Farm in Louisiana, 1940.
A few weeks ago, with John Pondoro Taylor, on our companion blog Going Feral, we made a controversial entry. Keeping with that theme, we do the same here.
If a person has agrarian interests, there's no escaping The Southern Agrarians as there is not escaping their magnum opus, I'll Take My Stand. It is one of the great, if highly flawed, works of modern agrarian thought.
The irony, I suppose, of the work and the group needs to be mentioned from the onset. They did not make their living from the land, although it's not necessary to do that in order to be an agrarian. Rather, they were twelve men of letters who wrote what amounted to an agrarian last stand, which they were very conscious of it being at the time. They were:
- Donald Davidson, from Tennessee, poet, essayist, reviewer and historian. He was also a segregationist.
- John Gould Fletcher, from Arkansas, poet and historian. He was the first Southerner to win the Pulitzer Prize
- Henry Blue Kline, a writer educated at Vanderbilt who taught at Tennessee, before ironically taking government employment for the rest of his life.
- Lyle H. Lanier, an experimental psychologist from Tennessee.
- Andrew Nelson Lytle,, also of Tennessee and also of Vanderbilt. a poet, novelist and essayist
- Herman Clarence Nixon, of Alabama and a political scientist.
- Frank Lawrence Owsley, also of Alabama and Vanderbilt. a historian
- John Crowe Ransom, of Tennessee and Vanderbilt poet, professor, essayist
- Allen Tate, poet, and of Tennessee and Vanderbilt.
- John Donald Wade, of Georgia, and a professor at Harvard and Columbia, biographer and essayist
- Robert Penn Warren, of Kentucky, and who was a university professor in a variety of universities, and a poet, novelist, essayist and critic, later first poet laureate of the United States
- Stark Young, of Mississippi, a novelist, drama and literary critic, playwright
What marks them is their monumental work, which was a Depression Era, anti-New Deal, strike against the modern world and capitalism. It is flawed, in that its view of the American South was highly romantic, and frankly they were not bothered by its inherent racism and manged to basically not even see it. The work, while important, includes muted strain of Lost Cause yearning which are not admirable at all. Indeed, it's hard not to notice that they didn't notice that the class that was hurt the most by New Deal farm policies were African American tenant farmers.
Still, as noted, there'rs no escaping this work. It remains the magnum opus of American Agrarianism.
