Pound was seeing Mussolini as a dynamic, even a daemonic force for a new order in Italy, one directed by the human will toward social justice and equity. On the last page of Jefferson and/or Mussolini he reasserted his ‘firm belief that the Duce will stand not with despots and the lovers of power but with the lovers of | ORDER’; to which he added, as if to define ‘ORDER’, ‘τὸ ϰαλόν’, signifying the thing—it would be the public thing or republic—that is beautiful because rightly and harmoniously ordered. Behind that he would have had the Confucian vision of the Chinese empire as a well-ordered totality. Also, he was dreaming again as he had dreamed in London in 1915 of a renaissance born when ‘the very apex of power coincided with the apex of culture’. ‘I dream for Italy an epoch’, he wrote in December 1933, that ‘will resemble somewhat the [quattrocento], an epoch in which the highest culture and modern science functions at maximum’. That is what Pound expected, or hoped for, from Mussolini’s dictatorship of Italy.
He did not advocate Fascism in and for America, and thought ‘the American system de jure…probably quite good enough [for America], if there were only 500 men with the guts and the sense to USE it’. At the same time he considered that Mussolini’s Fascism, with its ‘greater care for national welfare’, did put ‘our democratic system’ on trial with the challenge, ‘Do the driving ideas of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, Van Buren, or whoever else there is in the creditable pages of our history, FUNCTION actually in the America of this decade to the extent that they function in Italy under the DUCE?’ Pound’s opinion was ‘that they DON’T’, and that America needed ‘an orientation of will’ under the stimulus of Mussolini. It did not need to import the ‘accidental’ features of Fascism, the parades and the methods peculiar to the culture and condition of Italy at that time, but only ‘the permanent elements of sane and responsible government’. It would appear, since Pound was calling for the Constitution to be not altered but followed more faithfully, that dictatorship and totalitarian ways were to be classed as ‘accidentals’ and not as necessary means to a more enlightened American order. Indeed, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugurated as President of the United States in March of 1933, began talking about a New Deal for America, Pound paid attention in hope that he would be the one to effect the needed re-orientation of will in what he subscribed to as ‘our democratic system’. When Roosevelt proposed his Civil Works Administration Pound wrote to Dorothy, ‘At last I have a country.’
3. Invitation to Pound’s series of lectures, ‘An Historic Background for Economics’, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan, March 1933.
Revolutionary economics
It was not only with Mussolini that Pound wanted to talk economics. He would talk and write economics at anyone and everyone through the rest of the 1930s, very often as if it were the only bee in his bonnet. The capitalist democracies, America, Britain, France, and the rest, were in deep crisis, with their millions workless, their industries shut down, their markets stagnant, their farmers foreclosed upon by mortgagors, and with their governments paralysed by the contradiction between the needs and interests of their impoverished citizens and the needs and interests of the gravely threatened system of self-regulating capitalism in which they put their trust. Pound could see with blinding clarity what needed to be done, quite simply, that capital, the nation’s wealth, should be made to serve the needs and interests of the whole nation. He thought this should be self-evident to anyone of good will; and that it was the duty of everyone with a sense of social responsibility, from writers up to president or prime minister, to proclaim that solution and to make it happen.
For the moment, for the decade, the struggle to make other people see what was needed to bring about a just economic order was his dominant preoccupation. ‘Contemporary economics goes over my desk NOW,’ he told Morton Dauwen Zabel, the new editor of Poetry in 1934, ‘just as the Joyce, Lewis, Eliot etc/ went over it in 1917’. And to Ibbotson, his old Hamilton mentor who had become the college librarian, he wrote, ‘the vitality of thought NOW (1935) is in econ/ that is where the live thought is concentrated | for a few years’. To the young American writers associated with Contempo he was more insistent: ‘Without an understanding of economics no one can have any grip on the modern world or any understanding of what goes on, or what anything means. No one can understand the “news” in the daily papers.’ ‘Your generation has got to BOTHER about economics, and even politics, as mine bothered about philology’, he advised them in another little magazine, since ‘no man can write anything valid unless he has brains enough to SEE the social order about him and to know cause and effect in that order.’ Moreover, as he cordially informed W. E. Woodward, a historian and Roosevelt adviser, ‘god dam it to understand | history you GOT to understand ECON.’
In 1934 he was chiding Eliot for showing no awareness, when writing about ‘the modern mind’, of the economic realities confronting that mind. It was not that ‘economics constitute “the ONLY vital problem”’, he allowed, but, given that ‘poverty and the syphilis of the mind called the Finance-Capitalist system kill more men annually than typhoid or tuberculosis’, it seemed to him that to engage in purely aesthetic discussion just then was like stopping to discuss ‘blue china in the midst of a cholera epidemic if I possessed the means to combat the epidemic’. Pound was even more impatient with Joyce’s indifference to economic realities—Joyce who had once been his model realist. And he berated ‘son’ Zukofsky as ‘worse than blind Joyce’, and warned him, ‘The next anthology will be econ/ conscious and L/Z won’t be in it’. He even wrote to McAlmon, a rather tough-minded observer of his world, ‘I think both you and Hem have limited yr. work’—which he still held in high regard—‘by not recognizing the economic factor’. Williams, another he would not accuse of being out of touch with reality, he attempted to stir up to spread the word about Social Credit and stamp scrip—‘if you agree, GIT AXSHUN’—but Williams wrote back, ‘Aw what’s the use, you wouldn’t understand.…But as fer action as action. Taint in me. No use gettin mad.’
