THE HISTORICAL ARCHIVES OF THE LABADIE COLLECTION

KEEPING ANARCHY IN ORDER

By Stephanie Kadel-Taras

Images courtesy of Labadie Collection unless otherwise noted

Photo by Paul Jaronski, U-M Photo Services Herrada's mission is to explore expression that 'criticizes anything related to the status quo.'

When Julie Herrada is walking on the U-M campus and somebody hands her a flyer, she doesn't drop it in the nearest garbage can or wad it up and stuff it in her pocket. To Herrada, curator of the Labadie Collection in the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, any flyer about current social issues or a student demonstration is potentially a historical document. She takes it back to her office and considers whether it should be cataloged and preserved.

Flyers on the street are a minor source of material for the Labadie Collection, which is the largest holding of social protest literature in the world. But collecting such flyers is an example of the living quality of this library, where users can review original documents from the turn of the century as easily as today's "'zines." Pronounced "zeens," from fan-zines, these are self-published magazines on sex, music, politics, television, movies, work, food, etc., and reproduced at copy shops or on the sly at work and distributed through mail order and word of mouth.

Open to the public, the Labadie is a magnet for scholars who study anarchist history, liberation movements, socialism, communism and radical literature on both the extreme left and right. But more than its unusual and sometimes controversial content, the Labadie is a keeper and maker of history, an archive of lives just waiting to be rediscovered and reanimated by today's patrons.

About half of the researchers using the Labadie during the school year are U-M undergraduates. Lately, they've been particularly interested in the 1960s student protests and sit-ins. "Collecting done at that time is really starting to pay off now," says Herrada, noting that the Labadie has the best collection in the country of underground newspapers from the '60s and '70s.

Other scholars regularly come from far away. Sinead McEneaney traveled from the National University of Ireland last fall for her dissertation research on women's leadership roles in the US and French student movements in the '60s. The Labadie gave her access to correspondence and pamphlets ranging from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the left-wing organization founded by U-M students, to the Young Americans for Freedom (a right-wing student group).

McEneaney says it thrilled her to handle items like the SDS manifesto "The Port Huron Statement" and a letter written by alumnus President Gerald R. Ford '35. "I thought, 'Oh my god, Gerald Ford touched this paper,'" she says, laughing. "I guess it's kinda sad getting a buzz out of touching a piece of paper."

C O L L E C T I N G   H I S T O R Y

Located in the Special Collections department on the Hatcher Library's seventh floor, the Labadie Collection is mostly hidden from view despite its constantly

	Unusual publications with small press runs are a Labadie specialty.

growing trove of more than 40,000 books, 9,000 serials and 6,000 vertical files (newspaper clippings, leaflets and so forth), not to mention boxes and boxes of posters, buttons, pins, medals and various oddments. Patrons work in an elegant reading room graced by large windows and plush carpeting where librarians bring requested items in exchange for a photo ID. Behind the closed door is a huge repository of well-organized archives. Periodicals from the 1920s and '30s pack long metal shelves, while the colorful titles of more recent serials shout for attention: Lesbians on the Loose, Working for the Man, In Defense of Animals, Alternative Family, Green Revolution and The Good, the Bad and the Angry. Cabinets swell with photographs of labor leaders, suffragists and co-op farmers. Shallow drawers hold posters announcing 1960s anarchist gatherings. Non-acidic paper boxes preserve original typed and handwritten letters by Emma Goldman, Langston Hughes, Upton Sinclair, Mahatma Gandhi and thousands more.

"We try to go as far as we can into most radical movements," Herrada says, "or what society deems as radical at the time." For example, she explains, "Gay causes were seen as more radical a few decades ago than now."

Herrada attends many conferences and book fairs to seek out new acquisitions, and is occasionally approached by owners or dealers looking to donate or sell the papers and correspondence of radical figures in history. "We don't collect everything we can find on every topic," Herrada notes, but she'll explore each possibility "if it criticizes anything related to the status quo."

Whatever the issue, the Labadie is mostly concerned with whether the material will be valuable for research and is unlikely to be found in other libraries. She admits that decisions about what to collect require subjective judgment. "Sometimes I have to project into the future," she says, to guess what might interest the next generation of researchers.