George W. Christians

George William Christians (August 5, 1888 – June 27, 1983) was an American engineer in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who lost a fortune in the Wall Street crash of 1929 and afterwards launched a "paper and ink" campaign for a "revolution for economic liberty" in the United States.

In 1917, Christians was resident in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army. His draft documents recorded his occupation as construction manager and that he had served as private in the field artillery of the National Guard in New York. However, the 1930 census does not record him as having served in World War I, and he later declined to say where he was during the conflict.

Business career Christians was the owner of the American Asphalt Grouting Company, a firm that owned a process that stopped dams from leaking. He made a fortune from the business but lost about $200,000 in the Wall Street crash of 1929 that encompassed the abolition of the gold standard, the repudiation of the national debt, When fascism was on the rise in the early 1930s, he re-branded his American Reds, whose emblem was a red flag with the stars and stripes on top, as the American Fascists, In 1936 he founded the Crusaders for Economic Liberty in Chicago with the American fascist and anti-Semite Lois de Lafayette Washburn.

Christians posed for photographs with a form of crusader's cross or cross potent on a white shirt and a gun in his belt. More than one observer commented that with his toothbrush moustache he bore a resemblance to Adolf Hitler.

In November 1938, Christians figured in the proceedings of the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the United States Congress which noted the large number of organizations with which he was associated or had founded. These included the American Reds and the American Fascists, the Liberty Party, the Crusaders for American Liberty, the Crusader White Shirts, and the Fifty Million Club for Economic Liberty. Christians was once a candidate for Congress from the third Tennessee district.

Roosevelt and revolution On December 1, 1932, Christians was granted an interview with President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt at Warm Springs, Georgia, after driving there with his "Minister of Economics", Walter M. Higgins, a Catholic and former salesman for a stocking manufacturer, and insisting that unemployed steel workers were on the point of revolution. Roosevelt listened to Christians' economic ideas and promised to take them into account.

It was at that meeting, Christians claimed, that he put it to Roosevelt that he was "only the Kerensky" of an upcoming American "revolution", a moderate who would be overthrown by an American Stalin.

In December 1938, Christians told the press that "revolution" was bound to come to America, and that the American people were in the mood for it. He had timed it for the president's recent visit to Chattanooga before that was cancelled. ), saying "lots of things can happen in the dark", Raymond Moley described him as a "harmless lunatic".

In 1934, Pat McGrady, author of Fascism in America, visited Christians in Chattanooga for New York's Jewish Daily Bulletin and reported that he was mostly ignored there and "quite without honor", unable to get a letter printed in the city's newspapers despite his many attempts. Christians attributed this to a "campaign of silence" by the press but McGrady thought it was because Christians was a crank of the type found in every town and with whom newspaper editors were all too familiar.

In his 1943 book Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America, Christians was described by John Roy Carlson (Arthur Derounian) as "an odd combination of comedian and sinister revolutionist", strongly anti-Catholic but not anti-Semitic.

In March 1942, after the United States had joined the war, Christians was arrested under the Smith Act which aimed to counter sedition. He was only the second person to be charged under the act, after Rudolph Fahl of Denver who was arrested simultaneously. It was alleged that Christians had sent communications to the officers of Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and Camp Forrest, Tennessee, that might demoralize the army. His literature stated that even in wartime it was permitted to ask questions and posed a series of them, among which was "Are we fighting to make Roosevelt the dictator of the world?" Christians was convicted of four counts of sedition in June, in the first trial of its kind during the war and sentenced to five years imprisonment. The judge, Leslie Darr, recommended that he should not be paroled until after the end of the war.

From his cell, Christians told reporters that he felt that his work had been done and that his conviction had concluded his "paper and ink revolution for economic liberty".