“An Interview with Andrew Lytle”: Interviewed by Warren Smith and Michael Jordan.

Originally published in The Chattahoochee Review 08.4, 1988.1

Andrew Lytle held the annual week-long John O. Eidson Visiting Professorship at the University of Georgia in 1984, succeeding Cleanth Brooks in that position. He was interviewed ostensibly for publication in Stillpoint, the student Literary magazine. Warren Smith, then the editor of Stillpoint, wrote his MA thesis on Lytle. Michael Jordan is now writing a doctoral dissertation on Donald Davidson.

Smith and Jordan: You have often said that the term “Agrarian” did not encompass all the ideas of the twelve men represented in I’ll Take My Stand. What are those ideas, and is there a better term or phrase to express them?

Lytle: Well, I can’t exactly say what the better phrase is, but I felt, later on in life, that Agrarian was too restricted to just farming. What we were trying to defend was the whole cultural inheritance of Christendom. Of course, farming is the source of all society and life because it’s bread and meat, as well as other things. But we were not particularly concerned with agronomy or just farming, except to note that farming the land was the physical basis of all society.

In fact, culture comes from colo, colere, colui, coltum, which means the way you till the ground, and around tilling the ground and working the land and growing fruit and crops and things, you learn and pass on from generation to generation the manners and mores of a given society. In other words, a shopkeeper will not have the same kind of manners and mores as, say, a peasant farmer. Out of farming the land grows the larger sense of what the human condition is.

Red Warren and Allen Tate wanted to entitle the work Tracts Against Communism. I went along with them because we were the youngest and the best friends. But that was too political, just as Agrarian seemed somewhat too agricultural. It was an attitude towards Nature: don’t loot it, don’t destroy it, but cherish it and cultivate it and take care of it because nature and human nature are all part of the whole habits of life.

Question: It sounds like Agrarianism urges an attitude very similar to the Christian notion of stewardship. But Cleanth Brooks has said that while the Agrarian position is essentially a religious worldview, not enough emphasis was placed on religion by the original twelve. Is this true?

Lytle: Yes. I think it’s true. You see, we made the mistake of letting Allen Tate write on religion, and he reduced religion to philosophy — the half-horse business, you know. Now you see, that was part of the temperature of the times. I can say this in defense of not emphasizing it too much: when you emphasize religion consciously, it’s already gone. So obviously we had some sense of religion. We still operated out of a religious world.

But you see, we were just making a public protest. When we wrote, our backs were to the wall. We didn’t think of ourselves as prophets, though now we seem to be prophets. The liberals laughed at us. They had pictures of us with our heads in mules’ asses. They had us using privies. Now, there’s nothing wrong with privies. Allen Tate said he didn’t mind using an indoor toilet so long as he didn’t have to kneel down and worship it every time he used it.

The main point we were trying to make is that without a communion of things — people doing things together out of a common inheritance and a common way of making a living — you cannot really be happy. As John Ransom said in I’ll Take My Stand, the thing we do most is work, and when it’s an evil, as the industrial system says it is, you work hard so you can take a vacation. But then you work hard there, too, so you never have any fun.

Think of doing one thing all your life: screwing this into that. There are people in some factories who do that. And some of them are manacled; they put a part here, and if they don’t move their hands back quick enough, they’ll get smashed, so they have a machine that drags their hands back for them.

A point I would make is that the creative process is the only thing in us that is divine. We were not begotten; we were made. And the artist puts into his artifact himself — not his personality, but the thing in him that is eternal. That’s what God did. And if we become craftsmen again, we can restore the sense of the divine.

Question: So the critique of the Agrarians is that we have lost our sense of ourselves as craftsmen and have become—.

Lytle: Specialists. Specialism. It’s a terrible thing. It denies the whole body politic. For example, when I had my eye trouble, a doctor gave me something called Diamox. It made me feel so bad that it was a heroic act to take my foot out of my bed and put on my shoes. So I stopped taking it. When I got to a doctor down here, he said the drug could kill you. Well, I knew it would. That young man up there in Lexington was experimenting on me. He said “Well, it hurts some people.” It was a drug that was supposed to take the water out of the upper part of the body. Well, I said what about the lower part? In the body, you know, this is not separate from that. The water was causing my blindness, and the drug was supposed to take the water out of my eye. That’s the stupidity of the specialist.

Question: But we are pushed toward specialism from our earliest educational experiences. How do we resist this pushing? What kind of education should young men and women be trying to get?

Lytle: Reading, writing, and arithmetic, all the basic things. I suppose I received the best of educations at Sewanee Military Academy. I got grounded in Latin, four years of Latin, history, English, a foreign language, and mathematics. In college, you reach out into more private disciplines, such as chemistry and all the sciences. But all you get there is the knowledge of what things are and sort of where they are. You can’t learn the whole history of the world in four years, when you’re also doing other things. Getting to know each other.

There are three things you’ve got to do when you go to college. You’ve got to first discipline the mind. Then you’ve got to know how to drink. And then make love. Those are the three basic things in education. It’s true. That’s what you should concern yourself with.

Question: Make love?

Lytle: Yes! Courtship, and all of that. Your basic concern is to live in the order and discipline of a community. If you don’t discipline yourself in the basic matters that concern you, then someone else will. That’s tyranny. That’s the servile state…

Question: Discipline of the mind, then of the body, and then discipline within a social setting so as to live in order in a community. These are pretty lofty goals for both teacher and student.

Lytle: Of course, every man learns in his own way. And teaching is a craft.

At Sewanee students used to have to wear a coat and tie to class. They would come in barefooted, but they’d wear a coat and tie. When the weather got warm, they’d try to get away with taking off the coat and I’d say, “Now gentlemen, literature is greater than either the student or the professor, and you can only meet it formally. Put your coats on.” But, again, every man learns in his own way.

But anyway, I don’t see how you can teach anything you don’t like. If you love it, the students will love it. I’ve found that to be the case. And if you love it, you’ve got to find a way to transmit it.

I don’t understand, for example, these people who write a biography of a person they don’t like. It seems a silly thing to do, something done by a bad-natured person who wants to get back at a person who is dead because he didn’t like him.

Question: The modern university has gotten away from some of the things you’re talking about. Instead of a university, where men and women achieve a level of communion and get the chance to plug in, so to speak, to the tradition of men who came before them, it’s become a multiversity. Everyone’s doing his own thing. Is this an acceptable situation?

Lytle: It’s not. That’s because society has disintegrated. When you have a community, everybody moves based on certain beliefs, divine and natural. The family is the best description of that. You cannot have thousands of people in school, as in the large state universities today — thirty and forty thousand. It’s just too many. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t get an education there. If you’re lucky, there will be certain teachers there who can teach and who love their subjects. But it’s this Educationist business, with a capital E, which teaches methods and no subject, that’s destroying education in this country. Disciplines require their own methods. Certainly you’re not going to use the same methods in teaching French that you use in teaching chemistry. That’s just confusion.

Question: Speaking of confusion: you often write of the relationship between confusion and order both in the individual and in society. And often you trace confusion to a confusion of tongues, a confusion in the use of language.

Lytle: Well, yes. Just look at any newspaper, or take one word: temperance, for example. Temperance means that when you approach the objects of the world that are tempting, be temperate about them. That is, don’t go whole hog; don’t get drunk every day, just take a drink. But the moment you say you can’t do something at all, when you replace temperance with prohibition... you see, that violates the language. And you can see the tremendous power of the crying world that has grown out of prohibition.

That’s just one example, and an obvious one. You see, the word was the creative act of God. It has to do with life and a confusion of words is death. Now, of course, we all die. And whether you actually die alone, or in genocide, with a hundred million people, you always die alone. That’s why when we talk about the atom bomb or nuclear explosion it doesn’t matter about the individual, each individual, unless it hurts too bad. What we’re really concerned with is the death of society. And the word is the discipliner and orderer of society. We cannot have communion if we do not know the meaning of language.

Question: So the confusion of language is just as destructive as any possible holocaust. And perhaps this is why you have dedicated yourself so painstakingly to fiction though much of your training was in history?

Lytle: Fiction is the best way to make present and understandable history. For the simple reason that you have to recreate people acting in their predicament. When I came along, historians could not write. They thought of themselves as scientists, and scientists are illiterate and don’t write. My dear friend Frank Owsley wrote three basic books: State Rights in the Confederacy, King Cotton Diplomacy, and Plain Folk of the Old South. When I taught Civil War at Southwestern, I used the first book, and I read a paragraph that didn’t make any sense to me at all. I presented it to him, the author, and he didn’t know what it meant either!

I remember that Ambassador Dodd, who was ambassador to Germany under Hitler and was head of the history department at the University of Chicago, wrote a book on Jefferson Davis. He was held suspect because it was a decent book; you could read it. The words meant what they said, more or less. He was held suspect by his fellow historians. History, you can know it best — if you have a good writer — through fiction. The fiction writer doesn’t have an ax to grind, to begin with. If he’s good he will make people act in their predicament, and he will resolve it in some way before it’s over. Of course this is a prejudiced view, if I may say so.

Question: This blending of history and fiction — fiction as history, you might call it — has certainly been a hallmark of your fiction and that of other Southern writers.

Lytle: What you have now, I think, is this: for the past fifty years literature has been dominated by Southerners. There’s no doubt about it. But most of the publishing is in the Northeast, where a provincial kind of sentimentality seems to dominate. And publishing is on the stock exchange up there, so when Post Toasties buys a great publishing house, they may know about Post Toasties, but what do they know about reading literature and publishing? It comes down to materialism, absolutely. It’s getting to be that university presses and small presses in the South and elsewhere are the only hopes. There’s great confusion as to the status of letters now because all the older people who had maintained it are dying off. The only one in the East now is Malcolm Cowley, who seems to live forever.

Question: Aside from this understanding of fiction as history, why have Southerners so dominated literature? What was special about the South?

Lytle: Allen Tate made the point. He compared the South to the 16th century. The defeated South, after the First World War, had come up against materialism through industrialism. So you had the two opposites come together, and the friction caused certain people to become aware of their inheritance, historic and otherwise, just as the Renaissance — which was a squandering of the inheritance of the high days of Christendom — met feudalism to produce the great Elizabethan plays. That’s what Allen Tate said, and it makes great good sense.

And add this: the South was defeated. There was still at that time some sense of this defeat. People had eaten their bread in sorrow. That was a very important characteristic of the South, I think, whereas the Yankees have gone from one sweet titty to another. But don’t forget this. People did and still do eat their bread in sorrow. That bread sometimes is a metaphysical bread. Those people in the Northeast have lost their sense of triumph. They’re all screwed up. They don’t know what they’re doing.

Question: Based on what you’ve said about publishing and about society in general do you ever wonder that your own work has gained such a high status?

Lytle: An artist concentrates. Your whole attention is on your work, making it show itself. Anything that comes in, such as how to pay the mortgage on the farm, will it get me a reputation, will it get me a good lay, as some people used to say — anything that intrudes will spoil what you’re doing. I would say that I’ve never let that intrude. I discovered that you just try to do the work. You don’t know whether anybody’s going to read the work or not. It’s like being what the priest once was: totally committed. You take the long risk of faith, the long risk of not being recognized. I’ve been through that period. It didn’t matter to me because I’m not ambitious in that way. I want to see the subject expose itself under the proper control of distance. That is the craft of fiction. And as I said, if we can become craftsmen again we can restore the sense of the divine.

Andrew Lytle Interview (Chattahoochee Review 08.4, 1988)

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The vagrants and tourists don’t arrive until eight. I went out at six-thirty. The Piazza del Duomo was empty. The Duomo faced the square from the east, flood-lit from below, white marble against a sky still closer to night than morning. The five great doors were shut. They laid the first stone of this Cathedral in 1386. Six centuries. You stand there doing the arithmetic and it does not resolve. 1386. Before the printing press, before Columbus.

A train to Genoa left in the afternoon. The morning belonged to whatever we could cover on foot. Camera in hand, turning where the street turned, stopping when something stopped me. At the Colonne di San Lorenzo, sixteen Roman columns stood in their original alignment on a city street, a parking sign and graffiti visible through the colonnade. The columns date to the second or third century AD. Milan built around them the way a river builds around a rock.

At Sant’Ambrogio, founded by the bishop who baptized Augustine, Roman sarcophagi lined the arcade walls. Inside the Basilica of San Lorenzo Maggiore, wooden chairs sat in rows on a floor where congregations have gathered since the reign of the emperor Constantius II. Light came through high windows in long pale shafts. I sat down. We had a train to catch.

The train left Milano Centrale, Mussolini’s station, moving south for ninety minutes. I had never ridden a train, never been to Europe. I ain’t even made it to Missouri. The luggage rack didn’t like my luggage, American suitcases in a country where people travel with one small bag. An hour out, the Apennines rose from the plain — green, rounded, nothing like the Alps’ vertical wall. An October cloud settled into them. Farmhouses slid past at train speed, ochre and yellow, red tile roofs, satellite dishes bolted to their sides, garden walls going brown at the edges. Rain hit the window in small drops that bent the view without killing it. The ordinary country between one ancient city and another.

In 2022 I asked my wife to fly to a foreign country with people I knew from Twitter. I told her we would eat well and walk a beautiful city. She said yes.

Alan Cornett had put the week together with Tom Ruby through their venture, Cultural Debris Excursions1, named for Russell Kirk’s essay about collecting the flotsam of a sunken civilization. Alan is a friend of mine, a Southern gentleman who studied under Dr. Clyde Wilson and was one of Kirk’s assistants. The man knows books. Tom Ruby I had not met before Genoa. I count him now as a friend and a mentor.

Discussion topics ran down the itinerary: urbanism, local knowledge, fealty to the past, Christopher Columbus. They had arranged fixed menus with local chefs, private access to places you could not walk into off the street, and cocktail hours featured Alan-batched Boulevardiers and Limoncello Spritzes and Tom’s heirloom liqueurs. Kirk’s daughter Cecilia was in the group, and a gentleman whose family name sits on a college football stadium and who is working to bring back the American Chestnut.

We arrived at Genova Piazza Principe on Saturday. Our hosts brought us to our Bed & Breakfast, the Valéry Guest House. The stairs rose between the Palazzo Grimaldi della Meridiana and the Musei di Strada Nuova. We climbed to a modest door, then a few steps more, and the space opened into an atrium, Latin inscriptions cut into black-and-white marble walls and columns that marked every building of consequence in medieval Genoa.

Genoa drops from the Apennines to the Ligurian Sea in a crescent of stone. The mountains crowd the harbor, the city built upward. Narrow alleys called caruggi run between the waterfront warehouses and the churches and palaces above, six feet wide in places, vaulted in stone, the upper floors close enough to block the sky. The Romans knew it as Genua. During the Second Punic War, Scipio landed here. Mago Barca ravaged the city. Rome rebuilt it as a military base for campaigns against the Ligurian tribes. Genoese fleets sailed east in the age of the Crusades. Columbus was born here.

The Genoese drew portolan maps, financed ships, kept accounts. When the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, Genoese bankers turned west and underwrote Spain’s American empire. By the 1550s they held half the loans to the Spanish Crown. American silver moved through Genoa to Flanders. The families who controlled that trade built their palaces on a single street of marble and fresco, the Strada Nuova.

In 1784 the Genoese minister in Paris wrote to Benjamin Franklin about sending a consul to Boston. Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams replied that they were ready for a treaty of friendship and commerce with the Most Serene Government of Genoa. Nothing came of it.

Three years later Jefferson arrived. He spent three and a half months on the road through southern France and northern Italy and studied Genoa with an architect’s eye. In Piedmont he smuggled rice seed, whose export was punishable by death, and sent it to South Carolina.

In 1791 George Washington received Giuseppe Ravara, a Genoese merchant, as consul general of the Republic of Genoa in the United States. Ravara became entangled in an early scandal. He was accused of sending anonymous threatening letters to the British minister in an attempt to extort money. The case raised a constitutional question: could a consul be tried outside the Supreme Court under Article III?

Washington pardoned him, citing “sentiments of respect for the said Republic of Genoa.” Six years later the United States named Francis Childs, printer of the Federalist Papers, its first consul to Genoa. He never arrived. The republic fell that same year.

San Francesco di Castelletto once stood on the hill above the Strada Nuova. Franciscan monks broke ground in the mid-thirteenth century. Consecrated in 1302, it stood striped in black-and-white marble, the kind the Genoese took pride in the way Southerners do a porch. Margaret of Brabant, Queen of the Romans, was buried there in 1311. The republic’s first elected ruler was buried there, and an admiral who rescued a pope from a Neapolitan siege with ten Genoese galleys. Then Napoleon killed it. The French seized the property and demolished San Francesco lot by lot over three decades, filling the crypts with rubble.

Parts of the church survived inside a residential building. A passageway connecting Palazzo Bianco and Palazzo Tursi crosses the site where the monastery stood. I walked it. The shapes of arches still showed in the exterior walls. My guest house atrium was part of San Francesco di Castelletto. I did not know this at the time.

On the night of October 4, 1892, Paul Valéry, twenty-one, sat in a room in the Palazzo Montanaro while a storm battered the Ligurian coast. He had come to Genoa sick over a Spanish woman and sick of his own poems. A sleep-deprived Valéry swore he would free himself from “those falsehoods: literature and sentiment.” He turned to mathematics, philosophy, and language. Twenty years passed before André Gide drew him back to poetry. A plaque on the exterior wall marks the night. The guest house bears his name.2

The days in Genoa followed a pattern: breakfast, walk, stop, look, eat, walk, stop, eat, drink. We walked through Porta Soprana, the twelfth-century gate where the old city walls begin, and passed the house where Columbus is said to have grown up — an eighteenth-century reconstruction of a building the French navy shelled to rubble in 1684 — and turned into the alley maze. The Chiostro di Sant’Andrea sits in an open lot between apartment buildings. The cloister belonged to a Benedictine monastery demolished in the nineteenth century.

From the Columbus monument near the train station — A Cristoforo Colombo / La Patria, cut in marble, bronze wreaths gone green at the base — we took the Zecca-Righi funicular up to the old defensive walls above the city. Genoa spread below in haze, the port cranes and the Ligurian Sea dissolving into a single gray wash. The walls ran through fog and cedar trees. A medieval gate appeared along the path with Osteria da Richetto built into it. We ate and drank.

On the descent we stopped at the Sanctuary of the Madonnetta, built in 1696. The courtyard floor is a risseu — a traditional Ligurian pebble mosaic, black and white river stones laid by hand into scrollwork and heraldic patterns. In the crypt the sanctuary keeps a permanent nativity scene: a hundred carved wooden figures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, set in a miniature reconstruction of old Genoa.

Lower in the city we found the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Saint Agnes, founded in 1262 by Carmelite friars who had arrived in Genoa with the retinue of Louis IX of France after his failed crusade. The Carmelites built their church on the site of an older chapel; the parish of Sant’Agnese, founded in 1192, was merged into it in 1799 after the Napoleonic suppressions wiped out both congregations.

We took the train to Camogli and the ferry from there to San Fruttuoso. The abbey appeared around the headland — Gothic arches opening onto the water, a Doria watchtower above in the trees. No road reached this place. The mountain closed around the cove on three sides, the sea on the fourth. Off the cloister, a Roman sarcophagus sat on wooden blocks.

The fishing village Boccadasse sat on a cove at the eastern edge of Genoa. The boats still came in. The nets hung out to dry. People still lived above the sea in rooms with salt on the windowpanes. Back in the city that evening, at Savô Pizzeria, they kept bringing pizzas and pouring Ligurian wine and nobody told them to stop. Best pizza I have had anywhere.

My wife and I took the train south to the Cinque Terre. At Manarola the main street ran downhill from the station to the harbor like a long boat ramp. At Nessun Dorma, on a cliff above the village, we made pesto. At Vernazza a church rose straight from the waterline, built from the same stone as the seawall. Above Riomaggiore, terraced vineyards climbed toward the ridge. We came back to Camogli for dinner. I had caviar pasta and a Negroni. The pasta lives rent free.

I had the University of Genoa on my list. In 1964, a historian named Raimondo Luraghi established Italy’s first American history program there, and he built it around the study of the South. Luraghi had been born in Milan in 1921, drafted into the Italian army in 1941, and turned against the Fascists to join the partisan resistance — first Giustizia e Libertà in Torino, then the 4th Garibaldi Brigade, where he rose to command a ranger battalion in the mountains. Wounded in action on July 29, 1944, he earned a silver medal for gallantry.

After the war he joined the Communist party and worked as a journalist, quit journalism and Communism, but not Marxism, so naturally he moved into teaching. He first crossed the Atlantic in 1963 for a Harvard International Seminar directed by Henry Kissinger. Fulbright grants sent him into the archives of the American South, and in 1966 he published Storia della Guerra Civile Americana — 1,395 pages, awarded the Prize of the American Universities in Europe for the best book in American history by a non-American. David Donald called it the best single-volume history of the war. Luraghi lectured at Harvard, the University of Richmond, the University of Georgia, Notre Dame, and Indiana. Mr. Luraghi died on December 28, 2012, at ninety-one. Historian Emory M. Thomas called him “a modern Thucydides.”3

Dr. Clyde Wilson, in his Southern Reader’s Guide, recommending Luraghi’s The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South, wrote: “Raimondo Luraghi of the University of Genoa was one of the twentieth century’s most important European students of the American era of the War Between the States. He wrote, among other works, a superb history of the Confederate Navy and a general work on the War that has not been translated into English. In the work in hand, he writes a graceful appreciation of the society of the Old South. To state a sophisticated case briefly, he finds antebellum Southerners to be, as is claimed by their defenders, admirably honourable and non-materialistic.”

Professor Luraghi compared the plantation South to the Mezzogiorno, 1861 in Richmond to 1861 in Turin: agrarian peripheries governed by landed elites, divided from their industrialized counterparts, dragged into crises of unification on someone else’s terms. Luraghi read the antebellum South through the classical ideals of the Italian Renaissance, the planter modeled on the integral man, or what the Southern Agrarians and Richard Weaver called the whole man. He saw the war as the first modern industrial conflict: the agrarian Confederacy, forced to fight a technological war it had no infrastructure to wage, bypassed capitalism and built a war industry from the top down. Emory M. Thomas puts Luraghi’s point bluntly: Confederate industry, driven under Jefferson Davis, expanded at a pace and scale rivaled only by Mao’s China.

I first encountered his successor, Valeria Gennaro Lerda, in Dr. James Everett Kibler’s lectures and in his book The Classical Origins of Southern Literature. She chose her subject from a need to understand what follows a civil war. She knew that question from inside her own country. Italy’s questione meridionale, the “Southern Question,” took shape after unification in 1860, when the industrial North absorbed the agrarian Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.4

Lerda taught the American South at Genoa for more than thirty years. She co-founded the Southern Studies Forum, which met first at the university in January 1990, and she ran the Fulbright Senior Lecturer program that brought a Southern historian to Genoa each year. Pierangelo Castagneto, another scholar from Luraghi’s program, wrote on John Taylor of Virginia and Andrew Nelson Lytle.

