Who Was William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Legion?

In 1933, a former Hollywood screenwriter-turned-mystic named William Dudley Pelley made a startling public announcement. During a trance four years earlier, Pelley claimed, he had received some startling news from his spiritual contacts. The world was about to be plunged into economic chaos. From that crisis, an important new world leader would emerge. Pelley would know him by his former profession: The leader in question would previously have worked as a house painter. When that leader had obtained power, the prophecy concluded, Pelley was ordained to create his own so-called Christian Militia and make preparations to seize power in the United States. With the recent rise of former painter Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship of Germany, Pelley now announced, the time had come for him to make a play on the national stage through his new organization, the Silver Legion. Over the coming years, the Legion would become one of the most bizarre — and terrifying — groups looking to emulate Hitler’s Germany in the United States.

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William Dudley Pelley’s career had been fraught with controversy long before he founded the Silver Legion. 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. He came to the view that Christianity would need to change if it were to remain relevant in the modern world. Later he turned to fiction and a career in journalism. In 1918, he embarked on an ill-timed reporting assignment in China and India with his young wife, and they were soon stranded in Japan due to wartime travel restrictions.

Yet this soon yielded a life-changing opportunity for Pelley. In mid 1918, President Woodrow Wilson ordered thousands of American troops into Siberia to fight Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War — a part of American history we often forget about today. To aid these soldiers, the YMCA pledged to provide humanitarian assistance, and one of the group’s primary volunteer recruiting grounds was Japan. Pelley signed up, and found himself traveling across Siberian wilderness. Along the way he filed reports for the Associated Press. In the course of the war, Pelley developed a deep-seated hatred of Communism — and the Jews he increasingly thought were behind it — that would influence his later activities.

This was a man who could clearly command a fanatical following.

After the war, Pelley returned to the U.S. and embarked on a career in the burgeoning movie industry. In 1921 he sold one of his stories to a movie studio and, after divorcing his wife, moved to Hollywood. He would end up writing or assisting on nearly two dozen films, giving him a small fortune and access to all the fun Hollywood had to offer a young, recently-divorced man. Yet the excitement was short-lived. By 1927 Pelley fell into some kind of personal crisis. He left Hollywood, moved to a small house in Altadena, and began reevaluating his life. Around the same time, he began railing about Jews in the movie industry who he thought were mistreating him. In May 1928, Pelley reported having the first of his spiritual visions. After feeling as if he was being carried through some kind of a mist, Pelley recounted waking up on a marble slab next to two men who began revealing the secrets of the universe to him.  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 importantly, Pelley reported, the men told him that he would receive additional revelations in the future. The next day, Pelley said he felt better than he had in years and appeared physically younger to his friends. Over the coming months, Pelley reported having more visions and experimented with trendy spiritualist techniques including seances and automatic writing. In 1929, Pelley left California for New York and began writing about his experiences. A small circle of followers started coming to him for spiritual advice, and in due course he began publishing a journal that attracted more than 10,000 subscribers. The Hollywood screenwriter and journalist had now become a spiritual guru. 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.

It was perhaps little surprise that just a few years later Pelley announced that his spiritual sources had told him to prepare for political power. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Pelley upheld his side of the bargain and created the Silver Legion. Membership in the Legion was open to any person, male or female, over the age of 18, except for African Americans and Jews. The Legion’s anthem was The Battle Hymn of the Republic and its 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. 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. He also bestowed a new title on himself: “The Chief.”

The Silver Legion’s political platform was bizarre. Its main goal was to bring about what it called a “Christian Commonwealth” in the United States. This governmental system would not be fascist, communist, capitalist, or fit any other known political model. Instead it would be based on a system of “Christian economics” that Pelley himself had devised. All property would be held by the government, and every qualified citizen would be a stockholder in the state. Everyone would receive a guaranteed basic income of at least $1,000 per year and no property or money could be inherited between generations.

There was a deeply racist aspect of this as well. 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 from the economy entirely. 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, Pelley claimed, was necessary because there was a vast and international Jewish conspiracy responsible for every negative event in world history. He also claimed America’s Jews were the reason his ideas had not yet been implemented.

The Silver Legion’s political platform was bizarre. Its main goal was to bring about what it called a “Christian Commonwealth” in the United States.

These bizarre views attracted a surprising following. Pelley outlandishly 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. Most historians believe the number was smaller, around 15,000 at its peak. This was not a huge organization but it was still formidable in its local strongholds. Membership numbers were highest in Washington State, where membership peaked at around 1,600 people who were mostly located in the Seattle area.  Uniformed — and sometimes armed — Silver Shirts soon became a regular sight on the streets of the city.

What made the Legion even more threatening was its explicit embrace of lawlessness and violence. Pelley was once reported to be accompanied by a bodyguard of 40 Silver Shirts who carried pistols in shoulder holsters and vocally dared local law enforcement to “do anything about it.”  In 1938, a Silver Shirt leader told a Milwaukee reporter he was advising all members to keep sawed-off shotguns and 2,000 rounds of ammunition at home to help protect “White Christian America.” Pelley clearly had more than political campaigning in mind for his followers. His command over the Legion was so complete that even Fritz Kuhn — head of the German American Bund who we talked about in Part 1 of this miniseries — refused to have any official connection with the group because he feared Pelley would try to seize power over his own organization too. This was a man who could clearly command a fanatical following.

Throughout the 1930s, Legion members harassed Jewish shop owners, delivered anti-Semitic harangues, and made general nuisances of themselves across the country. In 1939, President Roosevelt even considered suing Pelley for libel after the Chief accused him of embezzling money he had raised for a children’s charity. The Attorney General sensibly advised Roosevelt that any lawsuit might allow Pelley to put the president on the witness stand, and that this wasn’t a great idea. Roosevelt wisely gave up on the idea. Despite his relatively small following, Pelley was garnering even the attention of the U.S. president. 

Pelley and his followers would be remembered as one of the most dangerous groups to align themselves with the Nazis.

As with Fritz Kuhn and the German American Bund, however, Pelley’s downfall would be brought about by his own corruption. As it turned out, back in 1934 Pelley had moved some money from his publishing operation in Asheville into the Silver Legion’s coffers. This was money Pelley had raised from investors, making the transaction illegal. Pelley was arrested and convicted in North Carolina, but released on parole in 1935． Over the coming years, though, Pelley basically ignored the terms of his parole and refused to return to North Carolina for hearings. In August 1939, he was also subpoenaed by the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities. Rather than comply, Pelley went on the run and taunted federal investigators with letters. In February 1940, he dramatically resurfaced in Washington, took questions from the committee, and managed to slip out of the city without being taken into custody. The Chief’s penchant for Hollywood drama remained remarkable, but his days were still numbered. With World War II underway in Europe, the U.S. government cracked down on the Silver Legion’s local chapters as potential hotbeds of subversion. In October 1941, Pelley finally gave himself up to North Carolina authorities and was sentenced to more than two years behind bars for violating his parole. He would later be indicted for sedition and end up spending the entire war behind bars.

Pelley and his Silver Legion were certainly among Hitler’s stranger American friends. What made The Chief and his followers so dangerous were their fanatical spiritualist beliefs and penchant for violence. While the Legion was never as large as the German American Bund or the America First Committee (which we’ll talk about in Part 5), Pelley’s followers instilled fear on the streets of American cities. In 1942, the British newspaper the Manchester Guardian referred to the Silver Legion as “the largest American fascist organization.” While the Chief would never come close to becoming the American Führer, he and his followers would be remembered as one of the most dangerous groups to align themselves with the Nazis.