by Kerry Bolton
The Pound-Eliot “revolution” was a return to the past in order to renew the links connecting past and present, but it also provided a new means of advance which was not available in such clear-cut form to any previous age.[260]
The following year Pound founded the Imagist movement in literature. He was by now already helping to launch the careers of William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was now also the mentor of Yeats, Pound’s senior by 20 years who enjoyed world recognition.
In 1914 Pound started the Vorticist movement, and although Giovanni Cianci insists that Filippo Marinetti’s Futurism had a major impact on the founding of Vorticism, Futurism providing the dynamic to move beyond Imagism,[261] the English Vorticists soon broke with Marinetti, and there was frequent feuding between the two movements.[262] As Cianci concludes: “Pound was deeply immersed in the past, so that he could not welcome the Futurists’ famous antipasséism.”[263]
The original impetus for Vorticism came from the avant-garde sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. With Wyndham Lewis and others, he launched the magazine Blast. This was also the year of the world war, which took its toll on many Vorticists. The original Blast only went to two issues, and among the dead of the Great War was Gaudier-Brzeska. Pound was to look back, during a wartime radio address in Italy, at the Vorticist movement as an attempt at “reconstruction” in response to the “crisis OF, not IN the system . . .” But England was “too far descended into a state of flaccidity to be able to react to the medicine.”[264]
Vorticism was for Pound the first major experience in revolutionary propagandizing and the first cause that placed him outside of orthodoxy. It was also Pound’s last effort at “group participation in the arts, before he retreated to a position of individualism . . .”[265]
Democracy & the Rise of Mass Man
Pound regarded commercialism as the force preventing the realization of his artistic-political ideal. Many others in his entourage and beyond, including Yeats and Lewis, regarded the rise of materialism, democracy, and the masses as detrimental to the arts, as newspapers and dime novels replaced literature, and the mass market determined cultural expression. Pound saw artists or what we might call the “culture-bearing strata” as a class higher than the general run of humanity who, under the regime of the democratic era, had been leveled down to a “mass of dolts,” a “rabble,” whose redeeming feature was to be “the waste and manure” from which grows “the tree of the arts.”[266]
This revolt against the masses (contra the “revolt of the masses”) at this epochal juncture became “an important linguistic project among intellectuals.”[267] Virginia Woolf descried “that anonymous monster the Man in the Street” as “a vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff, occasionally wobbling this way or that as some instinct of hate, revenge, or admiration bubbles up beneath it.”[268] Hence, many of the cultural elite were to seek a counter-revolution in the return of aristocratic societies or saw a modern alternative in Fascism.
Pound saw it as the duty of the culture-bearing strata to rule, even dictatorially, to ensure that the arts were not swamped by mediocrity amidst the drive of business to market “culture” as another mass commodity.[269] Writing in The Egoist in 1914 Pound stated:
The artist no longer has any belief or suspicion that the mass, the half-educated simpering general . . . can in any way share his delights . . . The aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its service. Modern civilization has born a race with brains like those of rabbits, and we who are the heirs of the witch doctor and the voodoo, we artists who have been so long despised are about to take over control.[270]
Social Credit
Pound embraced the Social Credit economic theory of Major C. H. Douglas, whom Pound met in 1917,[271] which was being promoted by A. R. Orage of The English Review and The New Age. Not only was Orage a guild socialist, but he was a primary mentor of new artists, some of whom understood the need for a new economic system in order to address their concerns with the crisis in culture engendered by industrialization and plutocracy. T. S. Eliot expressed the matter cogently: “any real change for the better meant a spiritual revolution [and] that no spiritual revolution was of any use unless you had a practical economic system.”[272]
Orage’s backing of Douglas’ monetary theory had a particularly seminal influence on Pound. Interestingly, Orage was the chief proponent of guild socialism, and his journals were considered among the foremost socialist periodicals of the day, yet even the name “Social Credit,” which is generally depicted by its foes as “anti-Semitic” and crypto-Nazi,[273] was coined not by Douglas but by Orage.[274] Orage’s advocacy of guild socialism, having its roots in English tradition rather than alien theorizing, would have been welcomed by certain traditionalists as providing an alternative to Marxism and capitalism, both of which are united in their materialism.
By subordinating money to the interests of society rather than allowing the power of the bankers to run unfettered, money would become the servant of society and not the master. Money, or more correctly, credit, would be the lubricant of commerce, a means of exchanging goods and services, rather than a profit-making commodity in itself. Hence the corrupting influence of the power of money on culture and work would be eliminated.
During the 1930s and 1940s Pound wrote a series of booklets on economics, “Money Pamphlets by ₤,” lucidly describing economic theory and history.
