A Sense of Doubt blog post #3903 - Village Voice - 70 Years Ago - October 26, 1955
The first edition of The Village Voice, considered the country's first alternative newsweekly, was published in New York City on October 26, 1955. Founded by Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer, it aimed to reflect the political and artistic energy of Greenwich Village, becoming known for its counterculture and independent journalism. You can find more information about its history on the Jewish Currents website.
I have been saving this post since last year because this year is the 70th anniversary of the creation of one of my favorite publications of all time:
When I went to New York City in my last year of college for an internship, it was like visiting another country compared to Richland and Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Celebrating 70 Years of the Village Voice
October 26, 2025, marks the 70th anniversary of the birth
of a newspaper that delivered the first draft of the counterculture.
By R.C. Baker
October 24, 2025
The layout dummy for the original Voice, and the first issue, both designed by Nell Blaine.
Elvis Costello once put it in a song, “Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.” But some history is always fresh, and the inaugural issue of the Village Voice, cover-dated October 26, 1955, would forever change Greenwich Village and, eventually, all of New York City, plus America and chunks of the whole wide world. Only twelve pages long, that first edition featured an elegant logo designed by Nell Blaine, who, the editors noted, was “a young woman with an established reputation both as creative artist and book-and-poster designer,” adding that Blaine (1922 –1996) “is almost singly to be credited with the visual aspect of this and succeeding issues of the Voice.”
The publisher and editors also proclaimed that they:
… intended to provide thoroughgoing coverage of the special entertainment and other features of this unique neighborhood. They foresee a net paid circulation for the Voice of at least 10,000.
Publisher Edwin Fancher, 31, is a practicing psychologist with two degrees from the New School. His varied career has included research work for the Cornell Medical College and the Institute of World Affairs…
Editor Daniel Wolf, 33, former newswriter for the Turkish Information Office, has the unusual distinction of having written the Greek, Roman, Arabic philosophy, and Psychology sections of the Columbia Encyclopedia. Wolf was born in New York City.
The newspaper’s “back of the book” section — movies, theatre, books, music, painting, and the like — will be under the direction of Jerry Tallmer, 34, associate editor. Tallmer has for some years been a free-lance editor-writer and a regular contributor of articles and reviews to such magazines as Architectural Forum and the Saturday Review, and he has lately written a long pamphlet for the Board of Education on the city’s new school-building program. He too is a Greenwich Villager of ten years’ standing, and like Mr. Wolf he is a native-born New Yorker.
News editor for the The Village Voice is John Wilcock, 28. Starting as a cub reporter in his native England at the age of 16, Wilcock has already had a twelve-year career in working journalism. In England he served on the staffs of first the London Daily Mail and then the London Daily Mirror, largest selling daily newspaper in the world.
The initial front page featured an article on folk musicians in Washington Square (which included an editorial error that would take 62 years to fix — more on that in a future SEVEN DECADES installment), and, among other stories, reports on Village political goings-on, a truck driver’s lawsuit against Columbia University, and a prize-winning painting that featured part of the 86th Street subway station wall — “complete with hearts and arrows, swear-words, and signs saying ‘Joe was here…'”
This was the buttoned-down Eisenhower years — a review of Sloan Wilson’s book The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit ran on page four — but New York at that time had been home for more than a decade to the “New York School” of abstract expressionists, and pop and conceptual art as well as cutting-edge theater, dynamic dance, avant-garde music, and home-brew films, were all percolating up from the Beat and beatnik undergrounds.
This was the loam of the counterculture, and the Voice was one of the most fecund seeds ever planted. The first issue covered theater, art, music — “Most of my friends hate Gilbert and Sullivan. Who can blame them?” wrote opera reviewer William Murray, who disagreed — and also fashion, with columnist Betty Bodian recommending Turkish suede slippers, an “exotic design” available for $6.95. And while that translates to 84 bucks in 2025 dollars, a genuine bargain could be found in the classified section — which would grow over the decades into not so much the paper’s cash cow but more of a cash great blue whale — in an ad for a “PLEASANT 4-room Village apartment; no heat, $27.”
Indeed, it was a different time, when all that was needed to become a serious bohemian was a wool beret, a couple of cable-knit turtlenecks, and roughly $326 (in today’s inflation-adjusted numbers) per month for rent.
