While U.S. fascism obviously has many similarities with other such movements around the world, it is noticeable how many fascist organizations here begin as money-making grifts. Edward Dahlgren on William Pelley’s Silver Shirts, as clownishly dangerous as today’s buffoonish Republicans…but not in power.

‘Nightgown Riders of America’ by Edward Dahlgren from New Masses. Vol. 10 No. 5. January 30, 1934.

(Although the comic opera insurrectionists behind the various revamped Ku Klux Klan shirts are inconsequential in themselves, they are significant as political trends. Even the smallest, doggerel Napoleon, like a Hitler, can rise to leadership. And in rapidly reviewing the fatuities and illiterate inanities of a Pelley or an Art Smith, there is no attempt to belittle the seriousness of these sporadic, mushroom movements. The role of the social democrats, and the silly beer putsch staged by the slapstick insurgent, Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 1923, have been too instructive.)

WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY, seer of the Silver Shirts, and a kind of outhouse, picaresque Rabindranath Tagore, has had a career worthy of a column in the Americana of the Mercury.

Erstwhile treasurer of a toilet paper company in Springfield, Mass., 1909-1912 (see Who’s Who), and at one time a secretary with the International Y.M.C.A. (during American intervention in Siberia, 1918-1919), then a scenario writer in Hollywood, he is today one of the venal harbingers of reaction and Fascism in America. Founder of Galahad College (for Aryans only) which was created for the purpose of training American storm troopers in graduate courses in anti-semitism, Fascism and red-baiting, he is also an editor and a soothsayer. Pelley has had astral communion with the disincarnated shade of Adolf Hitler from whom he received instructions and subsidies of a much less other worldly sort.

The Silver Shirts of America, started less than a year ago, has a culture and a philosophy behind it. An admixture of fake cosmology and postcard evolution, after the manner of, “If I were a tadpole, and you were a fish, in the Paleozoic times,” it served Pelley first as spiritualist and then as functionary for Nazi agents. Pelley lives in Asheville, North Carolina, a pleasant, resortish town whose bland climate attracts tuberculars and the leisure- class–arable ground for theosophical speculation.

Incidentally when Pelley goes to his office, he removes his good clothes and puts on an old pair of trousers and shoes in order to give the appearance of austerity and frugality. Pelley has received money from wealthy widows who wished to communicate with their dead husbands. The Seer almost succeeded in marrying off his nephew to a relative of Senator Reynolds, a widow, who wanted to make clairvoyant cable connections with her dead husband. Pelley promised to put through this message provided she would become the wife of his nephew; but she declined.

However, as spiritualism did not prove lucrative enough, and as a Nazi official was looking about for an alert American propagandist, William Dudley Pelley shifted his interests to anti-semitism and organized the Silver Shirts. He showed no intention of burying his mystagogical gifts which he immediately brought to this new movement; but proceeded to develop a philosophy for the Silver Shirts based on the knowledge of Sanskrit, pituitary glands and God. Briefly, his thesis reads as follows: the nordic’s evolutionary metamorphosis is traced from the lizard. The most highly developed nordics, who come from lizards, have pituitary glands at the end of which is the Radio Eye, which can see into the Realms of Higher Frequency, that is, the Styxian regions of the dead. William Dudley is a highly developed nordic and has at the nethermost end of his pituitary gland such a Radio Eye.

Pelley, an apostle of Nazi Gleichschaltung, has coordinated bookkeeping, spiritualism and Hitlerism in the following way: In May, he had collecting agents at work in California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Utah, Nebraska and the South. These agents were employed on a commission basis and received half of each ten dollar membership fee, and twenty-five percent on all money paid for dues, tax, literature and general contributions, Silver Shirt subsidiaries for raising funds were established: The League for the Liberation, The Foundation for Christian Economics, The Galahad Press, and The Galahad Fellowship Extension. It goes without saying, that like the Galahad College, which actually does not exist except on papers, these Silver Shirted auxiliaries are theosophical fictions somewhere at the end of Pelley’s pituitary gland.

A few excerpts from Pelley’s sleazy sheet, Liberation, indicating their similarity in tone, temper and contents to the Nazi organs, are in place here. In short, only a few weeks ago, there appeared in Das Neue Deutschland a verbatim transcript of Pelley’s article in Liberation. Simultaneously, Grissible, acting Nazi leader, announced that the Friends of the New Germany and the Silver Shirts are on the most amicable terms and “welcome wholeheartedly the wonderful understanding which the Silver Shirts have for the Nazis.”

Liberation says that Dawes, Young, the Van Sweringen brothers of Cleveland and Lenin are Jews. Further: “In America there are hundreds of men who saw nothing extraordinary that Senator Morrow ‘happened’ to be stricken fatally the day after his attendance at a Jewish banquet.” And elsewhere (July 15, 1933, Vol. IV, No. 13): “speaking of applause (reference to President Roosevelt’s yachting costume alias Rosenfeld), have you noticed how thin and spasmodic it is of late, when the sport shirt, the ice cream pants and the old hat are paraded for our aforesaid weekly edification.” Also: “Mutilated bodies of women hostages, and S. Ivanovna, owner of a drapery business, and Mme. Khlopova, a property owner, had their breasts slit open and emptied. It is all but impossible to enumerate the forms of savagery which the Jewish Chekka employed. A volume would not contain them.” (Liberation, Vol. 5, No. 1, August 26, 1933).

