Superfluous Southerners

Cultural Conservatism and the South, 1920-1990

John J. Langdale, John J. Langdale, III

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780826219855
• eBook ISBN: 9780826272850
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In Superfluous Southerners, John J. Langdale III tells the story of traditionalist conservatism and its boundaries in twentieth-century America. Because this time period encompasses both the rise of the modern conservative movement and the demise of southern regional distinctiveness, it affords an ideal setting both for observing the potentiality of American conservatism and for understanding the fate of the traditionalist "man of letters." Langdale uses the intellectual and literary histories of John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate—the three principal contributors to the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand—and of their three most remarkable intellectual descendants—Cleanth Brooks, Richard Weaver, and Melvin Bradford—to explore these issues.

Langdale begins his study with some observations on the nature of American exceptionalism and the intrinsic barriers which it presents to the traditionalist conservative imagination. While works like Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club have traced the origins of modern pragmatic liberalism during the late nineteenth century, the nature of conservative thought in postbellum America remains less completely understood. Accordingly, Langdale considers the origins of the New Humanism movement at the turn of the twentieth century, then turning to the manner in which midwesterners Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer Moore stirred the imagination of the southern Agrarians during the 1920s.

After the publication of I'll Take My Stand in 1930, Agrarianism splintered into three distinct modes of traditionalist conservatism: John Crowe Ransom sought refuge in literary criticism, Donald Davidson in sectionalism, and Allen Tate in an image of the religious-wayfarer as a custodian of language. Langdale traces the expansion of these modes of traditionalism by succeeding generations of southerners. Following World War II, Cleanth Brooks further refined the tradition of literary criticism, while Richard Weaver elaborated the tradition of sectionalism. However, both Brooks and Weaver distinctively furthered Tate's notion that the integrity of language remained the fundamental concern of traditionalist conservatism.

Langdale concludes his study with a consideration of neoconservative opposition to M.E. Bradford's proposed 1980 nomination as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and its significance for the southern man of letters in what was becoming postmodern and postsouthern America. Though the post–World War II ascendance of neoconservatism drastically altered American intellectual history, the descendants of traditionalism remained largely superfluous to this purportedly conservative revival which had far more in common with pragmatic liberalism than with normative conservatism.

Chapter 1

Superfluous Southerners and Gnostic Northerners

Southern Cultural Conservatism, Northern Pragmatism, and American Intellectual History

In 1927, Julien Benda published an indictment of the intellectual corruption of the age titled Le Trahison des Clercs or The Treason of the Intellectuals. Taken literally, Benda's title appealed to an archaic meaning of clerc, which pertained to the medieval scribes who provided a distinction between the sphere of letters and those of church and state that had been previously unknown.¹ The “treason” in question was the subsequent gradual betrayal by the clerks of their vocation as intellectuals or their breach of the realm of letters for communion with the world. From this pretense, Benda probed the consequences of modernity on the struggle of the man of letters to preserve the imperative of language in a historical climate of nationalism, egalitarian democracy, financial centralization, scientific specialization, and technological materialism.² In a review of Benda's work, T. S. Eliot agreed that “ours is an unsettled age” in which “everybody is conscious of every question and no one knows any answers.” Eliot, however, took exception to Benda's “romantic” plea for a return to separate spheres, insisting that one “cannot lay down any hard and fast rule of what interests the clerc, the intellectual, should or should not have.” Further countering what he described as Benda's “idealism,” Eliot declared that just as there is a “right relation of emotion to thought in practical affairs” so there is in art and the world of letters.³ In support of his realist perspective, Eliot might have redirected Benda's attention away from Europe to the American South where Eliot's contemporaries, the Nashville Agrarians, were engaged in a protracted effort to reconcile practical political and creative literary concerns with the role of the man of letters in the modern world.

