Allow me to conjure a good example while remaining intentionally vague as a means of letting certain others know what I know…
Certain terms have an implied meaning. Certain combinations of words communicate more clearly. A legal description, for example, should be pretty well-defined.
An off-handed account, as many of those I write about Pelley here are, does not have the ring of an academic history simple because I have not bothered to include “works cited” or call witnesses, nearly all of whom are dead now.
Pelley retold “Seven Minutes” and “The Aftermath” in at least half-a-dozen editions. Some varied greatly, while the core text, a slightly expanded version of the original American Magazine article, changed little… retaining exact wording and all manner of quotable quotes which were present in every edition.
One that I think I flubbed by just one word when I have quoted it regards friends who Pelley had last seen “as cold as wax” in their caskets. I saw someone else (you mean there are other people on this journey?) had scanned or photographed a paragraph out of Seven Minutes and shared on social media that read “as cold wax” when describing the mortal remains of Pelley’s friends at their funerals, no second “as” that I had inserted mistakenly in at least one essay. I want this observation to inform my deliberation of 30 years this year. Three entire decades in rumination. I’ve made typos. I've written varied accounts of the same incidents which have rolled around in my head on a thousand nights.
Chief among them, pun intended, is that of My Discovery. I have at least two very pointedly different tellings which I must one day bring together. They balance on what was actually the prompt that had me go to the library to a) learn more about Pelley for a class on Mass Media Law, with well-learned chapters such as what constitutes a Public Figure and why they are legally susceptible to closer public scrutiny than a private individual. This was generally a sound defense for Pelley’s criticisms of elected officials. Pelley was never sued for libel, while other American Nationalist figures, James True and Robert Edmondson, who compiled the collection of essays given the title “I Testify [Against the Jews]” were, if I recall, at least charged and had to answer accusations of libel. Both plead “not guilty” and it was easily demonstrated that, while they held unconventional or minority opinions, there was no personal threat in their “journaling” and publishing. Edmondson was sometimes called a pamphleteer. This differs from a proper publisher in that his newsletters were general hand-crank mimeographed and distributed to a small circle of allies, much as the very substack newsletter you now read. Are bloggers the pamphleteers of the 21st century? I’ll take it!
Read “I Testify” at Archive dot Org, the Internet Archive, a fantastic resource for obscure texts of the era: https://archive.org/details/EdmondsonREITestifyAgainstTheJewsSonsOfLiberty3rdEd1985_201905
Ah, we almost forgot out friend “a)” hiding behind the one-sided parenthetical a paragraph or so back. My discovery account b) constitutes a wildly synchronistic chain of events which expose the hand of an identifiable spirt! If you’ve heard my interview “Psychic Discovery of William Dudley Pelley” you know this version. Most correctly, I was not in the library to conduct research for my Media Law course, which I aced by the way, when I first encountered Pelley. When I first read his name I entered the library an empty vessel with no definite purpose and walked out a man possessed. Perhaps a transcript of this telling would do. Listen here: https://www.mixcloud.com/vance-pollock/psychic-discovery-of-william-dudley-pelley/
I will leave you with this hard fought scrutiny over legalese versus vagueries — When the Law calls for “more than one instance,” a single incident retold in multiple accounts does not quantify or qualify as more than one event. Pelley may have edited and redistributed his “Seven Minutes” story a dozen times to changing audiences over 30 years, between 1928 and 1958. I may cater the telling of My Discovery over another 30 years, 1993 to 2023, to suit the needs of the moment, brevity and sanity for example, but the essence of each version are true and point back to the “Solitary Incident.” I can trace Pelley’s grip on me back to the same, single occasion. All first hand accounts on the trail of Pelley stem from this one event. I’m not stalking him, he’s stalking me!
Elsewhere I have called such a moment of great personal illumination the Believer Experience. An old fellow in the library downtown in Asheville the other day, same age as my old friend Guy Harwood when I met him in nearly the same spot in 1995, told me he doesn’t believe in ghosts. I told him, “When you meet one you will.” I’ve seen a doorknob turn by itself in an empty house at midnight. I believe in ghosts. I have not seen a bonafide UFO. I believe people have. I don’t think all those reports are delusional or bogus. I hold open the check box for the day I do see a UFO. Then I will believe. Just because you’ve never seen one doesn’t mean “there ain’t no such animal.”
Take care friends. Be kind to someone today.