When did the conspiracy-obsessed, fascist-friendly far right first get a foothold in the Oregon Republican Party? Would you believe me if I said 1962?

A story about that time in 1962 when a group of former Silver Shirts and present white nationalists and Christian supremacists came close to taking over the Multnomah County Republican Party.

Every day seems to bring a new story about some Republican activist or elected official who has ties to violent white supremacists, Christian supremacists, or outright Hitler-admiring Groypers. This was a recent iteration of this now familiar story.

Whether it be PA Gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano’s ties to raging antisemite Andrew Torba, or the innumerable proud fascists in Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar’s orbit, the Texas GOP leaders who took a lengthy meeting with Nick Fuentes and then refused to disavow him, or the presumptive GOP POTUS nominee who dined at his palatial home (in a ballroom its designer in the 1930s called “the Mussolini Room” because it was modeled after a room in Il Duce’s palace) with Fuentes and his fellow Hitler-admirer Ye…“many people are saying” that the contemporary GOP has become a fairly hospitable environment for people whose opinions would have gotten them punched by Indiana Jones or run down by the Blues Brothers’ car back in the Reaganite 1980s.

My research into the history of far right extremism in Oregon suggests that there are two incorrect ways to think about how we got here. 1) It’s wrong to say that the GOP has always been like this. 2) It’s also wrong to say that this is an entirely new and unprecedented development. What Walter Huss’s story teaches us is that there’s been a white supremacist and Christian supremacist far right insurgency inside the Republican Party since the late 1950s. The ideology and tactics of this insurgency (and even some of its personnel) have roots in the American fascist mobilizations of the 1930s and even the 2nd KKK of the 1920s. This conspiracy-obsessed fascist insurgency has always been a minority persuasion…neither Holocaust-denying Walter Huss in the 1970s nor Holocaust-denying Nick Fuentes in the 2020s speaks for more than a small, alienated minority of their fellow Americans. But both have found the GOP to be a soft and powerful target, filled with potential recruits and helmed by people far too willing to forgive or just ignore the hateful and often violent extremism of the self-described “Christian Patriots” to their right, usually in the name of fighting against what they perceive to be the far greater danger of “the radical left.”

What follows is a close look into a struggle inside the GOP of one county (Multnomah) in one state (Oregon) in one brief moment (the summer of 1962) that will hopefully convey the texture of how this battle for the soul of the GOP played out, and also shed some light on how this early moment in the fascist insurgency inside the GOP was misperceived at the time, and then memory holed afterwards.

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In 1961 the Oregon Republican Party was in dire straits. They couldn’t even raise enough money to pay the rent and utilities on their modest office in downtown Portland. The chair of the party threatened to resign if the state’s Republicans didn’t quickly pony up enough funds to keep the already barebones operation going.

Medford Mail Tribune, 8 June 1961.

Politically active Oregonians from both parties in 1961 lamented the low level of public interest in party politics. A big part of the problem, as Sam Rosenfeld documents in this excellent book, was that it was hard to tell what each party actually stood for. The Democratic coalition consisted of Northern New Deal liberals like Hubert Humphrey, and also staunchly conservative, states rights segregationists like Strom Thurmond. The Republican coalition consisted of anti-government extremists like Senator Barry Goldwater, as well as liberals (or even progressives) like Jacob Javits, Nelson Rockefeller, and Mark Hatfield. This ideological cacophony sent confusing signals to voters—am I supporting civil rights by voting for the Democratic party of Hubert Humphrey, or am I supporting segregation by voting for the Democratic party of Strom Thurmond? Am I supporting racially-progressive, modern good governance by voting for the Republican Party of Jacob Javits, or am I voting for a rabidly anti-union and pro-states rights Republican like Barry Goldwater who will dismantle much of the federal government (except for the part we use to nuke commies) in order to restore America to its supposedly idyllic state of pre-New Deal free market freedom?

In the name of giving voters a more meaningful set of choices, there emerged a new brand of politician who called for each party to more clearly articulate what they stood for and to nominate only candidates who aligned with those principles.

On the national level, this battle to define what the Republican Party stood for played out from the early 1960s into the early 1980s, by which point Reagan’s massive victories fully cemented the association between Republicanism and (often quite far right) conservatism. But even into the early 1990s there were still a good number of moderate or even liberal Republicans hanging around inside the GOP, perhaps most notably Oregon’s Senators Bob Packwood (1969-1995) and Mark Hatfield (1967-1997).

