In March 1940, Scott had written to Zelda with news that The Great Gatsby had been taken out of The Modern Library: “My God, I am a forgotten man!” [1] It was a big deal. Bigger than any of them might ever have imagined. The Modern Library, a publisher specialising in affordable modern classics, featured prominently in ads on the inside back cover of magazines nationwide, and The Great Gatsby had been among several of the titles shown as samples from its catalogue. But if Scott was a forgotten man, then Zelda was a broken and forgotten woman. After their return from Europe, the deterioration in her mental health was visible for all to see. Their friend Mencken had had lunch with the pair and thought the poor woman was “plainly more or less off her base”. At that time, Zelda had just entered the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore after unravelling in Paris a year or so before. A complete nervous breakdown in 1930 had given way to full-blown schizophrenia. For the next eighteen years she would be in and out of sanatoriums, first in Switzerland, then in Baltimore and finally in Asheville, North Carolina. The cost of it, according to Mencken, had exhausted all their savings and Scott was now working flat out writing “dreadful drivel” for the magazines. For the best part of 1933 and 1934 Scott had tried his best to add a little flesh to the $300 they had left in the bank but the money was being spent on paying bills almost as soon as it arrived. Zelda, meanwhile, was ploughing her energies into painting which in her “half sane” state were full of “grotesque exaggerations and fantastic ideas.” Scott on the other hand was little better, the “vagaries” of her illness exhausting his own nervous system and increasing his dependence on alcohol. He was “boozing in a wild manner” and becoming a “nuisance” to all those around him, noted Mencken.
After receiving the letter about The Modern Library, Zelda had written back immediately to Scott talking about her doctors and asking for forgiveness for some minor lapses she had made in her sticking to her treatment. She was trying hard but was feeling miserable and longed to be released. The treatment was composed of a gruelling routine of electric shock therapy and a strict low-carb and low sugar diet. Escaping into town for an ice-cream soda had delayed her release by weeks. The illness had turned both of their lives upside down, shifting their values from one extreme to the other. A triumph over life for Zelda no longer consisted of renting a luxury suite at The Plaza or throwing a party with two orchestras, but getting some gloves, some flowers and some handkerchiefs from her sister Rosalind, and, of course, escaping into town for the occasional ice-cream. Understandably she was self-absorbed, and as one might be expected from someone in such a fractured and preoccupied state of mind, and her short reply made no mention of The Modern Library or how her husband might be feeling. Whatever kind of paradise they’d had was now lost. It was like everything had been forgotten. The romance and the dreams included.
In the early 1930s, Scott had worked his butt off trying to persuade Scribner’s to release the copyright. People were going into bookstores and asking for the novel only to be told it was out of stock. The 3,000 extra copies Scribner’s had rustled up as a second printing in August 1925 had been the last time it had gone to the press. He was feeling like Percy Washington in his story, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz; he had the world’s largest diamond that he could tell absolutely no one about. Scribner’s had eventually agreed to release it, but despite his expectations the deal m
ade little difference. Out of the 5,000 copies printed between 1934 and 1939, the vast number of them had to be disposed of for practically nothing. It turned out to be the worst selling novel in its series. The last cheque he’d had for Gatsby was for an embarrassing $13.00, his reward for shifting a handful of copies that year. Losing the support of The Modern Library might not have had a huge bearing on his earnings, but it would deal a big blow to his confidence and self-worth. His go-to remedy for this was to remind people how fabulous he had once been and how the literature of the Twenties was so much more superior to what was being written today. Around the house and in the bars, the past was now on constant playback; achievements and successes of his wonder years rolling off his tongue like champagne bubbles for anyone prepared to listen. As in his youth, the knocks he would take to his ego would erupt in a frenzy of boasts that would only serve to alienate him further. He was stuck in that impossible place between being the warm, glowing symbol of a bygone era and being relevant to modern times, passing among the living like a ghost.
By 1939 not one of his books was still in print. As a result Scott would pour most of his literary energies into writing the Pat Hobby adventure serial for Esquire magazine, a slick and glossy culture rag run by its editor and co-founder, Arnold Gingrich. In 1938, Gingrich would appear before the House of Un-American Activities Committee after leaking details of a plot featuring the Nazi’s Gestapo Service Station Two and William Dudley Pelley, the leader of the fascist Silver Shirt movement based in Asheville, North Carolina. The Silver Shirts, anti-Jewish and anti-Black, had first come to the attention of the press in August 1934 when the House of Un-American Activities committee revealed that 2,000 rounds of 0.30 calibre ammunition had been purchased from group of men serving at the Naval Air Station and stored in an underground bunker near Los Angeles. [2] Pelley, an ex-Methodist missionary turned fiction writer, was described by one newspaper as a small man with a cultivated dignity enhanced by grey hair and a well-tended Vandyke beard. At the time of the story he and his group in Asheville had been cranking out 30,000 items of printed propaganda every day. Along with Minnesota’s George E. Deatherage, Pelley was among a menagerie of ‘I’ve-got-the-shirt-to-prove-it fascists’ and ‘chronic speechmakers’ shaping the ragged valley of Depression-era politics. But unlike the vast majority of fascist groups who were winning the loyalty of their followers by downplaying their love of autocracy and racism and promoting patriotism, Pelley and Deatherage, were telling their members that violence was on the way and that America should be ready for it. [3] The Blue Sky charges of fraud brought against Pelley and two of his aides in April 1934 would subdue him for so long, but by the summer of 1936 he and his fascist movement were again on the rise. [4]
According to Anthony Buttitta, the editor of the Left-wing Contempo magazine, Scott had made enquiries about Pelley, a Hollywood screenwriter and successful short story writer, during his own restorative stay in Asheville in 1935 to 1937 period. The author had been telling friends that he was taking some time out in Asheville as part of efforts to improve his health. On arrival he checked in with a Dr Paul Ringer, a prominent social leader and lung specialist. The mountain air was said to be wonderful for all manner of common ills, but as Buttitta would write in his memoirs, “behind the façade of misty mountains and rhododendrons festival” the shadows of homegrown fascism were moving. Buttitta, who had also arrived that month, had interviewed Pelley at one of his local rallies and there was talk of arranging another meet between Pelley and Scott at his office around the corner. There were things here that clearly fascinated the author. “I’d like to get a look at him,” Scott is said to have remarked scornfully. [5] The author had then gone on to talk of his interest in the politics of the period, idly suggesting that Oswald Spengler and Karl Marx were the only modern thinkers who had any meaning today. Marx, he said, had helped form his “class-consciousness, while Spengler’s Decline of the West, with its stress on Old Money attitudes and the reach and power of money, had deepened a “romantic scepticism” he’d already inherited from Mencken. [6] Buttitta had shown him his critique of the ‘Proletarian Novel’ but Scott had shown little or no interest. ‘The worker’s world’ he said was outside his experience. [7]
At the time of his arrival, Pelley and his Christian Aryan militia had just moved to new premises in Grove Park, a historic house previously occupied by the Asheville Women’s Club. [8] Here they would parade round in their trademark blue corduroy jodhpurs and their space-age silver shirts emblazoned with the scarlet letter L for Liberation over the heart. Scott was located just around the corner at the no less sumptuous Grove Park Inn, a large and expensive resort hotel on the western-facing slopes of Sunset Mountain. So secretive was he about the trip that he suspended all work on his ledger, which he left back in Baltimore. A look through its pages today is an eerie experience as it ends very abruptly and rather cryptically on May 16, 1935 the day that he travelled to Asheville.
