Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 12: Southern Agrarian Andrew Nelson Lytle

I did a post last year about Southern Agrarian Andrew Nelson Lytle and his essay that was the eighth of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Andrew Nelson Lytle, "The Hind Tit." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies. Or at least nominally. The book is mainly a defense of the attitdues, assumptions and institutions of segregation and white racism.

This is a somewhat different take on the same essay.



Andrew Nelson Lytle (1902-1995)

Andrew Lytle was a writer and later a professor of history at the University of the South, which is now Sewanee University of the South. The brief text on Lytle at Vanderbilt University's Fugitives and Agrarians: Brief Biographical Sketches says that he "was the only member of the Agrarian literary group to actually support himself by farming while he wrote his novels."

Lytle's essay "The Hind Tit" is the kind of Blut und Boden idealization of the hearty life of the poor but virtuous farm family that normally has a great deal more appeal to those who grew up in the city than to those acquainted with the real life of family farms. The first part of his essay presents a fairly garbled history and class analysis of Southern agriculture from antebellum times to the present of 1930. He manages to take a couple of swipes at Andrew Jackson along the way for somehow having something to do with dividing the small white farmers from the planter class. One of the more coherent passages of this section gives a criticism of postwar economic conditions providing a glimpse of what he thought the desirable condition would have been. Not unlike present-day Republicans who blame the mortgage debt calamity on too many low-income people buying houses, somehow he figures that small farmers aspiring to better there conditions brought about a situation where many formerly independent white farmers became tenant farmers:

Such conditions broke many, and for the first time in the Cotton Kingdom, white tenantry developed. This was a definite social loss. With an entirely different race to serve the rich men as in slavery, the small white man could feel no very strong social inequality, and those who lived in isolation none at all. Now, economic dependence brought about social lines drawn, not upon a comparative use and enjoyment of nature, but upon a possession of cash. [my emphasis]

Lytle's idyllic society of virtuous white farm families presupposed a substantial supply of African-American tenant farmers, whose well-being was irrelevant to his view of the ideal agrarian paradise, at least so far as the reader can tell from this essay.

The dosage of bad history is followed by a deadly-dull description of the life of the virtuous white antebellum farm family. The dullness of the account is a (presumably unintentional) indictment of his own silly vision; it suggests the stagnation and boredom that was the experience of many members of those poor small white farmers in the real world.

He includes a marginally more interesting section on folk songs that he thinks sheds life of the happy existence of his idealized small farmers. Then he sums up his explicitly reactionary call for small farmers to reject progress and any attempts at increased prosperity and productivity. Earlier in the essay, he had written:

One common answer [for farmers in the struggle against Yankee Industrialism] is heard on every hand: Industrialize the farm; be progressive; drop old-fashioned ways and adopt scientific methods. These slogans are powerfully persuasive and should be, but are not, regarded with the most deliberate circumspection, for under the guise of strengthening the farmer in his way of life they are advising him to abandon it and become absorbed. Such admonition coming from the quarters of the enemy is encouraging to the landowner in one sense only: it assures him he has something left to steal. Through its philosophy of Progress it is committing a mortal sin to persuade farmers that they can grow wealthy by adopting its methods. A farm is not a place to grow wealthy; it is a place to grow corn. [my emphasis]

The reality was in 1930 that even large farms weren't looking like places to grow wealthy, and small farming wasn't even looking like a way to survive. In the latter part of his essay, he expands on this vision of rejecting Yankee progress for this imaginary agrarian ideal:

The Agrarian South, therefore, whose culture was impoverished but not destroyed by the war and its aftermath, should dread industrialism like a pizen [poisonous] snake. For the South long since finished its pioneering. It can only do violence to its provincial life when it allows itself to be forced into the aggressive state of mind of an earlier period. To such an end does bookkeeping lead. It is the numbering of a farm's resources - its stacks of fodder, bushels of corn, bales of cotton, its stock and implements, and the hundreds of things which make up its economy. And as the only reason to number them is to turn them into cash—that is, into weapons for warfare - the agrarian South is bound to go when the first page is turned and the first mark crosses the ledger.

The good-road programs drive like a flying wedge and split the heart of this provincialism - which prefers religion to science, handcrafts to technology, the inertia of the fields to the acceleration of industry, and leisure to nervous prostration. Like most demagoguery, it has been advertised as a great benefit to the farmer. Let us see just what the roads have done and who they benefit? They certainly can be of no use to the farmer who cannot afford to buy a truck. He finds them a decided drawback. The heavy automobile traffic makes it hazardous for him even to appear on the main highways. But if he has the temerity to try them, they prove most unsatisfactory. Besides being a shock to his mules' feet, it is difficult for the team to stand up on the road's hard, slick surface.

The large farmers and planting corporations who can afford to buy trucks are able to carry their produce to market with less wear and tear than if they drove over rougher dirt pikes. But this is a dubious benefit, for the question is not between trucks on good or bad roads, but between teams [of animals drawing wagons] on passable roads and trucks on arterial highways. [my emphasis]

It's amazing to see him argue even against good roads. And against farmers trying to keep track of their own financial accounts. But that's where this kind of Blut und Boden argument takes him. He quotes with approval a comment from one of his virtuous farmers, supposedly from the days of the Martin Van Buren administration, "as soon as a farmer begins to keep books, he'll go broke shore as hell." Even worse, from reactionaries' point of view, he might even begin questioning the crooked dealing of his tenant-farming landlord or the store owners who are cheating him on measures and prices.

His dystopian vision for the rural South is well expressed, again probably unintentionally, by his praise just quoted for the "provincialism" that "prefers religion to science, handcrafts to technology, the inertia of the fields to the acceleration of industry, and leisure to nervous prostration," the latter presumed to be the consequences of more efficient farming.

If this essay in 1930 could have served as anything more than a cynical ideological excuse for non-farmers to look with indifference on the farm crisis that actually began before the Great Depression itself set it, it's hard for me to imagine what those other purposes might be. In this nightmare vision of unending stagnation, the assumption that it was founded on unending white supremacy was so basic that it scarcely needed to be mentioned, though he did let it slip through in his frivolous description of the development of white tenant farming.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012 April 10: Once more on Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Agrarians

R. Blakeslee Gilpin in his book John Brown Still Lives! America's Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change (2011) includes an essay on the Southern Agrarians, "The Fugitive Imagination: A John Brown for the Old South". He focuses on Robert Penn Warren's biography, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929) and his essay "The Briar Patch" (1930), to talk about the impact the Southern Agrarians had on propagating and elaborating the segregationist neo-Confederate/Lost Cause view of the Civil War and American history.

