Read on Twitter
Here's a wee thread about Gerald L.K. Smith (an apostle of "Christian Nationalism" and a key figure in the founding of the America First Party in the 1940s) inspired by the important point David makes here. https://twitter.com/DavidAstinWalsh/status/1198299726745083909
Gerald LK Smith is one of those people few contemporary Americans know about, but if you ask me, he's someone whose ideas are getting noticed more and more these days. Here's a quick bio courtesy of the Univ of Mich library where his papers are held.
Smith got his start working alongside Huey Long in the 1930s. Here's how Alan Brinkley describes Smith's relationship to "great leader" Long in his book "Voices of Protest." It might ring a few contemporary bells for you [cough] Ben Garrison [cough] Stephanie Grisham.
![Smith got his start working alongside Huey Long in the 1930s. Here's how Alan Brinkley describes Smith's relationship to "great leader" Long in his book "Voices of Protest." It might ring a few contemporary bells for you [cough] Ben Garrison [cough] Stephanie Grisham.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKFOuolVUAAdVLi.png "Smith got his start working alongside Huey Long in the 1930s. Here's how Alan Brinkley describes Smith's relationship to \"great leader\" Long in his book \"Voices of Protest.\" It might ring a few contemporary bells for you [cough] Ben Garrison [cough] Stephanie Grisham.")
I first learned about Smith in the late 1980s when I read Brinkley's book in an undergrad course. In my mind, Smith inhabited a category we might roughly call "eccentric right wing kooks in American History who make for interesting stories but were not that significant."
The past few years have made me significantly reconsider that assessment. When I refreshed my memory about Gerald LK Smith's "Christian Nationalist" and "America First" it struck me as a far less marginal part of America's post WWII political culture.
What follows are the 10 planks of Smith's "Christian Nationalism" which he articulated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His non-dogwhistled antisemitism and racism had gotten him banished from the ranks of "respectable conservatism" by then, but he still had an audience.
Smith's point 1. America is a Christian nation, and Jews in particular are bad. Note how he points out supposed efforts to ban the Bible as what we today would call "hate speech," a false claim that Trump's new WH hire Paula White has made as well.
Again, I'll just point out that this point, like many of the others that follow, are not all that different from what you'll hear on conservative radio or even Fox News, only they'll be careful to dogwhistle the antisemitism with terms like "Hollywood elite" or "George Soros."
Smith's point 2. The biggest threat to America are the unhinged Socialists and Communists on "the dangerous left" that hates America. The more "leftists" hate me, the more you should support me because it proves I'm doing the right thing.
Smith's point 3. The deep state is out to get you. Those damn bureaucrats with all of their meddling rules and regulations are destroying America. Time to get the government off our backs in the name of freedom.
Smith's point 4 (apologies for the rank racism here). The federal government is a threat to your family, by which Smith meant that the federal gov't was on the side of integration which, to him, meant interracial sex which he regarded as "unnatural."
Remember that Smith is writing this only a few years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Here he is explicitly saying that the federal government is dangerous because it threatens white supremacy.
This was a commonly held conservative belief in those years, only most people (like Goldwater in this 1959 interview with the segregationist Citizens Council of Jackson, Ms) knew better than to say this in such blunt language. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1116349527244455936?s=20
Here in Smith's point 5 we see some foreshadowing of today's emerging green/brown alliance that argues that conserving America's natural resources (usually for exploitation by American companies) is one way to thwart the "globalist blood suckers."
Smith's point 6 was echoed by Devin Nunes in the hearings this week when he also invoked GW in a paean to a proudly provincial and reactionary isolationism that GW would have never endorsed.
Putting a pause on this countdown to draw your attention to this excellent, short piece on the history of Smith's "Christian Nationalist Party." By 1960 he had a mailing list of 3 million conservatives sympathetic to his ideas. https://twitter.com/suenray2/status/1198331900688945152?s=20
Smith's point 7 is a longstanding part of conservative & right wing US political culture--the idea that there is an international and domestic conspiracy (a New World Order, if you will) seeking to subvert good old Americanism. Such "enemies of the people" deserve destruction.
Smith's point 8 is that anything that has a whiff of Socialism is un-American, and is an existential threat to the only true American economic system, "free enterprise."
Smith's point 9 could be taken directly from Stephen Miller or Tucker Carlson's diary. Immigration is an existential threat to pure Americanism. Note that Smith is writing this at a time when immigration to the US was severely restricted, i.e. pre-1965 Immigration Act.
Smith's point 10 is a bit vague, but it resonates with the Ron Paul and Tea Party types (and others) who are obsessed with the idea that America's monetary system is being manipulated by (((people))) who are benefitting themselves at the expense of "us."
Political genealogies are tangled and messy. I'm not saying Gerald LK Smith is the founder of the Trumpist GOP. But it should alarm us that the content on the GOP facebook page of a central PA county lines up pretty well with Smith's 10 points. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1190670165236576261?s=20
It wouldn't surprise me if the Oregon woman I discuss in this thread had been on Smith's 3 million person mailing list back in 1960. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/942516394263851008?s=20
Right now, as we speak, there is a civil war within the American right about who can truly carry the mantle of "America First." Read this article about the actual Nazis in MAGA hats trying to make that push. Carrying forward Gerald LK's work, I'd say. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/11/20948317/alt-right-donald-trump-jr-conservative-tpusa-yaf-racism-antisemitism
What today's "America First" Nazi groypers are saying is this. "You lame conservatives have been dog whistling about Jews, immigrants, and black people for years. We're just brave enough to say out loud what you really think but are too scared to say." I mean...
This is the kind of stuff that made Gerald LK Smith pop into my mind this morning. Forgetting about him, regarding him as an irrelevant kook, is in part what made our political culture vulnerable to the resurgence of his brand of "un-American" but also "all too American" ideas.
The person who has done the most to keep Gerald LK's memory alive is a Tennessee preacher named Dewey H. Tucker. He had a scripture-based podcast explicating what he called "the Dixie Bible." https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/truth-from-god-dewey-tucker-ReMyIHrAiPY/
Here's his Wikipedia entry. Note that he was actively promoting these ideas in the 1960s and 1970s. These are the sorts of evangelicals who were especially primed to hear Trump/Bannon's message in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Tucker
Fascism has been a thread in American political culture from the 1930s up through today. It's always floated just off the right edge of the conservative movement, sometimes held at arms length, other times quietly catered to.
This is why figures like the Bundy Malheur occupiers & WA GOP/white nationalist legislator Matt Shea are worth paying attention to. There's a non-zero chance that such Gerald LK Smith-esque folks are the future of the GOP in many parts of the country. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1154908816749678593?s=20
Also want to recommend this great piece about Pat Buchanan's role in creating congenial space on the right for the sorts of ideas Gerald LK Smith endorsed. If anyone foreshadowed Trumpism, it's Buchanan. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-year-the-clock-broke-ganz
I also want to say that it's not good for my mental health that every time I tweet about current events and history, I irresistibly start thinking about Victor Klemperer. https://lithub.com/on-the-eerie-prescience-of-a-nazi-era-diarist/
