April Third Movement

It could probably be conservatively stated that Franklin, in his position of Associate Professor of English at Stanford University, represents one of the most militant radical extremists on American campuses, and his background has been well documented publicly.

To my knowledge, the trove of FBI documents pertaining to H. Bruce Franklin that was released by the Colorado ACLU in October, 1976 has heretofore not been made available on the World Wide Web. So I have sorted and scanned Pacific Studies Center's collection. The descriptions here are for identification purposes only.

However, the original documents, many of which have had substantial text redacted, are instructive. Either the FBI in the latter years of J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure as Director was incredibly incompetent and/or the documents released by the ACLU represent a small fraction of the material collected by the FBI.

One didn’t have to be a member of any of the organizations that Bruce led to know his views. Indeed, Bruce’s perspective on Stanford, the Vietnam War, and American business were shared by hundreds, and eventually thousands of local activists who did not share his particular approach to fundamental change.

Obviously, the emergence of digital communications and data storage has transformed the way the FBI and similar agencies collect information, but I am guessing that today they still have limited understanding of the movements that they monitor.

Lenny Siegel