Marshall Bloom

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Marshall Bloom is best know as the confounder of the newspaper Liberation News Service (LNS) with Ray Mungo in 1967. The Liberation News Service was the "Associated Press" for more than 500 underground newspapers.[1]

Contents

[edit] Early Life and University Studies

Marshall Bloom was born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado. He attended Amherst College, graduating in 1966. While there, he served as Chairman of The Student publication and received the Samuel Bowles Prize for his accomplishments in journalism [2]

Bloom achieved some national notoriety in England, where he attended the London School of Economics as a graduate student and was elected as President of its Student Union. He had a prominent role in the sit-ins and demonstrations there in the spring of 1967 and was suspended for his role in protest demonstrations; his suspension sparked further demonstrations. [3]

[edit] Liberation News Service

The inaugural issue of the Liberation News Service, a mimeographed news packet, was sent during the Sept. 1967 March on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. [4]

In 1968, the LNS moved to New York, and in August, an internal split developed. Liberation News Service split off from College Press Service (CPS) in a political dispute. Bloom left to contribute to the counterculture phenomenon of rural communes in the late 60s by buying a farm in Montague, Massachusetts and abandoning political activism in an urban setting and supplanting it with a Thoreauvian lifestyle. His former political colleagues, Ray Mungo and Verandah Porche were among the founders of a similar rural commune in southern Vermont. Mungo described the split as between the "Vulgar Marxists" in New York and the "Virtuous Caucus" who "liberated" the printing press and moved it to Massachusetts.

For part of 1968, Bloom published the "LNS of the New Age" but the project died, when the ink froze in the mimeograph.[5]

[edit] Death

Bloom committed suicide Nov. 1, 1969. His papers are in a special collection at Amherst College [6].

[edit] See also

[edit] Further reading

  • No Success Like Failure Documentary film in production based on the life of Marshall Bloom
  • Stevens, Amy. Daniel Shays' Legacy? Marshall Bloom, Radical Insurgency & the Pioneer Valley. (Amherst, Collective Copies Press, 2005). An exploration of the rebellion and its cultural legacy to the 1960s antiwar movement.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ No Success Like Failure. Retrieved on 2007-12-05.
  2. ^ Marshall Bloom Papers, 1959-1999, Amherst College, Archives & Special Collections
  3. ^ Blair, W. Granger. "Student Protest in London Goes On." New York Times (March 16, 1967): p. 11.
  4. ^ Mungo chronicles the story in: Famous Long Ago: My life and hard times with the Liberation News Service and Total Loss Farm.
  5. ^ Steve Diamond, What the Trees Said
  6. ^ Marshall Bloom Papers, 1959-1999, Amherst College, Archives & Special Collections http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/amherst/ma1_bioghist.html
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