Marshall Bloom

Marshall Bloom was born in Denver, Colorado. He attended Amherst College and graduated in 1966. While there, he served as chairman of The Student publication and received the Samuel Bowles Prize for his accomplishments in journalism.Marshall Bloom Papers, 1959-1999, Amherst College, Archives & Special Collections During the summer of 1965, Bloom worked as a Montgomery, Alabama, correspondent for The Southern Courier, reporting on the Civil rights movement.{{cite book|last=Stevens|first=Amy|title=Daniel Shays' legacy?: Marshall Bloom, radical insurgency and the Pioneer Valley|year=2005|publisher=Levellers Press|page=31|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uGnaAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA31}}

Bloom was one of the 20 Amherst graduates who walked out during their own commencement to protest the awarding of an honorary degree to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.{{cite news|last=Dobrow|first= Martin|url= https://www.gazettenet.com/The-Amherst-College-student-activist-who-embodied-his-era-2354986 |title=A Life in Full Bloom: 50 Years Ago, this Amherst College Student Embodied Turbulent Times|work=Daily Hampshire Gazette|date=May 25, 2016}}

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, protesting the appointment of Sir Walter Adams as the school's next director. Bloom was suspended and his suspension sparked further demonstrations.{{cite news|last=Blair|first= W. Granger|title=Student Protest in London Goes On|work=The New York Times|date=March 16, 1967|page=11}}

In the summer of 1967, Bloom was elected director of the United States Student Press Association (USSPA), which ran the Collegiate Press Service (CPS) news service. At an organizational meeting in Minneapolis in August, however, Bloom was purged from the USSPA because of his radical politics,{{cite book|last=Leamer|first=Laurence|title=The paper revolutionaries: the rise of the underground press|year=1972|publisher=Simon and Schuster|location=New York|isbn=978-0-671-21143-1}}{{cite book|last=Glessing|first=Robert J.|title=The underground press in America|url=https://archive.org/details/undergroundpress00gles|url-access=registration|year=1970|publisher=Indiana University Press|location=Bloomington|isbn=978-0-253-20146-1}} which included a push to send student editors to Cuba and defy the U.S. travel ban. (Others thought that Bloom's purging was additionally because of what historian John McMillian refers to as his "effeminate demeanor"). As a result, Bloom and his colleague Ray Mungo formed the Liberation News Service.{{cite book|last=McMillian|first=John|title=Smoking Typewriters: the Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America|year=2011|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-531992-7 }}

The inaugural issue of the Liberation News Service, a mimeographed news packet, was sent in the summer of 1967.{{cite book|last=Mungo|first=Ray|title=Famous long ago: my life and hard times with the Liberation News Service|url=https://archive.org/details/famouslongagomyl00mung|url-access=registration|year=1970|publisher=Beacon Press}} By February 1968, LNS was becoming the hub for alternative journalism in the United States, supplying the growing movement media with interpretive coverage of current events and reports on movement activities and the Sixties counterculture.

In 1968, the LNS moved to New York, and in August, an internal split developed. In August 1968, a successful fundraising event led to an ugly fight over control of the organization's funds. Bloom's intention was to abandon political activism in an urban setting, and supplant it with a Thoreauvian lifestyle. Aspiring to contribute to the counterculture phenomenon of rural communes in the late '60s, Bloom, Mungo, and their LNS colleague Steve Diamond left New York for Massachusetts, where they used the $6,000 cash from the fundraiser to make the down payment on a farm in Montague which was to be the new headquarters of LNS.

An angry posse of LNSers trailed them from New York, leading to a tense six-hour standoff at the farm. The dispute ended with Bloom writing a check for the money to the New York group, but soon afterward Bloom filed kidnapping charges against 13 people.{{cite news |last1=Leo |first1=John |title=Liberation News Rocked by Strife: Personal and Policy Issues Divide Agency for the Left |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1968/08/15/archives/liberation-news-rocked-by-strife-personal-and-policy-issues-divide.html |work=The New York Times |date=August 15, 1968 |page=34}} The charges were later dismissed.{{cn|date=December 2022}}

For the next six months,Slonecker, Blake. A New Dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the Long Sixties, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012, p. 47. Bloom published the "LNS of the New Age,"{{cite book|last=Diamond|first=Stephen|title=What the Trees Said: Life on a New Age Farm|url=https://archive.org/details/whattreessaidlif00diam|url-access=registration|year=1971|publisher=Delacorte}} with subscribers receiving rival news packets from LNS-Montague and LNS-New York. But Bloom's group was understaffed, underfunded, and isolated on a remote (and cold) country farm, and the project died when the ink froze in the mimeograph. Only the New York headquarters group survived the split.

Bloom's former political colleagues, Ray Mungo and Verandah Porche, were later among the founders of a similar rural commune in southern Vermont.{{cite book|last=Mungo|first=Raymond|title=Total Loss Farm: a Year in the Life|year=1970|publisher=E.P. Dutton|location=New York|isbn=0-525-22133-6|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/totallossfarmyea00mungrich}}

On November 1, 1969, Bloom committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.{{cite journal|last=Slonecker|first=Blake|year=2010|title=We are Marshall Bloom: sexuality, suicide and the collective memory of the Sixties|journal=The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture|volume=3|issue=2|pages=187–205|doi=10.1080/17541328.2010.525844|s2cid=144406764}} He was found dead in his car with the tailpipe connected to the window.[https://books.google.com/books?id=PD0vX2QIzdYC&dq=%22Marshall+Bloom%22+suicide+1969&pg=PA108 Bruce Pollock, By the Time We Got to Woodstock: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Revolution Of 1969] Many theories have emerged as to why he killed himself;{{cite book|title=Insider histories of the Vietnam era underground press, part 1|year=2011|publisher=Michigan State University Press|isbn=978-0-87013-983-3}}{{cite journal|last=Slonecker|first=Blake|title=We are Marshall Bloom: sexuality, suicide, and the collective memory of the Sixties|journal=The Sixties|year=2010|volume=3|issue=2|pages=187–205|doi=10.1080/17541328.2010.525844|s2cid=144406764}} Allen Young and Amy Stevens have both suggested that it was because he was unhappily closeted.{{cite journal|last=Young|first=Allen|title=Marshall Bloom: Gay Brother|journal=Fag Rag|year=1973|issue= 5|pages=6–7}}Young, Allen. (1990) "Liberation News Service: A History," Liberation News Service. [https://archive.org/details/lns-history-byYoung1990 Archived] at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved Dec. 15, 2022.

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• [https://archivesspace.amherst.edu/repositories/2/resources/150 Marshall Bloom Alternative Press Collection] in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College
• [https://archivesspace.amherst.edu/repositories/2/resources/13 Marshall Bloom Papers] in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College

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Category:1944 births

Category:1969 deaths

Category:1969 suicides

Category:Alumni of the London School of Economics

Category:American anti–Vietnam War activists

Category:American male journalists

Category:Amherst College alumni

Category:20th-century American journalists

Category:News agency founders

Category:People associated with the London School of Economics

Category:Journalists from Denver

Category:People from Montague, Massachusetts

Category:Suicides by carbon monoxide poisoning