The late Glen Jeansonne, long a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, once began a profile this way: "In August 1936, Gerald L.K. Smith addressed a packed Cleveland stadium at the convention of Father Charles E. Coughlin's National Union of Social Justice. The afternoon was hot, and the audience sweltered. Smith, sweating profusely, stripped off his coat and tie and gulped directly from a pitcher of water without bothering to use a glass.
"The theme of his speech was the iniquity of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Smith claimed that the policies of FDR's administration represented 'the most historic and contemptible betrayal ever put over on the American people. ... Our people were starving and they burned the wheat ... hungry and they killed the pigs ... led by Mr. Henry Wallace, secretary of Swine Assassination ... and by a slimy group of men culled from the pink campuses of America with friendly gaze fixed on Russia.' The audience roared."
It's the same Gerald L.K. Smith who would later erect the seven-story Christ of the Ozarks in Eureka Springs in the 1960s. When writing last Sunday's column about the eccentrics who have been a part of Eureka Springs' history, I decided Smith deserved his own column. He was a reprehensible character in most every way, but he built a huge following during the Great Depression.
Jeansonne wrote that Smith "addressed more and bigger live audiences than any speaker of his generation. They rarely left disappointed. With his beak-shaped nose and piercing blue eyes, standing six feet tall and weighing over 200 pounds, he was a dynamo, an extraordinary demagogue who swayed thousands and infuriated millions. His crisp voice, his spontaneous gestures, his transparent zealotry fixated audiences. ... His oratory impressed crowds, raised emotions, thrilled the masses."
Author William Bradford Huie said of Smith: "The man has the passion of Billy Sunday. He has the fire of Adolf Hitler. ... He is the stuff of which fuehrers are made."
Louisiana's Huey P. Long called him "the only man I ever saw who is a better rabble-rouser than I am."
H.L. Mencken wrote: "Smith is the greatest orator of them all, not the greatest by an inch or a foot or a yard or a mile, but the greatest by at least two light years."
Smith was asked to deliver Long's funeral oration in Baton Rouge before a crowd of more than 150,000 in September 1935 following Long's assassination. Smith, who was just 37 at the time of Long's death, came to Louisiana in 1929 as pastor of Kings Highway Disciples of Christ Church at Shreveport.
Smith resigned from the church after seven months and hooked up with Long, becoming a national organizer of Long's Share-Our-Wealth Society. The wealth redistribution group was to have been the launch pad for Long's 1936 presidential campaign.
Following Long's assassination, Smith joined forces with retired physician Francis Townsend and Coughlin to create the Union Party. Smith ran several times for the U.S. Senate and the presidency, losing each time. His final presidential bid was in 1956 as the Christian Nationalist Party nominee. By then, Smith was primarily supported by anti-Semitic and fascist activists.
Smith began a monthly publication called The Cross and the Flag in 1942 and continued publishing it until his death in 1976.
In the early 1960s, the Ozarks remained mired in poverty. In a sense, the Great Depression had never ended there. Eureka Springs was a shadow of the grand health resort it had been in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Everyone looking to invest money was welcome, including Smith.
Smith "bought Penn Castle, a Victorian mansion in Eureka Springs, an Ozark Mountain spa that had lapsed into economic stagnation," Jeansonne wrote. "He remodeled it lavishly, turning it into his retirement home. Two years later, he built the first of his Sacred Projects ... the "Christ of the Ozarks," on Magnetic Mountain.
"Smith proclaimed that it was more beautiful than Michelangelo's art. Disagreeing, an art critic likened it to a milk carton with a tennis ball stuffed on its top. Soon Smith added the Christ Only Art Gallery, a Bible Museum and a Passion Play staged in an outdoor amphitheater. The play was performed on a 400-foot reproduction of a street in old Jerusalem and included live animals."
The first performance of the Great Passion Play was July 15, 1968. That first season attracted 28,000 people. By 1975, the theater had been expanded from 3,000 to 6,000 seats. More than 188,000 people came to Eureka Springs for the play that season, making it the largest outdoor pageant in the country.
Smith announced that he would build a $100 million replica of the Holy Land, including a model of the River Jordan in which people could be baptized. Before the project could be completed, Smith died of pneumonia in April 1976 at his winter home in California.
Following Smith's death, the Arkansas Gazette editorialized: "To have the power to touch men's hearts with glory or with bigotry, and to choose the latter, is a saddening thing."
"The Sacred Projects gave Smith some respectability but could not obscure the anti-Semitism and hatred for which he was most known," Jeansonne wrote. "He maintained that Jesus was a Gentile whom Jews crucified; that Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower were Jews; that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was a Bolshevik and a Jewish foil; that Jews invented communism; and that Jews prodded African Americans to begin the civil rights movement to jolt a tranquil American society."
Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.