In 1946 a Wisconsin Town Invited a Fascist to Deliver the Keynote Address at their Centennial Celebration
Few people in Viroqua, Wisconsin WANTED Gerald LK Smith, the head of the America First Party, to speak, but when they ALLOWED it, they fanned the flickering embers of the American Fascist Tradition
When did the US go from being a country that prided itself on defeating fascism in WWII, to a country where self-described “patriotic” Americans had few qualms about allowing American fascists to spread their genocidal ideas at public events?
Four of the Hitler Salute-giving Nazis standing outside of the CPAC venue a few weeks ago.
I was surprised to learn recently that an answer to that question would have to include an event that happened in 1946, only one year after WWII ended. In August 1946 the “All-American” small town of Viroqua, Wisconsin (pop. 4000) invited one of America’s most notorious, Jew-hating, Hitler-sympathizing, anti-Black fascists, Gerald LK Smith, to deliver the keynote address at the town’s centennial celebration. The event drew a decent crowd and went off without a hitch, but the run-up to it produced a fascinating public conversation about how citizens of a democratic society like the US should think about and treat the fascists in their midst.
The coverage below from Madison’s left leaning newspaper gives a good overview of the event.
The [Madison, WI] Capitol Times, 19 August 1946.
As recounted in this newspaper coverage, the day opened with a speech by a Methodist Bishop from Madison who explicitly criticized Smith’s fascistic bigotry. In the afternoon’s more well-attended main attraction, Gerald LK Smith did his best to present himself as an unfairly maligned, Christian anti-Communist patriot who had just as much of a right to appear on that stage as any other American. All he wanted was to warn the good people of Viroqua of the Communist, radical left menace that had wormed its way into the nation’s colleges, churches, schools, and political parties; and which needed to be forcefully rooted out immediately if America was to be saved from impending ruin.
How on earth did a widely-reviled, Nazi-sympathizing religious bigot and racist like Smith wrangle an invitation to headline Viroqua, Wisconsin’s centennial celebration?
The story of how Smith got that invite is fairly straightforward. Smith had spent some of his school years in Viroqua in the 1910s, and there was a small group of prominent officials and businessmen in town who’d known him back then. This friend group had stayed in touch with Smith and were favorably disposed to his “America First,” White Christian Nationalist brand of politics. It appears that the idea to invite Gerald Smith originated with A.E. Smith (no relation)—an insurance man, former mayor of Viroqua, past representative to the Wisconsin state assembly, and [you’ll be shocked to learn] a leader of the area’s KKK chapter in the 1920s when he was serving in those public capacities. Before he got into the insurance business, A.E. Smith taught at Viroqua High School and very possibly was one of Gerald LK Smith’s teachers.
The [Madison, WI] Capitol Times, 16 January 1928.
The small handful of local Viroqua “town leaders” like A.E. Smith who took it upon themselves to invite Gerald LK Smith to deliver the Centennial address in 1946 had two motivations—1) to create a public stink that would draw attention and thus, people with money to spend to their little town’s Centennial celebration and 2) to do their small bit to help normalize/launder Smith’s fascism as merely “good old fashioned, anti-Communist Christian patriotism.” Smith, meanwhile, was an attention-seeking demagogue who would jump at any opportunity to use his substantial talents as a propagandist to win converts to his cause, sign up paying subscribers to his publications, and get his name in the newspaper. It was a win-win for everyone, right?
In early July, only a few days after Smith was extended the invitation to speak, the news about it got out and the initial response from the press and the public was overwhelmingly negative. Smith had recently been in the Wisconsin papers for weighing in on the upcoming state elections with endorsements of a few candidates, endorsements which all of those candidates immediately repudiated because they didn’t want to be associated with Smith’s toxic “America First” brand. Thus, in July of 1946, any regular reader of local newspapers would have been quite familiar with the attention-seeking shenanigans of the nation’s leading antisemitic and racist “rabble rouser,” Gerald LK Smith.
