WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY
Father of American Racial Mysticism
by A.V. Schaeffenberg
In his prophetic novel, 1984, George Orwell envisioned the kind of
society the world is rapidly becoming. A motto of that "future" time
was, "Who controls the present, controls the past, who controls the past,
controls the future." Part of that mind-control was assisted by the Memory
Hold. It was an incinerator into which where thrown any pieces of information
about the past which were considered damaging to the Big Brother System. To
demonstrate how close the Establishment in our country resembles that of 1984,
we present the story of William Dudley Pelley. Although the leader of a
mass-movement that commanded headlines throughout the decade of the 1930s, his
name is totally unknown today, except to a handful of researchers. Outside of
infrequent, fleeting references to him in a few histories of the Depression
Era, there are no books about his dramatic life; not even any newspaper or
magazine articles. His photograph cannot be found outside the pages of The New
Order, nor any photographs of his tens of thousands of followers, even though
both his image and theirs dominated newsreels and publications of the time. His
speeches are unobtainable even though they were heard by millions, sometimes
over national-wide radio broadcasts. He attracted the friendship of legendary
heroes like Charles Lindbergh and the hatred of legendary scoundrels like
Franklin Roosevelt. Sinclair Lewis wrote a full length novel, It Can't Happen
Here, based on his life. Along with the works of Theodore Dreiser, H.L.
Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other luminaries of the 1920s, his books
entered college curricula in the forefront of modern American literature. Yet,
no college course in Great Books today features any of his titles. He was one
of the most important creators of the silent film, the author of such classic
screen plays as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Despite the man's undeniable
impact on his times, his name has been thoroughly expunged from contemporary
history, his books (worse than banned or burned) unpublished, his political
achievements consigned to oblivion.
In trying to research the material for this article, after months of
investigation, I learned that his only biography was written eighteen years
ago, an obscure university thesis by a hostile postgraduate student. Some
scattered fragments of additional data came from xeroxes of Pelley's own
moldering publications, via dusty library archives. Everything about him has
been tossed into a genuine Memory Hole, no less thorough in its destruction but
far more real then Orwell's model. The Big Brother who blots out all
information about William Dudley Pelley is the same controller of the past who
makes sure there are plenty of school books and pseudo-documentaries for
television and the movies extolling the "greatness" of Marin Luther
King, Jr. or Malcolm X. What could Pelley have done that so struck to the heart
of the System, that ignited such a complete effort to erase all knowledge of
his existence from American consciousness?
Horror in
William Dudley Pelley was born in
By the end of the First World War, Pelley's prestige was such that his
publisher commissioned him as a foreign correspondent on assignment in
For two years, he covered 8,000 miles by train and horse-back through
He learned first-hand that communism was not an ideology, it was simply
the organization of the worst criminal elements led by Jews to destroy society.
This was no speculation. Virtually all the commissars he knew (some of whom he
interviewed) where Jewish, while the majority of their activists where common
murderers and perverts "liberated" from prison. They were motivated
by hatred, power and revenge, nothing else. All their slogans about
"Equality" and "Peace" where transparent rues to dupe
thoughtless liberals among the Russian people, their victims. Drunk with
success, the Jews boasted openly of their plans for world conquest by fomenting
the same kind of divisiveness in other countries. They told Pelley that
"Hooray for
Before his political awakening overseas, he knew nothing about Jews, never
heard them discussed at home while growing up and, at most, thought of them
only as members of a non-Christian religion. Returning to the United States a
changed and shaken man, Pelley made his report to Representative Louis F.
McFadden of Pennsylvania in 1920. The politician was so alarmed at what he
heard, he personally read aloud the Protocols for the Learned Elders of Zion on
the floor of Congress, officially introducing this vitally important document
into the Congressional Record. (The Protocols represent an agenda for bringing
Jewish leaders into positions of political and economic dominance over society.
