The Art of the Racist Troll, ca. 1987

In 1987 Oregon Republicans upbraided a former party leader (Walter Huss) for acting like a shameless, racist troll. Those were the days, eh?

In April of 1987, Walter Huss received an unwelcome letter from the Republican leader of the Oregon House of Representatives.

The letter was signed by virtually every member of the Oregon House, and it criticized Huss for using “offensive,” “unconscionable,” and “unacceptable…racial and political slurs” in a letter he had mailed to the home of Rep. Margaret Carter, the first Black woman to serve in the Oregon House of Representatives.

Representative Margaret Carter (1935- ) “Carter served as the chair of the Democratic Party of Oregon (1996) and was the first African American woman to hold such an office west of the Mississippi. In 2005, Carter became the first African American to serve as president pro tem in the Oregon State Senate.”

Although the term “racist troll” was not yet available to the people of 1987, that is basically what the entire Oregon State House of Representatives called Walter Huss, the chair of the Oregon Republican Party from 1978 to 1979 who had worked closely with many of the Republican legislators who signed that letter.

I wish I could say that this chastisement inspired Walter Huss, an ordained Foursquare minister, to rethink and repent for his racist ways, but of course that didn’t happen. The following year, the Husses’ 40 year old daughter fell in love with a Black gospel singer and preacher named Willie Murphy who she met in her Salem Foursquare church. Walter responded by trying to sabotage Murphy’s career and undermine their relationship. It didn’t work. His daughter and Willie Murphy married in 1988 and remained together until Willie died in 2001.¹

An album recorded by Willie Murphy, Walter Huss’s son-in-law. In 1976 Murphy had published his spiritual autobiography, entitled Black and Trying, with a small press in Harrison, Arkansas.

In 1989, one year after their daughter married Willie Murphy against their wishes, Walter and Rosalie organized an almost year-long, racist campaign to take MLK, Jr.’s name off of MLK Blvd. in Portland.

From the fall of 1989 into the summer of 1990, the Husses and an army of volunteers worked tirelessly to collect over 50,000 signatures on a petition that would have required the city to put the street name to a vote. [Ultimately a court determined that the names of individual streets can not be changed via referendum.] This MLK Blvd campaign was little more than an extended racist troll of the entire city of Portland, though an alarmingly large number of white Portlanders did not perceive it that way.² The Husses’ small-minded effort to remove MLK’s name from a street absorbed an enormous amount of the city’s time, resources, and attention. It also was a loud and clear signal to Portlanders who cared about racism that the city had quite a way to go before people who weren’t white could feel comfortably and consistently “at home” in that city.

A few years after the failure of his anti-MLK effort and his upbraiding by the OR state legislature, Huss singled out yet another Black women legislator for condescending and menacing, racist abuse. In 1993 his target was Avel Gordly, the first Black woman to serve in the Oregon Senate. Like most Black Oregonians, Gordly was quite familiar with such insults and sent Huss a professional but pointed response.

The issue that inspired Huss to berate both Rep. Carter and Sen. Gordly was their opposition to apartheid and their advocacy for divestment from South Africa. There was clearly something about the plight of white South Africans that especially fired Huss up, because he wrote an unusually large number of racist letters to Black public officials about that topic. [Notably, there’s no evidence Huss ever sent an angry letter about South Africa to any white advocates for divestment.]

Below is a letter he wrote on that subject to Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles in 1985, for example. Note Huss’s nostalgic reference to the 4 years he lived in LA in the late 1940s. This is when he likely came into contact with Gerald LK Smith, Wesley Swift, and other early articulators of the white supremacist and antisemitic Christian Identity theology that lay at the center of Huss’s world view his entire life.

For Huss, contemplating a future in which Black people wielded political power—whether that be in South Africa, the US, or Oregon—was terrifying. He claimed that what he was really concerned about was the spread of Communism, but that was largely a placeholder for his fears about having to share a state, a nation, the world (and in the case of his daughter, a family) with non-white people as equals. To a great extent, it is these same fears and anxieties about multi-racial democracy that, in our current era of “great replacement theory” messaging, animate racist troll politicians and many of the white people who eagerly vote for them.

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Below is Huss’s letter to Margaret Carter that prompted the Oregon House of Representatives to formally let Huss know they thought he was a racist POS. The racism here is not all THAT unusual for 1987, but remember, this is a letter that a recent Chair of the Oregon Republican Party wrote to Oregon’s only sitting Black Representative. This isn’t just a screed from one random citizen to another, though that would have been bad enough. It’s also worth registering the implied menace Huss communicated by sending this letter to Carter’s home rather than her Salem office.

