Masthead for _Right_ from August 1957.

Yale University Library has recently acquired a full run of Right: A Monthly Bulletin of, by, and for the American Rightwing, an ephemeral newsletter published by Liberty & Property, Inc. of San Francisco.  The newsletters, which date from October 1955-Sepember 1960, are bound together in a quarto volume that includes other pieces of ephemera, including nine tracts created by the publishers of Right, a 1957 directory (with a 1960 addendum) of right-wing groups in the United States, a recruitment flyer for the Northern League: A Society for the Preservation of the Ethnic and Cultural Heritage of the Nordic Peoples, a booklet by Bela Hubbard titled The Hybrid Race Doctrine, and a three-part essay titled Cultural Dynamics.

_First National Directory of “Rightist” Groups_. 3rd edition of 1957. Previously owned by M. Lyle Cashion, who was an oil worker in Houston Texas in the 1950s. He gathered together the materials in this volume.

The purported author of Cultural Dynamics, E.L. Anderson, was really Willis Carto, who was also the driving force behind Right.  Carto founded Liberty & Property, Inc. with the white supremacist Aldrich Blake in 1953 and has been involved with a variety of right-wing groups while managing a large network of right-wing publications and broadcasts for the last sixty years.  He might be most well known for founding Liberty Lobby, a right-wing advocacy group he dominated from 1958 until 2001, when it went bankrupt, as well as his virulent antisemitism and denial of the Holocaust.

For its first year, the publication appears to have been typed and copied for subscribers (who paid $3/year) and had very few images or graphics.  After November 1956, the newsletter takes on a crisper look and feel and contains more imagery, diverse fonts, and stories set off in boxes.  Each newsletter was four to six pages and has a vertical fold, since it was sent in a business-sized envelope to subscribers.

Announcement of William F. Buckley’s _National Review_ in the first issue of _Right_.

Carto provides updates, usually no more than several short paragraphs in length, from other right-wing groups, notes any new publications of interest to his readers, and offers analysis of current events. For example, in the first issue of October 1955, Carto announced the appearance of the William F. Buckley’s National Review; in March 1956, he reported on the incorporation of Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School in Colorado Springs; and in June 1957 he commented critically on the addition of fluoride into the public water supply, a plot, he claims, perpetrated by “the Communist Party and the Aluminum Trust.”

This volume will be available to researchers to use in Manuscripts and Archives after it is processed and cataloged by the library.  If there are any questions about this volume, please direct them to david.gary@yale.edu.

David J. Gary
Kaplanoff Librarian for American History