Sedition and Treason: Two Stories
These two stories take place many decades ago. Both begin in the 1930’s, but I thought of them each on Wednesday, as we watched the unfolding of the horrific attack on our lives.
1. My Seditious Correspondent
In the spring of 1964, in the middle of a one-year appointment at Haverford College, I had a strange experience.
In March, I was one of the signers of a document called The Triple Revolution, a sort of follow-up to the Port Huron Statement, and also signed by several of the latter’s authors, including Tom Hayden. The Three Revolutions were Civil Rights, Automation–and I forget the third; the whole document forgettable. It was drafted mostly by W.H. (Ping) Ferry, who was then at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. He mailed the signed document as a Letter to Lyndon Johnson at the White House. I don’t know if he ever heard back from LBJ; I myself did not.
At this point in my life I had published articles in Dissent and Commentary, but was hardly a public figure. However, I did get some feedback from an unexpected source. I received a letter–not an e-mail, but an actual letter — from a man named William Dudley Pelley. He contacted me as a known (if hardly well-known) critic of American capitalism, which was certainly the case, and he thought we might have much in common intellectually.
If he wrote to any other signatories of the our Manifesto, I’m not aware of it. In any event he referenced several sentences of the Triple Revolution, and then launched into a generally coherent analysis and critique of banking and finance as capitalism’s root of all evil. This was in fact a hallmark of a certain kind of American Protestantism — famously associated with Ezra Pound and his references to “Moloch, Moloch, Moloch.” Accompanying his letter was a current issue of his monthly newsletter, the name of which I’ve also forgotten, and a complimentary subscription to it for the rest of the year. The association of “finance” with “Jews” was a major trope of the Far Right then, as it is now, but the issue contained no uses of the word, “Jewish.”
Yes. For those of my readers who weren’t around in those days, William Dudley Pelley was, or at least had been, a Nazi. Not a neo-Nazi, like the pond scum who march around chanting, “Jews shall not replace us,” but the real thing, from the 1930’s. He had founded an organization called the Silver Legion, whose members (15,000 at its short-lived peak) wore“Silver Shirts” — distinguished from Mussolini’s and Sir Oswald Mosley’s Black, and Hitler’s Brown, but clearly carving out a niche on the same cave wall. If they actually marched anywhere, there’s no record of it. But no one could confuse them with “good people.” And he traveled around holding recruitment rallies, giving lectures and public speeches.
He founded Silver Legion chapters in almost every state and ran for President in 1936 as the candidate of the Christian Party; he was a nasty anti-Semite and a real Hitler lover. The Legion didn’t last long, due to some “financial irregularities.” But as to his later activities:
I quote and paraphrase from Wikipedia here: ‘ After stating in one issue of Roll Call [his newsletter] that the devastation of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was worse than the government claimed [this was true–PG] Pelley was arrested…and in April 1942, he was charged with 12 counts of high treason and sedition. One charge was dropped, but he was tried in Indiana and convicted of the other 11 charges, mostly for “Intent to cause insurrection in the military establishment,” “intent to obstruct recruiting,” and “conspiracy with his secretary.” The prosecutor called him “a tool of Axis propaganda.” He denied that he was “seeking to derogate the war effort,” or that he was anti-Semitic: “The Jewish people are behind Communism, but not every Jew is a Communist.” He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and paroled and released in 1950.’ (My emphasis)
His friendly and good-natured letter to me, written one year before he died, implicitly repudiated that past. now he was just a good, clean anti-capitalist; if he was writing to a Jew, you’d never know it. I did not re-subscribe to the newsletter; nor write him more than one polite reply, thanking him for his interesting discussion, and the subscription. And finally I stopped hearing from him.
2. The Battle of Cable Street
This story is not personal, but historical, and it recalls–not accidentally today–a major event in 20th Century Jewish life. The story can be found in Wikipedia (like everything else), but we heard it from a tour guide, on a guided walk through London’s East End, once a totally Jewish neighborhood, now mostly Islamic.
