1963
poster