Walter Huss and the Fascist Fifth Column in Cold War America

From Pedro del Valle's Minutemen to the Oath Keepers' January 6

The more I’ve learned about the broader political milieu of which Walter Huss was a part, the more I’ve come to think of him as an enthusiastic if minor player in an aspiring fascist Fifth Column in Cold War America. This fragmented movement was allied with the more mainstream conservative movement in its staunch opposition to communism and liberalism, but it was far more explicit and uncompromising in its embrace of white supremacy and Christian supremacy, and also in its willingness to use violence to preserve both. Beginning in the early 1950s this fascist subculture organized itself politically with the goal of taking over the Republican Party, and it created an extensive web of small publications that sought to deprogram their fellow Americans who’d supposedly been brainwashed by the nation’s liberal media and public school system. This far right media ecosystem sought to mobilize readers for the looming existential battle against the internal enemy of “anti-Christian, anti-American, globalist, collectivist leftism.” But some leaders of this movement didn’t stop there, they also focused on stockpiling weapons and providing paramilitary training for the members of the rank and file who were ready to carry out small acts of hateful direct action or domestic terror as they awaited what they considered to be the inevitable moment when the political and cultural war against the liberal/socialist/communist/Jewish menace would morph into a full-blown shooting war.

This fascist Fifth Column never came anywhere close to shaking the foundations of the American political system during Huss’s lifetime (he died in 2006). The extravagantly angry and conspiratorial right wing populist political culture it seeded, however, with its slippery slope from identifying “the left” as the internal enemy to arming oneself in preparation for militarily fighting back against it to “save America,'“ is arguably an important precursor to the groups behind the January 6 insurrection. It also helps us understand the many rank and file Republicans who, though weren’t in DC that day, still regard it as a sadly missed opportunity that may need to be repeated.

The idea for this post was sparked by a fascinating document I found last week in the Pedro del Valle Papers at the University of Oregon. The pictures I took are not super-easy to read so I’ve typed out the bulk of the document below. I’m not telling you the date of this document right now because I want you to read it with both US History and our present moment in mind.

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The Minutemen of America

1. The time has come when the liberties guaranteed to the citizens of the United States of America by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, are no longer safe in the hands of the duly constituted authorities alone.

2. Through careless relaxation of that eternal vigilance which is the price of freedom, we have permitted a gradual encroachment upon the substance of these documents with which the Founding Fathers endowed the Nation.

3. Many more attacks are constantly being made upon this Christian concept of government which made for the greatness of our country and the happiness of its people.

4. The tendency to draw power, wealth, and responsibility away from the townships, counties, and states, and centralizing them in one federal government, has resulted in an almost complete negation of the principle of self-reliance, which is a basic requirement of self-government.

5. Further to corrupt, misinterpret and weaken our national fundamental political philosophy we have become a member of a huge international aggregation, known as The United Nations, into which the United States of America has surrendered a large part of its sovereignty into the hands of a heterogenous conglomeration of representatives of all races, colors, and states of enlightenment, most of whom cannot properly "represent" their peoples because these did not select them, and none of whose interests exactly coincide with ours.

6. In the United Nations, Christianity, the basis of our form of government, can only with difficulty make its voice heard in this modern Tower of Babel amidst the din and clangor of clashing materialistic interests, including those of…our sworn enemy, the protagonists of anti-Christ.

7. Our communications, our railroads, our shipping, our aviation, practically all of our industry, banking, commerce and agriculture are, in one way or another, subject to unnecessary and largely un-constitutional Federal bureaus, agencies, controls and commissions, which in time of war have reached chaotic dimensions and tended to reduce the natural productiveness of our citizens.

8. Further inroads into the freedom of the citizens are projected in the form of socialized medicine, Federal Employment Practices Acts, compulsory social security, and other socialistic measures, which pretend to "benefit" the people.

9. The income tax, a device which Karl Marx advocated as a means

   to destroy capital, has been having just that effect upon our economy.

   Pretending to deliver into the hands of the poor the wealth of the rich, it will in the end destroy both.

