Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 30: Evaluating the Southern Agrarians

I’ve devoted all of the main Confederate "Heritage" Month posts to the Southern Agrarians represented in the 1930 book I'll Take My Stand. The Southern Agrarian essays provided plenty of examples of the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause viewpoint, both in its pseudohistory of the Civil War and Reconstruction and its function as a present ideology for segregation and white racism, the “present” in the cases we’ve examined being 1930-1934.

There was never much of a Southern Agrarian movement of a political nature. It was primarily a literary project. But the Agrarians made significant contributions to the Lost Cause cause, both in their essays like those discussed here and in books on historical topics. Robert Penn Warren, the most famous of the group, certainly moderated his views and his tone from the ugly jungle imagery for African-Americans he used in his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand. But even in his less benighted years, he still promoted Lost Cause pseudohistory. He did a little 1980 book called Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back. This passage represents a sort of Lost Cause Lite viewpoint:

Davis was what he was, and he was caught in the complications of the world he lived in – a world in which virtues could sometimes turn into liabilities.

Since that particular condition has applied to humanity for millennia can be seen in Sophocles’ Antigone and endless other examples. The only point of such a statement is to say, Pore Ole Jeff, the world forced him to betray his country in a big bloody war for slavery.

Except in more Lost Cause Lite, Warren mealy-mouths that away, too:

By and large, underlying many of the particular problems were fundamental difficulties built into the very nature of the Confederacy. It can even be argued that the factor underlying all other factors was a state of mind that existed in the North but not in the South.

The Yankees made them do it. And it wasn’t slavery but some fuzzy "state of mind" that caused the Yankees to make the Rebels do it.

Slavery, Warren explains in another Lite formulation, "was a necessary, if not sufficient, reason for the war." But Warren didn't only use the Lite version of neo-Confederate/Lost Cause history in that book:

The main idea that Davis [as the Confederate President] was officially committed to defend (however much he may have vacillated on the issue for reasons of expediency) was the doctrine of states’ rights.”

There are still styles in Lost Cause dogma, the most popular one lately is the notion that lots of African-American soldiers fought in the Confederacy. That such fads occur is a testimony to the vitality of the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause way of thinking, if not of its honesty or good will. Kevin Levin in his Civil War Memory blog regularly refutes new outcroppings of this particular pseudohistorical whopper. As Donald Rumsfeld infamously observed of the fruitless search for WMDs in Iraq, it's difficult to prove a negative. But so far, legitimate historians have yet to uncover even one single verifiable incidence of an African-American serving as a Confederate soldier in combat. One recent example of Kevin’s work on the subject is A Black Confederate General That We Can All Embrace? 03/17/2011.

But Warren was promoting the idea back in his 1980 book:

It is true that France as well as in England there was strong sentiment against slavery, but when the idea of offering emancipation as a bribe for recognition was finally beginning to be put forward in the Confederacy it was too late to be of any use … And a parallel instance appeared when the idea of enlisting blacks for Confederate armies (with the implied promise of freedom) was successfully brought forward – a paradox best formulated by the politician Howell Cobb, of Georgia, who opposed the idea: If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Actually, some blacks were enlisted and wore the gray, but only toward the end of the war. [my emphasis]

How deceptive Warren’s presentation there is can be seen from this description of the discussion of the issue by James McPherson in his very popular The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988). Gen. Robert E. Lee on February 18, 1865, when the Confederacy was just weeks away from surrender, endorsed the idea of using slaves as soldiers, despite “the risk which may be produced upon our social institutions.” As he writes:

By a vote of 40 to 37 the House passed a bill authorizing the president to requisition a quota of black soldiers from each state. In deference to state’s rights, the bill did not mandate freedom for slave soldiers. The Senate nevertheless defeated the measure by a single vote, with both senators from Lee’s own state voting No. The Virginia legislature meanwhile enacted its own law for the enlistment of black soldiers – without, however, requiring the emancipation of those who were slaves – and instructed its senators to vote for the congressional bill. They did so, enabling it to pass by 9 to 8 (with several abstentions) and became law on March 13. In the few weeks of life left to the Confederacy no other state followed Virginia’s lead. The two companies of black soldiers hastily organized in Richmond never saw action. Nor did most of these men obtain freedom until the Yankees – headed by a black cavalry regiment – marched into the Confederate capital on April 3.

If Warren was looking at the same set of facts, one would have to say that he was parsing his words very carefully. Another example of the habit of conservative intellectuals to construct formulations that are perhaps literally defendable but leave a completely wrong impression.

