Jefferson’s Rebel: William Carlos Williams and Nationalism

AbstractThis essay examines William Carlos Williams’s relationship to economic, cultural, and political nationalism. First, it argues that Williams’s fascination with the Social Credit movement was rooted in the nationalist paradigm of economics of C.H. Douglas and Friedrich List. This section also examines archival letters between Williams and literary critic and founder of the American Social Credit Movement Gorham Munson in order to uncover some of Williams’s motivations and values that led him to sympathize with economic and cultural nationalism. The essay then provides a close reading of Williams’s poem “Pastoral [When I was younger]” in order to show how his political and economic nationalist ideology influenced his aesthetics, particularly in the way that Williams imagines communities in his poetry. By analyzing both his economics and poetry, this essay concludes that Williams was more closely tied to broader ideological trends toward nationalism in early twentieth-century thinking than has often been thought, thereby revising current understandings of the politics of modernism.