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
