I read a box and a half of "crackpot letters" in Tom McCall's archive and all you got was this newsletter

Or, how I found some politically meaningful stories in a place Oregon's Republican Governor thought there weren't any

I spent a few days recently at the Oregon State Archives researching in the papers of moderate Republican Tom McCall. He served as Secretary of State from 1965 to 1967, and then Governor from 1967 to 1975. I was primarily interested in the correspondence categorized under topics like fluoridation, sex education, “racial matters,” and the Republican Party because I suspected (correctly, it turned out) that many folks in Walter Huss’s orbit would have written to McCall on these issues. But I also couldn’t resist requesting the 1.5 boxes that contained files labeled “Crackpot Letters.” What follows is a partly playful but also partly serious tour through some of what I found there.

I’ll freely admit that my interest in the “crackpot letters” was not 100% academic. That said, I also had a substantive, interpretive hypothesis about those files that was mostly borne out. My hypothesis was that McCall’s category of “crackpot” functioned as an ideologically useful way for him to disregard a barrage of fairly consistent and predictable voices of reactionary rage that activists in his own Republican Party (like Walter Huss) were working to organize and activate. By psychologizing and individualizing racism, antisemitism, religious fundamentalism, and conspiracy thinking, McCall’s category of “crackpot” rendered invisible the cultural logics, organizational structures, and far right media outlets that shaped the content of those letters. The “crackpot” folder was like a zoo in which the self-described “progressive Republican” Tom McCall and his staff could place exotic and unique specimens of humanity that they thought one rarely encountered in the real world…but alas, as we’ve seen, the “real world” inhabited by many of our fellow citizens has operated according to a logic and has been informed by sources that might seem quite unreal to people like Tom McCall or us, but which feel very real to them. And unfortunately for Tom McCall’s vision of what the Republican Party should be, one of those racist, antisemitic, and conspiracy-obsessed “crackpot” fundamentalists, Walter Huss, would get elected chair of the OR GOP less than 4 years after McCall left office.

I realize it might seem like I’m judging McCall harshly and anachronistically, but I don’t intend that. Compared to many of his fellow moderate Republicans in the late 1960s and early 1970s, McCall was exceptionally clear-eyed about the rising anti-democratic threat of the far right inside his party. That said, none of these moderates, McCall included, spent much time trying to figure out how to counter that threat. Thus, I think McCall used the humorous category of “crackpot” in much the same way that many liberal Jon Stewart fans (like myself) joked about the Tea Party kooks of the pre-Trump era—the humor worked as a defense mechanism to protect oneself from having to consider the real possibility that such crackpotishness might gain substantive political power at some point. Needless to say, it’s long since stopped being even remotely funny, even though it remains eminently laughable.

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While I have my criticisms of McCall’s choice of “crackpot” as a term, there were plenty of letters in that file that I definitely feel comfortable putting in that category. For example, McCall received several lengthy missives from the King of America (by an act of God), Dudley Fisher, who lived in a charming two-story house with a screened-in front porch in Madison, Wisconsin, because where the hell else would the King of America ca. 1970 choose to live?

And then there was the concerned “American citizen” who wrote Governor McCall in 1973 to warn him about the threat taking over America that was even worse than the communists. This threat, the UFOs, claimed more and more victims by “converting the victim’s brain to their own use…Already these beings have some victims in our government offices. Someone in Congress is going to have to have the courage to speak out on this problem, before we end up with a nation of human robots!” Given that the power of prayer had shielded the US from communist take over so far, this person thought “it could do no harm to urge the American public to pray for a spiritual shield of strength against these UFO beings.”

It wouldn’t be a folder of letters from cranks without several letters that announce at the outset “I AM NOT A CRANK!”

Like a large number of letters in that “crackpot” folder, this person claimed they weren’t a crank because they accurately perceived “truths” that the liberal media was afraid to tell—that the end of school prayer, the rise of drug use, and the protests against police brutality were all part of the internal Communist threat that was now “in full command” and had to be stopped immediately if the US was to be saved from destruction.

