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EZRA POUND 243
against him, his relationship to and his privileges in our organization
cannot be impugned."
Mr. Pound is still a member in good standing of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters.
The charge of treason made against Ezra Pound lumps him
with those hirelings who spied against the United States for foreign
powers both in peace and in war. Whatever Ezra Pound has
done has been done in the light of day, broadcast to the world
and signed with his name. There were no secret meetings, no
assumed names, no ideological twistings and turnings to suit the
needs of the moment or the orders of superiors.
"Only the most absolute sincerity under heaven can effect any
change whatsoever." Pound's broadcasts were made in conscience,
fulfilling his duty as a citizen of the United States as he
saw it, and informed by his understanding of the Confucian ethic.
Did Pound advocate fascism for the United States? He wrote,
in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, that he did not advocate fascism
for America. When he came to the United States to lecture
against war in 1939, he said, in an interview which appeared
in the Capitol Daily, May 9, 1939, "The corporate state is an
elaborate and un-American organization."
Ezra often said to me, "Knowing what I knew, I would have
been a cad not to speak up."
After his release, Ezra published an article on one of his later
discoveries, Sir Edward Coke. The subject was "Coke on Misprision".
"Misprision," wrote Ezra, "is what I would have been
guilty of had I not made the broadcasts." 9
According to Coke, he would have been guilty of misprision
of treason, had he not gone on the air to warn his fellow citizens
against Roosevelt's plan to involve the United States in a world
war. Ezra's position has been substantially borne out by Professor
Charles Callan Tansill's Back Door to War (1952), Morgenstern's
work on the Pearl Harbor massacre, 10
the several Congressional
investigations of that atrocity, and numerous other books
and articles.
In deliberately exposing himself to a charge of treason by
making the broadcasts, and risking a possible death penalty, Ezra
was acting in accord with the stern New England sense of duty