The July 6 op-ed below is one of the first newspaper mentions of Smith’s Viroqua invitation. It minced no words, describing Smith as a “demagogue” and “a leech living off his appeals to racial bigotry and religious intolerance.” It framed him as a cynical trouble maker who sought only to ripen the US up for a fascist dictatorship. The writer confidently asserted that Wisconsin citizens would of course see right through Smith’s “Nazi and fascistic” modus operandi. That said, note the helpless lamentation about how, “this being America,” there was really no way to prevent Smith the fascist from speaking. Such fascism-facilitating misinterpretations of the 1st Amendment have become quite familiar to many of us these days as, for example, Elon Musk welcomes and amplifies openly racist, antisemitic, and pro-Hitler accounts on his platform in the name of “fostering free speech.”
Wisconsin State Journal, 6 July 1946.
By no means would it have infringed upon Gerald LK Smith’s right to free speech had Viroqua’s centennial commission reversed the unauthorized invitation that a handful of self-empowered, bigoted businessmen extended to Smith in the name of goosing attendance for their event. But despite the 100% constitutionality of Viroqua telling GLKSmith to go fly a kite, Smith’s invitation quickly became a litmus test of whether Americans really believed in freedom. And in this through-the-looking-glass 1946 conversation about freedom, many placed genocide Gerald on the pro-freedom side of the equation while the advocates for the people Gerald wanted to genocide were positioned on the side of authoritarianism. Only one year after millions of Americans returned from fighting against fascism in WWII, Smith, the advocate of the principles those veterans had putatively risked their lives to defeat, proudly promoted himself as “America’s most courageous orator.” He had the “courage” to stand up to organizations like the NAACP, the ADL, and the Council of Churches who were supposedly trying to impose the “un-American” and “un-Christian” ideals of religious toleration and multi-racial democracy on the nation.
Between July 6 when word first leaked of Smith’s invitation and August 18 when Smith spoke, there were many twists and turns in the story. First, on July 12 the centennial committee voted to rescind the invitation to Smith that had been extended, without authorization, by a handful of people on the Chamber of Commerce. It appears that a Viroqua judge who’d initially supported the invitation to Smith started to have second thoughts when an African-American assemblyman urged Wisconsin’s Governor to inquire as to whether such a judge was suited to dispense justice fairly for all.
The Post Crescent, 13 July 1946.
The plan to retract Smith’s invitation appeared to have much popular support in Viroqua. That said, it met in the press with a good amount of “free speech” pushback, like this letter to the editor arguing that it would be prejudiced NOT to have the proudly prejudiced Smith speak. Had the formerly freedom-loving people of Viroqua been turned into closed-minded automatons who couldn’t handle the idea of someone standing on a public stage and expressing ideas with which they disagreed?
The Capital Times, 17 July 1946.
These “free speech” arguments seem to have won the day, because the week after rescinding Smith’s invitation, the Centennial Committee took another vote and this time the majority chose to re-invite Smith. There was nothing “political” about this decision, they claimed, this was just about using a high-profile public figure to draw as many people as possible to the town’s celebration. The pro-Smith faction on the Centennial Commission had another arrow in the quiver as well. They’d written to the famous car maker Henry Ford to ask his opinion of Gerald Smith. When Ford replied that he approved of Smith and his program, this added weight to their claim that even though Smith was controversial, he was well-regarded by “many fine people” like Henry Ford, America’s most prolific antisemitic propagandist of the 1920s and the 1938 recipient of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. [It’s important to note that Ford’s antisemitism was not something that most non-Jewish Americans knew or cared much about. All they knew was that Ford was a rich and successful businessman.]
The coverage of the Smith kerfuffle in the fairly conservative LaCrosse Tribune (article below) gave the impression that most people in Viroqua were generally open to hearing Smith. They highlighted one high school student who noted conspiratorially that “they never mention him in school,” a sign, presumably, of “crooked politics.” The article below also frames the opposition to Smith as pure emotion—people are “mad” that Smith has been invited. That Gerald Smith, he sure triggers the libs! Rarely was a rationale given for why Smith’s fascistic writings went untaught in public schools or why Smith was undeserving of the prime speaking slot at the town’s Centennial.
The LaCrosse Tribune, 18 July 1946.