In the late 1980s groups of neo-Nazi skinheads roamed Portland’s streets harassing people of color and LGBTQ folks, and the number of racist hate crimes in the state were increasing. Although Carter likely did not know this in 1987, Huss had longstanding ties to a number of violent far right extremists. While I’ve found no evidence that Huss engaged in vigilante violence himself, he was one degree removed from several people who did. The tone of Huss’s letter had a whiff of the Klan and the Jim Crow lynch mob about it, and it wouldn’t be surprising if this shaped how Carter, who had spent the first 32 years of her life in Jim Crow Louisiana, interpreted the letter.³

Here we see Walter Huss telling Margaret Carter that SHE was the real racist while Walter Huss was the one truly concerned for the best interests of Portland’s and South Africa’s “Negroes” (a very anachronistic and offensive term in 1987) who he also considers to be “tribal” and a threat to “Western” civilization. Why, Huss asked, would Margaret Carter be so grievously unconcerned for the “carnage” the anti-apartheid movement will supposedly wreak upon those who share her “color?” Obviously, it’s because Margaret Carter was a “desperate revolutionary” secretly working for the Kremlin to further the Communist takeover of the world and, soon, America. [For the record, Carter is a deeply devout Christian, like Huss claimed to be, and she had exactly zero ties to the Communist Party.] Huss’s letter holds Margaret Carter especially responsible for remedying Black “ghetto” poverty in Portland, while at the same time he chides her for supposedly using the “pigment of your skin” to shield herself from criticism in regard to her position on South Africa. Huss’s claim that South Africa was a white nation from the outset and that Black people only showed up later looking to take advantage of the economic opportunity whites had created is just…well…let’s just say I wish I could have seen the look on Margaret Carter’s face when she read that line. And of course, of course, Huss ends by challenging Carter to a debate.

At first I wasn’t going to share the full text of Huss’s racist letter because, well, why pump such bile into the atmosphere unless it’s serving some larger purpose. But as I researched this letter, I came to the conclusion that there are two good reasons to share it.

First, I’ve found evidence in Huss’s archive suggesting that this letter he sent to Carter’s home was likely part of a broader effort to intimidate, perhaps even terrorize her. Today it might not seem all that outlandish to see a major figure in the Republican Party working clandestinely to intimidate or terrorize a Democratic politician or a Black woman in a position of power, but in the late 1980s such behavior from a former state GOP party chair would have been considered scandalous, at least in Oregon.

Here’s the evidence I found. On April 16, 1987, five days after Huss wrote the letter to Carter and the same day on which the House of Representatives sent its response to him, Huss took these notes on a phone conversation he had with Larry Lundborg, one of Portland’s most famous private detectives and a longtime, right wing associate of his. [CW for racist language.]

Huss’s archive contains thousands of documents like this which consist of notes he took on phone conversations, and most of these documents are similarly cryptic. The first racist comment and the last bit about the “enemy within” suggest to me that Huss feared Carter (who he assumed was a secret communist, like most people he disagreed with) might use the power of the state to go after him using legal and state licensing investigations. Just one year earlier (1986) Huss had filed a legal brief stating his belief that he’d been fined for illegally importing Brazilian bark tea that he falsely claimed cured cancer, solely because Oregon was run by a Jewish/Communist mafia that was out to destroy him because he was such an effective anti-Communist. So while my interpretation of the document above might seem to impute too much paranoia to Huss…well, frankly, it would be impossible to impute too much paranoia to Huss.

Notes from another phone call with Lundborg (I’m fairly certain the date here is 1986) list Margaret Carter as a topic of conversation. Knowing what I know about Huss and Lundborg, there was almost certainly no good reason they were talking about her. If I’m right and the date is 1986, then that would suggest that Huss and Lundborg were keeping an eye on her for a year before Huss wrote her that harassing letter. And then when he got rebuked by the Oregon House for writing that menacing letter, he immediately reached out to his Private Dick friend for guidance on how to protect himself from the perceived threatening menace of Margaret Carter, that nefarious agent of “the enemy within.”

I won’t get too sidetracked on this Lundborg character, but I do want to emphasize that he was not some marginal, shadowy kook. Below is a long and generally positive write up he got in The Oregonian’s Sunday magazine just 4 months before he and Huss had their conversation about how “n***s are n***s.”