This is what I mean when I say that many voices we hear in the “crackpot” files are not those of one-off, isolated cranks. Those letters expressed deeply held and emotionally-charged opinions that the authors did not pluck out of thin air, but rather had gleaned from the vibrant political culture of the far right ca. the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The letter below, for example, repeated several key talking points one could have gotten from a John Birch Society newsletter or one of the many ubiquitous right wing AM radio shows like Life Line that were broadcast over Oregon’s airwaves in that era. Impeach Earl Warren! America is a Christian nation! We’re a republic, not a democracy! Harry Bridges was a traitor who unfairly escaped deportation due to the interference of that nefarious Commie traitor Frances Perkins. [My guess is that the Harry Bridges/Frances Perkins story would have been a pretty deep cut for most Americans in 1971, in the same way that Mike Lindell’s world of election fraud “facts” leave the vast majority of Americans wondering what on earth he’s talking about.]

Today, few Republicans would label as “crackpottery” the timeless complaint below about how “our students are not being taught American History right” because “the new left has a monopoly” on textbooks. It also feels eerily contemporary that this letter writer included, as support for their argument, a newsletter funded by right wing billionaire oil tycoon and master propagandist HL Hunt forecasting the imminent Sovietization of America. Spoiler Alert: America was NOT Sovietized in 1970 or in the years that followed.

One of the more surprising things I found in McCall’s “crackpot letters” file was a collection of letters from HL Hunt himself. Hunt, a nutball far right Texas oil tycoon, was one of the wealthiest men in America and precisely the sort of potential benefactor that any self-respecting Republican politician today would be thrilled to receive a letter from. But not McCall. Those letters didn’t even merit a terse “thank you” in response, but instead went straight into the “crackpot” file.

For anyone thinking “he was kinda right about Kissinger, tho,” note that Hunt’s critique came out of a right wing ecosystem in which Kissinger was perceived to be a secret agent of the Jewish/Communist conspiracy. This had nothing to do with critiquing Kissinger as a war criminal.

Hilariously, Hunt’s letters to the Oregon Governor included brochures and order forms for his HLH branded cosmetics and supplements, as if he expected McCall to place an order or help promote HL Hunt’s proprietary men’s cold cream or castor oil.

But the crackpot file wasn’t just filled with predictable right wing boilerplate. Some of the crackpot letters offered quite creative ideas that I’m surprised neither Fox News nor Trump have stumbled upon yet…like the term “Democommies” coined by puckish Herbert Hoover fanboy Bugs Moran. Shhhh, don’t tell Ingraham or Hannity.

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The letters I’ve shared so far were some of the more tame ones. A significant portion of the letters in the “crackpot” files contain viciously racist and/or antisemitic rhetoric that would have been considered inappropriate in most public settings in the early 1970s, but were a common enough feature of the far right political culture and media ecosystem of that era. These are the kind of things Walter Huss would have felt comfortable saying to his closer associates who were “in the know” and which suffused many of the periodicals and newsletters he read, but which he would have kept in check when in less “like minded” company.

Given that the community of such deeply-committed antisemites in Oregon was relatively small, I suspect the people who sent those violently antisemitic crackpot letters would have crossed paths with Huss at some point, but we’ll never know since they didn’t sign their names.

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One crackpot letter that unlocked a key part of Huss’s story for me

Historical research often resembles detective work in that one scours through mountains of evidence, much of it irrelevant, with the hopes that some connection or pattern eventually emerges. I had one of those “aha” moments thanks to this “crackpot” letter from Mrs. Vernon Drung of Ashland. Bear with me, because this is going to take some time to explain.

There’s a lot here to unpack. First off, you may be wondering who Dr. CW Burpo is, the radio preacher who Mrs. Drung so admired and thought would be instrumental in saving America from its impending ruin. Burpo, like Walter Huss, was one of the many B-list anti-communist evangelical “crackpot” preachers whose voices could be heard on AM radio across the nation.

