While investigating the John Scott National Hockey League incident, I was arrested by the statement that, among the other tourist delights surrounding the Nashville NHL All-Star game, there would be a fountain of Velveeta cheese.
The concept of a molten river of Velveeta gripped my imagination as I fantasized dams breaking, overflows, and Gary Bettman swallowed up in a cascading river of cheese-like dairy product that immediately solidifies to a state that could be mounted as sculpture. Perhaps forever. Or at least as long as the chemicals in Velveeta can preserve him. A century or two anyway.
But what does such a “cascading fountain of Velveeta” look like? I asked myself and then realized that, of course! the answer was on the Internets.
Yes, various intrepid idiots have utilized their chocolate fountains to melt Velveeta, and possibly other substances (but I decided not to investigate any further. You, of course, are free to do as you will).
Meanwhile, if you don’t own a chocofountain, here’s where you can rent one in the United States (and what other nation would ever have this melt capability?)
And here is a supreme photo of a cascading cheese fountain in action:

[BTW, the US used to give out blocks of Velveeta-ish cheese products to low-income folks. Denounced as “Government Cheese”, it was encased in plastic almost impossible to remove from the food and was, overall, a sign of how much America disdained its poor. But, I think, Government Cheese would probably do well in one of these fountains.]

Back when our children were small, we picked up two books by Wallace Tripp: Granfa’ Grig Had A Pig and A Great Big Ugly Man came Up And Tied His Horse To Me . These immediately became family favorites, books still remembered as those once-small children advance into their forties.

A Great Big Ugly Man disintegrated long ago, but I did discover the dilapidated remnants  of Granfa’ Grig a little while back. The graphics from here on are scans of that particular piece of family culture. And let me just stave off those who would say that our children should have been more careful with these books. No! You do not stop a child from reading; you do not make them wash their hands before opening the cover. These are some of the myriad ways  in which people destroy a child’s interest in reading. Little children are messy and heedless of consequence, and so is their love, whether of books or anything else. Would you demand your child wash their hands before hugging you?

Ah well, another day, another rant. That’s done. Here’s the wraparound cover for Granfa’ Grig:

And the double title page:

Is this getting through yet? This is a book of nursery rhymes, some quite obscure, illustrated by a very fine artist.

Wallace Tripp quit his day job and sought to find work illustrating children’s books in the mid-1960s. After a time, he established himself and worked on many books including the Amelia Bedelia series. Soon he discovered his forte: exquisitely rendered anthropomorphic animals. This genre lends to satire, and Tripp embraced a very gentle and humane satire that infuses all his work. Look at this silly rhyme:

Look at the marvelous expression on the bear’s face. And check out the children in these two rhymes:

But it’s not all animals. This rhyme was a family favorite:

“Beat you! Beat you! Beat you!” my kids would joyously shout. God knows what images were swimming in their partly-formed consciousness. And, speaking of family favorites, here is my wife’s:

She really enjoys scenes of pomposity being slapsticked.

Here’s some other Tripp work not in Granfa’ Grig:

Tripp had a company, Pawprints, that distributed his drawings in various formats. Now you should look to eBay for those calendars and greeting cards.

In the 1990s, Tripp began to have physical problems that were diagnosed as Parkinson’s Disease. He has been retired for twenty years now.

Here is the rhyme and illustration that ends Granfa’ Grig:

There are numerous collections of Wallace Tripp art reproduced on-line. For instance:

Flickriver, My Delineated Life, Michael Sporn: Some Pawprints cards

Tripp has a website but it appears moribund.

It seems like years since the US began this Presidential election campaign, but it’s only twenty or so months. American voters are hopeful, afraid, and indifferent, as usual. Like everyone else, I have some thoughts that are worth no more than those of your least favorite pundit; like everyone else, I have to voice these thoughts, because otherwise the Internet would just go to waste. Anyways:

Everyone has their reasons. At the beginning of the Trump ascendancy, many folks began asking, “Who on earth is voting for this phony? They must be stupid.” Well, no. Trump supporters have their reasons. For instance, at the beginning of the Republican nomination process, Trump was the only candidate to come out against the invasion of Iraq. While Jeb was trying not to disown his brother and the other Republicans were attempting to support the troops by justifying the mess a Republican administration had created for those soldiers, while this was going on, Trump said that the war was a bad idea. Now let me pause here and say, yes, I know that Trump had been for the war early on, but that is also true for Clinton. The point is that he was the only Republican willing to disavow it. I suppose there may be a few people who still think that invading Iraq was a good idea, but I doubt any of the candidates thought so, they just lacked the guts to say it out loud. And that was an early reason to support Trump.

Then there are NAFTA, the TPP, and other free trade agreements. It may be that the overall impact of free trade on the US economy has been positive, but you try selling that point of view to someone whose job was exported to Mexico. So, another reason.

Then there are the bad reasons, racism and misogyny. You may deplore them, but they are reasons. Racism is particularly prevalent in this campaign: four states are ignoring a Supreme Court decision that found their registration requirements discriminatory. A voter registration drive in Indiana has been busted by  state police, claiming that applications to register were “fraudulent or forged”. It will be many weeks before the investigation concludes, so 45,000 Black men and women may not be able to vote in November. Indiana’s governor is Mike Pence who, of course, is the Republican vice-presidential candidate, but that’s just a coincidence, right? On top of all that, Trump is urging his supporters to hang out around the polling stations, possibly code for “intimidate the opposition”. After all, intimidating Black voters is an American tradition that goes back a hundred and fifty years, to when Blacks were finally granted the franchise. So, a bad reason, but not stupid, if you fear losing your White privileges. It might be worth remembering that Obama has faced a lot of this stuff during his tenure. The reasons behind misogyny are similar to those behind racism: people are afraid of shifting gender roles that may diminish or change their own status. (More below on that.)

Finally, after years of neglect, many voters are just fed up and ready to kick over the apple cart because why the hell not? Similar reasons caused Brexit (IMO). It may be futile, it may be self-damaging, but damn! it feels good to watch the knobs in charge running around in panic.

So quit calling Trump supporters stupid. (Or “basic Rednecks”. Just shut up, Bill.) Once you start name-calling, you’ve lost the debate anyway. (And you do not name-call your opponent’s voters. That’s a basic political precept that Clinton violated with that “deplorables” business.)

“The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Jean Renoir

The Republican Clownshow  Beginning in 2008, the Republican nomination process has become stranger and stranger. Usually there are some professional politicians, a business professional or two, and an outlier. There will be a token black, a token woman, but (so far) no openly gay tokens. These categories overlap, of course. Sometimes candidates will take truly outlandish positions, like Newt Gingrich in 2012, who proposed that America create a moonbase so that precious elements could be extracted and sent back to Earth. (Incidentally, I believe he got this concept from the Dick Tracy comic strip, which utilized a similar story line back in the 1960s.) Other extreme statements have been made by Alan Keyes, Michele Bachmann, and Ben Carson, just to take an example from each of the three nominations since the Bush presidency ended. These positions seem to draw the other candidates into making their own platform more extreme. After all, Bachmann was declared the “winner” of the first 2012 Republican debate, so the other candidates had to take her seriously and respond. To ignore what seem to be outlandish positions may mean not recognizing an outside-the-box notion that has resonance with voters. Such as opposition to the Iraq War.

There’s another, somewhat disturbing, aspect to Republican nomination spectacles: Alan Keyes, Herman Cain, Ben Carson — what do they have in common, besides being Black? Well, they have been candidates people laugh at. Not everyone all the time, of course — each of those candidates was quite elevated in a post-debate poll or two in their respective election years — but, by and large, they were the butt of jokes. So, is the Black Fool (cf. Stepin Fetchit) a permanent fixture in Republican campaigns?

Black or not, clowns have become an integral part of Republican politics. Perhaps this has something to do with politics becoming show business. Even so, some Republican voices have been calling for party reform before the GOP is written off as a bad joke. So far, they have been ineffective. The one change that will probably happen is that the Republicans will strengthen the role of appointed delegates, so as to head off another candidacy from someone like Trump.

“The painted grin leers out at us from the darkness, mocking our insane belief in order, logic, status, the reality of reality.”  Terry  Pratchett

Groping The video that has Trump bragging about grabbing women by the pussy has caused a great deal of fuss, but not always (IMO) the way that it should have. Trump has characterized his words as “locker room talk” and “salty” language, and his supporters have brought up “political correctness” as an evil that keeps people from speaking their mind. The problem is, this isn’t a matter of Trump using incorrect language, it’s about repugnant attitudes and behavior. The hypocrisy of the Trump campaign was demonstrated when Trump supporters on a television panel requested that another panelist (a Republican) not use that terrible word, “pussy”. Ana Navarro insisted on repeating the word: pussypussypussy. The panel demanded that she employ a euphemism because the actual word used by their candidate was distasteful. But it’s not the word, it’s the mindset behind the concept of grabbing women that is offensive. Calling this locker room talk and diminishing the words used, is a dodge. Trump belongs to a privileged class that views other human beings as objects for his amusement. He is not alone. Even the Republican male opposition to Trump’s video often began with the words “I have a daughter… a wife…” In other words, “I respect women. Why, I even own a few.”  Mothers were not mentioned, of course. You can’t own your mother.

“It’s just words.” Donald Trump

Hillary Hatred Hillary Clinton has faced some nasty criticism ever since becoming First Lady of Arkansas. I found it hard to understand the degree of venom directed at her — until a few years ago. I noticed that people changed the reasons they gave for despising her and I began looking for the common thread in their anti-Hillary comments. First, she was attacked for having an over-developed sense of morality; now she is accused of being corrupt and amoral. She was accused of being uppity when she had an office in the White House and she wound up being blamed for Bill Clinton’s failure to bring in universal medical care. It is easy to dislike or disagree with Clinton’s hawkishness, or to say that the Libya intervention was a huge mistake, but it is really beyond reason to accuse her of being a Communist or to claim that she had numerous people murdered. But anti-Clinton folks seem willing to hang any accusation on her that they can, truthful or not. Sooner or later though, these detractors will descend into attacks on her appearance or make snarky comments aimed at her sex or her sexuality. I believe that she makes many people afraid. These same people, male and female, see their worldview threatened. Hillary Clinton challenges gender roles; she challenges a sexual order that does not allow women to openly show ambition or to wield power. So, all her life, Hillary Clinton has been tagged with whatever labels can be used to attack her very femininity. I recall New York Magazine, at that time edited by John Kennedy, jr., running a cover that showed Hillary and Bill in fetish garb. Hillary held the whip. Because, if she is strong, he must be weak. The lesbian tag has been freely applied to Clinton, linking her to this or that other woman who perhaps also deserves a bit of chastisement. Because, if she is strong, she cannot be completely feminine. She must be a perv. I can only marvel at the strength that Clinton has shown when dealing with this. Mind you, women are more used to handling insults and denigration than men. Still, Clinton is remarkably strong.

Recent polls have shown Clinton leading by a wide margin among women voters, while Trump leads among men. According to the polls, he would win if there were no female suffrage. You can analyze this in several ways: women are emotional and all worked up by Trump’s pussy remarks, for instance, which suggests that men are cool and rational when they support Trump. Spin it anyway you want — this election is yet another battleground in in the long struggle for women’s equality.

“Well, that hurts my feelings.” Hillary Clinton

Julian Assange Remember when Information was to be Free? Last interview I saw with Assange, he was wearing a T-shirt that read “truth“, and that was the rationale that gave WikiLeaks its gravity. Now, WikiLeaks serves some strange agenda that is anti-Clinton and, possibly, a Russian initiative. This is a peculiar end for an avowedly anti-authoritarian group. Of course, Assange means to attack what he used to call “the Conspiracy of Governance”, and this may be the immediate strategy he has chosen. But working against one political party hasn’t much to do with ending that conspiracy and doesn’t sit well with folks who would like to be sympathetic. Why no leaks from the Republican, as opposed to the Democratic, National Committee? After all, if the GOP is vulnerable, then why not bring it down? A  decade ago, Assange spoke of reducing the Republican and Democratic parties to “organizational stupor”. So show us, Julian; take down the GOP. WikiLeaks tactics have been ineffective against the Democrats, why not test them against the Republicans? Perhaps the answer is that Assange’s theories are just so much BS. Does this election mark the end of the usefulness of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange? Collateral damage, I suppose.

“Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.”  Julian Assange

The Nelson, B.C. cenotaph lists more than a hundred names of soldiers killed in World War I. This from a town of 6000. Other memorials in the Kootenay Lake area bring the total number of area men killed to around 300. “Their Names Liveth Forevermore”, taken from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, is the official war dead epitaph.  But just who were these names, these men who no one now alive has ever met?

The old Post Office/Customs House building (1902), which has also served as City Hall and city museum, bears a marble plaque dedicated to the memory of one of these men, Major Percy Rigby:

He was so loved by his men, who called themselves “Rigby’s Terriers”, that those remaining of his company would take up a collection from their meagre pay to erect a memorial to him…

Sylvia Crooks, Names on a Cenotaph: Kootenay Lake Men in World War I

Major Percy George Rigby. Unit: 7th Battalion, 1st British Columbia Regiment, Canadian Expeditionary Force. Death: 10 March 1915 shot by sniper Near La Boutillerie Armentieres Western Front Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205387788

Percy Rigby was born in London, in 1871. His father, Major-General Christopher Palmer Rigby had a long army career before becoming British consul in Zanzibar. Christopher died in 1885 and Percy went on to an education at Marlborough College and Sandhurst. At the age of 19 he joined the Sherwood Foresters and, from 1896 – 1911 served in various Africa campaigns, including the Boer War. Percy was Christopher’s youngest son and had no prospects in England, aside from his Army pension. Like many other men in his position, Rigby decided to emigrate.

Canada began advertising for immigrants in 1892. At first these ads were directed generally and many East Europeans came to Canada, but as time passed, the immigration program was aimed more and more at Great Britain and “desirable” people. One prospect that enticed many Brits who shared Rigby’s circumstances was fruit ranching in British Columbia.

Money grows on trees in Fertile Canada. Immigration propaganda from 1900.

Edible dessert apples, as opposed to cider fruit, had been developed as a crop only in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. Members of the British Empire (the Commonwealth came much later) developed their own apple varieties — for instance, Macintosh from Canada, Granny Smith from Australia — and British and American varieties were also available. The apple trees were propagated by slips or cuttings from good trees (as they still are) and thus, always bred true. British Columbia wanted settlers, apples grew well there, and Englishmen were always welcome. In addition, ex-officers could commute their pensions into enough to meet the initial investment in fruit — much larger than that required for either cattle or grain.

So, in 1911, the same year he retired from the military, Percy Rigby travelled to British Columbia and became a fruit rancher. He settled at Boswell on Kootenay Lake, named his new residence “Sans Souci”, and soon became known for throwing great Christmas celebrations as well as his minor, but lovable, English “eccentricities”. (I haven’t been able to discover much more about these.)

Fruit Ranching in British Columbia written by John Bealby in 1909 describes the process of developing a new orchard in the area. It was tough work, but rewarding and spiced with reminisces of colorful locals — and the locals were mostly colorful, all except the new-comers from England who were, of course, English and therefore models for the world.

“Cox’s Orange Pippin, Two Years Old” from Bealby’s Fruit Ranching in British Columbia

Perhaps by 1914, Rigby’s ranch was producing a profit — fruit trees take time — but, in August, there was a new priority. Ten days after the outbreak of World War I, Percy Rigby was training volunteers in Nelson. Shortly afterward, Rigby and 175 men travelled to Valcartier, Quebec and signed up with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Probably three quarters were English immigrants going to defend the Motherland. Another local contingent of more than 200 soon followed.

