Self-Styled Prophet Hoped to Be Another Hitler

In April 1928, William Dudley Pelley spent seven minutes with God in Altadena and emerged with a vision of Utopia and a fondness for sidearms.

His close encounter with the Creator, he later said, unlocked “secret powers” that led to the founding of the Silver Shirt Legion, a religious and political movement that blended American religious enthusiasm with the politics of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.

Though possessed of only a grade school education, Pelley--a self-proclaimed prophet--capitalized on the worldwide rise of fascist ideology to gain prominence as a prolific writer and an ardent propagandist before he was convicted of sedition and served eight years in prison.

The son of a Methodist minister-turned- toilet paper manufacturer, the American Fuehrer was born in Lynn, Mass., in 1890. Before his father left the pulpit, he was an impoverished itinerant preacher who forced his perpetually hungry, shabbily dressed children to attend church services five times a week.

An unhappy child, Pelley was forced to quit school at age 14 and work for his tyrant father.

Within a short time, though, Pelley quit his job to pursue a zigzag career in and out of journalism. He worked as a police reporter for the Boston Globe, then as a missionary in Japan and Korea and then as a war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, covering the Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks in Siberia.

In 1928, Pelley, like many an unhappy but undaunted dreamer before him, headed for Los Angeles.

Holed up in the Altadena foothills, deeply in debt, Pelley subsequently claimed that he was “caught in a swirl of bluish vapor” during a seven-minute visit with God. During this short encounter he reportedly relinquished his negative personality and habits and acquired the ability to unlock hidden powers within himself.

He published a vivid account of his alleged “out of body” experience in the March 29, 1929, issue of American Magazine under the title “Seven Minutes in Eternity--The Amazing Experience That Made Me Over.”

Clearly, the deity Pelley encountered was of a peculiarly American and pragmatic sort. Under divine inspiration, Pelley set up an advertising agency and real estate business in the popular Guaranty Building on Hollywood Boulevard. There he published a magazine called High Hat and founded a chain of fast-food restaurants.

Attracted to the growing film industry, Pelley wrote religious screenplays: “Light in the Dark,” “The Door to Revelation” and “The Saw Dust Trail”--all flops.

Finding little success in religious topics, he wrote scenarios for films that starred Lon Chaney, Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson. But his screenwriting talent ended there.

Feeling unappreciated, Pelley blamed his bad luck on “Jewish producers” and left Hollywood.

In 1930, he moved to Asheville, N.C., where he purportedly continued his brief interviews with the Supreme Being. There he set up the Galahad Press and Galahad College, where 250 students enrolled yearly to learn what he believed was a superior form of Christianity, astrology and spiritualism.

Hitler as Role Model

Pelley also forged a new mouthpiece, Liberation, a weekly journal that he used as a springboard to introduce his political philosophy--advocating violence against minorities and Jews, attacking FDR’s New Deal, urging boycotts of films by Jewish producers and entertainers and recruiting members of his Silver Shirts, a paramilitary group modeled after Hitler’s Brown Shirts. (Identification by shirt color was one of international fascism’s slightly less sinister, if inexplicable, eccentricities.)

Pelley conceived his Silver Shirts as a force destined to save the United States from “Hebrews and Britishers who are consorting together to strip this nation of its manpower and resources.”

The Silver Shirts numbered, at their peak, somewhere between 15,000 and 50,000 throughout the nation, with Southland chapters in Baldwin Park, Hollywood, Huntington Park, Inglewood, Long Beach and Los Angeles.

Armed with rifles, pistols and shotguns, the Silver Shirts, who were white male Protestants and former Ku Klux Klansmen organized in about 22 states, engaged in military drills and lessons in street fighting tactics.

With aspirations of overthrowing the U.S. government, Pelley envisioned a utopia with “no competition, no taxes, no rents, no interest, no currency, no foreclosures, no crime, no banks and no Jews.” Lawyers would be given a special place to administer the affairs of the nation, and Pelley had no doubt that he would become the “white king” or the “American Hitler,” the new ruler of the nation.

Despite a congressional subcommittee investigation in Los Angeles that probed his pro-Nazi propaganda, Pelley felt confident enough to run for president of the United States.

Preparing for political combat, in 1935 Pelley organized the Christian Party and chose Willard Kemp of San Diego as his running mate.

“When I’m president, I’ll incorporate the Silver Shirts into a combination of federal army and police force. I’m going to do away with the Department of Justice entirely,” Pelley said in a campaign speech.

Washington was the lone state to allow the Christian Party on the ballot in 1936. Even there, only 1,598 out of 700,000 votes cast were for Pelley.

Soon, the prophet’s followers, too, began to fall away. Toting two guns and accompanied by two bodyguards, Pelley spent the next few years giving speeches, recruiting Silver Shirt members and collecting contributions, including $5,000 from John S. Brinkley, the notorious proponent of goat-gland implants for impotent men.

Unraveling of the Silver Shirts

Despite Pelley’s efforts, membership declined steadily. Even his second in command remarked: “There are a lot of funny people . . . attracted to our movement.”

Even after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the pro-German Pelley continued to publish antiwar articles, and in 1942 he was arrested for violating the Espionage Act of 1917. His, in fact, was the first World War II prosecution under the statute. Convicted on 11 counts by a jury of Indiana farmers and tradesmen, Pelley was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but was released after eight.

During his imprisonment, the Silver Shirt Legion withered away.

Freed in 1950, Pelley returned to the family business--religion. Until his death 15 years later, he devoted himself to leading his flock on spiritual journeys by writing and publishing metaphysical books and conducting seances with Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science Church, and car czar Henry Ford.

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