Collecting area: Peace

A feminist, filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, writer, and New Yorker, Susan Kleckner helped to define the Feminist Art Movement. Born in 1941, Kleckner was instrumental in uniting Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) with Feminists in the Arts in 1969, and in 1970 she became a founder of the Women’s Interart Center, which still fosters women artists in the performing, visual, and media arts. A talented and prolific visual artist, she produced several important video documentaries during her career, beginning with Three Lives (made in collaboration with Kate Millet in 1970), which is considered the first all-women produced feature documentary. Her work often reflected a feminist commitment to the cause of peace: she participated in and photographed the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in England during the mid-1980s and in 1987, she curated a major year-long installation on Broadway called WindowPeace. A brilliant teacher, Kleckner was the first woman to teach photography at the Pratt Institute and she worked at the International Center for Photography in New York from 1982 until her death in July 2010.

A wide ranging and highly diverse collection, the Kleckner Papers document a life in art and activism. The diaries, letters, notes, and essays in the collection are augmented by hundreds of photographic prints and artwork in a variety of media.

Collection of 38 political buttons donated by Karen Lederer, UMass Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department faculty member, covering several social change issues including: gay rights, political candidates, unions, anti-nuclear activism, women’s rights, campaigns at UMass, racism, anti-war movement, AIDS, single payer health care, the environment, domestic violence, the Equal Rights Amendment, and other assorted events in Western Mass.

In 1967, Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo, former editors of the student newspapers of Amherst College and Boston University, were fired from the United States Student Press Association for their radical views. In response they collaborated with colleagues and friends to found the Liberation News Service, an alternative news agency aimed at providing inexpensive images and text reflecting a countercultural outlook. From its office in Washington, D.C., LNS issued twice-weekly packets containing news articles, opinion pieces, and photographs reflecting a radical perspective on the war in Vietnam, national liberation struggles abroad, American politics, and the cultural revolution. At its height, the Service had hundreds of subscribers, spanning the gamut of college newspapers and the underground and alternative press. Its readership was estimated to be in the millions.

Two months after moving to New York City in June 1968, the LNS split into two factions. The more traditional Marxist activists remained in New York, while Bloom and Mungo, espousing a broader cultural view, settled on farms in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont. The story of LNS, as well as of the split, is told in Mungo’s 1970 classic book Famous Long Ago. By 1969 Bloom’s LNS farm, though still holding the organization’s original press, had begun its long life as a farm commune in Montague, Mass. Montague (whose own story is told in Steve Diamond’s What the Trees Said) survived in its original form under a number of resident groups until its recent sale to another non-profit organization. Mungo’s Packer Corners Farm, near Brattleboro, the model for his well-known book, Total Loss Farm, survives today under the guidance of some of its own original founders.

The LNS Records include a relatively complete run of LNS packets 1-120 (1967-1968), along with business records, miscellaneous correspondence, some artwork, and printing artifacts, including the LNS addressograph.

Cover of Liberation News Service issue 441, June 10, 1972.

Founded in 1967, Liberation News Service, an alternative news agency, issued twice-weekly packets aimed at providing inexpensive images, articles, and art reflecting a countercultural outlook. First from its office in Washington, D.C., and then from New York City, LNS provided underground and college papers around the globe with radical and unconventional coverage of the war in Vietnam, global liberation struggles, American politics, and the cultural revolution. Two months after moving to New York City in June 1968, LNS split into two factions, with the sides mirroring common points of dispute within the New Left. The more traditional political and Marxist activists remained in New York, while those more aligned with the counterculture and “hippie” movement settled on farms in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont. For a year each faction put out competing versions of LNS news packets, until the winter conditions and small staff at the farm in Montague caused their production to end in January 1969. LNS-New York continued its production of unique leftist coverage of national and international issues throughout the 1970s, closing in 1981.

The LNS-NY Records include a relatively complete run of packets 102-701 (1968-1975) sent to the subscribing underground press newspaper the Indianapolis Free Press. Some packets and years are more complete than others, and these New York packets are especially dense with photographs compared to earlier LNS packets from before the split in 1968. The collection also includes a small selection of other artwork, articles, and materials kept by the Indianapolis Free Press.

