stylistic:tone
Mullins and Kasper

While in St. Elizabeths, Pound would often decline to talk to psychiatrists with names he deemed Jewish (he called psychiatrists "kikiatrists"), and he apparently told Charles Olson: "I was a Zionist in Italy, but now I'm for pogroms, after what I've experienced in here (SLiz)." He advised visitors to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he referred to any visitor he happened not to like as Jewish. In November 1953 he wrote to Olivia Rossetti Agresti that Hitler was "bit by dirty Jew mania for World Domination, as yu used to point out/ this WORST of German diseases was got from yr/ idiolized and filthy biblical bastards. Adolf clear on the baccilus of kikism/ that is on nearly all the other poisons. but failed to get a vaccine against that."

Pound struck up a friendship with Eustace Mullins, apparently associated with the Aryan League of America and author of the 1961 biography This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound. Even more damaging was his friendship with John Kasper, a Ku Klux Klan member who, after Brown v. Board of Education (a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision mandating racial desegregation in public schools), set up a Citizens' Council chapter, the Seaboard White Citizens' Council in Washington. Members had to be white, supportive of racial segregation, and believers in the divinity of Jesus. Kasper wrote to Pound after admiring him at university, and the two became friends. In 1953 Kasper opened a far-right bookstore, "Make it New", at 169 Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, that displayed Pound's work in the window. With Pound's cooperation, he and another Pound admirer, T. David Horton, set up Square Dollar Series, a publishing imprint that reprinted Pound's books and others he approved of.

It became increasingly clear that Pound was schooling Kasper in the latter's pro-segregation activism. In January and February 1957 the New York Herald Tribune ran a series of articles on their relationship, after which the FBI began photographing Pound's visitors. One article alleged that some of Kasper's pamphlets had, as John Tytell put it, "a distinctly Poundian ring" to them. Kasper was jailed in 1956 over a speech he made in Clinton, Tennessee, and he was questioned about the 1957 bombing of the Hattie Cotton School in Nashville. After Pound left hospital in 1958, the men kept in touch; he wrote to Kasper on 17 April 1959: "Antisemitism is a card in the enemy program, don't play it.... They RELY ON YOUR PLAYING IT."