Walter Huss Knew That if Fascism Ever Came to America, it would happen via the hostile takeover of a major political party
On American Fascism's parasitic relationship to "The Party of Lincoln"
In American politics, especially national politics, parties matter a lot. Winning the nomination of either of the two major parties has usually meant that a candidate starts the general election with >40% of the vote sown up. Some people in 2016 thought this normal rule of electoral politics might be suspended when an obnoxious know-nothing, pussy-grabbing wrecking ball of a first time candidate named Donald Trump barged into the Republican Party primary and took it by storm.
As of today, Senator Graham (R-SC) has still not deleted this tweet, which I choose to interpret as an encouraging sign that he’s hedging his bets.
The traditional Republican gatekeepers did their best to stop it. In January 2016 the “old grey lady” of conservatism, the National Review, published an entire issue entitled “Against Trump” in which two dozen prominent conservatives made the case for why Trump, “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist…with strong-man overtones,” was a “cancer on conservatism” who should be denied the GOP nomination. We all know how that turned out. And within a couple of years over half of the contributors to that National Review issue were onboard the Trump train.
The rapid extinction/capitulation of “anti-Trump Republicans” points to another important fact about modern American parties—while they might wield tremendous power in terms of securing votes in general elections, they are remarkably hollow and pliable as institutions. The GOP in particular, now that it has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump, Inc, has proven itself to be quite susceptible to what many Republicans in 2015-6, including many who are now on the Trump Train, would have considered to be a hostile takeover. And that takeover has involved not just the GOP’s buildings, letterhead, and fundraising apparatus, but also its political culture. That Trumpist political culture has rewired the hearts and minds of many people who used to be quite different sorts of “Republicans.” After all, who would have thought that a guy who called Trump “America’s Hitler” in February 2016 would agree 8 years later to be his running mate?
In 2016, Donald Trump and Steve Bannon’s relationship to the GOP as an institution was largely transactional and parasitic, like that of any aggressive corporate raider. Had their gambit not worked, there’s a good chance that both of them would have abandoned or aggressively turned on the GOP in pursuit of more money or attention. Neither of them had any long term investment in the health of the GOP as an institution. They reviled most of the party’s past standard bearers and they had the shallowest of commitments to the core principles (such as they were) that the party had historically claimed to stand for. In July of 2020, for example, Donald Trump revealed his deep grasp of his party’s history by pointing out the little known fact (that he apparently recently learned) that Abraham Lincoln had actually been a Republican. “You say that and people say ‘I didn’t know that!’”
As ambitious and self-aggrandizing shitposting trolls, Trump and Bannon saw the GOP in 2016 as both an easy mark and a useful vehicle for their extravagant and grubby wills to power. It’s impossible to overstate just how unlikely the Trump/Bannon takeover of the GOP would have appeared in January of 2015 to most informed observers, myself included.
Nothing better captures the radically unexpected nature of Trump’s hostile takeover than this excellent April 2017 episode of This American Life.
In the opening 8 minutes of the show we hear tape of a 2014 dinner conversation with Steve Bannon, the largely unknown editor of a fringe right wing website called Breitbart. Bannon is selling the hell out of a completely fabricated story about Mexican cartels who'd supposedly taken over entire counties in Texas. We’ve now gotten used to such shameless and brazen gish galloping from major political figures on the national stage (“every major legal scholar from both sides thought Roe v. Wade should be overturned!”), but in 2014 the journalist listening to this firehose of Bannon’s bullshit didn’t quite know what to make of it. Any political journalist is prepared to encounter spin and prepackaged talking points, but this was like watching someone improvise a free form fascist jazz odyssey in real time. At some level you had to admire the high wire act, even if it was utter nonsense.
The journalist who interviewed Bannon also attended a 2014 party in DC where he hung out with Sebastian Gorka, Jeff Sessions, (probably) Stephen Miller, and other people who were perceived to be totally fringe at that time. If you’d asked DC people in 2014 to name the Senator who had the least clout with their colleagues and was most likely to merit the label “laughing stock,” it would have been precociously early MAGA adopter and future Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It was inconceivable in 2014 that some young, white nationalist staffer for that backbench Senator (i.e., Stephen Miller) would in three years be writing major speeches and formulating policy for the President of the United States.
