Magazines, Newspapers, Newsletters. Pamphlets, Broadsides, Ephemera and Books in the M & S ...

343 Pages·2017·4.72 MB·English

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M & S COLLECTION
Introductory Essay by
Michael Coventry
Library of Congress Junior Fellow, 1991
M & S COLLECTION FINDING AID
The Library of Congress purchased the M & S Collection (also known as the M & S
American Extremism Collection) from M & S Rare Books of Weston, Massachusetts, in late
1981. The Collection's materials appear to be the duplicates culled from the much larger
collection of an unnamed radical history specialist.
The collection was initially inventoried in 1991 by Michael Coventry and David
Sukites; Mr. Coventry is the author of the introductory essay, scope and contents note, and
bibliography portions of this finding aid. Based on that inventory, the collection was
arranged into series, sorted and rehoused by David Kennaly and Mr. Sukites. Mr. Kennaly
prepared the container list of this collection. The finding aid was completed in 1993.
Linear feet of shelf space occupied: 46
Approximate number of items: 10,000
SCOPE AND CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION AND TOPICAL HIGHLIGHTS
People have pursued the "good community" for centuries. While some reformers
tried to establish separatist utopian communities, others worked to mold the civic community
to fit their own vision. Many defined their ideology in opposition to the status quo:
communism opposing capitalism, racial purity opposing an increasingly pluralistic society, or
pacifism opposing a world at war. The M & S Collection chronicles the activities of a
variety of persons and groups who attempted to offer an alternative vision of society. For
some rightists, this meant a world without communism, in which Whites remained "pure .. and
the nation was honored. For many leftists, the ideal society was one free of nuclear weapons
and nuclear power, with a socialist economic system, and a level class structure. All groups
embraced apocalyptic elements in their activities, all engaged in propaganda, all failed to tip
the even keel of American opinion.
The M & S Collection's diversity is a reflection of this medley of American radical
views. The Collection documents the activities of extremist groups and their visions of the
good community from 1934 to 1981, with the majority of the material centering on the years
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1950 to 1981. The Collection embraces a vast number of subjects in a wide range of formats
and genres, including broadsides, pamphlets, books, newspapers, newsletters, magazines,
subscription and membership cards, order blanks, petitions, catalogs, advertisements, article
reprints, and bumper stickers. The Collection is strongest in printed ephemera: fund-raising
letters, rally flyers, book order-forms, stickers, membership flyers, and propaganda pieces
produced by many sorts of radical Americans. These materials chronicle the activities of
radical groups, rallying, funds raising, propagandizing, theorizing, and petitioning.
The M & S Collection's greatest strength is in materials relating to the American
radical Right during the 20th century. The Collection especially documents the religious
Right's involvement with nationalism, anticommunism, antihumanism, anti-Semitism, and the
movement for media decency. It also partly describes various unusual religious groups, such
as the Unification Church, Church of Scientology, and the Church of God International. To
the extreme Right within the religious movements represented are the advocates of Identity
theology, with its concurrent anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism, anticommunism,
survivalism, and nationalism. The secular anticommunists and survivalists, the neofascists,
those opposed to fluoridation of the water supply, and those distrustful of the United Nations
are all among the groups chronicled.
The Collection includes materials from the New Left groups of the 1960s, the Old
Left groups of the 1960s and 1970s, and the 1970s movements against nuclear weapons and
nuclear power. It addresses the movement against the Vietnam War only in part, but covers
the 1970s and early 1980s .,peace" movements on behalf of various Third World nations in
more detail. It partly chronicles also the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the
movements for women's rights and gay rights.
THE RADICAL RIGHT
The student of the religious Right will find vast resources available for study within
the M & S Collection. In American society, the radical Right often linked its ideology to
religion, joining a conservative vision of America with the accepted °Christian" heritage of
the United States. Among the more prominent of these groups was Billy James Hargis's
camp-meeting oriented Christian F.choes National Ministry of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The group's
magazine, Christian Crusade, and its successor, The Weekly Crusader, fund-raising letters,
information letters published as serials, and various pamphlets and books provide scholars
with a broad view of the ministry's communication methods. Pamphlets, such as Unmaskin~
the Deceiver: Martin Luther Kin~. Jr. (Tulsa, OK:Christian Crusade Publications, 1961) and
Hargis and Julian E. Williams's, National Council of Churches and its Racial Aici,tation
Prouam (Tulsa: Christian Crusade, 1962), display Christian Crusade's views on civil rights
and ecumenicism. The group's overt anticommunism is illustrated by pieces such as Hargis's
book Communist America ... Must It Be? (Tulsa, OK: Christian Crusade, 1960).
