What the Old South Can Teach Us
Lessons from the Southern Agrarians

4,790 words

Henry Blue Kline, et al.
I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition
Harper Torchbook, 1962

One of the major themes of federal politics throughout the first seven decades (1789-1859) of the American Republic was the struggle to maintain the balance of power between the Northern and Southern states. Each section had its own economic structure, with the rapidly industrializing Northern economy dependent on a mixture of factories and smaller farms worked by free white labor while the South relied largely on cash crops such as cotton and tobacco, much of which was produced on plantations worked by African slaves. While most of the white people in the South who made their living through agriculture owned no slaves, the political, economic and cultural elite of the region tended to come from the slaveholding planter class.

Though the growth of the white population of the North outpaced that of the South, this did not immediately lead to Northern dominance at the federal level. Of the first fifteen American presidents, eight were from the South. All eight of these men were slaveholders, and six came from the Virginia planter aristocracy.  The two most famous senators of the age were Kentucky’s Henry Clay and South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun. Southerners were able to negotiate the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 and successfully agitated for the repeal of the Tarriff of 1828 (the so-called “Tarriff of Abominations.”) All this is to say that the agrarian South found itself on relatively equal political footing with the industrializing North in the antebellum era, and at times Dixie even held the upper hand. The following seventy years would prove to be quite different.

The Decline of Southern Power

After the Confederate defeat in the War Between the States, the South found itself conquered and impoverished. Following Reconstruction, the states of the former Confederacy backed the Democratic party. However, in the sixty-four years between 1869 and 1933, the Republicans controlled the Senate for fifty-four years, the presidency for forty-eight years, and the House of Representatives for forty-four years. Not one southerner served as president or vice president. The Party of Lincoln was so strong in the northern states, and especially in New England, that it simply did not need support from Dixie to dominate federal politics for nearly three-quarters of a century. Without question, the South was the minority section. It was permitted to govern its own affairs as far as the race question was concerned, but the national stage was to be the dominion of men from the Northeast and Midwest, and there was no room for any Jeffersons, Jacksons, or Calhouns.

The industrialization of the North continued, and it grew into a mighty hub of production, complete with great cities that attracted masses of newcomers from Europe, as well as migrants from the South, black and white. Victories in the Spanish-American War and the First World War signaled to the rest of mankind that America was able and willing to take its place among the leading global powers. Meanwhile the South, proud but comparatively poor, was being left behind. This led some Southerners to believe that the solution to their region’s woes was to industrialize as the North had. These advocates for industrialization wanted to build a New South that would replace the Old.

The Southern Agrarians: Defenders of the Old South

Not all Southerners, however, were in favor of this vision. In 1930, twelve Southern academics who cautioned against industrialization and championed the virtues of the Old South collaborated on a project titled I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. [1] The members of this group were Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, Henry Blue Kline, Lyle H. Lanier, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Herman Clarence Nixon, Frank Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Donald Wade, Robert Penn Warren, and Stark Young. Each of these men contributed an essay to the work. Most of the Agrarians were connected in some way with Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Davidson, Ransom, Tate and Warren were members of the Fugitives, a society of poets based at Vanderbilt.

These men were fierce defenders of what they called the “Agrarian Tradition” and engaged in a multifaceted critique of the industrial juggernaut then seemingly flourishing north of the Mason-Dixon line. The authors of I’ll Take my Stand argued that not only would adopting the Northern model fail to bring prosperity to the South, but that it would also have deleterious effects on Southern education, religion, art, morals, and even relations between the races. They felt that it would destroy a culture that, while far from perfect, had many attributes worthy of praise and preservation, and substitute for that culture a new way of life that was not only alien, but decidedly inferior.

In his introduction to the 1962 reprint of I’ll Take my Stand, North Carolina literary critic Louis J. Rubin summarized the Agrarian viewpoint in this way:

What was wrong with the South was not that it was backward and agricultural, but that it was failing to cherish its own highly civilized customs and attitudes. For it was the South, not the industrial Northeast, that still retained a manner of living in which grace, leisure, spiritual, and aesthetic experience was possible. As such it might furnish a needed corrective to America’s head-long materialism and provide an image of the good life.

The twelve authors of I’ll Take my Stand introduced the work by way of a statement of principles expressing the “common convictions of the group” to which “every one of the contributors in this book has subscribed.” This statement of principles does much to bring clarity to the reader, for the essays, which vary in length from twenty-one to forty-five pages, also diverge sharply in subject, style, and tone. It also made my task in discussing I’ll Take my Stand considerably less difficult, as reviewing each essay individually would result in this article growing excessively long. I believe that the most effective and efficient way for me to provide readers with a concise summary of the work is to list excerpts from some of these statements, and then to give examples from the various essays where the principles of the authors are defended and expanded upon further.

