I've finished painting all my Silver Shirts - as with the two test minis previously shared, they are a mix of Pulp Figures US Marines, and GEG + Warlord plastic mashups, mostly the former. Additionally, I've painted up Warlord's Oswald Mosley as William Dudley Pelley, the Silver Legion's founder and leader.
I really do wish the Silver Legion was more widely known; Pelley's background as a reasonably successful artist, his devotion to the aesthetic of nostalgia and sentimentalist moralizing, his embrace of nontraditional religious views, his willingness to criticize aspects of Capitalism, all of these are common (though by no means universal) features of modern fascism, which can nonetheless be baffling to people whose awareness of the movement is limited to mainstream depictions of Hitler and his Nazis.
One might argue that the Silver Legion's lack of long-term success explains its modern obscurity. But while the Legion never filled Madison Square Garden, and Pelley never reached Lindberg's fame or recruited anyone who had, certainly 15,000 members nationwide is nothing to sniff at. If nothing else, we are fortunate that Pelley was a remarkably bad judge of character who constantly delegated his finances to opportunistic embezzlers instead of "true believers", and also fortunate that his organization's sketchiest activities happened to occur within the vanishingly brief period of American history where law enforcement and the House Un-American Activities Committee actually cared more about stopping right-wing extremism than harassing unions and activists.
There are also interesting conversations to be had about how his occult interests put him at odds with potential allies elsewhere on the far right, but I will save that for a future post about how my game will handle factions.
Bringing it back to my tabletop gaming project: as part of his off-brand Theosophical belief system, William Dudley Pelley claimed possession of various psychic powers. Since my game is set in a pulp/superhero world of magic and super-science, he can actually have those powers so as to be a worthwhile antagonist for the players, in which case his administrative problems are solved. And since the central premise of my campaign is either a breakdown or hijacking of the Federal government's authority, he has nothing to fear from HUAC. It will be entirely up to the Superheroes to stop him!
For more on William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts, I highly recommend Scott Beekman's book on the subject.
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