Charles Olson: Psychological Warfare Executive

Taking a day job is awfully inconvenient for a young poet. Allen Ginsberg worked as a baggage handler at a Greyhound bus terminal; Jack Kerouac, a dishwasher and a night guard. Robert Creeley had a stint as a chicken farmer. Charles Olson, the son of a mailman, followed his father’s vocation in the summers of his early twenties. In fact, he would become a civil servant not once but twice: first at the US Postal Service and second at the federal government’s Office of Wartime Information, as a coordinator of anti-fascist counterpropaganda during World War II. In this sense, Olson was a man of letters in various forms throughout his life. But his work in the latter field also made him a man of numbers, as the only experimental US poet with experience monitoring a foreign-born population of 10.5 million who were collectively reading nearly a thousand varieties of newspapers printed in at least twenty languages with a total circulation of 4.9 million. Observing the counterpropaganda process from above and behind closed doors, Olson found that the government’s use and abuse of statistics (a nineteenth-century term whose origins literally refer to statist operations) was a theme he could not leave out of his literary writing. Despite eventually withdrawing from government work—vowing to have “nothing to do with it”—he carried the numerical idiom of state operations and population management into the fabric of his poetics.[1] These practices and their attendant moral dilemmas would influence his writing for the rest of his career.
  
Like his contemporaries in midcentury experimental American poetry—Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Bob Kaufman, say—Olson’s work bears many late-modernist hallmarks: multiple and fragmented voices, collaged historical and mythic interjections, patchwork versification, and horror at humanity’s physical and moral failings. However, his incorporation of statistical quantification, and its ethical implications, into his composition sets him apart from those peers. From his wartime writing to his final publications such as The Maximus Poems, one finds an enduring interest in numbers and in the sheer numerical scale of undertaking involved in building and maintaining a nation (or an empire). One page of The Maximus Poems, for instance, lists estimates of the provisions needed by fourteen men setting up a winter station at Stage Head in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the year 1624: “7 hundredweight” (or 700lbs) of “biscuit bread,” and “7 hhds” (7 hogshead, or 441 US gallons) of “beer or sider.”[2] This is followed by a list of multiple orders of sixteen different types of tools, mostly for woodworking, and 8,000 nails in three varieties. Summarizing for the whole town several pages before, he states simply: “It cost / $30,000 // to get / Gloucester / started.”[3] This overarching program of apprehending scale through aggregation and containment in the discrete runs alongside the endless verbal proliferation, digression, and breaking open of form that is typical across the poet’s corpus. Years, dates, distances, weights, and prices all add flesh to the “saturation job” of The Maximus Poems, which for Olson began by noticing how transactions were an integral component of an empire at its apex as well as its colonial origins.[4]
  
In the fall of 1942, Olson was thirty-one, and—having abandoned his doctoral studies at Harvard four years prior—had used up the funds from a Guggenheim Fellowship for the book-length work on Herman Melville that would later become Call Me Ishmael. Ending more than a decade in higher education, he took a $25-a-week job as a publicity director with the New York Civil Liberties Union, followed by another one at the Common Council for American Unity, where he served as chief of the Foreign Language Information Service.[5] At the Common Council, he met Alan Cranston—later a longstanding US Senator for California—who, attempting to warn the public about the rise of the Nazis, published a pirated, annotated, and uncensored translation of Mein Kampf that sold half a million copies before Hitler’s US publisher successfully sued to halt production.[6] Cranston moved on to become assistant director of the federal government’s Office of Facts and Figures, led by poet and scholar Archibald MacLeish. Firmly embedded in the US’s growing propaganda efforts during World War II, Cranston offered Olson the opportunity to join him as a Special Defense Writer in a government agency newly formed by executive order from President Roosevelt, the Office of War Information (OWI).[7]
  
