"To the Best of My Ability" is part of an ongoing series commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the End of World War II made possible by The Nierenberg Family.

Archival Audio - Ezra Pound’s Radio Broadcast, “Power”

[Ezra Pound speaking]

If this people hasn't the manhood and sense to spew out their Churchills, Baldwins, Buchans, and lesser vermin, that is their own affair, and they will presumably pay the penalty for their own flaccidity and mistaken tolerance. They will slang us for THEIR errors all right. But that any sub-Jew in the White House should send American lads to die for their Jewsoons and Sassoons and the private interest of the  scum of the English earth, and the still lower dregs of the Parsee and Levantine importations is an outrage: and that ends it. To send boys from Omaha to Singapore to die for British monopoly and brutality is not the act of an American patriot. Ezra Pound speaking!

[Unnamed woman’s voice speaking]

You have just heard a talk by Ezra Pound entitled “Power.”

Dr. Kristen Burton

In the final days of the war in Europe, influential poet and fascist sympathizer Ezra Pound was arrested in Genoa by the United States Army. After more than 20 years living abroad as an American expatriate in Italy, Pound faced  19 counts of treason against the United States for his pro-Fascist broadcasts, in  which he expressed support for Hitler and Mussolini, criticized then-President Franklin Roosevelt, and blamed the Jews for the outbreak of the war.

After his arrest, Pound asked if he could send a cable to President Truman so he could help negotiate what he called “a just peace” with Japan. He wanted to make one final broadcast - called “Ashes of Europe Calling” - in which he planned to recommend US management of Italy, leniency towards the Germans, and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, in addition to peace with Japan. The request was denied, and the script for the broadcast landed in the hands of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Days later, the FBI searched the residence where Pound had been arrested and found and removed more than 7,000 articles, letters, and other documents to be classified and used as evidence.

Pound was eventually found mentally unfit to stand trial, and was incarcerated at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric facility for more than 12 years.

Archival Audio - Truman Taking the Oath of Office

“I Harry S. Truman do solemnly swear to faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.”

Dr. Kristen Burton

You’re listening to “To the Best of My Ability: The Postwar Years” from The National WWII Museum in New Orleans. This is episode 3, “Ezra Weston Loomis Pound.” I’m your host, Dr. Kristen Burton. This week, one of history’s most influential poets is indicted on 19 counts of treason against the United States. Joining us is Dr. Daniel Swift, senior lecturer at New College of the Humanities and author of The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound. Our story begins in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where Pound spent his childhood.

Dr. Daniel Swift

Pound was born and raised in suburban Philadelphia really. His father worked for the Mint there, which is only interesting and remarkable because then, later on, Pound becomes increasingly obsessed with economics and particularly with money, so there’s an odd kind of memory throughout his life of his father’s career and his father’s work. But he's a quite unlikely figure to become this sort of reactionary, revolutionary, controversial kind of modern poet and firebrand because he has a fairly—as I said, fairly suburban, a fairly kind of—fairly ordinary or mundane upbringing. He goes to the University of Penn for his undergraduate degree, and he's sort of heading for life as an academic really. His interest is in literature, in translation, which is really important to him throughout his life, and particularly, kind of European poets. But as happens to many academics, I think along the way he kind of becomes distracted by this and he becomes more and more interested in poetry and in modern art. And he moves to Europe, he moves first of all to London in the early years of the 20th century really. And quite quickly, he becomes known as a kind of controversial poet, first of all. He's this kind of well-known, kind of exciting young poet doing things which are radical and which are considered very new. But it's also important to note that early on, he's also perhaps most influential as a kind of—I guess an influence in that he works as a sort of editor and almost like an agent for many other writers. 

Dr. Kristen Burton

Pound found work in London as a foreign editor for several literary magazines, where he helped to discover writers like T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. Joyce, whose controversial work Ulysses, was published largely due to Pound’s efforts while he served as editor at The Little Review. Pound was one of many American writers who came of age during World War I and sought community and inspiration in Europe.

Dr. Daniel Swift

I think that there’s a relevant context that's worth keeping in mind here—is what is called the Lost Generation, which is a whole group of American writers, poets, artists of different kinds, who in the early 20th century became really interested in Europe and in particular interested in France and in Italy. And so many people made a similar journey to Pound, which was to begin their lives in different bits of America, and then, move either to France or to Italy for all sorts of different reasons, partly because it was cheap, partly because it had a great kind of artistic and cultural tradition there. And I'm thinking F. Scott Fitzgerald does this, Ernest Hemingway does this, T.S. Eliot does this. Very often, what happens in these cases is that, like Scott Fitzgerald, people go for a time to Paris and then they return back to America. And what Pound does is that he goes to Europe and he stays. He goes first to London, then, he moves to Paris, and then, he moves to Italy. And the way he becomes involved in politics is really that he arrives in Italy in the sort of early 1930s as fascism is on the rise in Italy as it is across Europe in this moment. 

