The United States: Gerald Winrod’s 1938 Election Campaign in Kansas

In 1938, as the heartland of America suffered from the devastating effects of the Great Depression and World War II loomed on the horizon, the Republican voters of five Kansas counties voted overwhelmingly to field Gerald B. Winrod as their party’s candidate for Kansas’s 1938 U.S. Senate race. Dubbed the “Jayhawk Nazi” by his opponents, Winrod stood out from the field as a longtime anti-Semitic propagandist bent on exposing the “hidden hand” of international Jews behind the world’s problems. And though Winrod’s anti-Semitic views were widely known—he had long headed the Defenders of the Christian Faith movement—his appeal was not universal. He garnered roughly 48% of votes from Republican voters in Clay County but amassed only 11.48% in the equally agrarian and rural Russell County, just 100 miles away. Neither county had a notable Jewish presence. What led Clay County voters to favor Winrod while Russell County voters dismissed him? How significant was Winrod’s anti-Semitism in the decision of Clay County voters who selected him over three other candidates? Utilizing primary archival and press sources, we argue that Winrod’s anti-Semitic narrative took root in Clay County because it spoke to the perceived causes of the county’s enduring Depression-era hardships. In the 1930s, Clay County’s diversified, small tenant farmers were particularly vulnerable to displacement by the rise of gasoline- and combine-fueled wheat monoculture that already prevailed in Russell County, and federal policies like the Agricultural Adjustment Acts of 1933 and 1938 seemed to accelerate that displacement and block small tenant farmers from responding appropriately. Winrod presented himself as a champion of such farmers against hypervisible New Deal “Jews” and their international Communist co-conspirators intent on displacement, world revolution, and Christian enslavement. The variable impact of federal policy on certain farmers’ ability to endure or extricate themselves from protracted crisis proved decisive in whether voters found Winrod’s anti-Semitic narrative compelling—in whether they accepted his presentation of Jews as a chimeric danger.