Thread by @egavactip

It’s Saturday, so let’s enjoy it with a profile of another American extremist. Up this week? Colonel Eugene Nelson Sanctuary.

Never heard of him? Not surprised. But white supremacists and other antisemites today are still influenced by his poison-in-print.

One journalist described him as “one of the suspicious, psychoneurotic old men.” Another called him the “Grand Old Man of Anti-Semitism.” Yet another as “an old fundamentalist with a long, grey lifeless face.” A fourth wrote of his “long face, austere, froze in its gray pallor.”

Who is this man?

Eugene Nelson Sanctuary, aka E. N. Sanctuary, was born in Vermont in 1870. He went to the Univ of Vermont, where he was quite the baseball star, and became a civil engineer. He had several engineering jobs before joining the Army Corps of Engineers, where he

did engineering work in several states. He also worked for Standard Oil. During WWI, he became an Army Reserve colonel—thereafter calling himself Colonel Sanctuary—and served in Siberia with the Russian Railway Service Corps, which aided U.S. troops currently stationed there.

In the 1920s, Sanctuary settled in New York, his permanent home. In the 1920s, he was vice-president of a typewriter company and seems to have still been an engineer. He was a man of means.

His public activities related primarily to religion. He was involved in several

Christian missionary organizations, such as the “Russia Bible and Evangelization Society.” He gave talks on Christianity-related subjects, was involved with a Christian boy’s group in Brooklyn, and wrote many "patriotic" and religious hymns and songs.

By the end of the 1920s, though, something seems to have shifted in Sanctuary. Whether he had extremist ideas before, I can’t say, but in the 1930s, while in his 60s, he quickly became one of the most prominent and notorious right-wing extremist propagandists.

In the 1930s/40s, he published a variety of books, pamphlets, tracts and essays, some of them anti-communist, some virulently antisemitic. One example of the latter is his book “Are These Things So," subtitled: “A study in MODERN TERMITES of the HOMO SAPIENS TYPE.”

Sanctuary published most of these works, typically under his one-person groups: American Christian Defenders and the World Alliance against Jewish Aggression. White supremacists have kept most in print. He also wrote for other extremist publications.

Though voluminous, Sanctuary was a plodding writer. His most enduring success was publishing a book written by someone else: an antisemitic screed called "The Talmud Unmasked," written by Russian priest Justinas Pranaitis in the late 1800s.

The book purported to show passages in the Talmud—the collection of ancient Jewish writings—about mistreating Christians. It mostly relied on out of context text, mistranslations and fabrications. To the naïve or predisposed, however, it was “evidence” of evil Jewish intentions.

Sanctuary published the first English-language version of this screed; it quickly became exploited by antisemites everywhere. It has never gone out of print, long outlasting Sanctuary himself. You can easily buy it at Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, Target or other online sources.

Sanctuary was also a speaker, where he would rail against plots & conspiracies concocted by Roosevelt & the Jews, and similar topics. He had ties to other prominent extremists, including Father Coughlin, Gerald Winrod, George Van Horn Mosley, and various Nazi sympathizers.

He also developed ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and may have been a member. He created a publishing company to publish a sympathetic history of the Ku Klux Klan by Winfield Jones, and even contributed a song for it: “A Klansman’s Song.” Look for it at a jukebox near you.

By the 1940s, Sanctuary was so notorious he became one of 33 prominent extremists charged with sedition. The ill-fated case did not go well, coming to a halt with the death of the presiding judge, forcing a mistrial. Sanctuary was eventually released in 1947, at the age of 77.

Sanctuary’s hometown newspaper, the Burlington Daily News, happily reported on Sanctuary’s new freedom. Throughout his life, Vermont newspapers reported positively about Sanctuary, always ignoring his hatred and antisemitism. So far as I know, none ever apologized.

Because of his age, Sanctuary significantly slowed down after World War II. However, he did sue the New York Post for libel in 1947 after the Post called him a “quisling.” He did not do well—the judge overseeing the case determined the insult was “substantially justified.”

Sanctuary still made it to Chicago in 1952 for the Republican National Convention, where a coterie of right-wing extremists launched an unsuccessful attempt to nominate Douglas MacArthur for the presidency.

He died five year later, at age 86, in a VA hospital in Massachusetts.

Note that his obituary also avoids his extremism, antisemitism and hate.

However, we haven't forgotten.