Silver Shirt, Striped

As Hercules might have told him, a man cannot be too careful about his shirts. No Hercules in any sense, William Dudley Pelley might well have felt last week that he had unwarily donned the shirt of Nessus. Just because he favored silver shirts, Mr. Pelley was handed a couple of years in jail.

In 1928 Mr. Pelley, goat-bearded author, publisher, mystic, founder of the Silvershirt Legion of America, had quite an experience. The way he tells it, he died and went to eternity for seven minutes. The following year he was "inspirationally instructed" that "when a certain young house painter comes to the head of the German people, then do you take that as your time symbol for bringing . . . the Christian Militia into the open!"

He started the Galahad Press in Asheville, N.C., to publish the New Liberator. The Press lasted four years, and Publisher Pelley was tried, convicted and fined in 1935 for violating North Carolina Blue Sky laws by selling stock: 1) in an insolvent company which he had represented as being in sound condition; 2) without registering as a securities dealer in North Carolina. On Pelley's promise to be good, the sentence was suspended.

No man who has been in Paradise for seven minutes can be expected to pay much attention to the animadversions of a temporal court. William Pelley went on organizing his Silver Shirts, an anti-Jewish, anti-Communist organization. In August 1939 the Dies Committee heard about him, sent him a subpoena. Pelley disappeared. The Superior Court of Asheville ordered him to reappear, on charges of violating his suspended sentence. Wherever he was, in Paradise or simply off the premises, Pelley lay doggo.

But six months later, like a falling angel, he suddenly appeared before the Dies Committee. Loud were Mr. Pelley's praises of its good work. Embarrassed, bewildered, the Committee shushed and shooed Mr. Pelley away. Outside the committee-room door, police arrested him on a warrant from North Carolina.

After fighting extradition for more than a year, Pelley finally gave in. Superior Court Judge F. Don Phillips sentenced him to serve a 2-3-year sentence for violation of the Blue Sky law; to serve, concurrently, the 1-2-year suspended sentence handed down in 1935. Even though Prisoner Pelley was already under $10,000 bond, Judge Phillips directed that he be clapped securely in the county jail. With that kind of shirt and that kind of paradisal record, you could not be too sure of Mr. Pelley.

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