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.
Christians was arrested in 1942, after the United States entered World War II, and charged with sending seditious material to officers of 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.
[7] In the early 1930s, Christians founded the Crusader White Shirts in Chattanooga, Tennessee, claiming in 1934 to Pat McGrady of the Jewish Daily Bulletin that the organization had 10,000 members.
[9] In 1934, he complained to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the "persecution" in Chicago of the Nazi propagandist Oscar C. Pfaus, chairman of the Germanic Alliance.
[4][7] An inveterate letter writer in the cause of his "paper and ink revolution",[1] he sent twenty for every one he received,[6] on letterheads showing the Statue of Liberty, crossed American flags, and a torch with a red, white, and blue flame and in green and brown type.
[15] 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.
[16] 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.
[8] He planned to cut the power (he had a patent for an electrical fuse[20]), saying "lots of things can happen in the dark",[4] after which his men would seize the town and fly the red flag from the court house, before taking the state capitol of Nashville and moving on California, Chicago, New York, and Washington.
[22] 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.
[7] Nonetheless, he thought that Christians was not as much of a "nut" as some made out, saying: He is a clever fellow with a fine appreciation of the limits of our broad liberties of speech and action which he strains in promoting his personality and an economic scheme which, if effective, is enough to surrender the rights and properties of the people into the hands of whoever may be strong enough to grasp control of a despairing nation.
[6] In 1935, Jay Franklin of Vanity Fair cited Christians as an example of the inability of American radicals to capitalise on the weakness of an antiquated government due to their inability to lead, to follow, or to co-operate, opining of him that what could have been a mass movement was reduced to a one-man-show by his policy of double-crossing and the destruction of local movements in order to attract personal publicity.
[23] 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.
[1] 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".