Max Scherr (March 12, 1916 – October 31, 1981) was an American
underground newspaper
The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant (governmental, religious, or institutional) group.
In specific rec ...
editor and publisher known for his iconoclastic 1960s weekly, the ''
Berkeley Barb
The ''Berkeley Barb'' was a weekly underground newspaper published in Berkeley, California, during the years 1965 to 1980. It was one of the first and most influential of the counterculture newspapers, covering such subjects as the anti-war move ...
''.
Early life
Max Scherr was born in
Baltimore, Maryland
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
, on March 12, 1916, in a
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
household. His parents, Harry Scherr, a tailor, and Minnie, were
Yiddish-speaking
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
immigrants who arrived in America in 1898. His early life is obscure. From 1935 to 1938, he attended law school at the
University of Maryland
The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the Flagship un ...
, earning his law degree in June, 1938. For the next three years he practiced law in
Baltimore
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
, including serving as legal counsel to Local 175 of the CIO-affiliated
Transport Workers Union in a 1941 Baltimore taxi drivers strike. During World War II he served in the Navy. After demobilization he attended the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, earning a master's degree in sociology in 1949.
Career
On a trip to Mexico in the 1940s he met and married Juana Estela Salgado, a medical student. Together, they had a daughter, Raquel Lorraine Scherr, born in 1947, and two sons, Sergio and David Scherr. Returning to
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...
, they lived in
Albany, and
Berkeley, where Max Scherr worked for a publisher of legal textbooks, hanging out after work at a coffee shop called
Il Piccolo Espresso, where he kibbitzed with local bohemians and radicals. By the end of the 1950s "The Pic" had become an important meeting place for
SLATE
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic ro ...
, the progressive student party at
U.C. Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...
. In 1958, Scherr purchased a local hangout popular with students and
beatniks
Beatniks were members of a social movement in the 1950s that subscribed to an anti-materialistic lifestyle.
History
In 1948, Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation", generalizing from his social circle to characterize the undergr ...
called the Steppenwolf at 2136 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, which became a stop on the West Coast folk music circuit. Scherr ran the Steppenwolf for seven years, selling it in 1965 for $10,000, which he used to launch the ''Barb''.
The first issue of the ''Barb'' was dated August 13, 1965. Two thousand copies were printed and sold. According to legend, Scheer started the paper after a projected local paper to be published by the
Berkeley food co-op failed to appear. Scoffing at the claim that it would cost $43,000 to launch a small local paper in Berkeley, he boasted that he would have the first issue out in a week.
Around 1960 Scherr had split from Juana Estela Salgado and moved in with a much younger woman named Jane Peters (born Beatrice J. Peters in 1937), with whom he had two daughters, Dove and Apollinaire. By 1965 they had moved into a large, colonnaded house at 2421 Oregon Street. Coming home from the food co-op, he informed Peters that they had to put a paper out in one week "or I'll be the laughingstock of Berkeley." At the end of the week the promised paper, mostly written by Scherr, appeared. The smudgy first issue of 8 tabloid pages was crudely printed in a small edition of 2000 copies, and the paper was launched on a run which lasted almost 15 years.
The ''Barb'' quickly became the news and communications center for the militant
New Left
The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, ...
protest movements swirling around the Berkeley campus of the University of California, where the
Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of B ...
made nationwide headlines in 1964. By the fall of 1965 antiwar protest led by the
Vietnam Day Committee The Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) was a coalition of left-wing political groups, student groups, labour organizations, and pacifist religions in the United States of America that opposed the Vietnam War during the counterculture era. It was formed in ...
and
Jerry Rubin
Jerry Clyde Rubin (July 14, 1938 – November 28, 1994) was an American social activist, anti-war leader, and counterculture icon during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, he became a successful businessman. He is known for being one of the ...
dominated campus activism in Berkeley, and the ''Barb'' soon emerged as the unofficial mouthpiece of the VDC. In the San Francisco Bay Area the paper provided a radical alternative to the stodgy conservatism and anticommunism of the established local press, dominated by Hearst's ''
San Francisco Examiner
The ''San Francisco Examiner'' is a newspaper distributed in and around San Francisco, California, and published since 1863.