They may have miles apart in terms of politics and religion but Pelley’s opening lines in his 1936 memoirs, The Doors of Revelation, could very well have been lifted from one of the many essays that Scott would write for Gingrich and Esquire magazine that year: “This is the story of a man who spent the first thirty-eight years of his life groping for something higher and more satisfying than the normal rewards from strictly worldly living.” The courses that Pelley would provide for his students was an attempt to make sense of this something “higher”, fusing as the curriculum did elements of spiritualism, transcendentalism, occultism, spiritual eugenics and astrology. [9] Pressed by the editor of American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune, Charles K. Feinburg, the US Bureau of Investigation tasked R. L. Fagan with keeping an eye on Pelley’s activities from nearby Charlotte. From June 1934 onward, Fagan and his informers gathered as much practical intelligence as they could on the wacky, esoteric group and its publishing organ, the Galahad Press, looking for evidence of Nazi collusion. [10]
For a writer looking to replenish his imagination with new and unusual experiences, Asheville of the 1930s, with Pelley on one side of the political extreme and Buttitta and his radical friends on the other, would, in theory at least, provide all the nutrients he needed for a new novel. He’d been telling Mencken that he’d deliberately dropped-out, on the ground that he needed to get a fresh perspective on things. He said that having started writing at such an early age and having written so much, he had quickly exhausted “his store of experiences.” It was, after all, his time in Great Neck absorbing the rich variety of life there, its grandeur as well as its sleaze, that had given him the material for Gatsby. Lately, however, the only real experiences he’d been having were in bars getting drunk. Scott was a writer that drew much of his inspiration from real-life people and events and his instincts told him there was a story here, with characters and adventures as fascinating and bewildering as anything he could imagine waiting to burst to life on the page. Something would have told him that that among Asheville’s tall, misty mountains and wonderous blue ridges a change of glacial proportions was taking place in the heart and soul of America. The iconic blue haze and high peaks of its mighty ridges were justly regarded by many as the towering spine of the nation, created when the African and North American continents collided millions of years ago, lifting and folding the land. Now they were the backdrop to another kind of collision — a collision of contrasting ideologies.
Anticipating a storm of new ideas Scott had roped in Laura Millar Guthrie as his private secretary. Buttitta would remember her as a “pretty, bright and rather proper, attractive divorcee” who didn’t give a hoot about how people saw her, or however eccentrically she dressed for her age. Laura, who Buttitta would call Scott’s ‘dollar woman’, had graduated in journalism from Columbia University in October 1917. Those who met her recalled her as a lively and resourceful woman who during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II had joined her father, the Reverend William B. Millar, on an extensive tour of Russia. At the time of the trip, Reverend Millar had been in charge of the army and navy department of the International YMCA. Laura’s interest in Russia and the Eastern Mediterranean would continue well into the 1920s with her involvement in the Near East Relief mission in Washington and New York, where she worked in its press department. Scott would later claim to have met Guthrie, a self-taught astrologer and psychic, telling fortunes at the hotel he was staying in, dressed as a gypsy queen. He had been telling people he was writing a story about a gypsy woman and thought he may have been able to get some “interesting material”. [11]
When he met Guthrie in summer that year, Asheville was still reeling from a seismic shock to its system. The investigative journalist John Spivak had accused a congressional committee of deliberately suppressing evidence of a plot by Wall Street financiers to replace Franklin D. Roosevelt as President with retired Marine General Smedley D. Butler as part of a homegrown fascist plot. Playing a crucial part in this plot, claimed Spivak, was Asheville’s star-spangled psychic fascist, William Dudley Pelley, who was also actively plotting the first American ‘pogrom’. [12] According to his autobiography, Pelley had been encouraged to come to Asheville by wealthy Black Mountain mystic, Lillian Emerson Terry. Terry had initially suggested setting up base on her 24,000 square foot private estate, The Oaks, but during a meeting with Terry and the group at the Grove Park Inn it was agreed that Pelley would found his spiritual retreat, the Galahad College, at a YMCA building in Blue Ridge. It is not known if Scott’s personal secretary Laura Millar Guthrie, who was still an active YMCA organiser at this time, was among the 42 students enrolled at the college but she and Pelley certainly had history and interests in common.