While it’s impossible to know exact numbers, it’s likely that a majority of people attending that centennial would have had a brother, father, uncle, or husband who’d risked or lost their lives to defeat the principles Smith espoused, and a significant number of attendees would have been veterans themselves. It’s hard to imagine a more offensive slap in the face of such people. From what I can tell, the majority of Wisconsinites who paid attention to the situation fixated on what in hindsight seems like the right question—of all the people the town fathers could have invited, why on earth did they have to choose Smith? But even though it appears that only a small and unrepresentative handful of Viroqua town fathers actively WANTED Gerald LK Smith to speak, they successfully created a situation in which a critical mass of Viroqua residents were willing to ACCEPT it.
An ad-hoc Antifa Coalition kicks into action in opposition to Smith’s visit
But there were plenty of Viroqua residents who took (ultimately unsuccessful) actions to prevent Smith’s appearance. When Helen Felix, one of the few Jews who lived in Viroqua, heard about the plan to have Smith speak she immediately drove to Minneapolis to consult with Sam Scheiner, a Jewish WWII veteran and well-connected civil rights activist. Felix’s family had run a general store in Viroqua since 1905, and they weren’t about to sit idly by while their town feted one of the nation’s most notorious antisemites.
Excerpt from Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights by Samuel B. Freeman (2023)
Helen Felix’s actions precipitated a quick and cascading pushback against Smith at both the national and regional levels. First, the Minneapolis Methodist minister who’d originally been scheduled to speak at the event with Smith cancelled, stating his principled opposition to being associated in any way with Smith’s “fascist” philosophy. This story made the AP wire and was carried in scores of newspapers across the country.
The Miami News, 28 July 1946.
Two weeks before Smith’s visit, buoyed by the growing spirit of opposition in the town, an inter-faith group of three women (one Jew, one Protestant, and one Catholic…for real, not a joke), conducted an impromptu survey in a three block radius. They found that out of 185 people polled, only 13 supported Smith’s visit while 132 were opposed. Armed with this information, a local doctor attended the August 6th meeting of the centennial commission and tried to make the case for rescinding Smith’s invitation yet again, but the leaders of the commission hastily adjourned the meeting and huffed out of the room, claiming they were sick and tired of hearing complaints about Gerald LK Smith. After inviting Smith because they knew it would cause a stir, these pro-Smith town fathers were sick and tired of everyone creating such a stir about it.
After seeing protests like this from private citizens and an array of labor and civic organizations, even the stodgily conservative American Legion jumped on the bandwagon and issued a resolution condemning Smiths’ appearance.
LaCrosse Tribune, 15 August 1946.
The people who’d tried to scuttle Smith’s visit probably felt vindicated when a few days before Smith’s grand return to Viroqua the town received some troubling news about the “hometown boy’s” most recent exploits. He’d tried to stage a fascist rally with his fellow antisemite, Elizabeth Dilling, at a Chicago hotel under false pretenses When Jewish veterans showed up to protest, some of Smith’s fascist goons started a fistfight with them. Smith’s headline-grabbing rabble rousing in Chicago on Wednesday was not exactly good PR for Viroqua’s Saturday of “wholesome,” family-friendly festivities in commemoration of their bucolic little town’s 100th anniversary.
Wisconsin State Journal, 15 August 1946
As the day of Smith’s appearance approached the town prepared itself for violence, hiring about 40 additional police officers to be on duty for the day in case “outside agitators” tried to create trouble. Even though Viroqua was generally opposed to Smith, the story below suggested, the good people of that town would never do anything to cause a ruckus in response to that professional ruckus-creator, Gerald LK Smith, who they’d invited to town.
Portage Daily Register and Democrat, 17 August 1946.
Throughout the run-up to Smith’s appearance there was a lot of this sort of projection of violence onto people from places other than Smith’s hometown of Viroqua. The op-ed below, for example, lamented that the pleasurable scene of Viroqua’s hometown celebration was going to be sullied by a “fascist” like Smith, “who got his Fascism, not from his roots in that community, but after he had shaken the good Vernon county soil from his heels.” Indeed, Smith may have been a fascist who grew up in Viroqua, but since “it can’t happen here,” he must have internalized those values some place other than his hometown that [checks notes] had elected a mayor in the 1920s who was a KKK member and former high school teacher.
