donbosco
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I learned of Asheville’s William Dudley Pelley a few years before I moved there when a student wrote a paper on his life for the North Carolina History class that I was teaching. That a true-to-form fascist had lived in, and propagated his hate-filled ideology from a base in Western North Carolina during the 1930s was alarming. That his anti-semitism didn’t catch on strong in Asheville is comforting though. The city, like Greensboro to the east, has long had a vital Jewish population.
I only knew one Jewish person growing up - a salesman who called on my Deddy’s hardware store. I guess I must’ve known that fact because someone said it out loud. I do not remember any slurs or aspersions cast. I would if there had been any. He was northern though, his accent made that clear enough. I knew that, and had a sense of Jewishness, at least I thought I did, through TV. Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks’ “2000 Year Old Man,” bit, or Joan Rivers, Buddy Hackett, and the ubiquitous talk show comedian Alan King introduced me to new words and a sense of humor that seemed somewhat different from the comedy of Jerry Clower, Homer and Jethro, and Stringbean.
My very first Jewish friend was my freshman roommate at Carolina. My own life and my family have been very enriched by the many things we’ve learned, especially in Greensboro at Guilford College and then even more so in Asheville, particularly through Delilah’s connections early on with the Jewish Cultural Center. In New York City our education continues in an accelerated pace.
Pelley saw Judaism and Communism as unified and his early career as a screenwriter had made him believe in a Jewish conspiracy to control minds. That’s what he brought to Asheville in 1932. Perhaps his brand of hate couldn’t compete with NC’s homegrown Klan brand. Pelley tried for the KKK’s base just the same, wrapping himself in Christian Nationalism. He believed that FDR and The New Deal were products of Jewish puppetry and in 1936, under the banner of his Christian Party, ran very unsuccessfully for president.
Rather than being in The South, Pelley’s followers were mainly located in the West and Midwest and probably numbered 15,000 at their height in 1935. Still, his headquarters was in Asheville and he ran a correspondence school called Galahad College out of a building at the corner of Charlotte St. and Sunset Parkway and a printing press out of the “Biltmore-Oteen Bank Building” downtown. Emulating Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Hitler’s Brown Shirts, Pelley recruited his own thugs and called them The Silver Legion, or Silver Shirts for short.
“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.” Jews, Pelley maintained, were the source of all the world’s supposed evils, from Communism to ‘Hebrew Jazz.’ He wrote that “in Washington, ‘Jewish vampires’ were pulling the levers of power through their pawn, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” (See Jon Elliston at this Link: “New Age Nazi,” New Age Nazi )
Pelley’s fascism eventually became too overt — a perception that was fine-tuned by the examples of that worldview in Italy and Germany but ultimately was only deemed seditious enough for action as the World War 2 clouds gathered and Anti-Fascist sentiment in The Greatest Generation awoke. He certainly dreamed of, and spoke and wrote of a takeover and an anti-Constitutional Democratic Republican dictatorship but his Silver Shirts never attacked. Pelley presided over no January 6. Nevertheless, he served 8 years in prison on numerous charges related to conspiring to overthrow the government and foment insurrection — charges for which he was certainly guilty. His fascism was deemed intolerable. How times can change. How times have changed. He died on July 30, 1965.
#OTD (July 30) in 1965 William Dudley Pelley died. The Massachusetts Fascist spread Racist, Christian, Nationalist Hate From his #AVL base in the 1930s via the press and his #GalahadCollege. His followers were called #SilverShirts.” After a 1940 fraud conviction in N.C. he moved to Indiana. He was convicted of sedition and treason in 1942. Released in 1952 he recouped his energy and pushed a UFO-centered cult that he called ‘Soulcraft’ until his death. Asheville Fascist and Presidential Candidate William Dudley Pelley
I only knew one Jewish person growing up - a salesman who called on my Deddy’s hardware store. I guess I must’ve known that fact because someone said it out loud. I do not remember any slurs or aspersions cast. I would if there had been any. He was northern though, his accent made that clear enough. I knew that, and had a sense of Jewishness, at least I thought I did, through TV. Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks’ “2000 Year Old Man,” bit, or Joan Rivers, Buddy Hackett, and the ubiquitous talk show comedian Alan King introduced me to new words and a sense of humor that seemed somewhat different from the comedy of Jerry Clower, Homer and Jethro, and Stringbean.
My very first Jewish friend was my freshman roommate at Carolina. My own life and my family have been very enriched by the many things we’ve learned, especially in Greensboro at Guilford College and then even more so in Asheville, particularly through Delilah’s connections early on with the Jewish Cultural Center. In New York City our education continues in an accelerated pace.
Pelley saw Judaism and Communism as unified and his early career as a screenwriter had made him believe in a Jewish conspiracy to control minds. That’s what he brought to Asheville in 1932. Perhaps his brand of hate couldn’t compete with NC’s homegrown Klan brand. Pelley tried for the KKK’s base just the same, wrapping himself in Christian Nationalism. He believed that FDR and The New Deal were products of Jewish puppetry and in 1936, under the banner of his Christian Party, ran very unsuccessfully for president.
Rather than being in The South, Pelley’s followers were mainly located in the West and Midwest and probably numbered 15,000 at their height in 1935. Still, his headquarters was in Asheville and he ran a correspondence school called Galahad College out of a building at the corner of Charlotte St. and Sunset Parkway and a printing press out of the “Biltmore-Oteen Bank Building” downtown. Emulating Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Hitler’s Brown Shirts, Pelley recruited his own thugs and called them The Silver Legion, or Silver Shirts for short.
“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.” Jews, Pelley maintained, were the source of all the world’s supposed evils, from Communism to ‘Hebrew Jazz.’ He wrote that “in Washington, ‘Jewish vampires’ were pulling the levers of power through their pawn, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” (See Jon Elliston at this Link: “New Age Nazi,” New Age Nazi )
Pelley’s fascism eventually became too overt — a perception that was fine-tuned by the examples of that worldview in Italy and Germany but ultimately was only deemed seditious enough for action as the World War 2 clouds gathered and Anti-Fascist sentiment in The Greatest Generation awoke. He certainly dreamed of, and spoke and wrote of a takeover and an anti-Constitutional Democratic Republican dictatorship but his Silver Shirts never attacked. Pelley presided over no January 6. Nevertheless, he served 8 years in prison on numerous charges related to conspiring to overthrow the government and foment insurrection — charges for which he was certainly guilty. His fascism was deemed intolerable. How times can change. How times have changed. He died on July 30, 1965.
#OTD (July 30) in 1965 William Dudley Pelley died. The Massachusetts Fascist spread Racist, Christian, Nationalist Hate From his #AVL base in the 1930s via the press and his #GalahadCollege. His followers were called #SilverShirts.” After a 1940 fraud conviction in N.C. he moved to Indiana. He was convicted of sedition and treason in 1942. Released in 1952 he recouped his energy and pushed a UFO-centered cult that he called ‘Soulcraft’ until his death. Asheville Fascist and Presidential Candidate William Dudley Pelley
