University Daily Kansan / Wednesday, August 22, 1990
13
Former KU student pursues info on political movements
The Associated Press
College students often mistakenly call Laird Wilcox "professor."
He looks the part with his graying beard and his corduroy sports coats with patches on the elbows. And he has a vast knowledge of political groups.
But Wilcox isn't a professor of political science, although for 30 years he's gathered and studied pamphlets, letters, books and other remnants of extreme left and right political movements
Wilcox, 47. Olathe, has written guides to tracking down the radical left and right and often is called upon for advice in medical science classes at universities.
"Extremism is a part of the American experience." Wilcox says as he thumbs through a thin red pamphlet with a soldier and swastika on the cover. "Although extremist movements have formed in the United States . . . the influence of extremist movements here has never even approached its influence in other countries."
In 1965, while Wilcox was a student at KU, he took four file drawers of his political pieces and sold them to the school's Spencer Library.
He now donates the writings to the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements at KU, which was cataloged from 1986 through 1989, is listed in a database available to libraries nationwide, said Rebecca Schulte, assistant curator of the Kan-zen Museum, which houses the Wilcox items.
Other colleges and some historical societies in the United States have
similar collections of either left or right political movements, but not both, Ms. Schulz said.
The collection covers the 1980s to the present and now holds about 4,100 journals, 5,500 books and pamphlets about political movements, their leaders and followers: 700 audio tapes of lectures, speeches, meetings, debates and radio talk shows, and 100,000 items of correspondence, brochures, catalogs, flyers, broad sheets, posters and clippings.
About 65 percent of the items are right wing, 35 percent are left wing, and more than 7,500 groups are represented, Wilcox said.
He gathered the items by writing to political groups, picking up literature when he traveled, buying remnants of houses and attending group rallies.
Wilcox calls the collection a 'monument to the wide and diverse political culture of the United States and to our tradition of political and
Allen Cigler, a political science professor at KU, refers students to the Wilcox collection for their research papers.
"One student was looking at how the old right was obsessed with communism and how they became more concerned about affirmative action. The student moved from what they saw as an external problem to an internal one."
Wilcox studied sociology and psychology while attending KU from 1963 to 1967 and was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society, the Congress for Racial Equality and the American Civil Liberties Union.
He was with SDS during rites at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and in the mid-60s he marched with CORE in Washington, D.C.
"There were some hard-core communities in SDS, while others were liberals or reformists," he said. "I left in 1966 because they were getting into violence and drugs — it was just starting to get bad."
He once was on the Lawrence ACLU board of directors and has been a member of the group for 30 years. He's chairman of Civil Liberties Special Interest Group, a national organization for free speech.
He calls himself an 'old-fashioned, free-speech liberal' and says he started his political training at an early age.
Wilcox, an only child, grew up in California during the 1960s and often found aunts and uncles, his parents and grandparents debating McCarthyism, unionization and foreign policy.
"My grandparents were Republican, my father was leftist, one aunt and uncle were active in the Communist Party, and uncle and uncle were conservative," he said.
"I got to listen to the conversation, and I would wonder what it was that got people so upset." Wilcox said. "I didn't want them to hear me, with, but I had politics to listen to."
When he was 14 years old, he found some explanation as to why people are drawn to political idealism Reading Eric Hoffer's "True Believer," a book about political crusades and fanatics who launch them, drew Wilcox into his lifelong interest.
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