Forty years later, Christopher Lasch's The New Radicalism in America revived consideration of Eliot and Benda's intellectual quandary in the American context and argued briefly for the peculiar suitability of the American South as an avenue for understanding. In his introduction, Lasch noted that the “self-conscious” tendency of intellectuals to agonize endlessly over their respective roles and, indeed, the very idea of an intellectual class, are distinctly modern products of “cultural fragmentation” that characterize “industrial and postindustrial societies.”⁴ Like Benda, Lasch evinced discomfort with the tendency of modern intellectuals to “see cultural issues as inseparable from political ones.” However, like Eliot, he admitted that his “skepticism” was “mixed” with fascination for this “new radicalism,” and cautioned that it was not his intention to write another Trahison des Clercs. Furthermore, Lasch's conclusion expressed admiration for the resilient cultural conservatism of Irving Babbitt and T. S. Eliot, but reserved its highest praise for the Nashville Agrarians who, Lasch noted, remained committed to cultural criticism despite the allure of political resistance to the trials of modernity.⁵

Lasch's The New Radicalism extended the critique of modern intellectual culture that preoccupied not only Benda and Eliot, but also a host of twentieth-century critics including, among others, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim, and the American political theorist James Burnham.⁶ But while Gramsci's cultural Marxism, Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and Burnham's ideas on managerial liberalism proposed broad theories concerning the role of the intellectual in the modern world, Lasch's social historical approach argued for the peculiar suitability of American culture as a means to explore the relationship between modernity and the intellectual. As previously noted, the exceptionalism of American intellectual culture rests considerably on what James Russell Lowell called its founding upon a “new condition of mind,” and upon what Forrest McDonald subsequently described as a mind-set that was synchronously “conservative” and “radical.”⁷ Among other things, this novel condition, engendered by the Enlightenment, was characterized not only by a separation of the realms of church and state, but also by a precarious unprecedented balance among the realms of Church, State, and Letters. As a consequence of the Jeffersonian incorporation of this novel circumstance into America's creation, the autonomy of the literary realm became an implicit founding principle of the republic.⁸ Moreover, this circumstance fostered, during the early nineteenth century, an American mood of cultural consensus, which Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, stood in stark contrast to the contentious social and intellectual life of late eighteenth—and early nineteenth-century Europe. Of course, the mid-nineteenth-century convulsions of sectionalism and civil war challenged this exceptional historical circumstance and it was during this period, Lasch noted, that Northern intellectuals initially acquired “a sense of being at odds with the rest of society.”⁹ While the rise of an adversarial intellectual class had its genesis in the seemingly benign Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, it was soon channeled into the fiery anti-slavery politics that, Henry Adams observed, produced a “violent reaction” which swept New England “back into Puritanism with a violence as great as that of a religious war.”¹⁰ More than anything, Lasch was astounded at the ease with which Northern culture “reabsorbed” these radical reform impulses into the stream of genteel culture, and Lasch went on to argue that the Civil War had produced a “unifying effect” on the victorious North which was every bit as strong as the one rendered by the Lost Cause in the defeated South. In large measure, Lasch attributed the North's unsettling assimilation of radical reform to the ideology of “pragmatic liberalism” and its devotion to a sense of “national purpose.”¹¹

The nature of this “pragmatic liberalism” and its centrality to American intellectual history was the focus of Louis Menand's book, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. Like Lasch, Menand viewed the cataclysm of Civil War as the “birth of modern America,” and proposed that “the intellectual culture of the North,” and “the slave civilization of the South” were parallel casualties of sectional conflict.¹² From this premise, Menand traced the Northern quest for a philosophy that would ease the nation's transition to modernity and detailed the subsequent role of pragmatism in the postwar reconstruction of Northern intellectual culture. According to Menand, pragmatism, modernity's intellectual salve, was born out of a desire to debunk the philosophical overconfidence that had led to the Civil War and was lodged in Oliver Wendell Holmes's observation that “certitude leads to violence.” Extending his study well into the twentieth century, Menand insisted that pragmatism was ultimately about “tolerance” and was “designed to make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs.”¹³

