Which crazy idea shouldn't we have had? Alternative publications such as the Progressive Review are sometimes regarded as radical, eccentric or off the wall. But since the Review, its predecessor publications and its editor have been around for over 40 years, you can easily check whether this view is correct. See which of crazy ideas below - all of which were outside mainstream political and media opinion at the time - you think we should not have had when we did. in fact, it's not the alternative press that's extreme and radical, it's the mainstream media: extremely slow and radically wrong. We published first person reports from the Mississippi pivotal civil rights summer of 1964. We opposed the war in Vietnam We strongly supported the civil rights movement. In 1965 it called for the end of the draft. We proposed bikeways in the 1960s. We proposed community policing in the 1960s We opposed and helped stop the planned freeway system that would have made DC like an east coast Los Angeles. Beginning in the 1970s, we argued that the war on drugs would not work. It hasn't. We argued for light rail and other transit alternatives in the 1970s that were later widely adopted. In the 1960s we proposed neighborhood councils similar to the ones DC would get in 1974. We proposed that DC become a state, an article that led to the creation of the DC Statehood Party. Years later both the Washington Post and the NY Times editorially endorsed the idea. In the 1970s we ran a ground-breaking article on problems of city's latinos. In the 1970s we published a first person anonymous account of a then illegal abortion. We argued that the historic buildings on and around Pennsylvania Avenue (running from the White House to the Capitol) should be saved contrary to official plans of the time. These plans were eventually reversed and the buildings were saved. We published an expose of DC property tax assessments that helped spur a successful class action suit changing the way property is assessed. In the 1980s we ran an article on AIDs. It was the first year that more than 1,000 men would die of the disease. In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened. In the 1980s, we reported on the dangers of computerized voting and suggests possible solutions including an independent review of software and an adequate audit trail. Our 1990 article on savings & loan bailout scandal was selected by Utne Reader as one of the ten most undercovered stories of the past decade. In the early 1990s the Review ran a six page timeline of questionable activities by the Bush family. At the time it attracted little attention but is now one of the Review's most read features. Months before the 1992 Democratic convention, the Review became the first publication to report in depth on what would become known as the Clinton scandals. It listed more than a score of institutions and individuals - nearly all of whom would be linked to criminal misdoing before the end of the Clinton administration The Review started an web edition in 1995 when there were only 100,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are 45 million. In the 1990s, the Review, as part of its strong ecological reporting, warned of possible warming of the Gulf Stream and its consequences to Europe. We opposed both Iraq wars. The Review: the moderate voice of a time that has not yet come.

Fun facts
about
the Review
(and its predecessor,
the DC Gazette)

 Published the only regular column at the time by a prison inmate for a non-penal publication.

Is one of the last surviving members of the Underground Press Syndicate started in the 1960s.

Published the first urban planning comic strip in America -- drawn by architect John Wiebenson.

Featured exceptional writers and cartoonists, some well before they were discovered by larger media. Among them: Dave Barry, Tom Shales, Eugene McCarthy, Tony Auth, Paul Krassner, Jim Hightower, Tuli Kupferberg, Jim Ridgeway, Tom Tomorrow and Bill Griffin.

ABOUT THE
EDITOR

CAPITOL EAST GAZETTE, 1968
NOTE RED STAFF CAR AT LEFT

The Progressive Review is one of the few alternative publications remaining of the hundreds started in the 1960s. It has had the longest running act on the off-Broadway of Washington journalism -- the fourth generation of a publication that started in 1964 as the Idler. At the time the Idler started there were only a few such publications in the country, such as the Realist, Texas Observer, Carolina Israelite, and the Village Voice.

The Idler became a strong critic of the Johnson administration and the Vietnam War and a supporter of the civil rights movement. It published the cartoons of Hugh Haynie and columns by Charlie McDowell and Edward P. Morgan. In 1966 it published two articles on auto safety by Ralph Nader.

In 1966, the Idler's editor, Sam Smith, started an alternative neighborhood newspaper on Capitol Hill, the Capitol East Gazette, serving a community that was 75% black but also home to some of the most powerful whites in the country. In 1968 Washington went up in flames with half of its four major riot strips in the Gazette's circulation area. In 1969, the Gazette became a citywide alternative paper, the DC Gazette.

During the 1960s, the Gazette was a voice of the anti-war movement and the leading journalistic opponent of the city's planned freeway system. It mixed city reportage with national coverage believing, with theologian Martin Marty, in the need for "a place from which to view the world." Boris Weintraub in the Washington Star described the Gazette as "a combination of things Americans profess to hold dear: iconoclasm, a deeply felt sense of community and, above all, independence."

