HISTORY
THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE, 1968-1971: AN UNDERGROUND NEWSPAPER AND ITS
COMMUNITY
A CREATIVE PROJECT
SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE
MASTER OF ARTS
BY
RYAN BRANDON FRICK
DR. DOUGLAS SEEFELDT - ADVISOR
BALL STATE UNIVERSITY
MUNCIE, INDIANA
DECEMBER 2014
This project is currently available at http://rbfrick.iweb.bsu.edu/the_only_alternative
This digital history project came about as a result of an earlier project created for Dr. Seefeldt’s
Introduction to Digital History course. For that course, I created a digital thematic research
archive for the various student newspapers at Ball State during the 1960s and early 1970s that is
part of the Ball State University Digital History Portal. This project tracked the different
newspapers’ viewpoints on the Vietnam War, the Counterculture, and the Civil Rights
Movement. Building on that foundation, this new project focuses on one of those student papers,
The Only Alternative, which ran from 1968 to 1971 and moves beyond the uncritical thematic
digital archive into the argument driven digital research module. The Only Alternative serves as
an example of the more liberal underground press which gained popularity in the late 1960s.
While much of the scholarship about Ball State University during the Sixties focuses on the
apathetic nature of the students and faculty towards the New Left and the Counterculture
Movement, The Only Alternative stands as proof of a vibrant counterculture element at Ball State
and the larger Muncie community.
In order to fully analyze this newspaper, the full run of twenty eight issues first had to be
digitized. I was able to work with the Ball State University Libraries Archives and Special
Collections to scan the issues in order to facilitate the creation of a digital archive. The pages
were scanned in twenty four bit color at four hundred dpi on an Epson Expression 10000XL
scanner. After digitizing the issues, I used Adobe Acrobat XI’s Optical Character Recognition
feature to make the scans text readable. This is an important step as it allows the scans to be text
searchable, something necessary in order for researchers to use the digital archive more
effectively. Once the newspaper was digitized, made text searchable, and proof-read for
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accuracy, I had to create a spreadsheet with the metadata for the entire collection. This
spreadsheet includes the article title, author, volume and issue number, article subject, and other
basic descriptive information. This metadata is necessary in order for the digital archive
component of the project to be created. The newspaper archive has been made available in the
Ball State Archives and is available there for research.
After the archive was created I was able to use different digital tools to analyze the text
and break down the content of The Only Alternative in order to facilitate the analysis of it within
the context of relevant underground newspaper historiography. After reading through the
different issues of the paper, I decided that the best way to begin my analysis was to break the
articles down by subject matter.1 The first step was to tag each of the articles with a different
subject using the Library of Congress Subject Heading database. While there was obviously
some overlap in the subject matter of different articles, I was able to narrow them down into
seven primary subjects: Ball State University, Muncie, the Vietnam War, the Counterculture,
Politics, Sexuality, and the Civil Rights Movement. Articles about Ball State deal specifically
with the administration, academic programs, concerts, special speakers, and other events on
campus. Articles about Muncie focus on the Muncie Police department, racism in Muncie, and
other social problems with housing and the local school system. Articles tagged
“Counterculture” deal with the New Left, drug culture, and reviews of music, movies, and books.
Those tagged “Civil Rights” deal with the Black Power Movement, the Black Panther Party, the
rights of prisoners, and other Civil Rights issues. Articles tagged “Politics” deal with specific
political events such as elections or laws at the local, state, and national levels. Those tagged
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This same technique, sans digital tools, was used by James Spates and Jack Levin to analyze a wide cross section
of the Underground Press in two studies - James L. Spates, “Counterculture and Dominant Culture Values: A CrossNational Analysis of the Underground Press and Dominant Culture Magazines,” American Sociological Review Vol.
41 No. 5 (Oct. 1976); 868-883; Jack Levin and James L. Spates, “Hippie Values: An Analysis of the Underground
Press,” Youth and Society Vol. 2 No. 1 (1970), 59-73.
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“the Vietnam War” deal with anti-war protests and other issues surrounding the Vietnam War.
The final category of “Sexuality” includes articles on homosexuality on campus and the sexual
revolution of the 1960s. Once tagged with subjects, each article could be organized by topic,
allowing me to study each topic independently and to trace the frequency of topics throughout
the twenty eight issues.
After tagging these articles, I used the digital visualizations at the Voyant-Tools website
in order to more closely analyze the newspaper text. This tool allows researchers to upload their
text searchable files to calculate word frequencies, show keywords in context, and create word
cloud visualizations from text corpora. This tool allowed me to analyze how certain words are
used and the frequency at which they appear in The Only Alternative. This quantification
enables one to compare more accurately how this local newspaper compares to other
contemporary newspapers. In addition to comparing the topics included in The Only Alternative
to those in the average underground newspaper, I also analyzed what topics were not included or
were only discussed in a comparatively small amount.