I devoted all of the 2011 posts in the Confederate "Heritage" Month series to the Southern Agrarians, a group of reactionary Southern writers whose most prominent member was Robert Penn Warren. I devoted a post to "The Briar Patch" (see link below). In the 2006 series, I posted a lot about John Brown and cited Warren's biography. In several posts.

The Southern Agrarian group was founded on a group of poets who identified themselves as "Fugitives". Gilpin calls them the Fugitives throughout his essay. But they are more commonly identified as the Southern Agrarians or Nashville Agrarians.

In my post of April 21, 2006, I wrote:

For Robert Penn Warren in his 1929 biography of Brown, the antislavery fighter was a scamster and insane to boot. His antislavery activities in Kansas were simply a cover for horse and cattle theft. And his religion was nothing but a way to wrap a phony mantle of self-righteousness around his misdeeds. Warren emphasized what he found to be "one of the most significant keys to John Brown's career and character; his elaborate psychological mechanism for justification which appeared regularly in terms of the thing which friends called Puritanism and enemies called fanaticism." (Warren; 446)

The mini-civil war in Kansas Territory involved active guerrilla warfare, in which horse theft was common on both sides, a practice with obvious military significance in those days before the motorized cavalry.

Gilpin also notes Warren's polemic fixation on Brown's alleged personality issues, with reference to one of the most controversial incidents in Brown's career, the execution of several proslavery partisan fighters in "Bleeding Kansas":

After describing Brown's bloody killings at Pottawatomie Creek in May 1856, Warren highlighted only one fact: Brown stole his victims' horses and traded them on the profitable black market of territorial Kansas.

The exploitation of this trope was one of Warren's shrewdest thematic strategies. What better way to vilify Brown than to make him not just spiritually misled but also a common criminal? Warren's biography shows an almost obsessive attention to the debated incidents in Brown's life, specifically the continual1ies about his presence at the Pottawatomie massacre: "The truth was out at last, and the world had prepared a motive-a motive which would fit the martyr .... The world had justified the murderer .... It is a little more difficult to justify a horse thief." Warren was most incensed that Brown's defenders justified his actions while stolen property was on its "way north to be sold." Here Warren was able to condemn Brown, his mythmakers, and the North all in one stroke. [my emphasis]

Gilpin reviews numerous ways in which Warren's propagandist John Brown biography was hack history. He writes that "the main agenda of the biography was blaming the North for the Civil War and excusing the South for slavery." (Yes, blaming black people for awful things whites do to them started long before George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin and conservative whites rushed to defend the killer.)

Gilpin describes how the Southern Agrarians/Fugitives promoted a Lost Cause pseudohistory in the service of defending segregation and white racism as it was practiced in the American South in the 1920s and 1930s. His judgment on the Agrarians' manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, is sound:

I'll Take My Stand, and Warren's essay ["The Briar Patch"] particularly, patently ignored the actual racial realities of the interwar South. Warren's ideological gymnastics perfected the polemic he had been crafting with his fellow Fugitive-Agrarians throughout the previous decade. With the same historical background, arguments, and deftly crafted prose he had used in John Brown, "The Briar Patch" represented an attempt to convince and mobilize. Both book and essay sought believers in the ways of the Old South, particularly those sympathetic to the cultural values, social system, and racial hierarchies of this imagined world.

I do think he assigns the Agrarians more than their fair share of influence in promoting the neo-Confederate viewpoint at the time:

The Fugitive-Agrarian publications reveal the successful appropriation of history in the campaign to wrest control of the South's present and the future. Warren's John Brown and his contribution to I'll Take My Stand were part of an organized effort to convince the nation that their imagined South (past and present) was real. This impressive intellectual uprising effectivelycreated a history of the Old South that could be used as a model for the New South. In the hands of these talented men, historical writing gave legitimacy to what otherwise would have been dismissed as the rantings of hillbillies straight out ofMenoken's Scopes columns. Instead, Warren and his compatriots transformed the South, an amalgamation of historical reality, imagined past, and hopes for the future, into the torchbearer of the American republic.

Not that I want to let the Agrarians off the hook for their defense of segregation and the rank racism they employed in making it. It's rather than they were taking as their material a Lost Cause ideology that was well-established in white Southern culture and politics. And there were, unfortunately, no shortage of historians that were not particular associated with the Agrarian trend who promoted a Lost Cause outlook.

The Agrarians' cranky defense of rural poverty, ignorance and deprivation, their superficial criticism of Yankee industrialism, and their generally stuffy prose all served to limit their influence. And, as I discussed in last year's Confederate "Heritage" Month series, their association in the 1930s with The American Review, a reactionary journal whose editorial policy was openly admiring of Mussolini's brand of Fascism, pretty much wrecked the Agrarians as any kind of a coherent movement, even among intellectuals.

But despite what I see as some overestimation on his part of their actual distinct influence, Gilpin describes their viewpoint perceptively. He understands that their were about promoting segregation and white racism through their neo-Confederate/Lost Cause writing:

While this uniquely Southern project would continue to reverberate through literature, art, and history for much of the twentieth century, its roots were in an impassioned plea for regional redemption. The Fugitive-Agrarian project was designed to transform the present and direct the future. But the "Dixie" invoked in these texts, that land of happy, kinkyheaded slaves, beholden to kindly, benevolent masters, had never existed. The antebellum South, in reality, depended on subjecting blacks to all manner of degradation: of body, of mind, and of spirit. ...

Within a decade, the Fugitives' arguments had found overwhelming national sympathy. The group's romanticization of an imagined "land of cotton" was not just eerily effective, it spoke to the long shadows that the CivilWar continued to cast over American culture and society.That great national trauma allowed this intellectual tradition not just to embed itself powerfully in a regional culture and identity but to reforge the zeitgeist of our national past. The American impulse to imagine Southern plantations at the far end of a tree-shaded drive rather than at the slave quarters speaks to this understanding. Our insistence that the CivilWar was a valorous tragedy without blame owesmuch toWarren and his compatriots. This is the legacy of the Fugitive imagination.

