UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Monday, February 8, 1993
5
Collection in extremism
By Jennifer Jacquinot Special to the Kansan
As a child in the 1940s, Laird Wilcox watched his family squabble about political controversy.
His grandparents were Republicans, an uncle was a conservative, two relatives were in the Communist Party and his father was a leftist.
At 14, he read Eric Hoffer's book,
"The True Believer," a study of political and social fanaticism. He said the book helped focus his attention on something he had realized all along — when things go wrong, people cling to beliefs that give their meaning.
By 1965, at 23, he had collected four filing cabinets full of political literature and sold them for $1,000 to the University of Kansas.
Today, the four filing cabinets have grown into a collection of more than 10,000 books, pamphlets and serials, 800 audio cassette tapes and other materials from approximately 8,000 left-wing and right-wing groups, making it the largest collection of extremist literature in the nation.
It is the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, and it occupies more than 2,000 feet of shelving in the University's Kansas Collection in Spencer Research Library.
The collection includes materials
ranging from a counterculture newspaper, "Marijuana Review," to books on the Ku Klux Klan. Conspiracy theories in the collection claim that the Roman Catholic Church was planning to take over the government while President John F. Kennedy was in office. There are satirical articles and underground comic books. There is even a two-inch thick file from the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wilcox's involvement in civil rights during the 1960s.
Wilcox, who lives in Olathe, continues to collect extremist literature, which he donates to KU. In 1979, the collection was estimated to be worth $1 million. Wilcox now estimates its worth to be double that amount.
Now, at the age of 50, Wilcox has a new book on the market, "Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe." In this book, co-authored by John George of Edmond, Okla, Wilcox expounds on his theories of extremism.
"It isn't so much what they believe that interests me, but why," Wilcox said. "How do you account for these people? What are their attractions to these groups?"
Wilcox said he thought psychological motives spurred people to follow extremist movements. These motives can range from envy to the desire to exercise power over others, he said.
accidental." Wilcox said.
In the 1960s, Wilcox was involved in anti-war protests at KU. But then, he said, he took a good, hard look at the reasons people were involved in it.
"There was a large irrational component," he said. "For many people, it was personal rebellion. People are in them for the wrong reasons."
Wilcox has spent 30 years researching extremist movements and getting to know people involved in them. He also has been a member of the American Civil Liberties Union for 30 years and is a member of the Historians of American Communism, a professional group.
Brebecca Schulte, assistant curator of the Kansas Collection, said Wilcox was more of a spectator than an activist.
Schulte said that a cataloging project for the Wilcox Collection took five librarians three years to complete. The project put the collection on a computerized national library database.
Schulte said the collection was a forum for groups to express their right to freedom of speech.
"the purpose of the collection is to bring together, in one place, material that expresses a wide variety of opinion," she said. "We're not condoning what these things are saying, but their right to say them."
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