Gerald L. K. Smith

Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith (February 27, 1898 – April 15, 1976) was an American clergyman, politician and organizer known for his populist and far-right demagoguery. A leader of the populist Share Our Wealth movement during the Great Depression, afterward he became known for far-right causes including the Christian Nationalist Crusade, which he founded in 1942. He founded the America First Party in 1943 and was its 1944 presidential candidate, winning fewer than 1,800 votes.
He was a preeminent antisemite and a white supremacist.

Late in life, he built the Christ of the Ozarks statue in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with donations, and initiated the Passion Play there.

Early life and education

Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith was born on February 27, 1898, in Pardeeville, Wisconsin, to Sarah and Lyman Z. Smith. He had one sister, Barbara, who was ten years older. His father was a traveling salesman and preacher who spoke on patriotic occasions and was a supporter of Robert La Follette. Gerald Smith said of his childhood, "We took it for granted that the word 'Christian' was the companion for the word 'American.'" The family moved to rural Richland County, Wisconsin, and Gerald Smith received a public education, first at rural schools and then at a larger school in Viola. After Lyman Smith recovered from pernicious anemia, which he had suffered from during most of his son's childhood, the family moved to Viroqua, Wisconsin, where Gerald Smith graduated high school in 1915.

In 1918, after two and a half years of study, Smith graduated from Valparaiso University in Indiana with a degree in biblical studies. Smith enlisted in the United States Army but was not deployed before the end of World War I. An attack of nephritis forced him to return to Viroqua to recuperate.

Ministry

Smith said that he determined he would be a Disciples of Christ minister, like three generations of his family before him, when he was twelve. He was ordained in 1916, while at Valparaiso. Upon his recovery from nephritis in 1919, he became a temporary pastor in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, then at a larger church in Footville, then organized another church in the larger community of Beloit. On return from a trip to Chicago, he expressed his earliest recorded views on race in a letter to his parents: " en you see the white and black mixing it is terrible. White girls dancing cheek to cheek with black men. ... It sickens one."

After marriage and another period of illness, Smith joined a larger church in Kansas, Illinois. In 1922, he drew national attention for a sermon at a ministerial convention in St. Louis and moved to Indianapolis, where he preached to a congregation of two thousand. In Indianapolis, rumors circulated that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which was popular among the state's Protestant men but notorious following the conviction of Grand Wizard D. C. Stephenson. Smith denied these rumors throughout his life.

In 1929, Smith's wife contracted tuberculosis, and he moved his family to Shreveport, Louisiana, to seek treatment. He became minister of Kings Highway Christian Church, where his congregation included the city's mayor, two bank presidents, and the president of the Chamber of Commerce. In his early time in Shreveport, Smith was ecumenical, preaching at B'Nai Zion Temple and in return sharing his pulpit with the temple's rabbi.

Politics

Huey Long and Share Our Wealth

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.

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. 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.

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." 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.

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.

Union Party

After departing Louisiana, Smith campaigned in Georgia for white supremacist Governor Eugene Talmadge, who intended to oppose Roosevelt for the 1936 Democratic nomination. 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. 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 oosevelt advisors Frankfurter, Ickes, Hopkins, and Wallace".

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 he 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.

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." On October 22, he was punched in the face after delivering a radio talk in New Orleans

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