Hi everyone. It’s a relatively short review this week, just the one (long) review. I’ve actually been thinking about changing my schedule here. I know I just introduced some changes last January. But I’m thinking about how best to write. I’d like to write more long-form fiction. I’m not sure I can write as much criticism as I do and make any progress there. But part of the issue is I’m dealing with many things, including health issues (nothing dangerous, just inconvenient), that create many moving parts and make decision-making difficult.
Tl;dr- if you like my writing, I will keep doing it. You might see less short term so you can get more long term. I’m figuring things out. Thanks!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Davidson et al, I’ll Take My Stand
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Mithra Moving
REVIEW
12 Southerners, “I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition” (1930) - Fun fact- liberal hero Robert Penn Warren, he of “All The King’s Men,” that warning against the tyranny of the one guy with a real following who seriously discussed wealth redistribution at the time, was one of the authorial “12 Southerners” who produced this manifesto! They were a group of scribblers, the core of whom came from the circle of “fugitive” poets around Vanderbilt, but the group also included historians and assorted other intellectuals. They wrote this series of essays to associate their region, understood roughly as the former Confederate states, with something called “agrarianism,” and to defend both against the encroachment of the North and its industrial civilization.
We’ve heard this tune before, but what makes this collection stand out is when it was written: 1930. So, about a year into the Depression, but before FDR took office, before labor grew to the strength it would attain, before the rise of a sort of “popular front” culture that brought those to the left of liberalism closer to the mainstream of American politics or society than they ever had before or would since. It was also well before the challenges to the Jim Crow system that would come with the New Deal and WWII, which were necessary but comparatively small-scale building blocks for the really epochal changes that would come with the civil rights/black freedom movement. So, why a Southern/agrarian manifesto, and why then?
Well, superficially, it came down to one Henry Louis Mencken. Mencken was America’s most popular and arguably its most respected man of letters, and the South was one of his favorite targets for abuse. He condemned the region as backwards, violently religious, hypocritical, anti-modern, etc etc on and on. The most famous of this sort of material of Mencken’s today is his coverage of the Scopes trial in Tennessee, which made the inhabitants of that state out to be so many almost sub-human rubes, hounding good men for teaching the honest, unsentimental truth. But there was plenty more where that came from. And where Mencken went, others followed. Reporters covering the region for expanding newspapers, radio shows, and newsreels painted the South (which had many poor areas that did not share in the gilt bonanza of the roaring twenties) as uniquely “benighted.” That word came up a lot- “benighted,” stuck in the dark night, not seeing the light of the new day.
Most reactions against Mencken and the “benighted South” concept – which, let’s make clear, were seldom in any meaningful sense anti-racist critiques of Jim Crow or lynch law, certainly not from the profoundly anti-egalitarian Mencken – didn’t help matters much. Local newspaper editors and preachers were ill-equipped to not come off like earnest boobs next to the Sage of Baltimore, fair or not.
But, modern culture provides resources to those resisting some of that same culture’s advances or japes. Whatever else they were, the Southern Agrarians were not parochial or naive. The Fugitives were among the first major interlocutors of modernist poets like T.S. Eliot in the United States. Others were substantial poets, essayists, novelists, and historians in their own right, steeped in what was then state of the art thought, while that state was moving quickly. Their Sewanee Review could stand toe to toe, talent-wise and in terms of literary innovation, to any American literary journal. Figures like Allen Tate and Andrew Nelson Lytle are obscure today, but literary people knew the names well, and well into the mid-twentieth century, for poems, novels, and plays that drew comparisons to Joyce, Proust, Eliot, and most of the other modernist heavy-hitters you care to name. John Crowe Ransom, for his part, was arguably the godfather behind the New Criticism, the formalist school of literary analysis that had something like hegemony over American criticism for decades. These agrarians (all of whom made their livings at universities and small magazines and not at farms) may not have liked New York. But New York liked them.
Let’s put it this way: “I’ll Take My Stand” is, emphatically, a manifesto by intellectuals from the thirties. It’s this bizarre bridge document. It has a foot in two camps people normally don’t put together: that lf similar manifestos — Futurist, Surrealist, even dada — issued by intellectual/artistic/ideological cliques in the early twentieth century, and the kind of post-civil rights confederate apologia of the type produced by Forrest MacDonald and Grady McWhiney (agree with him or not, MacDonald, like the Agrarians, was no lightweight- McWhiney, I am less convinced about). I’ve spent some time looking at contemporary neoconfederate writing, and I can tell you… this isn’t that (and that isn’t MacDonald, either, but who’s counting, other than this guy). “Intellectual” or even “intellectually sophisticated” does not mean the same thing as “smart.” This book is actually profoundly stupid. But that, too, is in line with manifestos of the period. The way I think it’s stupid probably says more about me and my time than about theirs… but my opinion stands. There’s a whole network of associations between attitudes and ideas here that strike the contemporary reader as deeply counterintuitive.