Bruce Levine provides a more extended description of those events in Confederate Emancipation : Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War (2005).

Others of the Twelve Southerners of I’ll Take My Stand wrote history books. Allen Tate did Lost Cause biographies of Confederate military heroes Robert E. Lee (the Christ of the Lost Cause confession) and Stonewall Jackson, and one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis; Andrew Nelson Lytle, a hagiography of Confederate war criminal and later Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest; John Gould Fletcher, a state history of Arkansas; Warren, several books on civil rights issues.

Warren’s first book was John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), written when he was 23. It's story-telling is good, and he does seem to be careful of his facts. But his viewpoint was decidedly hostile. And he uses pro-Confederate arguments in making judgments on Brown that he scarcely attempts to support with arguments from the evidence. The 1993 edition includes an introduction by C. Vann Woodward that is complimentary, amazingly so in light of the way the young Warren presented his judgments on Brown. Merrill Peterson writes of Warren's book that it "exudes slurring innuendo about abolitionism".

Christopher Duncan in Fugitive Theory: Political Theory, the Southern Agrarians, and America (2000) defends the Agrarians’ segregationist viewpoint: “they were segregationists. While this certainly did not place them out in front on the issue in 1930, it just as certainly did not render them anachronistic or reactionary.”

Actually, they were both. The editor of The American Review was accurate in describing them as Radicals of the Right and even Conservative Revolutionaries, at least in their ideological perspectives at that time.

Duncan makes a straight-up whitewash of the Agrarians on race. He engages in the kind of deceptive hair-splitting that conservative intellectuals like to employ when they are trying to defend something not defensible in democratic terms, a version of which we saw in the Warren example above. Duncan writes:

Although it is not idiomatically possible in contemporary American discourse to be called both a democrat and a segregationist, the truth is that in 1930 that is exactly what the Southern Agrarians as a group were proposing – a segregated democracy.

To what extent the segregation system represented democracy for Southern whites is open to interpretation. A characteristic feature of segregation was a sometimes astonishing level of corruption, including in vote-counting. And the whole segregation system, as the Twelve Southerners knew very well in 1930, was based on the denial of the vote to African-American citizens. These days we call such tactics “vote suppression,” implemented in the segregated states by some combination of poll taxes, literary tests, intimidation and the background threat (occasionally made reality) of violence. It did not provide democracy for black citizens. Whether we can call state segregation systems that systematically denied the vote to such a large portion of their citizens “democracies” in a meaningful sense of the word is a matter for discussion. I tend to call it a limited democracy for whites. And whites inclined to openly challenge aspects of the segregation system often found that they didn’t enjoy full democratic liberties like freedom of speech and assembly.

Similarly, a symposium was held at Vanderbilt University in 1980 on the 50th anniversary of the publication of I’ll Take My Stand. If the papers from that symposium collected in A Band of Prophets: The Vanderbilt Agrarians After Fifty Years (1982; William Havard and Walter Sullivan, eds.) are any measure, the central role played by Lost Cause ideology and the Southern politics of race in I’ll Take My Stand was mostly discreetly ignored. In Charles Roland’s contribution, he quotes Frank Owsley’s Lost Cause description of the pre-Civil War Abolitionists with approval:

Professor Frank L. Owsley, a member of the Agrarian writers, once wrote: “One has to seek in the unrestrained and furious invective of the totalitarians to find a near parallel to the language that the Abolitionists and their political fellow travelers used in denouncing the South and its way of life. Indeed, as far as I have been able to ascertain,” he continued, “neither Dr. Goebbels nor ... other Axis propaganda agents ever so plumbed the depths of vulgarity and obscenity.”

John Shelton Reed in his paper also whitewashes the Agrarians on segregation and white racism:

Oddly, perhaps, given the time and place, they largely ignored race. When it was mentioned, it was often (as in Robert Penn Warren’s essay) in rather untraditional terms. I suppose that all of them were, at the time, segregationists: that is not the point. They did not base their defense of the South on its undeniable standing as the last great Western Hemisphere redoubt of white supremacy. (Other spokesmen for the South have not shared their scruples, or their tact.) Their defense of the South emphasized the last two of those three R’s – religion and, especially, rural life. And they effected a sort of rhetorical alchemy, transmuting vice into virtue, proclaiming that backward is beautiful. And they did it, some of us think, very persuasively.