On the last night in Genoa, Alan and I went to Neat Whiskey Bar, a place I found in the alleys. I set a bottle on the counter. Leiper’s Fork Distillery, Williamson County, Tennessee. Single Barrel, Cask Strength, 109.7 Proof. Barrel No. 52, New American Oak, Charred, Selected for the Southern Whiskey Society. I carried the bottle from Nashville to Genoa, rolled in a shirt, bagged in plastic.

The bartender picked it up, turned it in his hands, read the label. ROME ran across his knuckles. He poured three glasses. We drank. No one had carried a bottle across the ocean and set it on his bar. After that he kept pouring. The Michter’s came out. Then something else. The tab stopped mattering. We drank bourbon in a city where bourbon had no business being.

The walk home took twice as long as it should have. I climbed the stairs to the building where a Franciscan cloister once stood. I passed the Latin inscriptions and found my door. The bottle stayed on the bar. I didn’t smuggle out any rice, but I did bring home a dusty bottle of Wild Turkey.

Sources

* All photographs by me.

Beneš, Carrie E., ed. A Companion to Medieval Genoa. Brill, 2018.

———. Jacopo da Varagine’s Chronicle of the City of Genoa. Manchester University Press, 2020.

Bent, J. Theodore. Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell. London: C. Kegan Paul, 1881.

Bury, Michael. “The Grimaldi Chapel of Giambologna in San Francesco di Castelletto, Genoa.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 26, no. 1 (1982): 85–128.

Castagneto, Pierangelo. “Old and New Republics: Diplomatic Relations between the Republic of Genoa and the United States of America.” In Rough Waters: American Involvement with the Mediterranean in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, edited by Silvia Marzagalli, James R. Sofka, and John J. McCusker. Research in Maritime History 44. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010.

Congress.gov. “Journal of the Senate Executive of the United States, 1796-1797.”

Epstein, Steven A. Genoa & the Genoese, 958–1528. University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Gale. “Raimondo Luraghi.” Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors. Gale, 2007. Gale Literature Resource Center.

Giannattasio, Bianca Maria. “The Ligurians and Other Alpine Peoples.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pre-Roman Italy (1000–49 BCE).

Jefferson, Thomas. “Notes of a Tour into the Southern Parts of France, &c., 3 March–10 June 1787.” Founders Online, National Archives. Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11, 1 January–6 August 1787, edited by Julian P. Boyd, 415–464. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.

Lerda, Valeria Gennaro. “Teaching Southern History in Italy.” American Studies International 31, no. 1 (April 1993).

Mortier, Pierre. Genoa. 1704. Map. (Title Image)

Pickering, Timothy. “Timothy Pickering to George Washington, c. 17 February 1797.” Founders Online, National Archives. Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 21, 22 September 1796–3 March 1797, edited by Adrina Garbooshian-Huggins, 711–714. University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Scrivano, Simona, Laura Gaggero, and Elisa Volpe. “Methodological Approach to Reconstructing Lost Monuments from Archaeological Findings: The San Francesco di Castelletto Church in Genoa.” Minerals 9, no. 10 (2019): 569.

Strabo. The Geography of Strabo. Vol. 2.

Thomas, Emory M. “Raimondo Luraghi Remembered.” Civil War History 61, no. 1 (2015): 64–67.

Washington, George. “George Washington to the U.S. Senate, 17 February 1797.” Founders Online, National Archives. Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 21, 22 September 1796–3 March 1797, edited by Adrina Garbooshian-Huggins, 715–717. University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Robert Young Drake Jr. was born in Ripley, Tennessee, in 1930, the late-born son of a cotton merchant and a woman he called the most sensible person he had known. His grandfather, a Virginian who fought in the Army of Northern Virginia and stood at Appomattox. Drake grew up among old people, listening.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vanderbilt in 1952, took his M.A. there in 1953 under Donald Davidson, and earned a Ph.D. at Yale in 1955. He taught for forty years at Michigan, Northwestern, and Texas before settling at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He published several collections of fiction and a steady run of essays, memoirs, and reviews in Modern Age, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Georgia Review, and The Mississippi Quarterly. He never planned to write fiction. A department chairman at Michigan asked why he did not write down those stories he told about people back home. Drake went away that summer and set down his memories of childhood. He died on June 30, 2001.

The critic Michael Kreyling compared Drake to Chekhov, a Southern Chekhov who kept eye and ear peeled for the moment human nature shows itself in its constant struggle against loss. Austin Warren, Drake’s first great encourager at Michigan, called the stories “a strange kind of essay, which he did not disallow as fiction.” Drake set them all in Woodville, his name for Ripley, and the people of Woodville sound as though they come from the West Grand Division of Tennessee because they do.

I have selectively edited a fifty-page interview with Drake conducted by Alan Jackson and originally published as “A Conversation with Robert Drake” in The Chattahoochee Review 16.1 (1995). The full interview is linked at the end.

Professor Drake talks about the South: geography, history, community. He talks about the craft of writing: the particular over the general, the teller who reveals more than he knows. The Agrarians come up, and I’ll Take My Stand, which Drake read faithfully and understood as metaphor rather than prescription. Davidson stands at the center, the best prose of any Fugitive. Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Lytle, Ransom, and Warren all get their due.

So does Joe Christmas, standing outside a lit porch in the dark, wanting nothing more than to belong. So does O’Connor, whose verdict after a dull literary party, “They ain’t frum anywhere,” Drake heard firsthand. He argues for Gone with the Wind as better than its reputation and remembers the great-aunts whose slippery satin laps Mitchell sat on as a girl, old women toughened by Reconstruction. Welty’s The Ponder Heart struck him like a Damascus Road conversion, because she used the language he had heard and spoken all his life for the highest artistic purposes, and it worked.

Drake once said his Uncle Lewis, a Methodist preacher who took photographs for sixty years, explained his compulsion in five words: “I just want to get this down for the record.” Drake took the phrase as his own. This interview is part of the record.

The Interview

Jackson: You’ve said that Southern writers have three things going for them: geography, history, and community. I was wondering how you think these things influence your fiction?

Drake: First, they are all three very particular. Fiction by its very nature must be rooted in the particular; otherwise you get a sermon or something. That is one of the first things you have to tell young people who are trying to write. “You are just writing generalities, which don’t convince anybody. You’ve got to show the . . . well, I guess like Othello says when he wants to know if his wife is betraying him: “Give me the ocular proof.”

Southerners, of course, will look at history; that is the most obvious one. Southerners are, as a people, still the main people in this country to whom history has really happened. Now, Toynbee, you know, said that for most people in the modern world, history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. It really happened to us. You have heard me talk about my grandfather, who was a Confederate veteran. I remember him quite well; he was a Virginian in the Army of Northern Virginia, and he was at Appomattox.

In my apartment right now I have framed on the wall his discharge papers signed at Appomattox Court House. He was living history; he was there in the house, he was palpable, you could touch him, he was alive, in many ways unlike people who go ape in the modern world when they sort of discover history or find out that maybe there really may be something to it after all, even though it has been kept secret from them. They’ve always elicited from me, I think, scorn. I grew up knowing about history; it was in the house, and furthermore my grandfather (I don’t know if this was a holdover from the Army of Northern Virginia, but he ate peas with his knife and he didn’t like to bathe any more often than he could help.) And so history was not something deodorized and conjured up by Hollywood or indeed Williamsburg.

Williamsburg doesn’t do much for me because most of it is a movie set. But I get real excited about The Hermitage because Andrew Jackson really sat in that chair right there and it is real. My grandfather was real. I read some of his memoranda that he wrote down in his later years. Unfortunately, I wasn’t old enough to ask him intelligent questions about the war, but I know it happened to someone that I knew. That does a lot for you; it is not something in a book. It is something that most Americans don’t understand.

That’s what I am always inclined to say to people who, as many Southerners do, want to take credit for their ancestors’ great deeds. I always want to say, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The question is not whether some of their virtues rub off on you: the real question is, could you today be worthy of the examples they set back then. But I don’t think many of them would take that line, so I’m not much on the picturesque view of history. I always think of that scene in Gone With the Wind, which I’ve always said is a much better book than most people think, where at the barbecue at Twelve Oaks the news of Fort Sumter comes and breaks up everything, and the hot-bloods are standing around talking about war and just dying to get into it and kill a million Yankees, because of course one Southerner blindfolded can always kill two dozen Yankees.

And remember that Rhett Butler is the only dissenting vote when he says, you Southerners, all you have is slaves, cotton, and arrogance. He is about to be lynched at that time, when an old man, who is a veteran of the Indian wars or the Mexican wars, stomps out of the corner and says you young bucks don’t know a thing about war, you think it is all honor and glory, but it is dysentery and pneumonia and do you know what dysentery does to a man’s bowels?

That is what Southerners saw during the horrors of Reconstruction, and I know Margaret Mitchell said in an interview that she remembered all the old great aunts, whose slippery satin laps she sat on when they would go to visit on Sundays, and she said those old women were tough. They had to be because they had survived Reconstruction and they knew the world backwards and forwards. They had the benefit of the discipline of history.

I think history, more than any other subject, takes the starch out of people. Southerners have had history, they have had place, because again for Southerners people are always unique and they belong somewhere. Now everyone knows that wonderful story about Flannery O’Connor going to a literary party and being bored out of her mind and later she observed to several people, of whom I was fortunately one: “You know what’s the matter with all those kinds of folks? They ain’t frum anywhere.” For Southerners, I think people usually are from somewhere, and if they aren’t from somewhere, then something is wrong because Southerners historically have dealt with a stable culture or stable world.

I think very few people in Southern literature, at least modern Southern literature, have ever had to go in search of themselves. You know one of the most idiotic phrases in modern times is “I found myself” in a certain experience. That is why people like Joe Christmas in Faulkner is even more of a standout than he is, because he quite literally does not know who he is. In New York, I guess you probably have a Joe Christmas standing on every street corner, so there is no big deal about that. But in Jefferson, Mississippi, he is a sore thumb and then some.

So they have geography; people belong somewhere. That is one of the first things a lot of Southerners ask: Where is he from? Is he kin to the people by that name over in the next county? or is he kin to some other folks? They always try to place people. I know when I began teaching I would always, still do, and I have been teaching forty years, ask a new student, Mister So-and-So, where are you from? One of my colleagues pointed out to me that was really rather rude, that I was rather snobbish, as though I was trying to rank him in some sort of order. I said that was perfectly ridiculous. Where he is from is part of his self, and it is quite literal placement and it gives certain meaning to his life. The trouble is, the world we live in now has got some great rage against context. Race, color, creed, gender, and God knows what else, as though you could just strip all these fripperies, which is what they imply that they are, off of people and leave you with something called naked human nature and that is the real “them.” I think that is perfectly absurd. We are the sum of all these things; they make us what we are.

My hometown, for instance, is just a small town in west Tennessee, Ripley, where I grew up. I still call it home—that may tell you something right there. Memphis, which is our big city just fifty miles south, is just full of people that migrated there from Ripley, somewhere along the line, and they think it is just the most wonderful thing they ever did in their lives: they got out of Ripley. They put all those irrelevancies behind them and now they live in Memphis, and they can be mugged along with everybody else.

But, here we are at this very moment in Atlanta, and if you do a little field work in Atlanta, I think you would find that Atlanta is just full of people tickled to death that they got out of Memphis. Sooner or later if you go on to the wider vision, you end up in New York City, and you might find that although Atlanta is wonderful and has the biggest airport I reckon in kingdom-come and other improving modern things, that New York has got a lot of ex-Atlantans. So where does it all end? You have to come to a stop somewhere, otherwise you wind up being in charge of men in little white coats.

I know I put that question to a Yankee friend one time and he clearly had no idea what I was talking about. So, place is part of the totality of human experience and again to some extent this was forced on Southerners by being the venue where the war was fought. It was not fought in Ohio and Massachusetts; unfortunately, it was fought down here. Of course New England characteristically was kind of saying, “let’s you and him fight, they can pay the bill.”

One of the most moving scenes I think that Faulkner ever wrote, in Light in August, is when Joe Christmas walks at night through a residential area of Jefferson, Mississippi, and sees a group of people playing cards on the side porch (and I hope it was a screened in porch, I used to think that was the greatest luxury possible, and it saves you from getting mosquito-bitten), but he sees a group of people playing cards on the side porch, lit up of course at night, and he says, “that’s all I ever wanted. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.” I think that most people can relate to that, and Southerners were born knowing that. Not to belong is one of the worst things that can happen to anybody in the world. I have spent my life not belonging, in some ways, to various things but more often than not by choice, and that does things to people. I’m not asking for sympathy but it does things to people.

Jackson: You are a Southerner, a Tennessean, a student of Donald Davidson, and a Vanderbilt alumnus. What do you think of the Agrarians and the Agrarian movement?

Drake: I was terribly impressed by them. After all, their names have been in print. That was all it took to impress me and most other people. I read I’ll Take my Stand faithfully; I got out in the world and began to appear in some of the more conservative journals myself, and that’s not always the wisest thing I could have done, because back then that wasn’t the politically correct thing to do. But Mr. Davidson, of course, was an enormous influence on me, but I must say he never brought his far-right politics into the class. They did not affect, or indeed infect, his literary judgments. He sometimes would make funny asides about them, but no, that never infected his judgment.

I was so in awe of him, it was difficult for me to make any real judgment except that I knew a lot of people thought he was crazy—well, not crazy, but just tiresome and foolish. I thought, too, he was spoiled rotten. Everybody at Vanderbilt stood in such awe. I think he was sort of a bully, too. He was just always against everything. I had sense enough to know that there was a lot in this world I didn’t like, but I am just like that Peter Arno cartoon of the two men in quicksand: I had half a mind to struggle. Then I got tired of all the hangers-on. His graduate students said, “You know he’s always just so unhappy in the modern world,” and I thought, god-dammit, look at my Grandpa...he had every reason to be as unhappy as all get out, lost his money, lost his property, lost everything, and if it hadn’t been for my grandmother, God knows, he probably would have starved to death, but he wasn’t going around acting that way.

I just got tired of that. Of course, I never argued with him about anything like that, but then when I began to work closely with him, not only in writing class but also in his course in the ballad and the folktale, which I have more or less copied at the University of Tennessee, and then he supervised my M.A. thesis on the short stories of Saki, who, of course, a lot of people never heard of, we became, by definition, closely associated, and I began to see that behind all that there was a lot more. That’s what I tried to put in that article I wrote about him for the Vanderbilt Alumnus (Jan.-Feb., 1964). Because I saw there’s more to it than that, and basically he was not so much an Old Testament prophet as he was King Lear or something. I call him “The Ancient Mariner.”

Alexander Heard said before he came [to Vanderbilt] from Chapel Hill where he had been a dean and political scientist, he had heard more about Mr. Davidson than anybody connected with the university except Harold Vanderbilt himself. In a strange way I began to feel sorry for Mr. Davidson. But you see, what would put your back up was he always acted like he was the only one who felt this way and that the world had somehow gone back on him. You felt like saying there are other folks around, too. He had long since left the Methodist Church where he’d been reared, because it had become sociological and all, and that was more or less the reason I left it too.

I thought about how much my daddy and other people like him admired and indeed loved Franklin Roosevelt, whom of course Mr. Davidson, I understand, regarded as an anathema, and the TVA, oh that was terrible, socialism, and all that kind of carrying on.

It became an embarrassment; because if you mentioned that you had worked with Donald Davidson, people would say, “Oh that’s that crazy man,” or something like that. I thought, I don’t wonder that you are saying that, but you see you don’t know what I know about him. He did himself a disservice and finally he did us a disservice.

Now some people would wildly object to that I’m sure, but that’s what I think. To this day there is nobody in this world I would rather have commend something I had written than Mr. Davidson. He wrote the best prose of any of them, and I don’t believe anybody else’s comments on that; his prose is the most lucid, the most precise, and indeed, he had the best ear. Of course, that’s his poet’s ear, probably. The best ear of any of them, and I will never change my mind about that.

Then something else you should know, and other people should know and they don’t know it; nearly every summer he taught at the Bread Loaf School of English up in Vermont, and I visited him there several times just went and had lunch with him. I had friends up there I would visit and say, “Would you mind riding over to have lunch with Mr. Davidson?” Of course, they had heard so much about him they were ready to go.

The thing I learned was that he had as loyal a following up there as he ever had at Vanderbilt. It was not a sectional thing in that sense. He and Robert Frost were very good friends, and of course a lot of that is old country New England, and you see that at Yale. Some of my closest friends were that: they weren’t east coast people; they were country New England folks. There’s lots of similarity there. It has an edge to it. He always said about Robert Frost, “You better be careful when you read Robert Frost; now, you are liable to run over a booby trap.” That was something I learned from visiting at Bread Loaf School, and of course they had very distinguished teachers. He was on the permanent staff, but I know Cleanth was guest professor one summer and a lot of people from those New England schools, like Dartmouth.

It is not without interest if you want to start making comparisons; you know Robert Penn Warren is buried in New England. He got very fond of Vermont and he and his wife began to spend more and more time there and he is buried up there. There is not happenstance there.

Jackson: But not all the Agrarians were so kind to the north. Do you think the Agrarians were right?

Drake: Mr. Davidson didn’t agree with this, but I think maybe the best comment is what Louis Rubin said: that you should not read I’ll Take My Stand as a literal prescription for behavior, but it’s kind of a metaphor. It’s a poem, in a way. It speaks metaphorically. In that way I think some things were right. I know some scholars have found in the last few years, to their surprise and maybe consternation, young people have discovered this book and the Sierra Club and other people like that have discovered this book and they don’t think it is lunatic work. So much in what they wrote does speak to the condition of many modern people who now do feel dislocated and displaced. They didn’t really want people to give up indoor plumbing and pull out the TVA socket, I guess.

I think in many ways they were right in principle. I don’t see how you in some ways think otherwise. I think about my students. These things are harmless, but nonetheless I think they are important. My students don’t know any geography. Why? They go everywhere on the interstate, which doesn’t go through anything, and they don’t know where they are. Or else, they fly and they don’t know where they are, and I can tell you the people on that airplane...I mean the flight attendants as they are called, they don’t know.

One time I was going to Canada to speak at Windsor University right across the river from Detroit; naturally I had to go through Atlanta, and then the flight from Atlanta to Detroit and then Windsor, and the pilot says, “Ladies and Gentleman we are now passing over Cincinnati over on the left side.” It was a beautiful Fall day...so I looked and there was a little silver trickle of water and I just said to the flight attendant, “That must be the Ohio River.” She says “I wouldn’t know.” And I thought, well, honey, I hope the pilot knows. But it is almost a contempt for scenery. I think about my students; they don’t have any idea. For instance in Huck Finn, it is very important that you know that the Ohio River comes into the Mississippi River near Cairo. So then you say, now who knows where the Ohio River comes from? You never find anyone now that will know. Well, I had to learn that in the fifth grade. So you say, where is Three Rivers Stadium and that begins to percolate.

It is just the loss of the particular. I know Mr. Davidson, in one of his later poems, said something about in poetry the tame abstract must wed the wild particular. I think that is marvelous, and in a way that’s what the arts all try to do. No real art is about thought. I have not a shred of sympathy for it; the idea of thought just makes me want to go to bed. The idea of the wild particular is something to take notice about. I think in a certain way, a certain limited way, they were right. I think it is not accidental that some young people have been discovering this.

I’ve asked some of my friends why naturalists often write well in certain forms. One of them, who is a botanist, told me, in our business we are trained to observe and record the particular instance, and we are used to writing concretely. You see, the social sciences can’t be concrete about, God knows, anything. I thought that was a good explanation. I’ve always sensed that in Mr. Davidson’s conception. Then, of course, he was always concerned with Hardy; he used to teach a course on Hardy and Conrad, and I wish that he’d been doing it while I was there. But the conflict in Hardy was always, he said, essentially the conflict between tradition and anti-tradition, which I think is perfectly true and I think is also perfectly true of Southern literature.

Jackson: Vanderbilt, for all of its esteem, and I’m not going to dismiss that, did not seem like a terribly happy place to people like John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks.

Drake: Now wait a minute. You are talking about something, but you don’t quite have all the facts. I know that those gentlemen have said some things to that effect, but let me remind you that Cleanth Brooks always said he was born into genteel poverty; that was his phrase. His father was a Methodist preacher. He went to a prep school, a private school, a very good one too, in McKenzie, Tennessee, called the McTyeire School. That was named for Bishop McTyeire of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, who was one of the folks that helped persuade old Commodore Vanderbilt to give the first million dollars with which to found the school.

Furthermore, when Brooks went to Vanderbilt, he belonged to ATO Fraternity, which is a very reputable fraternity and always very strong in the South. Then, of course, later on he became a Rhodes Scholar. Only the United States Senate is a more prestigious club than the Rhodes Scholarships. You look around you on the national scene, and indeed on the local scene, and I think you will see what I mean. I don’t say this to be unkind or malicious, but the Fugitives and their literary coterie belonged to what there was to belong to; they were not left out.

I think in those days too, it was easier to be both a poet and a football player, than it became later on when you had Big Jim Dickey and people like that. I don’t think the world was quite so divided back then. Now Mr. Ransom later left Vanderbilt because Chancellor Kirkland would not give him the magazine he wanted to edit and Kenyon College made a more attractive offer.

They did not go around acting like poets. They were, I’m not going to say “good old boys,” but they were simply young men, most of them from quite good families, even if they were born into genteel poverty, who began to experiment with writing poems and got inspired by teachers like Mr. Ransom and Donald Davidson, who was my great teacher.

Mr. Davidson, of course, all of his life was mortally afraid of poverty because he grew up pretty hard, and I was told at one time that he did not even participate in the Vanderbilt retirement plan. He was depending on the sale of his textbooks to provide for his old age. I notice, by the way, you have here the one I used as a freshman at Vanderbilt and is still matchless in some ways [points to a copy of American Composition and Rhetoric]. Ransom and Tate were not left out and I don’t think they were regarded as such curiosities. This is very important because I hear this now. I have heard this over the years, how could we get such a body on our campus? The answer to that question is to beg that question because you don’t import such bodies; they happen. I think Mr. Davidson, who was the one most at the center of the group, said once that he saw no reason why a similar group could not have existed in any other university down South given the common commitment that they all had to the discipline and practice of poetry at that time. I think that is true. But you don’t order off for these and you don’t create it by establishing, God help us, a writing program.

Jackson: I want to ask you a little about Peter Taylor. He is from Trenton, Tennessee, your part of the state. I am curious about your themes and background, which are very different from his; even your approach is different.

Drake: Well, he puts my teeth on edge. Though he is enormously admired by many people who are good friends of mine and many people who are not good friends of mine. One of my students summed it all up better than I could, just a few years ago when we were studying his work in my Southern literature class. It was a summer school course. I’ve often had very bright students in summer school because they are highly motivated, and they want to get through. This fellow said, “Mr. Drake, you know what, I just don’t think his characters are as important as he wants me to think they are.” And I said, “You’ve got a point.” Now of course this comment would completely destroy whatever reputation that I may have in some circles because Taylor has a devoted and indeed fanatical following amongst the writers. And when I say that, I mean The New Yorker people and the Sewanee Review people and all that.

