United States of America v. Ezra Pound

I was intrigued by the charges of treason brought against Ezra Pound, and found this fascinating article by Robert Wernick that was published in the Smithsonian Magazine in 1995. Wernick lays out the situation in lively prose, covering the infamous radio broadcasts, the trial and subsequent internment in St. Elizabeth psychiatric hospital for 12 years until finally released in 1957 with his "condition upon discharge: unimproved."

What I found most amusing was that the Library of Congress selection committee decided to award its first Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1949. This incensed Congress, who couldn't believe that an arm of its government could bestow such a high honor on a man of such unforgivable character. In its rage, Congress revoked the award and abolished the prize. However, the controversial prize was subsequently awarded by the Beinnecke Library of Yale University, which kept Pound as the recipient of the first prize. Pound remained at St. Elizabeth enjoying the comforts of his government-paid confinement.

For most, such internment would gnaw at the soul and leave a shell of a man. Not for Pound, who found his accommodations amenable, and as Wernick noted, entertained visitors, as many as 15 at at time, on a regular basis. Pound also made friends with fellow patients and administrative staff alike, leading him to quip, "I can get along with crazy people, it's only the fools I can't stand."

One of them was Franklin Roosevelt, who he referred to as "Stinky Rosenstein" in his broadcasts. Pound felt FDR was in bed with the Jews. Pound railed against the capitalist world, which he considered controlled by Jews, referring to them as "the cultural stink [that] betrayed the United States in 1863" by keeping up the Civil War, presumably through the banks, which he loathed above all. The quote is taken from Non-Jew published in April, 1942, which you can find in this collection of his Italian radio broadcasts. He would later offer some measure of contriteness to Allen Ginsberg in 1967, saying that he was ashamed of his anti-Semitism, regarding it as a "stupid suburban prejudice."

Many years had passed by this point and Pound was near the end of his very long life. He had outlived many of the writers he had promoted decades before, among them Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. While Hemingway and Frost would turn their backs on Pound, others made a point to visit Pound while at St. Elizabeth. An exasperated Eliot felt his mentor had no intention of leaving the psychiatric hospital, as it was very comfortable for him.

Upon his release, Pound was forced to confront his wife, his mistresses and his daughter, who apparently fought over him for years before Olga Rudge bore him off to her apartment in Venice, where he spent his last years before being whisked away by a gondola to his deathbed in a hospital, insisting on scaling the stairs himself.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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