THE SILVER LEGION AND THE CHIEF
In January 1939, a crowd of three hundred packed the Swedish Hall in downtown Seattle to attend an evening event thrown by the “League of American Patriots.” That was the name of the organization that reserved the venue, at least. The main speaker that night certainly thought of himself as a patriot. He was Roy Zachary, the national field marshal of the Silver Legion based in Asheville, North Carolina. He was as fiery and unsparing as usual in his speech. “We are fighting people who have no ethics whatever; will let nothing stand between them and their goal,” he told the audience. “Matter of conscience doesn’t matter; they are taught ‘anything goes.’” At some point in the near future, Americans would have to “rise and stop these forces.”
Who were these insidious enemies? The Jews. “Jews came to America, got control of credit and finance; they control the nation thereby,” Zachary charged. “They have control of industry, distribution, education and politics—what more do you want?” All business men in “the East” were Jewish, he continued, and the Jews “have a monopoly on moving pictures and radio.” The Russian Revolution was one example of the Jewish plot in action, he claimed, as was the Great Depression. What was Zachary’s proposed solution to all this? “Our battle cry will be echoed from the stars,” he said. “Our battle cry is for Christianity and the Constitution. Our objective is to rid America of subversive influences that would destroy the constitution of our forefathers.” Exactly how this was to be accomplished was left unsaid, but the meeting closed with the speakers encouraging the audience to return for a German American Bund event at a later date.1
Zachary’s rousing rhetoric that evening—a surveillance agent who infiltrated the event noted he was “an exceptionally good speaker and a pleasant personality”—was the typical fodder of the organization he represented. As one of the Silver Legion’s leading members, Zachary traveled the country making speeches of exactly the sort he made in Seattle that night, calling on Americans to join a movement that he and his fellow Silver Shirts claimed would free the nation from the shackles of Jewish and communist oppression. They were at least moderately successful in gathering supporters. At one time the Silver Shirts had nearly the same number of members as the German American Bund and a national network of local chapters. Founded by eccentric mystic, former Hollywood screenwriter, and failed novelist William Dudley Pelley, the Silver Shirts became one of the nation’s leading national security threats in the mid-1930s. Unlike the German American Bund, Pelley and his fellow leaders were open about their desire to establish a fascist government in the United States. Pelley himself would even run for president on that platform. While never coming close to actually achieving national political power, the Silver Shirts represented perhaps the most direct effort to emulate Hitler’s Nazi Party in the United States.
Even more disturbing to the US government, however, was the fact that Pelley and the Silver Shirts were adept at making alliances with similarly minded groups at the local level, even as their leaders clashed over money and personal differences. Pelley was irascible, controlling and, in the minds of many, a complete madman, but his local organizers proved far more capable and managed to strike meaningful alliances with several local German American Bund and Ku Klux Klan chapters. The Klan was a particularly fertile recruiting ground for Pelley, and several of his trusted lieutenants were current or former Klan organizers as well. Unlike the Bund, Pelley deliberately structured the legion as a “Christian” and “Aryan” organization. Most of his members were Protestant. These demographics made overlaps and affinities with the anti-Catholic Klan inevitable. As will be seen, he would eventually claim there were Silver Legion chapters in anywhere between twenty-two and forty states, with a membership of around fifteen thousand at its 1934 peak and many more sympathizers. Given the difficulties estimating exact membership for either group, it can be assumed that the Silver Shirts probably had fewer members than the German American Bund, but probably not by a huge amount. Both groups had an ill-defined number of hangers-on who probably numbered around one hundred thousand each, with some crossover between the two (and they reached their peaks at different times).2 These were not insubstantial organizations, particularly since many of their followers were militant and, as will be seen, armed. Despite his reputation as a madman, Pelley certainly had the chance to make a bid for the title of American Führer if he could bridge the divide between the far-right factions.
There were some indications that Pelley might be able to accomplish this. The German government was more intrigued by Pelley’s organization than it was by the German American Bund, particularly after its conflict with Fritz Kuhn. In 1937, the head of the World Service—the Nazi Party’s international propaganda organization—prepared a memorandum for Hitler in which he described Pelley as one of the “national men” in the United States and someone who could be counted on to support the German cause. Nazi ideologues drew on Pelley’s writings in their own anti-American propaganda, often for distribution through its propaganda networks in the United States, and referred to him as “one of the first native Fascists” in the country.3 A Dies Committee report published in early 1940 referred to the Silver Legion as “probably the largest, best financed and best publicized” of the groups directly emulating Hitler and the Nazi Party.4
The biggest difference between the Silver Legion and the Bund, beyond the former’s religious orientation, was that the Bund was fundamentally more than one man’s quixotic venture. Certainly, the fall of Fritz Kuhn put the final nail in its coffin, but the Bund had also been born out the pro-Nazi organizations of the 1920s and Friends of the New Germany. Bund members were unified by their shared cultural heritage, and while the ideological orientation of the Bund was never really in question, there was at least an additional aspect to membership that theoretically superseded politics. The Silver Shirts had no such fallback beyond a general adherence to “Christianity.” It was fundamentally a cult of personality rotating around Pelley and the divine prophesies he claimed to be delivering. This divine inspiration, as will be seen, supposedly led to Nazism.