Rigby’s contingent included 26 men who carved their names into a CPR tabletop. Of these 26, 10 were killed. 80% of the first Kootenay Contingent were killed, captured, or suffered debilitating wounds. So many losses of young men had serious repercussions in sparsely populated interior British Columbia. Widows, who had little enough when their husbands went off to war, now had to subsist on inadequate pensions — inadequate, but the highest amount paid by any of the Allied nations. Many fruit ranching communities, including Rigby’s Boswell, never recovered. Some became ghost towns. Fruit ranching of the kind discussed by Bealby ceased to be a major enterprise in the Kootenays, although Christmas apples were still featured in Sears and Eaton’s catalogues as late as the 1970s. These were shipped in bulk to England and re-packaged there as “A Gift to Home”.

CPR train table carved by members of the Kootenay Contingent, (photo: Tony Holland via: Crooks, Names on a Cenotaph: Kootenay Lake Men in World War I)

In February, after three months training in England, the Kootenay Contingent was shipped to France as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. (Some individuals were assigned to Scottish regiments.) In March, the Canadians were assigned to the assault on Neuve Chapelle, a German-held town just south of the Belgian border. There was an English unit to the Canadians’ left and an Indian unit to their right. British command thought this a fine example of the Empire in action. Following a massive artillery bombardment, which obliterated the town, the Indians charged in and actually gained a foothold in Neuve Chapelle, but British forces were unable to turn the situation into an immediate victory and several days of fighting ensued before the town was taken at a cost of some 11600 Allied and an equal number of German casualties and captured. Percy Rigby saw none of this. On March 10, as the battle opened, he was shot in the chest by a German sniper.

Neuve Chapelle after the battle. (via: http://mentalfloss.com/article/62119/wwi-centennial-battle-neuve-chapelle)

Notes:

Sylvia Crooks, Names on a Cenotaph: Kootenay Lake Men in World War I was mentioned before. This is a great book and a model for local history. (And, in the end, all history, like all politics, is local.) Crooks has also written about World War II, both the names on the cenotaph and life on the home front.

According to some sites, the “Twelve Days of Christmas” has a hidden Christmas meaning. It’s a secret code for either persecuted Christians or persecuted Catholics, depending on the story being told. Snopes says this is cobblers and that the song is a counting rhyme. But Snopes also says that “gold rings” refers to pheasants and that’s wrong, because the earliest printed version has an illustration of rings, not birds.

Five gold rings from Mirth Without Mischief. [Wikipedia commons]

Or perhaps they were something else,  something other than hens. There are several versions in France of a counting song called “The Partridge/ la Peridriole”. The oldest (possibly) says that on the first of May the singer gave his love “a partridge that flies in the trees”. Then he gives her two blue jays sitting on their eggs, three crows, and, in lieu of hens, four blackbirds “with eyes of pearls”. And so on for seven birds. “Blue jays” = “geais bleus” (geese a-laying?). The “calling birds” were originally “colley birds”, i.e., “black birds”, in the English version of 1780, so may be derived from the French blackbirds. A later version of “la Perdriole” includes two turtledoves and ups the number of gifts (and days) to nine. The next version has twelve months of the year and adds milk cows, handsome lads, and beautiful maids. Saskatchewan Métis sang a ten-gift version that included items from the other three. (All these versions may be found here.)

The “Twelve Days” of the English version probably mean the twelve days between Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany. In the Faroes, there are fifteen days and gifts. In the north of England, only ten. (The North always gets short-changed.)

1994 Faroese stamps showing fifteen days of Christmas. Start on the right with one feather, two geese… [via picclic.co.uk]

Children, go where I send thee.
How shall I send thee?
I shall send thee one by one.
One for the baby Jesus,
who was born, born, born in Bethlehem. (several versions on YouTube)

And that brings us back around to Christian meanings hidden in the Twelve Days. Not likely. Christians have been pretty ambivalent, and sometimes hostile, to the very concept of Christmas. Christ’s Mass is a relatively late addition to Christian holy days and one disdained by early church fathers. At the time Mirth Without Mischief was published Scots Presbyterians forbade the celebration. I suppose they allowed counting songs though. Hmm, perhaps the “code” is an attempt to pretty up Christmas for hard-nose Puritans and Calvinists. No? Well, Merry Christmas anyway.

Over the past few months, several Americans have e-mailed me sentiments along the line of  “You can’t complain. You have Trudeau.” Now, I have nothing to say about America’s present political state, but I do want to post some correctives to foreign Trudeau worshipers because the guy is simply not doing as well as they think. But first, let’s look at what Trudeau did right: he won a stunning electoral victory, he promised to bring in Syrian refugees, to work for environmental well-being and justice for First Nations and Inuit peoples, to reform the electoral system, and he said he wasn’t afraid to bring in an unbalanced budget if that’s what it took to get the economy moving again, which he would do by funding infrastructure projects costing billions of dollars. Oh yes, and he promised to legalize (finally) cannabis. Let’s look at these items, one by one.

The Election: The incumbent Conservative Party came up with a grand formula for victory. They had brought in a set time for an election (as opposed to the traditional way of waiting for the party in power to call it. This was supposed to be a reform, a word that gets bandied about quite a bit when people talk of changing electoral systems. Reform or no, the Conservative plan was to manipulate election timing in order to inconvenience the other parties. Since the Tories are wealthy, they called the vote early, figuring that the Liberals and New Democrats could not match them in funding over a long period. The writ was dropped on August 4. So, instead of a normal campaign of a month or so, the candidates began hustling votes and buying ads almost three months before voting day, October 19, as legislated, remember, as a Conservative reform. This was the longest federal election campaign in history.

The Conservative scheme backfired. The extra time gave Trudeau the opportunity to introduce himself to voters. No one really knew what to expect from this young, inexperienced guy but, over time, he charmed everyone in sight. Meanwhile, the Conservatives thrashed about with attack ads saying that the kid just wasn’t ready. The New Democrats, who were supposed to do quite well, were blind-sided by Trudeau’s embrace of an unbalanced budget. For decades The New Democrat Party has pursued a mythic political center, believing that by turning to the Right, they would gain votes. Indicative of this approach was the removal of the word “socialist” from the NDP constitution, and the elevation of a professional politico (and former Liberal) to the leadership. Instead, they found themselves outflanked on the Left by the Liberals.

So Trudeau won and hit the ground running by making moves to keep some campaign promises.

Justin and Sophie with trademark hand on heart gestures election night, October 19, 2015. [Christinne Muschi/Reuters via Maclean’s]

So, score one for Trudeau.

Deficit Financing of Infrastructure Improvements: Once again, Trudeau got off to an early start by funding some projects here and there. In particular, the replacement of the elderly Nipigon bridge in Ontario was widely reported. Mind you, any government would have been moved to do something because the bridge was a vital transportation link, but Trudeau got credit for quickly moving on the problem. Two months after it opened, the new Nipigon bridge collapsed. Okay, embarrassing, but it was soon repaired. (The Ontario auditor-general report on the bridge construction, released a year ago, was scathing but didn’t harm Trudeau, as the screw-ups were mainly Ontario’s.) But that was then, now the Liberal government has actually approved only a third or so of the amount that they said they would spend on infrastructure. This will not help the government meet its growth targets. Still, unemployment is down and people are happy for the moment. Okay on this one, but not an emphatic score.

Incompetent Administration: Several government chores have been mishandled. For instance, there is the Phoenix system that handles pay cheques to civil servants, except that tens of thousands of them did not get paid at all. Trudeau blamed this on the outgoing Tories, and they might bear some blame, but the election was a while back, how much time do you need to get a computer program to run properly? And there are ongoing problems with veteran’s programs, including treatment for PTSD, which don’t seem to be going away any time soon.

Civil servants outside Trudeau’s office protesting lack of pay last October. [Ashley Burke/CBC News]

Indigenous Groups: During the campaign, the Liberals promised to implement all of the 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission was created to deal with fallout from residential schools, but went on to address general problems of indigenous groups and stated that Canadian governments had an “adversarial” relationship with native groups. Last December, Trudeau spoke to the Assembly of First Nations, once again promising  to implement all 94 recommendations. One month later, it was announced that one recommendation (at least) would not be legislated. That recommendation was that the government be transparent with aboriginal groups and publish the legal opinions that it had solicited for dealing with these groups. In particular, the legalities around land use, including dam-building, pipelines, and so on, will now remain the government’s secret. So much for transparency. Aboriginal groups will continue to do their own legal research and then the respective lawyers of government and affected groups will fight it out in the courts, an adversarial process.

Other complaints by First Nations and Inuit peoples include the slow movement to fulfill campaign promises for assistance.Grassy Narrows is still polluted by toxic mercury and the people are being poisoned long after the government promised to clean it up. Trudeau has acknowledged this but says he is trying. Some First Nations people gave credit to Trudeau for even showing up at their conference; this is not something they are used to. But, crediting Trudeau for taking another photo op is very faint praise indeed.

Justin Trudeau wipes away a tear or two after addressing the Assembly of First Nations, December 2016. [Justin Tang for Canadian Press, via Radio Canada International]

Banking Regulation: Canada escaped most of the 2008 downturn and the bank bailouts because, in spite of Right wing efforts, the country maintained a high standard of regulation. But, last year, the Trudeau government introduced a strange banking bill ostensibly to allow for infrastructure re-financing (or something) that includes a weird “bail-in” clause. On paper, “bail-in” seems to mean that banks can seize your assets — such as your chequing account — if it’s in trouble. Is that really what it means? Who knows (cf. “transparency” above). One thing, the Liberals, no less than the Conservatives, understand that banks run this country and are to be indulged whenever they ask for a handout.

Insurance Companies and Genetic Discrimination: Another Liberal campaign promise was not to allow genetic discrimination by insurance companies. That is, if an infant’s DNA shows a family propensity for heart disease, for instance, it would be discriminatory for a company to deny life insurance to that person. When back-benchers introduced an anti-genetic discrimination bill, Trudeau and his cabinet came out against it as a result of massive insurance company lobbying. Their attempts to gut the bill failed and the Liberal Parliament overrode Cabinet and passed the bill anyway. That’s important. Parliaments almost never pass legislation opposed to Cabinet wishes. Perhaps that’s a sign that the Liberal MPs are tired of breaking promises, perhaps… Oh, who am I kidding? Trudeau will find a way to get this through — if the insurance lobby promises high enough rewards.

Electoral Reform: Trudeau promised some kind of proportional representation before the next election. After a committee studied the matter for a while, the Liberals determined that there was no necessity to change from the system now in place. There were several reasons for this: First, about half of Canadians agree with that and want to maintain the current system. [Full disclosure: I am one of them and, just to confuse matters, I also view all polls with mistrust.] Second, back when the UK Tories needed support they made a deal with the Liberal Democrats that they would hold a referendum on electoral reform if the Lib-Dems would join their government. But after the election, the Tories waffled and finally held a referendum on alternative voting, a form of preferential ballot, but not PR, used in Australia. The referendum failed. Third, any change to Proportional Representation would mean adding seats to the legislature, and “More Politicians” is not a great campaign slogan.

The main force behind changing the electoral system is the Green Party, Canada’s answer to the Liberal-Democrats. Greens seem to think that Proportional Representation is a magic wand that will lift them to power, or at least reward their leaders with electoral office, and it has largely replaced environmental issues as the party’s focus. This shift has occurred as the Green membership has gentrified and turned to protecting the middle class from taxation. For instance, the Green support to continue dumping raw sewage in the waters off Victoria, because sewage treatment would raise property taxes. (Remember those polls finding that people would willingly pay more for a clean environment? Those people were not, apparently, Green.)

The New Democrats, adrift after their poor election showing, also backed PR and, for a while, used it as a means to attack the Trudeau government. They seem to have discovered now that most people don’t give a rat’s ass about PR and have given up on that issue.

So that’s… Wait, there was something else. If only my medium-term memory would kick in. Oh, wait! I have it now:

Cannabis Legalization: Pretty quickly post-election Trudeau made some comments that revealed that he thought provinces would regulate cannabis the same way they do liquor and, in fact, sell the two drugs in the same stores. Immediately, Quebec objected, saying that no one had asked them what they wanted and maybe they’d sell cannabis in drug stores, especially the medical stuff. Several court decisions decades ago had said that the federal government could not prohibit medical marijuana, because if you can show medical necessity then the drug has to be available. In one decision, a time limit was given and, if medical marijuana was not available after the date, then cannabis would be removed from the controlled substance list altogether. So the governments of Chrétien and Paul Martin’s brief regime grudgingly made dope available. With a prescription, you could get federally-grown marijuana delivered to you by Canada Post. The Harper Conservative governments left the medical stuff alone, even as they beefed up law enforcement efforts to control the killer weed. Meanwhile, most Canadians said, “legalize it!”

Lots of entrepreneurs were ready to open shop after Trudeau made his announcement, but there was still no formal legislation. Municipalities were left without direction about matters such as licensing. Finally, police began busting these newly opened businesses in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and other cities. Meantime, a House committee is pondering a new law. Possibly it will finish before the next election.

Marc Emery, “Prince of Pot”, being arrested March 9, in Montreal. [Global News screen cap]

The other night I watched a 1940s crime movie, Scarlet Street, on TCM. Edward G. Robinson plays a hen-pecked husband who holds down a stultifying job as cashier/bookkeeper at some sort of company. His only joy is painting, which he does in the bathroom of his run-down apartment. His wife hates his painting — doesn’t like the smell. One day, Edward G. Robinson meets Joan Bennett and is enraptured. Dan Duryea plays the heel who Joan loves (she likes to be smacked around). He persuades her to seduce the old guy. Things lead to a murderous climax. Okay, pretty much standard noir fare, but…

The paintings that Edward G. Robinson’s character creates are derided by his wife and others, but the first one I glimpsed made me sit up. The subject matter is a nondescript white flower in a glass, the painting looks like the artist was using hallucinogenic drugs. This was something special! In the movie, critics and dealers agree. Leaving aside the movie plot, I had to know more about the flower, some street scenes, and an incredible portrait of Joan Bennett, with eyelashes spiky as a psychedelic flower!

Screengrabs from Scarlet Street: the flower, portrait of Joan Bennett, closeup of portrait. The movie is in black-and-white, of course. I don’t know if any color was used in these paintings or not. (At least one of the paintings — that features a snake wrapped around an elevated train support — was in color). Decker has deliberately aimed at a primitive, untrained style — look at the dead-on composition of the Bennett portrait, for instance.

It didn’t take much digging to discover that the paintings had been made by John Decker. I researched him and that’s where things got really interesting, because John Decker was an artist, art forger, and drinking companion of W.C. Fields, John Barrymore, and other famous boozers. He may or may not have been a spy. He may or may not have forged the Head of Christ attributed to Rembrandt that hangs in Harvard’s Fogg Museum. He certainly did a famous portrait of W.C. Fields as Queen Victoria. Any of these accomplishments are enough to make a man interesting.

John Decker probably about 1935. [Wikipedia]

Graf Ernst August von der Decken, son of an artist, worked as a reporter and married Maria Anna Avenarius, an opera singer, in Greenwich in 1898. Their son was born in 1895. Hence the scandal. Maria abandoned the household at some point in what was, apparently, a stormy marriage. Ernst left his son alone in 1908. Decker despised his mother, “That red-headed whore!” “I like John Decker,” John Barrymore once said, “He hates sunsets and his mother.” Sunsets, possibly, because they reminded him of his mother’s red hair. At least that is the legend as recalled by one of Decker’s cronies. It does appear that Decker hated the natural auburn shade of his own hair. Maria died in 1918. Ernst in 1934.

