Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 10: Southern Agrarian Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

The ninth of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Robert Penn Warren, "The Briar Patch." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

This essay is basically an argument that African-Americans in the South have basically only themselves to blame for any lack of economic and social progress they have experienced, to the extent that they deserve to have any such expectation at all. In the context of this volume, his essay stands out for the fact that it at least bothers to acknowledge: "At present the negro frequently fails to get justice, and justice from the law is the least that he can demand for himself or others can demand for him."

Penn Warren's essay at least conveys a sense of possible real concern over racial discrimination, however superficially he may understand the problem. But his solution is the mythical agrarian Utopia advocated by all the contributors to this volume and whose imagainary quality was being evidenced on a daily basis by the brutal economic blows that the rural South, black and white, had received in the Depression then in progress. His solution to the race problem in that context is basically an embrace of the permanence of segregation:

The Southern white man may conceive of his own culture as finally rooted in the soil, and he may desire, through time and necessary vicissitude, to preserve its essential structure intact. He wishes the negro well; he wishes to see crime, genial irresponsibility, ignorance, and oppression replaced by an informed and productive negro community. He probably understands that this negro community must have such roots as the white society owns, and he knows that the negro is less of a wanderer than the "poor white" whose position is also insecure. Let the negro sit beneath his own vine and fig tree. The relation of the two will not immediately escape friction and difference, but there is no reason to despair of their fate. The chief problem for all alike is the restoration of society at large to a balance and security which the industrial régime is far from promising to achieve. Inter-racial conferences and the devices of organized philanthropy, in comparison with this major concern, are only palliatives that distract the South's attention from the main issue. Whatever good they do, the general and fundamental restoration will do more.

He rejects the viewpoint of what he calls the "negro radical" and the "white radical" in favor of the acceptance of segregation and an inferior economic position advocated by Booker T. Washington, the Southern whites' favorite African-American leader:

But the negro radical, or the white radical in considering the race problem, would say that he wants the second thing — he wants to go to the same hotel, or he wants the right to go to the same hotel. The millennium which he contemplates would come to pass when the white man and the black man regularly sat down to the same table and when the white woman filed her divorce action through a negro attorney with no thought in the mind of any party to these various transactions that the business was, to say the least, a little eccentric. To such a radical the demand for less is treason to his race; to simply look forward to a negro society which can take care of all the activities and needs of its members is a feeble compromise. When Booker T. Washington at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895 lifted his hand and said, "We can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress," the hand he raised, in the eyes of such a radical, was the hand of treason.

"My friend," Washington might well reply to such a critic, "you may respect yourself as a man, but you do not properly respect yourself as a negro." To him the critic would be suffering from a failure to rationalize his position, from the lack of a sense of reality, and from a defect in self-respect, for the last implies the first two deficiencies. The critic's condition would be like that of the individual of any color who consumes himself in "desiring this man's art, and that man's scope"; and his principles would be those of the doctrinaire. [my emphasis]

And Penn Warren's description of Reconstruction is the basic Lost Cause version and the helpless former slaves who needed a white master of some kind to tell them what to do:

At Appomattox, in the April of 1865, Lee's infantry marched past the close Federal ranks to the place of surrender and acknowledged with muskets at carry the courtesy of the enemy's salute. The old Emancipation Proclamation was at last effective, and the negro became a free man in the country which long before he had decided was his home. When the bluecoats and bayonets disappeared, when certain gentlemen packed their carpet-bags and silently departed, and when scalawags settled down to enjoy their profits or sought them elsewhere, the year of jubilo drew to a close and the negro found himself in a jungle as puzzling and mysterious, and as little answering to his desires, as the forgotten jungles of Africa.

The negro was as little equipped to establish himself in it as he would have been to live again, with spear and breech-clout, in the Sudan or Bantu country.

American whites manage to find a seemingly endless number of ways to refer to African-American in jungle imagery.

The necessities of life had always found their way to his back or skillet without the least thought on his part; the things had been only the bare necessities, but their coming was certain. He did not know how to make a living, or, if he did, he did not know how to take thought for the morrow. Always in the past he had been told when to work and what to do, and now, with the new-got freedom, he failed to understand the limitation which a simple contract of labor set on that freedom. It is not surprising that the idea of freedom meant eating the cake and keeping it, too. In the old scheme of things which had dwindled away at Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Chattanooga, he had occupied an acknowledged, if limited and humble, place. Now he had to find a place, and the attempt to find it is the story of the negro since 1865.

This image of Reconstruction as nothing but a history of manipulation and corrupted is also Lost Cause dogma:

The Reconstruction did little to remedy the negro's defects in preparation. Certainly, he discovered himself as a political power, but he was also to discover that the fruits of his power were plucked by some one else, by the friends who gave him big talk and big promises. Sometimes he got an office out of it all and smoked cigars in the chair of a legislature. The political training which he received, however, was the worst that could possibly be devised to help him; it was a training in corruption, oppression, and rancor. When the earth shook and the fool, or scoundrel, departed after his meat, leaving his bankrupt promises, the negro was to realize that he had paid a heavy price for the legislative seat and the cigar.

Given the realities of the overthrow of the Reconstruction-era democracies in the South by force and violence and murder, this description of that as the time "when the earth shook", as though it were a natural cause and not people motivated by racial and political goals that produced that grim result, is hard to read as anything but sneering and cynical.

He had been oppressed for centuries, but the few years in which he was used as an instrument of oppression solved nothing.

In the long and less than honorable tradition of whiny white people, the idea that Southern whites as a group were oppressed in any meaningful sense of the sense of the word by the democratic elections of Reconstructions in which black voters participated is an obscenity.

Instead, they sadly mortgaged his best immediate capital; that capital was the confidence of the Southern white man with whom he had to live. The Civil War had done much to show the negro's character at its best, but, so short is human memory, the Reconstruction badly impaired the white man's respect and gratitude. The rehabilitation of the white man's confidence for the negro is part of the Southern white man's story since 1880.

It's all the fault of the blacks themselves. As it always is - in the Lost Cause view.

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