The journalist wrote up his story about this network of ambitious hard right conservatives who were trying to remake the GOP in their extremist image, but the outlet that had solicited it demurred. "Why should we publish this? Who cares about these irrelevant freaks?" Ten years later, irrelevant freaks like Bannon and Miller are major power brokers in the media arms and institutional apparatus of the GOP and the “conservative movement.” Meanwhile, previously important Republicans like John McCain or Jeff Flake or Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan or Lisa Murkowski or John Kasich or George W Bush or Dick Cheney or Mike Pence (Trump’s loyal VP up until the final, key moment) have been rendered largely irrelevant, if not banished entirely from the Republican fold. Trump, the guy who was donating to Democrats (including Kamala Harris) and attending Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in the early 2010s, is now the Platonic form of “Republican,” while all of those other chumps are just pathetic RINOs.
There are few concepts historians love more than “contingency.” Trump’s surprisingly successful takeover of the GOP and it’s rapid transformation into a thoroughly Bannon-esque party of far right, Camp-of-theSaints-loving, conspiracy-obsessed, illiberal Christian Nationalists, is the dominant historical contingency of our era, a contingency that might end up wrecking America’s post-New Deal constitutional order. There was nothing inevitable about Trump’s narrow Electoral College victory in 2016. Nor was it inevitable that he would escape accountability via impeachment in January of 2021 while the US Capitol still bore the scars of the violent, attempted autogolpe he inspired. Nor was it inevitable that the GOP would re-nominate him in 2024 after one court found him liable for rape and another found him guilty on 34 felony counts. Nor is the future fate of American democracy pre-ordained.
But while history is unpredictable, and contingent events (like a 2016 electoral college victory that hinged on 78K votes in three states or a 2020 electoral college victory that hinged on 45K votes in three states) can alter its trajectory significantly, there are also deeply embedded structures or continuities that make certain types of changes more likely to happen while also constraining the range of possible futures. It was highly unlikely, for example, that this week the Republican National Convention would nominate a candidate who favors universal health care and the legislative codification of Roe v. Wade, though it wasn’t technically impossible. Similarly, it’s not a coincidence that Donald Trump’s “America First” messaging and his anti-immigrant and anti-PC demagoguery sounds so much like the rhetoric of that darling of the Clinton era far right and 1992 RNC keynote speaker, Pat Buchanan…or that one of Trump’s most influential mentors was Joe McCarthy’s right hand man Roy Cohn…or that many of the same elements on the American right that warmed to George Wallace also adore Trump. I mean, Trumpism didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree!
So while unpredictable contingencies matter, they can’t make politically titanic currents turn on a dime. History teaches us that we should always be prepared to be taken by surprise by events, but that we should also be clear-eyed about the durability of deeply-rooted historical dynamics.
The rest of this piece will be about two historical/structural dynamics inside which we’re currently living—1) the fascistic/illiberal threads in US political culture that stretch back decades, long before most living Americans were born and 2) the long game ultra right activists have been playing since the 1950s to take over the GOP and use it, as John Ganz puts it in his excellent new book, “to break the clock of liberal democracy.” My focus, as with most Rightlandia posts, will be on the Oregon GOP as a microcosm of national politics, and Walter Huss as a pivotal actor in that microcosmic history.
Past is not necessarily a straightforward prologue. Just because America has a long history of anti-democratic illiberalism and just because those fascistic energies have gotten a firm foothold in the GOP via Trumpism, that doesn’t mean the triumph of such forces is assured. There are still many unpredictable contingencies to unfold in the coming months and years, but we can perhaps better understand and respond to them if we have a clearer grasp of some of the deeper historical currents swirling beneath our turbulent present.
Walter Huss: The Fascist Troll Who Pulled off a Hostile, Parasitic Takeover of the Oregon GOP in 1978
My story begins, like many stories about the history of the American right, in 1964 with the presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater. Just as many longtime Republicans opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016 because they saw him as an extremist wild card who’d brought new, dangerously illiberal elements into the GOP, that was how many Republicans thought about 1964 GOP nominee Barry Goldwater and his supporters. After attending the 1964 GOP convention, for example, longtime Republican Jackie Robinson, said "I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany."
Oregon was one of many states where the GOP establishment was quite lukewarm on Goldwater’s extreme anti-government vision, fearing (a la Lindsey Graham ca. 2016) that if they nominated a radical like Goldwater the GOP would get destroyed and would deserve it. Future Senator Bob Packwood had his first great political success in 1964 when he organized a slate of decidedly un-Goldwater-esque Republicans to run for the Oregon legislature. In a year when Republicans got shellacked everywhere, Oregon was the only state where Republicans actually picked up seats in the state house. This victory provided momentum for the moderate to liberal wing inside the OR GOP for years, though I can’t resist pointing out the irony that Packwood’s work recruiting moderate candidates was bankrolled by one of Oregon’s richest men, Ernie Swigart, who was…wait for it…a founding member of the John Birch Society.
