Gerald L. K. Smith

Gerald L. K. Smith
File:Gerald L. K. Smith (cropped).jpg Smith in 1936, delivering an anti-New Deal speech
Born	Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith (1898-02-27)February 27, 1898 Pardeeville, Wisconsin, US
Died	Glendale, California, US
Resting place	Eureka Springs, Arkansas
Nationality	American
Political party	Union (1936) America First (1943)
Parent(s)	Sarah and Lyman Z. Smith

Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith (February 27, 1898 – April 15, 1976) was an American clergyman, politician and fascist sympathizer, who became a leader of the Share Our Wealth movement during the Great Depression and later founded the Christian Nationalist Crusade. He founded the America First Party in 1943, for which he was a presidential candidate in 1944.

Background

Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith was born in Pardeeville, Wisconsin, on February 27, 1898 to Sarah and Lyman Z. Smith. He had one sister. The family moved, and the children grew up in Viroqua, Wisconsin. He graduated from Valparaiso University in Indiana in 1918 with a degree in biblical studies.

Career

Ministry

The descendant of three generations of Disciples of Christ ministers, Smith followed his father into the ministry, becoming ordained in 1916. He first ministered in the Midwest: Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.

Smith moved his family to Louisiana in 1928 because his wife contracted tuberculosis, and facilities in Shreveport had a good reputation for helping those with the disease. Smith served as a minister in Shreveport, making radio broadcasts attacking local utility companies, the wealthy, and corruption, while supporting trade unions.

Politics

Smith met Governor Huey P. Long in 1929 and became his national organizer during the Great Depression, when Long launched the Share Our Wealth society. This movement proposed minimum and maximum limits on household wealth and income. Smith resigned his ministry to work full-time recruiting members to the society. In describing his campaign philosophy, Smith wrote that "in order to succeed, a mass movement must be superficial for quick appeal, fundamental for permanence, dogmatic for certainty, and practical for workability."

After Long was assassinated in 1935, Smith directed the society for a short time. He became an ally of Francis Townsend, Father Charles Coughlin and Huey Long's followers in forming the Union Party. It nominated William Lemke as its candidate in the 1936 presidential election.

In the fall of 1936, Smith joined the former short-term Governor James A. Noe in a tour of Louisiana in which the two railed against Governor Richard Leche's sales tax on luxury items, revenue that the governor claimed was essential for the state's share of the new Social Security program. Noe charged that Leche "sold out to Roosevelt to finance Social Security.

America First Party of 1943

In stark contrast to Long, who had held his racial views close to his chest and may have even been a racial egalitarian, Smith instead chose to take the Share Our Wealth movement in the direction of white supremacy. As European tensions rose with the ascendancy of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) in Germany, Smith tried to form an alliance with the non-interventionist America First Committee, but did not succeed.

In 1943, Smith formed the America First Party, essentially appropriating the name. He became a member of William Dudley Pelley's pro-German Silver Shirts organization, which was patterned after Hitler's brown shirts.

Pelley was later convicted for violating the Espionage Act in 1942 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but he was acquitted in 1944 for violating the Alien Registration Act.

Having moved to Michigan, Smith ran for the United States Senate as a Republican from there, but lost in the primary.

In 1947, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith cited Smith's Christian Nationalist Crusade along with Merwin K. Hart's National Economic Council and the Ku Klux Klan as organized anti-Jewish organizations... which had significant influence, resources and membership." In late 1947, Smith moved CNC offices from Detroit to St. Louis.

Presidential bids

Smith ran as the America First Party candidate in the 1944 Presidential election, winning 1,781 votes (1530 in Michigan, 281 in Texas). In 1948, with running mate Harry Romer on the Christian Nationalist Party ticket, he received 48 votes. Smith's only other bid for the presidency was in 1956, when he received eight write-in votes in California.

"Gerald Smith ran for president because he lusted for power, but his hatred for Jews and his relentless crusade against them had no such 'rational' motivation... Smith was fascinated by the Office of the President of the United States." wrote biographer Glen Jeansonne.

Post-war activities

After World War II, Smith continued to be active on the political far right. He lobbied for decades for the release of all German war criminals convicted at the Nuremberg Trials. Due to his activities, he was shunned by most politicians, including political right-wingers such as Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who distanced his States' Rights Democratic Party from Smith.

In the early 1950s, at the time of the appointment of Anna M. Rosenberg as Assistant Secretary of Defense, the Anti-Defamation League published an article that attributed the attacks on Rosenberg's loyalty to "professional anti-Semites and lunatic nationalists", including the "Jew-baiting cabal of John Rankin, Benjamin Freedman and Gerald Smith".

In 1956, Smith joined a strong campaign against the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act. He was among such opponents as those who nicknamed it the "Siberia Bill" and denounced it as being part of a communist plot to hospitalize and brainwash Americans. It was a bipartisan, federal effort to improve mental health care for residents of Alaska, which was still a territory, and its passage was aided by the support of the conservative senator Barry Goldwater.