Founding the Silver Legion was in many ways a strange apogee for Pelley’s career. He was born in Massachusetts in 1890 as the son of a Methodist pastor. A voracious reader and writer, the young Pelley began publishing his own journal in 1909. Many of his early writings focused on the role of religion in society, and he came to the view that Christianity would need to reform itself to remain relevant in the modern world. A few years later he turned to fiction, writing tales about the West (which he had never visited) and starting a career in journalism. In 1918, with World War I still raging, he embarked on an ill-timed reporting assignment on Methodist missions in China and India with his young wife. They were soon stranded in Japan.5
The strange decision to travel during a world war would soon present an opportunity for Pelley. In mid-1918, President Woodrow Wilson ordered thousands of American troops into Siberia to fight Bolshevik forces in the ongoing Russian civil war. The YMCA pledged to provide humanitarian assistance to these troops, and one of their primary volunteer recruiting grounds was Japan. Pelley signed up and soon found himself traversing across the Siberian wilderness. Along the way he filed reports for the Associated Press. His experience in war—particularly a war between communists and anti-communists—would have a profound effect on his later views. Pelley would later claim that in Siberia he first discovered the peril posed by Jews, particularly through their alleged links to communism. As was the case for so many who turned to the anti-Semitic right in the 1930s, the Russian Revolution was the catalyst for the development of Pelley’s views on both communism and Jews.
In the meantime, however, Pelley’s career as a writer seemed to be moving along swimmingly. In 1921 he sold one of his stories to a movie studio and, after splitting with his wife, joined the production team in New Jersey. Infatuated by the film industry and the prospect of living in California, Pelley moved to Hollywood and began a career that would see him write or assist with nearly two dozen movie scripts and net him a small fortune of more than $100,000 (the equivalent of nearly $1.5 million in 2018). As a young and recently divorced man with a good income, Hollywood had no shortage of fun opportunities. Pelley later admitted that he spent many of his years in the film industry enjoying the pleasures and sins of the flesh that came with wealth and growing fame.6 Amidst all this fun, however, Pelley seems to have had a sort of midlife crisis, and abruptly decided in 1927 that his life had gone off the rails. His personal anti-Semitism had been heightened by interactions with Hollywood movie bosses, and he believed that the Jewish conspiracy he saw everywhere had now targeted him personally. He also dabbled unsuccessfully in the Los Angeles real estate business, heightening his sense of personal victimization. Frustrated by Hollywood despite its pleasures and evidently filled with guilt about his own indulgence, Pelley purchased a house in the mountain community of Altadena and retreated from the film industry. It was here that he would purport to have a spiritual experience that changed his life.
Pelley would later claim that as he lay in bed on the evening of May 28, 1928, he experienced a vision of being whisked away through a “bluish mist.” He regained consciousness lying on a marble slab next to two men who began to reveal the secrets of the universe. Among these was the revelation that death was only temporary and that all human beings are reincarnated to proceed up a ladder to higher existence. Even more important, Pelley reported, the men told him that he would receive additional revelations in the future. Claiming himself to have been “reborn,” Pelley declared that when he woke up the next morning his physical appearance had changed, lines had disappeared from his face, and he appeared more relaxed. The “Great Release,” as Pelley called it, put his life on a new course. Over the next several years he experimented with aspects of spiritualism including automatic writing and clairvoyant mediums, all of whom unsurprisingly told him that his experiences had been genuine glimpses into the spiritual realm.
In 1929, Pelley moved to New York and began to publish accounts of his experiences. Inspired by his stories about the divine and convinced that he could offer the secrets of the universe, a small group of readers began consulting him for spiritual guidance, and his influence grew.7 Pelley’s career as a spiritual guide to humanity’s biggest questions had begun. Ever the salesman, Pelley soon turned his spiritual awakening into material success, publishing a spiritualist journal that he claimed had more than ten thousand subscribers. It offered personal lessons in how to grow personal wealth and cure various ailments through spiritual means. Ninety percent of his followers were women, some of whom gave him vast sums of money to assist with their needs. In 1931, Pelley founded his own publishing company, called the Galahad Press, and opened a small college in Asheville, North Carolina, to spread his teachings.8
This seems like a very strange career move for a successful, albeit frustrated, Hollywood writer to make from an early-twenty-first-century perspective. It was less unusual at the time. Millions of Americans were interested in spiritualism, and it was particularly popular in Hollywood (First Lady Nancy Reagan, herself a product of Hollywood in a somewhat later period, would become infamous for consulting an astrologer for advice on aspects of her husband’s presidency). Critically, Pelley tried to reconcile his spiritualist teachings with Christianity, claiming he been able to contact Jesus through his spiritualist methods. He declared Jesus was the greatest spirit of all that could be contacted, and that their conversations had revealed the truth about Christianity. The clergy, Pelley proclaimed, had long suppressed the idea of rebirth that he was now touting because it did not suit their earthly interests. Because he was the first to discover this fact, Pelley concluded, he was now able to receive messages directly from Jesus.9
Pelley would later claim to have received a critical message from his spiritual sources in mid-1929. The world would soon be plunged into economic turmoil, Pelley learned, and the entire political and social system would undergo major change. In the midst of this chaos, Pelley was to create a “Christian Militia” to save the United States, triggered when a new leader—a “certain young house-painter”—came to power in Germany.10 This “prophesy” was fulfilled in late January 1933 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Pelley kept up his side of the bargain by announcing the creation of the Silver Legion. The legion was intended to be a paramilitary organization that, according to Pelley, would bring about a spiritual and political renewal of the United States. He quickly turned his Asheville operations toward supporting the legion and claimed that Jesus himself had once again been in touch to endorse its creation. To complete the transition, Pelley now bestowed a new title on himself: the Chief.
