May 5, 2025
Thorne Dreyer, Notes from the Underground: 77 Articles that Bring the Past to Life. Austin: New Journalism Project, 2025. 476pp, $27.00
In the days of Campus Movement yore, i.e., the 1960s-70s, Austin, Texas, yielded nothing to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Madison, Wisconsin or Burlington, Vermont. Its claims upon bohemianism and political resistance had a unique flavor, to be sure. Major university town and state capital, it departed from the other protest-heavy places in one key respect: it was surrounded by Texas.
The flavor stood out by itself. If left-wing prairie radicalism once prompted an Oklahoma socialist movement larger by proportional vote than anywhere else in the country, a lot of time had passed. And yet, at any national meeting of radicals, Austin men and women, mostly youngsters, prided themselves on their distinctive sensibilities. And their responsibilities: by the middle 1960s, Austin stood not far from major Army camps training young men to go to Vietnam. Thus the GI Coffee House movement, the key connection of the working class and the antiwar movement.
Legendary underground newspaper The Rag—in many ways the most important of all the unofficial press that reached millions of young readers with alternative views of war, politics and culture— found a ready niche here. Or rather, as a founding editor and the long-run project savant Thorne Dreyer says, the niche was created and sustained through herculean efforts. Things never happen by themselves, especially when funds are rare and dependent upon political movements of resistance.
This astounding book offers a record of the times far beyond the underground press that tanked by the end of the 1970s. The Rag found new forms of communication after its print format death. It operated for decades online and continues now as a radio feature from Austin, with some of the old hands still at the wheels of information and insight. The last regular journalistic piece here ends in 2014, but the “Remembrances” of the vanished comrades and the last salutes to Dreyer and his work offer some important addenda: people pass but the work continues.
The bulk of this very bulky volume is about radical journalism almost as much as about the world seen by the radical journalist. I had not known that Dreyer, a Texas boy and son of a prominent Houston newspaperman, aspired to be an actor before turning to his life’s work in 1966. The very first pieces in the book establish the tone of his keen and also lean prose thereafter: confrontations of military and pro-war political authorities by young radicals on campus and off, seen from the newspaper office as organizing center. In other words, his journalism was a political project as it could hardly be for anyone in the commercial press. He wastes no adjectives and indulges in no flowery prose. Every sentence counts, and a great many are also fun to read or read again now, looking back on a lively time. Especially to be noted: a tale of Marines attacking SNCC workers and anti-war activists at Hermann Park in Houston; Dreyer’s unique coverage of the massive March on the Pentagon; “A Comprehensive View: The Movement and the New Media,” and finally, “Under Siege: Space City! And the Nightriders.”
Dreyer describes the rise of the underground press from a few papers, very notably the Rag itself, into a national network of hundreds of local efforts, some crudely written or printed, some highly sophisticated in every professional respect except….financed by nobody in particular, hawked by volunteers in public venues (starting with the campus), and staffed by amazing amateurs who nevertheless taught themselves to create the most lively and compelling journalism of the age. And not only journalism. Not since the Yiddish-language press of the 1890s had radical papers carried poetry on the first page! Never had a leftwing paper boasted such new and rebellious, wildly creative comic art. And so on.
Dreyer made himself an insider in the small crowd that created the Liberation News Service, a shoestring operation that circulated important journalism and entertaining features free of charge each week. The Rag boasted comic artist Gilbert Shelton and his Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, by the 1970s-80s a hit across large parts of Europe. A graduate school dropout who found his way to San Francisco (where he published and largely drew my own initial entry into comic art, Radical America Komiks, in 1969), Shelton popularized the Austin Ambience, if such a thing existed.
Dreyer moved on himself, for a few years, to Space City!, the underground newspaper counterpart in Houston, his own home town. He also toured widely, capturing news of the left, mobilization and repression, across the country. He met and interviewed the day’s radical celebrities, including Jane Fonda, later Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Judy Collins, NFL star Dave Zirin and inevitably Texas’s own Kinky Friedman, among others.
