The Rebuke of History

The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought

Paul V. Murphy

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807875544
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In 1930, a group of southern intellectuals led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren published I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. A stark attack on industrial capitalism and a defiant celebration of southern culture, the book has raised the hackles of critics and provoked passionate defenses from southern loyalists ever since. As Paul Murphy shows, its effects on the evolution of American conservatism have been enduring as well. Tracing the Agrarian tradition from its origins in the 1920s through the present day, Murphy shows how what began as a radical conservative movement eventually became, alternately, a critique of twentieth-century American liberalism, a defense of the Western tradition and Christian humanism, and a form of southern traditionalism--which could include a defense of racial segregation. Although Agrarianism failed as a practical reform movement, its intellectual influence was wide-ranging, Murphy says. This influence expanded as Ransom, Tate, and Warren gained reputations as leaders of the New Criticism. More notably, such "neo-Agrarians" as Richard M. Weaver and M. E. Bradford transformed Agrarianism into a form of social and moral traditionalism that has had a significant impact on the emerging conservative movement since World War II.

CHAPTER ONE
The Radical Conservatism of I’ll Take My Stand

It is strange, of course, that a majority of men anywhere could even as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants.

Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand

“The great worth of the Agrarian group was the society we made,” Agrarian Andrew Nelson Lytle recalled years later. “We liked one another. We were the same kind of people, and we usually met socially as well as for discussion. Sometimes for a party, or set-back or a little poker.”¹ The Agrarian circle originated at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in the years between 1910 and 1930, at a time when most faculty members lived on campus and relations between faculty and students extended well beyond the classroom. John Crowe Ransom, who began teaching at his alma mater in 1914, shared quarters in Kissam Hall with eight other bachelor instructors. Their rooms became a haven for students. It was natural for Donald Davidson, a student, to invite Ransom, his Shakespeare teacher, to join a group of friends who discussed philosophy and shared ideas. The group usually met off campus, often in the company of Sidney Hirsch, a Nashville aesthete whose special gift seems to have been to spark conversation. “Out on the Hirsches’ porch, with the cigar ends glowing occasionally, a debate always insured from the nature of the company, it is The Happiness,” one member of the group wrote to an absent friend.²

The membership in this circle varied over time, as faculty, students, and friends came and went, but its members shared a close bond, often referring to themselves collectively as the “brethren.” World War I intervened, but many in the group reassembled at Vanderbilt after the war. Their interests eventually turned to poetry, and from 1922 to 1925 they published a magazine of verse entitled the Fugitive, which attracted notice in both New York and England. Allen Tate, a brilliant undergraduate, became a member of the Fugitive group in 1921; in 1923 he met Robert Penn (“Red”) Warren, a tall, red-haired, and ungainly sixteen-year-old sophomore from Kentucky. They shared a room in the Vanderbilt Divinity School. It “was filled with dirty shirts, cigarette butts, filth to the waist, and empty bottles,” Warren later recalled. “Gangs of people would come there to argue poetry and read aloud.” Warren contributed wall illustrations depicting scenes from literary works, including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.³

Ransom’s house was a “second home” to Warren, a place of leisure and camaraderie. Ransom enjoyed tennis, excelled at golf, and would sometimes play bridge or poker for an entire weekend. He once rented a bankrupt country club for a year so that he and his friends could use the tennis courts and billiard tables. The Agrarians, friends from Vanderbilt and Nashville, visiting writers—all would socialize together, whether at a camp in the country; at the farm in Guntersville, Alabama, of Lytle’s father; or at Benfolly, the house Tate’s older brother purchased for him, which overlooked the Cumberland River. The Agrarian movement, Warren suggested, was a “menagerie,” held together by “a common shared history as Southerners.”⁴

By the 1920s, the South was in the throes of modernization, a process only fitfully managed by southerners. After the end of Reconstruction, “New South” boosters—businessmen and urban-based professionals and publicists—enthusiastically sponsored the building of railroads and encouraged industrial development and the expansion of cities, as well as the spread of the Yankee ideas of hard work and material success. They defined progress as increasing prosperity and economic opportunity for the average southerner. The rapid modernization of the South promoted by these New South businessmen bred profound social and cultural changes. The locus of southern society moved from the country to the city, resulting in a destabilization of southern agricultural life and the disruption of many of its distinctive features, including the age-old symbiotic relationship between planter and yeoman (and the newer, post-Civil War paternalism of the credit-making rural storeowner and the sharecropper); the reciprocity and exchange of rural and small-town living; and the ritualized trips of country folk to the county seat, whether to socialize, shop, engage in legal or business transactions, or listen to an orator. After the 1880s, the rate of urban growth in the South doubled the national average. Plantations decayed as southerners moved to a city or left the South entirely. While villages and towns grew in population by 5 million people between 1880 and 1910, the South as a whole experienced a net drain exceeding 1.2 million whites and 500,000 blacks.⁵

