Ephemeral Matters
In recent months we have added to the Chapin Library a variety of ephemera from the collection of Henry M. Halsted III, Williams Class of 1948. Most of these items were printed in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, during the Cold War between the Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union and the Western powers led by the United States – a volatile period sadly underrepresented by primary resources in the Chapin.
Among Mr. Halsted’s gifts are two English-language “information bulletins” from 1961, concerning the Soviet-organized World Youth Forum to be held in Moscow, one of a series of forums or festivals called supposedly to foster youth solidarity in the case of peace, but actually to enlist young people in promoting causes of the Soviet Union; two typed letters signed, in Russian, by the Vice-Chairman of the Committee of Youth Organizations of the U.S.S.R., Moscow, January 1960; a mimeographed typed letter signed, in English, from the same source, March 1960; and a mimeographed Appeal of the Plenary Meeting of the Committee of Youth Organizations of the USSR. Mr. Halsted has also given us two good anti-Soviet items, a 1962 pamphlet which exposes the ideological purpose behind the World Youth Festival then recently held in Helsinki, Finland (the cover photo, however, is from the opening ceremony of the festival held in East Berlin), and a “picture story”, Attention Comrades! (1954), which lampoons life behind the Iron Curtain through photographs of the popular Czech comedian Jara Kohout.
In addition, we have been pleased to accept from Mr. Halsted an envelope from May 1930, sent to his father, Henry M. Halsted, Jr. (Williams Class of 1918) in Antwerp from Rio de Janeiro via the renowned airship Graf Zeppelin (LZ 127); and three German stamps in the amounts of 100, 4 million, and 50 million Marks, representing the soaring cost of domestic letter postage – which in fact went much higher still before the year’s end – during the period of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic in 1923. We agreed with the donor that a remarkable amount of political, social, and economic history is bound up in these small packages, and hope that they will help to bring alive to our students some of the thoughts and events of the twentieth century. – WGH
Shown are the cover of World Festival Helsinki 1962 (New York: Independent Research Service, [1962], printed in the Netherlands), and the three German postage stamps from 1923.