Thorne Webb Dreyer (born August 1, 1945) is an American writer, editor, publisher, and political activist who played a major role in the 1960s-1970s counterculture, New Left, and underground press movements. Dreyer now lives in Austin, Texas, where he edits the progressive internet news magazine, The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM, and is a director of the New Journalism Project.
In June 2012 Dreyer topped a published list of Austin's most important political bloggers,Seale, Shelley, ""Election 2012: Keep up with Austin's top political bloggers" CultureMap Austin, June 2, 2012. and in 2011 received the noted Eddy Award for best Austin radio personality.
Dreyer was "an influential journalist in the underground press movement of the 1960s and early 1970s," according to the documentary encyclopedia, Conflicts in American History, which included him in a series of 73 short biographies of key figures in "The Postwar and Civil Rights Era: 1945-1973" in the United States.
He was a founder and editor of two of the most important of the Sixties underground newspapers, The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, was an editor at Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York, and managed Pacifica Radio's KPFT 90.1-FM in Houston.
Thorne Dreyer was active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the moving force in the 1960s New Left and perhaps the most important student-based activist organization in U.S. history. Dreyer's writing was published worldwide and his work has been cited or excerpted in more than 100 books.
Family and early life An only child, Dreyer was born in Houston, Texas, on August 1, 1945, the son of Martin Dreyer and Margaret Lee Webb. He attended Bellaire High School, where he studied theater with noted teacher and director Cecil Pickett – who later taught at the University of Houston and whose students included actors Dennis and Randy Quaid and Cindy Pickett. Dreyer later studied acting with William Hickey at New York's HB Studio, and briefly attended the University of Texas at Austin where he took liberal arts and theater courses.
Dreyer's family was at the center of a large literary and activist community in Houston. His mother, Margaret Webb Dreyer, was an acclaimed artist, teacher, and peace activist – and a leading light in the local cultural scene—and his father, Martin Dreyer, was a fiction writer and long-time travel editor at the Houston Chronicle and was a winner of the national Big Story Award for "investigative journalism in the interest of justice." Sandra J. Levy, writing in the Archives of American Art Journal, called Margaret Webb Dreyer "a moving force in Houston from the 1940s to the 1970s," and she is included in the University of Texas at Austin's Gallery of Great Texas WomenGallery of Great Texas Women and her biography is featured at the Handbook of Texas Online.The Handbook of Texas Online The couple owned and ran Dreyer Galleries, one of Houston's earliest and most prominent art galleries. According to Cite's Raj Mankad, Dreyer Galleries also "served as a countercultural hub," hosting art openings, political meetings, and social gatherings attended by Jane Fonda, Robert Altman, Warren Hinckle, and others.
While in Houston, Thorne Dreyer engaged in an eclectic array of pursuits. He worked professionally as an actor, a freelance writer and editor, a political consultant, a correspondent for Texas Monthly magazine, a public information officer for the City of Houston, a booking agent for jazz and rock musicians, an event planner, and a bookseller—and for years operated a leading Houston public relations business.
He has one son, Dustin Dreyer, who lives in Houston.
SDS and radical activism In 1963, Dreyer went to Austin to attend the University of Texas, but soon joined SDS and became heavily involved in the New Left—in student power and civil rights activities and the fast-growing movement against the Vietnam War. He organized demonstrations and guerrilla theater actions and helped put together the now-legendary Gentle Thursday happenings on the University of Texas campus.
"In the '60s my values crystallized," Dreyer would later tell Karen Kane, in the December 7, 1980, issue of the Houston Chronicle's Texas Magazine. "What happened during those years I will carry with me the rest of my life.... We had visions of a better world, and dedicated ourselves to building it." Kane wrote that Dreyer "was on the cutting edge" of the 1960s movement. Dreyer traveled widely, participating in SDS conferences and national demonstrations and gatherings of the burgeoning underground media.
In 1966, as part of an SDS summer project, Dreyer helped run a radical storefront in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. In September 1967, Dreyer was one of 40 peace activists, religious leaders, and movement journalists invited to travel to Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, for a direct meeting with high-level representatives of the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, in what was an unprecedented effort to explore new avenues for peace. Sol Stern wrote that "for the first time, high-ranking NLF representatives would... be included in discussions with American peace activists." Author Mary Hershberger wrote that the meeting, organized by SDS founder Tom Hayden and peace activist David Dellinger, "resulted in the first prisoner of war release to American peace activists."