Building a community of protest around itself, Space City! managed to survive military-style assaults upon its headquarters by the KKK and others, and ended only in the political exhaustion of the staff. Perhaps, looking back, the great virtue of all the Texas Left was to move on, change forms, find newer generations more usually organized around culture than politics as such. Even Houston, more than college-town Austin, a real Southwestern megalopolis, had a bohemian neighborhood by the 1970s-80s, where artists of various kinds flourished, most especially but not only musicians and singers. Meanwhile, Austin, like Madison and so many other places, has faced extreme gentrification from incoming capital, creating an urban world in which low rents and lazy bohemian afternoons seem to be part of urban memory. And yet Thorne Dreyer persists! And will be heard, we hope, for a long time yet.
Paul Buhle is a retired historian, and co-founder, with Scott Molloy, of an oral history project on blue collar Rhode Islanders.
ROBERT COTTRELL / BOOKS / A Trip Through the Long Movement
A Review of Thorne Dreyer’s new book, ‘Notes From the Underground’
By Robert Cottrell / The Rag Blog / April 9, 2025
Notes From the Underground: 77 Articles That Bring the Past to Life, the second collection of Thorne Dreyer’s lifework, includes essays, musings, and interviews, collectively cementing his standing as a foremost figure in the history of American journalism and dissent.
Simply put, his latest contribution is a terrific, vitally important offering, indeed, an instant classic. Significantly, as this volume — coming on the heels of his well-received Making Waves: The Rag Radio Interviews (2022) — movingly displays, its author-editor-compiler has remained at the cutting edge of both alternative journalism, the counterculture, and American radicalism for six decades. Large portions of his history, the Movement of which he was such an integral part, and many of its finest qualities, suffuse this panorama of commitment, activism, triumphs, and tribulations.
Smartly segmented into temporal and thematic sections, the book draws from Dreyer’s reminiscences, the people’s uprisings of the Long 1960s and the extended backlash that resulted, cultural happenings particularly meaningful to Dreyer, interviews conducted during the Movement’s heyday and aftermath, poignant memories of friends, and a tale of a stint at the Harris County Jail. Interspersed throughout are photographs of activists, taken both earlier and later, as well as drawings by some of the era’s finest illustrators.
Even the title of Dreyer’s book sparkles, with the reader able to reflect on the underground press and days gone by or through a conjuring up of Dostoevsky’s novella, a favorite from my late, great undergrad days.
As Dreyer notes in his brief introduction, “Notes From the Underground is an effort of love,” the byproduct of painstaking archival work, in the widest sense, on his part. It naturally includes several selections from the two legendary underground newspapers he helped to found: The Rag and Space City! The first, of course, appeared in Austin, Texas; the second, in Houston, where Dreyer was raised. But also cropping up are other seminal writings from Liberation News Service, that alternative press syndicate he helped shepherd, and various publications.
The initial section of Notes from the Underground, “Years of Protest and Upheaval (or Taking to the Streets),” opens with “All-Woman Sit-In at SS Office,” which appeared in one of the very first issues of The Rag during the fall of 1966. It displays Dreyer’s characteristic dry wit laced with sharp mini-biographies of villains and heroes — Alice Embree fittingly was there — as well as glimpses into the fledging anti-draft and feminist movements. Next up is a scathing look at Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s visit to the University of Texas, “Dean of War: Where’s Rusk at?” and the repression accompanying it. Dreyer goes on to explore the student movement during “the Season of the Witch” as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War continued to escalate. He examines the assault in Houston by Marines on antiwar demonstrators — among them SNCC’s Lee Otis Johnson — to the delight of John Birch Society members, some of whom were soldiers or policemen. Dreyer himself was among those assaulted by off-duty Marines.
Maintaining his dissection of the Movement, Dreyer next presents “Nightriders and the New Politics.” There can be found “The Battle for People’s Park,” which played out in Berkeley, California, the further maltreatment of Lee Otis Johnson, and the “Government Campaign Against the Black Panther Party.” But also situated in this section are stories involving the G.I movement at Fort Hood, where Jane Fonda spoke, transcripts of a lengthy interview with the actress-activist, and a visit by radical attorney William Kunstler. Also present is an account of the Ku Klux Klan’s assault on Space City! and “Houston’s Civil War,” involving right-wing terrorism there. …
Notes from the Underground…Review
PHIT book review
PEOPLE’S HISTORY IN TEXAS
JUN 09, 2025
[go the New Journalism Project or Lulu to order this book]
There is very little institutional memory of the Left in America.
