The Silver Shirts, founded on January 30, 1933, as a paramilitary organization by
journalist and Christian mystic William Dudley Pelley, the group also
faced opposition in Minnesota, where the informal Anti-Defamation
Council was organized to investigate antisemitism. In 1936, journalist
Eric Sevareid began reporting on the Silver Shirts for the Minneapolis Journal, hoping to raise the alarm, although he felt his editors were framing the organization as unserious.
His series in the Minneapolis Journal was the first major
exposé of the anti-Semitic fascist activity in the state and was
something of a bombshell. “Anti-Semitism is the outstanding feature of
the Silvershirts,” Sevareid wrote. He spent many “hair-raising evenings
in the parlors of middle class citizens who worshipped a man named
William Dudley Pelley, devoted to driving out the Jew from America.”
They claimed a membership of 6,000 in the state. “They sang the praises
of Adolf Hitler and longed for the day when Pelley should come to power
as the Hitler of the United States.”16
“It was an unbelievably weird experience,” he recounted a decade later.17
At first Sevareid’s editor refused to believe him until he was able to
gain admittance to a Silver Shirt meeting. His editor returned to the
office and demanded: “Get me a drink, quick! God, I feel I’ve been
through the fantastic nightmare of my life.” Sevareid “took them
seriously, as a cadre of fascism, and we proposed to expose them in a
series of articles.”
Somehow it was leaked to a group of “liberal rabbis
and wealthy Jews” that the Journal was about to publish Sevareid’s series, and the group asked the Journal
to “withhold the story” fearing it would “abet a virulent form of
anti-Semitism.” Their attitude, Sevareid thought, could be summed up as,
“It would be better to ignore the madmen and pretend they didn’t
exist.” Despite the opposition, his editor published the stories, “not
as I wanted written, as a cry of alarm, but as a semi-humorous exposé of
ridiculous crackpots who were befuddling otherwise upright citizens.”18 Nevertheless, after the first article appeared in print, the Minneapolis Journal sold several thousand extra copies above its regular distribution.19
What
Sevareid wasn’t prepared for was the unrelenting hostility that he
received from the good Christian, middle-class readers of the Journal.
“I was threatened by telephone and letter every day to such a point
that my family was alarmed for my safety and my brothers wanted to
sleep, armed in my apartment.” He got no relief at work, “Odd
characters, fuming and bridling, would march to my desk in the city
room, and demand to know whether I was a Christian or a Bolshevik.”
In
Teamster Politics, union activist, communist organizer, and
historian Farrell Dobbs wrote about the Union Defense Guard, which was a
group of union members that mobilized to confront the Silver Shirts in
1938, four years after Teamsters Local 574 (also known as Local 544 in
some sources) led the truckers’ strike that transformed Minneapolis into
a union town. Dobbs was one of the initiators of the strike, which
challenged the Citizen’s Alliance, an anti-union business oligarchy that
was renamed to Associated Industries.
When the Silver Shirts came to
town, they threatened to raid the union’s headquarters and were using
violent rhetoric against the re-election of Farmer-Labor governor
Elmer Benson.
Local 574 staff, Indigenous worker, and military veteran Ray Rainbolt
was commander of the Union Defense Guard, a multi-union formation that
set up combat defense training and an intelligence unit for hundreds of
union members.
When Silver Shirts leader Pelley came to Minneapolis to
deliver a speech, his cab driver reported it to Rainbolt, who led the
Union Defense Guard to where Pelley was scheduled to speak. The audience
that had gathered left, and Pelley fled the city. The Union Defense
Guard thwarted other Silver Shirt gatherings in Minneapolis, and after
the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Pelley disbanded the organization.