In my analysis of the articles of The Only Alternative, I found that forty percent of the
paper dealt with Ball State or Muncie. This finding reiterates much of the scholarship on the
Underground Press that suggests that these papers were local papers above all else.2 The authors
were interested in engaging the local countercultural community as well as educating people on
the more liberal viewpoints, or even more radical viewpoints on subjects such as the
Counterculture and the Vietnam War. I also found that the more controversial elements
associated with the Underground Press, such as sex, nudity, drugs, and cursing, were not
2
This point is argued by several historians including James Lewes and Donna Ellis. In fact Lewes directly states, “I
argue that each and every underground newspaper was first and foremost a countercultural community
newspaper!” James Lewes, “The Underground Press in America (1964-1968): Outlining an Alternative, the
Envisioning of an Underground,” Journal of Communication Inquiry Vol. 24 No. 4 (Oct. 2000), 381; Donna Lloyd
Ellis, “The Underground Press in America: 1955-1970,” Journal of Popular Culture Vol. 5 No. 1 (1971), 105.
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prevalent in The Only Alternative, with only 3.4% of the articles discussing sexuality of any kind
and only 4.4% discussing the drug culture. The paper focused far more on issues related to the
local community (42%) or the Civil Rights Movement (21%) than anything else.
In addition to analyzing the text of the articles, I broke down the paper into its different
sections or content types: articles, advertisements and classifieds, and the Preview Paper events
calendar. Each section had a specific purpose for the paper. The advertisements and classifieds
were the main connection between the newspaper and its target audience, the Countercultural
community of Muncie and Ball State. These sections also served as a source of income for the
paper, though unlike many other undergrounds, subscriptions and street sales provided a larger
percentage of the income than did the classifieds and advertisements. I broke these sections into
different categories and found that the most common ads were for local events, draft resistance
information, and local businesses. The final section of the paper was The Preview Paper. This
section was the back page of each issue which served as an announcement board for events at
campuses and cities around Indiana. While reading through these events, it became clear that
they were widespread across dozens of venues. In order to analyze this section, I created a
Google Map which shows the venues that advertised in The Only Alternative. In addition to
mapping the venues, this map shows the reach that The Only Alternative enjoyed in spatial terms.
As each of these events was suggested by readers of The Only Alternative, the fact that events at
venues from South Bend in the far northern part of the state, all the way to Bloomington, 112
miles south of Muncie, had advertisements in The Preview Paper suggests that the newspaper
created an underground community that had a widely dispersed readership.
In order to properly display all of these graphs and interactive tools, I needed to create a
website to host the project. To do this, I used Adobe Dreamweaver to modify a CSS template to
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create a website that was useful for this project. Creating the project in a website format allows
it to be available to a much wider audience than does the standard print format. It also allows for
a more visual project than a paper, especially with tools like Google Ngram Viewer, Timeglider,
and Google Maps only available online. The website format is currently the best option for
digital history projects and with the usability of programs like Adobe Dreamweaver, historians
and other digital humanists can easily create online archives and research projects like this one. I
have included these files along with this process essay as part of my CRPRJ 698 submission.
Sources and Data
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Underground Press
Armstrong, David. A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher,
1981.
Bankes, Paul, Jeffrey Boss, Amanda Cochran, Lee S. Duemer, et al, “The Catalyst and Student
Press Censorship: Implications for Student Personnel Administrators,” College Student
Affairs Journal Vol. 21 No. 2 (Spring 2002), 30-37.
Blasingame, Christina, “An Examination of Latent Threads and Themes in the Catalyst (19691971),” American Educational History Journal Vol. 36 No. 1 (2009), 299-310.
Dennis, Everette E. and William L. Rivers. Other Voices: the New Journalism in America. San
Francisco: Canfield Press, 1974.
Duemer, Lee S. “History of the Catalyst: Administrative Attempts to Suppress an Underground
Student Newspaper,” Southern Studies Vol. 11 No. 3 (2004), 87-99.
Ellis, Donna Lloyd, “The Underground Press in America: 1955-1970,” Journal of Popular
Culture Vol. 5 No. 1 (1971), 102-124.
Flacks, Richard, “Social and Cultural Meanings of Student Revolt: Some Informal Comparative
Observations,” Social Problems Vol. 17 No. 3 (Winter 1970), 340-357.
Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987.
5
Glessing, Robert J. The Underground Press in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1970.
Leamer, Laurence. The Paper Revolutionaries the Rise of the Underground Press. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1972.
Levin, Jack and Spates, James L., “Hippie Values: An Analysis of the Underground Press,”
Youth and Society Vol. 2 No. 1 (1970), 59-73.
Lewes, James, “The Underground Press in America (1964-1968): Outlining an Alternative, the
Envisioning of an Underground,” Journal of Communication Inquiry Vol. 24 No. 4 (Oct.
