The Silver Legion was America's first Nazi organization, founded the day after Hitler ascended to Chancellor in 1933. The documents and annotations included in this collection record reciprocation between the Silver Shirts and prominent businessmen, lawyers and government officials throughout the 1930s, such as Hjalmar Petersen, 23rd Governor of Minnesota; Ray Chase, prominent lawyer who assisted Minnesota Republican candidates through fear mongering and race hatred; Harold Stassen, 25th Governor of Minnesota and George Belden, wealthy Minnesotan who hired thugs to violently suppress union organization.
ON OCTOBER 25, 2020, ABOUT 36,000 TWIN CITIES SUBSCRIBERS of the Star Tribune newspaper received the Legends and Myths of Ancient Minnesota, an exhibition-in-print by Brooks Turner. The 32-page publication combines reproductions of original artworks with archival materials related to the Nazi following in Minnesota in the 1930s.
A fringe movement imported from Europe, in the form of a group called “Silver Shirts,” remained active—openly promoting Hitlerism and suppressing opposition to it—in the US for just a few years before being driven out with the beginning of WWII. But Silver Shirts did not take root here by simply importing European fascism: rather, their worldviews were built upon foundational elements of United States history, such as Manifest Destiny and slavery, that blended organically with the ingredients of European fascism to produce an authentically American flavor of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s following. In fact, even this gets the relationship between the two regions’ histories somewhat backwards: Hitler acknowledged, in his book Mein Kampf, the inspiration he took from the “racially pure and almost unmixed Germanic peoples on the American Continent [who] have risen to become the master of their land.”
Nor did the presence of fascism end with the formal dissolution of the Silver Shirts. By the end of the 1930s, mainstream politicians and pundits (for instance, Hjalmar Petersen, Harold Stassen, Ray Chase, and others) appreciated the electoral potential the Silver Shirts’ rhetoric and visuals, which thus migrated from underground gatherings of thugs and demagogues into popular partisan politics. None of those politicians explicitly referred to Hitlerism as their inspiration, but the fascist-sourced material and vocabularies inflected American political conversations for generations to come—and remain there to this very day.