As I hope my discussion of I’ll Take My Stand shows, it’s hard to imagine anyone who has read the thing could say “they largely ignored race.” And, actually, Warren’s jungle imagery for African-Americans in the book was pretty traditional for Southern bigots. To put in a Southern way, Reed doesn’t describe them too accurately, bless his heart.

Other scholarly works on the Southern Agrarians are, shall we say, more closely reality-based.

Robert Brinkmeyer, Jr., makes an analysis generally similar to mine in The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950 (2009). He devotes a separate chapter to Warren, whose view of the subject of the books title evolved to the point that, in Brinkmeyer’s words, “Warren found in Fascism humanity’s darkest enemy, the darkest inner reaches of the human heart made real.”

Paul Murphy his 2001 book, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought focuses, as the title suggests, on the Agrarians’ political outlook and positions it in the context of the development of conservative thought in America. He identifies the continuation of the Southern Agrarian tradition with writers like Richard Weaver, M.E. Bradford, Samuel Francis and the Marxist-turned-reactionary historian Eugene Genovese, and John Shelton Reed, quoted above; groups like the far-right Rockford Institute; and, the “paleoconservatives and neo-Agrarians gathered around such organs as Chronicles and Southern Partisan.” He also mentions the far-right, overtly secessionist League of the South as carrying on the Southern Agrarian tradition from the early 1930s. On the whole, not an intellectual or political legacy with much in it of which to be proud.

He devotes several pages to Wendell Berry as picking up on the agrarian side of that legacy. Based on my look at Berry’s view of the Agrarians in an earlier post in this series, his views of sustainable agriculture, the preservation of family farms, and organic farming can easily be matched with the vague notion of the Agrarian desired end state. But in the article we examined, he was willing to minimize the Agrarians’ segregationism as it appears in I’ll Take My Stand. Murphy seems to be suggesting that Berry’s thought doesn’t actually have much to do with the ideology of I’ll Take My Stand when he writes, “Berry acknowledges a ‘bit debt’ to I’ll Take My Stand, although it is evident that his influences are wide-ranging.”

Paul Conkin provides a general history of the group and their work in The Southern Agrarians (1988). He argues, without using the phrase Lost Cause, that neo-Confederate Lost Cause history represented “historical myths” for the Southern Agrarians in I’ll Take My Stand, which supported their “cultural description” of the virtues of their idealized agrarian South. He gives this description of the version of Lost Cause pseudohistory that framed the Agrarians’ posture of white grievance:

What seemed most common to the twelve contributors [to I’ll Take My Stand] was a view of southern history. The war between the states [itself a Lost Cause name for the Civil War] reflected primarily a competition between two economic systems and ideals – on the one hand an independent yeomanry of farmers and small shopkeepers, on the other a commercial, financial, large manufacturing oligarchy which already dominated the Northeast. The slavery issue provided a convenient, emotionally charged issue, a mere occasion, for a northern, imperial conquest of the South, which almost alone blocked the road to a capitalist future. [The posture here by the Agrarians that the antebellum South had been some kind of pre-capitalist, aristocratic society.] The war, reconstruction, and subsequent Republican economic policies completed and consolidated the political and economic conquest, leaving the South impoverished, politically impotent, a dependent colony of the North. Such an economic interpretation had plenty of historical support in the thirties. It was reinforced, in the South, by a recognition of southern realities, beginning with incomes at less than half the national average. Equally supportive were the memories, embellished by time, of wartime cruelties or of a purportedly black reconstruction.

But to the extent the Southern Agrarians recognized those “southern realities” of poverty, they tried to idealize them into a virtue. John Crowe Ransom made an observation, rare in the Agrarian essays I’ve surveyed in this series, which showed at least a passing awareness of the real nature of the agrarian society he and his fellow stand-takers were trying to preserve, in practice (”Sociology and the Black Belt” The American Review 4:2 (1934):

The condition of Southern tenant farmers, both white and black for that matter, is economically the lowest to be found in America, and constitutes the most urgent of all our permanent economic problems.

Tags: establishment press, confederate heritage month 2011, john crowe ransom, lost cause, neo-confederate, robert penn warren, southern agrarians

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 23: John Crowe Ransom on farming and Lost Cause history

Southern Agrarian John Crowe Ransom provided the lead article for The American Review 1:5 (Oct 1933), with the maudlin title of "Happy Farmers." Unlike most of the Southern Agrarian articles I've encountered, he actually devotes a significant part of his essay to agricultural issues.

