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  The Tale of John Kasper
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ContributorThomas Walker 
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DescriptionWhen reading a biography of the Ezra Pound, one of the premier poets of the twentieth century, references to a man named John Kasper caught my eye.

According to Pound’s biographer, in 1950 Kasper, a twenty-year-old Columbia University student, wrote
Pound, who was living in Washington, D.C., an adulatory letter saying that he had just written a term paper that compared Pound favorably to the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Pound wrote back, and this began weekly correspondence between the two men. Kasper’s letters to Pound are contained in the Yale and Indiana University libraries (evidently, Kasper didn’t keep Pound’s letters) and are characterized by Pound’s biographer as “extraordinary.”

After Columbia, Pound’s biographer reports, Kasper opened a bookstore in the Greenwich Village area of New York City that stocked Pound’s writing.

Eventually Kasper moved from New York
City to Washington, primarily motivated, it appears, by the desire to
be around Pound, whom he greatly admired. Kasper and Pound became quite close, to the point that Kasper has been described as a protégé of Pound’s. In any case, it seems clear that Kasper was strongly influenced by Pound’s political and social ideas; Pound was a white racial advocate, which included antagonism toward Jews.
Kasper started up a second bookstore in Washington and, with a partner, set up a publishing company that published some of Pound’s poetry, as well as that of other poets, among them, Charles Olson.

Immediately following the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the Brown case outlawing racially segregated schools, Kasper organized the Seaboard White Citizens Council. The motto of Kasper’s
organization was “Honor-Pride-Fight: Save the White.” Its avowed purpose was to prevent school integration in Washington. As it turned out, it wasn’t in Washington that Kasper fought school integration but rather in Tennessee. Pound’s biographer refers to the “dramatic events” in the town of Clinton, Tennessee around the
integration of Clinton High School, and quotes an historian as saying
that Kasper “had a large hand in the violence that plagued Tennessee in 1956 and 1957.”
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