illustration of tennessee map with a swastika overlaid

George W. Christians, American fascist

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Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It is the privileged role of the Art Smiths, the William Pelleys, and the George Christians to lay only the cornerstone of fascism. It is in their rudimentary organizations that the petty bourgeoisie receives its first elementary schooling in dictatorship. It is from the Smiths and the Pelleys that it learns to scrap its democratic scruples, to hate the Jew as the Mephistopheles responsible for depressions and to detest the Communist as the companion creation of the Devil.

It is in their lecture rooms that the small shopkeeper and the petty officers avidly absorb the bombastic emotional rantings of the would be American Hitlers who intoxicate their listeners with glorious hallucinations of the past and still more glorious visions of the future under the aegis of fascism. Religious animosity is of course, stressed more than anything else.

Class Struggle, Vol 4, No 3 March 1934

Tennessean George W. Christians, chief officer of the fascist Crusader White Shirts, was an odd combination of comedian and sinister revolutionist. “Does our Commander in Chief have ideas,” he asked, “or is he just the world’s greatest humbug?” In another handbill, Christians wrote of the president: “Some neck—for a rope.” He was characterized by one-time Roosevelt braintruster Raymond Moley as a ‘harmless lunatic.’

George W. Christians (White Shirts)
George W. Christians (White Shirts).

“The Crusader White Shirts,” Christians stated, “known as the American Fascists, is a military auxiliary of the Crusaders for Economic Liberty [CFEL]…. It embraces the Fascist idea of personal leadership, unity, force, drama and nationalism.”

Christians once issued orders to seize control of the government: “The first- objective should be to take control of the local government in the following manner: March in military formation to and surround the government buildings. Then, by sheer numbers and a patriotic appeal, force the officials to accept and act under the direction of an economic adviser appointed by the President of the CFEL.”

One night when FDR was scheduled to arrive in Chattanooga, TN, Christians threatened to cut off the city’s electric power and warned grimly, “Lots of things can happen in the dark!” Followers took this as a veiled reference to consider lynching Roosevelt.

American Liberty League logo
American Liberty League logo

This protege of the American Liberty League was from then on kept under surveillance by the Secret Service. On March 27, 1942, Christians and Rudolph Fahl, onetime physical-education instructor at a Denver high school, were arrested for disseminating material that could demoralize the army. Christians was accused of violating the Smith Act by “communicating to soldiers statements designed to impair their morale.”

In early April, five more seditionists were arrested. Meantime Christians, held in Chattanooga under $10,000 bond, said, “I consider myself a political prisoner rather than a criminal and should get better treatment.” The President took pride in the operation during his “Fireside Chat” late in April: “this great war effort . . . must not be impeded by a few bogus patriots who use the sacred freedom of the press to echo the sentiments of the propagandists in Tokyo and Berlin.” All of those from the March-April group were convicted by the end of the summer of 1942, except Fahl.

sources: www.csulb.edu/~crsmith/whitepapers/patriots.htm
Time magazine, Monday, Apr. 13, 1942 “Milquetoast Gets Muscles”
Time magazine, sidebar, Monday, May. 11, 1942
Free speech in the good war by Richard W. Steele, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999
‘Star-Spangled Fascists,’ by Jeff Nilsson, Saturday Evening Post, March 10, 2012,

More articles on paramilitary groups:

The Klan comes a calling(Opens in a new browser tab)

The White Caps of Sevier County(Opens in a new browser tab)

4 comments

  1. As a life-long resident of the Chattanooga area, this is the first I;ve heard of this character. Where else could one find more info on this person?

  2. He was my grandfather, and we thought he was a few cards short of a full deck, too.

  3. He was my uncle and yes he was a different kind of fellow, but I had never heard of him in this light. We knew he went to jail. I was told that the government thought he was a spy, but that this was not true. I was also told that he invented asphalt grouting that stopped leaks in the Watts Bar Dam and that he was very smart. “far out” would be a good term.

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