Gerald L. K. Smith - Louisiana and Politics

Louisiana and Politics

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 and corruption, while supporting trade unions.

Smith met Senator Huey P. Long in 1929 and became his national organizer during the Great Depression, when he 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.

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 followers to form the Union Party. It nominated William Lemke as its presidential candidate in the 1936 election.

Unlike Long, who had been relatively tolerant on racial issues, Smith took the Share Our Wealth movement in the direction of white supremacy. 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 its leaders spurned him because of his anti-Semitism and racism.

In 1944 Smith formed the America First Party, essentially appropriating the name. He became a member of William Dudley Pelley's pro-Nazi Silver Shirts organization, which was patterned after Hitler's brown shirts.

Pelley was later convicted for violation of the Alien Enemies Act, but Smith escaped conviction for violations of the Smith Act.

Having moved to Michigan, Smith ran for the United States Senate as a Republican from there but he lost in the primary. He 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 run for the presidency was in 1956, when he received eight write-in votes in California.

After World War II, Smith continued to be active on the political right. He lobbied for decades for the release of all Nazi war criminals convicted at the Nuremberg Trials. His activities led to his being shunned by most politicians, including conservative figures 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 trial of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Anti-Defamation League published an article that attributed the attacks on the Rosenbergs' 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 to residents of Alaska, which was still a territory, and passage was aided by the support of the conservative senator Barry Goldwater.