Activism and Controversies
Following the end of the war, Archie Roosevelt formed the investment firm of Roosevelt and Cross, a brokerage house specializing in municipal bonds. It is still a going concern with offices in New York City, Providence, Buffalo and Hartford.
During the early 1950s, Archie became affiliated with a variety of right wing organizations and causes. He joined the John Birch Society, and was the founder of the controversial Veritas Foundation, dedicated to the routing out of presumed socialist influence at Harvard and other major colleges and universities. Writing in the book America's Political Dynasties (Doubleday, 1966), Stephen Hess commented: "Archie Roosevelt has, in recent years, added the family's name to many ultra-rightist causes. As a trustee of the Veritas Foundation he was a leader among those seeking to root out subversion at Harvard. He also sent a letter to every U.S. Senator, stating 'modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States.' Present civil rights difficulties he blamed on 'socialist plotters.'" Roosevelt also edited 1968's incendiary Theodore Roosevelt On Race, Riots, Reds, Crime. and was the chief sponsor behind "The Alliance," a short-lived organization of the 1950s.
In 1954, when the Theodore Roosevelt Association made a decision to award the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Public Service to black diplomat Ralph Bunche, Archie loudly protested the award. He even went so far as to write and publish a 44-page pamphlet that attempted to prove Bunche had been working as an agent of the "International Communist Conspiracy" for more than two decades.
In his introduction to Zygmund Dobbs's The Great Deceit: Social Pseudo-Sciences (Sayville, NY: The Veritas Foundation, 1964), Archie wrote: "Socialists have infiltrated our schools, our law courts, our government, our MEDIA OF COMMUNICATIONS. ... the Socialist movement is made up of a relatively small number of people who have developed the TECHNIQUE OF INFLUENCING large masses of people to a VERY HIGH DEGREE."
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