Burpo shows up, for example, in this lineup of shows that aired on KLIQ in Portland in 1963—the Freedom Center was Huss’s show, Life Line was sponsored by HL Hunt, Max Wyatt was a Portland Pentecostal of the “Latter Rain” variety who had ties to the super-racist and antisemitic British Israelite tradition, Carl McIntire was a preacher one rung above Burpo and Huss on the anti-communist grifter ladder, Carlton Fredericks was a heavy smoking quack nutrition “expert” who died of a heart attack at 72, and “Christian-Jew,” well…to be frank, I haven’t worked up the gumption to look into that one yet.

Below is a letter to the editor of the Salem Capitol Journal in 1965 lauding Huss and Burpo as two of the most important “freedom fighters” in America today along with Billy James Hargis and Steuart McBirnie. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Americans would put America first” like those great freedom fighters do?

So while Burpo is a long-forgotten figure who was seen as a “crackpot” by contemporaries like Tom McCall, he was a significant player in the far right cinematic universe of the 1960s and 70s inhabited by Huss and his supporters.

As we leave Dr. Burpo behind, I would be remiss if I didn’t share with you one final gem. In my opinion it is one of the greatest song titles AND album covers in the history of the US, and possibly the world. For the truly dedicated fans of Walter Huss’s world who want even more Burpo content, there’s an entire FB fan page devoted to him that is quite a trip.

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The second key piece of context in that “crackpot” letter from Mrs. Drung has to do with the sense of panic in Portland that inspired businesses to board their windows up and preachers to hold prayer meetings. The letter is not dated, but I’m pretty confident that it was written in the summer of 1970 in the context of the American Legion convention to be held in Portland in late August of that year. When it was announced that Richard Nixon would speak at that conference, a group of anti-war activists organized a massive protest to coincide with Nixon’s visit. The Kent State massacre had occurred in May of that year, so there was good reason to fear that things could get ugly on the streets of Portland. In one of the most iconic moments of Tom McCall’s governership, he organized a free rock concert in a park many miles from Portland on the same weekend as the American Legion conference, hoping to lure young people out of the city and defuse the situation. It worked.

Walter Huss attended Vortex (for research purposes only, of course) and produced a salacious film depicting the sex, drugs, public nudity, and rampant immorality that suffused the event. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a copy of that film that Huss toured around the PNW showing in 1970-1.

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And now for the real “detective work” part of the story. When I searched for Mrs. Drung’s name in my Huss materials, I discovered that in 1971 Walter Huss had drawn her husband into a multi level marketing scheme.

But more importantly, when I looked at who else Huss drew into this 1971 REI scam I discovered that there was significant overlap between that collection of people and the ultra-conservative evangelicals that Huss organized across the state to try to take over the OR GOP in 1970. It was this statewide, grassroots network, described in its embryonic form in the 1970 newspaper article below, that would eventually mature into the movement that swept Huss to victory in the OR GOP chair’s race in 1978.

Corvallis Gazette Times, 10 July 1970. Mildred Sundeleaf, the grassroots GOP conservative from Lake Oswego, was not part of Huss’s MLM universe because her husband was one of Oregon’s leading architects and they lived in a Lake Oswego mansion that today is valued at $4 million. Sundeleaf served as the Oregon point person for the Liberty Lobby in the late 1960s, an antisemitic and white nationalist organization run by neo-Nazi Willis Carto.

The variety of people involved in the church/business/political network organized around that 1971 MLM is fascinating. Two notable participants were Edward Haman and Art Hollowell, both of whom would shortly become leaders in the Posse Comitatus movement, a white Christian Nationalist paramilitary organization with roots in the fascist Silver Shirts of the 1930s. One of the organizers of that MLM network, Walter Huss, would soon go on to chair the OR GOP. The person above Huss in the MLM hierarchy was a Portland preacher/entrepreneur named Bennie Harris who later moved to the DC area and established close ties with the Reagan Administration, especially conservative evangelicals who worked in the White House, the FBI, and the military.