Predictably condemned as forges by hysterical Jews, the Protocols where
verified as recently as 1982, when Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln's book about the
Grail legend, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, established their historical roots.) Soon
after, Pelley was introduced to a Justice Department official and Robert Sharp,
chief of State Department intelligence. They told him his experiences where
entirely born out of their abundant files on Jewish agitation in Russia and the
United States. That these politicians where so outspoken is a revealing
indication of how much political power the Jews have accumulated in the last 75
years; It is today completely unthinkable that any American politician would
even hint at criticizing the 'Jewish menace'.
There seemed to be nothing that could halt the "historical
inevitability" of the utopian one-world promised by Karl Marx. Pelley went
back to his home in Vermont and tried to forget both the "bath of
horror" he knew was slowly enveloping civilization. He felt restless and
frustrated and became unlivable, so much so, he and his wife divorced. These
were the Roaring Twenties, when Americans were caught up in the hedonism of
postwar prosperity. People lived for pleasure and let serious problems take
care of themselves. Pelley, too, was not immune from the spirit of his times.
Trying to escape from his own conscience, he fled to Hollywood, California,
where his reputation as an author preceded him, and he was hired as a screen
writer at M.G.M. and Universal Studios. He worked furiously, turning out
scripts for the leading motion pictures of the day. He even scripted a film
version of his own short story, The Shock, which was an instant hit. His work
was of such high calibre, he soon became one of the most respected and highest
paid writers in Hollywood. In the words of this biographer, his esteemed screen
plays for the leading actor of the silent screen "helped to establish Lon
Chaney's reputation and forged a friendship between the two men. In addition to
Chaney, he claimed 'constant entree' into the homes of Theda Bara, Chester
Conklin and other famous actors, producers and directors."
Busy as he was with living it up in Hollywood high society, Pelley found
time to write novels which catapulted his name into the highest levels of
contemporary American fiction. Both The Greater Glory (extolling the simple
values of life in a small New England town) and The Fog (a love story) were
best sellers and critically acclaimed. He was favorably compared to F. Scott
Fitzgerald and regarded as at least the equal to Sinclair Lewis. But money and
acclaim did not bring him inner peace. Ironically, he originally fled the
realities of the East Coast for the fantasy mills of Hollywood, only to find
himself in the midst of a largely Jewish movie industry that was perverting the
art of film into commercial propaganda, which "benumbed, anesthetized and
generally bilked" audiences. "White we concentrated on
creativity," he said, "furriers from Second Avenue and pants-pressers
from Milwaukee began to open studios to photograph canned dramas." He felt
inwardly ashamed to have anything to do with the Hollywood illusion, as he was
witnessing a shadow fall across his own country, just as it had in Russia.
At the height of his career's success and his emotional turmoil, on May
29th, 1928, he was suddenly and unexpectedly confronted by a deeply moving
personal experience. He wrote about it in My Seven Minutes in Eternity, which
sold 90,000 copies. Before 1930, he received more than 20,000 letters from his
readers. Despite the pamphlet's phenomenal success, the author revealed few
details concerning his experience, beyond his insistence that synchronous
events of personally significant "coincidences" are occurrences in
everyone's life that connect us to some Divine Plan. Never before a religious
man, Pelley was no St. Paul struck off his horse by God's holy lightning. Whatever
happened to him, it appears to have been not unlike the vision of a young
Hitler had of his life when, as a 15 year-old student in Linz, Austria,
something in a performance of Wagner's music showed him a glimpse of his future
mission. Such personally significant happenings are not at all that rare, but
usually occur to revolutionary personalities of a high order. In any case,
Pelley saw that he was wasting his time in "the necromancy of making
movies" that where becoming more materialistic, and determined to devote
the rest of his life doing meaningful work, whatever that turned out to be. He
was ready for greatness, he felt, but lacked any sense of direction.
Most of all, he wanted to do something worthwhile for his race and
Western culture. He was not unaware of the National Socialist Revolution going
on in Germany, but he thought it could not possibly triumph over the enormous
power of Jewry. He remembered how the slimy commissar in Russia had prophesized
that Europe was to be the next victim. He studied Mein Kampf and wondered if
the principles so clearly laid out therein could be applied in the United
States. It seemed too good to be true. Next year, the sham prosperity of the
1920s collapsed with the Great Depression. The United States went bankrupt and
its people knew real fear for the first time. As millions of bitterly
disillusioned Americans allowed themselves to be suckered in by a burgeoning
communist movement and the transparent promises of the 'New Deal' esposed by
Franklin Roosevelt, Pelley was horrified to recognize the same pattern of
mass-upheaval he witnessed in Russia being replayed in his own country.
