When the Lusitania was sunk: A German U-20 submarine torpedoed the Cunard Line R.M.S. Lusitania on May 7, 1915. Of the more than 1,000 lives lost to the sea, 128 were American. The sinking is commonly credited with hastening America's entry into the First World War. Pound's near-certainty that the Lusitania “carried munitions to kill Germans” was a widely circulated idea, which was also exploited by the German foreign office to justify the sinking.

Chas. Ricketts: Charles Ricketts (1866–1931), English painter, stage designer, Pre-Raphaelite follower, and Yeats's friend.

Morgan ideology: John Pierpont (“J. P.”) Morgan (1837– 1913), American financier and scion of the polemical Morgan banking dynasty. As Ron Chernow sums up (with Poundian overtones), their detractors saw the family as tyrannical hypocrites who intimidated companies, colluded with foreign powers, and wheedled America into war for profit.

When Isaac Singer invented his sewing machine: As documents from the U.S. Patent Office show, American inventor Isaac M. Singer (1811–75) invented and patented a sewing machine in 1851, which, as Pound suggests, built on Singer's earlier experiments. The patent itself was eventually issued in 1856.

It is volitionism: The key points in the anti-materialist “system of values” to which Pound alludes are spelled out in his “Volitionist Economics” (1934), a handbill synthesizing Douglasite and Gesellian principles (cf. note GK 250). He would stress its significance further by featuring the phrase, “Volitionist Economics,” on the title page of Jefferson and/or Mussolini.

Pius XI … Pio Nono and his cronies: During his papacy from 1846 to 1878, Pius IX (1792–1878) was widely vilified as a reactionary and anti-nationalist for opposing Italian unification. In contrast, the anticommunism of Pius XI facilitated the Church's rapprochement with the Fascist government after Mussolinni came to power in October 1922, just nine months after Pius XI's election to the papacy in February, a position he held until his death in 1939 (cf. note GK 76).