Membership in the Silver Legion was open to any person, male or female, over the age of eighteen, except for African Americans and Jews. Unlike the German American Bund, fees were low and eventually disappeared entirely. The legion’s anthem was the Battle Hymn of the Republic and its regulation uniform consisted of a silver shirt, tie, blue trousers, and a standard cap. A giant red L appeared on the breast of each shirt, over the heart, and supposedly symbolized “Love, Loyalty, and Liberation.” The legion’s flag was a white banner with a similar L on it.11 Outfitted so distinctly, the Silver Shirts were instantly recognizable wherever they went. Pelley himself sported a stylish goatee that turned gradually gray over the course of the decade, and maintained well-coiffed hair that gave him a sense of Hollywood glamour. Outfitted in his own legion uniform, the Chief cut a compelling public profile that was less outrageous than the one cultivated by Fritz Kuhn but equally charismatic and inspiring to his supporters.
The legion was administratively run on the same model as the Bund. The Chief was at the top of the hierarchy and, even more undemocratically than the Bund, never had to face an election. The Führerprinzip applied, meaning Pelley’s word must always be obeyed. Alongside the Chief was a general staff, elected for ten-year terms, and variety of other officials with pretentious titles including quartermaster, sheriff, and censor. State chapters were headed by a commander who reported to the national organization. Local chapters included a chaplain and other officials who managed finances and records. The paramilitary wing of the organization was called the Silver Rangers and was divided into cadres of one hundred armed fighters. Their weapon of choice was a scourge whip based on the one Jesus had supposedly used to drive money changers from the temple in the Gospels. Like the Bund’s nightsticks, this was a legal weapon that could potentially be used with lethal effect.12
Pelley’s stated goal was to bring about a “Christian Commonwealth” in the United States. This governmental system would not be fascist, communist, capitalist, or presumably fit any other known political model. Instead it would be based on a system of “Christian economics” that he himself had devised. As an American Jewish Committee report on Pelley noted, this system was based in “a curious sort of mysticism, compounded of astrology, mythology, and spiritualism.”13 All property would be held by the government, and every qualified citizen would be a stockholder in the state. All citizens would receive a guaranteed basic income of at least $1,000 per year, paid out as dividends on their “shares.” More stock in the state, and therefore income, could be acquired only through meritorious action. No property or money could be inherited between generations and only white citizens would be allowed to own stock. African Americans would be reduced to slavery to provide a supply of cheap physical labor, and Jews would be excluded entirely.14
Unsurprisingly, Pelley believed that the main obstacle to establishing this system was the Jews. In his future government, he proclaimed, there would be a “Secretary of Jewry” who would be responsible for dealing with the Jewish population by restricting them to a single city per state and closely monitoring their activities. This was necessary because there was a vast and international Jewish conspiracy responsible for every negative influence and event in world history, he claimed. In Pelley’s mind, Jews controlled most current media, politicians, and financial systems. Their main vehicle for sowing unrest presently was communism. A Silver Legion training document entitled The Reds Are Upon Us emphasized that “only an insignificant fraction of the real Communist work being carried on in America is openly and shamelessly stamped with the insignia of Communism.” The vast majority of communist plots were “camouflaged” behind a variety of covers that were seemingly innocuous. The training continued by asking recruits to guess how many communists there were in the United States (the “correct” answer being 22 million, which Pelley reached by counting every person “under the control of his rabbi”) and the number of rabbis (allegedly 2 million). Needless to say, these numbers were vastly exaggerated. In reality, most demographers put the actual number of Jews in the United States as being somewhere around 3 percent of the overall population, or around 4.5 million people in the 1930s (Pelley claimed that this number should be multiplied by five because “Jews reckon population only by males who have reached their majority” and failed to count anyone else, ignoring the fact that the official number had come from the US Census Bureau).15
Regardless, aspiring Silver Shirts were told that “We are not against the Jews as a people, but because they are slaves and serfs beneath the control of their rabbinate. And that rabbinate wants to see Communism come in and close all Christian churches.”16 As the American Jewish Committee summarized it:
One cannot always be certain of what Pelley favors, but one is seldom left in doubt as to what Pelley opposes, and he opposes many things. The Jews, of course, are his chief objects of hatred. To Pelley, the Jews are the root of all evil. Whenever he is against anything, it is because Jews are connected with it, and if he can’t find Jews, he creates them. Thus, his chief objection to Communism is its alleged Jewishness.17
Pelley intended for the Silver Legion to defeat this vast alleged conspiracy.
