Walter Huss and "The Best People," Episode 2 (Richard Barrett)
In which we meet Richard Barrett, an energetic white nationalist troll with fancy letterhead and an unfortunate ability to foresee the political future
Walter Huss’s 57-box archive overflows with thousands of names, 99% of which are entirely unrecognizable to me. Behind each of those names might be an interesting and important story, but more often than not, those names are just random “conservative” Oregonians who once gave Huss $5 to support one of his causes. Every now and then, however, I’ll google one of those unfamiliar names in Huss’s archive and find myself tumbling down quite a revealing and horrifying rabbit hole. Episode 1 of this series was about Dale J. Benjamin, the Oregon head of the National States Rights Party in the 1960s. This episode is about Richard Barrett, a Mississippian who also had ties to the National States Rights Party in the 1960s and 70s. Barrett and Benjamin, like Huss, are not the sorts of figures who usually show up in books about American political history. I obviously think that needs to be remedied if we want to more fully understand the past, present, and future of the American right. This is the case not because such people won elections or influenced legislation, but because they helped cultivate a populist, “grassroots conservative” political culture that was openly hostile to multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism, and which created the fertile ground in which Trump’s MAGA movement would take root and grow. People like Barrett, Benjamin, and Huss were considered “kooks” by their contemporaries in the mainstream media and establishment politics, but the far right political vocation they pursued diligently for their entire lives was consequential in ways that are much easier to see now, in hindsight, than they were at the time.
We need to talk about the April 5, 1978 edition of the Yazoo City (MS) Herald. More specifically, we need to talk about the matter-of-fact story about Richard Barrett, Mississippi gubernatorial candidate, lawyer, and co-chair of "Democrats for Reagan."
It all looks quite normal, an aspiring candidate who is a hard working entrepreneurial type, a Baptist, a veteran affiliated with the VFW, and someone who has been involved with political campaigns for over a decade. But there was something this newspaper article, inviting the public and especially young people to come learn about Barrett’s campaign, didn’t mention.
Though you’d never know it from that newspaper article, Barrett was well-known in Mississippi to be a rabid antisemite and white nationalist who in the 1980s would promote himself as “the father “of the Neo-Nazi skinhead movement. Barrett devoted his life to the idea that Black Mississippians, like the members of the choir pictured directly above that newspaper story about him, were not “real Americans” and should be forcibly deported to Africa. The 1967 report below (11 years BEFORE the publication of that pablum article about Barrett) was filed by an investigator for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, hardly a bastion of leftism. This conservative investigator, charged primarily with “protecting” the state against pro-integration “rabble rousers,” took one look at Barrett, someone who was on their side of the political and racial divide, and saw a mini-Hitler.
[Side note for the real history nerds out there: the New Jersey (Rutgers) prof that Barrett protested against by returning his diploma was Eugene Genovese.]
By 1978, Barrett had long been well known to the police, the FBI, the state Sovereignty Committee, and seemingly just about everyone in Mississippi to be a race-baiting “trouble maker,” which I take to be a euphemism for “KKK-style domestic terrorist.” Nonetheless, there was the Yazoo City newspaper, in 1978, encouraging young people to go out and hear what Mr. Barrett had to say for himself as if he was just a run-of-the-mill “conservative” politician.
In this way, Barrett’s story bears on a central question animating this Rightlandia newsletter: how can we explain why so many ordinary white Americans did “not see” people like Barrett for who he unabashedly was? Or, to what extent did they see it and either agree with it, or just not care enough to say or do anything about it?
Barrett first turns up in Walter Huss’s story in 1990. In that year Walter and his wife Rosalie were leading a movement to remove MLK, Jr’s name from a street in Portland. Barrett flew to Portland to support the cause, claiming he’d been invited there. The Huss’s, being the hospitable types they were, met Barrett for dinner and Barrett then sent them this thank you note which Huss kept in his files.
This Barrett incident was a key turning point for the Huss’s effort to remove MLK’s name from MLK Blvd. An Oregonian poll the month before Barrett’s visit had revealed that about 60% of Portland residents agreed with Huss that the street should be returned to its old name of Union Avenue. The Huss’s had organized an enormous petition drive (with petitions placed on the counters of virtually every business in Portland) that sought to put the question of the street name on the next ballot. They framed the MLK/Union Avenue issue in populist terms, as a people-power protest against an out-of-control city hall that had made an unpopular decision in an unaccountable manner. The Huss’s claimed that race had nothing to do with their opposition to MLK Blvd, but when one of the nation’s more notorious racists showed up to support the cause and they joined him at the MLK Blvd Sizzlers for dinner, that pretty much blew their cover. Here’s how The Oregonian covered the Barrett incident on February 10, 1990.
