documents, felt “the people…should have as little to do as may be about the government.” Benjamin Rush, another founder, called democracy “the devil’s own government”. Charles Lennox (pictured left) and James Wilson (pictured right) disagreed. They shared a faith in democracy and popular wisdom uncommon at the time. Their lives were markedly different: Lennox was an aristocrat and parliamentarian, while Wilson was a poor Scot who emigrated to America and, on the strength of his intellect, became consequential. The “tall, rich and beautiful” Lennox was an unlikely radical. Yet he was the first parliamentarian to propose letting all adult men vote in Britain and the first member of the House of Lords to suggest recognising American independence. He was also a patron of Thomas Paine, a tax collector in Sussex who became a vociferous proponent of independence after emigrating to America. Paine’s pamphlet, “Common Sense”, argued that Americans “have it in our power to begin the world over again”. Widely read, it galvanised support for revolution. In “Radical Duke”, Danielle Allen, a political philosopher at Harvard, makes the novel argument that Lennox and Paine were at the centre of “a network of writers” that formed Junius, a pseudonymous author. Junius published essays critical of King George III’s government that roiled British politics in the early 1770s; they argued that royal “authority rested upon the consent of the governed”. Both men “cut their teeth as radicals by playing Junius” several years before the publication of “Common Sense”. Lennox’s radicalism exemplifies Ms Allen’s shrewd broader argument that the roots of the American Revolution lay not in Boston but in Britain. Protests against unpopular and unjust taxation, popular demonstrations against royal authority, the publication of essays promoting revolution: all of these happened in Britain in the 1760s-70s. “Every act that provided the drumbeat of the march to revolution in the colonies had been foreshadowed in Britain,” she writes. That argument may provoke some grumbles: Americans consider their revolution home-grown. But few geopolitical events happen in isolation.
Ms Allen began researching Lennox’s life after she discovered a copy of the Declaration of Independence in a record office in Sussex. It had belonged to Lennox and was probably commissioned by James Wilson—the subject of Jesse Wegman’s biography. Wilson had emigrated to America in 1765, when he was 23, and was the only signer of both the constitution and the Declaration of Independence to serve as a Supreme Court justice. Mr Wegman, a journalist, situates Wilson within the Scottish Enlightenment, which linked commerce with goodness—a comfortable pairing for mercantile America. (“The road to virtue and that to fortune,” wrote Adam Smith, “are, happily in most cases, one and the same.”) Scottish nobles had long defended self-government; in 1320 barons declared their king’s authority stemmed from “the due consent and assent of us all”. In the run-up to the revolution, Wilson’s rigorous essays provided a legal argument for independence. Parliament had no authority over the American colonies, he stated, because colonists did not elect them. “All men are, by nature, equal and free,” so “no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent.” Mr Wegman suggests that Jefferson paraphrased this sentiment in the Declaration of Independence. He notes that Wilson was the only founder to use the phrase “created equal” in later writing and that he coined the constitution’s opening phrase (“We the people”). In his battles for direct elections for Congress and the presidency, Wilson was “by a long shot the most democratic of all the founders”. Why, then, is he not better known? First, because he was a creature of the law, not a politician. And second, alas, his roads to fortune and virtue diverged. Addicted to land speculation, he ended up in a debtors’ prison in New Jersey while a justice. Then, to escape his creditors, he fled to North Carolina, where he died of malaria in 1798. Were Wilson and Lennox failures because their ideals did not carry the day? That is a crabbed view of reform. Battles for social progress are rarely won in fighters’ lifetimes. Martin Luther King did not live to see a racially equal society; he was not wrong to fight for one. In their efforts to expand the
franchise and their faith in democracy, Lennox and Wilson were both ahead of their time—and their stories are a welcome rediscovery today. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/08/20/two-vital-figures-of-the-american- revolution-forgotten-by-history
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Mary de Rachewiltz devoted her life to defending Ezra Pound The poet and translator of “The Cantos” died on July 24th, aged 101 Aug 20th 2026 She was still awake when the tall bearded man came into her bedroom to say goodnight. She had hoped he would. Though she was nine, it was a rare treat to get a visit from her father. By the light of the kerosene lamp, he looked at her hands. Her fingernails were filthy. Then he started to rummage in his luggage, for sweets, she hoped. Instead he brought out scissors and, carefully, cleaned and cut her nails. He asked her then, where was her toothbrush? It was somewhere. The next day, he took her to buy one. This happened in Gais, in South Tyrol, in the house of two kind farm-folk, Mamme and Tatte, who cared for abandoned children. But she was not abandoned, quite. Her parents, the poet Ezra Pound and his mistress Olga
