As threatened, I am herewith sending, in installments, my
paper-in-progress on "Pound, the New Masses, and the Cultural Politicsa
of Race circa 1930." The paper is in four parts, and I'll try to send
it in four installments, if the local server will allow me to do so.  I
welcome comments and suggestions.  Burt Hatlen


Ezra Pound, New Masses, and
the Cultural Politics of Race circa 1930


I
        During the past two decades a substantial critical literature,
cornerstoned by Robert Casillo s The Genealogy of Demons, has sought to
address the significance of Ezra Pound s commitment to Fascism.  In his
politics, it is now clear, Pound s commitment to Fascism extended far
beyond a personal loyalty to Mussolini. Indeed, I would argue that we
need to see him in the context, not only of Italian Fascism, but also
of certain distinctly American varieties of neo-Fascism: in his St.
Elizabeths years Pound became, through his relationships with John
Kaspar, Eustace Mullins and others, a significant influence on the
political culture of the American Far Right the political culture that
has given us George Lincoln Rockwell, the skinheads, the Christian
Identity movement, the Church of the Creator, the Aryan Nations, and
the Oklahoma City bombers.   Furthermore, just as Nazism was at some
level simply a "war against the Jews," so Pound s politics takes its
energy largely from his anti-Semitism; on this score I think that
Casillo is absolutely right. From time to time Pound asserted that his
concerns were purely economic, and that he harbored no racial prejudice
against Jews (cf, for example, EPPPCP 7: 337-8). But Casillo has
definitely demonstrated that by 1940 Pound was a full-blown racial
anti-Semite, and in a recent book Leon Surette has persuasively argued
that the shift begins as early as 1934 (Surette 239 ff.). However,
while Pound was undoubtedly an anti-Semite, was he also a "racist" in
the more global sense of this term? In a contemporary American context,
the term "racist" may imply an animus against Jews, but it is more
likely to suggest a hatred of Blacks or, sometimes, Asians. Does Pound
display racist attitudes toward such groups?
        The Encyclopedia Britannica defines "racism" or "racialism" as "the
theory or idea that there is a causal link between inherited physical
traits and certain traits of personality, intellect, or culture and,
combined with it, the notion that some races are inherently superior to
others." 19th Century European racism, as developed by Gobineau and
Chamberlain, proposed elaborate "scientific" arguments for the
intrinsic superiority of Whites over all other races, and of Aryans
over other Whites. In Europe, these racist discourses were directed
primarily against Jews, the putatively "racial" Other with whom
Europeans, especially Middle and Eastern Europeans, had most frequent
contact.  But implicitly, racist doctrines also served to legitimize
colonialism, which Kipling defined as the "white man s burden" to take
responsibility for the "lesser breeds without the law." In the United
States, with an indigenous Native American population, a large
African-American population especially in the South, and waves of Asian
immigrants entering in the West, racism has been more often directed
against persons of non-European origin, although anti-Semitic attitudes
brought to American by European immigrants have often become entangled
with more specifically American forms of racism thus, for example, the
myth, promulgated by Pound s disciple John Kasper and apparently
accepted by Pound himself, that the Civil Rights movement in the
American South was engineered by Jews ("I  Cease Not to Yowl" 246, 275).
        Beginning in the late 1930s and continuing through the St. Elizabeths
years, Pound occasionally employs a "racialist" discourse. In 1936, for
example, he published an essay titled "Race" in the New English Weekly,
arguing that each "race" has its own distinctive political expression:
"Communism is Muscovite, Socialism is German and embodies the worst
defects of that race, democracy with representation divided in respect
to geographic areas is Anglo-American, and the Corporate State is
Latin. Resistance to any none of these modes of government by races
whereto it is alien, is a sign of health, submission to any one of them
by a race whereto it is alien is a sign of decay" (EPPPCP 7: 103).