I told Cleanth Brooks one time that I thought Peter Taylor really did believe that people who belonged to country clubs were better than other people. He very predictably denied that. He said, “Oh, some of his most unsavory characters are country club people, but you know the country club people don’t recognize themselves.” Well now, that’s stupid. The story that got my back up some years ago was published first in The New Yorker, where I read it, and then later appeared in book form, called The Old Forest. It all hinges on this crucial distinction between Memphis debutantes and Memphis working girls, the young girls who come into Memphis from places like my hometown and other towns to work as secretaries and the way the world is changing.

Occasionally I have found some of his stories extremely moving, like “A Long Fourth,” which is laid in Nashville and takes place over a long Fourth of July weekend, right at the beginning of World War II, when the son has come home to join the army. What his mother learns about her three children in the process of the weekend, and it has racial overtones, which of course ought to please many people because they think Southerners have not written about race or taken the right attitude about race. And, she learns, finally, that it is not in any one of her three children to really love anybody.

Now, I can’t think of a worse thing for a parent to learn about his or her progeny, and I find that is very moving and quite credible. And I didn’t go to Vanderbilt for nothing; I know Nashville pretty well and I believe every word of this story. Maybe down on Franklin Road his sociology is always impeccable. In Memphis, of course, they all live in what’s called the Gardens District, which is midtown, bounded on the west by Cleveland, on the south by Central, on the east by Cooper, and on the north by Peabody. It’s where Mr. Taylor’s own family lived when they lived in Memphis for a while.

As I understand it, his father was a big executive in various companies around the South, and he was always losing out in the power struggles, so they would always come back to Trenton and recoup their fortunes and then venture forth again. So there is that novelty that I think won the Pulitzer Prize, A Summons to Memphis, which I thought was really exasperating. It is based on a historical event, the collapse of Caldwell and Company in Nashville in the early 1930s and Luke Lea, one of the executives, being put in jail. Luke Lea was, by the way, the officer in World War I who tried to lead a group of men—after the Kaiser had abdicated and moved to Holland who tried to go and kidnap him, but the plan was foiled. Lea, spelled L-E-A by the way, Nashvillians are very particular about those things, and so he carries on about the family being forced to move from Nashville to Memphis as though they were Russian aristocrats being forced to move to Moscow from St. Petersburg. I just feel like saying, “Ho-hum.”

Mr. Taylor, of course, has an interesting family history on both sides. His maternal grandfather was Governor of the state of Tennessee; his name was Robert L. Taylor. He was called “Our Bob,” and he ran against his own brother for the governorship and beat his brother, Alf Taylor. Alf Taylor was later elected governor. Then on his father’s side, his father’s name was Hillsman Taylor and his paternal grandfather was named Robert Zachary Taylor, which sounds absolutely like, you know, just dripping with history. And he almost got lynched when he and his colleagues in a business organization called the West Tennessee Land Company tried to buy up a lot of the land around Reelfoot Lake that was kind of held by squatters’ rights. Anyway, they tried to buy up a lot of the land and turn it into a very big money-making development. This was about 1910 or 1912, or somewhere in there, and with disastrous results because they were subjected to terrorist tactics from the local owners, the people who owned just small plots of land and so on.

One time I was visiting some friends in England who lived in a wonderful old country house, and they decided to go out to some gymnastic event one afternoon which I did not want to go to, so I stayed home. I love to read back issues of magazines; I can’t think of a better way to spend a rainy Saturday than go through a whole lot of back issues of Life, and what should they have in their library but back issues of Illustrated London News, which would be the English equivalent, you know. And there were some issues from the early decades of the century, and lo and behold, there was a big write-up, with photographs, on the terrorist night-riders of West Tennessee. They finally called out the National Guard and got it pacified and The West Tennessee Land Company finally had to back down. . .

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, the editors of The Southern Review, were enormously influential at that time and for a few years, and of course Louisiana State University didn’t want to fool with it and declared it dead, then of course years later it was resurrected, you know, with Louis Simpson and others and continues as a very distinguished magazine, and this is not impugning the good faith of Brooks and Warren and their right to make editorial choices, but I mean they were in a position to do people an enormous amount of good.

One of the people that they fostered was Katherine Anne Porter. The fact that she was married to Albert Erskine, who was one of the assistant editors, didn’t hurt, I guess, and then Albert Erskine claimed to have discovered Eudora Welty. Of course, a number of people have claimed to discover her. Which is always very fine...now you see I’m getting to be ugly, but this is true. So those magazines were extremely powerful in promoting the interests of their friends.

I got to know Allen Tate really quite well some years later after they moved into Nashville, because his emphysema kept getting worse and he decided he must be closer to his doctors. I got to be very fond of him and he was so kind to me. He wrote blurbs for my books, and he said such kind things about some of my work. I had no claim on him, I mean he had not been my teacher; there was no connection, but he was very kind to young people. It was not just me, it was a lot of other people too. He was also mean. He would talk about people. Of course, sinner that I am, I relish that.

Any Southerner, any Southerner who is a real Southerner, I’m not saying wave the Confederate flag, but I mean any Southerner who thinks like one is a born rememberer. He’s been surrounded all his life by memories, often sad ones. Now that’s passing, I suppose, with people like me, and remember I don’t count in a way because I’m older than my years, in some ways. But these were all born rememberers. They were people for whom the past was, not that it was better, not that they necessarily thought that it was better than the present, but they thought it was part of the whole show and you must get it correct. So when they argued about the design of houses, that still seems funny to me. It was part of getting all the facts correct. For them the world was all one: past, present and future. Now that’s always true of Southerners, by and large. I mean it; it’s not that modern idea that the past is dead. Henry Ford said history is bunk and all that kind of stuff; ironically, through his own efforts he reconstructed a nineteenth-century village. What is it?

Jackson: Deerfield.

Drake: Yes, Deerfield. I haven’t been there, but what could be more ironic than that? It was almost like it was blood money or something. Because more than any other person in this country, he destroyed the nineteenth century, in some ways, with the invention of the automobile and the enormous proliferation of automobiles, and so they thought it was all connected and that the world was connected. That is the theme I see so much in Robert Penn Warren, but it didn’t surprise them a bit if they went somewhere else and met somebody who knew somebody they knew. They didn’t travel much—it was no news to them that people were all, in some ways, brothers and sisters. They wouldn’t have gotten up and taken a high stand on some social problems, I’m sure you know, but there was no news to them that basically most people were all alike. No news at all. I don’t think I could add any more to that.

Robert Drake Interview (Chattahoochee Review 16.1, 1995)

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Sources

James A. Perkins, “Remembering Robert Drake (1930–2001),” Modern Age 44, no. 3 (Summer 2002).

Jeffrey Folks, “Robert Drake, As I Knew Him,” Modern Age, June 10, 2015.

Thomas Hubert, “Robert Drake and the Presence of the Past,” Abbeville Institute.

State Route 155 carries its stream of cars past storefronts that might be anywhere. It circles Nashville for 35 miles, skirting the old Tennessee State Prison before surrendering its name to White Bridge Road. At 101 sits a repurposed mid-century mattress outlet. A sign above the street-facing windows reads, in green letters against a white background: BOOKS. Between a fortune teller and bubble tea (that invasive species) is Tennessee’s longest-running bookshop, Elder’s Bookstore. A paper notice taped to the entry door requires pocket machines to be muzzled.

To the left, a few steps in, sits Randy Elder, the second-generation owner of the place. His desk is a Cumberland point bar where the current slows and the cultural sediment of a bookman’s trade collects. Scraps, notes, slips, and lists advance unchecked, creeping as vines will. Books crowd the edges. Cherokee myths, Scotch-Irish migrations, the roads of Nashville. Beside Mr. Elder, a young man hunches over a laptop, waiting on the next online order.

Elder wears his green polo loose, fabric soft as old cash. Limestone-colored hair. He never quite looks at you head-on. The smile hangs crooked. The look of a man who has seen collectors wince at the price or catch the Spirit at the sight of a long-hunted spine. The hands never quit, flutter-fidget-pick-shuffle, grabbing a book, nudging it, sliding another a quarter-inch to the left, flipping one open, then shut. The chain-smoker’s rhythm without the smoke.

“Looking for anything particular?”

I mention the Fugitives, the Agrarians. Not the books, the men themselves.

He rises from the desk and walks. I follow. The light overhead is a hard civic white, the color of bureaucracy. The fluorescent tubes hum. I don’t know which note. I was born here. All the musicians came from out of town. We pass shelves that know the city’s three names: Athens, Music City, Neon Nowhere. The old city is still visible if you know where to look.

Athens

Beyond the desk stands the table, the center of the room. Glass-topped, its map spread wide, rivers like veins, counties etched in brown. Rolled maps jammed beneath like artillery shells. Over it all, the General’s portrait hangs—bearded, stern, eyes that follow; the patriarch of the room.

Nashville’s fortunes rose with new men from the hollers and farms of Middle Tennessee and southern Kentucky. Men whose fathers knew plows learned ledgers instead. They built themselves into bankers and insurance agents, Methodists and Presbyterians who set out to create a city of culture. By the time of the War, Nashville claimed the title “Athens of the South.”

In 1897, they raised a White City, plaster temples celebrating a century of statehood. McKinley pressed a button in Washington; the current rode telegraph wires seven hundred miles to fire a cannon here. At the center stood their Parthenon, scaled exactly to the Athenian ruin. Progress itself, the crowd was told, had arrived. The Gettysburg Cyclorama drew steady crowds. Visitors examined Daniel Boone’s old flintlock rifle and Andrew Jackson’s dueling pistols.

This was the culture that shaped Vanderbilt University, where Randy’s father, Charles Elder, graduated in the 1920s. Latin and Greek anchored the early curriculum, creating a classical foundation that attracted serious students to Nashville. The university rejected provincial attitudes, seeking cosmopolitan faculty who could match Eastern institutions in scholarship and ambition.

Behind Elder’s desk is a cabinet of oak, maybe walnut. You’d call a buddy or two to scoot it six inches. At its corners, it has posts carved with feathered leaves that curl upward, its glass front catching every glare of those buzzing ceiling tubes. On the glass there’s a sticker: “I WAS ANTI-OBAMA BEFORE IT WAS COOL.” Behind the pane, books lean like drunks. Books that carried whole movements, whole generations. Elder reaches for The Fugitive: A Journal of Poetry.

The journal first appeared in 1922, born in a parlor on Whitland Avenue. The fruit of a group of sensitive young men gathered in Nashville parlors from 1915 through the 1920s. They read poems aloud, argued over rhyme and meter. The Fugitive would survive three years and eight months before ending. By December 1925, the contributors scattered toward university jobs, toward other cities, toward careers that demanded more than poetry could give.

Vanderbilt’s chancellor, James H. Kirkland, never subscribed; the English chair, Edwin Mims, urged them to send work to “Eastern journals.” Years later, Allen Tate himself walked into Elder’s, searching for The Golden Mean and Other Poems, the slim booklet he and Ridley Wills had printed in 1923. He left without one. The store holds a copy now. Their works line shelves across the room, a few even propped behind the glass of the “Obama cabinet.”

Mills went silent. The mule was driven out, the tractor drove in. Nashville was not spared the change. In 1930, Charles Elder opened a bookstore downtown. That year, Twelve Southerners set their names to a book, their defense against a world given to the machine. You can find I’ll Take My Stand now on Elder’s shelf, between The Fugitive and Who Owns America?.

The Scopes Trial brought the world down on Tennessee. Reporters flooded Dayton, mocking its people as po’ White Tennessee trash. Nashville intellectuals watched. The wounds wouldn’t scab over. Blood pressure and tempers rose.

Ransom answered. Davidson answered. Tate and Warren answered—Fugitive poets joined by other Southern men, most tied to Vanderbilt. They became the Southern Agrarians, sometimes called the Vanderbilt Agrarians, sometimes the Nashville Agrarians. They named the machine as dignity’s thief. They named stewardship and tradition as the order worth keeping. Sons of small towns, sons of farms, sons of a South not yet erased—a South still holding what the nation had forgotten.

Vanderbilt was changing course. Latin and Greek fell away, the old order replaced by business courses and administrative salaries. Davidson stayed. The rest left. Tate sought aid and was refused. Warren, his course finished, went elsewhere. Ransom, denied his due, left at his prime.

Each departure scattered seeds. Ransom moved to Kenyon College, founded The Kenyon Review. Brooks and Warren drove south to LSU, started The Southern Review, turning it into America’s premier literary quarterly. Then LSU’s administrators killed it: money for deans, none for a Southern magazine. Andrew Nelson Lytle and Tate revived The Sewanee Review. These magazines shaped American literature for decades.

Yet the folkchain remains linked. Russell Kirk appreciated their work. Richard Weaver studied under them. M. E. Bradford came to Vanderbilt as Davidson’s doctoral student, called himself Davidson’s “disciple,” and spent his career writing about the Agrarians. Classrooms spawned more writers: Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews, and James Dickey. Their students’ students still lecture today in universities where Whitland Avenue means nothing. The genealogy stretches like biblical begats. Some say the Southern Renaissance began when Ransom walked into his first Vanderbilt classroom.

Music City

Next to a yellow mop bucket, a chair waits mid-aisle, exiled from some actuary’s cubicle. The old bookshop aesthetics are gone. What remains are the books themselves, visible in supermarket clarity. The air is scrubbed of mystery. The floor is checkered linoleum. Two colors alternating somewhere between oatmeal and cornmeal. I’m in the music section.

Jesse Ely Wills sat in the living room with the poets on Whitland Avenue, his cousin Ridley beside him. Across town their family switched on WSM, the “Air Castle of the South,” carrying fiddle tunes into living rooms across the region.

The Wills family changed the city’s name. Jesse’s father, William Ridley Wills, had co-founded the National Life and Accident Insurance Company in 1902. Twenty-three years later, as The Fugitive ended, his company put WSM on the air. “We Shield Millions”—slogan turned call letters. Jesse, still a Vanderbilt student at 23, joined the firm and never left. The Barn Dance followed. Then the Opry. Insurance wrapped in hillbilly music.

WSM’s first audience was made up of rural whites seeking factory jobs, fleeing farms the Depression had crushed. They crowded into neighborhoods that flooded with every hard rain; they lived in buildings without running water. Chamber of Commerce boosters sold Nashville to Northern manufacturers as a city with “cheap, docile labor” of “native, Anglo-Saxon stock.”

Nashville’s elite recoiled. “Low-class Cracker music,” they whispered in Belle Meade. They wouldn’t admit they listened, though their workers had no such shame. Athens had become Music City.

Charles Elder’s bookstore was at 4th Avenue North and Church Street. In 1957, Life and Casualty Insurance Company erected the L&C Tower on that exact spot—Nashville’s first skyscraper, tallest in the Southeast for a time. Elder’s moved to Elliston Place near Vanderbilt, where it became an institution.

Neon Nowhere

Bookstores dot the city, but they’ve got clerks with more pronouns and tattoos than books, rescue cats named Fauci with vaccine cards lurking about—their holiest sacrament, Banned Books Week. Meanwhile, the music grows louder and always sounds the same, like the architecture around it—prefab, hollow. The Athens of the South lies buried under pedal taverns and party buses. It’s hard to see with the sun reflecting off half-empty apartments with names like Albion, more spawn of Satan than seed of their namesake. This is the Neon Nowhere, a city with amnesia.

At Vanderbilt, more students speak Chinese than can name the Twelve. Born of Methodism, it once hired Christian men of tested character. Across the street, the Methodist church flies the rainbow flag. The prophets go unhonored now, though someone over there still appreciates the classics—the new Residential Colleges prove that much. Donald Davidson caught the Parthenon in verse back in 1935, already compromised by its setting, already diminished by men who didn’t know their Greek. Now you risk a beating there if you won’t play the jukebox for some vagrant.

A man pushes through Elder’s door, scans the shelves with airport urgency. “Y’all got anything on Hawaii?” Randy takes his name and phone number and promises to call if something turns up. The slip joins others grafted to his desk. At the airport, the hurried man might pause at the Fugitives Public House for high-proof syrup on the rocks, beneath letters that blaze orange plastic across the carpet, a parody of the name they stole.

I reach for one of the books on Randy’s desk. Nashville Pikes. The author: Ridley Wills II. Jesse Wills’s son. He died this year, back in January.

Yet there are people still around who know the way Hank did it. At Station Inn, you can hear that high lonesome sound. There are still Athenians about. You can find them over on the West End, where even the mosquitoes are more blue-blooded than my people.

Every city needs an Elder. A keeper who stocks Old Hickory biographies alongside hot chicken histories, who knows that the Fugitives weren’t outlaws and which singers were. State Route 155 carries me back into the stream. Behind me, the books, Randy at his desk, hands moving. Drive out there. Tell Mr. Elder you’re looking for Nashville. He’ll know which one you mean.

Originally published in Frontier Magazine

Related Reads

In October of 1949, Bernard Mannes Baruch walked into the Virginia State Library in Richmond with letters. One hundred fifty-two of them, written in a hand any student of the War would recognize, the neat, right-sloping script of Robert E. Lee. They were addressed to Jefferson Davis between 1862 and 1865, dispatched from field tents and hurried through the lines. Mr. Baruch, seventy-eight years old and among the richest men in America, presented them as a gift.1

His father, Dr. Simon Baruch, a Jewish immigrant from Prussia, had been a surgeon under General Lee. He had operated on a church house door laid across two barrels at South Mountain, worked two days without sleep at the field hospital in Black Horse Tavern after Gettysburg, been captured three times, paroled three times, came home to Camden on crutches to find his practice gone and the state under military rule, and went out on the occasional white robed night ride.2

Bernard Baruch left South Carolina in 1881, went to Wall Street, traded sugar stocks in 1897, made millions, purchased 17,000 acres of former rice plantations near Georgetown in 1905, Hobcaw Barony, where he would later host Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall. Between 1916 and 1946 he chaired the War Industries Board, advised Woodrow Wilson in Paris, counseled Harding and Coolidge and Hoover and Roosevelt and Truman on matters of state, earned himself the nickname “The Lone Wolf of Wall Street” and enough fame that tourists in Lafayette Park photographed him on his bench feeding pigeons. He had never lost the accent of Camden, South Carolina. He had never stopped whistling that catchy tune.

The librarians accepted the gift. The letters went into the vault. They arrived late, as Southern things often do. Not late by days but by decades. No one asked, at least not aloud, how Robert E. Lee’s confidential wartime correspondence to the President of the Confederate States came to rest with a financier in New York City, eighty-four years after Richmond burned, eighty-four years after the last Confederate train left the capital under a bruised April sky, eighty-four years after a young aide decided that papers might survive if they shared a trunk with his shirts.

“To me, the memories of the great southern heroes like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are almost living figures because of what I heard my father and others repeat to me in story and song.” - Bernard Baruch

The last time those letters had been in Richmond, the city was burning.

Sunday morning, April 2, 1865. A messenger entered St. Paul’s Episcopal Church during the eleven o’clock service and handed a paper to the sexton. The sexton walked the aisle to the President’s pew. Jefferson Davis read the dispatch and rose. He walked out, down Ninth Street to his office. The congregation watched him go.

Lee’s words: “I think it is absolutely necessary that we should abandon our position tonight.”

Four o’clock—the government announced its evacuation. By nightfall, clerks burned documents in the streets. Staff members swept Davis’s desk into trunks—letters from generals, calling cards, official records, private correspondence.

The presidential train departed around eleven. Judah P. Benjamin rode with Davis. George Trenholm passed around peach brandy. John Reagan whittled a stick.

By morning, nine-tenths of the commercial district had burned, eight hundred buildings, twenty blocks. Raphael Semmes scuttled the James River Fleet after midnight. The explosions shook houses forty miles away. Gutters ran with whiskey. The arsenal exploded before dawn. When Union cavalry rode in, Mayor Mayo surrendered ashes.

Somewhere in the baggage that fled south lay Lee’s dispatches to the President. Danville, Greensboro, Charlotte, Irwinville, Waldo. Five years passed. When the letters surfaced, they belonged to a private collector.

The man who should have been guarding those papers was not in Richmond that Sunday. Burton Harrison, twenty-seven, Davis’s private secretary since February 1862, had left days earlier escorting Varina Davis and the children south.

Davis gave his wife a pistol and showed her how to load it. “You can, at least, if reduced to the last extremity, force your assailants to kill you.” Their son Jeff begged to stay with his father. They left anyway. Harrison rode with them. The President’s family, his responsibility. The President’s papers, left to clerks.

Yale, 1859. Skull and Bones. Yale Literary Magazine. Mathematics at the University of Mississippi. Then the war. Three years managing Davis’s correspondence. Now Harrison was in Georgia. The papers were in trunks on a train.

May 10, 1865. Union cavalry caught the Davis party near Irwinville, Georgia. Harrison watched the Federals seize the President. “The business of plundering commenced immediately after the capture.”

Harrison spent the next year in federal prisons, Old Capitol Prison in Washington, then Fort Delaware. He studied law with books sent by Yale classmates. Released in 1866, he moved to New York, passed the bar, began building a practice. In 1867 he married Constance Cary, one of the three cousins who had sewn the first Confederate battle flags in 1861. Constance became an author. Their sons would lead the Southern Railway and govern the Philippines.3

The trunk remained in Georgia. Mrs. Robertson shipped it north in 1866. Harrison received it. He did not open it. It sat in storage. Years passed. Jefferson Davis wrote requesting the return of his papers. Harrison did not respond. Davis wrote again. Silence.

Many Confederate records were captured—boxes and barrels seized in Richmond, Charlotte, and along the retreat—and were forwarded to Washington. The War Department established the Archive Office in July 1865 under Francis Lieber to hunt for evidence against Confederate leaders. Lieber sorted through thousands of documents: War Department files, State Department correspondence, Treasury accounts. What the federal government seized became the foundation for the Official Records. What Harrison kept in New York remained unknown.

Harrison was not the only former Confederate remaking himself in Manhattan. Colonel Charles Colcock Jones Jr., of Savannah, Georgia and the Confederate artillery, arrived in New York in 1866, the same year as Harrison. Both practiced law. Both moved in circles of former Confederates.

Sometime around 1870, the Lee dispatches passed from Harrison’s possession into Jones’s collection.

Charles Colcock Jones Jr. collected the way some men drink, not for taste alone, but because they cannot stop. Son of a Presbyterian minister, Jones had graduated from Princeton in 1852 and Harvard Law in 1855. Mayor of Savannah in 1860. Lieutenant colonel of Confederate artillery at the Siege of Savannah in 1864. The war ruined him financially.

Jones collected: autographs of every signer of the Declaration of Independence, including Button Gwinnett’s, one of the rarest American signatures; more than twenty thousand prehistoric artifacts from Georgia’s Indians; colonial imprints, maps, manuscripts; bound volumes of Confederate papers—letters, orders, dispatches; “foremost among them,” one inventory noted, “several hundred letters from Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis.”

