FE was started by Harvey Ovshinsky, a seventeen year old youth from Detroit. He was inspired by a summer trip to California where he worked on The Los Angeles Free Press, the first underground paper in the US. The name came from a coffee house he liked to visit on the Sunset Strip
The first issue was published on November 19, 1965 - "That's what we really are - the voice of the liberal element in Detroit" so they said. It was produced on a typwriter and then reproduced by offset litho. It featured a critical review of a Bob Dylan concert, a borrowed Jules Feiffer cartoon, alternative events listing and an announcement of a forth coming anti-Vietnam War march. None of these things would have been included in contemporary newspapers.
In 1966 Ovshiunsky moved the office from his parents basement to a mid-town storefront near Wayne State University. Here the paper was saved from extinction by the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, John Sinclair's Artist Workshop and other radicals. Later in 1966 the paper moved to Plum Street where they also established a bookshop. Fifth Estate thrived in the late sixties, a period when over 500 underground papers emerged in the US. thousands of copies were distributed locally with hundreds more being sent to GIs in Vietnam. FE openly called on soldiers to mutiny. In 1967 the FE offices were tear-gassed by the National Guard during the massive Detroit uprising. In this period the paper published 15,000 - 20,000 copies.
By 1972 the optimism of the sixties had worn off and the tone of the paper became more concerned with struggle than fun. Ovshinsky left, leaving a group of young people (teenagers or in their early twenties) to run the paper. Some of their naivety wore off as they sent delegations to Vietnam, Cambodia and Cuba. With the massive defeat of George McGovern and the election of Richard Nixon for a secondterm with an increased vote damaged the movement - many underground papers stopped coming out and the alternative news services such as the Liberation News Service, and the Underground Press Syndicate had collapsed. By 1975, FE was linger on - many staff had burnt out through too much activism and they had their share of internal disputes. The debts were mounting up.
In August, 1975 Vol. 11, No.1 declared "The issue you are now holding is the last issue of the Fifth Estate - the last issue of a failing capitalist enterprise . . . This is also the first issue of a new Fifth Estate." This was the first explicitly libertarian issue of FE. The papaer had been taken over by the Eat the Rich Gang. They were a group had successfully published several pamphlets and were particular influenced by Fredy Perlman, Jacques Camatte, Jean Baudrillard, Council communism and Left Communism as well as the Situationists. They did not originally identify themselves as explicitly anarchist and had no contacts with an anarchist currrents of the 1930s. However they were contacted by veterans of that period, who they saw as powerful role models. They developed a close relationship with Black and Red, a radical printers/publishers which Fredy and Lorraine Perlman were involved in.
From 1980 when they came up with the dictum "All isms are was-isms." the paper became more anti-technological and anti-civilisation, something which it has been well known for ever since.
The Fifth Estate is also a current affairs-documentary program on the Canadian CBC network.