Despite Pelley’s outlandish and pretentious ideas, the Silver Legion was surprisingly successful in recruiting members. Much like the Bund, the decentralized nature of the Silver Legion makes finding exact membership figures difficult. Pelley claimed to have 50,000 followers a few months after launching the organization, but later revised this and claimed to have attracted 25,000 members and three times as many sympathizers at the peak of his popularity. Historians have generally suggested that the numbers were somewhat smaller, with the most widely cited estimate being 15,000 members at its peak.18 As with the Bund, the fact that members would have joined and left the organization as the political situation changed made it nearly impossible for Pelley or anyone else to know the true number of active members at any given time. Regardless, even 15,000 would have made the legion a formidable presence in its local strongholds. Demographically, most legion members appear to have come from British and German backgrounds and were either working or middle class. About 15 percent were engaged in professional, white-collar careers. The medical profession seems to have been particularly well represented, perhaps reflecting the Chief’s appeal to whites who were inclined to believe their social status was under attack from the minority groups Pelley loudly denounced. Membership numbers were largest in the upper Midwest and the far West, especially Washington State and California.19
It would indeed be the West where Pelley focused the bulk of his efforts. The Nazis themselves recognized that the West and South were the regions most likely to be sympathetic to their propaganda due to their respective racial tensions (between whites and African Americans in the South; and Asians, especially the Chinese, in the West).20 Washington State would become Pelley’s biggest stronghold. One estimate has placed Washington membership at around 1,600 people, primarily in the Seattle area. In a state of about 1.6 million people in the mid-1930s, this suggests that the legion membership was around 0.001 percent of the overall population, which, as already seen, was also the exact approximation of Bund membership and sympathizers in the total US population.21 Uniformed Silver Shirts would soon become a regular sight on the streets of Seattle.
As the Chief’s membership began to grow, however, so did his legal difficulties. These stemmed in part from his past career as a spiritual leader. Back in 1932, Pelley devised a scheme to sell shares in the Galahad Press to his readers to generate cash for its operations. He then advertised those shares for sale in his own publication. After the founding of the legion, Pelley started moving funds between various accounts to support his activities, including some money that had been received as donations from well-wishers and cash raised from the sale of the shares. However, this financial chicanery left the press bankrupt. In early 1934, Pelley ordered an associate to burn the press records, and declared bankruptcy. This, however, meant he had defrauded the shareholders by effectively looting the company. Pelley was duly indicted in North Carolina on a range of charges and many of his personal records were seized. The resulting legal battles would drag on for years, but, unlike the Bund’s Fritz Kuhn, this would be far from the end of Pelley’s career as one of Hitler’s American friends.22
Pelley was subsequently arrested, convicted, and released on parole. He blamed the legal woes on the Jews and renewed his activities with the legion in late 1935. Membership numbers in the organization had fallen as Pelley’s legal problems unfolded, and several of his close associates broke away to form their own splinter factions. Always the showman, Pelley knew that a big comeback would require dramatic action. He did so by announcing that the Silver Legion was getting into politics at the highest levels by seeking the presidency. Claiming to have received a divine message predicting another economic crisis, Pelley announced the formation of the Christian Party with himself as its head. As such, Pelley would be its presidential candidate in the upcoming 1936 election. The party’s platform was a carbon copy of Pelley’s other teachings, including the heavily anti-Semitic aspects. In the course of the campaign he vowed to prevent Jews from owning most property and pledged to enact his economic plans. He had already denounced the president as a secret Jew, accusing him of concealing the fact that his actual family name was “Rosenfeld.” Now he claimed the president’s Republican opponent, Alf Landon, was conspiring against the Christian Party by having his staff hold events in the same towns Pelley was visiting to draw away his crowds.23 This was all conspiratorial and outlandish, but it was also vintage Pelley rhetoric.
