Degenerate and ignorant, peddling what are still very recognizable conspiracy theories, the Silver Shirts led by (another) failed screenwriter, William Dudley Pelley. Life-long anti-fascist Miriam Allen deFord on the ‘ideas’ of one of the 1930s most successful fascist organizations.

‘Silver Shirts’ by Miriam Allen deFord from Fight Against War and Fascism. Vol. 1 No. 7. May, 1934.

Most of us can remember the great days of the Ku Klux Klan–the days when fiery crosses burned and white nightgowns paraded, and helpless men and women, black and white, who had offended the prejudices of the Knights of the Nightie were tarred and feathered and beaten and in some cases shot to death; when whole states were under the power of the K.K.K., and public officials hastened to do their bidding.

It will not be pleasant news to those who recall those days to know that this country is now witnessing the rapid rise of an organization beside which the Klan looks as harmless as a kindergarten. This organization, known as the Silver Shirts of America and the creation of one William Dudley Pelley, is spreading like wildfire from its original home at Asheville, North Carolina, and already has representatives in almost every state of the union.

A lot of us met the early excesses of the K.K.K. with derision, and most of the commentators on the Silver Shirts today are finding in it merely a subject for ridicule. They underestimate the appeal of such an association to the suggestible and bigoted. Chester Rowell, one of the ablest editorial writers in America today, makes no such mistake as to take the Silver Shirt menace lightly. He says:

“When the Ku Klux Klan was at its height, its bigotry was at least American bigotry; its prejudices and illusions at least grew out of an American background. But now we have the beginnings of organized intolerance of the same sort, emanating from the same localities and the same sort of people, but definitely inspired from abroad.”

Inspiration by Hitler

The great inspiration of the Silver Shirts is Hitler and Hitlerism. Hitler, says Mr. Pelley in his official organ, Liberation, is “the only man in Europe who correctly understands the tie-up between Communism and the predatory element among the Hebrews.” Communism and the Hebrews are the two Big Bad Wolves of the Silver Shirts–with the Hebrews a little bigger and worse a wolf than the Communists. Anti-Semitism is the keystone of Mr. Pelley’s arch. In one number of Liberation, he ran an article by a “Dr.” Anna Sloan which “proved scientifically” that our Jewish brethren are not even members of the white race–they are closely related, among other peoples, to the Turks, the Chinese, and the Eskimos!

There is a very simple criterion by which one may discover whether any given person is a Communist or a Jew: Beware of anyone who believes in any liberal movement or opposes War. That is the sure “mark of the beast.” Please bear in mind that in this article I am quoting directly from the official literature of the Silver Shirts, no matter how extravagant, wild, or absurd those quotations may sound. For example, according to the Silver Shirts, both Eugene O’Neill (whose father was one of the founders of the Catholic Actors Guild) and George Arliss are really Jews and part of the vast international Jewish conspiracy in which Jacob Schiff was one of Lenin’s “right-hand men”! “About forty percent of the Brain Trust appointees” have “records for Communism.” General Hugh Johnson and President Roosevelt himself are really Communists in disguise, or at the very least the dupes of Jewish Communists.

Roosevelt the “Red”

In fact, it was the Jews and the Communists together–really the same thing, says Mr. Pelley–who caused the depression in the first place, for the specific purpose of manufacturing a condition where the president would have to seek a remedy, which they themselves then suggested, and which is known to us as the NRA! “We are against President Roosevelt because he is a tool of the Jew capitalist, and opposed to the NRA because it is the communistic product of Jewish thought,” said a spokesman for the Silver Shirts at a recent meeting in San Francisco. At this same meeting the “chaplain,” Frank T. Collins, brandished a huge rope whip, explaining that it was for use on “spies and newspapermen” who got by “the vigilantes at the door.”

When you have bought one of the new three-cent postage stamps, did you suspect that it carried insidious Communist propaganda? Ah, that shows how gullible you are, and how badly you need the enlightenment offered by the Silver Shirts! Look closely at that stamp–you will find “a Russian-type peasant woman, a starving Armenian business man, a Slavic farmer, and a Daily Worker mechanic”; worst of all, you will find “the business man as the only one out of step and [with] only one leg to stand on!” The exclamation point and the italics are Mr. Pelley’s.

