We are very near an answer to our question - How may the Southerner take hold of his Tradition?"A Modest Proposal" was the name of a famous satire by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), the full title of which was, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public" (1729). One of the most famous satires in literature, Ricardo Quintana in his article on Swift in the Encyclopædia Britannica (2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD) describes it as follows:
The answer is, by violence.
For this answer is inevitable. ...
This method is political, active and, in the nature of the case, violent and revolutionary. Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots.
"A Modest Proposal" is a grimly ironic letter of advice in which a public-spirited citizen suggests that Ireland's overpopulation and dire economic conditions could be alleviated if the babies of poor Irish parents were sold as edible delicacies to be eaten by the rich.George Wittkowsky in "Swift's Modest Proposal: The Biography of an Early Georgian Pamphlet" Journal of the History of Ideas 4:1 (Jan 1943) wrote that "A Modest Proposal" was not only a "satire directed against conditions in Ireland" but also a criticism of "the theories and attitudes that rendered such conditions possible."
So giving his article the subtitle of "modest proposal" was a clear signal to the readers that it is a satire. The ostensible point of his satire is that the Southern Agrarian bogeyman of industrialism, which he here calls both "the American system" and Capitalism, has all sorts of problems that can only be fixed by the vague utopia of Agrarianism. In the ironic mode, the narrator assumes the pose of a defender of Yankee industrialism, and defines the virtues of Agrarianism by criticizing it.
This is confusing now, and undoubtedly was as well to readers in 1933. As I've discussed in earlier posts, the Southern Agrarians may have taken their agricultural ideal seriously as such. But their emphasis was on defended the (white) South against criticism from the North, including its so-called folkways on race relations and opposing the economic development of the South along the lines of the rest of the country. It was a distinctively and self-consciously reactionary program, as Tate's quote at the beginning of this post indicates.
It was also exotic. The American Review defined itself as a journal of Radicals of the Right/Conservative Revolutionaries. Americans defining themselves in similar ways in 1933 are likely to be overt defenders of capitalism as such. The Christian Reconstructionist arguments that are so influential on today's Radical Right emphasize the alleged Biblical mandate for capitalism, as Peter Montgomery explains in Jesus Hates Taxes: Biblical Capitalism Created Fertile Anti-Union Soil Religion Dispatches 03/14/2011.
That was not so completely the case in 1933; some radical right criticisms of the existing order of things nominally attacked capitalism, as Tate does in this essay. That part of his approach would have looked more familiar in 1933 than today. Southern Agrarian ideology, though, was not nearly so familiar, not least because the "agrarian" content was so vague. So it's hard to say how likely it is that the readers of that essay in 1933 understood this to be a defense of a Southern Agrarian alternative to industrial capitalism. I've been immersing myself in this Southern Agrarian writing for this month's series of posts. But it's not entirely obvious to me here what Tate is trying to say in favor of Agrarian thinking and what is his caricature of what defenders of Yankee industrialism would say in exaggeration about Agrarianism.
One part of Tate's Swiftian proposal is to turn some of the the unemployed into prostitutes. Including some of the men!
But his main "modest proposal" to eliminate unemployment is this. I'm quoting it at some length to include some of the nuances:
There is a certain number of useless persons. If that number increases or is even allowed to remain constant, it will, as we have seen, constitute a dire menace to order. It is the fate of labour - and who will question the logic of history? - to be placed as it is placed now. Society would suffer the least rupture, and be spared that violence to its sympathy - a peculiarly modern refinement of feeling - if it quietly, and in the ordinary routine of industrial technology, killed off about eight million workers and their families.I doubt that many (or even any) readers took him literally in this. The Nazi Holocaust was still years in the future, so the reference to gassing people wouldn't have immediately brought Auschwitz to mind, as it is likely to do for a reader in 2011.
It should be done, all things considered, gradually, but completed in a year lest there should be an abnormal increase of that class of persons, with the attendant perils. By looking at this scrapped property [the disposed-of workers and their families] as raw material, not as productive machinery as we usually do, industry could be put to use. Economy and expediency alike suggest this course. Merely to administer to twenty-five millions of souls some kind of euthanasia would shock the public with its hideous spectacle of waste. To lay them out, even in our handsomest "burial parks", would be a serious abuse of the concept of property-in-labour - the temporary assumption upon which the whole procedure here suggested would be based. To grant to mere possessions all the rites historically allowed at the demise of sentient creatures would of course invalidate the entire program. ...
I need not suggest any precise method of putting away these good people. I need not suggest that the method be painless. We are too humane for the axe, guillotine, rope, or firing-squad. I should personally prefer some kind of lethal gas, but not being a chemist, I leave that proposal to the specialists. There should be some kind of brief ceremony before each demise - a sort of half-ceremony, to remind us that these people are half-human. Perhaps the rite could be conveniently administered to groups, or put upon the air. It would be appropriate if a distinguished pastor of the church - whose Protestant branches have marched in the vanguard of progress - could be appointed to receive the herds at the pens. ...
It may be argued against this scheme that twenty-five million people would yield less raw material than the same number of hogs. The objection is sound but short-sighted. ...
For example, that "deep inward satisfaction" that the public gets out of a fine, animal-skin glove would deepen further could men and women wear the whole skin of a hand meticulously removed and tanned into a soft, seamless glove. The "fine art of cookery" would get a richer base for oleomargarine and the shortening oils. The potash and sodium chloride [from the bodies] would revise the slogan, "25¢ is enough to pay for toothpaste", to ""This toothpaste is cheap at any price: Human dentifrice for humanity". [my emphasis in bold]
But still: this was 1933, 15 years after the end of the First World War, in whose horrors and massive carnage the use of poison gas loomed large. Even allowing for the pre-Holocaust setting when this would not have recalled the discussion at the Wansee Conference, this "modest proposal" sounds more psychopathic than ironic to me.
The one time I heard the late, great Texas columnist Molly Ivins speak in person, she talked about the main function of satire as the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. She contrasted this to Rush Limbaugh mean-white-guy version of "humor," in which derision is often directed against those in trouble and with little or no power, rather than against elected officials or those holding some other form of power in society.
At best, Tate's irony in "Unemployment: A Modest Proposal" defends a vague and dubious Southern Agrarian ideology with overt reactionary aims against his image of Yankee industrial capitalism - and the non-segregationist brand of democracy with which the Southern Agrarians identified it. To me, it reads less as an indictment of the meanness of industrial capitalism and more like just plain mean.
And it sounds even more so when you pair it with his essay in I'll Take My Stand in which he defended the Agrarian approach as a likely to require an approach that would be "political, active and, in the nature of the case, violent and revolutionary. Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots."
He wasn't claiming that one to be ironic.
Tags: allen tate, confederate heritage month 2011, southern agrarians, us south
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