Did the counterculture have an aesthetic ideology in the way that other social movements have been said to do? Its rhetorical innovations are, of course, well known: “up against the wall”; “power to the people”; “turn on, tune in, drop out”. But what was the common bank of symbols, visual styles, artistic forms, and genres from which its aesthetic was drawn? What, as Michael Denning asked of the cultural front of the 1930s, was its “sense of what is good, true, and beautiful”?Footnote ¹ Posing such questions might seem to be of secondary importance when set against those concerned with the movement's political outlook and composition. But as this collection attempts to show, frequently “the design practices of this period [were] continuous with a range of activist strategies” (6). That is, the graphical innovations of the radical press between 1964 and 1974 (it is not clear why these dates have been chosen, or how strictly they are followed) helped to make certain political orientations legible, while furnishing alternative ways of seeing the world.

Power to the People is a vibrant collection of counterculture periodicals, richly illustrated, mostly using front covers, and diligently curated to capture this movement's vast geographic scope. I counted just over eighty different publications here – though some of the better-known ones, like The Guardian, are absent, or, like The Rat and Ramparts, appear only fleetingly. The focus is on front covers, typography, and design, and not the content of those publications. We should not get too sniffy about this. Ever since the “paperback revolution” of the early 1960s, many critics have argued how image has “triumphed” over word. The public “do not read, they see, they look,” the Italian poet Eugenio Montale grumbled in 1961.Footnote ² The care that America's publishing houses took in styling dust jackets for activists’ manuscripts offers some support to the point. Still, words did evidently matter. The three-part essay “How to Make a Magazine,” originally published in Amazon Quarterly in 1974, and now republished here (8–18), describes the mechanics of manipulating “copy,” while the artist Harmony Hammond poetically recounts in one of the eleven interviews printed at the back of this volume how designers thought hard about the “visual rhythm” of each page (223). So: what is the graphical beat that comes off these pages?

The collection does not leave us entirely to our own devices to answer the question, including three brief critical essays that provide some interpretive hints. Bob Ostertag's essay encourages us to see the distinctive visual style of the counterculture, though it is the preceding ones by Fred Turner and Gwen Allen that begin to clarify the features of this style. For Allen it is the graphical practice of détournement – what the critic Kenneth Burke called the “stealing back and forth of symbols” – that served as the preeminent graphical technique of the counterculture.Footnote ³ Such practices were the means by which this movement illustrated its rejection of authority, evident in the Black Panthers’ characterizations of state officials as pigs, as well as the movement's appropriation of the mundane symbols of officialdom: the graph, flow chart, the table. The Boston-based Old Mole compiled a two-page flow chart to convey “How Harvard Rules” (115), while Detroit's Fifth Estate used one to draw attention to the web of financial, social, and corporate interests that “Rule[d] Detroit” (100) – a graphic that ought to be updated for present times. Juxtaposing images (Martha Rosler's series Bringing Home the War (110)), and images and text (Ramparts overlaid “Re-elect the President” on Ron Haeberle's photograph of the My Lai massacre (110)), were related graphical forms that punctured liberal assumptions about the country's political condition, just as the contemporary political satirist Jon Stewart achieves when he plays video clips of present-day politicians that illustrate the contradictions of their positions.

Political satire also found expression in caricature, more so of Nixon than of Johnson, though we are not told if this trend was representative. Many of the figures that appear on these covers might be construed as broadly Rabelaisian – a mix of the absurd, allegorical, satirical, occasionally the humorous. The Berkeley Barb certainly drew from all these traditions, though others tended to emphasize just one: grotesque characters feature on the covers of New York papers, like Radical Software and The Realist, while fantastical ones appear on the Chicago-based SEED. Sometimes such carnivalesque covers cross over into the ludic, showing much in common with the neighboring fields of science fiction and comics. A December cover for the Peninsula Observer, for example, positions a jolly Santa Claus atop his usual chimney, but with a less than conventional machine gun, and wishing everyone, “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” (246). How frequently laughter passed for critique rather than advanced it is difficult to tell from these materials alone.

Playful distortion was also evident in the riot of curvilinear calligraphic styles and experimental psychedelic fonts that these periodicals developed, a trend related both to their interest in lettering and to a curiosity about the relationship between language and political formation. Many understood what one Black Panther leader called “the significance of words in the struggle for liberation,” and thus popularized different ways of speaking (black power!), just as artists drew pictures highlighting newspeak, brainwashing, or censorship (the courtroom sketches of a gagged Bobby Seale).Footnote ⁴ These imaginative graphics were not intended just to inform readers, but to involve them in political action. Allen's essay provides some sterling examples of how editors went about doing this, while Turner, writing more synoptically, argues that the counterculture's attempt to inspire readers’ “feedback” was done “to disrupt the existing media system by feeding ‘noise’ back into it” (150). This volume makes the case, then, that together these publications sought to recompose the infrastructure of broadcasting: the images show the challenge that the radical press posed to anodyne or legitimating coverage, while the contextual essays reveal how activists worked to democratize the production of such coverage.

While technological innovations may have altered the means of producing underground newspapers, it changed the methods of distributing them hardly at all. A number of the covers reprinted here clearly show the conventional marks of journeys and readers: postage stamps on issues of the Milwaukee Kaleidoscope indicate subscribers in San Diego; copies of the LA Free Press bear the institutional stamp of a New York-based group. Little is said about such circulation or consumption, although the need to pay attention to “local contexts and networks in which [these periodicals] circulate[d]” (232) is a theme grazed in some of the retrospective interviews done with activists and artists. The decision to focus here predominantly on those periodicals produced in the US makes editorial sense, but it sits uneasily with the globalism implied by many of the graphics, fascinated as they are by new communicational technologies and mounting ecological anxieties, and opposed to the hegemonic reach of US imperialism. A 1969 cartoon in Other Scenes shows a creature enveloping the US Congress, its blood-covered tentacles clutching entire continents, just as an earlier generation of octopuses had done in Populist critiques of Standard Oil and the Rothschild bank (126). The comparison with the Populists is perhaps more than just graphical, though, for these covers do not always show the counterculture to have been straightforwardly oppositional. Some writers found here tout the benefits of IBM's Selectric Composer typewriter for the underground press, but few wrestle publicly with the improvements that IBM's navigation, logistics, and bombing systems brought to America's computerized weaponry of warfare.