Pound did get mad, not at Williams and not at individuals he knew personally, but at the whole uncomprehending and apathetic world in general, and at young writers in particular who didn’t want to know about economics. He declared himself fed up, in January 1935,
fed u p (up) with young idiots who can’t see that history does not exist without economics; who do not know that Bithinian mortgages at 12% are a matter of history; who think that…‘l’histoire morale’ can get on without economics any more than any other department of history, or that literature keeps its head in a bag.
It was left to him, he raged, to do all the work of instruction on his own, and to write out the ABCs of economics, ‘because the circumjacent literati are weaklings, they are piffling idiots that can’t get on with the job, they can not even write text books…and I can type for eight hours a day’.
It is necessary for me to dig the ore, melt it, smelt it, to cut the wood and the stone, because I am surrounded by ten thousand nincompoops and nothing fit to call an American civilisation or a British civilisation…
He saw himself as the lone hero desperately embattled, or as the scorned prophet seeing the truth none dared face. In a prefatory note drafted for a proposed collection of his essays, possibly late in the 1930s, he refracted the alien image his opponents had of him, ‘a stray crank’, into a drama of doomed heroism, then found consolation and a kind of triumph in the certainty that anyway his vision was superior to their ignorance:
Against [the] phalanx of academic writing the stray crank hurls himself vainly. He has seen the light, he has seen the landscape illuminated during tempest by one flash of lightning. His adversary has never seen it at all.
And they were afraid of him, he boasted—this was as early as November 1933—‘The college presidents of America dare not read either How to Read or my ABC of Economics’; and the professors of economics, and all the ‘clercs’ in the beaneries, dared not face his facts. ‘T
he cretinism of their era has left them no shred of decency,’ he fulminated. Then, having boiled over with rage—and observed himself doing so with detached interest and approval—he would temper it by saying to someone not an imbecile, ‘all my cursing and blasting is against ONLY those who refuse to look facts in the eye’.
Deeper than his rage there was his hatred, a murderous hatred, as he himself declared, for a murdering capitalism. ‘What causes the ferocity and bad manners of revolutionaries?’, he asked rhetorically in an essay in Eliot’s Criterion in July 1933, ‘Why should a peace-loving writer of Quaker descent be quite ready to shoot certain persons whom he never laid eyes on?…What has capital done that I should hate Andy Mellon as a symbol or as a reality?’ The direct answer was this, ‘I have blood lust because of what I have seen done to, and attempted against, the arts in my time.’ He was thinking back to what he had seen in London, the lack of support for and the suppression of the radically new writing and sculpture and painting of the time, and the best musicians ‘gradually driven off the platform’. He had ‘no personal grievance’, he said, ‘They tried to break me and didn’t or couldn’t.’ But ‘hatred can be bred in the mind’, and ‘head-born hatred is possibly the most virulent’. He had come to understand that the source of the harm done to the arts was the unjust distribution of credit at the heart of the capitalist economic system. And that, evidently, was why he nursed his virulent hatred of the bankers and plutocrats and politicians whom he held responsible for obstructing the flow of creative intelligence in England and France and America.
The evil, he now saw, afflicted not only the arts but infected the whole society, and the cure therefore must be a radical reform of the entire socio-economic system. There had been a time when he had imagined that the problem of the unemployment of the best artists might be settled by one millionaire patron, and ‘without regard to the common man, humanity in general, the man in the street, the average citizen’. That idea he now retracted and apologized for. The unemployment of artists was only a special case of the general unemployment of the millions. The miserliness towards the arts went with the ‘miserliness in regard to sanitation, healthy houses, medical and dental services’; the waste of talent went with the waste of lives—in England ‘three million lives in peace time for every million lives spent in the war’. And what was needed ‘to release more energy for invention and design’ was the same as was needed to overcome the social evil, nothing less than a new economic system that would deliver social justice to all.
Pound conducted his own campaign for economic enlightenment on two fronts, in his cantos containing history where he was inventing objects for contemplation, and in his prose where he was trying at once to make people see the light and to blast the forces of darkness. Cantos XXXI–XLI are largely concerned with banking and economics from Jefferson to Mussolini, with the focus mainly on the American Revolution and its betrayal; The Fifth Decad of Cantos is concerned with banking and economics mainly in Europe, with much attention paid to the founding of a bank in Siena and the very different founding of the Bank of England. More or less at the same time as he was composing those cantos Pound was hammering out on his typewriter letters to editors, articles for whatever newspaper or periodical would publish him, and letters to senators and anyone else whom he thought might be moved to use their influence in the cause of economic reform. Of the 375 items he contributed to newspapers and periodicals in the years 1933, 1934, and 1935, about four in every five were on economic matters, with the frequency of those rising year on year from 80 to 100 to 130. On top of that there was his very extensive and no less furious private correspondence.
