Conditions Governing Access

The collection is open for research use.

Preferred Citation

MSS 8851, Mary Blake French collection of George Lincoln Rockwell papers, Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

The collection was given as a deposit from Mrs. Richard Crouch (Mary Blake French) to the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia on April 24, 1968

Biographical / Historical

Mary Blake French was a student at William and Mary who interviewed George Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, in 1963. Born in Bloomington, Ill., in 1918, George Lincoln Rockwell was the son of vaudeville comedians who counted among their friends Fanny Brice, Jack Benny and Groucho Marx. He attended prep school in Maine, enrolled at Brown University to study philosophy and then dropped out to serve as a Navy pilot in World War II. He later studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he developed the drawing talents he would eventually use to create Nazi propaganda.

After a short career in advertising, Rockwell married and fathered three children. When the Korean War broke out, he was called up and stationed in San Diego, and then assigned to a U.S. naval air facility in Iceland. It was there that he read Hitler's Mein Kampf and became obsessed with Aryanism and the threat of communism. Abandoning his family in the States, he married an Icelandic woman and honeymooned in Germany (in Hitler's retreat town of Berchtesgaden).

In the mid-1950s, Rockwell returned to the United States and founded the American Nazi Party in the suburbs outside the nation's capital, where he quickly gained status as a national newsmaker whose name carried shock value. Taken in part from an online article "Swastikas on Wilson" http://www.arlingtonmagazine.com/swastikas-on-wilson/

Scope and Contents

Mary Blake French collection of George Lincoln Rockwell papers, 0.03 cubic feet, 1963-1964, includes her interview with George Rockwell, and copies of the resulting news stories printed in the William and Mary "Flat Hat" and the Williamsburg "Virginia Gazette," and related correspondence, including a letter from George Rockwell, (1963) thanking French for sendinghim a clipping of the article, and a letter from Mary French to Jeff Warren, at "The Daily Press" about publishing the interview. There are also thirteen photographs of George Rockwell and the American Nazi Party at their headquarters in Arlington, Va.