Queen Elizabeth I, c. 1600. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Queen Elizabeth I, c. 1600. National Portrait Gallery, London. 

Politics

Volume V, Number 4 | fall 2012

Miscellany

Ezra Pound began his radio broadcasts for Benito Mussolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture on January 21, 1941. Familiar with his friend’s admiration for fascism and his vocal anti-Semitism, William Carlos Williams wrote him on November 26 of that year, asking, “Can’t you see that every word you utter reveals to any intelligent and well-informed man that you know nothing at all?…You’re a wonder. Barnum missed something when he missed you.” Postal delivery to Italy was halted in December; the letter was returned to its sender. The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Pound for treason on July 26, 1943.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

—Frederick Douglass, 1855