Pelley’s openly anti-Semitic and mystical platform gained him little support, particularly when his predicted economic crisis failed to materialize. Despite a national speaking tour he only managed to make it onto the ballot in Washington State. He garnered fewer than two thousand votes there in November. This result humiliatingly put him behind both the Socialist and Communist candidates on the ballot.24 As left-wing journalist Gustavus Myers noted acidly, “The scattered vote cast for the Christian Party was so altogether negligible that almanac compilers of election returns did not take the trouble to give it notice.”25 The entire campaign had really only been a ploy to put Pelley back in the national spotlight, however. After the 1936 defeat his followers began to take a more active role in the political organization he had built. In the course of his work in Washington, Pelley met Roy Zachary, the anti-Semitic demagogue with whom this chapter began. Zachary was a former clerical worker who owned a Seattle restaurant and became enamored with Pelley’s supposed connection to the divine. He quickly became the Chief’s chief political organizer in the state, selecting the slate of other Christian Party candidates (all of whom would lose) for a wide range of federal and state offices. Following the defeat, Pelley chose Zachary to be his nationwide second-in-command. In this new role, Zachary began traveling the country on Pelley’s behalf, ending his career as a restaurateur but gradually rebuilding the organization’s membership.26
Zachary’s importance to the Silver Legion lay in not only his personal dynamism as a speaker and his organizational skills, but also in the fact that he quickly proved able to make connections with Hitler’s other American friends. The Bund had long shied away from any kind of alliance with Pelley in part because its leaders saw him as a dangerous madman. Fritz Kuhn told the Dies Committee that he had only met Pelley on one occasion in 1936 and “never cooperated with the Silver Shirts at all.”27 The Bund might be interested in an alliance with the legion, Kuhn continued, if it “would have a good organization,” but he professed that he did not “care for them at all.”28 Most of Hitler’s other American friends saw Pelley as a “lone wolf” who was not only uncontrollable but would demand “dictatorial powers” in the event that they cooperated with him.29
Pelley’s lieutenants were a different story, however. Surveillance reports filed by John C. Metcalfe and Hollywood Anti-Nazi League investigators record the presence of Silver Shirts at Bund meetings up and down the West Coast. Even if Pelley himself was an undesirable ally, his supporters were welcomed with seemingly open arms. In Los Angeles, Metcalfe was told that the local legion leaders would drop into the Bund headquarters, the Deutsches Haus, on a periodic basis and conceal their identities from all but a handful of key officers. The Bund leaders there were “constantly in touch with them and [worked] together.” The LA Silver Shirt headquarters—“ironically enough” located next to a federal naturalization bureau—had shut down entirely by the time he arrived, but Metcalfe found the organization to still be “quite active.” The aims of the Silver Shirts and the Bund, one Kuhn lieutenant told him, “are very similar in many ways,” and there was therefore a natural affinity between the groups.30
Pelley did try to build some of these alliances himself. One of his more bizarre ploys involved an effort to convert Native Americans to the Silver Shirt cause. Pelley’s sudden interest in Native Americans stemmed from a supposed divine realization that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been taken over by Bolsheviks. Native Americans were therefore natural allies for his political movement because they too were supposedly victims of the Jewish conspiracy Pelley saw everywhere. Among the many problems with this eccentric plan was the fact that Pelley did not actually know many Native Americans. His efforts to reach out by referring to himself as “Chief Pelley of the Tribe of Silver” and writing articles in prose that could have been lifted from the stock characters of Hollywood Westerns gained few supporters.31 One Native American ally Pelley did manage to recruit was a mixed-race Portland attorney named Elwood A. Towner who soon took on a bizarre role. Adopting the “Indian title” of Chief Red Cloud, Towner began attending legion and Bund meetings up and down the West Coast and drew sizable crowds as he wore a stereotypical feather headdress and clothing covered in swastikas.32
Towner’s primary mission was to recruit Native Americans into the legion, but most of his appearances were before Bund and legion audiences and focused on providing a bogus Native American backstory for Nazism. Once described by a Hollywood Anti-Nazi League investigator as the “Charlie McCarthy of the Bundsmen” and their “spiritual symbol,” a typical appearance involved the fake chief speaking in broken English about how “the coming of the German to these shores was glowingly prophesied.” The Jews, he claimed, were also prophesied and “were the traditional Aryan enemies, the gold worshippers who would corrupt the Aryan Indians and put them in concentration camps.” Native Americans “from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego” had been taught to “blame the Jews for their generally pitiful conditions” and were ready to accept “the Nazi doctrines of violence, rebellion and race-hatred.” He usually concluded this bizarre tale by claiming the swastika and the Nazi salute both originated in Native American culture. “Our people admire Hitler for this reason that he adopted for his symbol the swastika,” Towner told a Los Angeles Bund gathering. “It means prosperity, good luck, and Christian government.… Hitler also adopted our salute [Gave salute and audience cheered and responded] which means ‘Peace be unto you—advance friend.’” This bizarre reading of history was generally greeted with applause and heils at Bund and Silver Legion meetings, but apparently did little to actually recruit Native Americans.33