Think about it. There is no long lasting Socialist Party as in Europe and no Labor Party that has happily contended for power in England for a century. There aren’t any recognized American Colleges of the Left. Every generation sadly has to re-discover the history of protest and organizing all over again.
Those historically valuable models of success and the useful lessons of failed attempts are simply lost.
People’s History in Texas has spent 50 years collecting stories of the voices for change, because those stories weren’t being told, weren’t being collected, and weren’t being passed on. These stories are sorely needed so that the next generation will understand that they are not the first and they won’t be the last.
Our friends over at the New Journalism Project have published a new collection of historical journalism by Thorne Dreyer that highlights his career of writing left journalism over a span of 60 years. We highly recommend it.
Back in the 1960s folks began resisting the Vietnam War. The mainstream press did not cover the issues nor the marches nor the organizing. Thorne was a key player in the development of the underground press that publicized those efforts. Many of those anti-war activists had also been involved in the desegregation efforts as well.
Thorne Dreyer, a Texan born in Houston, worked with the RAG, Space City! and the Liberation News Service. These are valuable resources even today for opposition efforts.
As a side comment, when I take the PHIT documentaries on the road and show them to youngsters in academia, the one thing that absolutely fascinates them is the RAG trilogy. They want to talk about how The RAG was organized, how The RAG worked, how decisions were made, and even how the art got drawn. Young activists today want their own source of information and they are looking to models of the past. They don’t want to replicate the past, but they want to understand the process so they can create the concept anew in a different technological era.
The RAG is a great model of change. At some point the anti-war, anti-racism movement for change morphed into changing the “way we do everything,” as Judy Walther so graphically put it in our Rag Documentary.
In order to get the message out, in pre-internet days, folks created their own newspapers. The Underground Press offered the News of the Day that the mainstream newspapers didn’t see fit to print.
Thorne Dreyer helped start up the Rag. Then he moved to Houston and helped create Space City. He also worked for LNS (Liberation News Service) which was created to assist the growing culture of underground newspapers, by disseminating stories of interest to the movement from around the world. (These days they would call him a serial social entrepreneur and, honestly, in the school of UT Social Entrepreneurship, there should be class “case studies” on these radical underground press creations.)
Anderson Valley Advertiser
Liberation, Cooptation & the Sixties
June 15, 2025
Reflections on Thorne Dreyer’s Notes from the Underground (New Journalism Project, $27).
Have you noticed? Sixties folk—organizers, activists, pacifists, feminists and liberationists of all stripes—can’t seem to get enough of the era when they made history. For some it never really ended, though recent history has not been kind to the Sixties. In the 1980s conservatives co-opted the buzz words of the Sixties and touted “The Reagan Revolution.” These days, Trumpers have also scooped up and recycled the vocabulary of that era of protest. They have promoted “Liberation Day” and the arrival of tariffs meant to “make America Wealthy again.” The word underground, which the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky popularized in the title of his best known novella, Notes from the Underground, lost much of its bite when a website with information about the weather called itself “The Weather Underground.”
The language and the vocabulary of the Sixties isn’t what it used to be. In some cases the meanings of words have turned into their opposite. Thorne Dreyer, the founder of The Rag and the host of Rag Radio, calls his new collection of 77 articles, “Notes from Underground” and means to honor the past. I’ve been interviewed on Rag Radio at least half-a-dozen times and have enjoyed the conversations and the onair and behind-the-scenes contributions by engineer Tracey Schulz.
Some of the pieces appeared in Austin’s signature underground paper and others in the Houston Chronicle and the Texas Observer, “sea level publications,” as they were called. Underground reporters and editors like Dreyer sometimes migrated from media down under the surface to media up above. The gap between the two doesn’t seem as wide as it once did. As someone famous once observed, “yesterday’s heresy is tomorrow’s orthodoxy.”