The argument advanced in “I’ll Take My Stand” is that the South is an “agrarian civilization.” While all twelve of our intellectuals wax for pages about the agrarian quality of life versus the industrial (associated with the North), we never get what I would call an adequate explanation of what this means. But of course, I’m a New Englander, a socialist, an inhabitant of a timeline where the Agrarians lost (or did they? more anon) so of course I don’t get it.
Well… what exactly did Futurism mean, if you subjected it to close scrutiny? To use a term that would come much later, and that these writers who went through intellectual training that no one does today (including these ludicrous stabs at “classical education” the right sells to idiots) would rather chew their own arm off than use, these manifestos really were more about “vibes” than anything else. Say what you want about Marinetti, he got a vibe across: motorcycles! Smoke on the horizon! Weird metal sculptures! Death! No more spaghetti!
So what vibe were the Agrarians after? As far as I can tell, an opposite of the roaring twenties and of the progressive era that came before it. That meant getting their own back against smart alecks like Mencken, but even more it meant a rebellion against what they didn’t have the vocabulary to call “mass culture.” This meant everything from heavy industry to advertising to radio to the automobile to most ideas of progress, especially those quantifiably measurable. They have a good time emphasizing the human-scale pleasures of community, sense of place, local uniqueness, etc., versus the industrial values of making everything about money and getting more widgets off the assembly line. Naturally, they dismiss any type of socialism as just industrialism gone rampant, as evidenced by what Stalin was up to at the time. Even though several of them were major contributors to pro-fascist periodicals, they got quite upset when accused of fascism themselves. Fascism involves central organization of the type they simply cannot abide, can’t you see?! That Mussolini character is an industrial roustabout! What the South needs is —homegrown— oppressors who know the names of all their slaves…
Anyway, sorry about that, North gonna North. What I’m describing up there probably doesn’t sound all that odd. Countercultural types eventually took something like it up, with varying degrees of coherence and only sometimes using the South as a prop. So did Ted Kaczynski, for that matter, though he represents the strain that came to see the sort of high culture that the Agrarians thought their preferred social order could protect as either irrelevant or part of the problem.
That’s where things get weird. The idea of agrarian versus industrial isn’t that unusual, and neither is the idea of North and South as civilizational opposites. Materially, neither makes any sense, for the same reason- the two historically constitute each other. If there’s a germ of truth in the historical alibi pro-confederates throw up, that the North fought the civil war to promote its industrial system, it’s that industry needs agriculture… but agriculture, certainly agriculture as practiced by the nineteenth century south, also needed industry. Frankly, they should have thanked us for the favor, that we didn’t boot them on their ass and let Britain make them a debt-colony, into less-interesting Brazil… And you have to wonder… in 1930, the US might not have looked like an incipient superpower, the kind of country it’d be worth sticking around in despite disagreements, especially to flighty intellectuals. It might have seemed like being the aristocratic intellectuals in a decaying debt colony that the world left alone except to extract profit from was actually a good deal…
Anyway! There I go again. Sorry, just read hundreds of pages of Southern propagandizing… I suppose we should talk some about how this book approaches race, slavery, and the war. Except for one chapter, the answer is “elliptically or barely at all.” The historiography as it stood did a lot of their work for them. Between the white revanchism embraced by the Dunning School, and the economic reductionism of a lot of progressive historians at the time, the idea that the war was a tragic mistake and that slavery really only entered into it because of addled ideologues (mostly abolitionists), was common sense with white readers, South and North. The most interesting thing about the chapter on the war in this book is that its author, Frank Owsley, wasn’t some sweaty romantic or racist, or not just one (he was definitely hugely racist). He was also a pioneer of what would be called social history, a man who did serious groundbreaking archival work on the lives of “plain” (white) “folk”… not for this essay, he didn’t need to, he just regurgitated then-established historiography’s greatest hits, but elsewhere. The rest of the Agrarians could ignore the race angle because no one made them face it.