In 1959, the Cross and the Flag, the Christian Nationalist Crusade's magazine, claimed that six million Jews were not killed in death camps in Europe during World War II but instead immigrated to the United States during the war.

Last years

Smith eventually moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where he bought and renovated a mansion as a retirement home. In 1964, he began construction of a planned religious theme park on his own property, to be called "Sacred Projects". Smith's biographer, Glen Jeansonne, in Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate, says that Smith only had $5,000 to his name at the end of 1963 and yet raised $1,000,000 by the spring of 1964 to commission and construct the "Christ of the Ozarks" project.

Although the park was never fully developed, in 1966 the centerpiece, the Christ of the Ozarks statue, was completed on Magnetic Mountain at an elevation of 1,500 feet, from where it overlooked the town. Emmet Sullivan, the sculptor, had worked under Gutzon Borglum as one of the sculptors of Mount Rushmore.

Smith's original plans were for a life-size recreation of ancient Jerusalem in the hills near Eureka Springs; no construction of this portion took place. He did initiate an annual outdoor Passion Play, inspired by another passion play which is performed every ten years in the town of Oberammergau, Germany. It is staged in an amphitheater located near the statue for several nights each week from late April through late October.

Personal life and death

Smith married Elna Sorenson in 1922. They adopted their only child, whom they named Gerald L. K. Smith Jr.

Smith died age 78 on April 15, 1976 of pneumonia in Glendale, California. With his wife, he is buried adjacent to the Christ of the Ozarks statue, where hymns are continuously played near the graves.

Works

Smith is claimed to be the originator of the following quotation, often wrongly attributed to others (in particular Baptist pastor, author, and political commentator, Adrian Rogers, who quoted it in a sermon without attribution):

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

According to the Congressional Record of 1958, it had also been said by U.S. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi during his address at the November 13, 1957 annual meeting of the Illinois Agricultural Association.

Smith read Henry Ford's book The International Jew, which became one of his favorites; Smith sold many copies of this book, which he reprinted.

Books published by Smith

• The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem (prepared by Gerald L. K. Smith)

Books by Smith

• Matters of Life and Death: A Handbook for Patriots dealing with the issues on which American will rise or fall

Books edited by others

• Besieged patriot : autobiographical episodes exposing communism, traitorism, and Zionism from the life of Gerald L.K. Smith

See also

• Holocaust denial
• Meade McClanahan, Los Angeles City Council member recalled from office because of his association with Smith, 1946
• 1948 United States presidential election

Further reading

Articles

• Janowitz, Morris. "The Technique of Propaganda for Reaction: Gerald L. K. Smith's Radio Speeches." The Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 1, 1944, pp. 84–93.
• Jeansonne, Glen. "Preacher, Populist, Propagandist: The Early Career of Gerald L. K. Smith." Biography, vol. 2, no. 4, Fall 1979, pp. 303-327.
• Jeansonne, Glen. "Partisan Parson: An Oral History Account of the Louisiana Years of Gerald L. K. Smith." Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 23, no. 2, 1982, pp. 149–158.
• Jeansonne, Glen. "Oral History, Biography, and Political Demagoguery: The Case of Gerald L. K. Smith." The Oral History Review, vol. 11, 1983, pp. 87–102.
• Sitton, Tom. "Direct Democracy vs. Free Speech: Gerald L. K. Smith and the Recall Election of 1946 in Los Angeles." Pacific Historical Review, vol. 57, no. 3, 1988, pp. 285–304. doi:10.2307/3640706.
• Jeansonne, Glen. "Huey P. Long, Gerald L. K. Smith and Leander H. Perez as Charismatic Leaders." Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 35, no. 1, 1994, pp. 5–21.
• Jeansonne, Glen. "Arkansas's Minister of Hate: A Research Odyssey." The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 4, 2000, pp. 429–435. doi:10.2307/40023193.
• Jeansonne, Glen. "Gerald L. K. Smith: From Wisconsin Roots to National Notoriety." Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 86, no. 2, Winter 2002, pp. 18–29. Full issue available.

Books

• Jeansonne, Glen. Gerald L.K. Smith: Minister of Hate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. ISBN 0300041489 / ISBN 978-0300041484.
• Ribuffo, Leo P. The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right From the Great Depression to the Cold War. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.

External links

• Gerald L. K. Smith at Find a Grave
• Gerald L K Smith in 1956
• "Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith", Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture
• Gerald L.K. Smith, American Jewish Committee, 1953
• The Cross and the Flag: dedicated to the memory of Gerald L. K. Smith
  • The Jews and Their Lies
• FBI files on Gerald L.K. Smith, obtained under the FOIA and hosted at the Internet Archive:
  • Parts 1–10
  • Parts 11–18
• University of Michigan: Gerald L. K. Smith Papers: 1922-1976