No, Unfortunately, This *Is* Your Grandfather's Conservatism.
Gerald L.K. Smith and the disquieting reality that there is nothing new under the sun.
Never in the history of our Nation has so much responsibility rested upon a little handful of fearless, sacrificial, truth-loving patriots. … I have accepted the responsibility of sensitizing and enlightening 100,000 new people who have shown some flicker of intelligent concern for the debacle which our Nation faces.
We are being ruled by the most ruthless and ambitious gang of politicians the human race has ever known. Nothing in the days of Alexander or Caesar, or the royal tyrants of France, surpassed in power the regime that now holds sway over you and me. …
Our President is a complete puppet. He is to be pitied. In his weak, sickly form, he is being propped up by publicists and political propagandists on the theory that anything goes if he can be gotten through the [Convention] and the general election. …
They are holding life and death power over our economic existence by turning on or turning off the money-printing machines and the extension of credit. …
For all practical purposes, we do not have a President. Our country is being run by … his White House cabal. It is rumored that if Mrs. [Biden], or even the President, had their way they would step aside, but pressures and misrepresentations are so terrific that for the President even to intimate the thought of withdrawal is to bring down upon his head terrifying and bulldozing attacks. He is virtually a kidnapped captive. Upon this great uncertainty hangs the destiny of America. …
The Democrat Party is led by weaklings and imbeciles.
Our Nation has been degenerated from the top down and from the bottom up. The public is so uninformed concerning national affairs that a recent poll revealed that from 50% to 75% of the people interviewed could not even recognize the leading candidates for President by their pictures.
America hangs like an over-ripe apple, ready to be plucked and destroyed by the conspirators who manipulate our knaves and exploit our fools in high office.
It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Like an alt-right screed you’d find one or two links away from your uncle’s Facebook feed? A post amplified by the current proprietor of zombie Twitter, with ‘interesting’ as the one-word comment on the retweet?
This is July 1956, and the author Gerald L.K. Smith, writing in his Christian Nationalist Crusade’s publication, The Cross and the Flag.
You can see the whole sordid thing for yourself here, in the digital archive at the University of Arkansas. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. The margin notes left by an anonymous reader from the time period aren’t for the faint of heart.
Prior to his life as a pro-fascist writer and leader of the Christian Nationalist Crusade, Smith was a minister with the Disciples of Christ. The Disciples were an integrated denomination going back to their wellspring at the Cane Ridge, Kentucky revival in 1801. Yet Smith, a Wisconsin native born into the fever pitch of the Progressive Era, as the late UW-Milwaukee professor and Smith researcher Glen Jeansonne notes, would exist in a tension between the political progressivism of his family and the area in which he was raised, and the doctrinally conservative Christian Church that would spell his eventual split from vocational ministry in Shreveport, Louisiana.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas’ entry on Smith tells us that his first foray into politics was with Louisiana’s infamous Huey P. Long, whose populist bombast and calls for wealth redistribution were at first glance a far cry from the staunch anti-communist stances Smith would tow in The Cross and the Flag.
Yet, Smith’s position was consistently, if not ambivalently, anti-Marxist and viewed Roosevelt’s New Deal and, later, Eisenhower’s Republicanism as somehow stealth Marxist intrusion, but pro-wealth redistribution. After Long’s assassination, Smith found himself in Detroit, steeped himself in the anti-Semitic views of Henry Ford, sought to join the pro-Nazi Silver Shirts, would help found the short-lived Union Party, which floundered and failed as a Roosevelt-alternative project, and then would settle in as a fascist-loving, anti-Semitic crank who would run for office likely as a way to keep his brand relevant and the funds coming in.
He would organize the Committee of One Million, an isolationist organization that opposed both the New Deal and American involvement in World War II. (In The Cross and the Flag, Smith viewed Charles Lindbergh as a martyr for their shared cause.) In 1943, he founded the America First Party. The Christian Nationalist Crusade would come after World War II, moving headquarters from Detroit to St. Louis and eventually Los Angeles.
It should be noted that at one time, no less than Ronald Reagan found Smith loathsome. In 1945, Reagan wrote to Walter Winchell in New York and excoriated Smith’s antics as a newcomer to LA, how local officials helped give him cover and how Reagan set up a Smith meeting full of Reagan’s own opposing American Veterans Committee, replete with rows of servicemen reading newspapers.
