Why archival research matters: The power of a single document

When you accuse a former chair of a state Republican Party of having neo-Nazi ties, it's important to have receipts. Luckily, Walter Huss left behind a huge stack of them.

More than once I’ve had Oregonians who were alive during the Walter Huss era (roughly 1960-2000) say to me “he wasn’t a Nazi, he was just a socially conservative Christian Republican who had some kooky old fashioned ideas about things.” It’s understandable that folks who didn’t know him closely, and who have an investment in not thinking of themselves as having worked in partnership with a hateful racist and antisemite, would want to believe that. But the material in Huss’s archive shows beyond a doubt that he thought of himself his entire life as working in close alliance with a myriad of white power and neo-Nazi organizations.

Take, for example, this single document that Huss had in his “Hatfield” folder and which he dated 4/19/75 (that’s Huss’s handwriting). Many of the references, names, and organizations in this document will probably be obscure to you unless you’re closely familiar with the history of the US far right in the 1960s and 70s, so I’ll do a little parsing below. One key piece of context to keep in mind is that Huss received, dated, and saved this document a full THREE YEARS before he was elected chair of the Oregon Republican Party. Based on the context of what else is in his “Hatfield” folder, Huss seems to have taken this document to be an exposure of Hatfield’s insidiousness. Walter Huss was a right wing RINO hunter many decades before that became cool.

Note at the outset that this document is framed as having been sent to a select group of “Patriots” who presumably share this person’s exceptionally clear eyed understanding of what was really going on in America. The message of impending one world government doom imposed by a set of secret (((globalist))) overlords will probably sound vaguely familiar today—”they” will create an energy hoax to justify government restrictions to control us patriots, “they” will seek to liquidate the Republic and confiscate our guns in the process, “they” will use their control over the money supply to create inflation that will create a crisis they’ll use to impose a totalitarian dictatorship, and only the insight and resistance of Christian Patriots like us can stop them! [FWIW, every single Trump fundraising email I receive is addressed to “Patriot,” and over 50% of them contain some reference to George Soros.]

Note the people and organizations this document identifies as part of the solution. George Wallace I’m sure you’re familiar with. Huss had stumped for Wallace in 1964 and 1968, and continued to be an admirer of his into the 1970s. John Rarick was a segregationist Democrat from Louisiana with close ties to David Duke. John Schmitz was so far right that the John Birch Society kicked him to the curb. [Side note: Schmitz was the father of Mary Kay LeTourneau, and also the father of Trump-appointee Joseph Schmitz.]

But the real action is in the list of recommended reading. The National Youth Alliance was a neo-Nazi organization associated with Willis Carto, the head of the Liberty Lobby which held annual celebrations of Hitler’s birthday at their DC offices. William Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries, eventually took over the NYA (I’ll leave all of the internal squabbles amongst these people to the side for now). The Cross and the Flag was the long running publication of America’s leading antisemite, Gerald LK Smith. The NSRP is the National States Rights Party, a white power domestic terror group responsible for more than one bombing. Huss’s archive is rife with references to and materials from the NSRP.

Aside from these violent white nationalist and antisemitic groups, folks and texts a few clicks closer to the mainstream also get positive shout outs here—Phyllis Schlafly, Phoebe Courtney, None Dare Call it Treason (a favorite text of the John Birch Society), None Dare Call it Conspiracy (the text that Alex Jones’s father owned and which Jones claims he read and was inspired by as a youth), and the Christian Crusade Weekly. The latter was the publication of Billy James Hargis’s organization. One of Hargis’s main associates was David Noebel, who is most famous for his book proving The Beatles used hypnotism in their music to turn kids into Communists, but he also has influenced a large number of important conservative activists like Richard Viguerie and Michele Bachmann. He currently serves as the head of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, an organization started by Fred Schwarz in the 1950s. To bring things full circle, Walter Huss credits a 1955 anti-communist rally run by Fred Schwarz as being the moment when he found his life-long vocation as a Christian Patriot fighter against the Communist menace. Huss and Schwarz carried on a friendly correspondence into the 1990s.

This is just a single document. It alone is not sufficient to make the case that Walter Huss was a white Christian Nationalist who advocated far right violence as a mechanism of political change. But this document gives us insight into a largely subterranean far right (we might say “fascist”) political subculture that the majority of Americans would have regarded as “kooky,” but which people like Walter Huss regarded as articulating “the truths that (((they))) are trying to keep from you.”

There’s much more that could be said about this document, but I’ll leave it there for now. This is just one of about 17,000 images I’ve taken of materials in Walter Huss’s archive. I’m not sure if this exactly counts as an incentive, but if you subscribe to this newsletter you can expect to see many more “windows into Walter’s world” like this over the coming months.