James Hervey Johnson (August 2, 1901 in Oregon - August 6, 1988 in San Diego, California) was an American atheist freethinker, writer and editor of The Truth Seeker (founded 1873), formerly run by Charles Lee Smith. Early years Born in Oregon, his family moved to San Diego in his youth. He attended the San Diego Army-Navy Academy. His father was in the real estate business, and he became a partner. By age 30 he was a self-made millionaire. In the 1930s Johnson was elected county tax assessor, but lost reelection when he advocated the taxation of churches. Freethought leader After becoming a freethinker early in life, Johnson became prominent in the San Diego area Freethought movement, eventually hosting annual dinners in honor of his heroes Robert Green Ingersoll and Thomas Paine. He was also a fan of ex-Roman Catholic priest Freethought and Rationalist writer Joseph McCabe, and stocked his large collection of Little Blue Books from Girard, Kansas. The Truth Seeker After contributing to the periodical The Truth Seeker for decades, Johnson helped Smith relocate from New York City in 1964, then took over the ailing magazine after Smith's October 26, 1964 death, systematically driving its circulation further down through sloppy editing and shabby publication practices, mainly using it to promote and sell a warehouse of books printed in past decades. Although very wealthy, his entire operation put up the appearance of near-bankruptcy, mainly because he was a tightwad and misanthrope, according to journalist Mimi Swartz, and would never trust anybody else to manage his magazine, and only trusted a few people other than himself to write articles for it. White supremacist, Anti-Semitic, and Anti-Zionist views As with Smith and Smith's cousin Woolsey Teller, Johnson was a white supremacist, and was also anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist, always referring to Israel as "the bandit state of Israel". AAAA vs. American Atheists and Madalyn Murray O'Hair Johnson also took over the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (AAAA) from Smith, but his continued promotion of white supremacy caused its membership to stay low during the heyday of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, permitting his archrival Madalyn Murray O'Hair (who gained fame in 1963 with the U.S. Supreme Court decision to ban Bible reading in public schools) to build the membership of her organization American Atheists. In 1983 after years of acrimony (he liked to call her a