Others of my posts on Robert Penn Warren and the Lost Cause/neo-Confederacy:

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 10: Southern Agrarian Robert Penn Warren, which deals with "The Briar Patch" essay

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

Robert Penn Warren on William Faulkner, 1934 03/29/2011

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, lost cause, neo-confederate, r blakeslee gilpin, robert penn warren, southern agrarians, white racism

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 26: Allen Tate on 19th century history

Southern Agrarian Allen Tate has a review in The American Review 2:2 (Dec 1933) of a book by Herbert Agar, The People's Choice. Tate elaborates a strange political history of the United States. In this paragraph, he seems to slip up and admit that the abolition of slavery may have had something to do with the Civil War:

No avowedly democratic state has made a serious effort to make equality of economic opportunity a social relaity; for this concession to the peole would haved jeopardized the plutocratic aims of the middles class [here he means capitalists]. In this country Jacksonian democracy stopped with the fiction of social equality. Economic inequality and the fictitious character of social equality provide the first step of American capitalism to rationalize its power. Working with the reality of economic disparity, capitalism made secure the doctrine of social equality, and fought on that basis the War Between the States, which finally consolidated its power. [my emphasis]

Tate's Southern Agrarian vision insists that the "Jacksonian" policy of social equality is a lie. Part of the Southern Agrarian schtick was to use "capitalism" as a pejorative against Yankee industrialism. There actually is a serious discussion among historians as to what extent the antebellum Southern economy had feudal as distinct from distinctly capitalist features. But the business of Southern agriculture was carried on within a capitalist economy. It takes some imagination for the Agrarians to conceive of the antebellum South or of postwar subsistence forming as somehow other than "capitalist."

Tate gets all Calhounian here, using arguments that could be cut and pasted to sound like a leftwing, labor-oriented criticism of the capitalist system. But it isn't. It's an indictment of the Yankee political and economic system in Lost Cause terms. In a particular twist, though, that I don't recall encountering elsewhere, he makes the historical argument this way:

Our capitalism [Yankee industrialism] has contrived to make, first, a special myth of its own origin: the myth that it rose with the salvation of democracy and the Union. It has constructed, secondly a pseudo-moral sanction fo itself: its origin being heroic, its mission to the American people is necessarily to give them the benefits of "democracy". ...

American capitalism has thus followed the pattern typical of all ruling classes: it has disgusied its origins and it has issued a "moral" sanction. It is becoming increasingly evident to the historians that the transitional period of early American politics, known as democracy, was not perpetuated, but was crushed out of existence by the Confederate War; and that the Union, instead of being preserved as a real union of interests, survived as a fiction by which capitalism enormously extended its power, at the expense of local, agricultural interests.

For those of us not blessed with the conservative passion, this kind of convoluted argument is less a wonder to be admired than a headache-inducing mind-twister. My own translation of this would be: The Yankees are big ole hypocrites, because they like to talk about democracy and national unity but really they destroyed both! We had real democracy when chattel slavery was legal, when the slaveowners shut down freedom of speech and the press even for whites who wanted to criticized slavery in the South and worked hard to impose the same regime on the North, and when slave states thought they could just overthrow the Constitutional government in a bloody civil war whenever they decided the Yankees were offending their Sacred Honor too much. And so now, everyone - even inferior sorts like blacks and women - theoretically have the right to vote and to fair trials and the like, and that's un-democracy. And the nation is united but that's just a big fake and the Civil War actually destroyed the Union.

Well, I guess something that is gobbledygook in the original is a bit hard to translate into something reasonably intelligible. But as far as I can tell, that's the general idea.

I don't want to tag Herbert Agar with Tate's dubious analysis. But in the world of up-is-down history writing that Tate reads from Agar, it wasn't Andrew Jackson who routed what the Democrats of that time called the Money Power in the form of the Bank of the United States. Instead, it was his predecessor and bitter opponent, John Quincy Adams! Tate writes that Agar's "portrait of J.Q. Adams as the last president who made a serious attempt to rescue the country from the explotiation of money power will doubtless influence future writers, and correct a prevailing error in American history." Well, maybe in some future Southern Agrarian dystopia of subsistence farming when most people won't have access to all that thar useless book-l'arnin'.

But Tate gives the following quote from Agar, which gives another headache-causing historical interpretation of a weird Lost Cause variant, which makes Abraham Lincoln into a Confederate at heart! Agar, with Tate's brackets:

[L]incoln had no knowledge of the economic revolution that was taking place, no prevision of its effects on politics. It is this ignorance that accounts for Lincoln's belief that the Southerners were seceding because of what they thought was a threat to slavery. When they disregarded his honest and explicit promsies that their slave property would not be touched, Lincoln thought they were bemused by disloyal leaders. ... There is no telling whether he would have made [war] if he had realized that the South was fighting for an agrarian society against the threat of a business man's oligarchy. Lincoln would have hated that oligarchy almost as much as did Jefferson Davis, and if he had grasped the main issue, Lincoln might have felt that his real fight lay elsewhere.

We can safely count this as proof that crackpot history did not begin with Glenn Beck!

Tate concludes his dose of Southern Agrarian history-writing with the following that directly follows the Lincoln quote. It explains that because Honest Abe didn't recognize that he really in his heart of hearts supported Jefferson Davis, now the Commies may git us!

Because the real fight lay outside the false issue of freedom or slavery, capitalism was able to step in, in the Reconstruction, and seize the power. After we have bemused ourselves with the equally false issue of "capitalism v. the work", what monster will rise upon our delusion to enslave us again? It is likely that its name will be Communism - a new rationalization of industrial power copleting the reduction of free citizens to the ignominy of servitude.

Tate's review is another grounds to suspect that Southern Agrarianism had less to do with imagining an agrarian ideal than with defending Southern "folkways" with all the Lost Cause pseudohistory baggage that came with it.

Tags: allen tate, andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2011, john calhoun, slavery, southern agrarians, us south, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 25: More Donald Davidson on Rebels and Yankees

Donald Davidson continued in The American Review 2:2 (Dec 1933) with a second installment on the them of his essay in the previous issue, "Still Rebels, Still Yankees. II. Brother Jonathan of Vermont and Cousin Roderick of Georgia."

The characters of the title are evidently fictitious and serve as types for Davidson to continue making his point about "Rebels and Yankees." More precisely, to continue the Southern white-people's whining about how put upon they are by the blacks they must tolerate and the Yankees who misunderstand them. Cousin Roderick feels the burden in his life as what appears to be the landlord to sharecroppers:

On his several tracts of land, the gatherings of inheritance and purchase, are some one hundred and fifty Negroes whom he furnishes housing, food, and a little money; they do his labour - men, women, children together - the are his "hand". He is expected to call them by name, to get them out of jail, to doctor them, even sometimes to bury them when "lodge dues" may have lapsed. They are no longer his laves; but though they do not now utter the word, they do not allow him to forget that he has the obligations of a master.

All the duties of mastership without the advantages of owning his "hands" outright! How can we fail to pity the generous white landlord?