In November 1875, a slim package arrived at Scribner’s Monthly. Inside was the transcript of a letter from Lee to Davis, dated August 8, 1863, offering his resignation after Gettysburg. The sender was Charles C. Jones Jr. When pressed for authentication, Jones refused references but supplied his law partner’s name and mentioned his authorship of Antiquities of the Southern Indians. Regarding provenance, he offered no clue. Scribner’s published it in February 1876 as “A Piece of Secret History.”

Davis saw the resignation letter in print and wondered how it had escaped his files. Major William T. Walthall, gathering materials for Davis’s memoirs, traced the leak to Harrison. In October 1876, Walthall and Harrison crossed the East River to Brooklyn and arrived at Jones’s brownstone on Clinton Street. Jones produced Harrison’s trunk and claimed the Lee letters had never been inside it—he had copied the resignation letter from a Richmond collector named Captain James O’Donnell. No one ever found O’Donnell.

Jones returned to Georgia in 1877, settled at Montrose near Augusta. He published nearly a hundred books, pamphlets, and articles. When Jefferson Davis died in December 1889, Jones delivered the memorial address in Augusta’s Opera House.

Jones never explained how he had come to possess Lee’s dispatches.

Charles “The Macaulay of the South” Jones died on July 19, 1893, at Montrose, his health broken by Bright’s disease. He left a widow, a historian son, and a collection his estate could not afford to keep. The books Jones had spent decades gathering began to migrate. Wymberley Jones De Renne came to Montrose between 1891 and 1893. The two men shared a surname and a state.

W. J. De Renne’s father had been a collector. His mother had assembled a Confederate collection that Douglas Southall Freeman would later call “second to none in the country.” He had returned to Georgia after years abroad, educated in France and Germany, where he acquired a dueling scar after joining the Saxonia Corps at the University of Leipzig. He came home to Wormsloe, the family estate outside Savannah.

Jones needed money. De Renne had it. The Lee dispatches changed hands. The price is not recorded, but years later De Renne insured them for ten thousand dollars.

Noble Jones arrived in Georgia with James Oglethorpe in 1733 and received five hundred acres on the Isle of Hope. He intended to raise silkworms. The venture failed. The name persisted: Wormsloe. Wymberley’s father, George Wymberley Jones De Renne, had been a collector since the 1840s. Then Sherman marched to the sea. The library did not survive. After the war, the elder De Renne began collecting again. He died in 1880, the library partially rebuilt. His widow Mary continued, focusing on Confederate materials, including the original vellum manuscript of the Confederate Constitution, signed by all the delegates.

Wymberley inherited the estate. By the time he acquired the Lee papers from Jones, he had resolved to surpass his father’s collection. Within two decades, he assembled more than four thousand items relating to Georgia history, which contemporaries called “the most complete private state historical collection in existence.” In 1907, he built a library to house it. Fireproof.

Douglas Southall Freeman entered this world in the summer of 1910. He was twenty-four, a newspaper reporter with a Johns Hopkins doctorate earned at twenty-two, his dissertation already lost to fire. He had published one scholarly work, A Calendar of Confederate Papers.

De Renne had a proposition. He owned two leather-bound volumes containing more than two hundred letters from Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis and the bookplate of Colonel Charles C. Jones, Jr. inside. He believed most had never been published. He wanted Freeman to examine them, edit them, annotate them, and bring them to print.

The work took four years. Freeman annotated every letter, traced every officer, verified every date. De Renne waited. He sent money. In June 1915, Lee’s Dispatches appeared—letters believed lost, missing from the Official Records, passing through a private secretary and two collectors before reaching print fifty years after the war. Freeman wanted to explain the provenance. De Renne pushed back. Freeman’s introduction identified the source only as a “well-known Southern writer.”

In 1939, Dallas D. Irvine of the National Archives published “The Fate of Confederate Archives” in the American Historical Review, concluding after years of research that Colonel Charles Colcock Jones Jr. had “purloined” the Lee dispatches. The charge was precise: Jones had acquired papers never his to keep, documents that should have been returned to Burton Harrison, surrendered to the federal government, or deposited in the archives Francis Lieber created to collect Confederate records.

Irvine’s case was circumstantial, resting largely on Harrison’s testimony that the papers had been loaned, not sold. Jones never returned them, allowing the loan to harden into possession through silence and time, until Harrison’s death in 1904 ended any claim. Douglas Southall Freeman circulated Irvine’s conclusion in The South to Posterity, even as he recognized the contradiction at its center: without Jones’s “book-madness,” the letters might not have survived at all.

De Renne did not live to see what Freeman became. He died at the Hotel Netherland on June 23, 1916. He was sixty-three. His funeral was held in the library at Wormsloe, among his treasures.

W. J. De Renne’s son inherited the library and continued adding to it until 1918. His sister contributed volumes. Leonard L. Mackall presided over the shelves from 1914 to 1931. In the spring of 1938, the family sold the Georgia collection to the University of Georgia for sixty thousand dollars, against an assessed value of two hundred and fifty thousand. They kept a few things, the rest went to Athens. The Lee dispatches did not.

Sources

Alford, Kenneth D. Civil War Museum Treasures: Outstanding Artifacts and the Stories Behind Them. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

Beers, Henry Putney. The Confederacy: A Guide to the Archives of the Government of the Confederate States of America. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1968. Reprint, 1986.

Books Relating to the History of Georgia in the Library of Wymberley Jones De Renne. Compiled by Oscar Wegelin. Savannah: Morning News Press, 1911.

Bragg, William Harris. De Renne: Three Generations of a Georgia Family. Wormsloe Foundation Publications, no. 21. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999.

Bragg, William Harris. “Charles C. Jones, Jr., and the Mystery of Lee’s Lost Dispatches.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 72 (1988): 429–62.

Bragg, William Harris. “‘Our Joint Labor’: W. J. De Renne, Douglas Southall Freeman, and Lee’s Dispatches, 1910–1915.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97, no. 1 (January 1989): 75–100.

Burnette, O. Lawrence, Jr. Beneath the Footnote: A Guide to the Use and Preservation of American Historical Sources. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1969.

Callahan, James Morton. The Diplomatic History of the Southern Confederacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1901.

Clark, James C. The Last Train South: The Flight of the Confederate Government. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1984.

Coulter, E. Merton. Wormsloe: Two Centuries of a Georgia Family. Wormsloe Foundation Publications, no. 1. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1955.

Freeman, Douglas Southall. A Calendar of Confederate Papers, with a Bibliography of Some Confederate Publications. Richmond: Confederate Museum, 1908.

Freeman, Douglas Southall. The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939. Reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998, with introduction by Gary W. Gallagher.

Freeman, Douglas Southall, ed. Lee’s Dispatches: Unpublished Letters of General Robert E. Lee, C.S.A., to Jefferson Davis and the War Department of the Confederate States of America, 1862–65. From the Private Collection of Wymberley Jones De Renne, of Wormsloe, Georgia. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915.

Freeman, Douglas Southall, and Grady McWhiney, eds. Lee’s Dispatches: Unpublished Letters of General Robert E. Lee, C.S.A., to Jefferson Davis and the War Department of the Confederate States of America, 1862–65. New Edition with Additional Dispatches and Foreword by Grady McWhiney. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1957.

Harrison, Constance Cary. Recollections Grave and Gay. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911.

Irvine, Dallas D. “The Archive Office of the War Department: Repository of Captured Confederate Archives, 1865–1881.” Military Affairs 10, no. 2 (Spring 1946): 93–111.

Irvine, Dallas D. “The Fate of Confederate Archives.” American Historical Review 44, no. 4 (July 1939): 823–41.

Irvine, Dallas D. “The Genesis of the Official Records.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24, no. 2 (September 1937): 221–29.

Johnson, David E. Douglas Southall Freeman. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2002.

Johnston, Angus James II. Virginia Railroads in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.

Mackall, Leonard L. “The Wymberley Jones De Renne Georgia Library.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 2, no. 2 (June 1918): 63–86.

Patrick, Rembert W. The Fall of Richmond. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960.

Posner, Ernst. “The Captured Confederate Records under Francis Lieber.” American Archivist 10, no. 4 (October 1946): 277–319.

Sternhell, Yael A. War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.

The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 128 vols. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.

December 25, 1779. The city of Nashville does not exist.

No streets. No bachelorettes. No Opry. No Californians. A limestone bluff above a cold brown river. A sulfur spring the French had traded at for decades. A handful of men in three-sided shelters open to a fire set against the wind.

James Robertson led them here. Thirty-eight years old. A veteran of the Chickamauga Wars. In October, when the mountain laurel had gone to rust and the first hard frost silvered the Watauga Valley, he gathered between two hundred and three hundred men and boys and pointed them west through the Cumberland Gap. They drove horses and cattle and sheep. Horses scattered. Cattle balked at creek crossings. Sheep spooked at wolves. A man alone could cross thirty miles of open country in a day. A man driving livestock across the Cumberland Plateau counted himself fortunate to make eight.

The route wound north through the Gap. This narrow saddle in the Appalachian spine bore Thomas Walker’s name from 1750; Cherokee, Shawnee, and buffalo had beaten the trace for generations. All westward movement funneled through that wind-scoured notch. Mist clung in the hollows past midday. From there they descended into Kentucky, down toward the Barren River and on to Mansker’s Station. Kasper Mansker had hunted the basin for a decade. He knew every trace between the French Lick and the Ohio. He guided them south.

Amos Heaton left the Holston settlements around the same time. On Christmas Eve, they camped near White’s Creek within sight of the bluffs. The Williams and Buchanan families followed the headwaters of the Cumberland westward. They arrived to find twenty-five men already there. Some huddled in half-face cabins open to a fire; others hacked at the ground to plant corn for Virginia’s bounty laws. By Christmas morning, fragments of several parties converged.

Meanwhile, 985 river miles east, another party sat trapped in ice.

At Long Island on the Holston, John Donelson spent the autumn building a flatboat. A hundred feet of deck. Twenty feet across. He christened it Adventure. Donelson was fifty-four, a county surveyor and land speculator, a former member of the House of Burgesses chosen to lead the families by water. That summer, his son Johnny married Mary Purnell. The sixteen-year-old bride saw the passage as a wedding trip.

The Donelsons stowed household goods and slaves. They packed silverware stamped with JDe. Charlotte Robertson brought her children to rejoin James at the French Lick. The Adventure served as flagship for thirty vessels—flatboats and pirogues and dugouts—carrying several hundred souls. On December 22, 1779, after the families had boarded the flotilla, they cast off from Fort Patrick Henry.

They did not get far.

At the mouth of Reedy Creek, the water had dropped. The cold sharpened. Three days out, the hulls ground into the silt. Ice crept along the gunwales and held. Rope stiffened. Wool froze. Fires failed. Men went ashore for wood with rifles in their grip. Children cried, quieted, cried again. Flour was counted. Firewood too. The river skinned over.

They would not move again until February.

Christmas Day broke cold over the Cumberland. Robertson held the limestone heights. Heaton’s party lay at White’s Creek. The Williams and Buchanan families slept in scattered lean-tos. A thousand river miles east, the Donelson boats held fast in the Holston ice. Snow covered the ground and stayed. Sap locked in the wood. Trees split through the night, the sound carrying. Years later, Mary Purnell Donelson recalled cattle lying down and never rising. Turkeys froze on the roost and fell, bodies thudding below.1

Further Reading

The Cumberland Settlements–Annotated Bibliography

Journal documenting the 1779-1780 river voyage of Col. John Donelson

Sources

Arnow, Harriette Louisa Simpson. Flowering of the Cumberland. Macmillan, 1963.

Arnow, Harriette Louisa Simpson. Seedtime on the Cumberland. Macmillan, 1960.

Barnes, Katherine R. “James Robertson’s Journey to Nashville: Tracing The Route of Fall 1779.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1976): 145–61.

Henderson, Archibald. “Richard Henderson: The Authorship Of The Cumberland Compact And The Founding Of Nashville.” Tennessee Historical Magazine 2, no. 3 (1916): 155–74.

Snyder, Ann E.. On the Watauga and the Cumberland. Publishing House M.E. Church, South, 1895.

Spence, Richard Douglas. “John Donelson and the Opening of the Old Southwest.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1991): 157–72.

Stealey, John Edmund. “French Lick and the Cumberland Compact.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1963): 323–34.

The remains of the Dutch-owned American ENKA plant cover the land in Lowland, Tennessee, like a steel skeleton picked clean. The smokestacks rise red against the sky, two of them, maybe a hundred fifty feet high. The parking lot has cracked enough to let a little wilderness in, an archipelago of grass and weeds pushing up through old asphalt. Grackles squawk rustily atop rust-red I-beams, some peeling back like pencil shavings to raw metal.1

The plant opened in 1947 to manufacture rayon for tire cord. Wood-pulp alchemy of a time that believed chemistry could reorder the world. Three years later bullets were flying. Striking C.I.O. textile workers, young men from the East Tennessee hills—tall, spare, quiet as fence posts—shouldered rifles, and fired on cars approaching the gate. Forty-seven bullets struck one Ford sedan. Violence flared, then cooled. Decades later, the chemistry moved elsewhere and the plant left to the elements.2

The story is not unique.

My Grandpa drove the tow motor at Oscar Mayer in Goodlettsville for near twenty years until they shut it down. Grandma worked the security shack at Pirelli Tires. Other kin punched the clock in the shirt factories and shoe plants that once dotted Middle Tennessee. A Great-Great-Grandpa kept the blades sharp for a cedar mill in Mobile and was sent to Lebanon because the pencils were made there. First time I ever saw a hijab was twenty years ago, on shift at the Nashville Dell plant. Once disconnected from the land, families moved in small arcs shaped by mills, plants, shifts, and the sound of whistles.

Some plants stayed long enough to anchor a county. Many did not. Kannapolis lost its textile empire. Pine Bluff lost a paper operation that once ruled the skyline. Gadsden lost steel. Lake Charles lost two chemical lines. Rock Hill shut a tire cord division. Spartanburg, Baton Rouge, Rome, Danville—whole blocks hollowed after closures. A factory in Salisbury just closed. A packaging plant in Alabama. A parts supplier in Mississippi. A plastics outfit in Florida. In Tennessee the GM battery layoff in Spring Hill sent seven hundred home for a season.

Across town a banner on a fence promises thousands of new jobs. Local newscasts talk about “the future of American manufacturing.” Politicians call it proof that they care about the community.

The work is real. The wages are real. The chance to make an honest living. But the rhythm is familiar, and familiarity is its own kind of instruction. The South has lived long enough with these waves to know that industry arriving with flourish may leave when the larger order changes its mind. A plant opens. A plant closes. The town learns to grieve in unemployment offices, job fairs, and church parking lots. Another banner goes up on another fence.

This rhythm did not begin with rayon or batteries. It runs back through textiles, through timber, through all of it.

Stand below one of the old TVA dams on an autumn afternoon and watch turbines turn falling water into light and dividends. You might forget, looking at that clean geometry of poured government ambition, that FDR spoke it into existence in 1933, a few years before he stood at Warm Springs in 1938 and called the South the “Nation’s No. 1 economic problem.”3

He saw a region whose wealth had long flowed away from its people. A region held in patterns shaped by others. A region whose natural abundance did not translate into local prosperity. His solution was federal—TVA, REA, WPA, CCC—the whole alphabet. Roosevelt’s framing became part of the vocabulary of the New Deal. Though, ever since Appomattox critics have cast the South as a standing American problem.

Eleven years after Roosevelt’s declaration, Anne E. Hulse and Patrick J. Deturo published a study in the Harvard Business Review titled “Economic Problem of the Southeast.” They wrote with the calm authority of mid-century business science. Their purpose was diagnosis and prescription. Their tone was measured, urgent, optimistic. Their audience wasn’t the South.

Hulse and Deturo framed the South as a domestic Marshall Plan waiting to happen. Europe received billions in reconstruction and recovery funds while businessmen hurried to secure contracts in foreign markets. A vast potential domestic market sat unattended at home.

Their working definition of the Southeast covered eleven states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Texas and Oklahoma were excluded. Those states, they wrote, had little in common with the Old South, and to include them would obscure the genuine problems confronting the region.

Charts and tables fill the pages. It is all very neat. I assume their numbers were not wrong. A number is clean, brings order to a region that resisted it. The South held a fifth of the population but earned a tenth of industrial wages. School terms ran short. Children left class for fields, for mills. Workers stayed on past sixty, past sixty-five, bodies bent, joints stiff. Farm income stayed low. Diets suffered. Families lived at the edge of necessity. And none of the men were leadership material. Backwards, they called it.

Many jumped on the Hillbilly Highway. One-seventh of Southern servicemen did not return after WWII. The region never experienced a European immigration influx on the scale of the North and West. The South was never a nation of immigrants. Between 1920 and 1930, a hundred thirty thousand more people left the region than entered each year. During the war years, the average net loss climbed to a quarter million annually. Over half of those who left were between fifteen and thirty-four.

The cure, Hulse and Deturo believed, was industry. More plants, deeper capital, longer schooling, and outside management until the region could stand on its own.

The region which the charts describe as “lagging” was, in 1940, already well along the road to national assimilation. Radios and mail-order catalogs had carried the gospel of mass consumption into the backwoods. The old loyalties were already yielding to the new creed of Mobility.

The authors projected convergence. The numbers, for a time, cooperated. By 1978, Southern per capita income reached 88% of the national average. Spring Hill got Saturn. Smyrna got Nissan. Georgetown got Toyota. Research Triangle filled with labs. Atlanta pulled in corporate headquarters. Charlotte built bank towers forty stories high. Progress, they call it. But new industry often comes with strings thicker than the hawsers on those Liberty ships.

Many jobs that did stay—poultry plants, meatpacking, construction—now rely on foreign labor. From a local worker’s view, this feels like a double bind: your father’s union-ish factory job left for Mexico or China, and the new jobs in town are lower-wage, harder, and staffed by people who you can’t even shoot the breeze with. The 1949 framework grappled with none of this.

But read past the tables and charts, past the policy prescriptions, and something else emerges—abstractions and a place identical to everywhere else.

Abstraction erases the very things that give a place its meaning. A region becomes a zone, a section, a market. A community becomes a labor force. A farm becomes an inefficient use of acreage. A home becomes a unit of consumption. A tradition becomes a barrier to progress. The people become inhabitants, units in tables. A place that lives by particular attachments becomes, in the hands of experts, a problem to be solved. When a place is interpreted through aggregated data alone, its history disappears.

The authors list the region’s four “great resources”: a young population, abundant minerals and timber, adequate energy, and productive land. They are not praising its blessings. They are identifying inputs. Their admiration is functional. They speak with the confidence of engineers describing a machine that has not been operated at full capacity. What they cannot capture with their diagrams are the costs such a view imposes on a place. They assume growth is neutral.

Education is viewed solely as preparation for industrial work. They see children as future cogs in a national system of production. They never ask what education means for a community beyond the labor market, what it offers beyond wages. They measure the success of schooling by its ability to produce technicians and managers. They do not consider that education might also safeguard memory and shape civic life.

But this is heresy to the Church of Gross Domestic Product. In that denomination, the highest sacrament is line go up. A man becomes human only when his labor passes through the blessed machinery of wages, taxes, and corporate profits, there to be sanctified by economists and returned to him in the form of rayon shirts purchased with one-click interest free payment plans.

What is never asked in these liturgies to Progress is what sort of life the South is to lead when it has at last matched the national average of Amazon deliveries per household.

Agrarian thinkers had named these blind spots long before 1949. They did not deny the South’s poverty. They argued that the cure being offered—unchecked industrial growth, absorption into the national economic order, the transformation of farmers into factory hands—would strip the region of something hard to name and harder to recover. They believed memory was a form of capital and that breaking a region from its past in the name of progress left it hollow. They believed that economies organized at a scale too large for human life would always extract more than they returned.

The South built a Sunbelt economy. Foreign auto plants arrived in the 1980s. Amazon fulfillment centers followed. EV battery megasites rise now from Tennessee limestone. Income converged. Population reversed its outflow, by the twenty-first century, the South gained more people than it lost. The region that once exported its young now imports workers from other states and other nations.

While researching for this piece, I messaged a more knowledgeable friend about my split mind on the subject and if he knew of industry “done right.” He wrote back: “You have to make a decision to not maximize scale, dollars, etc. There are lots of smart guys who went to some fancy school and returned to their small town to run a smaller business that employed the entire town. Not enough people appreciated that, and now lots of them are gone. But you can run a smaller manufacturing business and do okay. All the fat of those companies has just gone into Private Equity pockets. I see it every day. Tragic.”

Economic Problem of the Southeast (Harvard Business Review 27.1, 1949)

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My essay “The Bookstore Time Forgot” appears in the current issue of Frontier Magazine. It tells Nashville’s story through Elder’s, Tennessee’s oldest bookstore. Randy Elder keeps it alive in a converted mattress outlet on White Bridge Road beneath a green sign that says BOOKS, nothing more, the way older generations marked graves with a single word—Father, Mother.

To the left, a few steps in, sits Randy Elder, the second-generation owner of the place. His desk is a Cumberland point bar where the current slows and the cultural sediment of a bookman’s trade collects. Scraps, notes, slips, and lists advance unchecked, creeping as vines will. Books crowd the edges. Cherokee myths, Scotch-Irish migrations, the roads of Nashville.

Elder’s holds the remnants of every city Nashville has been. First, Athens, when Vanderbilt men read Greek and the Fugitive poets gathered in parlors. Then Music City, when WSM carried fiddle tunes over the Tennessee hills. Now Neon Nowhere, the bright forgetting of high-rises and pedal taverns. Southern accents? Vanderbilt students speak Chinese now.

On those shelves, many threads wait to be pulled. One runs through Nashville’s literary past—the Fugitives, the Southern Agrarians—and to the generations they set in motion. Their students and their students’ students redirected the course of Southern letters. Russell Kirk read their work and found permanent things. Richard Weaver studied under them. Mel Bradford came to Vanderbilt to study with Donald Davidson. Some say the Southern Renaissance began the day Ransom walked into his first Vanderbilt classroom.

I’m hardest on the present because I live in it. The city forgets, calling its amnesia progress. We’re told to throw away old books, old ideas, old ways. But Mr. Elder remembers, selling the city back its own discarded memory. Almost twenty years ago, after I traded my DVDs for books, I walked into Elder’s on Elliston and bought my first Southern book: The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy.

Every city needs an Elder. A keeper who stocks Old Hickory biographies alongside hot chicken histories, who knows that the Fugitives weren’t outlaws and which singers were. State Route 155 carries me back into the stream. Behind me, the books, Randy at his desk, hands moving. Drive out there. Tell Mr. Elder you’re looking for Nashville. He’ll know which one you mean.

Mills went silent. The mule was driven out, the tractor drove in. Nashville was not spared the change. In 1930, Charles Elder opened a bookstore downtown. That year, Twelve Southerners set their names to a book, their defense against a world given to the machine. You can find I’ll Take My Stand now on Elder’s shelf, between The Fugitive and Who Owns America?.