In Oregon, the battle to define the political culture of the Republican Party began in 1961 when a 30 year old, NYU-trained lawyer named Bob Packwood was serving as the chair of the Multnomah County Republican Party (Multnomah is the county that encompasses most of Portland, for those non-Oregonians out there). Packwood proposed that in the run-up to the 1962 elections the Oregon Republican Party should hold a convention at which they would stake out clear positions on key policy issues, and then endorse candidates in the primary elections who aligned with those positions.

The old heads in the OR GOP were not pleased with Packwood’s proposal. The state chair resigned in February 1962, saying that he was “sick and tired of this young man talking when he should keep his mouth shut.” The chair of the Marion County GOP (where the state capital of Salem is located) accused Packwood of trying to bring back the old system of cronyism and bossism, denying Republican primary voters the right to decide on their own which candidates they thought were best qualified.

Salem Statesman Journal, 4 February 1962

Ultimately, Packwood’s efforts to bring more ideological clarity to the party led to a rousing success at the Multnomah County GOP convention in March of 1962. Suddenly it seemed as if there was new “pep” around Republican politics in Oregon, and it took on the decidedly moderate tone favored by figures like Packwood (who had taken the opportunity while studying in New York to get to know liberal Republican icon Jacob Javits) as well as Packwood’s former professor at Willamette University, Republican Governor Mark Hatfield.

In 1962 Packwood was elected to the Oregon State legislature as a Republican, and in 1964 he recruited a large group of moderate Republicans who ran successfully for the State House and Senate. In a year when Goldwater’s shellacking on the Presidential ticket dragged down Republican candidates everywhere, the remarkable electoral success of Oregon’s decidedly non-Goldwaterite Republicans was the exception, and Packwood deserved much of the credit for that. In 1965 Packwood followed up on that success by starting the Dorchester Conference, a gathering of Oregon Republicans designed to create an institutional home and political momentum for Packwood’s brand of moderate Republicanism. The future of a moderate to liberal Republican Party in Oregon seemed bright…but as we know, in the long run, that was not to be.

Indeed, below is a picture from the 2018 Dorchester Conference in Salem where the keynote speaker was Roger Stone. Here he is flashing the white power hand symbol with a few Oregon Proud Boys. Not exactly the GOP Packwood imagined in 1965

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Enter Walter Huss and his band of far right insurgents who sought to take the GOP away from moderates like Packwood.

Let’s return to 1962. At the same time Packwood was bringing new organization and message discipline to the moderate/liberal elements inside the Oregon Republican Party, a newly coalesced group of far right activists were marshaling their forces for their own takeover of the party (which would eventually succeed in 1978 when Huss was elected OR GOP chair, but that was still 16 years in the future at this point). In June of 1962 the Multnomah County GOP met to elect a new chair to replace Bob Packwood who had recently stepped down to run for the legislature. Walter Huss and a group of his far right associates tried, unsuccessfully this time, to gain control and reverse 180 degrees the political orientation of the organization that Packwood had recently run.

Below is how the Oregonian covered this battle inside the Multnomah County GOP. Note how the conflict is framed as one between a “somewhat more conservative” far right faction and the supporters of “middle-of-the-roader” Robert Elliot, Packwood’s chosen successor. When I tell you about the people whose names are circled in red, you’ll see why “somewhat more conservative” is quite the understatement. It’s worth noting that in 1962 very few readers of the Oregonian (and likely even the writer of this story) would have had any idea who the people circled in red were. Most observers probably looked upon this as totally normal politicking between slightly different flavors of “Republicans,” but as we’ll see, that is very much not what was going on here.

Oregonian, 24 June 1962

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Wallace Lee

Let’s start with the guy whose politics were on the left edge of this insurgency, Wallace Lee. Lee was one of the more active leaders of the John Birch Society in Portland. When Robert Welch came to Seattle in 1959 to establish JBS cells in the Pacific Northwest, Lee was amongst the dozen or so people from Washington and Oregon who attended. [Sci-fi fans may be interested and surprised to learn that another attendee at that meeting was Robert Heinlein.] Later Wallace Lee would somewhat distance himself from JBS founder Robert Welch by stating that he wasn’t entirely sure he believed Welch’s claim that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist. As you can tell, Wallace Lee was quite the lefty. [sarcasm alert]

January 1961 article, possibly from the Oregon Journal. Clipping is from the Charlie White Americanism Collection at Portland State University. Be sure to check out the fascistic stylings of JBS member Joseph Mallon in the last few paragraphs.

