Around the country there are stashes of Pelleyana. Among the rarest are the political newspapers, Pelley’s Weekly and the Silver Legion Ranger.
I have only ever owned one complete newspaper edition of Pelley’s Weekly. It was first printed on magazine paper as a replacement for Liberation after the stock lawsuit of 1934. Those hold up well. The newsprint? Does not.
Most issues of Pelley’s Weekly carried a full page editorial by WDP. I once had a collection of loose pages of these editorials on the original crumbling newspaper which I managed to copy on large format paper before they disintegrated. I remember blowing yellowed flakes of paper out of the copier as I placed each new page on the glass. Most dated from 1936.
As for the Silver Legion Ranger, which was their Los Angeles and. for a time, Oklahoma City newspaper, I have never held a copy.
Thankfully it seems that more of these archives are being digitized all the time. Locating and navigating the digital repositories can be tricky.
A few years ago I discovered a digital archive of 1930s antisemitic propaganda. The inventory was described in a useful finding aid but the web addresses for each folder of materials were not always a perfect match.
Here are links with some instructions which, hopefully, will help you access this material. Most of the individual files are downloadable as PDFs and I’ve collected several, but not all.
Happy hunting!
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Here is the finding aid:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171111004840/http://findingaids.cjh.org/?pID=1525697
Scroll until you start to see something like this…
Here is a sample entry, for a folder of the rare 1936 newspaper editions of Pelley's Weekly:
https://archive.org/details/florencemendheimb001f024
The address numbering at the end here refers to "Box 1, Folder 24" and corresponds to holdings as listed in the finding aid.
Another example, the rare Silver Legion Ranger newspapers, according to the finding aid linked above, are to be found in (OS=oversize) Box 165, folder 3. The archive links to this collection do NOT follow pattern for this item. The link associated with this entry (which you can see while pointing at the title in the finding aid) is:
https://archive.org/details/florencemendheimb001f027
And now you're reading some early issues of the Silver Legion Ranger.
This is a rare resource and I think it is scarcely used. Knowing how to access this material is a neat trick.