CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
One day, the phone rang in Davey Berman’s gambling HQ in the Hotel Radisson, and for once it wasn’t a degenerate betting the Minneapolis Millers versus St. Paul Saints game out at Nicollet Park. Rather, it was one of Berman’s spies with news that the Silver Shirts were meeting that evening at eight o’clock at the Elks Lodge.
Berman contacted his fighting crew and told them to meet at the Radisson at 7:00 P.M. Once they had assembled, Davey distributed the tools of his trade—knucks, bats, sawed-off pool cues.
“Put on the knucks, boys,” Berman said. “Hit ’em right in their stupid little toothbrush mustaches.”
Berman’s crew was twelve strong, a baker’s dozen counting Davey himself.
The gang drove in three cars to the Elks Lodge and assembled near the front door. The meeting was underway, and there was a Silver Shirt at the podium delivering a speech about “the Jew bastards in this city.”
Taking that as their cue, Berman’s gang invaded the meeting. For ten long minutes, they busted Nazi heads. By the time the beatdown was over, all of the Nazis were either on the floor or had managed to find a way out of the building.
Berman went to the podium, his suit spotted with Nazi blood, and delivered a speech of his own to the wounded in the room: “This is a warning. Anybody who says anything against Jews gets the same treatment, and next time it will be worse. Tell your pal Hitler that it is dangerous being an anti-Semite in Minneapolis!”
Berman pulled his gun and fired a single shot into the ceiling.
In 1992, Minnesota Public Radio presented a documentary about the anti-Semitism in Minneapolis during the Depression. On that program, a Minneapolis attorney named Joe Bard talked about the physical campaign to combat the Silver Legion.
Bard had joined a small group of “Jewish businessmen and professionals” to take on the Nazis. He was on a need-to-know basis and didn’t know if these brawls were one and the same as Davey Berman’s battles, but we can assume they were. All he remembered was that they called themselves the Twenty Club. Bard and the men gathered and plotted strategy as to how to best disrupt a meeting.
Bard recalled being handed a set of brass knuckles and not knowing what they were.
“Put ’em on your hand, like this, punch a guy, break his jaw,” some guy, maybe it was Chickie Berman, explained to him.
One tough guy waved off the brass knuckles, explaining that he preferred holding a roll of nickels in his fist. Asked why, he said, “Get caught with knucks, and they know you want to hurt somebody. Get caught with nickels, you say you just need to make a few phone calls.”
Bard looked around and saw the men he was with in a new light. These were very special businessmen, indeed, the type who were familiar with the Law and knew how to get around it.
Bard was impressed with the demeanor of the operations. They were executed with patience. Nothing was impulsive. The Twenty Club always worked out a plan with tactics and strategy. They learned techniques, like a military unit getting ready to undergo a suicide mission behind enemy lines. Think The Dirty Dozen, with some Yiddish thrown in.
There were Nazi-busting vets in the group, but for Bard his first action came when the crew broke up a Silver Shirt meeting in a hall on Minneapolis’s Lake Street. The hall had an auditorium that sat around three hundred in varnished wooden chairs.
“We wore uniforms of a sort,” Bard recalled, dark shirts with what they called “Mogen Davids” painted on the front—that is, Stars of David. These were men of steel onions. It was courageous to wear a Mogen David in mixed company.
The SS meeting was underway when they arrived, and they charged in with a whooping battle cry.
“Let’s crack some skulls, boys,” Bard recalled shouting.
According to Bard, the Twenty Club busted up three Silver Shirt meetings with great success, but the activity never made it into the newspapers nor was it ever mentioned in any subsequent Silver Shirt propaganda. After that, there were no more Nazi rallies in Minneapolis. The cops had been paid off, and none of the brawls resulted in arrests.
From the end of the Twenty Club’s campaign until Pearl Harbor, the war against the Minnesota fascists took place above ground. In July of 1939, the Anti-Defamation Council was officially incorporated and renamed the Minnesota Jewish Council. The new executive director was Samuel L. Scheiner. He had operatives throughout Minneapolis, and he was a hard man to keep a secret from.
