Joseph Elsberry "Joe" McWilliams (1904 – 1996) was born to a poor pioneer family in the small town of Hitchcock, Oklahoma.
In his earlier days McWilliams was well known for using an American-flag-draped covered Conestoga wagon for publicizing his rallies and speeches, as well as for drawing attention to his cause. Most of his early rallies were impromptu street presentations that at times ended violently, as one did on July 4, 1940 in New York City. A crowd which had supported McWilliams turned ugly when McWilliams began to disparage Jews, Communists and businessmen for the world's problems, and McWilliams was arrested. McWilliams used the arrest to further his cause through newspaper reports of his speech and the violence that resulted.[1]
In 1940, he ran for Congress as a Republican in the 18th Congressional District of New York, which is around the Yorkville section of Manhattan. After losing by a large margin,[2] he ran for Congress under the American Destiny Party ticket (a political organization he founded and based on the Nazi Party), but McWilliams was disqualified from the ballot after failing to gather enough signatures.[3] In 1944, he and others were charged with sedition under the Smith Act. The Great Sedition Trial, as it became known, became a farce of a trial in which it would become clear that the charges against many of the defendants were more against their political beliefs and free speech than on their actions, and that the 48 on trial should not have been placed on trial as a group; even The Washington Post would eventually withdraw their reporter; a mistrial was declared on December 7, 1944, and charges of sedition would not be taken up against Joseph E. McWilliams again.
It was during and after these times that McWilliams, conscious of the hardships facing servicemen returning from war, and having three younger brothers who served honorably in the United States Armed Forces in World War II, two of them in the European theatre, worked on his Serviceman's Reconstruction Plan, one of the blueprints used, but not given credit to by others, for the G.I. Bill of Rights.
After World War II, he briefly worked on the campaign of North Carolina Democratic Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, who had been a fascist sympathizer.[4]
In an interview, Eustace Mullins, a disciple of Ezra Pound who continued Pound's investigation into the monetary system, but who was also a devout anti-Semite, credited McWilliams as "one of the greatest American patriots", and as the source for his theory, set forth in The Biological Jew, that Jews were "biological parasites". Mullins said that "Joe taught me about the biological Jew. This was a study he had made over thirty years [asking] what is the Jew? And he decided that it was a biological parasite."[5]
In a footnote, one of Joe McWilliams daughters married a man with Jewish ancestry, who subsequently helped take care of Joe in his old age.