On February 16 I sent the list a query about a small disagreement among the
biographers: did Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson approve or disapprove of
Pound's indictment for treason? Nobody on the list was able to answer, and
(as I reported a couple of weeks ago) my own search of the Stimson papers
at Yale didn't come up with anything.
 
However, Archie Henderson has used the Freedom of Information Act to locate
three letters from Stimson about Pound. The first, dated Nov. 26, 1942, is
the cover letter for a report on Americans broadcasting for the Axis; it
calls the Attorney General's particular attention to the names of thirteen
of these, including Pound, who continued broadcasting after war had been
declared. The second (Sept. 18, 1943) is a two-sentence note which
concludes, "Please inform me of the wishes of the Department of Justice as
to the nature of the action which should be taken in the event that Pound
should be taken into custody by our troops in Italy," and the third (Feb.
4, 1944) is a three-sentence note which begins, "Receipt is acknowledged of
your letter of January 24, 1944, outlining the action which you wish to be
taken in the event that Doctor Ezra Pound should be taken into custody by
the military authorities."
 
That's it, but it has led to an interesting difference of interpretation
between Archie and me. On the one hand, Archie says, "I am reading between
the lines of the letters in order to conclude that Stimson's attitude was
favorable towards Pound's indictment.  It would of course be helpful to
have more Stimson letters on which to base an assessment.  As far as I
know, these are the only letters of Stimson's that I have. . . ." On the
other hand, for me these letters aren't as productive as they are for
Archie. I just read them as emotionless bureaucratese, quite possibly not
even written by Stimson himself. On the third hand, bureaucratese isn't a
language I'm good at reading.
 
However, it occurs to me that here the Yale archive might be useful after
all. As I told the list the other day, that huge trove consists mostly of
personal material. That's where you'll learn, for instance, that in 1943
Henry Stimson smoked Sano cigars, brushed his teeth with Dento tooth powder
which he had his secretary order by mail for delivery from a Washington
drugstore, and insured his chauffeured Buick with Fireman's Fund. The
further news is that his dentist was a Lt. Col. Fox and one of his frequent
correspondents was the Yale economist Irving Fisher, who sent him 20-page
letters about world peace and the need for a diet that will cleanse the
body of its toxins. There's also a fascinating series of letters which
sketch something like a father-son relationship between General Patton and
the 75-year-old Secretary of War. Looking at all that gave me a small idea
of Stimson's personality, but I'm sure I would have learned much more if
I'd taken the time to read all the way through the many handwritten letters
from relatives and old friends that are also in the archive. If somebody is
into reading between the lines, I bet those would supply her with a useful
lexicon of Stimson's private vocabulary of likes and dislikes. And then,
maybe, we could find out something useful about how a career government man
really felt about the author of _Jefferson and/or Mussolini_.
 
 
 
 
--
Jonathan Morse
Department of English
University of Hawaii at Manoa
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