Legend has it (meaning John Decker told a drunken story that was recalled later by someone who had heard it while drunk) that, at the age of thirteen, the young lad began to work for an art forger, whose specialty was conning tourists. During World War I, some of these paintings were shipped back to the continent and some had writing on the back of the canvas that may have been coded espionage messages. And that, according to legend, got the young man interned on the Isle of Man in 1917 or 1918. Later, Decker said that it was a terrible experience; that he had witnessed scenes of depravity too horrible now to relate. One that he did relate had to do with an internee who committed suicide by immolating himself on an electric fence. Since there is no record of electric fences at the Man internment camp, that seems unlikely. Decker also claimed that internees had to eat the corpses to keep from starving.

Internee art for one of the four newspapers published at the Isle of Man camp at Knockaloe. [via bbc.com, copyright Manx National Heritage, knockaloe.im]

Released at the War’s end, the young man may have travelled to Europe (or not) but did shift his name from von Decken to John Decker. Using phony papers, at some point he sailed to America, probably in 1921. He hung around New York for a while, working as a newspaper caricaturist and set decorator for stage productions. He tried acting, but, legend has it, he was already a heavy drinker and passed out on stage during a scene with Jeanette MacDonald. In 1928, or possibly 1930, Decker emigrated to Hollywood, where anybody can be anyone they want to be. He left his first wife, Helen, in New York, along with his baby daughter. When he arrived in California, Decker had a second wife, Judith. He never divorced Helen, not even after marrying a third time.

Decker had met John Barrymore in New York (in a bar, of course, where they discovered they had the same taste in beer, the legend says) and soon became part of a drunken crew known as the Bundy Drive Boys. Bundy Drive was the location of Decker’s studio and the boys included, besides Barrymore and W.C. Fields: Ben Hecht, who wrote the dramatic sketch that Decker performed in New York; Gene Fowler, journalist turned script-writer; Sadakichi Hartmann, art critic and poet; and actors Errol Flynn, John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell, Alan Mowbray, and others who drifted in and out. Toward the end of the group’s existence, a few younger men, such as Anthony Quinn and Vincent Price, tagged along. Members of the original group had achieved some success in New York, where several of them first met, and had trekked out to Hollywood where the money was. Most of them hated the place and the film industry. All wanted to be a different kind of artist than they were — the screenwriters wanted to be novelists, the actors wanted to be painters, and so on. Decker was very clear about his art and his motivation: he wanted to make money and he would paint anything, anytime for a fee.

Decker was very gifted and could draw well and paint quickly. Somehow, though, he could not become wealthy, or at least, not wealthy enough. Mind you, he was living the high life through the 1930s, but there was an air of dissatisfaction about him that was revealed in the coat-of-arms that he hung on the Bundy Drive door. It shows his initials on a shield flanked by unicorns and bears the motto: “Useless. Insignificant. Poetic.”

Decker portrait of Henry Hull as Jeeter Lester, 1935. [photo from eBay sale of painting. It went for $3250.]

Jimmy Durante and Buster Keaton admire paintings of Cyrano de Bergerac and Hamlet. Note the Army outfit on Durante who was probably on his way to or from a USO gig.

Sometimes Decker worked for himself and not a contracted customer. So he produced a portrait of W.C. Fields as Queen Victoria. Her Majesty, recognizable both as herself and as Fields, frowns at a picture of Johnny Walker. Fields pretended outrage: “Decker has kicked history in the groin.”  Dave Chasen, owner of the restaurant where the Bundy Drive Boys hung out, demanded a copy. Decker dashed one off for him. He claimed to have done many others in various sizes, small copies going for $50 a picture. One would think that there would be more examples on the Internet, but surprisingly few examples of this famous image can be found on line.

Fields/Victoria hanging. [via Movies from the 20’s – 60’s]

Harpo Marx as Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy”. Dave Chasen liked this painting so much that he commissioned one with his face on it. The Chasen picture actually was blue and not green.

In 1941, Decker did a series of murals depicting the history of Hollywood for the Wilshire Bowl nightclub. The murals have disappeared, but Decker’s preliminary drawings are in the Smithsonian. Then, in 1942, Decker produced a great piece: a drawing of John Barrymore on his deathbed.

Barrymore on his deathbed. He had eczema and clawed at his skin as he died. Decker turns this into a theatrical gesture.

Barrymore was Decker’s closest friend. The actor’s self-destruction was mirrored in that of the painter. Both were very aware of the damage that they were doing to themselves. Later, Decker worked up some finished, sentimental, death-of-Barrymore pieces, but it is the drawing that strikes home. It may have hung over Barrymore’s coffin at his funeral, or that may have been one of the more sentimental pieces that Decker did at the time. Errol Flynn once claimed to have abducted Barrymore’s body and, with some other Bundy Boys, transported it from bar to bar, feeding it booze. Later, Flynn admitted that he made up the story (which has also been told of other dead drinkers).

Hartmann was the next of the group to die. He was also the oldest, 78 at the time of his death in 1944. In some ways. Sadakichi Hartmann was a model for the other Bundy Drive Boys. Born to a German father and Japanese mother in Japan, Hartmann was thrown out of the family (he said) at the age of fourteen and later adopted a Bohemian lifestyle in New York. He met Walt Whitman, quarreled with him, it is said, and eventually moved west to California. He is more known now for his criticism, which took photography seriously, than his other work, which included poetry, painting, and a brief turn as an actor (he appeared in Douglas Fairbanks’ Thief of Baghdad).  Alcohol and other drugs fueled his poetry. He had the habit of pissing himself while drunk. Decker’s daughter found Hartmann repellant and steered clear of him because he smelled so bad. Alcoholics may be fun to read about but aren’t so nice to live with. [pictures by or of Hartmann may be seen here. And here.]

Decker portrait of Sadakichi Hartmann, 1946 [via Laguna Art Museum ]

At the end of 1946, W.C. Fields died. Six months later, suffering from diabetes and cirrhosis, Decker passed away. His then-wife, Phyllis, had an open bar at his funeral. She also darkened his red moustache with mascara. The drawing of Barrymore on his deathbed was placed on Decker’s casket and a Decker portrait of Barrymore hung on the wall. Legend has it that, when the minister recited the words, “Let us pray”, the flower wreath fell from Barrymore’s portrait into the coffin. John Decker was 51 at the time of his death.

Van Gogh or Decker?

But that’s not the end of the story. In 1949, a Van Gogh self-portrait purchased by William Goetz, Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law, was pronounced a fake by experts. Goetz angrily defended the work, which he had bought from a dealer in 1946. The dealer, said to be reputable, withheld the painting’s provenance for “business reasons”. The authenticity of the picture is still being debated and one name that keeps coming up is that of John Decker. According to a drinking buddy, Decker loved Van Gogh’s work and claimed that the Dutch artist sometimes used his penis to apply paint. No one has examined the disputed painting looking for traces of Decker’s organ, but legend has it…

The Fogg Museum says this is a Rembrandt study. Legend has it that the painting was done by Decker.

And in 2003, Stephen Jordan published a biography of Decker in which he claimed that Decker faked a Rembrandt study at the behest of Thomas Mitchell. Whether Mitchell was part of the con or its victim is unclear. According to the story related to Jordan, Mitchell, who was an art collector, bemoaned the fact that he could not afford a Rembrandt. Decker said that he could locate one that only cost $2000. Then Decker bought a piece of 17th Century furniture and pulled out a drawer bottom that he used as a surface. After painting the piece, Decker then cracked it along the back and sent it to Holland for repairs. When the piece returned to the US, it bore Dutch customs papers, which helped provide some provenance. Mitchell may or may not have paid $45000 for it, but it seems to have been part of his estate. That painting is now in Harvard’s Fogg Museum (which bought it for $35000). Harvard and the Fogg maintain that the work is genuine. Some testing was done a few years ago which showed that the wood panel was, indeed, Baltic oak from the 17th Century.

Finally, although not as valuable as Rembrandts or Van Goghs, Decker’s paintings have been a target for thieves.

Notes:

Bohemian Rogue: The Life of John Decker by Stephen C. Jordan, so far as I know the only full-length biography. The paperback now sells for $90

Hollywood’s Original Rat Pack: The Bards of Bundy Drive by Stephen C. Jordan. Out of print.

Hollywood’s Hellfire Club by Gregory William Mank. Was out of print, now seems to be back in stock.

The books above recycle all the legends and anecdotes that might better be read in:

Minutes of the Last Meeting by Gene Fowler. Fowler’s account of trying to write Sadakichi Hartmann’s biography. Mostly anecdotes about the Bundy Drive Crew.

Good Night, Sweet Prince by Gene Fowler. Bio of John Barrymore with lots of anecdota.

Reddit is a place where anyone can find or create a group about anything. It is very loosely moderated and, consequently, has developed a reputation as a hangout for neo-Nazis, anti-Social Justice Warriors, misogynists, and assholes in general. But on the April first weekend, reddit.com created an experiment that will be the focus of discussion and debate for years to come — or at least as long as people are interested in the Internet.

Reddit created a space, r/place, where any Reddit member (and there are legions of them) could contribute to an art project. The Place was 1000 X 1000 pixels in size. Participants were invited to place a pixel, in any one of 16 colors, anywhere on the space. Users could place more than one pixel, but had to wait five minutes in between placements. After a few individual attempts at making a picture, groups formed to make team projects. Penis pics proliferated. Soon the entire one million pixel grid was covered and pictures both created and destroyed by users. There were attempts to grief the project, including the creation of a black blot that spread like a malignant virus from the center of the page. Teams began utilizing their time and energy to protecting what they had done, and this was the final result at the end of three days:

via sudoscript.com/reddit-place

Pretty impressive, right? Let’s check out a few highlights. First, that block of text is a Reddit tale inspired by the Star Wars prequel. The national flags show an interesting progression over the weekend — someone extended the German flag over the French one. The French retaliated by going vertical and, finally, the flag overlap was replaced by the European Union banner. Canada began with a suitably modest maple leaf that was replaced by one that was somewhat larger but perhaps more significantly, hockey logos abound in the grand scheme. The entire design is strung together (sort of) by a rainbow highway.

Here is the final version of Place on Reddit.

Here is a time lapse of the Place being created. (You can search “r/place timelapse” on YouTube and get others of varying lengths.)

Here is a time lapse of small (but interesting) sections.

Fall of the Void (black blot).

There are several heat map breakdowns, showing most-changed pixel sites over time. A fully browsable map done in Minecraft.

Already major critiques and interpretations of the project have appeared on-line. Here’s Ars Technika being sort of thoughtful, for instance. But my favorite is this post by sudoscript, who comes up with a Hindu exegesis: Creators, Preservers, Destroyers = Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. (If you don’t look at any other site about this, you should click on sudoscript, which has some fine graphic excerpts.)

Andy Baio has a swell collection of links, but by the time you read this, it’s already obsolete.

[discovered via Metafilter]

President Trump’s trip to the G7 and the Middle East has given the world a good look at The Donald. One thing that stood out for many was the TrumpShake. Trump honors old-fashioned business practices, like the Manly Handshake, where you give the shakee a firm grip. If you want to be Macho, rather than Manly, you crush those outstretched phalanges like an empty beer can just to make it clear who is Bull Goose in this barnyard. Watch here as Trump tries to cripple Macron.

See full video.

That standing handshake bit at the end demonstrates another TrumpShake concept: using a jiu-jitsu move to yank the shakee off-balance. (It would be funny to watch, say, Erdogan lose it and go flying across the room.) But Justin Trudeau has his number:

Check out Trudeau’s smile. Very very sincere, right? [via thestar.com] Here’s video from The Guardian.

More from mashable.com

There were many other G7 moments, but they were marred by reporters looking for a reason to diss the Prez. For instance, I don’t believe that Trump really gave Italy the finger. And it’s possible that he ignored the Lithuanian president because he mistook her for Angela Merkel, because all those women look alike. But for sure, he did muscle out Montenegro’s president, so perhaps I’m wrong and the President of the United States of America is reminding Italy and Montenegro just who’s in charge.

President Trump flapping his arms before crowing over the shove. Darko Markovic, Montenegrin president, is on the right. [NBCnews.com]

On the other hand, I sure can’t explain this (unless Trump has joined the League of Super-Villains or something):

[photo: Saudi News Agency]

Reporters now say that the big reason Trump pulled out of the Paris Accord is because Macron did that handshake thing and then bragged about it. As he said in his speech, Trump doesn’t like the world laughing at him: “Hearing smack-talk from the Frenchman 31 years his junior irritated and bewildered Trump, aides said.” I am so sorry that I added to the giggles. I now realize that my unthinking mockery may have consigned the human species to extinction.

Now you may say that I am not to blame, that everyone is saying stuff about Trump and at least I didn’t mention tiny hands, and you may be thinking, “What is this guy? Some kind of special snowflake?” The answer is: Yes. I am. But snowflakes make avalanches. I am so sorry, folks.

(But I don’t promise not to do it again.)

Denmark has the longest continuous rule by a single family of any European nation, tracing its lineage back to at least Gorm the Old, who reigned in the mid-10th Century. Yet, in all its history, Denmark has been ruled by only two queens. Margrethe I ruled in the 14th Century, Margrethe II has been on the Danish throne since 1972.

Margrethe I was born in 1353 in prison where her mother was confined, possibly for adultery, by her father, Valdemar IV of Denmark. At this time Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were embroiled in a struggle with German princes over control of the Baltic. Marriages, births, depositions, and occasional battles were part of this ongoing struggle. At the age of six Margrethe was betrothed to the Crown Prince of Norway for political reasons which shifted causing the engagement to be cancelled, then shifted again, resulting in Margrethe’s marriage at the age of ten to her original betrothed, Haakon VI, King (then) of both Sweden and Norway. She was raised by a Swedish noblewoman and was more or less an adult by contemporary standards when she finally consummated her marriage. She bore Haakon a son, Olaf, when she was eighteen. By that time Haakon had been ousted as King of Sweden by a German noble from Mecklenburg. Meanwhile, Haakon had a stormy political relationship with his father-in-law that ended with Valdemar’s death in 1375. Margrethe did manage, then, to ensure that her son, Olaf, was named heir to the Danish throne. This was a tricky matter since Margrethe’s elder sister was married to the Duke of Mecklenburg and she also had a son. Valdemar’s only son had died before the throne became vacant and, succession being what it was then, only a male could inherit the crown. Margrethe also pressed for Olaf’s claim to the Swedish crown, a claim that later bore fruit.

Margrethe I, tomb effigy. [Wikipedia]

Sarcophagus of Danish Queen Margrethe I, Roskilde Cathedral. [WikiMedia Commons]

The Danish Royals, last April, on the occasion of Margrethe’s 77th birthday. Crown Prince Frederik at far right, Prince Joachim at left, Prince Consort Fredrik to Joachim’s right, then the Queen, God bless her. [copyright Getty Images. via dailymail.co.uk]

Tapestry by Nørgaard depicting the marriage of Margrethe and Fredrik. Hey! That’s an apple. And a tree! Does this have anything to do with that old anti-feminist myth? You know the one I mean… [via http://www.bjoernnoergaard.dk/en/gobeliner]

Margrethe’s sarcophagus. The base is layers of sandstone, possibly a reference to Fredrik’s France. The pillars are stone from Greenland, the Faroes, and Bornholm. Silver elephants. Glass made to look as though someone is there even though they aren’t — Margrethe will be buried in the floor below. The whole thing topped with gilded bronze bric-a-brac. [Photo:  Mikkel Møller Jørgensen © Scanpix. via dr.dk]

In a space above an old warehouse in St. John’s, Newfoundland are the premises of the Crow’s Nest Officers Club. The club was formed in January, 1942, and was meant to be a refuge for those engaged in the Battle of the Atlantic. Canadian, British, and American naval officers all passed through the Crow’s Nest during the War Years. At first, they scribbled their names and the names of their ships directly onto the wall until the proprietor, weary of wall cleaning, assigned each vessel its own space to decorate as it wished.

Shadforth’s spike at the Crow’s Nest Club.

