The "Silver Shirt" movement

[Bela]

I've been looking up old articles and came across this one:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=nI ... ttle&hl=en

anyone know what to make of it?

[Wimpy]

Bela, as you have succeeded in digging up this information, due to the internet, maybe this time we chicken-little's will do better in spreading the message.
I find these older articles and older books curious though.  Curious why their (Silver Shirts) obvious truth didn't catch on and spread like wild fire.  Yes, the newspapers were controlled but TV didn't exist yet, family cohesion was strong , children were still stringently educated and the economy was still weak from the depression.  So, why?

Seeing the date on the Spokane Newspaper was July, 1938, perhaps explains one reason for the stifling of this information.  War.  With War breaking out in Europe and three years later the USA entered, what better way to distract a population from looking into the evil deeds of the chosen.

I'm guessing they are about to do the War thing again because the heat is coming in strong from several directions.  Will they succeed this time?

[Bela]

Well, at first glance, I thought it was some American Nazi movement designed to create "anti-semitism" much like the neo-Nazis today, which usually are run by some Jewish person.

Then I found it was founded by William Dudley Pelley:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Legion_of_America
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dudley_Pelley

who wrote this:  http://iamthewitness.com/books/William. ... e.Jews.htm

I had relatives who lived in the Miami area in the 40's and they were witness to Jewish transplants pouring in from Europe. They had no idea about what was going on in Germany.   At that time, news didn't travel as fast and people were less likely to know what was going on.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

"Come and Hear" has this story:
http://www.come-and-hear.com/supplement ... index.html

Dupes of Judah: (with lengthy background intro)
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/HTML-docs/ ... 0judah.htm


There's a story that the Silver Shirts were attacked by Jewish Mobsters at the beginning of WWII.
What is interesting is that the SS of the Nazis was created in the 1920s as personal body guards to protect Hitler from Jewish Gangs and Mobsters along with Communist thugs. Street fighting these types was the norm. In the USA, since this was a "Christian" group first and foremost, they weren't that accustomed to street brawls unlike the Nazis who often were WWI vets or Communist resistors.  The Silver Shirts didn't realize the type of trouble they were dealing with back in the 1930s and didn't realize the depth of the dangers, IMHO. --The CSR

Jewish Gangsters of the 1920's & 30's

There are few excuses for the behaviour of Jewish gangsters in the 1920s and 1930s. The best known Jewish gangsters -- Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Longy Zwillman, Moe Dalitz -- were involved in the numbers rackets, illegal drug dealing, prostitution, gambling and loan sharking. They were not nice men.

During the rise of American Nazism in the 1930s and when Israel was being founded between 1945 and 1948, however, they proved staunch defenders of the Jewish people.

The roots of Jewish gangsterism lay in the ethnic neighborhoods of the Lower East Side: Brownsville, Brooklyn; Maxwell Street in Chicago; and Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. Like other newly arrived groups in American history, a few Jews who considered themselves blocked from respectable professions used crime as a means to "make good" economically. The market for vice flourished during Prohibition and Jews joined with others to exploit the artificial market created by the legal bans on alcohol, gambling, paid sex and narcotics.

Few of these men were religiously observant. They rarely attended services, although they did support congregations financially. They did not keep kosher or send their children to day schools. However, at crucial moments they protected other Jews, in America and around the world.

The 1930s were a period of rampant anti-Semitism in America, particularly in the Midwest. Father Charles Coughlin, the Radio Priest in Detroit, and William Pelley of Minneapolis, among others, openly called for Jews to be driven from positions of responsibility, if not from the country itself.

Organized Brown Shirts in New York and Silver Shirts in Minneapolis outraged and terrorized American Jewry. While the older and more respectable Jewish organizations pondered a response that would not alienate non-Jewish supporters, others - including a few rabbis - asked the gangsters to break up American Nazi rallies.

Historian Robert Rockaway, writing in the journal of the American Jewish Historical Society, notes that German-American Bund rallies in the New York City area posed a dilemma for mainstream Jewish leaders. They wanted the rallies stopped, but had no legal grounds on which to do so. New York State Judge Nathan Perlman personally contacted Meyer Lansky to ask him to disrupt the Bund rallies, with the proviso that Lansky's henchmen stop short of killing any Bundists. Enthusiastic for the assignment, if disappointed by the restraints, Lansky accepted all of Perlman's terms except one: he would take no money for the work. Lansky later observed, "I was a Jew and felt for those Jews in Europe who were suffering. They were my brothers."