Pelley, the son of a Methodist minister who had worked as screenwriter in Hollywood in the early 1920s, had the most perplexing of careers. At the height of the civil war in Russia between the Tsarist loyalists and Lenin’s Bolsheviks, Pelley had accepted the invitation of George S. Phelps, Secretary for the International YMCA in the Far East, to view the appalling conditions in Eastern Russia. [13] A news report in April 1918 reveals that Pelley left for the Orient that June with the Board of Foreign Missions. Armed with a Kodak camera and keen skills of observation, Pelley hooked-up with the 56,000 Japanese troops already in Siberia and wrote up a number of articles on the scourge of ‘Satanic Leninism’ for the Methodist missionary magazine, World Outlook. [14] Still playing an active role in Foreign Missions at this time was Guthrie’s father, the Rev, William B Millar. [15] The big turning point in his life came in 1929, when the American Magazine had published a sensational account of a near death experience in Altadena, California. During the seven minutes in which he claims to have been out of his body, Pelley says he had received messages from hyper-dimensional beings, who wanted him to save the world from Communism. They said his instructions had come directly from God. [16]
Pelley and the Millars had both observed tyranny and oppression in Russia under the protection of the Japanese, but these experiences were in wildly different times and under wildly different regimes. Scott’s ‘dollar woman’ Laura Millar Guthrie and her father had been in Japan and Russia in 1905 as part of a mission to have the country’s Mikado adopt YMCA methods and practices for its troops in their war with Russia. Among Millar’s associates there was George S. Phelps, the man who recruited Pelley. At the time of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 Phelps was serving as Head of the American YMCA Mission in Tokyo. With Phelps, Millar would instruct the Japanese military in the relief methods used in the USA. Whilst many thought Pelley and his group were finished after the fraud case in February 1935, rumours continued to spread of an imminent resurgence and a fresh assault on President Roosevelt whose New Deal program was being viewed by some as a sinister ‘Russocrat’ plot. At the end of Scott’s first summer in Asheville, Pelley would be talking of making his own bid for the White House in the 1936 election. [17]
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Curiosity about Pelley and his crazy fascist group wasn’t the only reason Scott was in Asheville. The relative failure of his third novel, Tender is the Night, completed in Baltimore, had left Scott feeling restless and in need of excitement and adoration. The chaos and uncertainty of the Great Depression was taking its toll on his mental health and his insomnia was getting worse. Arnold Gingrich at Esquire magazine had offered him the opportunity of writing something more relevant to the times, something that people all over America would have no trouble relating to. The outcome of this was ‘Waking and Sleeping’, a soul-bearing account of the insomnia he’d suffered for years which would be published in the December 1934 issue of Esquire magazine. In terms of marketing and career development it was an inspired move. Scott’s life was coming apart just as America was coming apart. The challenges of the Great Depression had changed the fabric of what people wanted to read about. You wanted stories about health problems? Scott had health problems. You wanted stories about infidelity, alcoholism and mental anguish? Consider it done. Esquire’s editor had spotted that it was possible to align Scott’s own personal decline with that of the nation at large. If he had troubles, then Gingrich had told him to write about them, whether it was the troubles he was having with Zelda, his drinking or his writer’s block. For a man who had made his name in the boom period of the early Twenties, it seemed only fitting that he should sow the seeds of his comeback within the cracks of its collapse. Gingrich had said he had no desire to see Scott piss away his talent again in Hollywood and would help in any way he could— confessional pieces and all. [18] This unusual arrangement would culminate would in Scott’s groundbreaking essay, The Crack Up, composed in nearby Hendersonville in December 1935, and a work that would be perceived as nothing less than terrifying by large sections of the press. His friend John Dos Passos had urged him not to publish it. In the end he was glad he’d paid him no attention as he believed it to be one of his best. The ‘desolately frank’ essay would give a measure by measure account of how Scott had been “mortgaging himself” spiritually for two years. [19] Scott was coming apart, and he felt the whole damn world should know about it. One man who wouldn’t be getting involved this time was agent of fourteen years, Harold Ober. Scott would be dealing with Gingrich and Esquire directly. Although he was willing to publish everything he gave him, Gingrich’s top price was $250,00 and for the next six years it would be a case of tightening his belt and handling his own affairs. [20]
Two months into his arrival Scott would give an interview to the Asheville Citizen in which he made clear his thoughts about the state of the modern novel, reminding them that in times of social turbulence it was important for writers to live and to leave the writing of fiction until the period of tranquillity that often followed. [21] As dark and unsettling as they were, the stories were still coming but the energy it was taking to pick up the pen and make them work was getting harder by the day. These were difficult times for everyone. In every town in every state there was high unemployment and poverty. Businesses were closing, families were suffering, and banks were failing almost as frequently as marriages. Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Republic in 1931, summed up the fears of many Americans: “Our cities are scenes of privation and misery on a scale which sickens the imagination; our agricultural life is bankrupt; our industry, in shifting to the South, has reverted almost to the horrible conditions of the Factory Acts of England of a hundred years ago.” [22] Some five months before Scott’s arrival in Asheville, the author Thomas Boyd had died as he was putting the finishing touches to In Time of Peace, a sequel to his bestselling war novel, Through the Wheat. The novel, as bleak and as compelling as its predecessor, would follow the slow decline of its war hero, William Hicks, as he and the rest of America came apart in the Great Depression. Boyd, at just 24, had been the first to really articulate the experiences of young Americans in the war and the book had become a symbol of its economic insanity and the incalculable loss of innocence the country experienced. It’s sequel, built around that same relentless but sensitive realism, followed the prosperity splurge of the mid-1920s to the crash of ’29 which sends the hero of the novel back to the factory floor and finally to the lines of the unemployed waiting outside the factory gates. Scott’s Asheville friend, Tony Buttitta would recall the author asking after him and feigning surprise at hearing the news of his death. [23] As it is, Scott had learned of Boyd’s death in Time Magazine in February that year and had expressed his shock to his editor, Max Perkins. [24] Just 12 months earlier, Boyd had stood as candidate for the Communist Party of America, warning that Fascism was the next logical step for the American nation to take. The former Saint Paul newsman and bookshop owner had died suddenly at his home in Vermont from a cerebral haemorrhage. The ‘History of American Revolt’ which he had planned to complete that year was left unfinished. [25]
