Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 8: Southern Agrarian Andrew Nelson Lytle

Andrew Nelson Lytle

The eighth of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Andrew Nelson Lytle (1902-1995), "The Hind Tit." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

The Great Depression was the worst economic slump ever in the United States, and the worst in the lifetimes of those living now, the current one being second in degree of severity. It was not unusual in 1930 to see declarations of historic disaster like this, from the opening paragraph of Lytle's essay:

When we remember the high expectations held universally by the founders of the American Union for a more perfect order of society, and then consider the state of life in this country today, it is bound to appear to reasonable people that somehow the experiment has proved abortive, and that in some way a great commonwealth has gone wrong.

But there wasn't necessarily anything specific about the diagnosis of that problem that would normally follow. Lytle elaborates a clearly reactionary outlook, as in this passage where he compares the Republican Administration of Herbert Hoover to the Soviet Union in terms of their economic management:

The escape is not in socialism, in communism, or in sovietism - the three final stages industrialism must take.

"Industrialism" in the vocabulary of the Southern Agrarians was a dirty word standing for Yankee economic development and Constitutional democracy. In Lytle's view, the Hoover Administration had already ushered in the third of those evil final stages:

These changes merely the manner and speed of the suicide; they do not alter its nature. Indeed, even now the Republican government and the Russian Soviet Council pursue identical policies toward the farmer. The Council arbitrarily raises the value of its currency and forces the peasant to take it in exchange for his wheat. This is a slightly legalized confiscation, and the peasants have met it by refusing to grow surplus wheat. The Republicans take a more indirect way - they raise the tariff. Of the two policies, that of the Russian Soviet is the more admirable. It frankly proposes to make of its farmers a race of helots.

This is the same kind of crackpot talk we hear today from the more highbrow Tea Party Republicans accusing President Obama of being a Marxist Kenyan revolutionary Islamunofascist. Complete with an argument based vague on currency tricks.

Like all but one of his fellow Agrarian essayists in this volume, Lytle wastes little time describing or justifying the segregation system and the severe limitations it imposed on democracy in the South, even for many whites. I suppose they would have considered it uncouth to waste much time on such topics; better to stick with literary images of rural bliss. He does gives us some hints of his racial attitudes, however. For instance, when discusses the cosmic evils of industrial development, he advises his readers, "That is the nigger in the woodpile ... keep the machines turning!"

Okay, maybe I'm violating "Godwin's Law"; but it fits

Lytle's essay is emphatic in opposing the vague menace of industrial civilization like the Yankees had. And even more vague in espousing the Blut und Boden virtues of agricultural life as the Southern Agrarians imagined them in these essays. But his vision for the rural paradise of the South he would like to see, from how he describes it here, sounds like a barter economy conducted by dirt-poor whites - "the pore white, the hookwormed illiterate," to use his phrase - and even more dirt-poor (and very scary) blacks, all happily content with subsistence labor and backwoods superstition:

Charms, signs, and omens are folk attempts to understand and predict natural phenomena. They are just as useful and necessary to an agrarian economy as the same attempt which come from the chemist's laboratory in an industrial society, and far wiser, because they understand their inadequacy, while the hypostheses of science do not.

Charms and omens are far better than all this here new-fangled "science" stuff, apparently, in the Agrarian utopia Lytle foresees.

He ropes Lost Cause history into the service of his anti-progress agenda, here conflating an historical what-if argument (about how the South's economy would have developed if the Confederacy had won the Civil War) with the relative prosperity of agricultural and industrial areas and with an probably unintentionally ambiguous image of what the Confederate and anti-Reconstruction "Redeemers" stood for:

This error [of thinking progress should be part of agriculture!] is also seen in the works of those highly respectable historians who, pointing to the census returns and the mounting wealth of the industrial states during the early decades of the nineteenth century, declared that the Southern culture was then already doomed, and that the Civil War merely hastened its demise. This view holds that industrialism is manifest destiny, that it would have supplanted agriculture in the South even if the Confederacy had maintained its withdrawal from the already disrupted Union. It strangely argues that the victorious planter and the small yeoman farmer would have abandoned what they had waged a desperate war to preserve from others; and what, in spite of defeat, survived in its essential features until the second decade of the twentieth century; and what still possesses sufficient strength to make a desperate fight for its inherited way of life.

Lytle probably intended his readers to understand that last part as a reference to the continuance of the South's rural nature. But it could apply just as well to white supremacy. Or even to slavery, if one wanted to use slavery as a metaphor for the segregation system and sharecropping. The Confederacy would not likely to have been in a hurry to abolish those, either.

Lytle polemicizes at some length against the notion of modernizing farming methods with present-day technology and/or industrial methods. Nowhere do he or any other of the 12 essayists in this book deal at all seriously with the grinding poverty that affected most of the rural economy, especially in the Deep South in 1930. He even quotes with approval a country sage from the 1840s or thereabout advising against the evils of even the most basic business accounting for the farm: "as soon as a farmer begins to keep books, he'll go broke shore as hell." It's not just a cute story he throws in. He comes back later in the essay to rail against bookkeeping on the farm. And against programs to improve rural roads, and the radio and motor cars and the like that follow them. Then our noble farming folk have to deal with other evils, like "public schools, high schools, the normals [colleges to train teachers], and even the most reputable universities, the press salesmen, and all the agents of industrialism."

He includes in the middle of this what is little more than a propaganda portrait of an idealized farm family's daily life, spiced up with some harmless lyrics from popular folk songs to show what a charming life the sturdy "hookwormed illiterate" farmer and his family have. They live in a dogtrot house, which were still in view here and there in the country when I was growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s. They were generally understood to be about the surest sign of rural poverty short of going to town in a horse and wagon. (And I did see even that with at least one family growing up.) The boys and girls of the family work at home all day. And even in the evening, there don't seem to be no book-l'arnin' goin' on. But I guess that's obviously not part of the "hookwormed illiterate" farming life.

It's hard to imagine who could have taken something like this seriously, even in 1930. Or I really should say especially in 1930, when the Depression had made the collapse of the rural economy in the South and its effects on the farmers (with and without hookworms) were painfully evident throughout the South. As was the especially extreme toll taken on rural African-Americans by the combination of the failed farm economy and severe racial discrimination. I suppose you could take Lytle's arguments seriously if you were the kind of person who couldn't distinguish Herbert Hoover Republicanism from Soviet Bolshevism.

He concludes with a final plea for rural insularity against anything that reeks of progress, democracy or freedom for rural dwellers:

As for those countrymen who have not gone so deeply in the money economy, let them hold to their agrarian fragments and bind them together, for reconstructed fragments are better than a strange newness which does not belong. It is our own, and if we have to spit in the water-bucket to keep it our own, we had better do it.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, southern agrarians, us south