10. Since the course of these assaults upon our liberty cannot or will not be stopped by the constituted authorities alone, then it becomes the duty of every good citizen to organize his millions to combat these evils and to restore the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

11. Be it therefore declared by resolution of the signatories herewith that we, the ordinary citizens of the United States of America will, and of a right should, organize, unite and form ourselves into a body called "The Minute Men of America.” That the purpose of the Minute Men of America is to restore the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by whatsoever means may be required, to the end that the present and future generations of this great Republic may once more enjoy the liberties which were bequeathed to us by our forefathers and which we, the people of the United States have, by our lack of vigilance, largely lost. That “The Minute Men of America" will be formed into squads of one squad leader and four men each, at the smallest local level; into platoons of one platoon leader and two or more squads each at the next largest level; then into companies of 100 men lead by a centurion, commandos led by commanders of two or more companies; into legions of two or more commandos led by a legionary, and finally, at State level, into divisions led by a State Councillor. All of these entities will, each in it’s own level, exercise the greatest possible initiative while responding generally to the directives of the higher echelons and the whole will be coordinated at the National level by the National Director.

12. The oath of office of the Minute Men will be "to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to restore the Bill of Rights and its guarantees to the people of the United States of America.” Washington's admonition, "Let none but Americana be put on guard tonight" will be the watchword. The emblem will be a white cross with the shield of the U. S.A. upon it. The motto: For God and Country. The clothing and equipment will be by each individual and need not be uniform. Meetings will be at the call of the leaders for each echelon. Discipline must be largely self-imposed, it being assumed that only patriots who realize the seriousness of our situation and the need for concerted action will be enrolled.

13. Every member will provide himself with a copy of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington's Farewell Address, and will use every effort to memorize the true meaning of each. Every meeting will be preceded by a prayers "Almighty God give us the strength, the wisdom, and the courage to serve Thee and our Country in such wise as to deserve the sacrifice Thy Son made for us, Amen.”

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That document was written in 1951 by former Marine Lt. General Pedro del Valle in consultation with several other former high ranking military officers.

I imagine that as you read that you caught more than a whiff of the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Constitutional Sheriffs, the Bundy/Malheur occupiers, or other far right paramilitary groups active on the right today. The Constitution lay in tatters, the “administrative state” has become a dead weight smothering the freedom and initiative of the American people, the only forces that stand between us and impending socialistic tyranny are brave, God-fearing Christian patriots with their stockpiled guns. In preparation for the coming battle we must commune with the words of the founders, get right with our Christian God, and clandestinely organize ourselves into military-style ranks, prepared for war at any time.

Mike Flynn is smart enough not to openly and actively organize a paramilitary force directly under his command. Based on the sort of rhetoric he uses on his Reawaken America tour, however, I imagine he’d sign on to most of the sentiments articulated in that Minuteman manifesto.

Pedro Del Valle sent that 1951 Minuteman proposal to his former commanding officer General MacArthur and cc’d it to the three most influential leaders of America’s antisemitic fascists: Conde McGinley, Merwin K. Hart, and Robert H. Williams.

When I call these three antisemites, I don’t mean they were impolite to Jews they may have met in their daily rounds. What I mean is that they understood themselves to be engaged in the most important struggle of their day—an existential battle between the international Communist/Jewish conspiracy and the forces of freedom. These men believed that America should be seeking to destroy the Communist/Jewish enemy with all of its might, both at home and abroad. Put another way, they believed America must soon find some sort of final solution to the Communist menace, lest it be destroyed by it. We’re used to thinking of post WWII American Nazi-friendly fascism as being comprised of little more than the effusions of a few fame-seeking sociopaths like George Lincoln Rockwell, but it flourished in a host of self-described “conservative” publications and in a handful of small local paramilitary organizations that floated just off the right edge of the conservative movement. This fascist fifth column generally looked dismissively upon the more mainstream conservative movement, but they also regarded its ranks as a source of potential recruits.

While del Valle (as far as I know) never got the thumbs up from MacArthur, he did find many former military men who agreed to work with him on this Minuteman project. In this 1963 document below we see del Valle writing to another retired military man with the plan for how to divide the country up once the fighting starts. Note that Col. Gale is cc’d on this document. That’s William Potter Gale, a foundational figure in the Christian Identity, Posse Comitatus, and white power militia movements of the 1960s through 1980s. Another figure cc’d here, John Crommelin, was an antisemitic and white supremacist former military man who ran for Alabama Senate in 1960 as “the white man’s candidate,” was involved with the domestic terrorists in the National States Rights Party, and through the NSRP was an associate of Huss’s friend Dale Benjamin, who I wrote about here.

To give you a sense of how central antisemitism was to del Valle’s world view (as it was to Huss’s), below is a letter he wrote in 1960 resigning from the John Birch Society because it was allowing Jews to join. WTF, del Valle asks Robert Welch, why can you not see how self-defeating that is? By definition Jews can’t be a part of the struggle against Communism because Communism is Jewish.