This same pseudo-proletarian appeal to the masses is also found in Goebbels’ early writings. Note the descriptive cartoonist’s epithets and the orientation to workers in the Nazi Sozi, a pamphlet by Goebbels: “There can surely be nothing more hypocritical than a fat, well-fed capitalist who protests against the proletarian idea of class struggle.”

The aforementioned quote is typical of the disingenuous and fake proletarian political vocabulary adopted by the National Socialists who have bilked and betrayed the workers more shamelessly than any party in the history of Europe, the Nazis who have abolished collective bargaining, dissolved all organizations of “Marxist class warfare,” and decreed in their stead that the wages of employees shall rest upon the “social honor” of employers. That is, upon Fritz Thyssen, the coal and steel king of the Ruhr, one of the principal instigators of the World War, and today an archetype “labor trustee” of the Third Reich.

Among other mushroom Fascist organizations that have sprung up in North America are the Blue Shirts in Quebec, the Crusader White Shirts in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and “General” Art Smith’s Khaki Shirts in Philadelphia. A brief case history of Art Smith should be recorded: At the age of eight he was committed to the County House for stealing a horse, a pistol and for attempting to shoot the sheriff. Later, but still a minor, he was about to be indicted for the murder of a drunken lumberjack whom he had “rolled,” taking his watch and ninety cents, and then burying him underneath a dungheap; but the man recovered.

Approximately illiterate, he had no difficulty in enlisting in his ranks the Philadelphia police. His men carried clubs, “loaded” riding crops and guns, and like all the Vigilantes in the history of America, who have murdered and brutally beaten workers, they were abetted and aided by the forces of reaction. The papier mache “general” rode about in swanky automobile with two armed guards standing on the running board.

Smith had a large store of Lee-Enfield rifles, which can only be obtained by order of the U.S. War Department, and he challenged the government to find them, but the Department of Justice, dealing with a useful strike breaker and a thug, did nothing.

The Khaki Shirts have since fallen into obscurity; but white-haired boys like Seward Collins and Lawrence Dennis have come to take their place. The American Review, the literary trade journal of Fascism in the United States, has become a fustian Liberation, on a slightly higher level.

Collins, like Lawrence Dennis, editor of The Awakener, has joined ranks with Pelley, buffoon megalomaniac; Art Smith, pathological criminal type; Rosenberg, sadist; Goering, dangerous paranoiac and morphine addict, who was committed to an asylum in Stockholm in 1925; and Captain Roehm, notorious pervert who created a scandal in Berlin a few years ago a delectable coterie to whom the masses of unemployed and starving should turn as their political leaders.

In the meantime, Adolf Hitler is enjoying the claque of the American press in the novel and unpredictable role of good Samaritan and connoisseur of music. Hitler is shown in a photograph on the front page suavely bowing in dinner jacket to Gigli, Italian opera singer, which makes him a lover of the fine arts. Through the Radio Eye and the pituitary gland of Ivy Lee, Hitler is so emotionally affected by the plight of a hitch-hiker crossing the American Continent, that he sends him money. Unsuspecting readers who may not know that Hitler is doing nothing to feed German workers who have been reduced to a pellagra diet of potatoes, and that every first-rate composer, writer and artist has been compelled to fly for his life from the terroristic storm troopers in Germany, are offered this mendacious fare by American newspapers.

Each week at Turner Hall some agent provocateur from Germany speaks to large audiences of German-Americans. Last Tuesday there was a lecture announced on “Children’s Institutions and Homes in the Ruhr,” but not a word was mentioned on this topic, the platform agent confining himself to–“Awaken German!” Parents are asked to enroll their children in private Nazi schools. Under the heading, University of the State of New York, State Education Department, they are offered, Freie Kurse Fur Erwachsene.

Hitler’s Mein Kampf is the bible for Deutschen Rings in America, German concert, dancing and singing groups. These are the new little innocent clubs behind which the political tactics of Hitlerism are masked. In an unbowdlerized edition of Mein Kampf, there appears the following, which might have been written in collaboration with Judge Callahan who has condemned the Scottsboro boys to die: “The black-haired Jewish youth lies for hours in ambush, a satanic joy in his face for the unsuspecting girl whom he pollutes with his blood…It was, and is, the Jew who brought Negroes to the Rhine, brought them with the same aim and with deliberate intent to destroy the white race…”

In both Hitler’s swastika regime and in the mouldering plantocratic and industrial south, it is the Jew and the Negro who are pilloried as the classical ravishers and rapists. The political observer, however, is compelled to look to the harrowing decline in the world markets, to starvation and unemployment, and not to race, color or creed for the real reasons.

The nightgown ghost riders are spreading Fascist terror in Mexico and South America. And in this country, it is the American Legion, the Patriotic Coalition Societies, A.F. of L. officials and Congressmen who are giving the illiterate Pelleys and Art Smiths their support.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1934/v10n05-jan-30-1934-NM.pdf