Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 12: Southern Agrarian Henry Blue Kline

The eleventh of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Henry Blue Kline, "William Remington: A Study in Individualism." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

Similar to the previous essay by John Donald Wade, Kline's piece is a story. In this case about a young man named William Remington, who moved about the country trying different jobs and locations and groups of friends. Being young, in other words. Finding himself eventually back in New Orleans, he develops a group of friends who think of themselves as pioneering individualists. Apparently, their individualism consists in major part of a suspicious attitude toward Yankee materialism and a pleasing feeling of superiority to the average person, which they call "median man." He describes their grand historical perspective this way; don't zip by part in which Communism may be worse than "capitalism gone progressivist", i.e., their presumption is that the two are at least equally bad. It's not clear whether "race" here means white people or the human race.

And about this "median man": Though William find him pretty consistently bovine-passive just now, he believes on the evidence of human history that a time would come, provided that social idolatries should continue to be practiced long enough, when a few hundred or a few hundred thousand median men would suddenly become aware that they had fallen into moral slavery ... and so would set about a repetition of the Russian noble experiment. William's friends do not want this to happen. And although they can find no likelihood of armed rebellion coming to pass during their lifetime, the mere thought of such an issue ensuing at any time would make them have the less respect for the common sense of their race and so indirectly for themselves. To the individualistic way of thinking, communism, whether urban or rural, industrial or agricultural, is as bad as capitalism gone progressivist, and perhaps worse, as tending even the more to negate personality and to reduce critical individuality to the zero deadness of a mass-mind

I'm at a loss as to what "zero deadness" might mean; 100% aliveness?

The kind of smug Southern elitist conservatism that Kline admiringly describes here may actually show the fundamental attitude of the Nashville Agrarians, and of those who were attracted to their reactionary vision more than any of the other essays.

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