Hoods and Shirts

The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925-1950

Philip Jenkins

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807857069, 9780807823163
• eBook ISBN: 9780807862285
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Extreme right-wing groups have always been a part of the American religious and political landscape. The era between the world wars, especially the 1930s, was a particularly volatile period, and by 1940, racist, nativist, and fascist groups had become so visible as to arouse public fears of insurrection and sabotage. In Hoods and Shirts, Philip Jenkins uses developments in Pennsylvania as a case study of the local activities and broader significance of organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Italian Black Shirts, the Silver Legion, the German-American Bund, and Father Coughlin’s Christian Front.

Pennsylvania’s cities were a stronghold of several of the most active extremist movements, and Jenkins argues that while the threats they posed were often exaggerated to benefit the solidarity of the political mainstream, a loose coalition of dozens of these groups nevertheless constituted a formidable political presence in the state. In chapters on each of the major organizations, Jenkins traces their common commitment to a fascist agenda as well as the ethnic and religious differences that divided them. His comprehensive analysis sheds new light on how these right-wing movements influenced the mainstream of American politics in the interwar years.

Originally published in 1997.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1 Introduction

MUST AMERICA GO FASCIST?

In the decade before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States possessed a number of activist organizations that were commonly described as fascist or Nazi in their political orientation. The best known was the German American Bund, but other “shirt” groups proliferated. In 1940 the leftist news-sheet The Hour typically claimed that “scores of new and old terrorist organizations—Silver Shirts, Black Legion, Christian Front, Mobilizers—sprout overnight like toadstools.”¹ Fears about a fascist danger were focused in two periods; in each, observers perceived analogies between domestic conditions and the circumstances that had brought dictators to power in other nations. Each period was marked by an outpouring of exposé literature and by congressional investigations that in turn fueled media investigation.

The first wave of concern occurred at the worst of the Great Depression, between about 1932 and 1934, at a time when the media were giving extensive coverage to the collapse of German democracy and Hitler’s seizure of power with the assistance of reactionary industrial interests. The 1932 Bonus March to Washington showed how mass discontent could potentially be harnessed for a direct challenge to the nation’s political and industrial establishment.² This movement inspired imitation by aspiring leaders seeking to mobilize the unemployed and desperate. Father Cox of Pittsburgh used another such march to lay the foundations for his Blue Shirt army, while Art Smith’s Khaki Shirts aimed to seize power through a ludicrous March on Washington in 1933.

In these same years the United States acquired a number of extremist groups that acknowledged their ideological debt to the Nazis: the Silver Shirts of William Dudley Pelley, the Association of the Friends of the New Germany, and the Order of 76. All used anti-Semitic rhetoric, which was brought into the public arena by the activities of Pennsylvania congressman Louis McFadden. The world of the shirts was publicized by the McCormack-Dickstein congressional committee of 1934–35, which investigated “Un-American Activities.”³ These organizations were exposed in a number of magazine articles and pamphlets published during 1934, especially John L. Spivak’s investigative series in New Masses.⁴ This influential account portrayed an extensive network of hate groups, closely linked to foreign intelligence agencies and domestic reactionaries.

America seemed to have acquired the components of a German-or Italian-style dictatorship that required only the appropriate strong man to consolidate into a threatening movement. Many felt that Huey Long had the potential to play such a role, while after his assassination in 1935, populist and anti-Semitic activism was continued by his associates and admirers such as Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Charles Coughlin. A 1935 study of these leaders was ominously titled Forerunners of American Fascism.⁵ In the same year, Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here portrayed a fascist takeover in the United States under the demagogic Buzz Windrip and his paramilitary MMs, or Minutemen.⁶

Fears revived at the end of the decade. Between 1938 and 1941 a flood of books and periodical articles regularly made extreme claims about the vast and imminent danger posed by American fascists, and papers such as Equality, American Appeal, and The Hour devoted themselves to exposing the “Nazi menace.” This was the age of books such as Stefan Heym’s Nazis in USA, George Britt’s The Fifth Column Is Here, Harold Lavine’s Fifth Column in America, John L. Spivak’s Secret Armies, and Donald Strong’s Organized Anti-Semitism in America.⁷

The “fascist exposé” genre depicted ultra-Right movements as a vast menace threatening armed revolt and civil disorder within the United States.⁸ In this view, groups were sponsored and supported by foreign intelligence agencies, working through diplomatic missions and consulates, and the subversive activities of the far Right extended to plotting “fifth column” and treasonous behavior in the event of American entry into the European war.⁹ In 1943 John Roy Carlson’s best-selling book Under Cover exposed “the development of a nativist, nationalist, American Nazi or American fascist movement which, like a spearhead, is poised to stab at Democracy.”¹⁰

