Call Number:

SCRC 85

Repository:

Temple University Libraries: Special Collections Research Center

Extent:

327.8 linear feet (675 boxes + periodicals)

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

[Description and date of item], [Box/folder number], Franklin H. Littell Papers, SCRC 85, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Date:

1859-2014 (bulk 1934-2009) (inclusive), 2010, and 1934-2009 (bulk)

Creator:

Littell, Franklin H. (Franklin Hamlin), 1917-2009

Form:

Administrative records, Articles of Incorporation, Audiocassettes, Born digital, Bylaws (administrative records), Clippings, Compact discs, Correspondence, Directories, Printed ephemera, Financial records, Floppy disks, Legal documents, Mailing lists, Manuscripts, Membership lists, Minutes (administrative records), Negatives, Newsletters, Newspapers, Objects, Pamphlets, Periodicals, Photocopies, Photographs, Posters, Press releases, Publications (documents), Reports, School records, Sermons, Sound recordings, Speeches (documents), Vertical files, VHS (TM), video recordings (physical artifacts), and Yearbooks

Abstract:

Franklin H. Littell (1917-2009), professor and department head of Temple University's Department of Religion, was a Methodist minister, pacifist, activist, proponent of religious liberty, historian, and supporter of the State of Israel. He advocated against political extremism, was active in the rehabilitation of Germany after World War II, and dedicated himself to the study of the Holocaust. The Franklin H. Littell Papers house a variety of correspondence, research and writing, planning, organizational and administrative records, ephemera and printed materials, collected reference and other papers documenting Littell's work and interests in religious liberty; anti-extremism; interfaith cooperation; church history; Methodism, ministry and the laity; education, especially religion in education; and the study and memorialization of the Holocaust.

Franklin H. Littell (1917-2009), a teacher and ordained Methodist minister, was also a pacifist and social activist, proponent of the Christian laity, advocate for new religious movements, historian, political commentator, and supporter of the State of Israel. He advocated against political extremism, was active in the rehabilitation of Germany after World War II, and dedicated himself to the study of the Holocaust. Among other academic appointments, Littell was professor, and department head of Temple University's Department of Religion between 1969 and 1986.

Littell was born June 20, 1917, in Syracuse, New York, the oldest child of Clair and Lena Hamlin Littell. He and his three sisters, Claire, Marjorie and Eloise, and his brother, Wallace, were raised in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where his father was a professor at Cornell College. The Littells were devoted Methodists, pacifists, and socially conscious. Littell was ordained a Methodist minister as a teenager and graduated with his BA in History and Political Science from Cornell College in 1937.

Littell enrolled in Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1937. There he studied church history with theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, and graduated in Spring 1940. While a student at Union, Littell worked with the youth at the Fort Washington Collegiate Church in New York City and the general congregation of Myrtle Beach Community Church in Connecticut. Following his graduation from Union, he worked as youth minister at the Central Methodist Church in Detroit.

Around 1936, Littell became involved with the National Council of Methodist Youth (NCMY), through which he met his first wife, Harriet Lewis. The NCMY partnered with other prominent peace organizations, including the Youth Committee Against War, for which Littell served as an officer, and the United Student Peace Committee. In his work with these organizations, Littell took a public stand against United States involvement in World War II, and received national attention after delivering testimony before the House Committee on Naval Affairs against increased military spending. In June 1939, Franklin and Harriet Littell, and forty-one other American youth, attended the first International Conference of Christian Youth in Amsterdam and toured Europe, just prior to the start of World War II.

Littell earned a PhD from Yale University in 1946, after working with noted church historians Roland Bainton and Kenneth Scott Latourette. Littell and Harriet then returned to Michigan, when he was hired as Director of the Student Religion Association at the University of Michigan. There he continued to develop his "Tens for Christ," a rubric for small groups to practice their faith outside of service to the church.

In 1949, Littell relocated to Germany, where he worked for the United States Office of Military Government and the High Commission for Occupied Germany. In his role as religious advisor, he worked with the Evangelical (Protestant) Church in Germany, at first in de-nazification and later in anti-communism programs.

Through this work with the US government and later as director of the Franz Lieber Haus in Bonn, Germany, Littell became connected with German Protestant leaders and the lay movement. He helped plan and administer the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag (German Evangelical Church Assembly), an inter-denominational, revival-like convention first held in 1949. He was also involved in the administration of the Evangelische Akademien (evangelical academies), a series of lay centers that linked Protestant faith with everyday life.

