The Silver Legion of America, commonly known as the Silver Shirts, was an underground American fascist and Nazi sympathizer organization founded by William Dudley Pelley and headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. History Pelley was a former journalist, novelist and screenwriter turned spiritualist who, by 1931, had begun to promote antisemitic views, asserting that Jews were possessed by demons. He formed the Silver Legion with the goal to bring about "spiritual and political renewal", inspired by the success of Adolf Hitler's Nazi movement in Germany. A nationalist, fascist group, the paramilitary Silver Legion wore a uniform modeled after the Nazi's brown shirts (SA), consisting of a silver shirt with a blue tie, along with a campaign hat and blue corduroy trousers with leggings. The uniform shirts bore a scarlet letter L over the heart, which according to Pelley was "standing for Love, Loyalty, and Liberation." The blocky slab serif L-emblem was in a typeface similar to the present-day Rockwell Extra Bold. The organizational flag was a plain silver field with such a red L in the canton at the upper left. By 1934, the Legion claimed 15,000 members. Legion leader Pelley called for a "Christian Commonwealth" in America that would combine the principles of nationalism and theocracy, while excluding Jews and non-whites. He claimed he would save America from Jewish communists just as "Mussolini and his Black Shirts saved Italy and as Hitler and his Brown Shirts saved Germany." Pelley ran in the 1936 presidential election on a third-party ticket under the Christian Party banner. Pelley hoped to seize power in a "silver revolution" and set himself as dictator of the United States. He would be called "the Chief" just like other fascist world leaders who had similar titles such "Der Führer" for Adolf Hitler and "II Duce" for Benito Mussolini. However, the Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt handily won the reelection, and Pelley failed to figure among the top four. By around 1937, the Silver Legion's membership had declined to about 5,000. Pelley disbanded the organization after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. On January 20, 1942, Pelley was sentenced to serve two to three years in prison by Superior Court Judge F. Don Phillips, in Asheville, North Carolina, for violating terms of probation of a 1935 conviction for violating North Carolina security laws. The same sentence had been suspended pending good behavior, but the court found that during