Gerald L. K. Smith

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Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith (February 27, 1898–April 15, 1976) was a clergyman and politician who was a leader of the Share Our Wealth movement and a founder of the America First Party (1944).^[1]

Early life

Smith was born in Pardeeville, Wisconsin, and grew up in Viroqua, Wisconsin. He was ordained a minister in the Disciples of Christ denomination of Christianity in 1916. Smith moved to Louisiana in 1928 because his wife contracted tuberculosis and Shreveport had a good reputation for helping those with tuberculosis. Smith served as a minister in Shreveport, making radio broadcasts attacking local utility companies and corruption, while supporting trade unions.

Smith became a friend of Huey Long in 1932, and they launched the Share Our Wealth society soon afterwards. This movement proposed minimum and maximum limits on household wealth and income. Smith resigned his ministry and worked recruiting members to the society.

Politics

After Long was assassinated in 1935, Smith took over the society for a short time. He entered into an alliance with Francis Townsend, Father Charles Coughlin and Huey Long followers to form the Union Party, which nominated William Lemke as their presidential candidate in the 1936 election.

Unlike Long, who was generally favorable to racial tolerance, Smith soon took the Share Our Wealth movement in the direction of white supremacy. He became associated with the non-interventionist America First Committee. After this group dissolved in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Smith formed the America First Party. He was also a prominent member of William Dudley Pelley's pro-Nazi "Silver Shirts" organization patterned, after Hitler's "brown shirts".^[2] Pelley was later convicted for violation of the Alien and Sedition Act but Smith escaped conviction for violations of the Smith Act. Smith ran for the United States Senate in Michigan as a Republican but he lost in the primary. He ran as the candidate of the party 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.^[3] Smith's only other run for the presidency was in 1956, when he received eight write-in votes in California.

Smith was one of 30 co-defendants in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. The case against all the defendants was dismissed when a mistrial was declared, following the death of the presiding judge.

Smith lobbied for decades for release of all Nazi war criminals convicted at the Nuremberg War Tribunals. He later suggested that the Holocaust never happened and that various politicians had links to a 'Jewish Conspiracy'. Smith was shunned by most politicians, even hard-right figures such as Senator J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who distanced the States' Rights Democratic Party from Smith. An article in the ADL Bulletin entitled The Plot Against Anna M. Rosenberg 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.' (Jews Against Prejudice, p 120) In 1956, Smith joined a vociferous campaign against the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act, the opponents of which claimed that it was a communist or Jewish plot to establish concentration camps in Alaska.

Smith eventually moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas. In 1964, he began construction of a planned religious theme park. Although the park was never fully developed as originally planned, in 1966 the centerpiece, the Christ of the Ozarks statue, was completed, overlooking the town from Magnetic Mountain at an elevation of 1500 feet. The sculptor, Emmet Sullivan, had worked under Gutzon Borglum as one of the sculptors of Mount Rushmore.

Smith's biographer, Glen Jeansonne, in Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate, states 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 in order to undertake the "Christ of the Ozarks" project. Smith's life-long benefactor, Wickliffe Draper (1891-1972), founder of The Pioneer Fund in 1937 and a major benefactor of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, civil rights opposition, the compulsory sterilization movement in America, the Hollywood blacklist campaign championed by Smith, and the Back to Africa repatriation movement, is strongly suspected as the source of these funds for Christ of the Ozarks.^{[citation needed]}

Smith also had plans for a life-size recreation of ancient Jerusalem in the hills near Eureka Springs. While this was never fully realized, each year an outdoor passion play inspired by that of Oberammergau, Germany is staged on a set located not far from the statue. Smith was the target of extensive criticism because of the blatantly anti-Semitic aspects of the play. [1] Smith was considered the "leader of anti-Semitism" in America for decades and did nothing to deflect or defend that title or to change his behavior in that regard. Smith died in 1976 as a result of pneumonia. He and his wife are buried adjacent to the Christ of the Ozarks Statue. A loud speaker plays hymns over the graves continuously.^[4]

Notes

Sources

• Jeansonne, Glen. Gerald L.K. Smith- Minister of Hate, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
• Gerald L K Smith in 1956

External links

• Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith article at the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture
• 57-page dossier on Smith by the American Jewish Committee, written in 1953