What is the connection between Ezra Pound, the Constitution, and the Steel Industry?
The steel industry is making profits, hand over fist. But it’s not passing the profits on to the workers. So the 30,000 members of the United Steelworkers Union are talking strike. If the workers wind up benefiting from the current boom, it’ll be in spite of the industry, not because of it.
Which reminds me…
Literary scholars know the publishing house New Directions as the publisher of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Tennessee Williams, and Wallace Stevens, among others. It was founded by James Laughlin, scion and heir of the Pittsburgh Laughlin family, of Jones & Laughlin Steel fame, after Pound told him that he didn’t have a future as a poet.
Constitutional scholars know that Jones & Laughlin Steel produced one the most transformative Supreme Court cases of the New Deal era, NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel, which upheld the Wagner Act, thereby making joining and organizing a union a fundamental right, blessed by the Constitution (the Commerce Clause, however, not the 13th Amendment, as an earlier generation of labor organizers and scholars had hoped). With that case, as Karen Orren argued, the entirety of the old constitutional order, grounded in feudal common law, came crashing down.
NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel was decided in 1937, one year after Laughlin founded New Directions.
So two bursts of modernism: one literary, one constitutional; one in 1936, the other in 1937—both the products of the American steel industry, in spite of itself.
Shana Tova.