The Birth of the Silver Legion
When, however, Adolf Hitler was elected to power on January 30th, 1933, Pelley
was thunderstruck. The impossible had happened. At least somewhere in the
world, the people had pulled themselves together in the cause of their national
existance. The omnipotent Jews where defeated after all. If idealistic men
could win power in Germany, the same could be accomplished here. The very next
day, Pelley founded the Silver Legion, regarded by most historians as the first
genuine Fascist organization in the United States. True, the roots of the
German-American Bund went back ten years earlier. But it was essentially a
fraternal group with no political goals save, much later, preserving peace
between America and Germany. The Silver Legion began as something altogether
different. From its inception, its thrust was the attainment of political
power, to someday become the U.S. government and establish a state based on the
fundamentals of Fascism. More important even than these obvious political and
philosophical goals, a new spirit, the dynamic will of people committed to
social justice would be summoned to inspire Americans as never before.
From the outset, however, Pelley was faced with a serious dilemma: While
he wanted to clearly identify his organization as Fascist, he was anxious to
make it appear as American as possible. Although he admired the Swastika symbol
and understood its significance, he knew too, that it was the official emblem
of a foreign power. He did not wish to create the impression that he was the
agent of another country. Instead , he chose the letter "L" as the
symbol of his new organization. It was simple to reproduce under a variety of
circumstances and stood for Loyalty to the American Republic, Liberation from
materialism and, of course, the Silver Legion itself. He personally designed
its flag, a square, white standard emblazoned with a capital L in scarlet. For
the next nine years, it was to be seen by millions of Americans, carried into
vicious street battles and hoisted over every state in the Union.
But in the beginning, beyond creating its first symbol, Pelley really
did not know where or how to start. At last, he fell back on his writing skills
and published a tabloid newspaper, Liberation, at his own expense. It created a
sensation, becoming virtually an overnight success by attracting not only
numerous financial supporters, but expressive writers like himself and first a
dozen or so, then hundreds of unemployed men anxious to sell the publication
from street corners. In decadent big cities like New York or Washington, D.C.,
these early activists were attacked by mobs, aggitated by the communists, so the
same enemy that made Hitler's Stormtroopers necessary were likewise responsible
for the Silver Shirts coming into being. Pelley's choice of the name was an
obvious reference to the German SS., but their presence at newspaper sales and
public speeches was not less vital. The members of the Silver Shirts where by
no means armchair revolutionaries, but tough street fighters. In a short period
of time the Silver Shirts became the Silver Legion. The vast majority of
Legionnaires where factory and office workers, or students attending high
school or college. Many where also ex-serviceman, betrayed veterans of the
phony "War to End All Wars". They saw through the capitalist nature
of the Depression and regarded F.D.R. as the most dangerous president ever
foisted on the country. Most of all, they wanted to sweep aside the
liberal-capitalist-democratic System and build in its place a free republic of
altruistic citizens deeply conscious of their heritage and committed to social
justice. To achieve that goal, they strove to build a real political movement
aimed seriously at putting their leaders in office through legal,
constitutional means.
Their uniforms consisted of a cap identical to those worn by German
Stormtroopers, blue corduroy trousers, leggings, tie and silver shirt with a
red "L" over the heart. To offset their European appearance the
Silver Shirts never failed to fly the Stars and Stripes side by side with the
Legion flag, and their official anthem was a pro-American text set to the
famous Civil War march, the Battle Hymn of the Republic. "Silver
symbolizes the purity of our fight", Pelley announced, "and the
purity of our Ideals!" This began what he referred to as "The Great
Marathon", conjuring images of the Thermopylae - "the ultimate
contest for existance between enlightened mankind and materialism."
