In the fall of 1828, Irish labourers digging Pennsylvania's Mainline Canal at Clark's Ferry, near Harrisburg, rioted when their employers — the Mammoth Contracting Company of New York — fell behind in wage payments by as much as $400 to skilled workers. The men soon returned to work, but in April the following year demanded a raise in wages from 80¢ to $1 until they paid off debts to local storeowners accumulated over the winter. The contractors refused, but the next day a freshet partially washed out the dam on the Susquehanna and threatened the canal works. The labourers, many of whom had been unemployed for some time, refused to repair it until their wage request was met. Canallers from the surrounding area arrived to join the protest. The contractors attempted to erect a temporary dam with a few loyal hands, but were attacked by strikers with rocks and clubs. Likewise, skilled workers who remained aloof were forced to halt work and join the turnout. The river broke through the dam causing $8–10,000 damage, but still the workers persisted in their strike.

As William Tweed noted over a century ago, the cartoon, with its combination of graphic and text, can be a dangerous political weapon. Indeed, the Tammany Hall boss's career was destroyed when he was arrested for kidnapping in 1875 — an arrest made by a police officer who recognized Tweed from a newspaper cartoon. Likewise, when comic strips first appeared in the American sensation papers of the 1890s, they too were seen as having important, and potentially threatening, political and social ramifications. Journalists such as Oswald Villard condemned newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst for using the comic strip as a cheap ploy to boost circulation, claiming that it compromised journalistic integrity. Meanwhile, genteel reformers waged their own war against comic strips, worried that the slapstick action and irreverent content would erode middle-class American values and “foster a spirit of disrespect and insubordination… by their glorification of cheeky, iconoclastic urchins.”

J. Edgar Hoover directed the Bureau of Investigation (BI), later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, from 1924 until his death in 1972. His autocratic style of management, self-mythologising habits, reactionary political opinions and accumulation of secret files on real, imagined and potential opponents have been widely documented. The views and methods he advocated have been variously attributed to values he absorbed as he grew up and to certain peculiarities of his personality. Most biographers trace his rapid rise to prominence in the BI to his aptitude for investigating alien enemies during World War I, and radicals during the subsequent Red Scare. He was centrally involved in the government's response to the alleged threat of Bolshevism in America, and, although he later denied it, he co-ordinated the notorious Palmer raids of January 1920, in which thousands of aliens were rounded up and several hundred were deported.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley occupies an odd place in the context of the poet's work as a whole, partly because it has produced a range of widely conflicting readings, but also because Pound himself seems to have gone to quite unusual lengths to authorise one particular interpretation of the poem. Take his notoriously unhelpful comment in a letter to Thomas Connolly, that “Mauberley buries E. P. in the first poem; gets rid of all his troublesome energies.” Pound seems to ignore the powerful elements of social critique in the first main section of the poem, insisting instead on the text's complete dissociation of the aesthete Mauberley from the “active” E. P. The same way of construing the poem as simple satire can be found in a 1935 letter to Basil Bunting where Pound observes:

Mauberley: sure, the picture of ANY young man in England. Eviscerated, VOID of ALL creative impulse. EP done a picture of what ANY young educated bloke wd have SEEN, and all he would have done about it IF he had no guts, balls, viscera, PREcisely.

While Pound's dismissive handling of the poem in his later years is closely bound up with his insistence that “I'm no more Mauberley than Eliot is Prufrock,” recent critical discussion has tended to emphasise connections between the two main “characters,” with Stephen Adams, for example, arguing convincingly that “There is…no necessary reason to summon a speaker other than ‘Pound’ at any point in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.”