For months Lansky's workmen effectively broke up one Nazi rally after another. As Rockaway notes, "Nazi arms, legs and ribs were broken and skulls were cracked, but no one died."

Lansky recalled breaking up a Brown Shirt rally in the Yorkville section of Manhattan: "The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action. We threw some of them out the windows. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults."

In Minneapolis, William Dudley Pelley organized a Silver Shirt Legion to "rescue" America from an imaginary Jewish-Communist conspiracy. In Pelle's own words, just as "Mussolini and his Black Shirts saved Italy and as Hitler and his Brown Shirts saved Germany," he would save America from Jewish communists. Minneapolis Gambling Czar David Berman confronted Pelley's Silver Shirts on behalf of the Minneapolis Jewish community.

Berman learned that Silver Shirts were mounting a rally at Lodge. When the Nazi leader called for all the "Jew bastards" in the city to be expelled, or worse, Berman and his associates burst in to the room and started cracking heads. After ten minutes, they had emptied the hall. His suit covered in blood, Berman took the microphone and announced, "This is a warning. Anybody who says anything against Jews gets the same treatment. Only next time it will be worse." After Berman broke up two more rallies, there were no more public Silver Shirt meetings in Minneapolis.

Jewish gangsters also helped establish Israel after the war. One famous example is a meeting between Bugsy Siegel and Reuven Dafne, a Haganah emissary, in 1945. Dafne was seeking funds and guns to help liberate Palestine from British rule. A mutual friend arranged for the two men to meet.

"You mean to tell me Jews are fighting?" Siegel asked. "You mean fighting as in killing?" Dafne answered in the affirmative.

Siegel replied, "I'm with you."

For weeks, Dafne received suitcases filled with $5 and $10 bills -- $50,000 in all -- from Siegel.

No one should paint gangsters as heroes. They committed acts of great evil. But historian Rockaway has presented a textured version of Jewish gangster history in a book ironically titled, "But They Were Good to their Mothers."

Some have observed that despite their disreputable behavior they could be good to their people too.

http://nynerd.com/jewish-gangsters-of-the-1920s-30s/

Jew corrupter David Berman:

David Berman (mobster)

David "Davie the Jew" Berman (1903, Odessa, Russian Empire – 1957, Las Vegas, Nevada) was an American mobster in Iowa, New York City, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was also one of the pioneers of gambling in Las Vegas. He was a partner with Bugsy Siegel at the Flamingo Hotel and one of the few mobsters of his era to die a natural death.

Early life

Berman was born into a Jewish family in Odessa, Ukraine, at that time in the Russian Empire. His father was a former rabbinical student who played the violin. When he was a young child, his father departed for America and settled in South Dakota on land provided by Baron Maurice de Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association. Mr. Berman then sent for his wife and children. Davie's mother was reportedly horrified after getting off the train and realizing that they had exchanged the warmth of Odessa for the icy cold of the Great Plains.

Gangster

After failing on the land, the Bermans moved to Sioux City, Iowa, where David got his start as a mobster. At the age of 13, he ran a crew of teenaged thugs committing petty shakedowns and eventually a string of illegal distilleries. He then went on to run his own bank-robbing crew. After developing close ties to the Genovese crime family, he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he operated a major bookmaking operation in rivalry with local mob bosses Kid Cann and Tommy Banks. One of Berman's closest enforcers during those years was Israel "Ice Pick Willie" Alderman, a homicidal Jewish gangster from North Minneapolis. His brother, "Chickie" Berman, also worked for him.

Due to his close relationship with Minneapolis mayor Marvin L. Kline, Berman briefly eclipsed his rivals as boss of the Minneapolis gambling rackets.

According to his daughter, Susan, he also used his crew to intimidate and terrorize members of the racist Silver Shirts, driving them out of Minneapolis.

World War II

Persecution of his fellow Jews enraged Berman so much that he enlisted in the Canadian Army. He had previously been turned away by the U.S. military as a convicted felon. In addition, Pearl Harbor had not yet brought the U.S. into World War II. He saw combat in the European Theater with the 18th Armoured Car Regiment (12th Manitoba Dragoons), a reconnaissance outfit, along with Minnesota friend Nathan Gittlewich. Berman was well liked, and fellow troopers did not know of his criminal background.