Rudge, a violinist (Tattile and Mamile to her then), lived in Venice and paid 200 lire a month for her keep. She did not mind the arrangement at all. From birth she had grown into a Tyrolean peasant child, a shepherdess with blonde plaits who had her own flock and, in secret partnership with her father, ran a miniature bee business for a while. But then at fairly regular intervals she would go to her parents in Venice, to a villa full of books in many languages, to the Lido via vaporetto and to feasts of ice cream. Her cool, willowy mother made her speak no German there, and wear white gloves. It was a small price to pay. From the start, her two lives ran in counterpoint. She became skilled at defending one against the other. In a poem she wrote later she relished the Pustertal dialect she spoke, words as weighty as sausages and dumplings. Against city people she defended dung-heaps, insisting that a good one smelled mostly of leaves and moss. Tyroleans hated Italians; but her father, arranger of all her Italian treats, was an American Italophile and she adored him. “Babbo” taught her both Italian and English by making her translate “The Cantos”, the huge and obscure poem he spent his life working on, into Italian. For her, that was like being presented with a basket of exotic food she had no idea what to do with, but she tried. Each typed page she produced for him would come back entirely scribbled over, not only with corrections but with newly perplexing thoughts. From the mid-1920s Babbo had also formed some controversial political ideas. He began to worship Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, extolling him in articles and broadcasts and even presenting him with a copy of the early Cantos. (“Ma questo” said the Boss, “è divertente.”) For Pound, Mussolini embodied the strength and order Italy needed. But then he went further. The true threat to mankind was “international Jewry”. Racial purity should be preserved to strengthen the nation. On Italian radio he begged Franklin Roosevelt not to side with the Allies and said he should be hanged; those broadcasts earned him a charge of treason in absentia. When American troops eventually liberated Italy, in 1945, they captured Pound and caged him. For 13 years he was kept in a locked cell in a psychiatric hospital. Mary now had two battles to fight. The first was to defend her father against the charge of treason and the imputation of insanity. The latter was clearly ridiculous, as he wrote her long, lucid letters from prison and continued
working on “The Cantos”. She managed only one visit; otherwise she imagined him, still tall and dignified in the dining room among the slobbering inmates. His broadcasts and articles, though, were much harder to dismiss. What could she say of his vile remarks about “Jew slime” and “the dog-damn wop”? Only that he had been influenced by the opinions of the time. T.S. Eliot had been antisemitic, too. (She went to see shy, stooping Tom to ask for help; he offered her thin Sawia biscuits, Loneliness personified.) And obviously, later on, the “master of utterance” had lost his grip on words. That was her second fight. Babbo had been carried away by words all his life. Before the debacle in Italy he had been ranked among the foremost poets of the age; now he was untouchable. But that could not be. She worked on with “The Cantos” and with his other poetry, turning everything into Italian and insisting on the beauty in it. “Beauty is difficult,” Babbo had written in Canto LXXIV; but, like light, it kept breaking through. In her memoir “Discretions”, in 1971, she cited his poetry whenever it could illuminate a phase of her life, or a memory. Her own poetry was a homage to the man who had trained her in it, not least on those evenings when the air had tingled, threatening explosion, as he recited his own. In 1985, 13 years after his death, she at last published the first dual-language edition of “The Cantos”. She still had more to do. She preserved his papers and first drafts, most of which went to Yale, and lectured about him all over North America. Occasionally she unveiled long-resisted plaques to him. Most important, she had to keep up the re-evaluation. After her marriage in 1946 to a Russian- Italian minor nobleman, Boris de Rachewiltz, they bought Brunnenberg, a crag-bound castle in her beloved South Tyrol. It was a ruin when they found it, but over the years she turned it into a centre of Pound studies. Scholars from the world over came to discuss him amid the splendour of the Alps. She firmly told them, when they arrived, that they could say anything they liked about Pound. And then she would tell them what he really thought, and why. Babbo himself had stayed there after his release from the asylum, hoping for peace in which to write “Paradise”, intended as the final Canto (with a nod to Dante). But he found the place too cold, and retreated again to Venice