Paul Buhle, former editor of Radical America and Radical America Komix and director of oral history programs of the left, and David Wagner, Madison newspaper reporter for The Capital Times and The Madison Press Connection, began organizing Cultural Correspondence in 1974. They envisioned the journal as a “research exchange” of bibliographies, reviews, and commentaries distributed to a small group of people actively interested in the role of “latent progressive and revolutionary tendencies within mass culture.” The journal was intended to describe “progressive” elements in popular culture, encourage a dialogue between radical artists, and trace “forgotten traditions among blue collar ethnic and racial groups expressing a sense of culture as the fullness of social collectivity within a daily life of political committment.”
Cultural Correspondence consisted of articles, reviews, fiction, graphic art, poetry, and comics. Several issues had a theme--health, feminist humor, ethnic radical popular culture, surrealism. Other topics covered include Marxism and mass culture, UFOs, drag racing, television, horror literature, diners, “people's music,” underground comics, sports, and vaudeville. The editorial in the final issue of the first series (nos. 12-14), outlining the history and philosophy of the journal, was translated and reprinted in I Giorni Cantati, no. 4, 1983. Cultural Correspondence was “a journal for American culture . . .it excludes both the bourgeois notion of culture--which is the subjectivity of capital itself in repose (as it attempts to 'transcend' its self imposed denial of daily life in its fullness)--and the bourgeois instruments of discovery of the culture of the masses, i.e. positivist sociology and anthropology which represent the subjectivity of Capital in an active state.”
Fourteen numbers of Cultural Correspondence were published from 1975 to 1981. The editorial staff changed over the years with the exception of Paul Buhle. Active were Danny Czitrom, George Lipsitz, Edith Hoshino Altbach, Ron Weisberger, and Marcia Blair. Even as the journal's orientation changed to general distribution, circulation never surpassed a few thousand. Constant financial woes resulted in the demise of the first series. A second series of Cultural Correspondence began publication out of New York City in 1982, with Jim Murray as editor.
Cultural Correspondence's editors believed popular culture was an important and neglected or trivialized element of comprehensive social analysis. They optimistically believed in a “resurgent Left” and the need for theoretical as well as practical “revolutionary” work. They perceived their contribution to this work as “. . . seeking a broader and deeper theoretical understanding toward fashioning a new grammar which sympathetically treats popular culture from the perspective of the Left.”