Oregon’s leading moderate Republican, Governor Mark Hatfield, gave the keynote address at Goldwater’s 1964 GOP convention, and he used the occasion to denounce the bigotry and right wing extremism that provided much of the energy behind the Goldwater movement. Hatfield even criticized by name the avid Goldwaterites in the John Birch Society, a group whose deeply paranoid and conspiracy-obsessed members comprised perhaps 10% of the delegates at the convention. As you can see in the video below, many people in Hatfield’s Republican convention audience forcefully cheered those comments, but he also received a lot of angry mail in response. The pushback during his convention speech would have undoubtedly been greater had the Goldwater organization not arranged for an event offsite, ensuring (perhaps intentionally) that most of the right wing Republicans Hatfield was criticizing were not there.
This is an excerpt from Hatfield’s full remarks which can be seen here. Apologies for the poor video quality. This was the only source I could find for Hatfield’s address and the only way I knew how to turn it into a downloadable clip was by just taking a video of my computer screen with my phone. But you get the idea.
While the majority of “establishment” Republicans in Oregon were not enthused about Goldwater’s ascendancy, there was a significant element inside the party that saw Barry as the entering wedge of a movement that would soon kick the state’s GOP establishment out of power and replace them with “true conservatives” like Goldwater. One of the leaders of that far right insurgency in 1964—a man who 14 years later would stage a successful, hostile takeover of the OR GOP and become the party chairman—was, of course, Walter Huss.
One of the funnier moments in Huss’s career as a far right activist occurred in 1964 when he trolled the chair of the Oregon Republican Party at the Portland airport. Barry Goldwater had flown to Oregon on October 10 for a desultory campaign visit to a state that he knew he was going to lose. When he landed at the airport he was greeted by a few hundred cheering supporters. The person who’d arranged for that crowd to be there was Walter Huss, the director of the Oregon Committee for Goldwater-Miller. [That’s Huss in the bottom left picture below.]
The Oregonian, 11 October 1964.
But there was a problem. Huss held no official position in the Oregon or national Republican Party, in fact he was quite hostile to virtually every elected Republican official in the state, especially Governor Mark Hatfield who Huss believed was an agent of the international Communist conspiracy. When Elmo Smith, the chair of the Oregon Republican Party, arrived at the airport that October 10 to greet Goldwater he was chagrined to discover that Huss had butted his way into the event.
One month earlier The Oregonian had reported on GOP chair Smith’s frustrations with the way Huss was basically running the Goldwater campaign in Oregon, doing everything from organizing door-to-door canvassing, printing up and distributing literature, and collecting funds to compensate himself for his labor and the materials he produced. Huss’s activism on behalf of the GOP candidate concerned Smith because it gave the impression that the Oregon Republican Party shared Huss’s far right politics, especially his opposition to the civil rights movement and his support for the Liberty Amendment that would have abolished the federal income tax.
The Oregonian, 19 September 1964.
Although almost no establishment Republicans knew it at the time, Huss had moved back to his hometown of Portland in 1960 with the express purpose of organizing a grassroots, far right movement that could steal control over the Oregon Republican Party away from the loose coalition of conservatives, moderates, and even liberals who had historically run it. Huss thought the establishment Republicans who supported things like the civil rights movement, the United Nations, religious pluralism, the federal income tax, and water fluoridation were either secretly or unintentionally helping to advance the Communist/Jewish conspiracy. To Huss’s mind, such anti-American and anti-Christian traitors obviously had to be rooted out of the GOP if the party was to advance the cause of true Americanism. Huss scored his first near-victory in 1962 when he and some neo-Nazi, white nationalist, Young Americans for Freedom, and John Birch Society associates organized a far right insurgency that came within a few score votes of taking over the Multnomah County chapter of OR GOP. I told that story in the post linked below.
Like virtually all far right activists in 1964, Huss saw the Goldwater campaign as a hugely consequential tipping point and inspiring sign for the future of the GOP. It was the first time Republicans had nominated a ‘true conservative” to be their standard bearer. Huss worked tirelessly from the spring of 1964 into November to get his man into office. He even produced and performed on a recording of an unintentionally hilarious Goldwater campaign song written by his friend and fellow evangelical preacher Jim Bisel, Portland’s leading Christian ventriloquist. “Let us through strength preserve the peace for which our forefathers died/ Come let us stand with our boys in Vietnam who have tried.”
