Since I have very nimble fingers, I applied for a job at the John Hay Library Archives last summer. I worked in the Lownes Room, surrounded by manuscripts, fin-de-siècle ephemera and extremist propaganda. I was helping archive the second part of the Hall-Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda. After Gordon D. Hall died in 2002, his relatives shoved every scrap of paper from his home into cardboard boxes and donated them to the Hay. The boxes were packed with pamphlets, newsletters and flyers, which spanned the range of political organizations. I ushered each item into a folder, placed each folder in an acid-free box and labeled: Hall-Hoag 97A-42: Anti-Communist Crusade; Hall Hoag 97A-43: Anti-Defamation League; and Hall-Hoag 97A-44: Black Panther Party.

In 1990, when the Hay Library acquired the first part of the collection, Mark Brown, a curator at the time, wrote in the library newsletter that the collection would “eventually constitute one of the largest of its kind in the country.” Senior Library Specialist Timothy Engels works now on the second part and confirms the uniqueness of the Hall-Hoag collection “in its focus of collecting across the political spectrum.” Currently, there are 168,800 documents from 5,470 organizations available to the public and accessible through the Hay’s online finding guide. Engels hopes that the collection, which details a broad cross-section of American culture, will be valuable for research.

On my first day at the Hay, I sorted through documents from the Christian Patriots Crusade, an anti-busing coalition, the American National Party, Ku Klux Klan, Focus on the Family, an anti-fluoridation group, and White Aryan Resistance. Sitting in the air-conditioned room and with a manila stack of extremists, I asked, “What do these inflammatory materials have in common?” Gordon Hall tied them together. There is no other collection that matches the scope of the Hall-Hoag project. Mostly because there has never been anyone as dedicated to documenting American fringe groups as Hall.

Starting in the 1940s, Hall was enraged by hate group publications. “When Gordon returned after the war, someone recommended that in order to uncover the ‘real truth’ about ‘Commies,’ he ought to read Common Sense, an anti-Semitic hate sheet,” Grace Hoag, who team up with Hall after seeing him speak at Smith, wrote in a foreword to the collection. Hall hitched a ride to New Jersey to confront the publisher, who instead took a liking to Hall and offered him a job handing out literature.  Hall accepted, only to pocket a few flyers and chuck the rest of them. From there, Hall continued collecting. Obtaining extremist literature didn’t involve many tricks at first. All Hall needed to do was write an organization and pretend to be sympathetic to their cause. The newsletters would soon fill his mailbox.

Since collecting was his profession, Hall desperately needed a source of income. He began giving lectures and publishing articles about extreme groups, and soon Hall became known as an expert and a “rabble rouser.” Both sides—Right and Left—pegged him as an enemy. “The Right Wing accused him of having a Left Wing bias,” Engels explained, “while the Left Wing accused him of being too far Right.” Hall began to write groups under aliases and created PO boxes around Massachusetts; however, he was threatened often and even once beat up outside a church in Iowa following a lecture. A Nazi group called him “the lowest and vilest man I know.” When the John Birch Society found out that he had amassed a huge amount of material on them, the Birchers entered him into their infamous Blue Book of Communists, calling him “one of the dozen slimy characters loose in our midst.”

Engels thinks that Hall’s unclear political stance related more to the clarity of his mission. In Hall’s opinion, these groups—whatever their politics were—needed constant surveillance. While poring through the archives during July, I started finding what seemed to be photos of staked-out John Birch Society meetings. There were pictures of cars with their license plates clearly visible and snapshots of groups of people milling around outside buildings in Cambridge.  In general, Hall worried about extremists at the lowest local levels, running school boards, service clubs, and PTAs—perhaps with their political biases unknown to the general public. If a newspaper ever published a letter-to-the-editor from a known Bircher, Hall would write immediately to expose his politics.

In 1962, The Saturday Evening Post followed Hall to one of his lectures. “Don’t expect laws to protect your way of life,” Hall said. “Only education, judgment and political maturity will do that.” In many ways, the creation of something as expansive as the Hall-Hoag collection makes the steps toward education, judgment and political maturity transparent. When friends asked me if I started to zone out, I admit that I listened to music and This American Life episodes while I worked. However, the material never just washed over me. I noted each item that my fingers filed away: Hall-Hoag 143B-17: Goldwater, Barry; Hall Hoag 143B-18: Lyndon LaRouche Organization; and Hall-Hoag 143B-19: Libertarian.

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KATHLEEN ROSS B’08  is pretty much neutral on the fluoridation thing.