Some archival gems from an amazing but largely unknown archive

One of the great joys of archival research is the thrill of the chase, the feeling like you’re looking at historically significant stuff that no other human has seen since it was placed in a box in an archive somewhere. I had that experience yesterday when I spent a few hours in an incredibly rich collection that I never would have known about were it not for the amazing archivists at Portland State.

Here’s how I learned about it. On January 23 I’m giving a talk at PSU about a group of young brownshirts who terrorized the city of Portland in 1965 and then disappeared. The person at PSU who put together this poster worked with the PSU archivists to get high quality scans of the images below (which had appeared in the PSU yearbook from 1965-6). That archivist then asked if I knew about the 17 box “Charlie White Americanism” collection…I did not…and so she sent me the finding aid and holy buckets!

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Charlie White was hired as a History Professor at Portland State in 1951. He’d written his dissertation on left wing radicalism, but in the McCarthy era he became fascinated by the rising far right of his day—a political tradition he labeled “Americanism.” And so Charlie embarked on a three decade long project to collect and preserve materials from as many contemporary groups as he could that fit with that label of “Americanism.”

One of the people in that political tradition that White identified was Walter Huss. Charlie’s Americanism collection contains three thick folders of Huss’s materials that he collected beginning in 1960 when Huss first moved to Portland and continuing into the 1970s. Just when I thought I’d found just about every scrap of extant archival material related to Huss, Charlie’s archive delivered up one unexpected gem after another.

I’m about to return to the archive today, so I’ll just share a couple things with you now before I head out to PSU.

The 1956 letter below is from one of Charlie’s “informants.” Based on what I’ve seen so far in the archive, it appears that Charlie identified as a moderate to conservative Republican in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s important to know that this meant a very different thing in that era than it does now. It seems clear to me that Charlie was fascinated by the far right materials he was collecting because he found it so outlandish and disturbing, in part because these were people who claimed political proximity to him. The context for this letter is that Charlie has asked this person to send him as many of the periodicals they received as possible so he can put them in his growing “Americanism” collection.

The materials she sent Charlie were indeed on the far right edge of American political discourse in 1956—GLK Smith’s Cross and the Flag, Free Men Speak (a segregationist newspaper edited by Kent Courtney), and The Woman’s Voice by virulently antisemitic America Firster Lyrl Clark Van Hyning. Gotta love the fact that the Daughters of the American Revolution was the organization responsible for Ms. Bernard’s “awakening” to “the fact” that the greatest threat the US faced today was from the many-tentacled international Jewish conspiracy, otherwise known as Communism. Also note how she subscribes to a bunch of far right periodicals, and then shares them with strangers who have written letter to the editor indicating that they are either “patriotic, or uninformed” and thus could profit from the edification to be found in these works.

“I would like to add that I am NOT prejudiced against either negroes or Jews, because as an individual myself, I believe I must judge each one as they affect my life, as an individual on their individual merits. That does not prevent me from believing that there is a force of the anti-Christ, in the form of Zionists (Communists) etc. trying to stamp out Christianity & freedom and make slaves of us.”

Some real “I’m not an antisemite, I’m just concerned about how the Soros-funded globalists are engaged in a plot to stamp out Christianity & freedom and make slaves of us” energy there. It’s notable to me that in 1956 this woman, who was consuming some of the most aggressively racist and antisemitic literature available to someone in Oregon at the time, also felt the need to tell Charlie White (who she thought of as an ally) that she didn’t have a racist or antisemitic bone in her body. I think that at some level she actually did think of herself that way, as fully inside the “consensus” Americanism of the post WWII era that rejected the racism and antisemitism enacted in such a genocidal fashion by the Nazis who we’d just defeated. But yet, she was a total white supremacist and antisemite…and so the way she squared that circle was by making it clear that she had nothing against individual Jews or Black people she might meet, but was merely opposed to the evil anti-Christian and anti-American Communist conspiracy that the Jews had cooked up, using Black people as their pawns. This is exactly the same way that Walter Huss justified his own commitment to white supremacy and antisemitism—once you’ve seen the “truth” about the Jewish-led Communist conspiracy that was using the Civil Rights movement as its trojan horse, then how could you, as an America-loving Christian, NOT speak out against it? When “they” call you a racist or an antisemite in the press organs “they” control, that’s just a sign that you’re over the target! People will say that you hate Jews or Black people, but really, that’s just their way of undermining you as a true lover of Christ and American freedom!

The scrawl below is a bit hard to read, but it’s an amazing snapshot of an interpersonal encounter on the front lines of America’s culture war ca. 1963. Billy James Hargis (one of Huss’s great heroes and fellow Christian Patriot fighter against Communism) had come to speak in Portland along with General Edwin Walker. Charlie White attended the event, probably along with some of his students who shared his fascination with the far right “Americanism” of their day. It appears that Charlie and his compatriots shared a few giggles at Hargis’s expense, and someone in the audience near them was not pleased. And so they scrawled a message on their flier and handed it to Charlie. “Are you fellows for this government? Your laughing irreverence indicates so. WAKE UP!” The “sheeple” is silent there, presumably.

Charlie White got to know Walter Huss quite well in the early 1960s. That did not prevent Walter Huss from demagoguing non-stop about the Communists who supposedly ran Portland State and the other institutions of higher education in the state of Oregon at the time. In 1966 the students at PSU elected a student body president who had some leftist inclinations (a shocker in 1966, right?), and so Walter Huss took to the airwaves to lament that the Communists had finally taken over Portland State for good. Charlie White wrote to Huss in a (futile) attempt to burst his bubble about the supposed “Communist brainwashing” going on at PSU.

I’ll leave you with one last, incredible twist to Charlie White’s story. I mentioned that he began teaching at Portland State in 1951…well, I just got an email from Charlie a few days ago telling me that he’s very excited to come hear my talk in a few weeks. That’s right, Charlie is almost 100 years old and still going strong. I can’t wait to meet him, ask him some questions about his memories of Walter Huss, and thank him for his prescience in saving such an enormous collection of far right materials that most of his contemporaries regarded as “kooky” and irrelevant, but which he, for whatever reason, thought future historians might find useful.

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