In a recent post I asked this question: did Walter Huss devote his life to building a totally normal grassroots political operation that sought to gain power through regular institutional and electoral channels, or was he building a self-consciously eliminationist Christian militia preparing to engage in large-scale apocalyptic violence against the internal Jewish/Communist menace? The answer I proposed there and which I still stand by is a coy, “yes.”

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The specific 1971 MLM scam that tied all of these actors together involved selling a product called “Paser Magnum” that supposedly cut down on emissions and improved engine performance. As this court action established, however, it did neither of those things.

Participating in this Paser Magnum scheme was not cheap. Vern Drung’s initial payment was $1040, about one month’s salary, for which he received promotional materials and 50 units of the Paser Magnum. He was then responsible for selling this automotive snake oil at $29.95 a pop in order to begin his path toward making his desired $3000/month. I feel pretty confident that Vern did not sell the 300 units per month in Ashland (population 12,000 in 1970) that would have enabled him to meet that income goal. But the good folks at REI Industries had their non-refundable $1040 and ministers Walter Huss and Bennie Harris who were in Vern’s “upline” got their cut of it, so Vern just had to figure out what to do with any unsold Paser Magnums he got stuck with.

While I feel bad for anyone who gets ripped off by the sort of hucksters who run multi-level marketing schemes like this, it’s important to note that the median family income in 1970 was $9870, and if Vern accurately stated his monthly income at $1000 then that would have put him in the top ~30% of earners that year. Vern and Tillie Drung were not rich, but thanks to Vern’s union job, they were fairly well-off compared to their peers.

Most of the people in this Huss-organized MLM network seem to have been in economic situations similar to the Drung’s—middle or working class white people with little formal education who were looking for a business-opportunity with low buy-in costs that would enable them to get rich quickly. This has long been the demographic most likely to get drawn into multi-level marketing schemes by trusted people in their church networks. Only a tiny fraction of people who participate in these schemes ever make much money, let alone become rich. Any money made in these schemes usually goes to the small handful of people with more power, wealth, and/or education at the top of the food chain of such enterprises.

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As I mentioned earlier, the big boss behind this Paser Magnum MLM was a pastor named Bennie Harris. In 1970 Harris was an ambitious minister/entrepreneur in Portland. Huss seems to have acted as the middle man who recruited participants across the state drawn from the grassroots, evangelical political network he’d built over the past decade.

Idaho Statesman, 18 April 1970.

At some point in the 1970s Harris moved from Oregon to a church in the greener pastures of Alexandria, VA. He did quite well for himself, selling insurance and other financial products to his parishioners and ministers across the country. Harris’s parishioners included three Senators, nine members of Reagan’s staff, and a good number of FBI agents and Pentagon employees. In the Reagan/Bush era, Harris met with Reagan in the White House multiple times as a “spiritual advisor” and led an Easter Sunrise service outside the US Capitol building for ten years running. When Huss traveled to DC in his capacity as OR GOP chair in January of 1979, Harris invited him to give a sermon at his Alexandria church.

Another person drawn into this 1971 MLM scheme with Harris and Huss was Edward Haman, a Gladsone preacher, long time anti-fluoridation activist, and silk sportswear salesman who followed a political path post-1971 that differed quite a bit from that of Bennie Harris. As I discussed in a recent post, Haman became a leader in the violent Posse Comitatus movement and had ties in the 1980s with the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho.

Arthur Hollowell was already employed as an extremist gun rights activist with NAKBA (the National Association to Keep and Bear Arms) in 1971, and by the 1980s he’d gone full Sovereign Citizen and was running a tax evasion scam called a “warehouse bank” premised on the idea that the Federal Reserve was unconstitutional. There are records in Huss’s files that suggest he may have invested money with Hollowell’s “bank” in the 1980s. Hollowell was eventually busted by the feds in the mid 80s, went on the lam for a few years, and then served time in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By the early 2010s he was out of prison and involved yet again with the Oregon “Patriot movement” of the Tea Party era. Like Haman and Huss, Hollowell was a virulent racist and antisemite who believed violence was probably necessary to return America to its roots as a white Christian republic. He was also one of the grassroots conservative Republicans mentioned in that newspaper article about the takeover of local GOP organizations by the far right in 1970.