Principles of Agrarianism

The Agrarians felt that, because of the mechanization of labor that “the act of labor as one of the happy functions of human life has been in effect abandoned and is practiced solely for its rewards” and that, as a consequence of the idea- which they saw as inherent to the philosophy of industrialism- that labor is not itself a good but rather an activity that should be reduced to the greatest extent possible, that “man has lost his sense of vocation.”

In “Reconstructed but Unregenerate” John Crowe Ransom argues that Dixie, in contrast to the industrial North, “never conceded that the whole duty of man was to increase material production, or that the index to the degree of his success was the volume of his material production.” Ransom goes on to characterize industrialism as “a program in which men, using the latest scientific paraphernalia, sacrifice comfort, leisure, and the enjoyment of life to win Pyrrhic victories from nature at points of no strategic importance.” In “Whither Southern Economy?” Herman Clarence Nixon deplores industrialism as “a conquest of the spirit” and worried that American industrial might had turned the country into a “de-facto empire” and would lead inexorably to imperialism, class conflict and foreign wars if not sufficiently tempered by the agrarian ethos of the South. Andrew Nelson Lytle shared Nixon’s disdain for the imperialistic tendencies that had emerged in American politics and described agrarian resistance to industrialization as nothing less than “a war to the death between technology and the ordinary human functions of living.” In a memorable line that contrasted the agrarian ethic which affirmed labor itself as worthwhile with the rampant and undisguised materialism present in industrial settings, Lytle remarked that “a farm is not a place to grow rich; it is a place to grow corn.”

Two more principles of agrarianism posit that industrialization would be ruinous to Southern religion and Southern art. In relation to spiritual matters, the Agrarians advanced the argument that:

Religion can hardly be expected to flourish in an industrial society. Religion is our submission to the general intention of a nature that is fairly inscrutable; it is the sense of our role as creatures within it. But nature industrialized, transformed into cities and artificial habitations, manufactured into commodities, is no longer nature but a highly simplified peace of nature. We receive the illusion of having power over nature and lose the sense of nature as something mysterious and contingent.

As for artistic pursuits:

Art depends, in general, like religion, on a right attitude to nature; and in particular on a free and disinterested observation of nature that occurs only in leisure. Neither the creation nor the understanding of works of art is possible in an industrial age except by some local and unlikely suspension of the industrial drive.

In “A Mirror for Artists” Donald Davidson predicted that “the making of an industrialized society will extinguish the arts, as humanity has known them in the past, by changing the conditions of life that have given art meaning.” Societies most conducive to artistic flourishing were

for the most part stable, religious, and agrarian; where the goodness of life was measured by a scale of values having little to do with the material values of industrialism; where men were never too far removed from nature to forget that the chief subject of art, in the final sense, is nature.

To Davidson, the cultivation of conditions most able to support great art provided “an additional reason among many reasons for submitting an industrial program to a stern criticism” and was “worth the most heroic effort that men can give in a time of crisis.” Therefore, the Southern artist, which Davidson, as a poet, certainly was, had a responsibility to “enter the common arena and become a citizen” and defend the agrarian way of life against the encroachment of industrialism.

Henry Blue Kline’s essay “Willian Remington: A Study in Individualism” tells the story of a fictional artist who is native to the South but moves northward after completing his university education. Remington had an easy enough time finding friends in his new locale and spent time working in a factory. However, he became alienated and cynical, and found his creative energies stymied. But his life improved upon returning to his native region:

And here, even as he excepted, he knew a new satisfaction, a sense that he belonged at last: for here was a social soil of just such a richness that he could take root and thrive therein; here was a people who thought in his terms and respected his traditions even when, exceptionably, they could not subscribe to them; here were young men who knew not only how to get drunk, but the art of staying happily sober: here were his own people.

He also discovered that labor itself is more enjoyable when it is performed alongside one’s people rather than in the company of strangers:

And, being satisfied in his own companions, he discovered the very interesting truth that many kinds of meat-and-drink labors which would have been distasteful and not worth doing in the houses of strangers may seem attractive and eminently worth doing while one is able to maintain a feeling that one’s efforts are in some way “all in the family.

