content. One case involved the Nassau County district attorney’s injunction
against a 1964 issue citing pornographic content. According to the
complaint, a confidential informant employed at the bindery “observed black
and white photographs in the magazine which showed the nude human
form, possibly male and female, but reputed by fellow workers to be two
females; and that the forms portrayed various poses and positions indicating
sexual relations. My informant further stated having read portions of the
printed material... [that it consisted] of four-lettered obscene language.” In
fact, the pictures were shot through a can of Vaseline and were barely visible
to the reader much less the informant, who was a part-time employee of the
bindery and whose husband was a retired police officer.
Rampartswas no stranger to legal hassles, either. The most
threatening was the time Dugald Stermer arranged a 1967 cover shoot with
Carl Fischer that showed his and three other Rampartsstaffers’ hands
holding their burning draft cards—a symbolic gesture of nonviolent
resistance against the war that broke at least two federal laws. The statute
that was broken was known as the Disrespect Law, referred also to the
burning of money or the flag. Since the disrespect was towards the symbol
itself, Stermer determined that it didn’t matter whether the cards were real
or facsimiles, and so decided to burn the real thing. Not surprisingly an act
of such defiance, commonly perpetrated in street demonstrations and now
codified on the cover of a national magazine, forced the government to
impanel a federal grand jury to investigate a possible indictment. While
Stermer and Scheer initially wanted to fight the case as a freedom of the
press issue, their counsel, Washington lawyer and football team owner
Edward Bennett Williams refused to let his clients risk imprisonment and
persuaded them to plead not guilty should an indictment be handed down.
In the end, however, Williams pulled strings with his friend Lyndon
Johnson, one of the bitterest of Ramparts’s enemies, to squash the
investigation. In the end, the cover was a powerful emblem of Vietnam
protest.
Rampartsand Evergreenhave not published for almost three
decades, but to look back at them now is not an exercise in nostalgia.
They should not be seen merely as documents of the 1960 s, but as
monuments of activist publishing, where the writing, art, and design were
brought together to make a revolution.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1