The city of Nashville was no exception to these larger trends. Between 1880 and 1930, the city’s population increased three and one-half times, reaching a level just below 154,000 by the latter date. Led by an aggressive entrepreneurial class, Nashville was a city on the make in the late nineteenth century, becoming a regional leader in railroads, industry, commerce, and education. Although lagging behind such cities as Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis in growth, Nashville possessed milling and storage facilities for grain that were unmatched in the South after the turn of the century. Rural emigrants who streamed into the city during World War I and the postwar agricultural depression discovered a city divided into distinct residential and commercial zones and possessing sizable suburban development, segregated, of course, by race and class. By the 1920s, Nashville boasted a diversified economy and was a regional center in banking, insurance, and securities trading. (Local boosters nicknamed Union Street the “Wall Street of the South.”) Its leadership in education was undisputed; the city was home to the George Peabody School of Teachers and two black schools—Fisk University and Meharry Medical College—as well as Vanderbilt.⁶

Some southerners resisted the new dispensation, lamenting the loss of distinctive southern traditions and social practices. “I ask in Heaven’s name,” one southerner wrote after reading an article by a spokesman for the New South, “is it essential that a southern man must eat dirt or wallow therein, denounce his ancestry or ridicule their foibles, or otherwise degrade himself to prove his newborn loyalty and devotion to the new order of things?” The vociferous testimonials to the New South creed by figures such as Atlanta newspaperman Henry Grady were met by equally strong denunciations. The South, critics charged, was selling itself cheaply to northern capitalists.⁷ Commenting on the rise of the textile industry at the turn of the century, historian Edward L. Ayers noted the “pervasive sense of decline of Southern rural life,” which created “a sense of dissatisfaction and desperation” driving white families into “public work,” meaning the textile mills. “The demographic pressure on the land, the decline of cotton prices, the growing percentage of women to men in the older regions, the mobility of blacks, the disaffection of the young for rural life—all these dislocations made it easier to undergo the powerful dislocation of leaving home to work in a textile mill.” In Nashville, National Life and Accident, carrying its advertising to a new medium, established radio station WSM in 1925 and soon inaugurated the Saturday night Barn Dance, dubbed the “Grand Ole Opry.” The showcase for hillbilly music was immensely appealing to an audience of southern rural folk, whether living in the countryside or displaced to the city. Its popular brand of instant nostalgia for rural life reflected southerners’ ambivalence toward the changes produced by modernization.⁸

Historically, the South was a closed, rigid society, founded on an assumed orthodoxy with regard to social norms, particularly those concerning race. A veneer of genteel custom, often centered on ritualized, public deference to authority and an exaggerated emphasis on manners, decorum, and civility, covered the hard expectations of conformity to this orthodoxy. White southern society demanded of its members, white and black, not only conformity to written and unwritten rules but also loyalty to an often informal but clearly defined social hierarchy. In return, the white southerner gained a deep sense of community, identity, and familial connection. Black southerners gained quite a bit less.

The great dilemma posed by modernization was the balancing of change and tradition: How could the South both modernize and remain its essential self? Many southerners contemplated modernity with an uneasiness at the prospect of losing special southern customs and ways of life. For the white elite, modern life threatened an established power structure and social leadership. For whites in general, the issue was retaining white supremacy, particularly as cities introduced new and more threatening possibilities for the intermingling of the races. The white majority retained power by means of segregation, disenfranchisement, and the use of terror, particularly lynching. Between 1889 and 1919, white southern society experienced a paroxysm of radical race hatred and racial terrorism, with the result that the system of white supremacy was reaffirmed.⁹ Southern whites succeeded in making blacks invisible in their society. By the 1920s, the earlier radicalism had subsided, and, enjoying a period of relative racial peace, white southerners allowed the “negro problem” to recede from the forefront of their consciousness.¹⁰ The southern white vision of a solid, organic South, buttressed by the civil religion of the Lost Cause, was reflected in such works as Wilbur J. Cash’s Mind of the South (1941), a critical analysis of the overpowering and oppressive unity—the “savage ideal”—of southern life. “In the popular mind of the white South in the decades after World War I,” historian Joel Williamson writes, “there was no race problem, no black history, and no history of race relations if the Yankees and Communists, Catholics and Jews, outsiders and aliens would simply leave black people alone.” Southerners of the period, Williamson argues, were comfortably out of step with the nation. “The South was a fine spun living dream, and, in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, the dream waxed rosy, romantic, and unreal.”¹¹