As Pelley’s fame grew, the German embassy in Washington, DC, was becoming increasingly skeptical of his activities. First Secretary Heribert von Strempel later recalled he believed it would be unwise for German officials to receive Pelley in any official capacity because he was so openly anti-Semitic and potentially a loose cannon (regardless, embassy staff may still have funneled Pelley some money through back channels).34 The embassy’s caution was understandable. As his public profile increased, Pelley became more and more delusional. In late 1937, he instructed associates in Washington State to begin outreach to “key Japs” in the area who might support the legion financially. Pelley’s reasoning was that the Japanese community feared the potential of war breaking out and would therefore be willing to back the legion. There was supposedly a deeper backstory too. When he was seventeen, Pelley now claimed, he had been sitting in church when he suddenly heard a disembodied voice say, “When you grow up you are to be the instrument for stopping a great war between your country and Japan.” Pelley now believed that his task was to “minimize the troubles between the two countries as destiny may serve me with the opportunity.”35
There is little evidence the Japanese-American community was at all interested in Pelley, but this attempted outreach demonstrates the extent of his ambitions. In 1938, Pelley laid out his future plans directly in a manual entitled “A Million Silvershirts by 1939.” The pamphlet called upon state organizers to sign up one hundred new members per day, a significant increase from the prevailing average of five.36 Faced with this impossible quota, legion organizers tried to increase their appeal by arguing that they were not anti-Semitic and were part of a patriotic, Christian organization. “The only reason we make open opposition to the Jews is because they are the ones … who support communism which is atheism and are out to destroy Christianity,” a Washington State organizer wrote to a critic in 1938. He continued, “We are not Jew haters as reported, we are only against their system.… I do not hate a single Jew, but I do feel sorry for them. I do not hate a single person on this earth including all Jews.”37
As the legion’s stature increased and its tone seemingly moderated, it became more difficult for the US government to ignore its activities. Roosevelt himself saw Pelley as a serious annoyance if not an outright threat. In 1938, the president asked the Department of Justice whether it would be possible to sue Pelley for libel. This ill-conceived plan came to nothing, but the following year Roosevelt asked Attorney General Frank Murphy the same question after Pelley accused him of embezzling money intended for a disabled children’s charity. Murphy wisely advised the president that he would almost certainly be called to testify in any trial, which would put him under oath and at Pelley’s mercy. Roosevelt sensibly decided that this was a bad idea.38 Public fury against the legion was growing at the same time. In 1938, Roy Zachary was “run out of town” in Sharon, Pennsylvania, when dozens of World War I veterans attacked a Silver Shirt meeting, smashing windows and beating up at least two participants. As the violence unfolded, Zachary ran to his car “with a dozen veterans on his heels” and hightailed it across the Ohio state line.39
Congressman Martin Dies Jr. had far more of an opportunity to deal with Pelley than the president or mobs of angry veterans. The public’s growing impatience with the legion mirrored the growing distrust of the Bund, giving Dies a political motivation to go after Pelley. The Chief had also long been openly flouting the law as well. At one point he was reported to be accompanied by a “personal bodyguard” of forty uniformed Silver Shirts who carried pistols in shoulder holsters and dared local law enforcement to “do anything about it.”40 In 1938, Zachary told a Milwaukee reporter that he was advising all Silver Shirts to have sawed-off shotguns and two thousand rounds of ammunition at home, “for the protection of what Mr. Zachary terms ‘white Christian America.’”41 All this suggested that Pelley was planning a significant escalation in his activities beyond rhetoric.
With his work on the Bund wrapping up, Dies turned his Committee’s attention to the legion in 1939. He was immediately faced with an odd and troubling development. Early in the year, the Committee received an application for employment as an undercover agent from a man named Frasier S. Gardner, who had strangely been attending all of the Committee’s open hearings as a member of the public. At nearly the same time Gardner applied for the position, “a local attorney active in anti-radical work” sent the Committee a letter claiming that Gardner had offered to sell him information about the witnesses scheduled to appear in later hearings before the list became public knowledge. Exactly how this information was obtained is unclear, but it suggests Gardner must have had a source inside the Committee. Subsequent investigation revealed that Gardner was in fact an employee of Pelley’s Skyland Press. The obvious implication Dies drew was that Pelley was attempting to infiltrate his Committee.42
Dies resolved to expose the plot by letting Gardner hang himself rhetorically. Calling Gardner to testify on the pretense that he was being background-checked for employment, the Committee put him under oath and asked whether he had any connection with organizations the Committee was investigating. Gardner replied that he did not. With this denial duly recorded, the Committee adjourned into open session and called Gardner as a witness to confront him with telegrams its investigators had obtained that had seemingly been sent from Pelley to Gardner. Gardner’s testimony quickly changed from the claim that he had “nothing to do with Pelley” to the admission that they had met several times and finally the revelation that they had talked on the phone on several occasions about “reports that refugees were brought into this country in violation of the law.” Through it all, however, he denied that he had been paid directly by Pelley and insisted that he had simply been an employee of the press. No one was impressed, and Gardner ended up going to prison for perjury. Dies described the case as being of a “specially grave nature” and warned that other organizations might well try to infiltrate his Committee as well.43
Had Pelley tried to infiltrate the Dies Committee? There is no direct proof he did, but it is easy to see why Dies would be concerned by the Gardner case. There was only one way to find out the truth: subpoena Pelley. The summons was issued in August 1939. However, in a decision that one biographer has understatedly described as “truly poor,” Pelley decided to go on the run instead of testifying. Traveling across the country and undoubtedly being aided by Silver Legion local chapters, he openly mocked federal investigators in published articles describing his adventures. Adding insult to injury, Pelley then sued the entire Dies Committee for an astonishing $3.15 million for defamation after Committee members publicly described him as a “racketeer.”44 The suit was filed by Pelley’s attorneys and lacked even an affidavit from him, which would have been difficult to justify having since he was technically missing. The case came to nothing and was eventually dropped, but it served to keep Pelley’s name in the press just as the outbreak of war in Europe was dominating the headlines.45