In many respects, pragmatism is a distinctly American incarnation of the historical compulsion to the utopian and of what philosopher Eric Voegelin described as the ancient tradition of “gnosticism” which, as previously noted, rests on the belief that human knowledge can transform the very foundation of being. According to Voegelin, this endeavor “can be meaningfully undertaken only if the constitution of being can in fact be altered by man.” The difficulty, he insisted, is that “the world remains as it is given to us, and it is not within man's power to change its structure.” In order to circumvent this reality and make the transformation of the world appear possible, Voegelin noted, the gnostic “must construct a world picture from which the essential features of the construction of being that would make the program appear hopeless are eliminated.”¹⁴ In this regard, Holmes's correlation between certitude and violence clearly rested on the gnostic assumption that man has the power to alter the constitution of being and reflected a gnostic desire to construct an image of man to suit his will. Such convictions were equally implicit in fellow pragmatist William James's pleas for “tolerance” of whatever is not itself “intolerant” and in his maxim that “ideals” ought to aim at the “transformation of reality.” In many regards, James's heralding of pragmatism as “a new name for some old ways of thinking” was ironically prescient. Broadly considered, pragmatism is a brazen extension of the effort to idealize the Republic and, as such, belongs to what Voegelin described as the ancient gnostic project to abolish the constitution of being and replace it with an image of perfection which lies within the realm of human action. In the end, pragmatism is a gnostic glorification of the present and a timorous, though noble-intentioned, denial of human reality.¹⁵

In this and other respects, Menand's masterful study is as remarkable for the questions it raises as for those it purports to answer. On the one hand, he successfully portrays Oliver Wendell Homes, William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey as the intellectual fathers of modern liberalism. Indeed, there is a grain of truth in the maxim that Americans are, by nature, all tolerant gnostic pragmatists.¹⁶ In many aspects, The Metaphysical Club is reminiscent of Vernon Parrington's grand narrative of the American mind and, as such, is a refreshing departure from the contextual and post-structural approaches that have recently dominated the field of intellectual history.¹⁷ Moreover, it is significant because it recasts pragmatism as a subject to be studied at a time when its precepts have become central to the methodology of American intellectual history. ¹⁸ But in returning to the grand narrative of the American mind, Menand's purported “story of ideas in America” also resurrects the historiographical limitations of the traditional “myth and symbol” approach to American intellectual history. Namely, what of regions other than New England and what of traditions other than liberal?¹⁹ In Menand's vision, the Civil War and the American mind are entirely Northern matters from which the South simply vanishes. In fact, Menand's allusion to the Civil War's dissolution of the South's mere “slave civilization” alongside the “intellectual culture of the North” virtually resurrects Henry Adams's pronouncement that the South had “no mind.”²⁰ Likewise, there is no hint of intellectual dissent in Menand's pragmatic-liberal America—a scheme which verges on reviving Lionel Trilling's mid-twentieth-century claim that liberalism was America's sole intellectual tradition.²¹

The point, of course, is that the South, as Lewis Simpson and C. Vann Woodward have shown, also experienced intellectual devastation in the aftermath of the Civil War.²² However, in contrast to the North, the South's acquaintance with the ordeal of human bondage and the anguish of defeat rendered the region and its intellectuals decidedly more skeptical of human perfectibility than their Northern counterparts. Consequently, conservative voices, rather than pragmatic liberal ones, played the primary role in the South's cultural and intellectual reconstruction. Like pragmatism, southern conservatism is foremost a response to modernity. However, in its tendency towards fixed notions of God, nature, and truth, southern conservatism is also an anti-modern rebuke of the pragmatist's gnostic project to accommodate modernity by resisting “certitude” in the name of “tolerance.” Nowhere is this more explicit than in Allen Tate's call, in the un-pragmatically titled Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, for his fellow Southerners to reclaim their tradition through, what else, “violence.”²³