But if time has changed some aspects of NYC life, other quarters remain dishearteningly the same. As we’ll see in future installments, the Voice would be there early and often to cover the malfeasances and degredations of New York’s political and business classes, including a nepo-baby real estate developer from Queens.
Stay tuned.
Norman Mailer, a best-selling author with his novel, The Naked and the Dead, joined four other literati in launching The Village Voice on this date in 1955. It was the first of numerous “alternative weeklies” in America, and among its best-known Jewish regulars were cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Stan Mack, First Amendment watchdog (and jazz critic) Nat Hentoff, feminist writer (and rock critic) Ellen Willis, political columnist Jack Newfield, cultural critic Richard Goldstein, and many others. The Voice was an early GLBTQ advocate and was one of the first organization in the U.S. to extend domestic partner benefits to its workers. It has published many of our country’s best writers, poets, and artists, but in recent years has lost most of its political and avant-garde bite.
Mailer “described his time as an assassin-and-lover columnist for the Voice as being filled with marijuana, sexual conquests, and the bohemian counter-culture in Greenwich Village. ‘Drawing upon hash, lush [sic?], Harlem, Spanish wife, Marxist culture, three novels, victory, disaster, and draw, the General looked over his terrain and found it a fair one, the Village a seed-ground for the opinions of America, a crossroads between the small town and the mass media,’ he later reflected in the introduction of his Village Voice columns in Advertisements for Myself. Four months later, however, he quit the paper — a move he attributed to typographical errors in his column.” —Harry Bruinius, The Village Voice
New York’s 1970 ‘Hard Hat Riot’ Was a Precursor of Today’s MAGA Demagoguery
With a PBS special on the Wall Street battle coming up, we revisit a “first draft of history” piece about cultural fractures that still divide us today.
[Editor’s note, September 22, 2025: After President Richard Nixon announced on April 30, 1970, that the U.S. had invaded neutral Cambodia as part of America’s Vietnam War strategy, four student protesters were shot and killed by national guard troops at Kent State University, in Ohio. Anti-war protesters turned out in lower Manhattan to memorialize the dead students and to march on the New York Stock Exchange against war profiteering. Construction workers in the area (some came over from the World Trade Center building site) believed that the protesters were being unpatriotic, and began attacking them.
Voice staff writer Joe Flaherty was “one of us,” to borrow journalist Tom Wicker’s phrase, which he used as the title for his later biography of Nixon. Flaherty was an Irish Catholic, born in Brooklyn, and considered the construction workers to be friends and colleagues, albeit ones who accepted a steady diet of anger and division from a man in the White House who was “a whiner in defeat, and a paranoiac by profession.”
The piece touches on some of that era’s most fearsome demagogues, such as Alabama governor George Wallace and Vice President Spiro Agnew (who would later resign after a bribery scandal).
On September 30, PBS will premiere the documentary Hard Hat Riot. Flaherty’s piece is as fine a primer as you’ll ever read on why the past will always claw away at us in the present.]
Requiem for the Payday Patriots
By Joe Flaherty
May 21, 1970
It seems we have under-rated Richard Nixon. Not only does he play the dummy admirably, but in the last weeks, he has shown a flair for ventriloquism by finding a voice for his silent majority. But it’s a shame that it was the working men who were wooden-headed or hard-hatted enough to climb upon his knee.
At first glance it seems incongruous that the working class would gravitate toward Nixon. His style is not theirs. Wallace, yes. A face in the crowd, a small lonesome road that runs through dirt farmers’ country and pauses in the early morning hours at truck stops. But Nixon’s odyssey isn’t even on a working man’s map. The class debater, benchwarmer for the football team at good old Whittier College, a man who sees Knott’s Berry as America’s happy farm, the master of the cheap shot (or a “shy rap artist” to use a laborer’s term), a whiner in defeat, and a paranoiac by profession.
Then why the recent alliance between Nixon and the workers? It is a wedding of his pomposity and, sadly, their circumstances. The key word is “majority.”
If you came out of a working-class family, you always wanted to belong. Only aristocratic politicians long for “humble beginnings.” Anyone who was born there doesn’t want to go home again.