Archival Audio - Newsreel: Mussolini’s Rise to Power
This is Italy in 1922. These marching men are charter members of a new Italian political party, the fascists, founded and led by a flamboyant ex editor ex Army corporal ex socialist Benito Mussolini.

Fascism has been Mussolini's dream for seven years now. They march on Rome, his movement numbers a million members, including uniform black shirts and Mussolini successfully forces his leadership on the Italian King and people. In the afternoon of October 28 1922, in a downpour of rain, Mussolini himself arrives despite the fact that 80% of Italians still support the constitutional monarchy. His threats of violence and revolution win him the office of premiere on his first anniversary with the aid of gunfire, kidnapping in castor-oil. He is absolute dictator. Italians must call him Il Duce. Mussolini stages great national celebrations at which his own pompous oratory is the chief attraction. The organizer’s children methodically breaking down natural instincts to make them creatures of the party. This and other Mussolini inventions are borrowed by a new dictator, Adolf Hitler, here in his first meeting with Il Duce. By 1938 the student Hitler has [unintelligible] the teacher. Il Duce has given Italy's king and queen a temporary Ethiopian Empire and together with Hitler has helped spread fascism to Spain as well single-handedly defies the League of Nations and gets away with it. Now all Europe trembled at the sound of the axis goose-step which Il Duce and complement to Hitler has introduced among his own troops

[Music fades out]

Dr. Daniel Swift
And that's not why he moves to Italy, but it certainly coincides with his move there. And I think—and I don't mean to sound like I'm sort of excusing him or defending him, but I think his politics were a bit of a muddle. And I think that that might partly be because I think fascism is a bit of a muddle in that it accumulates and absorbs lots of different ideas, some of which are quite contradictory. So Mussolini, the great Italian fascist leader, begins life as a socialist journalist, and then, he moves from the extreme left, the extreme right. And lots of people have that kind of tragic trajectory in their thinking, in their political thinking. What I think Pound finds compelling in Mussolini personally, and also in Italian fascism, is something that it promises—something that it never actually achieves, but something that it promises it might achieve, which is that what Mussolini believed he could do was offer a kind of alternative to capitalism, which he thought was a great evil. And Pound was very taken with that idea. And he took that idea to quite evil extremes, but the idea, at least as its beginnings, is a sort of observation that capitalism is kind of unfair, brings great inequalities to the world, and that might be a political program that would lead us to solve some of those problems of capitalism. Now, I say that and it's not a way of excusing the way Pound thought, but I think that idea was a crucial one. Pound is interviewed in the late 1930s and someone asks him: why do you hate capitalism so much? And he replies, “I hate capitalism because of what it's done to the arts in my time.” I think that's sincere. I think he really does believe that capitalism has destroyed things like traditional craftsmanship that has been replaced by all sorts of other artistic sort of models and forms. 

And he doesn't like that. He wants to get back to kind of traditional practices. And again, we might think about his interest in translation and translation works of the past. Having said all that, that fascism quite quickly sort of slides into a series of what I think of as deeply, deeply ugly political views. And the most extreme of these is anti-Semitism. And so, we move from perhaps a kind of interest in social equality or almost something like socialism to something that we associate much more with fascism or even Nazism, which is a kind of virulent anti-Semitism. And it's worth tracing that trajectory not to explain away, or to excuse Pound, or to apologize for him, but to note that it's a kind of pathway that I think many thinkers, and many artists, and many writers, and many politicians took that same sort of journey during the 1930s.

