Arkansas's Minister of Hate: A Research Odyssey

Abstract

GERALD L. K. SMITH IS KNOWN TO MANY Arkansans as the creator of the Christ of the Ozarks statue, the Passion Play, and other tourist attractions at Eureka Springs. To some outside Arkansas, he is known for having been national organizer of Louisiana senator Huey P. Long's Share Our Wealth clubs and as a collaborator with Father Charles Coughlin in the 1936 Union Party challenge to Franklin D. Roosevelt. But many more probably know Smith as one of the most notorious figures of the American far right and the dean of American anti-Semites from the 1930s through the mid1970s. In the 1930s and 1940s he could fill football stadiums with crowds who came to hear his anti-Semitic message. He had drawn his hatred of Jews from books and tracts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a notorious forgery), as well as from such figures as Coughlin, Henry Ford, and William Dudley Pelley. After Long's death, he briefly joined Pelley's Silver Shirts and would eventually be investigated by the FBI for his fascist sympathies. He created anti-Semitic organizations such as the Committee of One Million and the Christian Nationalist Crusade as fundraising vehicles, was a principal in the America First Party, and ran for president three times as candidate of the Christian Nationalist Party. In 1942, Smith began to publish an anti-Semitic monthly, The Cross and the Flag, which appeared until his death in 1976. Smith lived in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, and California, but for the last decade of his life he considered Arkansas his summer home. Arkansas was the site of his proudest accomplishments, his Christian shrines, which revived tourism in Eureka Springs and the surrounding area and helped make it a leading destination of visitors to Arkansas. In Arkansas, Smith could relax, shielded from the national press, and play the role of kindly Christian gentleman. If his antiSemitic outbursts were never entirely suppressed, they were at least subdued there. He never permitted any of his anti-Semitic tracts and pamphlets to be sold in Eureka Springs. Researching a biography of Smith occupied fifteen years of my academic career. From 1973 to 1988, I traveled the United States collecting information on Smith, organizing it, and finally shaping it into a narrative published as Gerald L. lK. Smith: Minister of Hate. The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and won several lesser awards. I had become interested in Smith while in New Orleans in 1973 working on the final stages of my Ph.D. dissertation on Leander H. Perez, the arch-segregationist of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. Both Smith and Perez had been cogs in Huey Long's political machine and a biography of Smith seemed a natural sequel to my nearly-completed biography of Perez. After defending my Ph.D. dissertation in the summer of 1973 and accepting a position as assistant professor of history and associate editor of Louisiana History at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana-Lafayette), I pushed forward with my research on Smith, collecting newspaper clippings about his life. Eventually, I obtained clippings from most major cities with papers that had covered Smith extensively, including Shreveport, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Tulsa, New York, Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Eureka Springs, and Little Rock. I traveled to each city to photocopy the files, or hired someone native to the city to do it for me, usually a graduate student at a local university. Some papers were reluctant to permit photocopying, but ultimately I succeeded at all the major dailies, as well as the Eureka Springs weekly. While collecting clippings, I also began corresponding with Smith, telling him that I was interested in writing a book about his life and that I taught Louisiana history and was interested in Huey Long. Proud of his apprenticeship under Long, Smith proved receptive from the start and invited me to come to Eureka Springs to visit him. …