JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This little pamphlet packed a lot of bitter bilious hope into its small-framed four pages. The  Committee of 1,000,000 was the work of the past-and-present pastor Gerald L.K.Smith, a rabid far-rightist who seemed to be present at the birth of most of the bad ideas of the 1930s and 1940s. He was a white supremist anti-Semite ultranationalsit pro-Nazi who started his major political life as a national organizer for Huey Long, an ally of Townsend and Coughlin, and the founder of the America First Party. He was a presidential candidate running in   against what he considered to be the Communist Franklin Roosevelt, was a member of William Pelley’s neo-Nazi Silver Shirts in 1942, advocated for the early release of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, denied the Holocaust saying that six million Jews weren’t murdered but emigrated to the U.S….and, well, you get the picture. The little leaflet was printed in 1937 and evidently was owned by H.L. Mencken (who kept his fingers on the pulse of such dangerous folks) though he gave it up to the Library of Congress after only a few months. The leaflet is printed on only one sheet of paper, and I reproduce it below.