In a 1976 article published in the Texas Monthly, Dreyer asked if the Sixties generation made “any difference?” And whether it left “its mark on the world?” His answer, “Who knows?” He adds “I have no intention here of constructing some grandiose analytical overview of the Sixties explosion.” Fair enough. He wasn’t then and isn’t now a theorist. In that 1976 piece, Dreyer goes on to offer sketches of some of his friends who were movement organizers and who were “white, thirtyish and come from moderately affluent family backgrounds.” That sounds like Dreyer himself. He adds that the folks he profiles are like him “mostly native Texans.” He ends the piece with a quotation from Stoney Burns, a Texas writer and hippie who ran for Dallas County sheriff in 1972 and who says it was an “exciting time” and that “I sure had fun.”
Half-a-century after Dreyer first asked his relevant question about the Sixties generation it’s still worth asking whether it made its mark on history. In my view it did and it didn’t. It helped to end the War in Vietnam, undo the wrongs of legal racial segregation, altered white middle class lifestyles in the cauldron of the counterculture and freed women from some of the chains of the patriarchy.
But now in the age of Trump and with a counter revolution in full force many of the achievements of the Sixties generation seem to have been undone or faded into a sea of reaction the likes of which has been seen since the era of Jim Crow when the achievements of Reconstruction were undone by white supremacists, racists, bigots and members of the KKK.
Some of my friends who were activists in the Sixties tell me they don’t know what to do now to counteract Trump and his cronies. In my recollection they weren’t all that savvy in the Sixties, but were often carried along helter-skelter by the current of contemporary events. Where, one wonders, was Dreyer in the Sixties? An article he wrote in 1969 with Victoria Smith which was originally published in Liberation News Service and is contained in Notes from the Underground and that provides some answers.
“We cannot individually remold our lives,” he and Smith wrote. “No matter how beautiful the vibrations you emanated, you couldn’t create the good society in the entrails of the decaying body.” No mention is made of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW) , the radical labor union whose members argued that it was essential to “build a new world from the shell of the old.”
Feminist Gloria Steinem recycled the IWW notion not long agoand called for “a revolution from within” which gained traction in feminist circles and among Sixties radicals who turned to meditation, Buddhism and spirituality. Dreyer and Smith, argued in their 1969 article that a “new kind of left has emerged in America that combines the positive and the negative, the vision of a better way and the need to destroy the old, the loving and the burning.” Depending on where you stood on the spectrum and whether you trashed or sat-in nonviolently you emphasized either the loving or the burning.
The authors denounce “chickenshit liberalism,” the sectarian cliquishness of the Old Left and hail the arrival of the underground press as a “revolutionary departure from the traditions of American journalism. They allow that “radical journalists came and went” and suggest that “their work never approached the stylistic or contextual impact that today’s Movement press is having.” That remark and others similar to it might remind readers that Sixties radicals sometimes rejected radical history and the achievements of the past, including benchmark publications like The Masses and The New Masses.
Notes from the Underground is divided into seven parts; “Years of Protest and Upheaval,” “Night Riders and the New Politics,” “Echoes of the Resistance,” which includes articles from the 21st century”; “Special Reporting” with news of Houston ; and “Progressive Voices” which offers interviews with folk singer Judy Collins, SDSer Carl Davidson, Yippies Judy Gumbo and Nancy Kurshan, Weather Undergrounders and more, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and Bernie Sanders often a lone voice in the wilderness of American politics today. No one I know has done more to transcend the sectarianism of the old New Left than Dreyer.
In the last section of his book, “Remembrances,” he offers profiles of folks little known outside of Texas such as Stoney Burns, Jack A. Smith, Daniel Jay Schacht and Thorne’s accomplished artist mother Maggie. Here, as elsewhere he honors Texas radicals and radicalism often neglected by underground newspapers on both coasts.
Dreyer has always rightly insisted that Austin ought to be included in accounts of the Sixties, and not be forgotten in the barrage of stories about New York, Madison and Berkeley. Parts I and II bring the past to life and thereby achieve the author’s stated goals. “Echoes of the Resistance” feels less timely, and the profiles at the end don’t significantly enhance the portrait of the era of protest and upheaval.
