Walter Huss's Political Paranoia, and My Own
What if they really were/are out to get you as they transform the country into an authoritarian hellscape?
You know times are tough when the music podcast you use to decompress from the heaviness of current events devotes an entire episode to songs about existential dread and our looming, dystopian apocalypse.
There’s no avoiding the fact that the vibes these days are bad…like, “how many more people will the government disappear into an ICE detention center or an El Salvadoran labor camp today without due process” bad…like, “will the American system of higher ed or Social Security or Medicare still exist in any recognizable form in 5 years” bad…like “what happens if the President refuses to abide by a court order” bad…like “we should probably move this [completely innocuous] text conversation about the Trump administration onto Signal just to be on the safe side” bad…like “multiple people asking me [the person writing this] if I have a lawyer on call in case Trump’s FBI or DOJ comes after me because of something I said on Bluesky” bad.
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It is bonkers that I, a straight white cis man in his 50s who is a peaceable US citizen with tenure at a private university whose entire rap sheet is comprised of a speeding ticket from the 1980s should be even remotely worried about becoming a target for government oppression in “the land of the free.” In mid-January a reporter for Willamette’s student newspaper asked if I’d be willing to be interviewed for a story about the Trump administration. When she told me that many people had refused to be quoted by name and that she’d totally understand if I wanted to remain anonymous, my first thought was “WTF, I’m a freaking tenured professor who will simply be stating my opinions based on factual information. What could I possibly have to worry about?” But as the weeks have unfolded since January 20, I’ve increasingly come to think that student’s sense of wariness was not unfounded.
Before I post something on social media these days I think to myself “how might the most ungenerous interpreter employed by Kash Patel’s FBI read this?” When someone asks me to sign a petition I have a moment of hesitation as to whether this might come back to haunt me the next time I re-enter the country from abroad. I’m an American Historian so I’m fully aware of this nation’s track record of civil rights abuses. But it’s truly fucked up for someone in my position of extreme privilege to be entertaining such McCarthy-era, paranoid thoughts about the possibility of getting investigated or locked up for publicly stating my opinions.
Whenever I find myself doing this sort of paranoid future tripping, my thoughts always turn to Walter Huss (1918-2006), the hyper-paranoid right wing weirdo I’ve been researching and writing about for the past four years. As with most biographers, I’ve developed quite the parasocial relationship with my subject—I know how profoundly his kids hated him and why, I know he obsessively worried about the state of his colon, I’ve spoken on the phone with one of the aspiring neo-Nazis he mentored in 1963-5, I’ve heard a couple salacious and far too detailed rumors about Huss’s not-particularly-pious sex life, I’ve listened to hours of private phone calls he recorded (because he wanted to have a record in case the Oregon stasi hauled him into court), I can tell you how many Valvoline motor oil rebate coupons he redeemed, I’ve found $7500 in crisp Franklins that Huss hid in his “Barbara Roberts” folder because he mistrusted bankers who he assumed were Jewish and out to get him, I’ve slowly driven past and gawked at his old home and headquarters on 23rd and Belmont in Portland scores of times, and I’ve read every newspaper article ever written about him. I’m morbidly fascinated by Huss, but I’ve never found him particularly relatable…that is…until a few months ago when I started finding myself gripped by waves of apocalyptic paranoia.
The Cold War era into which I was socialized was suffused by a general climate of paranoia, but Walter Huss stands out for the outlandishly extravagant case of it from which he suffered. From the early 1960s into the early 2000s he went about his daily activities in constant fear that he was being watched and targeted by the FBI, the ADL, the Portland police, Communists, the lesbians who lived in his neighborhood, the Oregon Republican establishment, the Jewish mafia, and/or some combination of all of the above. Huss assumed that his reviled enemies were keeping an eye on him precisely because he was over the target, because he was Portland’s most effective exposer of the Oregon outcropping of the international Communist/Jewish conspiracy.
An excerpt from a 1986 legal brief filed by Walter Huss’s “non-union lawyer” Lyle Hartford VanDyke in regard to a $30,000 fine Huss was obligated to pay because in 1983 he was caught trying to illegally import Brazilian Bark Tea that he falsely claimed cured cancer.
