5. William Dudley Pelley went from being a famed Hollywood scriptwriter to an infamous supporter of an American strand of Nazism.
In 1920s Hollywood, William Dudley Pelley was a renowned, and award-winning writer. In the 1930s, however, he was better known as a wannabe dictator. According to the man himself, a near-death experience in 1929 led him to conclude that he was destined for bigger things than writing movie scripts. So, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Pelley assumed that he was to follow his lead. Not only did he admire Hitler from afar, he attempted to establish a homegrown Nazi movement in America, with himself as its leader.
The Silver Legion, which Pelley established, in the early-1930s, was modeled on the Nazi Party. The uniforms looked like SS uniforms, while the ant-Semitic rhetoric and the focus on militarism was unquestionably Nazi in nature. For all Pelley’s bombast, however, the Silver Legion only ever numbered 35,000 members at its peak. Moreover, Pelley’s attempts to assume political office never amounted to much. Then, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, Pelley was jailed for 15 years for sedition. He served 8 years of a 15-year sentence. Upon his release, he ditched his fervent Nazism for a passionate interest in UFOs and extra-terrestrials.