Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 28: Allen Tate on Southern race relations

Southern Agrarian Allen Tate in "A View of the Whole South" The American Review 2:4 (Feb 1934) provides an extended review of a book of essay edited by W.T. Couch, Culture in The South: A Symposium by Thiry-one Authors. (Yes, my Yankee friends, I know, isn't "culture in the South" an oxymoron? I've heard that one a few times before!)

Tate uses his essay to defend the Southern Agrarian view on some points. He also gives us a further taste of his view of race relations in the South. He sneers at an essay in the book by Couch, saying, "His zeal is noble, at times lachrymose, but it is not preceisely responsible to shed tears unless one is prepared to do something for the pitiable object."

Tate explains that he sees the only solution in the vague Southern Agrarian Utopia, which he and his fellow Agrarians seemed very loath to describe with much clarity. Although John Crowe Ransom did make it clear that it was a vision based on subsistence farming in "Happy Farmers" The American Review 1:5; (Oct 1933) and Tate calls in this essay for "sound subsistence-farming," which he also formulates as the more high-sounding "technique of making a living on the land." Tate writes on the race question, explictly defending lynching:

There is the other problem of the reformers who are anxious to have Negroes sit by them on streeet-cars, but are loath to devise a programme whereby they may purchase land; nor have I any sympathy with reformers who are agitated about social equality, for there has never been social equality anywhere, there never will be, nor ought there to be. Every class and race should get what it earns by contributing to civilized life. ... There will be no practical solution to the race question (as a problem it is inherently insoluble and ought to be, like all social problems in ultimate terms) until Southern agriculture, by means of politico-economic action, recovers its independence; that alone will destroy the lynching-tension between the races by putting both races on an independent footing. Liberals like Professor Couch, who find no "justice" in Anglo-Saxon domination, have no precise picture of what should take its place: let us have "justice" and the devil take the hindmost. It is not a question of sentimental justice. I argue it this way: the white race seems determined to rule the Negro race in its midst; I belong to the white race; therefore I intend to support white rule. Lynching is a symptom of weak, inefficient rule; but you can't detroy lynching by fiat or social agitation; lynching will disappear when the white race is satisfied that its supremacy will not be questioned in social crises. To tempt the Negro to question this supremacy without first of all giving him an economic basis is sentimental and irresponsible. ... If abstract agatiation against white supremacy would give way to concrete programmes for the negro, a great deal could be done for him; but not until then. [my emphasis]

In other words, some way, somehow, someday, Southern whites will generously give up arbitrary ritual torture and murder of blacks, eventually, around the time Hell freezes over.

I wonder if Wendell Berry would find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Allen Tate with his own words in that passage.

Tate goes on, somewhat inconsistently, to blame lynching on them thar outside agitators:

The recent outburst of lynching in the South ... is probably due to three factors: Communist agitation, which deludes the Negro into believing that he can better his condition by crime; general economic fear and instability taking the form of mob violence; and outside interference in the trials of accused Negroes. ... [W]ere it not for the new violence of industrial warfare, the end of which cannot yet be seen, there would be a sound hope for the disappearance of mob violence in the South.

In this take, lynch murder and the attendant ritual torture was forced on the innocent Southern whites by the Commies, the labor unions, and hard times. Plus if the Yankees would just let the white South convict blacks in kangaroo court trials, there would be no need for lynching!

All of this is part of Allen Tate's Southern Agrarian vision.

The same issue of The American Review contains an article by Tate's fellow Southern Agrarian Robert Penn Warren, "T.S. Stribling: a Paragraph in the History of Critical Realism," in which Penn Warren shows a sensible appreciation of several of William Faulkner's novels. So the guy obviously wasn't all bad!