United States v. McWilliams et al.

> Indictment July 21, 1942. Trial began April 17, 1944. Judge Edward C. Eicher died in his chambers on November 29 of the same year. Mistrial. The last federal attempt to prosecute American fascism as a coordinated thing died with him.

> The Justice Department had thirty defendants in the dock, including William Dudley Pelley of the Silver Shirts and Gerald Winrod of the Defenders of the Christian Faith, and they could not get a verdict before the judge's heart gave out. Read that twice. — from the file

The charge was conspiracy to cause insubordination in the armed forces under the Smith Act. Lawrence Dennis, the Black intellectual passing as white who wrote *The Coming American Fascism* in 1936, sat at the table next to Elizabeth Dilling, who had published *The Red Network* listing every name she suspected of communism. George Sylvester Viereck, the Kaiser's American publicist in the previous war and Goebbels's stringer in this one, was beside them. McWilliams himself was a footnote, a Brooklyn agitator whose name happened to appear first alphabetically and therefore titles the case forever.

Eicher's court could not hold the room. Defense counsel objected continuously, by design — the strategy was to make the trial expensive enough to collapse. It worked. After seven months and twelve thousand pages of transcript the judge died, the case was hung, and the government quietly declined to retry. Pelley went back to his cell on a separate sedition conviction. Dennis went home and wrote three more books. Gerald L.K. Smith launched the Christian Nationalist Crusade in 1947. Wesley Swift, who had absorbed Pelley's cosmology through Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple, started Christian Identity in California the same year. Aryan Nations grew on the Swift branch. The militia movement on the Smith branch.

The mistrial set the precedent that conspiracy among ideological cousins is functionally unprosecutable in the United States. Eighty years later QAnon inherits the same finding without ever having to argue for it.

The case is named after the man whose surname came first in the alphabet. That is the level of seriousness the verdict deserved and got.