Las Vegas

After his return to Minneapolis, Davie's gambling operations were shattered during the first term of racket busting Mayor Hubert Humphrey. Berman moved his crew to Las Vegas and operated there in concert with Genovese Family associate Moe Sedway,

Almost immediately after the assassination of Bugsy Siegel, Sedway and Berman walked into the lobby of the The Flamingo and announced that they were in charge. Berman died on the operating table during surgery to remove polyps from his colon on Father's Day, 1957.

Family

While he lived in Minneapolis, Berman met and married Gladys Ewald, a German-American dancer who later converted to Judaism. Their only child, daughter Susan Berman, wrote a memoir about growing up as Las Vegas mob royalty titled Easy Street (1981, '83). In her memoir, Susan indicates she knew little of her father's past until an acquaintance brought to her attention the mentions of her father in the book The Green Felt Jungle. Gladys Berman died shortly after Davie Berman at age 39 of an overdose of barbituates, although it is unclear whether it was suicide or a mob murder for refusing to give up Davie Berman's shares in the Flamingo for pennies on the dollar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berman_%28mobster%29

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Jewish Press on Pelley:

New Age Nazi
The rise and fall of Asheville's flaky fascist
by Jon Elliston in Vol. 10 / Iss. 25 on 01/28/2004
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    The Silver Shirts, Pelley vowed, would wage "the ultimate contest for existence between Aryan mankind and Jewry."

The news quickly crossed the Atlantic, hitting the United States like an ill wind. Adolf Hitler had vaulted into power, becoming Germany's chancellor. Most Americans familiar with Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party reacted with apprehension, but one Asheville man was "inspired," as he would later put it. William Dudley Pelley -- writer, publisher, guru, self-proclaimed metaphysician and avid anti-Semite -- was about to hitch his fate to the Nazis' rising star.

Pelley was working late in his Charlotte Street office that day when his secretary brought in the evening paper. In his autobiography, The Door to Revelation, Pelley recalled how he'd seized on the front-page headline about Hitler. "I looked at the lines. I read them again. I sought to comprehend them. Something clicked in my brain!"

Pelley had been watching Hitler for years, admiring the man who'd railed against the "Jewish menace" and muscled his way into power with a cadre of brown-shirted thugs. As a few of Pelley's compatriots milled about the office, he looked up from the newspaper and made an impassioned announcement that stopped them in their tracks.

"Tomorrow," Pelley declared, "we have the Silver Shirts!"

And that's how, on Jan. 31, 1933, Asheville became home to what would prove to be one of the largest pro-Hitler organizations in the United States: the Silver Legion of America (or Silver Shirts for short). Their brief and bitter story is an unusual one for Asheville, and their mercurial leader's news-making career here is all but absent from most local histories.

That lack of attention, plus other recent disclosures about the strong but historically hidden and overlooked ties between some prominent Americans and the Nazis, makes Pelley's story seem ripe for review. No less a personage than President Bush's grandfather, the late Prescott Bush, has come under new scrutiny for his part in bankrolling Hitler's rise to power. And a new book -- Max Wallace's The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich -- shows how even those two American icons served as pro-German propagandists.

It's a history that can be hard to come to terms with, Wallace told Xpress in a recent phone interview. "We look at Hitler's Germany as a sort of lunatic operation, as the kind of thing that just couldn't happen here," he said. "People are embarrassed to think that Americans could have embraced this lunacy."

It was, of course, only a brief and partial embrace. Today, Asheville displays no memorials to Pelley, no monuments or street names to mark his legacy. But amid the current wave of historical investigations of American ties to the Nazis, the special-collections division of UNCA's Ramsey Library recently made available a set of files documenting much of Pelley's work in Asheville. In addition, Pack Memorial Library has long housed rare Pelley materials, including most of his books and well-preserved copies of Silver Shirt newspapers. From those faded pages and yellowed news clips emerges the long-forgotten but still-intriguing story of Asheville's New Age Nazi.
Pelley's purpose

Although he achieved notoriety here, Pelley was not an Asheville native. He was born in 1890 in Massachusetts, the son of an itinerant Methodist preacher turned toilet-paper manufacturer. A restless but contemplative boy, Pelley showed a talent as a wordsmith from an early age. At 19, he launched his first magazine, The Philosopher, and he would remain a prolific publisher for the rest of his life.