Beyond the desk stands the table, the center of the room. Glass-topped, its map spread wide, rivers like veins, counties etched in brown. Rolled maps jammed beneath like artillery shells. Over it all, the General’s portrait hangs—bearded, stern, eyes that follow; the patriarch of the room.

There are still Athenians about. You can find them over on the West End, where even the mosquitoes are more blue-blooded than my people.

In early summer 1931, Jesse Stuart stood in the Greenup National Bank with empty pockets and a failed tobacco crop behind him. That spring he and his brother James had raised tobacco on a round knoll in W-Hollow, hoping to earn college money. Heavy rains came. The leaves went pale, then brown, then soft, then nothing. He borrowed three hundred dollars, folded one hundred thirty in his pocket, and set out.

He was twenty-four, six feet tall, broad in the shoulders, hands marked by farm work and the Ashland steel mill. Family talk still ran to his great-grandfather Raphy, a six-foot-six Highlander who left the Firth of Forth with five brothers and settled by the Big Sandy.

That same summer he arrived in Nashville. The city smelled of coal smoke and river water. As O. Henry put it, “London fog mixed with gas leaks, dew drops from a brickyard, a touch of honeysuckle … not as fragrant as a mothball, not as thick as pea soup.” The streets ran straighter than back in Greenup County.

By his own account he reached Vanderbilt without ever applying. Edwin Mims listened as the young Kentuckian told his story. Mims doubted his chances but admitted him anyway. Stuart found work sweeping the corridors of Calhoun Hall, one of the few white men on that crew. He could afford eleven meals a week and counted them out like coins.

On Saturday nights he walked downtown to the Grand Ole Opry. Uncle Dave Macon and the Fruit Jar Drinkers. Dr. Humphrey Bate and his Possum Hunters. Stuart sat in the cheap seats and felt at home.

The grades came in December: three C’s and a B from Robert Penn Warren. He needed a B average for the master’s degree. “My legs weakened,” he said later.

He wrote poetry when professors assigned term papers. When he did write the papers, they missed the point. For Mims’s British literature survey he turned in an essay on Thomas Carlyle. Mims refused to accept it. Stuart reread his own prose and could not find Carlyle in it either, only three places where he had imitated the style. Another paper came back marked “Too poor to grade.”

He kept writing sonnets, notebook after notebook, and stacked them in his room beside a thesis he had started on John Fox Jr., the Kentucky writer.

In the winter of 1932, Mims assigned an autobiographical essay, eighteen typed pages due in two weeks. Stuart sat in the cold room on Twenty-First Avenue and went to work.

He wrote of the one-room school at Plum Grove and the barefoot walk through frost. He wrote of the carnival that carried him off. He wrote of the mill and the boy torn open before his eyes. He wrote of a father who could not read and a mother who had stopped in the second grade. He wrote of debt, pride, hunger. He wrote about his grandfather Mitchell Stuart, the knock-down-drag-out fighter, the hard-working, hard-drinking, land-clearing timber cutter. The man Stuart had been terrified of as a child—“If I had met Grandpa at night I would have thought he was The Devil.”

Stuart wrote for eleven days straight. Fingers cramping. Then wrote some more. He wrote like a man who had once thrown a punch for honor. When he finished, he’d written 322 pages, typed margin to margin. He knew it broke every rule. He slid the pages between cardboard, bound them tight with heavy rubber bands. He left the stack on Mims’s desk.

Professor Mims felt the weight. “There you go, Stuart. You hand me a paper like this when you are failing my class. And you know I read every word a student gives me.”

Three days later Mims called him back. His voice had softened. “I have been teaching school for forty years. I have never read anything so crudely written and yet beautiful, tremendous, and powerful as that term paper.”

He looked at Stuart. “It’s the finest paper handed to me in my career as a teacher. So crudely written and so beautiful and it needs punctuation.” He studied the boy. “If you were a son of mine I don’t know what in the world I would do with you. You’re unusual. Just some kind of special genius.”

The paper earned no grade. Six years later, with a final chapter added, it became Beyond Dark Hills.

Across the hall Donald Davidson—Tennessean, poet, scholar of the ballad—taught the Elizabethan lyric. Stuart sat in the front row, first to arrive, last to leave. He brought poems from the hill-tongued and burley-barn scented. Davidson heard the true note, gave him his only A, and pointed to one called “Elegy for Mitch Stuart.”

“Send this to H. L. Mencken,” he said.

Jesse laughed. Mencken had just said no poet in America was fit to print.

“His bark is bigger than his bite,” Davidson said.

Mencken published it in The American Mercury.

That spring fire swept Wesley Hall, taking the typewriter, the thesis, the little he owned. He begged the registrar for a small loan. When the money ran out he left. He hitchhiked home on a dollar tucked in his shoe. Once he rode most of the way on a truckload of dynamite. When he could pay he took the Greyhound that rumbled across the Bluegrass toward the hills.

Before he left for good he stopped by Davidson’s office to say goodbye. The older poet fixed his compass in a sentence. “Go back to your country. Go back there and write of your people. Do not change and follow the moods of these times.”

In 1955 Greenup County named a Jesse Stuart Day. Davidson, too ill to travel, sent a letter: “You have restored the bardic tradition, the one thought lost. It couldn’t have happened to Tom Wolfe. It can’t happen to Ransom, Tate, Warren, or me.”

When Stuart’s father died, Davidson wrote again. “If from him you had the gift of life, from you he has a gift of life that mounts beyond death. As a writer, you are everybody’s memory.”

April 1968. Davidson lay dying in the hospital. He wrote Stuart a final letter. “I am putting aside all unfinished commitments and will try to get my affairs straight. We think of you with greatest affection.”

Four days later, Davidson died.

I do belong to these men of the past.
I am one of a sleeping generation.
I have gone to weed roots and dust at last.
I may not have been a builder of the nation.
But I was just one of the many millions,
Lover of earth and trees and blackberry blossoms,
And a one-horse scrap of land, Don Davidson.
- Jesse Stuart’s Man with a Bull Tongue Plow (E. P. Dutton, 1934).

Sources

Clark, Jim. “‘Unto All Generations of the Faithful Heart’: Donald Davidson, The Vanderbilt Agrarians, and Appalachian Poetry.” The Mississippi Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2005): 299–313.

Foster, Ruel E. “Jesse Stuart and Donald Davidson: A Literary Friendship.” In The Vanderbilt Tradition: Essays in Honor of Thomas Daniel Young, edited by Mark Royden Winchell, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.

Gifford, James M. “Donald Davidson, Jesse Stuart’s Mentor, Editor, and Friend”.

Stuart, Jesse. Beyond Dark Hills. E.P. Dutton, 1938.

Winchell, Mark Royden. Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance. University of Missouri Press, 2000.

Wolfe, Charles K.. A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry. Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.

David Meade inherited land down on the Nansemond where the river met the James, where Meades had been since his Grandfather came over in Charles II’s time. Sent to England for schooling at seven, he returned a gentleman, sold his inheritance and purchased Maycox—six hundred acres south of the James near Westover—but the soil there was thin as Bible pages, and now he was fifty-two, his wife Sarah was forty-eight, and here they were, bound away with fifty souls to Kentucky in 1796 where he settled and built La Chaumière des Prairies.

Nineteen years before, Thomas Hardeman loaded the wagon at dawn in Pittsylvania County. Horses hitched to the front, corn sacks stacked in the bed, iron pot tied to the side, oilcloth-wrapped rifle under the seat. His wife tucked a quilt around the children. He was twenty-seven, a tenant farmer who’d worked rented plots in the Dan River lowlands, chafing under tidewater planters. Indian attacks drove his first attempt back. He tried again, settled Boone’s Creek in Watauga, fought at King’s Mountain, received 640 acres on the Little Harpeth after the war. The former tenant soon held 7,000 acres. His children spread into Georgia, Missouri, Texas, New Mexico, and California. None could be found in Virginia.

Every migration bears more than trunks and tools. One cargo rattles in the wagon bed; another rides in the blood; a third travels in the mind. David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly’s Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (University Press of Virginia, 2000) gathers all three to reconsider Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “Frontier Thesis” alongside the older Altlandschaft (Germ Theory) theories of cultural inheritance. Fischer and Kelly show Virginia’s people, culture, and institutions migrated westward and south largely intact, translated across distance but never dissolved. Three centuries of evidence testify that the invisible freight endured.

Bound Away began as Away, I’m Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, published by the Virginia Historical Society in 1993 to mark the centennial of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. Fischer and Kelly compiled the exhibition catalog, which explains the book’s visual richness—maps of migration routes, portraits of settlers, landscapes of river valleys, and photographs of furniture and tools that made the trip west. This visual record matters, because it grounds abstraction in objects—the heft of a surveyor’s chain, the wear of a family Bible. Readers and collectors alike will find it a worthy shelf-mate beside Albion’s Seed.

The story unfolds in three waves. First, migration to Virginia: cavalier elite and indentured servants from southern England in the 1600s, bringing Anglican religion, hierarchical order, a culture of honor. Then migration within Virginia: from Tidewater to Piedmont to the Shenandoah Valley through the 1700s, each stage expanding the pattern. Finally, migration beyond Virginia: after the Revolution and into the nineteenth century, when half a million Virginians by 1850 lived in other states, carrying their inheritance to Kentucky and Tennessee, Ohio and Missouri, Alabama and Texas.

The laws Kentucky wrote were Virginia’s laws. The land Alabama surveyed followed Virginia’s measures. The universities Tennessee built borrowed Virginia’s honor codes. The Old Dominion looked west and recognized itself: the same legal structures, the same social hierarchies, the same folkways down to how men pronounced earthworm versus redworm. They built houses with the same floor plans, entertained with the same hospitality, and guarded the same hierarchies. It is a powerful argument, and in part persuasive. Anyone who has read Fischer’s Albion’s Seed will recognize the method: folkways as markers of continuity.

Bound Away deserves attention from anyone interested in Southern migration, Virginia history, or the question of how American culture formed.

Bibliography of Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement

Introduction: Historiography, Theory, and Method

A. The Frontier Thesis and Its Critics

“A Centennial Symposium on the Significance of Frederick Jackson Turner.” Journal of the Early Republic 13 (1993). Note: Special issue dedicated to Turner’s legacy.

Adams, Herbert Baxter. “Report of Proceedings of Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association.” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893, 1894.

Bennett, James D. Frederick Jackson Turner. Twayne’s United States Authors Series. Twayne, 1975.

Benson, Lee. Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered. Free Press, 1960.

Billington, Ray Allen. Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher. Oxford University Press, 1973.

Billington, Ray Allen, and Martin Ridge. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. 4th ed. Macmillan, 1974.

Grossman, James R., ed. The Frontier in American Culture. University of California Press, 1994.

Hayes, Carlton J. H. “The American Frontier—Frontier of What?” American Historical Review 51 (1945–46): 199–216.

Johns Hopkins University. Herbert Baxter Adams: Tributes of Friends. The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Extra no. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1902.

Mattson, Vernon E., and William E. Marion. Frederick Jackson Turner: A Reference Guide. G. K. Hall, 1985. Note: Contains an excellent bibliography arranged by year.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893, 1894.

Wilson, Woodrow. “The Making of the Nation.” Atlantic Monthly 80 (1897): 1–14.

Wilson, Woodrow. “The Proper Perspective of American History.” Forum 19 (1895): 544–59. Note: One of the first extended discussions of Turner’s thesis to appear in print.

B. Alternative Settlement Models and Cultural Geography

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford University Press, 1989.

Wilhelm, Hubert G. W. “Settlement and Selected Landscape Imprints in the Ohio Valley.” In Robert L. Reid, ed., Always a River: The Ohio River and the American Experience, 59–89. Indiana University Press, 1991. Note: Wilhelm develops the “Altlandschaft” model of settlement geography.

Zelinsky, Wilbur. The Cultural Geography of the United States: A Revised Edition. Prentice-Hall, 1973. Reprint, 1992. Note: Zelinsky advanced the “doctrine of first effective settlement.”

C. Mobility, Expansion, and Economic Theory

Barnhart, John Donald. Valley of Democracy: The Frontier versus the Plantation in the Ohio Valley, 1775–1818. Indiana University Press, 1953.

Juricek, John T. “American Usage of the Word ‘Frontier,’ from Colonial Times to Frederick Jackson Turner.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110 (1966): 10–34.

Pierson, George W. The Moving American. Knopf, 1973.

Potter, David M. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures. University of Chicago Press, 1954.

Simler, Norman J. “The Safety-Valve Doctrine Re-evaluated.” Agricultural History 32 (1958): 37–45.

D. Slavery, Serfdom, and Labor Systems

Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Harvard University Press, 1987.

Nieboer, Herman J. Slavery as an Industrial System: Ethnological Researches. 1910. Reprint, Johnson Reprint, 1971.

E. The New Western History

Cronon, William, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds. Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past. Norton, 1992.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. Norton, 1987.

Milner, Clyde A., ed. A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Nash, Gerald D. Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890–1990. University of New Mexico Press, 1991.

Riebsame, William E., ed. Atlas of the New West: Portrait of a Changing Region. W. W. Norton, 1997.

White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

Part I: Origins—Migration to Virginia (1607–1750)

1. English Origins and Early Colonization

A. Migration Patterns in Early Modern England

Bridenbaugh, Carl. Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 1590–1642. Oxford University Press, 1968.

Clark, Peter, and David Souden, eds. Migration and Society in Early Modern England. Hutchinson, 1987.

Hanley, Hugh. “Population Mobility in Buckinghamshire, 1573–1643.” Local Population Studies (1973): 43–58.

Hey, David G. An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts. Leicester University Press, 1974.

Patten, John. English Towns, 1500–1700. Dawson, 1978.

Slack, Paul. “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598–1664.” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 27 (1974): 360–79.

B. The Peopling of British North America

Bailyn, Bernard. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. Knopf, 1986.

Bailyn, Bernard. Voyagers to the West: Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. Knopf, 1986.

Meinig, Donald W. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800. Yale University Press, 1986.

Steele, Ian K. The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community. Oxford University Press, 1986.

C. Early Virginia: Narratives and Settlement (Primary Sources)

Barbour, Philip L., ed. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631). 3 vols. University of North Carolina Press; Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1986.

Fiore, Jordan D., ed. Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims of Plymouth. Plymouth Rock Foundation, 1985.

Quinn, David Beers, ed. The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590: Documents to Illustrate the English Voyages to North America. 2 vols. Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., vols. 104–105. Hakluyt Society, 1955.(v1, v2)

Quinn, David Beers, ed. The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. 2 vols. Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd ser., vols. 83–84. Hakluyt Society, 1940. (v1, v2)

Smith, John. The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles…. 1624.

Smith, John. The Proceedings of the English Colony in Virginia. 1612.

Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625. Original Narratives of Early American History. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907.

D. Jamestown and Early Virginia: Secondary Studies

Axtell, James. After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Craven, Wesley Frank. The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1689. Vol. 1 of A History of the South, edited by Wendell Holmes Stephenson and E. Merton Coulter. Louisiana State University Press, 1949.

Craven, Wesley Frank. White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian. University Press of Virginia, 1971.

Lemay, J. A. Leo. The American Dream of Captain John Smith. University Press of Virginia; British Library, 1991.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. Norton, 1975.

Morton, Richard L. Colonial Virginia. 2 vols. University of North Carolina Press, 1960. (v1, v2)

E. Early Demographic Studies

Hecht, Irene W. D. “The Virginia Muster of 1624/5 as a Source for Demographic History.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30 (1973): 65–92. (1624/5 Muster Databases)

Hening, William Waller, comp. The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia. 13 vols. 1809–23.

2. The Cavalier Elite and Colonial Governance

A. The Cavalier Migration Debate

Billings, Warren M. “Sir William Berkeley—Portrait by Fischer: A Critique.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 48 (1991): 583–97.

Bridenbaugh, Carl. Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South. Louisiana State University Press, 1952.

Fischer, David Hackett. “Rejoinder.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 48 (1991): 598–611.

Manahan, John E. “The Cavalier Remounted: A Study of the Origins of Virginia’s Population, 1607–1770.” PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1946.

B. Sir William Berkeley and the Colonial Elite

Berkeley, Sir William. A Discourse and View of Virginia. 1663. Reprint, 1914.

Carson, Jane Dennison. “Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia: A Study in Colonial Policy.” PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1951.

Moryson, Francis, ed. The Lawes of Virginia Now in Force, Collected out of the Assembly Records, and Digested into One Volume. 1662.

Sainsbury, W. N., ed. “Virginia in 1666–1667.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 21 (1913): 121–39.

C. The English Civil War Context

Cary, Henry, ed. Memorials of the Great Civil War in England from 1646 to 1652. 2 vols. 1842.

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641. 5 vols. 1706–7. Reprint, 1888.

Underdown, David. Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660. Yale University Press, 1960.

D. Bacon’s Rebellion and Political Crisis

“Ingram’s Proceedings.” In “A Narrative of the Indian and Civil Wars in Virginia in the Years 1675 and 1676.” In Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America. 4 vols., 1836–46. Reprint, 1963.

“Narratives of the Insurrections, 1676–1690.” In Original Narratives of Early American History. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915.

Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. University of North Carolina Press, 1957.

Webb, Stephen Saunders. 1676: The End of American Independence. Knopf, 1984.

Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon’s Rebellion and Its Leader. Princeton University Press, 1940.

E. Elite Families and the Consolidation of Power

Anderson, James LaVerne. “The Governors’ Councils of Colonial America: A Study of Pennsylvania and Virginia, 1660–1776.” PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1967.

Bates-Harbin, S. W. Members of Parliament from the County of Somerset. Somerset Record Society, 1939.

Berkeley, Henry J. “The Berkeley-Berkley Family and Their Kindred in the Colonization of Virginia and Maryland.” William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd ser., 3 (1923): 1–25.

Bruce, William Cabell. John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773–1833. 2 vols. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922.

Chickering, Arnold. “Founders of an Oligarchy: The Virginia Council, 1692–1722.” In Bruce C. Daniels, ed., Power and Status: Officeholding in Colonial America, 75–100. Wesleyan University Press, 1986.

Harrison, Fairfax. Virginia Land Grants: A Study of Conveyancing in Relation to Colonial Politics. Old Dominion Press, 1925.

Labaree, Leonard Woods. Conservatism in Early American History. New York University Press, 1948.

F. Chesapeake Regional Context

Carr, Lois Green, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society.. University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Menard, Russell R. “Population, Economy, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Maryland.” Maryland Historical Magazine 79 (1984): 117–42.

G. Elite Culture and Society (Primary Sources)

Bruce, Philip Alexander. Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Macmillan, 1895.

Bruce, Philip Alexander. Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. Whittet & Shepperson, 1907.

Fisher, George. “Narrative of George Fisher, 1750–55.” William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 17 (1908–9): 150–75.

Jones, Hugh. The Present State of Virginia …. Edited by Richard Lee Morton. University of North Carolina Press, 1956.

3. Bound White Labor: Servants and Convicts

A. General Studies of Indentured Servitude

Ballagh, James Curtis. White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia: A Study of the System of Indentured Labor in the American Colonies. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. 13, nos. 6–7. Johns Hopkins Press, 1895.

Galenson, David. White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis. Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Smith, Abbot Emerson. Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776. University of North Carolina Press, 1947.

B. Servant Migration and Recruitment

Eltis, James. “Servant Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century.” In Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, 127–52. University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

Moller, Herbert. “Sex Composition and Correlated Culture Patterns of Colonial America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 2 (1945): 113–53.

Morgan, Edmund S. “Headrights and Head Counts.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 80 (1972): 361–71.

Nash, Gary B. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1979.

Salerno, Anthony. “The Character of Emigration from Wiltshire to the American Colonies, 1630–1660.” PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1977.

C. “Spiriting” and Forced Transportation of Children

Coldham, Peter Wilson. “The ‘Spiriting’ of London Children to Virginia, 1648–1685.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83 (1975): 280–97.

Cope, William H. A Glossary of Hampshire Words and Phrases. English Dialect Society, 1883.

Firth, C. H., ed. An American Garland: Being a Collection of Ballads Relating to America, 1563–1759. Clarendon Press, 1915.

Johnson, Robert C. “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, 1618–1622.” In Howard S. Reinmuth Jr., ed., Early Stuart Studies: Essays in Honor of David Harris Willson, 137–51. University of Minnesota Press, 1970.

D. Convict Transportation

Coldham, Peter Wilson. Bonded Passengers to America. Genealogical Publishing Co., 1983.

Ekirch, A. Roger. Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775. Clarendon Press, 1987.

Ekirch, A. Roger. “Bound for America: A Profile of British Convicts Transported to the Colonies, 1718–1775.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 42 (1985): 173–200.

Kaminkow, Marion, and Jack Kaminkow. Original Lists of Emigrants in Bondage from London to the American Colonies, 1719–1744. Magna Carta Book Company, 1967.

4. African Forced Migration and Cultural Formation

A. The Atlantic Slave Trade to Virginia

Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

Donnan, Elizabeth, ed. Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America. 4 vols. Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930–35.

Hamer, Philip M., et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens. 10 vols. to date. University of South Carolina Press, 1968–.

Headlam, Cecil, ed. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1701. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1910.

Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery. 1918; repr., Louisiana State University Press, 1966.

B. African Origins and the Middle Passage (Primary Sources)

Curtin, Philip D., ed., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. University of Wisconsin Press, 1968.

Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. 2 vols. 1789.

Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves, in the Sugar Colonies. 1803.

C. Slavery and Cultural Development in the Chesapeake

Breen, T. H., and Stephen Innes. “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676. Oxford University Press, 1980.

Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800. University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Mouer, Daniel. “Chesapeake Creoles: The Creation of Folk Culture in Colonial Virginia.” In The Archeology of Seventeenth-Century Virginia. Special Publication no. 30 of the Archeological Society of Virginia, 53–70. Archeological Society of Virginia, 1993.

Sobel, Mechal. The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Princeton University Press, 1987.

D. African Cultural Retentions

Hess, Karen. “Historical Notes and Commentaries on the Virginia Housewife.” In Mary Randolph, The Virginia Housewife. Facsimile of 1824 edition, with additional material from 1825 and 1828 editions. Edited by Karen Hess. University of South Carolina Press, 1984.

Linn, Karen. That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture. University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Winans, Robert. “The Banjo: From Africa to Virginia and Beyond.” In Blue Ridge Folk Instruments and Their Makers, 12–25. Blue Ridge Institute, Ferrum College, 1992.

E. Slave Voices and Perspectives (Primary Sources)

“Eighteenth-Century Maryland as Portrayed in the ‘Itinerant Observations’ of Edward Kimber.” Maryland Historical Magazine 51 (1956): 97–113.

Creswell, Nicholas. Journal, 1774–1777. Dial Press, 1924.

Perdue, Charles, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. University Press of Virginia, 1976.

F. Comparative Slavery Studies

Patterson, Orlando. The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1967.

Rubin, Vera D. and Arthur Tuden, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Society. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977).

5. American Indians and Colonial Contact

Egloff, Keith, and Deborah Woodward. First People: The Early Indians of Virginia. Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1992.

Lewis, Clifford M., S.J., and Albert J. Loomie, S.J. The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570–1572. University of North Carolina Press, 1953.

Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America. Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Robinson, W. Stitt. The Southern Colonial Frontier, 1607–1763. University of New Mexico Press, 1979.

Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Savitt, Todd L. Fevers, Agues, and Cures: Medical Life in Old Virginia. Virginia Historical Society, 1990.

6. Religious Minority Migration

A. Huguenot Settlement

Alexander, Edward Porter, ed. The Journal of John Fontaine: An Irish Huguenot Son in Spain and Virginia, 1710–1719. Colonial Williamsburg, 1972.

Brock, R. A., ed. Documents, Chiefly Unpublished, Relating to the Huguenot Emigration to Virginia. Collections of the Virginia Historical Society, n.s., 5. Virginia Historical Society, 1886.

Bugg, James L., Jr. “The French Huguenot Frontier Settlement of Manakin Town.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 61 (1953): 359–64.

Butler, Jon. The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society. Harvard University Press, 1983.

Cobb, Sanford H. The Rise of Religious Liberty in America: A History. Macmillan, 1902.

Durand of Dauphiné. A Huguenot Exile in Virginia. 1689. Reprint, Macmillan, 1934.

Fontaine, James. “Journal of John Fontaine.” In Ann Maury, comp., Memoirs of a Huguenot Family: Translated and Compiled from the Original Autobiography of the Rev. James Fontaine. Putnam, 1853.

Menk, Patricia Holbert. “Notes on Some Early Huguenot Settlements in Virginia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 52 (1944): 15–22.

B. Quaker Migration and Settlement

Edmundson, William. A Journal of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, and Labour of Love in the Work of the Ministry. 1774.

Gragg, Larry Dale. Migration in Early America: The Virginia Quaker Experience. Studies in American History and Culture, 13. Indiana University Press, 1978.

Jones, Rufus M. The Quakers in the American Colonies. 1911; repr., Norton, 1966.

Weeks, Stephen B. Southern Quakers and Slavery: A Study in Institutional History. Johns Hopkins Press, 1896.

Part II: Internal Movement—Regional Cultures within Virginia (1650–1800)

7. Tidewater Expansion and Consolidation

A. Regional Studies: Eastern Shore and Northern Neck

Dize, Frances W. Smith Island, Chesapeake Bay. Tidewater Publishers, 1990.

Perry, James R. The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615–1655. University of North Carolina Press; Cambridge University Press, 1990.

B. Northern Neck Land Grants and Settlement

Harrison, Fairfax. Landmarks of Old Prince William. 2 vols. Old Dominion Press, 1924.

Morton, Louis. Robert Carter of Nomini Hall: A Virginia Tobacco Planter of the Eighteenth Century. 1941; repr., Colonial Williamsburg, 1964.

Wright, Louis B., ed. Letters of Robert Carter, 1720–1727: The Commercial Interests of a Virginia Gentleman. Huntington Library, 1940.

C. Tidewater Geography and Economy

Beverley, Robert. The History and Present State of Virginia. Edited by Louis B. Wright. 1705; repr., University of North Carolina Press, 1947.

Middleton, Arthur Pierce. Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era. Mariners’ Museum, 1953.

8. Piedmont Settlement

A. The Southside: Lunenburg and Beyond

Beeman, Richard R. The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746–1832. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.

Bell, Landon C. Sunlight on the Southside: Lists of Tithes, Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1748–1783. Genealogical Publishing Co., 1931.

Turner, Susan McNeil. “The Skipwiths of Prestwould Plantation.” Virginia Cavalcade 10 (Summer 1960): 42–47.

B. William Byrd II and the Dividing Line

Beaty, Richmond C., and William J. Mullo, eds. William Byrd’s Natural History of Virginia, or The Newly Discovered Eden. Virginia Historical Society, 1940.

Byrd, William II., Louis B. Wright, ed., The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover.. Harvard University Press, 1966.

Lockridge, Kenneth A. The Diary and Life of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674–1744. University of North Carolina Press; Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Marambaud, Pierre. William Byrd of Westover (1674–1744). University Press of Virginia, 1971.

C. Piedmont African American Life

Kulikoff, Allan. “The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700–1790.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (1978): 226–59.

9. Early Trans-Allegheny Exploration (1650–1750)

Alvord, W. H., and Lee Bidgood. The First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region by the Virginians, 1650–1674. Arthur H. Clark, 1912.

Briceland, Alan Vance. Westward from Virginia: The Exploration of the Virginia-Carolina Frontier, 1650–1710. University Press of Virginia, 1987.

Gaines, William H., Jr. “Abraham Wood and the Rivers of the West.” Virginia Cavalcade 4 (Autumn 1954): 20–23.

10. The Valley and Backcountry: German and Scots-Irish Settlement

A. Alexander Spotswood and the Opening of the Valley

Abernethy, Thomas Perkins. Three Virginia Frontiers. Louisiana State University Press, 1940.

Brock, R. A., ed. The Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood, Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony of Virginia, 1710–1722. Collections of the Virginia Historical Society, n.s., vols. 1–2. 2 vols. Virginia Historical Society, 1882–85.

Dodson, Leonidas. Alexander Spotswood: Governor of Colonial Virginia, 1710–1722. American Philosophical Society, 1932.

Havighurst, Walter. Alexander Spotswood: Portrait of a Governor. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1967.

B. German Migration to the Shenandoah Valley

Chappell, Edward A. “Acculturation in the Shenandoah Valley: Rhenish Houses of the Massanutten Settlement.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980): 55–89.

Kercheval, Samuel. A History of the Valley of Virginia. 1833. 3rd rev. ed. Shenandoah Publishing House, 1902.

Wayland, John Walter. The German Element of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Shenandoah Publishing House, 1989.

Wokeck, Marianne. “Harnessing the Lure of the ‘Best Poor Man’s Country’: The Dynamics of English-Speaking Immigration to British North America, 1683–1783.” In Ida Altman and James Horn, eds., ‘To Make America’: European Emigration in the Early Modern Period, 201–42. University of California Press, 1991.

C. Ethnic Origins and Settlement Patterns

Jordan, Terry G., and Matti Kaups. The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

McDonald, Forrest, and Ellen Shapiro McDonald. “The Ethnic Origins of the American People, 1790.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 37 (1980): 179–200.

Purvis, Thomas L. “The European Ancestry of the United States Population, 1790.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 37 (1980): 201–25.

Sanderlin, John B. “Ethnic Origins of Early Kentucky Land Grantees.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 85 (1987): 123–40.

D. Shenandoah Valley Community Studies

Mitchell, Robert D. Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley. University Press of Virginia, 1977.

Mitchell, Robert D., ed. Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and Development in the Preindustrial Era. University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

E. Augusta County and the Upper Valley

Tillson, Albert H., Jr. Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740–1789. University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

11. Virginia Society and Culture in the Eighteenth Century

A. General Social History

Bruce, Philip Alexander. Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. G. P. Putnam’s Sons; Constable, 1910.

Fishwick, Marshall W. Gentlemen of Virginia. Columbia University Press, 1961.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1787.

Lewis, Jan. The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Palmer, W. P., ed. Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, 1652–1781. 11 vols. Virginia State Library, 1875–93.

B. The Cavalier Myth and Cultural Identity

Caruthers, William Alexander. The Knights of the Horse-Shoe: A Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion. Elmore County Literary Association, 1845.

Davis, Curtis Carroll. Chronicler of the Cavaliers: A Life of the Reverend James B. Taylor. Dietz Press, 1969.

Osterweis, Rollin G. Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South. Yale University Press, 1949.

Taylor, William R. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character. Oxford University Press, 1961.

C. Language and Dialect

McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. Viking, 1986.

Nixon, Phyllis J. “A Glossary of Virginia Words.” Publication of the American Dialect Society 5 (1946): 1–20.

12. Cartography and Geographic Knowledge

Martin, Lawrence. “Warner’s Map of the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers.” William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd ser., 19 (1939): 20–34.

Sanchez-Saavedra, E. M. A Description of the Country: Virginia Cartographers and Their Maps, 1607–1881. Virginia State Library, 1975.

Schöpf, Johann David. Travels in the Confederation. Translated and edited by Alfred J. Morrison. 2 vols. 1788. Reprint, Burt Franklin, 1968.

Part III: The Great Exodus—Virginians Move West (1750–1860)

13. General Works on Western Migration

A. Contemporary Accounts and Travel Narratives

Brissot de Warville, J. P. Nouveau voyage dans les États-Unis de l’Amérique, 1791. Edited by Durand Echeverria. Harvard University Press, 1964.

Filson, John. The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky. 1784. Reprint, Corinth Books, 1962.

Tinling, Marion, and Godfrey Davies, eds. The Western Country in 1793: Reports on Kentucky and Virginia. Huntington Library, 1947.

Weld, Isaac, Jr. Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. 2 vols. John Stockdale, 1799.

B. Migration Narratives: Family Perspectives

Cashin, Joan E. A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier. Oxford University Press, 1992.

McFarland, Gerald W. A Scattered People: An American Family Moves West. University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.

C. Language and Terminology

Mathews, Mitford M., comp. A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles. University of Chicago Press, 1951; repr., 1956.

D. Biographical Reference Works

Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774–1989. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989.

14. The Upper South: North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky

A. North Carolina Piedmont

Cumming, W. P. “The Earliest Permanent Settlement in Carolina: Nathaniel Batts and the Comberford Map.” American Historical Review 45 (1939–40): 55–63.

Powell, William S., ed. Ye Countie of Albemarle in Carolina: A Collection of Documents, 1664–1675. State Department of Archives and History, 1958.

B. Tennessee: Watauga and Early Settlement

Dixon, Max. The Wataugans. Tennessee Historical Commission, 1976.

Donelson, John. “Journal of a Voyage Intended by God’s Permission, in the Good Boat Adventure.” Tennessee Historical Society Collections. Manuscript, Tennessee State Library and Archives.

Driver, Carl. John Sevier, Pioneer of the Old Southwest. University of North Carolina Press, 1932.

Hardeman, Nicholas Perkins. Wilderness Calling: The Hardeman Family in the American Westward Movement, 1750–1900. University of Tennessee Press, 1977.

McBride, Robert M., and Dan Robison, eds. Biographical Directory of the Tennessee General Assembly, vol. 1, 1796–1861. Tennessee State Library and Archives, 1975.

Spence, Richard Douglas. “John Donelson and the Opening of the Old Southwest.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 50 (Fall 1991): 117–32.

Wrenn, Lynette B. “John Sevier.” In Charles W. Crawford, ed., The Governors of Tennessee, vol. 1, 1790–1835, 31–62. Tennessee Historical Society, 1979.

C. Kentucky: General Studies

Clark, Thomas D. A History of Kentucky. Prentice-Hall, 1937.

Coward, Joan Wells. Kentucky in the New Republic: The Process of Constitution Making. University Press of Kentucky, 1979.

Talbert, Charles Gano. Benjamin Logan, Kentucky Frontiersman. University Press of Kentucky, 1962.

Watlington, Patricia. The Partisan Spirit: Kentucky Politics, 1779–1792. Columbia University Press, 1972.

D. Elite Migration to Kentucky

Dicken-Garcia, Hazel. Western Woods: The Breckinridge Family Moves to Kentucky in 1793. University of Kentucky Press, 1991.

Gill, Harold B., Jr., and George M. Curtis II, eds. “A Virginian’s First Views of Kentucky: David Meade to Joseph Prentis, August 14, 1796.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 90 (1992): 35–58.

Philyaw, Scott. “Virginia’s Western Visions, Political and Cultural Expansion on an Eighteenth-Century Frontier.” PhD diss. University of North Carolina, 1995.

Still, Bayrd. “The Westward Migration of a Planter Pioneer in 1796.” William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd ser., 21 (1941): 23–41.

Terry, Gail S. “Family Empires: A Frontier Elite in Virginia and Kentucky, 1740–1815.” PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 1992.

Winship, Marion Nelson. “The Portable Planter: Virginia Gentry Travel across the Appalachians, 1790–1810.” Paper read at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association, Atlanta, November 6, 1992.

E. Kentucky Consumer Culture

Perkins, Elizabeth A. “The Consumer Frontier: Household Consumption in Early Kentucky.” Journal of American History 78 (1991–92): 486–510

15. The Deep South: Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi

A. Georgia

Coulter, E. Merton. Old Petersburg and the Broad River Valley of Georgia. University of Georgia Press, 1965.

Cunyus, Lucy Josephine. The History of Bartow County (Formerly Cass) [Georgia]. 1933. Reprint, Southern Historical Press, 1976.

Saggus, Charles. “Agrarian Arcadia: Anglo-Virginians in Georgia: The Greater Planters of Wilkes County, Georgia, in the 1850s.” Typescript, courtesy of the author, Augusta College, ca. 1980s.

B. Alabama and Mississippi

Baldwin, Joseph Glover. The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi. 1854. Reprint, Hill and Wang, 1957.

Hunter, Phyllis. Research on Virginia Revolutionary War veterans in Alabama, based on U.S. Pension Rolls (1835). Virginia Historical Society.

16. The Northwest Territory: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois

A. General Studies and Land Policy

Bond, Beverley W., Jr. The Civilization of the Old Northwest: A Study of Political, Social, and Economic Development, 1788–1812. Macmillan, 1934..

B. French Exploration and the Ohio Country

Lambing, A. A., ed. “Céleron’s Journal.” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 29 (1920): 1–37.

Marshall, H. “Céleron’s Expedition to the Ohio in 1749.” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 29 (1920): 38–60.

C. George Washington and Western Lands

Acton, George B. “George Washington Looks Westward.” Michigan History Magazine 16 (1932): 127–42.

Ambler, Charles H. George Washington and the West. University of North Carolina Press, 1936.

Cook, Roy Bird. Washington’s Western Lands. Shenandoah Publishing House, 1930.

Hixon, Ada Hope. “George Washington, Land Speculator.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 11 (1919): 201–15.

Jackson, Donald, and Dorothy Twohig, eds. The Diaries of George Washington. 6 vols. University Press of Virginia, 1976–79.

Ketchum, Richard M. The World of George Washington. American Heritage Publishing, 1974.

Titus, James. The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia. University of South Carolina Press, 1991.

Wayland, John W. “Washington West of the Blue Ridge.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 48 (1940): 34–51.

D. George Rogers Clark and the Revolutionary West

Bakeless, John E. Background to Glory: The Life of George Rogers Clark. Lippincott, 1951.

George Rogers Clark Papers, 1771–1781. Illinois State Historical Society Collections 8. Illinois State Historical Society, 1912.

Rankin, Hugh F. George Rogers Clark and the Winning of the West. Virginia Historical Society, 1976.

E. Ohio Settlement and Politics

Clayton, Andrew R. L. “Land, Power, and Reputation: The Cultural Dimensions of Politics in the Ohio Country.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 47 (1990): 689–720.

F. Indiana and Illinois

Curti, Merle. The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in Frontier County. Stanford University Press, 1959.

Stevenson, Adlai E. Major Campaign Speeches of Adlai E. Stevenson, 1952. Random House, 1952.

17. Trans-Mississippi West: Missouri, Arkansas, Texas

A. Louisiana Territory and Early Exploration

Garrison, George P. “A Memorandum of M. Austin’s Journey from the Lead Mines in the County of Wythe in the State of Virginia to the Lead Mines in the Province of Louisiana West of the Mississippi, 1796–1797.” American Historical Review 5 (1899–1900): 108–21.

Malone, Dumas. Jefferson the Virginian. Little, Brown, 1948.

Robertson, James A., ed. Louisiana under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States, 1785–1807. 2 vols. Arthur H. Clark, 1911.

B. Missouri Settlement

Nagel, Paul C. Missouri: A History. University Press of Kansas, 1988.

Parrish, William E., ed. A History of Missouri. 5 vols. University of Missouri Press, 1971–.

Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935.

C. Texas: Revolution and Republic

“A Virginian ‘Ranger’ of Texas [William A. A. Wallace].” Virginia Cavalcade 5 (Summer 1955): 40–43.

Campbell, Randolph B. An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865. Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Kemp, Louis Wiltz. The Signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Anson Jones Press, 1944.

Webb, Walter Prescott, ed. The Handbook of Texas. 3 vols. Texas State Historical Association, 1952–76.

D. Sam Houston: Biographical Studies

Braider, Donald. Solitary Star: A Biography of Sam Houston. Putnam, 1974.

DeBruhl, Marshall. Sword of San Jacinto: A Life of Sam Houston. Random House, 1993.

James, Marquis. The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston. Doubleday, 1929.

Williams, John Hoyt. Sam Houston: A Biography of the Father of Texas. Free Press, 1993.

Wisehart, Marion K. Sam Houston, American Giant. Public Affairs Press, 1962.

18. The Far West: Oregon, California, Nevada

A. The Oregon Trail

Mattes, Merrill J. Platte River Road Narratives. University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Walker, Joel P. A Pioneer of Pioneers: Narrative of Adventures thro’ Alabama, Florida, New Mexico, Oregon, California, etc. Ward Ritchie Press, 1953.

B. The California Gold Rush

Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of California. Vol. 6, 1848–59. In The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 23. Wallace Hebberd, 1980.

Barnes, Alton Brooks Parker. Gold Fever and a Virginia Doctor. Eastern Shore Historical Society, 1989.

Henley, Bernard J. “A Richmonder in Search of Gold: The 1849 California Gold Rush.” Richmond Quarterly 3 (Winter 1980): 15–27.

Read, Georgia Willis, and Ruth Gaines, eds. Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings, and Other Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff. Columbia University Press, 1944.

C. California: Society and Elite Formation

Batman, Richard Dale. “The California Political Frontier: Democratic or Bureaucratic.” Journal of the West 7 (1968): 461–70.

Burchell, R. A. “The Character and Function of a Pioneer Elite: Rural California, 1848–1880.” Journal of American Studies 15 (1981): 23–45.

Muscatine, Doris. Old San Francisco: A Biography of a City from Early Days to the Earthquake. Putnam, 1975.

D. Lord Fairfax of California

Cartmell, T. K. An Historic Sketch of the Two Fairfax Families in Virginia. Eddy Press, 1913.

E. Nevada

Carlson, Helen S. Nevada Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary. University of Nevada Press, 1974.

19. Mountain Men and Frontiersmen

Alter, J. C. James Bridger: Trapper, Frontiersman, Scout, and Guide. Shepard Book Company, 1925.

The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians. Harper & Brothers, 1856.

The Story of the Great American West. Reader’s Digest, 1977.

Vestal, Stanley. Jim Bridger, Mountain Man. Morrow, 1946.

20. Revolutionary and Early National Leaders

Royster, Charles. Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution. Knopf, 1982.

Part IV: Consequences—The Impact on Virginia (1780–1860)

21. Demographic and Economic Decline

Abbott, Richard H. “Yankee Farmers in Northern Virginia, 1840–1860.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76 (1968): 259–75.

Dabney, Virginius. Virginia: The New Dominion. Doubleday, 1971.

Goldfield, H. David R. Urban Growth in the Age of Sectionalism: Virginia, 1847–1861. Louisiana State University Press, 1977.

Sutton, Robert P. “Nostalgia, Pessimism, and Malaise: The Doomed Aristocrat in Late-Jeffersonian Virginia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76 (1968): 34–58.

Trist Papers. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

22. The Domestic Slave Trade

A. General Studies

Bancroft, Frederic. Slave-Trading in the Old South. J. H. Furst, 1931.

Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

23. Slave Conspiracies and the Slavery Debate

A. Gabriel’s Rebellion (1800)

Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

B. Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831)

Duff, John, and Peter Mitchell, eds. The Nat Turner Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern Controversy. Harper & Row, 1971.

Halasz, Nicholas. The Rattling Chains: Slave Unrest and Revolt in the Antebellum South. Scribner’s, 1966.

C. General Studies of Slave Resistance

Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. International Publishers, 1963.

Carroll, Joseph. Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800–1865. Chapman & Grimes, 1938.

D. The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–32

Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention of 1829–1830. Samuel Shepherd, 1830.

Freehling, Alison Goodyear. Drift toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832. Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Robert, Joseph Clarke. The Road from Monticello: A Study of the Virginia Slavery Debate of 1832. Historical Papers of the Trinity College Historical Society 24. Duke University Press, 1941.

E. Antislavery Voices in Virginia

Eaton, Clement. Freedom of Thought Struggle in the Old South. 1940. Reprint, Harper & Row, 1964.

Eaton, Clement. The Mind of the Old South. Louisiana State University Press, 1967.

24. Literary Responses and Cultural Nostalgia

A. Antebellum Virginia Novels

Bohner, Charles H. “Swallow Barn: John P. Kennedy’s Chronicle of Virginia Society.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 68 (1960): 131–48.

Kennedy, John Pendleton. Swallow Barn. J. B. Lippincott, 1860.

Tucker, George. The Valley of Shenandoah, or, Memoirs of the Graysons. 2 vols. Bliss & White, 1824.

Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley. George Balcombe: A Novel. 2 vols. Shepherd & Pollard, 1836.

B. Elite Figures and Nostalgia

Garland, Hugh A. The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke. 2 vols. D. Appleton, 1850.

25. Political Culture and Democracy

Shalhope, Robert E. The Roots of Democracy: American Thought and Culture, 1760–1800. Twayne, 1990.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Knopf, 1992.

26. Revolution and Sectional Tensions

Berlin, Ira, and Ronald Hoffman, eds. Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution. University Press of Virginia, 1983.

Part V: African American Migration: Forced and Free (1780–1865)

27. African Colonization: Liberia

Gunther, John. Inside Africa. Harper, 1955.

Smith, James Wesley. Sojourners in Search of Freedom: The Settlement of Liberia by Black Americans. University Press of America, 1987.

Miller, Randall M., ed. Dear Master: Letters of a Slave Family. Cornell University Press, 1978.

Tyler-McGraw, Marie, ed. “’The Prize I Mean Is the Prize of Liberty’: A Loudoun County Family in Liberia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1989): 405–26.

Wiley, Bell I., ed. Slaves No More: Letters from Liberia, 1833–1869. University Press of Kentucky, 1980.

Part VI: The Virginia Legacy in Western Culture (1780–1900)

28. Architecture and the Built Environment

A. General Studies and Theory

Loth, Calder, ed. The Virginia Landmarks Register. 3rd ed. University Press of Virginia, 1987.

Rasmussen, William M. S., and Richard Guy Wilson. The Making of Virginia Architecture. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1992.

Thrower, Norman J. W. Original Survey and Land Subdivision: A Comparative Study of the Form and Effect of Contrasting Cadastral Surveys. Association of American Geographers Monograph Series, 4. Rand McNally, 1966.

B. Log Construction and Vernacular Architecture

Hutslar, Donald A. The Architecture of Migration: Log Construction in the Ohio Country, 1750–1850. Ohio University Press, 1986.

Kniffen, Fred B., and Henry Glassie. “Building in Wood in the Eastern United States: A Time-Place Perspective.” Geographical Review 54 (1966): 40–66.

Wilhelm, Hubert. Log Cabins and Castles: Virginia Settlers in Ohio. Videotape. Ohio Landscape Productions, 1991.