Social Credit: An Impact[275] was dedicated “to the Green Shirts of England.”[276] In the opening lines, Pound states that “No one can understand history without understanding economics. Gibbon’s History of Rome is a meaningless jumble till a man has read Douglas.”[277]
Pound pointed out the fundamentals of economic realism: that “the state has credit” and that although the sword can protect against foreign invasion, it cannot protect against the serfdom of usury, of which Pound stated: “Usury and sodomy, the Church condemned as a pair, to one hell, the same for one reason, namely that they are both against natural increase.”[278]
He stated that the truth about “the principles of honest issue of money” have been known throughout history, but are repeatedly forgotten (or willfully obliterated), pointing to examples in history where currency has been issued without recourse to state debt. Marco Polo, for example, observed that Kublai Khan’s “stamped paper money” “costs the Khan nothing” to fund his state.[279] The much-lauded “New Deal” of Pound’s home country, on the other hand, indicated no comprehension of “the basic relations of currency system, money system, credit system to the needs and purchasing power of the whole people.”[280]
Pound pointed out what should be obvious to all, namely that money—or more accurately credit[281]—should properly serve as a means of exchanging goods and services, and that “money is not a commodity.”[282] He wrote:
Four things are necessary in any modern or civilized economic system:
1. the labourer; 2. the product; 3. the means of transport; and 4. the monetary carrier.
Inadequate monetarization has made “inaccessible islands” of fields laying adjacent one with the other; it has erected barriers between garden and factory.[283]
The reason for growing food is to feed the people. The reason for weaving cloth is to clothe them. The function of a money system is to get the goods from where they are to the people who need them . . .[284]
Money has been treated not only as if it were goods, but it has been given privileges above all other goods. This was flagrant injustice. Free men will not tolerate it for one hour after they understand it.[285]
Pound next alludes to a factor in the Great Depression that epitomizes the criminality of the economic system: the phenomenon of “poverty amidst plenty,” which during the 1930s saw the destruction of meat and crops by government order—while people starved—because the people had no money or credit to purchas
e the food. One might wonder whether this was any less criminal than the planned famine in the USSR in order to destroy the kulaks as a class. Pound wrote of this “New Deal” economics that was supposed to secure social justice under Roosevelt: “If the American government OWNED crops sufficiently to order their destruction, it owned them quite enough to order their delivery.”[286]
Fascism
Pound considered Fascist Italy to be partially achieving Social Credit aims in breaking the power of the bankers over politics and culture, writing:
This will not content the Douglasites nor do I believe that Douglas’ credit proposals can permanently be refused or refuted, but given the possibilities of intelligence against prejudice in the year XI of the fascist era, what other government has got any further, or shows any corresponding interest in or care for the workers?[287]
He also saw Fascism as the culmination of an ancient tradition continued in the personalities of Mussolini, Hitler,[288] and the British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.
Pound had studied the doctrines of the ethnologist Leo Frobenius during the 1920s,[289] which gave a mystical interpretation to race and had influenced Oswald Spengler. Cultures were the product of races, and each race had its own soul, or paideuma, of which the artist was the guardian. In Mussolini, Pound saw not only a statesman who had overthrown the money power, but also someone who had returned culture to the center of politics. He said: “Mussolini has told his people that poetry is a necessity of state, and this displayed a higher state of civilization than in London or Washington.”[290] In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound explained:
I don’t believe any estimate of Mussolini will be valid unless it starts from his passion for construction. Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything save the artist and you will get muddled with contradictions . . .[291]
. . . The Fascist revolution was FOR the preservation of certain liberties and FOR the maintenance of a certain level of culture, certain standards of living . . .[292]
In Social Credit: An Impact, published the same year, Pound wrote of Fascism in relation to economic reform:
Fascism has saved Italy, and saving Italy bids fair to save part of Europe, but outside Italy no one has seen any fascism, only the parodies and gross counterfeits. Douglas for seventeen years has been working to build a new England and enlighten England’s ex- and still annexed colonies. The corporate state[293] has invented a representative body that should function in the age of correlated machinery better than the old representation of agricultural districts.[294]
Pound saw both Italy and Japan trying to throw off the system of usury, writing: “Japan and Italy, the two really alert, active nations are both engaged in proving fragments of the Douglas analysis, and in putting bits of his scheme into practice . . .”[295]
. . . The foregoing does not mean that Italy has gone “Social Credit.” And it does not mean that I want all Englishmen to eat macaroni and sing Neapolitan love songs. It does mean or ought to mean that Englishmen are just plain stupid to lag behind Italy, the western states of America and the British Dominions . . .[296]