Pound particularly targeted a few US senators whom he hoped would steer Roosevelt in the desired direction, and also some of the officers of the President’s think-tank, the Committee for the Nation to Rebuild Prices and Purchasing Power. He wrote as ‘A Jeffersonian or very left wing Fascist’, though one who didn’t ‘care a damn about the theory’ or ‘the political system’ of Fascism—‘Call me a Jeffersonian. brought up to date’, he told W. E. Woodward who was serving on two government advisory councils. Whomever he was writing to, whether it was Woodward, or Senator Cutting of New Mexico, or Senator William Borah of Idaho—or indeed to whatever newspaper or periodical or fellow writer—it was always the same few fundamental ideas out of Douglas’s Social Credit and Gesell’s stamp scrip that he was trying to get across.
The immediate and pressing problem was the mass unemployment of the Depression and the damage being done by that to both the unemployed and the economy. In the United States in 1932 around four hundred in every thousand of the farming population were out of work; in 1934 about 17 million workers altogether were reckoned to be unemployed, and there were forty million living below the poverty line. The Secretary of Agriculture was ordering the destruction of crops and livestock because so many hadn’t the money to buy the food. Pound urged that the available work be shared among those willing and able to work, with a reduction in the hours each worked, but with no reduction of wages. A government subsidy would be needed to keep up wages, but that would be a better use of the state’s money than leaving men workless and doling the money out to them. He was all in favour of creating useful new jobs through Public Works schemes such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, provided they were financed from government credit and not by borrowing from private banks. But the main thing was to tackle the root cause of the Depression, which was not excess production, as orthodox economists maintained, but the lack of purchasing power where it was most needed, among the mass of the people. ‘There is NO real overproduction as long as there are people who WANT the stuff/ god damn it there is plenty of stuff still WANTED | the clog is in the money system. | (overproduction begins when the stuff is not WANTED, not when people merely can’t buy it.)’
The banks having control of the nation’s credit was one side of the problem, as Pound had learnt from Major Douglas, and as quite a number of economists and politicians now perceived. (The other side was how to get the purchasing power to the people.) The banks were called upon to create new money to meet the nation’s demand for credit, but they held it as their money not the nation’s, and lent it out and called it in to their own profit without regard to the common interest. And the worst of it was that the nation’s government, in order to finance its projects, went to the private banks for the money, which the banks created out of nothing, and on which the government then paid them interest. This was ‘an infamy’, Pound protested, ‘It is an infamy that the STATE in, and by reason of, the very act of creating material wealth should run into debt to individuals.’ It was infamous because it was directly contrary to the Constitution, which vested the power to issue money in the government of the Union; and behind that was the idea of natural justice, that the nation’s credit was its common wealth and belonged to the whole people. The Constitution and its democratic principle had been overridden after the Civil War as the power to issue money and control credit had passed from the government to private banks. Senator Cutting was one who wanted to put the government back in control. ‘What does the government do’, he asked in anger in a speech in May 1934,
when it goes to the rescue of its needy and starving citizens? It floats loans through the banks. It pays interest to private organizations for the use of its own credit. The thing becomes more preposterous when we realize that an enormous proportion of the relief expended by the government has gone to the aid of great banking institutions. So that actually the government is getting itself into debt to the banks for the privilege of helping them to regain their stranglehold on the economic life of the country.
Cutting proposed in the Senate that the banks should be nationalized in order to ‘monopolize the credit system of the country for the benefit of the public not for the benefit of the bankers’. Pound, while maintaining that it was not necessary to nationalize the banks Bolshevik fashion in order to control them—Mussolini had demonstrated that—thought Cutting might h
ave made it clear that in any case the profits on the nation’s credit should accrue to the nation. That was underlining the radical principle, which Cutting was asserting, ‘that the nation owns its own credit, and that the whole people should benefit by this fact’.
The basis of credit, in this view, is the nation’s common wealth, that is, its natural resources, or ‘the abundance of nature’, plus the labour to make useful products of those resources; and then the accumulation of skills and knowledge which increases the productivity of labour in both quantity and quality. Marx, in his nineteenth century, had made labour the measure of value, but ‘that’s OLD stuff | no longer fits facts’, Pound insisted to Woodward; ‘Values now from a little (ever decreasing) amount of work: | AND a huge complex of mechanical inventions | which are “the cultural heritage” | and have got to be used for THE WHOLE PEOPLE, | nobody really owns ’em ANYHOW.’ More largely, the cultural heritage consists of ‘the whole aggregate of human inventions’, ‘improvements of seed and of farming methods’, ‘and the customs and habits of civilization’. Douglas had brought forward this perception of the cultural heritage as the main source of economic and social value, with the correlative that it belonged to no one man and to no group; and he had thus expanded the proposition that all men are born free and equal into the claim that all therefore have a right in common with others to the earth’s resources and to the benefits of human progress.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 22