Good God!  It is bad enough that interest in E.P. seems to have become
largely the province of the kind of academics that EP himself despised,
and is primarily carried on by means of the sort of thinking that he
most vehemently condemned.  (In some ways, though, it might be objected
that the habit of a number of Pound scholars of filtering all
information through their particular obsessions is in fact quite
typical of some of Pound's worst thinking patterns on politics and
similar matters.)
 
But the level of scholarship shown here (not that I make any claim to
being a Pound scholar myself) is at times atrociously bad.
 
If you want to deduce things from Pound's letters, you need to have some
understanding of how Pound's mind worked and how he communicated,
otherwise none of your deductions will make any sense.  You also need to
have some sense of the world he was part of.  Not that you need to
approve of that world, but if you read things he wrote in 1952 as if they
were written in 1999, then nothing you conclude will have any value.
 
And at the very least, you need to be able to READ.
 
>From:  Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject:      Racial or cultural?
 
              >SNIP<
 
>It's easy enough to demonstrate that Pound in his last phase was a racist
>through and through. We could drop the name "Kasper," for instance. Or, if
>you want some comic relief from a very sad book, page through the Agresti
>letters and watch what happens when Pound belatedly learns that Alexander
>Del Mar was Jewish.
 
As to Del Mar, the reference is to Letter 100 to Olivia Ressetti
Agresti:  "... and Kasper has ascertained what I had long deduced, that
our greatest historian, Del Mar was kike/ AND I shall go on revivifying
his glorious memory.  NOT that such impartiality will do me any good.
When ever some jew DOES something useful, his tribesmen let him drop
hotter than a goy/"
 
Professor Morse has written "Pound belately learns."  The actual letter
from Pound says, "what I had long [since] deduced."
 
Professor Morse apparently implies that learning that Del Mar was
Jewish caused Pound to condemn him.  (If this is not what Morse meant
to imply, I don't know what the point of his comment is.)  The letter
actually says, "I shall go on revivifying his glorious memory."  Does
anybody need a dictionary to understand the meaning of "revivifying"?
(Not to mention "glorious"!)
 
Of course, in a way this is all beside the point, since there are plenty
of passages in the Agresti letters which uncontestably illustrate the
fact (which I already knew from my own knowledge of the man) that Pound
was intensely anti-semitic.  But it does make me inclined to distrust any
information that comes from Professor Morse.  This is not the first
instance in which it seems unmistakable to me that he has clearly
misinterpreted Pound's words in the Agresti letters, but it's the most
blatant.
 
As to Kasper....  I guess it's probably understandable that nobody
considers it worthwhile to go back and search out the truth about John
Kasper.  Certainly the truth would not vindicate him.  He deserved all
the condemnations that were directed toward him and all the punishment
that fell his way.  And yet the judgements that people made at the time,
and which Pound scholars today accept uncritically, were simplistic and
missed the point of who he was.
 
As I say, Kasper was no innocent who was unjustly condemned.  And yet at
the same time, I think that he was a convenient fall guy for the many
supporters and opponents of school de-segregation who wanted to
blame the disturbances in Clinton and Knoxville, TN. on an "outside
agitator."  Mostly what Kasper did, from what I knew, was simply let
people know about the plans for desegregation which the governments in
question were trying to keep quiet.  The public reaction in the local
communities to this information was predictable.
 
In the years since then, I have lived through times in which there have
been many different sorts of riots, both leftist and rightist, against
government policies, and I have never seen any convincing evidence that
any of them were actually caused by "outsider agitators," although
there are almost always interested parties that want to promote that
claim.
 
By the time I arrived on the grounds of St. Elizabeths in the winter of
1955-56 (as near as I can figure out the dates at this point), Kasper was
already arrested and about to stand trial.  I met him only once (he was
out on bail) and then only briefly.  I knew his ex-girlfriend Nora quite
well, but my sense of the sort of person Kasper was comes mostly from
more publically available information.  (Charles Norman seems to have had
at least a little bit more knowledge than most.)
 
Kasper, in my understanding, was a wannabe intellectual who was
enthusiastic about Pound.  From the public accounts of the discussion
groups he held at his Make It New bookstore in New York, it seems clear
that he was attracted (in some general sense, I don't mean sexually) to
Negros, just as many bohemian intellectuals at that time were.  (Norman
Mailer, of course, later wrote a famous essay called "The White Negro.")
 
As a person enthusiastic about Pound's ideas and who had read all the
right books, Kasper satisfied all the prerequisites for being welcome on
the grounds of St. Elizabeths.
 
When Kasper chose a venue for putting "ideas into action," this venue was
the segregationist movement in the South.  There's no indication at all
that Pound suggested this to him, and there's a little information
suggesting that Pound had a lot of doubts about Kasper's choice of a
political forum.  The "Negro Question" was not Pound's issue of choice.
 
From my many visits to St. Elizabeths, I recall Pound referring to
Kasper's activities twice.  The first time, when someone brought the
topic up, I was quite curious to find out what Pound's attitudes were
towards his "disciple's" notorious activities.  He definitely didn't
condemn them, but he also seemed vaguely uncomfortable about the subject
(or at least this was my perception).  I remember him saying something
like, "I hope he's managing to find some time to educate people about
economics and the monetary system."
 
This attitude is echoed in Letter 118 to Agresti, p.243:  "Kasper's
REAL ideology is so far above ANY [illegible deletion] U.S. audience/
and am not sure it is useful to spread it among those who will NOT
understand why Lincoln was shot (i.e.  for understanding what Jeff.
wrote to Crawford in 1816.)  [The editor has a footnote here referring
back to letter 70.  Without chasing this down, I will simply comment
that Pound believed that John Wilkes Booth had been in the pay of the
bankers, who thought that Lincoln needed to be killed because he had
caused currency to be issued which was not backed by precious metal nor
by the credit of banks, but simply backed by the credit of the United
States government.  In my opinion, anyone who needs this explained has
no business being a Pound scholar.  I am not, however, claiming that
there was any merit in Pound's belief.]
 
Pound did definitely support segregation (primarily of the public school
system).  But he certainly did not hate Negros, and in fact had much
affection towards them, as shown numerous places in his writings.
(Whether he respected them as equals is much less clear.  There's
certainly some reason to suspect that he did not.)   Pound believed that
segregation was actually in the best interest of Negros.  Kasper also
preached this point of view on a number of occasions, although there may
have been other occasions when he preached a more blatant racial hatred;
I don't know one way or another.
 
Pound and Kasper believed that integration was a Jewish conspiracy, and
pointed to the fact (referred to obliquely in the Agresti letters) that
the chairman of the board of the NAACP was Arthur Spingarn, a Jew.
 
Pound did not talk a whole lot about the Negro Question, however.  The
one other thing I remember him saying was that it was stupid for Negros
to direct their efforts toward becoming like Whites, because they at best
that approach would result in their becoming second-class Whites.
 
In this respect, Pound's attitude, and at least some of what Kasper was
preaching, foreshadowed such later ideas such a Black Power and the
"Black Is Beautiful" slogan.  But of course Pound had no real interest in
helping Blacks find ways of empowering themselves.  For practical
purposes, his attitudes, and a fortiori the preachings of Kasper, would
simply have resulted in keeping Blacks in the position of inferiority
which they had at the time.
 
--Lee Lady   <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>