Scott had befriended Tom Boyd in the early 1920s but Boyd’s criticisms of Gatsby had soured the relationship. The Brooklyn Eagle would describe his final novel, In Time of Peace, as a “fictional history of the twilight of the gods of the bourgeoisie”, an age in which the miracles had all run out. Of the two lost authors of the ‘lost generation’ only one of them now remained. The politics of the country, and the economic turmoil that it faced was fast becoming the hot, blazing foundry of American novels and authors like Boyd had little option but to feed off the energy of its sparks. Sinclair Lewis, the author of Babbit, was another who was charting the change. At the beginning of 1935 word was coming through that Lewis was going to write a story about the rise of a fascist dictator in the modern-day USA. [26] The book, It Can’t Happen Here, eventually came out in October that year, and would be described by Scott’s Hollywood friend, Budd Schulberg, as the ‘high sign’ they’d all been waiting for: Lewis was one of their own, a part of the antifascist cause. [27] Lewis’s book would be supported by two works of non-fiction that year: Sawdust Caesar by Esquire contributor George Seldes, and Mainland by Scott’s friend and George’s brother, Gilbert Seldes — a major fan of Gatsby — which featured an alarm-bell ringing assessment of fascism in America. On March 29, 1935 the American League Against War and Fascism held a talk at the Adline Club on Fifth Avenue on ‘American Fascism: How to Stem the Rising Tide’. Before the decade was out we would also have Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
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It wasn’t all politics in Asheville. For a short while, Scott would drift into a fairly casual affair with Beatrice Dance, the passionate young wife of a Texas oil man whose fawning adoration would keep him modestly buoyant during his weeks of on-off abstinence in the Blue Ridge wilderness. She is said to have loved him on sight, something which had stimulated and excited him in equal measures. Laura, who would act as go-between the whole summer, recalls that Beatrice had asked the impossible and it had all come to a sad conclusion: she had wanted to leave her husband and daughter and move away with him, but moving away would have meant closing the door on Zelda, Scottie and the 36-bottle a day beer habit that kept him loyal to his own delicious ruin. It was, however, an even younger group of intellectual radicals, Tony Buttitta, Phil Russel and Bill Buttrick, that was energising his thinking. The men, all recent graduates of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill coalesced at The Intimate Bookshop, which had newly reopened at the George Vanderbilt Hotel that June. Scott had been feeling out of touch with the younger generation and may have seen this as an opportunity to sharpen his emotional knowledge of modern youth and the bipolar politics of 1930s America. [28] In 1931, Buttitta had co-founded the arts magazine, Contempo, which provided a Left-wing look at Modernist literature in the style of the Little Review. His partner in the project was Milton A. Abernethy, a graduate of Chapel Hill and regarded by many as the ‘village Communist’. For the three years that followed its launch the pair were actively involved in all manner of Marxist escapades, becoming especially militant on Worker and Black Rights issues. [29] When Scott quizzed Buttitta about another of his friends, James Boyd, a familiar face at Chapel Hill, Buttitta claimed not to know him personally but told him he had read a number of his books. [30]
How and why Scott decided to come to Asheville remains a mystery to scholars, but there may be some clues in his political interests. Faced with an uncertain future in the early 1930s, he and Zelda had moved to Baltimore in Maryland, Scott’s ancestral home. It was here that Scott had befriended V. F. Calverton, editor of The Modern Monthly, a political and arts magazine with a strong Marxist bias. Although his office was based in New York, the 34-year old pipe-smoking radical would offer his home at 2110 East Pratt Street as a base for un-anchored writers to share their artistic and political ideas. Even by the standards of Depression-era radicals Calverton was a prolific and obsessive individual of a doggedly persuasive bent. If he thought there was the even the ghost of a revolutionary inside you he would be down on you like a shot with teeth-bared, lavishing you with praise and making you feel that you and you alone could help realise his dreams of taking the US ‘revolutionary tradition’ into its most progressive, egalitarian phase. And of course, he did this with everyone. “It is only by revolution that that realization can be translated into action,” he would thunder, “Are you with in saving society, Mr Scott!?”
Whilst Zelda was sceptical of Calverton’s influence, comically dismissing him as the ‘community communist’, Scott would be quietly intrigued by his fire and brimstone attitude to reform and would invite him around to their flat for drinks. The news editor F. T. Fain Jr, who the author befriended during his stay in Asheville, would later describe Scott’s Marxism as ‘parlour pink’. He had turned up in Asheville declaring his rejection of the Catholic faith, and showing an interest in the occult, especially in mediums. The author had arrived at another crossroads in his life and was furiously seeking enlightenment from any quarter; Marxism was just one of the options available. Although advising the young news editor to go to Russia, Fain was of the opinion that Scott’s ‘love of the comforts that money can bring’ made him totally unsuited to life in Stalin’s Soviet. [31] He loved the romance of the thing but not its practical application. Even so, this hadn’t stopped his mother thinking that ever since his discovery of Marx in 1932, he and Zelda had joined the Russia Secret Service and now preferred bombs to June strawberries for breakfast. [32]
Twelve months before Scott’s arrival in Asheville, Calverton’s magazine had published a public warning about Pelley’s Silver Shirts. The article, satirical in parts, appeared in its February issue and came from the pen of Jean Burton, a level-headed feminist and part of the Mercury Group who’d recently arrived from Canada. Ruth had been working for an organisation looking at banking reforms and had been surprised to find that most of her visitors were connected with several religious bodies vaguely reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan. Her ‘favourite’ had been the Silver Shirts, and after making some enquiries, Burton learned that it was led by Pelley who during his career as a scenario writer had worked “shoulder to shoulder with the Hebrew screen potentates of Hollywood” only to leave with his tail between his legs to start the League of Liberation. Among his many hysterical claims, she notes, was a warning of a Jewish plot to poison the canned foods of America. Responding to the imagined threat, Pelley had “thoughtfully laid in a supply of some hundred dollars’ worth of canned food”. Burton dryly observes that if the worst came to the worst, she would “at least know where to apply for a small tin of asparagus soup.” [33] It was a sharp and witty article that followed the same mocking line as several other newspapers at this time, presenting Pelley as a ‘manipulator extraordinary’ who was using his ‘clairvoyancy’ and ‘psychic antenna’ to rescue the world from Satanic communism and prepare for the arrival of a United Fascist States of America.
