Table Of Contents
David Davidson was perhaps the most famous of the Freemason Pyramidologists. He believed in British Israelism but was not as keen on the Jews, though he did believe Britain would help get them back to Israel. David Davidson influenced the pseudo-Nazis Christian Identity movement. However, there was another figure who he influenced and that was American Fascist Nazi supporter William Dudley Pelly. Pelly was a spiritualist who formed the Fascist Silver Shirts. He used David Davidson's pyramid calculations to form prophecies of his own. However, Pelley was not a British Israelist and disdained the ideas (like the Nazis). He also did not believe in the return of the Jews to Israel. He eventually went on to create a teaching called Soulcraft. While Pelley was a more minor figure than others he still had influence on other movements. From pro-Jewish to anti-Semitic, every group got involved with Pyramidology, and many of them were influenced by the Freemason flavor.
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By 1935, a colorful southern evangelist with British-Israel views, Joe Jeffers, set up shop in Los Angeles and may simultaneously have been active in William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion. By the early 1940s Los Angeles had also attracted Clem Davies, a prominent British-Israel preacher from Victoria, British Columbia. By the time he arrived in Los Angeles, Davies had a long right-wing and anti-Semitic past, including involvement with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and sympathetic statements about the Silver Shirts and the British fascists. William Dudley Pelley disdained British-Israelism and took no role in its organized manifestations. He was, however, profoundly influenced by one of its major figures, pyramidologist David Davidson. He turned Davidson’s ideas in directions neither their author nor other British-Israelites would have approved, but Pelley did perform two functions in the emergence of Christian Identity: he popularized Davidson’s writings among his followers, and he integrated Davidson’s work into an unabashedly anti-Semitic political movement.10
The Silver Shirts’ founder claimed to disdain British-Israelism. However, in the early and mid-1930s, he had appropriated parts of it for his own eclecticideology, a mixture of fascism and mysticism. His fondness for the occult led him to the pyramid literature, which served him, as it had others, as a device for predicting critical events. Since he remained aloof from organized Anglo-Israelism and incorporated only a small and arguably minor part of its beliefs, the use he made of pyramidism will not be considered here. It will, however, be examined in chapter 5, along with other British-Israel scenarios of the Last Days.
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William Dudley Pelley
William Dudley Pelley, the founder of the Silver Shirts, did not consider himself a British-Israelite, and, indeed, it is difficult to imagine a person of such idiosyncratic views subordinating himself to any belief system he had not invented. He mocked British-Israelism as an ideology based upon a flawed conception of the covenant between God and Israel. Nonetheless, Pelley’s entire vision of history was structured around the pyramid chronology of David Davidson. While it is not clear how early Pelley first became acquainted with Davidson’s ideas, Pelley reports that his lieutenant, Robert Summerville, was in correspondence with Davidson by March 1933. Summerville interrupted Pelley with a letter and a pamphlet “from Professor [sic] David Davidson, the eminent Great Pyramid authority.” Summerville asked him whether he was familiar with the pamphlet Davidson had sent, the title of which Pelley does not report. Pelley had not previously seen the pamphlet but is vague about whether he knew Davidson’s other writings. The general tenor of the passage in which the incident is described, however, suggests that this was not his first exposure to Davidson. Davidson had been publishing since the mid-1920s and had issued two works in the early 1930s that spoke directly to current political and economic issues, The Great Pyramid’s Prophecy on the Current Economic Oppression (March 1931) and The Great Pyramid’s Prophecy Concerning the British Empire and America (September 1932). It may well have been one of these that Summerville received.25
In any case, Davidson’s work evidently made a profound impression on Pelley. In 1935 Pelley announced the organization of the Christian party, on whose ticket he intended to run for president in 1936. For the inner circle of the party—its Councils of Safety—he created a set of Master Councillor’s Addresses, in which he laid out his application of Davidson to both world and American history. The Master Councillor’s Addresses cite Davidson copiously. Indeed, Pelley appropriated most of Davidson’s system of pyramid chronology unaltered. Even when Davidson is not explicitly cited, his system permeates Pelley’s view of events.26
Despite Pelley’s disdainful comment on British-Israelites, he retained a good deal of British-Israelism. Although he occasionally implied that Jews were descended from Israelites—as when he referred to the latter’s Exodus as “their petty and spleenish experiences”—he was inclined to accept British- Israelism’s distinction between the two. Intellectual rigor, never Pelley’s strong suit, collapses in a heap of contradictions. On the one hand, the people led out of Egypt by Moses were “Hebrews and Israelites. By no means were they Jews.” On the other hand, “it’s from the tribe of Judah that we get modern Jews.” The tribe of Judah, according to Pelley, were the bane of Moses’ existence, as “disruptive [and] cantankerous” in the desert as their descendants were subsequently. Pelley’s confusion apparently arises from his emphasis upon the period of the Exodus rather than upon the subsequent division of the Israelite polity into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Pelley also adopted the notion, occasionally found among Anglo-Israelites, that descendants of Abraham also migrated east and south to become ancestors of the Hindus. A similar idea—this time that some members of the ten lost tribes fathered modern Hindus—appeared at the turn of the century in the writings of the founder of Pentecostalism, Charles F. Parham, also a believer in British-Israelism.27