Wallace also served on the Liberty Lobby’s “Board of Policy” alongside a who’s who of the nation’s leading white supremacists and antisemites. The head of the Liberty Lobby was a neo-Nazi named Willis Carto, who later founded the nation’s leading outlet of Holocaust denial “scholarship” and was known to celebrate Hitler’s birthday in the DC offices of the Liberty Lobby.

Wallace Lee was also the State President of the Liberty Amendment Committee. The Liberty Amendment called for the repeal of the 16th Amendment (authorizing the federal income tax). This would have resulted in the elimination of virtually every feature of the federal government that pertained to domestic matters. If repealing the New Deal has been a key part of the conservative movement’s long game since the 1930s, the Liberty Amendment folks of the 1950s and 60s like Lee were the Leninist vanguard (if you will) of that revolutionarily destructive initiative.

So that’s Wallace Lee, the lefty in that coalition of “somewhat more conservative” Republicans who were strategizing to take control of the Multnomah County GOP in 1962.

As a reader of Rightlandia, you are already familiar with Walter Huss, the white supremacist and Christian supremacist who the FBI would eventually come to credibly suspect of having ties to the Nazi Party and the anti-government terrorists in the Posse Comitatus movement. In 1962 Huss was a subscriber to Gerald LK Smith’s Cross and the Flag, and a great admirer of Christian Identity preacher Kenneth Goff who ran a training camp for right wing domestic terrorists in Colorado. Huss took Goff on multi-week speaking tours around the Pacific Northwest in 1963, 1967, and 1970. Goff and Smith were both important articulators and organizers of the American fascist tradition in the 1950s and 1960s, and Huss looked up to them as inspirational models to follow.

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Sylvester Ehr

Now let’s turn to Syl Ehr, an absolutely essential but almost entirely unknown figure in the rhizomatic history of fascism in Oregon.

Syl had been a Portland Silver Shirt in the late 1930s, and then from the 1960s into the 1980s his sign shop at 1021 NE Union Av (now MLK, Jr. Blvd, ironically) was the meeting place for a succession of fascist organizations. Here, for example, we can see in Syl’s short-lived newspaper “The Yardstick” announcements for weekly meetings of “Minutemen” in 1961, as well as announcements for meetings at Walter Huss’s Freedom Center cells which had just started up in towns throughout Oregon. The “controlled press” line was a reference to the “Jewish controlled press,” a common fascist talking point that stretched back to the 1930s. Note also the letter to the editor which frames the present moment as delicately perched on a precipice. The republic is on the verge of being destroyed by Communists (more commonly known as normie New Deal Democrats and moderate Republicans) who want to institute “a new totalitarian order” that patriotic “Constitutionalists” are duty bound to fight back against tooth and nail.

In 1965-6, Ehr’s print shop at 1021 NE Union hosted the meetings of the newly formed National Party, an organization of college-aged, brownshirted and jackbooted white nationalists and antisemites who’d cut their teeth at Walter Huss’s Freedom Center. Between the fall of 1964 and the summer of 1966 the National Party staged dozens of menacing direct actions across Portland featuring signs like “Another Jew Deal,” “Racist Police Brutality is a Commie Lie,” and “Communism is Judaism.” The National Party called for the deportation of Black people and Jews so as to restore America to its White Christian roots, and their leader Edmund Crump (pictured below) joined forces with the National States Rights Party, the domestic terrorist arm of the southern segregationist movement.

The National Party self-consciously styled themselves after William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, an indication of the influence that those 1930s era fascists like Syl Ehr had on their politics. [Another one of the National Party’s mentors was an associate of Huss’s named Dale Benjamin, the leader of the National States Rights Party in Oregon who’d been an itinerant KKK preacher in the 1920s who drove a car sporting a sign that said “Keep Kalvin Koolidge.” I told Benjamin’s story in an earlier edition of Rightlandia.]

Fast forward to 1976 and Syl Ehr is holding meetings for the Oregon Posse Comitatus in his “Constitution Room” at his 1021 NE Union Av. sign shop. At those meetings they would say a prayer, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and then make plans to arrest and “lock up” the state’s district attorneys and judges who they’d decided had violated the Constitution. These “Constitutionalists” also complained about the overly woke police force that had been brainwashed by the same sort of Communist “sensitivity training” that led these patriots to pull their kids out of the public schools.

