Collecting area: Social change

Richard Wolff delivering a lecture at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2011. Photo by Joel Simpson

Hired to the UMass Amherst Economics Department as part of the “radical package” in 1973, Richard D. Wolff is an influential Marxian economist and professor emeritus of economics. Wolff was born in 1942 to Max and Lieselotte Wolff, who emigrated to the United States during World War II. He earned a BA in History from Harvard, MA in Economics from Stanford, and MA and PhD in Economics from Yale University, during which time he was an instructor at Yale. Before coming to UMass, Wolff also taught at the City College of the City University of New York. Wolff and his colleague and frequent collaborator, Stephen Resnick, wrote prolifically during their career at UMass, developing a new framework for considering political economy. While teaching at UMass, Wolff and his colleagues established the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA), which sponsors publication of the journal Rethinking Marxism. In 2012, Wolff co-founded Democracy at Work, a non-profit producing media that provides education and analysis of capitalism, Marxism, and democratic workplaces.

The Richard Wolff Papers document the professorial and professional career of Wolff through course material, writings and publications, book contracts, floppy disks, and a plethora of correspondence in the form of handwritten letters and printed out emails. There is also a small but significant amount of personal material, including family scrapbooks from Germany and his mother’s manuscript on surviving the Holocaust.

Informally referring to themselves as WAGs (Women Against Garage), Fay Kaynor, Mary Snyder, Merrylees Turner, and Mary Wentworth, opposed the building of a parking garage in the center of Amherst. Together they collected newspaper clippings, reports, minutes of meetings, and flyers that tell both sides of the story, but in particular shed light on the motivations of those opposed to the garage, concerns not well represented in the local paper, the Amherst Bulletin, at the time. Potential problems raised by garage opponents focused on the environmental issues that added traffic in Amherst would introduce, as well as the financial impact both on the town, if the revenues from the garage did not cover the investment or maintenance costs, and on locally-owned businesses that might not be able to afford higher rents if property values near the garage increased significantly.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

In the early 1980s, Paul Connett, a chemist at St. Lawrence University, his wife Ellen, and other environmental activists in upstate New York formed Work on Waste USA to oppose the incineration of solid waste materials. Arguing that incineration was a major source of air pollution, pumping dioxin, mercury, cadmium, and lead into the atmosphere and leaving behind toxic ash and other residues, Work on Waste consulted nationally on issues surrounding incineration, coordinating with dozens of local organizations, and it became an ardent proponent of recycling as an alternative. From 1988-2000, WOW published a pro-recycling, anti-incineration newsletter, Waste Not.

The records of Work on Waste document the national struggle against the incineration of solid waste. With materials from dozens of groups opposing incineration in their communities, the collection provides insight into community activism and grassroots legal and media campaigns. The collection also includes materials relating to Work on Waste’s support for recycling and extensive data on the environmental impact of dioxin and other chemicals, medical waste, and ash landfills, and on the operation of incinerators.

The 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance was held in Durban, South Africa, under the auspices of the United Nations as an international forum to address a range of issues, from the legacy of colonialism and slavery to Zionism. In response to a draft document equating Zionism with racism, both the United States and Israel withdrew from the Conference, and although it is often considered a landmark in the antiracist struggle, political events following the September 11 terrorist attacks have blunted its impact.

This small collection consists of a selection of ephemera and approximately 20 collected by an American attendee at the World Conference.

A 1968 graduate in mathematics from MIT, Ferd Wulkan has been a fixture in activist circles for many years. A member of SDS in college and a rank-and-file clerical union leader at Boston University, Wulkan moved to Amherst in 1989. His passion has been the intersection of the labor movement with other progressive movements; he served for 15 years as a field representative with Locals 509 and 888 of SEIU, working with non-faculty professional personnel at UMass Amherst and Boston, and then as a representative and organizer for the Massachusetts Society of Professors from 2004 to 2016. In 2007, Wulkan became organizing director for the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM), a grassroots advocacy organization for affordable and accessible public higher education.

The Wulkan Collection consists of a fascinating array of material from Leftist and radical political movements during the late 1960s and early 1980s, with an emphasis on the Cambridge-Somerville area. In addition to a rich assemblage of formally published pamphlets and magazines, the collection includes a large number of fliers, handouts, informally published works, and underground newspapers on Socialist, Feminist, and anarchist topics and relating to the war in Vietnam, the labor movement, civil rights, and Black Power. The collection also contains three unprocessed boxes of material related to the clerical/technical union at Boston University. This union was affiliated with District 65, UAW, and District 65 had been part of the Distributive Workers of America, and affiliated with the United Auto Workers in the early 1980s. Related to this collection is a thesis by Leslie Lomasson, who worked at BU and completed her Master’s at UMass Amherst: “We Built the Union Ourselves: A Feminist Model of Unionism at Boston University” (1994).

On June 23, 1946, a young Bulgarian refugee, Theodore Konstantin Yantshev, arrived in Baltimore as a stowaway aboard the S.S. Juliet Victory, intending to seek asylum in the United States. Despite the intervention of influential supporters including John F. Kennedy and Leverett Saltonstall, and the services of the Boston legal firm Powers and Hall, Yantshev was deported to Argentina in 1948. Efforts to secure a legal to the states eventually succeeded, yet poverty prevented Yantshev from following up.

