Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [89]
The Silver Shirt Legion’s popularity was centered mainly on the West Coast. It engaged only sporadically in armed training—though notably so in its San Diego chapter. More typically, the Silver Shirts served as a vehicle for pro-Hitler rallies and Pelley’s fringe campaign for the White House. The group also developed into a clearinghouse for Pelley’s string of propaganda publications—professionally produced hate sheets that blamed all the world’s ills, from the Lincoln assassination to Pearl Harbor, on the wiles of international Jewry. The most shocking element of Pelley’s magazine Liberation was the sheer relentlessness of its hatred. Its “humor” is best summed up in one of Pelley’s proposed Christmas cards in 1937:
Dear Shylock, in this season
When we’re all bereft of reason,
As upon my rent you gloat,
I would like to cut your throat.
In 1934, Liberation had attracted its most famous subscriber: the modernist poet Ezra Pound. The long, tortuous path of Pound’s own anti-Semitism and his support of fascist ideology appear to have taken a leaf directly from Pelley. Apparently in an effort to dissuade Pound from his growing attachment to racialist conspiracies, one of Pound’s literary friends and interlocutors, the Jewish modernist poet Louis Zukofsky, sent him a Pelley article alleging that a cabal of Jewish bankers had instigated the American Civil War. The effect, however, was the opposite of what Zukofsky had intended. Instead of seeing the absurdity of it, Pound delighted in the article, praising Pelley in letters back to Zukofsky as a “stout felly” and rhetorically asking if “all bankers is jooz?” For Pound, it was a turning point: “With two exceptions,” wrote historian Leon Surette in his masterly study Pound in Purgatory, “this is the earliest occurrence of overtly anti-Semitic remarks I have found in Pound’s correspondence or publications.” A further reference to Pelley’s Civil War theory emerged in one of Pound’s famed Cantos. “It seems reasonable to conclude,” Surette wrote, “that Zukofsky unwittingly set Pound on the course of anti-Semitism and conspiracy theory by sending him Liberation in early 1934.”
Prophet of Hate
By the mid-1930s, the Silver Shirts reached a peak membership of about fifteen thousand. Pelley had become sufficiently infamous to serve as the model for novelist Sinclair Lewis’s American dictator, Buzz Windrip, in It Can’t Happen Here. In the pages of Liberation—whose subscriber list may have run as high as fifty thousand—Pelley repeatedly hammered the Roosevelt administration for its support of England, declaring that the president was a puppet of the “house of Judah” and calling him a scheming, Dutch-descended Jew. Pelley finally pushed a button that Roosevelt would not ignore. In a 1939 pamphlet, “Cripple’s Money,” Pelley wrote that the polio-stricken president was personally pocketing money raised through his Warm Springs Foundation for Crippled Children (and, of course, sharing it with his Jewish puppeteers). Roosevelt asked Attorney General Frank Murphy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about prosecuting Pelley for libel. But the plans were dropped for fear that Roosevelt would be subpoenaed to testify.
At the dawn of World War II, however, with the nation reeling from Pearl Harbor and Pelley praising Hitler as “the outstanding statesman–leader of the world,” the federal government was ready to strike. “Now that we are in a war,” Roosevelt wrote Hoover in January of 1942, “it looks like a good chance to clean up a number of these vile publications.” In April the FBI raided Pelley’s offices, and by August a circuit court in Indianapolis sentenced