In my last post, I talked about the trick of pulling observations from some of their essays to make them sound more benign than the defenders of white racism, Jim Crow segregation and a vaguely agrarian authoritarian dystopia that they actually were.
Wendell Berry provided us an article that is an actual case study in just that, in the Jan/Feb 1999 issue of The Oxford American, in an article called "Still Standing."
President Obama recently awarded Berry the National Humanities Medal. (James Carroll, Wendell Berry receives humanities medal from Obama Louisville Courier-Journal 03/02/2011):
Berry, 76, a Port Royal novelist, essayist, poet, farmer and activist, shook hands with Obama, and the two whispered to one another briefly. The president then draped the red ribbon and medal around Berry's neck.In this YouTube video of a talk by Wendell Barry in Washington state in (apparently) 2009, environmental activist Bill McKibbon introduces him "our greatest moral essayist."
"The author of more than 40 books, Mr. Berry has spent his career exploring our relationship with the land and community," said the citation that was read aloud during the White House East Room ceremony, attended by Vice President Joe Biden, First Lady Michelle Obama and heads of federal arts agencies.
I probably shouldn't give a lead-in like that to a writer whose approach I'm about to criticize. But it gives a clue to the approach Berry took toward the Southern Agrarians. He connected their vague vision of agrarianism to his own work in preserving small farms and fighting the environmental problems created by industrial agriculture. Here's an example:
The great contribution of I'll Take My Stand, therefore, is in its astute and uncompromising regionalism. The Twelve Southerners were correct, and virtually alone at the time, in their insistence upon the importance of the local. Their thinking, which stood (and still stands) opposed to that of the agri-industrialists, conforms perfectly to the thinking of such agricultural scientists as Sir Albert Howard and Wes Jackson, whose guiding principle is that of harmony between local ways of farming and local ecosystems. An agriculture is good, thus, not by virtue of its universal applicability, but according to its ability to adapt to local conditions and needs. A culture is good according to its ability to provide good local solutions to local problems.He also quotes a few passages from John Crowe Ransom's "A Statement of Principles" which all the 12 contributors to I'll Take My Stand endorsed, such as:
... some economic evils follow in the wake of the machines. These are such as overproduction, unemployment, and a growin inequality in the distribution of wealth. But the remedies proposed by the apologists are always homeopathic [curing like with like]. They expect the evils to disappear when we have bigger and better machines, and more of them.If this were all you knew about the Southern Agrarians, you might think of them as some latter-day Fourier disciples, or forerunners by three-and-a-half decadesor so of the back-to-the-land hippies of the 1960s and 1970s. A large part of Berry's essay talks about the ideas and work of groups like the Northeast Organic Farmers Association and the Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. He characterizes them as "hundreds of organizations, large and small, that are working regionally or locally for land conservation, better farming practices, community preservation, local marketing of food and other farm products, preservation of agricultural breeds and varieites, better standards of health, and so on."
But the reader of I'll Take My Stand will look long and hard to find any meaningful discussion of "local marketing of food and other farm products" and the like. Even in Herman Clarence Nixon's contribution, which at least gives some economic statistics. As I've discussed in my posts on the individual essays in the book, there's very little of economics or sociology involved in them. There's a lot of segregationist politics, Lost Cause history and what we today would call "culture war" atmospherics. Berry in this article is making a purse out of a sow's ear. Or rather, he's making a purse and saying, hey, I made this out of that sow's ear over there. Because you have to twist the Southern Agrarian turnip very hard to get the kind of blood he does out of it. Or rather, you have to put food coloring in whatever liquid you can squeeze out and call it blood.
What does "our greatest moral essayist" have to say about the segregationist cause that is so clearly central to the I'll Take My Stand essays? He writes:
The reputation and influence of the book has been reduced also because it was written during the era of segregation. None of the authors at that time had explicitly dissociated himself from racism, and at least one of them never did so. Donald Davidson was to the last a segregationist - which brings us, as readers, to trial, just as it does Davidson.I'm not sure how that brings readers "to trial." But this is quite a literary slight-of-hand here. Berry calls attention to the fact the book was written "during the era of segregation." And then he conflates segregation with white racism, with support of Jim Crow segregation being the decisive measure of white racism. He continues directly:
We must decide whether to deal with this issues according to the rules of political correctness or according to the rules of critical discourse. The enterprise of political correctness deal in the political merchandise of general categories, invoking judgment without trial, whereas critical discourse must try to deal intelligently with the fact that people who are wrong about one thing may be right about another. And in fact Donald Davidson the segregationist contributed to I'll Take My Stand and excellent essay on the meaning of the arts in an industrial society.What Berry doesn't bother to "deal intelligently with" is the clearly expressed support for segregation and Lost Cause pseudohistory which frames all 13 of the essays in I'll Take My Stand.