This present study, much like Menand's, is a story of cultural and intellectual reconstruction. The premise is that the South also suffered cultural disintegration in the aftermath of the Civil War and the recovery, which did not really begin until after the First World War and continued until well after the Second World War, was an arduous process. In large measure, it follows Eugene Genovese's contention that the mainstream of southern cultural development has been “quintessentially conservative” and that this conservatism represents one of America's most viable critiques of modernity.²⁴ Along with Genovese, it provisionally affirms Lewis Simpson's portrayal of antebellum southern thought as an effort to “establish its differences from modernity on a new mind” with the caveat that this struggle nonetheless comprised a quintessentially conservative endeavor.²⁵ At the same time, it acknowledges, in accordance with Genovese, Simpson, and Michael O'Brien, that the so-called “southern conservative tradition” remains, in numerous regards, as elusive and as varied as those who have endeavored to articulate it.²⁶ In many respects, the fragile nature of modern conservatism is reflected in the tentative musings of Benda and Eliot in contrast to the bold declarations of Oliver Wendell Holmes and William James. But whereas the pragmatic musings of Holmes and James were anticipating and encouraging a world that was becoming, conservatives are invoking a past that is in the process of dissolving and which no longer encompasses a linear experience of time. The conservative, Karl Mannheim notes, “first becomes conscious and reflective when other ways of life and thought appear on the scene, against which it is compelled to take up arms in an ideological struggle.” Consequently, the conservative, Mannheim maintains, seeks to insure that “old ways of life and thought do not become “superfluous” as the “progressive” mind presumes. Toward this end, the conservative strives to adapt his convictions to this “new stage of social and mental development” and, thereby, forestall the extinction of his mode of thought.²⁷

Expanding from these conceptions of conservatism, this story of southern intellectual reconstruction joins conventional—the Agrarians, and unconventional, Richard Weaver—contributors to southern conservative discourse. From the perspectives of six southern intellectuals spanning two generations, the study traces the development of three related, but diverse modes of southern cultural conservatism which emerged during the twentieth century.²⁸ The preliminary chapters examine the national and regional intellectual context of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. Of particular concern is the transformation, in the aftermath of the Civil War, of the meanings of the terms liberalism and conservatism in America and of the intellectual quandaries posed by these transformations for the New Humanists, a band of midwestern traditionalist conservatives, whose ideas would, in short order, rouse a band of southern men of letters. Accordingly, subsequent chapters trace the emergence of southerners John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate as conservative intellectuals following the First World War and their participation in the Agrarian movement during the 1930s. Agrarianism, which arose directly from the southerners' confrontation with the New Humanists and which reached its pinnacle with the publication of I'll Take My Stand, fragmented during the late thirties into three distinct modes of cultural conservatism. Ultimately, Ransom sought refuge in literary criticism; Davidson in sectionalism; and Tate in an image of the religious wayfarer as a custodian of language.²⁹ Subsequent chapters trace the expansion and renovation of these modes of cultural conservatism by succeeding generations of southern intellectuals. Following the Second World War, Cleanth Brooks, following Ransom, further refined the tradition of literary criticism and Richard Weaver, following Davidson, further elaborated that of sectionalism. However, both Brooks and Weaver, in distinct ways, also countenanced Allen Tate's notion that the integrity of language constituted the fundamental concern of the man of letters in the modern world. Though the rise of neoconservatism during the fifties transformed the American political landscape, the intellectual descendants of the New Humanist and Agrarian persuasions remained largely peripheral, indeed superfluous, to this supposedly conservative revival which ultimately had more in common with pragmatic liberalism than normative conservatism. In illustration of this, the study concludes with a consideration of the Reagan-era neoconservative opposition to traditionalist conservative M. E. Bradford's proposed nomination as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and its final significance for the southern man of letters in what was becoming postmodern and post-southern America.

As modern conservatives, each of these figures was preoccupied with the specter of irrelevance and with securing the place of the man of letters in the modern world. Though these preoccupations were undeniably encumbered with undertones of race, class, and gender, those categories are, for better or worse, largely peripheral to this study which maintains, along with Lewis Simpson, that the Agrarians and their culturally conservative intellectual descendants are best understood in light of their “essential historical motivation” to restore and conserve the “polity of letters.”³⁰ In this regard, their respective conservatisms were predicated on negotiating between Benda's idealism and Eliot's realism. Though attracted to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Superfluous Southerners and Gnostic Northerners: Southern Cultural Conservatism, Northern Pragmatism, and American Intellectual History
• Chapter 2 - Conservatism in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century America: From Sectionalism to the New Humanism
• Chapter 3 - From the New Humanism to Agrarianism
• Chapter 4 - The Divided Minds of Agrarianism
• Chapter 5 - The Conservative Legacy of Agrarianism: Cleanth Brooks and Richard Weaver
• Chapter 6 - Southern Conservatism and Its Discontents: M. E. Bradford and the Modern American Right
• Conclusion: The Southern Man of Letters in the Postmodern World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index