The 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill promoted me to take a look through the Hall-Hoag collection to find an item relating to the spill. However, I came across something of a surprise that I wanted to share. The Exxon Pipeline Company printed a newsletter called The Liner and I was able to find a copy of it in the collection. Corporations like Exxon often have publications and Gordon Hall collected many of them. I believe that his reasoning was two-fold. 1) Many corporations were the target of other extremist groups and would publish responses. 2) Many corporations were involved in politics and had agendas to promote, but the item shared today does not quite fall into either category.

When I located the item I was expecting it to be about the Exxon Company and most likely pertaining to some aspect of the oil business. It is really just a showcase for an employee of the Exxon Pipeline Company,  Norma Gabler who edited and wrote textbooks in Texas on the side job. Gabler’s work made her a prominent figure in education and she became somewhat controversial for her conservative views of education believing that “modern education was designed to undermine traditional, moral absolutist education.”

My guess is that Gordon Hall collected this item because he was interested in learning more about Gabler. It was a surprise because it seems unusual that he was able to locate this profile in a fairly obscure publication. This item also showcases how difficult it can be to classify the items in the collection without looking at them. The item is listed on an inventory as The Exxon Pipeline Company because they published the pamphlet, but the item really has nothing to do with oil or Exxon. What we really have here is something that would interest someone researching education in the 20th century in the U.S., but would be very difficult to find. Considering that there are 170,000 folders in the Hall Hoag Collection, it is not possible to spend this amount of time on each of them providing the somber proof that although we are working to make this collection visible, there were always be some aspects of it that remain hidden.

The Liner Cover (March 1973)

The Liner Inside (March 1973)

The Bohemian Grove Action Network was founded in 1980 in Occidental, California. A prominent member of the group, Mary Moore states that the purpose is “to expose that there is a ruling class in this country, and who they are.”[1] It is hard to determine how many members are in the group but it fits into a larger movement of conspiracy groups that in their most extreme cases work to expose The New World Order, with varying theories on who the New World Order is.  

Specifically The Bohemian Grove Action Network protests against the Bohemian Club, which is a yearly meeting of some of the most powerful men in the world in Monte Rio, California.[2]  Formed in 1872 the Bohemian Club is an all-male invitation only group that has included every Republican and some Democratic U.S. presidents since 1923, many cabinet officials, directors and CEOs of large corporations including major financial institutions. 

Groups like The Bohemian Grove Action Network believe that these meetings are being held to make policy decisions and manipulate world affairs.  Moore believes that the Bohemian Club serves as an opportunity for powerful men to make back door deals. More extreme groups see the Bohemians as satanists who rule the world and make human sacrifices. Although many members are powerful people The Bohemian Club seems mostly to function as a vacation retreat for powerful executives with some strange traditions. One such tradition is the Cremation of Care[3], which involves dark hooded figures paddling boats across a lake and burn effigies in front of a 40-foot owl shrine.

There is really not enough space here to expand on this further, but there are extensive conspiracies developed around the Bohemian Club. I suggest trying the Jon Ronson book “Them: Adventures with Extremists” in which he covers the Bohemian Club in a chapter or this video documentary also made by Ronson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dahQCEzjkfM. 

Bohemian Grove Action Network (1984)

Weathermen Clipping (Boston Herald 1980)

On March 6, 1970, a bomb went off in a Greenwich Village apartment in New York. The bomb detonated accidentally as it was being constructed by members of the Weather Underground. Three members of the group (Ted Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins) were killed in the explosion. Two other members Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson were at the scene of the crime but avoided prosecution as fugitives for ten years.

The Weather Underground existed from 1969 until 1977 and functioned as an extremist left-wing, anti-imperialist and communist group known for a string of bombings throughout the 1970s including the detonation of bombs at the Pentagon and New York City police headquarters. The group formed as a faction of the Student for a Democratic Society and as some points aligned itself to the Black Power Movement. The group became very well known in popular culture and was very active in the 1970s. The group eventually dissolved due to pressures from the federal government and internal fracturing.

Read more about the  more information on the Weather Underground on Wikipedia. I have included a clipping from the Boston Herald from July 1980 that outlines Cathy Wilkerson’s surrender to the police ten years after the apartment bombing.

There are over 60 boxes of newspaper clippings in the Hall-Hoag Collection. Many of them are unlabeled and very hard to process. Even at the end of this project most of the newspaper clippings will be unavailable for research because it would take far too much time and effort to organize them. In addition, items like the image at this post can be found in the Boston Herald’s archives. I chose a clipping today to show the scope of Gordan Hall’s work. He closely followed the mentions of extremist groups in publications throughout the country. For example, the folder this item came from had clippings about the Weather Underground from 19 different newspapers from Mississippi, Florida, Delaware, Massachusetts and many other. It must have taken considerable effort to find all of these clippings at the time considering they most likely had to be collected in their home state and shipped to Hall or collected by Hall on location.