Now fast forward to 1985 when Walter Huss acquired a letter on official Posse Comitatus letterhead stating that even though he’s been friends and political co-workers with Syl Ehr and LaVerne Hollenbeck for decades, Walter and his wife Rosalie were DEFINITELY NOT members of the Posse Comitatus. Note that the headquarters for the group are listed, again, as 1021 NE Union Av.

In the summer of 1962 Syl Ehr told a reporter from the Oregonian that the idea to stage a right wing insurgency inside the Multnomah GOP had germinated in the conservative group he headed, the same group whose meetings at his sign shop had been advertised in his 1961 newspaper pictured earlier. Like Huss, Ehr understood himself as part of a grassroots movement that would purify the nation, clearing out the corruption (that he associated with Jewish Communism) that was supposedly on the verge of destroying White Christian America. Ehr and Huss, of course, were strategic enough not to publicly state the racist and antisemitic logic that lay at the heart of their political worldview.

Oregonian, 28 June 1962

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William Gardiner

So at this point we’ve got Syl Ehr the former Silver Shirt and future Posse Comitatus leader, Walter Huss the White Christian Nationalist, and Wallace Lee the John Birch Society organizer, Liberty Lobby board member, and Liberty Amendment leader. The last mover and shaker in this 1962 far right insurgency was William Gardiner.

To cut to the chase, here’s a letter that Gardiner wrote to the Salem Statesman Journal on 6 April 1981.

And here’s a letter in a similar vein that he wrote to The American’s Bulletin in March of 1993.

In the 1980s Gardiner corresponded with Keith Stimely, the neo-Nazi editor of Willis Carto’s Journal of Historical Review that specialized in Holocaust Denial. Here’s a letter that Gardiner shared with Stimely in which he brags about how he successfully created a pressure campaign that forced the University of Oregon to include a Holocaust denier in a conference on the “Holo-hoax” that would have otherwise been “Five Days of Hate.” The “Lieuallen” Gardiner mentions was Roy Lieuallen, the long serving chancellor of higher education in Oregon.

It might be tempting to think that William Gardiner was not so extreme of a Nazi when he was President of the “Portland East Central Republican Club” in 1962 and considering running against Robert Elliot for chair of the Multnomah County GOP, but alas, in the 1960s Gardiner corresponded on friendly terms with his fellow white nationalist and Hitler-admiring antisemite, Retired General Pedro del Valle.

In the 1970s William Gardiner moved to the Oregon coast where he hosted a regular AM radio talk show, refused to pay his taxes because he thought the “Rothschild-controlled” IRS and Federal Reserve were unconstitutional, and advocated for the coastal counties of Oregon to secede in order to evade the control of the Communistic Jews who he thought ruled the state.

Gardiner was involved with the publication of the two primary Posse Comitatus newsletters in Oregon in the late 1960s and 1970s—the Parallax View and The Swinging Sword (both mentioned in that 1976 article about Syl Ehr posted above). Gardiner’s co-worker on those publications was Lyle Hartford VanDyke, Jr.—a Pearl Harbor truther who was jailed in the early 2000s for printing $3 million of his own money. VanDyke had been converted to the far right cause at Walter Huss’s Portland anti-Communism school in 1960, and his last appearance in public occurred in 2020 on the YouTube page of a Qanon influencer. Here you can hear him reminiscing about the meetings of Constitutionalists he used to attend at Syl Ehr’s sign shop in the 1960s and 70s.¹

I offered a much fuller account of VanDyke’s life in this earlier edition of Rightlandia.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that VanDyke’s father, Lyle Hartford VanDyke, Sr. was also an active member of that 1962 far right insurgency that attempted a hostile takeover of Packwood’s Multnomah County Republican Party.

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So hopefully the point is now abundantly clear that the small group of far right “conservatives” who tried in 1962 to stage a takeover of the Multnomah County GOP were not just “slightly more conservative” than Bob Packwood and his ilk. Packwood thought top marginal tax rates should be lower so as to encourage economic growth. His far right opponents thought the IRS and the Federal Reserve were unconstitutional impositions that the international Jewish conspiracy used to suck the lifeblood out of hard working Christian Patriots like them. Bob Packwood thought Black Americans should have the same legal and political rights as all Americans. His opponents thought Black people were biologically inferior and were being duped by cunning Jews into engaging in disruptive Civil Rights activism so as to sow divisions amongst White Christians and bring about the downfall of America and the emergence of a one-world, Jewish/Communist dictatorship. The most “moderate” participant in this insurgency, Wallace Lee, basically agreed with these positions but thought all the talk about Jews was probably a bit over the top.