By the end of 1933, the Legion's growth was nothing less than
extraordinary. Units were springing up all across the country, as Pelley found
that he spoke as eloquently as he could write. By 1936, he was a nationally-known
public figure, who had already addressed hundreds of thousands of farmers,
students, housewives and, most usually, unemployed people all across the
country. As he described once in Liberation, "Men in the little towns are
suddenly galvanized by the piercing sound of the Silver Bugles (the name of a
Silver Legion drum and bugle corps). They crane their necks up from ledgers and
lathes. Rippling flags go past foggy windows where they've viewed the world
with increasing sullenness during this highly successful capitalist Depression.
They deploy upon the sidewalks and behold the finest specimens of American
manhood doing something to relieve mass resentment. They want to play their
parts." Like the growing Legion of his followers, being a Fascist
activist, he felt "part of the very essence and figure of my country's
current history." His message was the simple truth: "Capitalist
democracy has failed, but out of its putrid remains is struggling to be born
the monstrous offspring, communism. The Russian people failed to crush that
monster in its womb and suffered terribly. I know, I saw it happen. The same is
happening here. It is not a struggle for capitalism or communism, but between
spiritual values and materialism."
Silver Shirts on the March!
Pelley's organization of the Silver Legion was unique. Although there were
permanent barracks for Silver Shirt training and local units flourished in most
states and in every region of the United States, there was no central
headquarters building. Instead, the Chief, as he was popularly known to his
followers, ran the Legion from his Ford touring car. He never stayed any place
more than a few weeks, at most, but was constantly on the move, traveling from
one headquarters to another, staging outdoor rallies and mass-meetings along
the way. Actually he went through several cars per year, because he was driven
an astounding 20,000 miles annually. Wherever he happened to be visiting at the
time was the national headquarters from which he made all his phone calls to
other headquarters. This extremely mobile leadership tied the various
headquarters very closely together and gave Pelley a tremendous understanding
of Americans at all levels, in all parts of the country, while making him a
personally known statesman to millions of people.
His plan for achieving power was open and direct: First, he would
acquaint his follow citizens with the Silver Legion program. Then he would
enter the next presidential race in one state only for the experience he and
his activists needed to understand practical politics. With that real-life
training, he would make a serious bid for the 1940 national election.
Accordingly, his support was so widespread in Washington State that his name
was placed on the presidential ballot, thanks to the hard, door-to-door
campaigning work of the Silver Shirts, who collected thousands of signatures on
their circulating petitions. (Here, my research draws a blank, as I was unable
to locate any sources describing the voter response he won. I conclude it must
have been significant, for reasons which will soon by made clear.)
F.D.R.'s reinstatement as president brought closer the "conflict
between the Light and Dark forces on earth" - a prophesy of the coming war
against the Germany made by Pelley in his first national radio speech. His
election bid increased Silver Legion membership three-fold and win some
important figures, including George van Horn Moseley, a retired general in the
U.S. Army, Congressional Representative Jacob Thorkelson, Charles A. Lindbergh,
Jr., and Walt Disney. All of them attended his public rallies and some shared
the podium with the Chief. He was confident that, with this kind of high-level
support and the obvious acceptance of millions of average Americans, the Silver
Legion had a great destiny before it. As his biographer wrote, "Pelley
looked forward to a World Alliance, centered in a Fascist Washington and made
secure at either end in Berlin and Tokyo. As long as China tottered on the
verge of becoming Stalin's satellite, the Japanese armies in Manchuria defended
civilization against the insidious serpent of communism." Having lived in
Japan for some time, Pelley came to deeply respect the Japanese as the bulwark
in the Far East against the Soviet Union. He was therefore appalled at
Roosevelt's attempts at goading Japan into a catastrophic war that would leave
the door wide open to Communist expansion into Asia. The Chief proved all too
prophetic here too, as the crippled American veterans of Korea and Viet Nam can
attest.