When I say del Valle was a Nazi-sympathizing fascist, I’m not being hyperbolic. Below is a friendly 1963 letter he wrote to the head of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, in which he invites him over for a meal. The only qualms del Valle expresses about his swastika-wearing friend is that he prefers his antisemites to be good Christians…but in this time of crisis that little detail could be overlooked.

Del Valle’s correspondence is littered with positive comments about Mussolini and Hitler. The fact that the Marines, as far as I can tell, still have a scholarship named after him is pretty stunning.

While I have yet to find any direct connection between Walter Huss and Pedro del Valle, their political networks overlapped significantly. They read many of the same newsletters and they knew many of the same people. I don’t have the time here to fully unpack that claim about Huss’s political network, but I talked a bit about the extremists who Huss was connected to in this post where I offered a close reading of this 1975 document below. Most of the people on this list of material recommended to Huss were associates of Pedro del Valle.

The figure who best illustrates the violent Fifth Column world that Huss and del Valle both inhabited is Kenneth Goff. Like William Potter Gale, Goff was a Christian Identity preacher who advocated violence on earth against the forces of Satan who, in his mind, took the form of Communists, Jews, and the civil rights activists these “puppet masters” were supposedly using to destroy traditional White Christian America. In 1963 and again in 1970, Walter Huss took Goff on extensive, week-long speaking tours throughout the Pacific Northwest. What I wouldn’t give to have have recordings of the conversations these two had as they drove from Portland to Eugene to Medford to Spokane…but alas.

When I first started looking into Goff all I knew is that he had been associated with Gerald LK Smith in the 1940s and that he was a white nationalist and an antisemite. That variety of “Christian patriot” squared with what I knew about Huss and it made sense that the two saw eye to eye in their bigotry. But in newspaper reports about their 1963 tour through Oregon there were intimations of something even more violent and menacing.

Albany Democrat Herald, 2 October 1963.

As I learned more about Goff it became clear why I picked up on those menacing vibes. Goff and Pedro del Valle were associates throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and Goff’s “Soldiers of the Cross” camp in Englewood, CO served as a seemingly wholesome, “Christian” front for what was actually a paramilitary training camp utilized by the 1960s iteration of The Minutemen (led by Robert DePugh). The article below from the September 1968 Arizona Republic tells of an undercover agent’s experience at Goff’s training camp. Goff was not just a bigoted, tough talking anti-Communist, he helped train hundreds, maybe thousands, of white Christian soldiers (and not just metaphorical soldiers) for their role as violent freedom fighters against the American government.

Occasionally an Oregon Republican who knew Huss will tell me that he was just a Christian conservative who tried to make political change via normal channels, not some wild-eyed radical with ties to Nazis and other right wing domestic terrorists. While I’m sure that is how Huss presented himself to many of his fellow Oregonians, his links to a wide variety of violent fascists around the country (and Goff is just one of many who fit this description) suggest that beneath that grandfatherly, Christian demeanor was a man whose political imaginary¹ involved an expectation that at some point in the near future Christian patriots like him would need to rouse themselves for a grand battle against the forces of the Jewish/Communist anti-Christ on American soil. Huss was smart enough to know that this wasn’t the sort of thing one just casually dropped in a conversation with a new acquaintance, but it was an eventuality that he spent much time reading about, preparing for, and talking about with his cohort of trusted fellow travelers like Goff.

One of those fellow travelers was a Gladstone, OR preacher named Edward Haman. Huss and Haman had known each other since the early 1970s when they teamed up to distribute car lubricants under the auspices of a Christian multi-level marketing scheme. Needless to say, those Christian lubricants worked as well as snake oil, and neither Huss nor Haman seems to have made any money off the deal.

In the 1970s and 1980s Haman made the news a few times as a leader in Oregon’s Posse Comitatus movement. In the article below we see that these folks depicted themselves, like Pedro del Valle, as defenders of the Constitution rather than as violent threats to it. To outsiders and the FBI (who was keeping fairly close tabs on these groups) this claim seemed absurd, but to these Posse Comitatus types it made sense because they considered most of the laws enacted by the currently existing federal government (like tax laws or gun laws) to be null and void because they were foisted upon “the real American people” by a Jewish-Communist cabal. Many of these people referred to FDR as “Rosenfelt” because they claimed he was actually Jewish and thus the entire New Deal was part of “the conspiracy.”² Another point worth noting in regard to the newspaper article below is that the self-proclaimed founder of the Oregon Posse Comitatus, Mike Beach, had been an active Silver Shirt in the 1930s. This is another case where we can see deep continuities in the history of the far right in terms of personnel and ideology.

