Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 2: Southern Agrarian John Crowe Ransom

A famous document in Southern conservatism is the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by "Twelve Southerners". It consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)

John Crowe Ransom's contribution was called "Reconstructed but Unregenerate." As the title suggests, it's a highbrown pitch for Lost Cause militance. He writes of the "unreconstructed Southerer":

I wish that the whole force of my own generation in the South would get bewhind his principles and make them an ideal which the nation at large would have to reckon with. ...

His fierce devotion is to a lost cause - though it grieves me that his contemporaries are so sure it is lost. They [the Yankees] are so far from fearing him and his example that they even in the excess of confidence offere him a little honor, a little petting. As a Southerner I have observed this indulgence and I try to be grateful. Obviously it does not constitute a danger to the Republic; distinctly it is not treasonable. ...

The Southerner must know, and in fact he does very well know, that his atinque conservatism does not exert a great influence against the American progressivist doctrine. The Southern idea today is down, and the progressive or American idea is up. But the historian and the philosopher, who take views that are thought to be respectively longer and deeper than most, may very well reverse this order and find that the Southern idea rather than the American has in its favor the autority of example and the approval of theory. And some prophet may even find it possible to expect that it will yet rise again.

... The South is unique on this continent for having founded and defended a culture which was according to the European principles of culture; and the European principles had better look to the South if they are to be perpetuated in this country.

Much of this will sound familiar to viewers of FOX News today: the whiny-white-guy posturing; the defiant pose against the supposedly oppressive dominant majority; the attack on the whole idea of progress ("progressivist doctrine"); the religious atmospherics; the simultaneously pompous and defensive claim about Truth being on their side.

If we substitute "white" for "European", even that attitude is alive and thriving in American political culture today, although "Europe" has become a negative symbol to be set against "American exceptionalism"for our contemporary conservatives.

Ransom's essay continues with polemics against "such fine words as Progressive, Liberal, and Forward-looking," against materialism, against the notion of "Service" (?!?). Ransom's view is explicitly reactionary, as seen in his 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."

Some of Ransom's arguments for living in harmony with nature have a superficial contemporary "green" ring to them. But it is only a superficial impression. His viewpoint rejects science in favorite of the morals, habits and economics of the slave-based aristocracy of the pre-Civil War South. Like the other Southern Agrarians, he holds it up as a civilized ideal for the present:

Slavery was a feature monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice; and it is impossible to believe that its abolition alone could have effected any great revolution in society.

The fulness of life as it was lived in the ante-bellum South by the different social orders can be estimated today only by the application of some difficult sociological technique.

Or perhaps by application of a lively imagination. He continues directly:

It is my thesis that all were committed to a form of leisure, and that their labor itself was lesurely. The only Southerners who went abroad to Washington and elsewhere, and put themselves into the record, were those from the top of the pyramind. They held their own with their American contemporaries. They were not intellectualy as seasoned as good Europeans, but then the Southern culture had had no very long time to grow, as time is reckoned in these matters: it would have borned a better fruit eventually. They had a certain amount of learning, which was not as formidable as it might have been: but at least it was classical and humanstic learning, not highly scientific, and not wildly scattered about over a variety of special studies.

Yes, "labor itself was lesurely." Except, you know, for the people who actually labored. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were "not intellectualy as seasoned as good Europeans"? Please. Like I said, it takes a lively imagination to come up with this stuff. We can give Ransom that much.

When Ransom proceeds to slightly less grand depictions of society and history, he makes an argument against the industrialization of the South. Other than vague moral and sentimental posturing against the corrosive effect of industrialism, he doesn't offer any real concept of how a prosperous agrarian-based economy could function in the South. The context of 1930 is important. The Great Depression had just begun. The depression condition had hit the rural South years earlier. And it was so terribly properous to begin with. Ransom avoids specific racial terms. But his vision, such as it is, is to turn the real condition of poverty and increasing hopelessness of rural and small-town whites into a moral virtue to be defended by an increasingly aggressive conservative Southern block within the Democratic Party, which in those days was critically dependent on its conservative and segregationist Southern wing. Ransom calls it a "counter-revolution" against industrialism as represented by such advocates of the awful doctrine of Progress as President Herbert Hoover.