Upon returning to the United States, Littell's work centered on his role as a professor and university administrator. Though he spent most of the 1950s in Germany, during the 1952-1953 academic year Littell served as Dean of the Chapel at Boston University. Between 1958 and 1969, Littell held professorships at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he taught for the first time a seminar on the Holocaust and Church Struggle, the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Texas, and the Chicago Theological Seminary. From 1966 to 1969, he was also President of Iowa Wesleyan College.

Littell was wary of any extremist group and broadcasted his concerns in speeches, lectures, books, and newspaper articles. In the 1960s, at Iowa Wesleyan College, he established the Freedom Institute, which encouraged the study of totalitarianism and he served as chairman of the Institute for American Democracy (IAD). The IAD was dedicated to educating against and exposing extremism in American society, particularly on the far right.

At the same time, Littell began work on his book Wild Tongues: A Handbook of Social Pathology (1969). In this volume, he targeted specific extremist groups and individuals, including William F. Buckley, Jr., who later sued him for libel. In Wild Tongues, he also introduced his "Early Warning System," a grid which was designed to analyze and identify potentially totalitarian, genocidal groups or governmental regimes.

Littell joined the Department of Religion at Temple University in 1969. Temple's department was grounded in inter-religious academic cooperation and staffed with professors specializing in a diversity of religious history. He remained at Temple until his retirement in 1986. Both before and after his retirement, Littell also held numerous short term teaching appointments at various universities in the United States and abroad. Most notably, he was granted adjunct status at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Professor of Holocaust Studies at Stockton College in New Jersey.

Littell was a life-long champion of constitutionally protected religious liberty. In the 1980s, he established The Hamlin Institute, which provided a channel through which he could actively fight for that cause. He wrote "Proclaim Liberty," a syndicated newspaper column, and he advocated for the rights of new religious movements. Littell served as a consultant to the Church of Scientology International, becoming involved with several court cases, and participated in Unification Church-sponsored educational tours.

Littell devoted more than fifty years of his life to the study and memorialization of the Holocaust, and it was while he was at Temple that this work gained real momentum. Littell encouraged an interfaith approach to the examination of the Holocaust and its meaning in history, and he established conferences and founded institutes to stimulate that type of analysis.

In 1970, with Hubert G. Locke, a professor at Wayne State University, Littell established the Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and Church Struggle (ASC). The ASC provided a forum for discussion on the Holocaust in the United States. Littell later partnered with Robert Maxwell, British millionaire and media magnate, and his wife Elisabeth, in planning the Europe-based conference, "Remembering for the Future," held in 1988, 1994, and 2000.

In 1975, Littell was involved in organizing the first Philadelphia Conference on the Holocaust, spurring the establishment of the Philadelphia Coordinating Council on the Holocaust. At Temple University, in 1976, Littell founded the PhD major in Holocaust studies and established the National Institute on the Holocaust (NIH), an interfaith education center. A direct result of these efforts was the inclusion of Holocaust education in the School District of Philadelphia's curriculum.

In the 1980s, the NIH changed its name to the Anne Frank Institute. The organization retained its primary purpose of education, and worked towards the creation of a museum. Littell and his second wife, Marcia Sachs Littell, who was Executive Director resigned from the Institute in the late 1980s and then organized the Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights.

Beginning in 1979, Littell served as a member of the Advisory Board to the President's Commission on the Holocaust and as a presidentially appointed member of the subsequent United States Holocaust Memorial Council. This group was tasked with developing a plan for the construction and purpose of a national memorial. Their work culminated fifteen years later, when the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors to the public in 1993.

A prolific writer, Littell wrote or contributed to dozens of volumes and delivered hundreds of papers and addresses on the topics of church and religious history, religious liberty, totalitarianism, interfaith cooperation, extremism, and the Holocaust. Some of his more notable scholarly works, The German Phoenix (1960) and The Crucifixion of the Jews (1975), focus on the long term implications of the church struggle with totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel. He regularly wrote commentary on these issues and others in his syndicated newspaper columns, "Lest We Forget" and "Proclaim Liberty."

The Franklin H. Littell Papers include correspondence; research and writing files; planning, organizational and administrative records; ephemera and printed materials; and collected reference and other papers, documenting the life and work of Franklin Littell. His primary concerns of religious liberty; anti-extremism; interfaith cooperation; church history; Methodism, ministry and the laity; teaching and education, especially religion in education; and the study and memorialization of the Holocaust and German Church Struggle are woven throughout the files. The papers, which span his entire life, offer evidence of his participation and leadership in many activities and organizations with wide-reaching impact.

