Gerald L. K. Smith

Smith came to prominence as the national organizer of Huey Long's Share Our Wealth Society.

Upon his move to Shreveport, shortly after the 1929 stock market crash, Smith began to engage more actively in politics. He became chaplain of the Louisiana American Federation of Labor and delivered a keynote at the Louisiana chapter meeting of the American Bankers' Association. He also began preaching radio sermons calling for social reform and denouncing the Standard Oil Company.[11]

Shortly after his arrival in the city, Smith met Governor Huey P. Long, who maintained a law office there. His friendship with Long ultimately forced his resignation from his church in 1933, as many of the congregation were opposed to Long.[13] Following his resignation, Smith allegedly turned toward fascist politics by contacting William Dudley Pelley and attempting to reach Adolf Hitler to discuss "Semitic" and "anti-German" propaganda.[14]

In 1934, Long formed the Share Our Wealth Society, which proposed minimum and maximum limits on household wealth and income, and named Smith its national organizer. 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."[15] Smith delivered campaign speeches for Share Our Wealth throughout the country, described as "a combination of Savonarola and Elmer Gantry" and often drawing large crowds of supporters and hecklers. In 1935, he boasted to a reporter that he might "duplicate the feat of Adolph Hitler in Germany". Behind the scenes, he encouraged Long to challenge President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.[16]

After Long was assassinated in 1935, Smith failed to take control of the Long faction in Louisiana and was effectively expelled from the state politically by Seymour Weiss. Smith was fired from Share Our Wealth, which was soon abolished.[17]

After departing Louisiana, Smith campaigned in Georgia for white supremacist Governor Eugene Talmadge, who intended to oppose Roosevelt for the 1936 Democratic nomination.[18] Smith then joined Francis Townsend, an advocate of pension reform, in New York City on the incorrect belief that Townsend had acquired Long's mailing list.[19] Smith soon ingratiated himself to Townsend against the misgivings of many of Townsend's advisors. In November 1935, Smith convinced Townsend to join with Charles Coughlin, an anti-Roosevelt Roman Catholic priest, to back William Lemke for president to oppose, in Smith's words, "the communistic philosophy of [Roosevelt advisors] Frankfurter, Ickes, Hopkins, and Wallace".[20]

Late in the 1936 campaign, Smith announced his intent to form an independent movement to oppose communism and "seize the government of the United States." He claimed support from "ten million patriots" willing to sacrifice their lives to prevent "an international plot to collectivize [the United States]" and from wealthy donors who would provide one percent of their annual incomes "to make America vigorously nationalistic." Townsend promptly disowned Smith and Lemke's campaign manager expelled him from the Union Party, despite his protests. Coughlin ignored the controversy, having already developed antipathy toward Smith during the campaign.[21]

In the fall of 1936, Smith returned to Louisiana to join former 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."[22] On October 22, he was punched in the face after delivering a radio talk in New Orleans. On the night before the election, he was arrested for disturbing the peace, reviling the police, and using obscene language after attacking Leche on statewide radio.[21] Despite the boasts of Smith, Townsend, and Coughlin, the Union ticket received only 2 percent of the national vote, mostly in Catholic precincts where Coughlin's popularity was strongest; within two years, the party collapsed entirely.[23]

As European tensions rose with the ascendancy of the Nazi Party 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 fascist Silver Legion of America, which was patterned after Hitler's brown shirts.[24] (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.) Smith told an audience of Silver Shirts, "We're going to drive that cripple out of the White House," meaning Franklin Delano Roosevelt.[25]

After moving 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."[26] In late 1947, Smith moved CNC offices from Detroit to St. Louis.[26]

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.[7] 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.[4]

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 attributing 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".[27] Smith's activism in the Los Angeles area was opposed by a coalition of Jewish and black groups; a headline in the B'nai B'rith Messenger called him "the Little Fuehrer".[28]

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.

The Christian Nationalist platform called for deportations of Jews and African Americans. Smith and his groups also targeted screeds against Catholics, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and others.[25] 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.[29]

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, writes 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.[30]

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.