Departing a largely nocturnal lifestyle for a day job fighting fascism, Olson relocated with his common-law wife, Constance “Connie” Wilcock, from Greenwich Village to Washington, DC. At the OWI he joined colleagues such as MacLeish, painter Ben Shahn, Viking Press publisher Harold Guinzberg, and poet Muriel Rukeyser, while upping his salary to $75 a week. Olson’s work built on his former roles, drafting press releases for foreign-language newspapers as well as promotional literature to present the war against fascism as an effort requiring the involvement of every immigrant in the United States.[8]
  
One specific practice that bridged the Common Council and the OWI was the examination of foreign-language newspapers throughout the US—along with their subscribers and political alignments. In documents dated September 1942, the month Olson transitioned from the former job to the latter, he was provided with a list of forty-four newspapers across twenty-two states, all German-language, with innocuous names such as the Iowa Reform and the California Demokrat. These were both described as “pro-Hitler” periodicals, with a weekly circulation of 2,000–3,000 copies.[9] A much larger newspaper, the Correspondent of Baltimore (with a supposed daily circulation of 21,000), was judged to have a political balance of “50/50 Hitler.” Other, less-frequently used categories were “unpolitical,” “social democratic,” “liberal,” “Catholic,” and finally one marked simply “Swiss paper.”[10] These labels represent minority constituencies in the US, and attempts by editors to capture segments of the market for political opinion, as well as to expand their audiences.
  

  
Pro-fascist literature was, in fact, common among foreign-language-speaking communities throughout the war. According to the data provided to Olson, the total weekly circulation of German-language newspapers judged to have at least an even mix of editorial content supporting the Axis during World War II was at least 624,000. National census data tells us that the German-born population in the US in 1940 was just over 1.2 million, meaning there was roughly one of those newspapers for every two German immigrants.[11] The German American Bund, the leading US fascist political organization of the period, is furthermore estimated to have had 25,000 dues-paying members at the time.[12]
  
The OWI’s counterpunch to these papers included Olson’s first standalone publication, the 1943 two-color bilingual recruitment pamphlet Spanish Speaking Americans in the War: The Southwest. It bore such headings as “TODOS – ALL of us are in this war,” and featured a photo of an amiable Franklin D. Roosevelt shaking hands with Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho.[13] The OWI undoubtedly intended to gather recruits for the war effort, but the underlying assertion was that Spanish-speaking peoples of North and Central America should support the world’s hegemonic liberal democracies and their values. This was a salient concern for US strategists given that multiple Latin American countries, Argentina most prominently, had leaders sympathetic to the Axis.
  
Across Olson and his colleagues’ annotations of newspapers and in their publicity materials such as Spanish Speaking Americans in the War, a particular view emerges of minority populations as numerical figures, as quantities of opinion to be influenced. This relationship between the individual subject and a broader sampled population, between the propagandee and the technology of broadcast, is a theme that develops in Olson’s poetry only after he had worked for the OWI. If Olson’s early work drew heavily on mainstream high modernism, his encounter with state quantification methods set his writing on a different path. No better demonstration of his early style can be found than in these lines, considered by Ralph Maud to be Olson’s first poem, written Gloucester, MA, in 1940, two years before joining the OWI:
  

The bulk of the poem is neo-Romantic and quasi-mythical—Olson sits in for the subject of an American Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Only the final two lines indicate a nascent political project: a “flood” is revealed to be a nondescript “northern war” coupled with “native / smug content,” where the precise historical referents are unclear. This poem shows concern for the alienation caused by internal divisions within an emergent political landscape, but it is not yet immersed in a specific discourse of statistics or offset by a liberal humanism epitomized by the “we the people” of the Constitution.
  
However, the title of Olson’s first poetry publication—the 1948 pamphlet y & x—immediately signals the substitution of values for symbols, and therein a growing awareness of the anonymization of such a “people.” The Second World War, demanding greater codebreaking and ballistics power, pushed computers from mechanical to electromechanical operations, making them by 1950 simultaneously 100 times faster and far cheaper than they had been four decades prior.[15] Taking survey data, generating million-point datasets, and forecasting a hundred years ahead, scientists far exceeded what their nineteenth-century predecessors had imagined for the field originally dubbed “social physics.”[16] Statistics were the working matériel not only of Olson’s office—originally that of Facts and Figures—but also of the emerging social-scientific research establishment, which in the postwar era would be largely funded by the Pentagon.[17] Thus, by 1955, Olson declared in his “Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn” that sociology was, without exception, “a lot of shit… this dreadfull beast, some average and statistic.”[18] For him, the arrival of mass numbers turned intellectual work into a project of deducing meaningless averages at a distance, rather than of forming specific claims based on the “LOCAL AND THE SENTIMENTAL,” which he viewed as the appropriate foundation for American national—and even continental—culture.[19] While he used numbers in his own literary work, he turned sharply from the newly formed datasets that served government policy prescriptions.
  