This picture of the Oregonian clipping comes from Huss’s “Barrett” file in the Walter Huss Papers, Box 49, University of Oregon Special Collections.
The first thing that stands out here is the Portland City Commissioner’s claim that Barrett’s visit could backfire because Oregonians don’t like outsiders telling them how to vote. So it was Barrett’s status as an outsider, not his status as a, you know, white supremacist that would turn Oregon voters off? It’s important to note that the city commissioner to whom this statement is attributed was Dick Bogle, only the second Black city commissioner in Portland’s history. Later in the story Bogle is quoted as saying that racism was at the root of the anti-MLK movement, so it’s interesting that the Oregonian writers chose to lead with his comment about Barrett being an “outsider.”1
Another piece of the story worth noting is Barrett’s trollish claim to be on the side of unity vs. the divisiveness of “Kingism.” Unfortunately, this is how a significant number of white Portlanders also thought about this issue—they thought bringing up racism (by naming a street after MLK, for example) was divisive while not talking about racism would create a more harmonious future. In hindsight we can see how ludicrous this sort of talking point was coming out of the mouths of racist trolls like Barrett or Huss, but it actually fell on a lot of receptive ears in 1990, and not just the ears of people who would have embraced the self-description of “racist” the way Barrett did.
As for Huss’s claim that there was no racism in his movement, let’s consider some context. The Huss’s began their anti-MLK Blvd movement less than a year after a group of neo-Nazi skinheads in Portland murdered an Ethiopian immigrant named Mulugeta Seraw. That racist hate crime (which occurred seven blocks from the Huss’s SE Portland home) drew attention to the depth and extent of organized, violent racism in Portland. The decision to name a street after MLK was a symbolic, anti-racist gesture on the city’s part. While many white Portlanders claimed there was nothing racist about their anti-anti-racist opposition to city hall’s MLK Blvd designation, most progressives and people of color in Portland knew full well what sorts of energies powered that anti-MLK Blvd movement.
Regular readers of Rightlandia will also know that Walter Huss’s claim that race had nothing to do with his anti-MLK organization was laughable because Huss was a deeply-committed white supremacist his entire life. At the exact same time Huss was devoting hours to this anti-MLK Blvd campaign, he was closely reading and carefully annotating David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People newsletter and sending Duke money and fawning letters of support.
When the Barrett story came out, the Huss’s did not admit defeat and close up shop. Rather, they doubled down and lashed out at the newspaper for engaging in shameless race baiting, something the Huss’s, of course, abhorred and would never consider doing! Four months after Barrett’s visit, for example, Rosalie Huss wrote a letter to The Oregonian accusing their “negro editor” of being prejudiced and spreading a “media virus [that] agitates racism.” [For readers too young to remember 1990, the use of the term “negro,” which before the mid-1960s was a term of respect, by the 1990s would have sounded quite anachronistic and offensive coming out of the mouth of a white person.]
While I don’t know if Huss and Barrett knew each other before they met for that 1990 dinner in Portland (the Huss’s claimed to have been hoodwinked by Barrett), I know that they traveled in many of the same political circles. Barrett’s political organization in the early 1970s, for example, listed figures like Arch Roberts and Pedro del Valle on its list of officers (see screenshot below). Huss was a subscriber to several newsletters put out by those two prominent white supremacist fascists and had likely met them. Huss and Barrett also shared personal and political ties to national far right figures like California congressman John Schmitz and Louisiana’s most well-known racist politician in the 1970s and 80s, John Rarick. Whether or not Barrett and Huss knew each other before 1990, they swam in the same explicitly white supremacist and antisemitic waters that lay just off the right edge of the more mainstream “conservative” movement.
You may have noticed a name on that list of Barrett’s 1970 supporters that perhaps took you by surprise—Paul Harvey, the avuncular nationally syndicated columnist and radio commentator. And yes, it’s THAT Paul Harvey that Mr. White Nationalist Barrett successfully recruited to lend clout to this project and a few other ventures that Barrett organized. This Paul Harvey cameo in a story about Nazis takes on added meaning these days given that last year Ron DeSantis (who has had to boot a few Nazi-curious staffers from his campaign recently) put out a deeply-strange ad entitled “God made a fighter” that was a riff on Paul Harvey’s iconic (and now virally popular) “God made a farmer” bit. I grew up in the 1970s and 80s hearing Paul Harvey’s commentary on the radio, thinking of him as a grandfatherly voice of the heartland who I mostly found to be corny, old fashioned, and unconvincing…but it turns out he had some more sinister associations as well. Walter Huss, for example, was a fan of Harvey’s and printed up one of his more racist columns from the late 1960s as a leaflet that Huss sold at his Freedom Center. When I think about my own history of “not seeing” the depth and extent of far right radicalism around me, my youthful assumption that Paul Harvey was just a harmless and cuddly old coot leaps to mind.
