31. Hall-Hoag Collection

Week 31 2/24/16

Some of you know that my mother, Grace Hoag, spent many years volunteering for Gordon Hall, a Boston-based researcher, writer and lecturer on American political extremists and dissenters. Together they amassed a huge collection of newspapers, pamphlets, posters, letters, handouts and other ephemera which Grace spent many years filing and cataloging. She also attended meetings, wrote letters, collected handouts and made many phone calls for the cause of the collection. Other volunteers helped as well. I often wonder what Gordon Hall would have made of the current presidential situation.

All my teen and young adult years, Gordon and Mom's work was very prominent. I went to the office on Boylston Street at every opportunity and sometimes was sent off to various headquarters such as the Black Panthers in Cambridge. In those days, political newspapers and handouts were everywhere, and I picked up whatever I was offered. Some of the groups turned out to be rather mainstream and some were already or became extreme, but all was interesting -- and the whole point was the collection of information for the future. I remember one time attending the New England Rally for God, Family, Country in the early 1970's which was run by the John Birch Society. Gordon asked me to dress conservatively. Several of us shared one conference registration with the first name Chris, so it could be used for Gordon's colleagues, male or female. I dropped the tag in the hotel elevator. Someone saw me drop it and called after me: "Chris, Chris." It took me several seconds to remember that this was my name that day.

When I majored in Sociology at Wellesley, I used materials from the collection for some of my own research. I hope these papers are in my attic somewhere.

The collection has found a home at Brown University's Hay Library as The Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda. On our visit, the librarians were very welcoming to Paul and me. We had called ahead for an appointment, and several boxes were pulled for us to look at. But the best part was hearing about how the collection was being processed during a three-year grant, and the enthusiasm of both the library and the patrons for the availability of these materials which might have been lost forever if Gordon and Grace had not carefully saved them.

I'm sorry this photo is so blurry, but I want to include Tim Engels, Senior Library Specialist, Jordan Jancosek, Project Archivist (Hall-Hoag), and Holly Snyder, Curator of American Historical Collections.

First we viewed some American Nazi Party stickers and other handouts from this very extreme group (as you can see here).

The next box we went through contained Black Panther papers. I think some of these might have been collected by me!

I found these rules, particularly interesting. They were printed over and over in each issue of the newspaper. 

Our visit to Brown's Hay Library was a reminder to appreciate that a vast array of resources such as these are made available to scholars, researchers and the general public for the asking, by librarians through institutions all over the world. These resources are more accessible than ever before, thanks to the Internet, but  a personal visit to see and feel materials that are historical, beautiful, valuable and inspiring is an experience that can't be matched.