The Oregonian, 15 March, 1976.

Below is an amazing and bizarre letter that Posse Comitatus leader Edward Haman wrote to Walter and Rosalie Huss in 1988. It provides a remarkable window into the violent, far right imaginary that he and the Husses inhabited. I’ve included the entire letter for context, but the material relevant to the theme of this newsletter is in the red boxes.

So yeah, that letter is quite a lot and you can imagine the look on my face and the sounds I emitted when I read it in the archive. I also feel obliged to point out that this guy was running summer bible camps for kids in the SE Portland suburbs throughout the 1970s and 80s.

I discussed the links between Huss’s belief in alternative medicine and his far right politics in this post, so I won’t spend any time talking about the herbs and faith healing Haman describes in the letter’s first few paragraphs.

It’s the barrage of names on the bottom of page 1 and page 2 that are of particular interest here, because they point to the political subculture that Huss and Haman inhabited that was so familiar to them that Haman could just trot these names out and assume Huss would know who these people were. 99% of Huss and Haman’s fellow Oregonians, being “sheeple,” would have not recognized these supposed “truth tellers” of the modern Christian Identity and radical anti-tax/Posse Comitatus movements. I won’t march you through all of them, but one that stands out is Everett Thoren. In 1964, 1966, and 1970 Thoren was the GOP nominee for Congress in District 2, a seat held by longtime Democratic incumbent Al Ullman. When Huss ran against Mark Hatfield in the GOP Senate primary in 1966, he placed newspaper ads and campaigned with Thoren at that time. Thoren and Huss were part of the far right grassroots insurgency that worked to take over the OR GOP from the mid-1960s into the 1970s. But where Huss succeeded in becoming OR GOP chair in 1978, Thoren landed himself in jail in 1977 for organizing a violent takeover of an Eastern Oregon potato shed that he claimed to own based on a bunch of cockamamie Posse Comitatus-inspired legal theories, presumably the same legal theories that Thoren would be sharing on that conference call that Haman informed Huss about in his 1988 letter.

Corvallis Gazette-Times, 15 August 1977

You probably picked up on Haman’s mention of Kenneth Goff, the Christian Identity preacher who ran a training camp for right wing domestic terrorists in Colorado, and who Huss had taken on tours around Oregon in 1963 and 1970.

This portion of the letter suggests to me that Haman had attended some of those Huss-organized meetings with Goff, 18 years or more before he was writing this letter. Clearly Goff’s message resonated deeply with Haman and he’d likely spent many a waking hour thinking about the day when he’d be able to contribute to the overthrow of the Rothschild/Shickelgrubber Babylon system, whatever the fuck that is.

In the letter’s final paragraph we get the same story about who will “save America” from the Jewish-Communist conspiracy as we got from Pedro del Valle—it will be retired Christian military officers linked to MacArthur. This list included William Potter Gale (a Christian Identity preacher who had been named on del Valle’s list of regional commanders once the battle begins) and Richard Butler, the founder of the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho. One year after Haman wrote this letter, Butler invited racist skinheads from across the country to celebrate Hitler’s birthday at his compound. This letter places Walter Huss two degrees of Kevin Bacon (or should it be two degrees of Adolf Hitler?) away from Richard Butler, not something that could be said about your run of the mill former chair of their state’s Republican Party in 1988.

The alternative reality depicted in Haman’s letter obviously felt very real to him, and the people and media he surrounded himself with undoubtedly reflected that far right imaginary back at him. Unfortunately I have not found any letters that Huss wrote to Haman, but based on the other evidence in his archive I have no reason to believe that Huss disagreed with Haman or was unconnected to Haman’s network of far right activists. I think I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite artifacts in Huss’s archive is his letter, on official letterhead, from his friend LaVerne Hollenbeck, the head of the Oregon Posse Comitatus, stating that Walter Huss was NOT a member of the Posse Comitatus.

