Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 13: Southern Agrarian Stark Young

Stark Young

The last of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Stark Young, "Not In Memoriam, But In Defense." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

If I had read through this book in a single day, but the time I got to this last essay I think I would feel as spacy as if I had deliberately hyper-ventilated. Young makes a weak stab in this essay at defining those superior Southern virtues. He tries to make particular respect for family one of them. But apparently he doesn't want to do it by celebrating the survivals of elements of the family-clan-based "rule of honor" dynamics that Bertram Wyatt-Brown describes in the antebellum South. So he winds up admitting that there's nothing so terribly unique about Southerners being attached to their families.

He's not comfortable with overt religiosity that he sees as an undesirable characteristic of the South in 1930. He calls it "a whining on certain pious excellences that arise from goodness combined with natural dullness, and a certain half-conscious jealousy of all distinction." His lack of comfort with these characteristics appear to be connected to his distinct distaste for democracy, on which he elaborates in the same paragraph, saying of this religious attitude:

It is encouraged by democracy - all votes are equal - and is flattered by a commercial society. One of the odious traits of industrialism is that, even where there are men who know better, it defers to the mass, largely in order to exploit them, but partly because most of the leaders have few conceptions - barring business - beyond the mass at large. ... Politicians may flatter the masses. But the ignorant do not posses every man of any intelligence, who should love and despise rather than indulge them; nor have elemental, narrow, stubborn convictions the right to infringe on private spiritual rights. We can put one thing in our pipes and smoke it - there will never again be distinction in the South until - somewhat contrary to the doctrine of popular and profitable democracy - it is generally clear that no man worth anything is possessed by the people, or sees the world under a smear of the people's wills and beliefs. Of this whining, canting simplicity the Southern quality that we fight to preserve must at the very outset disclaim all defense.

In other words, in Young's vision of the Agrarian utopia, the plantation owner and the cotton-exchange magnate have to own whatever the elected products turn out to be of these annoyances they call democratic elections.

Along with this, Young thinks it would be wise to restrict university education to a smaller fraction of the population. Not that there was such a huge percentage of Southerners getting a college education in 1930. He goes on to elaborate on the value of Southern aristocratic pretensions: "We may, for instance suggest that the English get on better with Southerners than with other Americans, the better class especially." It's not clear whether by "better class" here is meant Southerners, Yankees ("other Americans") or Brits. Or all three.

He even says, "Good system or not, from this [antebellum] Southern conception of aristocracy certain ideas arose about which this book to a fair extent, has been written." No argument from me on that particular point.

Southern provincialism he also finds to be a fine thing. "Provincialism does not at all imply living in the place on which you base your beliefs and choices. It is a state of mind or persuasion. It is a source."

There's a lot more sentimental fluff along pretty much the same lines. But the discussion of antebellum aristocracy gives us, as he said in the quote above, the framework within which the Southern Agrarian ideology and vision moves. It's based on a Lost Cause romanticizing of the antebellum South of gracious planters and happy slaves:

... we must make it clear that in talking of Southern characteristics we are talking largely of a certain life in the old South, a life founded on land and the ownership of slaves. ... It is true that our traditional Southern characteristics derive from the landed class.

In other words, they're not talking about the South that appeared at the time in the songs of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. They're talking Scarlett O'Hara and Ashley Wilkes and Mammie.

"It is aristocratic to take things for granted, go your own way without comment, apology, defense, or self-consciousness," writes Young. Of course, the Southern Agrarians were long on all four. It can't be helped, he explains. "For such of us as wish to sustain certain elements out of the Southern life, our backs must be against the wall." This back-against-the-wall white victimization attitude and ideology has been at the core of Southern conservatism since the days when Congressman Preston Brooks clubbed Charles Sumner nearly to death sitting at his desk in the Senate. Feeling his back against the wall and his Southun honuh threatened, Brooks boldly snuck up behind Sumner and started beating him on the head with a heavy cane.

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