That paragraph and the mindset it reveals is, of course, insane. A significant part of my parasocial relationship with Huss has been built around the contrast between what I’ve thought of as my sober-minded, reality-based lack of paranoia, versus Walter’s narcissistic and hysterical obsession with the pantheon of non-existent demons that haunted him. The two thick files labeled “Jews” in Huss’s archive, files he filled with antisemitic pamphlets and clippings of Oregonian stories about the completely innocuous activities of Portland’s Jewish community, testify to the depth and extent of his paranoia.
But here’s the thing, as much as I might find Huss’s paranoia pathetic and humorous, he actually was being watched. The night of JFK’s assassination, for example, the Portland police contacted Huss and several of Huss’s associates because they considered them to be the sort of rabble rousing “usual suspects” who might be involved with some national conspiracy to engage in widespread political violence.
A report from the Portland Police Bureau documenting the area’s “racial extremists” who they suspected might be involved with a wider conspiracy of which JFK’s assassination was a part. The night before JFK’s assassination, Huss and Dale Benjamin (also mentioned in this police report) had attended a city hall meeting together to testify in opposition to the NAACP’s application for a routine fundraising permit. Edmund Crump (also mentioned here) was an associate of both Huss and Benjamin.
Although he probably didn’t know it, Huss had been on the FBI’s radar as early as 1961. In 1985 he got word from a friend that the FBI (very plausibly) suspected him of being a member of the Nazi Party and the Posse Comitatus movement. Someone who attended meetings at Huss’s “Freedom Center” in the mid-1960s told me that he frequently saw crewcut-sporting men in suits who looked out of place in the largely elderly and working class crowd at those events. My informant assumed those guys were FBI agents. I’ve spoken with Portland antifascist activists and researchers from the late 1980s and early 1990s who told me they kept tabs on Huss and even did a few small scale, non-violent direct actions designed to stymie him because they considered him to be a dangerous, far right extremist.
In 1961, one year after moving back to his hometown of Portland, Huss had the privilege of being spied on by no less an august figure than KGW television personality (and future Republican governor) Tom McCall. The backstory is that Huss had applied for a routine city fundraising permit to solicit $88,000 in donations to fix up his anti-Communist Freedom Center’s headquarters…which also happened to be his home that was in need of a new roof. It looked more like a scam than an actual charity, and so the city turned him down. Huss created a huge stink about his persecution at the hands of the Communistic city government and appealed the decision. Tom McCall arranged with the mayor’s office and his friends on the city council to broadcast the appeal hearing live on KGW. My impression is that they hoped this public humiliation would spell the end of Huss’s political career. If only.
In preparation for the broadcast (which lasted a grueling five and a half hours and drew a huge viewing audience), McCall colluded with the chairman of the city solicitations commission, Bob Blyth, to do some work behind the scenes to make this moment of public exposure as humiliating as possible for the “fascistic” Huss. Walter Huss was paranoid, and also, as this document shows, people in positions of power were genuinely out to get him.
Tom McCall Papers, Oregon Historical Society.
I’m ambivalent about the scrutiny Huss faced. On one hand, he was a private citizen engaging in political activity that he believed would benefit the public. In a free society he should be able to engage in such actions without being spied on by people in positions of power in politics, civil society, and the media. On the other hand, Huss was a fascist with ties to violent extremists, and he believed that America should be run exclusively by and for white straight male Christians. He was an enemy to multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism, and he was comfortable with the use of violent state and private vigilante action to put large numbers of his fellow citizens into a state of terror and second class citizenship at best, to forcibly remove them outside the geographical boundaries of the US at worst. Was it so outlandish for a government and a civil society committed to the blandly antifascist, “liberal consensus” of the post WWII era to have been keeping an eye on Huss? After all, he was one of Oregon’s leading organizers of a movement that sought to smash that consensus and replace it with a white supremacist, Christian nationalist, and anti-democratic socio-political vision derived from the American and global fascist movements of the 1930s.