Along with his Paul Harvey beard, Barrett also used Peyton Manning’s father Archie (a star quarterback in his own right) to launder his organization’s reputation.2 Barrett tried to recruit young men for his political project by hosting award ceremonies for the state’s best white football players. He would then put out reports about these awards in his newsletter that also contained a wide range of right wing political commentary designed to stoke white populist anger at the federal government, civil rights activists, feminists, professors, liberals, and just about any person or organization to the right of Richard Barrett.
Barrett’s publication, which combined football boosterism with far right political chatter, also enabled him to puff up his own importance by publicizing his trips around the nation speaking to civic and veterans groups. The story below is from the same edition of Battlefront as the one that contained the story about Archie Manning. You’ll note how Barrett carefully identifies all of the “respectable” people and organizations who he met with in New York. How closely familiar each of these people or organizations might have been with the extremity of Barrett’s white nationalist beliefs is unclear (as with Paul Harvey), but it’s hard to believe that Barrett kept his true feelings to himself in most of these settings.
One theme that emerges in Barrett’s career is his great interest in speaking to student and veterans groups, as well as his skill at getting the his word out via radio and other media. The list below represents just one month of Barrett’s 1970 activities plying local groups with his distinctive take on what it meant to support “God and Country.”
Barrett was such a well-established figure in Mississippi’s political culture that one of his long-time associates was Senator Trent Lott. Barrett had a picture of himself with Lott hanging up in his house. Barrett was at Lott’s victory celebration in 1994 when he won re-election and according to Barrett, “Trent entered the hall and the first person he went up to shake hands with and greet was me. He called me by my name and was very affable." This connection to Barrett would be one of the data points that got Lott ousted from the Senate in 2002 when it came out that he had said the US would have been a better place if Strom Thurmond (a segregationist) had been elected president in 1948.
In March of 2002 Mississippi’s governor Ronnie Musgrove issued a proclamation for the “Spirit of America Day,” the event honoring white male high school athletes that Barrett had been organizing since the late 1960s. When it was brought to the Governor’s attention that Barrett was a white nationalist, he claimed to be unaware of that.
[Jackson, MS] Clarion Ledger, 5 March 2002.
I don’t want to overstate how influential or powerful Barrett was. What we can say with certainty is that between the late 1960s and 2010 (when he died) Barrett spoke to thousands of small groups of veterans, high school students, civic groups, churches, and so on. In those meetings he spoke of God and Country, of Southern heritage, of civilizational decline, of the “tyrannical government overreach” that was being unjustly used to dismantle Jim Crow. He was looking for recruits to his white nationalist cause, trying to identify people who’d be receptive to the sharper edged, more hateful and violent messages he conveyed when amongst “like minded” people. Fostering white nationalist sentiment of both the softer and more angry variety (depending on the audience) was Barrett’s vocation to which he devoted the majority of his time. How much success he met with, however, is another matter.
This 2009 account of one of Barrett’s pathetic “sports awards” events captures the vibe that I imagine infused many of the events Barrett organized over the years. This account was written by a fairly uninformed Australian journalist who had traveled to Mississippi in the spirit of a wildlife safari to poke fun at Barrett and other Americans, but who ended up stumbling into a much more complicated story. The journalist hoped he was about to see and catch on film an exotic gathering of skinheads that he could mock, but instead he encountered a small, sad gathering of regular folks who’d been roped into one of Barrett’s racist stunts.
Screenshots from John Safran, God’ll Cut You Down (2014)
While I could do without some of the author’s descriptions of the Mississippians he met, I think his account of the absurdist, Charlie Kaufman-esque nature of Barrett’s event is spot on. The only problem with such sarcastic depictions, however, is that they fed into an impulse, quite common in the “post-racial” Obama era, to dismiss the continued power and relevance of white supremacy in American political culture. Stories about pathetic racists like Barrett and their hilariously sad events were confirmation bias catnip to a particular type of white American, of which I must admit to have been.
But while people like me were quite wrong about what the nation’s racial future held in 2008-9, Richard Barrett and his white nationalist comrades had a much more clear-eyed vision of the coming backlash to Obama’s victory. For example, here’s an NBC News piece from August 2008 where Barrett predicts pretty accurately what the future held.
