Good morning, Peter! I think that you make a very good point in noting that the Tea Party movement should be documented and the archives of the movement preserved. It's an important political phenomenon that has had major and dramatic effects on recent American politics. It deserves to have its activities, agendas, personalities, and the actions of its funding organizations fully documented. And I would hope that institutions would recognize the TP as something worth archiving.
However, I'm not sure the situation is as conspiratorially-minded as you seem to imply. Perhaps there are biases of archivists against the politics of the Tea Party (just as there are no doubt biases against those of the Occupy movement). But unless somewhere there's a secret World Council of Archivists that is ordering archivists and institutions NOT to collect Tea Party documentation, this seems to me to be a failure of individual archivists and institutions and records creators, not an indictment of group bias.
Archivists are, in some ways, captives of the collecting policies of their institutions. Institutions collect certain things and do not collect others, and archivists - even if they have a personal interest in collecting materials devoted to certain subjects - may not have the freedom, the time, or the available resources to collect those officially for their repositories. Collecting the vast documentation of the Tea Party movement - which often crosses state or regional boundaries - is an endeavor that a lot of institutions may not feel is worth their time and effort because they do not collect political materials. I'm sure that the same criteria would apply to the archives of the Occupy movement. Archives must be matched to the appropriate institutions, and it's unfair to say that we need to "put aside our biases" as if it were a simple matter of just acquiring materials regardless of our collecting strategies and policies.
There are institutions out there that explicitly collect political materials (and even those, like the Hoover Institution, that are known for conservative slants and would, I assume, have a vested interest in collecting Tea Party materials). Why not reach out *directly* to those institutions and ask them whether they collect TP archives and if not, why not?
Or, alternatively, you might contact your local Tea Party representatives and ask them whether they have archives they want to see preserved. If an archivist DOES have the freedom to acquire materials, then he/she should strive to be proactive about it. Contact the relevant record creators and offer them suggestions about possible homes for their archives. Are you actually collecting these TP materials yourself, Peter? I assume so, or at least that you're interested in doing so: let *your* institution become the primary home for Tea Party materials and thereby help preserve the history of the movement.
The problem with archiving the Tea Party as a whole, as opposed to the Occupy movement, it seems to me, is that the TP is a combination of rich and powerful foundations and other funding organizations (which, one assumes, archive their own materials privately if at all), and individual or small group efforts on the ground, with whom it can be difficult to contact or establish a solid working relationship. This dichotomy can make it a challenge to initiate an archiving strategy. But, it's true, we should try to do so.
My concern is that you seem to be saying that "liberal-bias" archivists are somehow blocking the archiving of the TP, as if they are somehow preventing "conservative-bias" archivists from doing their jobs. If a movement is important and significant enough, it will find its archivists. They are out there, and if the TP movement is not yet being documented, I think it more realistic to ascribe this to the absence of an appropriate institution or to obstreperousness on the part of the amorphous TP movement itself rather than a collective refusal by archivists to document it.
As archivists, we acquire and preserve materials all the time of causes and organizations to whom we may personally object. The Labadie Collection of anarchist and other radical material at the University of Michigan is an example of a collection built by archivists whom, I assume, in many cases do not agree with the ideas of the people they document. The Holocaust Museum collects materials from the Nazi Party, although I doubt very much that anyone there supports Nazi "ideas". Heck, here at Texas A&M University we have in our collections a number of Ku Klux Klan robes, but I can assure you that no one here at our library is a Klansman or supports the Klan. Archivists can and do overcome their biases in the name of a full and lasting documentary record. Let those unbiased archivists interested in the TP - and whose institutions ALLOW FOR THIS KIND OF ACQUISITION - contact the relevant creators and start a collection.
Be well,
Jeremy Brett, C.A.
Assistant Professor and Processing Archivist
Curator, Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection
Cushing Memorial Library and Archives
Texas A&M University
5000 TAMU
College Station, TX 77843-5000
jwbrett@library.tamu.edu
(979) 845-1951
You deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve.
-Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra, December 24, 1798