A growing awareness of the moral implications of computational statistics is evident in y & x’s poem “The K,” where Olson recasts the individual as subject to a “tide” that “moves him to his moon,” concluding soon after that: “The affairs of men remain a chief concern,” directly rebuking the treatment of humans as data. This interplanetary mysticism reaches a roadblock mid-poem, however, when the writer’s demographic anxiety over his own fate emerges: he will not “see the year 2000” unless he “break[s] the fatal male small span.”[20] These worries invoke a topic that would preoccupy social scientists for decades to come: life expectancy and mortality trends.[21]
  
In the opening poem of y & x, “La Préface,” Olson types out his birth year, 1910, followed by his trademark open parenthesis emphasizing formal unboundedness. Then he adds these lines: “We are the new born, and there are no flowers. / Document means there are no flowers.”[22] The arrival of a newborn as an instance of paperwork without ceremony is another self-effacing verdict, announcing to the exacting administrators of the life course that his generational peers born in the twentieth century should expect to be scrutinized and risk-assessed upon arrival rather than welcomed. His lines anticipate the dark side of the moral panic surrounding fertility that would later be framed as civilization-ending onslaught on both sides of the Cold War divide. As Ben Hickman puts it, both the US and the Soviet Bloc were united in Olson’s view by a “shared alienation from populations,” culminating years later in Paul Ehrlich’s false prophecy of overpopulation-induced worldwide famine, The Population Bomb (1968).[23] This logic would eventually lead, in China, to the enactment of the One-Child Policy in the 1970s, as a result of population forecasts run by rocket scientists. The millions of forced abortions and sterilizations that followed were rationalized as the cost of doing business as a postwar superpower.[24] Even as early as the 1940s, Olson’s front-row seat in the theater of operations in a war by numbers entered his writing in the form of a preoccupation with quantities broadly construed, and cemented his view that large-scale administration by statistics was a double-edged sword at best. The same bureaucracies of the New Deal that had given work to millions, guaranteed pensions to the elderly, and outlawed child labor would in turn be appropriated for foreign-policy projects aimed at global supremacy.
  
Olson’s poetry judges the perpetrators of transactional government policy who forced his hand in exiting civil service at the end of the war. Returning to “The K”—this time in its penultimate stanza—we see Olson describing the government’s transition from Roosevelt-era progressive liberalism to the dealmaking of the “merchandise men.”[25] The Truman administration, in Olson’s view, “drove an inhuman bargain,” and he thus wonders aloud when an “end to romans, hippocrats and christians” might arrive.”[26] “Hippocrat” is a homophone for “hypocrite,” but with different prefix and suffix roots—an Olsonian neologism, just as “perjorocracy” (government of the worst) was Ezra Pound’s. In the case of Olson’s invention, the etymological root “hippo-” for horse makes hippocracy, a government by horses, in which all politics is a kind of backdoor “horse trading.” As a matter of fact, the term “horse trading” was printed more frequently during the early years of Truman’s presidency than at any other point in its two-hundred-year history up to today.[27] Transactions became the dominant governing style, from the well-known Operation Paperclip—German rocket scientists headhunted for US government jobs after 1945 and thereby saved from prosecution in The Hague—to the data-for-immunity deal struck by General Douglas MacArthur with the Japanese scientists of Unit 731, responsible for the atrocities of medical and military “research” on prisoners of war.[28]
  
