William Dudley Pelley, leader of the anti-Semitic Silver Shirts, who was convicted last month of violating the North Carolina “blue sky” laws, will not retreat “a single inch” in his feud with Jewry, he made it plain here today.
Pelley, who is temporarily at liberty on bail, pending sentence February 18, faces imprisonment for as long as five years under the statutes, but according to one of the local newspapers Judge Wilson Warlick has indicated he will suspend infliction of a prison term upon payment of a fine, the amount of which was not divulged.
In a mimeographed statement headed “Special Bulletin on ‘The Battle of Asheville'” which ran to five pages, single-spaced, the Silver Shirt chieftain gave his version of the recent trial and voiced frequent attacks upon the Jews.
“At the present time I am concentrating all my time and energies on the heart-rending task of accumulating the $1,000 to $1,500 that must be paid the clerk of Buncombe County on February 18,” Pelley confessed in this circular.
“All activities of every nature are subservient to this, since it means a new lease on life for me to operate with a freedom which has been denied me since May, 1934.”
Pelley then related that “Judge Warlick has made his ‘arrangements’ for disposing of the case as above cited of record, so that if the fine money is forthcoming I cannot be jeopardized for the same offense.”
SAYS TRIAL WAS FAIR
Declaring that his trial was “absolutely fair,” Pelley’s statement reported that Judge Warlick ruled out all mention of the Jewish question from the start. The anti-Semite revealed childish pleasure in narrating this occurrence.
When the verdict was brought in, Pelley’s account continued, “local Jews bit their knuckles in rage and the Gentile attorneys who had fought so bitterly over three weeks of time to clamp me behind prison bars had no alternative but to gather up their documents and go home.”
Pelley is convinced he will not be sent to the penitentiary, he explained, on the basis of purported assurances given him by his attorneys that Judge Warlick is disposed to accept the minimum fine of $1,500 provided under the law. In addition, he and Robert C. Summerville, an aide convicted with him, will have to pay costs.
DONS MARTY’S MANTLE
With a gesture of martyrdom Pelley then claimed that “all the Jewish wealth in the United States is pitted against me to see that I suffer the extreme penalty as provided by the statutes.’
“It was reported to our attorneys from what they considered to be reliable sources that it had cost the Jews of the country something like $15,000 to obtain even this drawn verdict against me,” he gloated.
“But who got this money, granted the figures are accurate, and how it was divided were items successfully kept from the official records.”
REPORTS RALLY FAILED
The Silver Shirt leader then reported that a mass meeting held here in which he was branded a disgrace to North Carolina was attended by only 100 persons “and still angrier comment against the Hebrews was rife in this city in the week that followed.”
“Like the infamous Dickstein investigation,” the wordy effusion proceeded, “my trial has only served to rivet attention on the machinations of Jewry and validate my claims that patriotic Christians have a real problem on their hands in Jewry to which they must ultimately give bitter attention. . . .
“On every hand the wave of mass resentment at the tactics of Jewry, as demonstrated in the Pelley case, is mounting.”
NO MONEY, LOTS OF AGONY
The anti-Semite averred he was suffering “a sort of agony” by being forced to withhold his heavy artillery because of a lack of resources.
The statement also contained an ominous passage in which it was broadly hinted that, in some mysterious fashion, those who opposed Pelley always ran into serious difficulties.
Strange, strange indeed are denouement of events in the lives of those who take up the Silver Shirt work and then turn back.”
TELLS OF ACCIDENTS
Harry F. Sieber, a former collaborator who went over to “the Ballard-King Group in Chicago,” the account said, suddenly met with a terrible auto accident in Baltimore.
“It has been only a matter of months,” it was also recalled, “since C. W. Bick deserted the Silver Shirt work in California to set up a rival organization, only to suffer the loss of his beloved daughter by a mysterious disappearance on a boat crossing Puget Sound.
“I am informed that Luther Powell, James H. Craig and Frederick Beutel, who each and severally have tried to compete with the Silver Legion by appropriating our mailing lists and going forward on their own, have each had severe reversals of personal fortune.
‘STRANGE PROTECTION’
“It is difficult how to account for such occurrences. It leads the philosophical-minded to infer that there is a strange protection that exercises over loyal workers in this movement, whereas such protection seems to be withdrawn when the work is discarded for competitive pursuits.”
Adopting the pose of a child who considers itself unjustly spanked, the statement had the following to say of ‘the battle of Asheville’:
“For thirteen days I sat between my attorneys in a lofty southern courtroom and heard myself castigated before a jury as a stock-selling shyster, a religious racketeer, a despoiler of widows and orphans, an inciter of race hatreds, a defamer of the President and a general all-around scoundrel who had come into the State of North Carolina in 1932 because I was at my rope’s end financially and assumed that down here among these mountaineers I would be able to carry on my ‘nefarious enterprises’ unmolested and undetected.
” ‘But the law finally caught up with this man!’ declared the attorneys for the state, shaking their accusing fingers in my direction.”
PROSECUTION PROTESTED
The prosecutor purportedly expostulated with Judge Warlick when it became apparent that Pelley would get off with a fine to the effect that to turn him loose constituted “pernicious business.”
” ‘Not only does he capitalize on religious sentiment to dispose of his utterly worthless securities,’ ” Pelley narrated that the counsel for the state said, “but he goes to and fro defaming our beloved President, he is an inciter of religious hatreds, he is one of the most dangerous men we have in this country today.’ “
The statement then asserted Judge Warlick informed the prosecution that ‘writing on the subject of Jews or anything else is his constitutional privilege.’
ATTACKS FORMER AIDE
Another feature of the lengthy “bulletin” was a venomous attack upon George S. Anderson, former treasurer of Pelley’s Foundation for Christian Economics, who testified for the prosecution.
“He sat with my tormentors and colluded with them throughout the whole trial, supplying them with all the information they may have desired in their attempts to either trap me or make me appear in a disadvantageous light to the jury.
“He testified with alacrity to dozens of happenings which had occurred months before I ever met him or he ever became associated with our concern.
RAIDED HIS OFFICE
“This is the same George Anderson whose private office we raided one night in July, 1932, to discover nearly 4,000 letters and postal money orders going back over three months secreted in his desk.
“He had the effrontery to tell the jury that Galahad Press was always in arrears with his salary, whereas he had never been hired or paid by Galahad Press on the one hand, and one the other we had discovered as a result of the raid that he had not only overdrawn his salary account by had used, moneys of the Foundation unknown to me to pay his personal bills.”
If he succeeds in raising the money to wash his slate clean with the court, Pelley promised, he will launch new efforts to further the spread of his movement. They will be carried forward with greater conviction than before, he pledged.
“Important announcements will be forthcoming on February 19. We shall endeavor to convince America that right must triumph and that the program we have launched cannot be halted by the machinations of men and interests who do not understand what it is that we are about but do not want to understand.
“Bear with me, therefore, till February 18 is come and passed. Again I use the words of the immortal Garrison in summing up my position:
” ‘I am deadly in earnest. I will not equivocate, I will not play politics, I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard!’ “
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