When Edmund Wilson wrote Patriotic Gore, a study of the Civil War, he purposely bypassed official newspaper accounts in favor of letters from soldiers and politicians. This primary material, he felt, gave him a much better sense of the war that he could have gained from more official sources. For anyone wishing to do research into labor history or social history, the FAU library offers a similar opportunity in its Socialist Labor Pamphlets collection, a group of 1,700 late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pamphlets published by a wide variety of socialist groups and their critics, both here and abroad. 

The pamphlets, which have never been fully cataloged, were acquired in the 1960s as a small part of the bulk purchase of materials from bookseller and publisher Burt Franklin. This large overall purchase became the basis of the original library collection at FAU, but the socialist pamphlets themselves were not a high priority for processing in the university’s early years. Nevertheless, scholars have already made significant use of the pamphlets. Dr. Bernard Johnpoll, recently retired professor of Political Science at FAU, made extensive use of the pamphlets in his recently published, monumental 8-volume Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States, a set of which he has donated to our library. Dr. Johnpoll, who also used the Socialist Party records at Duke, the Tamiment Collection at New York University, and a wide variety of other libraries and archives from Boston to California, spent 40 years laboring on this massive, definitive compilation. He found the FAU socialist pamphlets to be among the most useful materials he encountered, providing him with direct evidence of how various groups propagandized, how they perceived themselves, and how they wished to represent themselves to others.

 As we begin to enter the computer age, Dr. Johnpoll says, “It is important to remember that even now, with so much starting to be computerized, there is no alternative to the research libraries and archives which preserve the original documents from which the information on the Internet is derived. We all owe the research libraries a debt which we should repay by supporting these repositories of the world’s knowledge.”