Raising the cost of telling the truth about the far right
The 1959 death of fascist seditionist Robert Edmondson and the plight of the poor editor of the Bend Bulletin
This is a story about what happened after WWII to one of the people involved with the 1944 Sedition trial that Rachel Maddow discusses in her new book Prequel. Robert Edward Edmondson was one of the nation’s most virulently antisemitic propagandists in the 1930s and 40s. After the sedition case against him and his fellow defendants was dropped, he moved to Bend, Oregon (population ~12,000 at the time) to live out the rest of his life. He became a fairly well-known local figure for his anti-fluoridation activism. His efforts helped scuttle plans to fluoridate the water in Bend and other municipalities across the state.
When Edmondson died in 1959, his hometown newspaper, the Bend Bulletin, published an editorial that basically said “good riddance.”
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You can be forgiven if you shook your head a bit when you read those last few paragraphs from 1959 about how fascist propagandists like Edmondson “who fight issues merely by villifying those who oppose them, those who answer sound arguments with fury, are a disappearing group.”
Not only did this not turn out to be the case in the long run, but in the weeks immediately following the publication of this editorial the paper received a barrage of angry mail from across the country attacking them for so rudely describing Edmondson as part of a dying breed. The sacks of mail on Edmondson’s behalf were not the result of some spontaneous outpouring of nationwide affection for him. Rather, one of the nation's leading antisemitic periodicals, Conde McGinley’s Common Sense, had noted the Bend Bulletin’s offense and encouraged readers to write to the editor.
Common Sense, 1 Aprili 1959. You can read the entire edition on the Internet Archive if you want to get a flavor of the sort of periodical this was.
The map below shows where those letters originated, a sign of how geographically dispersed the fascist network of the late 1950s was, and also how quickly they could organize their forces to make the life of a rural Oregon editor miserable and to make their fascist movement appear as if it was still very much alive.
After publishing every letter they received for a couple weeks (in the name of allowing all opinions to be aired in their newspaper), on May 5 the Bulletin’s editor finally said "enough already" and stopped printing those replies, in part because they were filled with racist and antisemitic bile as well as thinly veiled death threats.
This is just a small sampling of the content of the letters Robert Edmondson’s friends and admirers sent from around the country.
I get the sense that after a while the editor of the Bend Bulletin decided he was sick and tired of allowing antisemites and racists to use the columns of his paper as a platform for their hateful bile.
One of the people who rushed to defend Edmondson’s honor was Maj. General George van Horn Moseley, an important figurehead of the American fascist movement of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Moseley conveniently clammed up, however, once the government informed him that he had the choice between keeping his military pension or continuing to advocate for the cause of Nazi Germany. But once the war was over Moseley got right back into the fight to “save America” from the Jews who were supposedly out to destroy it.
Another person who wrote to the Bend Bulletin to defend Edmondson’s honor was his fellow Sedition Trial defendant, Charles B. Hudson. I feel like we need to pause for a second to note that a) Edmondson shared a birthday with Hitler (April 20) and b) that Hudson made it a point to note that Edmondson’s birthday was April 20 (which I have to assume was an intentional reference).
In 1959, saying something like “United States was founded a Christian Constitutional Representative Republic—and will return to it” would have marked you out as a kook who probably had fascistic leanings…today it would mark you out as, well, just your average Republican running for elected office in most places.
Rachel’s book about these Nazi seditionists ends around 1946 with O. John Rogge’s unsuccessful attempts to get legal accountability for these plotters who he’d gathered so much incriminating evidence against. The history of that fascist political movement in the US, however, continued on into the 1950s and beyond. None of those Nazi-sympathizing fascists ever recanted their beliefs or actions from the WWII era. Some, like Edmondson, focused on specific fronts of the battle like fluoride, but behind that fight lay the same basic idea that fighting Communism meant that you were fighting against the Jews who were supposedly behind Communism.
One of the people who understood his battle against Communism to be a battle against the Jews was Edmondson’s fellow Oregonian Walter Huss, the future chair of the Oregon Republican Party and the proud owner of that “Beyond Communism” book pictured above. Edmondson’s name appears frequently in Huss’s archive, like in this 1984 flier Huss placed in his “Jews-Holocaust” file.
Huss’s two, thick “Jews” folders contained reams of antisemitic literature from the 1950s (like Frank Britton’s Beyond Communism) to that 1984 flier from the “Christian Defense League” up through this 1994 newsletter from the white supremacist “Northwest Imperative.” Huss was 76 years old, campaigning to be the chair of the Multnomah county Republican Party, and spearheading a statewide anti-tax ballot measure when he acquired that Northwest Imperative newsletter.
As I talked about in this earlier post, Huss’s antisemitism wasn’t just some sort of eccentric personality quirk, it was the ideological foundation of and emotive force behind his forty years of “conservative” activism in Oregon from the late 1950s into the late 1990s.
Like Edmondson, Walter Huss was a fascist who believed that Hitler was right to have identified Judaism as a malevolent, Communistic force that needed to be eradicated in order to save Western Civilization. Despite the fact that Huss believed this his entire adult life, including when he was serving as the chair of the Oregon Republican Party, not once in the hundreds of newspaper articles that were published about him during his life was he identified as “a fascist.” Somewhere along the line we decided as a country that we wouldn’t call our fellow American fascists even when they most obviously were. Perhaps because, like the 1959 editor of the Bend Bulletin, we assumed such people were powerless and dying off; or perhaps its because those fascists succeeded in intimidating members of the media into referring to them in the terms they preferred—as patriotic defenders of Christianity and the Constitution.
This is just one more example of the messed up memory culture of Cold War America that I wrote about in the last installment of Rightlandia.
Seth Cotlar
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