Dr. Kristen Burton

In 1941, Pound began to collaborate with Mussolini’s regime on pro-fascist radio broadcasts. The broadcasts, which were transmitted to Central Europe, England, and the United States, were extremely anti-Semitic and racist, imploring listeners to read anti-Jewish propoganda like the 1903 hoax document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Dr. Daniel Swift

The broadcasts are really a great big mix of different things. I've said already fascism was a bit of a muddle. I think that the broadcast is a bit of a muddle too. Pound is hired by the Italian—this kind of Ministry of Culture really, which is sort of the Ministry of Propaganda, really fascist propaganda. He's hired by them and he’s paid. And it's important that he's paid because that ties into the accusation that he was treasonous in his actions—paid to give a series of broadcasts. We don't know exactly how many for various different reasons, often because they would air the same broadcast multiple times, partly because many of them have been lost, and partly, I think, because very few people actually heard them. So there aren't very good records kept. All the Italian records have been sort of destroyed. And what Pound does in his time on air is a real mix of things. So, in some of the broadcasts, he comes on air and he reads a poem. He reads often one of his own poems. And then, he starts reading and the audience, the listeners, must be baffled by this. They're expecting fascist propaganda and they got an Ezra Pound poem. It seems kind of bizarre. Sometimes, he talked about economics, economic history, one of his great obsessions. He talks about the founding of the Bank of England in the 17th century. He was obsessed with that. He talks about the gold standard, talks about money lenders. And you can see already this is going to kind of—as soon as he starts, money lending was beginning to get back into the old sort of medieval slanders about—anti-Semitic slanders really. And in many ways, Pound was a kind of medieval anti-Semite. But a repeated message that he gives in the broadcasts is a very simple one. And these broadcasts were given in English, the English language broadcasts on Italian radio so they’re aimed at an English-speaking audience, that aimed really at the allies, and people in England, and people in America. And the argument he very often gives is that the allies shouldn't be at war with the axis powers, that the Americans should not be at war with the Germans and Italians and Japanese because the real villains in the Second World War weren't Germans, they weren't Italians, but they were the Jewish people, who Pound believed were involved in banking and in money lending, and they’re kind of all the worst extremes of what he thought was the extremes of capitalism really. So, again, we've got a kind of medieval idea that's given sort of new life in the context of the Second World War. In retrospect, it looks all the more grotesque. The more we know about the Holocaust, about the Second World War, the more grotesque this looks. But that was the argument he was making, and it’s that actually, the allied and the axis powers were natural sort of teammates. He was saying they shouldn't have been at war with one another.

Dr. Kristen Burton

The broadcasts were being monitored by the United States Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, and in mid-1943, the District Court of the United States indicted Pound in absentia for treason. Unbothered and undeterred, Pound continued to broadcast for Mussolini until American forces arrested him in May 1945.

Dr. Daniel Swift

By the spring of 1945, Pound is still living in Italy. He is commuting to run to record the broadcast and he's living in another bit of Italy farther north from this. And Italy starts to sort of fall to the allies, really, the allied troops. So Italy is sort of falling apart as a country. And Pound actually hands himself in to a group of American soldiers in the summer of 1945. He does so because I think that he knows that what's happening is Italy is falling apart, is collapsing. And he's put in a military prison just outside Pisa for that summer, for the summer of 1945. So it's a prison camp really for American soldiers who've committed crimes, a camp run by the American Army, but it's not a camp for prisoners of war necessarily. He is treated there severely, as you would expect from someone who is being accused of treason, but he’s also being kept in a prison camp during an ongoing war. And he has some kind of nervous breakdown while he's there. He is already fairly elderly by this point. He's already very frail. He has a kind of nervous breakdown and he returns to writing poetry. During the previous ten years or so, he's more or less abandoned writing poetry as his focus has been on writing prose, and writing about economics, and writing about politics. But in the prison camp, he returns and writes a very celebrated collection of poems called The Pisan Cantos, which are really poems which are about a kind of a mind in torment, really, and about Pound’s—I think his realizations of the failure of many of the things that he has done so far. Having said that, there are also problematic poems and they seem to continue to celebrate many kind of fascist ideas. They’re deeply divided poems. But it's important and it carries on the intensive importance that these poems are written in these very extreme circumstances. By about November of 1945, the war is over by this point, and Pound is flown back to Washington D.C. in a military plane. And he's flown directly to Washington D.C. because it matters where in the US he lands because that is the district then where he will be tried.

Dr. Kristen Burton

Pound was indicted and at the start of the trial, his attorney, Julian Cornell, entered a plea that Pound was unfit to stand trial due to mental illness. A series of doctors evaluated him, and testified that he appeared to suffer from insanity and therefore was not mentally fit to stand trial. Though not all the doctors agreed, the plea was accepted, and Pound was ordered to be incarcerated at St. Elizabeth’s, a psychiatric facility in Washington.

While institutionalized, Pound befriended John Kasper, a staunch segregationist who was suspected of committing multiple synagogue, church, and school bombings.