Similar to Hargis's group was the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. Dr. Fred
Schwarz, an Australian-born medical doctor, came to the United States at the invitation of
Dr. Carl McIntire of the Twentieth Century Reformation Hour and built up a personal
following. The Anti-Communism Crusade was fundamentalist, but it appealed to a more
sophisticated audience than Hargis's Christian Echoes through such pieces as a flyer for the
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May 1962 Greater New York School of Anti-Communism. There are also examples of the
Christian Anti-Communism Crusade's fund-raising letters, its serial publications, and
pamphlets like Communism--A Disease (Houston, TX: Christian Anti-Communism Crusade,
1959) and Why I Am A~ainst Communism (Long Beach, CA: Christian Anti-Communism
Crusade, 1981). Of special interest is a copy of Schwarz's book You Can Trust the
Communists (To Be Communist5) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960).
Among the more interesting and less well known of the groups represented in the M
& S Collection is James Parker Dees' Anglican Orthodox Church. In 1963 Dees, a former
Episcopal priest, founded the Anglican Orthodox Church in response to the Episcopal
church's social gospel and pro·communist leanings. Earlier Dees had beaded the
segregationist North Carolina Defenders of States' Rights and served on the board of policy
of the Liberty Lobby. Material in the M & S Collection on the Anglican Orthodox Church
includes a large number of fund-raising and propaganda letters and a few pamphlets. The
scholar will also note a fascinating series of newspaper and magazine reprints, many with
comments from Bishop Dees pointing out the procommunist, pro-internationalist, and
prohomosexual apostasy of the contemporary Episcopal church.
In addition to the more orthodox fundamentalist groups of the religious Right, the M
& S Collection is abundant in materials on the extremist Identity movement. Rooted in anti·
Semitic philosophies formulated by Edward Hine in late 19th-century England, the Identity
movement held that the "Aryan" or Northern European and Anglo peoples were the true
descendants of the Children of Israel. Therefore, Jesus was not a Jew, but an Aryan. In the
Collection, groups such as Sheldon Emry's Lord's Covenant Church and America's Promise
Radio of Phoenix Arizona and James K. Warner's New Christian Crusade Church present the
broad lines of Identity theology. Publications like the Lord's Covenant Church's We Believe
ZwJl (Phoenix: America's Promise Radio and Lord's Covenant Church, 1977) tie together
America and the Children of Israel. More racially focused are the New Christian Crusade
publications How the Jews Use Modern Christianity (Hollywood CA: New Ctuistian Crusade
Church, 1972) and Why Race Mixine is Anti~Christian (Hollywood, CA: New Christian
Crusade Church, 1971). The M & S Collection also contains material from other Identity
and anti-Semitic groups, such as Gordon Winrod's Our Saviour's Church of Gainesville,
Missouri, and Dan Gaymen's Church of Israel and Emancipation of the White Seed of Schell
City, Missouri, publishers of the BATTLE AXE N.E.W.S.
In 1960 Missouri businessman Robert DePugh founded the Minutemen. This group, a
forerunner of the 1970s Survival Right groups, called for Whites to prepare for the
Armageddon to come. During the 1960s the Minutemen sought the public eye in their
newspapers The Minutemen and On Tar2et and in pieces like DePugh's 1965 pamphlet
What's Wron~ With Communism? (Independence, MO: Minutemen). DePugh's 1968
imprisonment on firearms and conspiracy charges did not dampen his survivalist philosophy,
as his 1978 Blueprint for Victory (4th ed. Norborne, MO: Salon Publishing Company)
illustrates.
Many Survival Right groups found justification for their radical racism in the Identity
movement. A major player among these was John R. Harrell's network of Survival Right
and Identity groups. Harrell's Christian Conservative Church provided theology for his
survivalist Citizen's Emergency Defense System, Christian-Patriots Defense League, and Paul
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Revere Clubs. The Collection contains various events and membership flyers from the
different groups. Of particular interest are the flyers for the popular Freedom Festivals,
which were important gathering places for many survivalist and Identity groups.