On the Club’s opening night in 1942, some members pounded back a few beverages and decided to have a nail-driving contest. Whoever could drive a spike deepest in the wood floor would win glory for his ship. The winner was LtCmdr. Bert Shadforth, commander of HCMS Spikenard K198, a Flower Class corvette assigned to convoy escort duty. Two weeks later, off the north coast of Ireland, convoy SC-67 was attacked by a U-boat wolfpack. The Spikenard, veteran of several other convoy runs, was torpedoed shortly after a cargo vessel was hit. The torpedo hit forward and the Spikenard went down bow first. In the dark and confusion, vessels attending the stricken cargo ship missed the sinking of the Spikenard. Next morning, only eight of the Spikenard‘s 65-member crew were rescued from the icy waters. All others, including LtCmdr Shadforth, were lost. Back at the Crow’s Nest, members cut out a piece of flooring that included Shadforth’s spike and mounted the piece on the wall, memorializing the Spikenard.

LtCmdr. Shadford and the Spikenard

After war was declared in 1939, Britain inaugurated a program of turning out small escort vessels — not so expensive as destroyers and nowhere near as fast, these ships were labelled “corvettes”, a term dredged up from history. Small and poorly armed, slower than the U-boats that were their enemy, these ships had one great advantage: they were cheap and easy to build. Churchill called them “cheap nasties”, but he envisioned a faster, more heavily-armed ship than the Flower-class corvette.

Aboard a corvette in the North Atlantic.

Convoys transporting materiel to Britain and the Soviet Union took on cargo at Halifax and Sydney (and, after US entry into the war opened rail passage from Canada, Saint John, New Brunswick.) Convoy escorts were based in St. Johns and accompanied the cargo vessels to an area off Iceland, where British (and later, American) ships took over for the voyage to Great Britain or the Murmansk Run to the USSR. This was brutal duty for the seamen involved. After the War, ex-corvette sailor Nicholas Montsarrat wrote a best-selling novel about his experience: The Cruel Sea. The title says it all. It was not simply enemy guns that sank ships, it was the sea itself — the bitter cold, the ferocious swells that could roll a corvette forty degrees to one side, then eighty degrees to the other. Still, these short, broad ships were very seaworthy. As one seaman put it, corvettes would roll in wet grass but they would sail in any weather:

The corvette bounced around like a cork. The waves were so high you couldn’t see the top when you were in the trough. The corvette would climb that wave, then, passing the top, the stem of the ship would come crashing down on the other side. This would send shivers through the whole ship. You could feel it through your boots. [“Scrappy Little Corvettes”]

In 1939, the Canadian navy had only four small warships, and seven coastal vessels — motor launches and armed yachts. British corvettes began adding to that number in 1940. In that year, the Spikenard was completed in the Lauzon, Quebec shipyards and quickly was transferred from the British Navy to the Canadians. Over the period 1940- 1942, Canadian and British shipyards turned out 267 of these small vessels, 70 serving with the Royal Canadian Navy, the others going to allies. Some revisions were made to the Flower-class design, with 40 or so of the revised “Increased Endurance” vessels brought into the RCN.

Sailors rescued from a sunken freighter aboard HCMS Arvida, St. John’s, September 1942.

The revisions did not help the corvettes’ fighting ability. Armed with one or two small guns and racks of depth charges and hedgehogs for anti-submarine work, the ships lacked firepower. The basic corvette tactic was to charge directly at an attacking U-boat, hoping to make it submerge, since that reduced the speed of the undersea craft to less than that of the corvette. If it stayed on the surface, the U-boat could outrun the corvette. So long as the subs were operating beyond the range of coast-based aircraft, that was the best that could be done. And that best was complicated by the fact that Canadian corvettes were using obsolescent sonar which was confused by the mix of fresh and salt water in the St. Lawrence. This last became important in the spring of 1942 when U-boats began attacking in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and even in the river itself.

Between May of 1942 and early 1944, four Canadian warships and twenty-three merchant vessels were sunk in the Battle of the St. Lawrence — the first engagements in Canadian coastal waters since the War of 1812. In October, 1942, the SS Caribou, a Newfoundland Railway ferry operating between Port Au Basques and Sydney, Nova Scotia was torpedoed. 137 lives were lost, half of them military personnel on leave, the other half civilians, including women and children. Although residents along the coast had witnessed naval battles and seen bodies washed ashore, they were not allowed to speak of it under wartime censorship rules. Authorities decided to relax the restrictions and report the ferry sinking so as to prevent rumors that might be worse than the truth. The truth was bad enough. There was an uproar when Canadians discovered how poorly the St. Lawrence was defended and demanded that more vessels be added to the original force of four warships — two small motor launches, an armed yacht, and the minesweeper that was Caribou‘s escort when she was attacked. Five corvettes had recently been added, but the force was still inadequate. The Royal Canadian Navy continued to prioritize the convoys, seeing that as their main strategic duty. Meanwhile, Canadian shipyards turned out ships at an increasing rate, including the new River-class frigates that were faster, better armed, and equipped with better electronics. By the end of the War, Canada had increased the size of its navy almost a hundredfold, becoming the fifth-largest navy in the world.

Chaplain-General John Fletcher visiting the Battle of the Atlantic Memorial.

After the War, corvettes were sold to various nations where they served, generally, in a mercantile capacity. As they aged, the ships were broken up for scrap. The last corvette afloat, HCMS Sackville, is now a museum ship in Halifax.

The Spikenard‘s stone at HCMS Prevost

Today, the Canadian ships sunk and the men lost at sea in the Battle of the Atlantic are memorialized at HCMS Prevost near London, Ontario. Each ship that was lost in the Battle of the Atlantic has a stone. Many are surrounded by photos of the men lost at sea who crewed them.

NOTES:

For Posterity’s Sake page on the Spikenard

The Crow’s Nest official site

“Inside A Secret World War II Officers’ Club” on Messy Nessy [via Nag On The Lake]

The Stones, ship memorials at HCMS Prevost

The Battle of the Atlantic Memorial

Corvette K-225 is a 1943 movie where the real K225, HCMS Kitchener, plays a ship called the Donnacona. There are some scenes shot in Halifax of actual convoy assembly. Film crews actually went on convoy runs to gather background and the film rates as better than the usual wartime propaganda.

Action Stations (1943) is an NFB-produced wartime docu-prop film that has great shots of the conditions faced by these ships and their crews, but the narration is hard to take. Corvettes were not “swift” nor “maneuverable”, nor “heavily-armed”.

Last night, I was announced the winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novella by the Crime Writers of Canada. The story, “How Lon Pruitt Was Found Murdered In An Open Field With No Footprints Around”, originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. It’s the second in a series of stories set in Depression-era Arkansas. The first, “How Aunt Pud, Aunt Margaret, And The Family Retainers Kept Me From Hanging”, also was short-listed for an Arthur Ellis Award a few years back. A third may be published soon. And, before you ask, No, I don’t always have such long titles — just for this series.

Very little of Dresden was left after the city was fire bombed in 1945. The Soviet GDR re-built many of the structures that had been destroyed, but had to raze others. A monument to Mozart, in the Bürgerwiese Park, depicted three Graces dancing around an altar dedicated to the composer. Two of the statues survived with relatively minor damage, but only half of one statue remained and that was removed to the Zionskirche ruins “lapidarium” where fragments of the ruined city are stored to await possible restoration.

Dresden, 1945

Hermann Kurt Hosaeus won the commission to design the Mozart memorial in 1904. He was not yet thirty years old. There was a bit of a scandal about this: Hosaeus was young, unknown, and there was little in the way of completed works for the jury to examine. In 1907, the monument was revealed. Again there was some grumbling, but most accepted the baroque vivacity of Hosaeus‘ work.

The reconstructed Mozart memorial. Ernst is the right-hand figure that appears very serious, indeed. [Wikimedia, photo: Kolossos]

War memorial near Bünde. Sculpted in 1926. Hosaeus often used a wounded soldier motif. [ photo: Vova Pomortzeff from The Woe of the Vanquished]

Statue of Hindenburg by Hosaeus, unearthed near the Kyffhäuser Memorial. Sculpture was created 1939, discovered in 2009. [Wikimedia, photo by Andreas Vogel] (News photo showing Hitler at this statue’s unveiling and curious story of the work’s burial on this page.)

Ernst in the Zionskirche lapidarium. [Wikiwand]

…it was clear what it should represent: To learn from the city’s fate, to intervene before everything is held for disposal, as it was done in the art city Dresden. That was and remains to be the message. Remembering that Dresden’s fate was not a singular one, not then and certainly not now. Adding to the continual state of mourning, Dresden’s message about all that was lost, transcends remembrance: War is not the means of last resort it is the wrong means.

Sculptor Konstanze Feindt Eißner designed the Peace Prize. It is a replica of the Ernst statue as it exists now: riddled with bullet holes and a gaping wound in the abdomen, but Eißner has restored the statue’s legs and drapery. The parts replaced are the same gilt color as the replica in the Bürgerwiese; the areas above are weathered and grey.

The Dresden Peace Prize.

Recipients of the Dresden Peace Prize have included Mikhail Gorbachev, Stanislav Petrov, Daniel Ellsberg, and war child Emmanuel Jal.

[A tip of the hat to Klaus who told me about the Dresden prize.]

Notes: Russian photographer Vova Pomortzeff toured Germany seeking out war memorials and published his photos and impressions as The Woe of the Vanquished . This is a very interesting book that raises questions about what the artist meant and what the audience understood.

Dresden Peace Prize site (in English)

Konstanze Feindt Eißner (in German)

German Art page on Hosaeus with many pictures.

When Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol, he subtitled it “A Christmas Ghost Story”. So, in 1843, there was a Christmas Ghost Story genre in England. Victoria had married in 1840. Albert brought his Christmas traditions from Germany and Victoria was young enough to welcome a celebration and a party and anything that made Albert smile. Christmas was slowly coming back after being suppressed by Cromwell and the Puritans. So how did the Christmas Ghost Story become an established custom?

One answer is that the stories reflect England’s pagan past, when the Yule season was one of religious ritual and death — death of the year, but also perhaps, of some sacrificed person. So: fear, death, and the supernatural are the components of the model ghost story, all part of our cultural heritage. Or at least, that’s a theory. And I think it is one that would appeal to master ghost story writer, Montague Rhodes James.

M.R. James, 1900. [Wikipedia]

The Stalls At Barchester Cathedral

The Ash Tree

A Warning To The Curious

But the BBC has also created full dramas from James’ stories. “Whistle And I’ll Come To You” has been done several times:

1968 version (B/W)

And in 1971, a series of five:

The Stalls of Barchester

A Warning To The Curious

Lost Hearts  (being repeated by the BBC this year on Christmas Eve.)

The Treasure of Abbot Thomas

The Ash Tree

Illustration for “Whistle And I’ll Come To You” by James’ friend James McBryde. McBryde was supposed to illustrate James’ 1904 collection of stories, but died after completing only four illustrations. [Wikipedia}

A View From A Hill

Number 13

Whistle and I’ll Come To You

The Tractate Middoth

Merry Christmas!

Toward the end of 2020, I wanted to hear about something (anything!) other than Coronavirus or Donald Trump, but the news was clogged like a public toilet with items on those two newsmakers. But there were other stories, interesting items that didn’t get enough play. Here’s some:

1: War At the Top of the World
The border between India and China is disputed. Over the years, numerous border incidents have occurred including serious conflicts in the1960s. Diplomatic efforts to reduce the chance of all-out war have created a set of rules that China and India test regularly. Perhaps 2% have been reported in the news. Since 2014 there have been a number of meetings between Xi and Modi on this matter.

Both India and China beefed up their military around Galwan and came to blows May 4, 2020, and again in mid-June. Patrols up in the disputed area are unarmed by agreement, so the battle was fought with fists, rocks, and snowballs. Soldiers were pushed off the high mountainsides and fell to their death or drowned in a river. China admitted to losing four soldiers; outside analysts say at least nine times that. India lost thirty, with another ten captured by China.

This could get serious in the long run; both countries want to establish themselves in this uninhabitable spot. But for now, just consider the picture of two groups of men battling with naked fists over a patch of unusable frozen rock. This is a metaphor waiting to be applied.

2: The Mauritius Disaster

Mauritius is an island nation in the Indian Ocean. At one time it was home to the dodo which became extinct after human beings reached the island, not so much because Dutch sailors killed the birds and ate them, but because they brought rats and other problems. Anyway, centuries later, Mauritius has a population of a million and a quarter and, before 2020, was relatively prosperous.

On July 25, an empty Japanese freighter, the Wakashio, ran aground on a coral reef off the south-east coast of Mauritius. A crew member was having a birthday party and the Wakashio sailed closer to improve its wi-fi signal, winding up on the reef. Efforts were made to pump oil from the ship, but it broke up in August and 1000 or so tonnes of oil were released directly into the Blue Bay marine park that is a Ramsar-designated important wetland area. Mauritius needs tourist dollars for its economy and the park was a major destination. The spill and its economic impact set off demonstrations and demands for the government to resign.

So is this a case of restoring cosmic balance? Environmental karma? Curse of the dodo? (Probably not.)

3: Stuck Ships

March 23, 2021, a very large container vessel, the Ever Given, belonging to Evergreen Marine Corporation, got stuck in the Suez Canal. For a week it blocked traffic, holding up billions of dollars worth of trade. Finally, moved on the 29th, the Ever Given was held for months until a settlement with the Canal authority was reached.

But, in March, 2022, another Evergreen ship, the Ever Forward, got stuck in Chesapeake Bay. This time, it took a month to free the vessel.

These are huge ships. Some are talking about crewless, AI-navigated versions. I got reservations about that. Next March, I’ll be looking to see if the Ever Ready or the Every Man or the Ever After is being refloated.

4: Kardashian and the Artist Formerly Known As Kanye

I don’t follow the Kardashian saga generally, but this was just so… Anyway, Ye (as I think he is now known) was married to Kim Kardashian. But he had some mental health issues and began (he says) talking divorce in the summer of 2020, when he was also running for President. In January, 2021, Kim and Ye were openly considering divorce but Ye decided he wanted to stay with her, so sent her a present. And it is this present that pulled me into this dysfunctional saga.

Ye (still Kanye then) gave Kim a hologram of her father (who died in 2003) that spoke to his daughter and told her what a great guy Kanye was. Now I think this is creepy, but Kim cried and said “Thank you so much, Kanye, for this memory that will last a lifetime.” So, I guess it’s just me.

Anyway, since then, Kim has taken up with Pete Davidson, which caused Ye to release a video showing him beheading Davidson. Davidson baited Ye on social media, and the two went back and forth at each other. This is not cool. Nor is it smart. Davidson must know it’s a bad idea to tease the mentally unstable. But, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I just don’t understand these people.

5: Still Growing

So how tall is the world’s highest mountain? 8848.86m as of now, which is .86m higher than previously calculated. Experts are divided on whether or not a 2015 earthquake caused this growth. Everest grows anyway, as tectonic plates collide and push upward, but that adds maybe 50cm a century, so this recent growth is unexpected. Or this may mean that measurement of this object is difficult and may have to be revised yet again.

Anyway, this is a reminder that the World Wags On, no matter the foolishness of its denizens.

It’s raining. It rained yesterday. It rained the day before. Ever since it quit snowing, it’s rained. Long-term weather forecasts say this area is becoming a rain forest. Not a warm tropical type forest — it gets cold here when it clouds over, the air is warm but the ground is cold — nor an ocean-tempered Haida Gwaii sort of place, but a rain forest liable to have cataclysmic weather breaks — bitter cold spells with heavy snow, brutally hot dry spells with great forest fires.

