A conservative's mother lode - A Pasadena woman carefully collected anti-communist era artifacts. Now they are at the Huntington, prized by scholars.
Historian Michelle Nickerson still recalls with delight and awe the day she first visited a Pasadena house stuffed with a vast collection of political pamphlets, books and clippings documenting conservative and anti-communist causes since the 1940s.
"My heart was jumping out of my chest. I could not believe it," said Nickerson, now an American history professor at the University of Texas in Dallas. "It was one of those moments that you only get a few of in the course of research. I thought: Holy cow, I have found the mother lode, not to mention I found a really interesting person."
That person was Marie Koenig, a political activist who collected diligently for five decades. Nickerson's meeting with her eventually led the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino to acquire Koenig's immense trove two years ago and more recently to open it to scholars interested in the Cold War, religious right and similar topics. The result is shedding new light on conservative women in the Southland and their role in such causes as Ronald Reagan's elections to the governorship and presidency.
Koenig, who died in 2003 at 84, collected as a serious ideological pursuit, not for sentimental keepsakes. Her family and the academics who met her said she built a paper trail to what she and like-minded activists considered a communist threat and to other hot issues of that era.
The archive includes programs from the 1964 Republican Convention, where Koenig was happy to see Barry Goldwater nominated to run for president. A 1968 book is inscribed by conservative writer William F. Buckley "To Mr. and Mrs. Walter Koenig with great and long-standing admiration." Newsletters from the 1950s denounce President Eisenhower as "an appeaser" and California Gov. Pat Brown as a "communist apologist."
So she and her friends could study opposing opinions, Koenig also saved socialist newspapers along with magazines of the John Birch Society, the ultra-right group that she considered too extreme.
"The thing I find fascinating is these women were intelligent, intellectual advocates. They were prepared and knowledgeable. They weren't afraid of argument and discussion, unlike today, when people are so polarized they won't even talk things out," said Alan H. Jutzi, the Huntington's chief curator of rare books. Shortly before she died, Koenig approved Jutzi's plan for the Huntington to buy her collection. The deal was completed with her estate for what he described as a five-figure price.