Many of Huss’s contemporaries (especially the moderate Republicans he so hated and for whom he was an annoying presence) thought of him as a “kook.” I have no problem describing Haman’s letter to him as decidedly “kooky.” In hindsight we know that Huss and Haman’s grandiose plans for the (possibly violent) takeover of America by noble white Christian Patriots like them never came to pass, never even came close, despite the decades of assiduous effort they put into that project. But it strikes me as important (and shocking) that the chair of the Oregon Republican party in 1978 understood himself to be part of a fascist Fifth Column (though he would not have described himself that way) that was preparing for a future, violent confrontation with the Jewish/Communist controlled US government in the name of restoring the reign of true Christian Patriots like himself. It strikes me that the adjective “kooky” that many of his contemporaries used to describe Huss doesn’t quite capture the extent of the threat posed by the movement of which he was a part.

I’ll leave you with one final artifact from Huss’s archive, the confirmation of his attendance (for the third year in a row) at Bo Gritz’s survivalist/insurrectionist training camp in 1994. The full training manual is in Huss’s archive. It contains instructions for how to bulletproof your house, how to properly fire a gun so as to kill an assailant, how to neutralize an opponent with jujitsu, and so on. In 1994 Walter Huss was 76 years old, but he was still loaded for bear when it came to confronting “the enemy.”

The Oregon contact person for Bo Gritz’s event, Richard Flowers, was a white supremacist associated with the Christian Patriot Association based in Boring, OR. He ran an illegal banking/tax avoidance scheme that landed him in jail in 2002. One of the headline speakers at these SPIKE trainings was Eustace Mullins, a disciple of Ezra Pound’s and one of America’s more prolific antisemites who’d been churning out empirically-challenged conspiracy theories since the early 1950s.

I’ve spoken to three separate people who told me, unprompted, that they suspected that Walter Huss was a violent man. One progressive activist who’d met Huss in the early 1990s described him as “mean,” and another who’d spent time studying Huss organization in the early 1960s told me that he bought a gun for the first time in his life for fear of what Huss or his people might do to him.

At this point I’ve found no evidence that Huss ever engaged in political violence or even committed a violent crime against another individual. That said, he seems to have spent a lot of time thinking about participating in righteous political violence to restore America to what he thought it should be. Fascists like Huss, Haman, and del Valle understood themselves as Christian Patriots beset by a vast Jewish/Communist conspiracy that targeted freedom fighters like them. Even though that was more paranoid fantasy than reality, it felt very real to them and their political associates. Paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed, and violent political imaginaries like that don’t just come out of nowhere or perpetuate themselves spontaneously. They require organization and methods of dissemination. The perpetuation and growth of a political culture built around that sort of political imaginary has been greatly facilitated in the past decade by the extensive foothold it’s gotten in the institutions of right wing media and the Republican Party. In an age when the former President’s son and National Security Advisor are appearing at an event headlined by Alex Jones and organized around the idea that January 6 was a noble effort to reverse an election stolen by radical left globalists, Walter Huss starts to look less like a kooky anomaly and more like a premonition of things to come.

1. I’ve borrowed this term “imaginary” from historian Jennifer Mittelstadt who deployed the concept in this excellent review of recent books by Edward Miller and John Huntington. In a future newsletter I’ll talk more about this analytical term and explain why I find it to be such a useful way to describe “the far right.” For now, here’s one paragraph from her review that gives a good sense of how she uses the term. “While Huntington and Miller have returned conspiracy to view, their treatments of the subject demonstrate that more work may be required to understand the full nature and impact of the imaginaries of the right. Huntington and Miller present conspiracies as self-evident structures of emotion and cognition, characterized by faulty causal logic, the urge to create connection between events, and the belief that enemies possessed frightening powers. The conspiracies Miller and Huntington cite come into view in their books fully formed, and are adopted and adapted by Welch or Haley or the many readers and listeners to far-right publications and radio shows. Conspiracies not only appear fully formed, but often seem to operate under their own steam, generating appeal on the far right simply through their iteration in a society the authors argue is itself becoming more open to conspiracies of all kinds. Overall, then, the books identify conspiracies and note their diffusion, but the conspiracies remain black boxes of sorts. When and how did the idea of a grasping Soviet monster emerge and among which groups? What cultural forms, theology, or events inspired the myth of a power-hungry global government? How did these symbols make people on the right feel? How did those feelings foster actions? What work did shared beliefs in these myths do to elide differences among people, to build bridges within and beyond the right? Did these emotion-laden frameworks operate as a kind of “psychic glue” for the movement?31 The origins, specific structures, emotional valences, and above all the political power of these imaginaries—remain little explored.”

2. Fun fact for the Oregonians in the audience. I learned from an interview with a former Republican legislator that the guy after whom Kruse Way in Lake Oswego is named was the sort of right winger who would talk your ear off about how FDR was ackshually a Jew.