Pelley held back, however, in tracing other modern descendants of the Israelites. He clearly had little patience with the claim that the British were descendants of the lost tribes and was apparently unaware of the British-Israel belief in the central role to be played by the descendants of Ephraim (the British) and Manasseh (the Americans). As for the place of the United States in Pelley’s cosmic drama, he was characteristically muddled, uncertain how much to embrace the biological determinism of British-Israelism. Thus he seemed to interpret American chosenness figuratively when he asserted that “my Chosen People aren’t composed of a race. They’re those who’ve given their allegiance to a king” But in nearly the same breath he announces that “the real Chosen people … are here in America. It’s the Twelve Tribes here in the United States.” Whether his tribes are symbolic or literal, however, is never explained.28
The key to understanding God’s design for Pelley, as for Davidson, lies in the configuration and measurements of the passageways of the Great Pyramid, what British-Israelites were fond of referring to as “the Bible in stone.” He saw in pyramid prophecy an infallible guide to history: “Great Pyramid prophecy has never been wrong,” although there can be difficult problems in correlating the prophecies with the right kind of evidence. The pyramid is always right about issues of timing; if the date comes up, something must have happened. As Pelley put it, “The quandary which we, as reasonably enlightened students of universal affairs, are faced with, isn’t WHEN great events are due to occur, but WHAT the nature of those great events is to be in each case when chronology arrives at Great Pyramid markings.” In other words, the assumption that pyramid prophecy is infallible implies that something must have occurred on the assigned date.29
This approach to prophetic fulfillment effectively eliminates a major vulnerability of date-setting schemes, the danger that specific, empirically testable predictions will produce massive public embarrassments for a religious movement, of the sort experienced by the Millerites in 1844. Such predictions customarily involve statements that some particular event, most frequently the Second Coming, will occur on a particular date; hence its nonoccurrence is traumatic. Pyramidologists emphasized the significance of the date and then looked to see what had happened on it. Given the intrinsic ambiguity of events, they were almost always able to find an event that could be appropriately classified.
Pelley, however, was reluctant to place all of his confidence in a single view of history, especially one concocted by someone else, if only because it appeared to make him dependent upon the insights of others. Accordingly, he was at pains to make clear that whatever Davidson had discovered had already been vouchsafed to him (Pelley) independently. Pelley always claimed special access to divine or supernatural forces, beginning with a revelatory, out-of-body experience he claimed to have gone through in 1928. He assured his followers that before he had ever read or heard of the pyramid literature, his “Oracle” had already revealed to him the significance of a key pyramid date: “‘Your True labors in this nation begin on the morning of September 17, 1936’” the date the Silver Shirts were founded. The work of Davidson could then function as a confirmation of the prophet’s revelation.30
The principal alteration Pelley made in Davidson’s system lay in the radically changed significance of the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. For Davidson, as for other mainstream British-Israelites, the Exodus was a central episode in the history of the “Adamic race,” Davidson’s term for the white race, the spiritual elite that was subsequently to populate Britain. Indeed, for Davidson it was one of the “three chief occasions of Divine Interference in the normal course of human history,” the other two being the Resurrection and the final, apocalyptic “Exodus of civilisation from Economic Bondage under the rule of Money-Power.” Pelley took a very different view of things, suggesting that the travails of the escaping Israelites were less a significant set of events in themselves than they were a préfiguration of later history. He was inclined to see in the events of the Exodus merely a microcosmic anticipation of the future. The Israelites of the Exodus were “little” Israel, “petty and spleenish,” people temperamentally unworthy of performing great events. What they experienced was important only because it provided “a literal model for the Program of the Greater Israel coming out of real Egyptian bondage 3,000 years afterward.” And who was this latter-day “Greater Israel”? It was none other than the white Christians of Pelley’s own day. And “real Egypt”? In language the Populists might have appreciated, Pelley described it as “the economic structure founded on gold, where the true followers of Christ must make bricks without straw.”31
Pelley was prepared to go a good deal further in identifying “Egypt.” In an inversion whose irony Pelley himself seems to have realized, the Jews became “Egypt”: “Now we’ve got the ironical situations of the tables being turned…. The ‘Egyptians’ are the racial plunderers who imagine they’re Israelites because they’ve descended from the one tribe of Judah…. The Jews are the Egyptians, and the Gentiles are the Israelites.” In a way, Pelley simply completed the theme of reversal begun in British-Israelism. The latter, by rejecting Jewish chosenness and asserting Anglo-Saxon chosenness, had reversed the positions of Jews and Gentiles. Now Pelley’s version of the Exodus reversed the roles of Israelites and Egyptians. Not only were the Jews merely a tiny fragment of the Israelites (“from the one tribe of Judah”); they now played Egyptians to the “Christian Israelites,” as Pelley called them. In this replay of the Exodus as modern economic allegory, the story of escape from Egyptian slavery became something “not to glorify the Jews, but to give us a Code Book for all that is to happen in the 65 years ahead.” The crossing of the Red Sea even became the passage “unscathed through the great sea of Red Bolshevism.”32