In office only for weeks, Scheiner wrote to the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago, telling it that he had tentatively identified the Minneapolis distributor of the Silver Shirt pamphlets. His operatives, Scheiner wrote, had determined that a United States postal worker was assisting in distribution, so folks received their Silver Shirt pamphlet with the rest of their mail. Not only was the piggybacking technique cheap, but it also lent credence to the material because it was seemingly coming from an official department of the federal government.
This artificial seal of approval was only the outer layer of the deception. The pamphlets would sometimes come with a Star of David on the cover and claim to be from a real Jewish organization, the Committee for Relief of Jewish Refugees, for example.
The phony pamphlets were found throughout Minneapolis. There was even a Nazi distributing them outside the city’s downtown courthouse. Pretending to come direct from the horse’s mouth, the pamphlets discussed how a European Jewish refugee resettlement was part of a massive Jewish conspiracy to take over the United States.
The pamphlets urged Jews not to shop in gentile stores and said that prohibition had only been repealed so that Jews could control the booze business. The pamphlet was careful to name as many names as possible, names of prominent members of the Minnesota Jewish community, linking them to the insidious conspiracy.
In his letter to Chicago, Scheiner gave his opinion that the anti-Semites had left themselves vulnerable by distributing the ersatz pamphlet: “This is the first opportunity we have had to invoke the criminal statutes against the leaders of this organization and if possible we do not want to ‘muff the ball.’ ” It was important that matters be handled judiciously and cautiously. If the printer could identify the person who purchased the pamphlets, that suspect could be charged for libel, forgery, and conspiracy to commit and utter a forgery and libelous statements.
In less than a week, Scheiner received key intelligence from an informant named Albert Cyr. The distributor of the vile material was T. G. Wooster, whose name had appeared on a variety of Silver Shirt documents and pamphlets since 1936. Analysis had indicated that Wooster was a passive and insignificant Silver Shirter, but now he would need to be viewed differently.
Cyr was willing to testify under oath that Wooster had bragged about his basement publishing business and the grand cause it served. He showed Cyr that he was in possession of five hundred copies of one pamphlet. Wooster, as he bragged, ended up revealing more about the distribution system than perhaps was smart. He talked about the ingenious system he had for getting the propaganda to the people of the Twin Cities. He said that he had a team of women who delivered daily newspapers to private homes in Minneapolis and St. Paul. They would insert the Silver Shirt pamphlet inside each newspaper before delivering it. Not only did it get the pamphlets out there, but the system also gave the material a subliminal stamp of journalistic integrity from the legitimate newsprint it came with.
“I’d like to help you distribute your pamphlets,” Cyr had said to Wooster enthusiastically.
“That’ll be great. I’ll print some up for you,” Wooster replied.
Cyr said he would return later in the day. When Cyr did return, he brought his landlord with him, a man named George R. Blaisdell, himself a Silver Shirter. Neither Blaisdell nor Wooster knew that Cyr was working undercover for the Minnesota Jewish Council. In fact, Cyr had rented a room from Blaisdell just to get close to him.
Cyr had already reported once on Blaisdell, after seeing his landlord’s eleven-year-old son putting Nazi propaganda on the windshields of cars in a church parking lot during services.
Cyr’s testimony before a grand jury was key to having Blaisdell, Wooster, and a third man brought up on libel and forgery charges. Scheiner made sure that Blaisdell’s indictment read that the material he was distributing was “likely to create violence and a breach of the peace.”
Blaisdell, who by now really regretted ever renting a room to Cyr, had his day in court, Minneapolis Municipal Court Judge William C. Larson presiding, where he was convicted of disorderly conduct and sentenced to one month in the workhouse.
