PART FIVE
We will undermine the morale of the people of America. Once there is confusion and after we have succeeded in undermining the faith of the American people in their own government, a new group will take over; this will be the German-American group, and we will help them assume power.
—ADOLF HITLER, 1933
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
From the 1880s until the 1920s, Jews came to Minnesota directly from Europe, predominantly from Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus, the Galician sections of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Romania. But they also came, second-generation, from the Eastern cities of the United States, where overcrowding in the ghettos sent them fleeing a second time, leaving the urban soot for the breath of fresh air they hoped to find in “the Land of 10,000 Lakes.”
By 1937, there were 43,700 Jews living in Minnesota. The men worked with their hands. They made and repaired shoes, worked as carpenters, tailored clothes. They were bakers and grocers. Because of the strict kosher rules, many became butchers whom their Jewish neighbors could trust. The women, if they worked outside the home, were clerks at corner grocery stores or seamstresses in cruel, dimly lit factories.
Many jobs were not available to them, despite their education and experience. The big downtown department stores wouldn’t hire them. They couldn’t get a job in a bank—ironic in that anti-Semites thought Jews controlled all the money—or in any large manufacturing plant. They were expected to be a self-sufficient set outside the Christian world. They were to buy and sell from other Jews. Period.
They were routinely bullied on the streets in the usual fashion. In state politics, the most anti-Semitic candidate often received the most votes. As was true elsewhere, Minnesota Jews could not even turn on the radio without hearing that they were part of a communist conspiracy to overthrow the American way.
The Minnesota Jews felt anti-Semitism on every street and with every breath.
In the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, anti-Semitism had deeper roots than in many places in the country. The German American community there was large enough and hateful enough to support its own branch of the Silver Legion. As Minnesota Jews realized, having written down the license plate numbers of cars in the parking lots outside fascist meetings, it was the era of the “Nazi next door.”
The Jewish communities of the Twin Cities rose up in protest during the early 1930s and the rise of Hitler. They screamed about Hitler’s threat to Jews as a race and about the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that denied Jews many rights enjoyed by gentiles. There were marches in the streets, a boycott of German goods, and calls for the federal government to allow more Jews to emigrate from Europe.
“They will die if they remain in Europe,” the Jewish protesters yelled, largely into a vacuum.
The government did allow 250 extra Jews entry into the country, a drop in the sadly doomed bucket. The Jewish protesters received a more vigorous response from Minnesota’s German American communities.
The Nazis in that area wore silver shirts rather than brown shirts, but the hate was the same. And their meetings were no secret. There were full-page ads in the newspapers announcing the next get-togethers.
The local Nazi organization was the creation of one William Dudley Pelley, who was already an accomplished man in several fields before he became leader of the Silver Legion.
Pelley had a long face and long fingers that fluttered urgently when he spoke. He was a confidence man through and through, with a face that could break into a huge three-dollar-bill smile, using the weight of his artificial charm to lean on his multitude of marks. (Think John Huston in Chinatown.)
Born in New England to a Methodist minister and his wife, Pelley rebelled against his dad, and while still a teenager started his own magazine, The Philosopher, filled with iconoclastic and antireligious messages. The magazine didn’t last long, but Pelley stayed in the business, editing country newspapers in Vermont.
He switched to fiction and did much better, writing adventure stories with strong romantic angles. He grew into a novelist, most famous for The Fog (1921), from which a silent film was made in 1923, and Golden Rubbish (1929), about an abandoned girl who grows up to be a great Manhattan businesswoman. He won an O. Henry Prize for a short story called “The Face in the Window,” which ran in the May 1920 issue of Redbook magazine. In all, Pelley wrote sixteen scenarios for produced movies, from 1917 to 1929.
By the time America’s movie theaters were converted to talkies, Pelley had moved on to writing nonfiction about his bizarre conversations with the dead—and politics. He was a new man, a man who now only wrote mystical and spiritual prose, enlightened as if struck on the head with a divine hammer, not just a man of vision but also of visions, although we suspect his reported conversations with Jesus were merely part of his con-man pitch. Whatever they were, Pelley’s claims were nothing if not specific.
For instance, Pelley claimed that at 3:30 A.M. on May 28, 1928, while he was living in a suburb of L.A., he woke from a sound sleep and heard an urgent voice echoing, “I’m dying!” Overcoming a fear that he might be having cardiac arrest, his chest ready to explode, he said he felt something rolling over his skin, as if he’d fallen into a “mystic depth of cool blue.” He was naked and stretched out on a marble slab, like a sacrificial altar, and on either side of him were men who called themselves “Spiritual Mentors.” They told him he was a man of destiny, a man who would one day lead a “great spiritual movement.” For the rest of his life, Pelley claimed the Mentors were steering his every move.
“The Mentors told me to give up smoking, and the next time I picked up a can of tobacco, a mysterious force knocked it from my hand,” he said.
The claims evolved from the spiritual to the political. In 1929, he claimed he’d been “given a sign” that a man named Hitler was going to rise to power in Germany and that he himself would become the leader of Hitler’s movement in the United States.
Pelley worked on his appearance, tried to make it as iconic as possible, just in case his face one day replaced George Washington’s on the one dollar bill. He was always kempt and sported a perfect goatee with just the right amount of gray.
