Collecting area: Social change

A legal scholar and pacifist, Caleb Foote was born in Cambridge, Mass., on March 26, 1917, the son of a Unitarian minister and Quaker mother. Earning degrees in history from Harvard (AB 1939) and economics from Columbia (MA 1941), Foote was hired by the Fellowship of Reconciliation to organize their northern California office as the U.S. entered the Second World War. A committed conscientious objector, he refused assignment to a Civilian Public Service camp, arguing that the draft was undemocratic and “an integral part of the war effort,” thus earning a sentence of six months in prison. When released, Foote resumed his work with the Fellowship, opposing the internment of Japanese Americans, but ran afoul of the Selective Service a second time in 1945, earning an additional eighteen months. After a presidential pardon in 1948, Foote became Executive Director of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objection, but left after two years to return to school, hoping a law degree might aid him in the cause of addressing racial and economic injustice. He held academic positions in law schools at the University of Nebraska (1954-1956), Penn (1956-1965), and Berkeley (1965-1987), becoming well known for his opposition to a bail system that unfairly burdened the poor and falsely accused, among other causes. Foote died in Santa Rosa, Calif., in 2006, shortly before his 89th birthday.

An extraordinary archive of principled resistance to war, the Foote collection contains a thorough record of one man’s experience as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Accompanying some of the legal proceedings associated with Foote’s refusal of assignment to Civilian Public Service is an extensive correspondence with family while imprisoned and other associated content. Foote also retained important material from his wartime work with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and later work with the CCCO. His later correspondence provides an important perspective on his developing legal career, particularly the earlier years, and an extensive series of essays and autobiographical writings provides critical personal and intellectual context for Foote’s pacifism and legal practice. The collection also includes some correspondence and writings by and about Foote’s education, his father, Henry Wilder Foote, and mother.

Foresty and lumbering have been substantial sectors of the Massachusetts economy for more than 300 years. This collection includes photographs of forests throughout New England and New York, lumbering and related occupations, tools of forestry, and distinguished foresters. Together these images capture the history and traditions of forestry and lumbering in Massachusetts from mill work to Christmas trees.

Shortly after receiving her doctorate from the University of California Berkeley in 1972, the anthropologist Sylvia Helen Forman joined the faculty at UMass Amherst. A staunch feminist and activist, Forman was known for her commitment to her students and to the political life at the university, and for her engagement in the community. She died of cancer in 1992, just 48 years old.

The nine papers in this collection were the products of studies by students enrolled in Forman’s Anthropology 497 class at UMass Amherst. All are intensive analyses of issues of race, gender, and social justice in local communities, including disability, teenage pregnancy, child care, Cambodian refugees, and attitudes toward community living and community change.

Collection of chiefly newspaper clippings compiled by Georgana Foster documenting the response of the western Massachusetts community to a variety of local and national topics such as the Vietnam War, communes, the re-elections of Congressmen Silvio Conte and John Olver, the Amherst Peace Vigil, the Peace Pagoda in Leverett, and the Iraq War.

For the better part of four decades, Nancy E. Foster was active in the struggle for social justice, peace, and political reform. From early work in civil rights through her engagement in political reform in Amherst, Mass., Foster was recognized for her work in the movements opposing war, nuclear power, and the assault on civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Locally, she worked with her fellow members of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst and with interfaith coalitions to address problems of hunger and homelessness.

Centered in western Massachusetts and concentrated in the last decade of her life (2000-2010), the Nancy Foster Papers includes a record of one woman’s grassroots activism for peace, civil liberties, and social justice. The issues reflected in the collection range from the assault on civil liberties after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to immigration, hunger and poverty, the Iraq Wars, and the conflict in Central America during the 1980s, and much of the material documents Nancy’s involvement with local organizations such as the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst. The collection also contains a valuable record of Nancy’s participation in local politics in Amherst, beginning with the records of the 1972 committee which was charged with reviewing the Town Meeting.

An East German Prosecutor General, Carlos Foth was a key player in the legal effort to investigate and punish Nazi war criminals. For two decades beginning as a law student in Berlin in 1947, Foth was part of a team dedicated to the prosecution of former Nazis, and he contributed to the creation of an antifascist internationalist system quite distinct from the weaker efforts in West Germany. Having assisted in high profile cases such as those stemming from the Koepenicker Blutwoche (the SA-led pogrom in Berlin in June 1933), Foth found himself at the center of investigations that highlighted the tensions between the East and West German systems. In a series of cases in the early 1960s, East German prosecutors uncovered former Nazis working in the West German judiciary, culminating in the 1963 “show trial” conviction in absentia of Hans Globke, National Security Advisor to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had been the author of Nazi racial purity laws. As department head for international relations beginning in 1972, Foth was engaged in negotiations between the German legal systems and in 1979 he was invited to assist in the investigative phase of war crimes trials against the Khmer Rouge. He left office after reaching retirement age in 1988.