Judge Larson said to Blaisdell, “There can be no more potent breeder of public disorder, than a deliberate stirring up of class against class, and race against race. This undermines the patriotic unity of our nation, and is in direct opposition to that tolerance of race and religion which our constitution provides for, and which is a distinguishing feature of the fundamental law of our land, one of its great cornerstones essential to the peace and safety of any community.”
The judge’s words were of historical importance, as they didn’t follow the company line that hate speech was protected by the freedom of speech. The American Jewish World periodical, which sounded national but was actually local, praised Larson for being able to see what other judges in Minnesota could not, the “light behind the sound.” Larson had merely uttered a simple truth, that hate speech was equivalent to inciting a riot, and the World commented, “No matter what legalistic appeals or decisions may follow this ruling, no one can reverse its moral soundness.”
The ruling put a major crimp in the Minnesota Nazi movement. Their written materials had been determined to be more than just offensive to civilized sensibilities. Now they were illegal as well.
The Silver Shirts were forced even further underground. A few of them went to jail, based on investigations that began when the subject’s name showed up on a list found in Pelley’s files.
Not everyone who went to church was a jaw-clenched anti-Semite, of course, and Scheiner pleaded with the clergy to report Nazis in their midst, especially the evangelical fascists seeking to convert others to their way of thinking. There is written evidence that this system worked and that it rooted out some Nazis.
“I heard the guy reciting Silver Shirt propaganda,” an informant reported, regarding one of Pelley’s men. The subject, it turned out, was a friend of Reverend C. O. Stadsklev, an evangelical minister known for anti-Semitic sermons. The guy was tossed out of the informant’s church and told to go peddle his hate elsewhere.
The anti-Semitic clergyman with the most power was still Father Coughlin because of his syndicated radio network. In 1939, the US House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Texas Representative Martin Dies Jr., while choosing targets, debated internally and decided to ignore Father Coughlin, whose activities were obviously un-American.
Dies explained the decision, saying it was dangerous giving subpoenas to clergymen because it could be construed as antireligion. Instead, he set the committee’s sights on William Dudley Pelley, who wanted to be thought of as a religious figure but in reality wasn’t.
To avoid a public grilling in Washington, DC, Pelley went into hiding, reportedly in Indiana and holed up with some Ku Klux Klan pals. He wiggled out of the jam by telling his followers that the Dies Committee was doing such a great job of rooting out commies that the Silver Legion was no longer necessary and that his members were free to go. That didn’t end his legal problems, however. He was found, convicted of sedition regarding the contents of a magazine he’d published, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
The Congress might’ve maintained a hands-off policy regarding Father Coughlin, but not so the FBI. The Christian Front, an organization that Coughlin founded, was busted in New York attempting to, as the feds put it, “overthrow the Government of the United States.” The raid, which took place in Brooklyn, revealed that a cell of the Front was gathering weapons and ammunition while making plans to blow up bridges and power plants.
Coughlin responded by saying he had nothing to do with that organization anymore, an absurd notion that the FBI seemed to swallow whole. Coughlin might’ve gotten away with it if he hadn’t gone on the radio the following Sunday afternoon and pledged his allegiance to the Brooklyn conspirators. His ass was saved by the fact that the Christian Fronters were released for lack of evidence, acquitted by juries, or slogged through mistrials, with their charges eventually dropped. Unaware of how things were going to go, one Christian Fronter committed suicide.
In 1940, Scheiner received word that there was an outbreak of anti-Semitic materials under windshield wipers in one Minneapolis neighborhood. The local Catholic priest in that neighborhood was contacted, and he reported to Scheiner that there was a branch of the Christian Front in the neighborhood and they were growing more popular by the day.
Scheiner was a hated man. The Nazis saw him as enemy number one. Their revenge was both pathetic and terrifying. When Scheiner attempted to buy a home in a largely gentile neighborhood, St. Louis Park, he received anonymous phone calls telling him to stick to his own kind, that moving into the Christian neighborhood would be a big mistake.
Crank phone calls. It was the last gasp of a Minnesota Nazi movement that had envisioned world domination.