Finally, scholars of the Survival Right will take particular interest in the Collection's
copy of William Pierce's book The Turner Diaries. The Diaries portrays a future
Armageddon in which White citizens must take up arms to defend themselves. Pierce, of the
neo-Nazi National Alliance, wrote the book under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald; the
volume enjoyed a wide circulation among both survivalists and neo-Nazis. Materials
outlining the later career of well-known rightist Gerald L. K. Smith are among the
Collection's more notable resources. Smith, publisher of the newspaper The Cross and the
Ela&, headed the Christian Nationalist Crusade throughout much of his career. His pamphlets
in the Collection include the 1965 I Love the Church (Los Angeles, CA: Christian Nationalist
Crusade) and The Bi&~st Lie in Modem Pro.12a&anda (Los Angeles, CA: Christian
Nationalist Crusade, 1961). Also of interest are materials from one of Smith's later ventures,
the Arkansas-based Elna M. Smith Foundation, producers of an anti-Semitic passion play.
Holocaust Revisionism, an ideology supported by Identity theology, held that the
extermination of the Jews by Hitler never occurred. Representative of groups with this
ideology in the Collection include the Los Angeles-based World Service, publisher of such
pamphlets as Tbe Bi2 Lie: Who Really Told It? (Los Angeles: World Service, 1978) and
President Carter and His Kosher Crowd (Los Angeles: World Service, 1978). The Collection
also contains a copy of the influential Holocaust revisionist tome The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century by A. R. Butz (Richmond, UK: Historical Review Press, 1976).
In 1961 the shadowy Willis Carto organized the secular anticommunist Liberty Lobby,
and from the start the group saw itself as a vehicle for changing the United States
government's liberal, ,.socialist" direction. Membership flyers, like the 1966 Who's Your
wbbyist in Washin~on? (Washington, DC: Liberty Lobby) and the 1968 How To Write
Your Con~essmen (Washington, DC: Liberty Lobby, 1968), reveal this aspired role. Copies
of the Liberty Lobby's newspaper, The Spotli2'.ht, its newsletter, the Liberty Letter,
contribution flyers, and materials related to Liberty Lobby's television ventures highlight the
Collection's holdings. Of note are book lists and pamphlets from Carto's Noontide Press of
Torrance, California, and publications from the Liberty Lobby~associated Dr. Austin J. App
and his Boniface Press of Takoma Park, Maryland, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Perhaps the most well known of the groups on the radical Right was Robert Welch's
John Birch Society (JBS). Based in Belmont, Massachusetts, the JBS was involved in a large
number of activities on the Right, always advocating a virulent secular anticommunism. The
M & S Collection chronicles the group's publishing activities through issues of the group's
unofficial organ, American Opinion, the official publication, the Bulletin, and a large number
of reprints from American ()_pinion, the Review of the News, and the Dan Smoot .Rev<>rt. In
addition, the collection contains a copy of the "bible" of JBS members, The Blue Book of the
John Birch Society (Belmont: Western Islands, 1959, 1961), and Welch's book about
President Eisenhower, The Politician (Belmont: Belmont Pub. Co., 1964). The Collection
reveals the diverse activities of the JBS through materials related to the TACT and TRIM
committees, flyers from the American Opinion Speakers Bureaus, and a copy of a postcard
showing an "Impeach Earl Warren" billboard, a campaign believed to have ties with the JBS.
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Also representative of the secular strand of anticommunist activity was Kent and
Phoebe Courtney's anticommunist network spearheaded by the Conservative Society of
America. The Courtneys founded the Society in July 1961 as a "political action group, 0 and
it embarke.d on a fairly intensive publishing career. In addition to the Courtney's newspaper,
the Independent American, the M & S Collection holds a nearly complete run of the group's
Tax Fax pamphlets series. Titles from the Tax Eax series include Treasan on the campus
(New Orleans: CSA, 1965) and Carter: Front Man for the Cons.piracy (New Orleans: CSA,
1978). Other pamphlets are The Income Tax Can Be Repealed! (New Orleans: CSA, 1959)
and Impeach Earl Warren'? (New Orleans: CSA, 1961).
The Collection records some of the activities of the American Nazi Party through
copies of American Nazi "Commander" George Lincoln Rockwell's magazine, The Rockwell
Rq,ort, and pamphlets, such as Rockwell's The Barry Goldwater Record (Arlington, VA:
American Nazi Party, 1964). The Collection's holdings tend toward the bizarre in a copy of
an advertisement for purchase of Rockwell's ashes, headed '"Martyr's Ashes': The Ideal
National Socialist Yuletide Gift." Of more ordinary interest is what appears to be a piece of
Commander Rockwell's personal stationery.
The Collection also holds materials from the various Ku Klux Klan splinter groups of
the post World War II period. A few of the groups are the United Klans of America Knights
of the Ku Klux Klan; the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Invisible Empire; National Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan; and the Dixie Knights.