As the 1940 presidential election approached, the Silver Shirts, now
100,000 strong (House Committee, on "Un-American" Activities, Special
Committee, 1939), where being taken very seriously by F.D.R. who recognized
Pelley as a deadly serious contender; the Chief might not actually get into the
White House, but he could control enough votes to swing the election away from
the democrats. Roosevelt's popularity already waning, he could not risk his
reelection and ordered the F.B.I. to "investigate" Pelley. Attorney General
Frank Murphy balked at the obvious political persecution and made excuses to
the President, telling him it would be a mistake to make "martyrs out of
the Silver Shirts". Martyrs, schmartyrs - democratic incumbency was at
stake, so he ordered what Pelley referred to as his "Gentile satraps"
to make life miserable for the Silver Shirts. Their North Carolina unit (the
legion's largest headquarters and the closest thing they had to a national
office) was raided by federal marshals, its properties, including printing
presses, confiscated, its residents arrested and jailed on a variety of
contrived charges, all of which were dismissed but only after long months of
financially draining court proceedings. Even so, none of the confiscated
materials, as well as the legally owned building itself, were returned to the
impoverished Silver Shirts; they were told by the smiling judge that they had
the right to sue the government for damages.
Hard on the heels of the North Carolina raid, Congressman Dickstein (New
York) called for a national ban on public display of the Silver Shirt uniform.
The Chief was quick to respond: "Any kike who thinks he can tell me what
kind of shirt I can wear, or that I can't war a scarlet L on it, will get a
punch in his nose that he'll remember until he lands in Abraham's bosom!"
As even his unsympathetic biographer admits, "Pelley had grounds to
believe that he was being harassed."
The harassment accelerated and he was charged with tax evasion. Although
he beat that politically motivated charge, the great expense and time needed to
defend himself from impending imprisonment sabotaged his 1940 campaign. By that
time (November), U.S. involvement in the widening conflict against Germany
seemed virtually inevitable. Accordingly, Pelley changed the direction of the
Legion from running for elective office to opposing the Roosevelt and his
liberal warmongers. The Silver Shirts joined up with the German-American Bund,
the Ku Klux Klan and numerous other patriotic organizations, large and small, united
in mobilizing mass-opposition for peace. Here too, the Chief proved his power
to win over millions, as national poles taken only a week before Pearl Harbor
showed that more than three quarters of the American people were against war
with the Axis unless the United States was physically attacked. How Roosevelt
engineered that prerequisite, well-documented by modern scholars, is too
complex for retelling here. After America finally entered the war, Pelley was
heartbroken at what he saw as his country slid into the abyss. His life's work
of the past nine years, all the wonderful success of the Silver Shirt
organization and its enthusiastic grass-root support, seemed in vain. He
dissolved the Legion, even its newspaper; what else could he do? He was remarried
in 1935, but spent little time with his new wife, by whom he had a daughter.
Close to despair, Pelley joined them in the small town of Nobelsville, Indiana,
where he wanted to forget the world he had tried to save. His years of
self-sacrifice seemed "a thankless job, striving to bring a vision to
humankind, as humankind is constituted." But his wife, Helen, and some of
his closest comrades urged him to continue, not to give up, in spite of the
worst that had happened. Somewhat encouraged, he wanted personal assurance from
the new Attorney General Biddle that he would be allowed to publish his views
so long as he not undermine the war effort. Biddle gave him his word of honor
that Pelley could publish without fear of restraint. Even though the country was
at war, the right of free expression was constitutionally guaranteed.
A Pro-Hitler Roll Call in Wartime America
In the midst of wartime hysteria sweeping the nation, he launched a new
magazine, Roll Call. It was uncompromisingly Fascist, its famous editor and
Silver Shirt writers unapologetic. They documented the prewar oil embargo
Roosevelt imposed on the Japanese, forcing them to witness the strangulation of
their economy or risk a war to free themselves from U.S. domination. F.D.R.
wanted war to save his own faltering "New Deal" economy by the kind
of mass-production only wartime industry could provide. The Reds wanted war to
save the moribund Soviet slave-empire from Hitler's armies. The liberals wanted
war to preserve the capitalist/communist shell game they imposed so
successfully on Gentile people throughout the world. Worst of all, in
prosecuting war on the Fascist Forces of Light, duped Americans were making it
possible for the same forces of internal decay that rotted German society
before Hitler cleaned them up to take root in our own country.