Last year I got an opportunity to interview Bob Packwood. After he shared his unhappiness with the current state of the Oregon Republican Party and his desire to see it return to its old moderate roots, I asked him when he thought the far right takeover of the OR GOP started. "2010, the Tea Party,” was his answer. When I told him I was working on a research project about Walter Huss he chuckled and asked why anyone would care about that kook. He said he looked back at his diaries and could only find a couple of mentions of Huss. I didn’t think at the time to run this story from 1962, the very beginning of Packwood’s political career, past him to see what he made of it. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do so in the future.

My educated guess, however, is that Packwood would remember almost nothing about this 1962 episode, because at the time those insurgents were losers. Indeed, the whole way up to 1978 when Huss shocked the world by becoming the OR GOP chair, Huss and his crowd were, from the standpoint of winning elections, complete losers. When Scott McNall’s excellent participant-observer study of Huss’s Freedom Center ca. 1962-65 was published in 1975, the subtitle was “A Study in Failure.” When I asked McNall about that subtitle he laughed and said that he can’t think of anyone in 1975 who thought Huss’s brand of Republican politics had any future to look forward to.

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I’ll close with a passage from an earlier edition of Rightlandia where I proposed that we think of the history of fascism in the US as a rhizome, in which this 1962 moment in Oregon’s political culture is one example.

This is what I mean when I analogize American fascism to a rhizome…an underground network that occasionally sends shoots up into the sunlight of public attention with the hopes of gathering a bit more energy in the form of resources or new recruits. That fascist rhizome built upon the conspiracy-obsessed and hyper-nationalist fascist movements of earlier eras like the Silver Shirts of the 1930s and the 2nd KKK of the 1920s. It also added new elements from the McCarthyite anticommunism of the 1950s and the neo-Nazi and massive resistance movements of the 1950s and 60s. It linked up with the Christian Identity movement and the Posse Comitatus movements that flourished in the 1970s and 80s, and which then bled into the militia movement of the 1990s and beyond. It could pop up out of the soil in the form of David Duke’s political campaigns of the late 80s and early 90s, or in the more directly violent form of the murder of Denver radio host Alan Berg by The Order in 1984 or Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in 1995.

Because our national memory has no structured “history of American fascism” to help us see the rhizomatic evolution over time of the American fascist tradition, we are left viewing what look like isolated incidents and “lone wolf” individuals that are easy to condemn and then dismiss as unrepresentative of anything significant. Sure some Nazis came very close to winning elections as Republicans in the late 1980s and 90s, but they didn’t win! Sure a guy with substantial ties to Nazis who was a vicious antisemite his entire life and had ties to an array of fascist domestic terrorists became the chair of the Oregon Republican Party in 1978, but he was removed in 1979 and then everything just went back to normal. Right? I mean, it’s not like Oregon Republicans ever again came to believe that it was their duty to smoke out and destroy an imaginary secret cabal of globalists who controlled the media, higher education, the medical profession, and the federal government and who worked in cahoots with leftist/Communist protestors and other moral degenerates in a conspiracy to destroy the purity of America’s great Christian civilization…right? Right?

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A very quick Coda with an unexpected twist.

I had mentioned earlier that Bob Packwood put together a slate of moderate Republicans who did exceptionally well in the 1964 election, much to the chagrin of Walter Huss and his far right compatriots. Ironically, the person who financed Packwood’s work as a moderate Republican organizer was Ernie Swigert—one of Oregon’s richest men, the state’s “Republican kingmaker,” and also a founding member of the…wait for it…John Birch Society.

Salem Capital Journal, 27 April 1961

In sum, in the early 1960s there was a battle waging for the soul of the Oregon Republican Party between a populist, fascistic faction obsessed with evidence-free conspiracy theories about the Jewish/Communist conspiracy, and a “moderate,” more socially-upscale and politically savvy faction funded by a founding member of the John Birch Society who was obsessed with evidence-free conspiracy theories about the Communist conspiracy. So if it seems odd how obsessed the OR GOP is with baseless conspiracy theories these days, well, that thread has been there for quite a long time.²

1. I interviewed William Gardiner’s son (who very much does NOT share his father’s politics) and he remembered his father dragging him in the 1960s to those meetings at Syl Ehr’s sign shop. He told me that he’s fairly certain he remembers seeing Walter Huss there at those meetings.

2. It’s important to note that Swigert stepped away from the John Birch Society at some point and the Republican politicians he funded were quite critical of the JBS…but still, this is just too juicy of a detail not to have included.