John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic by Alec Marsh (review)

Having published two earlier books on Ezra Pound, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson(Tuscaloosa, 1998) and Ezra Pound(London, 2011), Alec Marsh now explores the relationship between the controversial poet and the Far Right activist John Kasper. From the time that twenty-one-year-old Kasper first wrote to the sixty-four-year-old Pound in June 1950 until their communication ceased in the early 1960s, the two men exchanged hundreds of letters. Although most of Pound’s letters to Kasper disappeared after the younger man’s death in 1998, Marsh is able to piece together the gist of their exchanges and the poet’s viewpoints by analyzing Kasper’s replies.

While incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, D.C., from November 1946 until April 1958, Pound welcomed many visitors, including a large number of right-wing disciples. Kasper, who had most likely become acquainted with Pound’s writings while studying at Columbia University, visited him at St. Elizabeth’s for the first time in June 1951. Admiring Pound’s Cantos, with its themes of politics, economics, and culture, Kasper found that he shared a majority of the modernist poet’s views. In particular, both men were militant anti-Semites. Soon Kasper was running errands for Pound and serving as his representative in New York City, making connections in the arts, and helping get Pound’s ideas out to the public. Kasper opened a bookshop in the city, which featured Pound’s works as well as those of other Far Right authors.

Marsh carefully analyzes the ideas and actions of his two protagonists, placing them in the context of both time and culture. For instance, in explaining Ezra Pound’s “southern” point of view (although the poet was born in Idaho), Marsh examines Reconstruction-era historiography and how those works may have influenced the poet’s advocacy of states’ rights. Marsh also explores the influences on both Pound and Kasper of nineteenth-century scientist and philosopher Louis Agassiz. Agassiz advocated the theory of polygenism, the belief that the races were created separately and had distinct attributes. Marsh shows that such ideas informed the two men’s positions on both anti-Semitism and integration of the races. He notes, too, that Pound held unique beliefs as to the hierarchy of race and culture. Not the usual white supremacist, Pound placed white and Chinese people at the top, with Jewish people near the bottom scheming to work their way up.

From his analysis of Kasper’s letters and other documents, Marsh describes Kasper, who during the mid-1950s was an activist in opposition to school integration, as having considered himself to be on a “civilizing mission” (p. 179). Kasper believed he was educating white people about the history of their racial identity and was determined to see them taking pride in being white. While in the early 1950s Kasper may have been more tolerant of African Americans, he later claimed that he opposed integration because he wanted African Americans to be proud of their racial identity. However, by the mid-1950s, Kasper had adopted Pound’s view that “the NAACP [was] a Communist front run by Jews” (p. 179). In anti-integration treatises Kasper also freely quoted phrases from Pound’s works.

Marsh effectively reveals the complexities surrounding the thinking of Pound and Kasper as well as their influence on others. He does occasionally make assertions without providing supportive evidence, such as mistakenly referring to the Alaska Mental Health Bill as a “scheme to make Alaska a psychiatric Siberia” (p. 111). But, overall, the book is a valuable addition to studies of both Pound and Kasper, as well as the Right.