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."