Sayers and Kahn’s book Sabotage: The Secret War against America provides a characteristic example of the far-reaching rhetoric offered: “By 1939 the Christian Front had assumed the proportions of a subversive army numbering some 200,000 members, many of whom were secretly drilling with rifles and other military equipment. Working closely with the German-American Bund, the Christian Mobilizers, the Silver Shirts and similar gangs, the Fronters made American cities the scenes of violent anti-Semitic agitation.”¹¹ By 1940 George Britt could claim in The Fifth Column Is Here “the first complete revelation of a foreign army within the United States —four times as large as the regular US Army . . . a million Fifth Columnists—and that is cold official estimate based on investigation.”¹² The federal prosecutor charged with investigating pro-Axis sedition in the years leading to war saw a systematic plan: “They talked in terms of legal means and counter-revolution. Their legal means, however, consisted of underground armies of Storm Troopers, Silver Shirts, White Knights, Christian Mobilizers, Christian Fronters, marches on Washington, appeals to army officers to be disloyal, pogroms, and finally a nationalist dictatorship.”¹³

Charges acquired national visibility following a series of incidents which implied that America contained within its borders groups that were aspiring to the same role played by other seditionists in Madrid, Vienna, or the Sudetenland. Three domestic events had a particular impact, including a massed Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1939. Ostensibly a patriotic celebration of the birthday of George Washington, this gathering of 20,000 faithful bore an unsettling resemblance to a Nuremberg Party Day rally. In January 1940 the arrests of the Christian Front leadership in New York City for allegedly planning a putsch raised public fears about the military potential of the far Right and their conduct in the event of war. The following August this threat was reinforced by a joint rally of Bund paramilitaries and Ku Klux Klansmen at Camp Nordland in New Jersey, an incident that reflected growing unity among the diverse sects and ideologies. Meanwhile the parade of extremist leaders before the revived Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Martin Dies offered a thorough review of the nation’s would-be dictators and pogrom organizers.

In retrospect the charges made against the far Right seem ludicrously exaggerated, at least as much as the accusations made against leftist and Communist infiltration in the decade after 1945. However, in both eras, there was some basis for the hysteria in that the specific groups named did exist, and they genuinely did have a political base, some following in particular classes, regions, and ethnic groups. Rightist sects really did discuss or advocate violent or subversive activities, and on occasion they formed links with the governments or intelligence agencies of hostile regimes. They preached racial terrorism, and in some urban areas their activities excited widespread tension and fear. To pursue the Red analogy, the fact that the anti-Communist crusades of the Truman era involved hysteria and wild exaggeration does not mean that the American Left was not a real presence, or that the Communist Party and its affiliates were not connected to Soviet interests and policies.

As in later years, however, claims about a subversive menace must be placed in their proper political context, specifically the intense political polarization of the late 1930s, when the threat from the Right acted as a potent ideological weapon to promote unity on the Left. In the most benevolent view, anti-fascist observers and critics were likely to focus attention on the most violent, bigoted, and bellicose statements of their opponents and portray them as typical. More seriously, the question arises whether seditious or fifth column allegations might be wholly invented. Questions about authenticity and bias abound. One of the most influential platforms for these views was Albert Kahn’s The Hour, which ran from 1939 to 1943. However, the paper’s editors were committed to a political agenda that was not merely left wing but solidly pro-Soviet. Their charges of Nazi sabotage plans in the United States thus drew heavily on material from the Soviet purge trials of the late 1930s, a source to which few later commentators would give any credence whatever.¹⁴

Like the far Left, the Roosevelt administration had much to gain from portraying American fascism as a genuine subversive menace. Robert E. Herzstein suggests that by 1938 at the latest the White House was deliberately orchestrating a campaign to link the far Right to foreign espionage and potential subversion. This was achieved both through the FBI and through friends and assets in the mass media, through broadcasters such as Walter Winchell.¹⁵ The emphasis on the rabid anti-Semitism of the Right served both foreign and domestic policy goals in linking racial bigotry to political disloyalty and Hitlerism. The Nazi and anti-Semitic agitation of 1939 and 1940 proved a godsend for the administration in stirring public fears at a time when the intervention debate was reaching a crescendo.¹⁶

To this extent the Brown Scare, the fifth column scare, was a socially and politically constructed phenomenon, in which an ideological superstructure was built around a less impressive core of objective reality. On the other hand, this does not mean that there was no underlying reality, that the fascist and Nazi groups were invented by their political opponents, or that they may not have enjoyed much influence. Even in the extreme case of subversion and conspiracy, we should not necessarily dismiss out of hand all the allegations made. Germans and Italians used overseas sympathizers to undertake assassinations and sabotage activities in Europe, and it was not improbable that they would try to use such tactics in North America. Italian Fascists carried out violent acts in the United States, and the Germans forged alliances with overseas dissident groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA).¹⁷ The fact that something resembles conspiracy paranoia does not mean that it is not objectively true, however lurid the terms in which it is framed.

