In the last years of his life, as recorded in Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound, the poet Ezra Pound had a disturbing dream. “Eustace Mullins, of Staunton, Virginia, one of Pound’s acolytes at St. Elizabeth’s, starred in an unlikely Freudian drama. Ezra and the poet Hilda Doolittle, his young sweetheart, were staying with the Mullins family when Ezra learned that Mullins had raped H.D.” Nothing else is said about Mullins in the book, though there are many references to famous visitors to St. Elizabeth’s, as well as a regular corps of eager young believers. Mullins seems to have met Pound’s wife, Dorothy, in 1949 when he worked at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. A year later he became a researcher for the Library of Congress and a frequent visitor at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Washington, DC, where Ezra Pound was imprisoned for his treasonous radio broadcasts from Italy during World War II. Suspected of being insane, the famous poet was never transferred to prison and was finally freed after twelve years. During this time, Mullins claimed to have been Pound’s secretary and also did research for the House Un-American Activities Committee. And he began his career as an author.

Other than a 1961 biography of Pound, described as melodramatic, the books that Mullins wrote did not attract much notice in literary circles. We would not be talking about him today, except for his interactions with Ezra Pound and a small file of letters to the poet, E.E. Cummings, at Harvard, if not for the fact that it was seemingly his anti-Semitism that formed the connection between the young Mullins and the imprisoned Pound. Mullins claimed that Pound asked him to look into the Federal Reserve in the earliest days of their relationship. Out of that research grew the book that was published in 1952, later known as Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Whatever Pound wanted out of the reported directions to Mullins, “You must work on it as a detective story,” Mullins took it very much in the direction of hatred against bankers and Jews. He saw the hand of the Rothschilds in American banking policy, imagining Woodrow Wilson, Colonel House, and the Rockefeller’s in on a grand, secret scheme.

From the success of this book, dedicated to Pound, Mullins would begin a long career as a prominent figure on the far-right and a promoter of hateful ideas of conspiracy. For most of that time, he would do this work from a modest house he inherited in his home town of Staunton, Virginia. The Southern Poverty Law Center would grow to consider him a one-man force in the dissemination of hate in America over the course of four decades. Many ideas of Holocaust denial, the evils of the Bilderberg Group, and the coming dominance of the World Orders have their beginnings in the books and pamphlets sent out under many different imprints from Staunton.

Beyond their hometown connection, however, there is a reason to mention Eustace Mullins here. Much of the hatred and fear of Woodrow Wilson coming from people on the right side of the political spectrum, and some on the left, has to do with the banking stabilization efforts that he marshaled early in his presidency. At the time, many thought them progressive and even necessary to deal with a failing system. Over the years, however, fearmongers have sought to paint Wilson as a party to conspiracies and dirty dealing in his work to prevent bank closures. Many of their notions started with a book sent out from right here in Staunton, written by a man who haunted the dreams of Ezra Pound.  Not only was Mullins able to spread his ideas across the globe, but they have also only become more well-known in the age of internet hate sites and cable news shows.