On the Road with Walter Huss and his Weirdo Friends
The last chapter of Walter Huss’s 40-year career as a right wing activist in Oregon came in the 1990s when he launched several unsuccessful efforts to get a ballot measure passed that would have eliminated all property and income tax in the state and replaced them with a 2% transaction tax. Huss turned 72 in 1990, but that didn’t stop him from piling into his 1982 Itasca RV and traveling to every county in Oregon to spread his anti-tax gospel and meet up with his many friends who had been fighting against “the establishment” with him for decades.
Walter Huss (middle) and two of his anti-tax activist friends in Coos Bay in 1992. That’s Huss’s RV on the right.
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Because he’d been traveling around the state showing right wing films or hosting speakers since the early 1960s, Huss had built up substantial mailing lists of like-minded people in every county. These mailing lists are scattered throughout his papers so I haven’t been able to analyze them systematically yet, but I’d estimate that they contain several thousand names which, in a state the size of Oregon, was quite a powerful organizing tool. But Huss’s network was not some impersonal, corporate endeavor, he formed close bonds with a good number of his fellow grassroots conservatives whose names were on those lists.
In the image above, we see Huss memorializing some of his fellow anti-tax warriors who did not live to see the fruits of their labors. [Spoiler: Huss died in 2006 and also did not live to see the fruits of his labors.] Bill Brewster listed here is one of the men pictured standing with Huss and his RV (haven’t figured out which one he is yet), and Paul Eller is the Arizona antisemite that I talked about in this post that includes a recording of the first time Huss and Eller spoke on the phone in 1991.
When I say that Huss cultivated a network of “weirdos” during his 4 decades as a right wing activist, I mean that not so much in a judgy way as in a “I just can’t think of a better term to describe this collection of people” way. Huss was the sort of guy who would receive in the mail 100-typewritten-page treatises on the history of taxation from an autodidact rancher in Southern Oregon. Huss had massive collections of dozens of different niche newsletters churned out by Christian Nationalists and tax resisters and sovereign citizens and neo-Nazis located in Connecticut, Louisiana, Arkansas, Southern California, Montana, and everywhere in between. He was also the sort of guy who’d receive long earnest letters from local Boy Scout troop leaders and Little League coaches who’d retired early “to do research into family history and other matters.” Those “other matters” involved the shocking “discovery” that the Marxist/Communist threat to the future survival of the US was entirely the fault of the Jews….an ever-so-original conclusion that Huss’s friend, a former wood products inventory manager, felt obligated to share with William F. Buckley because he thought Buckley was close to getting it but not quite. When Mr. Terrall sent the results of his “research” to his fellow Portlander Walter Huss for his perusal, Huss dutifully filed it away in his “Jews” folder.
Or consider weirdos like Edie Marglon and Jack Titus, anti-tax “Citizens of Planet Earth” and residents of North Bend, OR who avidly supported Ross Perot in 1992 and sent Walter Huss a huge packet of their custom-printed philosophical treatises like this one. I assume they printed (or claimed to print) 144,000 of them because that is the number of Jews that will supposedly be raptured up with the “real Christians” when the time comes.
Or consider “weirdo” Thomas Wilson Hall who sent Huss a string of faxes in 1998 with his thoughts on Waco (“God does our country ever need patriots with balls”), Socialism (Spoiler: It’s TREASON!), and the recent constituent letter from Rep. Peter DeFazio (“it was difficult to read while vomiting.”).
I could keep offering examples like this all night, but you get the idea by now. Huss’s archive houses an enormous collection of locally-active right wingers who saw Huss as a trusted fellow-traveler. These were precisely the sorts of alienated, enraged, conspiracy-addled, “grassroots conservatives” who got fired up by “outsider” candidates like Goldwater in ‘64, Buchanan and Perot in 1992, and Trump in 2015-16. These people would have never given Oregon Republican Senators Mark Hatfield or Bob Packwood the time of day, and Ronald Reagan was the only GOP President they were even willing to tolerate. Walter Huss was not responsible for the ideas in these weirdos’ heads, rather he worked tirelessly to connect them together into a force sufficiently coordinated and focused to (hopefully) bring about the dramatic changes they envisioned. For some that meant a whites-only nation purged of Jews, for others it meant a nation that fully and truly honored the one true Christian God, for others it meant a nation where the income tax and the entire political apparatus built up by “that Communist FDR” had been eliminated, for others it meant a nation where abortion and homosexuality were illegal and severely punished. For some it meant all or a couple of these.
At some point I will find more a precise analytical term than “weird” to describe the constellation of people who gravitated to Walter Huss. But I chose “weird” for now as an homage to a former, America-besotted iteration of myself that Donald Trump killed—a former self who in the late 1980s and early 90s (thanks in part to Bob Dylan, the Harry Smith Anthology, Tom Waits, Alan Lomax recordings, etc.) became enthralled with what Greil Marcus called “Old Weird America.”
Walter Huss and his eccentric pals were most definitely part of that “old weird America” of tax rebels and religious seers and con men and political ranters and the sort of “John Birch Society members and millionaire inventors of bread bag clasps from Yakima” who peopled the songs of Dylan and Waits.
In the late 80s and early 90s I tended to think of those weirdos as one-offs, as isolated quirky “kooks” who could entertain you for an evening of half-true stories and even-less-true theories about the world at a diner or a bar. At the time it all seemed (at least to a 20-something me) quite quaint and adorable, if a little sketchy. But there was a menacingly dark organizing logic to that “weirdness” that has become apparent now that so much of it has been gathered together under the banner of the Trumpian GOP. On a much smaller scale, Huss was like Trump in that he functioned as a magnet for and inspirer of such enraged alienated weirdness. It’s fucking weird that people fly enormous “Fuck Joe Biden” flags on their pickups. It’s fucking weird that people wait in line for hours to watch Donald Trump dance to YMCA and do his meandering, fascist stand-up routine in his over-long tie. It’s fucking weird that the GOP is about to nominate in 2024 a former President who recorded himself alongside a J6 choir comprised of people imprisoned for trying to do a coup on his behalf.
It’s fucking weird that large numbers of people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 thought Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and it’s fucking weird that tens of millions of people who will vote for him in 2024 think that Trump actually won in 2020.
I still believe that “weird” things are often good. Perhaps there is some non-hateful, pro-democratic constellation of weirdos just waiting to sweep the nation’s political culture the way Trumpian weirdos did in 2016, and if that happens then sign me up. All I know is, when I immerse myself in Walter Huss’s very strange archive, I can’t stop hearing things that sound eerily contemporary. Some of that might just be me imposing my contemporary obsessions on the past, but I also think a lot of it involves seeing in Huss’s world a future in embryo—a future that I absolutely did not see coming in 1992 when Huss took that picture next to his RV, and I was beginning my first year as a graduate student of US History.
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