In doing so, he makes it clear that what he hopes to preserve and even expand in the South is subsistence farming. He recommends restructuring federal and state tax incentives to achieve that goal and even New Deal projects aimed at that goal. He suggests that agricultural colleges should teach farm management "chiefly from the standpoint of a secure and comfortable subsistence."
In framing his dystopian vision, he uses Lost Cause pseudohistory, in which he describes the Civil War (though in fuzzy terms) as being a fight of those dastardly Northern industrialists against the noble white agricultural South, a very similar take as that of fellow Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley. Ransom's version, which emphasizes the tariff issue:
... industry was scarcely in the game for the ultimate benefit of agriculture. Our Civil seemed to be fought on a certain issue [slavery], but perhaps what it settled chiefly was quite another issue, and probably a war was required to settle that issue: between farmers who wanted free trade in which to sell and buy, and industrialists who wanted them to sell, for the time being, but were already beginning to use protective tariffs for the industries emerging from embryo, and forcing the farmers to buy in an artificially high market with the proceeds of their free exports. It is useless to tickle the gland of indignation at this distance. The Civil War was won, and then the industrialists put through the last item of their programme.Even in an article that actually was primarily devoted to farming, Lost Cause pseudohistory plays a part.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, john crowe ransom, slavery, southern agrarians, us south, white racism
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