His long career at the University of Washington was highlighted by the publication of the seminal, five-volume work Beetles of the Pacific Northwest.
[4] In 1949 Hatch served on the University of Washington's Committee on Tenure and Academic Freedom, which considered the case of several faculty members who had been charged with "subversive communist activity."
The committee, while making strong denunciations of communism, found no good cause to dismiss three other admitted communist faculty members and recommended their retention.
[5] Rod Crawford, the curator of arachnids at the Burke Museum, would later note that Hatch's "essays show clearly enough that he had as little sympathy with Communist ideology as any Cold War American.
The mammoth work, considered a seminal guide to beetles in the Pacific Northwest, took Hatch 23 years to finish.