As to your “democratic principles,” the next ten years will show whether your groggy and incompetent parliament “represents” the will of the English people half as effectively as the new Italian Consiglio of the Guilds, where men are, at least in terms of the programme, represented by men of their own trade.[297]
It is interesting that Pound mentions Japan as having implemented some of Douglas’ methods of economic policy, considering the knowledge of Japan’s economic system is even more obscure to most people than those of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany.[298]
Douglas had toured Japan in 1929 where, as in his New Zealand tour, he was enthusiastically received. Douglas’ works were published in Japan more so in any other country. In 1932 the Imperial Bank was organized as a fully state bank, and in 1942 the Bank of Japan Law was enacted, based on the 1939 Reichsbank Act in Germany.[299]
Pound and his wife Dorothy settled in Italy in 1924, “to remove himself from the deadening influence of the twentieth century’s mass man.”[300] He met Mussolini in 1933.[301] He also became a regular contributor to the periodicals of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists,[302] first writing to Mosley in 1934 and meeting him in 1936,[303] the latter recalling that Pound was “exactly the opposite of what I expected from the abstruse genius of his poetry. He appeared as a vivacious, bustling, and practical person . . .”[304]
Writing in Mosley’s BUF Quarterly, Pound stated that Roosevelt and his Jewish advisers had betrayed the American Revolution.[305] It was a theme he returned to in more detail during the war: The American Revolution of 1776 had been a revolt against the control by the Bank of England of the monetary system of the American colonies. Benjamin Franklin had stated in his diary that the colonists would have gladly borne the tax on tea. They had issued their own colonial scrip. This had resulted in prosperity with a credit supply independent of the private banking system. The Bank of England intervened to compel the colonies to withdraw the scrip at a rate of devaluation that caused depression and unemployment. The colonists rebelled. But people such as Alexander Hamilton ensured that an independent America was soon again subject to the orthodox financial system of private banking control. Lincoln attempted the same resistance to the bankers and issued his famous “Lincoln Greenbacks.”[306]
Pound pointed out that Mussolini had instituted banking reform in 1935 and deplored the lack of knowledge and understanding around the world of what Italy was achieving. The US Constitution provided for the same credit system, giving the government the prerogative to create and issue its own credit and currency. Pound saw parallels between Fascist Italy and the type of economic system sought by certain American statesmen such as Jefferson and Jackson. The war was being fought in the interests of usury:
This war was not caused by any caprice on Mussolini’s part, nor on Hitler’s. This war is part of the secular war between usurers and peasants, between the usurocracy and whoever does an honest day’s work with his own brain or hands.[307]
In the British Union of Fascists Pound found a congenial home for his economic theories. While the policy of “state credit” advocated by fascists and National Socialists, and indeed by Pound, was not in accord with orthodox Social Crediters,[308] opposition to usury was a prime element of British Fascism as it was of generic fascism in most countries.
The British Union of Fascists’ “director of policy,” Alexander Raven Thomson, an economist who had been educated in Scotland, Germany, and the US,[309] explained that a “Fascist Government would issue the new currency and credit direct, without charge of usury . . .”[310]
Only a strong state could break the rule of the usurers, explained Thomson in a further policy pamphlet, where he pointed out that merely “nationalizing” the Bank of England would be of little use, as the bank would still be part of the international financial system, as are numerous central banks, which merely serve as the means by which the state continues to borrow from international finance. Therefore a Fascist government would bring the “control of currency out of the hands of the financial tyrants,” basing credit issue on the needs of production and consumption.[311]
W. K. A. J. Chamber-Hunter[312] advocated Social Credit as the means by which the British Union should implement a new financial system in place of usury.[313] Thomson stated that Social Credit “deserves consideration,” but that its followers failed to recognize that only strong authority could “overthrow the present financial dictatorship.”[314] BUF woman’s organizer Anne Brock Griggs, pointed out the suffering of mothers and children caused by the financial system due to the lack of purchasing power to buy basics such as milk, of which there was an abundance.[315] Henry Swabey traced the long tradition of the Church in condemning usury and advocating the principle of the “just price,” also alluding to Dougl
as, and stated that the fault lies with the system that allows bankers to create credit “out of nothing as a book entry.” He pointed out that in 1936 “the Bank Acts of March” in Italy enabled the state to issue credit, and not the usurer.[316]
It seems logical that Pound would have perceived the British Union as the most militant means by which to overthrow the usurers and establish a just social system, together with the examples of Germany and Italy as having introduced measures in that direction. Hence he wrote in 1939: “USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of nations.”[317]
Pound’s Canto XLV, “With Usura,” is a particularly lucid exposition of how the usury system infects social and cultural bodies. He provides a note at the end defining usury as “a charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production: often without regard even to the possibilities of production.”
With usura . . .
no picture is made to endure nor to live with