The net was still closing quickly around the Chief. In October, a judge in North Carolina ordered Pelley to appear for a parole hearing. As with the Dies subpoena, he ignored the summons. This opened the door to a full investigation of his activities in the state. The Silver Legion’s national headquarters was soon ransacked and its records seized.46 Pelley’s flair for the Hollywood-esque once again came to the fore. In January 1940, as war raged in Europe and the debate over American intervention heated up on Capitol Hill, Democratic congressman Frank E. Hook of Michigan—a liberal Roosevelt ally—introduced shocking letters on the floor of Congress that were purportedly between his colleague Dies and Pelley himself. The explosive correspondence supposedly revealed a secret alliance between the Silver Shirts and the Dies Committee chairman, though the letters were oddly signed “Pelly” rather than the correct spelling of the Chief’s name. If true, this was a massive revelation, and it shook Washington to the core. Liberals who believed Dies was targeting unions and the left rather than the real fascist threat rejoiced at the thought of bringing down their archnemesis. Unfortunately for them, the letters were quickly shown to be forgeries, and within weeks the Committee had elicited a confession from the forger responsible (a disgruntled former employee of the Dies Committee, it emerged).47 In a strange move, Hook still refused to retract the letters or apologize until the Department of Justice conducted its own investigation. The House tied itself into knots for days debating the issue and requesting more information, derailing consideration of a major agriculture bill.48
As the controversy boiled, Pelley decided at this moment to travel to Washington unannounced and stroll into the Dies Committee offices. As the New York Times put it, this caused the “sensation of the day” across the Beltway. The Committee was caught completely off guard. Dies himself was sick with a cold and did not attend the hearings. Pelley was questioned under oath about the letters, which he (truthfully) denied writing. He further rejected claims he had links to Nazi Germany. Oddly, he spent much of the time praising the Committee’s work rooting out communists, telling reporters when he first surfaced in Washington that he was there to give “Martin Dies a clean bill of health; I admire the work he’s done.” Whether this was intentionally ironic, given Dies’s illness that week, went unexamined.49 The most bizarre moment came when Pelley told the Committee that he would be willing to disband the entire Silver Legion if the Committee members were willing to take up the mantle of hunting down the communist menace in the United States. It was a strange offer, and the Committee was unimpressed.
Slipping out of Washington to escape extradition to North Carolina, Pelley fled to Indiana and struck up an alliance with the local Ku Klux Klan. He remained there for months and, in the meantime, was sentenced in absentia to two to three years in a North Carolina prison for parole violations. He still refused to return to face the music.50 Meanwhile, the Dies Committee’s hearings continued in Washington. In April 1940, a female government agent named Dorothy Waring testified that she had infiltrated the legion in 1934 at the behest of the Dickstein Committee, an investigatory precursor to the Dies Committee. Waring’s cover had been to work as a secretary for another right-wing organization, “The Order of ’76,” and establish herself within similar groups by presenting the image of being a wealthy potential donor. In that capacity she met Pelley, who visited her in her Park Avenue apartment “in full uniform,” carrying two pistols, including a German Luger, and tailed by bodyguards. After dismissing the guards, he allegedly bragged to her that he intended to “be dictator of the United States” and would “put into effect the Hitler program” after overthrowing the government.51 It was explosive testimony.
The Silver Legion’s days were numbered. With his legal troubles mounting, the last thing Pelley needed now was being accused of plotting to overthrow the government. His bizarre offer to disband the group if the Dies Committee continued its work opened a face-saving way out of some troubles. Writing from Indiana to his supporters in Washington State, Pelley acknowledged that “the rancor against us is significantly increased.” The situation had become increasingly perilous, he continued, because “Never have I exerted more influence in this nation that [sic] I find I do at present—and not only in this nation but abroad as well.… Never had I less money. Never was I personally in more danger.” However, he argued that Dies and the America First Committee, discussed later, were the true inheritors of the legion’s legacy:
Unbeknown, certainly unsuspected, Silvershirts have been responsible for much of the constructive side of the work of the Dies Committee—exposing the alien menace to America—they have been active in the formation of the American First.… they have veelated their hands in the stupendous mail that has reached the White House and Capitol Hill, retraining our mercurial politicians from plunging into war.… They have actually stood up on platforms and introduced Martin Dies to audiences when the gentleman no more suspected who was sponsoring him than he expected to be named as President of the Nazi Reichstag.… All this is no alibi for a seeming hiatus in bold action in the present. It is merely a reminder that we can take no small satisfaction out of the influence we have wielded, and still wield, to hold American upon even keel.52
Whether any of this was true or not, Pelley used the Dies Committee as his excuse for shutting down the legion. In late 1940, Pelley announced that because Dies was still doing his work, he would uphold his side of the bargain and shut down the Silver Legion completely. The Chief resigned. A few of his followers, especially on the West Coast, continued to meet in secret or joined forces with surviving Bund chapters, but the glory days of the legion were long past.