In her book, Dreams and Everyday Life, Penelope Rosemont wrote about the historic demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. "Thorne Dreyer came into town from Austin, Texas, to edit the SDS wall poster called Handwriting on the Wall," she said. Handwriting on the Wall was published each night during the convention and posted all over town, playing an important role in keeping the thousands of demonstrators informed about the week's cascading events. These wall posters were featured in the 2011 exhibit, "Left to Right: Radical Movements of the 1960s," at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin.
The Rag
In October 1966, the first issue of The Rag was published in Austin—partly in response to the election of an ultra-conservative editor of the traditionally-liberal UT student newspaper, The Daily Texan—with Thorne Dreyer and Carol Neiman as editors. (They were actually called "funnels," in keeping with the group's anti-authoritarian approach.) In his acclaimed memoir, Famous Long Ago, Ray Mungo wrote that "The Rag's chief 'funnel,' Thorne Dreyer, exercises an authority that is gentle and decent."
The Rag was the first underground paper in the South and the sixth member of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS). Cited by historian Laurence Leamer as "one of the few legendary undergrounds," The Rag was credited with being the first of its genre to successfully combine the radical politics of the New Left with the spirit of the burgeoning alternative culture, and, according to historian John McMillian, it served as a model for many papers that followed.
Abe Peck, author of Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press, wrote that "The Rag was the first independent undergrounder to represent... the participatory democracy, community organizing and synthesis of politics and culture that the New Left of the midsixties was trying to develop." Author Douglas C. Rossinow, described The Rag as "enormously important to local activists,"Rossinow, Douglas C., Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 176, 192, 194, 257-58, 260, 269. and historian McMillian said that The Rag was regarded by the Austin community as "a beautiful and precious thing."
The paper tempered serious political analysis with ample doses of humor, and The Rag provided a primary forum for two of the Sixties underground graphic artists – Gilbert Shelton, whose iconic Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comix would be republished in papers all over the world, and Jim Franklin, whose surrealist armadillos helped create what writer Hermes Nye called "the Great Armadillo Cult." Austin was also the center of an active left political community based at the University of Texas campus and was a major player in the massive Sixties drug and music culture. The city incubated talents like Janis Joplin, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and some of the pioneering psychedelic poster and comix artists. The Rag united these communities into a potent political force.
Underground press and LNS
Thorne Dreyer heralded the coming of The Rag ("from deep in the bowels of reaction... where apathy and dullness thrive") in a letter addressed to the founding members of the Underground Press Syndicate. This colorful dispatch — dated October 5, 1966 — is included as a historical document in Conflicts in American History, a 13-volume encyclopedia published in 2010.
On March 26, 1967, Dreyer and Carol Neiman attended the first national convergence of underground papers at Stinson Beach, California. Historian Abe Peck wrote that "at Stinson Beach, the paper that most prefigured those to come [The Rag] was represented... by several writers, including the increasingly important Thorne Dreyer." Dreyer also participated in a historic meeting of the United States Student Press Association (USSPA) in Minneapolis in August 1967 at the invitation of its newly elected director, Marshall Bloom. At the meeting Bloom was purged from USSPA because of his radical politics (and, some thought, because of what John McMillian refers to as Bloom's "effeminate demeanor"). Bloom and colleague Ray Mungo then founded Liberation News Service (LNS).
The underground press started out with a handful of papers on the East and West Coasts, but soon spread and, according to historian McMillian, author of the 2011 book Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, the papers' combined readership eventually reached into the millions. Rolling Stone's John Burks quoted Thorne Dreyer as saying that the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) was organized "to create the illusion of a giant coordinated network of freaky papers poised for the kill." But, as McMillian and others would emphasize, the underground press was no illusion, and in fact played a vital and dynamic role in the 1960s cultural revolution.
According to historian James Lewes, "A number of underground newsworkers – including Marshall Bloom, Thorne Dreyer, Ray Mungo, and Victoria Smith – argued that their papers filled a vacuum left by the collective failure of mainstream media to address the needs of the growing counterculture and anti-Vietnam War movements." John Leo wrote in The New York Times that the underground press was "consciously subjective" and "rooted in personal experience." Leo quoted Dreyer as saying that "objectivity is a farce," and that the underground papers were different from the establishment media because they were upfront about their biases.
In 1968, Thorne Dreyer left The Rag to help build the editorial collective at Liberation News Service in New York City. LNS, which was becoming the hub for alternative journalism in the United States, supplied the growing movement media with interpretive coverage of current events and reports on movement activities and the Sixties counterculture. In a history of Liberation News Service, Allen Young — who had worked for both The Washington Post and LNS — wrote: "The people of the underground press helped forge a national youth culture and in both subtle and direct ways influenced their colleagues in the 'establishment media.'"