In his 20s, Pelley freelanced for popular magazines, including Collier's, Good Housekeeping and The Saturday Evening Post. Soon his writing started taking him places. Pelley covered the aftermath of the Russian Revolution in Siberia as well as historic events in the Far East. Back in the United States, he won prizes for his short stories, penned several novels, and struck gold in Hollywood, where he cranked out a series of screenplays that were made into major motion pictures.

Despite those accomplishments, though, Pelley wasn't satisfied. Something was missing, he felt -- some sense of deeper purpose. He found it one May night in 1928 when, while sojourning at a California mountain bungalow, he drifted into what he later described as an "ecstatic interlude." For "seven minutes in eternity," Pelley said, he left his earthly body and entered a mystical realm where he bathed in an ornate pool "among jolly, worthwhile people," including a divine oracle who continued to speak to him from then on.

"Call it the Hereafter, call it Heaven, call it Purgatory, call it the Astral Plane, call it the Fourth Dimension, call it What You Will," Pelley wrote in an account of the episode. "Whatever it is -- and where -- that human entities go after being released from their physical limitations, I had gone there that night." Feeling reborn into a fundamentalist form of Christianity, he decided it was his mission to "give the whole race an inspiration by which it may quicken its spiritual pace."

In search of further insight, Pelley abandoned Hollywood for a brief stint in New York City, where he networked with clairvoyants and mystics of all sorts. Frequenting Greenwich Village salons and seances, he quickly developed what was to prove a lifelong interest in a grab bag of esoterica, from channeling to pyramidism, from studies of the afterlife to extrasensory perception, weaving it all into his unique brand of Christianity.

In 1930, Pelley relocated to Asheville, where, with assistance from wealthy donors inspired by his spiritual revelations, he founded the short-lived Galahad College. Housed in the Asheville Women's Club building at the corner of Charlotte Street and Sunset Parkway (today the site of the Zion Christian Assembly church), Galahad offered a course of study based on Pelley's own developing philosophy. Key courses included "Christian Economics" and "Social Metaphysics."

Meanwhile, Pelley launched a new magazine, Liberation, which featured his latest insights obtained from the "hyper-dimensional instruction" he said he received via "mental radio." Along with flowery paeans to Jesus Christ, the newspaper featured articles with titles like "Why You Are Opposed by Invisible Persons," "Take Your Daily Cues From the Great Pyramid" and "You Can Remember Before You Were Born!"

Galahad College folded after a couple of years, but Pelley continued to churn out his mystical manifestos. Meanwhile, he began searching in earnest for a way to parlay his supernatural interests into some tangible power here on earth. It wasn't long before another mystic with political aspirations, one Adolf Hitler, paved the way for Pelley's most ambitious project yet.
Silver Shirts

In 1933, grabbing onto Hitler's coattails, Pelley shifted his focus from spiritualism to fascism. "Silver symbolizes the purity of our fight," he proclaimed, "and the purity of our race." The Silver Shirts, he vowed, would wage "the ultimate contest for existence between Aryan mankind and Jewry."

Pelley's writings, one critic declared in a 1934 New Republic article, were now "a mad hodge-podge of mystic twaddle and reactionary, chauvinistic demagogy." Jews, Pelley maintained, were the source of all the world's supposed evils, from Communism to "Hebrew Jazz." In Washington, he wrote, "Jewish vampires" were pulling the levers of power through their pawn, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In kinder times, this bigoted world-view might have been wholly disregarded. But in pockets of Depression-era America, hard times had prompted a rise in scapegoating -- and the Jews were a ready target. For some, Pelley's peculiar brand of hate-mongering -- still interwoven with his idiosyncratic strain of mystical Christianity -- struck a sympathetic chord.

Good timing wasn't the only way Pelley seemed tailor-made for the role of American fuehrer. Like the German leader, Pelley was a short (5 feet 7 inches) and oddly dapper man. Sporting spectacles and an angular goatee, he clad himself in the uniform he designed for the Silver Shirts: a silver or gray shirt with a scarlet "L" above the heart (to signify the "Legion"), a blue necktie, short-cut blue corduroy pants, and black leggings covering the tops of black boots. At rallies, Pelley donned a gray cap modeled after the ones worn by Hitler's storm troopers, and he was judged a rousing (if pompous and bombastic) orator.