The condition of poor white he wants to preserve and turn into a badge of pride and a program of political resistance, he describes fairly vividly at one point. In it, he seems to contradict his earlier insistence of the virtues of the leisurely life:

The Southern tradition came to look rather pitable in its persistence when the twentieth century had arrived, for the establishment [by which he means the economy] was quite depreciated. Unregenerate Southerns were trying to live the good life on a shabby equipment, and they were grotesque in their effort to make an art out of living when they were not decently making the living. In the country districts great numbers of these broken-down Southerners are still to be seen in pached blue-jeans, sitting on ancestral fences, shotguns across their laps and hound-dogs at their feet, surveying their unkempt acres while they comment shrewdly on the ways of God. It is their defect that they have driven a too easy, an unmanly bargain with nature, and that their aestheticism is based on insufficient labor.

But there is somethihng heroice, and there may prove to be yet something very valuable to the Union, in their extreme attachment to a certain theory of life. They have kept up a faith which was on the point of perishing from this continent.

This is Ransom's highbrown way of saying that the rural economy sucks and the South ought to fight to keep it that way.

And in this passage, Ransom hides the meaning of "1875" - the overthrow of the democratic Reconstruction governments by force and violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations - by eluding it into the greater industrialization of the North. Since segregation, white supemacy and substandard public services including education that went with them don't figure into Ransom's essay explicitly, the reader could be forgiven for not wondering if those realities might have had something to do with the greater relative economic development in the rest of the country, where white racism took less self-destructive and pathological forms. Ransom derides that economic development as the "progressive principle" that meant "boundless aggression against nature":

Of course it was only after the Civil War that the North and the South came to stand in polar opposition to each other.

One wonders if John Calhoun would have agreed with that assessment.

Immediately after Appomattox it was impossible for the South to resume even that give-and-take of ideas which had marked her ante-bellum relations with the North.

A "give-and-take of ideas" that did not in the two decades leading up the Civil War includes open debate over the institution of slavery in most of the South. But did include increasing demands from Southern representatives that any discussion of abolition also be suppressed in non-slave states.

She [the South] was offered such terms that acquiescence would have been abject.

That is, under Congressional Reconstruction, the Southern states were expected to hold honest elections in which black males would be free to vote and to observe the terms of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. Today we have Republicans conservatives still attacking the basic concept of the 14th amendment on American citizenship, ostensibly in the name of controlling illegal immigration.

She retired within her border in rage and held the minimum of commerce with the enemy.

The "enemy" presumably being their fellow American citizens who were not supportive of white resistance to democracy and the Constitution.

Persecution intensified her tradition, and made the South more solid and more Southern in the year 1875, or thereabouts, than ever before. When the oppression was left off, naturally her guard relaxed. But though the period of persecution had not been long, nevertheless the Southern tradition found itself then the less capable of uniting gracefully with the life of the Union; for that life in the meantime had been moving on in an opposite direction. The American progressive principle was like a ball rolling down the hill with an increasing momentum, and by 1890 or 1900 it was clear to any intelligent Southerner that it was a principle of boundless aggression agaianst nature which could hardly offer much to a society devoted to the arts of peace.

One can't help but notice than Ransom's seeming opposition to the "boundless aggression agaianst nature" wasn't understood by his readers as less about industrialism - the struggle against nature is also a part of agriculture, after all - than about race. The opposition to "race mixing" and "miscegenation" would have been easily understood by Southern whites in 1930 as "aggression agaianst nature" in the segregationist ideology.

In any case, he is obviously promoting a thoroughly dishonest and reactionary version of history in his essay. This is hardcore Lost Cause ideology, though there may be distinctive quirks to his particular take.

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