Interest in Pelley’s activities had been increasing ever since Hitler’s accession in Germany in 1933. At the end of that year, Scott’s old friend Harold Loeb would feature his Silver Shirts in a broader look at ‘American Fascism in Embryo’ for Edmund Wilson’s The New Republic. [34] The following April, The New Republic’s Arthur Graham would introduce a more serious tone: Pelley was “dangerous” and needed watching. [35] That same month, Scott’s Princeton buddy, Edmund Wilson, still very much involved at The New Republic, would move across to Calverton’s Modern Monthly, where for the next twelve months or so he would sit on its editorial board with longtime Socialist activist, Max Eastman.[36] The September 1934 edition of The Modern Monthly would contain a preview of a symposium entitled, ‘Will Fascism Come to America?’ featuring contributions from Calverton himself and authors Waldo Frank and Theodore Dreiser. An ad for a series of five talks to be given in support of the symposium would be included in Calverton’s letter to Scott’s future biographer Arthur Mizener that same month. The one-sided notice featured a handpicked selection of premonitions from Waldo Frank, Stuart Chase, Theodore Dreiser and Charles A. Beard. No one pulled any punches. “The true Fascist leaders in this country will be judicious, black-frocked gentlemen, graduates of the best universities”, warned Waldo Frank. “We can prevent Fascism only if we sell Socialism to the American people in Middle Class terms,” Calverton added. The talks, sponsored by the Harrisburg Community Forum and given across New York and its neighbouring states, would last from October 1934 to March 1935. The final forum lecture was followed by an “open forum” period. [37]
Mizener, then a 27 year-old professor of English at Yale, had contacted Calverton at his editorial offices on Morton Street, New York in September 1934 with plans of how he could help energise further funding and distribution of The Modern Monthly. Calverton had been publishing at a loss of about $100 a month and had been anxious to get help on new subscriptions, especially from fertile soils like Yale. Calverton had responded by thanking Mizener for his donation and invited him to New York. Mizener had mailed him another letter the following month informing him of a fracas on the university campus, when a New Haven branch of the American League Against War and Fascism protested against the admittance of over 100 Italian Students. According to reports, an unidentified man had shouted “down with Mussolini” as four busloads of students had driven past. Calverton had responded to Mizener’s letter with a message of support: “The American Revolutionist has a tough job ahead of him. He’ll have to be able to write, distribute literature, speak before miners, old ladies sewing circles and cook cabbage so that it tastes well for eating it after the eighteenth meal. One of his jobs is reviewing books so their infernal essences are pulled up on the table where all can see.” Calverton then addressed the issue of Mizener submitting his own reviews, something the Yale professor clearly felt nervous about: “Certainly you have the educational and literary qualifications to undertake the job. Why shouldn’t you? And why shouldn’t the Modern Monthly be especially interested in developing younger revolutionary cadres? … it’s a question of intelligent revolutionary self-development on your part.” Several weeks later Mizener would submit a review of The Black Consul by Soviet educator, Anatolii Vinogradov. [38] After several further exchanges, Calverton invited Mizener to attend the Eleventh Modern Monthly Dinner at a restaurant on East 41st Street on April 12th. He was looking forward to meeting him and “any of his radical friends.” [39]
A few months later, Mizener would be asked to provide a statement after details had been leaked of student plans at Yale to join the American League Against War and Fascism. It was Mizener’s belief that universities should move with times and study these movements with interest— Communism and Fascism. Chief of the League’s youth section, Waldo McNutt, was, incidentally, area leader of Rocky Mountain, Y.M.C.A in North Carolina. [40] The pace of events was staggering. In just nine months the Jews of America were being brought back as the leading agents in a satanic Red Plot and William Dudley Pelley had evolved from being a benign and ridiculous figure into an unambiguous threat. In March 1935, Calverton had approached Scott for an article in his magazine, but he turned it down. Esquire’s editor, Arnold Gingrich, had just made him an offer of $250 per article for his more offbeat material and with the times being as tight as they were, Scott couldn’t possibly refuse. [41]
If either Calverton or Gingrich had influenced Scott’s decision to go to Asheville, then it’s interesting to note that Calverton had been exchanging letters with Scott’s bookshop buddy in Asheville, Anthony Buttitta and his co-editor, Milton Abernethy, since 1931. In one letter dated April 1932, Calverton thanks the men for hosting him at no cost in Asheville during a trip. He had just published an essay on the ‘Liberation of American Literature’ in Scribner’s Magazine, and although it didn’t mention Gatsby, the book that followed in the autumn would include it in a list of fictions that were “American and not English in spirit and conception.” [42] In March 1935, Scott would write to his editor, Max Perkins, saying that he had just had dinner with Calverton and James and Elizabeth Boyd, at that time holding writing salons at their Weymouth Estate in Southern Pines, North Carolina. Among the illustrious names who would meet there were William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Scott’s old friend, Sherwood Anderson. [43] As King of Disillusionment, perhaps Scott was now out scouting out his kingdom rallying support from his army of subjects.
Fortunately for Scott, his friendship with Buttitta and the group at the bookshop would bring him even closer to the nexus of fringe radicals that propped up The Modern Library — Gatsby’s best new shot at redemption. Buttitta’s business dealings with the publisher’s CEO, Bennett Cerf, dated back to 1931 when Cerf had written to congratulate his co-editor, Milton Abernethy on ‘the splendid work’ they were doing on Contempo and asking if there was anything they could do to help. The alliance continued with Cerf’s attempt to lift the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses with lawyer, Morris Ernst the following year. Contempo duly reported on the case and sought updates on a regular basis until Cerf’s victory in court on December 6, 1933, when the ban was overturned. [44] Included in its bumper Joyce Edition in February 1934 was an article from Cerf himself, paying homage to the tireless work already done on getting it published by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap and his financial backers, Irving A. Sartorius and Robert N. Kastor of 61 Broadway. Elsewhere there was an advertisement for The Modern Library and an exclusive special offer: buy a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses from Contempo’s Chapel Offices and receive a free year’s subscription to the magazine. [45] Cerf had written to Scott in the summer of 1932 requesting his support on overturning the ban, a period that coincides with Scott’s own requests to Scribner’s to give permission for The Modern Library to license Gatsby. [46] The following year, Cerf would submit a review of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre for inclusion in Contempo’s review section. Calverton’s relationship with Cerf and The Modern Library went back further back still, the author having edited a series of Modern Library anthologies, starting with An Anthology of Negro Literature in 1929. [47] It was during his ‘Baltimore-Calverton period’ that Scott bagged his much desired deal for Gatsby. Negotiations with Cerf started sometime in spring 1934 and Calverton may well have played his part in greasing the wheels. [48] By January 1934 Ulysses was being published for the first time in America by Cerf’s Random House imprint with Gatsby following later in the year. In light of his connection to the belt of young radicals in Asheville and Chapel Hill, it seems reasonable to assume that Calverton may have featured in Scott’s introduction to the group. [49]
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The story of an advanced fascist plot featuring Pelley and his group finally hit the headlines in August 1938 when Scott’s live-wire editor at Esquire magazine, Arnold Gingrich, published a series of bombshell articles in his more radical journal, Ken. As at Esquire, Gingrich’s partners at Ken were the investigative journalist, George Seldes and publishing brothers, David and Albert Smart, whose father Louis had fled the Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Imperial Russia in the early 1880s. Within weeks of going to print, the Dies Committee subpoenaed Gingrich to appear before congress and present his evidence to the House of Un-American Activities Committee. [50] The main exhibit in the case was a letter dated July 15, 1937 that had been had been written in Asheville, just days after Scott had left to take up his place at MGM in Hollywood. A few days later, Scott would enter the final phase of life when he was introduced to his future partner, Sheilah Graham, at a Screen Writers Guild dinner held in the Fiesta Lounge at the Ambassador Hotel. Ring Lardner Jr, son of his Great Neck buddy Ring Sr, and Budd Schulberg were also in attendance. Scott and Sheilah’s next meet would be on August 5 at the Anti-Nazi League anniversary dinner held at the same venue. [51] The letter from Asheville, and other evidence provided by Gingrich, purported to show Pelley and his group in the process planning Fifth Column style arms movements and sabotage offensives in the event that America entered the war. If Scott had been able to pass on any information about Pelley and his group to Gingrich and Smart during his time in Asheville, it’s not on the public record, but it would be naïve to think that he hadn’t been quizzed by Smart and Gingrich after making Asheville his second home the past two years. Scott was always a keen observer, so it is possible he shared whatever gossip he’d picked up during his time at Grove Park Inn. Smart had conceived Ken as an anti-fascist newspaper, big on whistleblowing and insider information. His hiring of Ernest Hemingway and George Seldes was testament to that.