By 1944, Olson’s time in Washington was ending, signaled in a well-known New York Times headline: “Two OWI Aides Resign.”[29] It seems clear that he left partly out of growing political frustration, and partly because many of his colleagues were doing the same (Ben Shahn had left in the summer of 1943).[30] However, Olson’s detachment from the world of politics was far from a clean break. After departing the OWI, he briefly worked for the Democratic National Committee, attempting to re-elect a now frail Roosevelt to a fourth term. His primary task was to win support for the Democrats among immigrant communities, a continuation of his work at the OWI.[31] On an otherwise blank page that follows his plea to the head of the Democratic National Committee to engage such voters, he writes:
  

Writing out with separate headings the number of Germans, Italians, Poles, and Hungarians living in the US, Olson adds a subheading of “two common characteristics”: namely the “special valuing” of themselves as Americans and their ties to a European home country through “letters, money and gifts.”[33] The facts begin as numbers with relevant breakdowns, but Olson immediately attaches particulars that embed these populations in a cultural context. Valuing their newfound national identity, these groups identify with their homeland through intangible ties of social affiliation. Just as his OWI populations were to be steered away from fascism, such newly arrived Americans had to be counted on to sustain the dream of New Deal politics by voting for its proponents. Olson may have worked for the DNC for only six months or fewer; perhaps the DNC’s own horse-trading—when senior party leaders chose Truman to replace Roosevelt over Olson’s preferred vice-presidential candidate, the popular and progressive Henry Wallace, in closed-door negotiations—dimmed his hope to have influence in mainstream politics.
  
But Olson hung on even a little longer. A letter from June 17, 1944, exactly one month after his resignation from the OWI, outlines an offer to be appointed “Psychological Warfare Executive” at the same organization, with an annual salary of $4,600 (about $85,000 today), alongside forms already filled in by Olson, describing the nature of his original resignation as “Dissatisfied.”[34] He didn’t take the job, but he was interested enough to fill out the paperwork, adding additional pages to the endless handwritten and typed drafts of his resume that litter the archival files from this phase of his life.
  

If the offer to become a “Psychological Warfare Executive” thus appears (despite the sinister title) to have been tempting, soon after leaving the OWI Olson pivoted emphatically in the other direction. His writing began to express thinly veiled outrage at how developments in military-backed technology had outpaced human moral capacity to limit their use. Among his unpublished work, Olson’s disillusionment with the state apparatus surfaces in an untitled prose fragment beginning “There are two wars on,” first explored by Catherine Seelye in 1975 and later by Alan Gilbert in 2017.[35] A key excerpt:
  

  
This is testimony to the treatment of peoples as dispersible: conscripted into conflicts to be worked to death, tortured and disfigured beyond recognition, disappeared and made legible only in the form of embargoed archival records. Combatant or not, one’s presence in a twentieth-century conflict zone—or zone of government interest—makes one a de facto signatory to a contract of unlimited liability, where working individuals, as Keston Sutherland puts it, are “murderously squashed and denatured into meaningless, anonymous dot-likeness.”[37] If the men Olson identifies are “little” because of their insignificance in the face of state bureaucracy, then they are little, too, in the numeric sense—the variation of a singular datum within a population-size dataset is almost always “statistically insignificant.” Such a reduction makes population management easy, because identifying markers of individuality (the nuances of convictions, of connections to family, town, or homeland, all manner of humane ephemera) complicates the task of broad-scale social stratification. This is especially true if the end purpose is to purge individuals belonging to a certain identity category, or to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of supporting one political constituency over another. The zero-sum management by numbers among elites that Olson participated in led him to conclude that a war of liberation against fascism had evolved into the absorption of former political enemies for the purpose of consolidating US strength during the imminent Cold War. The “big war,” Olson writes, was a “defeat for the people,” leaving only local struggles for self-determination in places such as China, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia. His call to “unwrap the charters” and “pacts” shows skepticism of the crystallization of power under NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and even the UN Charter. It also points to such regions as having “little” local subpopulations with unique political aspirations that were either ignored or actively suppressed as the American- and Soviet-led Cold War blocs were formed. The former Yugoslavia, aligned with neither, became a federation of six Balkan republics and two autonomous Serbian provinces, allowing “men of Europe [to] stand up to the beast,” in which small peoples risk being appropriated for big, globalist aims. “There are two wars on”—undated, but probably written in the closing years of the war—bridges Olson’s earlier work at the OWI (self-directed freedom to propose projects with fellow artists) with the latter: being forced to work on assignment.[38] It marks the point where his day job had become incompatible with his political instincts.
  