C. Regional Architectural Studies

Lancaster, Clay. Antebellum Architecture of Kentucky. University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

Lane, Mills. Architecture of the Old South: North Carolina. Beehive Press, 1985.

Lane, Mills. Architecture of the Old South: Virginia. Beehive Press, 1987.

D. Elite Family Houses in the West

Cary, Wilson Miles. “The Dandridges of Virginia.” William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 5 (1896): 20–45.

Gamble, Robert. “Endangered Aristocrats.” Alabama Heritage 23 (Winter 1992): 12–19.

Kennedy, Mary Selden. Seldens of Virginia and Allied Families. Grafton Press, 1910.

29. Political Culture and Legal Traditions

Brown, Elizabeth G. British Statutes in American Law, 1776–1836. University of Michigan Law School, 1964.

Childs, James Rives. Reliques of the Rives. J. P. Bell, 1929.

Davis, Richard Beale. “The Jeffersonian Virginia Expatriate in the Building of the Nation.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 259–82.

Fox, Dixon Ryan, ed. Sources of Culture in the Middle West: Backgrounds versus Frontier. 1934. Reprint, Octagon Books, 1964.

Williamson, Chilton. American Suffrage: From Property to Democracy, 1760–1860. Princeton University Press, 1960.

Wright, Benjamin F. “Democracy and the Frontier.” Yale Review 20 (1930–31): 630–49.

30. Economic Development and Innovation

A. Agriculture

Gray, Lewis Cecil. History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860. 2 vols. Carnegie Institution, 1941.

B. The McCormick Reaper and Industrial Innovation

Casson, Herbert N. Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work. University of Chicago Press, 1930.

McCormick, Cyrus. The Century of the Reaper. Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

31. Honor, Dueling, and Social Culture

Leazer, Linda. “Randolph of Roanoke on the Field of Honor.” Virginia Historical Society: An Occasional Bulletin, no. 53 (1986).

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. Oxford University Press, 1982.

32. Visual Arts

Bloch, K. Maurice. The Paintings of George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Raisonné. University of Missouri Press, 1986.

Pennington, Estill Curtis. William Edward West, 1788–1857: Kentucky Painter. National Portrait Gallery, 1985.

33. Virginia’s Decline and National Narratives

Adams, Henry. History of the United States of America. 9 vols. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889–91.

Rouse, Parke, Jr. Below the James Lies Dixie: Smithfield and Southside Virginia. 1968. Reprint, Dietz Press, 1972.

Conclusion

Turner, Frederick Jackson.Frontier and Section: Selected Essays. Classics in History Series. Prentice-Hall, 1961.1

In my last Substack I mentioned a magazine deadline that had my full attention. I finished the piece and filed it a week ago, along with photos that made me blow the dust off my “real” camera. I’ll share it when it’s announced. This week a large envelope arrived in the mail; inside was an old issue of Southern Partisan. Also, it wouldn’t sit right with me if I didn’t mention the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I’m praying for his family, especially his wife and two children. I’ll leave it there. I am Scots-Irish and my blood is stirred.

The following transcription is from Tom Landess’ interview with M.E. Bradford (1934 – 1993), published in Southern Partisan 5.2 (1985).

The author of three volumes of political thought and several truckloads of literary criticism on Southern writers, he is a frequent lecturer, television pundit, and has engaged in formal debate with scholars who have presumed to challenge the South’s view of American political history. In these debates—none of which has yet ended in a duel—he has shown such wit and knowledge that on at least one occasion his enemies actually conceded his victory, speculating gloomily that he must have memorized the entire American microfiche collection. Indeed some of his greatest admirers are scholars like Eugene Genevese who disagree with him on virtually every important point but nonetheless respect his keen integrity and fair-minded dissent.

The occasion for this interview is the publication in early summer of a new volume of political essays entitled Remembering Who We Are (Publisher: The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia 30602); but in a frank, free-ranging discussion Professor Bradford talks not only about the book but also about current politics, the region’s recent history, and the difficulties he has encountered as a Southern conservative in a profession dominated by Northern liberals.

Professor Bradford was interviewed in his study in Irving, Texas by Associate Editor Tom Landess, who knows too much about him not to get straight answers.

PARTISAN: This is your third political book in the past five years, yet your academic discipline is Southern literature. You’ve published even more in that area than you have in politics. So why are you now regarded as “M.E. Bradford, the political philosopher”?

BRADFORD: I think it’s probably because people in the intellectual establishment get more excited about heresies of political theory than they do over heresies buried down inside a work of fiction. These people could care less about the social implications of Faulkner’s The Reivers or of Stark Young’s So Red The Rose; too often they’re contemptuous of literature, or to put it another way, they don’t feel threatened by fringe comments on novelists who are outside of their own established canon, from Thoreau and Norman Mailer.

PARTISAN: But when you say something about Lincoln, that excites them.

BRADFORD: Oh, my, yes.

PARTISAN: Let’s talk about some of your heresies. You’re “anti-ideological.” In fact, a good deal of your political philosophy is directed against the modern preoccupation with an abstraction like equality. Why is that the case?

BRADFORD: I think I write so much about political theory because in our time you have to struggle constantly to keep from being overwhelmed by the political side of things, the cost of which is living under someone else’s politics. In our day, politics is the queen of the sciences and if you’re engaged in the study of literature or sociology or theology eventually everyone forces you to relate your discipline to politics.

PARTISAN: There’s nothing wrong, is there, with politics in the old Aristotelian sense? You’re talking about “ideological” politics. So how would you distinguish between the two?

BRADFORD: Well, in making this distinction I like to use a phrase borrowed from the British political theorist Michael Oakeshott, who said that modern politics is “teleocratic,” that is, it is oriented toward accomplishing certain utopian ends, forcing everybody into conformity with some grand scheme or plan designed to do us good whether we like it or not.

PARTISAN: These schemes are always abstract, aren’t they?

BRADFORD: As a matter of fact, they are like the vast plans conjured up by the Projectors in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—they float around on a big flying island and send messages down to the poor folk below, whom they threaten to squash if they’re not obedient. What they send down are schemes for converting dung into gold, making water flow uphill, and other worthy projects.

PARTISAN: Another one of your heresies is your distrust of “absolute democracy.” You believe in demосracy that’s qualified by certain specific restrictions and you tend to view the founding of the American Republic as a “not-so-democratic” occasion. How are we not as democratic as some people would like to think we are?

BRADFORD: Well, people who wish to make us out democratic simply take American politics to be derived from one sentence in the Declaration of Independence, abstracted from the rest of that document and understood in a certain pernicious way–all men are created equal. That’s all the politics we seem to have these days, yet the Constitution ignores that sort of premise and says almost nothing about equality. And the people who drew it up made it the premise of their labor that unbridled democracy was terrible and was to be avoided at all costs. They met in Philadelphia in order to check or halt the excesses of democracy. Instead, they hoped to create something that would prevent it from ever coming into being. I am undemocratic in that spirit.

PARTISAN: How did the Founding Fathers attempt to check democracy?

BRADFORD: First of all, take the idea of majority rule. It took only a majority of the states represented in the Great Convention to get something put into the Constitution. And it took only a majority of those who were represented in nine state ratifying conventions to give the Constitution the force of fundamental law. In the wake of what they decided, however, it now takes three-quarters of the states to modify that document and before that can occur other steps must be taken as well. It’s very difficult to amend the Constitution. It takes an overwhelming majority of those in the present generation to outvote what’s been done in the past. It’s a presumption, an undemocratic presumption of the superior wisdom of those who drew the thing up in the first place.

PARTISAN: You also on occasion speak out against a certain kind of freedom. You have an essay in this collection called “More Freedom Than We Want.” What about that?

BRADFORD: Yes, it was in the Intercollegiate Review originally. I discussed some classic westerns, Shane and Red River, both novels made into classic films. I talk about these works in particular and about other images of life on the frontier as they show up in Western American literature. The most valuable thing about our classic documents is that they show that freedom which is not contained in some sort of institutional structure is a dreadful burden, something that human beings flee from after they’ve tried it a while. It looks tantalizing in the distance, the same way the mountains of Western states look wonderful and tempting; but once you get there and you’re all by yourself or you’re up against some wild creature or unprincipled adversary, then freedom becomes terrifying. It’s in the Stephen Crane short story “The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky.” Once society grows up it has to have institutions, it has to give up that dangerous adolescent stage where it doesn’t recognize the necessity for law and custom to give freedom meaning.

PARTISAN: In the light of that, as we’re conducting this interview, the New York Grand Jury has just indicted Bernhard Goetz. Everybody tends to think that he’s a hero. And in a sense, he is. In the same mold of John Wayne and Alan Ladd in those films. Have we gotten to that point again; are we back to an absence of normative institutions?

BRADFORD: Shane has to ride out of the valley after he has killed the gunslinger, because having performed the heroic act, made necessary by the absence of society, by the state of nature, he’s isolated himself from the rest of the community, which is now a little bit afraid of him. to have institutions, it has to give up that dangerous adolescent stage where it doesn’t recognize the necessity for law and custom to give freedom meaning.

PARTISAN: Isn’t that just what has happened to Goetz? Isn’t it true that New York City has been reduced to a state of nature–at least the New York subway?

BRADFORD: Yes, in the New York subway they live in a state of nature. People there are not protected against the violent, who are sentimentalized by our courts and legislators. So when Goetz takes the law into his own hands–when he becomes a law unto himself because there is no law–he isolates himself and becomes a little terrifying to the rest of us, even though we may admire him at the same time. I think that’s part of the ambivalence about Goetz. We recognize that if all of us had to carry a gun and defend ourselves it would be too great a strain for us to bear so we draw back from the image of Goetz and his smoking revolver.

PARTISAN: Are Southerners still better off than people in New York City?

BRADFORD: I think people in the South are decidedly better off. For one thing, the kind of terrorizing of the general population that’s possible in the great cities of the North is still very difficult in the South, because when threatened beyond a certain point, a Southerner defends himself in good conscience and with a certain amount of enthusiasm. That’s why they’ve never been able to work “the protection racket” in cities and small towns in the South. Even a tailor running a tailor shop is liable to have a gun there someplace. He doesn’t have to hire anybody to take care of his “personal business.” He’ll take care of it himself, thank you.

PARTISAN: Isn’t that what Goetz did? Aren’t you suggesting that that’s all right down here but not up there?

BRADFORD: In a way, yes. The social and legal institutions of the South support the individual’s right to defend himself. In New York, no one carries a visible rifle in the back of his pickup truck–which means that what Goetz did there threatened the sentimental pacifism of the social and legal ambience. Down here nobody would have brought Goetz to trial, because he would have been within his rights, as defined by the unwritten law.

PARTISAN: Maybe it’s just because it’s a subway. Suppose there was a subway that ran from north Dallas through the central city and into south Dallas. Would you feel uncomfortable riding through south Dallas or do you think that the black people there would behave better than the black people in New York?

BRADFORD: Well, I think that they would behave much better. However, maybe there’s something about a subway that causes Southerners to resist the whole idea. The idea of mass transportation in the South hasn’t gotten anywhere. That’s changing a little now here in Dallas, and we’re going to have a few more metropolitan busses, but not many.

PARTISAN: Since we’ve been tip-toeing nearer and nearer to racial questions, let’s talk about the events of the past thirty years beginning with Brown vs. The Board of Education and moving on into the era of Jesse Jackson. Do you feel that the changes that have come about in the South over the past thirty years have made a substantial difference in the way Southerners think and feel and behave? Or do you think we’ve simply altered surface arrangements and kept relationships between the races essentially the way they were, say, in the Era of Good Feeling?

BRADFORD: Oh, I think decidedly the latter. And I think blacks and whites agree on most matters. Some of the changes have not been as troublesome as we expected them to be, and some of them have been worse than anyone could have imagined. Note, for example, the black reaction to social experiments like bussing. Here in Dallas there’s as much black opposition as there is white; yet it’s impossible to be opposed to massive bussing without being called racist by Yankee social engineers. I’ve been opposed to bussing since it began. I’ve watched the name-calling, and occasionally I’ve been called names myself. But the rhetoric has been changing in recent years. The people who imposed bussing on the unwilling of both races are part of an era that’s passed into memory. Everyone recognizes that, but they’ve not yet figured out how to withdraw gracefully. When they do, bussing will cease.

PARTISAN: Within the last year and half, a federal court finally ruled in Chicago that the schools simply could not be integrated, that nobody wanted it, and so the courts gave them permission to not integrate. People don’t realize the degree to which the North is segregated, do they?

BRADFORD: No. It’s a big state secret. But the federal courts have dealt more kindly with them from the beginning. And they have a rationale–it’s called a “besetting interest.” It’s a blank check for the courts to do any damn thing they please. In this case, they’ve been talking about a besetting interest and setting aside some of the implications of Brown.

PARTISAN: Do you think they’re about ready to make an accommodation and admit that certain things can’t be done?

BRADFORD: Before William French Smith left office he initiated an action in Norfolk, Virginia which was a great groundbreaker. It was the first time since all this began that the government of the United States has gone on the attack against already-established bussing plans. In Norfolk they’re calling for the dismemberment of a bussing plan that’s been operating there for years. They want to go back to neighborhood schools.

PARTISAN: Are they doing that on the grounds that bussing according to quota is racially motivated?

BRADFORD: They’re doing it on the grounds that it doesn’t work. They’ve tried it for years and the sophistical reasoning that used to go into these things seems to have gone by the board. They do make the argument that Norfolk, Virginia has in good faith done everything it could to have a unitary system, and since an hour and a half is wasted coming and going to school, these schemes have lost all meaning and authority. Now the government says that in order to have enough money, enough public support for public schools, it’s important to stop harassing the whites to the point where they leave the public schools and their parents cease to feel any identity with public education and refuse to vote any money for it. They’re saying now that if we don’t stop bussing there won’t be any bond issues and nobody will know how to read.

PARTISAN: A few years ago, you were active in George Wallace’s campaign, and you received a lot of flack from it. Was it worth it–your entrance into partisan politics?

BRADFORD: Well, just let me say that I make no apology for what I did at that time. Governor Wallace made it possible for those who supported him to make a political statement, to express their dissatisfaction with the iron hold of ideology over public policy. He helped in those two campaigns to bring about some of the vast shifts which finally turned the country around in ‘80 and ‘84. I think there’s a line running from Goldwater’s campaign in ‘64 to Wallace’s in ‘68 and ‘72 to Reagan in ‘76, ‘80 and ‘84. And that’s not to imply an identity among those three public men. Wallace–the old Wallace–was more of a Populist than the other two.

PARTISAN: In the light of that, you have maintained in your writings that Populist candidates have arisen where a significant political sentiment was being ignored by both political parties and that in this respect Populism is a healthy thing. Otherwise the people’s dissatisfaction might manifest itself in more terrible and destructive ways. Nonetheless, doesn’t George Wallace’s conduct over the past ten years seem to indicate what a lot of people have said about the Populists past and present? That all they want is to win votes and that when the wind shifts they’re in there trimming their sails to fit the times?

BRADFORD: That doesn’t fit some of the Populists of the past at all, because some of them went down with all flags flying and all guns blazing.

PARTISAN: Who?

BRADFORD: Well, the first that comes to mind is Alfalfa Bill Murray up in Oklahoma who never gave an inch his whole life.

PARTISAN: Did he ever lose?

BRADFORD: Surely. The last thing he did at the end of his public career was to stump for Strom Thurmond in ‘48. He was always a conservative Populist. He persisted in it at a time when he was embarrassing his son, who was the leader of the regular Democrats in Oklahoma.

PARTISAN: Anybody else?

BRADFORD: W. Lee O’Daniel, Governor and Senator from Texas.

PARTISAN: Aren’t a lot of these Populists the very people you despise–egalitarian ideologues, fanners of the flames of envy?

BRADFORD: That’s always the real question. Bill Murray wasn’t. O’Daniel wasn’t. Neither was Tom Watson. I think that Watson pretty much stayed with one position throughout his public life.

PARTISAN: He changed on the race issue, though, didn’t he?

BRADFORD: Oh, only a little. He changed in his perception of what kind of a threat that issue might become to the people of Georgia. At one point, early in his life, he thought that it would be possible to include blacks in the political process without having blacks become pawns. And he changed in his perception on that subject. That’s the way he explained it. But Watson, at the end of his life, was the ultra-respectable leader of the Democratic Party in Georgia and a United States Senator. What happened was that instead of the Democrats changing Tom Watson, he changed the Democratic Party of his day. He imposed upon it a definition of respectability without giving much ground. There’s no doubt about it: Many of the Populists were opportunists. A lot of people in Southern history have gone through a Populist phase and then given up on it. Almost all Southern politicians know how to act the part of the injured Populist chieftain when the times call for it. If you look at the behavior of the fire-eaters right at the time when John Brown’s raid was largely approved all across the North in 1860, you see the old established political leaders of the South fighting off the call to secession over and over again. Most of the Populist leaders in 1860 were very high-born gentlemen. They were not sons of the wild jackass. They knew how to put on the armor of the people right at that moment and to roar back and forth across South Carolina saying, “Now you see the old-time politicians were only interested in being ‘in’ and didn’t really care what the Yankees did to us.” They ate their opponents alive and everyone turned around and ran very rapidly toward a secession convention.

There’s a lot of evidence that most of the leaders of the South, as it moved toward secession, fell in line, adopting the position that led to the withdrawal of their states from the Union. In this, I include Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis, both of whom were very reluctant to see secession. However, they soon realized that if they didn’t agree to secession then the fire-eaters who had adopted the Populist rhetoric were just about to get them thrown out as men taking their orders from Massachusetts and New York. One doesn’t think of Jefferson Davis as a Populist, but it’s very difficult to find a major Southern politician who doesn’t have a Populist phase somewhere in his life. They all know how to play that game. The fundamental question is whether or not the strategy of Populism so hems in the person who practices it, that he’s forever compromised from following a more responsible line.

PARTISAN: The academic community has always been predominately ideological, and tyrannically so. We all know stories that illustrate how little academics really believe in academic freedom. So how has your position as a Southern conservative affected your career as a teacher and scholar?

BRADFORD: To begin with, my career as a college teacher has been in small institutions or new schools, outside of the academic mainstream, despite the fact that I’ve published enough books and articles to qualify me for consideration by a major university.

PARTISAN: Do you know for certain that you have lost opportunities for major appointments, because of your political views?

BRADFORD: Yes. I know of several instances.

PARTISAN: Have you ever been pressured at institutions where you were employed?

BRADFORD: Yes, I was forced out of a position once because I supported a friend who was a Republican running for congress.

PARTISAN: Are Southern colleges as guilty of this sort of thing as Northern colleges?

BRADFORD: Yes, I think they’re worse, because most of them are governed by presidents and deans who are interested in politically reforming the region. The businessmen who control these colleges never catch on.

PARTISAN: You supported Reagan in 1980 and were proposed by famous conservatives and by fifteen or more U.S. Senators to be chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities; but you were shot down in the final days. Do you feel that the fact that you were maligned in the press and specifically the object of a whispering campaign and outright lies is the result of being Southern? And if so, has it been worth it?

BRADFORD: I think that what hasn’t been worth it was allowing the enthusiasm of my friends to deceive me that the world had changed for the better. But I also think it’s been most constructive to discover that it’s not only as bad as I thought, but even worse. The chasm which divides the intellectual community along sectional, political, cultural, and even religious lines is so vast and deep as to be beyond any kind of reconciliation in the foreseeable future. The best that can be achieved is a kind of civil commitment to discourse and disagreement, which was–at one time the basis for all types of scholarly exchange. Unfortunately, I think that only a small number of American intellectuals are now really interested in learning from people who disagree with them. I think that mostly what they’re interested in is winning intellectual skirmishes. I had a taste of all that. The experience of being a national scandal (not simply a scandal confined to the community of scholars who work on American history) was instructive and terrifying all at once.

PARTISAN: Perhaps we should note here that you became a front-page story in The New York Times, that members of the so-called Neo-conservative faction were oozing up and down the hallways of the White House telling people that you were pro-Nazi and an advocate of slavery. They really said that, didn’t they?

BRADFORD: Yes, they told all kinds of delightful little stories. They circulated a little selection of quotations extracted from my work without any kind of accompanying details. A selection of passages that were designed to frighten bureaucrats into believing that the Beast of the Apocalypse was about to be nominated. A little thing called “Quotes from Chairman Mel.”

PARTISAN: And along those lines, let me ask you this: do you not have the impression that (a) Ronald Reagan is the best we can possibly get in this country, and that (b) he ain’t too good?

BRADFORD: Well, he’s not all that I’d have him to be. There’s no question about that, though I don’t know what problems he faces in dealing with the factions of his own party and the entrenched bureaucracy. But what one judges is conduct. However, I’ve supported him unequivocally and will continue to do so.

PARTISAN: We all have, but it hasn’t done us any good, has it?

BRADFORD: Well, I think that the difference between President Reagan’s vote in ‘80 and ‘84 and the insufficient vote earned by President Ford in ‘76 comes mostly from people whose presence in the Republican column is still not being recognized by those who lead the Republican Party.

PARTISAN: You’re from Texas. How do you feel about the fact that James Baker III is the only Southerner in Mr. Reagan’s cabinet?

BRADFORD: Well, I feel the way most Southerners feel: that we’re under-represented in the councils of government. In general, we’re not consulted. Certainly the intellectual community in the region has nothing to say about those posts that really require the presence of an academic. All of that selection comes from the part of the Party that really preferred President Ford to Ronald Reagan in ‘76 and George Bush in ‘80. And some of the people who have come into the Party since the President’s election are far, far to the left of even President Ford. I know what the Bible says about those who come late to the harvest, but that only applies to the kingdom of Heaven. I think in politics that analogy does not obtain; it’s a fatal analogy. I think that if you identify yourself with those who are just barely on your side more frequently than those who are indubitably your friends, then you undermine the enthusiasm for politics that makes good people and work for you.

PARTISAN: Do you think that there is any place for Southern conservatives in the Republican Party as it’s presently constituted?

BRADFORD: I think at the state level, yes. At the national level, I’m not so sure.

PARTISAN: Can we ever go back to the Democrats?

BRADFORD: We can’t go back to the Democrats, so to some extent we’re stranded as we have been throughout a good portion of the history of the Republic.

PARTISAN: Is there any way out of that uncomfortable position?

BRADFORD: It depends on the good judgment of the people with whom we make common cause. One of the national parties will have to decide that we’re to have some input in its councils in proportion to the service we perform on the first Tuesday in November. And that party must be prepared to take the kind of flack from the national press that will come as a result. It’s still the prerogative of the Northeastern press to define the boundaries of respectability that prevent the Republican Party from acknowledging not just Southern conservatives, but by and large any of the more traditional conservatives from other regions of the country.

PARTISAN: But they have a special hate on for us because of historical questions, many of which have long since been resolved.

BRADFORD: That’s right. And because we have the wrong patrimony. We suffer from the great inherited guilt.

