Tim--
 
When reading this passage from the broadcasts, keep in mind that this is
one of Pound's coded anti-semitic passages--for him, as for so many
anti-semites of populist persuasion around the turn of the century, "New
York bankers" was a way of saying "Jew."  This phraseology and attitude
return again and again in EP's poetry, essays, letters, and broadcasts.
 
Note that Leonard Doob, for instance, won't list such a passage in his
list of anti-semitic passages.  This is not to criticize Doob so much as
our way of knowing anti-semitism when we see it.
 
Also, what are we to do with the fact that Pound treats the same idea with
the same language in both broadcast, essay, and poem?  Are they
ideologically equivalent?
 
Jonathan Gill
Columbia University
 
 
 
 
 
On Sat, 11 Sep 1999, Tim Romano wrote:
 
> I'm reading Pound's wartime radio speeches, and must relate a recent
> experience.
>
> In the speech for 26 March 1942 Pound writes:
>
> ".... Can't go back before Gettysburg, the very names are forgotten now.
> Names we, the men of my time, grew up on, but we WERE being taught to
> forget. Or rather the WHOLE of the history was aimed at FORGETTING. It was
> top dressing, a monotony of military encounters, done with music and
> banners, to KEEP the nation's mind OFF the causes--off the REAL causes.
> Debts of the Southern states, to the bankers of New York City."
>
> Well, I was recently in Gettysburg and visited the National Park. As you
> approach the tower, from which you can look out upon the cemetery and the
> battle fields, a triumphant J.P. Sousa march is BLARING from the loud
> speakers stuck up in the trees lining the footpath. Then you pay your money
> and enter the tower. When you get to the top of that high tower, the Sousa
> march is no longer audible and a different piped-in music strikes your
> ears-- a smooth and bubbly piece fit for the orchestra of the swankest of
> nightclubs, a number Fred Astair might have swirled Ginger Rogers across the
> floor by, in a 30's film musical.
>
> Since Pound mentions Gettysburg and forgetting in the same breath, here's an
> excerpt from Lincoln's address:
>
> "....The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it
> can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be
> dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus
> far so nobly advanced
> ..... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and
> that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
> perish from this earth."
>
> Tim Romano
>