The Dies Committee excuse was merely a smokescreen.53 Practically speaking, Pelley had little choice but to retreat from open political activity at this point. In October 1941, he surrendered to North Carolina authorities and was released on bond. In January, he was sentenced to two to three years for his violation of the 1934 parole.54 Pelley appealed, and the case dragged on. The Chief was not yet finished, however. Following his old playbook, he attempted to reinvent himself yet again and began publishing two new journals. One of these was called The Galilean and was theoretically focused only on religious matters. It quickly generated a subscriber base of more than three thousand. After Pearl Harbor, Pelley interpreted religious matters to include the war effort, and published a number of articles accusing Roosevelt of having tempted the Japanese into war. The Pearl Harbor attack itself was one aspect of “divine justice punishment,” he foolishly wrote.55 The Roosevelt administration was not entertained. When a single copy of The Galilean was discovered in a soldier’s duffle bag, Pelley was indicted for sedition under the Espionage Act of 1917 along with several of his associates and arrested in April 1942. He would spend the rest of the war fighting a series of protracted legal battles that would see him in court alongside a number of Hitler’s other American friends.
What was the true impact of William Dudley Pelley and his Silver Legion? Certainly, he never came close to achieving the Christian Commonwealth or corporate state that he had envisioned in the mid-1930s. A following of fifteen thousand nationwide was not huge but, like the Bund, it was substantial enough in its strongholds to cause major local concern, especially given that many members were armed. Pelley envisioned creating a mass movement to bring about a future corporate state, but what he was left with instead was a small movement of dedicated radicals who proved themselves willing to cut local alliances with the Bund, even if this was not part of Pelley’s national plan. Pelley’s ideas quickly outgrew the narrow confines he had established for them.
Two factors made Pelley uniquely dangerous. First, unlike the Bund he was openly anti-Semitic and used racial prejudice as a major facet of his teachings. The Christian Commonwealth was fundamentally premised on removing Jews from society and segregating them from society, with the implication of worse things to come. Similarly, he was an open admirer of Hitler and barely went through even the motions of denouncing Nazism. For this reason, the British Manchester Guardian referred to the Silver Legion as “the largest American fascist organization” in a 1942 article.56 Depending on how one defined “fascist organization” this may well have been true, despite the legion being numerically smaller than some of its rival groups. Part of Pelley’s personal appeal undoubtedly lay in his personal charisma and personal presence, which he had cultivated as a Hollywood screenwriter. The 1920s were a key period in entertainment history, with the move from silent film to the talkies that required producers to rethink the way their plots and characters were seen and understood by the audience. Pelley would have been faced with these lessons on a daily basis during his time in the studio system. It is easy to see the echoes of a Hollywood mentality in the way Pelley designed the legion uniform (the giant L leaving no question as to what organization was being represented) and his own flair for dramatic action (barnstorming the country to run for president, and turning up unannounced at the Dies Committee office at the moment his presence would attract maximum attention).
These were the actions of a man who was entirely aware of what would impact his audience the most. In addition, the fact that Pelley had run a religious movement that very much resembled a cult before launching the legion stands as another testimony to his potential appeal. The American Jewish Committee noted that he had a remarkable penchant for pivoting to issues he knew an audience would support, including attacks on Catholics, Christian Scientists, and Greeks at different times, in addition to his standard attacks on the Jews. This ability to “attack every organization, group, or development which was in any way open to misrepresentation and abuse” was the key to his success and the danger he presented, as the organization reported at the time:
It is little wonder then that in spite of his repeated failures, Pelley has always managed to obtain some sort of following. There is always a sufficient number of discontented, unemployed human misfits, there are always enough fanatics of either a religious or political variety ready to accept demagogues of the Pelley type as their saviors.57
Pelley was effectively a blank slate upon which a wide range of complaints could be written and seemingly explained.
Like the Bund, the Silver Legion was ultimately a failure, destroyed by the vanity of its leader and the improprieties that had stemmed primarily from ego and personal ambition. In the middle years of the 1930s, however, it was a growing organization that commanded a nationwide presence and was a force to be reckoned with in its strongholds. Its potential for greater success would have lain in the striking of alliances with the Bund and other groups, but these were precluded at the national level by Pelley’s personal quest for power. The story was much different at the local level, where Bund–Silver Shirt cooperation was a reality.
With a higher degree of personal discipline, Pelley might well have become the leader around which the far right could coalesce. With his ideological flexibility, flair for the dramatic, and ability to harness religious language (even in his own unique way), Pelley could have been formidable. As it turned out, he was merely a flash in the pan who ended up being exposed as an unscrupulous fraudster.
Pelley would not be the only one of Hitler’s American friends to use the language of religion to push his followers toward a political extremism, nor was he the only political extremist to use the lessons of entertainment and mass media to spread his message. Indeed, Pelley’s star would soon be dramatically outshone by friends of the Führer who managed to combine religion with the power of mass media to build even more substantial followings.