Once self-dubbed the "Monarch of the Dailies" by then-owner William Randolph Hearst, and flagship of the Hearst Corpora ...
'', the ''
Chronicle'' and
William Knowland
William Fife Knowland (June 26, 1908 – February 23, 1974) was an American politician and newspaper publisher. A member of the Republican Party, he served as a United States Senator from California from 1945 to 1959. He was Senate Majority Lea ...
's ''
Oakland Tribune
The ''Oakland Tribune'' is a weekly newspaper published in Oakland, California, by the Bay Area News Group (BANG), a subsidiary of MediaNews Group.
Founded in 1874, the ''Tribune'' rose to become an influential daily newspaper. With the decli ...
''. Max Scherr considered himself and the paper to be part of the revolutionary left, although he had never been in any organized left-wing party, and the paper's news coverage was often seen as baiting the police and authorities in Berkeley, with inflammatory headlines like "Pigs Shoot to Kill—Bystanders Gunned Down." The battle over
People's Park which began in 1969 with an article by
Stew Albert
Stewart Edward "Stew" Albert (December 4, 1939 – January 30, 2006) was an early member of the Yippies, an anti-Vietnam War political activist, and an important figure in the New Left movement of the 1960s.
Born in the Sheepshead Bay secti ...
in the ''Barb'' was in some respects the paper's high-water mark in arousing its readers to militant activism in the streets, but the bitter aftermath, in which several protestors were shot and the city was occupied by the National Guard, left many in Berkeley with little appetite for further confrontation.
The paper grew rapidly, developing a nationwide following, and by mid-1969 ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, t ...
'' reported that the paper was circulating 86,000 copies and charging $450 a page for advertising, turning an annual profit of $150,000. This led to conflict with the paper's staff of 40, which was earning at most the legal minimum wage, and the staff rebelled, forming the Red Mountain Tribe collective and issuing a special interim edition called ''Barb on Strike'' without Scherr, who managed to put out a bare-bones 8-page issue of the paper on schedule without assistance. Scherr succeeded in getting the Tribe out of the paper's offices, whereupon he moved the newspaper's equipment into a new office and hired a new staff. The Red Mountain Tribe retaliated by starting their own competing paper, the
Berkeley Tribe
The ''Berkeley Tribe'' was a radical counterculture weekly underground newspaper published in Berkeley, California from 1969 to 1972. It was formed after a bitter staff dispute with publisher Max Scherr and split the nationally known ''Berkeley Ba ...
, which lasted until 1972.
The ''Barb'' continued to decline. In 1978, with sales down to 20,000 copies (from a peak of over 100,000), in an effort to attract mainstream advertisers, the paper's lucrative sex ads were spun off into a separate publication, the ''
Spectator
''Spectator'' or ''The Spectator'' may refer to:
*Spectator sport, a sport that is characterized by the presence of spectators, or watchers, at its matches
*Audience
Publications Canada
* ''The Hamilton Spectator'', a Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, ...
''. The decline continued, and by 1980 circulation of the ''Barb'' was down to the same 2000 copies Scherr had started with in 1965. The ''Barb'' finally folded in July, 1980.
Max Scherr died on October 31, 1981 of cancer.
Legacy
Shortly before his death he told fellow underground newspaper editor Abe Peck: "We were a lot of well-meaning fools. All of us were tainted by the environment we were brought up in. We had no revolutionary base, no real class consciousness. Along with the good, we developed a large rip-off philosophy." But, he added, "we broke down a lot of barriers to honest thought and opened up a whole visionary realm of the future, which has to be worked on."
[Peck, Abe. ''Uncovering the Sixties'', p. 320-321.]
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scherr, Max
1916 births
1981 deaths
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Writers from Baltimore
Writers from Berkeley, California
University of Maryland, Baltimore alumni
University of California, Berkeley alumni
American newspaper editors
Jews and Judaism in Baltimore
Deaths from cancer in California
Emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States