Letter from Gerald L.K. Smith, Director of the Christian Nationalist Crusade, to Arnold Leese

Authors

Object ID

2019.2.261

Object Name

Letter

Date

6-29-1955

Files

Content Warning

The Bulmash Family Holocaust Collection consists of images, documents, and artifacts related to the Holocaust. The collection contains materials that depict a number of topics that may be difficult for viewers to engage with, including: antisemitic descriptions, caricatures, and representation of Jewish people; Nazi imagery and ideology; descriptions and images of German ghettos; graphic images of the violence of the Holocaust; and the creation of the State of Israel. For more information, see our policy page.

Description

Document with red banner across top with “FROM THE DESK OF GERALD L.K. SMITH” in white print.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Smith was an antisemitic, white supremacist clergyman and founder of the Christian Nationalist Crusade. During World War II, Smith founded the America First Party, which subsumed his pro-Nazi agenda.

In this letter to the fanatical British anti-Semite Arnold Leese, written in 1955, he refers to the Jewish “pressure…on me” to call out “the distribution of the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion] as a fraudulent operation.” Smith was quite taken with the Protocols, which he claimed (in his autobiography) had a formative influence on his own antisemitic worldview, despite its being a thoroughgoing fabrication. Of course, Smith states that he has an “abundance of evidence” to make his case for the Protocols’ authenticity, but asks Leese to send him any research he may have to bolster it nonetheless. Not wishing embarrassment, he prefers that Leese make no reference to this request in his publications.

Dimensions

11 x 8 1/4"

Keywords

Gerald L.K. Smith, Arnold Leese, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, America First Party, American Anti-Semitism

Subcollection

Anti

Recommended Citation

"Letter from Gerald L.K. Smith, Director of the Christian Nationalist Crusade, to Arnold Leese" (1955). Bulmash Family Holocaust Collection. 2019.2.261.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/bulmash/1588