As he threw himself into organizing his own "SS," Pelley was delighted to find ready recruits across the country. "It was an awe-inspiring thing," he wrote in his autobiography. "I had known that the nation was disgruntled with the encroaching caste of Jewry. I had never appreciated that it hungered for leadership like this." Chapters of the Silver Shirts sprang up in 22 states, with the largest clusters organizing in the Midwest and on the West Coast. At its peak in the mid-1930s, Pelley boasted that the group's membership reached 25,000; historians, however, have put the number closer to 15,000.

Establishing a quasi-military command structure, Pelley designated himself "chief" and appointed state commanders across the nation. The rank and file were grouped into 10-member "safety councils" that were instructed to meet regularly and learn to act as a unit. While a few Silver Shirt chapters conducted serious paramilitary training, most busied themselves with listening to speeches, holding the occasional public rally or march, and distributing Pelley's many publications.

In the pages of Liberation and Pelley's Silvershirt Weekly, the author trumpeted his plan for addressing "the Jewish problem" -- a plan that bore no small resemblance to Hitler's. The Silver Shirts, Pelley pledged, would spearhead a new "Christian Commonwealth" in the United States, which would register all Jews in a national census, then systematically reduce their role in business, government and cultural affairs, ultimately confining all Jews within one city in each state.

"We are sanctioning no programs of mob violence in dealing with this people," Pelley wrote to his followers in 1934, "but by the same token we are not ignoramuses in regard to Judah's plans and purposes and we will not stand for nonsense." In fact, for all their hostile rhetoric, the Silver Shirts rarely became involved in violence, and when they did, Pelley's followers didn't generally fare well. Militant trade unionists and Jewish gangsters sometimes sent their own strongmen to break up Silver Shirt rallies. According to a report by the American Jewish Historical Society, for example, Minneapolis "gambling czar" David Berman and his associates forcibly shut down three Silver Shirt gatherings, "cracking heads" and effectively running the group out of town.

And though the organization brought a core of devoted activists to Pelley's crusade, even at its peak, the Silver Shirts remained a fringe group mostly ridiculed by both the national and local press. A 1934 Asheville Times editorial, for example, openly mocked Pelley: "Asheville enjoys the rather dubious distinction of being the headquarters of the Silver Shirts. This honor was not achieved, but thrust upon the city. ... We have seen the Silver Shirt movement for what it is. In laughing at it, we laugh at others who find it a menace to the Republic."

Pelley, however, could claim genuine success in at least one pursuit: His anti-Semitic ruminations spread nationwide. Pelley's print shop, housed in the old Biltmore-Oteen Bank building, cranked out such items as the 10-cent pamphlet What 50 Famous Men have Said About Jews and a 25-cent reprint of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a turn-of-the-century anti-Semitic forgery -- already discredited by reputable scholars by the 1930s -- that purported to reveal a "Jewish plot against Christian civilization."

But the strongest salvo in Pelley's war of words was another forgery, the so-called "Franklin Prophecy," which he appears to have authored. The Feb. 3, 1934 issue of Liberation featured an unattributed article, provocatively titled, "Did Benjamin Franklin Say This About the Hebrews?" The article reproduced a lengthy excerpt from what it claimed was the diary of South Carolina's Charles Pinckney, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Purportedly written during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the "diary" entry recorded Franklin saying that while the new country must guard against religious tyranny, a more severe threat was at hand: "This greater menace, gentlemen, is the Jew!"

The entry quoted further from Franklin's supposed screed, which urged barring Jewish immigration to the new United States: "In whatever country Jews have settled in any great numbers they have lowered its moral tone. ... If you do not exclude Jews for all time, your children's children will curse you in your graves!"

A dramatic declaration, to be sure -- but a fictitious one. There's no evidence that Franklin ever made those remarks, much less that Pinckney ever wrote them down, according to numerous subsequent historical investigations of the "Franklin Prophecy." Still, the forgery -- appropriated by Germany's propaganda apparatus -- echoed around the world.
Shell games and sedition

For all Pelley's energy, vision and skill as a propagandist, however, he proved to be an abysmal businessman. With each new political or spiritual whim, it seemed, Pelley founded another enterprise, never pausing to solidify any of them. In the course of a mere 10 years, he incorporated Galahad College, the Galahad Press, the Fellowship Press, the Foundation for Christian Economics, the League for the Liberation, Pelley Publishers and the Silver Shirts, and founded five publications: Liberation, Pelley's Silvershirt Weekly, The New Liberator, The Galilean and Roll-Call.