It isn’t that this class has suffered the abject poverty of blacks that either deadens or ignites the soul. The working class always has lived financially, ethnically, and culturally from hand to mouth. There was sufficient, but not enough. Were you Irish or Irish-American? Italian or Italian-American? You’ve come a long way, baby, from a “harp” or a “wop,” but would you ever be honest-to-God American in your breast or in your brain?
The schools were as half-assed as everything else. You knew your catechism, could read all the books that didn’t mean anything, and had learned the one fundamental lesson. When you graduated, the odds were eight to five you would work for a smart Jew. Or perhaps a Protestant, if any of them except Henry Cabot Lodge could be identified.
So you wanted in. An identity, but more a non-identity to blend in with those who moved around without disturbance. Not the top. You knew better than that. “Just a small piece of change,” as Brando said in “On the Waterfront,” but surely a small piece of the pieces you’d never had. ”To be liked, well liked,” as Willy Loman said. “The majority,” as Nixon says. Or a “regular guy,” the canonization members of the working class themselves devoutly wish.
It seems odd that these robust people (both in body and spirit) seek the approval of a bunch of white-collar lackeys.
But one thought there was a limit on the dues they would pay to belong. It seems wreaking havoc at a memorial for four dead kids is a stiff tariff to pay for such limp company as Nixon and Agnew, though in retrospect it had been coming for a long time.
The kids are scattering that “small piece of change” by demanding that blacks and Puerto Ricans receive equal employment in restricted unions. Worse, they are sacrilegious to such “regular” relics as the draft, the American Legion, and dying for someone else’s notion of their country. So the stomping, the skull-cracking with tools, the five on one beatings (whatever happened to the saloon society ethic of one on one?) were only a matter of time. And, of course, some of McLuhan’s Marauders (“I’m pissing on the flag up here, CBS”) and those purveyors of love who oink-oink behind their daisies have helped speed up the action, get the cameras rolling, and put out the lights in many peaceful demonstrations.
So now the more zealous workers, along with their exotic opposites, pose, parade, and pontificate for posterity nightly at 6. It’s a shame David Merrick doesn’t move in and take the stripe-and-star-struck on the right and the bombs-bursting-in-air-segment of the left and move them up to New Haven for the summer to get the kinks out of their act.
But the workers would have struck without provocation anyway. Their street smarts told them they finally had the credentials for the All-America Club that nobody else on the scene possessed — muscle and the nastiness to use it. It came as no surprise that the most rampant brutality happened on a Friday — payday, which means early boozing and 90-proof patriotism. And the Wall Street workers cheered them on, showering them with capitalism’s sperm, ticker tape.
The working class finally had made it — grimy John Glenns and Tom Seavers, not only being accepted but adored by those they viewed as their betters. In a fine article in the New York Post, Tim Lee quoted the feeling of one of the ironworkers: “… I was Jesus Christ walking among them, and people in the crowd shouted, ‘God bless you,’ and patted me on the back. That was the proudest day of my life.” The need and subservience in that quote stuck with me.
I knew these men when they were better than that. Over the years I’ve admired their penchant for tough work and their strong sense of family, and on many bleak nights I’ve been warmed by their humor. Moreover, I have been the recipient of their kindness time and again. The working-class community has that generous quality of the early settlers’ barn-raisings. One helped his neighbor paint his new apartment or move his furniture. The stores had an intimacy and standards that the plastic Prussian supermarkets never can achieve. Then there are the moments of happiness and sadness. The men gathered around a formica table in the kitchen drinking a round to the new-born and the women in the living room offering condolences for the dead. It seems odd that these robust people (both in body and spirit) seek the approval of a bunch of white-collar lackeys.
A class cannot discard the foundation of their lives without madness resulting.
The office workers and clerks who had any spirit quit the Street when their Republican masters told them to remove their FDR button or lose their jobs. The ones who remained now tell you how democratic their company is, because on their annual outing “the old man himself joined the softball game. Singled to right in the fifth, and when it was over sat right down with us and drank canned beer. The old so-and-so is a regular joe at heart.” Meanwhile, the regular joe’s wife was bitching at him for acting so common, until he told her to stop being a cunt, because all such bullshit counts a lot to these boobs when he has to negotiate salary.
