The FBI thought OR GOP chair Walter Huss was involved with the Nazi Party. Today I found some evidence that they might have been right
A state GOP chairman who was possibly a Nazi? Seems bad.
In 1985 Walter Huss took notes on a phone call with his wife Rosalie in which they talked about how someone named Ron (probably their fellow far right Christian Republican friend Ron Sunseri) had informed them that the FBI suspected Walter of being involved with the Nazi Party and the Posse Comitatus. Huss definitely had many decades-long ties with the leaders of Oregon’s Posse Comitatus, but his archive contains no evidence tying him to self-described Nazis. It’s possible, of course, that Huss destroyed all evidence of his Nazi connections after hearing about the FBI’s suspicions, but there’s no way to prove or disprove that. In response to my FOIA request for Huss’s FBI file I was informed that it had been destroyed. So I’ve been going on the assumption that perhaps the FBI had good reasons to suspect Huss was a Nazi, but I haven’t seen enough evidence to corroborate that claim with any degree of confidence.
Today at the Oregon Historical Society, however, I stumbled upon a new piece of evidence that made me slightly more inclined to think the FBI was on to something. In a folder of materials about the American Nazi Party I saw a reference to a 4 page flier from 1964 entitled “Communism is Irish.” The very niche joke (such as it is) is that every Nazi “knew” that “Communism is Jewish,” and so saying it was “Irish” was a Khaki-clad-knee-slapping way to say “Communism is Jewish” without actually saying it. High-larious, I tell you. The flier goes on to mention Irish communists such as Karl McMarx, Julius O’Rosenberg, and…you get the point. [Apologies for the antisemitic caricature in the image below…but such nastiness is impossible to avoid when writing about Nazis.]
When I saw that flier I immediately remembered a 1991 phone call that Walter Huss recorded between himself and an Arizona anti-tax activist named Paul Eller. About 30 minutes into that phone call, the first time these two men had ever spoken, Eller asks Huss “well you know who owns the media, don’t you?” and Huss replies “Yeah, Irishmen.” That moment occurs at the 2:50 mark in the recording below, and then they launch into a conversation about how “it’s high time our side begins to recognize who the enemy is…it’s the Jew.” The first voice you hear is Eller and the second one is Huss.
There’s a lot to unpack in that phone conversation. I did that in this post from a few months ago so I won’t repeat it here.
But I do want to draw attention to the paragraph in that April piece where I discussed that “Irishmen” line.
the moment around the 2:50 mark when Eller asks “you know who controls the media don’t you” and Huss playfully says “Irishmen.” My read on this is that by this point in the conversation, even though “the Jewish conspiracy” has not been explicitly named, Huss is pretty confident that he’s talking to a likeminded antisemite. “Irishmen” is both a playful joke that the two can share, but also holds out a bit of plausible deniability for Huss. Remember, he’s recording this call because he’s a deeply paranoid person who thinks he’s being spied on by “the Jewish mafia” who he believes controls Oregon and the country. You never know who might be a spy.
What I didn’t know then was that saying “the Irish control the media” was not a random playful joke that Huss improvised in the moment, but rather was quite likely a reference to that old American Nazi Party meme that I just learned about today. I guess Huss could have snatched that “Irishmen” reference out of thin air, or maybe he’d heard it from a friend, thought it was funny, and incorporated it into his conversations without realizing its origin. But that seems less likely to me than the most straightforward, Occam’s Razor explanation, which is that Huss traveled in the sorts of circles where people passed around pieces of “humorous” literature produced by the American Nazi Party, such as that flier about how Communism is Irish. Given that Huss was a Holocaust-denying antisemite who had believed that “Communism was Jewish” since the 1950s, and that his archive contains two thick, carefully curated folders labeled “Jews” stuffed with the “greatest hits” of Cold War era antisemitism…well, I’m going to go with the Occam’s Razor interpretation of where that “Irishmen” reference came from.
The date of that “Communism is Irish” flier is also perhaps a clue. In 1964 there were two recent high school graduates who regularly frequented Huss’s Freedom Center during the Goldwater campaign. They also had a habit of showing up with antisemitic picket signs at the Jewish-owned Meier & Frank store in downtown Portland. In early 1965, apparently taking Goldwater’s electoral shellacking as a sign that they needed to embrace an edgier form of “conservatism” than what Huss had on offer at his SE Portland Freedom Center, they donned brownshirts and jackboots and formed a rabidly antisemitic and white supremacist organization called “The National Party” modeled on the pro-Hitler Silver Shirts of the 1930s. For about a year they terrorized the city and then vanished from the scene [for those in the Portland area, I’m giving a talk about this episode at Portland State in two weeks.]
These were exactly the sort of young neo-Nazis who would have likely been consuming material from George Lincoln Rockwell’s Virginia-based American Nazi Party in 1964-5, like that “Communism is Irish” flier. So while I can’t say for sure at this point that they were the source of Huss’s knowledge about that “Communism is Irish” line…it seems at least plausible that they served as the inter-generational conduit through which a fairly square, 46 year old Foursquare minister like Huss would have come into contact with the edgiest of American Nazi content ca. 1964-5.
There’s one more piece of evidence from 1964 that seems relevant here—this very strange and defensive flier in which Huss lashes out at the editor of the Medford [OR] Mail Tribune who, like many newspaper editors in that year, expressed concern about the fascistic and even quasi-Nazi features of the American radical right that had rallied to Goldwater’s banner.
In 1963 Walter Huss had toured Oregon with Ken Goff, one of the nation’s most virulent white supremacist and antisemitic anti-communists who literally ran a Christian Nationalist domestic terrorist training camp in Colorado. In 1964 Huss was receiving literature from Gerald LK Smith’s Christian Nationalist crusade and several other organizations that advocated for sending Black people back to Africa and forcibly expelling the Jewish/Communist menace that was supposedly on the verge of destroying the United States. So yeah, can you believe that Eric Allen would have the gall to suggest that there was something fascistic or quasi-Nazi about Huss’s politics? The tone of Huss’s 1964 flier sure has a “he doth protesteth too much” feel to it. And you gotta love the twist at the end where we learn that the person who was really acting like Hitler was none other than mild-mannered editor Eric Allen, who was trying to cover up “the fact” that his pals who were moderate Republicans were actually Communists working in cahoots with the Democrats to destroy America.
The idea that Communism was a sinister Jewish plot designed to undermine the national sovereignty of white nations and destroy the superior white race via the institution of a global government was a centerpiece of Nazi ideology. It is also the centerpiece of Walter Huss’s world view from the late 1950s until he died in the early 2000s. Now, whether Huss can accurately be called “a Nazi” or not is still an open question in my mind…but his proximity to that political tradition has come to appear closer and closer the more archival research I’ve done.
The more I learn about Walter Huss, I have no doubt the FBI were right about him.
A little plausible deniability wrapped in humor, you say? Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx have a really good book that you might like that does a deep dive into that strategy, it’s “That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them”
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520402966/thats-not-funny