Background
He was born on February 27, 1898 in Pardeeville, Wisconsin, United States, the only son and second child of Lyman Z. Smith, a traveling salesman and farmer, and Sarah Henthorn, a teacher.
(A biographical look at Gerald K. Smith, a gifted speaker,...)
A biographical look at Gerald K. Smith, a gifted speaker, social commentator, and foe of communism.
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He was born on February 27, 1898 in Pardeeville, Wisconsin, United States, the only son and second child of Lyman Z. Smith, a traveling salesman and farmer, and Sarah Henthorn, a teacher.
Smith began his education in a one-room, rural school on his father's property, attended elementary school at Viola, Wisconsin, and graduated from high school at Viroqua, Wisconsin, where he participated in debate and track. He enrolled at Valparaiso University in 1915, where he worked at part-time jobs, including preaching, and earned as many as forty credits in a single semester, enabling him to graduate in 1918 with a B. A. in biblical studies.
Smith decided to follow his father and grandfather, unpaid lay preachers for small Disciples of Christ churches, into the ministry and returned to Wisconsin after graduating from college, preaching at Soldiers Grove, Footville, and Beloit, Wisconsin, then in Kansas, Illinois, and Indianapolis, Indiana.
Gerald Smith accepted the position as pastor of the large Kings Highway Christian Church in Shreveport. Despite arriving shortly before the stock market crash, he improved the church's finances and membership and became prominent in the community as a charity fund-raiser. He became acquainted with Senator Huey Long when Long intervened to save the homes of some of Smith's congregants threatened with foreclosure. Smith attached himself to Long's political machine, an unpopular move with his wealthy congregation, many of whom disliked Long's program of taxation of the rich.
In the summer of 1933, Smith resigned to avoid being fired and briefly joined the Silver Shirt Legion of William Dudley Pelley, a demagogue headquartered in North Carolina, who modeled his movement on the German Nazi party. Smith, however, saw no future with Pelley and became a paid organizer for Long.
Beginning in early 1934 he toured the United States organizing clubs for Long's Share Our Wealth Society and promoting Long's plan to confiscate and redistribute the incomes of millionaires. When Long was assassinated in September 1935, on the verge of declaring his candidacy for president, Smith delivered a moving eulogy to more than 150, 000 mourners at his funeral on the grounds of the state capitol.
Smith campaigned for Long's successor, Richard W. Leche, in the Democratic primary of January 1936, dipping his hands in red dye to proclaim that the opposing ticket had the blood of Huey Long on its hands, calling down Long's voice from heaven - and achieving a response from a loudspeaker in a tree. With the election won, Smith was no longer useful to the Long machine and lost out in a power struggle with Long's lieutenants Seymour Weiss and Robert Maestri, who wanted to discontinue the Share Our Wealth Society and support President Franklin D. Roosevelt's reelection campaign in return for New Deal patronage.
Smith left Louisiana, seeking another politician whom he could serve. On January 27, 1936, he spoke in Macon, Georgia, at a mass gathering of supporters of Governor Eugene Talmadge, an enemy of Roosevelt, who was testing his potential as a presidential candidate. "We're going to get that cripple out of the White House, " Smith said of Roosevelt.
After Talmadge failed to emerge as a credible presidential candidate, Smith joined the crusade of Francis E. Townsend, a California physician whose solution to the Great Depression was to provide $200 monthly stipends to everyone older than sixty who retired, thus priming recovery by an infusion of spending and opening jobs to younger workers. Smith spoke at Townsend's annual convention of the Townsend Recovery Plan supporters as well as the convention of the National Union for Social Justice of Father Charles E. Coughlin, the radio priest, a bitter foe of Roosevelt.
In the fall Townsend, Smith, and Coughlin created the Union party, whose candidate for president was North Dakota congressman William Lemke. Despite the oratorical prowess of Smith and Coughlin, Lemke polled only 891, 858 votes and failed to carry a single state. For the next three years Smith delivered speeches and raised money to fight Communism.
In 1936 he founded the Committee of One Million as the vehicle for his political activities. The next year he befriended Henry Ford, who financed his radio speeches and used him as an antiunion speaker in his plants. Smith claimed that Ford introduced him to the issue of anti-Semitism.
In 1939, Smith settled in Detroit, and three years later he campaigned for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate, polling more than a hundred thousand votes but finishing second.
After his loss in 1942, Smith moved to the far-right fringes of politics. In 1943 he founded the America First party as the successor to the Committee of One Million; it was succeeded in turn by the Christian Nationalist party in 1946 and by the Christian Nationalist Crusade in 1948.
Smith remained active in politics, supporting candidates in every presidential election and running for president himself in 1944, 1948, and 1956 but never polling more than a few thousand votes. The issues in Smith's crusades changed as he grew older: preaching in the 1920's, politics in the 1930's, anti-Semitism in the 1940's, anti-Communism in the 1950's, and religious fundamentalism in the 1960's.
In his later years Smith encouraged younger anti-Semites and provided them with articles and information for their publications. As Smith grew older, and as television replaced radio, he turned increasingly to the written word to reach audiences. Effective in direct-mail solicitations for money, he became a millionaire.
During the 1950's, Smith's career was in temporary eclipse, but he emerged in the 1960's as an entrepreneur of religious shrines. In 1966 he dedicated the Christ of the Ozarks at Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a statue twice the size of the better-known Christ of the Andes and half that of the Statue of Liberty. In 1968 he began staging a passion play in an amphitheater at Eureka Springs, and it became the largest outdoor production in the United States.
At his death in 1976 he was buried at the foot of the Christ of the Ozarks.
(A biographical look at Gerald K. Smith, a gifted speaker,...)
Smith was most notorious for his hostility to Jews in his speeches and in the pages of The Cross and the Flag and numerous tracts. He claimed Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus and also blamed them for causing the Great Depression and for inspiring World War II. He praised Hitler, who he said had done much good for Germany, and he denied the reality of the Holocaust. Smith claimed presidents Woodrow Wilson, Harry S. Truman, and Franklin D. Roosevelt were Jews or, at the very least, were dominated by Jews.
Arrogant and boastful among weaker individuals, Smith was servile among stronger men such as Long, and his charismatic oratory recruited millions of members to Long's movement.
Quotes from others about the person
Journalist H. L. Mencken considered Smith "the best rabble-rouser he had ever heard. "
On June 22, 1922, he married Elna M. Sorenson, whom he met while preaching at Footville. They had one adopted son, Gerald L. K. Smith, Jr. , who was estranged as an adult from his parents. In the spring of 1929, Elna Smith contracted tuberculosis and the Smiths moved to the South for her health.