The Aftermath—How did Viroqua and the nation metabolize Smith’s high profile visit?
Smith’s keynote address did not contain as much fascist red meat as his usual speeches, but as the reports below show, he still managed to get across his central claim that the US was beset by culturally-alien, Communist enemies who must be destroyed if America was to be saved. Smith may have apologized for some of his “tough talk,” but he expressed confidence that the good people of Viroqua “had the guts” to agree with him.
The left-leaning Capital Times interpreted Smith’s speech as an alarming sign of a potential American form of fascism to come. Noting that professional bigots like Smith were often backed by reactionary men of wealth, they warned that dismissing such figures as “crackpots” was a mistake, the likes of which the German public made with Hitler in the 1930s.
The Kickapoo Scout thought Smith’s speech “did no harm,” but they did see harm in his appearance at Viroqua, the only town in the country to give Smith a public platform. The problem, as this author saw it, lay in how receptive the crowd was to Smith’s oratory. “Smith's words made a deep impression on the larger percentage of his hearers. He was presented as a persecuted man, a boy from Viroqua who had made good, who was therefore the target of the envious, the skeptical. Surely there could be no harm in this man!” It was precisely Smith’s ability to present himself as an innocent Christian Patriot being unfairly persecuted by the media, intellectuals, and the political establishment that made him dangerously alluring to many in his audience.
While a few newspapers expressed regrets about Smith’s appearance, most simply made no mention of the event in its aftermath, making it seem as if there were no lessons to be drawn, no critical self-reflection necessary about Viroqua’s choice to put the spotlight on a homegrown fascist. Viroqua held their centennial, a dairy queen was crowned, Gerald Smith gave an oration, and that was that. As far as I’ve been able to determine, no newspaper outside of Wisconsin mentioned Smith’s appearance in Viroqua after it happened. A fascist speaking to a homecoming crowd of possibly 20,000 people one year after the US had sacrificed oceans of blood and treasure to defeat fascism was apparently a non-story.
The Madison Capital Times was one of the few papers that ran pieces critical of Viroqua and Smith in the week following the event. This made one reader from Viroqua so mad that he cancelled his subscription. He was outraged that the Madison newspaper had “stirred up dissension” about Viroqua’s decision to invite the intentionally divisive Gerald LK Smith to speak.
The coverage in the Janesville newspaper (soon to be Paul Ryan’s hometown, FWIW) stood out for its eerily positive spin on Smith’s appearance.
In the summer of 1947, Virginia Wicks Vidich, a Sociology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, conducted interviews with 58 young men in Viroqua (aged 20-30) regarding their impressions of Gerald Smith’s August 1946 appearance in town. Her thesis offered a wide ranging and fascinating analysis of Smith’s reception. Of the 58 young men she interviewed, only 12 expressed moderate or strong disapproval of Smith. Almost 80% of the people she interviewed were either neutral on Smith (20) or had a positive impression of him (26).
One of her most troubling findings was that not only could a scant few of her interviewees offer even a basic definition of “fascism,” but most of them had little comprehension of Smith’s politics.
Vidich sorted her interviewees in terms of how prejudiced they were toward Jews and others. One of her more interesting findings was that her more prejudiced informants approved of Smith’s speech because “he really gave it to the Jews,” while the less prejudiced informants had a positive impression of Smith’s speech because they’d expected him to be a nasty bigot, when instead he just sounded to them like a regular old pro-American, Christian anti-communist speaker.
Quantitative methods are not my forte, so I’m hesitant to draw conclusions from this 1948 study with an n of 58, but her thesis does seem to suggest that giving Smith the opportunity to speak to a large audience in 1946 conduced to his benefit in terms of generating sympathy for (or at least neutral tolerance of) him as a public figure. It’s pretty striking that in 1947, two years after the end of WWII, 80% of young men in Viroqua who’d gotten a chance to hear American fascist Gerald LK Smith speak had a neutral or positive impression of him, while also having virtually no idea what “fascism” was or how Smith’s politics could be classified. This speaks to how fascist movements grow not by persuading and converting large numbers of new adherents, but by merely gaining acceptance as “normal” players on the political landscape who perhaps speak some “tough” truths that “they” don’t want you to hear. It’s unlikely that Smith changed any minds with his August 1946 speech, but he did manage to create the impression that his fascistic brand of White Christian supremacism was one plausible and legitimate expression of “Americanism”—one item amongst many on the menu of American politics.
