In 1965 a group of young brown-shirted, jackbooted neo-Nazis terrorized Portland. Calling themselves the National Party of America (and Christian Patriots), they claimed to be the inheritors of the Silver Shirt movement of the 1930s. The NPA attended dozens of public events holding racist and anti-Semitic signs and menacing the people around them with threats of violence. After a December 1965 car crash took the life of one member and injured several others, the National Party disappeared from the scene never to be heard from again.
Most commentators at the time dismissed these young fascists as unrepresentative kooks. In hindsight, however, it's clear that the National Party was just the most visible manifestation of a broader far right network in Oregon and nationwide. One of the National Party's mentors, a minister named Walter Huss, was Portland's leading anti-communist activist who had ties to white nationalists, Christian supremacists, and neo-Nazis. In 1978 Huss was elected chair of the Oregon Republican Party. While ultra-right activists like Huss and the National Party were few in number, their actions significantly shaped the political culture of the city in much the same way that future ultra-right groups like the neo-Nazi skinheads of the 1980s or the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer of the 2010s did.
Seth Cotlar is a Professor of History at Willamette University in Salem, OR. His current research project is titled “Rightlandia: Walter Huss and the Long History of the Far Right in Oregon, 1955-2005.” Cotlar teaches courses on the history of the far right and the history of American Conservatism. His first book was Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early American Republic (University of Virginia Press, 2011), which won the James Broussard Prize for Best First Book from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He also co-edited Historian in Chief: How Presidents Interpret the Past to Shape the Future (University of Virginia Press, 2019) with Richard Ellis.
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