This collection documents Littell's social activism and participation in the national peace movement in the 1930s and 1940s through his work with the National Council of Methodist Youth and other organizations; his early ministry in New York City, Connecticut, and Detroit, and his life and work in Germany in the 1950s. There is documentation of his role as religious advisor to the United States occupation government as well as his work with the Protestant Churches and laity through records of the Franz Lieber Haus, Evangelical Academies, and the Kirchentag.

Records documenting Littell's long academic career are also included, from his tenure as Dean of the Chapel and professor of Religion at Boston University in 1952 to his decades-long career at Temple University during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as visiting and distinguished professorships at Baylor University, Stockton College, and other schools. Complimentary to that are papers related to his research and writing projects, including papers and correspondence pertaining to his published books, and copies of his published articles, his syndicated column on the Holocaust and related issues, "Lest We Forget," as well as his many speeches and lectures.

Littell's work to promote an interfaith approach to understanding the Holocaust are documented in records related to the establishment of the Annual Scholars Conference, as well as the papers of the Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights and its predecessors, the National Institute on the Holocaust and Anne Frank Institute; Remembering for the Future International Conference; President's Commission on the Holocaust and United States Holocaust Memorial Council; and the Philadelphia Coordinating Council on the Holocaust.

Littell established and directed several centers for the diffusion of information on extremism in the United States, support for the State of Israel, and issues of religious liberty in contemporary society. This collection evidences his work for each of these causes, and offer insight into the various attitudes and actions of the American and international publics on these issues from the 1960s to the 1990s. Of note are papers documenting his run-ins with leaders of the radical right like Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntire, and the John Birch Society in the 1960s, and papers related to his involvements with the Church of Scientology and the Unification Church in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally researchers will find a small collection of national media coverage of the 1993 federal attack on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, as well as Littell's public response to that event.

Littell also keenly observed or maintained short- and long-term affiliations with established religious and other organizations. Organizational affiliations documented in the collection include the Committee on Advancing the Democratic Process, the Association of College and University Religious Affairs, National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, National Council of Christians and Jews, and the United Methodist Church, Board of Christian Social Concerns.

A small collection related to Littell's education and personal life includes papers and keepsakes from his childhood and adult life, as well as correspondence with his family. Early correspondence with his parents, siblings, and his first wife, Harriet, as well as papers related to his education are especially worthwhile.

Researchers interested in particular activities or projects in which Littell was involved are advised to begin by consulting series and subseries associated with relevant organizations and tasks. Researchers should then review folder lists for Series 1: General correspondence; Series 13: Journal; and Series 15: General reference for related records. Refer to the series scope and contents notes and folder lists for more information on the contents and arrangement of each series.

The collection is divided into 16 series. Most of the series correlate with specific periods of time in Littell's life and/or areas of work and interest. The series are further divided into subseries, often based on organizational affiliations.

Series 1: General correspondence, 1940-2009

Subseries 1.1: Correspondence, 1940-1963

Subseries 1.2: Correspondence, 1963-2009

Subseries 1.3: Memoranda, 1956-2004, undated

Subseries 1.4: "Nut File," 1961-1988, undated

Series 2: Youth work, 1934-1991 (bulk 1936-1945)

Subseries 2.1: National Council of Methodist Youth, 1934-1991 (bulk 1936-1941) (Partially digitized)

Subseries 2.2: Other youth organizations, 1936-1950

Subseries 2.3: Ministry and lay training, 1937-1968 (bulk 1937-1945)

Subseries 2.4: Early correspondence, 1938-1941

Series 3: Germany, 1934-2005 (bulk 1949-1960)

Subseries 3.1: General Life in Germany, 1934-1980s (bulk 1940s-1950s)

Subseries 3.2: High Commission for Occupied Germany/Office of Military Government, US, 1946-1953

Subseries 3.3: Franz Lieber Haus, 1951-1959, 1970

Subseries 3.4: Evangelische Akademien (evangelical academies), 1949-2005 (bulk 1949-1966)

Subseries 3.5: Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag (German Evangelical Church Congress), 1947-1991

Subseries 3.6: Ecumenical Association of Academies and Laity Centers in Europe, 1954-1999

Series 4: Academic appointments, 1946-2012 (bulk 1951-1996)

Subseries 4.1: Boston University, 1951-2001 (bulk 1951-1953)

Subseries 4.2: Emory University, Candler School of Theology, 1958-1968 (bulk 1958-1960)

Subseries 4.3: Southern Methodist University, Perkins School of Theology, 1959-1997 (bulk 1959-1962)