Another local activist who worked with Huss on that 1970s insurgency inside the OR GOP was Twyla (Bee) Montano. Her husband signed up to sell Pacer Magnums with Huss in 1971. A rumor circulated in Southern Oregon GOP circles that Walter Huss and Bee Montano’s relationship involved an intense collaboration that went beyond mere politics, but I have not been able to get independent confirmation of that rumor.

Finally there’s Alan Berg, who will eventually merit a Rightlandia installment all to himself. Berg was a successful small businessman who owned the leading Christian Supply Store in Portland. The store is still there and is now run by his children. Berg was one of Huss’s few financial benefactors his entire life. Most of the people with real money in Portland, even the significant number of them who shared Huss’s far right politics, would have never deigned to be associated with Huss. It’s not like Berg gave Huss that much money, but he bailed him out at key moments when Huss might have lost his house or had to declare bankruptcy. Berg also contributed to every campaign Huss ran from the 1960s into the 1990s.

Berg’s big marketing breakthrough came in 1947 when he invented a best-selling Christian Chemistry set that visually demonstrated how Christ’s spirit purified the true Christian’s blood.

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If only those “crackpots” had stayed in the folder

Art Hollowell and Edward Haman the Posse Comitatus extremists, Alan Berg the owner of Portland’s leading Christian Supply Store, Bennie Harris the Christian insurance salesman and future spiritual advisor to Ronald Reagan, Tillie Drung the fundraiser for CW Burpo, and Bee Montano the Jackson County GOP vice chair were “crackpots” who Walter Huss brought together in 1971 as business partners in a pyramid scheme that sold automotive snake oil. It’s likely that all of them besides Bennie Harris lost money in the deal.

But more importantly, this network of “crackpots” who maintained their friendships with each other from the 1960s into the 1990s, formed a core of committed grassroots activists who eventually stole the Oregon GOP out from under the noses of moderates like Tom McCall and Mark Hatfield in the late 1970s and 1980s. They listened to radio shows and consumed magazines and newsletters that McCall would have considered laughable. They worshipped together in ways McCall probably would have found quaintly old fashioned and strange, even if he ultimately would have respected it. And they cycled through one get-rich scheme after another in a vain quest for the sort of economic security that enabled people like Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield, or other “establishment Republicans” to carry themselves with such equanimity.

Their “economic anxiety” doesn’t absolve these crackpots of their racism and antisemitism, nor does it entirely explain why they embraced the apocalyptic far right imaginary that led them to write the sort of letters that landed in the “crackpot” files of politicians like McCall. After all, the majority of middle and working class Oregonians never got roped into Huss’s political or entrepreneurial networks.

Ultimately, the story I found in the “crackpot” file was about the generative nature of political culture. Those crackpot letters from the 1970s sound so familiar to us today because the far right imaginary that informed it never went away….it just kept getting reproduced year in and year out by activists like Huss and the shows on radio stations like KLIQ and the reams of publications funded by right wing billionaires like HL Hunt.

What has changed since the 1970s is that a) the Republican Party long ago purged moderates like Tom McCall who had no truck with such anti-democratic and irrational tomfoolery and b) social media has made it much easier for geographically-dispersed “crackpots” to find each other and join forces. Rather than listening quietly at home to Lifeline or Carl McIntire or CW Burpo and occasionally meeting up at church or political meetings, people can interact in real time in the comments section of a Steve Bannon podcast or a Facebook post from a right wing politician or a Reddit forum devoted to Donald Trump. That apocalyptic political culture still draws in only a fraction of our fellow citizens, but it’s now the fraction that has taken over one of the nation’s two major political parties.

I wish I had a happier note to end on…but I mean, have you heard the kind of crackpot shit Donald Trump is saying these days and which the Republican base seems to consider totally fine?