This column first appeared in June 2011.
Well, okay so William Dudley Pelley was not a native Hoosier. By the end of this article, you’ll be glad of that. However his body does rest under 6 feet of Hoosier soil in a Noblesville cemetery to this very day. By the end of this article, you’ll be glad to know that, too.
Pelley was one of the most important figures of the anti-Semitic radical right in the 20th century. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, he also became a well-known psychic and believer in the occult. Pelley is best remembered as the leader of the paramilitary “Silver Shirts.” Pelley was also an award-winning short story author, Hollywood screenwriter, and religious leader. During the Depression, Pelley was an ominous presence in American politics who ran for president in 1936 for the Christian Party on a platform calling for the colonization of American Jews and was constantly under fire for his unwavering support of Nazi Germany.
Despite the fact that Pelley commanded headlines throughout the decade of the 1930s, his name is totally unknown today, except to a handful of diehard historians and researchers. Pelley retains a unique position in Depression-era America as a man whose name was familiar to every citizen and for whom every American had an opinion about, but a man whose name is rarely mentioned in the histories of that important era in U.S. history.
His speeches, once heard by millions over nationwide radio broadcasts, are nearly unobtainable today. Simultaneously, he was a close friend of the most famous man in America, aviator Charles Lindbergh and an avowed enemy of the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Nobel Prize winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. He hated the Hollywood illusion and became convinced that the Zionist shadow was falling across his own country, just as he had witnessed in Russia.
Pelley was ready for greatness, but lacked the direction to attain it. He felt he was destined to do something great for the white race, he just didn‘t know how to make it happen. Then in 1929, like a script from a Hollywood movie, the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties collapsed into the Great Depression. America was bankrupt and its people knew real fear for the first time. In 1932, after moving to Asheville, N.C., Pelley founded Galahad College and became active in local politics. His mail order college specialized in correspondence courses based on “Social Metaphysics,” and “Christian Economics.” But most importantly, Pelley founded Galahad Press, which he used to publish various political and metaphysical magazines, newspapers, and books all designed to spread his radical views and increase his national visibility.
When Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30th, 1933, Pelley founded his Fascist organization, “The Silver Legion,” the very next day. Regarded by most historians as the first genuine National Socialist organization in the United States, the Silver Legion’s (a.k.a. Silver Shirts) goal was to eventually take over the country for exclusive control by the White Race. But Pelley knew he had a problem. How could he clearly identify his organization as National Socialist, while still making it appear as American as possible? Pelley loved the swastika symbol but knew that it was the official emblem of a foreign power. He did not want to give the impression that his Silver Shirts were the agents of another country, so he chose the letter “L” as the symbol of his new organization. It stood for Love of the Aryan Race, Loyalty to the American Republic, Liberation from Jewry and, of course, the Silver Legion itself. He personally designed its flag, a square, white standard emblazoned with a capital L in blood red. For the next decade, the banner would be seen by millions of Americans as the centerpiece of vicious street fights in nearly every state in the union.
Pelley had his organization, he had his flag, but he still really didn’t know how, or where, to start. He fell back on what he knew best, his writing skills. At his own expense, he published a tabloid newspaper called the Liberation which became an overnight success. Pelley’s new venture attracted many new financial supporters, expressive writers, like-minded anti-Semitic zealots and soon hundreds of unemployed desperate men anxious to sell the publication on street corners. In cities with a large Jewish population, like New York and Washington, D.C., Pelley’s Silver Shirts were attacked by angry mobs. This only helped to galvanize the anti-Jewish sentiment within the Silver Legion. The vast majority of Silver Shirts (an obvious reference to Hitler’s German S.S. troops) were factory and office workers, or students attending high school or college. Many were also disgruntled ex-serviceman and bonus marchers, upset about the false promise of the “War to End All Wars.” The Silver Shirts, now calling themselves “Christian Patriots,” blamed the Jews for the Depression and regarded Franklin D. Roosevelt as the most “Jewized” president in American history.
Their uniforms consisted of a cap identical to those worn by Hitler’s Stormtroopers, blue corduroy trousers, leggings, tie and silver shirt with a red “L” over the heart. The Silver Shirts were always sure to fly the Stars and Stripes side by side with the Legion flag, and their official anthem was the Battle Hymn of the Republic with updated white supremacist lyrics. “Silver symbolizes the purity of our fight,” Pelley announced, “and the purity of our Race!” By the end of 1933, the Legion’s growth was astounding with units popping up all across the country. By 1936, he was a nationally-known public figure, who had already addressed hundreds of thousands of farmers, students, housewives and unemployed people nationwide.
Typical of Pelley’s rabble rousing rhetoric from the Liberation; “Capitalist democracy has failed, but out of its putrid remains is struggling to be born the monstrous offspring, communism. The Russian people failed to crush that monster in its womb and suffered terribly. I know, I saw it happen. The same is happening here. It is not a struggle for capitalism or communism, but between White Civilization and Jewry.”
Next week: Part 2 of the William Dudley Pelley story.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