Subseries 4.4: Chicago Theological Seminary, 1960-1970

Subseries 4.5: Iowa Wesleyan College, 1966-1976

Subseries 4.6: Temple University, 1968-2004 (bulk 1968-1988)

Subseries 4.7: Stockton College, 1989-2012 (Portions restricted)

Subseries 4.8: Short term teaching appointments, 1946-2002 (bulk 1970-1996)

Subseries 4.9: Student records, 1955-2002 (bulk 1970-1990) (Restricted)  

Series 5: Holocaust remembrance work, 1950-2014 (bulk 1970-2009)

Subseries 5.1: Annual Scholars Conference, 1970-2014 (bulk 1970-2010)

Subseries 5.2: Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights, 1975-2007 (bulk 1976-2000)

Subseries 5.3: Remembering for the Future International Conference, 1985-2000 (bulk 1988-2000)

Subseries 5.4: President's Commission on the Holocaust and United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1978-2006

Subseries 5.5: Philadelphia Coordinating Council on the Holocaust, 1975-1988

Subseries 5.6: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1979-2002

Subseries 5.7: Yad Vashem, 1978-2006

Subseries 5.8: Reference materials, circa 1950-2008

Series 6: Institute for American Democracy, 1949-1980s (bulk 1966-1976)

Series 7: Organized support for the State of Israel, 1969-2008

Subseries 7.1: Christians Concerned for Israel, 1969-1983

Subseries 7.2: National Christian Leadership Council for Israel, 1975-2008

Series 8: Religious Liberty work, 1970-2006 (bulk 1981-1999)

Subseries 8.1: The Hamlin Institute, 1981-1988

Subseries 8.2: Unification church, 1981-2002 (bulk 1981-1988)

Subseries 8.3: American Conference on Religious Movements, 1988-1997

Subseries 8.4: Church of Scientology International, 1970-2006 (bulk 1980-1999)

Series 9: Waco Branch Davidian Disaster, Texas, 1993-2003 (bulk 1993-1996)

Series 10: Small projects file, 1948-2008 (bulk 1955-1995)

Series 11: Professional affiliations, 1950-2008

Subseries 11.1: American Academy of Religion, 1964-2006 (bulk 1972-1993)

Subseries 11.2: Association of College and University Religious Affairs (ACURA), 1959-1994 (bulk 1959-1979)

Subseries 11.3: Foundation for Reformation Research, 1958-1998

Subseries 11.4: Institute for Contemporary Social Problems, 1974-1984

Subseries 11.5: National Council of Churches of Christ, 1950-2002

Subseries 11.6: National Council of Christians and Jews, 1952-1994

Subseries 11.7: United Methodist Church, Board of Christian Social Concerns, 1964-1971

Subseries 11.8: World Council of Churches, 1951-2008

Series 12: Research, writing and speaking, 1938-2006

Subseries 12.1: Books and edited volumes, 1950-2003

Subseries 12.2: Published articles and book reviews, 1937-2004

Subseries 12.3: Early Warning System, 1971-2006

Subseries 12.4: "Lest We Forget," 1978-2002

Subseries 12.5: Speeches, lectures, and article manuscripts, 1938-2006 (Digitized)

Subseries 12.6: Manuscript fragments and loose notes, circa 1950-2000 (bulk undated)

Series 13: "Journal" file, 1936-2008

Subseries 13.1: General journal, 1936-2008

Subseries 13.2: Speaking engagement fliers and other advertisements, 1937-2006

Subseries 13.3: Clippings (featuring Franklin H. Littell and/or his work), 1942-2007

Subseries 13.4: Press releases, 1949-1993

Series 14: Personal and family papers, 1859-2010 (bulk 1934-2000) (Portions restricted)

Subseries 14.1: Education, 1934-2007 (bulk 1934-1949)

Subseries 14.2: Franklin H. Littell personal papers, 1917-2010 (Portions restricted)

Subseries 14.3: Family correspondence, 1930-2008 (Portions restricted)

Subseries 14.4: Harriet Lewis Littell papers, 1917-1979 (bulk 1934-1970) (Portions restricted)

Subseries 14.5: Marcia Sachs Littell papers, 1973-2008 (Portions restricted)

Subseries 14.6: Portraits and snapshots, 1918-2009

Subseries 14.7: Family papers, 1859-1966 (bulk undated) (Portions restricted)

Series 15: General reference, 1863-2006 (bulk 1940-1990)

Subseries 15.1: File 1, 1863-1999 (bulk 1940-1979)

Subseries 15.2: File 2, 1930-2006 (bulk 1940-1990)

Series 16: Periodicals, circa 1900s-2000s