Dr, Daniel Swift

Kasper is a kind of interesting and hugely problematic figure. John Kasper was a white supremacist troublemaker, really, and I don't mean troublemaker in kind of light sense. He was accused of an enormous number of awful things, school bombings, synagogue bombings, and so on. So there's a deeply kind of unpleasant, dangerous, divisive figure. And he writes to Pound, and Pound invites him to come and visit. It's worth noting that Pound is being kept in this hospital and isn't allowed to leave, but he is allowed to receive visitors. And a great many people come and visit him, many poets, many artists, many writers go and visit him. And John Kasper is one of the people who decide to go and visit Pound, and he writes to Pound, and Pound writes back, and he eventually goes and visits him. And he goes and visits Pound several times. We don't know exactly how many times, but Kasper visits him several times. Now, it's while Kasper is visiting Pound that he's also kind of beginning to become increasingly active in the sort of school segregation movement. 

Dr. Kristen Burton
Kasper directed his efforts towards trying to stop the integration of Clinton High School in Tennessee. In January 1956, a federal judge ordered Clinton High School to desegregate in accordance with the Brown vs.  Board of Education ruling. At the start of the school year in August, 12 Black students who became known as the Clinton 12 were the first to try and attend an all-white school in Tennessee. They were met by a mob of nearly 1,500 pro-segregation protestors, led by Kasper and his ilk. The protestors encouraged white students to join them with moderate success, and he violence continued to escalate; In one incident, Reverend Paul Turner, the white minister at the First Baptist Church, was beaten beyond recognition after escorting the Clinton 12 to school. In another, three of the Black students who were walking together were rescued from the mob by the Clinton High football team, and hidden away in the principal’s office until the danger passed. The all-white police force only intervened in the riots when it became clear that Kasper’s mob was headed to the mayor’s home.

Clinton was in chaos; buildings were burned, cars overturned, and Kasper’s followers indiscriminately beat Black men on the street. The National Guard was called in, and after the riots subsided, Kasper faced charges for his role.

Archival Audio - Edward R. Murrow Broadcast on the Clinton 12

Edward R. Murrow: “The most talked-about man in Clinton is John Kasper of Washington, DC. John Kasper, still awaiting appeal of a one-year sentence, is the self-appointed executive secretary of the Seaboard white Citizens Council and a protege of Ezra Pound. Since his two arrests, he is forbidden from interfering in Clinton but because it is impossible to measure his full effect on the community without observing him in action we followed him to nearby Kentucky on December 12 he was speaking to a white Citizens Council group in a fourth floor loft.”

Kasper: “The faces of common law is the custom of the people. If the custom of the people in Anderson County is to keep the races separate then the Supreme Court law doesn't mean anything. It doesn't.”

Dr. Daniel Swift
So it's really a kind of movement against the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. And that's what Kasper’s kind of particular interest is at that moment. Kasper is also a kind of very active member of the KKK. He has all sorts of links to a kind of right-wing, what we think of a neo-Nazi underground really. And many of Pound's literary friends are so horrified by this association, but Pound seems to like something in Kasper. And I think there are two sort of parts to that. I think what Pound does for Kasper is Pound gives a kind of intellectual cover for Kasper's sort of racist white supremacist views in that he gives a kind of stamp of authority to them. 

Dr. Kristen Burton
Kasper faced charges of sedition and inciting a riot, and was ultimately acquitted. The jury included a number of auxiliary police force members who had been present for the riots.

Pound’s involvement with Kasper and other known white supremacist terrorists -  including Eustace Mullins, an ardent Holocaust denier who was allegedly active in the Aryan League of America - troubled many of his famous friends, who were attempting to appeal to President Truman for clemency. Many of those closest to him tried to convince him to stop his relationship with these men, but Pound waved off these concerns.

Dr. Daniel Swift
So Pound becomes kind of involved with this figure, Kasper, this unpleasant figure. And this is towards the end of Pound’s time in the hospital in the sort of mid-1950s. But it's very often thought that—I mean, and it was claimed at the time—that Pound did himself a disservice by being associated with Kasper because it slowed down the possibility of his release. In a way—and people wrote about this. They wrote great many scandalized articles about this. This was proof that Pound had not in any way renounced his old views. By the early 1950s, it was perfectly clear to anyone that Pound’s views that he broadcasted in the Second World War were deeply at his heart. The Holocaust was widely known about by this point, and yet, Pound was here seen as associating himself with another kind of racist movement and placing himself on a side which seems to imply that he had learned nothing from all the various kind of trials and tribulations that he'd been through. So Kasper is this problematic figure. Many of Pound’s writer friends implored with him to send Kasper away, but he kept kind of inviting Kasper back, precisely because I think that—I think Pound felt like Kasper offered him something.

