Abstract
In the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Depression, political engagement became the order of the day for many artists and writers. No one knows exactly how many officials of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the United States federal government, not to mention state and local governments, Ezra Pound lobbied by mail from Rapallo during the early 1930s. The number may approach two or even three score. In a herculean effort to influence American policy and opinion, Pound sent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of letters, cards and telegrams from Italy at his own expense to highly placed public and private figures in his homeland, urging upon them various remedies for the crisis that had struck Europe and North America. Largely overlooked by editors, biographers and critics of Pound, this correspondence is an important part of his oeuvre during the 1930s and a significant source of information for anyone seeking to assess his political position in the years leading up to the Second World War and the Rome Radio broadcasts.1
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Notes
Pound’s Congressional correspondences are briefly mentioned in the most authoritative recent biography, Humphrey Carpenter’s A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) pp. 521–2, 527. Carpenter wrongly says that Representative George H. Tinkham was ‘the only American politician willing to pay serious attention to Ezra’s letters’ (p. 527). The correspondences receive more attention in John Tytell’s Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1987) pp. 221
William E. Borah of Idaho’, Paideuma, 12 (1983) 419–26
Philip J. Burns, ‘“Dear Uncle George”: The Pound—Tinkham Letters’, Paideuma, 18 (1989) 35–65.
To date, the best source of information on Cutting’s career is Jonathan R. Cunningham, Bronson Cutting: A Political Biography, Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1940. See also Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 21 (London: Oxford University Press, 1944) pp. 215–16; Patricia Cadogan Armstrong, A Portrait of Bronson Cutting through his Papers, 1910–1927 (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Department of Government, 1959)
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, The Politics of Upheaval (London: Heinemann, 1961) pp. 139–41
William Bedford Clark, ‘“Ez Sez”: Pound’s Pithy Promulgations’, Antioch Review, 37 (1979) 420–7.
See E. P. Walkiewicz and Hugh Witemeyer, ‘Ezra Pound’s Contributions to New Mexican Periodicals and his Relationship with Senator Bronson Cutting’, Paideuma, 9 (Winter 1980) 441–59
Hugh Witemeyer, ‘Senator Bronson Cutting versus Customs Censorship’, New Mexico Humanities Review, 6 (1983) 75–82.
James O. N. Paul and Murray L. Schwartz, Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mail (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961) pp. 55–62.
See John L. Finlay, Social Credit: The English Origins (Montreal: McGill—Queen’s University Press, 1972) pp. 26–8.
See the New York World, 15 February 1931, p. 2; Margaret Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control (London: Faber and Faber, 1932) pp. 323–33
David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970) pp. 228–50.
In a letter to Cutting of 2 January [1935], Pound refers to ‘a bombproof cellar under Mishthr Rottschild’s house in Paris, vhere ahl hiss aht voiks coes vhen Rohtty/ goes avay vrum Paris’. This information, Pound says, is ‘news from a lady not lunched’, whose identity we have not been able to ascertain. Pound mentions the cellar again in three lines of Canto LI (1937) that were blacked out as possibly slanderous in printings before 1986. See also his review of ‘John Buchan’s “Cromwell”’, New English Weekly, VII (8) (6 June 1935) 149.
These ideas are spelled out most clearly in Pound’s letters to Cutting of 9 October 1931 and 11 February 1932. See also ‘Ezra Pound Prescribes 5-Hour Working Day’, Chicago Tribune (Paris), 15 October 1931, p. 2; ABC of Economics (London: Faber and Faber, 1933) pp. 20–1, 42–5, 54–6, 74; ‘More on Economics’, Chicago Tribune (Paris), 12 April 1933, p. 5; and ‘American Notes’, New English Weekly, VII (4) (9 May 1935) 65. For Senator Black’s plan, see Hugo Black, ‘The Shorter Work Week and Work Day’, Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, CLXXXIV (March 1936) 62–7.
Silvio Gesell (1862–1930) was a German businessman who imported surgical supplies into Argentina. His economic theories were formulated in Die natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung durch Freiland und Freigeld (1916), English trans. Philip Pye, The Natural Economic Order (Berlin: Neo-Verlag, 1929).
New English Weekly, IV (23) (22 March 1934) 535–8. On the fate of the bill in Congress, see Gorham Munson, Aladdin’s Lamp: The Wealth of the American People (New York: Creative Age Press, 1945) pp. 382–3.
Congressional Record, 76 (4) (17 and 20 February 1933) 4327–34, 4460. According to Pound,’ senator Bankhead rose to very considerable greatness in the debate on his bill’ (‘The Individual in his Milieu: a Study of Relations and Gesell’, Criterion, XV (58) (October 1935); rpt. in Noel Stock (ed.), Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilisation (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960) p. 250).
Wendy Stallard Flory, The American Ezra Pound (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989) pp. 82–7.
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© 1992 E. P. Walkiewicz and Hugh Witemeyer
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Walkiewicz, E.P., Witemeyer, H. (1992). Ezra Pound, Bronson Cutting and American Issues, 1930–5. In: Kaye, J. (eds) Ezra Pound and America. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22066-3_10
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