Davidson pleads for a national attitude of "diversity" in which Cousin Roderick can go about his benevolent life tasks, burdensome though they may be at times, without interference from outsiders who might want to disturb the harmony of his life:

By some it may be said that dark clouds hang over Yankeetown and Rebelville - clouds of menace, maybe of destruction. I do not deny their presence, but my story is not of such clouds. In this strange modern world it may be observed that men talk continually of the good life without producing a specimen of it, to convince an inquirer. Brother Jonathan and Cousin Roderick do not talk about the good life. They lead it. If government is intended to serve human interests, what does it propose to do about them? If science is really intelligent, what does it mean by conniving to put a stigma upon them or to destroy them? I cannot believe that a government or a science which ignores or depreciates them is very trustworthy. I believe that government and science will fail unless they are taken into account. They, and others, are the incarnations of the principle of diversity through which the United States have become something better than Balkan, and without which the phrase "my country" is but a sorry and almost meaningless abstraction.

Yes, what's important is for fictional white guys like Brother Jonathan and Cousin Roderick be able to keep living the "good life." If that means that African-Americans in Cousin Roderick's Georgia have to settle for whatever piece of the "good life" that Cousin Roderick is generous enough to toss their way, then, well, as Davidson said in the first installment in the previous issue, they are after all only "amiable children of cannibals" who should be glad of the "continual forbearance and solicitude that the Georgian" like Cousin Roderick felt toward them.

Such was Davidson's Southern Agrarian vision.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, donald davidson, slavery, southern agrarians, us south, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 24: Donald Davidson on Rebels and Yankees

The American Review 2:1 (Nov 1933) featured two articles by Southern Agrarians. One was a sketch by Robert Penn Warren of the Southern poet Sidney Lanier (1842–1881. It's mostly free of Lost Cause/neo-Confederate dogma. He does make a vague dig: "His social judgements in themselves are interesting only in so far as they illustrate the peculiar and sometimes irresponsible confusion into which the Southern liberal lapsed."

But Donald Davidson's "Still Rebels, Still Yankees" takes up the sectional cause of the (white) South. He was disturbed by the implications of Yankees worrying about the state of civil rights of African-Americans in the South. He tells a story about an anonymous ditsy Yankee woman who visited Virginia at some time in the relatively recent past from 1933:

Mount Vernon was all right, she thought; there the legend was safely frozen. But beyond, on the road to Richmond, what had become of all the great mansions she had read about, the cotton fields with Negroes carolling, the old gentlemen in goatees and white vests, sipping mint juleps in the shade? They were not visible. There were only a few scattered shacks and tumbledown barns in miles of impenetrable wilderness that looked for all the world as it must have looked when John Smith first invaded it. If she could have encountered the legend, the lady would have been content. But not seeing it or knowing how to locate it, she was smitten with a housewifely desire to get at this ragged land with a good broom and whisk it into seemliness.

Such vague tales about feckless Yankees visiting the South and being clueless about it are still popular today among segregationists. But such disappointed tourists were relatively harmless. Others were considerably more annoying:

Other sojourners had been anxious to do a far more drastic tidying-up. The Harlan County visitors, the Scottsboro attorneys, the shock troops of Dayton and Gastonia asked no questions about the genius of the place. Wherever they went on their mission of social justice, they carried with them a legend of the future more dangerously abstract than the legend of the past, and sternly demanded that the local arrangements be made to correspond with it, at whatever cost. The only American they knew or cared about was an overgrown urban America, that was forever in process of becoming one laboratory experiment after another.

This "overgrown urban America" was apparently about fair trials for black defendants as well as industrialization.

Davidson invokes the Lost Cause version of Reconstruction. He writes of the post-Civil War meddling Yankees:

Since Burgoyne's expedition no invader had come upon them to ravage and destroy. They had freed the Negroes, replying "I can" to duty's "Thou must"; but they were fortunately exempt from the results of emancipation, for no Negroes lived among them to acquaint them with the disorder of unashamed and happy dirt. ... In a land [New England] where everything was so right, it was hard to imagine a perverse land where so much could be wrong without disturbing either a people's composure or their happiness. [my emphasis]

There had been an extensive proslavery propaganda prior to the Civil War about the supposed moral fanaticism bred in "New England." The non-Southern part of the United States in 1933 consisted of 48 states, only a few of them in New England. But the Southern Agrarians were great respecters of Southern tradition. So Davidson reached back to the venerable tradition of trashing "New England" for its indulgent attitude toward the black citizens who lived "with the disorder of unashamed and happy dirt."

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.

How might that silly Yankee woman have gotten some romantic idea about the South? Maybe from descriptions like this one from Davidson, set in some vague time not specified, apparently intended to reinforce some Blut und Boden notion of the development of the virtuous Southern white character:

The Georgia landscape had a serene repose that lulled a man out of all need of conscience. [?!?] It was anything but swept and garnished. It could be mild or majestic or genial or savage, depending on what view you got of pines against red earth, or Negro cabins underneath their chinaberry trees, or sedge grass running into gullies and thence to impenetrable swamps, or deserted mansions lost in oak groves and magnolias. Rivers were muddy and at times unrestrained; they overflowed at embarrassing moments. In the pine barrens you might get an impression of desolation and melancholy; but things could grow lushly too, with the overpowering vegetable passion that harrowed the Puritan soul of Amy Lowell, when she visited the Magnolia Gardens at Charleston. But finally, it was a well-tilled country, where you were forever seeing the Negro and his mule against the far horizon, or the peach orchards bursting into an intoxicating pink.

Happy Negroes were pleasant enough for whites, at least as long as they were out working happily a safe distance away at their subsistence sharecropping with a mule pulling a plow. Though perhaps not not as attractive as other parts of the Georgia backdrop, like "peach orchards bursting into an intoxicating pink."

When white people got a little closer, though, things got more complicated. Speaking specifically of the post-Reconstruction era, Davidson writes:

And everywhere was the Negro, a cheerful grinning barnacle tucked away in all the tender spots of Southern life, not to be removed without pain, not to be cherished without tragedy. The [white] Georgian, when reproached for his intolerance, told himself that actually nobody outdid him in fond tolerance of the Negro. Lynchings, the work of hothead and roustabouts, were regrettable; but what did a few lynchings count in the balance against the continual forbearance and solicitude that the Georgian felt he exercise toward these amiable children of cannibals, whose skins by no conceivable act of Congress or educational programme could be changed from black to white. The presence of the Negro, which had its advantages in agriculture and domestic service, made the [white] Georgians' life both comfortable and ramshackle; it gave him devoted servants and social problems, cheap labour and hideous slums, an endless flow of folk-lore and anecdote, and eternal apprehension for the future. But in his own way, the [white] Georgian respected the Negro, as another irregularity, taking a human and personal form, that had somehow to be lived with. He distrusted all ready-made prescriptions for bringing about regularity. In Georgia, life went along horizontally: you never crossed a bridge until you came to it - and maybe not then. [my emphasis]

At the risk of repeating myself, would Wendell Berry find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Davidson with his own words in that passage?