Obviously Barrett is being duplicitously strategic and self-aggrandizing here, as he was every time he interacted with the press from the 1960s until his death in 2010. His slippery refusal to let “the controlled media” put him in the white supremacist box in which he clearly belongs points to a dynamic we might call “reverse dog whistling.” Normally we think of “dog whistling” as the sort of thing MAGA-activists do when they use the term “globalists” or make sinister references to “George Soros.” For a certain subset of far right extremists in their audience, they’ll take this talk to be referring to “the joos behind the Communist conspiracy to destroy Christianity and America,” but they can still have plausible deniability that they’re merely criticizing Soros’s liberalism and organizations like the World Economic Forum and the UN. “Are you saying we can’t criticize the WEF or the UN, or say anything negative about Soros just because he’s Jewish?”
But what Barrett is doing in that NBC story (and what he did his entire political career) was slightly different. He was a far right extremist who skillfully used code words that he knew his less-radicalized audience would warm to—Southern heritage, law and order, preserving Christian civilization, government overreach, etc.—with the hopes that a few of the people he lured in with such normie “conservative” talking points could be dragged into the fever swamps of white nationalism where he resided and where he hoped to build an army ready to fight for the cause. This is the same dynamic we saw at work in 1990 when Barrett claimed he came to Portland to help unify the city and fight off the “divisive race baiters” who promoted things like naming a street after MLK. Rhetoric like this gave permission to white people to embrace white supremacy as something other than the anti-democratic and exclusionary force that it was—as a benign and patriotic thing, as something that would bring unity, as something that was about heritage and not hate. But really what Barrett was doing in Portland was meeting with local neo-Nazi skinheads and encouraging them to come to his summer training camp in Mississippi.
So yes, while most of the thousands of events that Barrett organized over the course of his life were probably as low energy, absurd, and ineffective as that 2009 action at the Jackson, MS city hall…and while most of the publications and TV shows that Barrett produced reached only a handful of dedicated acolytes…his life’s work as a litigious merry prankster for white nationalism sowed all sorts of seeds that would eventually bear fruit, especially in localities where the mainstream media barely reached and where mainstream politicians rarely visited.
Barrett’s life ended in 2010 in a sensational and violent manner.
I haven’t talked about Barrett’s sexual conduct yet because a) it’s not clear how, if at all, it related to his politics and b) it’s hard to pierce through the shroud of shame and homophobia that marked the way his contemporaries talked about it. It was an open secret in white nationalist circles that Barrett pursued men, especially younger men. This likely explains part of his interest in organizing events where he could present white high school football players with awards, and also explains why many parents of those athletes expressed displeasure about Barrett’s activities. This also raises questions about his history of organizing summer camps in Mississippi where young male skinheads would come to be trained in military tactics by him. Given his power and his authoritarian personality, as well as the well-documented history of abuse in right-wing churches, its doubtful that Barrett’s sexual relationships were marked by respectful consent, to say the least. Ultimately, however, there’s simply not enough evidence (and the evidence that exists is vague) to say much definitely about Barrett’s abuse of sexual power.
Barrett’s broader historical significance is that he was one of the many people in post WWII America that historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae has described as “a constant gardener of white supremacy.” Even though Barrett’s Nationalist movement seemed to be comprised of little more than himself and some fancy letter head, and even though he does not appear to have personally perpetrated any acts of domestic terrorism, he devoted his life to recruiting others into the white supremacist world view and movement. Here’s how a white man named Tommy, who was a child in Barrett’s Mississippi neighborhood, described Barrett’s methods of recruitment.
The last word belongs to Earnest McBride, a longtime journalist and editor at Jackson’s Black newspaper, the Jackson Advocate. Where many people in the area saw Barrett as a “nice guy” who wasn’t really a racist but whose strangeness could be explained by his repressed homosexuality, McBride could testify from decades of first hand experience that Barrett was indeed a true-believing, hateful racist. More than that, Barrett was a true believing racist who the white powers-that-be in rural Mississippi considered to be a very useful Johnny Appleseed of white supremacist ideas.
Thanks to Darrel Plant who pointed out the complexity of Bogle’s role in this story.
As was often the case, Barrett did not get the permission of this well-known public figure before using his name in association with Barrett’s organization. When Barrett’s publication was brought to Manning’s attention, his lawyers sent Barrett a letter telling him to stop using Manning’s name or else they’d sue.
Oh Paul Harvey. My grandparents listened to him every day, and read Reader’s Digest. Like you, I associated Harvey’s voice with cozy, comfortable memories of lunch with Grandma and Grandpa with the big old radio on. My grandparents were certainly republicans and my grandfather was racist, although it didn’t appear in his daily life. I was disappointed to discover his racism as a young adult, in much the same way that I was disappointed to learn about Paul Harvey’s distasteful beliefs and the fact that reader’s digest wasn’t just giving us jokes and vocabulary games.
And now I know... the _rest_ of the story.