The Oregon GOP establishment had many reasons to be suspicious of Huss apart from his poor taste in music. Soon after Huss set up his anti-communist “Freedom Center” in Portland, at which he was known to disseminate an array of antisemitic tracts, someone spray painted swastikas on a synagogue in town. The Rabbi publicly speculated that Huss’s political activism might have inspired the vandalism. [FWIW, based on my research I’d say it’s likely that the Rabbi was correct, but I can’t definitively prove that.] A few weeks after the 1961 synagogue desecration Huss applied for a city permit to raise $88,000 to support his work as a crusader against the internal Communist menace. When the city learned, however, that the money would be spent repairing the roof on Huss’s newly purchased home which doubled as his “Freedom Center,” Huss’s request was denied. When Huss appealed that ruling, the 5 1/2 hour public hearing on the matter (at which Huss was represented by Cleon Skousen’s brother) was broadcast live on KGW’s television station. In preparation for the hearing, future Republican Secretary of State and Governor Tom McCall dug into Huss’s background and wrote a memo describing Huss as “a fascist.” At least two Portland residents who testified at the televised hearing, a Finnish trade unionist and an African-American minister, explicitly compared Huss’s organization to that of the Nazis. Considering that as a young man in the 1930s Huss had likely been involved with a pro-Hitler group called “the Silver Shirts,” what may have sounded like hyperbole to some viewers in 1961 was more on the mark than anyone at the time (other than Huss and his friends who shared his Silver Shirt ties) could have known.
Transcript of the May 11, 1961 city council hearing on Walter Huss’s application for a fundraising license, broadcast live on KGW. Edith Green Papers, Oregon Historical Society.
The next year, 1962, Huss organized an angry crowd that staged a protest at Republican Governor Hatfield’s home. The menacing crowd so terrified Hatfield’s wife that she gathered up her children, took them to the basement, and made a panicked call to the police.
In 1963 Huss organized an extensive and racist letter-writing campaign that tried to convince Governor Mark Hatfield and Portland Mayor Terry Schrunck NOT to appear on stage with Martin Luther King, Jr. when he came to speak in Portland. Huss’s argument was that MLK promoted “racial mongrelization” and was part of the vast Communist conspiracy to destroy white Christian America and hence should be persona non grata amongst Republicans and all freedom-loving Americans.
Then, in January of 1964, Huss and a group of eight counter-demonstrators showed up to support Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace (of “Segregation Forever” fame) when he visited Portland. Two of the people who accompanied Huss at this pro-Wallace protest in January 1964 were teenaged proteges of his who later that year founded the National Party, a Portland fascist organization modeled on the Silver Shirts of the 1930s that staged dozens of racist and antisemitic direct actions in Portland from the fall of 1964 into the spring of 1966.
Capitol Journal, 13 January 1964
A Portland newspaper reported that Huss and his friend Dale Benjamin met with George Wallace during the Alabama Governor’s stay in Portland.
Oregon Journal, 13 January 1964
Benjamin had been an itinerant KKK preacher in the 1920s (he drove a car with Keep Kalvin Koolidge emblazoned on the side) and was the Oregon head of the National States Rights Party, the Nazi-adjacent domestic terrorist arm of the massive resistance/pro-segregationist movement in the US South.
Walter Huss and "The Best People," Episode 1 (Rev. Dale J. Benjamin)
So given these aspects of Huss’s pre-Goldwater background (and this is just a small sampling I’ve offered here), you can understand why the chair of the Oregon Republican Party was less than thrilled to see Huss, that Democratic Governor George Wallace lover and Republican Governor Mark Hatfield hater, at the Portland airport interacting amicably with the GOP POTUS candidate as if he was the representative of Oregon Republicanism.
The next stage in Huss’s trollish campaign to take over the OR GOP came in 1966 when he ran in the Republican primary for US Senate against Mark Hatfield, the sitting two-term Governor who was the presumptive nominee. Because Hatfield refused to debate him, Huss followed Hatfield around the state and shouted questions at him from the audience at his campaign events. This is how Hatfield remembered it in an oral history interview he gave in the late 1990s. [Note that Hatfield misremembered the year Huss became OR GOP chairman. It was 1978, not 1966.]