Dr. Kristen Burton
In addition to inciting pro-segregation riots in Clinton County, Kasper was suspected of being involved in a number of racially motivated bombings, including multiple school bombings in Tennessee and the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple bombing in Atlanta. Though no evidence was ever found to link him to any of these acts of terrorism, Kasper served 8 months in prison for conspiracy, and the media attention he was garnering resulted in his expulsion from the KKK. After his release from prison, he tried to run for President on the National States Rights Party ticket alongside convicted neo-Nazi terrorist J.B. Stoner, but garnered just under 6,500 votes.

Kasper and Pound continued to correspond into the 1960’s, until Kasper gave up public politics and returned home to the north, taking a series of clerical jobs until his death in 1998.

Dr. Daniel Swift

But what Kasper gives to Pound is the opportunity to sort of feel that he's still in touch with the world of politics outside the hospital. And Kasper invites Pound to write for various different sort of racist magazines, and Pound writes segregationist articles for different magazines. Pound, I should say, I think is a deeply unlikely segregationist for all sorts of reasons. I think Pound’s interest is deeply in, as I keep on mentioning, translations from many other cultures, but at the same time, his politics do seem to coincide with those of this younger man.

Dr. Kristen Burton

Throughout his incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s, Pound’s friends continued to advocate for his release. Although some, like Hemingway, did so grudgingly, telling violinist and Pound’s long-time mistress Olga Rudge that Pound had quote “made the rather serious mistake of being a traitor to his country, and temporarily he must lie in the bed he made." For her part, Rudge self-published six of Pound’s radio broadcasts under the title This Be Treason in an effort to show how ultimately harmless his actions had been. Rudge carefully chose broadcasts that dealt with cultural topics, eschewing the more inflammatory statements her paramour had broadcast. 

By 1957, more than a decade into Pound’s incarceration, multiple mainstream publications were advocating for his release, including Esquire and The Nation, which argued that the poet and self-proclaimed fascist had been incarcerated without any due process and that even quote “a sick and vicious old man” had constitutional rights.

On May 7, 1958, Pound was discharged from St. Elizabeth’s. Upon his release, he and his wife Dorothy returned to Italy. Unrepentant, Pound gave reporters in Naples awaiting his arrival a fascist salute before taking their questions, during which he called “all of America an insane asylum.”

Pound lived out the rest of his days in Italy, and died in his sleep in 1972 at the age of 87.

Dr. Daniel Swift

And it seemed that the Pound case—and in particular what I mean is the sort of Pound’s suspended treason trial and also his many years in the hospital—raised for me all sorts of questions which felt like they were questions about the past and also questions about the present. And perhaps the first way of thinking about this kind of episode is thinking about it in terms of a sort of history lesson. And one of the things that Pound is a real reminder of is the ways in which nationalism and a kind of extreme forms of nationalism rely upon kind of claims about history. They are often telling stories about history. And very often, they will offer a particular vision of the past, which is to do with a purer past, like a better vision of the past, which is very often tied up with ideas about racial and ethnic purity also. So there's a story that's being told here that was told by the Nazis, told by Pound in all sorts of ways that we now see sort of nationalist leaders telling, a way in which if only we could get back to a pure past, things would be better. But it’s interesting the way in which that story is one that was prevalent in the world in the 1930s and 1940s and then seemed perhaps for times to disappear has now released, perhaps since the late 1980s, but much more intensely, more recently, has returned to us. So it's always worth to me kind of being aware of the way in which those same sorts of political stories or cases are presented.

Dr. Kristen Burton

In our next episode, “Duck and Cover,” as the iron curtain descended on eastern Europe, fears over a new global war with the USSR cast a pallor over every aspect of American life. Rising suspicions turned into an unprecedented era of domestic spying, and a new government agency began targeting everyone from civil rights activists to Hollywood producers.

From The National WWII Museum, I’m Dr. Kristen Burton. This episode was written by executive producer Gemma R. Birnbaum. Digital content manager Bert Hidalgo did the sound mixing. Archival audio is courtesy of the National Archives, Critical Past, and the CBS News Edward R. Murrow Archive.

Please leave us a review or comment on your favorite podcast platform. Reviews are important to help others find the series. "To the Best of My Ability" is part of an ongoing series of programs commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the End of World War II made possible by The Nierenberg Family.