Last year I began to notice these strange commercials. I heard rain. Oh, Jesus, I thought, Is the basement full of water? But it was on the TV. Rain noise, billed as “thirty seconds of Calm”. Calm! Yeah, I’ll think about that while we’re hooking up the shop vac to pump out the basement, or repairing the roof damage where ice ripped off the gutters. Calm, my ass! Apparently though, millions of sick people do spend money to listen to rain. (Cue sub-rant on the Emptiness of Bourgeois Existence.)

During Covid, I re-read The Drowned World, J.G.Ballard’s Water book from the Elements tetralogy — Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The Drowned World was published in 1962, before global warming was a thing. Ballard’s cataclysm is some kind of solar event. Earth is heating up — the equator is a death zone. The climate generally is hot Paleozoic Era. Lizards and giant insects swarm the remnants of cities sticking up from the water. Ballard’s main character decides to travel south into the heat, seeking apotheosis of some sort, but probably finding death.

Whatever he discovers will be a new mode of being. He may adapt or die or revert to some primordial form… Ballard said the book was about Time. His characters have Devonian nightmares. I don’t. I have terrible thoughts about the future. I will not revert; I opt to Adapt.

So that is what I am doing. Adapting. My toes aren’t webbed yet, but I’m waiting. Calmly.

In August of 1956, the town of Clinton, Tennessee prepared to follow the US Supreme Court directive to de-segregate their public schools. Everything was proceeding peacefully until John Kasper came to Clinton with the avowed purpose of stopping “race mixing”. Within days there were threats, assaults, and attempts to intimidate those in charge of the process, culminating in the destruction of the school by a bomb in 1958. Kasper was an acolyte of poet Ezra Pound, who fostered a group of neo-fascists from the mental hospital where he was confined. Kasper and Clinton attracted national attention and inspired a novel, The Intruder, by Charles Beaumont, which Roger Corman made into a movie starring William Shatner. Here’s the story.

John Kasper

Born in 1929, Frederick John Kasper grew up in New Jersey. His father was very Right-wing, an America Firster, and young John attended Carl McIntire’s Bible Presbyterian Church in Collingwood, N.J., which was expelled from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1937, as conservative Presbyterian factions splintered. McIntire later toured the country, preaching that the Civil Rights movement was Communist-inspired. (details here.) McIntire was a central figure in the politicizing of American religion.

Kasper attended Columbia College and became interested in poetry. This, in turn, led to correspondence with Ezra Pound, who was confined in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane in Washington, DC. Pound was an energetic letter-writer and soon drew Kasper into his group of admiring followers. They came for the poetry; they received the politics — Pound had unorthodox economic views and was very anti-Semitic.

Kasper wrote a paper on Pound and Nietzsche. His instructor at Columbia, Babette Deutsch, remarked that one could admire Pound as a poet while dismissing his politics. Kasper took exception and there was some heated back-and-forth in the classroom. Afterward, Kasper wrote a letter of apology to Deutsch:

Strange, but I always thought myself free from insidious falsehood. I was the one who childishly railed at superstition and malicious teaching. And yet I fell into the pit like any other subnormal inhuman beast of an uncivilized age. I thrilled at Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the political Ezra Pound. … I know now by the living example of another, that the myth of fascism is “a clear and present danger”…

[NY Herald Tribune, Jan. 30, 1957. Part two of a four-part series on Kasper by Robert Bird. see Sources below.]

Deutsch later concluded that his apology was “insincere”.

In June, 1951, 21-year-old John Kasper graduated from Columbia and, after two years of correspondence, travelled to Washington and met his guru face-to-face.

Ezra Pound

Born in Idaho, raised in Pennsylvania and New York, based in Europe after 1908, Pound was a force in the literary dynamics of his day. Besides his own poetry, Pound’s importance lies in the way he nurtured great Modernist talents.

Pound aided Hemingway with the publication of In Our Time, he published Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, and edited T.S.Eliot’s “The Wasteland”. These are only a few of the young writers he helped. Many artists felt a debt to Pound and tried to aid him later.

While in England, Pound met “Major” C.H. Douglas, whose concept of Social Credit Pound adopted as an economic panacea that would end the Jewish Banking Conspiracy. (another analysis of Pound’s Social Credit thinking, here’s another). He also was attracted to the thinking of Silvio Gesell, who promoted notions of “free money” and public ownership of land. Whether Pound developed his anti-Semitism in Europe or the US, it permeates his writing after 1910. All this was cobbled into Pound’s own political vision, an interpretation of which which you can read for yourself here, or here, or here, if you are so inclined.

Pound put everything on an economic basis. The real problem was usury, usura, as Pound termed it in his poetry, calling it a sin and a cancer. The solution was a just and autocratic government, and a new economic system based on Social Credit and the ending of banks and Jewish financial power. Scholars explicate and debate Pound’s ideas as though they add up to a coherent political philosophy; I don’t think so, but that’s just me.

Pound’s forceful energy wore out his welcome in England, and he and Dorothy moved to the continent, finally settling in Italy. He became an admirer of Mussolini and an adherent to fascism. He maintained a connection with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and published in their magazines. In 1933, when Pound finally met Mussolini, he tried to persuade Il Duce that Social Credit was a proper economic partner to fascism. Mussolini was not convinced, but Pound admired him anyway, comparing him to Thomas Jefferson.

Fascism is notoriously difficult to define, but: “…the writer of these pages has already defined Fascism as an organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy.” [Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932)]

So there you have it: fascism = authoritarian democracy. Of course, the individual is subordinate to the State, and the State is run by emotion, not reason. “Believe — Obey — Fight!” was the fascist mantra. Sometimes Pound said he wasn’t a fascist: “I have at all times opposed certain “gray” zones of the Fascist opportunism by defining Fascism in a way to make it fit my own views.” And Pound had very idiosyncratic views. (Pound’s fascism.)

When World War II began, Pound offered himself to the Italian government as a propaganda instrument and, once they determined that he was Aryan and friendly to fascism, he began a series of broadcasts extolling Mussolini, attacking Jews, and demanding that the Allies abandon the War. Hundreds of these radio broadcasts were made. In 1943, Pound was charged by the US government in absentia with treason. Pound was returned to the US to stand trial at the end of the War. People were understandably a bit raw after the years of destruction and the revelation of the death camps. William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, was hanged two weeks before Pound arrived at St. Elizabeths. Trials of other Lords Haw-Haw, Tokyo Roses, Axis Sallys, and the like were taking place, but there was no real plan by any of the Allies on how to handle these people and punishments varied. Pound’s friends seized on an insanity plea as something that could save him from a firing squad.

Examination by sympathetic doctors returned a diagnosis of “undifferentiated psychosis”, meaning that Pound was unable to stand trial for treason because he could not understand the charges against him. He was confined in St. Elizabeths, while his many well-wishers tried to get him released. He was allowed visitors and a fair amount of freedom. Soon Pound began corresponding with everyone who had any interest in him or his politics. Kasper was not the first to visit.

John Kasper and Grampaw

When Kasper graduated in 1951, he opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village called Make It New, after a line in Pound’s Confucius poems/translations. His business partner was Lina Lett, five years older, then breaking up with her husband, who invested some of a legacy that came her way. The store was dedicated to promoting Pound’s poetry and anti-Semitism. Kasper decorated the windows with Pound’s writings, including some letters, and the store sold mostly Pound-approved material. Kasper offered some non-approved works as “muck”, intended for informed readers to learn about the enemy. Pound was not pleased and ordered Kasper to clean out the “Jew-rot” and, also, remove his letters from the windows. Kasper was very apologetic:

I’m damn sorry NOT TO HAVE CONSULTED about windows. I AM
trying to stand on own 2 feet, but thought someone here in the heart of the
“red ghetto” ought to do something GOOD (what Kasper though wuz good),
“unfortunately.”
However, be that as it may, the windows are changed and everything is now quiet.

Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.41

Before his visit to St. Elizabeths, Kasper always addressed the poet as “Mr. Pound”; after meeting him, Kasper referred to Pound as “Grampaw” or “Master”. Other visitors included T. David Horton, a law student who worked with the Defenders of the American Constitution, a group whose leadership consisted of retired military officers. Horton edited the DAC magazine, Task Force. Pound got Horton and Kasper to run the Square Dollar Press, dedicated to reprinting out-of-copyright works that Pound thought important. In theory, there was an advisory board (that included Marshall McLuhan), but that was window-dressing. Kasper worked up a volume of Louis Agassiz’ 19th Century writings opposing Darwinism and other Square Dollar books were reprinted from photostats of the original publications so as to save money on typesetting.

Eustace Mullins, a member of the Aryan League and the neo-Nazi National Renaissance Party, had gone to Pound for advice on his writing. In 1951, Pound gave him $10 a week to research banking and Mullins produced the book that would later be titled Secrets of the Federal Reserve. In its original form, as Mullins on the Federal Reserve, the work had far less direct anti-Semitic content than later editions. Mullins also wrote for various newsletters such as Common Sense and did research for defenders of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. During the early 1950s, his roommate and partner was Matt Koehl, later to lead the American Nazi Party.

Mullins was invited to St. Elizabeths by Pound’s wife Dorothy Shakespear, who met him in Washington. Meanwhile, Pound had a long-term mistress, Olga Rudge, who visited St. Elizabeths twice, but did not become part of the coterie there. Dorothy and Olga despised one another. Both were from privileged families and used to getting what they wanted. Olga and Dorothy had been competing for Pound’s affection since 1922, even engaging in dueling pregnancies to get it. Now they were separately working on obtaining his release from St. Elizabeths. They were joined by established poets and writers, many of whom felt some debt to Pound.

There were other women — young “muses” — who also hung out with Pound: Sheri Martinelli, later to move West and become the “Queen of the Beats”, and Marcella Spann, an earnest young teacher who wanted to collaborate with the Master. “The honey-pot girls” as Dorothy called them.

Kasper’s anti-Semitic bookstore attracted both black and white customers. After the Clinton riot, the FBI looked into Kasper’s past and one informer told the FBI that the store was frequented by “Negro and Chinese homosexuals”. (From the FBI Kasper files ) The FBI also was told that Kasper was funded by various women he was accommodating. There is a kernel of truth in this. Kasper did have liasons with various women who helped him and others like him with a few bucks here and there.

Ezra Pound suggested in a letter that Kasper look up poet Louis Dudek. Kasper did so and became acquainted with Stephanie Dudek, eight years older, whose marriage to Louis was disintegrating. She described the 6’4″ gangly Kasper as “a gentle and likable boy”. Kasper persuaded Stephanie Dudek to give Mullins $3000 to publish his book on the Federal Reserve.

Kasper hit on Diane Di Prima, later a well-known poet and activist, but she resisted his advances — she was somewhat younger — calling him in her memoirs a “really unpleasant fascist”. In revenge, Kasper wrote her parents and others accusing Di Prima of being gay. He wrote to Pound:

Diane di Prima & Co. no use. I stand by J.K. who sd. banishment yr
& ½ ago. Lessies may be o.k. in their circle but they corrupt otherwise

JK letter to Pound May, 1955, quoted in Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.61. “J.K.” is John Kasper, who often referred to himself in the third person.

One problem with having youthful supporters was that they were all so “YOUNG”, as Pound wrote. Others referred to his “kindergarten”. He appreciated the adults who visited, poets, of course, and politicos like Pedro del Valle, retired Marine Corps general, who had been an observer during the Italian campaign against Ethiopia. Del Valle admired Mussolini and hated Communists. In 1953, he joined with other military men in forming the Defenders of the American Constitution (DAC), the group that employed Dave Horton, who brought Del Valle to St. Elizabeths. Del Valle had political ambitions — he was almost Governor of Puerto Rico — and ran for the Maryland Republican Gubernatorial nomination in 1954. Some of his campaign rhetoric might have come from Pound. Del Valle lost the election.

From New York to Washington

Kasper’s Make It New bookstore was not doing all that well and his letters to Pound through 1954 reflect his depression and desire to leave New York. In order to keep the store going, Kasper worked outside jobs, including six months as an agent at Household Finance Company. It was too much. Kasper located a Washington, DC site and rented Cadmus Books in November, 1955. By December, he had cleaned out the New York store and left town. Lina Lett claimed afterward that he owed her money. Kasper denied it.

One person that came to Washington with Kasper was Florette Henry, a dedicated worker at Kasper’s bookstore. Kasper took her to meet Grampaw who found her good company. Florette wrote Pound a polite thank-you letter after the visit. Florette Henry was black. After the Clinton incident in 1956, Henry and other African-American artists and poets who had hung out with Kasper expressed their astonishment at his contradictory behavior. What happened to him, to change him so? Unless, of course, this was the real Kasper, and the man they had once known, a fraud.

Robert Furniss, a lawyer that helped Kasper close the deal on his bookstore, had been recommended by Ezra Pound. It’s possible that Eustace Mullins brought the poet to the lawyer’s attention. Mullins had some articles in publications overseen by Furniss, who first wrote Ezra Pound in March, 1955. Very soon they were penpal buddies. Furniss knew both Dave Horton and General Del Valle. Furniss and Horton are named as co-owners with Kasper of Cadmus Books in the newsletter Right [FBI Reports]

It was through Furniss that Kasper met Admiral John Crommelin, a famous Navy pilot. Crommelin was one of the Admirals who opposed the re-structuring of American armed forces after World War II. He was urged out of the service and retired in 1950 to his farm in Alabama. There he took up Right-wing causes and ran for office.

In 1954, Crommelin and Del Valle were both part of the “Ten Million Americans for Justice” campaign, which defended Senator Joseph McCarthy when he was threatened with censure. Crommelin addressed a crowd of 13000 in Madison Square Garden, where he warned of “the HIDDEN FORCE in government” that McCarthy had exposed.

It may be that Kasper heard of Crommelin when he was in New York, though he apparently did not meet him then. Kasper had approached some Congressional committees friendly to McCarthy, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Committee on Government Operations, to send any printed material they put out to his bookstore, where he gave it away. Kasper made friends in Congress. When he put together a catalogue of books available at Cadmus, he mimeographed it on machines in the House of Representatives basement. Possibly he was helped by a female assistant to Rep. Usher Burdick that he seduced. The assistant was somewhat older than Kasper and, under his direction, got her boss to make references to Pound’s plight in the Congressional Record.

Kasper brought Crommelin to St. Elizabeths. Pound approved of him:

…Kasp/ come up with a good admiral
last Thurs./ a few words of wisdom from bloke as had been wrigglin round
dodging jap crash-bombers / BUT adults are still rare…

quoted in Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.116.

Furniss wrote Pound of a meeting at the house of Del Valle’s aide, Colonel Pomeroy. Both Kasper and Horton were there and Furniss volunteered them to work toward consolidating the various Right-wing organizations that had come into existence since the end of the War. Furniss had established his own group, “We the People” (later to be folded into the Liberty Lobby) and wanted to organize “a Right-wing, national, political action group”.

The groups Furniss hoped to bring together were anti-Communist, segregationist, and anti-Semitic. And they brought other issues into the mix, such as the Alaska Mental Health Bill, or fluoridation (which Crommelin believed was being used to turn people into “zombies”), or banning rock and roll music. Some were more one thing than another — more anti-black than anti-Jew, for instance — but they were brought together under this notion: Jew Communists were forcing white and black together because race-mixing would weaken America. Race mixing = “mongrelization”. Pound agreed that race-mixing was a bad idea — he had a liking for thoroughbreds. From #39 of the wartime broadcasts:

As to the Hitler program, it was (what we ALL knew, and did nothing about, namely) that the breedin’ of human beings deserves MORE care and attention than the breedin’ of horses and wiffetts, or even the breedin’ of sheep, goat, and the larger livestock. That is point ONE of the NAZI program. Breed GOOD, and preserve the race. Breed thorough, that is for thoroughbreds, conserve the BEST of the race. Conserve the best elements. That means EUGENICS: as opposed to race suicide. And it did not and does NOT please the Talmudic Jews who want to kill off ALL the other races whom they can not subjugate…

May 18, 1942 Ezra Pound Speaking
I think “wiffetts” = “whippets”, fancy pets of thoroughbred aristocrats. Or something.