The large social and economic forces transforming the South affected Vanderbilt University no less than Nashville. The university originated in 1872 as Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Bishop Holland N. McTyeire gave the institution decisive shape and form—and a new identity—when he secured the financial backing of the aging New York shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1873.¹² As Paul K. Conkin observed, the university, “like most other private universities, was born of an unholy alliance of piety and plutocracy.” The rechristened Vanderbilt University opened its doors in 1875, eventually garnering almost $1.2 million from Commodore Vanderbilt and his son.¹³ After a protracted and bitter conflict, the university won its autonomy from the Methodists in 1914, and Chancellor James H. Kirkland subsequently oversaw a revision of the curriculum, which included reducing the requirements in Latin and Greek, and kicked off a major fund-raising drive. An institutional symbol of sectional reunion and convergence, Vanderbilt raised more than $20 million from northern benefactors (specifically, the Vanderbilt family, the Carnegie corporation, and various Rockefeller charities) between 1915 and 1930. It was the upper South’s foremost university in the 1920s despite the fact that, owing to the generally narrow and restrictive cultural climate of the South and the tendency of the university’s administration to hire like-minded and deferential faculty, its faculty was somewhat disengaged from the major trends of national intellectual life. The school’s homogeneous student body was drawn primarily from central and western Tennessee and Kentucky, northern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi and parts of Arkansas and Texas.¹⁴

All the same, the culture of Vanderbilt and the closeness of the community were conducive to the development of the Fugitive writers. There was something of a literary ferment at Vanderbilt in the 1920s. Even a football player, Warren liked to recount later in life, attempted to write poetry.¹⁵ Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and other of the Fugitive poets were all members of the Calumet Club, an honorary society of Vanderbilt journalists and would-be writers. Davidson and Jesse Wills, another Fugitive poet, were both members of the Old Oak and Coffee House, two distinguished Nashville literary clubs.¹⁶ By the late 1920s, the interests of the key members of this Nashville circle turned toward the South as a whole. The New Yorker William S. Knickerbocker, recently arrived in Monteagle, Tennessee, as professor of English at Sewanee and editor of the Sewanee Review, claimed to play a role in the origins of Agrarianism. Sometime between 1926 and 1928, Knickerbocker arranged to have Ransom speak at Sewanee before the EQB (ecce quam bonam) club. Ransom’s chosen topic was a recent series of articles on the South written by Bruce Bliven, editor of the New Republic. After touring the southern states, Bliven was convinced that the South was becoming indistinguishable, in mores, industry, and labor, from the rest of the nation. Knickerbocker later remembered that Ransom made seemingly off handed challenges to various passages in Bliven’s articles. “He indulged in pure lyric, the celebration of The South and its Tradition. In his own rare mind, something like a catalysis had happened,” Knickerbocker recalled. Ransom’s remarks were published in the Sewanee Review in the spring of 1928 and contained the entire basis of Southern Agrarianism.¹⁷ “The impression is being given out,” Ransom began, “that the Old South—seat of an antiquated culture whose persistence has been such an anomaly in these longitudes—is being industrialized, and brought into line with our forward-looking and hundred-percent Americanism.” Ransom denied that this was true.¹⁸

The first efflorescence of southern fervor among Davidson, Ransom, and Tate—and the first talk of a collective work on the South—had occurred in the spring of 1927, when Tate suggested a symposium on southern literature.¹⁹ Tate’s 1927 proposal is not extant, but it set off a flurry of excitement. Davidson welcomed Tate’s animus against the boosterism of the pro-business, progressive New South propagandists. Davidson was already impassioned on these issues. “I feel so strongly on these points that I can hardly trust myself to write,” he declared. He expressed enthusiasm for Tate’s idea, writing to John Gould Fletcher, “We have maybe found a Cause of a sort; we may be able, as you say, to ‘do something for the South.’”²⁰ The idea of a symposium flagged in 1927 but was revived in 1929, this time as a symposium on southern matters in general. Serious discussion about a collection of essays began in earnest late that summer.²¹ The impetus seems to have come from Davidson and was in part a response to plans under way for a symposium to be organized by Howard Mumford Jones, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina.

