4pQonT

EZRA POUND 271
The July 2, 1949 issue contained a number of retractions by
the editors in regard to Mellon, Jung, the Bollingen Foundation,
and virtually everything else that Hillyer had said. Pantheon
Books, which he had suggested was part of the fascist conspiracy,
was actually run by two refugees from the Hitler regime!
Nevertheless, letters again poured in from loyal readers, supporting
Hillyer and the editors in every one of the distortions and
falsehoods. Such is the flexibility of the liberal mind! Dixon
Wecter wrote,
"Congratulations on publishing Robert Hillyer's inquiry into
the Bollingen award to Ezra Pound. Whether that moth-eaten
faun deserves the noose or merely the straitjacket I don't pretend
to judge . . . a shabby charlatan from the start . . . a
thirdrate hack. . . . His snobbery has always been cheap and
vicious, but only within recent years has his genius—fructifying
in the Pisan Cantos now crowned by the bays of the Library of
Congress—been compounded by senile dementia."
The July 2 issue also contained a letter from a lady in Milan,
Michigan: "I'm just a housewife but this Ezra Pound case has
me incensed. I just sent off a letter to Senator Vandenberg to say
so." Vandenberg made no statement on the Pound case, perhaps
because he was too busy with the British Secret Service agent
whom Ruth Montgomery, Washington newspaperwoman, gives
credit for reversing Vandenberg's stand against the United Nations.
The more intellectual members of the United States Congress,
that is, the readers of The Saturday Review, were not slow to
sense the immorality of the Fellows' decision to award Pound a
prize for his poems. The Hon. James T. Patterson reprinted the
two Hillyer articles in The Congressional Record, on July 19,
1949. Oddly enough, the editors of The Saturday Review refused
permission to the compilers of A Casebook on Ezra Pound 4
to
include them in that collection, the only such instance of a
refusal from the editors of newspapers and magazines who allowed
use of the material for this "textbook".
The Hon. Jacob Javits, the present U.S. Senator from New
York State, inserted material in The Congressional Record on