2000), 379-400.
Lewis, Roger. Outlaws of America: the Underground Press and Its Context. Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1972.
McMillian, John Campbell. Smoking Typewriters: the Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of
Alternative Media in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Mungo, Raymond. Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.
Peck, Abe. Uncovering the Sixties: the Life and Times of the Underground Press. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1985.
Richardson, Peter. A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine
Changed America. New York: New Press, 2009.
Rips, Geoffrey. The Campaign Against the Underground Press. San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 1981.
Shore, Elliott. Alternative papers: selections from the alternative press, 1979-1980. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1982.
Spates, James L., “Counterculture and Dominant Culture Values: A Cross-National Analysis of
the Underground Press and Dominant Culture Magazines,” American Sociological
Review Vol. 41 No. 5 (Oct. 1976), 868-883.
Wachsberger, Ken. Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press. East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2011.
Wachsberger, Ken. Voices from the Underground. Vol. 1 and 2 Tempe, Arizona: Mica Press,
1993.
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Watson, Francis M. The Alternative Media: Dismantling Two Centuries of Progress. Rockford,
Illinois: Rockford College Institute, 1979.
Young, Stephen Flinn, “The Kudzu: The Sixties Generational Revolt Even In Mississippi,” The
Southern Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 3 (1996), 122-136.
Digital Humanities and Digital Archive Scholarship
Bingham, A., “The Digitization of Newspaper Archives: Opportunities and Challenges for
Historians,” 20th Century British History Vol. 21 No. 2 (2010), 225-231.
Klijn, Edwin, “The Current State-of-art in Newspaper Digitization: A Market Perspective,” DLib Magazine Vol. 14 No. 1/2 (Jan/Feb 2008), 1-10.
Nilsson, Pär, “Newspaper Digitization in Sweden,” Microform & Digitization Review Vol. 41
No. 3/4 (Dec. 2010), 126-128.
Price, Kenneth M. “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s
In a Name?” Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol. 3 No. 3 (Summer 2009), 1-10.
Robinson, Laura, “The Evolution of Newspaper Digitization at the Washington State Library,”
Microform & Digitization Review Vol. 39 No. 1 (April 2010), 24-27.
Palmer, Carole L. “Thematic Research Collections” in A Companion to Digital Humanities. ed.
Susan Scheibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2004.
Smallwood, Carol and Elaine Williams. Preserving Local Writers, Genealogy, Photographs,
Newspapers, and Related Materials. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012.
Wilson, Leslie Perrin. “Presentation of Archival Materials on the Web: A Curator’s Model
Based on Selectivity and Interpretation” in The American Literature Scholar in the
Digital Age. ed. Amy E. Earhart, and Andrew Jewell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2011.
VISUALIZATIONS
Graphs
Visual LightBox Gallery of The Only Alternative covers
Visual LightBox Gallery of advertisements in The Only Alternative
Pie chart of subjects of Liberation News Service articles
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Pie chart of subjects of Local Writer articles
Pie chart of estimated Ball State readership of The Only Alternative
Pie chart of estimated Ball State readership of The Only Alternative
Pie chart of estimated Muncie readership of The Only Alternative
Pie chart of estimated Muncie readership of The Only Alternative
Pie chart of the staff of The Only Alternative
Pie chart of Male vs. Female staff of The Only Alternative
Pie chart of topics in The Only Alternative
Pie chart of percentage of topics in The Only Alternative
Pie chart of percentage of topics by local writers
Pie chart of topics by other writers
Bar graph of statistics of Ball State students
Pie chart of advertisements by subject
Pie chart of advertisements by type
Bar graph of Ball State University articles per volume
Bar graph of Muncie articles per volume
Bar graph of Counterculture articles per volume
Bar graph of Civil Rights articles per volume
Bar graph of Politics articles per volume
Bar graph of Vietnam War articles per volume
Bar graph of Sexuality articles per volume
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Line graph of Women’s Liberation articles
Textual Analysis
Voyant Word Cloud for the full twenty eight issues of The Only Alternative
Voyant Word Frequency graph of “sex” “sexuality” and “sexual”
Voyant Word Frequency graph of “black”
Voyant Word Frequency graph of “gay” “homosexual” and “homosexuality”
Voyant Word Frequency graph of “women”
Voyant Word Frequency graph of “marijuana”
Voyant Word Frequency of “panthers”
Keywords in Context of “Pruis”
Keywords in Context of “Pigs”
Google Ngram Viewer statistics about the use of “underground newspaper” and “underground
press” in American English from 1700 to 2008
Google Ngram Viewer statistics about the use of “underground newspaper,” “underground
press,” “alternative press,” and “alternative media” in American English from 1700 to
2008
Other
Google Map of the venues in The Preview Paper
Database
Spreadsheet containing descriptive metadata for the complete twenty eight issue run of The Only
Alternative – Vol. I - V
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