The Carlos Foth Papers offer important documentation of East German attempts to hold former Nazis accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity and they provide insight into the operation of the East German legal system and its relations with the west. In addition to materials on prosecutions of SA Brownshirts involved in political violence during the Köpenicker Blutwoche, the collection includes files relating to prosecutions of West German officials accused of Nazi-era crimes and materials relating to Foth’s role as a consultant to the 1979 war crimes trials against the Khmer Rouge.

For the tercentenary of the Massachusetts court system, Paul J. Liacos, Chief Justice of the the Supreme Judicial Court convened a 45-member Commission on the Future of the Courts (also called Reinventing Justice) to examine the court’s role and responsibilities for the next century. The commission was charged both with creating a new vision for justice and for proposing a way for the system to move toward that vision. Responding to this initiative, Franklin County attorney Diane H. Esser and Thomas T. Merrigan, the First Justice of the Orange District Court, established a Franklin County Futures Lab Task Force Proposal to focus on the specific needs in Franklin County. Approved in December 1993 with Esser and Merrigan as chairs, the Task Force worked intensively with community partners, issuing a dozen recommendations on topics ranging from court house facilities to juvenile justice, substance abuse, Appropriate Dispute Resolution, and child care services. Although not all of the recommendations were implemented, the success of their model for court and community collaboration resulted in the creation on a ongoing position of Community Relations Coordinator in 1998. The project continues to evolve to meet community needs, but has continued to reflect the restorative justice values and principles engaged from the beginning.

The records of the Reinventing Justice initiative in Franklin County reflect an intensive, two-decade long effort to facilitate engagement between the courts and the community in western Massachusetts and build a vision for courts in the coming century. In addition to planning, administrative, and grant-seeking records, the collection includes significant documentation of process of engaging community members, and materials relating to their recommendations in restorative justice, substance abuse projects, facilities, and victim-offender mediation.

The Franklin/Hampshire Health Care Coalition is one of forty grassroots organizations in Massachusetts that allied to form the Massachusetts Campaign for Single-Payer Health Care (Mass-CARE) in 1995. Concerned about the inequities of the U.S. health care system, Mass-CARE has been a key sponsor of the Massachusetts Medicare for All act, which would establish a single payer health care system providing comprehensive health care for all residents of Massachusetts.

The records of the Franklin/Hampshire Health Care Coalition are a reflection of grassroots advocacy in Massachusetts for single payer health care. The collection includes minutes of meetings, background and informational materials, and other documents, including some materials from founding members Arky Markham and Alice Swift.

An author, scholar, and librarian, James Fraser had a voracious intellectual appetite that ranged from visual culture to the inter-war avant garde to Communist-era eastern Europe. Born April 30, 1934, Fraser earning his doctorate in Library Science at Columbia University and enjoyed a career of nearly 50 years in academic libraries. A specialist in international children’s literature, he and Sibylle von Holstein, his wife of 56 years, became known for building research collections at a number of university libraries, drawing upon their extraordinary knowledge of 20th century book arts, graphic design, photography, political ephemera, and East German culture, among other areas. Fraser was also an energetic exibitions curator, often based upon material he had collected. Jim Fraser died at home after a short illness on Nov. 25, 2013.

The product of two active and eclectic collectors, the Fraser collection contains over 1200 imprints on art and design in Communist-era eastern Europe, East Germany, 1960s radicalism, and other subjects, along with ephemera on radical movements in both the United States and Europe.

A voice of the radical working class during the Great Depression, Jack Conroy was the son of a union organizer, born and raised in the mining camps near Moberly, Mo. His novels The Disinherited (1933) and A World to Win (1935) were among the best known works of “proletarian” American fiction to appear in the 1930s.

The Conroy Collection includes a series of 24 letters from Jack Conroy to Lewis Fried, a professor of English at Kent State University and UMass PhD, along with a small number of letters by associates of Conroy, and a selection of publications associated with or including work by him. Of particular interest are Fried’s oral history interviews with Conroy (1971) and Sally Goodman (1978).