Huss’s 1966 GOP primary race against Hatfield was largely bankrolled by Arthur Dahl, a retired factory owner from Chicago who’d moved to Oregon in the 1950s and became famous (or infamous) for taking out big ads in the state’s newspapers voicing his ALL CAPS support for an array of conservative causes and especially his vociferous opposition to virtually all forms of taxation and government spending.
Salem Statesman Journal, 22 October 1964.
Huss joined forces in 1966 with another far right anti-communist, anti-one worlder, anti-”controlled media,” anti-tax and anti-government Republican primary candidate named Everett Thoren. Thoren won his primary to represent Oregon’s 2nd Congressional district but lost handily to Democratic incumbent Al Ullman. Note that these Huss/Thoren ads were paid for by the previously mentioned Arthur Dahl. Note also Huss and Thoren’s explicit appeal to conservative Democrats to switch parties so as to build a more conservative OR GOP. Oregon had a significant population of white Democratic voters who had moved to the state from the South, or who were the descendants of Southern emigres. Huss accurately perceived that such voters’ allegiance to the Democratic party was often bound up with their religious conservatism and commitment to white supremacy, thus making them perfect candidates for recruitment into the sort of Republican Party Huss was trying to build.
[Albany] Greater Oregon, 15 April 1966
[Albany] Greater Oregon, 25 March 1966
The life story of Everett Thoren (which I’ll tell at greater length in a future installment of Rightlandia) is a perfect example of why the Oregon GOP had good reason to be quite nervous about Huss and the political company he was keeping in 1966. Ten years after losing in the 1966 general election, Everett Thoren had established himself as a leader of the state’s Posse Comitatus movement. That antisemitic, racist, and Christian supremacist movement that was founded by men who’d been pro-Hitler Silver Shirts in the 1930s sought to bring a violent end to “the treason that is going on in the United States by our President, governors, congressmen, etc.”
Salem Statesman Journal, 13 February 1976
In 1977, exactly one year before Walter Huss achieved his greatest political success by getting elected chair of the Oregon Republican Party, Thoren was sent to jail for the role he played in a Posse Comitatus inspired attack on a potato shed that he falsely claimed to own in eastern Oregon. Thoren was just one of several Posse Comitatus leaders who Huss knew well and worked closely with throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Corvallis Gazette-Times, 15 August 1977
Huss seemed to have stayed in Thoren’s orbit through his Posse Comitatus phase and into the early 1990s. One of Thoren’s final acts in the mid-1990s was to inspire a group of “Christian patriots” to physically assault a county clerk in Stanislaus County California.
Modesto Bee, 16 April 1997
Let’s rewind back to 1966. After Huss lost to Hatfield in the GOP primary for Senate (110K votes for Hatfield, 20K votes for Huss) he joined up with a right wing group called the United Republicans of Oregon (URO) who’d formed the year before and who tried to set themselves up as “the real” Republicans of Oregon. The URO was basically a John Birch Society front group that also included local representatives of the Liberty Lobby, an even further right organization headed up by Willis Carto, the neo-Nazi publisher of The Spotlight who in the late 1970s became America’s leading funder and publisher of Holocaust denial. [In the 1980s Huss was a subscriber to Carto’s Holocaust-denial publication.]
Salem Statesman Journal, 3 April 1966
A statement of principle from the United Republicans of Oregon that Walter Huss acquired at the April 2, 1966 meeting of the group.
As Geoffrey Kabaservice has documented in his book Rule and Ruin, the years following Goldwater’s defeat featured intense intra-party conflicts between those who envisioned a more moderate GOP and those who espoused a more hard right vision. In Oregon in 1966, that battle took the form of 2 unofficial “Republican” meetings that were held in two different towns on the same weekend. The moderates, led by Bob Packwood, met at the “Dorchester Conference” in Gearhart on the Oregon coast while the far right insurgents (almost none of whom had ever held elected office in Oregon or official positions in the OR GOP) held their “United Republicans of Oregon” meeting at the Portland Hilton. The only person who made the effort to attend both events was “Progressive Republican” Tom McCall who had planned to criticize “the extremism of the radical right” at that URO conference, but at the last minute chose to omit that portion of his speech.