I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition appeared on November 12, 1930.²² Although most of the contributors to the Fugitive did not contribute to I’ll Take My Stand, Agrarianism developed out of the same social milieu—one marked by deep camaraderie as well as intellectual commitment. Ten of the twelve contributors were associated with Vanderbilt at one time or another: Ransom, Davidson, and John Donald Wade taught in the English Department; Frank L. Owsley and Herman Clarence Nixon taught in the History Department; Lyle Lanier taught in the Psychology Deparment; and Tate, Warren, Andrew Nelson Lytle, and Henry Blue Kline were former students. The two remaining contributors were acquaintances of Tate: Stark Young, an established critic in New York; and John Gould Fletcher, an expatriate southern poet.

Ransom drafted the book’s introduction, entitled a “Statement of Principles,” but all the contributors subscribed to it. It contains a coherent critical analysis of the South and the nation. The Twelve Southerners rejected the systematic application of scientific expertise to the system of production in society because, they argued, such an enterprise failed to provide the good life it promised, degraded the concept of labor, and introduced a meretricious consumerism into American life. Moreover, the Agrarians resisted the modern sociological tendency to analyze society as a whole and ascribe primary importance to broad and abstract social forces, which are often defined in terms of statistical measures. They insisted that life be analyzed in terms of the individual. The southerners encapsulated their criticism, programmatically and metaphorically, in the opposition between the agrarian and industrial orders (xxxvii).²³

The underlying core of the “Statement of Principles” was a rejection of the hollow blandishments of science and the industrial economy that translated the scientific ethos into the system of production and, inevitably, into society as a whole. “The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical; it has enslaved our human energies to a degree now felt to be burdensome,” the Agrarians wrote (xxxix). Science simply does not deliver what it promises. It is supposed to ease labor but it does not: the modern worker’s “labor is hard, its tempo is fierce, and his employment is insecure” (xl). Labor is to be enjoyed, but the modern scientific attitude, with its emphasis on labor-saving machines, ensures that it is seen as onerous and below one’s dignity (xl–xli). Moreover, the entire industrial system breeds overproduction, unemployment, and growing inequality in the distribution of wealth (xli). The Agrarians warned of technological unemployment. “A fresh labor-saving device introduced into an industry,” they argued, “does not emancipate the laborers in that industry so much as it evicts them” (xlv).

Proponents of industrialism promised greater consumption, but, in the eyes of the Agrarians, the effects of industrialization were uniformly deleterious. “We have more time in which to consume, and many more products to be consumed,” they allowed. “But the tempo of our labors communicates itself to our satisfactions, and these also become brutal and hurried” (xlii). The “strictly-business or industrial civilization” is subtly corrosive of religion because it undercuts the humble submission to nature that is the essence of religion. The arts, in turn, decay because of a decline in sensibility and the loss of leisure necessary to observe nature with disinterest. And, finally, the social amenities—manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love—suffer (xlii-xliii). In the end, Americans are saddled with the continuous pressure of advertising, with its salesmen who desperately “coerce and wheedle” the modern consumer into maintaining the habits necessary to feed the insatiable engine of the economy (xlv-xlvi).

“It is strange, of course, that a majority of men anywhere could even as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants,” the Agrarians declared. Ultimately, their opposition to industrial capitalism led them to a consideration of the individual rather than the group. This essential distrust of the sociological or socialist viewpoint underlying all progressive or social democratic policy making and politics provided the motivating conservative core of I’ll Take My Stand: “Men are prepared to sacrifice their private dignity and happiness to an abstract social ideal, and without asking whether the social ideal produces the welfare of any individual man whatsoever. But this is absurd. The responsibility of men is for their own welfare and that of their neighbors; not for the hypothetical welfare of some fabulous creature called society” (xlvi).

The southerners’ proposed response was a return to the society oriented around the hard...