This gets at the thing that makes this book so odd, read almost a century after its publication. The South these people are defending is borderline unrecognizable once you get to what brass tacks such artsy types can be bothered to produce. Moreover, I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t have that much to do with the South as it existed then. On top of that, while the Agrarians would no doubt look on this moment in time and despair — I mean, among other things, despair is a better modernist pose than, like, glee — in certain respects they got what they ordered, if not what they wanted.
The weirdest chapter is Allen Tate’s essay on southern religion. Tate was a big, big deal in American poetry in his day, someone who used to get bandied about as a potential Nobel laureate. Not exactly a lightweight! So what to make of an essay that proclaims that the South has the most powerful religious impulse in America, but could never truly form - a religion - because it was based in Protestantism? Tate hadn’t even converted to Catholicism at that point! That would be decades later. He just waxes wistfully on how if only the southern religious impulse could be “organized” i.e. attached to a hierarchy and stable intellectual system, how powerful it would be! Alas, he sighs tragically, they’ll just get more Northern, which as far as Tate is concerned, means more Protestant(!).
Well! What a funny little historical cul de sac. You can almost see it. Tate wrote this long before fundamentalist Protestantism made its big turn into secular politics. He lived to see it, but was insulated by intellectual fame, his eventual conversion to Catholicism, and, one suspects, booze, and died before Reagan really brought the thing home. A few fundamentalists tried politics earlier with the Scopes Trial and got their fingers badly burnt- part of what inspired this collection, in fact. Southern religion didn’t look strong, and weird aesthetes like Tate half-agreed with Mencken that it was embarrassing.
That’s the thing about all of this, with a century’s hindsight. In many respects, the industrial society that the Agrarians saw as Babylon bent over backwards to not force everyone to live an “industrial” lifestyle. Governments, banks, and employers spent the late twentieth century routing (white) people out of cities, into little fiefdoms of their own in the suburbs. The knock-on effects of this were substantial, and most of them redounded to the favor of what historians see as a distinctly Southern model. Official anticommunism helped promote a religiosity with a distinctly Southern bent, that Tate might have derided but which proved pretty fucking important down the line. Businesses based either in the South or its weird step-child the Sun Belt — Wal-Mart, Disney, franchise fast food, etc — pioneered forms of capitalist organization that emphasized the empowerment of a broad middle strata of managers to discipline and reward workers, the importance of emotional labor, workplaces as family units overseen by patriarch figures, contemporary for bureaucracy and unions, etc. Not exactly socialism, and not exactly the dark satanic mills gobbling up the piedmont.
“And not exactly what we wanted either, asshole!” you can hear the Agrarians whining from the grave. Well… it’s true. Many a pleasant field and fine old home and even civil war historical site has been gobbled up by McMansions and office parks. Southern culture is somewhat less distinct- though in no small part because Southern culture invaded the North much more successfully than Lee’s army ever could have. And it’s hard to get around the decline of family farming, a straight up victim of capitalism and Cold War policy, though given that the version of non-capitalist Southern farming the Agrarians championed was something of a chimera anyway…
The point here isn’t (much) to own the Agrarians for being wrong about things. It’s to point to the weird “long duree” of Jeffersonian fantasy, intellectual politics, very specific historical conjunctures, capitalism, and policy, that makes all of these weird ideas, images, and people sit together. The guy who made up the New Criticism got his artsy friends together to write a big Marinetti/Wyndham Lewis-style manifesto about how a fantasy of southern agrarian regionalism was the last redoubt against Moloch, only for most of them to renounce the book as youthful folly without quite realizing that Moloch was going to sell the cheap version of their fantasy to millions… I don’t know. It interests me. Definitely more than the essays themselves- it seems like a lot of these guys were half-embarrassed by intervening in crude politics at all, when there were delicate poems and essays they could be doing. Weird stuff, man. **
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Mithra Moving
Here’s what it looks like just as Mithra starts moving in to rub her head against your legs.
Fun fact: in the 1990s, a tenured Marxist historian named Eugene Genovese stumbled upon a copy of "I'll Take My Stand", and after a few months of talking about it with his wife, both of them abandoned Marxism and converted to traditionalist Catholicism.
Between that, and the detachment from racial reality of the entire book, and Allen Tate’s weird essay on religion, and the predominance of the Black Church in Southern life -- there's an odd, slightly Lovecraftian undercurrent to the Agrarians, but let's leave someone else to write that story... best of luck with the fiction endeavor!