Capital Journal, 1 April 1966
The United Republicans of Oregon seem to have disbanded after the 1968 election, but not after avidly supporting Ronald Reagan for the GOP POTUS nomination in the fall of 1967, and then George Wallace for President after Reagan did not get the GOP nod. Given the URO’s refusal to back Republican POTUS candidate Richard Nixon (hardly a flaming leftist) in 1968, it’s understandable why Oregon’s Republican establishment was quite suspicious about the political intentions of this group of activist “Republicans.”
The World, 8 October 1968
Like his compatriots in the URO, Walter Huss supported George Wallace instead of Richard Nixon in 1968, but that didn’t stop him from continuing his work inside the OR GOP to remake it in his image. In 1968 Huss devised a plan to recruit far right Christians in every county to run for Republican precinct captain and then vote for Huss to be state chairman. Only that way could Oregon’s “true and mature Christians” unseat the “ungodly clique” (by which Huss meant “Jewish Communists”) that supposedly controlled the party.
Every two years between 1968 and 1978 Walter Huss attended the state Republican convention where he tried to get the Christian precinct captains he recruited to vote as a block to make him state party chairman. The screenshot below is how Curry County GOP chair Norman Crowhurst described Huss’s mode of operation. Although Crowhurst laregely shared Huss’s political and religious views (and would later get arrested for his participation in Posse Comitatus-related tax evasion schemes he engaged in with several of Huss’s long time friends), he could not bring himself to go along with Huss’s authoritarian tactics in 1968. The pictures below are of the copy of Crowhurst’s 1981 memoir, Victory over the Beast’s Image, that Walter Huss owned. I assume those are Huss’s markings. Since this isn’t super easy to read, I’ve transcribed the most relevant portions of the text below.
“In 1968, while I was County Chairman of the Curry County Republican Central Committee, I received a long phone call from a man who identified himself as Walter Huss, a preacher with the Church of God. He was using a WATS line, so he kept me on the phone for 45 minutes that time, and over an hour another time. The gist of the conversation was God had told him to take over the Republican Party, and that God Had told him that I was his man in Curry County. The time was spent explaining the strategy, several times over, because I could not accept it as the Christian thing to do. When he said God had told him I was to "take over" the party in Curry County, I had two objections: first, if God had told him that, why hadn't God told me Himself? NO, I was not being facetious. In my previous experience, If God had something for me to do, He revealed it to me, not through some third party. And second, I was already County chairman in what way was I to "take over” from myself? It seemed I was to become a dictator and railroad what he said ‘had to be done’ without reference to the elected committeemen and women. That was trickery. Come party convention time, Huss’s plan was to get a slate of officers (all from his church) elected by skillful strategy. As soon as I arrived at the convention hotel one of his henchmen told me Huss wanted to see me in his ‘inner sanctum’—a suite of rooms on the top floor that he had set up for the purpose. I was ushered in like a VIP and he explained the strategy to me…[Crowhurst refuses to go along with the plan]…He had given his orders and all any of us peons had to do was to obey them. They were God’s orders transmitted through him.”
If Norman Crowhurst found Huss to be an outlandishly authoritarian presence at the Republican state convention, you can imagine what the secular and moderate Republican establishment thought of him. One such moderate, state Representative and future Speaker of the House Roger Martin, told me a story about the 1970 convention in Eugene that conveys the contempt that people like him had for Huss. After an evening of partying with a group of his fellow mainstream Republican delegates at the hotel bar, Martin signed the bill with Huss’s name and the room number of the penthouse suite Huss was using as his “inner sanctum” that year. When Martin saw Huss the next morning as everyone was checking out to go home Huss was apoplectic about being charged for alcohol (he was a teetotaler) and was plaintively making his case to the desk clerks that he shouldn’t have to pay.
The gusto with which Martin told me that story and the gales of laughter that accompanied it conveyed just how much derision he felt toward Huss and the Greek chorus of theocrats Huss inspired to start coming to OR GOP convention meetings to vote as a block. Martin, a devout Catholic and firm believer in religious pluralism, described himself to me in this 2022 interview as a “Lincoln Republican.” That’s how he explained both his revulsion for Huss’s racial and religious bigotry in the 1970s, as well as his distaste for “that jackass” Donald Trump. Some might say Roger Martin was being very unfair to President Trump who did an amazing job of discovering that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and is getting noticed more and more, but oh well.