The source for the Pelley stories in published in Ken was alleged to have been provided by undisclosed persons working within the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee, an anti-nazi spy ring headquartered in Hollywood and whose members and financial backers included Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, the latter being Scott’s real life inspiration for Monroe Stahr in his last novel, The Last Tycoon. [52] The Pat Hobby stories that Gingrich would publish in his other magazine, Esquire, told the story of a down on his luck screenwriter trying to claw back his wealth and former glory in Hollywood. The first story in the series, Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish, even brought up the murder of William Desmond Taylor in 1922, the studio executive whose life was closely entwined with Scott’s Great Neck friends, Allan Dwan and Gloria Swanson and Rothstein’s man, Dapper Dan Collins. It was trash but as Scott would tell Gingrich, it paid the grocer. [53] If Scott thought he had left all the politics behind in Asheville, he was in for a disappointment; Pelley’s Silver Shirts had their own leader in California — Henry D. Allen — who testified at the Dies hearing that the Nazi Party were working with these groups through the German Embassy in Los Angeles.
In June 1937, Scott had made his final will and testament, and before leaving Zelda in Asheville paid a visit to New York where he watched Hemingway deliver his famous speech against fascism at the American Writer’s Congress. It was during this visit that he had a meeting with his old friend, Edwin Knopf, now heading the scripts department at MGM, who sounded him out about some possible work in Hollywood. One man who was keen to work with him was the director, Joseph Mankiewicz who was considering a screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s book, Three Comrades, a subtle and engaging wake-up call about the emerging fascist threat and the loss of the country’s innocence. Just four years earlier, Joseph’s brother Herman had been temporarily blacklisted over his attempts to put another anti-nazi film, The Mad Dog of Europe, into production. [54]
Within weeks of being drafted on to the project, the film censor, Joseph Breen, seeking the approval of the German Consul and the Nazi Council, would make a series of suffocating demands on the script: there was to be no explicit reference to Hitler or the Nazi Party and where at all possible it should be intimated that the cut-throats and assassins depicted in the film were not fascists at all but Communists. Supporting his decision was Louis B. Mayer of MGM, anxious not to lose money by having it banned in Germany, and William Dudley Pelley, who had been celebrating Breen’s appointment as head of censors as far back as 1934. As far as Pelley was concerned, the Jews controlled the most effective propaganda medium in America — the Hollywood movie. [55] Breen and Mayer had dealt the same blow to MGM’s plans to film Sinclair Lewis’s political bombshell, It Can’t Happen Here, in 1936. $200,000 of their investment were lost overnight when Mayer deemed it too controversial to show in theatres as entertainment. [56]
At the beginning of September 1937 Scott submitted what he thought was a finished script. He told Mankiewicz that he was heading back to Asheville to visit Zelda but would be available to make any edits he thought might be necessary. As it was, his input was not required. As work on the script evolved it soon became obvious that its anti-Nazi bias had grown ever more intense, and a more experienced screenwriter, sensitive to the politics of the industry, was drafted in to curb its political excesses and make the dialogue more natural for its stars. After Mankiewicz threatened to tear up his contract and ditch the movie altogether, a compromise was reached. The movie could go ahead as long as the scenes portraying oppression and violence against Jews, Catholics and others were removed and they kept the shots of the bully-boy fascist platoons to a bare minimum. [57] Its said that the final shoot included less one third of Scott’s script.
Despite the drastic cuts that would be made to the film in production, Scott’s original script was a bold and unswerving endeavour. “Here’s to simplicity and all that goes with it, love and faith in the future, the dream of happiness, paradise regained,” says one of the characters. “Here is one country where a Jew is not homeless — where the Fatherland belongs to him as well as to the others. For that I am proud and happy.” At another point Scott’s script has the camera linger on the obvious Brownshirts; the spectacled clerks; blank-faced country types; thin, pool-room youths and pimply boys in their early teens: “God help us if that represents the future.” [58] He might well have written the line in Asheville. Despite the efforts of Joseph Breen to reverse the film’s political and cultural agenda the press saw that although not labelled as such, it was easy to see that the riots and acts of violence depicted in the movie were “the start of the ruthless drive of the Nazis to beat down opposition”. Its depiction of a ruined country, crippled by poverty, strife and unrest, was applauded by many reviewers for explaining the evolution of what was inevitably going to be world’s most dangerous man. [59] It may have lost some of the venom of the original novel and Scott’s script, but it was still regarded as moving, The Daily Worker going so far as to say that the “original script had guts.” [60]
Hollywood hesitancy over fascism would continue till the following year when Warner Bros finally kickstarted US resistance with Anatole Litvak’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Charlie Chaplin would follow with The Great Dictator. In 1940, Scott’s old friend James Boyd would co-found the Free Company of Players as a way of challenging the antidemocratic messages being punched out by the right-wing newspapers of William Randolph Hearst. His group, which included John Steinbeck, Orson Welles, Paul Green, Stephen V. Benét, and Sherwood Anderson, supported Boyd’s idea that the roots of American nationalism lay in each’s man valuing his “own private America”, just as he himself valued North Carolina. Not everybody was quite so confident about the future. [61] As he concluded his evidence against William D. Pelley at the hearings in Congress in October 1937, Arnold Gingrich offered the bleakest of forecasts: democracy in America was now on the defensive. It was clear to anybody could who could read without moving their lips, he went on, that democracies at the present moment were strained, “if not broken.” [62] Everything was turning political. Just as in March 1920, Scott had arrived at the wildest and most unpredictable of times. The period of tranquillity he had been hoping for, was still a long way off.
