While going back over my Silvershirt membership material lately I decided to check against available digital repositories. There are several digital archives which are difficult or impossible to navigate. One special collection sent me their entire holdings on a CD-ROM perhaps 12 years ago containing a PDF which locked up after a month. I still have the file but it is now inaccessible, at least to me.
UNC Asheville had nice, large scans of many issues of Liberation on their site, but when I complimented them they said, “Oh! Those weren’t intended for the public!” and proceeded to withdraw them. Why so proprietary? This material is mostly public domain by now. The family never renewed the copyright on any of the overtly political stuff except for No More Hunger and Nations-in-Law.
The Washington state comptroller or liaison officer’s files are on microfilm. I borrowed the reel ages ago. It would be worth digitizing if anyone has some pull with UW. There is some interesting material in several California collections, more in Michigan and Delaware. In other words, scattered corners.
I pulled a Bing result of a choppy OCR reading of ‘One Million Silvershirts by 1939’ and off down the rabbit hole I went.
The archive hosting this item turns out to be one of the largest digital collections concerned with the JFK assassination, The Harold Weisberg Collection. It also contains, appropriately enough with government offices closed today, a large amount of MLK material.
The public facing introduction page offers us a “browse” button which drops an unwieldy list of folders and submenus in our lap.
At the top of the list is something headed “12-2018 Files.” Does this mean they were created in December of 2018? That’s the only logic I can apply to it.
12-2018 contains hundreds if not thousands of PDFs divided into numerous boxes with only numbers for titles.
Thankfully, we have a finding aid in the form of a spreadsheet file. A quick scroll shows me some rare goodies, most starting in the mid-1930s with some earlier material. The heart of the subject matter would seem to be American communists and fascists, embrace those labels or not. It would also seem to be that this material was collected by a left-winger, Mr. Weisberg I assume, and since the bio material refers to his long career as an investigative writer, this must be some of his early files. Seems he was contributing to a number of publications, some quite rare and luckily preserved here, if only in clippings and extracted pages.
I will attempt to create a tutorial from here on, mostly for the sake of my dozen or so collector friends who might value the scarce material to be found within.
I was able to acquire a nice file, for example, of Pelley’s rare tract ‘Duress and Persuasion’ being an early critique of the Anti-Defamation League. Some things never change.
The first useful thing you should do is download the spreadsheet file. Whoever named the 12-2018 Files made what I was always taught was a faux pas. They include [spacebar] spaces in the file names. I would prefer underscores or hyphens. Because of this, the web addresses usually render with %20 in place of each space.
If that last paragraph lost you, don’t worry. I will generate a few (hopefully) functional weblinks below.
First, here is a screenshot of the spreadsheet file directory…
The file you need should get on your computer if you click here:
If you open the spreadsheet file and search (ctrl+F) keyword ‘pelley’ for example, you will soon encounter results such as follow…
This tells us that there is a whole lotta WDP in Box number 5.
The top menu for these files is at:
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/12-2018%20Files/UWSP%20Folders/
…and you can click into the appropriate box and scroll/search for the matching file number as seen here…
That file address is here: http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/12-2018%20Files/UWSP%20Folders/Box%2005/Box%2005-013.pdf
More Pelley from the Dies Committee era turns up in the spreadsheet, for further example, here…
…and you can use that box menu to locate links for these, such as this one for ‘Key to Crisis,’ another rare one: http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/12-2018%20Files/UWSP%20Folders/Box%2010/Box%2010-196.pdf
If you see how those URLs are rendering, you can go back and adjust the path and file numbers yourself, or drop back to that box menu and collect them all!
I spent a few hours yesterday just clicking through random files and they were nearly all of passing interest, including some good old-fashioned undercover reports with lots of details I had never heard before.
When your keyword search for Pelley runs out in the spreadsheet file, try ‘silver’ as in Silver Shirts, Silver Legion, etc. and get ready for lots more results. If that’s not enough, you can seek out other characters like James True and read some of his rare Industrial Control Reports, which I don’t think I had ever seen before yesterday.
Also, some Pelley material has been misidentified as communist pamphlets. I can only imagine the person indexing this trove was entirely clueless as to what some of it was. Anyway, several of our 9 Green Booklets of the Councils of Safety turn up…
The files are mostly photographed open pages, so the flatbed scans I am working on for these tracts will be the better source for printing, though these read pretty well.
I am adding Silvershirt material to Archive dot org with the author/creator listed as Silvershirts [one word] so you can keep an eye on that field here: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Silvershirts%22
One day someone will get the text from such scans formatted so you can read them on your phone. As of today, this post goes out to the tedious digital termites like myself.
Enjoy!