During Huss’s short stint as OR GOP chair from August 1978 to June 1979, he spoke frequently with Lundborg and seems to have utilized his services for either personal security or to spy on his “enemies” in the OR GOP.

A clipping from the September 8, 1978 edition of The Oregonian that Walter Huss placed in his “Larry Lundborg” folder. This was one month after Huss first took over as OR GOP chair and he had already become quite convinced that his “enemies” were out to destroy him. The next item in this folder is Lundborg’s glossy brochure advertising the various services he offered his clients.

Lundborg was also quite a physically intimidating man, not someone a survivor of domestic violence like Margaret Carter would likely be pleased to see casing her house. Lundborg was long renown at the Multnomah Athletic Club (one of Portland’s most expensive and tony clubs) for his weightlifting prowess, and way back in 1945 he claimed to be the “Strongest Man in the United States for his Height.” Points for the modest qualification, I guess.

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In sum, reason #1 for sharing Huss’s racist letter to Margaret Carter is that it’s genealogically connected to the racist, mob-like, klannish thuggery that has, in recent years, become a much more prominent feature of the Republican Party’s political culture. In an age when Donald Trump regularly refers to Black prosecutors as “the real racists” who are supposedly funded by “globalist” George Soros and are persecuting Trump because he’s a white politician who’s looking out for the interests of “the real Americans,” it’s hard not to hear echoes of Huss’s paranoid claims that “the real racists” in 1980s Oregon were the state’s only two Black women in elected office, part of “the enemy within” that secretly worked in cahoots with a nefarious, un-American, “globalist” conspiracy that sought to destroy white Christian patriots and authentic tribunes of “the people” like Walter Huss.

Here’s reason #2 for why I decided to share Huss’s racist letter to Margaret Carter, and it’s quite the trip. One thing that stood out to me when I read this letter was how uncharacteristically detailed it was. Huss rarely delved this deeply into the minutiae of issues. The letter to Carter also had more argumentative and rhetorical punch than most of Huss’s writings (even though it’s important to note that when I dug into some of the evidence for those arguments much of it turned out to be bullshit, rhetorically powerful bullshit, but bullshit all the same).

When I went looking for the source of Huss’s information about South Africa, I discovered that he’d plagiarized the majority of this trollish letter. The racist spirit and intent was his, but most of the words were not. Researching the original source led me down quite a rabbit hole that involves an incel direct mail guru who died filthy rich in an unfurnished Colorado Springs McMansion, a network of Christian multi-level marketing scams from the 1980s, a powdered milk substitute, “clustered water,” white Jesus bringing literally dead people (not just spiritually dead people) back to life, and a series of 2006 articles about how “tofu turns men gay” that Alex Jones would eventually pick up and run with and which were published on a far right, evangelical conspiracy website run by the guy who persuaded Donald Trump in 2011 that he should build his political persona around the birther lie. You know, normal stuff when it comes to Walter Huss’s world.

Ok, strap in.

The majority of the sentences in Huss’s letter to Carter were cut and pasted from this 20-page document he received in February of 1986 from Jim Rutz (1938-2014). I’ve included just one example below of Huss’s cut and paste job.

Jim Rutz’s South Africa script he sent to Walter Huss in 1986

Walter Huss’s 1987 letter to Margaret Carter

I’d never heard of Jim Rutz and there’s not much to be found out about him on the internet, but one thing I’ve managed to discover is that Rutz is considered one of the “all time greats” in the world of people who write direct mail copy for a living. In an industry where most people get paid only after their pitches get results, Jim Rutz could command $100K payments up front and people cued up for over a year to utilize his services. Some people are apparently willing to pay $295 for a collection of the direct mail pitches that Jim Rutz left laying around on the floor of the house in which he died.

Rutz was such a dedicated direct marketing copywriter that the 3000+ square foot house he died in contained no furniture aside from stacks and stacks of direct mail copy that Rutz used in place of chairs and tables. He published a few clever advertisements looking for wives over the course of his life, but, ironically enough given his profession, none of them achieved the desired result. Around 2003, Rutz began contributing scores of articles to WND (World Net Daily), a virulently anti-gay and Islamophobic conspiracy-mongering online Christian publication edited by Joseph Farah (who has his own SPLC page).⁴

Joseph Farah made the mainstream news in 2016 when the New York Times reported that he was the person who convinced Trump in 2011 that “birtherism” was the messaging he should ride into the national political spotlight. Say what you will about Farah, but he, like other important people in Trump-world like Steve Bannon or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham or Chris Ruddy, has a real marketer’s knack for knowing what sort of messaging might appeal to credulous, reactionary, white evangelicals.

