Dan Smoot on the Illegal 14th Amendment

Gary North - September 14, 2017

Dan Smoot was good looking. He was a perfect speaker: a mixture of sincerity, intellectual mastery, and rhetoric: persuasiveness.

In the days before cable TV, he had a national TV show. The networks would not touch anything like this. The show was filmed, which was expensive. Then it was shown on independent local TV stations. There were four such channels in large cities. This show was possible because he had a sponsor: Dr. Ross Dog Food (is doggone good!).

Smoot is most famous for his book on the Council on Foreign Relations, The Invisible Government (1960). It was the first book-long attack on the CFR.

I recall this article most of all. He wrote it in 1963 in his newsletter, where I read it. That was the first time I had heard of the illegal ratification of the 14th amendment. Yet I was in my final semester in college, majoring in American history.

Since then, we have had a few scholarly attacks on the 14th by legal scholars, the most important being Harvard Professor Raoul Berger's book Government by Judiciary. But Smoot's short report remains a classic.

Here is his TV broadcast.