Further, Remington’s artistic output benefited from his return to Dixie:

Furthermore, his self-imposed silence was broken at last; lifted out of the narrowly circumscribed area of selfhood into the richer realm of human relations by contact with a community life organized and conducted as a worthy end in itself, he now acquired the inner conviction which is the first condition of any artistic creation, no matter how humble. And here was an audience, not a very large one, perhaps, but in sympathy with his own sense of human values.

Kline’s fictional William Remington follows the advice of Donald Davidson in becoming politically active in order to safeguard the Southern way of life. The message comes through loud and clear: artists must not sit idly by and let the conditions which enable art to flourish be altered by the forces of commerce.

Another ideal held dear by the Southern Agrarians was humanism, which they defined as “not an abstract system, but a culture, the whole way in which we think, act, and feel.” The authors go on to call humanism

a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition. And, in the concrete, we believe that this, the genuine humanism, was rooted in the agrarian life of the older South and other parts of the country that shared in such a tradition.

Embracing the industrial program, the Agrarians cautioned, would do great harm to “the amenities of life.” These amenities, which include “manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love” will inevitably “suffer under the curse of a strictly business or industrial civilization.” In this vein, Lyle H. Lanier, in his “Critique of the Philosophy of Progress”, takes note of the fact that families in industrial settings are spending more time apart. Fathers are no longer working the land alongside their children. “The segmentation of both adult and child activities which has accompanied the corporate age” lamented Lanier, leaves little to the family beyond the details of finance and the primary sexual functions.” [2] Family, Lanier argues “is the natural biological group, the normal milieu of shared experiences, community of interests, integration of personality.” He goes so far as to state that the feelings of “personal isolation” which accompany the weakening of familial bonds are in fact the “sequel to industrialism.”

But the Agrarians did not warn against industrialism only because of what they perceived as its social and artistic consequences. They also critiqued it on economic grounds, as seen in this assertion included in their Statement of Principles:

It is an inevitable consequence of industrial progress that production greatly outruns the rate of natural consumption. To overcome this disparity, the producers, disguised as pure idealists, must coerce and wheedle the public into being loyal and steady consumers, in order to keep the machines running.

Lytle tells the story of a Southern farmer grappling with these unenviable circumstances:

How impossible is it for him to keep pace with the procession is seen in the mounting mortgages taken by banks, insurance companies, and the hydra-headed loan companies that have sprung up since the World War.

However, as Lytle sees it, no satisfactory solution is offered by the proponents of industrialism, which “with the best possible intentions, advise him to get a little more progressive, that is, a little more productive.” But Lytle’s argues that “an agrarian economy and industrial warfare are sustained through two different economies” and that therefore “the progressive-farmer ideal is a contradiction in terms.” As Lytle explains, the Southern farmer had once been relatively self-sufficient, having had “hardly anything to do with the capitalists and their merchandise.” But the new sort of “progressive farmer” must instead “think first of a money economy, last of a farmer’s life.” In Lytle’s tale, the progressive farmer can take advantage of improved roads, but he must pay for a car or truck. He can also make use of a tractor, but he must pay to maintain it. He can plant more crops, and diversify his crops, but “a greater yield does not necessarily mean a greater profit. It means over-production and its twin, price deflation.” This farmer gradually discovers that for every apparent advantage of this new system, there is also something worthwhile which is lost.

Through his essay “The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius” John Donald Wade furnishes readers with a profile of an elderly Georgia farmer and schoolteacher who, unlike Lytle’s “progressive farmer”, tries to warn others against adopting the New South program as a recipe for immediate wealth and permanent prosperity. The wise old farmer preferred any changes to be moderate and careful:

All that he insisted on was that the expansion of his community be an ordered response to actual demands- not a response so violently stimulated to meet artificial demands that it created new demands faster than it could satisfy the old ones.

While his approach initially draws the ire of some of the younger men in town, they come around to his way of thinking due to a poor harvest. Lucius, for his part, becomes disillusioned with even gradual industrialization.

The Statement of Principles finishes with this declaration:

The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the maximum economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.

The Agrarians were realists in that they conceded that industrialization would come to the South in some capacity- indeed, even by 1930, it already had. Yet, they were adamant the interests of the agricultural sector must be put first. One political solution floated was an Agrarian takeover of the Democratic Party by a coalition of Southern and Western farmers. Still, the authors admit that “These principles do not intend to be very specific in proposing any practical measures. The authors do, however, offer this final word:

For in conclusion, this much is clear: If a community or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political will and doomed itself to impotence.