A World of Possibilities logo, ca. 1998

Founded in 1995, by founder and former executive director Mark Sommer, the Mainstream Media Project (MMP) was a nonprofit public education organization focused on print and broadcast media about creative approaches in achieving peace, security, and sustainability in an interdependent global community. Until its closing in early 2014, it was particularly involved with placing top policy analysts, social innovators, and on-the-ground organizers on radio and television stations across the country and globe. One such project, A World of Possibilities radio show, founded in 2001, was an award-winning one hour weekly show hosted by Sommer. A program “of spirited global conversations,” featuring interviews searching for understanding of, and solutions to, longstanding global public affairs challenges, A World of Possibilities was nationally and internationally syndicated until it ceased broadcasting in 2011.

The MMP Records contain over ten linear feet of CD and DVD masters of uncut interviews and produced radio shows. Shows, including Heart of the Matter and A World of Possibilities, explore promising new thinking and experimentation in fields ranging from energy, food, water, and wilderness to human rights, global security, and public health, and include interviews with leading experts and innovators, such as Studs Terkel, Pete Seeger, Laurie Garrett, Wangari Maathai, Frances Moore Lappe, Howard Gardner, Lily Yeh, Robert Reich, Majora Carter, Van Jones and many more. The collection also contains MMP business files, consisting of correspondence, reports, articles, grant information, and organizational materials.

Ruth Mansberg was a writer, editor, poet, mother, and ardent peace activist. She worked with several civic, social, service, and political organizations dedicated to social change including a Pound Ridge, NY Nuclear Freeze chapter, the League of Women Voters, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She lived with her husband Hyman Mansberg and children Laura and Daniel in Pound Ridge, NY until moving to Chapel Hill, NC in 1991. After sidelining a writing career due to family obligations, she returned to writing upon her children entering adulthood. She enrolled in a continuing education writing course at the University of Connecticut, Stamford, where, thanks to a teacher there named Mel Goldberg, she picked up freelance work with two trade journals, Dental Management and Optometric Management. In 1971 she pitched a story to Dental Management on Bernard Bender, a 52 year old Los Angeles dentist who was convicted of helping young men avoid the draft by applying braces to their teeth. He was convicted in February of 1972 and sentenced to 15 years in Federal prison, but was later released in late 1973. Mansberg worked for a number of newspapers and trade publications and co-authored two books. She died in November of 2000 in Chapel Hill

This small collection consists of Mansberg’s correspondence and research materials related to her article, “The Strange Case of Dr. Bender”, which was published in the June 1972 issue of Dental Management. This includes correspondence between Mansberg, Dr. Bender and his wife Bea discussing the article and other things. In addition, there is correspondence with Mel Goldberg, the editor of Dental Management and others, whom she wrote for information about the case. There is also a reporter’s transcript of the trial and the testimony of dentist Spiro J. Chacanos.

In the early 1980s Chuck Matthei, in collaboration with Gail Daneker and Cheryl Fox, conducted approximately 40 taped interviews with the founders of the revolutionary pacifist and tax resistance group, Peacemakers. The interviewees included: Ernest and Marion Bromley, Maurice McCraken, and Wally and Juanita Nelson. Matthei was a pacifist and activist and from 1980-90 was the Executive Director of the land trust/community loan organization Institute for Community Economics (ICE), then based in Greenfield, MA and now located in Springfield, MA. Matthei then went on to found Equity Trust in 1991, which focused on alternative models of land tenure and economic development across the U.S., Central America and Kenya.

The interviews discuss the founding and development of Peacemakers, a decentralized, self-described “revolutionary pacifist” organization which believed in economic and social community uplift through resource sharing and cooperation as a way to dismantle capitalistic lifestyles. They spread the idea of peacemaking and developed non-violent methods of opposing war through various forms of non-cooperation and to advocate unilateral disarmament and economic democracy. The group manifested this through tax resistance, refusing to serve in the armed forces, refusing to make or transport weapons of war, and refusing to pay taxes for war purposes.

