Being Anti-Fascist in Minnesota has a long fascinating history

https://isreview.org/issue/85/it-cant-happen-here/index.html

https://workdaymagazine.org/three-times-workers-resisted-fascism-in-minnesota-history/ 

being anti-fascist in Minnesota has a long fascinating history... 

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.