Rutz’s most successful WND article by far was a six part series about how tofu turns men gay. I imagine you’ve encountered the “soy boy” epithet frequently thrown around on social media by folks on the far right…well, good old Jim Rutz can take some of the “credit” for getting that meme going

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The crowning achievement of Rutz’s career seems to have been the publication of this 2005 book, complete with a blurb from New Apostolic Reformation founder, C. Peter Wagner. Rutz claimed that a wave of grassroots, anti-institutionalist, true Christianity was about to sweep the globe, clearing away all of the false religions and degenerate forms of leftism so as to bring about God’s reign on earth. The book is filled with examples of ordinary Christians doing miracles, like bringing dead people back to life. “A vast cleansing storm is roaring toward us,” Rutz claimed in 2005. A storm, you say?

In this video from 2006 you can hear Jim Rutz tell a story about a friend of his who was sitting on his L-shaped sectional couch in his living room worshipping the Lord when Jesus showed up. Rutz tells us that Jesus, a white man wearing his usual white robe, carefully crossed his left leg over his right, you know, like Jesus would. If you listen to this for just a few minutes, you’ll get a sense of Rutz’s story telling skills.

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Let’s rewind back to the 1980s. Huss and Rutz first came into contact around 1984 when Huss tried to purchase Sharex, a failing multi-level marketing company run by Jim and his brother Bob Rutz that sold a powdered milk substitute and a few miracle supplements with very 1980s names like “The Right Stuff.”

Honolulu Advertiser, 10 September 1983

In the mid-1980s Huss was working to expand his health food/alternative medicine multi-level marketing business called Priority Products. One of their most popular items was a powdered milk substitute called “Best Whey,” and it appears that Huss saw Sharex as either a competitor to be absorbed or as a company whose superior product he wanted to acquire.

The “Lee Lorenzen” mentioned in the above document was one of scores of people with whom Huss developed a business partnership over the course of his life that eventually went sour. In 1984-5 Lorenzen was the main person working in Southern California to seal a deal between the Rutz brothers and Huss’s company. In these years Huss was trying to build a Christian health food/alternative medicine multi-level marketing empire that stretched from British Columbia to Southern California. The products Huss sold claimed (usually falsely) to have substantial scientific evidence behind them, and Lee Lorenzen (PhD and owner of an honest-to-God microscope, as you can see below) was the guy who provided that scientific heft.

Lee Lorenzen is still active in this same industry, lending his credentials to the marketing of dubiously-scientific “health” products, like “clustered water.”

At some point I’ll tell the story of Huss and Lee Lorenzen at greater length, but for now suffice it to say that the Husses lent a young Lee Lorenzen their brand new red Ford (of course it was a Ford) in 1985 to help advance their joint business venture in Southern California, and then had difficulty getting it back from him. When they did finally retrieve the car it was in pretty rough shape and it’s not clear if they ever got the registration card back from Lee. That same year, 1985, Jim Rutz called Huss to tell him that Lorenzen didn’t show up for an important marketing meeting they’d organized because Lee was in the hospital with chest pains. That then prompted Huss to send Lee an insulting and condescending letter about how Lee was letting him down and just needed to get right with God so that they could pursue their mission of healing the world with their fake medicine, and also bringing more people to Christ (and wealth) by incorporating them into their pyramid, er, multi level marketing, scheme known as Priority Products. There’s even a wrinkle here where Huss tried to avoid bankruptcy by creating a (likely illegal) shell company in Nevada with Lee signed on as owner…but again, we’ll leave that for another day.

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During Huss’s business interactions with Jim Rutz, he became aware of Jim’s substantial skills as a writer of direct mail copy. As we’ve seen, Rutz at some point figured out he could make a very good living producing copy that separated gullible people from their money. This explains why Huss got in touch with Jim Rutz in 1986-7, because at that time Huss was looking for assistance marketing his “Help America!” plan that was designed to organize the nation’s right wing evangelicals into a potent force capable of “saving America” from the imminent triumph of Jewish Communism. The plan could only work, however, if Huss could get people to pay him money when they signed up.