Many of Pound’s friends worried that these political activities would upset the authorities and delay his release. One wrote to Pound that he’d been having bad dreams after meeting Horton and Kasper at St.Elizabeths. He reminded Pound that he now lived in “the backyard of the gov’t” and an incident could endanger his release. [letter from G.Giovaninni Oct. 8, 1955, quoted in Marsh, p.98]

Pound ignored this advice. In fact, he seldom spoke of being released. Some of his friends began to suspect that he didn’t want to leave St.Elizabeths. “Of course, we want out of this place,” said Dorothy, but Ezra changed the subject. After all, he had the love and attention of devoted followers; he had the time and space to write; and his days were scheduled so that he was never exhausted, only invigorated, by bustle and fuss during limited visiting hours. He oversaw the production of a half-dozen or so literary magazines, he wrote articles about economics and politics under pseudonyms, he gave interviews to scholars researching Modernism, he wrote hundreds of letters to poets and politicians, he worked on his Confucian translations, he worked on the Cantos. Since first being confined, Pound’s surroundings had gradually improved. He used the hallway outside his room as as a reception area for visitors, who were offered food sent to him by admirers. He loved ice cream and ate a lot of it. He played tennis. In the summer, Pound moved outside and presided over gatherings on the St. Elizabeths lawn. In winter, sometimes a group would drive Pound up to “the Point”, where they sipped wine, “the whole of Washington, D.C. in panorama below”. Pound had enormous energy and it was exciting to be around him, to work with him, to try to change the world. It was a lively scene at St.Elizabeths:

Contrast the delightful afternoon/miracle of five intelligent people visitors and one highschool article in course of getting educated by Horton/whether it wd/be possible to duplicate such a gathering in the Jewnutted States OUTSIDE a bughouse I don’t know.

Pound, November 1956 letter to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, an Anglo-Italian fascist sympathizer.

So, Kasper was to go to Alabama to work for Crommelin’s Senate run, and Horton was working with Del Valle and the DAC, as well as producing a radio show. But first, Pound’s crew testified before a Congressional committee on the Alaska Mental Health Bill. Alaska was not yet a state and mental patients had to be sent to the lower Forty-eight for hospitalization. The bill would allow for treatment in Alaska. But Pound’s team was concerned that a concentration camp was being planned. This camp would incarcerate those the government thought subversive — like Pound, perhaps.

Kasper’s testimony before the Committee soon became a plea to release “political prisoner” Ezra Pound, then an attack on Jews, who ran psychiatry as well as the banks, “almost 100 percent of psychiatric therapy is Jewish…” and “…there is tremendous tension between Jew and Gentile. . . Jews historically have not always been assimilated. . .” The Committee members took issue with these statements but allowed Kasper to ramble on about the Bank of the United States. The next witness made a point of dissociating himself from Kasper’s remarks. With Sen. Barry Goldwater’s help, the bill became law in July, 1956.

The Alabama Campaign

“Am now leaving to make Admiral Crommelin dictator”, Kasper wrote Pound. He continued to send dispatches from the campaign and Pound responded with bullet-point lists of key positions:

DON’T fight from a teeter-board. Don’t fight from confused principles.
Fight from the original declaration of the Rights of Man.
Droits de L’homme.
Droit de faire tout ce qui ne nuit pas aux autres.
To do anything that harms not others.
Nothing is more damnably harmful to everyone, white AND black than
miscegenation, bastardization and mongrelization of EVERYTHING.
Less sense in breeding humans (eugenics) than is used for cattle and sheep.
Also the ruin of neighborhoods for the speculations of real estate sharks now
down, now up, now out, now building projects.
Blood banks an infamy also.
Get onto that Beria program. I think [Hollis] Framp[ton] may reprint some, etc.
Local self govt. well, admit NO immigrants to registration who don’t swear
loyalty to state constitution/work back toward QUALIFIED suffrage, IMPOSE
educational qualification, to get in less experienced votes/ fight the 18 year old
vote/ if necessary, but not to put in program and print, give circus tickets for
poll-tax receipts.
dont confuse ingenuity with proclamations.
[. . .]
leave local option in principle, but make it unbearable in fact. metaphor and
tradition: refusal of water and fire. ostracize ‘em. Surro[u]nd ‘em, cut ‘em off,
but don’t MIX principles for an immediate advantage.

Letter from Pound to Kasper, April, 1956, cited Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.124. [Hollis Frampton]

Federal courts had struck down a lot of Jim Crow laws since 1945. For instance, courts ruled that it was illegal to bar blacks from voting in Democratic Party primaries, so they could now cast a meaningful ballot in the South. But that was only one of a number of legal decisions that were changing the way things operated. Nationally, Truman integrated the Armed Forces and that upset many professional officers, especially in the Navy where every captain had his black messboy. Southern politicians and big planters saw that their system was about to collapse. In 1948, at the National Democratic Convention, many Southern delegates walked out after the Democratic Party added civil rights to the platform. These Dixiecrats ran their own candidate, hoping to throw the election into Congress where they could bargain, as they did in 1876. Truman didn’t even appear on the Alabama ballot, but he won the election without those electoral votes and the court cases continued, culminating in the Brown decision of 1954 that ordered an end to segregated schools, and the follow-up implementation order a year later.

Crommelin’s opponent was Lister Hill, a long-serving Democrat. In March, Hill signed the Southern Manifesto — a pledge to fight integration through “massive resistance”. But Crommelin still thought he was soft on racial issues:

Crommelin charged that the campaign against segregation in the South was led by “Felix Frankfurter. A Jew, [and] Senator Lehman [D-NY], a Marxist Jew. Don’t you know it’s their kind of people who are
behind this whole mess?”

Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.120

Kasper was very optimistic about Crommelin’s chances and wrote Pound enthusiastically that a boycott was successful in hurting the businesses of those opposing segregation. He did not say how that indicated success for Crommelin over Hill, though. And he complained that the newspapers ignored Crommelin, but they were all run by Jews. Even so, Crommelin was sending out the message, exposing “the kike behind the nigger”. Pound added Crommelin and Del Valle to Canto 105, promoting them as warriors — “With a Crommelyn at the breech-block/ or a del Valle,/ This is what the swine haven’t got…” Kasper said Crommelin appreciated the gesture.

Kasper’s fellow organizer in Alabama was Asa “Ace” Carter, a radio host who had been fired for expressing extreme views on-air. Now he was leader of the North Alabama Citizens’ Committee, which he formed after being kicked out of the Alabama White Citizens’ Council for refusing to tone down his anti-Semitism. (Jews were Council members in some areas of the state). Carter hated rock-and-roll, claiming the NAACP used it to subvert white teenagers, so rock and roll should be banned! “Be-bop promotes Communism.”

George Lincoln Rockwell, later to form the American Nazi Party, but now a paid organizer for Americans for Constitutional Action, paid the campaign a visit:

Rockwell flew down here last week. He was very disheartened at C’s rejection
of his work and flew back next day. The enclosed cartoon is his work and he
turned out 10,000 on the offset press in Georgetown. The Admiral, however put
his foot down and refused to let it circulate on the grounds that white people as
well as the Nigra would say he hated the Nigras, which he doesn’t. That is a very
delicate matter here and the races have lived with separate but equal facilities
in harmony for 85 years. The Jews (NAACP) are trying to drive a wedge in the
south and what has taken years to build is being destroyed in 2 or 3.

Letter from Kasper to Pound, April, 1956, quoted in Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.122

By April, it must have been obvious — at least to Carter — that Crommelin would not win. Hill was so unconcerned about him that he left Alabama to campaign for other Democratic Senators. Kasper was still confident of victory. Pound wrote:

Kasp/whooping perhaps with too great elation re/ his nobl/ Admiral down in Florida.
Tomorrow the primaries, and leZ keep fingers crossed, cause it wd/ be TOO
bloody glorious to git a real admiral into our decrepit senate

quoted in Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.133. “Florida”, Alabama, it’s all the same to Grampaw.

Meanwhile, Carter’s North Alabama Citizens’ Council had decided on some direct action. Nat King Cole was to perform in Birmingham backed by Ted Heath’s English band. It was illegal in Alabama to have a mixed white and black audience, so Cole was to perform for whites, then give a second concert for African-Americans. On April 10, when Cole took the stage in Birmingham, Carter’s gang was in the audience.

Carter’s group had been publicizing their action, saying that more than a thousand segregationists would show up and end the concert. Police took this seriously and there were many officers at the Birmingham auditorium. When five Citizens’ Council members rushed the stage and attacked Cole, the police arrested them right away. But Cole had been knocked down, hit in the back by a microphone. During the confusion someone yelled for the band to play the National Anthem. Ted Heath’s group struck up “God Save the Queen”.

After the arrests, Cole reappeared, said that his back hurt and that he would not continue. Then he went to play the concert for blacks. Six members of the North Alabama Citizens’ Council were charged and convicted: four men got six months in jail, two others received suspended sentences. Carter, who had been in the audience, but did not charge the stage, defended their actions. He said it was  “a short step … from the sly, nightclub technique vulgarity of Cole, to the openly animalistic obscenity of the horde of Negro rock ‘n’ rollers.” Carter was unsuccessful in raising a defense fund and the NACC ceased to exist. Later in 1956, he ran for Birmingham Police Commissioner. He was defeated by Bull Connor.

On May 1, the primary results had Hill out-polling Crommelin two-to-one. Kasper returned to Washington where Pound gave him some advice:

AN intellectual movement/
may be ONE man, 50 years ahead of his time. a POLITICAL party, in a republic
with democratic suffrage must be something that can get 85 million votes out
of 160 million or at least 80.000.001 . . . must contain people of VIOLENTLY
opposed views on MANY points, probably on all save one or two points.

…[A ]Politically (effective) formula must not be FALSE BUT it must NOT go into details re/which the 85 million disagree.

You can NOT say: Nationalist. You can not put segregation as BASIC[.] You
cannot say, Douglas (C. H.) or Social Credit or Gesell. You must use a formula
which allows you to plug for what is correct in all three. You can say local control of local
affairs. …You can not SAY local control of local pur [chasing]
/pow[er] which is the only way to GET loc[al]. Cont[rol]. Loc[al]. af[fairs]…

(“Noone is accused of antikikismo until they monkey with question of monetary issue”)…

quoted from Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.133

Something that stands out here is that Pound is serious. There are no goofy Ezratic puns and nonsense; Pound wants Kasper to understand. But Kasper wants action. He is competing for Pound’s affection with Dave Horton and needs to accomplish something.

Horton had a radio show where he interviewed Members of Congress. He operated in the DC area and had frequent access to Pound. He was often the person called upon to pick up visitors and drive them to St. Elizabeths and back to train station or hotel. Pound thought well of him and Kasper was jealous, often squabbling with Horton. Pound admonished him, but fed the competition between his acolytes:

Score: Dave got del V[alle] / Yu got Crommelin… If you don’t have VIOLENT oppositions IN the centre, there will be VAST blocks of people shut out.

…when I want to depress yr/adored confrere D.H. I remind him
that a democracy is a place where ole VYoleR [his old friend Viola Baxter Jordan
who was obsessed with astrology] has a vote. Just as much VOTE as he has (I
never added the second part of that statement. Reserve it for moments of stress).

letter from Pound to Kasper, quoted in Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.135

He assessed his youthful proteges to another correspondent: “mullins flighty, Kasp impulsive Horton solid. several others YOUNG.”

In November, 1953, when Kasper was still commuting from New York, he showed up at St. Elizabeths at the same time as aspiring poet Frederick Seidel. Seidel had no time for non-poets. He told Pound that he would not share his time with Kasper. Pound then ordered Kasper out and Seidel did not see him any more, though he spent the weekend visiting with Pound. [Swift, The Bughouse, Chap.6] Pound kept his followers in line by giving or withholding his approval, so of course they were willing to undergo small humiliations in order to receive it.

Kasper was emotionally needy and his worship of Pound was intense. He wrote:

O Sidgismundo, Your army’s gathering every day, please, we need you for the
offense and the “charge.” There’s nothing they can do, NO NUTHIN they can’t
take it away from you, not a damn thing can they take way, from thee THOU
GREATEST GIVER, KNOWER, SEER, SAGE, WATER, GRAIN, RAIN, and
SUN.
[signed] Yours, John Kasper, Cap’n, 34th Brigade 16th Cuirassiers Regiment of the Line

[and in another letter:]

Granpaw, Granpaw, I love you, love you.

letter Oct. 1952, quoted Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.6. Sigismondo Malatesta was a 15th C. condottiero admired by Pound.

The Cadmus Bookstore was limping along — various Poundian disciples looked after the store while Kasper was away; for a time, his mother even came down from New Jersey to work there. But Kasper had too much to do. On June 4, he announced the formation of the Seaboard White Citizens’ Council. Motto of the SWCC: “Honor, pride, fight, SAVE THE WHITE!” In July he transferred the store to Nora Devereaux, secretary-treasurer of the SWCC. Then Kasper mobilized his troops. His targets were those identified with the Jewish mongrelization plot: Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and Chief Justice Earl Warren, architects of the Brown decision; US Solicitor-General Simon Sobeloff, who had overseen Brown II, the 1955 implementation order; Senator Herbert Lehman; and Mrs. Douglas King, chair of a Maryland NAACP chapter. On July 14, crosses were burned in front of their homes.

The FBI tagged the SWCC as probable perpetrators right away, but Ronald Eugene Rowley, a student at the University of Virginia, confessed to the cross-burnings. He said he was protesting July 12 court rulings that Charlottesville schools had to integrate, and refused to name his accomplices. Rowley was released on bail which he later forfeited after failing to show up in court.

The Virginia Excursion

Charlottesville was Kasper’s next target. On July 28, Kasper sniffed out the territory. He spoke to city officials who shined him on. Then on August 4, four members of the SWCC accompanied Kasper on the drive from Washington, DC. to distribute leaflets and SWCC membership forms. They handed out a mimeographed leaflet, Virginians On Guard!, which included photographs of the crosses burning on July 14. The four were arrested right away for violating city ordnances, and released pending their court appearance a week later. But Kasper had another problem: Grampaw did not like the broadside.

Pound had a hand in writing the bulk of Virginians On Guard! which had a list of “proposals” including a new Constitution for the United States. There are discussions of economic fixes, including a Poundian screed on usury. The new Constitution also included an anti-fluoridation clause and banned rock and roll, but racial integration was the main topic. Not only are schools to be segregated but blacks are not to be allowed to attend college without passing a rigorous exam. It would be unlawful to even suggest that integration was a good idea. (But Pound’s essay on press freedom was also included in the leaflet.) And there were photos to spice up the mix: black men embracing white women and so on. The problem, for Pound, was the cover which included bits of his poetry.

Pound wrote Kasper that the broadside looked too much like Blast, the 1914 Vorticist manifesto put out by Wyndham Lewis. Kasper was puzzled and replied that he had never seen Blast. More likely, Pound was upset about his poetry being used this way. (Compare Blast here.)

Gramps, mebbe I’m wrong but I figure I’m working REAL POLITIK instead of
“practical politics.” The REAL has to master, in the end.
If I’m doing wrong, going down the wrong road, getting corrupt in character,
acting unConfucian, am in a rut or stupid, please so say. I would quit Citizens
Councils today if you asked me to. I will do anything you ask me to. Sire, you’re
my real Grampop sure.
You’re tops.
[. . .] our aim is NOT educationalist, defensive maneuvering, discussion-debate,
security- conscious, or ivory tower [. . .] We are aiming for a people’s
grass-roots, actionist, nationalist, ATTACK organization, UNCONTROLLED
BY THE POLITICIAN or the JEW or FINANCIER.