Agrarianism as a Right-Wing Movement

Agrarianism was a product of a specific place and time and would not find a comfortable home in the Democratic or Republican parties of the present day. The Agrarians would be at odds with the worship of free markets rampant among conservates, as well as the collectivism of the Democratic socialist faction. They were harshly critical of both communism and capitalism. Indeed, according to Rubin, Robert Penn Warren had wanted to title the book Tracts Against Communism. What’s more, the Agrarians feared that embracing the industrial model would ultimately lead to “much the same economic system as that imposed by violence upon Russia in 1917.” Thus, the Agrarians deemed communism “a menace indeed, but not a red one.”  They perceived the systems of industrial capitalism dominant in the North and the communism reigning in Eastern Europe as two sides of the same dehumanizing, atomizing, community-destroying coin.

It is also critical to note that the Agrarians were fiercely individualistic and put forth the image of the self-sufficient farmer as their ideal. As the Agrarians saw it, Individualism and capitalism did not always go hand-in-hand. Robert Penn Warren did attach the label “conservative” to the individualistic Southern ruling class, with an important reservation:

But this attitude is not to be taken as a simple economic conservatism which would find a congenial supplement in capitalistic theory; its conservatism bears a more philosophical inflection which subjects the organization of capital to the same skeptical regard.

It may come as a surprise to some members of the conservative rank-and-file that one who refuses to fetishize the GDP and economic growth for its own sake is not necessarily one of those hated “socialists.” Those who carelessly and routinely lob such accusations would do well to read I’ll Take My Stand.

The Agrarians did not tell the long-suffering Southern farmer, fearful that his economic future and way of life was in jeopardy to “pull himself up by his bootstraps.” On the contrary, they championed his cause and called for fierce defiance against the ascendant zeitgeist; the pocketbooks of the industrialists be damned. According to the thought of the Agrarians, salvation for the individualist will not come from submitting oneself to the almighty forces of the “money economy.” But it would be a mistake to label the Agrarians simply as populists, for the populist spirit unquestionably present in Agrarianism is tempered not only by a pronounced individualist streak, but also by an old-fashioned elitism and respect for hierarchy. Lytle, for example, believed that the planter class were deserving of their position as the rulers of the South because “they were the more rigorous, the more intelligent, the more fortunate- the strong men of their particular culture.” Stark Young praised the virtues of the slaveholding aristocracy and notes with satisfaction that “our traditional Southern characteristics come from the landed class.” In contrast, he described the poor whites of the antebellum era as “more shiftless and less self-respecting” than the wealthy slaveholders. He also provided readers with this harsh appraisal of what he saw as the shortcomings of populism and democracy in Dixie:

We can put one thing in our pipes and smoke it- there will never again be distinction in the South until- somewhat contrary to the doctrine of popular and profitable democracy- it is generally clear that no man worth anything is possessed by the people, or sees the world under a smear of people’s wills and beliefs.

Additionally, both Young and John Gould Fletcher believed it best that higher education be restricted to a select few, an idea which would not be unfamiliar to the Cavalier elites who comprised the ruling class of the Chesapeake region in the seventeenth century. [3]

Another way in which the Agrarians deferred to existing hierarchies can be found in their attitude toward blacks. In “The Irrepressible Conflict” Frank Owsley recounts the history of race relations between whites and blacks in the South and notes matter-of-factly that the former were unwilling to emancipate enslaved Africans without removing them from America altogether. For this, Owsley does not condemn the South, nor does he reveal any hint of inherited guilt or embarrassment. Furthermore, Wade’s “Cousin Lucius” does not feel sorry for blacks. On the contrary, his lack of sympathy for them is one of the reasons Lucius is dismissive of socialist doctrine:

Socialism meant to him at bottom the desire of the world’s laboring classes for a more equable share of the world’s goods, and the laboring classes that he knew were negro farm hands. It seemed to him that in all conscience they shared quite as fully as justice might demand in the scant dole of the world’s goods handed down to their white overlords.