Later in the same essay, Pound says, "There would be no talk of . . .
the decline of parliamentary government . . . in America, had America
not been flooded first by German and then by Muscovite and Semitic
populations. . . ." Pound disavows any need to address this cultural
situation by "religious furies, pogroms, or discrimination against any
man because of religion or colour. . . . But to suppose that a
difference of policy is due to a mere ideology or to mere reason, when
it has its roots in blood, bone and endocrines, is to take a very
superficial view of society, humanity and human co-ordinations" (104).
Similarly, in the Rome radio broadcasts Pound occasionally proposes
that "you lose by not thinking of this problem as RACIAL" (Dodd 71).
(The "problem" here is economic injustice and cultural decay.)  And in
some of the broadcasts, Pound challenges his English listeners to think
"RACIALLY": "CAN you save your own race? Which is my race, though you
may not like that phase of the problem? . . . . Have you got to that
state where your vices are your dearest possession?  Meaning the END of
your paideuma, the end not only of your imperial mandate but of your
race consciousness, your race conviction" (Dodd 168).
        Pound borrowed the term "paideuma, " as used in the above quotation
from the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius. Thus the quoted passage
lends credence to Surette s suggestion that Pound s shift toward
"racial" modes of explanation owes much to the influence Frobenius,
whose works Pound first discovered in 1929, and who became a major and
persisting influence on his thought (Surette 258 ff.).  Frobenius was
certainly a "racialist," insofar as he saw each race as the bearer of a
distinct cultural ethos. Yet it also seems important to recognize that
Frobenius was decidedly NOT an advocate of White Supremacy, in the
tradition of Gobineau or Chamberlain. Frobenius devoted his life to the
study of African cultures, and assembled a large ethnographic
collection devoted to this subject. He argued for the historical
priority of Africa over Europe and the influence of African culture on
Europe, anticipating some of the arguments of Black Athena.  Far from
denigrating Africans, he sought to elucidate what he regarded as their
unique world-view, and his work belongs, not to the history of White
Supremacy, but rather to the broad current of Modernist Primitivism
that includes figures as diverse as Gauguin, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot
and Stein (for Modernist Primitivism, see Barkan and Bush). Frobenius,
like other artists and anthropologists of the time, was certainly
guilty of sentimentalizing the lives of "primitive" peoples, but he was
a racial relativist rather than a White Supremacist. Thus Pound himself
argues that African-Americans should welcome Frobenius as the man "who
has shown their race its true charter of nobility and who has dug out
of Africa tradition overlaid on tradition to set against the traditions
of Europe and Asia" (in Cunard 293).
        With respect to African and African-American peoples, I find in
Pound s writings a good deal of condescension and primitivist
sentimentality, but never the kind of animus that he displays towards
Jews. In 1957, for example, we find him complaining a bit wistfully to
Olivia Agresti that
    . . .I have been advising american afros to learn their OWN
culture, african genius, as manifest in G. W. Carver, etc.
    wrote Langston Hughes re/ Frobenius about 30 years ago/ he replied
that the negro-universities {were} not then at that level.
       But the way out, or a way wd/ be for them to develop their OWN
paideuma, and not give a 5 an 10 c. imitation of judaized Birmingham.
. . . .
    No study yet made of the DIFFERENT african races imported to
America.
. . . .
   some wop-head instead of swallowing Luce and the Meyerblatt might
mention that E.P. has been advocating development of their own Afric
paideuma/ their own classic   (246)
The essentialism apparent in this letter can certainly be categorized
as, in some sense of the word, "racist."  However, the predominant tone
is distinctly not the kind of hatred characteristic of Pound s comments
on Jews, but rather a condescending paternalism.
