"Is this my fault?"
"How can it be? You didn' kidnap those people. You didn' pour gas down the sides of a buildin' and light it on fire. It was that bigoted madman, and his freakish cult. You know that."
"I sometimes wonder... If only my rhetoric were less severe... or if it was a moderate like Borah in office... maybe they would not have been driven to such extremes. Maybe..."
"Madness ain't going to be swayed by rhetoric or policy. They'd've found some conspiracy theory 'round Borah as sure as Hell as they cooked up around you. They'd've struck against him, and forced him to respond jus' like you did. It would all have gone the same. If either of us is to blame, it's me. I could've crushed them bastards earlier, but I didn't. I should've. I want to make it up to you and the nation. Please, let me."
"People are rallying against the South, even though Pelley was from Massachusetts. I don't know if putting a Southerner, even one as left-wing as you, as the front man for the anti-extremism efforts, will go down well."
"Y'all up North have always stared down at us, callin' us racist hicks. Well, I ain't racist - Lord knows how much I despise having to call for 'separate but equal' to avoid bein' lynched - but I am a hick. I was born in rural Louisiana. I am one of them. If you send some yankee down to deal justice, they'll call it Reconstruction number two and rally against you. You will fail like Miller. Send me. They can't stand up to another Southern man. The nation will see, not the enlightened North teachin' the Southern hicks a lesson, but a good old Southern boy cleanin' his home. And I'll clean it as sure as the sun'll rise. You gotta fight fire with fire. I'll burn those bastards out of the South, the North, the West. I'll drag them to the gates of Hell."
"So be it."
~~~~~
The American psyche had been slowly collapsing for around a decade. Violence, racism, and depression plagued the nation. And right as things seemed to be looking up, right as the economy started recovering and the jobs began to return, Galahad happened. In future years, historians would claim that late July, 1933, marked the second lowest point in the American consciousness, behind February of 1932 alone.
Galahad would go down in history as the most significant single event of the 1930s in America. Within days, almost everyone in America had heard about it. Asheville went from being a relatively unknown city, to being more famous than any American city other than New York. Nearly everyone could name William Dudley Pelley. Polls in the following weeks identified him as America's most hated person of all time. Numerous sensationalist publications proclaimed him "The Most Evil Man In All History". Effigies were burned across the nation of Pelley and the red "L" which symbolized his movement. Lynch mobs arose, targeting suspected members of the Silver Legion in what became known as the "Silver Scare". Anyone who was suspected of having supported the Christian Party was fired from their jobs. Not even the American Employment Agency would hire them.
In the days following Galahad, all opposition to Floyd Olson on matters of internal security melted away. Both Houses of Congress quickly passed the Internal Security Act, which proclaimed that any crime done in an attempt to promote a political or social cause was deemed "rebellion", and therefore under Article I Section 9 of the Constitution grounds for the suspension of Habeas Corpus. The ISA expanded the Bureau of Investigation and renamed in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, granting it more power. It stated that individuals suspected of participating in domestic rebellion could be held without bail, and, if the Attorney General determined that they were a threat to National Security, they could be tried by a military tribunal instead of a regular court. The ISA created a system of secret courts designed solely to issue secret search warrants on suspected members or supporters of extremist paramilitary groups. Furthermore, it established that based on provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3, that anyone who was arrested under suspicion for being involved in extremist paramilitary activity was to be removed from the ballot, and all write-in votes for them were to be discounted.
Attorney General Huey Long addressed the nation, vowing to crush all extremist forces that sought to topple the US government. Within weeks, he had destroyed the remnants of the far-right militias, aided by lynch mobs (who were pardoned by the President if it could be proven "with a preponderance of evidence" that their victim was a member of the Silver Legion). He also crushed various far-left anarchist groups. Huey Long went further than that, and proclaimed that anyone who had ever funded or supported known members of any far-right paramilitary group, including the old Ku Klux Klan, were henceforth also suspects. While shrewd enough to decline to purge any of the sitting members of Congress of the Democratic or Conservative Parties who had been former supporters of these groups, he used his power to arrest numerous lower officials of those parties across the South, seizing their partisan assets, and searching their records and party lists. While allowing the Representatives to stay in Congress and complain, Long damaged their party apparatus. He did not act against the Republicans in the North, for he knew that while Northern conservatives would accept his actions to crush "Southern racist hicks", they would stand against him if he attempted to crush them.
In following years, the term "Galahad Graduate" came to mean anyone who accepted a belief unquestionably. A memorial was constructed at the sight of Galahad Hall, to the 249 innocent victims killed there, as well as the 144 killed elsewhere in the city and the US by the Silver Shirts. No one knew how many Silver Shirts were killed in Asheville in general and in Galahad Hall in particular, but the number was believed to be close to a thousand. They were unmourned; those few "Galahad graduates" who survived the battle in Asheville were all executed. Anyone who spread crazed conspiracy theories that the whole operation was a false flag attack by Olson to gains support for the ISA was deemed to be spreading slander and/or libel, a crime, for the political cause of supporting an extremist paramilitary group, and thus under the ISA was deemed to be in unlawful insurrection and therefore arrested.
