Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 6: Southern Agrarian Lyle Lanier

The fifth of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Lyle Lanier, "A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.



Lyle Lanier (1903-1988)

 Lanier's essay is less burdened with Lost Cause dogma than most of the contributions to this volume. His essay is a readable account of the philosophical history of the idea of progress. He spends a lot of time on the philosophy of John Dewey and Dewey's criticisms of the conditions at the time of mass democracy and the industrial society. Although Lanier criticizes Dewey on such points as his faith in the flexibility of human behavior and the potential of general cooperation, he does treat Dewey's ideas with some apparent sympathy and therefore avoids the more overtly reactionary character of other contributors.

At least until the last couple of pages. What he proposes as a desirable solution to the Depression conditions of 1930 sounds more like Mussolini than Dewey. He proposes:

... to renounce the capitalistic industrial program. This does not mean that the industrial technology should be scrapped; on the contrary, further mechanization of industrial production should be encouraged, since this would mean that progressively fewer persons would be required for its processes. The production of commodities should be stabilized in each industry, and the large surplus of chronically unemployed should be induced by all possible means to return to agriculture. The objection may be made that already there is over-production of agricultural commodities; the answer is that agriculture is more than a process of "production." The millions of people who now hang on to the fringes of industry would find a place to live and food to eat; they would no longer fill the "flop" houses and the bread lines. They would not have to look forward to the demoralising prospect of the dole, even when made under the guise of "insurance." They would have a base on which to knit together the fragments of lives now broken on the wheel of what we are pleased to call civilization.[my emphasis]

This sounds like a giant system of sharecropping, forcing the urban unemployed to the countryside "by all possible means." How an already-ravaged agricultural market could be altered to accommodate such a change, Lanier does not discuss. His main concern is to avoid public assistance programs for the urban unemployed - out of concern for the damage it does to their characters, of course.

Lanier's vision appears to be a dystopian one based on some abstract notion of the superior virtues taught by the agricultural life:

The unsalutary psychological and social consequences of the diminution of the influence of agriculture upon the general patterns of American life have already been indicated. ... If there exists any effective social and political intelligence in the country it might profitably be mobilized for the conduction of a specific program for the rehabilitation of the agrarian economy and the "old individualism" associated with it. This program is not conceived in a spirit of pathological regression to the past, stimulated by repugnance toward contemporary conditions; it is the definition of a concrete social aim. The instrumentalities of intelligent political leadership, informed social science, and a definitive social philosophy could have no more important problem than that of trying to effect a synthesis, in some sense, of the unified manner of living inherent in the agrarian family and community with the energy and inventiveness which have been divered into industrialism.

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