For many years, the Gazette also provided alternative coverage of the arts, with writers such as Tom Shales (now with the Washington Post and a nationally syndicated TV critic) and movie critic Joel Siegel. Patricia Griffith, later president of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, was also among the paper's arts critics.

The Gazette featured the photography of Roland Freeman, the first photographer to win a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and later a leading expert on African-American quilts. In the mid-70s the arts section was spun off as an independent non-profit publication, the Washington Review, which won a number of awards during its 25-year life as an independent journal.

The Gazette long published the only urban planning comic strip in America, drawn by DC architect John Wiebenson, who played a major role in saving a number of historic buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue and elsewhere in the city. And -- until its author was released from prison -- the Gazette published the only column written from behind bars for a non-prison publication.

In the 1970s the Gazette published the first article calling for DC statehood. It urged the development of light rail transit and bikeways, and proposed the creation of neighborhood commissions. With a mixture of controversy and wit, it repeatedly locked horns with the city government and the Washington establishment. In the mid 1980s it suggested that the DC Statehood Party change its name and become the first American Green party with ballot status.

In the mid-1980s, increasingly concerned about the rightward drift of the country, the Gazette ended its local coverage to concentrate on national politics as the Progressive Review. It became the city's most unofficial source -- a rare free journalistic voice in Reagan-Bush-Clinton Washington, in a sense returning to its roots as an "underground" publication.

It has been a constant critic of the War on Drugs and has presented workable alternatives to it. In 1988 it ran an article on devolution as the new global ideology, presaging the breakup of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The Review has, since the mid-eighties, espoused a pragmatic, decentralized, progressive alternative to rightist Democrats and their emulation of GOP policies and has been a voice of the growing Green movement. Its 1990 article on the second S&L scandal -- the S&L bailout itself -- was picked by Project Censored as one of the top ten censored stories of the year, an honor repeated in 1991 for the Review's articles on the Iraqi War. In 1994, the Utne Reader selected the Review's coverage of the S&L bailout as one of the top ten undercovered stories of the past decade.

In November 1990 it devoted an entire issue to the ecologically-sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely -- from Utne Reader to the Atlanta Constitution and the San Francisco Examiner. In 1992 TPR won a national Annual Alternative Press Award for its coverage of emerging issues. It was a finalist in 2000 and 2001.

Utne Reader, the Reader's Digest of the alternative press, had this to say about the Review: "In a spirited and compelling style, editor Sam Smith gently weaves messages about community and individual empowerment through coverage of politics. . . . Whatever the debate, the Review's sharp critiques encourage us to look out our window, notice and act upon what we see, and also to look further -- to the rest of the country and globe -- to see how the organized big world interacts with our more spontaneous small worlds."

In the 1990s, the Review became one of only a handful of progressive publications to investigate and report on the Clinton machine and the Arkansas Mafia. In May 1993, even before Clinton's nomination, the Review published a comprehensive report on the issues involved in what would become known as the Clinton scandals. In 1994, at the request of Indiana University Press, the editor wrote the first book to raise serious questions about the Clinton administration.

These efforts, in the paper's fact-finding tradition, were not appreciated by many liberals and the editor, Sam Smith, soon found himself banned from a major local NPR program and blacklisted at other outlets including CSPAN.

With the arrival of the Bush administration, however, the Review began becoming acceptable again. Further, its website - begun in late 1995 before many much larger publications had started using the Internet - took off and attracted many new readers.

Over the years many interesting writers and cartoonists have graced our pages. Among them: poet and former presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy; Chuck Stone, former senior editor of the Philadelphia Daily News; Charles McDowell, national TV commentator and correspondent for the Richmond Times Dispatch; Des Wilson, a longtime activist who was dubbed the Ralph Nader of Great Britain; Tuli Kupfenberg, the minimalist cartoonist; Jim Hightower, later a national populist leader; Paul Krassner, satirist and publisher of the Realist; Jim Ridgeway, now with the Village Voice.

Other contributors have included Larry Cuban, later superintendent of Arlington County Schools and a noted writer on public education; Jon Rowe, later associate editor of the Washington Monthly and a writer for the Christian Science Monitor; CL Smith-Muniz, later sports writer for the New York Daily News and now a play-by-play broadcaster for ESPN’s Latin American service; Pati Griffith, author of several novels, a movie and a play; Sally Crowell, director of the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop; James Sterba, later was a correspodent for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; Carl Bergman, who went on to become assistant city auditor; Andrea Dean, subsequently associate editor of the AIA Journal; Kathy Smith, historian and author; Jim Smith, who later started two community papers in New York City and subsequently started Journal Transcripts, the first major broadcast transcription service. We have also featured the work of such alternative cartoonists as Ron Cobb, Tony Auth, Tom Tomorrrow and Bill Griffith and the columnist Dave Barry long before they were picked up in the journalistic mainstream.