As I discussed in the post linked below, since the mid-1960s, Huss had been developing such a plan for a grassroots organization that was one part book club, one part church fellowship, one part grassroots Republican organization, one part multi-level-marketing scheme, one part gun club, and one part Wolverines (a la the film Red Dawn). Huss’s plan closely resembled a wide array of past right wing organizations with which he was familiar, like the Silver Shirts of the 1930s or the Minutemen of the 1960s, that sought to organize the saving remnant of “true Americans” into small cells scattered across the entire nation that could be quickly activated when the time came to rise up to save the country from the Communist revolution that was surely about to happen any day now.

Unfortunately for Huss, Rutz’s work marketing “Help America!” was about as fruitful as Rutz’s efforts to find a wife by placing clever ads in the newspaper. As far as I can tell, Help America! was never much more than a right wing letterhead organization that netted Huss little money or influence.

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Margaret Carter Gets the Last Word

In March 1990 when the Husses’ racist movement to remove MLK’s name from MLK Blvd. met with its final defeat in court, Margaret Carter led a celebration at a NE Portland church. Carter had led the push to have MLK Day officially declared a state holiday in 1985, so it was fitting that she would lead such a celebration five years later. The reporting in the Oregonian quoted a local Rabbi’s negative assessment of the Husses: “It's very clear that the leaders of the movement are racist and they have a racist record…I'd be embarrassed for anyone who denies the charge when allying oneself with the Husses in their efforts.'' When contacted for comment, the Husses, who had recently sent a campaign donation to Louisiana’s rising political star David Duke and would soon get actively involved in Patrick Buchanan’s “America First” challenge to GHWB in the 1992 GOP primary, noted how tired they were of being falsely accused of racism.

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So what does it all mean?

I began writing this post several days ago, thinking it would be a quick and simple story about Republican legislators chastising Huss for being a racist in 1987…and then I discovered the Jim Rutz rabbit hole, and then came the Larry Lundborg rabbit hole…and now here we are.

As with many aspects of Huss’s life, what stands out to me is how his story reflects features of American conservative political culture that were considered fairly fringe and unrepresentative in Huss’s time, but which today have become taken for granted. A Republican sent harassing and intimidating messages to a Black Democrat with an assist from a shady, body building private detective who got rich by getting bosses to pay him to spy on their employees? Yawn. We discover that a Republican leader has ties to scammy multi-level marketing schemes and rhetorically-glib, charismatic weirdos who are preternaturally skilled at telling racially inflammatory half-truths that inspire reactionary white evangelicals to open their wallets? Another day that ends in the letter ‘y.’

These particular pathologies in American culture —our history of klannish menace intended to silence politically “uppity” people of color and our history of populist con men and grifters who use well-crafted but duplicitous sales pitches to line their pockets at the expense of the anxiety-ridden hoi polloi—hardly come as news to anyone familiar with the country’s history. The questions of when and how such pathologies came to play such a central role in what was once “the party of Lincoln,” however, strike me as as ones we still haven’t fully answered. While Huss’s story can’t possibly bear all THAT much explanatory weight, it can at least give us some glimpses into what a fuller explanation might look like.

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Coda

On a whim I thought I’d check out what Larry Campbell, the Republican who upbraided Huss for writing that racist letter, was up to lately. Turns out Larry traveled to Cleveland to attend his very first RNC meeting in 2016, where he supported the racist troll candidate. Though, in Larry’s defense, he was supporting the racist troll because he believed that racist troll would do tremendous things to improve the lives of African-Americans. That worked out great I see.

1. Because Oregon is basically a small town masquerading as a state, Sandy and Willie Murphy lived in a house that is only two blocks from where I currently live. Unbeknownst to me, I walked past that house hundreds of times on my regular walking route before I made this connection. One day I ran into a neighbor across the street from that house who’d lived there since the 1970s and she remembered Willie and Sandy fondly. Once it came out that I was a historian, she started asking me if I could help her confirm a family story that her husband was descended from the Romanovs and at that point I politely demurred and went on my merry way.

2. A poll conducted by The Oregonian in early 1990 indicated that 60% of Portlanders favored the removal of MLK’s name. Parsing the meaning of that poll isn’t necessarily as easy as it might seem at first glance. There was much talk, for example, of naming the new convention center or a school after MLK rather than a street, so it wasn’t as if everyone who responded “no” to that Oregonian poll about MLK Blvd. shared the Husses’ general animosity toward MLK. But still, not a great look.

3. I would love to interview Margaret Carter but don’t have any way of getting in touch with her. If any Rightlandia reader with Oregon ties might help me make that connection, I’d be very appreciative!

4. Another regular contributor to WND back in the day was David Rives, the husband of Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis. Rives currently runs a Creationist Superstore that got its initial start on the WND website.