Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Douglas’s idea was that the surplus value or credit accruing from the cultural heritage should be distributed to all citizens as a national dividend, and that this would be a fair mechanism for providing the needed increase of purchasing power in the economy. Pound took up the main idea but wanted it modified. Douglas did not mind whether people worked for their dividend or not. In Pound’s view, however, everyone had both a right to work and a need to work, though only for so many hours a day as would get the nation’s work done and allow everyone to share in it, and he therefore would have wanted the social dividend to go into subsidizing work-sharing and keeping up wages. At the same time he allowed that the dividend might take various forms, such as the control of rents and prices to keep them in line with wages, as was being done in Italy; or it might go into the improvement of public utilities and infrastructure, and the provision of better education, health care, and welfare. All such public benefits could be, and should be, financed out of the public credit, without recourse to ‘the buggering banks’.

  These were revolutionary ideas threatening the freedoms of the capitalist order in its moment of crisis, a moment when the contradiction between the interests and workings of capitalism and the interests and needs of society as a whole was painfully exposed by the Great Depression. Of course the ideas were dismissed as unworkable, as ‘crank economics’, by those who opposed or simply feared the changes that would follow from them. And because they were not effectively carried into action in any capitalist democracy their power to bring about a more truly democratic order remained unproven.

  Yet the principles behind those ideas, Pound and others maintained, were fundamental to democracy, especially to one which honoured Jefferson as a founder. In the United States they were upheld by many responsible legislators addressing the disastrous breakdown of their social economy. In 1933 Senator Hugo Black of Alabama proposed a six-hour working day and a five-day week to spread the existing jobs among 25 per cent more workers, and a majority in the Senate approved. In 1934 and 1935, according to Walkiewicz and Witemeyer, ‘There was a growing consensus that the causes of the Depression had more to do with poor distribution and underconsumption’ than with problems of production, and in March 1934 President Roosevelt called for ‘an increase in the purchasing power of the people’. His Administration’s large-scale public works schemes were one way of bringing that about, though, as Senator Cutting pointed out, his financing those schemes by borrowing from private banks was counter-productive. Cutting’s own proposal to nationalize the banks had considerable support in the Senate and in the country, though it died in committee, the great objection to it being, as he noted, that it was too radical.

  There were other, less temperate, voices spreading these ideas over the radio, the mass medium of the time, and getting a responsive hearing for them from millions of listeners. There was Father Coughlin, the radio evangelist of his day, who, as Pound observed, was preaching social justice in simple terms the populace could understand. Pound, enthusiastic about the texts of his broadcasts and deeply impressed by his speaking to and for so vast an audience, bombarded him with suggestions and instigations, and received only form letters in return.

  Another powerful voice attracting Pound’s particular interest was that of the Governor of the State of Louisiana and US Senator Huey P. Long (1893–1935), known as the ‘Kingfish’, and much followed and much castigated as ‘a populist demagogue’. Woodward told Pound that Long had ‘a splendid education—brilliant mind…with the manners and speech of a ward politician or a street corner orator’. ‘Better a wild man that wants justice than a tame one who just don’t care for the people and who won’t look at the nature of money,’ such was Pound’s attitude. On that basis he urged American Social Creditors to work with Long, though they might disagree, as he did himself, with some of his ideas. The essential thing was that ‘Long WANTS a new economic system. The root is in VOLITION; in the direction of the WILL.’ As evidence of direction he cited Long’s ‘radio speech of March 7th [1935]’, in which he had spoken against the situation in which too few controlled the nation’s money and wealth, while too many were without the money ‘to buy the things they needed for life and comfort’; along with that he cited Long’s broadside, ‘The Share Our Wealth Principles’, which affirmed as a founding American idea ‘that all the people should share in the land’s abundance’. ‘Huey for president’, Pound fantasized,2 wanting to see him where he would be most able to put ‘his WILL into practice’. Long, however, was assassinated in the Louisiana State Capitol in September 1935.

  ABC of Economics (1933) in gists.

  Exhibits from Father Coughlin and Senator Huey Long.