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, donald davidson, slavery, southern agrarians, us south, white racism

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 22: Andrew Nelson Lytle on backwoods history

Southern Agrarian Andrew Nelson Lytle's "The Backwoods Progression," his history of the development of rural life in American history, appeared in the 1:4 (1933) number of The American Review. Its main value for me is the chance it gives me to defend the two patron saints of the Democratic Party.

Robert Barnwell Rhett (1800–1876): Not an Old Hickory sort of guy

As history, it's not very impressive. But it does illustrate something about Lytle's version of the Southern Agrarian ideology. His criticism of Thomas Jefferson illustrates how much Lytle's thinking falls within the tradition of late 18th century, anti-democracy thought:

The weak point in Jefferson's defense [of property rights] was his own belief in a distorted conception of property, albeit a specific kind, landed property and the kind of life it supported. This meant that his political activity concerned itself fundamentally with the same thing the Federalists espoused: the principle that the chief duty of the State is the protection of the property of individuals and aggregates of individuals. This is certainly one duty of government, but only as a means of guaranteeing the security and self-perpetuation of the family. Prohibiting kings, then allowing private citizens to own the State is certainly hopping from a very slow pan to a very hot fire. Instead of laying the broad foundations a State needs to rest upon - and these foundations are best laid upon the dogma of one religion - he raised the question as to which will, the middle-class or the agrarian, would own the continent.

The aesthetic joys of the rural life clearly weren't the only concerns of the Southern Agrarians.

I am impressed with Lytle's comments on the historical significance of Andrew Jackson. Although I approve what he finds reprehesible. Speaking of the Nullification Controversy with South Carolina, Lytle writes:

South Carolina, under the prompting of such men as Rhett and Hammond, made such active opposition that the great leader of the state, Calhoun, abandoned his nationalistic stand and proposed his Nullification theory of redress. Andrew Jackson's romantic idea of the Union and his dislike of Calhoun joined together in his stubborn mind to play him into the hands of the enemy. Although he had destroyed the National Bank, he threated to send troops into Carolina to make tariff collections. For a moment war seemed inevitable; but Henry Clay came forward with a compromise, Calhoun accepted it. The Congress voted favourably on Jackson's force bill, and voted to reduce the tariff. Two great blows to State rights were struck at once. The South got temporary relief, and for this relief agreed to a sacrifice of principle. There can be no compromise between two antithetical ways of life. What appears a compromise is a postponement of the issue. The South, by accepting this postponement, doomed itself to ruin. The high prejudices of his heart and a limited political vision led Jacxkson to squander the great strategic moment by which his backwoods could have established its rule. Life a good backwoodsman, he took "the responsibility" and Calhoun refused it; but the South, not Calhoun or Jackson, suffered the consequences.

Jackson's "romantic idea of the Union" was his notion of the United States as a united country based on democracy. He articulated the idea of democratic national patriotism to which the North held in the Civil War and which still defines the formal notion of American patriotism today.

As Lytle says, Jackson backed "the enemy". Or rather what was considered "the enemy" in the eyes of the enemies of democracy, the enemies of America, the enemies of the Constitution. This is what makes the image of Andrew Jackson, despite his very real faults, especially on slavery and Indian relocation, such an important symbol of American democracy. A wealthy man, he sided with the small farmers and the urban workers against the concentrated economic power facilitated by the Bank of the United States. A slaveowner and a supporter of slavery, when forced to choose between Calhoun's anti-patriotic defense of slavery in the Nullification Controversy, on the one hand, and democracy and American patriotism on the other, Jackson made the right choice. In an important sense, Lytle is right in saying that the slave South "doomed itself to ruin" in the Nullification Controversy. And to the extent that is true, to that same extent Andrew Jackson was the executioner.

Lytle, of course, sides with Calhoun. His shares the anti-democratic tradition of Calhounian thought his fellow Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley expressed in the previous issue of The Southern Review.

Lytle explains who the Confederates were supposedly forced into their treason and their war to destroy the American government by those evil Yankees and especially by that Southerner Old Hickory:

There was after this [Jackson's defeat of the secessionists in the Nullification Controversy] only one avenue left open to the South - secession. Calhoun still hoped to concetrate Southern leadership and make the fight within the Union. But his plans of effecting his ends by controlling the Democratic Party failed. With desperation he took up a last position, secession through the common action of all the Southern States. But Clay's American plan - an extension of capitalism - and his compromises, the god of all opportunists, had done their work. In this crisis Calhoun's chief lieutenant, Robert Barnwell Rhett, proposed a policy of coercion. He contended that if one State acted separately, the other State, all believing in their own sovereignty, would follow the lead. He supported his contention by reminding his political peers that the revolt against England did not take place until the tea had been thrown into Boston Harbour.

At least one Southern Agrarian in 1933 was looking at the Tea Party as a useful symbol to defend the white South!

When common action did take place, it came about by South Carolina's single-handed withdrawal; but it came ten years too late and brought Appomattox, not independence.

And he notes in the Calhounian demogogic mode, "The fall of the Confederacy removed the last great check to the imperialism of Big Business."

John Calhoun and Robert Barnwell Rhett, fighters for the workers' revolution! This is the kind of idiocy to which the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause line of thinking inevitably leads.

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2011, frank owsley, frank owsley, john calhoun, slavery, southern agrarians, us south, white racism

April 21: Frank Owsley on the "Scottsboro boys" case (3)

This is the third of three posts on Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley's essay, "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction" American Review 1:3 June 1933. In the previous two posts, I talked about the contemporary concerns of the piece with defending Southern segregation from Yankees who wished to make "outside interference with the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South." In the first two posts, I discussed the 1933 setting of his essay and the pre-Civil War anti-slavery movement, which Owsley counts as the third and first crusades, respectively, of the North against the white South. In this post, I focus on Owsley's second crusade, postwar democratic Reconstruction.

I'm concerned with the way he uses neo-Confederate/Lost Cause history to provide an ideological frame for his contemporary (1933) application of segregationist ideology.

In Owsley's pseudohistory, the Radical Republicans after the Civil War "preached to the naive and childish blacks" of the South, "incendiary doctrines calculated rouse the wildest passion so revenge against their former masters." They promised the freed slaves "that the property of the white would all be confiscated and given to the Negro." Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and other Radicals, Owsley says, "promised to give the Negro social and political justice - at the cost of Southern white extermination, if need be."

