Early on a Friday evening in July 1938, several hundred concerned Minneapolitans streamed into a rented auditorium for what had been promoted as a gathering of “Christian American Patriots.” In a formal letter of invitation, the meeting’s organizers had called for “united action” against “the alien forces that are seeking to undermine our constitutional government, take away our right of free speech, and deprive us of our liberty.” By way of providing more specific instruction, the featured orator, a “national field marshal” named Roy Zachary, devoted a portion of his two-hour diatribe to urging his audience to “combat the Jewish conspiracy…through the organization of vigilante groups in every community to take whatever action is necessary.”
While Zachary served as the face and voice of the rally, its ultimate leader was one William Dudley Pelley, who had converted from the mainline Protestant faith of his minister father and former YMCA employers to fervent belief in the Nazism of Adolf Hitler. Soon after Hitler’s consolidation of power in 1933, Pelley had established a homegrown fascist group called the Silver Legion. It was more commonly known as the Silver Shirts, a reference to the rank-and-file’s trademark apparel.
Both the name and the attire purposely honored Pelley’s inspiration—the Brownshirts, a paramilitary force that Hitler had deployed over the dozen years leading to his seizure of dictatorial control. Hitler himself had modeled the Brownshirts (formal name Sturmabteilung, meaning “Assault Division”) on Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the bully boys of his fascist insurgency in Italy. By whatever name or hue, the operating mode of all these groups was the same, assembling and deploying an armed unit under the sole control of the strongman that could intimidate political opponents, religious minorities, and the official military and law-enforcement bodies of a weakened state.
To an America hollowed out by the Great Depression, Pelley proposed a social safety net that he dubbed “Christian economics” for white gentiles only. He identified the scapegoats for the growing economic misery by pointing to Jews, Blacks, and the New Deal liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his quest for allies, Pelley had been busily reaching out to the Ku Klux Klan and the German American Bund.
As a nationwide movement, the Silver Shirts never mustered more than about 15,000 members, far from the several million Pelley claimed. Yet in Minneapolis, a city with sizable reservoirs of racism and antisemitism, the group found an enthusiastic following, and not just among a destabilized and desperate white working class. The audience at Zachary’s speech on that summer’s evening included the president of the Minneapolis school board, the head of the city’s Real Estate Board, the leader of the local industrial association, and assorted doctors, dentists, teachers, ministers, and small-business owners.