  ‘The root is in VOLITION; in the direction of the WILL’—that emphasis, with the implication that the means to the desired end of social justice are negotiable, is the key to understanding Pound’s economic propaganda. The means and methods by which the fruits of abundance might be distributed were not of fundamental importance to him. ‘With sane economics’, he told Woodward, ‘the political system can be pretty much ad lib/.’ So Mussolini’s totalitarian regime could be ‘utterly necessary in Italy’ given that country’s history and present conditions, but ‘inconceivable’ in England with its parliamentary tradition, or in America with its own democratic principles that it ought to be following. The system of distribution could be equally ‘ad lib’, whether by a ‘national dividend’ or a ‘material dividend’ or whatever else, just so long as everyone received enough to ensure life, liberty, and happiness. Pound cared about the end, but not so much about the means.

  Moreover, the instrumental ideas which he promoted so persistently were in no sense his own, being derived from Douglas and Gesell and other reformers, and being very widely known and debated in that time of economic crisis. Indeed in respect of having ideas about how best to manage the nation’s credit Pound was rather like Churchill in the anecdote in canto 41: ‘“Never”, said Winston…waste time having ideas”,’ ‘“Be a GUN, and shoot others’ munitions”.’ That is very much how Pound behaved in the field of economics, shooting off the gists and piths of a few of the more explosive ideas that were then current with the aim of driving them into ‘the mind of the people’, and more especially into ‘the few powerful public leaders who really desire the good of the people’. His purpose was to generate a passion for social justice, and to move leading politicians to enact it.

  ‘Can’t move ’em with a cold thing like economics’, so Griffith, the Sinn Fein leader, had informed him back in 1921, and now Pound seemed determined to do something about that. The people and their politicians had to be motivated, their will to act had to be roused. The rationale of his ABC of Economics, he declared, was ‘to base a system on will, not on intellect’, on ‘will toward order, will toward “justice” or fairness, desire for civilization’, and on ‘the intensity of that will’. He was consciously echoing Dante’s definition of rectitude as direction of the will towards justice, and conscious also of being probably ‘the first writer to formulate an economic system…from that point’. Volitionist economics, ‘an heretical movement’, was to be his original contribution to the science of economics, the heresy being in his seeking to make the economics answer to the desire and the will for social justice. In doing that he was very deliberately shifting its ground from cold science to ethics and morality.

  Dante also wrote, in his De Monarchia, that it is the love of justice which animates and directs the will towards right action, and from that it would follow that to ‘move ’em’ Pound should be rousing a love of the desired order of things. Pound’s agitprop prose, however, as he frankly admitted in 1928 when comparing himself to Williams, was given rather to murderous hate than to love. A typical letter would go like this one in the New English Weekly in May 1934:

  Sir,—Without claiming that stamp scrip distributes purchasing power as effectively as the Douglas dividend would do, there are the following reasons for mentioning it (stamp scrip) LOU
DLY and on every possible occasion.

  I. It terrifies the unspeakable filth that made the last War and is trying its best to make the next one.

  II. It is definitely a form of currency (auxiliary) that cannot be hoarded.

  III. The tax falls on the currency itself and cannot therefore ever fall on anyone who is not in a condition to pay it, and to pay it without hardship.

  IV. It has produced the greatest hush-hush in the ranks of filth that has occurred since Douglas’s first volumes 14 years ago. This ought to prove that the enemies of mankind are afraid of it. And all honest men therefore ought to examine it, and to spread the news of it all day and every day.

  V. The liars, scoundrels and paid pimps who wouldn’t discuss Douglas in 1919 and who will not discuss him NOW are equally averse from discussing Unterguggenberger, Woergl, Gessel. Anything that can make their lives unlivable is an infinite gain to humanity.

