The write stuff: U.S. serial print culture from conservatives out to neo-Nazis

Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Chip Berlet

WHAT IS THIS STUFF CALLED?

Librarians are faced with the problem of what to call serials from the rivulets, back eddies, and swamps of the political and intellectual spectrum. Various terms used have included alternative, dissident, oppositional, "ephemera," "fugitive literature," and "little magazines." Danky (in press) prefers the term "oppositional press" as an umbrella way to refer to "nonstandard, non-establishment publications which advocate social change through deed or idea." He admits this is a "relational definition" in which the "oppositional press" is contrasted against "the mainstream press, the proclaimed voice of the majority."

As ideological winds buffet the body politic, however, what were once oppositional serials sometimes move from the margins to the mainstream. This is clearly the case with the National Review magazine and the Human Events newspaper. Editors and writers for both publications now regularly appear on network news programs as political commentators, an idea that would have been considered alarming in the 1950s. Note that William E Buckley's Firing Line television program did not appear until 1966, two years after the Goldwater presidential campaign demonstrated that conservatives were not all vestigial troglodytes, despite the common characterization of them by many liberal periodicals and pundits at the time.

This migration also goes the other way. Consider the case of paleoconservative journalist Samuel Francis, booted from the nation's capital and the Washington Times daily newspaper in 1995 and sent to the woodshed of the oppositional press for rhetoric deemed too blatantly white supremacist. Until his death in 2005, Francis continued publishing in a variety of right-wing oppositional serials, including Citizens Informer newspaper (Council of Conservative Citizens); Chronicles magazine (Rockford Institute); and Occidental Quarterly, a journal celebrating white culture. In a similar fashion, author Joseph Sobran was exiled from the National Review for antisemitism, and then he turned to writing for oppositional periodicals ("Dirty Dozen," 2006).

A BRIEF MAGICAL HISTORY TOUR

There was a sharp break before and after WWII in the nature of the U.S. political right. "In the early twentieth century, there was no such thing in American politics as a conservative movement," Judis (2001) explains. "The right was an unwieldy collection of anti-Semites, libertarians, fascists, racists, anti-New Dealers, isolationists, and Southern agrarians who were incapable of agreeing on anything" (p. 142). It can be hard to imagine today, but as an example, John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, was so embedded in the normative white supremacist worldview in the 1930s that he saw no problem with describing southern wage earners as "almost wholly of one blood, one God, and one language.... No people on earth love individual liberty, or will make greater sacrifices for it, than ... those proud Anglo-Saxon elements who constitute the working army of this homogeneous section of the nation" (Edgerton, 1930, p. 6).