Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 7: Southern Agrarian Allen Tate

Allen Tate (1899-1979)

The sixth of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Allen Tate, "Remarks on the Southern Religion." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

Following Lyle Lanier's entertaining but unconvincing philosophical praise of the the supposed rural virtues, poet Allen Tate takes up Southern religion. At the start, he wisely confesses the modesty of his qualifications to write on the subject. There follows quite a bit of discussion of the religious view of "a horse croppping the blue-grass on the lawn" and of the distinction between Western and Eastern attitude toward Christianity. None of it especially informative.

He eventually gets to Southern religion. He argues that historically the American South never quite got its religion right. One reason was that it was mostly Protestant, which was "a non-agrarian and trading religion", Tate says. Another was that "the South never created a fitting religion," which meant that "the social structure of the South began grievously to break down two generations after the Civil War." The reader is left to guess that somehow this breakdown has to do with the encroachment of Yankee industrialism. Though how that relates to deficient Southern Protestantism is quite unclear. Everything would have been different if most Southerners had been Catholic like Scarlett O'Hara?

Tate sees the great religious need for the South as the requirement to "take hold of Tradition." The religious tradition of the South, as Tate sees it, consists in being more concerned with images than with dogma or abstract thought:

It could entertain the biblial mythology alomg with the Greek, and it could add to thsese a lively mediaevalism from the novels of Sir Walter Scott. ... The old Southerners were highly critical of the kinds of work to be done. They planted no corn that they could not enjoy; they grew no cotton that did not directly contribute to the upkeep of a rich private life; and they knew no history for the sake of knowing it, but simply for the sake of contemplating it and seeing in it an image of themselves. And aware of the treachery of nature, as all agrarians are, they tended to like stories, very simple stories with a moral.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

His fellow contributor John Gould Fletcher might wonder at this point if Tate might be saying that those bad Yankees were right to think that the general educational system of the antebellum South was deficient in comparison to its Northern counterparts. One finds it hard to resist the suspicion that Tate in that passage is looking for flowery ways of saying that Southerners had such limited education opportunities that they were inclined to spend way too much time thrilling to Walter Scott stories and mistaking them for reality. Antebellum Southerners found in Scott's romantic novels a glorified version of the honor codes which dominated the rural South and which contributed so greatly to their exaggerated fears of Northern critics of slavery and to their tendency toward belligerant reaction to perceived injuries to their "sacred honor." Mark Twain had something like this in mind when he said of Scott, "Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war." (Life on the Mississippi)

Somehow out of this muddle, Tate comes to the following conclusion, which somehow he considers a religious solution:

We are very near an answer to our question - How may the Southerner take hold of his Tradition?

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 forward-looking radicalism is a contradiction; it aims at rearranging the foliage.

The Southerner is faced with the paradox: He must use an instrument, which is political, and so unrealistic and pretentious that he connot believe in it, to re-establish a private, self-contained, and essentially spirtual life. I say that he must do this; but that remains to be seen.

Tate doesn't specify what the targets of this (religious? nihilistic?) violence should be, though it's safe to assume by the Southerner he meant the white Southerner. Should the target be Yankees? Foreigners? His black neighbors in the South? His white neighbors? His wife and children? All of the above?

Mark Twain might have wondered if Allen Tate weren't suffering from a variety of the "Sir Walter disease."

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