Kasper to Pound, Aug. 8, 1956, quoted in Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.144

I am also a bit puzzled by Pound’s reaction. After all, he actually added lines to a poem to glorify Crommelin and del Valle, so what is the complaint here? Anyway, Pound praised Kasper’s actions to others, at least later, after the Tennessee campaigns.

The Seaboard White Citizens Council accused returned to Charlottesville for trial on August 11 — one member deciding to forfeit bond rather than appear — and there were no convictions due to lack of evidence. The SWCC had their picture taken as they stood before the Confederate Monument in front of the Albemarle County courthouse. Kasper’s chum, Asa Carter, sent a congratulatory telegram comparing them to Confederate raiders Mosby and Forrest.

Immediately the group began leafletting again. Now they had a new broadside: Charlottesville Attack, an “Open Letter To The White Citizens of Charlottesville”.

Kasper wrote about meeting the city officials of Charlottesville — “…scoundrels who have let your city be put under attack by the reds, NAACP, pinks, race-haters and mongrelizers.” and warned “White citizens of Charlottesville!! …your children will go to school with niggers…”

First the sacred schoolhouse.
Then restaurants, picture-shows, DANCES, home, then marriage-bed. Now fight.

NOW. FIGHT! There’s nowhere to run

Meanwhile, pro-integration forces were organizing. A chapter of the Virginia Council on Human Relations formed in late-July. At its inaugural meeting a month later, Kasper and the SWCC invaded the room. Kasper seized the podium and yelled that the VCHR would be “run out of town”.

An SWCC mass meeting was poorly attended. The group continued to leaflet and burned some crosses, but then Virginia Governor Harry Byrd’s Massive Resistance strategy became policy. The court order to de-segregate Charlottesville schools was stayed because of new state legislation. A new round of legal maneuvers began, but the schools remained segregated. There was nothing left for the SWCC to do in Charlottesville. Kasper chose a new target: Clinton, Tennessee, and began to organize the foray that would attract national attention.

One thing that Kasper may not have understood was that many people saw the potential violence in his activities. The established segregationists in Charlottesville never wanted anything to do with him. Wanting to ban rock and roll seems so silly that it’s funny, but no one laughed about the assault on Nat King Cole. Worse was to come.

That’s enough for today. Part 2 will be about Kasper in Tennessee.

NOTES:

Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Saving the Republic is a major source for this post.

The standard bio of Pound now is David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. The third volume covers the years 1939 – 1972.
Daniel Swift, The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound
Matthew Feldman, “Ezra Pound’s Political Faith from First to Second Generation; or, “It is 1956 Fascism””, article that details Pound’s fascist beliefs and his activities after he was confined in St. Elizabeths. The title quote is from Kasper, but aside from the Kindergarten, Pound was involved with the British Union of Fascists and writing for their magazine, The European, until he was released in 1958.

Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers: the American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era has chapters on Kasper and Crommelin

Robert Byrd, NY Herald-Tribune, Four part series on Kasper Jan.30 – Feb. 4, 1957.

FBI reports on Kasper and others mentioned here are on-line at Archive.org as well as
publications of Eustace Mullins.
Crommelin FBI reports.
Carl McIntire publications
House Committee on UnAmerican Activities report on National Renaissance Party
Ernie Lazar FOIA Collection: Extreme Right Groups

Eustace Mullins, “My Struggle Against the Jews”

Greg Barnhisel, “‘Hitch Your Wagon to a Star’: The Square Dollar Series and Ezra Pound.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 92, no. 3 (1998): 273–95.

Jeremy Gray, “The night Nat King Cole was beaten on a Birmingham stage”

[See here for Part 1: Ezra Pound’s Kindergarten]

Why Tennessee? Possibly because of the widely-publicized integration of several schools there in 1955. The atomic city of Oak Ridge integrated under federal rules and there were no problems. Some small communities also moved to integrate early. These were rural districts that had a split schedule to allow students to work on their family farms during harvest. Generally, these districts would save money by integrating, rather than having to pay for separate black/white schooling. It is worth noting that Governor Frank Clement vetoed bills meant to stop de-segregation, and that Senators Kefauver and Gore both had refused to sign the Southern Manifesto.

Arkansas also integrated some rural districts in 1955. Everything went smoothly except in Hoxie, which was the subject of a Life Magazine photo essay. A local group, White America, Inc, formed to oppose integration. The courts upheld the school district in 1956, but the threat of violence remained. Governor Orval Faubus refused to help the local district — a critical point of difference between Arkansas and Tennessee. Many pupils, white and black, stayed out of school. The district won in court, but the school lost.

So school desegregation could be interrupted, perhaps stopped, with the proper tactics.

A model for Kasper’s Southern incursion was Bryant Bowles, founder of a National Association for the Advancement of White People. There was at least one other such organization — the concept was too obvious not to be used — but probably the groups did not know of one another in 1954. Bowles was a small-time contractor from Florida who had various petty crimes on his sheet. Some have accused him of starting the NAAWP as just another scam, but Bowles was also a true believer in segregation.

School segregation was written into the Delaware State Constitution but people weren’t too excited about it. One of the cases rolled into Brown vs. Board was that of a Delaware school that had integrated after a state order. The State Supreme Court had upheld the order, and of course, so did the Federal Supreme Court in the Brown decision. So Delaware started to desegregate in 1954, a year before the Supreme Court’s implementation order. This went fairly smoothly except in Milford, a town of five thousand. People were upset there for various reasons, but everyone thought things would settle down. Still, the Lakeview Avenue High School, where eleven black children were attending, had to cancel a dance for fear of race-mixing.

Comes now Bryant Bowles who had amassed six thousand dollars to fund his battle against race-mixing. He appears to have been aided by Conde McGinley, publisher of Common Sense, which printed articles by people like Eustace Mullins. Bowles hired airplanes with loudspeakers to fly over Milford announcing a public meeting at a nearby airfield. Three thousand people, including many from Virginia and Maryland, showed up.

Bowles made an impassioned speech defending segregation. He urged parents to boycott integrated schools, keep their children home and not to worry about truancy laws, the NAAWP would provide lawyers. He held his three-year-old daughter up to the crowd and said:

Do you think this little girl will go to school with Negroes? Not while there is breath in my body and gunpowder burns!

from Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers, p.19

The next day, less than a third of the Lakeview Avenue School students showed up. One of the eleven black students dropped out and registered at the William Henry School in Dover, nineteen miles away but the only black high school in Delaware. The boycott spread to other towns in the area that had “sympathy strikes”, while Bowles travelled the state, stirring things up. His speeches always contained references to violence, though Bowles was careful in his wording. Eventually all black students were removed from Lakeview Avenue School. This area of Delaware did not desegregate until after 1959.

So, Bowles won in Milford, but when he attempted similar tactics in Baltimore, he was shut down right away by local authorities. As he was also in Washington, D.C. The mayor of Philadelphia warned Bowles he would be arrested if he entered the city. Segregationists in other places froze Bowles out of the actions they were taking — he smelled like violence waiting to happen and people didn’t want him in their town. He was, after all, an outsider — an accusation Bowles had constantly to answer. And his past was catching up to him: reporters uncovered Bowles’ convictions for forgery, fraud, and stiffing his employees. He moved to Milford but there was nothing for him to do there because Lakeview School was now segregated. Florida authorities were after him for forgery and there were other crimes to answer for and the IRS was asking about taxes, so Bowles decamped to Texas. In 1957, he picketed the Harry Belafonte movie, Island in the Sun. A year later, he went to prison for murder.

But Bryant Bowles won — for a little while — and he created a model scenario that John Kasper was to imitate. Bowles created it, or perhaps somebody else did. Bowles’ lawyer was none other than Robert Furniss, sometime attorney for Ezra Pound and Cadmus Books, who had sent John Kasper to Alabama to campaign for Admiral Crommelin. [see Part 1]

Kasper in Clinton

Clinton, Tennessee, had a population of around four thousand in 1956. The high school also served the rural area around Clinton. The principal, D. J. Brittain, had begun preparing the school for integration during the previous Spring term. Papers on integration, the Constitution, and US history were assigned and discussed. The Mayor, the town Board, and the school board had worked out a plan. On August 20, eight hundred twenty students, including twelve African-Americans, were peacefully registered at the school. Classes were to begin a week later.

On August 25, Kasper burned a cross in Charlottesville, then drove all night in his battered white convertible to Clinton. There he went house-to-house, handing out leaflets. That evening, Kasper addressed a crowd of about fifty people. He said that the Supreme Court decision was not “the will of the people”, that parents should keep their children out of school, and that principal Brittain should be fired. Kasper slept in his car that night and the next day, Sunday the 26th, was arrested for vagrancy and inciting to riot.

On Monday, Kasper was in jail when the high school opened. Some people did show up with signs to demonstrate, but everything went smoothly in the school.

On Tuesday, Kasper’s charges were dropped for lack of evidence. Immediately on his release, Kasper went to Clinton High and confronted Brittain, demanding that he re-segregate or resign. Brittain refused.

By the time school let out, a crowd had formed that booed the black students as they left for home. That night, Kasper addressed several hundred students and adults at the courthouse. Nora Devereaux, Seaboard White Citizens’ Council member and manager of Cadmus Books, excitedly wrote to Ezra Pound that five thousand people showed up to hear Kasper, that Asa Carter was on his way up from Alabama after the legislature there passed some anti-integration measures, and that Admiral Crommelin had offered to make bond if Kasper was arrested again. It was true that Carter was coming to Clinton.

On Wednesday, the 29th, a crowd of five hundred had formed and some black students were roughed up. An hour before school closing time, the sheriff of Anderson County removed all twelve black students for their own safety. That night, the sheriff attended a meeting held by black families and offered to personally drive students to school each day. The offer was declined. At any rate, he had not been re-elected and his term would end that weekend.

Meanwhile, Brittain petitioned a federal judge for an injunction against those hindering integration. That night, Kasper was haranguing a crowd of around a thousand people, when US Marshals served him with a restraining order that demanded his appearance in a Knoxville courthouse. Kasper told the crowd that the order was meaningless, just like that of the Supreme Court. The crowd yelled for the marshals to be killed and burned a black man in effigy.

The next day, black students were brought into the high school via a side door. A mob of around two hundred was circulating in the area, and when school let out, began screaming and throwing rocks at the black students walking home.

Kasper appeared in court in Knoxville. He was immediately charged with violating the injunction by continuing to speak the night before and thrown in jail, awaiting a hearing in a week. Then a Federal judge found him in violation of a State court order and sentenced him to a year in prison. Kasper could not make the $10000 bond and stayed in jail during the events of the next few days.

The Clinton situation hit the news and people began converging on the community. Among them was Kasper’s old comrade-in-arms from Admiral Crommelin’s Senatorial campaign, Asa Carter. Carter whipped up the crowd, but did so with words that carefully skirted the terms of the injunction.

US Highway 25 was Clinton’s main street as well as the link to other places. The crowd began assaulting cars that contained blacks, some heading from other states, just driving through. Another group surrounded the mayor’s house, threating to dynamite it. Eventually, early Saturday morning, the crowds dispersed. A Clinton resident:

If you can imagine the courthouse, it was so thick with people that cars couldn’t move. Now, this was before any interstate, so the main route going south was coming through Clinton, right through Main Street. And, cars were being stopped, cars were being jostled. The people coming through were terrified. A gang of ruffians had taken over.

. . .

It was on a Friday night. Can you imagine driving through a little-bitty, sleepy town, and, all of a sudden, being surrounded by people stopping your car and shaking your car and threatening to turn it over? And, pulling the people out of it? Well, that was what was going on. That’s why they needed the extra policemen.

John G. Moore, Jim Crow History

Because of the recent election, the Anderson County sheriff’s office changed hands at midnight and was unable to mobilize what few officers it had. Clinton had a six-man police force. The Chief was in hospital, so only five were available. They made no arrests because they lacked the personnel even to take prisoners to jail. The acting police chief, Joe Wilson, called together those he could find willing to bolster his force. Forty-seven men, most of them veterans armed with their own weapons or with billy clubs, were sworn in. A few of the ex-sheriff’s force signed on. Saturday night, this small force was called to face a mob of more than two thousand.

One volunteer auxiliary recalled:

We didn’t want a lot of people from outside the town, even outside the State. We had cars with every tag in the South you can imagine there. We were prepared for integration, and we didn’t think these people should come in and stop what we had decided. This [integration] was going to happen. It woulda been completely smooth, completely smooth, if we had not had the outside interference. But, it was the most terrifying experience of my life. Never seen such hatred…. They would have kicked us, killed us, anything. It wouldn’t have mattered to them.

John G. Moore, Jim Crow History

Saturday the first, Mayor Buford Lewallen and the Clinton Board of Aldermen declared a state of emergency and begged Governor Frank Clement for help. A mob began forming that would build to over 2000. The auxiliary police force kept people moving but by 8 PM, the crowd began to storm the courthouse. The police used tear gas and repelled the attack. The mob formed for another assault and then the cavalry arrived in the form of a hundred State troopers dispatched by Clement. The State Police managed to secure the peace. The next day, six hundred Tennessee National Guardsmen with M-41 tanks arrived in Clinton. This was the first time that the National Guard was activated over school de-segregation in the South.

Although mob action was discouraged, there were still problems. On Sunday, a crowd was dispersed by Guardsmen wielding bayonets. During the week, things were quiet enough so that some of the troops were removed. Others had to be dispatched to Oliver Springs, twenty miles away, to put down a riot there. And more than half the Clinton students failed to attend school.

Across the border, in Sturgis, Kentucky, a mob halted the enrollment of a black child. Governor “Happy” Chandler, with the Clinton example before him, immediately sent the Guard into Sturgis. Soldiers escorted the child and her family to school to be registered. Then Sturgis and nearby Clay County segregationists adopted boycotts as a tactic. White parents kept their children out of school.

Kasper was in and out of jail, but between court appearances, he stirred up all the trouble he could. That was his stated purpose:

The people of Clinton needed a leader. I’m a rabble-rouser, a
trouble-maker. I’m not through up there. We want trouble. We want it now.
We need lots of rabble-rousers. Some of us may die and I may die too. It may
mean going back to jail, but I’m going back to fight. We went as far as we could
have gone legally. Now is the time to fight, even if it involves bloodshed.

from a speech in Birmingham, September 13, 1956, quoted in Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.171.

Kasper reminded his listeners that outsiders sneered at them, mocked them as incestuous hillbillies. One national story has this about them:

Poverty, isolation, inbreeding, ignorance, the cumulative effects of their traditional cornpone and fatback diet—all are reflected in their gaunt faces, their toothless gums, their gnarled and stunted bodies.

James Rorty, “Hate-Monger with Literary Trimmings: From Avant-Garde Poetry to Rear-Guard Politics”, Commentary, Dec.1956

Dehumanizing people is a racist mechanism, and doesn’t look any nicer when it is used to stigmatize poverty. (Do I need to point that out?) People in Clinton were aware of disdainful outside opinion and became defensive about living where they did. Kasper tried to mobilize these feelings but failed. He failed because he himself was an outsider, an Ivy-League educated Yankee with an agenda.

Kasper made incendiary speeches in Birmingham, Knoxville, and Battle, Alabama where he shared the stage with Asa Carter and one of the men who had attacked Nat King Cole. By late October, he was back in Washington, DC. He sent Pound birthday greetings (October 30):

Illustrious Prince:
Glorious, deathless of many names; Grampaw aye seeing all things, seer of
the inborn qualities of nature, of laws piloting all things.
Yr mighty Ldshp, please accept this bookshop on this 70th birthday and
please may the gods bless Grampaw always.
Also, Magnificent Capitan, our Treasured Lord, we ask the gods to help guide
us ever to you, O great light, brave Genral.
ARRIBA GRAMPAW, GOD BLESS GRAMPAW.

letter from JK to Pound, Marsh, Saving the Republic, p.173. Pound actually turned 71 in 1956.

