In a post yesterday, I discussed a 1999 article by Wendell Berry that painted a benign picture of the Southern Agrarians, deflecting attention from their segregationism and dishonest Lost Cause pseudohistory by largely ignoring it and by implying that criticism of the Twelve Southerners on that score were indulging in "political correctness" (which he of course considers political incorrect) and that such criticism paints them as "racist by association." As I said there, associating someone with a position they actually wrote down and published under their own names isn't really an inappropriate association.
In his biography of the Southern Agrarian that Berry throws to the dogs as the one die-hard segregationist among them, Where No Flag Flies : Donald Davidson & the Southern Resistance (2000), Mark Royden Winchell calls attention to another association of several of the Twelve Southerners from 1933 to 1936. Seward Collins had been the editor of a journal called The Bookman since 1927. In 1933, he changed the name of the publication to American Review, shifting its emphasis from literary to more political and economic concerns. Despite being published in that Babylon of Yankee industrialism New York City, the five 1933 issues of the first volume of American Review (1933: April, May, Summer, September, October), included essays by five of the 12 I'll Take My Stand contributors: Andrew Nelson Lyttle, Allen Tate, Frank Owsley, John Crowe Ransom and John Donald Wade. Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher and Owsley also contribute reviews.
In the "Editorial Notes" to the first American Review, unsigned but presumably authored by Collins, he described the perspective of the retitled publication:
The American Review is founded to give greater currency to the ideas of a number of groups and individuals who are radically critical of conditions prevalent in the modern world, but launch their criticism from a "traditionalist" basis: from the basis of a firm grasp on the immense body of experience accumulated by men in the past, and the insight which this knowledge affords.The editorial viewpoint was to be conservative-to-reactionary, in other words. The editorial defines four main viewpoints to be represented: the American humanists like Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More; the English Distributionists including Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton; the Southern Agrarians represented in I'll Take My Stand; and, "neo-scholastics, the men who are carrying on the Aristotelico-thomistic tradition in philosophy and applying it to modern problems."
The editorial's description of the Southern Agrarians positions them as follows:
Their drastic criticism of industrialism, their emphasis on agrarian life, and their praise for the ways of the old South, were dismissed as nostalgia and a hopeless attempt to return to the past. But this is a most superficial judgement of a deeply considered viewpoint that goes to the very heart of American history as well as of contemporary problems.And this is largely accurate: the Agrarians were promoting a contemporary program, however silly and shallow the "agrarian" trappings of it were. The editorial continues; I've bolded the passages in the following that reflect Lost Cause pseudohistory:
It is becoming increasingly recognized that the Civil War was at bottom an economic war, the industrial North against the agrarian South; and it should be obvious that while the North won the victory for its way of life, it has spent seventy years in throwing the victory away, until now the industrialism for which it stood has come to the end of its resources and threatens to drag the world down in ruins about it. It is with no futile nostalgia that the Southern group turn to the old Southern ways: it is with a far more acute understanding of the modern dilemma than their critics, who are so limited by the narrow purview of our tottering carpet-bag civilization that they can recognize the merit of no solution that does not talk the shallow language of Planning" or the barbaric jargon of Marxism.The Southern Agrarians might claim to speak for a distinctive regional way of life; but in the American Review, they were able to find common cause with Yankee and European reactionaries. As the editorial puts it:
... THE AMERICAN REVIEW aims at providing a forum for the views of these "Radicals of the Right", or "Revolutionary Cosnervatives", as they might be called ...Mark Winchell gets a little fuzzy about the timeline when he describes the disullusionment of the Southern Agarians with Seward Collins and the American Review:
Like many unstable people, Seward Collins was attracted to extreme political commitments. The Agrarians, distributists, neoscholastics, and neohumanists were all social reactionaries who rejected at least some of the basic assumptions of liberal democracy. Although such skepticism was not unusual during the Great Depression, Collins went several steps further to embrace a kind of medieval authoritarianism that he frankly identified as Fascism. As his espousal of Fascism became more explicit and more strident, the Agrarians became increasingly uncomfortable with Collins. [my emphasis]But he gets specific about 1936:
In February, a small pro-communist publication called Fight against War and Fascism published an interview in which Collins showed his true colors. He told his interviewer, Grace Lumpkin, that he wanted to destroy factories and return to a medieval guild system. He expressed his longing for a king, his disdain for negroes, and his contempt for Jews. He declared himself a Fascist and seemed to imply that all the contributors to the American Review were of the same persuasion. If [Herbert] Agar [an American Ditributionist] was already in the process of distancing himself from Collins, Allen Tate did so even more vociferously. In a letter to the New Republic, Tate dissociated himself and the Agrarians from the sentiments Collins had expressed. He declared himself so deeply opposed to Fascism "that I would choose communism if it were the alternative to it." He also rejected Collins’s romantic medievalism. "I do not want to restore anything whatsoever," Tate writes. "It is our task to create something."Although Winchell makes the seemingly sympathetic comment that the incident "that would be used to tarnish his memory" later, he describes an occurrence which casts Tate in an unpleasant light:
