The Door to Revelation: An Autobiography

Asheville, N.C: Pelley Publishers, 1939. First Edition. 482 pages: illustrations, portraits; 22 cm. Soiling and wear to exterior. Binding is fairly tight and leaves clean within. Overall about very good (-) thus. Hardcover.

Scarce. Autobiography of William Dudley Pelley (1890–1965), the Massachusetts-born magazine writer and Hollywood screenwriter who, after a claimed out-of-body experience in Altadena in May 1928, recast himself first as a spiritualist prophet and then, in 1933, as founder of the Silver Legion of America. The "Silver Shirts" were a uniformed, antisemitic organization modeled on Hitler's Brown Shirts, with chapters in some twenty-two states. Issued in 1939 under his own Asheville, North Carolina, imprint, the book traces Pelley's path from a Methodist parsonage in Lynn, Massachusetts, through freelance work for the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's, reporting from Siberia during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, the screen trade, and the visions and political turn of the Depression years. It includes his account of the January evening in 1933 when news of Hitler's accession reached his office and he announced, "Tomorrow we have the Silver Shirts!" Congressional investigators later cited that passage as evidence of his totalitarian aims. The book appeared the same year the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities summoned him, and shortly before his move to Noblesville, Indiana. He was arrested there in 1942 and convicted of sedition after publishing claims that the Pearl Harbor losses were worse than the government admitted. On his release from federal prison he spent his last years building the UFO-inflected religion he called Soulcraft. It is a primary document of the interwar American far right and its occult undercurrents, and the chief source for Pelley's self-mythology.