Pelley sent pre-publication review copes to the Attorney General's
office for government approval. Biddle could afford to appear magnanimous,
confident as he was that the last of the Silver Legion would be hoisted on its
own by the war-hysteria of "patriotic" Americans. But he was
flabbergasted to learn that Roll Call was incredibly successful! Far from the
popular hostility he counted on to overwhelm Pelley, the feisty little
publication was turning up everywhere. And people were openly agreeing with its
notorious editor. Most serious of all, "many copies were found amoung U.S.
servicemen in all theaters of the war," according to Pelley's biographer.
Into March, 1942, print runs first doubled, then quadrupled. In the space of
probably no more than five weeks, Roll Call grew at a phenomenal rate.
Obviously, not everyone was taken in by the propaganda-factories of Hollywood,
obsessed as its capitalist movie-makers were with "International Finance
and Roosevelt in shorts, Confession of Nazi Spies and Stalin in pajamas, dramas
of thugs shooting up civilization, mobs storming sundry Bastilles and New
Dealers breaking sod for billion-dollar privies," as Pelley wrote then.
"We have gone to war because the selfish materialistic policy foisted on
our country has pushed the United States back to the verge or bankruptcy."
Then, in late winter, he was urgently contacted by a U.S. naval officer
who had been stationed at Pearl Harbor the previous December 7th. The man said that
F.D.R. had lied to the American people about the attack, telling them that
"although damage has been severe, our Pacific Fleet is still intact."
The officer said he personally witnessed the devastation, which was far worse
than the President allowed. In fact, all the U.S. capital ships where either
sunk or badly damaged, except for five unescorted (and, therefore,
nonoperational) aircraft carriers and their obsolete planes. Pelley rushed into
print with the news: "Japanese bombers made Pearl Harbor look like an
abandoned W.P.A. project in Keokuk!" The special edition that hit the
streets was a bombshell, and eaten up by a public starved for truth, which had
been the war's earliest causality. But when the Attorney General showed the
usual advance copy to F.D.R., the President exploded like the battleship
Arizona and demanded Pelley's arrest on April 4th. The charge: high treason!
Forced to break his word of honor to Pelley, Biddle ordered a grand jury
to indict the Chief on twelve felony counts of the Sedition Act. During the
course of his trial, the intensely politically-motivated prosecutor, Oscar
Ewing, a cigar-smoking "big wheel" in the democrat Party,
emphatically denied that the U.S. Pacific Fleet had been all that badly damaged
at Pearl Harbor, and subpoenaed Secretary of the Navy, Knox, to assure the
judge (and a vast, listening radio audience) that the situation was well under
control, with no cause for alarm. As he spoke, American military forces were in
headlong retreat from an unbroken series of defeats throughout the entire
Pacific Theater. But when Pelley's defense attorney threatened to have the
entire salvage crew from Pearl Harbor testify in court to support Roll Call's
controversial report, the judge swiftly dropped the main part of the indictment.
Now he was accused of falsely portraying the U.S. economy as bankrupt,
therefore undermining public confidence during wartime. Here too, the defense
was well prepared and subpoenaed Marriner Eccles, Chairman of the Federal
Reserve Bank, who would have had to testify under cross examination and oath
that the American economy was indeed only saved at the last moment by the
war-production sparked by the blood-bath at Pearl Harbor. But the judge crushed
the subpoena.
Sentenced!
To their credit, both Congressman Thorkelson and Charles Lindbergh personally
testified as character witnesses on Pelley's behalf, immeasurably brave actions
when we consider that they did so in the midst of World War II, at a time when
the United States was experiencing defeat from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Despite their support and the failure of the leading indictment against
him (to say nothing of a total lack of evidence regarding treasonable activity
of any kind), Pelley was sentenced to 15 years confinement at a maximum
security federal prison. The prosecution had been unable to produce a single
piece of evidence to prove Pelley had committed any treasonable acts; all he
had done was to criticize an unjust war and the evil President who schemed for
it. Twenty five years later, thousands of communists and their brainless dupes
burned U.S. flags in the streets and violently protested American involvement
during the Viet Nam War; unlike Pelley, none of them pulled hard time.