Attempts at a Fitzgerald revival had been made in the late 1930s by his friend and admirer, Victor Francis Calverton, who had given a kiss-of-life talk on his work at the Writer’s Club in New York in November 1936. For Calverton, and other Marxist radicals like him, Scott had been the “stormy petrel” of the “gin and jitters” period. Compared to what else was going on in literature, Scott’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, Calverton continued, had been “monumental to the youth of its time.” Scott had depicted the Flapper age as an era of unbridled indulgence with people drinking themselves silly, “sick and sophomoric.” Despite his celebration of extravagance, Calverton praised the author’s “brilliant” and “memorable” style and for capturing the wild period of prohibition and the speakeasies and the moment that American life changed forever. There was, however, a hidden payload to his talk. The “tempo of the times” had changed and Scott’s stories of gross indulgence were no longer relevant to the sobriety of the Great Depression. [63] Whether he’d consented to it or not Scott was being recruited as a potent totem in a searing critique of the excesses, superficiality, and moral recklessness of the American Dream. For men like Calverton, the richness of his social critique and his keen observation of class dynamics had made his work a particularly effective carrier of revolutionary propaganda.
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[1] ‘To Zelda March 19, 1940’, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, p.331
[2] ‘Silver Shirt Threat Against US Charged’, Los Angeles Evening Post, August 7, 1934, p.1
[3] ‘Star Spangled Fascists’, Stanley High, Saturday Evening Post, May 27, 1939, vol. 211, no. 48; Jeff Nilsson, Saturday Evening Post, March 10, 2012
[4] ‘Two of Pelley’s Aides Arrested’ Asheville Citizen Times, May 24, 1934, p.1
[5] After the Good Gay Times; Asheville, Summer of ’35, A Season with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tony Buttitta, Viking Press, 1974, pp.83-84.
[6] Ibid, p.78
[7] Ibid, p.31
[8] ‘Headquarters and Founder of Silver Shirts’, Asheville Citizen, April 29, 1934, p, 1, p.2, p.3, p.6
[9] William Dudley Pelley, Door to Revelation, William Dudley Pelley, The Foundation Fellowship, Asheville, 1936.
[10] Federal Bureau of Investigation, Silver Legion, Silver Shirts, William Dudley Pelle, US Bureau of Investigation , June 22, 1934, R.L Fagan. Interestingly Scott had used Sir Galahad Gin in the story, An Alcoholic Case that he wrote in Asheville. It was also the name of Pelley’s college.
[11] ‘A Summer with F. Scott Fitzgerald’, Laura Guthrie Hearne, Esquire, March 1964, p.160 ; ‘Mrs Laura Millar Hearne Dies, Expert on Fitzgerald’, Asheville Citizen Times, November 20, 1973, p.15. Arnold Gingrich published extracts from her diary talking about her time with Scott in Esquire Magazine, December 1964. In 1919 Laura married William Colden Guthrie, Secretary of the International YMCA. Charlotte psychic Ray Hiat claimed that Laura had been the first person to put astrology in the newspapers in the US, and was a talented psychic herself.
[12] ‘The Inside Story, Wall Street Financiers Plan Fascist Coup’, New York Times, January 28, 1935, p.7; America Faces the Barricades, John L. Spivak, Covici Friede, July, 1935; ‘Plotting the American Pogroms’, The Producer News, January 4, 1935, p.2
The plot against Roosvelt has gone by several different names including the Business Plot, also called the Wall Street Putsch
[13] William Dudley Pelley, Door to Revelation, William Dudley Pelley, The Foundation Fellowship, Asheville, 1936.
[14] ‘W. D. Pelley to Start Soon on World Tour’, Rutland Daily Herald, April 30, 1918, p.2
[15] Foreign Missions Conference Of North America, January 15-17, 1918, NY. Millar served as Secretary of the United Missions Committee. Also served as secretary International Committee Y. M. C. A,, in charge of Army and Navy work; general secretary of the Layman’s Missionary Movement; secretary New York Federation of Churches.
[16] ‘My Seven Minutes in Eternity’, William Dudley Pelley, American Magazine, March 1929, pp.7-9, pp.139-144
[17] ‘‘Millar to Lecture’, The Morning Astorian, June 22, 1905, p.2; Washington Post, June 18, 1905, p.2; A World of Crisis and Progress: The American YMCA in Japan, 1890-1930, Jon Thares Davidann, Lehigh University Press, 1998; William Dudley Pelley in Race for President’, Asheville Citizen Times, September 11, 1935, p.7;
[18] ‘From Arnold Gingrich, Late 1934’, Correspondence, pp. 396-397
[19] The Crack Up, F . Scott Fitzgerald, Esquire, February 1, 1936, pp.41-42, p.164
[20] Gingrich had initially published two items written by Zelda and polished by Scott, The second of these, Auction – Model came with self-explanatory tagline, “Light-hearted housekeepers take an inventory after fifteen years of hard earning and easy spending.” (Esquire, July 1934).
[21] ‘Famous Author Visiting in City’, Asheville Citizen Times, July 21, 1935, p1-2.
[22] ‘An Appeal to Progressives’, Edmund Wilson, The New Republic, January 14, 1931, LXV
[23] After the Good Gay Times; Asheville, Summer of ’35, A Season with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tony Buttitta, Viking Press, 1974, pp.84-85.
