6 - Fascism and Antisemitism in 1930s America

Summary

This chapter explores the impact of William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Shirts or Silver Legion, and the Legion’s place within the broader field of Interwar American extremism, when an undergrowth of xenophobia and antisemitism overtook the landscape of domestic politics. This chapter addresses a previously unknown genocidal dimension of American fascist rhetoric – which, in its violence and its visibility, went further than what even the Nazi regime was advocating at the time. The leading Silver Shirt dailies, most particularly The Liberator, and published interviews with William Pelley in other outlets are examined to reveal the precise nature of this rhetoric, which goes beyond emotional frisson to detailed proposals for programmatic, genocidal action. Genocidal antisemitism was not just the purview of German National Socialists, but was a concept autonomously articulated by fascists on both sides of the Atlantic. What this speaks to is a shared set of agendas: rather strikingly identical ideological precepts rooted in similar national, racial, and particularly religious cultures.