The files retained by Powers and Hall in the case of Theodore Yantshev are focused closely on the plight of a Cold War-era refugee and would-be immigrant from Communist Bulgaria. The collection includes memoranda and summaries of the Yantshev’s case compiled by Powers and Hall and an apparently complete set in incoming and outgoing correspondence from the beginning of the case in 1947 through its final, failed disposition in 1958.

The Yarn Finishers Union was one of several autonomous craft bodies affiliated with the Fall River-based American Federation of Textile Operatives (originally known as the National Amalgamation of Textile Workers). Active in several shops — including Durfee Mills, Tecumseh Mills, Union Belt Co., O.B. Wetherell and Son, and Troy Cotton and Woolen Manufactory — the Yarn Finishers included membership from different segments of the work force, including rollers, quillers, and harness markers.

This slender collection documents two years of labor activism by the Yarn Finishers Union in Fall River, Mass. The minutebook begins in May 1919 as the Yarn Finishers voted to strike over low and unequal wages, particularly those to “girls,” and includes references to elections, financial issues such as the proposition to institute a minimum wage scale, and to settling disputes. The minutes continue through the end of a much quieter year, 1922. The second volume consists of a record of union dues collected, arranged loosely by craft.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

One of the most prominent and vocal scientific critics of fluoridation, the biochemist John Yiamouyiannis (1943-2000) spent over three decades fighting the professional and political establishment. A graduate of the University of Chicago with a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Rhode Island (1967), Yiamouyiannis became interested in the health effects of fluoride while employed as an editor with the Chemical Abstracts Service. His growing opposition to fluoridation, however, led to conflict with his employers and after being placed on probation in 1972, he resigned. Becoming a key organizer in the antifluoridation movement, he served at various times as the Executive Director of Health Action, the Science Director of the National Health Federation, founder and president of the Safe Water Foundation, and editor of the journal Fluoride. He also ran for the Senate from Ohio and twice for the U.S. Presidency on small party tickets, never garnering more than a handful of votes. Yiamouyiannis died of cancer at his home in Delaware, Ohio, on Oct. 8, 2000, at the age of 53.

Offering important insight into the antifluoridation movement in the 1970s through 1990s, the papers of John Yiamouyiannis offer a perspective on an unusually prolific and determined activist. The collection contains a large quantity of research material and correspondence relating to Yiamouyiannis’s antifluoridation work, and perhaps most importantly an extensive series of transcripts relating to civil cases in which he was involved.

The physician Philip E. Zanfagna was a prominent early opponent of fluoridation of the public water supply. Born in Lawrence, Mass., in January 1909, Zanfagna earned his MD at Boston University and spent the bulk of his professional career as a specialist in allergic diseases at Lawrence General Hospital. Placed in command of a military hospital in Tennessee during the Second World War, he became immersed in pharmaceuticals research, through which he became aware of the health effects of fluoride. Over the next three decades, he emerged as a prominent opponent of fluoridation of the public water supply and of the suppression of debate over the topic within the scientific community. He published widely on the topic during the 1960s and 1970s and was recognized as an important antifluoridation activist, becoming a founder and first president of the International Society for Fluoride Research and a leading figure in the Massachusetts Citizens Rights Association. Zanfagna died in June 1982 at the age of 73.

A small but interesting collection, the Zanfagna papers contain a small quantity of correspondence relating to antifluoridation activism and research, 1969-1972; a set of audiotapes of the Frankfurt Conference of the International Society for Fluoridation Research, October 1967; and a handful of research reports of fluoride toxicity. The collection also includes a paperback copy of Zanfagna’s best known book (co-authored with Gladys Caldwell), Fluoridation and Truth Decay (1974).

Sally Zinman, ca. 1985

At the age of 34, Sally Zinman woke up one morning believing that she was not Sally Zinman. Her family put her in the care of psychotherapist John Nathaniel Rosen from 1971 to 1973, during which time Sally suffered physical abuse at the hands of Rosen and his aides, including beatings, restraint, and seclusion. After leaving Rosen’s care–lying and pretending to have recovered so that she could get away–and recovering on an organic farm she bought in Florida, Zinman hired a private investigator to expose Rosen’s abuse. Motivated by her experience, Zinman decided to dedicate her life to fighting for the civil rights of mental patients. She helped found several self-help organizations, including the Mental Patients’ Rights Association in Florida, and–after moving to California–the Berkeley Drop-In Center, the California Network for Mental Health Clients, and the California Association of Mental Health Peer Run Organizations. She was also involved in several national organizations and activism efforts. Zinman remained an active and crucial figure in the psychiatric survivors movement until her death in August 2022.

The Sally Zinman Papers contain material from the earliest years of the psychiatric survivors movement to the present, including documents from the organizations and conferences with which Zinman was involved, newsletters, awards, documents related to her investigation into John Rosen, copies of speeches and presentations, photographs, and memorabilia.