Agnew may have been a clown to many, but in hindsight he was also a prophet. He presaged our current era of tub-thumping by mixing the white middle-class anxieties of the Kiwanis-PTA set with the paranoia of the Far Right. Facts were less important than temperament.
But a reevaluation of his legacy shows not only his importance as a figure of the populist Right but also the role of white-nationalist media in elevating his national profile. These were the days long before the internet and partisan cable stations, when verbal warfare was waged mainly through newsletters. But Agnew’s moment in the spotlight came when an important modern political pattern was coming into focus: always attack, and if defeated, invoke conspiracy.
The right-wing conspiracist who had always paid the closest attention to Agnew’s rising star was Gerald L. K. Smith. Smith’s career in the world of demagogues began as Huey Long’s chief organizer for Long’s Share Our Wealth campaign. By the time of Long’s assassination in 1935, Smith’s organizing skills had grown the membership of Share Our Wealth clubs to eight million. At Long’s funeral, Smith led a massive procession of 200,000 mourners and then gave a powerful eulogy as “old women cried and men wiped away tears,” according to Long biographer Richard D. White Jr. During the New Deal years, Smith branded Franklin Roosevelt’s Brain Trust a “slimy group of men culled from the pink campuses of America with [a] friendly gaze fixed on Russia.” In the late 1940s, he launched his Christian Nationalist Crusade, delivered radio addresses, and pioneered the art of direct mail fundraising. By the 1960s, Smith’s mailing list had reached three million, with contributions of hundreds of thousands of dollars coming in annually, making him a millionaire with multiple homes.
But Smith was also notorious for his antisemitism and his fierce objection to American support for Israel. More than just a crank, H. L. Mencken called him the “deadliest and damnedest orator ever heard on this or any other earth.” Or as writer Max Lerner later summed up Smith’s career: “Hatred flowed out, money flowed in.”
Smith spotted an ally in Agnew after what came to be known as the Des Moines speech of November 1969. Here, Agnew singled out a “little group of men” in the media who, he alleged, “wield a free hand” in “selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues” to the American public. The “little group,” he added, “live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, DC, or New York City.”