Meanwhile, Olson was also gearing up to make an independent case for the defense of political minorities in an article for Survey Graphic entitled “People v. The Fascist, U.S. (1944),” which argues that individuals should be able to sue for libel based on a group identity. This legal remedy, Olson believed, would combat the key fascist strategy of dividing society through the defamation of minority groups. Reasserting his motif of big lies, Olson argues for the importance of civil protections as a bulwark against dehumanization:
  

  
Ever an adherent of the civil rights values that would come to be known in the 1960s as the “Great Society,” Olson is clear that countering these “attacks” would require legal reform as well as rehabilitation of the powers made possible by federal government agencies. His article ends by arguing that libel law reform must be accompanied by regulatory changes at the Federal Communications Commission, including the institution of “active governmental education, information, and counter-propaganda,” alongside private-sector efforts to “eliminate poisons from the stream of communications.”[40] Free now to write openly on the government’s failure to permanently dispel public interest in fascism, Olson claims psychological warfare would need to be waged internally by the state on behalf of “the people”—his constitutionally derived bedrock term that runs throughout both his creative and critical work—in order reanimate and sustain the aims of US democracy. Both the “Two Wars” fragment and the “People v. The Fascist” article are verdicts that, after three years of observing populations from a bird’s-eye view, the politics of individual dignity would alone be redemptive, regardless of the changing political winds against it. Olson carried this position into his work as an educator, where his pedagogy at Black Mountain College occurred on a case-by-case basis, with students and faculty made up in large part by those underrepresented in higher education: the working poor, war veterans, gay and lesbian individuals, European Jews in exile, and African Americans.
  
A concern for the moral consequences of how to represent population groups in an era of mass data persisted in Olson’s mid-career writing. What distinguishes his work from his peers’ is an attention to humans as political constituents, and in “The Kingfishers” such an identification is an extension of their individuality. The extension registers subtly in his choice of the word “Kingfishers,” as though to expand on the abbreviated title of “The K,” covertly signaling a return to the theme of “horse trading” as a response to political and social crisis. Section 4 of Part I opens by lyrically sketching atrocity at scale, while echoing the legal-reformist convictions of the Survey Graphic article:
  

The “death” may be that of many, as in war or genocide, but it may also point to how particular parts of a person can die, as Olson’s aspirations for a career in politics did following Truman’s rise to the vice presidency and then the presidency. The poem continues shortly after with the lines, “[a]round an appearance, one common model,” suggesting a communalistic vision of a constituent society based on shared perceptions, and ending with “we grow up / many,” a clause repeated in The Maximus Poems, there joined by the closing lines, “And the single / is not easily / known.”[42] For this notion to appear both in his long and shorter works emphasizes Olson’s conception of the individual as pluralistically composed as well as inherently integrated into a network of proximate others, and it is perhaps his clearest affront to the misuses of modern quantitative computation. Not only is the individual-as-data a “complex of occasions,” as he famously says elsewhere; populations and their subgroups comprise discrete units that are much harder to apprehend than broad statistical analysis can typically make possible.[43] Before ending this section, Olson addresses what is at stake when the sequentializing precepts of technology are used to frame a view of humanity. The “factors,” he writes, are “communication and / or control,” pointing to the way in which messaging itself is key to social control, and the message is:
  

While individuals should be viewed on their own terms (albeit as groups in the context of libel law), Olson recognized that governance inevitably depends on messaging that follows a narrative structure, just as data is organized on computers—one bit after another. But recognizing this pattern offers an opportunity for liberation: breaking out of arbitrarily administered sequences (whether as propaganda or dataset) is how people can escape forms of social control. Exiting structures of conformity, as the poet did with the OWI, is a way of attaining moral autonomy in the face of dehumanizing state operations, and the call to do so comes not from public relations or the social sciences but from poetry.
  