His eyes bright with zeal, he formed an organization that he called the Silver Legion, a “Christian organization” dedicated to politically and spiritually transforming the United States.
Fritz Kuhn of the German American Bund had met with Hitler and considered himself to be carrying out Hitler’s orders, but Hitler wanted nothing to do with Pelley. Perhaps he didn’t like the religious angle. Perhaps he suspected a rat. That was okay with Pelley. He told his followers that Christ himself approved of his anti-Jewish agenda, and why wouldn’t he? Wink wink wink.
Pelley did not openly praise Hitler or wave the Nazi flag as the Bund did. His message was more subliminal, mixing esoteric Christianity with far-right political activism and “anti-communism,” a code phrase for “anti-Jew.”
Though the Bund and the Silver Legion were separate organizations with separate leadership, there was evidence that they cooperated. If you went to a rally of one, chances were good that there would be someone at the site distributing propaganda printed by the other.
Pelley divided the United States into nine divisions and created a Silver Legion outpost in each. He organized a paramilitary band, “actionists” who were prepared for battle, and he called them his Silver Rangers. He didn’t want to be called Supreme Leader or Grand Imperial Poobah. A simple “Chief ” was fine.
His “army” wore uniforms that were called silver, but were in reality gray and blue, with a scarlet L embroidered over the left breast. The L stood for “Love, Loyalty, and Liberation.”
He took to calling the United States the “Jewnited States.” He wrote a book called No More Hunger: The Compact Plan of the Christian Commonwealth, which discussed the “permanent solution to the Jewish problem.” The solution was to round the Jews up and put them in “Beth havens,” like Indian reservations, and to pass a law that any Jew caught outside his or her haven would be shot. Pelley’s own uniform became increasingly militaristic, and he carried a holstered gun on his left hip.
Pelley’s complaint about the Jews was familiar: they controlled too much of the money. He preached of an America where he was in charge and the economy was completely in Christian control. All property, he said, would be state controlled, and it would be portioned out to white citizens in shares based on loyalty.
He founded a publishing company called Galahad Press and a small college in North Carolina where his supernatural treks and social theories were taught as fact. In 1933, he incorporated the Silver Legion.
The publishing business came back to bite him, not because of the extremist political message but because he was defrauding Galahad shareholders and got caught. He served a brief stint in prison and was released on parole.
He ran for president against Roosevelt in 1936 but was not very successful. He only managed to get on the ballot in one state: Washington. Come Election Day, he only received a smattering of votes. FDR, of course, won big.
Jews were inhabited by demons, he preached—feeling free to quote from deceased figures from history and the Bible who supported his views, quotes gathered during his now regular journeys along the astral plane.
History’s wisest people, he said, agreed that Christians of European ancestry were at the top of the heap, with Jews, Native Americans, and African Americans far below.
Pelley’s claims may have seemed ridiculous to critical thinkers—some said Pelley preached the things he did to mask his own feelings of inadequacy—but a frightening number of believers were all in.
A 1934 booklet distributed by the American Civil Liberties Union warned the Jewish community (and all people of good character) that it would be a mistake to take Pelley and his followers lightly: “Pelley is no fool, no accident. He is a clever manipulator of mobs with a distinct talent for popular appeal, and a purpose so single and violent that it carries a conviction of sincerity.”
Pelley, the article said, liked to frame his organization as a grouping of Mayflower families, old Protestant Americans, old money, and old and pure culture, but the truth was his gatherings were mean-spirited, wild-eyed, and to any Jewish citizen of Minnesota, terrifying.
He told crowds that the Nazi movement in Europe had begun when one sign painter had climbed up on a barrel and gave a speech. If it could happen in Germany, it could happen in America.
Estimates of how many Silver Shirters there were in the country varied from 75,000 to 2 million. Today, experts say there were about 15,000, with another 100,000 who sympathized with the cause. Many of them were in Minnesota. There was a group of students at the University of Minnesota in 1934 that called itself Swastika.
No matter the number, Minnesota Jews agreed that something needed to be done. Pelley needed to be opposed. At first, the efforts were legal and legit. The Minnesota mainstream press was anti-Silver Shirt, and their ranks were best represented by a young journalist named Arnold Eric Sevareid, who wrote a six-part exposé in September 1936 for the Minneapolis Journal in which he laid bare Minnesota’s pro-fascist climate.
This is the same Eric Sevareid who would become a top reporter and commentator for CBS News, the same man who editorialized on November 22, 1963, that President John F. Kennedy had been murdered by the city of Dallas, a metropolis he called the “City of Hate.”
For his 1936 six-parter, Sevareid went undercover, and he wrote, “The experience was like Alice going down the rabbit hole into the world of the Mad Hatter. I spent hair-raising evenings in the parlors of middle-class citizens who worshipped a man named William Dudley Pelley.”
After his exposé was published, Sevareid had to deal with death threats from those same middle-class worshippers.
In New York City, Judge Perlman understood that Pelley’s troops, like the Bund storm troopers, needed a punch in the mouth. Once again, that punch would have to come from the Jewish underworld, in this case a crew of gangsters led by David “Davey the Jew” Berman.