Edward James Smythe

Edward James Smythe (born 1892, died August 16, 1955) of New York and Chicago was a defendant in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. He was the publisher of Our Common Cause and national commander of the Protestant War Veterans Association organized in 1937 based in Washington DC. He persuaded the telephone company to give him the phone number "National 1776". He founded the Protestant Chaplin Association and the Christian Civil Liberties Committee. Smythe wrote a weekly column titled "Unmasked" for the nationalist publication Publicity.

Smythe was instrumental in organizing a joint rally of Ku Klux Klan and German American Bund members on August 18, 1940 at Bund Camp Nordland in New Jersey.

Smythe was absent when the sedition trial opened in Washington DC on April 17, 1944. He was apprehended the next day in New York state near the Canadian border. He said he had gone there to fish and was unaware of the date of the trial claiming the FBI had stolen his mail.

In 1944 he organized a front group called the Republican Nationalist Party.

In the 1950s he was the editor of the Protestant Statesman and Nation in Washington DC and ran the Protestant Press Association. In April 1952 he received a one-year suspended sentence for using the mails to defraud.

Smythe wrote the popular nativist jingle "God Bless America":

God Bless America

The Jews own it

The Catholics run it

The Negroes enjoy it

The Protestants founded it, but

The Communists will destroy it

Smythe reportedly once called Hitler the "The Twentieth Century Messiah".