This, of course, is only funny; but it is not so funny when he accuses the kidnapers of Mr. Urschel “out at the Western Headquarters City of the Silver Shirts,” of being Jews. The names which first occur to the ordinary person in thinking of that kidnaping are Kelly, Shannon, and Bailey; but the ordinary person would not therefore jump to the conclusion that kidnaping is an expression of an international plot on the part of the Irish!

Neither is it funny when the Silver Shirts inform us that “secret control of many of our great canning industries, particularly in the Far West, has been planned by alien enemy agents of America, so that ‘at the proper time’ fatal disease germs can be introduced into America’s canned foods and whole States of our population wiped out.” The cannery owners have, I think, grounds for suit on the basis of this libelous statement, which could cause enormous injury to their business.

Pelley’s imagination knows no bounds; he has conjured up another fearful spectre of “a plague germ worse than bubonic plague, which is said to paralyze and destroy every vestige of human and animal life with 100 percent fatality within four hours after exposure and infection.” This terrible disease, unknown to science, he asks us to “suppose” (note his clever avoidance of direct statement) to have been “perfected” and intensified in virulence by “Soviet specialists under GPU auspices” (apparently unaware that the GPU is concerned entirely with internal affairs in Russia), by means of “protracted experiments on helpless kulaks,” while all Communists at home and abroad have been “systematically immunized”! Then he goes on to hint that the outbreak of hoof and mouth disease in the Southwest a few years ago; the mysterious gas cloud which floated over northern France, Belgium, and England in 1931 (which was found to be due to accidental escape from industrial plants); and the sudden death of Dwight Morrow “after attending a Jewish banquet in the Commodore Hotel, New York City,” were all due to the machinations of those dreadful Jews and Communists combined!

Portrait of a Fascist Leader

The guiding spirit of the Ku Klux Klan was an ex-dentist. The moving force of the Silver Shirts is a former writer of lurid fiction for the “pulp magazines.” William Dudley Pelley was born in Massachusetts in 1885, the son of a Methodist minister, and spent most of his young manhood as editor and publisher of country newspapers in small towns in that state and Vermont. He was with the Y.M.C.A. in President Wilson’s unauthorized expedition to Siberia in 1917 and 1918. In 1929, to use his own words, he “cast aside his former occupation, that netted him $25,000 a year.” If Pelley made $25,000 a year by means of adventure stories and a few unnoted novels, he was a great deal luckier than most popular fiction writers, even during the boom era.

His next move was a curious one, and throws a strange sidelight on the whole Silver Shirt movement. He organized the League for the Liberation, whose “surface purpose was metaphysical research.” Pelley has always been interested in the metaphysical and the occult; he was editing the so-called Philosopher Magazine when he was only fifteen. The early numbers of Liberation are full of incoherent rhapsodies marked “psychically received.” They are less frequent now as the organization grows more prosperous and more aggressive; but there still appears a page of dithyrambs beginning “My Beloved,” and ending, cryptically, “PEACE,” which is accompanied by the following remarkable words:

“Out of the vastness of Cosmos, the Psychic Antennae tunes [sic] in a Voice. If the Word was made flesh and spake once to men, how much stronger may be its pronouncements when the handicaps of the flesh are perished? If we cannot believe this, to Whom or What shall we look for authority of commitments like the following?”

The answer probably is, to William Dudley Pelley, and the implication, of course, is that the “message” comes straight from heaven. In a little booklet he got out in the early days of the Silver Shirts, he stated unblushingly that “the cold, stark, irrefutable fact remains that true clairvoyants have looked into the imminent future and seen it actually in effect” (“it” being his “Christ Democracy,” his first name for the glorious state in which we shall find ourselves when the Silver Shirts have triumphed). In other words, his “Christian Protestantism” is strongly tinctured with spiritism.

