by Tucker Koch, Contributing Writer
The Great Depression hit the United States pretty hard. If you know anything about the Great Depression, this illustration wouldn’t shock you. We didn’t get hit as hard as some other nations throughout the world—just look at Germany in the 1930s—but we still got obliterated by poverty around this time. This phenomenon causes all sorts of random crime gangs and extremist groups to pop up around this time. The one I will be focusing on today, because it is so fricken weird, is the Silver Legion of America.
First off, this group just sounds like a faction in an alternate history game, but they seriously named themselves that. To be clear, this is their party’s official flag.
This crest is legitimately what we’re working with here. They believed this flag would unite the people. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a step back to look at how this mess formed in the first place.
The Silver Legion was formed by William Dudley Pelley in 1933. Before he founded the Silver Legion, he worked as a journalist for various newspapers. He eventually enlisted with the Red Cross for a bit and helped out in the Russian Civil War on the White’s side (for those who aren’t incredibly familiar with the war, it’s the non-communist side). Then he became a writer of short stories and movies in the 1920s, helping write such stories as Adventure and The Shock (rivetingly unique names there). He also got obsessed with the spiritual in the 20s as well, claiming to have three out-of-body experiences and basically making his own form of Christianity in which there exists “Dark Souls” (that is legitimately the name they chose), which essentially included everyone he hated: Communists, the pope, and Jews, because we can’t have an extremist group in the 1930s without anti-Semitism. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, Pelley believed it was an opportune moment to gain influence using similar methods.
He structured his party and theoretical government similarly to those of other fascist nations, characterized by a personality cult surrounding the central leader and a prioritization of militarism above all else.
He thought this plan was so perfect. Unfortunately for him, many US crime gangs were tolerant of Jewish people and proceeded to interrupt every rally he tried to do. He eventually bit the bullet and gave up in 1941 when the bombing of Pearl Harbor united all Americans around a single cause: to defeat the Japanese.
While US alternate history frequently discusses this topic, it is unlikely that this group could have achieved significant success, even under ideal circumstances. And good riddance, too; the world didn’t need even more Fascist powers.
This has been Tucker Koch, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this.