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 1: the Southern Agrarians

A famous document in Southern conservatism is the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by "Twelve Southerners". It consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

In a joint introduction written by John Crowe Ransom, the Agrarians provided "A Statement of Principles". They state that all 12 contributors agree on the following:

... all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial.

They state an opposition to applied science (technology), which sounds reactionary enough in itself:

Industrialism is the economic organization of the collective American society. It means the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences. But the word science has acquired a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even with the applied sciences when their applications are made subject to criticism and intelligence. The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical; it has enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome. The apologists of industrialism do not like to meet this charge directly; so they often take refuge in saying that they are devoted simply to science! They are really devoted to the applied sciences and to practical production. Therefore it is necessary to employ a certain skepticism even at the expense of the Cult of Science, and to say, It is an Americanism, which looks innocent and disinterested, but really is not either. [my emphasis]

But they are not indulging in a critical analysis of the way technological priorities are shaped by dominant economic powers or related social assumptions. In fact, it's hard to avoid the suspicion that they are using their superficial criticism of technology as opposition to science itself. They are, after all, defending a conservative South that a few years before staged had its melodramatic confrontation with science in the Scopes Trial.

In a reflection of the kind of muddled thinking that we still see today among American reactionaries, the Agrarians declared that supporters of Northern "Industrialism" are "Sovietists." They write: "With respect to these last it must be insisted that the true Sovietists or Communists - if the term may be used here in the European sense - are the Industrialists themselves."

They declare, "Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition." This is a telling claim, that they don't need to define their ideal state of society, which they find partially realized in the American South of 1930. Because what they are actually defending is their version of the white South, a Southern way of life which they explicitly oppose to the American way of life, a set of white Southern values for which "Americanism" is an insult to be cast at defenders of Yankee "Industrialism." And they state their general values in a way that is disturbingly suggestive of Blut und Boden mythology:

An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige - a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers. [my emphasis]

The Agrarians' statement of principles is a piece of whiny white Southern victimology, one which takes for granted the Jim Crow system of white supremacy and doesn't even pretend to see white racism and its institutions of the time as the least bit problematic.

In the following statements, it helps to clarify the tone if one understands that "the South" in this context means "the white South", and that the "American industrial ideal" also includes the Constitutional system of democracy which the Southern Jim Crow political system was violating in the most egregious ways:

Nobody now proposes for the South, or for any other community in this country, an independent political destiny. That idea is thought to have been finished in 1865. But how far shall the South surrender its moral, social, and economic nutonomy to the victorious principle of Union? That question remains open. The South is a minority section that has hitherto been jealous of its minority right to live its own kind of life.

This is a somewhat Orwellian instance of white whining. They are representing white Southerners as a minority among Americans, guarding their "own" Jim Crow segregation "kind of life" which involved the political and social subjugation of the African-American minority relative to whites.

The South scarcely hopes to determine the other sections, but it does propose to determine itself, within the utmost limits of legal action. Of late, however, there is the melancholy fact that the South itself has wavered a little and shown signs of wanting to join up behind the common or American industrial ideal. It is against that tendency that this book is written. ...

These principles do not intend to be very specific in proposing any practical measures. How may the little agrarian community resist the Chamber of Commerce of its county seat, which is always trying to import some foreign industry that cannot be assimilated to the life-pattern of the community? [my emphasis]

Foreign industry in this case would include industries from other parts of the United States, some of which white Southerners feared might demand adjustments to the racially segregated "life-pattern of the community", which included Jim Crow laws, lynch-law and a thoroughly neurotic set of social customs and manners governing relationships between whites and blacks.

Just what must the Southern leaders do to defend the traditional Southern life? How may the Southern and the Western agrarians unite for effective action? Should the agrarian forces try to capture the Democratic party, which historically is so closely affiliated with the defense of individualism, the small community, the state, the South? Or must the agrarians - even the Southern ones - abandon the Democratic party to its fate and try a new one? ...

For, in conclusion, this much is clear: If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence. [my emphasis]

This was the attitude that led to Southern Governors standing in the schoolhouse doors to defy federal law to integrate Southern universities, a well-known symbol of the segregationists bitter fight against having the American Constitution and the American way of life prevail in the Jim Crow South.

The Southern Agrarians presented a highbrow, intellectual brand of reactionary ideology whose purpose was focused on preserving the segregation system in the South and the various economic and social restrictions on white workers that were very much a part of it.

In these posts over the next several days, I'll be looking at each of these essays individually.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, john crowe ransom, southern agrarians, us south