All of this was keyed, of course, to Davidson’s pyramid chronology, which marked off dates on a sacred calendar. Using his formula of one “pyramid inch” for one solar year, Davidson calculated that there would be a two-phase Tribulation as part of the Last Days, the outcome of “the Great Pyramid’s Scientific prophecy.” The first phase would run from August 4, 1914, to November 11, 1918, the second and greater phase from May 29-30, 1928, to September 15-16, 1936. Then, “between September 16, 1936, and August 20, 1953, the English-speaking peoples should be guided, as the nucleus of the Theocratic (or Theocentric) World-State, to receive Divine Protection ensuring racial isolation and true safe-guarding under the Law of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.” Pelley proceeded to incorporate into Davidson’s eschatology his own conceptions of a war against the Jews and his own meta-historic role in human redemption.33
Not surprisingly, Pelley focused on the year in which he was writing, 1936, the year of the foundation of the Christian party, when he would attempt to vindicate himself at the polls. Davidson had predicted great events for September 16, when the Tribulation would give way to the final march toward “the Theocratic [i.e., millennial] … World-State.” According to Pelley, September 16 would mark a “crisis,” “the lowest ebbs of this depression” In his idiosyncratic reading of the Exodus story, September 16, 1936, was going to mark the beginning of freedom from “Jewish-Egyptian economic bondage.” Davidson’s pyramid date was anticipated by Pelley’s Oracle, who had independently revealed to him that“‘your true labors in this nation begin on the morning of September 17, 1936.’” After September 16, 1936, nations would have the next seventeen years to decide whether to adopt theocratic government, after which those who rejected it would be destroyed.34
The Jews played rather a different role in Pelley’s scheme than they did in Davidson’s. As we shall see in a later chapter, Davidson, together with other twentieth-century British-Israel writers, incorporated covertly anti-Semitic themes. However, he regarded Britain as divinely charged with rescuing Jews from persecution and facilitating their ingathering to Palestine. Pelley, of course, considered the Jews responsible for the Depression as well as much else in the way of the world’s evil, although he was willing to forego genocidal massacre, largely on the grounds that “so long as one Jew remained, in the furthest corner of Patagonia, the deed down distant years would have to be repeated.” He was perfectly willing to tolerate “incidental” violence but was confident that the establishment of “Christian economics” would drastically alter Jewish behavior. Consequently, he was impatient with Davidson’s seeming disinterest in “the Jewish question.” Indeed, as a result, he said, Davidson had entirely missed the significance of January 31, 1933, when Hitler came to power “and began smashing the predatory clutch of Judah on civilized institutions.” It was the struggle against the Jews that was central for Pelley, for that was “THE GREAT ARMAGEDDON OF ANCIENT PROPHECY,” the battle of Gog and Magog.35
This struggle would inexorably lead, in Pelley’s view, to both the end of the Depression and the millennium. He held out little hope that the Depression would end any time soon, however; surcease would come only on the night of September 16, 1969, “and not one moment sooner.” As to the millennium, he was of two minds. In one sense, he expected the millennium to begin in a matter of months, on September 16 of the year in which he was writing, for everything from then on would be improvement. On the other hand, that position reflected a kind of postmillennialism, the point when beneficent forces would begin to operate in America, thanks presumably to the Silver Legion and the Christian party. The true, world millennium was farther off, on September 17, 2001, at which point the entire world would be incorpo- rated into “the Christ form of government.” Although the date was distant, the finality of the outcome allowed Pelley to indulge his premillennialism as well.36
The Christian party’s performance in the 1936 election was pathetic even by minor party standards. Indeed, Pelley’s efforts were paltry compared with the far more conspicuous campaign by the Union party, the coalition formed by Dr. Francis Townsend, Gerald L. K. Smith, and Charles Coughlin. Although Pelley claimed significant efforts in sixteen states, the party appeared on the ballot only in the state of Washington. Of the nearly 70,000 votes cast in Washington in 1936, the Union party received 17,463. Only 1,598 went to Pelley, 300 fewer than the Communist party received and only 550 more than the Prohibition party garnered.37
Notwithstanding Pelley’s failure to draw any significant electoral support, such grass-roots activity as the Silver Legion and Christian party had generated was heavily concentrated in a few areas of the country. Pelley’s followers clustered in the Great Lakes region and the Pacific Coast, probably never amounting to more than fifteen thousand at any one time. Modest though the size of the movement was, its concentration, particularly on the West Coast, may have nurtured coteries of proto-Identity believers, persons who had been exposed to Pelley’s personal fusion of British-Israelism and anti-Semitism and hence were more receptive to other such combinations later. Among them was Henry L. “Mike” Beach, who in 1969 was one of the founders of Posse Comitatus. In the mid-1970s Beach’s organization, CLERC (Citizens Law Enforcement and Research Committee), reprinted a turn-of-the-century extract from C. A. L. Totten’s Our Race, and in so doing brought Identity from its roots in late nineteenth-century British-Israel missionizing, through Pel-ley’s mystic anti-Semitism in the mid-1930s, to the militantly antiauthority stance Identity took in the 1970s.38
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