These claims are examples of what is known in technical terms as bald-faced lies. More colorful and informal terms also come to mind.

But I wonder if Wendell Berry would find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Owsley with those of his own words in this essay.

The South during this period suffered from "Negro rule," which is apparently Owsley's synonym for democratic governance in which African-Americans were officially regarded as equal citizens to whites. The suffering of the persecuted whites was world-historical, in Owsley's Lost Cause version: "The South thus reconstructed probably had no counterpart in the history of the world." There's actually a touch of truth in that. The formal extension of the vote to white males and the moves toward democratic land reform were far more advanced democracy than that seen in most of Europe or other parts of the world at the time. But that's not what Owsley means.

Owsley's pseudohistory here serves to justify his warning discussed in the first of these three posts that if the Yankees didn't stop pointing to injustices of Southern segregation - in Owsley's view that was being done by a conspiratorial alliance of Herber Hoover Republicans and the Communist Party! - then the Ku Klux Klan would start murdering Southerns blacks and it would all be the Yankees fault. Here's how he projects that justification for white racist violence back into Reconstruction:

The white man, especially the small farmer and the poorer classes, returned the hatred of the Negro with interest. The slave-holder of former days was more tolerant of the Negro's irresponsible acts, for he regarded the Negro as a juvenile race badly advised; but being human, he came to distrust and n many cases to hate the Negro. Despite the military support given the Negro governments, retaliation was frequent and violent. ...

The Negro should have learned then that in the end the relationship good or bad between himself and the white race of the South must be settled between them and that no outside power could dictate permanently the terms of this relationship. He was quickly disfranchised by indirection - and constitutionally, for the Supreme Court has not been able to void the legislation by which it was done - driven from politics, brought under rigid social discipline, in short completely subordinated socially, economically, and politically. The white race disciplined him severely for his conduct during reconstruction.[my emphasis in bold; italics in original]

No, there is no language from Owsley in this essay to indicate that there was anything regrettable about this, except the sneering reminder that "the Negro" had better learn his lesson or the "white race" will again discipline "him severely." He continues directly:

At length, however, with outside interference largely removed, old friendships were renewed between the races; new ones were formed until something of the old affection which had existed between the black man and white man returned. His condition gradually improved; though he has never yet been given back the ballot nor allowed to sit on juries. The experience of reconstruction was too bitter to be soon forgotten. It has formed and will continue for many years to form the background of Southern social and political attitudes. In considering any political action either state or national, the Southern white first considers how that action will ultimately affect the relationship between the races. It has crippled and at times destroyed the political value of the South in the national councils; it has created and will indefinitely perpetuate the solid South, solid against the Republican Party. [my emphasis]

If we understand that by the "experience of reconstruction" Owsley means the thoroughly dishonest Lost Cause pseudohistory of Reconstruction, that last quote is accurate. Lost Cause ideology about the Civil War and in particular about Reconstruction was the framework for segregationist and white-supremacist politics in 1933.

And I also wonder if Wendell Berry would find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Owsley with his own words in those quotations.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, frank owsley, frank owsley, john calhoun, reconstruction, southern agrarians, us south, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2001, April 20: Frank Owsley on the "Scottsboro boys" case (2)

This is the second of three posts on Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley's essay, "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction" American Review 1:3 June 1933. In the first post, I talked about the contemporary concerns of the piece with defending Southern segregation from Yankees who wished to make "outside interference with the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South." In this post, I'm concerned with the way he uses neo-Confederate/Lost Cause history to provide an ideological frame for his contemporary (1933) application of segregationist ideology.

John C. Calhoun

The first crusade in Owsley's historical trilogy of grievances inflicted on the white South by the damnyankees was abolition. Owsley's Lost Cause perspective dictated that he had to deny that slavery was in any way really the cause of the Civil War. As usual, such claims don't bear close scrutiny. Owsley's twist is that there was a basic competition between the industrialists of the North and the beautiful agrarian society of the South. The fact that one was based on free labor and the other on chattel slavery is somehow supposed to be incidental in this particular Lost Cause twist. But in Owsley's construction, the anti-slavery movement in the North was a sinister plan by the evil Yankee industrialists against the white South:

In order to subordinate the South it would be necessary to destroy [the] balance [of power between the North and South]. But the industrialists, carefully coached by their lawyers and statesmen and "intellectual" aides, realized the bad strategy of waging a frank struggle for sectional power; they must pitch the struggle upon a moral plane, else many of the intelligentzia [sic] and the good people generally might become squeamish and refuse to fight. Shibboleths and moral catchwords must be furnished. It was therefore found convenient to attack slavery as an evil and the slaveholder as a criminal, in fact to impugn the morality of the South, in order to create opinion in the East and North in favour of the industrialists' plans of Southern restriction.

The actual history of the abolition movement - including the sometimes violent rejection of it in the North - the need for fugitive slave laws to return human property that had absconded from the humane and civilizing conditions of slavery, the slave revolts and the paranoid panics over possible slave revolts that increasingly characterized conditions in the slave states: all of that has to be ignored or minimized for the Lost Cause pseudohistory to maintain a thin film of credibility even to those predisposed to accept it. For the Lost Cause, abolition was just a nasty Yankee plot against the put-upon whites of the South.

Owsley, typical of Lost Cause partisans, echoed the slaveowners' pre-Civil War accusations against the damnyankees. Given the ideology of racial superiority that became stronger and stronger over time in the slave South, the reality of slaveowners fathering their own children with their slaves was a particular embarrassment to the owners of human property. Owsley takes up their cause retrospectively by pointing to Yankee hypocrisy:

... when ... the moralist crusaders of the Northeast were painting a picture of universal prostitution and miscegenation in the South, information was available to those same moralists which showed sexual degradation in the factories of the East to have reached depths hitherto unknown in the experience of a modern civilized nation.

Illegitimacy was more common in the industrialized East than in any country in the world. Yet these crusaders offered little criticism of a society which forced young girls into semi-prostitution.

He goes on to gripe about the nastiness of working conditions in Northern factories. All of this was standard slaveowner polemics prior to the Civil War.

Since, as we saw in the last post, Owsley was especially worried about alleged Communist influence over civil rights agitation in 1933, it's appropriate here to quote an observation from Communist Party leader William Foster from his 1954 book The Negro People in American History (1954):

The furious debates of the 1850's over the question of slavery presented a rare spectacle of the two quarreling sectors of capitalism - the Southern planters, with their obsolete production system, and the Northern industrial capitalists, representing the interests of capitalism as a whole. They exposed and denounced each other's system of exploitation, and many true words were spoken in these mutual unveilings. Never, in any country, have the sinister workings of capitalism been so thoroughly aired from within.