  That was to charge the idea of stamp scrip with vehemence and invective, and the effect was unlikely to be a better understanding of it or a deeper desire to have it put into practice. A reader not already in the know might be some time discovering that ‘Unterguggenberger’ was the mayor of the small town of Wörgl in the Austrian Tyrol who had been responsible for issuing, in the autumn of 1931, a local currency or stamp scrip of the sort advocated by the economist Silvio Gesell (1862–1930). The scrip was good for payment for goods and services within Wörgl, but to remain valid it had to have a stamp worth 1 per cent of its face value stuck on to it every month, and that was both a tax and an incentive to keep spending. The town had been on the verge of bankruptcy because of the Depression, and suddenly, within little more than a year, it was prospering thanks to the speedy circulation of just 12,000 or 30,000 schillings (accounts differ) of this local money. The more often it was used the more value was got out of it. The town’s books were balanced and, so the story goes, it had been able to spend up to the value of 100,000 schillings on public works including a new bridge and a ski jump. There are appropriately arcane explanations of how the miracle was worked, but Pound hardly went into them. He would make more of how the story ended. In November 1933 the National Bank took the mayor to court and had him found guilty of violating its sole right to issue banknotes. The bank was terrified, Pound concluded, by the demonstration that ‘the state need not borrow’, and ‘all the slobs in Europe were terrified’. So the Wörgl experiment came to represent in Pound’s repeated references to it not so much the virtue of Gesell’s stamp scrip, as how enlightenment might come to a small town only to be snuffed out by ‘the enemies of mankind’ determined to maintain their ‘strangle hold on the unfortunate townsmen’.

  Even when he was writing for the first time to a US senator Pound could be instantly on the attack as if assuming the worst. Senator William A. Borah of Idaho held views similar to Pound’s on a number of issues, among them the need to restore purchasing power instead of reducing acreage and destroying food. In 1933, when the Bankhead–Pettengill bill was before the Senate calling for an issue of $1b in stamp scrip to get the currency circulating, Pound wrote to Borah,

  Sir: As an Idahoan, it wd. interest me to know whether your ignorance of the Bankhead bill is real or pretended, and whether the American press boycotts mention of it from decent or indecent motives.

  Is there a political game on, which requires that Stamp Scrip remain unmentioned, or are all of you crooks and ALL OF YOU afraid to touch the dangerous subject of a real and PROVED remedy for a lot of trouble?

  Borah replied mildly but pointedly, ‘“As an Idahoan” I suggest that you come back to Idaho and to the United States. It isn’t fair to give us so much “hell” at so great a distance.’ Pound continued to write to Borah from Italy, in fragmentary, exclamatory, hectoring letters, putting him straight on stamp scrip and related matters and laying out for him the basic platform on which he should run for president. His influence on the senator, not surprisingly, was negligible. After a couple of years Borah wrote back a brief note, ‘Thank you for your several letters.…We have had a perfectly marvelous autumn…’ Later, in 1937, he would be saying in his speeches that any American citizen who advocated or believed in Fascism must be a traitor to America.

  In one of his more extreme bids for influence with the powerful Pound nominated himself to be Secretary of the Treasury under Huey Long as president, in a letter which affected the lingo and persona of a gangster’s enforcer, or of the redneck rough-houser he may have imagined Long to be:

  KINGFISH; You iz’ goin’ ter

  need a CABINET

  DIFFERENT

  from the present one. You iz goin to need a sekkertary of

  the treasury whose name is NOT Morgenthau/stein, or

  Richberg/ovitch

  or Mordecai Ezekiel OR Perkins.

  You is going to need a Sekkertary of the Treasury,

  THAT’S ME.

  I’m a tellin you ’cause no one else will.

  LET THE NATION USE ITS OWN CREDIT

  instead of paying tax FOR IT

  to a gang of sonsofbitches that DON’T own it.

  The senator’s response, if any, is not recorded. The letter might have amused him, if he ever saw it; it is unlikely he or anyone around him would have given it a moment’s serious consideration. As a way of getting his attention it was surely self-defeating.

