Background on Liberation News Service
In the summer of 1967, Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo, former editors of the student newspapers of Amherst College and Boston University, were fired from the United States Student Press Association (USSPA) for their radical views. In response, they collaborated with colleagues and friends to found a news organization, first called Resistance Press Service, to act as an alternative to established news services such as the Associated Press (AP) and Collegiate Press Service (CPS). Soon renamed the Liberation News Service (LNS), the alternative news agency provided images and text via inexpensive mimeographed news packets mailed out to subscribers. Articles, commentary, and art offered radical perspectives on the war in Vietnam, national liberation struggles abroad, American politics, and the cultural revolution. At its height, LNS had hundreds of subscribers, spanning the gamut of college newspapers and the underground and alternative press. Its readership was estimated to be in the millions.
From a three-story brownstone in Washington, D.C., LNS gained initial success and momentum with its coverage of the October 1967 protests at the Pentagon by reporting on unique and insider aspects of the protests and antiwar movement. Remaining in the capital, the Service then moved to a shared office (and communal living space) with the Washington Free Press at 3 Thomas Circle, continuing to issue news packets twice-weekly, and growing with support from subscriptions, private donors, and the Institute for Policy Studies. LNS opened an international Telex line in December 1967, and later merged with the Student Communications Network (SCN) out of Berkeley, with its own nationwide Telex network. In addition to news, articles, and artwork from an often shifting (and mostly volunteer) staff, unsolicited material streamed into LNS from around the nation and globe. A New York staff and office came with the SCN merger, and was vital to the substantial role LNS played in the underground press coverage of the strikes at Columbia University in the spring of 1968.
Failing to ever establish a united “Liberated Zone” from which to help lead the movement in Washington, and tiring of both their high rent and the conditions in the nation’s capital in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Poor People’s Campaign, LNS officially moved its headquarters to New York City in June 1968. Some Washington staff joined the local group, and in total the list of young writers, photographers, and activists working and jesting under the LNS production over the years was substantial, including George Cavalletto, Steve Diamond, Thorne Dreyer, David Fenton, Clif Garboden, Martin Jezer, Verandah Porche, Sheila Ryan, Peter Simon, Mark Sommer, Harvey Wasserman, Allen Young and many others in addition to founders Bloom and Mungo.
However, the group, much like the countercultural movement itself, was often pulled in multiple directions by interests both serious and slight. Two months after moving to New York City, LNS split into two factions, partially along lines representing the New York office and the original staff from D.C. Bloom’s historical leadership of LNS as a personal passion project, and continuing rule over much of the Service was unwelcome for some, and the New York office was filled with more traditional Marxist activists, hoping not only for more communal and transparent processes for LNS, but also increased commitments to more intense and leftist news journalism. Bloom, Mungo, and those who would later join them, espoused a broader cultural view, and wished to leave their urban setting and settle on farms, seeking a more idyllic existence.
The major, and final, fight for control of LNS funds and leadership followed a successful fundraising event around a screening of the Magical Mystery Tour at the Fillmore East in August 1968, after which a group followed Bloom and Mungo to Montague, MA, where they used the fundraiser profits to purchase a farm and profess it the new LNS headquarters. A tense standoff at the farm ensued, with those from New York eventually reclaiming the funds, but also getting charged with kidnapping by Bloom. The charges were later dismissed, and competing news packets from LNS-Montague and LNS-New York were produced until the winter conditions and small staff at the farm in Montague caused their production to end after issue #120 in January 1969. LNS-New York produced packets through 1981.
The story of LNS, as well as of the split, is told from Mungo’s perspective in his 1970 classic book Famous Long Ago. By 1969, Bloom’s LNS farm, though still holding the organization’s original press, had begun its long life as a farm commune in Montague, MA. Montague Farm (whose own story is told in Steve Diamond’s book What the Trees Said) survived in its original form under a number of resident groups until its recent sale to another non-profit organization. Mungo’s Packer Corners Farm, near Brattleboro, the model for his well-known book, Total Loss Farm, survives today under the guidance of some of its own original founders. Bloom did not live to see the commune counterculture movement grow, however, as he committed suicide on November 1, 1969.
