White, Charles M.

The Charles White Americanism Collection is comprised of books, leaflets, magazines, newsletters, newspapers, pamphlets, and mailings from a variety of far right religious fringe organizations from the mid- to late 1950s until the early 1980s. The focus of the collection, as established by Charles White, was to document political groups who considered themselves to be fundamentalist Christians while promulgating the views of the extreme right. As such, the collection documents a shift from a primarily politically-motivated right wing to a religious-political one.

White documented the combination of long-standing anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic traditions within fringe groups with Communism and the Communist Conspiracy. For example, the Christian Education Association’s Common Sense newspaper contains headlines such as: “Harvard Socialists-Zionists Set Up the New Frontier – Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, Marxists are remaking your Government” (April 15, 1961); the Christian National Socialist White People’s Liberation Army bore the slogan, “America will smash race-mixing and Jew-Communism” (March, 1981). Less extreme organizations like the Christian Crusade, the City Temple Forum, and the American Council of Christian Laymen were primarily concerned with Communism, modernism, and communist conspiracy, especially the infiltration of these doctrines among the American people.

White initiated the Americanism Collection soon after accepting a teaching job at Portland State University (circa 1951-52), but ceased when his responsibilities as an administrator for the school took too much of his time (early 1980s). White organized the collection when he realized no one else was attempting to systematically document the increasing popularity of far right movements in the United States. The collection was housed originally in White's office before he offered it to the university library.