Several of the dozen essays in I’ll Take my Stand briefly touch on the race question in one way or another, but only one- Robert Penn Warren’s “The Briar Patch”- makes racial issues its primary focus. In that piece, Warren makes the case that an independent black economy, will best serve the interests of Southern blacks. Warren’s position can be seen as somewhat similar to that of black activist Marcus Garvey, though, unlike Garvey, Warren did not endorse Black Nationalism or a return of America’s black population to their native continent. Warren’s fear was the competition for jobs and wages in an industrial environment would pit the races against each other and create conditions ripe for increased violence and hatred. He contended that “The rural life provides the most satisfactory relationship between the two races which can be found at present, or which can clearly be imagined if all aspects of the situation are, without prejudice, taken into account.” Warren hoped that black laborers, whether they be working in factories or on farms, would be given the same protections as whites. He also condemned lynchings and found it regrettable that the “negro so often fails to get justice” in Southern courts. At the same time, overturning the system of social segregation was not something that Warren nor any of the other Agrarians advocated for in I’ll Take My Stand. [4] White political, economic, and social dominance in the South was not treated as an outrage, an embarrassment, or an injustice. It was simply a fact, nothing more.

In his introduction, Louis Rubin Jr. mentioned that I’ll Take My Stand has been denounced as “reactionary.” This charge is far from baseless. In “Remarks on the Southern Religion” Allen Tate embraced the label, writing that “Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting back the overgrowth and getting back to the roots. A forward-looking radicalism is a contradiction; it aims at rearranging the foliage.” Yes, the Agrarians were undeniably “backward-looking.” The nostalgia for the Old South, the skepticism of the inevitability of Progress, the general suspicion of change, and the deference to established hierarchies are all features of Agrarianism that are easily recognizable as “right-wing.” Overall, I believe it is appropriate to categorize Agrarianism as a movement of the right.

Following the Agrarian Example

The Agrarians were unable to inspire a popular movement of farmers that would stem the tide of industrialism. The New South triumphed over the Old. Even in 1962, Rubin could write that “The South has thrown its lot squarely with the machines and factories; agrarianism as a general pattern of life is largely a dead letter.” [5] So, why aside from indulging a general historical interest in the Old South and in rightist movements, should we pay any mind to the Agrarians and what they thought? What is it that we can learn from them? In my estimation, the most valuable lesson one can obtain from I’ll Take My Stand is that it is not always wise to follow down what appears to be the easiest path to short-term financial gain. Consider the issue of immigration. Corporations may call for more foreign workers to keep production high. It will stimulate economic growth, they assure us, and besides, this country needs more workers because the birth rates are too low. But what will happen to housing prices, public welfare consumption, and crime rates? And what will the demographic consequences of all this immigration be? How soon will we be relegated to minority status in the cities and towns that were once ours? The corporate lobbies and Chambers of Commerce, as well as the so-called conservatives who only care about conserving the GDP, do not want us to ask those questions. But they must be asked.

Like the Confederate Army, the Southern Agrarians provide an inspiring example of resistance to hostile outside forces threatening to permanently alter their communities in the name of “progress.” These are circumstances that we know all too well. We too must resist to the very best of our ability. The battle will be long and hard, but if we do not take up the fight, if we become convinced that defeat is inevitable, then our race will have, as the Agrarians said, “doomed itself to impotence.”

Notes

[1] The title is taken from the chorus of Dixie’s Land, the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy. Another nod to that period is in the authors’ decision to dedicate the book to Vanderbilt professor and Alabama native Walter Lynwood Fleming, a historian who studied the Reconstruction era under Columbia’s William Dunning. The Dunning School (briefly discussed here and here by Morris van de Camp) revised the Northern partisan view of Reconstruction and was sympathetic to Southern whites.

[2] I wish to highlight Lanier’s point that the decline of farm life weakens the family because it relates to two recent articles published at Counter-Currents, one by Jesse Poe Holiday and one by Derek Stark, on the declining influence of fathers and the adverse effects this has had on sons.

[3] For more on the traditional Cavalier reluctance to allow the less prosperous classes access to education, one can consult the second chapter of David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed. (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 1989). Fischer wrote that “At the time, visitors and natives both agreed that schools were few and very far between, that ignorance was widespread, and that formal education did not flourish in the Chesapeake. This condition was not an accident. It was deliberately contrived by Virginia’s elite, who positively feared learning among the general population.”

[4]Robert Penn Warren would later defect to the integrationist side. Rubin surmised that “A poll taken nowadays might find the surviving Agrarians sharply divided on the desegregation issue.” Davidson and Owsley remained committed segregationists.

[5] To see just how decisive the triumph of industrialism has been below the Mason-Dixon line, one can listen to James Edwards’ recent interview with Identity Dixie’s Padraig Martin on The Political Cesspool. Martin noted that the South has surpassed the Rust Belt in manufacturing and, as a section, stands to benefit from higher tariffs, a far cry from the days when John C. Calhoun led the Old South’s fight against the Tarriff of Abominations.