Vidich’s thesis contains one crucial coda to the story of Gerald Smith’s visit to Viroqua in 1946. Smith was invited back to town in the summer of 1947, this time for a private dinner hosted by the group of 40 prominent men in the town who had spearheaded his 1946 invitation. In this setting, Smith felt free to express his bigotries and hatreds more bluntly. He also succeeded in signing up all 40 attendees for subscriptions to his recently started magazine, The Cross and the Flag. These 40 people may have only represented 1% of Viroqua’s population, but they were prominent figures in town and each one was now primed to serve as a local vector for Smith’s seductive variant of “apple pie fascism.”
So what does this story from 1946 tell us about our contemporary “fascism debate,” such as it is?
Hopefully you’re sane enough not to have gotten sucked in to the recent drama around the debate as to whether it’s appropriate to use “the F-word” to describe Trump or Trumpism. These terminological arguments are pretty inconsequential, but academics can’t restrain themselves from engaging in them. I wrote a long thread on Bluesky about the “debate” that ended up going semi-viral. Over on X-Twitter, where I no longer post or spend much time, a screenshot of one of those Bluesky skeets seems to have provoked the ire of the people I thought I was mildly and sympathetically criticizing. As far as I’m concerned, one can glean just about everything one needs to know about this “debate” from John Ganz’s hilarious and biting post about it.
For folks who are regular readers of Rightlandia, you’ll know that one of my central historiographical contentions is that there is quite a robust, rhizomatic American fascist political tradition that stretches back to the KKK of the 1920s and up to today. This tradition and its main figures have been grievously understudied, and are virtually non-existent in our public political memory. Like any political tradition, American fascism has changed over time. That tradition has also usually resided on the margins of formal American politics. While many American fascists have looked to violence as a means to bring about political change, many have also engaged in formal politics as a way to.advance their radically illiberal and exclusionary vision of the American future. I’m trying to tell that latter part of the story through the lens of a fascist named Walter Huss, a long-time subscriber to Gerald Smith’s Cross and the Flag who had cut his teeth in the Silver Shirt movement of the 1930s, sharpened them during the Christian Nationalist anti-communist mobilizations of the 1950s and 1960s, and then tried to sink those teeth into the neck of the non-fascist elements of the GOP when he became the chair of the Oregon Republican Party in 1978.
The fascistic ideas and social formations that have gotten a significant foothold in Trump’s GOP have deep roots that stretch back to the 1920s, but it’s important to note that the rise of a fascist form of political culture inside the GOP was not a unilinear story, nor was it inevitable. Contra political theorist Corey Robin (one of the most vocal people in the “it’s not fascism” camp), the GOP ca. 2024 is quite different from the GOP ca. 1968—coincidentally, the year that fascist Walter Huss began his effort to become the chair of the OR GOP, an effort that would fail in 1968, 70, 72, 74, and 76 before finally succeeding in 1978…only for him to be booted out of the chair’s seat in the summer of 1979.
Are there continuities in the GOP from 1968 to today? Absolutely. But focusing on those 30,000 foot continuities misses what to me is the most important story happening on the ground, which was the ongoing struggle that fascists began waging in the 1950s to transform the GOP into a vehicle for their fascistic vision of a white, Christian, patriarchal, crony capitalist America.
It’s not merely a coincidence that Gerald LK Smith’s two most prominent political slogans from the 1940s into the 1970s were “America First” and “Christian Nationalism.” Trump is not just a reincarnation of Gerald LK Smith, but the genealogical connections are rife. And those connections run not so much through electoral politics, but rather through the murkier terrain of political culture and the always permeable boundary between “the conservative movement” and “the fascistic far right.”