There never were a million fifth columnists, but there were dozens of extremist groups on the far Right, forming an interlocking network that looked to the same core of leaders and theorists and that shared common facilities for the manufacture and dissemination of propaganda. While the terminology is controversial, at least some of these movements can legitimately be described as Nazi or fascist.

STUDYING AMERICAN FASCISM

Rightist extremism of this era has attracted a good deal of distinguished modern scholarship. The Bund has provided the basis for three major studies, and Father Charles Coughlin has attracted a number of biographical studies, though his followers have been poorly served.¹⁸ Appropriately enough, given the political context, the literature often focuses disproportionately on the ideas and activities of the leaders rather than the led. However, several writers have placed the various movements in the broader tradition of American nativist and racist agitation and fringe religious activity.¹⁹ Scholars such as Geoffrey S. Smith and Charles Higham have studied the wider networks, the interplay between the different groups that gave such apparent plausibility to charges of national conspiracy.²⁰ The diplomatic and propaganda role of the pro-Axis movements has been placed in a broader political context by Herzstein and in other work on the isolationist campaign.²¹

There are also real lacunae in recent research. Much of the most valuable material on this period is found in unpublished dissertations, and this includes the best accounts of the Silver Shirt movement as well as the best case study of the Christian Front movement and Schonbach’s pioneering survey of the whole spectrum of “native fascism.”²² While dissertations are relatively accessible, at least to an academic audience, there is a lack of modern scholarship in other large areas of concern. Apart from the Germans, other ethnic fascist movements have been poorly served, and Diggins’s key work on Italian Fascism pays only limited attention to party organization and activism at the level of the streets and local communities.²³ Ukrainian and other Slavic groups remain unstudied, and whole movements such as the Christian Front, the Christian Mobilizers, the White Shirts, and the Khaki Shirts have yet to find their historians. The same is true of the Ku Klux Klan revival in the 1930s, despite the huge volume of work that has appeared on that group in its heyday before 1928.²⁴ With a few notable exceptions, biographical studies are lacking for most of the leaders and propagandists of these years. Without case studies of the specific movements, it is impossible to estimate the success of rightist campaigns, the numerical scale of the membership, and the wider audience. A circular argument might be at work here: as the movements are so little studied, they appear to be of no great historical significance, and therefore they attract few researchers.

Another dark area concerns the fate of the rightist groups after Pearl Harbor. Such accounts as do exist concentrate on the late 1930s and the isolationist movements, with the implicit suggestion that the groups faded away on the outbreak of war, presumably in response to official intervention and a radically altered public mood. This perception conceals the continuing activity of some organizations and individuals, who occasionally remained active in rightist causes through the McCarthy era. Observing this continuity draws attention to the Mothers’ movements that were pivotal to extremist campaigns in the 1940s, and which have been studied by Glen Jeansonne.²⁵

LOCAL STUDIES

By far the greatest omission lies in the area of local studies of rightist movements in the depression era, of the sort that have revolutionized our understanding of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Such accounts are lacking for the 1930s, except to the extent that virtually every major examination of a national rightist movement focuses chiefly or entirely on one locality, New York City.²⁶ We thus know a great deal about the Bund and the Italian Fascists in this region, and this is the one center where there exists a detailed picture of the Christian Front.²⁷ Activities elsewhere are mentioned in passing, but there is an implicit suggestion that activism was largely a metropolitan phenomenon, with some spillover into nearby cities like Boston and Philadelphia.

The absence of local research increases the likelihood that the New York experience will be seen as normative for other cities and communities, both on the East Coast and, more perilously, nationwide. These generalizations are often unsafe. To take one example, most rosters of extremist parties include the Christian Mobilizers headed by Joe McWilliams as one of the most powerful factions, and this is usually listed alongside such major groups as the Bund and the Christian Front.²⁸ This may have been true in New York City, but the group had a negligible presence elsewhere, and McWilliams was a local phenomenon, in contrast to widely active national leaders such as James B. True or George Deatherage. Conversely, New York-based writers pay little attention to movements with little impact in the northeastern United States—groups such as George W. Christians’s White Shirts, which flourished in the South and West in the early 1930s, or the still more active Silver Shirts. Chicago and Detro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Hoods and Shirts
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Usage
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Red Years
• 3 The White Giant
• 4 The Invisible Blackshirts
• 5 Silver Shirts among the Brown
• 6 Germany Calling
• 7 The Franco Way
• 8 From Unity to Ruin
• 9 After the War
• 10 Conclusion
• Notes
• Index