        Furthermore, in discussing Pound s politics, it seems to me important
to recognize that the Pound of 1910 or even 1930 may be, in views and
attitudes, very different from the Pound of 1940 or 1950. In this
paper, I want to explore in some detail a case in point: Pound s
oscillations over political and social issues, including issues of
race, in the years from 1926 to 1931.  At this time Pound was already
an outspoken admirer of Mussolini, but during these years he also
carried on a flirtation with the political Left, including the
Communist Party. During this period, Pound subscribed to, read, and
sent contributions and letters to several Left-wing literary journals,
including Morada, Front, New Review, and most significantly, from my
perspective New Masses, a journal affiliated with the Communist Party
beginning with its founding in 1926. (See EPPPCP 7: passim).  New
Masses was edited principally by Mike Gold, who during the 1930s became
famous some would say notorious as the unofficial cultural commissar of
the CPUSA and the principal enforcer of the Party line on "socialist
realism."  And for this reason the mutual interest and respect that
Pound and Gold repeatedly voiced in the years between 1926 and 1931 is
of particular interest.
        The December 1926, issue of New Masses includes, under the heading
"Pound Joins the Revolution," a letter from the poet declaring that he
had read through the first five issues of the journal "with a good deal
of care." In the letter, Pound expresses sympathy with and admiration
for the magazine s editorial position and asks the editors to send him
copies of John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World and Scott Nearing's
Dollar Diplomacy  (2:2, 3). Over the next few years, Pound contributed
two essays and several letters to this magazine, which for its part
published an enthusiastic review of Personae.  In publishing the second
of Pound's essays, "The Damn Fool Bureaukrats," the editors note that
they "disagree violently" with what Pound says (the real enemy, they
say, is the capitalist, not the bureaucrat), but they also declare that
the statement is "important" because Pound "is the leader of the most
vital wing of younger American writers" (4:1 [June, 1928], 15). After
1928 Pound published no more essays in New Masses, but in October,
1930, Gold printed a letter from Pound and devoted most of his "Notes
of the Month" column to a long and respectful response: "I like this
letter.  I like the overtones of it, and the image it conveys of the
free gaudy Elizabethan man-of-letters" (6:5, 3).  And Pound continued
to read the journal at least until 1931, when he selected thirteen
pages of poetry from recent issues, including eight anonymous "Negro
Songs of Protest," for inclusion in his Profile anthology, published in
Milan in 1932.
        That Pound chose to end the Profile anthology with selections from New
Masses suggests that in 1931 he saw this journal as embodying "the new"
at that moment in history, both in poetry and in general cultural
consciousness; and in this essay I want to explore what this judgment
tells us both about Pound and about the political culture of New Masses
itself. In turn, the warmth that the New Masses displayed toward Pound
allows us to recover a moment when "revolutionary" currents in politics
and the arts could flow together, before "High" Modernism retreated
into political reaction, and before the arid dogmatisms of "socialist
realism" dried up the artistic vitality of the radical Left. However, I
am here primarily interested in what Pound s relationship with New
Masses, climaxing in his choice of those anonymous "Negro Songs of
Protest" for his Profile anthology, suggests about his attitudes toward
African-American culture. As a reader of New Masses, Pound inevitably
found himself engaged with racial issues. For as several recent
historical studies have made clear, in the late 1920s the Communist
Party consciously set about building its membership within the Black
community by foregrounding racial issues (Hutchinson, esp. 43 ff., and
Solomon, passim).  As I will demonstrate in the next section of this
paper, the pages of New Masses in these years clearly reflect the
evolution of the party line on race. Did some of this progressive
approach to Black/White relations in American rub off on Pound, during
his years as a reader of New Masses?  I believe that the answer to this
question is "yes," and if so then it seems clear that any description
of Pound as a "racist" at this stage of his career needs to be
carefully qualified.
        In developing this argument, I will, in the next section of this
paper, explore the ways in which the Communist Party in general, and
New Masses in particular, approached the "Negro question." I will also
examine the possibility that Pound's literary methods may have
influenced the way that New Masses treated race and other issues.  In
the third section, I will attempt to build up a context that may help
us to understand Pound's decision to end his Profile anthology with
thirteen pages of selections from New Masses.  Then in my fourth and
final section, I will return to the question how Pound's relationship
to New Masses might help to clarify the ways in which his perspective
on American Blacks and their culture was or was not "racist."