If Collins's affinities for Fascism and monarchy were foreign to Agrarian sensibilities, his racial views were not. Four years earlier, Allen Tate had been involved in a racial controversy that would be used to tarnish his memory over half a century later. In January 1932 Thomas Mabry, a young English instructor at Vanderbilt, invited Tate and Davidson to a party he was giving at the end of the month. Among the other persons invited were the novelist James Weldon Johnson, who was a guest professor at Nashville’s predominantly black Fisk University, and the poet Langston Hughes, who was also on the Fisk campus at the time. Not only did Tate refuse to attend the party, he responded to Mabry’s suggestion that he bring a beautiful woman by saying that the most beautiful woman he knew was his colored cook, but that her sense of decorum would prevent her from coming. Although he would be glad to meet socially with Johnson and Hughes any place outside the South, he insisted on maintaining local racial customs while in Nashville. The liberal Mabry was appalled by Tate's attitude, while Johnson was greatly embittered by the whole incident. In 1985, at a literary conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the African American scholar Houston Baker brought up the story of the Mabry party as an occasion for publicly referring to Tate as a "son of a bitch." [my emphasis]One might get the impression from Winchell's account that the rawness of editor Seward Collins' political views were rather obscure before 1936. So it's worth noting what that editorial statement in the first American Review (April 1933) said:
In forthcoming issues there will be several more articles which, like Mr. Dawson's this month, afford a criticism of Communism. The conversion to Communism of a number of liberals in this country, and some also in England will receive particular attention. Mr. Goad's survey of the Corporate State is the first of several articles on the inner workings of the present Italian government. The Fascist economics, in particular, which have received scant treatment by our universally liberal and radical press, are badly in need of sympathetic exposition. [my emphasis]Rightwing obsession with the Librul Press obviously didn't begin with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in 1969. The editorial continues directly:
The rise of Hitler to power in Germany brings up still further aspects of the Fascist question which will be discussed. The scrapping of the parliamentary system in a growing number of European countries, paralleled by the drift toward increasing the power of the President in this country, especially in times of crisis, raises the whole question of the relative worth of monarchy and republicanism.Harold Goad's article on Mussolini's government in that same first issue of The American Review, "The Corporate State," provides a glowing picture of the Italian experience with Fascism and its superiority to "parliamentary democracy." "From Italy," he writes "we [Americans] today have far more to learn than from Russia, if only for the reason that the Italian race [sic] is far nearer to our own in temperment, civilization, and historical tradition." Mussolini's regime, like the similar one established by Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria, was called the "corporate state," referring to the business groups on which governance was based. Goad writes:
Now the Corporate State is unquestionably a new form of Democracy - not the old democracy embodied in parliamentary representation of geographical constituencies, divided by class interest or psychological prejudice into many groups and parties, but a true unitary form of democracy in which the interests of the people, and especially of the people as producers, are duly represented in a single, patriotic corporate body which is the expression of their will; not the will or a compromise between the many wills of each separate class or personal political group, represented independently, but the will of the whole people with its divers [sic] and occasionally divergent interests patriotically conciliated and harmonized.I could add more examples of Goad's uncritical praise of the virtues of Italian Fascism, including the welcome suppression of those who would "thwart its policy of production by fomenting strikes and destroying the laborious habit of the working classes" and the oh-so-obsolete notion of "a constitutional Opposition" that "by artificial criticism and obstruction endeavours to promote its [the government's] failure." In terms of its wonderful service for "the poorer classes," Goad writes, "By this test unquestionably the ideal of democracy is carried out completely" in Italian Fascism.
He concludes with this bit of progaganda drivel on the achievements of Mussolini's regime:
It abolishes press or popular agitation and speculation on the chances of a change of government. Moreover, the rule of the whole people by the whole people eliminates the possibility of subversive disorder, of waves of popular feeling or panic, and fresh revolution engineered by a discontented minority. Furthermore, and most important of all, this form of democracy [Fascism] includes among its governing motives of policy not only the interests of the present generation, but the historic tradition of the national purpose, and the plans and aspirations of generations that are to come.Such were the prominent and voluntary ideological associations of several of the Southern Agrarians from 1933 to 1936. In following posts, I'll look at some of the Agrarian contributions to American Review.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south
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