What does he make, for instance, of the Davidson essay he praises when Davidson characterizes the antebellum South's culture as "sound and realistic in that it was not at war with its own economic foundations"? Or of Frank Owsley's ludicrously dishonest Lost Cause account of Reconstruction and his embrace of white victimhood whining? Coming at the end of the decade of the 1920s in which the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed its apex of popularity, against whom did Berry think the purging violence that Allen Tate was advocating? Did he imagine that segregation and white supremacy were no part of the South's "inherited way of life" to preserve which Andrew Nelson Lytle calls on Southerners to "make a desperate fight"? Did he think the jungle images and explicitly defense of segregation made by Robert Penn Warren ("Let the negro sit beneath his own vine and fig tree") were only a coincidence of the fact that the book was published "during the era of segregation"? Does he take John Donald Wade's absurd characterization of Confederate Vice President being full of "a passionate integrity and a passionate love for all mankind" came from scrupulous historical scholarship? (Or maybe since Wade's adoration piece for the Lost Cause was in the form of a short story he thinks it doesn't matter?)
Without grappling with the explicit and implicit ways in which the Twelve Southerners dealt with race, he later returns to this defense of their position on the subject, which is really an excuse for dodging the subject - as good segregationists back in the day knew they had to do when discussing "Southern folkways" with Yankees:
Is the "Statement of Principles" a racist document? I cannot see that it is. Is it racist by association, in the sense that some racists have subscribed to it? I suppose so, but in that case so are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Gospels. Are we going to disown our forebears entirely because they were partly sinner? (Are we willing to stand judgment before our own descendants on the same terms?)This formulation has the uncomfortable feeling of someone defending something he knows is unpopular and giving himself room to comma-dance away from criticism. The "Statement of Principles" which all the Twelve Southerners endorsed at the time does not articulate overt white supremacy. Neither do any of the other essays, for that matter. Nor does the "Statement" explicitly defend racism. As I said in my comments on it earlier, the Agrarians' statement of principles is a piece of whiny white Southern victimology, one which takes for granted the Jim Crow system of white supremacy and doesn't even pretend to see white racism and its institutions of the time as the least bit problematic. Readers both North and South would have understood in 1930 that Ransom and the other endorsers of that introductory statement understood that it was the white South that was mean when they asked, "But how far shall the South surrender its moral, social, and economic nutonomy to the victorious principle of Union?"
Berry's suggestion that I'll Take My Stand - excuse me, the introduction to I'll Take My Stand - can only be considered "racist by association" is particularly disingenuous. As I've shown in various posts and to some extent in this one, the Twelve Southerners were defending the Southern system of white supremacy and segregation and the corrupt, semi-democratic government that went along with it. The concept of guilt-by-association is normally taken to mean imputing guilt to someone by irrelevant associations. Associating someone with a position they actually wrote down and published under their own names isn't really an inappropriate association.
Berry continues:
Is an agrarian society necessarily a racist society? I don't think so. In 1930 the most successful agrarian communities in the Untied States were probably those of the Midwest, which did not depend on the labor of any subject or oppressed race. At the time, moreover, the farmland of the Midwest was distributed more democratically, and was better farmed, than it has been under the dominance of industrial agriculture.And so he dances away from any serious consideration of the things the Twelve Southerners actually wrote in the book that deal in some way with questions of race relations.
Berry also doesn't deal with the explicitly reactionary position the Twelve Southerners take, as exemplified by John Crowe Ransom's statement, "The gospel of Progress is a curious development, which does not reflect great credit on the supposed capacity of our species for formulating its own behavior." Nor does he contextualize the role Blut und Boden (blood-and-soil) played at the time in such ideologies. Which is necessary to appreciate what readers in 1930 would have taken from John Gould Fletcher's contempt for public education, for instance. Or Lyle Lanier's vision of what seems to be massive compulsive sharecropping with his recommendation that "the large surplus of chronically unemployed should be induced by all possible means to return to agriculture." Or Andrew Nelson Lytle's praise of rural superstition.
Framing the Southern Agrarians as early heralds of organic farming or hippie communes is really just a trick. The changes in American society that mean that far fewer people work in agriculture directly also mean that the political vocabulary has changed in a way that can facilitate that particular trick. Because to understand what the Southern Agrarians were saying and what their audience in 1930 was hearing, their writing does have to be situated in the farming depression that was devastating the lives of rural Southerners well before the stock market crashed in 1929. And where it would be rare today to hear American ultra-conservatives explicitly criticism capitalism as such or the evils of industrialism as the Twelve Southerners did, it was not so unusual at that time. Henry Blue Kline's horror of "capitalism gone progressivist" was embedded in a story praising smug white elitism of a hyper-individualist kind. Such hyper-individualists today would probably not use that kind of phrasing - although it's worth noting that Glenn Beck's primitive Bircher style ideology today does attack the straw man Beck makes out of "progressivism."
Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south
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