The 1970s "movement for media decency11 was frequently tied to religious groups like
Jerry Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour and Moral Majority and Donald Wildmon's National
Federation for Decency. These morality sentiments, however, also found expression in a
secular milieu, as both the national Morality in Media, based in New York City, and its
regional branch, Morality in Media of Massachusetts, evidence. The Collection contains
copies of Morality in Media's MM Newsletter and a number of broadsides, such as one titled
Candy. Medicine, Children, and Pomoifaphy (Boston, MA: Morality in Media of
Massachusetts, 1980).
In addition to the many prominent groups mentioned, the M & S Collection includes
the work of many smaller and less well known groups on the Right. There are a substantial
number of items from the Network of Patriotic Letter Writers of Pasadena, California. Mrs.
Joseph Crosby and some members of the "Tuesday Morning Study Club" of Pasadena
organized the Network, and it published a series of reprinted newspaper and magazine articles
indicating topics members of the Network could address in their next letter to their
congressperson.
Throughout the period covered by the M & S Collection many people wrote and
distributed small, usually photocopied or mimeographed, newsletters or pamphlets. Louis
Zoul of New York City published two rightist newsletters, Highlights and Insufficiently
Quoted Quotables and About This and That, which the Collection contains. L. Lee Layton of
Dover, Delaware, Marilyn Allen of Salt Lake City, a former head of the Gerald L. K. Smith
affiliated Utah Anti-Communist League, and Hugh S. Ramsey of South Bend, Indiana, a
former member of the board of advisors and endorsers for Billy James Hargis' Christian
Echoes National Ministry, are among the more notable of these individual producers.
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THE RADICAL LEFT
The M & S Collection boasts of a variety of sources on the activities of the radical
Left, with the material focusing forward of 1960. The primary group of the New Left
represented is the Students for a Democratic Society. The Collection contains a substantial
number of items from the late-sixties life of the group nationally, as well as a few pieces
from the Harvard-Radcliffe and New England Regional chapters of the post-Weathennen era.
Copies of SDS's newsletter, New Left Notes, several mimeographed broadsides meant to be
distributed as informative flyers at rallies, and a number of broadsides for events form the
Collection's holdings on SOS. The broadside from the Boston SDS, The Bosses are the Real
Enemies! (Boston: Boston Students for a Democratic Society/Boston Area SOS Work-In,
1969), is a fine example of SDS's propaganda methods.
Materials in the Collection reveal the standard communist and socialist parties
concerns with United States "imperialism" and economic, racial, and gender injustice during
the late 1960s and early 1970s. Copies of the newspaper Challem~e and some ephemeral
materials provide the antirevisionist, or Maoist, Progressive Labor Party with the majority of
its representation in the M & S Collection. The newspaper Daily World, published by the
Communist party, appears in the Collection, as do election materials from various communist
party presidential campaigns, including those of Gus Hall and Angela Davis. The scholar
will find Socialist Workers party pamphlets, such as the 1964 Socialist Workers Party
Election Platform (New York: Socialist Workers party, 1964) and the 1963 Freedom Now
(New York: Pioneer Puhl.) of interest in the Collection. Also included are materials from
the Socialist Workers party's Militant Labor Forum and Young Socialist Alliance sub
branches, the Chicago-based Revolutionary Communist party, and the Communist Workers
party.
Of interest also among the Collection's holdings are the materials from the late 1960s
Third World independence movements, including pieces from the Puerto Rican independence
movement such as the pamphlet published in 1969 by the Puerto Rican Youth Movement,
Puerto Rico: A Colony of the United States (Boston: New England Free Press).
Big players on the Left scene during the 1970s were the Anti-Nuclear Power and
Nuclear Weapons Freeze movements. Fighting nuclear power plants for ecological reasons
or nuclear weapons for peaceful reasons, these groups established many ad hoc committees
and alliances. The Collection's material on the Left is particularly strong in these
movements. There are a large number of rally flyers from the national Clamshell Alliance
and its local Boston chapter, the Boston Clamshell, centering around protests against the
Seabrook Nuclear Power Station. The Three Mile Island Alert and their newsletter, the
Island Update, and various rally flyers are also represented. The movement for Nuclear
Disarmament is represented by pieces from Mobilization for Survival and a run of the
American Friends Service Committee's Peacework newsletter dealing with nuclear
disarmament. The 1979 broadside Nuclear Power & Nuclear Weapons, published by
Mobilization for Survival and Boston Clamshell, and the 1981 membership flyer from the
Council for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are good examples of
these groups' publications. Also of interest are a 1980 membership flyer from the national
SANE organization and a bumper sticker from the New Jersey regional SANE (Montclair,
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NJ: N. J. SANE, 1970).