Which is true enough, as far as it goes, although I can't vouch for the international comparison. John Calhoun actually incorporated such a conception of exploiting class differences into his political strategy and theory, as Richard Current explains in John C. Calhoun (1963). At the beginning of the Martin Van Buren Administration in 1837, Calhoun was becoming increasing unhappy with the Democratic Party:

There was much that he disliked about the party, including its name. He was himself no democrat, and he had little in common with the city workingmen to whom, among others, the party catered. That is, he had little in common with them except for the votes which they could cast and which he, in some future presidential election, might receive. In practice he was fond of "the people," including the workers. In principle he feared the "needy and corrupt" many, whom he expected to rise sooner or later in revolt against their betters, the rich and wellborn few. At heart he preferred the Whigs to the Democrats, the party of the rich to the party of the poor.

That appeal to urban labor was key to what "Jacksonian democracy" meant. Calhoun, to put it mildly, was no Jacksonian.

What Calhoun hoped for was an enduring alliance which would include working class Northern voters and Southern slaveholders. And in the service of that goal, Calhoun elaborated a nominally pro-labor viewpoint which, not coincidentally, also served as an indictment of the Northern system of free labor that increasingly competed directly against the slavery-based Southern agricultural economy. Current writes:

"It is useless to disguise the fact," Calhoun frankly informed his fellow senators (1837). "There is and always has been, in an advanced state of wealth and civilization, a conflict between capital and labor."

And he provides the following quotes from the Senator from South Carolina. From 1847:

Where wages command labor, as in the non-slaveholding States, there necessarily takes place between labor and capital a conflict which leads, in process of time, to disorder, anarchy, and revolution, if not counteracted by some appropriate and strong constitutional provision.

For, as the community becomes populous, wealthy, refined, and highly civilized, the difference between the rich and the poor will become more strongly marked; and the number of the ignorant and dependent greater in proportion to the rest of the community. With the increase of this difference, the tendency to conflict between them will become stronger; and, as the poor and dependent become more numerous in proportion, there will be ... no want of leaders among the wealthy and ambitious, to excite and direct them in their efforts to obtain the control.

It worth noting that in 1847 Karl Marx at this time was still an obscure Young Hegelian German scholar and polemicist with a tiny group called the Communist League (Bund der Kommunisten).

Calhoun's condemnation of the evils of industrial capitalism was entirely cynical politics and reactionary political theory. Which is not to say he wasn't correct in some of the things he had to say on the subject.

But the Lost Cause ideology expounded by Owsley in this essay is a direct descendant of Calhoun's pro-slavery positions. What may sound in isolation like perceptive criticism of the evils of the American form of capitalism circa 1933 - the failings of which were painfully evident in the early years of the Great Depression - are embedded in a defense of a Southern Agrarian ideal, which was really a dystopian vision meant to defend the existing system in the South: segregation, sharecropping, thoroughly corrupt politics that were democratic more in form than content, poverty and hopelessness for the majority of the rural population white and black. Owlsey was taking his stand on the grounds John Calhoun and other defenders of slavery had lain years before the Civil War.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, frank owsley, frank owsley, john calhoun, slavery, southern agrarians, us south, white racism, william z foster

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2001, April 19: Frank Owsley on the "Scottsboro boys" case (1)

Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley provided the readers of the Summer 1933 American Review a feast of Lost Cause pseudohistory in an article on the "Scottsboro Boys" case, "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction." In this post, I discuss the 1933 setting of his essay. In the following two posts, I'll focus on what Owsley considers the first and second crusades by the evil North against the virtuous (white) South: anti-slavery agitation prior to the Civil War and postwar democratic Reconstruction.

The "Scottsboro Boys"

The Scottsboro Boys case involved nine young African-American men who were arrested in 1931 in Scottsboro, Alabama, and charged with the rape of two white women. A lynch mob attempted to take them out of the jail the next day to torture and murder them, which is what "lynching" was. The evidence against them was dubious, with one of the two alleged victims after their first conviction specifically denying that she had been raped. The arrest was on March 25. The first round of convictions were on April 7. The US Supreme Court overturned the convictions in November 1932 on the grounds the defendants were denied adequate counsel. In new trials in Alabama, they were convicted against in late 1933.

PBS has an American Experience documentary on the case, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy (2000) Here is a feature on the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School website on the trials: "The Scottsboro Boys" Trials 1931-1937.

The Scottsboro case became a prominent civil rights cause in the first half of the 1930s. The NAACP competed with the Communist Party-linked International Labor Defense (ILD) group to take over the representation of the accused after their first kangaroo-court trial, with the ILD eventually getting the case. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr. give this summary of the case in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (2003):

... nine young blacks, the youngest of whom was thirteen, were arrested and jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama, and sentenced to death on charges of raping two white women on a freight train. After a fight with NAACP lawyers, ILD lawyers and the Communist party made an international issue of the case. The Supreme Court ordered a new trial when it was proved that at the original trial the defendants did not have adequate counsel. In the new trial the Scottsboro boys were sentenced to terms up to ninety-nine years, but by 1950 the last of them had been released.

The Communist Party's involvement with the case gives Owsley's imagination material for considerable creative fantasy. In fact, his fantasies about the Commies are about the only thing about the case that does interest him, as he pretty much admits:

I am not here concerned with the guilt or innocence of the Negroes - though I wish justice done; I am interested in pointing out the meaning of these cases and of the general emotional disturbance in the East over the "injustices" committed in the South against the Negro. I wish to examine the relationship between this new attack upon the South and the former attacks, and by so doing gauge the probably motives and the final results.

The "former attacks" to which he refers are the pre-Civil War antislavery movement and the postwar Reconstruction period. His article is a great example of how the pseudohistory of the Lost Cause was used as an ideological framework for the defense of segregation, corrupt Southern justice and white supremacy in real time.

He takes a chronological approach in his essay. But since the present-day (1933) part was his real point, I'm discussing that in this post and taking up the pseudohistory parts in a second one.

After digging through numerous of these Southern Agrarian essays, it becomes a challenge on how to summarize them. The purpose of this series of Confederate "Heritage" Month posts is to highlight how neo-Confederate ideology functions. And Owsley's piece certainly fits the bill. On the other hand, I start to ask myself where does useful scrutiny end and transcribing of dreary segregationist propaganda hackery begin?

