The Open Road newsjournal was an anti-authoritarian paper founded in Vancouver, Canada, in 1976 by a group of anarchists, yippies, feminists and environmentalists who had come out of the new left, student, radical youth, anti-war and counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the 1970s were not the lost “me decade” but a decade when people organized a variety of direct action campaigns in many different areas: campaigns against nuclear testing and nuclear power, destruction of local neighbourhoods, parkland and wilderness, sexism and patriarchy, violence against women, drug prohibition and homophobia. People all over North America started community controlled food co-ops, women’s health collectives, workers’ co-ops and progressive credit unions.

Eschewing more traditional approaches of the sectarian left (including old-style anarch o-syndicalism), Open Road embraced an approach in the spirit of Emma Goldman’s remark about not wanting to be part of a revolution that didn’t include dancing. The name of the journal, Open Road, was the name that Emma Goldman had wanted to use for her paper, inspired by the Walt Whitman poem, “The Open Road,” but for which she had been denied permission by the Whitman estate (with the result that she ended up calling her paper Mother Earth).

One of the original founders traveled around North America, with the help of Yippie mailing lists, connecting with people of similar views and establishing a distribution network, with Open Road‘s circulation peaking at around 18-20,000 with its 11th issue in 1980. Previously, I posted Kytha Kurin’s article from that issue, “Anarcha-Feminism – Why the Hyphen,” as well as the interview with Murray Bookchin from OR Issue No. 13. Although circulation then started to drop, Open Road continued to publish until the final issue in 1990.

Now you can access old issues of Open Road at this website: http://www.zisman.ca/openroad/. Entire issues have been and are being scanned, so you can not only read the articles, but you can also see some of the great artwork, including the “OR posters” at the centre of most issues. I also included some material from Open Road in Volume Three of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas.