The Sage of Austin, Texas |
Image by Andrej Lišakov.
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........