Minister of Hate
Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrrsen on Gerald L.K. Smith, orator of the far right
On a September afternoon in 1935, the Reverend Gerald L.K. Smith preached the eulogy for the recently deceased US Senator Huey Long before the 150,000 mourners gathered outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s skyscraper capitol building. ‘This tragedy fires the souls of us who adored him,’ Smith said of Louisiana’s controversial demagogue and politician, assassinated a few days earlier near the spot where Smith spoke. ‘He was the unfinished symphony’.
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