In the Mississippi Delta [the traveler] is forced to believe that the progress has been backward, as it has been in those unsouthern regions which have felt the extreme impact of the machine economy: what could be more like the homelessness of men in those regions than the life of this black population on this black land, resembling the life of a camp, forcing from nature an annual tribue of cotton and otherwise scarcely obtaining a single token of her usual favours?"But," he tells us, "in Louisiana it seems different."
The darkey [sic] is one of the bonds that make a South out of all the Southern regions. Another is the climate. The South is a place in which it is generally pleasant to be in the open air, and nature blooms and waxes prodigiously; one of the earth's areas most easily habitable by man, and perhaps, for the morale of the inhabitants, too easily. The large Negro population, the all-the-year farming - was it not inevitable that the South should develop a distinctly agrarian culture, whose farmers would dominate their cities, which could not be expected to be large? If the Southern cities are growing rapidly now it does not in the least reflect the intelligent consent of their hinterlands, which are the real South, but the coming of industrialism, which destroys the native tradition, and calls the traditionalists "reactionary". The South has had a noble tradition, as traditions go in these longitudes. But at the moment it is just coming out of being intimidated by the get-rich-quick element that has concentrated in its cities, and is only beginning to think about reviewing seriously its old tradition with the thought of a proper future.I wonder if Wendell Berry would find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Davidson with his own words in that passage. I mean, after all, he didn't say anything bad about the "darkey," did he? He said the "darkey" was an integral part of the South. Even if the "large Negro population" in his view seemed to be part of the natural landscape, just like swamps and Mississippi River floods. Evidently the white planters migrated to the Louisiana area and discovered that there was a "large Negro population" and said, heck, why don't we make them slaves a create big ole plantations?
That's if you can swallow the Southern Agrarian version of history and its cheerful aboriginal Louisiana "darkey."
The same issue of The American Review contains an esasy by W.E.D. Allen gushing about "The Fascist Idea in Britain." The economic and political ideas of Fascism, Allen tells us with regret, "continue to be both misrepresented and misunderstood" - well, at least they are "outside Italy and Germany." He explains the historical background:
Even Mussolini - that occasional pehnemenon of the ages which embodies a synthesis of the "man of action" and the serene philosopher - appears earlier to have failed to appreciate the import of the movement which he had invoked, when he preferred to regard Fascism as peculiarly Italian in character. It was only later, when Fascist political and economic theory began to transform the character of Italian life, when the Fascist ideal awoke the Italian nationa to a sustained devotion, and when the Fascist conception had proved sufficiently urgent to inspire a national revolutinary movement in Germany, that it was generally admitted that, for good or ill, a new idea had been called forth which was to mould or to modify the desitinies of the twentieth century.Under the influence of this new historical inspiration, "The Italians and the Germans ... show the vigorous determination of building and conquering races."
The point of these quotations is another reminder of the political company that the Southern Agrarians consciously knew they were keeping at The American Review. I don't want to waste time reproducing a lot of drivel that could have come from the Italian or German propaganda services at the time. But this one last bit of characterization of Fascism, by which he explicitly meant both the Italian and German variants, as an exciting historical movement:
... Islam, in its day [i.e., its early years], was a young, realist, "protestant" creed, cutting through the fictions and the fancies of an older world. It, too, had revolutionary bases, a physical fire, and a spiritual ruge to creative action.He proceeds with things like explaining the nature of the State by quoting the contemporary political theoriest Adolf Hitler from Mein Kampf.
Didn't the Southern Agrarians' mamas ever warn them about hanging out with a bad crowd?
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