By People’s World
Photos: People’s World
Back in the 1930s and ’40s, and even before that, there were fascist operatives in the U.S. with significant followings. Their aim was to destroy the U.S. government and remake America in their own image.
William Dudley Pelley, leader of the fascist Silver Legion and the Christian Party during the Great Depression, espoused many of the same things put forward by Christian nationalists of today. He relied on right-wing followers to provide the soldiers for his movement and dressed them in silver shirts, modeled on Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts.
His anti-Semitic party promoted a program full of the kind of positions backed by the modern-day religious and fascist right. The torch-light paraders in Charlottesville who Trump said were “very fine people” would have felt at home in Pelley’s movement.
Some know about the 1933 Wall Street “Business Plot” to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace him with a military dictator, but most have forgotten these days about another planned fascist revolt that involved figures at the highest levels of power in Washington.
In the 1944 “Sedition Trial,” dozens of people were charged for plotting to undermine democracy with help directly from Hitler’s Germany—a scheme that involved several sitting members of the U.S. House and Senate who were using taxpayer dollars to pump Nazi propaganda into American homes. Connected to these figures were well-armed groups who schemed to kill Roosevelt and install a fascist dictatorship.
Unfortunately, the judge died during the proceedings, leading to a mistrial. Furthermore, the war had turned against Germany at this point, and with the Justice Department slow to prosecute the case in the first place (Doesn’t that sound familiar?) the whole matter was dropped….READ MORE