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

A lifelong activist for social and environmental justice, Kevin McVeigh was among the founders of two prominent antinuclear and environmental organizations in Northern California, the Pelican Alliance (1978) and Interhelp (1981). After relocating to Massachusetts, he continued in environmental activism, founding the Green River Center in Greenfield in 1987, but in response to the intense public health crisis, he gradually shifted his focus to become an advocate for persons with HIV/AIDS. As a founder of the AIDS Community Group of Franklin County (Mass.), he has coordinated AIDS services for Tapestry Health, a not-for-profit organization providing affordable health care to in Western Massachusetts.

The McVeigh Papers document a career as a committed antinuclear activist and advocate for persons with HIV/AIDS. The collection includes organizational materials from each of the groups McVeigh helped found: The Pelican Alliance, Interhelp, the Green River Center, the AIDS Community Group of Franklin County, and Tapestry Health, as well as correspondence, newspaper clippings, journals and magazines related to the issues concerning, notes from HIV/AIDS caregivers’ conferences, materials relating to men’s support groups, and other material related to environmental protection and anti-war activism. Finally, the collection includes audio files of an oral history (approximately two hours) conducted with McVeigh in July 2010, and a small collection of antinuclear books from small publishing houses.

Born in 1930 in Delaware, Ohio, Margaret Theodora “Teddy” Milne, graduated from Boston University in 1952 before attending the University of Paris in 1953-1954 for post-graduate studies. Milne moved to Northampton, Mass. in 1959 to teach at the Northampton School for Girls. She married Alexander W. Milne, general manager of radio station WHMP, in 1965 and together the couple had three sons: Timmon, Peter, and James. Milne worked as a writer, serving as a reporter and copy editor at the Daily Hampshire Gazette, before establishing and editing two journals focused on peace: Laser, a children’s newsletter, and Compassion Magazine. She owned and operated the Pittenbruach Press, which published her journals as well as several book she authored, including Peace Porridge (v. 1-3, 1987-1995), War is a Dinosaur (1987), Solo Publishing (1990), Mooncakes and Flower Beans (1994), and Calvin Coolidge Doesn’t Live Here Any More (1994), and contributed articles, stories, and crossword puzzles to magazines and newspapers.

As an active author and peace activist, the Teddy Milne Papers cover all of her primary passions from parenting and teaching to publishing and anti-nuclear activism. The collection contains photographs and newsletters from her days as a teacher at the Northampton School for Girls as well as articles and columns she prepared for the Daily Hampshire Gazette. There are extensive records documenting the Pittenbruach Press, which Milne operated, including materials related to the journals and books she published. A series of letters along with files related to committee work and Milne’s membership in Quakers United in Publishing (QUIP), reveal the important role her Quaker faith played in her life.

A writer, educator, and activist for human rights and social justice, Ward Morehouse was a prominent critic of corporate power and globalization. Raised in a family of progressive political economists and academics in Wisconsin, Morehouse began his research in international political economy while a student at Yale (BA 1950, MA 1953) and embarked on a standard academic career path. After teaching political science at New York University for a time, he became director of international education at the Center for International and Comparative Studies in 1963, building a particularly strong program in India. However in 1976, conservative opposition to his political views led Morehouse to leave for a new post as president of the Council on International and Public Affairs (CIPA), a human rights organization he had helped found twenty years before. Throughout, he remained an activist at heart. Galvanized by the 1984 industrial disaster in Bhopal, India, he organized the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, and went on to form or work with many other organizations seeking to resist corporate power and build democracy, including the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) and the Permanent People’s Tribunal, operating the radical Apex Press. Morehouse died in June 2012 at the age of 83.

The Morehouse collection is a massive archive documenting six decades of research, writing, and activism. A prolific writer and editor, Morehouse left a deep record of his activities, his research and writing on corporate power, and the full breadth of his commitments in labor relations, alternative economics, “people’s law,” and peace.