‘God, my god, you folks are DUMB!!!’: Pound’s Rome Radio Broadcasts

Abstract

In this chapter I discuss the series of broadcasts made by Pound in Rome Radio’s ‘American Hour’, transcripts of which have been published by Leonard Doob in Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1978). These talks were audible on shortwave in the United States and on short- and medium-wave in Great Britain. Individual speeches were generally directed at either an American or a British audience, although a few were directed at both. A number of these talks were monitored by the BBC and by the Princeton Listening Center. Between October 1941 and July 1943 the broadcasts were monitored more or less systematically by the Federal Broadcast Intelligence Service of the Federal Communications Commission; on the basis of the service’s reports Pound was indicted for treason in 1943. A selection of these transcripts is available on microfilm, entitled Ezra Pound Broadcasts in Federal Communications Commission Transcripts of Short-Wave Broadcasts. The texts that Leonard Doob reproduces in Ezra Pound Speaking are almost all reproduced from Pound’s prepared scripts, which often differ significantly from the FCC monitors’ transcripts.KeywordsFederal Communication CommissionFree SpeechRadio BroadcastAmerican AudienceInterrogative ElementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.