Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for mimeograph machines (and links there for other ancient propaganda agents, machine section). Kudos to Wikipedia on this one.
I have in the recent past been posting archival material from the Vietnam era GI anti-war movement and have, as an initial offering, highlighted the efforts of the Spartacist League/U.S. (now the U.S. section of the International Communist League) to intersect the then burgeoning GI discontent with that war. (See From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs, dated May 11-18, 2011). One of those posts involved commentary on a reproduction of a mimeographed issue of a GI-published anti-war newspaper, The Fort Polk GI Voice (see archives, May 12, 2011).
That commentary centered on a comparison of the old-fashioned way that we had to produce our propaganda via mimeograph machine (and other now exotic machines) and today’s Internet-driven efforts. Now there is no question that the modern technology that allows easy publication, and easy communication, of all manner of material, including our precious communist propaganda is a plus but just for a moment I wish to return to the so-called "good old days" when we worked in small, rented cubby-hole backrooms to get out our material for distribution on the streets, many times on the fly. And that held true not merely for anti-war GI work that was the impetus for this commentary but I would estimate that from about 1960 on until the mid-1970s when things died down, died down too quickly and without resolution (or rather without resolution no in our favor), was the mode of operation for all political efforts, all extra-parliamentary efforts (and maybe, remembering what friends told me at the time, the early liberal parliamentary efforts of the Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy, to unseat President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 as well).
One of the most poignant moments in Leon Trotsky’s 1930 memoir My Life for me was when he was describing his first, tentative efforts to put out revolutionary propaganda in Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century under very trying, much more trying than we faced in relatively democratic 1960s America, circumstances. There he described a crude hectographic method of production, painstaking (and meticulously as well, as least from what I know of Trotsky’s work habits), was closer, too much closer to our methods of 1960s work than today’s high-speed publication, but more recognizable because of the collective nature of the work, if the not dangerousness of the efforts. Trotsky noted that he had to do all the stenciling work by hand and then place the master on the block. Ouch! That provided an additional image, an image of something that also might have been used in the 1960s night if a machine broke down, or got cranky, that came to mind in seeing that GI publication.
A picture, or rather pictures, come to mind just now very similar to the one Trotsky described in his memoir, all due technological advances between his time and ours considered. A scene: Cambridge 1969, 1970, 1971, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1971, Camp Pendleton, California, 1971, Washington, D.C. 1971, 1972, Fort Lewis, Washington, 1971, New York City, 1971, early 1972, name your year, name your place, take your pick. A small, dusty, always dusty, almost storage room-sized back room on about the 14th floor of an old time building like something out of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. An old building, a building still findable in any medium or large-sized city, if you look hard enough. Long past its prime filled with small businesses like divorce-work private detectives, penny-ante loans companies, failed dentists, chiropractors, and the like the landlord grateful, grateful as hell, for the rent (discounted usually, depending on how unsuitable the building for other uses).
Or some clean, always clean, back room, down-stairs back room, of a church, usually one of the function-oriented protestant churches that were washed over by the Reformation’s disdain for pageantry, just plain gospel and plainsong, thank you. Available, always available, if you put your case just right (and didn’t look too scruffy, too scruffy even by liberal church brethren standards) for the good of the cause, after all we are all brothers (and later, sisters too) in the struggle to made judgment day in good order, whatever the cost. Or, and this was surprisingly more frequent that the reader might think, the book-lined, newspaper-strewn, cluttered desk den, study, extra room, hell, in suburban New Jersey or California, the family room, of some long-in-the-tooth old-time 1930s radical, or wannabe radical who couldn’t quite get him or her self get immersed in the struggle because of kids, college tuitions, hefty mortgages, health, soul, take your pick. Not exactly “angels,” but on the right side of the angels.
And in that cobwebby dusty storage room, in that saintly austere backroom, in that photo-filled family memory den someone hard at work pecking at the old typewriter, the old creaky needs oiling (and a new ribbon) Underwood typewriter, working against time, always working against time, or against the latest egregious transgression by the imperial state that we needed to arouse the masses against, and to produce the latest newsletter to spread the word. Or better, several people talking, talking up the “party line” for the issue at hand as the woman, and let’s be candid here, it was usually a woman at the typewriter just then, and mainly guys talking up that party line storm and letting the collective wisdom, including many times that madly typewriting woman, rain down on the paper. And hope and pray, if that was your “thing,” that the fiendishly sensitive stencil in the typewriter would hold up to the beating of the fingers tapping. Or that there were no errors, no typos, in those ancient pre-"spell check" days. And worry, worry not only about time, not only about typos but about making sure it was only one page, or at the most two sides of one piece of paper. The “masses,” after all in that short-focused, media-icon-obsessed, Marshall McLuhan message age, couldn’t take more than one sheet. Right? Folk wisdom, folk wisdom and political “wisdom.”
Jesus, the smell of the mimeograph fluid permeates the air even now, as does the noise made by the cranking out by hand of those few hundred copies (hopefully, if the master holds out). And always some ink, or some other fluid, on the hands. But success and the latest announcement for the latest rally, march, conference, something-in, newsletter, what-have-you was ready for distribution. “Eddy, Phil, Doris, take twenty each, take some paste and put them up on XYZ poles, walls wherever,” cried the communications director (not his or her title in that somewhat title-averse day but in effect that what it was). And the next morning, or maybe it was morning already before they were done, New York, Washington, D.C., christ, Hoboken, was awash in the latest real news, ready to do battle against that many-headed monster. And… But enough of this because the point then, and the point that I am making here, is that something beyond high or low technology was going on in those days, something I sense is missing now, as important as this technology I am using right now is.
Let me finish by reiterating something I said in one of the GI Voice commentaries because, unfortunately, we face today that same imperial hubris, and that same struggle to get the ear of the GIs today. “We can cut up old touches some other time though. The important idea then, and today as well, is that this little four-page beauty [referring to the size of the GI Voice newspaper] got written by, and distributed by, GIs on base. The brass will forgive “grunts” many things (not as many as in civilian life though) but to put out anti-war propaganda cuts them where they live and they go crazy. See, they “know," know deep down, that it doesn’t take much, a little spark like during Vietnam days, and you have horror of horrors, something like the Bolshevik Revolution on your hands, and you are on the wrong side. All over a little four-page spread. Ya, nice.” And that my friends, whatever the method of conveyance, is why we put out our anti-war, anti-imperialist propaganda today. Even if we can’s hear the clickity-clack of the typewriter, the smell of the mimeo fluid, or remember the recipe proportions for that damn wall poster paste.
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