[24] ‘Dear Max, February 26, 1935’, Dear Scott, Dear Max, p.217
[25] ‘Thomas Boyd, CP Candidate Dies’, Daily Worker, NY, January 29, 1935, p.2
[26] It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis, October, 1935
[27] The Four Seasons of Success, Budd Schulberg, Doubleday, 1972, p.31
[28] Ibid, pp.81-82
[29] A Southern life: Letters of Paul Green, 1916-1981, University of North Carolina Press, 1994, pp.192-193. Paul Green, one of Boyd’s closest friends, knew Buttitta and Abernethy in Chapel Hill.
[30] After the Good Gay Times, Buttitta, p.86. Boyd would receive an honorary degree from the University of North Carolina in 1938.
[31] ‘Recollections of F. Scott Fitzgerald’, Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, ed. Matthew J. Broccoli, 1975, pp.133-39. Scott arranged for Minnie Sayre to see a local medium during his stay.
[32] ‘To Scott, February-March 1932’, Dear Scott/Dearest Zelda, p.152
[33] ‘The Silver Shirts’, Jean Burton, The Modern Monthly, February 1934, vol. VIII, no.1
[34] ‘American Fascism in Embryo’, The New Republic, Dec 27, 1933, vol. LLXVII, no. 995, p.186
[35] ‘Crazy Like a Fox, Pelley of the Silver Shirts’, The New Republic, April 18, 1934, pp.264-266
[36] ‘The Silver Shirts’, Jean Burton, The Modern Monthly, Vol. VIII, No.1, February 1934, p.18. Burton was born in Abernethy, Saskatchewan in 1905 and died in Los Angeles in 1952. She was the author of a number of plays and several celebrated biographies. Burton was co-founder of the modernist literary magazine, The Canadian Mercury. She also contributed articles at this time to the Catholic propagandist news and culture magazine, The Commonweal. After completing her BA in history she obtained a Masters in Economics at the University of Alberta. She came to Long Island and New York in the early 1930s to work on her play Left Turn.
[37] ‘Plan Lecture at Centre’, Harrisburg Telegraph, March 6, 1935, p.4
[38] Anatolii Vinogradov served as head of the library department of the People’s Compressiat of Education.
[39] Letters from editors of The Modern Monthly, Box 9 Group 162, F1, Mizener, Arthur, Yale Special Collections of American Literature manuscript miscellany. Waldo McNutt’s brother Russell would work with Kellex on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge and be accused of spying for the Soviet.
[40] Ibid. Like Scott’s critical biographer, Henry Dan Piper, Waldo McNutt’s brother Russell would work with Kellex on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge and be accused of spying for the Soviet. He would leave his job in February 1947, shortly before news of a spying scandal broke out at Oak Ridge.
[41] ‘Dear George, March 25, 1935, Correspondence of, p.406
[42] The Liberation of American Literature, V. F. Calverton, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932, p.37
[43] ‘Dear Max, March 11, 1935‘, Letters of, p.264
[44] Cerf, Bennett Alfred, 1898-1972. 12 TLS to Contempo, 1931-1934. Container 1.8, Contempo Collection 1925-1945, Harry Ransom Center.
[45] Contempo, James Joyce Issue, February 13, 1934, vol. III, no.13
[46] ‘Dear Mr Cerf, August 29, 1932, Correspondence, p.296; ‘Dear Max, April 30, 1932, Life in Letters, p.218
[47] Cerf, Bennett Alfred, 1898-1972. 12 TLS to Contempo, 1931-1934. Container 1.8, Contempo Collection 1925-1945, Harry Ransom Center.
[48] Frustratingly, Andrew B. Myer’s ‘I Am Used To Being Dunned’, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Modern Library only starts with a telegram from Scott to The Modern Library in June 1934, sometime after the deal had been struck. He appears to have been asking permission from his publisher, Scribner’s since the summer of 1932, shortly after his arrival in Baltimore.
[49] Calverton, Victor Francis, 1900-1940. 4 TLS, 6 TLI to Contempo, 1931-1932; Container 1.8, Calverton, Victor Francis, 1900-1940. TLS to A. J. Buttitta at Contempo, 13 February 1933. Container 1.8, Contempo Collection 1925-1945, Harry Ransom Center.
[50] ‘Magazine Editor Testifies German Secret Police Set Up Unit for Propaganda’, New York Times, October 7, 1938, p.1, p.18. Gingrich maintained that he had been actively investigating the Silver Shirt Legion of Fascists of America headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. Zelda would attend the Highland Hospital here for treatment and Scott spent much of his time here during the 1935-1937 period after pursuing treatment for TB.
[51] College of One, Sheilah Graham, Penguin, 1966, p.53; ‘Anti-Nazi League Will Celebrate Anniversary’, Hollywood Citizen News, August 5, 1937, p.12. She refers to Cocoanut Grove which was at the Ambassador Hotel.
[52] Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles, Laura B Rosenzweig, NYU Press, 2018, pp.53-54, pp.154-156. The organizer of the group was Chicago lawyer, Leon L. Lewis. The investigative reporter John Spivak may have been the common link between Lewis and Esquire/Ken publisher, David A Smart, both from Chicago.
[53] ‘Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish’, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Esquire Magazine, January 1940, p.45, 171, 172. Came with the tagline, ‘The First in a series of stories featuring Pat Hobby, who was hot stuff when the movies were dumb.’
[54] ‘Nazis Seeking to Halt Mad Dog of Europe’, The Jewish Press, October 27, 1933, p.2
[55] Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros, Campaign against Nazism, Michael E. Birdwell, New York University Press, 1999, pp.53-54
[56] ‘It Can’t Happen Here at Cost of $200, 000’, Commercial Appeal, February 23, 1936.
[57] ‘Three Comrades’, Sunday Worker, March 20, 1938, p.13
[58] F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Screenplay for Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Southern Illinois University Press
[59] ‘Reviews, Three Comrades’, The Spokane Press, June 20, 1938, p.2
[60] ‘Three Comrades’, The Daily Worker, June 6, 1938, p.7
[61] ‘James Boyd’, Greensboro, North Carolina, March 1, 1964.
[62] Hearings Before A Special Committee On Un-American Activities House Of Representatives Seventy-fifth Congress Third Session On H. Res. 282 Volume 1, August 12 , 13, 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19, 20, 22 , And 23, 1938 At Washington , D. C. United States, Government Printing Office, p.1222. Pelley was jailed for 15 years in August 1942 for Nazi collusion.
[63] ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald Theme of Calverton Before Writer Club’, Standard Star (NY), November 25, 1936, p.4.