Conservatism, the Right Wing, and the Far Right: A Guide to Archives. Archie Henderson

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_254d1e2f-813a-55d8-8ade-482cbeb9073a">36 Likewise, the Republican Opposition Research Group collected materials on its Democratic opponents. Also, some collections have reports based on surveillance or infiltration of their political counterparts. Examples are the California Surveillance Collection, the Fight for Freedom Committee Records, the Carl Jacobson Collection of Hollywood Anti-Nazi League Records, the Florence Mendheim Collection, the Hollis Mosher papers, News Research Service typescript, the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League Papers, the Joseph Roos Papers, and the Abraham Shoenfeld Papers. Numerous collections of ACLU and FBI records, as well as civil rights, labor, LGBT, Jewish, and women's groups collections, further document the right, often from an oppositional viewpoint. Those who have been attacked by the right--from the women's suffrage groups of the 1910s and the pacifist groups of the 1920s to the League of Women Voters and other ERA advocates of the 1970s and 1980s, to the gay rights and Planned Parenthood groups and the National Organization for Women of recent years--have frequently collected documentation on their opponents and the attacks waged by them, as well as their answers to the attacks. At the same time, those on the right have collected material regarding the left. Where individuals or organizations have created a cause or rallying cry or lightning rod for the right wing--figures such as Harry Dexter White, Owen Lattimore, or Alger Hiss, and organizations such as the Institute of Pacific Relations--materials relating to them have also been included.

       For considerations of space, the emphasis of the guide is on the specific contents of the collections as opposed to library hours and policies. More than 4000 archives and collections in more than twenty countries are described in the guide. Countries represented include Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The majority of the collections consist of personal papers and collections, as well as institutional, organizational, and corporate records. Included are papers or records of conservative or right wing politicians, diplomats, journalists, editors, ministers, military officers, economists, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, think tanks, right-wing committees, lobbying or pressure groups, political parties, etc. Besides collections of personal and institutional papers, the list includes archives of right-wing periodicals and other publications, including those in the Japanese, Polish, Romanian, and Russian languages; collections of pamphlets, ephemera, posters, vertical files, scrapbooks, and press cuttings; newspaper indexes; oral histories; sheet music; library-accessible commercial or noncommercial databases; digital collections and exhibitions; archived web sites; and microfilm and microfiche collections with right-wing material. Some of the archives are collections of photographs, newspaper art, cartoons, sound recordings, video, kinescopes, films, political commercials, newsreels, and television programs. Included are the photographic morgues of the Afro-American Newspaper (along with clippings), Amsterdam News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Baltimore News American (along with clippings), Boston Herald-Traveler, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Chicago Defender, Daily Worker and Daily World (New York), Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Look Magazine, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Examiner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Los Angeles Times, Memphis Press-Scimitar (along with clippings), Miami News, The New Leader, New York Journal-American, the Paris bureau of the New York Times, New York World Telegram & Sun, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (along with clippings), Rocky Mountain News (Denver) (along with clippings), St. Louis Globe-Democrat (along with clippings), San Antonio Express-News, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, Toronto Star, Toronto Telegram, and Washington Star (along with clippings). Clippings files include the morgues of the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Journal American, and the New York Times, and the research archive of Newsweek (all at the University of Texas at Austin). Digital newspaper databases are included where the indexed newspapers contain much material pertaining to the right-wing. This is especially true of African-American and Jewish newspapers. Examples are the Jewish Criterion, the American Jewish Outlook, the Jewish Chronicle, the Memphis World, The Southern Israelite, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). Also included are several online newspaper indexes – the indexes without the articles—such as the Arkansas Gazette and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Raleigh News & Observer, and the San Antonio Register.

Archival research can supply information that can be obtained in no other way. For social historians and other researchers, marginal and alternative movements "are the [authentic] expressions of the ideas and feelings of a segment of society." As such, these organizations and causes, which "include right-wing, racist organizations, radical or militant religious groups or sects, and nationalist or other terrorist organizations," are important for an understanding of the period in question.37 As interest in studies of the right increases, the need for a guide to archives has grown. Right-wing and other alternative movements have been studied using the traditional ways of conducting research in the social sciences: fieldwork, surveys, case studies, interviews and correspondence, data mining and analysis, website monitoring, reviews of published and unpublished literature and videos, etc. Often overlooked in the research process, however, is archival research. One possible reason for this relative neglect springs to mind: there is no comprehensive guide to archival collections of right-wing material. Another reason is that right wing publications are in general scarce, difficult to locate, and little known by researchers.38

Much of the literature published by the right, especially the radical or extreme right, has taken the form of pamphlets, ephemera, and periodicals. Timothy G. Young defines printed ephemera as follows: "Ephemera are printed artifacts, usually less substantial than books, which, though intended for specific limited purposes or events, are kept by libraries and archives because they contain continuing research value, notably for the study of popular culture."39 Pamphlets are frequently included in definitions of printed ephemera.40 Pamphlets and ephemera, because of their temporary and often fleeting nature, can be difficult for libraries to collect as well as catalogue.41 For libraries and archives, though, the very mention of ephemera can cause shudders as it immediately conjures up difficulties: ephemera is difficult to store, catalog, and preserve.42 Ephemeral political material of whatever political stripe often does not find its way into institutional collections either because the material is discarded before it draws the attention of collectors, because it is too popular and mass-produced to merit consideration as art, or because it does not fit easily (either physically or intellectually) into the book- and manuscript-based realm of libraries.43 On occasion, politically controversial material is collected but not catalogued.44 In the late 1960s, many libraries considered pamphlets to be expendable.45 Included in this category were pamphlets of the radical right, whose controversial subject matter discouraged cataloguing. In 1970, Ned Kehde wrote, "all too often librarians categorize radical [including radical right] pamphlets with the epitaph 'ephemera'; such a pejorative provides librarians with an all too easy rationalization to disregard pamphlet material as a vital part of a library's collection, and as a result the pamphlets that are inadvertently acquired are quickly relegated to the inaccessibility of a Vertical File. This is a trend which must be reversed if the history of the present and past decade is to be properly written in the future."46 Regarding material in vertical files, "Often librarians give this part of the collection very little thought, sometimes because of lack of time, but more often because they are not interested in such material and they fail to see the values of it."47

An informal, though growing and dedicated group of individuals and organizations interested in collecting political and cultural ephemera, formed by the early СКАЧАТЬ