Dreyer backs away from the language of the Sixties and refrains from calling it a revolutionary period. He uses words like “progressive,” “protest” and “upheaval.” When asked why he unearthed, collected and published the articles in Notes, Dreyer said be wanted to write a memoir, a history of the movement from the perspective of a personally-involved writer, a journalist/participant,” and to “fill in a gap of knowledge about the out-sized role that Austin and Houston played in the story of the Sixties.” It has done that,
It has often been said that a picture is worth 1,000 words and that’s true of some of the pictures in this volume that depict a protester surrounded by marines, young men at a headshop talking about “police harassment” —a constant threat— and the reproduction of a stunning front page of the Rag from 1972 that offers an iconic image by artist Jim Franklin of an armadillo about to cross what looks like an endless highway littered with broken automobile tires.
Liberation and Cooptation, Repression and Resistance: Reflections on the Sixties
Thorne Dreyer (right) and University of Texas campus cop, October 1966. Photograph Source: Thorne Webb Dreyer – CC BY-SA 3.0
(This is a slight revision by Jonah Raskin of his review of Thorne Dreyer’s Notes From the Underground that was originally published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. It is the second review of Dreyer’s book that has been published in CounterPunch.)
Have you noticed? Sixties folk—organizers, activists, pacifists, feminists and liberationists of all stripes— can’t seem to get enough of the era when they made history. For some it never really ended, though recent history has not been kind to the Sixties. In the 1980s conservatives co-opted the buzz words of the Sixties and touted “The Reagan Revolution.” These days, Trumpers have also scooped up and recycled the vocabulary of that era of protest. They have promoted “Liberation Day” and the arrival of tariffs meant to “make America Wealthy again.” The word underground, which the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky popularized in the title of his best known novella, Notes from Underground, lost much of its bite when a website with information about the weather called itself “The Weather Underground.”
The language and the vocabulary of the Sixties isn’t what it used to be. In some cases the meanings of words have turned into their opposite. Thorne Dreyer, the founder of The Rag and the host of Rag Radio, calls his new collection of 77 articles, “Notes from Underground” and means to honor the past.
It’s true that Dreyer didn’t break any big stories from The Sixties. He didn’t do what Seymour Hersh did for the New Yorker, or what Woodward and Bernstein did for The Washington Post. He didn’t have the resources of the mighty media. But he had his feet on the ground. He saw the action as it unfolded up-close and personal, and perhaps that’s as valuable as the headline news from the White House, the Pentagon, Watergate or Woodstock.
Dreyer didn’t write about the murder of Fred Hampton but he wrote about the murder by the police of Houston’s African American activist, Carl Hampton. And no matter that he used some of the overheated language of the day and wrote that “Hampton was picked out for extermination” and that “the Houston police ripped off one of the most dedicated and selfless revolutionaries in the city. Dreyer poured his heartfelt politics into prose.
Some of the pieces appeared in Austin’s signature underground paper and others in the Houston Chronicle and the Texas Observer, “sea level publications,” as they were called. Underground reporters and editors like Dreyer sometimes migrated from media down under the surface to media up above. The gap between the two doesn’t seem as wide as it once did. As someone famous once observed, “yesterday’s heresy is tomorrow’s orthodoxy.”
In a 1976 article published in the Texas Monthly, Dreyer asked if the Sixties generation made “any difference?” And whether it left “its mark on the world?” His answer, “Who knows?” He adds “I have no intention here of constructing some grandiose analytical overview of the Sixties explosion.” Fair enough. He wasn’t then and isn’t now a theorist. In that 1976 piece, Dreyer goes on to offer sketches of some of his friends who were movement organizers and who were “white, thirtyish and come from moderately affluent family backgrounds.” That sounds like Dreyer himself. He adds that the folks he profiles are like him “mostly native Texans.” He ends the piece with a quotation from Stoney Burns, a Texas writer and hippie who ran for Dallas County sheriff in 1972 and who says it was an “exciting time” and that “I sure had fun.”
Half-a-century after Dreyer first asked his relevant question about the Sixties generation, it’s still worth asking whether it made its mark on history. In my view it did and it didn’t. It helped to end the War in Vietnam, undo the wrongs of legal racial segregation, altered white middle class lifestyles in the cauldron of the counterculture and freed women from some of the chains of the patriarchy. …
