Extreme propaganda and dissident literature may be treasured by those who write and live by them, but the pamphlets and flyers often find their way to the trash, washed up in gutters and covered in yesterday's lunch. But some of this literature has reached the University's campus as part of the Gordon Hall and Grace Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda, located in the John Hay Library.
The second part of the collection recently received the Mellon Foundation's 2011 Hidden Collection award, according to the Hay's website. The award provides the necessary funding for categorizing and digitizing the second part of the collection. The collection's second part initially had 800 cartons of inventory, twice as much volume as the first part, and the three year grant provides the funding to completely organize the remaining 300 cartons, said Jennifer Betts, University archivist.
The collection, which includes over 150,000 items of extremist and dissident propaganda in the United States from 1945 until the end of the century, was painstakingly collected by World War II veteran Gordon Hall. He made it his life's work to compile a complete picture of the country's most extreme groups, hoping to increase awareness about the spectrum of extremes he believed threatened the stability of the middle ground in the U.S., said Holly Snyder, curator of American Historical Collections at the Hay.
At first glance, the content of the unorganized cartons resembles the inside of your grandmother's attic. Unopened envelopes addressed to many of Hall's accomplices and his fake names lie rapped in rubber bands. Hall personally infiltrated many of the extremist groups whose propaganda composes the collection, Snyder said. He was consequently blacklisted and even threatened at many times by groups such as the John Birch Society, she said.
A copy of a more recent issue of the Atlantic magazine lies underneath a handwritten note reminding the writer of some long forgotten address. Some of the contents are extremist publications, and other items are correspondence, both personal and formal, addressed to many different names, underscoring the long and dedicated span of Hall's work.
Hall was a young man when he first encountered the danger and charisma of extremist groups and their propaganda. As a young veteran of World War II, he was seduced by the teachings of communist fellow soldiers, Snyder said. He soon saw the potential of these groups to damage the stability of the middle of the political spectrum and spent the rest of his life gaining physical evidence of every aspect of all dissident groups, she said. He sold the collection to the University in 2000 to fund his retirement.
The first part of the Hall-Hoag collection demonstrates what the award-winning second half will one day resemble. Once they are recalled from an offsite storage space, researchers will be able to access folders revealing collections of Black Panther newsletters as well as pro-life and pro-choice literature from the 1970s, carefully stored side by side.
The second part of the collection will also benefit from the library teams' careful organization and access to digital systems, said Andrew Ashton, director of the Center for Digital Scholarship. The library's technology will make the second part of the collection easier to search and find digitally, he said. Hall's own organizational system for cataloguing the different material is idiosyncratic and flawed by years of at times singular effort, Snyder said.
The available part of the collection has already been used by many students as a way to "recapture the flavor of the period," Snyder said. The collection is highly valuable in its power to explore the cultural products of the last fifty years in our country, she added.
Both graduate students and professors have already used the categorized collection as material for their studies. Recently, Associate Professor of History Naoko Shibusawa directed her students to use the collection for their papers and primary sources, Snyder said.
But curious historians should be warned. "This is controversial material, and many will probably be offended," Betts said. The library has collected this material not because the University holds any of the extremist groups' views, but because documentation of these debates is an important aspect of our cultural history, Snyder said.