From Wikipedia: “It had become known that the British Union of Fascists ([led by Sir Oswald Mosley, for whom see above] were organising a march to take place on Sunday 4 October 1936, sending thousands of marchers dressed in their Blackshirt uniform through the heart of the East End [an area which then had a large Jewish population]… residents of the area petitioned [the Home Secretary] to ban the march because of the strong likelihood of violence. He refused, and sent a police escort in an attempt to prevent anti-fascist protesters from disrupting the march”. Antifas, Yes! Damn right. Many in fact members of the Communist Party, who had come from all over Britain to defend the East End against Fascism.
The purpose of the March was terror; the marchers, numbering several thousand, were armed with clubs, and the 6–7000 strong police escort, many of them mounted, with the usual batons at the least. This was a show of anti-Semitic force.
But lo! At the intersection of Cable Street and Christian Street, 20,000 antifas (baloney), mostly but not only Jews, had built barricades, and awaited the Fascists. The Battle of Cable Street began. The police “attempted to clear the road to permit the march…to proceed. The demonstrators fought back with sticks, rocks, chair legs and other improvised weapons. Rubbish, rotten vegetables and the contents of chamber pots [Yes, shit] were thrown at the police by women in houses along the street. After a series of running battles, Mosley agreed to abandon the march to prevent bloodshed… and the anti-fascists rioted with police. About 150 demonstrators were arrested, although some escaped with the help of other demonstrators. Around 175 people were injured including police, women and children.”
Sometime during the telling of this story on our walk, which was much more involving than the dry Wikipedia account, most of us in the tour group had begun to cry. With both indescribable pain and yet a sense of nostalgic triumph. Time to peel off to Bloom’s kosher restaurant for corned beef on rye. As for Sir Oswald, the Battle of Cable Street was effectively the high point of British Fascism, from which he and it never recovered. Those who don’t fight, and run away…are not a murder of crows but a covey of cowards.
Why do I think of these two stories now? Because William Dudley Pelley, who spent eight years in jail, never harmed a single person as far as we know, and if his speeches persuaded a single soldier from serving, that’s the Unknown Soldier. But the British Union of Fascists? We’ve just seen their successors in action four days ago, the real thing, the real Nazis, a lynch mob in action, prevented from doing their worst only by the skin of the Capitol police’s unprepared teeth. (And let’s hear it for Officer Eugene Goodman, who put his life on the line to lead them away from their intended targets.)
Every one of them is an insurrectionist, and the worst of all the proto-Fascist Josh Hawley (not so long ago one of David Brooks’s “New Republicans”), who pumped his fist to the mob, and is guilty of sedition at the least and treason at the most. As is every one of the Sedition Caucus who tried to overthrow the elected government. “Aiding and abetting,” that’s what it’s called. Not everyone in a lynch mob gets to knot the rope. But everyone in it is wrapped in guilt. And Hawley’s defense of “free speech” is not only hilariously ignorant of constitutional law, but his attack on “cancel culture” is doubly comical, as though gosh how unfair to suffer consequences for having egged on an armed insurrection.
Who are these people? That’s the terrible question. In a Civil War, as was declared around noon-time on Wednesday, you don’t spend a lot of time imagining that there are “good people” on each side: you just fight back against the fascistic and incorrigibly fanatical enragés, however that becomes necessary. They are not good people, there is not a single person among them, including in the halls of Congress, who will not sacrifice all truth and decency to have their own way.
Within the confines of the Law, nothing bad enough can be done to them, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, armed assaulters and their cheering section all, with their gallows waiting for the Vice-President. But how exactly, in what turns out to be a very fragile democracy, do you deal with millions of enemies who long for nothing but your destruction, whose virtually every belief at the nature of the nation and the world is false, and is reinforced every day by the Christian Fascist propaganda machine?
I don’t know. I’d rather have to deal with William Dudley Pelley.
