May 3, 1945: The Arrest of Ezra Pound

Judging by his mug shot,

maybe he should have tried the insanity defense.

May 3, 1945: Ezra Pound, often called one of America's greatest poets, is arrested for treason.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born on October 30, 1885 in Hailey, Idaho. By 1908, he was already living in Italy, teaching there, and a published poet. He moved to London, and worked as foreign editor of American literary magazines. He introduced the world to Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold."

He blamed the horrors of World War I on international bankers, and moved to Italy, where he became a supporter of dictator Benito Mussolini, and later of Nazi Germany's Adolf Hitler and the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley.

During World War II, Pound recorded hundreds of paid radio propaganda broadcasts for the Italian government, allied with the Nazis in the Axis. In these broadcasts, he attacked the U.S. government, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in particular; the British government; international finance, Jews in general, and the Jewish influence on international finance; and munitions makers and arms dealers, accusing them of prolonging the war. Keeping with the Fascist theme, he used his broadcast to support the Holocaust, and to support eugenics, and urged U.S. soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender.

On May 3, 1945, 3 days after Hitler killed himself, and 5 days after Mussolini was executed, Pound was arrested by the Italian Resistance, and was handed over to the U.S. Army. Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, he was held at St. Elizabeths Hospital, a famed psychiatric facility in Washington, where he was diagnosed as a narcissist and a psychopath.

Despite being held there, his poetry collection The Pisan Cantos was published in 1948. He would continue work on the project, published in full in 1962 as The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Norman Mailer, a leftist author who despised Fascism, once said that he would rather read Pound than any of the Communist screenwriters known as the Hollywood Ten, because, he said, Pound was a better writer.

He was released in 1958, and, knowing he was not particularly welcome in America, returned to Italy, called America "an insane asylum," and gave a Fascist salute for the press. He died in Venice in 1972.

*

May 3, 1945 was a Thursday. This was also the day on which the SS Cap Arcona, a former cruise ship that "played the title role" in the Nazi's 1943 film version of the Titanic story, was sunk by Britain's Royal Air Force. I have a separate entry for that event.

The only sport in season at the time was baseball, and no major league games were scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.