The Collection also contains materials from the 1970s "Human Rights" and "Anti
Imperialism" movements. These groups protested United States activities in El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Iran, Palestine, and elsewhere. Examples of items published by these groups
include flyers from the People's Anti-War Mobilization's 1980 rallies in Washington against
U.S. support for the Salvadoran government, a 1980 meeting flyer from the Boston Coalition
Against U.S. Intervention in Iran, and materials from the National Network in Solidarity with
the Nicaraguan People, including their National Network Newsletter.
The Women's, Civil Rights, Black Power, and Gay Rights movements also appear in
the Collection. The Women's movement is represented by primarily local materials such as
flyers for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, "women's schools" and a few issues of SISTER
COURAGE, the Boston-area feminist news magazine. The Civil Rights and Black Power
movements are chronicled in small ways, often through pieces published by various White
1960s radicals about the oppression of African Americans. The Gay Rights movement also
appears in the Collection, through pieces such as book catalogs from the gay Glad Day
bookstore of Boston. As is often the case with those who have been hidden from history, it
is possible to trace the Gay Rights, the Women's, and the Civil Rights movements through
their opponents' publications. The Religious Right in particular spent considerable time
addressing the issues raised by these movements.
OTHER RESOURCES
In addition to the M & S Collection, the Rare Book and Special Collections Division
maintains several other important collections related to American radicalism. The Anarchism
Collection consists of books printed between the 1850s and 1970s. Main-entry and shelflist
card files in the Rare Book Reading Room provide access to the Collection's holdings. The
Division also maintains the Anarchism Pamphlet Collection of pamphlets, broadsides, and
posters. Anarchist groups wrote and published these pieces between 1895 and 1972 for
foreign language audiences in the United States. The Radical Pamphlets Collection consists
of pamphlets, serials, broadsides, cartoons, and other ephemeral items published in English
between the years 1870 and 1980. This coJJection focuses primarily on communism,
socialism, and anarchism, and is especially strong in the period 1930 to 1949. The scholar
may access both collections through finding aids available in the Rare Book Reading Room.
In addition, the Division maintains the Avrich Anarchism Collection of books,
newspapers, pamphlets, recorded sound and video, and ephemera related to the study of
anarchism in the 20th century. In the future a register in the Rare Book Reading Room will
provide access to the Avrich Collection. The House Un-American Activities Committee
Collection consists of 4,000 pamphlets covering a broad range of leftist viewpoints, including
communist and Black Power, in the post-World War II period. The Rare Book Reading
Room holds a container list for this collection.
In addition to the resources of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, the
author reminds the reader of the vast resources available within the general stacks of the
Library of Congress. The Library keeps nearly complete runs of serials, such as American
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M«cucy and Gerald L. K. Smith's The Cross a.qd the Fla1:, from both the Right and the
Left. Many book and pamphlet titles by rightists and leftists are available in the general
stacks as well.
The Manuscript Division of the Library maintains custody of the papers of many who
figured prominently in American hi~10ry during the period covered by the M & S Collection.
The papers of New Mexico Congressman Clinton Anderson, Pennsylvania Congressman
James Patrick McGranecy and his wife, Regina Clark McGranery, and Senator Theodore F.
Green of Rhode Island, are particularly helpful for the study of anticommunism. Worthy of
special note are the papers of Lawrence Edmund Spivak, publisher of American Mercury
magazine during its left-leaning days. The Spivak papers contain materials from one of
Spivak's later ventures, the Meet the Press broadcasts. These include viewer correspondence
and radio and television transcripts of programs dealing with topics like the John Birch
Society and anticommunism. For the study of the Left the Manuscript Division holds the
papers of A. Philip Randolph, a Civil Rights leader, as well as a microfilm copy of the
papers of the Socialist party in the United States (1897-1976). Finally, the Manuscript
Division maintains the papers of Justice Earl Warren, prominent Supreme Court Justice
during much of the Civil Rights era.
The author directs the reader's attention to additional noteworthy collections,
supplementary to those maintained by the Library of Congress, for the study of American
radicalism. Within the District of Columbia, the files of Group Research are an invaluable
source of standard-format publications on the American Right. For the American Left, the
literature often recommends Taniment Library of New York University and the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison. The Wilcox Collection of Contemporary
Political Movements at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas at
Lawrence may be one of the largest collections available of material related to both the far
Right and the far Left. For further information on these collections, the author points the
reader to the section in the Bibliography labeled .. Some Collection Resources." This section
provides a list of helpful sources on other radicalism collections in the United States.
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