  Pound’s economic propaganda is often rubbished as ‘crank economics’, as ill informed, wrong-headed, even wicked. In fact, so far as it was advocating his chosen ethically based economic prescriptions, it was none of those things. But there was crankiness, there was self-defeating error, in the manner of his advocacy. One fundamentally disabling defect, given the nature of his project, was that the predominance of rage and hate meant that there was too little evident love of the justice he was after. Even when there is a glimpse of the shining city set on a hill, or a radiant image of the just society to move the will to act, it is attributed to Fascism—there seem to be none in the capitalist democracies—and Fascism, after 1935, ceased outside Italy to be a recommendation for any line of action.

  A further and not unrelated disability was that generally there was more vehemence and invective than specifying detail in his attacks. It was as if he were impatiently assuming that the reader ought already to be in possession of the facts; though it could also seem that he did not himself have immediate and intimate knowledge of what he was going on about. Why, for example, did he hate Andrew Mellon?3 As he well knew, it needs ‘a sufficient phalanx of particulars’ to enforce a general truth; and yet in his prose propaganda his tendency was to assert the general truth as if it were self-evident fact—‘It is definitely a form of currency (auxiliary) that cannot be hoarded’—and then to enforce it with a charge of emotion, usually negative emotion—‘the enemies of mankind are afraid of it’. The emotion, the invective, stands in for the demonstrative detail; and that leaves the desired constructive action as a relatively abstract idea, while any will towards it is directed by a hatred of evil rather than by a positive attraction toward the good to be done.

  Worse, the evil itself tends to be defined by the fear and hatred directed against it rather than by a demonstration of its effects. All we are told about ‘the enemies of mankind’ in that letter is that they are terrified of stamp scrip and will not discuss it; and instead of their names, places, actual words, we read ‘ranks of filth’, ‘liars, scoundrels and paid pimps’. Sometimes the hatred is given a more definite focus by naming names, as in ‘Morgenthau/stein, or Richberg/ovitch’; and the names more often than not are Jewish or are given a Jewish twist, so that the stereotyped and prejudicial association of Jews with money is stirred up and anti-Semitism is drawn on to reinforce the hatred of the evil banks do. ‘The people are damn well FED UP with slimy and ambiguous crooks’, Pound wrote in a letter to Borah in May 1935, ‘also with Morgenthaus, Baruchs, Mordecai Ezekiels, Lehman’s etc.’ Those names, generalized and altogether detached from anything in particular the individual
persons might have done or said, but potentially charged with the endemic fear and hatred of Jews, are made to stand in for the entire private banking system and its ‘stranglehold’ on America. In that way Pound’s ‘will to order’ would be more and more subverted in his fighting prose by the will to destroy, with Jewish names and the Jewish race standing in for what was to be destroyed. Anti-Semitism would become the dark force in his propaganda for revolutionary justice in America, to the tragic undoing of his enlightened intention.

  And yet—and this is hard to take in—Pound’s anti-Semitism was, like his stamp scrip or National Dividend, instrumental, a means to the end of financial revolution, not an end in itself. He did not hate Jews, he hated what they could be made to stand for; and when writing to those who were simply anti-Semitic he became concerned lest their prejudice distract them from the real enemy. When he became disillusioned with Roosevelt for continuing in the old way of financing public works by borrowing from the private banks, he called him ‘Roose(n)velt’, said he was under the thumb of ‘the Lehmanns, Barachs, Morgentsteins, etc.’, and was ‘fundamentally the usurers’ champion’. That was using anti-Semitism to attack the President’s economic policy. But to the Silver Shirts, who were modelling themselves on Nazism and were as anti-Semitic as Hitler could wish, Pound wrote that the ‘S/S/ should attack financial tyranny BY WHOMEVER exercised, i.e. whether by international jew or local aryan’. And to an English writer in sympathy with Nazism and its anti-Semitism he wrote, ‘The anti-semitic fury blunts perception’, that is, it distracts attention from all the usurers who are not Jewish, and ‘EVERY IRRELEVANCY weakens your attack’. His real enemy was always the banking system which he held responsible for a great deal of human misery. He could see that anti-Semitism would distract and deflect the attack from that enemy; and still he would persist in using it as a weapon in his economic war. He was able to do that because his objection to it was superficial, merely instrumental. And his indifference to its inhumanity would negate his humane intention.