This will antagonize some persons otherwise drawn to him; but let it not be thought that the Silver Shirts are to triumph by persuasion alone. No, this “strictly Protestant Christian Movement for the protection of the Christ people in this nation” believes very firmly in force and violence. Nordic Protestants over eighteen years of age and in good health, who are “not afraid to risk life and limb for their country,” are invited to join at a cost of five dollars a year for Liberation, ten dollars for the “complete outfit” of uniform, and whatever else they can spare to outfit less prosperous aspirants to membership. The chief feature of the uniform is the Silver Shirt “with the great scarlet ‘L’ emblazoned over your heart standing for Love, Loyalty, and Liberation.”

Silver-Shirted Cossacks

Just how much love, loyalty, and liberation are involved may be seen by the added information that “the Quartermasters Corps in Oklahoma City is primarily interested in outfitting the National Rangers [a subsidiary of the Silver Shirts for special appeal to the Southwest] for active service against the communistic adversary.” Anyone with a horse is especially invited to join the Rangers, and this invitation gives a grisly emphasis to the threat to “those who oppose us, who view us as un-American,” that “before we are finished we shall ride you down.”

“We leaders,” says Pelley, “are risking our lives to write a new page in American history…Within this coming year you are going to see the Silver Shirts loom large in the affairs of these United States. You will see their parades in the News Weeklies. You will hear about their activities at the National Capitol.” [Perhaps the first fulfilment of the prophecy is the diatribe against the “Brain Trust” by Dr. Wirt, of Gary, Indiana.]

Anti-Labor “Socialism”

For a while Pelley seemed to have snared at least one Congressman, in the person of Representative Louis McFadden of Pennsylvania, who appeared openly in Liberation. Whether McFadden contributed financially to the sudden rapid growth of the movement is a matter which only he and Pelley know. But certainly he gave the appearance of close affiliation with them; and I know of several instances in which admirers of McFadden’s policies joined the Silver Shirts on the strength of his articles. There is, of course, nothing unusual in this; in its heyday the Klan numbered many members of both houses and other high government officials among its supporters.

It is, in sober fact, a complete replica of the Nazi system, including even the semi-socialistic promises of Hitler’s pre-election speeches. It protests that it is not military, yet its literature abounds with such phrases as “the thunder of thousands of Silver Shirt horses,” “the open challenge of an organization of the New Vigilantes.” It speaks touchingly of its revival of “the great Christian forces of gentlemanliness and knighthood,” while it repeats every vicious lie of anti-Semitism even to adducing the forged “Protocol of the Elders of Zion,” for whose espousal Henry Ford once had to apologize publicly. It is aggressively militant, not only anti-radical but also anti-labor; it says truly, “here is a gesture that is already commanding the support of a growing company of affluent citizens.” (Italics mine.)

Though the Silver Shirts specialize in anti-Semitism and anti-Communism they neglect no one of the objects of hatred of the Ku Klux Klan. They fulminate about “morality” and “the destruction of the family”; they write in an incendiary strain about the Negroes; and they are intolerant to any group that is not “pure Nordic Protestant.” One Robert C. Summerville, writing in Liberation, informs us that “the Jewish system of high finance” “has created the ‘pink’ Socialistic Party and the ‘red’ Communistic Party. It ‘put over’ the NRA and its system of bureaucracies.” All this is shown by “the Unwritten History of the World,” which, since it is unwritten, it is not surprising that “the general public has not been permitted to study.”

Imagine the effect of this sort of balderdash, uttered in a tone of assured knowledge, on some harassed worker or farmer without political understanding who for four years has heard his children cry for food and who is looking, unconsciously, for some scapegoat on whom to load his burden of bitterness and despair, some outlet for his desperate need to do something and do it quickly!

FIGHT Against War and Fascism was the monthly newspaper of the broad-based, but Communist-inspired, American League Against War and Fascism formed in 1933 as Nazism came to power in Germany. The paper and the League attracted fairly wide support and hosted many events in the 1930s. In 1937, reflecting the Popular Front turn, the name of the group was changed to the American League for Peace and Democracy and the journal to The Fight for Peace and Democracy. Both the paper and the organization closed in the wake of 1939’s Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/fight/v1n07-may-1934.pdf