Penniless, he was unable to mount an appeal. Later, Lindbergh told a reporter
for the Chicago Tribune that Pelley was no traitor, but a true patriot who was
obviously being persecuted for saying publicly what a growing number of
Americans were discussing privately. Pelley was to be made an example of for
these people: Keep your opinions to yourself, or look what will happen to you!
Stunned by the harshness of his sentence, he was a mute prisoner of the
war he opposed. While the Western World outside his penitentiary bars committed
suicide, he read voraciously and thought deeply. Although sad, something in him
would not let him despair: "Some day, we Americans will see in true
perspective what a small group of rich financiers did to us, and why we have
been so stupid to suffer it." As the catastrophic decade of the 40's came
to an end, Pelley's daughter and son-in-law, with the help of old comrades,
were able to raise enough money for an appeal. It failed, but their loyalty was
undiminished and they tried again. In 1952, with Americans dying needlessly in
Asia, just as he predicted, Pelley was reluctantly paroled on the condition
that he participate in no "political activities of any nature", a
flagrantly unconstitutional requirement he was too broke to contest. Frail in
health, his daughter and her husband nursed him back to health at the family
home in Nobelsville, Indiana.
Together, they founded a new publishing company, Soulcraft Press, which
released his first book since the war: Something Better. In it, he singled out
Roosevelt as the man most responsible for setting in motion the social upheaval
America experienced in the Viet Nam era. "He was the forerunner of today's
evolving chaos," which was nevertheless deemed necessary to create a
Fascist-style state in the future. But it was the creation of two magazines
dealing largely with mystical and metaphysical themes that got him back on his
feet financially, so much so he was able to repay all those loyal followers who
had contributed so generously to his appeal. As earlier in life, writing gave
him a sense of purpose and fulfillment. And he recalled without regret that
seminal experience that set him on his difficult dramatic path in 1928; it all
seemed destined to happen and therefore part of some Higher Purpose he trusted
instinctively, even tough he could not understand it intellectually. In his
last years, he was happy with the love of his daughter and old comrades, and
content to know that, even though he failed, he had done the best be could on
behalf of his race and nation. And his enemies - the enemies of his people -
had honored him by long imprisonment. He also lived long enough to witness the
rise of George Lincoln Rockwell's 'American Nazi Party', a phenomenon that
offered him deep comfort: Someone was carrying on the fight he began thirty
years before.
Death and Legacy
William Dudley Pelley died peacefully in his sleep on July 1, 1965, aged 75.
While he was lying in state, someone burned a cross on the front lawn of the
funeral parlor. It was never determined if the fiery cross had been set there
by a friend or an enemy. His passing was observed (with malice, of course) in
the national newsmedia, but immediately thereafter his name was allowed to
lapse into obscurity.
In 1982, the little Indiana town of Nobelsville achieved brief national
attention once more, when a neighborhood boy playing outside his room one
midsummer evening was narrowly missed by a falling meteor that landed at his
feet. "Not since the death of fascist leader, W.D. Pelley, seventeen years
ago," the local newspaper reported, "has the rest of America taken
notice of our community."
Pelley's life as a patriot was similarly meteoric. He was our country's
first political activist in the Fascist style. He was the predecessor to
Commander Rockwell and the Patriotic Movement in America Today. His living
martyrdom in the belly of the beast won him a place of honor in the hearts of
fellow fighters who came after him. He did not fail, as he thought, any more
than a brave soldier who does his best when captured by the enemy fails.
Historical circumstances did not allow him to create the Fascist
Washington he dreamt of. But in the far larger struggle for world-wide
supremacy of reason, he fought the good fight; his was but the opening battle
in an ongoing war for the final triumph of humanity. The Chief and his Silver
Shirts have gone before us. They inspire us to follow their lead. And our
victorious banner someday unfurled over Planet Earth will belong as much to
them as to us!
Sources
Ribuffo, Leo Pual, Protestants on the Right: William Dudley Pelley,
Gerald B. Winrod and Gerald L.K. Smith, two volumes, Yale University, 1976
Liberation magazine, January 1936, New York City Library