This focus in “The Kingfishers” on the politics of quantification has led the critic David Herd to read Olson as adopting a kind of “foreign policy” in poetry.[45] Herd uses the idea of “complicity” to apprehend how the poet places “violence” and “bought” together with “benevolence” on the same line:[46]
  

Emulating the terms and inverted syntax of an ancient legal text, Olson renders serious judgment here against those who conflate peace with justice, and who enjoy local protections at the expense of those further afield. A tense “silence” lurks within a victorious America, wherein a series of clean deals embargoes further inquiry into the wellbeing of distant populations. Olson’s “foreign policy,” then, is the awareness that when those at home are both safe and silent, a miscarriage of justice abroad is likely underway and going uncontested. Meanwhile, those who enforce the silences which accompany such peace are among the complicit (literally “folded together”), and cannot be easily counted (or counted on), enjoying a convenient anonymity that masks their disregard for the responsibility to uphold justice. The anonymity provided through this close overlap with others blurs the distinction between benefactors and perpetrators until no single defendant can be tried for human rights violations without reference to some proximate and equally culpable neighbor. Hannah Arendt, for example, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, noted how the chain of command among Nazi officers had freed them from taking responsibility for their actions; they noted only the horrors they witnessed in carrying out their duties, and “how heavily the task weighed upon [their] shoulders.”[48] Olson’s departure from the state apparatus was his attempt to stand apart from this regime of enmeshed sequence as control, and from the censoring of his work that amounted to enforced silence. This newfound distance allowed him to take on the issue directly in his subsequent writing, since exposure to the numerical scale of state operations had revealed the humanitarian stakes of such methods, both for the US and the rest of the world.
  
Just a few years later, the poet announced his abandonment of the protections and prosperity offered by loyalty to US state operations even more boldly. In a cycle of poems dated January 4, 1953, each piece titled simply “Song,” he addresses a chosen life on the edge of poverty. The rationale for this lifestyle is given in the opening poem: the speaker has “no eyes or ears left / to do their own doings,” because they have been “invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses // including the mind.”[49] With the failure of local sensing faculties (ears, say, rather than microphones), Olson asks in the next song, “where shall we go from here,” locating the cause of his bewilderment in contemplating a streetcar trip across town: “how get out of anywhere ( the bodies / all buried / in shallow graves?”[50] A shallow grave—a site of bodies interred by amateurs in hostility or haste, placed without headstone or ceremony—is the ultimate symbol of war crimes, of the attempt to anonymize the dead. And the image clearly haunted Olson: recall the reference to “tightening the soil over the men” in “There are two wars on.” What presses so indelibly on the senses is that, while bodies in shallow graves go unrecorded (the removal identifying data is called “censoring” in statistics), their physical presence can reemerge: rain or erosion can reveal human remains, exposing them to scavenging animals. The “Song” cycle carries the psychological weight of knowing that the triumphs of late modernity had failed to end historic abuses of human dignity, conditions in which humans—living, dying, or dead—were referred to as “logs” in Unit 731 or as “pieces” in Nazi concentration camps.
  
The rhetorical crescendo that follows in “Song 3” is Olson’s micro-manifesto of withdrawal:
  

The reduction to walking and no other vehicle places the speaker on par with the death march, the preface to a shallow grave: those humans turned into prisoners of war, or toward concentration camps, or simply out into exile—external or internal. While Olson was not literally an internally displaced person, after the OWI he was never again closely affiliated with mainstream institutional life, and he lived, as Nathaniel Mackey writes, with the belief that a life in poetry was a vow of poverty.[52] This vow is Olson’s reorientation following the revelation of the horrors enabled by the treatment of individuals as mere data, brought to the public by print and broadcast journalism. Although human rights abuses of course predate the arrival of statistics, what matters is that—far from exposing a record by which governments would learn never to repeat—the speed and anonymity inherent in computational statistics helped perpetrators to eradicate undesirable populations such that the law and observing publics could never have kept pace.
  