The first dynamite bombing in Clinton took place September 26. It was meant to intimidate blacks from going to school. It was not the only method of intimidation used by the segregationists. Cars full of hooded Klansmen drove in cavalcade through black neighborhoods. Slowly. There were threats. Windows were smashed. Lights were shot out. Nasty phone calls. Petty vandalism. Businesses run by anti-segregationists were boycotted. The Mayor’s son was attacked. There were more bombings. Principal Brittain and his wife began going to hotels in other towns where they could get a night’s sleep. The Brittains were unable to have children and now Principal Brittain wondered, if he did have children, how could he protect them?

Meanwhile, the Clinton 12 continued to attend school and do their work as they were yelled at and spat on. Their leader was Bobby Cain, a Senior who would rather have traveled the seventeen miles to Knoxville each day and graduate with his friends. Every day now, he walked through crowds of jeering whites. At night, when he got home, he would sit and tremble. “I had to rush home, eat really fast and do my homework before it got dark. . .The lights were out in the neighborhood from being shot out or turned off and our lights were out too.” He wanted to quit, but his mother asked, “Where are your brothers and sisters going to school if you don’t stick?” So he stuck. But he told his parents, if I go, I won’t be the same Bobby Cain. He thought, if someone shoved him, he’d shove back. He says now, “I went to war.” One day a picketing woman called him a nigger and he turned away from her. She hit him across the back with a stick. Other members of the crowd moved in to attack Bobby and he pulled out a pocketknife. He was arrested right away. But that was the experience that changed him:

“After that day,” he says, “I found a little courage of my own. I won’t say I wasn’t afraid after that. But it came to me for the first time that I had a right to go to school. I realized that it was those other people who were breaking the law, not me. That night I determined to stick it out for Bobby Cain, and not for anybody else.”

George McMillan, “The Ordeal of Bobby Cain”, originally appeared in Collier’s, November 25, 1956

Streetlights or no, the black community had its own warning system, should a mob swarm up the hill, and the community was armed.

Kasper organized a teen-age auxiliary to the Seaboard White Citizens’ Council, The Tennessee Youth Council. They were instructed to harass the black students and paid to beat them up. Things were not as bad in school as the walk there and back where attacks occurred. White citizens began to walk groups of black students to the school to protect them.

Kasper had been indicted on charges of sedition — essentially, for inciting the riot of August 31 — in September, a few days before the first bombing. In mid-November, he was found Not Guilty, since he had been in jail the night of the 31st and, so, it was reasoned, could not have been responsible. Pound wrote:

Kasper acquitted of sedition/public cheers. . .None of the kikecution witnesses stood up under Xexam. At least got a little publicity for the NAACP being run by kikes not by coons.

letter to Olivia Agresti, Anglo-Italian facist sympathizer, November 1956.

Through the last week of November and into early December, Kasper led crowds who yelled and catcalled at the black students as they went to school. Some black families had enough and decided to boycott the school. But the court order sending these students to Clinton High meant that they could not enroll somewhere else. Boycotts meant losing the opportunity for an education.

Reverend Paul Turner, a Baptist minister, talked to black families about ending the boycott. There seemed no options if their children were to be educated. On December 4, Turner and other white men escorted some black students to Clinton High. After seeing the students safely inside, they split up. Turner was walking to his church when he was seized by a crowd who began to beat him. But Turner fought back, charging into the mob, until he was thrown against a parked car. “His head was being bounced against the fender of the car,” said a witness. A white woman tried to help him and had her face clawed by a woman who was with the segregationists. The police finally intervened and Turner was taken to hospital. That Sunday, face battered, he was back in the pulpit, “There is no color line at the cross of Jesus,” he preached.

Arrests were made on December 4, and a man charged with assault. The SWCC paid his bail right away, then gave complimentary KKK stickers to the arresting officers. Also on the 4th: some of the crowd that beat Turner tried to invade the high school; the wife of Principal Brittain was threatened when she tried to stop them; the High School was closed down and students sent home; the Klan drove a slow cavalcade through black neighborhoods; a black-owned business was dynamited. And John Kasper was arrested — not in Clinton, but hundreds of miles away on the highway headed to Washington where he was charged with speeding. Possibly he wanted not to be in Clinton when trouble happened. Some noticed that Kasper was always somewhere else when there was a bombing.

The beating of Rev. Turner seemed a kind of turning point in Clinton. Fourteen people were arrested for the crime, six were convicted. The same day Turner was attacked, there was a local election. Several segregationists ran for office; none were elected. Whether for or against segregation, most people were opposed to violence. A massive dynamite bomb exploded on February 15, 1957, damaging thirty homes and injuring many people. This was the eighth bombing since September. Now even segregationists wanted Kasper to stay away.

Kasper Becomes Famous

On January 30, 1957, the New York Herald Tribune began a four-part series on Kasper by Robert Bird that focused on his time in New York:

Kasper, a carpetbagger from Camden, N. J., and the cold-water-flats of bohemia lower Greenwich Village, is executive secretary of the Seaboard White Citizens Council of Washington. Former social intimate and confidante of Negro literary aspirants in Greenwich Village, he became overnight in Clinton, Tenn., September one of the most reckless and dangerous segregationist rabble-rousers in the South.

His racist propaganda is shot through with Ezra Pound’s ideology of race hatred.

Robert S. Bird, “Segregationist Kasper Is Ezra Pound Disciple”, NY Herald-Tribune, Jan 30, 1957

In the second article of the series (“How John Kasper Fights Integration”), Bird quotes “Virginians On Guard”, the flyer Kasper printed for his Charlottesville campaign. Bird spots the Poundian prose and notes that “whole phrases come from the Cantos”. Pound is referred to as “the insane poet and indicted traitor”. All this was very troubling to those working for Pound’s release.

Also troubled were Kasper’s black friends. The third installment of Bird’s series “Kasper: High-Brow To Rabble Rouser”, has the sub-head “Former Negro Friends in Village Can’t Understand His Turnabout”. Quoted in the article was one black man who had shared a Greek dictionary with Kasper: “I was very shocked when I found out what he was. I can’t understand it.” Readers of the black New Amsterdam News and the Pittsburgh Courier read interviews with people who had known Kasper, who were all astonished and hurt by his revealed racism.

In several accounts of the beliefs of Ezra Pound and his followers, there is an attitude that might be summed up as, “He wasn’t racist. Anti-semitic, yes, but not racist.” That’s nonsense. This kind of hatred is not a single-target matter. It’s easy enough for an anti-Semite to add blacks, browns, gays, Masons, or any other human division you can name to the Hate List. The haters need targets for their own anger and disturbed feelings. There is nothing peculiar about Pound, Kasper, and their ilk adding blacks to their other hatreds.

Kasper had actually tried to get people to join the NAACP in September of 1955, according to Bird and the FBI Reports. He said that, if he were black, he would join. But he refused to do so as a white man because the organization was run by Jews. Two months later he opened his Washington bookstore. There he met Robert Furniss, who would send him to Alabama campaigning for Admiral Crommelin. That is when, Kasper said later, he became a segregationist, in the months between September 1955 and the summer of 1956. Marsh tries to understand this as an intellectual shift brought on by reading Pound’s standbys, Louis Agassiz and Leo Frobenius. I think this is misguided. Kasper was trying to develop his personal destiny.

When Kasper apologized to Babette Deutsch (see Part 1) he said that he had once been drawn to Nietzsche, Machiavelli, and the “political” Ezra Pound; that he had once believed “That the weak have no justification for living except service in the weak. What is a little cruelty to the innocuous when it is expedient for the strong ones who have the right to alter the laws of life and death before their natural limit?” But, Kasper said, he had become aware through the “living example of another that the myth of Fascism is ‘a clear and present danger'”. Deutsch politely said this was “insincere”. I say it’s open mockery.

Kasper wants to be a political force, a rabble-rouser. He wants to be Important. “[Kasper] declared that, as for himself, he was prepared to go to any extreme to make his name known to history, and was convinced that sooner or later his chance would come.” He is a “strong one” above the laws meant for the weak. Kasper is shaping a personal variant of the lone hero fulfilling an intense destiny beyond good and evil. Kasper stated how he meant to achieve that goal in a letter to Ezra Pound: “We are aiming for a people’s grass-roots, actionist, nationalist, ATTACK organization. . .” [quoted Marsh, p.144, caps in original] (“Action” was a common term used by fascists. In his writings, Kasper usually couples it with “Attack”.)

That’s my take and it was also that of Charles Beaumont, whose novel, The Intruder, is based on Kasper in Clinton.

Charles Beaumont and Roger Corman Tackle “The Intruder”

Charles Beaumont wrote fiction, and film and TV scripts. Some classic Twilight Zone episodes are probably his best known work. The Intruder was published 1958, but the manuscript was likely finished sometime in 1957. The title was probably suggested by Arthur Gordon’s article “Intruder in the South”, Look Magazine, Feb. 19, 1957. And I think the black student character is based on Bobby Cain from the article quoted above. Other characters are based on locals, white and black. Beaumont himself played a part in the movie.

The Intruder tells of Adam Cramer who visits a Southern town and stirs up racial antagonism there. Why? Because Cramer has a vision of himself as “the man on horseback”, the dictator who will clean up after messy democracy collapses (from Georges Boulanger, the original “man on horseback”). He is the decisive figure who brings order from chaos. In one scene, Cramer compares himself to Hannibal. He writes his old academic mentor and asks if he wants a role in the New Order he is creating. This is very much like the letters between Kasper and Ezra Pound. Pound even joked about being Kasper’s Aristotle — Aristotle having tutored Alexander the Great. [letter to Bo Setterlind, cited in Marsh, p.157; also see here]

Cramer’s mentor is Max Blake, a college professor who runs a “nursery for dictators”. Blake’s strategy: seize “upon an area of unrest” and “gain the support of the sheep who would not yet consciously understand the concept of single authority”. The masses are kept in a state of flux while the would-be dictator consolidates his power. “Play upon their ignorance; underline and reflect their prejudices; make them afraid.”

Cramer is presented as a man who desperately needs some kind of self-validating success, so he follows Blake’s plan. Pound was not so simple as Max Blake, and perhaps his concepts of political organizing were not as sharply defined, but Kasper’s desire for Pound’s approval is very much like that of Cramer’s for Blake.

In the novel, Max Blake visits Cramer and tells him that the theories he espoused were just conversation fodder, not to be taken seriously, only a bit of contrarian irony ha-ha. He tries to persuade Cramer to quit rabble-rousing and leave town, but Cramer realizes that his old mentor is just a second-rate professor who is frightened about losing his job and cuts himself loose from Blake.

There are elements of the relationship that hint at Blake being gay. Sublimated homosexuality is one of two common psychiatric tropes used in the 1950s. The other is: “It’s all the Mother’s fault.” Beaumont uses that one, too. Neither seem particularly useful in understanding Kasper, but the man did wish to live up to some kind of ideal that would please his father who died in 1954. Kasper wrote about him several times to Pound.

Max Blake does not appear at all in the movie version of The Intruder and viewers may find themselves wondering what motivates Cramer. Otherwise, Beaumont’s script follows the novel. Cramer, played by William Shatner, arrives in a small town and begins stirring up mischief. He makes incendiary speeches and creates an organization. But Cramer has a problem: he is somewhat confused about sex. He comes on to teen-aged girls, but never consummates the relationship — the novel suggests this is something he may not be able to do, even though he beds older, less chaste women. I’m not certain what Beaumont is after here; some kind of virgin/whore thing, I suppose.

There is a curious note in Kasper’s FBI files that he was fired from Household Finance for “peculiar” remarks he made around a fifteen-year-old girl. But it should be noted that this part of the FBI files includes a bunch of reports jammed together that are often questionable. (For instance, Kasper’s bookstore was hardly a hangout for “liberals” as one report has it.) Investigators tried very hard to discover some warped sexual motivation for Kasper, but came up with nothing substantial.

Anyway, in The Intruder, a sexual encounter eventually brings Cramer down in an unconvincing dramatic climax. Before that, a church is bombed and the black minister killed. The white editor of the local paper is attacked and hospitalized. And Cramer threatens a high-school girl into accusing a black student of rape.

Beaumont attempts to portray some of the pain that the Kasper/Cramer incident caused black people in 1956, and the centuries-long suffering that preceded these events. He also has white characters, decent white characters who have failed to change things:

It’s us, the nice people, the intelligent, sophisticated people — we’re the ones to blame for this, not the ignorant hillbillies and the cheap neurotics! They have no power to act; we have, and always have had. But we didn’t act. The guilt is ours. . .

Charles Beaumont, The Intruder, Ch. 18

Maybe Adam Cramer is just into villainy for its own sake. Shatner plays him as a mysterious presence, a man battling inner demons as he seeks to create chaos. He wears shades and sweats a lot. Kasper was image-conscious. He wore a white stetson hat that added to his 6’4″ height. Both Kasper and Shatner wore white linen suits.

Roger Corman wanted to make a film that said something important. He and his brother, Gene, managed to produce the movie, then couldn’t get it distributed. It was the only movie Corman ever made that lost money.

The Intruder was filmed in Missouri and the movie people felt that they were outsiders who were in danger. Shatner pranked the crew once, by pretending that a mob was moving on the motel where they were staying. The last shots were taken while the crew was literally on the run, chased out of town.

Graduation

May 17, 1957, Bobby Cain became the first black graduate from Clinton High School. He went to the gym to turn in his cap and gown, when the lights suddenly went out and he was attacked by a group of white kids. In the dark, they hit each other as much as they did Cain. The light snapped on and off, the fighting went on until some adults walked in. Bobby Cain went home and grabbed a shotgun. He meant, he said, to walk down the hill and shoot everyone who “didn’t look like him”. His family stopped him. In the Fall, Cain went on to Tennessee Tech.

October 5, 1958, Clinton High School was destroyed by a dynamite blast. The town of Oak Ridge opened up some buildings that were used as Clinton’s high school for the next two years. Students were bussed in and greeted by the Oak Ridge High School band who played the Clinton Alma Mater. No one was ever charged with the bombing.

After the destruction of the high school, Billy Graham used Clinton as a site for his crusade. Kasper attacked him, but did not win any support doing so. Graham said it was time for white people to take the lead in integration. Perhaps he changed some minds.

At the beginning of 1957, Kasper was famous and as important as he ever would be in his life; by the Fall of 1958, he was a spent force. Part 3 is about Kasper’s end — and that of Pound’s kindergarten, as well.

Notes:

Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound and John Kasper, Saving the Republic
Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers: the American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era has a chapter on Bryant Bowles as well as one on Kasper.
FBI reports on Kasper.
FBI reports on Asa Carter
Ernie Lazar FOIA Collection: Extreme Right Groups

David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. Volume III, The Tragic Years: 1939 – 1972.

The entire Clinton incident was covered one year later on Edward Murrow’s See It Now: Clinton and the Law. Well worth watching. Includes video of Kasper orating.
The Clinton 12 are the subject of a documentary
Jeaneane Payne, “Black History: The Clinton 12”
George McMillan, “The Ordeal of Bobby Cain”, also Cain in a 2022 interview.
Memoir of an auxiliary officer during the Clinton riot.
Margaret Anderson, The Children of the South. Anderson was a teacher and guidance counselor at Clinton HS.
Holden et al, Clinton, Tennessee: A Tentative Description and Analysis of the School Desegregation Crisis (Field Reports on Desegregation, published by Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith)

Charles Beaumont, The Intruder

The Intruder is on both YouTube and the Internet Archive.
Roger Corman, How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime
Documentary about Charles Beaumont and The Intruder.

Marie-Noëlle Little, The Knight and the Troubadour – Dag Hammarskjöld and Ezra Pound (free on-line)