And, of course, there is the new breed on the Street — with his first snap-brim hat, his attache case, and his tightly wound umbrella, trying like hell to forget his father cleaned out the holds of ships or emptied trash cans to put him through a course in business administration, so now he can walk into the Bull and Bear on Friday nights and order a Beefeaters up, instead of a beer or a rye and ginger. So he roots for the ghosts of his violent past to keep his new-found world secure. And who knows? If he gets lucky, he just might meet someone like Julie on “Dating Game.”
Then, too, there is the workers’ much-needed image of macho. I suppose the thinking goes Tough on the Job, Dynamite in the Sack. So the word most frequently heard during the demonstrations (excepting USA) was faggot — Lindsay was one; the protesters had no fear of being drafted, because they all were faggots; and bystanders who made peace signs also were included. The specter of homosexuality seems to haunt many of these men. It seems ludicrous and illogical to make these charges of a generation that probably has been with more women in 15 years than mine and the workers’ has seen in 30.
The phenomenon of growing up in the ’50s was that when someone asked you how many times you had scored that week he was talking about masturbation, not fornication. Old men ought to admit their envy. As a class, we rubbed our groins up against more bars and shuffleboards than we ever did against women. And when you saw the hard-hats carrying a scantily dressed Miss Liberty on their shoulders, you knew she was the Flying None of their movement.
To be shilled by the powerful is expected, but to join them in the dupe is disgusting.
But the real sadness is that the working class has allowed their unions to rob them of their pride and manhood in their work. Like the socialist sob sisters of the telephone company, they have opted for “security” (a guarantee of pensions, medical care and 37 toasters and waffle irons when they become engaged), and the integrity of their work be damned. The only evil they’ve ever seen in automation is the loss of jobs, not the demeaning of their life blood — work.
As a class, they have reneged on their standard of acceptance — achievement in a decent job. When the blacks and Puerto Ricans took the same route out of oblivion they did (as laborers and civil servants), they still were looked on as “spades and spicks.” A class cannot discard the foundation of their lives without madness resulting.
But the most tragic placard in sight at these demonstrations was one proclaiming “God Bless the Establishment.” It’s pathetic to think that the workers really believe they’re a part of the power structure, the same structure that indiscriminately uses their sons as cannon fodder in a war they don’t really understand, a war that has driven up the unemployment rate among their own to the highest level in a decade. The same beloved establishment that rapes the quality of their daily lives by channeling their tax dollars into Terry and the Pirates adventures, building highways they’ll never use, and granting tax exemptions to fat cats who sneer at them. Whatever happened to their built-in shit detectors that told them the only way to win the Congressional Medal was to come home in a box. Last week, Nixon handed out a dozen at a White House ceremony as if they were crackerjack prizes to add some glitter to this gory war. To be shilled by the powerful is expected, but to join them in the dupe is disgusting.
These men weren’t raised to hit boys and girls in the street and to spit on grown women who disagree with them. At their best, they are as generous a group as I have ever met. Easy terms like “neanderthal” or “fascist” should be left to the granite-tongued Maoists. Johnson and Nixon have sent their sons and relatives off to die, and it’s hard for any man to admit his issue died for a crock of shit. But it’s harder still when the message comes from draft-deferred college students who, in the workers’ minds, have it made. But understanding their exploitation goes only so far. They still are men with singular minds and souls who consciously are selling both for acceptance to a dismal dream of “respectability.”
Hamlet’s tragedy was “to be or not to be.” A choice of the cosmos — all or nothing at all. Most agree Willy Loman’s odyssey was less profound, since he conspired with forces that were destroying him. But was it less profound? Hamlet was; Loman populated that neuter terrain of the never-beens and the could-have-beens.
So the working class, like the country in which they labor, have to be relegated to an unfulfilled potential. Not quite failing, but also not adventurous enough to attempt real fulfillment. Their souls and the soul of their country reside neither in heaven nor in hell.
So the silent majority’s tragedy will come full circle. In the end no one weeps for the citizens of limbo.
❖ ❖ ❖
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2510.25 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3768 days ago & DAD = 422 days ago
- New note started on 2410.28 - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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