Less than 20 years later, Reagan would be denouncing Democrats as closet communists and making blustering claims about America’s imminent downfall:
In 1923, Lenin said that they would take Eastern Europe, next organize the hordes of Asia, then surround the United States, and, he predicted, " …that last bastion of Capitalism will not have to be taken. It will fall into our outstretched hands like over-ripe fruit."
Lenin never said that, but this line from John Birch Society disinformation does sound like something familiar, doesn’t it?
America hangs like an over-ripe apple, ready to be plucked and destroyed…
I was raised in a rock-ribbed Republican family, Rush Limbaugh on the radio and on the “conservative” ideas of small government, Christian family values, low taxation, minimal regulation, promotion of American interests abroad and personal freedom at home. The intellectual inconsistency of these separate ideas held together never occurred to me until I heard and saw conservative pundits talking about things I did not see in reality — namely, liberal brainwashing in the classroom.
My professors and teachers at a state university, almost to a person, were no fans of Reagan or Bush, but they weren’t there to teach us about evil Republicans or to drive the Christianity out of our hearts. They were there to teach, and I received a wonderful education. As a philosophy and religious studies transfer student, faculty were fascinated by my background as someone raised Pentecostal and yet intellectually minded and thoughtful. I was told by more than one of my instructors that I wasn’t supposed to exist. I was treated with compassion and encouraged to remain true to my faith and pursue academic excellence. My experience was the exact opposite of what these cretins were saying was happening.
On the other hand, what I did see was the very conformity and intellectual homogenization they decried in running rampant our own churches, where I was made a pariah, in our Christian colleges, where I was drummed out, in conservative circles I wanted nothing to do with and in relationships that have gone long estranged.
And that which I suspected was hypocrisy bubbling under our feet geysered with the ascendance of Donald Trump: Conservatism was never about small government, jurisprudence, free markets, personal liberty, strong defense or family values. It was about power and the amassing and retention of it, at the cost of, well whatever it takes.
Actual American conservatism sought to conserve one thing.
In some respects Vice President Nixon is a pitiful figure. When the international money-changers, operating under the direction of Sidney Weinberg and others, came to Chicago in 1952 to buy the Republican Convention so that the puppet Eisenhower could be nominated, their one big problem was the conservative element.
What is this “conservative element” at the Republican National Convention? What did they seek to conserve?
Smith endorsed Joseph McCarthy, though Jeansonne notes that McCarthy rejected Smith’s support, if for no other reason than raw pragmatism (and what was likely savvy advice from Roy Cohn).
Later, another figure tried recruiting Smith to moderate his positions so that he could be brought into the mainstream. William F. Buckley eventually stopped trying.
Our “conservatism” has always been a big, problematic tent filled with broken people with odious views and powered by similarly useful idiots as those who fueled the Bolshevik Revolution. It has always been “hunting where the ducks are,” principle-less and pragmatic to a fault.
For the first time in my mature life, a major political party has nominated a candidate for President worthy of respect. … Don't waste any time In petty arguments. No one says [Barry] Goldwater is perfect. But he personifies the force in America which is hated and despised by everybody from Khrushchev to Martin Luther King and everybody from Ben‐Gurion to Jacob Javits. Every Jewish journal is against him. Every left‐wing journal is against him. Every segment of the international establishment hates him like poison.
If you manage to force your way through a copy of The Cross and the Flag, you’ll find that it’s all accusation and excoriation. There is no platform aside from preserving America as a Christian nation, opposing immigration, internationalism (when you consider churches that preach apocalyptic millenarianism, one world government fearmongering and rapture doctrines, this takes on a whole new light), and Jewish influence and “mongrelization.” But there’s nothing there when it comes to actually doing anything. It’s just pure, straight-up, disgusting bigotry and hatred. There’s no affirmative platform or policy.
Records indicate that Smith dictated almost all his ‘writings,’ that he would typically wake up early and rant for four hours straight, until he got so worked up he couldn’t go on. He would give lectures without notes, and often would thunder at his bully pulpit at length for hours to his captive audiences.
This could be construed as a sign of intelligence; more likely, it was indicative of an obsessed, single-minded bitter man who knew only how to play the same notes over and over.
70 years later and what has changed?
Sources for this piece include The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wisconsin Magazine of History, the Gerald L.K. Smith Papers at the University of Michigan, the Virgil T. Blossom Papers at the University of Arkansas, the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Heritage Auctions, Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association. I’m sure there are others that I’m remiss in mentioning.