Huss diligently worked at his Christian-precinct-captain-recruitment project for ten years before it finally bore fruit with his election to party chairman in 1978. Over the course of the decade from 1968 to 1978 during which Huss was doing this organizational work, the establishment of the party did little to counter him. Those pesky Birchers of the early 1960s had seemingly faded from the scene, and it was inconceivable that a “kook” like Huss and his network of working class evangelicals scattered around the state could possibly succeed in taking over the OR GOP from popular moderates like Mark Hatfield and Tom McCall, both of whom won statewide elections by comfortable margins in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
But Huss just kept at it. In 1972 Walter’s wife and political partner, Rosalie, staged a coup inside the same Multnomah County Republican party that Walter had tried to take over ten years earlier. Rosalie was the vice-chair, and when chair Ben Doerksen took a trip out of the country for a few weeks she put herself in charge and passed resolutions endorsing far right Republican John Ashbrook for President over incumbent Richard Nixon. She dismissed all of Doerksen’s previous appointees and changed the locks on the Multnomah County Republican Party’s doors. Eventually the central committee appointed another moderate named Ken Doty to replace Rosalie, and the locks on the office doors were changed back.
I’ll share just one more story to give a flavor of the Husses “hostile takeover” tactics. In 1976, a woman who was a moderate GOP precinct captain from Clackamas county got an alarmed phone call from a friend telling her that she had to go to the county executive committee meeting that night. “Ugh, why?” she thought. “Those meetings are soooo boring and I was planning on just relaxing at home and watching TV.” But she honored her friend’s request and attended the meeting. There was a sense of urgency around this usually mundane event because Huss's far right forces had rented several school busses to bring precinct captains from all over the county to vote as a block for a right wing coup to take over the county organization. My informant remembered looking out the window of the room where they were meeting and seeing the convoy of busses pull in. Huss’s forces easily won, and immediately following the vote that replaced the former county chair with some new right winger who was entirely unknown to most of the county's old line Republicans, the new chair immediately asked everyone to bow their heads to pray. No new business was discussed. No votes were held. There was no discussion of policy or political strategy. There was just an offering to God, and then back on to the school busses to head home. My informant remembered being taken aback that the new chair would ask everyone to say a Christian prayer at a political meeting. She’d never witnessed anything like that before and didn’t want to be rude, but also felt like it would be inappropriate to join in. She left wondering what the hell had just happened.
From the vantage point of 2024, when the official Facebook page of the Oregon Republican Party posts clips from a 1969 John Birch Society film featuring G. Edward Griffin (who I think of as the OG Alex Jones) pontificating about how America is a republic not a democracy, the far right takeover of the OR GOP might seem foreordained.
But the Oregon Republicans who lived through and eventually came to lament the far right’s gradual and then sudden capture of the OR GOP had only the vaguest comprehension of what was happening at the time. Wendall Wyatt, a moderate Republican Congressman and friend of Gerald Ford’s claimed in an early 1990s interview that Huss’s far right takeover of the OR GOP in 1978 came out of nowhere and shocked everyone. Republican Governor Vic Atiyeh (1979-87) identified 1974 as the moment when he became aware that far right figures like Huss had begun to wield significant influence in the state party. Richard H. Jones, a Hatfield staffer, recalled GOP party chair Elmo Smith warning him in the mid-1960s about how “local organizations were being captured by these [far right] groups that wanted to inject an ideological” division into the party. According to Republican Secretary of State Clay Myers, far right “Bible bigots” like Huss had been working to take over the Oregon Republican Party since 1952. On the other hand, according to Senator Bob Packwood the far right insurgency inside the Oregon Republican Party didn’t begin until the Tea Party movement of 2010. When I asked Packwood about his memories of Walter Huss in 2022, he laughed, said he barely remembered him, and asked incredulously why on earth anyone would want to write about “that kook.”
So if we’re talking about the realm of memory, there is little consensus about or awareness of the process through which the historically moderate Oregon Republican Party moved haltingly but steadily rightward from the 1960s into the 21st century. If one speaks to older Oregonians who today are not fans of Trump, it’s quite common to hear both Democrats and Republicans wax nostalgic about past Republican giants like Mark Hatfield, Tom McCall, or Vic Atiyeh. But I can say that in my many years of following contemporary, pro-Trump Oregon Republicans on social media, I have yet to see a single positive mention of past Republican Senators or Governors. Most political parties have a pantheon of past greats they refer back to, not today’s OR GOP. And even though Walter Huss’s policy commitments line up almost exactly with the consensus in today’s OR GOP, I doubt there’s even a single contemporary Oregon Republican activist who would even recognize his name. Most political parties don’t have robust and nuanced cultures of historical memory, but the OR GOP seems to suffer from an exceptional degree of historical amnesia. Granted, if one of the people who played a significant role in shaping the political culture of my party was a Holocaust-denying white Christian Nationalist with ties to right wing domestic terrorists and neo-Nazis, I probably wouldn’t want to talk about him much either.