In 1956, Olson himself became the subject of an FBI investigation. Arriving at his front door, federal agents stalking the campus of Black Mountain College made him into a subject of state inquiry—ironically, much as he had done to the immigrant populations that the OWI had endeavored to steer away from fascism.[53] Withdrawing from official life as a form of moral recusal had proven so effective that federal agencies were now concerned he might have become a threat to national interests. But it was too late to prevent a critique of government policies from entering Olson’s poetics: he had already absorbed firsthand knowledge of what “the old State-secret” might be, of the sites of interaction between the state and the poem, between institutional power and the complexities of the individual.[54] For the remaining thirty years of his life, after migrating from civil service into full-time teaching and literary writing, Olson retained the material legacy and political-moral question of technocratic public-opinion management. He held on to newspaper data and correspondence between senior Washington and Democratic party officials, as well as other articles from his time at the Common Council and the OWI: news of raids and seizures of fascist periodicals by the Treasury Department, a column covering a Lithuanian paper dedicating an issue to poetry.[55]
  
Olson’s process of coming to terms with the implications of state surveillance and manipulation of public sentiment is part of a moral, intellectual, and aesthetic problem he grappled with throughout his several careers: how to persuade others to pull away from autocracy toward progressive, Roosevelt-era New Deal politics, and to view individuals as citizens worthy of civil protections, not as bargaining chips. In departing the OWI, he learned the lessons that every white-collar worker eventually learns: that under the wrong president, bureaucracies can easily be manipulated to serve anti-democratic, illiberal ends; and that civil servants are typically powerless to protest authoritarian appropriation of those bureaucracies. Walking off the job tends not to form a lasting political statement, except to those who study the legacy and influence of the ones who do it. What Olson learned that was unique to him, however, was that his self-identified position as lyric outlier in full view of state operations was made more effective by acquiring intimate knowledge of the practices of treating populations as numbers—a first fact underlying social control. Discovering that his political impulses were incompatible with postwar state policy obliged his exit from a career in government and the beginning of his political and intellectual exile. It also allowed his literary ambitions to take form as he became one of the guardian forces of the New American Poetry, radicalizing the techniques and conscience of late-modernist American culture.
  

  
Previously unpublished works by Charles Olson are copyright the University of Connecticut. Used with permission. The author wishes to thank Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative for their support in retrieving this archival material, as well as Melissa Watterworth Batt at the Charles Olson Research Collection, University of Connecticut, for her support in making this work available.

  

Notes:

[1] Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 18–19.
[2] Olson, The Maximus Poems, 122.
[3] Olson, The Maximus Poems, 109.
[4] Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, 50th anniversary ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 245.
[5] Charles Olson, “Civil Service Papers,” Series III: Personal and Professional Papers, box 23, folder 2, Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.
[6] Anthony O. Miller, “Court Halted Dime Edition of ‘Mein Kampf’: Cranston Tells How Hitler Sued Him and Won,” The Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1988.
[7] Ralph Maud, Charles Olson at the Harbor (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2008), 31.
[8] Maud, Charles Olson at the Harbor, 52–54.
[9] Charles Olson, “Summaries of Foreign Language Newspapers and the Political Alignment,” Series III: Personal and Professional Papers, box 264, folder 1, Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.
[10] Olson, “Summaries of Foreign Language Newspapers.”
[11] US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945: A Supplement to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, “Series B” (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1949), 32.
[12] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “German American Bund,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed January 15, 2025, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-american-bund.
[13] Charles Olson, Spanish Speaking Americans in the War: The Southwest (Washington, DC: Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, 1943).
[14] Ralph Maud, “Charles Olson’s First Poem,” in Contemporary Olson (Oxford: Manchester University Press, 2015), 308–10.
[15] R. Serrell, M. M. Astrahan, G. W. Patterson, and I. B. Pyne, “The Evolution of Computing Machines and Systems,” Proceedings of the IRE 50, no. 5 (May 1962): 1039–58; and William D. Nordhaus, “Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing,” The Journal of Economic History 67, no. 1 (2007): 143–44.
[16] Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900, new ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 42.
[17] Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4.
[18] Dorn, Gunslinger, 233.
[19] Dorn, Gunslinger, 236.
[20] Charles Olson, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick, 1st paperback ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 14.
[21] Olson’s concerns were justified: he died at age sixty from liver cancer, nearly twelve years short of the life expectancy for a male of his birth cohort.
[22] Olson, Collected Poems, 47.
[23] Ben Hickman, Crisis and the US Avant-Garde: Poetry and Real Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 67.
[24] Matthew James Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008), 340–42.
[25] Olson, The Maximus Poems, 58.
[26] Robert Von Hallberg, Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 10; and Olson, Collected Poems, 14.
[27] Google Books Ngram Viewer results for “horse trading” in American English, 1800–2022, accessed June 19, 2025, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=horse+trading&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en-US&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false.
[28] For Operation Paperclip, see Michael Neufeld, “Project Paperclip and American Rocketry after World War II,” The National Air and Space Museum, March 21, 2023, https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/project-paperclip-and-american-rocketry-after-world-war-ii. For the recruitment of Japanese military scientists, see Howard Brody, et al., “U.S. Responses to Japanese Wartime Inhuman Experimentation after World War II: National Security and Wartime Exigency,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 23, no. 2 (2014): 220–30.
[29] “Two OWI Aides Resign,” The New York Times, May 19, 1944, 14, https://www.nytimes.com/1944/05/19/archives/two-owi-aides-resign-poulos-and-olson-charge-interference-but.html.
[30] Christof Decker, “Fighting for a Free World: Ben Shahn and the Art of the War Poster,” American Art 33, no. 2 (June 2019): 102.
[31] Catherine Seelye, Charles Olson & Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths (New York: Grossman, Viking Press, 1975), xix.
[32] Charles Olson, “There are two wars on,” “Germans – 5 million 2/3 in cities,” Series III: Personal and Professional Papers, box 265, Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.
[33] Olson, “Germans – 5 million 2/3 in cities.”
[34] Charles Olson, Letter to Charles Olson from Walter Hughes, 1944, Series III: Personal and Professional Papers, box 263, folder 2, Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.
[35] Seelye, Charles Olson & Ezra Pound, xix–xx; and Alan Gilbert, “Charles Olson and Empire, or Charles Olson Flips the Wartime Script,” Chicago Review 60, no. 4 (2017): 108–9.
[36] Olson, “There are two wars on.”
[37] Keston Sutherland, Lecture on Poetry (Canterbury: University of Kent, 2014).
[38] Gilbert, “Charles Olson and Empire,” 92–117.
[39] Charles Olson, “People v. The Fascist, U.S. (1944),” Survey Graphic, August 1944, 356.
[40] Olson, “People v. The Fascist,” 368.
[41] Olson, Collected Poems, 89.
[42] Olson, Collected Poems, 89; and Olson, The Maximus Poems, 56.
[43] Olson, The Maximus Poems, 185.
[44] Olson, Collected Poems, 90.
[45] David Herd, “‘From Him Only Will the Old State-Secret Come’: What Charles Olson Imagined,” English: Journal of the English Association 59, no. 227 (December 2010): 394.
[46] Herd, “‘From Him Only,’” 376.
[47] Olson, Collected Poems, 92.
[48] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 106.
[49] Olson, The Maximus Poems, 17.
[50] Olson, The Maximus Poems, 17.
[51] Olson, The Maximus Poems, 19.
[52] Nathaniel Mackey, “Gassire’s Lute,” Paracritical Hinge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 90.
[53] “FBI Investigations at BMC,” Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/fbi-investigations-bmc/.
[54] Herd, “‘From Him Only,’” 385.
[55] Charles Olson, Letter to Charles Olson from Walter Hughes, 1944, Series III: Personal and Professional Papers, box 264, folders 1 & 2, and box 265, Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.