Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith (February 27, 1898 – April 15, 1976) was an American clergyman, politician and organizer known for his populist and far-right demagoguery. A leader of the populist Share Our Wealth movement during the Great Depression, afterward he became known for far-right causes including the Christian Nationalist Crusade, which he founded in 1942. He founded the America First Party in 1943 and was its 1944 presidential candidate, winning fewer than 1,800 votes. He was a preeminent antisemite and a white supremacist. Late in life, he built the Christ of the Ozarks statue in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with donations, and initiated the Passion Play there. Early life and education Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith was born on February 27, 1898, in Pardeeville, Wisconsin, to Sarah and Lyman Z. Smith. He had one sister, Barbara, who was ten years older. His father was a traveling salesman and preacher who spoke on patriotic occasions and was a supporter of Robert La Follette. Gerald Smith said of his childhood, "We took it for granted that the word 'Christian' was the companion for the word 'American.'" The family moved to rural Richland County, Wisconsin, and Gerald Smith received a public education, first at rural schools and then at a larger school in Viola. After Lyman Smith recovered from pernicious anemia, which he had suffered from during most of his son's childhood, the family moved to Viroqua, Wisconsin, where Gerald Smith graduated high school in 1915. In 1918, after two and a half years of study, Smith graduated from Valparaiso University in Indiana with a degree in biblical studies. Smith enlisted in the United States Army but was not deployed before the end of World War I. An attack of nephritis forced him to return to Viroqua to recuperate. Ministry Smith said that he determined he would be a Disciples of Christ minister, like three generations of his family before him, when he was twelve. He was ordained in 1916, while at Valparaiso. Upon his recovery from nephritis in 1919, he became a temporary pastor in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, then at a larger church in Footville, then organized another church in the larger community of Beloit. On return from a trip to Chicago, he expressed his earliest recorded views on race in a letter to his parents: "[W]hen you see the white and black mixing it is terrible. White girls dancing cheek to cheek with