Congressional investigators later concluded that the Silver Shirts had raised some $174,000 in the 1930s through donations and publication sales. But Pelley badly jumbled the finances among his various endeavors, conducting a contorted corporate shell game that promptly mired him in legal troubles. In January 1935, Pelley was found guilty of selling worthless stock. Convicted of fraud in Buncombe County court, he was fined and given a suspended prison sentence.

Meanwhile, the federal government was also casting a wary eye on the Silver Shirts. In 1934, the House of Representatives' newly created Special Committee on Un-American Activities sent an investigator to Asheville to seize a sizable portion of Pelley's financial records. (Later, in 1940, the committee would call Pelley to Washington to grill him about his pro-Hitler organizing and publishing.)

Undaunted, Pelley rallied the Silver Shirts behind a madcap bid for the White House. In 1936, he ran as the presidential candidate for the hastily assembled Christian Party, whose platform resembled the Silver Shirts' hate-filled mission statements. Pelley campaigned in 16 states but made it onto the ballot in only one: Washington state, where he garnered a mere 1,598 votes (300 less than the Communist Party candidate received).

As the United States drifted closer to war with Nazi Germany, Pelley and other American fascists pushed to keep the country neutral and openly backed the Axis powers. Meanwhile, early in 1941, Pelley decided to relocate. His legal problems in Asheville had multiplied, and worse, he'd attracted no significant local following, outside of his small circle of advisers and office staff. He was just getting his new headquarters off the ground in Noblesville, Ind. -- strategically positioned amid some hotbeds of Silver Shirt activity -- when the United States declared war against Germany and Japan.

Although Pelley was clearly too marginal a figure to pose any real threat to national security, President Roosevelt himself now deemed the Silver Shirt leader a menace to society. In January 1942, Roosevelt wrote FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, mentioning Pelley's publication The Galilean and commenting, "Some of the stuff appearing therein comes pretty close to being seditious." The president added, "Now that we are in a war, it looks like a good chance to clean up a number of these vile publications." In a March cabinet meeting, Roosevelt went further still, ordering Attorney General Francis Biddle -- a civil libertarian who'd been reluctant to crack down on dissenting publications -- to move against Pelley.

The FBI raided Pelley's offices in April 1942 and arrested him. In August, a jury of farmers and tradesmen in Indianapolis federal court found him guilty on multiple charges of sedition. The trial featured at least one laughable moment: While Pelley was on the stand, his attorney accidentally addressed the Silver Shirt leader as "Mr. Hitler."
Further into the mystic

Sentenced to 15 years in prison, Pelley spent the rest of the war behind bars. Paroled in 1950, he returned to writing and publishing but mostly steered clear of politics. Pelley spent his remaining years in Indiana, delving further and further into mystical explorations. He founded a small, cultish group called Soulcraft and spent thousands of hours writing messages "channeled" from various deities and expounding on the divine providence of UFOs and extraterrestrials.

Despite Pelley's ignominious descent into the dustbin of history, it would be wrong to say his influence died with him. The fraudulent "Franklin Prophecy" he fostered has found new life on the Internet via neo-Nazi Web pages and online discussion lists. In fact, Pelley was a kind of founding father of modern hate groups, as several former Silver Shirts went on to become instrumental in forging the post-World War II white-power movement. In the early 1970s, for example, Henry "Mike" Beach, a former Silver Shirt state leader, co-founded the Posse Comitatus, a violently racist anti-government group. And former Silver Shirt Richard Butler, now 85, has spent the last 30 years leading the Aryan Nations, until recently the country's most prominent neo-Nazi organization.

In Asheville, however, the sole vestiges of Pelley's work are stored away in libraries. And that should come as no surprise, observes UNCA history professor Milton Ready, who helped assemble the university's Pelley collection. "He did not have a base of support here," says Ready. "This was just a mail drop for him." Asheville was simply too tolerant, he says, and its Jewish community too involved in business and civic affairs, for Pelley-ism to take root locally.

By the time Pelley died in 1965 at age 75, he had faded into near obscurity. There was, however, one final, fitting tribute to the man who'd stoked the fires of fascism in America. Shortly after Pelley's death, as his body lay in state in a funeral parlor near Indianapolis, someone planted a wooden cross in the ground outside and set it aflame.

http://www.mountainx.com/news/2004/0128pelley.php