Seth Cotlar
Huss was on the receiving end of a good amount of government surveillance, but ultimately, the degree of state oppression he experienced seems quite mild given what Huss did (and would have liked to do if he got power) to his fellow Oregonians. My research has turned up a good amount of illegal activities by Huss and the people in his circles ranging from coordinated harassment of their perceived “enemies” to financial fraud to tax evasion to vandalism. At some point in the 1980s he basically stopped paying his mortgage (held by the daughter of the person who he bought his house from in 1963) and it was only thanks to the incredible patience and generosity of his creditor that he wasn’t subjected to eviction proceedings. Huss got a couple speeding tickets (which of course he protested vociferously), but aside from the one time he got fined $30,000 for illegally importing Brazilian bark tea that he falsely claimed cured cancer, Huss had few encounters with local, state, or federal authorities. The public resources devoted to surveilling Huss pale in comparison to what groups on the left, especially groups led by people of color, experienced in the Cold War era. In hindsight I’d say a case could be made that Huss was surveilled by the government in excess of what was merited, but given his ties to violent racist and antisemitic extremists, I don’t think it was that unreasonable for officials to be concerned that Huss might pose a potential risk to public safety.
In contrast to the modicum of sympathy I feel for Walter’s plight, I’m quite confident that Walter would have loved to see the Trump Administration lock up a “radical left Jewish indoctrinator of students” like me. In fact, I’m sure that Walter would have cheered on every single authoritarian thing the Trump Administration is currently doing. It would have thrilled him to see undocumented people who’d committed no crimes sadistically rounded up and deported to a gulag in El Salvador without due process. As someone who led a massive public campaign to get the President of the University of Oregon fired in 1962 for allowing “Communistic activities” to happen on campus, Huss would have eagerly cheered the Trump Administration’s aggressive assault on “radical left” institutions of higher education. As someone who tried to get a “fetal personhood” initiative on Oregon’s ballot in the 1990s, Huss was an early adopter of the idea that providers of reproductive care should be prosecuted as murderers of the unborn. As someone who tried to get LGBTQ teachers fired from Portland’s public schools in the 1970s, Huss would have supported efforts to ban “gender ideology” and “pornography” from America’s schools. And like today’s anti-DEI and anti-CRT Republican Party, Huss reviled the “anti-white racism” he thought he suffered at the hands of the media and Black Oregonians like Margaret Carter.
Seth Cotlar
Walter Huss was convinced his entire life that the internal Communist enemy (i.e. the Democratic Party and the establishment/moderate wing of the Republican Party) was on the verge of transforming the United States into a totalitarian hellhole in which he would be locked up for the crime of being a freedom-loving Christian Patriot.
Walter Huss believed New Deal liberalism—with its foundational belief in religious pluralism, government regulation in the public interest, and multi-racial democracy—had put the nation on an inevitable glide path toward totalitarian Communism. This tyrannical threat is what motivated Huss to organize a grassroots insurgency inside the OR GOP. He sought to take back that institution from the Com-symp moderates who controlled it, and turn it into an institution capable of ruthlessly fighting against and ultimately purging the “radical left” enemies of American freedom. In Huss’s mind, these “enemies” included Jews, LGBTQ people, immigrants, Black people, union organizers, college professors, the leaders of non-right-wing churches, and media outlets that wrote critical articles about him. Huss didn’t get his way during his lifetime and he died a demoralized and embittered man. But his paranoid style of politics, and the authoritarian political vision it authorized, is now the governing logic of the political party to which he devoted his life, and which currently controls all three branches of the US government.
This photo was taken at a GOP fundraiser in Portland in 1991. A copy of it hung on the wall of Huss’s house throughout the 1990s. One year before this photo was taken Huss had led a movement to remove MLK’s name from MLK Blvd in Portland. During that time he’d met with Richard Barrett, one of the leaders of the white nationalist/neo-Nazi skinhead movement who’d come to Portland support the cause. In 1991 Huss was also an avid reader of David Duke’s publication, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, and a contributor to Duke’s political campaigns.
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