The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has acquired the papers of Mann Randolph Page Hufty, a Washington DC-born insurance executive and financier who also served as the national director of organization for the America First Committee (AFC), an organization that encouraged American non-intervention in European affairs before the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought America into World War II. The collection includes correspondence, newsletters, office files, artwork, and cartoons pertaining to the isolationist movement in America in 1940-41. Hoover Archives also houses the organizational records of the America First Committee and the papers of its founder, Robert Douglas Stuart, Jr., who was a lifelong friend of Mr. Hufty.
Born on July 6, 1907, Mann Randolph Page Hufty, who went by “Page,” was an entrepreneur and noted athlete at an early age. As a champion golfer in his youth he became the youngest golfer ever to win the esteemed North-South amateur golf tournament in Pinehurst, North Carolina. Hufty won the competition in 1926 at the age of eighteen; only one other golfer, a young Jack Nicklaus in 1959, has ever since won the tournament as a teenager. While in his early twenties, Hufty founded Page Hufty Inc., a successful insurance firm that later became part of the Corroon & Black insurance brokerage house. Over the ensuing years Hufty would become the director of dozens of other companies, splitting his time between Washington DC and Palm Beach, Florida.
During the years of intense debate over American involvement in European military matters at the end of the 1930s, Hufty came to believe that US intervention abroad would be a costly mistake in terms of money and lives. He joined the America First Committee and worked tirelessly as its director of national organizing, overseeing recruiting of committee members, a speakers bureau that would organize 126 public addresses and rallies in 32 states, the publishing of newsletters and position papers, the creation of advertisements, the launching of mail campaigns, and managing congressional liaison efforts. Though the America First Committee would be short-lived—established in September 1940 and disbanded in December 1941 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—it nonetheless exerted a significant and forceful influence on American political debate, largely due to its effective organization of mass communication.
The papers of Page Hufty were donated to Hoover by Hufty’s eldest son, John “Jack” Archbold Hufty, a resident of West Palm Beach, Florida. The contents of the collection serve as one of the most important tools available to date for the study of the interventionist/non-interventionist debate that dominated American political conversation during 1940-41.
