The Near-Death Experience of "America's Hitler" William Dudley Pelley (1928)
And what about the positive transformational effects of NDEs?
William Dudley Pelley was a toxic combination of American Christian-Nationalist, occultist, would-be politician, Nazi sympathizer, traitor, conman, and writer. Alongside his novels, short stories, and screenplays, he also wrote anti-Jewish tracts and spiritualist publications. Cobbling together elements of theosophy, UFOs, fascism, and pseudo-archaeology, he invented a religious philosophy which he called “Soulcraft.”
In 1933, Pelley founded the Silver Legion: a white supremacist paramilitary group inspired by Hitler’s reich, with which he planned to overthrow the U.S. government and persecute Jews and people of color. Pelley was convicted of treason, sedition, and fraud, though his prosecution ended in a mistrial — but only because the judge died.
Given his interest in the occult, Pelley would almost certainly have been familiar with near-death experiences, as well as with Spiritualist ideas about the afterlife. He certainly understood the potential religious power of claiming to have gone to heaven and learned the secrets of the cosmos. And he knew he could harness such claims to gain wealth, power, and fame as a prophet of both the afterlife and life in 1930s America.
The 1929 publication of his alleged experience in the American Magazine helped him to gain the national notoriety he desired to promulgate his dangerous ideas. The account was even reprinted and promoted in The Improvement Era, an official magazine of the Mormons. In the account, Pelley describes how in 1928, he was in bed at his home in Pasadena, California with his police dog, when he had what he believed to be “a combination of heart attack and apoplexy.” He was convinced that he was dying. He allegedly had an out-of-body experience alongside other common features of NDEs, though he described them in rather unconvincingly precise detail.
Pelley claimed to have developed psychic powers as a result of his NDE, along with a new understanding of how “vast and fine and high and beautiful” life was. Like so many other NDErs, he described how he was positively transformed by the experience, spiritually, mentally, and physically, writing that it had “launched him into a wholly different universe that seems filled with naught but love, harmony, health, good humor, and prosperity.”
If we accept Pelly’s NDE at face value, however, it is one of the few examples of the phenomenon that did not lead to a positive transformation, for his fascist and treasonous activities only accelerated. But Pelley was not exactly a reliable narrator. Given his criminal lack of ethics, it seems likely that he invented the entire account as a tool to profit from his writings and promote his Nazi agenda — the intertwining motivating forces in his life. In an expanded book version of the article, much space is dedicated to promoting his works, especially a self-proclaimed “prophetic” novel based on his alleged NDE. As other have done at various time in history, he was using his NDE claim to gain status as a spiritual leader — but also to sell books. More seriously, Pelley was also laying the groundwork for his ambitions as a Nazi-spiritual leader.
Dudley was grooming his spiritually-minded readers to support his political aspirations to become Nazi dictator of the United States.
He announced that he was divinely ordained by the “Great Spiritual Forces” to preach about “the most beautiful and stupendous principles of Truth.” To this end, he founded New Liberator magazine to publish his alleged communications with the “Great Souls” he had met during his NDE, which he subsequently channeled via “Psychic Radio.” These spirits told him, he claimed, that Jews and Blacks are at the bottom of the spiritual hierarchy, and are enemies of white people whose souls are more developed. Interspersed among articles on psychics, reincarnation, biblical prophecies, “eastern mysticism,” and protection from demons were his conspiracy-theory editorials on “world money barons,” “international bankers,” shadowy world governments, and other antisemitic tropes. With articles such as these — not to mention one called “Did You Know that Christ was Not a Jew?” — Dudley was grooming his spiritually-minded readers to support his political aspirations to become Nazi dictator of the United States.
Pelley also founded a college where courses such as “Spiritual Eugenics” were taught, lending a chilling tone to a remark in his NDE account that there are “no misfits” or “physical handicaps” in the afterlife.
He even attempted to run for president of the United States under the banner of “The Christian Party of America,” launching his own propaganda newspaper as an electioneering tool. On a platform copied directly from Nazi Germany, he promised the forced registration and persecution of Jews. At one of his trials, he expressed his ambition to become “America’s Hitler.”
Aside from whatever historical value Pelley’s own case might have for near-death studies, he did leave behind a tantalizing claim for those interested in the history of the phenomenon. The publication of his account generated national interest, and he received thousands of letters. “Hundreds and hundreds” of them, he claimed, were “from persons who declared they had undergone a similar experience,” with descriptions “which were substantially identical with details I had not mentioned in my public account in the magazine, and some of which I had never mentioned to my closest friends.” While this claim of the “sameness” of so many accounts may seem compelling to some readers, given the diversity of NDEs seen throughout my work, it rather suggests that Pelley was constructing a narrative to appeal to his readers. In other words, he was simply engaging in yet more fraudulent self-promotion.
The relationship between white supremacism and New Age-type movements such as Spiritualism, theosophy, and other forms of esotericism has an unfortunately long and involved history (and indeed continues up to the present). It also has serious implications for those who believe that NDEs are evidence for life after death, for one must accept either that (1) some postmortem spirits in other worlds will continue to practice racism, eugenics, and other forms of intolerance and oppression, and that the spiritual transformation of an NDErs does not preclude founding a paramilitary group to bring Nazism to the United States; or (2) that such accounts are fabricated by fraudulent, amoral con artists — like William Dudley Pelley.
In a chapter of my book The Next World: Extraordinary Experience of the Afterlife, I explore some of these issues further in relation to Edwardian mediumistic descriptions of the afterlife, which are filled with racism, sexism, classism, and religious intolerance. In my Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions, I consider the political force of NDEs, used both as a tool of resistance and a tool of exploitation (also discussed to a lesser extent in my Near-Death Experience in Ancient Civilizations).