Owsley here with his treatment of American Communism goes into the kind of Glenn Beck/John Birch Society conspiracism that has become so much a part of the Republican Party's political understanding of itself now. It probably more accurate to put "Communism" in quotes here, since he's conveying his own view of it, in which the Reds (which meant Communists in those days) and the Herbert Hoover Republicans are both part of Yankee industrialism, which in Southern Agrarian jargon meant the evils of Yankeedom generally, from factories to scary labor labor unions to the even more scary notion of no legal (de jure) racial segregation. I'm not exaggerating: "But today there are two sets of industrialists: the capitalist-industrialists on the one hand and the proletarian-industrialists or Communists on the other."Owsley explains, "The capitalist-industrialists control the Republican Party" while "the Communists ... represent the base of industrialism." And they have formed an "alliance" - that would be the anti-New Deal, labor-hating Hoover Republicans with their Liberty League (a forerunner of today's Koch brothers political operation) teaming up with Earl Browder's Communists - which has "declared war upon the South."

It would be accurate to say that this was divorced from reality and didn't make jack for sense. But it lets Owsley spin page after page of Southern white victimization, whining about how the mean Commie Yankee Republicans are pickin' on us innocent Southern white folks. The emotional and propaganda sense of it lies in the equating opposition to Southern segregationist outrages in any form to Communist revolution, so that Yankee industrialists (presumably of both parties though Owsley is more worried about the Republicans here) can be assumed to share in the Communist Party maximum program which, as Owsley presents it:

It urges the Negro to rise and seize the lands of his oppressors and divide them out. ... It even promises to create a Negro State out of the Southern black belt and grant the Negro autonomy or allow him to secede from the Union. That is, it offers to help the Negro set up a black peasant state formed out of the confiscated or expropriated lands of the white man who is to be either exterminated or completely subordinated to the black race.

The Scottsboro case functions mainly for Owsley in this essay as a half-plausible way to equate Yankee industrialism (including Yankee democracy and rule of law) with his image of "Communism," which he then takes into such satisfying flights of white political paranoia and masochistic fantasy. Whatever the faults of the American Communist Party in 1933 may have been, calling for the extermination or complete subordination of "the white man" was not one of them.

Generally, all but the nuttiest paranoid conspiracy theories have some vaguely identifiable relationship to reality, though the relationship in Owsley's case here seems to be into the realm of the clinical. It's true that the Communist Party pulled just over 100,000 votes in the 1932 Presidential election (out of 39.8 million) for William Z. Foster, its Presidential candidate, a whopping 0.3% of the total. That would be the historical high point for its direct electoral influence in both absolute numbers and percentages, though we can't blame Owsley for not knowing that in 1933. It's also true that the official Communist Party position then and for another two decades did call for a "black belt" Negro nation in the majority African-American districts of the South, an odd and impractical idea that was a result of their attempt to articulate a "black nationalist" politics. Foster's and his party's program of that time was laid out in his memorably-titled 1932 book, Toward Soviet America, whose promise to "abolish all restrictions upon racial intermarriage," its praise of "racial amalgamation" and its assertion that "wherever Negroes have half a chance they demonstrate their intellectual equality with the whites" (pp. 305-6, pp. 317-318 of the PDF) would no doubt have been uncomfortable to the Southern Agrarians and their fans.

Actual Communist influence nationally in that period was primarily in the labor movement during the union organizing drives of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s. John L. Lewis as head of the United Mine Workers (UMW) union had fought the Communists in the 1920s - and I do mean fought. But when he became head of the CIO, he welcomed the participation of Communist organizers, because they tended to be determined and tough and shared his goal at that moment of organizing democratic unions free of Mob influence. The Communists did generally take a hard line against white racism, and through the Scottsboro Boys case did have some influence in promoting civil rights activism.

But their political influence in the South could safely be described as minuscule. Owsley was right in saying "the South is probably the greatest obstacle to Communism" in the United States. But to imagine that the Communists and Yankee industrialists were in an alliance to smash the virtuous South for their shared, sinister Yankee purposes - that was just nuts.

Owsley ends by explaining that if the white South decides to crank up the lynch-mob action, well, it will all be the fault of the industrialist-commie-yankee combination against them. The Judge Lowell to whom he refers is federal District Judge James Arnold Lowell (1869–1933), a Warren Harding appointee who refused to allow the extradition of a criminal suspect from Massachusetts to Virginia on 14th Amendment grounds as explained in this Time article, Crawford for Virginia 10/30/1933. Judge Lowell had thus committed a grave offense against the South in Owsley's eyes, making himself part of "the present agitation for 'justice to the Negro' as exemplified in the Scottsboro affair." The Dadeville reference is to yet another case where some damnyankees had thought it appropriate to be concerned about "justice to the Negro" in the South, clearly an odd conception in Owsley worldview:

But in the meantime, before the issues is settled, Communist agitation - and such conduct as Judge Lowell's - is creating a dangerous situation in the South. The criminal Negro, seeing those who have been accused of murder or rape such as the "Scottsboro boys" or the defendants on trial at Dadeville assiduously championed by an outside group, seeing them granted immunity in Judge Lowell's court or, perhaps, even in the Supreme Court, is bound to feel that he himself is above the reach of the law in a Southern State. It is hardly to be supposed that the Southern whites will tolerate such a situation. One has only to read the history of the abolition crusade or more particularly the history of reconstruction to be able to predict what will follow such flagrant interference either by the capitalist industrialists or by Communists. An extra-legal government would quickly spring into existence and such cases as that of the "Scottsboro boys" would be tried in courts whose decrees could not be appealed to a Federal tribunal In other words, the outside interference with the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South can result in nothing but organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and in violent retaliation against the Negroes - themselves often innocent. Such interference makes justice difficult, not only by creating friction between the races, but by arousing anger against those who interfere ... [my emphasis]

And this is a highbrow defender of segregation!

For Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley, defending the white South was clearly about more than singing the praises of the family farm and subsistence agriculure, or promoting the healthiness of organic farming. He obviously saw defending "the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South" under Jim Crow segregation as part of that task.

I wonder if Wendell Berry would find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Owsley with his own words in that passage. Would it be "racist by association" to wonder if that Owsley refers to as "violent retaliation against the Negroes" by Klan types is similar to what his fellow Southern Agrarian Allen Tate had in mind three years earlier when he wrote in their joint project I'll Take My Stand:

We are very near an answer to our question - How may the Southerner take hold of his Tradition?

The answer is, by violence.

For this answer is inevitable. ...

This method is political, active and, in the nature of the case, violent and revolutionary. Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south