The job of the historian is to supplement and refine memory with empirical evidence gleaned from the archive. The hope is that such historical insight can serve as an aid and corrective to memory, and can help us better understand how we got where we are. What happened to the Oregon Republican Party between 1960 and the 1990s is that a small group of dedicated, ideological extremists who were mostly outsiders to the Republican Party establishment organized an insurgency that fundamentally transformed the political culture of the party. This evolution didn’t occur through good faith deliberation amongst a diverse group of Republicans who sought to persuade each other to gradually adjust their positions. The transformation of the OR GOP was, to a great extent, a multi-stage, slow-moving hostile takeover by the far right forces that Walter Huss devoted his life to organizing. Many of the people who participated in that takeover did not share Walter Huss’s fascistic worldview in all of its fullness, but very few of them spoke out forcefully against it, and any that did soon found themselves outside the mainstream of the Republican Party. Meanwhile, a large number of self-understood moderates or conservatives simply accommodated themselves to the rightward drift of the party, coming up with a variety of rationalizations or denial mechanisms that enabled them to justify staying in a party increasingly dominated by “single issue” radicals on guns, abortion, or sexuality with whom they often disagreed. But more commonly, those moderate Republicans just gave up and left a party that had become openly hostile to them.
Walter Huss’s actions from 1960 into the 1990s mattered. They influenced the trajectory of the Oregon Republican Party in significant ways. But it’s not as if Oregon was the only state where the GOP moved radically rightward. That was a national phenomenon, not just an Oregon one. When I began this research on Walter Huss in 2021, I had a hunch that there was an important story there to be found, a story that might help us make sense of the seeming bizarro-world that people like Bannon and Trump had made of the GOP—a world of attempted coups, unabashed Christian nationalism, unhinged conspiracy theories, antisemitic dogwhistles and bullhorns, debate stage shout outs to paramilitary organizations, and talking points like “the great replacement theory” that had been the sole preserve of neo-Nazis and Klansmen a mere 30 years ago. Right wing extremist political cultures like this don’t get built in a day. And if the history of the Oregon GOP is any guide, they don’t necessarily course correct even when they result in decades of electoral defeats.
But if there’s one silver lining in this story it’s this: the voters of Oregon have responded to the right wing radicalization of the OR GOP by simply rejecting it at the ballot box. 1983 was the last time a Republican won a Governor’s race. Since moderates Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood left the Senate in the mid-1990s, Oregon has elected only one other Republican Senator, Gordon Smith, who left office in 2009. In the last two Senatorial election cycles the GOP nominated Jo Rae Perkins, a Qanon adherent, anti-vaxxer, 9/11 truther, 2020 election denier, and advocate for Michelle and Barrack Obama to be sent to Gitmo.
In both Senatorial elections, Perkins lost by about the same margin that Donald Trump lost Oregon to Joe Biden in 2020.
At this point the OR GOP has yet to find any sort of path out of the political cul de sac they’ve been stuck in for several decades now. There’s always a possibility that the Democrats will mess things up so badly that they will drive voters into the arms of the GOP, but it seems highly unlikely that a party that nominates politicians like Jo Rae Perkins will be winning statewide elections anytime soon.
A few months after Walter Huss was elected chair of the OR GOP in 1978, former President Gerald Ford anxiously asked his friend Wendall Wyatt, a moderate Republican Congressman from Oregon, if they’d “gotten rid of that nut yet.” If only Ford had lived to see what became of his Republican Party. Leaders like Ford knew that the angry illiberalism that marked Huss’s style of politics appealed to many conservative Republican voters, but they feared that if such anti-democratic and bigoted elements rose to prominence in the GOP it would be disastrous for both the party and the country. And indeed, during Huss’s forty years as a far right activist in Oregon from 1960 to 2000, he helped create the conditions that would lead the state’s Republican activists like Jo Rae Perkins to greet Trump’s 2016 victory as a glorious realization of the party’s values, not as the lamentable rise of an aberrant “nut.”
Only time will tell if the nation’s voters will reject the right wing nuttiness of Trump as decisively as Oregon’s voters have rejected it’s Walter Huss-flavored, local variety.