PARTISAN: Do you think that we should insure our acceptance into the national consensus by putting this patrimony behind us or should we continue to fight for it in the face of such formidable antagonism?

BRADFORD: I’ve never liked the example of Esau. I think we’ll do better by “remembering who we are.”

Southern Partisan 05.2, 1985

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I tossed out a question on X: Can you recommend any children’s books about the Permanent Things? Books about the seasons in their turn, the work of careful hands, the memory of family traditions, the bonds of community, the recognition of limits, and the quiet beauty of things rightly scaled? Nearly three hundred people answered. Until I became a father I had given little thought to such books. My shelves are heavy with another sort. To each who took the time to reply, thank you.

Most Recommended (10+ mentions)

Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (12 mentions)

Highly Recommended (4-9 mentions)

Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem (7 mentions)

Ox-Cart Man by Donald Hall / Barbara Cooney (6 mentions)

Redwall Series by Brian Jacques (4 mentions)

Frequently Mentioned (3 mentions)

Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey

Little Britches Series by Ralph Moody

Richard Scarry books

The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton

Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Multiple Mentions (2 mentions)

A Confederate Trilogy for Young Readers by Mary L. Williamson

All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

Andrew Lang's Fairy Tales by Andrew Lang

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Beatrix Potter by Beatrix Potter

Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo

Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown

Findus and Petson by Sven Nordqvist

Frog and Toad Series by Arnold Lobel

G.A. Henty by G.A. Henty

Hank the Cowdog by John R. Erickson

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen

James Herriot’s books

Marguerite Henry books

Meet Robert E. Lee by George W.S. Trow

Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney

My Side of the Mountain Trilogy by Jean Craighead George

Our Little Adventures by Tabitha Page

Rascal by Sterling North

Swallows & Amazons by Arthur Ransome

Tasha Tudor by Tasha Tudor

The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden

The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant

The Story of Ping by Marjorie Flack

The Year at Maple Hill Farm by Alice & Martin Provensen

Thornton Burgess Books

Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson

Single Mentions (Alphabetical)

100 Cupboards by N.D. Wilson

A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson

A Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende & Harry Devlin

A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck

A Farm Through Time by Angela Wilkes

A Is for Appalachia by Linda Hager Pack

A Year in a Castle by Rachel Coombs

A.A. Milne Books by A.A. Milne

All of a Kind Family by Sydney Taylor

Around the Farm

Babar Series by Jean de Brunhoff

Barbara Cooney's books

Bedford Forrest: Boy on Horseback by Aileen W. Parks

Berenstain Bears by Stan & Jan Berenstain

Billy and Blaze Series by C.W. Anderson

Roger Lancelyn Green books

Brer Rabbit in the Briar Patch by Joel Chandler Harris

Carry on, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

Chris Van Allsburg books

Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander

Collodi's Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

Crinkleroot's Guide to Walking in Wild Places by Jim Arnosky

David Wiesner Books by David Wiesner

Diary of an Early American Boy by Eric Sloane

Dulaire's Book of Greek Myths by Ingri & Edgar Parin d'Aulaire

E. Nesbit books

Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter

Edward Eager by Edward Eager

Enid Blyton books

Eric Sloane books

Family Sabbatical by Carol Ryrie Brink

Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Fifty Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin

First Peas to the Table: How Thomas Jefferson Inspired a School Garden by Susan Grigsby

Flicka, Ricka, Dicka Go to Market by Maj Lindman

Foxfire Series by Eliot Wigginton

Freckles by Gene Stratton Porter

Gail Gibbons by Gail Gibbons

Gene Stratton Porter books

Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rolvaag

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun

Harris and Me by Gary Paulsen

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

Hello Lighthouse by Sophie Blackall

How Does My Garden Grow by Gerda Muller

I Am a Bunny by Richard Scarry

Island Boy by Barbara Cooney

It's Corn Picking Time by Jill Esbaum

Jan Brett books by Jan Brett

Jane Austen books by Jane Austen

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

Little Blue Truck's Beep-Along Book by Alice Schertle

Long Road In a Short Day by Gary D. Schmidt

Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Louis L'Amour by Louis L'Amour

Marguerite Makes a Book by Bruce Robertson

Mary Azarian books

Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney

Meet Andrew Jackson by Ormonde de Kay Jr.

Meet Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter

Mike Mulligan & His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton

Mother Goose

Old Swedish Fairy Tales by Anna Wahlenberg

One Morning in Maine by Robert McCloskey

Our Animal Friends by Alice & Martin Provensen

Owl Moon by Jane Yolen

Pelle's New Suit by Elsa Beskow

Peter Spier books by Peter Spier

Pig-tail Days in Old Seattle by Sophie Frye Bass

Pilgrim Cat by Carol Peacock

Poems to Read to the Very Young by Josette Frank

Ralph Moody Books by Ralph Moody

Redwall Cookbook by Brian Jacques

Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran

Rush Revere series by Rush Limbaugh

Saint George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges

Sarah Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan

Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare

Snipp, Snapp, Snurr, and the Buttered Bread by Maj Lindman

Stephen Biestie books

Stephen W. Meader books

Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski

Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola

Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson

The Adventures of Telemachus by François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon

The American Boy's Handy Book by Daniel Carter Beard

The American Girl's Handy Book by Lina Beard

The Bear on Hemlock Mountain by Alice Dalgliesh

The Big Snow by Berta & Elmer Hader

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner

The Borrowers Series by Mary Norton

The Canada Geese Quilt by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock

The Children's Book of Virtues by William J. Bennett

The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey by Susan Wojciechowski

The Curious Christmas Trail by Haley Stewart

The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea Buchanan

The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig

The Field and Forest Handy Book by Daniel Carter Beard

The Fourteen Bears by Evelyn Scott

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

The Good Master by Kate Seredy

The Great Turkey Walk by Kathleen Karr

The Heavenly Tenants by William Maxwell

The Hundred-Year Barn by Patricia MacLachlan

The Lassie Stories by Dorothea Snow

The Life of General Robert E. Lee by Mary L. Williamson

The Lion's Paw by Robb White

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Milkman's Boy by Donald Hall

The Old Man and the Boy by Robert Ruark

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald

The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills

The Railway Series by Rev. W. Awdry

The Tale of Three Trees by Angela Elwell Hunt

The Tree Lady: The True Story of How One Tree-Loving Woman Changed a City Forever by H. Joseph Hopkins

The Very Last First Time by Jan Andrews

The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree by Gloria Houston

Through the Mickle Woods by Valiska Gregory

Tomie dePaola books

Too Many Pumpkins by Linda White

Too Much Noise by Ann McGovern

Tractor by Sally Sutton

Tractor: The Definitive Visual History by Various

Treasury for Children by James Herriot

Tuttle Twins series by Connor Boyack

Up in the Garden, Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner

Walter Farley books

Watership Down by Richard Adams

What Happens in the Autumn by Sara Venino

When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant

Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

White Fang by Jack London

Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World by Wendell Berry

Wilder Goode Series by S.J. Dahlstrom

Odds and Ends

Ambleside Online Free Homeschool Curriculum

Beautiful Feet Books

Cats and Sixty Foot Whales: Reflections on Children's Books

Charlotte Mason List

Emily Finley's Substack

John Senior's 1000 Good Books List

Logos Elementary Literature List

Redeemed Reader

Russell Kirk's List: Humane Literature for Young Readers

Sonlight Homeschool Curriculum

Yesterday's Classics

I was also told a good place to find children’s book recommendations is the Caldecott and Newbery Award lists. The ALA gives these prizes each year for outstanding art (Caldecott) and literature (Newbery). The ‘40s and ‘50s Caldecott winners in particular are worth a look.

I’m currently working on an essay for an actual magazine and happened upon the March 1984 issue of Nashville! magazine. Inside was an interview with Andrew Lytle and an article on the Fugitive Poets and Southern Agrarians. Thought y’all would appreciate it.

An Interview with Andrew Lytle

One of the most adamant essays in I'll Take My Stand is “The Hind Tit” written by Andrew Nelson Lytle. Born in Murfreesboro in 1902, Lytle was educated at Vanderbilt, Yale, Oxford and the Sorbonne. Today, at 82, Lytle lives on Monteagle Mountain in a log cabin that belonged to his mother.

An author, historian and professor for more than 50 years, Andrew Lytle has eloquently defended the rich and gracious morality that he considers uniquely and innately Southern. He has been called one of the South's finest contemporary novelists. Presently, his work is receiving long-deserved attention. His 1957 novel, The Velvet Horn, has been reissued. An anthology is planned, and other Lytle publications are soon to be reissued.

The air is clear and very cold on top of Monteagle Mountain. Mr. Lytle opens the door of his cabin. There are family portraits on the walls, Persian rugs on the hardwood floors and antiques everywhere. “Sit by the fire and warm yourself, daughter,” he says, indicating a rocker in front of the stone hearth. His mind is very clear, his memory excellent. He spills over with history and with his message.

Nashville: Why did the Agrarian movement happen at Vanderbilt? Why not some other place?

Lytle: Only God can answer that question. Nashville was the center of a homogeneous society. Most of the writers came from Tennessee and Kentucky, nearby. They had a common inheritance, but they were all there by accident. What brought them all together was this. The South had been defeated during the War of Northern Invasion, but after the first World War we were disconcerted to find that things were not equal yet. There was the same old antipathy. The South was still a conquered province. It was a common feeling among us that industrial might would obliterate the family and society. We were protesting, our backs to the wall. We had no sense of being prophets. But the depression set in and made us look like prophets.

Nashville: What is your impression of the reaction to I'll Take my Stand?

Lytle: There were two reactions to what we said. Southern liberals criticized us, and others were sympathetic but didn’t believe it would happen. And what was happening was not only wrong, it was dangerous, it could destroy a way of life. Now we have the complete triumph of the industrial revolution, but our critics couldn’t understand that the dominant way of life could disappear. Those who called us romantics were wrong. We were advocating something real. Agrarianism isn’t a myth. Land is not a myth. Corn is not a myth. We took the word Agrarian because the best societies were based on close association with the land. The family and the family-size farm and business were the basic unit of society. By destroying the family, you make the individual dependent on some abstract entity — like a federal government agency. What we have is the abstract superimposition of the financial corporate state on a system based on real property.

Nashville: About land and corn — you once tried to become an Agrarian, a farmer. What happened to you, and what about groups who try to return to the land today like the Farm in Summertown?

Lytle: I bought a little “throw-away” farm, but there wasn’t any point. It was impossible to be independent. I couldn’t afford machinery to really farm. You had none of the usual habits of the farm and the town I grew up in. There was no system of support, no country community. In the 1940s I might have taken eggs to town to sell. You can’t take anything to town now and get cash for it.

As for the Farm, you can’t dope and farm, too. They are making an effort to recall what has been lost. But they formed a kind of cult. You can’t do that. They are, at least, dealing with nature.1

Land is a living thing. It takes a fine religious belief in what you’re doing. Industrialism uses nature, exploits it and destroys it. Agrarianism is a Christian and European attitude toward the land. From the land comes bread and meat and independence — and democracy. You'll be careful who you vote for for governor because you have something real to lose.

What the Agrarians were trying to do was to reuse, restore somewhat, our European inheritance which was a Christian inheritance. The South was in a formless way still religious.

Nashville: What do you mean by Christian and European?

Lytle: God was sovereign. The land was His and everything in it. The king was His secular overseer and the bishop His religious. The moment that God ceased to be sovereign, history took the place of God. History is man judging man, not God judging man. Everything becomes relative, and chaos is the result.

In the European Agrarian society and later here in the South there was family, connections, order. Today there is no division between what's public and what's private. To confuse the two is the basis of tyranny. It violates the individual’s integrity.

Nashville: If industrialism has triumphed, then what hope do Southerners have of building lives of quality?

Lytle: What is divine in man is his sense of craftsmanship. If catastrophe happens, you may survive if you are an artist, if you can create a thing of utility or beauty. The economic basis of Christendom was craftsmanship. You must either make or do. That’s your only defense against an impersonal, industrial state.

The Company Was Olympian: Fugitives and Agrarians by Amy Lynch

During the early 1920s, the Fugitive poets called Nashville home, and later that same decade the city saw the publication of the controversial Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. This flurry of literary activity, often called the Southern Renaissance, had its beginnings in 1914 when John Crowe Ransom came to Vanderbilt to teach English.

Born in Pulaski, Ransom was a Rhodes Scholar and an Oxford-trained classicist philosopher. He soon encountered a promising student, Donald Davidson, from Campbellsville, Tennessee. They became friends. During the summer of 1915, Davidson and fellow student Stanley Johnson began visiting coed Goldie Hirsch at her home near Vanderbilt. There the students met Goldie’s half brother, Sid Hirsch, and found themselves fascinated by his far-flung and intriguing ideas. Hirsch was challenging, domineering and, the students decided, blatantly wrong about some things. Davidson and Johnson decided that the person to disabuse Hirsch of some of his fantastic misconceptions was Ransom, their English instructor. Ransom met Hirsch, and found him stimulating. The four began meeting regularly to discuss the classics, faraway places, art, and the abstract.

Sidney Mttron Hirsch, (1885-1962) the center of and catalyst for the discussions, was no ordinary Nashvillian. He ran away from home to join the Navy at an early age and for several years traveled throughout Asia and Europe. Fascinated by the mystical and remote, Hirsch read widely but without traditional guidance or education. He formulated some fantastic notions about the world. He also grew into an exceptionally handsome man. The heavyweight boxing champion of his navy fleet, Hirsch modeled for Rodin. He cultivated friendships with literary greats like Gertrude Stein and Edwin Arlington Robinson, and finally he tried writing too. A play entitled The Fire Regained was the robust result. It was perhaps the most outlandish theatrical performance in Nashville history.

The 1913 extravaganza featured classical characters and was performed in front of the newly-completed Parthenon. The cast numbered 600. A full-page advertisement in the papers invited visitors to see “The Flight of a Thousand Doves, The Revel of Wood Nymphs, the Thrilling Chariot Race, the Raising of the Shepherd from the Dead, and the Orgy of the Flaming Torches.” Railroads reduced their fares for out-of-town visitors, and trolley companies ran special cars to accommodate the 5,000 people who turned out for six performances between May 5 and May 8.

Those performances were nearly incomprehensible, but The Fire Regained was a smashing success. On the second day, one of the chariots rolled over in a cloud of dust — raised, perhaps, by the 300 sheep in the cast. The thousand doves in their flight implicate one of the temple virgins who is sentenced to be burned for her impurity. Happily, she is rescued by Hermes and turns out to be Athena herself. A happy ending, even if audiences couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

After The Fire Regained Hirsch remained in Nashville, restless and intense, but writing nothing of literary note. His one play remained his only achievement as a writer, but his influence on American letters was just beginning. Throughout 1915 other students joined the meetings: William Yandell Elliot from Murfreesboro, William Frierson and Alec Stevenson.2

Evidently the meetings were fun. During 1915 Stevenson called them “a gorgeous time.” He wrote to a friend, “Nat Hirsch, Stanley Johnson, Donald Davidson, John Ransom, and Sidney Hirsch were the company last night and it was Olympian.”

The weekly meetings continued the following fall, but behind the scenes something happened that would eventually change the group forever. At 28, John Crowe Ransom began to write poetry. The story goes that one afternoon he asked Donald Davidson to go for a walk on campus, and he showed his first poem to his young friend. Shortly afterward, World War I broke up the group temporarily. Several Fugitives fought overseas, and some stayed in Europe to study after the war was over. But the core group returned to Vanderbilt in the early 1920s. They began to meet again in the home of Hirsch’s brother-in-law, James Marshal Frank, where Hirsch was living. Today the Frank home at 3802 Whitland Avenue is marked by a state historical marker. The discussions resumed with 11 or 12 regulars. Allen Tate from Kentucky joined the group.

In the fall of 1921, Ransom showed one of his poems to the group and found they made good critics. That evening proved so exciting that other members began bringing their verse. Talk turned from philosophy to poetry, and throughout the winter of 1921-22 the poems piled higher. In March someone suggested that they publish their work, and the proposed magazine was named The Fugitive. The magazine’s title was a reference to Hirsch’s conception of the archetypal fugitive in poetry — an outcast, a wanderer often with mysterious knowledge. The first issue made clear, however, that this Fugitive was fleeing the “high-caste Brahmins of the Old South.” Proclaiming that traditional Southern Literature had “expired,” the Fugitives strove to produce a new style of poetry. They had little use for moonlight and roses.

The first issue of The Fugitive must have been fun to produce. It contains poems under pseudonyms like Robin Gallivant, Roger Prim, L. Oafer, and Henry Feathertop. The 500 copies sold well in Nashville, and the rest were sent to editors across the country. Reviews were mixed at best. Only three copies were sold in New York. Merrill Moore joined the group soon after the appearance of the first issue, and Robert Penn Warren and Jesse Wills joined during the next year. The members became more seriously committed to poetry.

The Fugitive was published until 1925. By that time, members had developed other interests which took priority. From then until 1928 the group slowly drifted apart. 1928 marked the publication of an anthology and the formal end of Fugitive poetry.

Agrarians. In 1925, when the last Fugitive was issued, the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, caused a national sensation. During the hot circus-like summer, Northern reporters interviewed rabid fundamentalists, local “characters,” and tobacco-chewing moonshiners squatting in the shade in front of the courthouse. Tennesseans were portrayed in the Northern Press as ignorant, obstinate and lazy. Nashvillians resented the picture painted by the press, and over the next five years the four primary members of the Fugitive group (Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson) along with eight other Southerners developed a strong and complicated response.

That response was a symposium on Southern culture and history entitled I’ll Take My Stand, and they certainly did. The Agrarians, as the group came to be called, argued that Southern society fostered individual integrity, stability, character, and aesthetic qualities unavailable in the industrialized North. Southern society was still tied to the land, they argued, and therefore allowed for a happy integration of work and play as well as for order and quality. Advances in education, economy and the arts must not be made at the expense of Agrarian values. The North, they were convinced, had lost this precious heritage and had given way to impersonal and brutalizing industrialism. The South must not do the same.

I'll Take My Stand produced as heated a controversy as any Southern publication ever printed. The authors were deluged with editorials, newspaper articles and letters of protest from every part of the country. It was called the “most audacious book ever written by Southerners.” Critics called the authors dreamers trying to stop progress, Neo-Confederates, and romantics trying to escape the realities of modern life.

In spite of criticism, the Agrarians continued their scholarly defense of Southern Agrarian traditions and values. Some of them became very well-known. Allen Tate wrote to Donald Davidson in 1942 “Never fear: we shall be remembered when our snipers are forgotten.” So it would seem. I’ll Take My Stand remains a landmark in Southern literature, an articulate defense of the humane tradition, of beauty over progress, and of spiritual wealth over material profits.

A Fugitive and Agrarian Bibliography by Marice Wolfe

The Works:

The Fugitive. Nashville, 1922-1925. Nineteen issues. The little poetry magazine through which the Fugitives discovered themselves and were discovered.

I’ll Take My Stand: The South Brothers, 1930. Reprinted by Louisiana State University Press, 1977. The Agrarian manifesto — disparate views of a common cause.

Davidson, Donald, Southern Writers in the Modern World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958. An insider-historian’s view of the genesis of the Fugitives and the Agrarians.

Lytle, Andrew Nelson. A Wake For the Living. New York: Crown, 1975. His family as subject offers an invitation to explore the bases of Lytle’s fiction and his Agrarian beliefs.

Ransom, John Crowe. Poems and Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. An opportunity to sample vintage Ransom in poetry and prose.

Tate, Allen. Collected Poems: 1919-1976. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1977.

Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946. Robert Penn Warren Talking: Interviews 1950-1978. Floyd Watkins and John T. Hiers, eds. New York: Random House, 1980. The most various and durable of the productive Warren’s work in many genres and a chance to listen to the man.

The Studies:

A Band of Prophets: The Vanderbilt Agrarians After Fifty Years. William C. Havard and Walter Sullivan, eds. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Fugitives’ Reunion: Conversations at Vanderbilt May 3-5, 1956. Rob Roy Purdy, ed. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1959.

Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. The Wary Fugitives. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Stewart, John L. The Burden of Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.

Young, Thomas Daniel. Waking Their Neighbors Up: The Nashville Agrarians Rediscovered. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982.

The books listed above and a thousand more by or about the Fugitives and Agrarians can be found in the Jesse E. Wills Fugitive/Agrarian Collection housed in the Special Collections section of the Vanderbilt University Library. The collection also contains 75 shelf-feet of letters and manuscripts relating to the writers and poets. Especially valuable are the letters of Andrew Lytle and Donald Davidson. Splendid photographs of the Nashville-based writers line the walls. If you want to learn about the Fugitives and Agrarians, Special Collections is a delightful place to browse. The General Library Building is located at 219 21st Avenue, South. Hours for the Special Collections section are 8-5 Monday through Friday and 9-2 Saturday. Phone: 322-2807. (Marice Wolfe is Head of Special Collections at the Vanderbilt University Library.)

Nashville 11.12, 1984-03

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When Donald R. Ellegood arrived in Baton Rouge in 1954, he brought with him a Distinguished Flying Cross earned in the Pacific and four years of publishing experience, much of it learned on the job. He was twenty-nine years old.

Born in 1924 in Lawton, Oklahoma, Ellegood had served as a navigator in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, flying bomber missions over the Pacific. After the war, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the University of Oklahoma. There, he began his publishing career as an editorial fellow at the University of Oklahoma Press under Savoie Lottinville, a pioneer of regional publishing.1 In 1951, he joined the Johns Hopkins University Press as editor and production editor. Then LSU called.

Shortly after settling into his Baton Rouge office, Ellegood encountered Eric Voegelin, then teaching at LSU. From their meeting emerged the Press’s role as publisher of Voegelin’s masterwork, the multivolume Order and History. Soon after, historian T. Harry Williams became both author and advisor to the Press, contributing two books on Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard.

But perhaps Ellegood’s most consequential decision came when he approached C. Vann Woodward, whom he had known at Johns Hopkins, with a proposal to gather the historian’s scattered essays into a single volume. That book, The Burden of Southern History, would become a landmark in American historical writing. In courting Woodward, Ellegood made a promise that would become legendary among editors: to “do anything reasonable” to ensure the book was “popularly reviewed, forcefully promoted and not priced too high” to reach the widest possible audience.

The strategy worked brilliantly. By 1960, on the eve of the Civil War centennial, the Library of Congress compiled its definitive reading list on the conflict. LSU Press had published more books on that list—seventeen—than any other publisher in the country, academic or commercial. “Publishing these books was a lot of fun, and appropriate for the Press,” Ellegood recalled, “and they sold well.”

The Press’s influence extended far beyond Confederate history. George Lowery’s definitive Louisiana Birds appeared in 1955, launching a distinguished list in natural history.2 The Coastal Studies Series began in 1957. A jazz history program took root, along with textbooks like Edwin A. Davis’s Louisiana: The Pelican State. The Press even ventured into phonograph recordings, releasing a folklore collection prepared by Harry Oster.

By October 1959, the thirty-five-year-old Ellegood was juggling some 350 manuscripts: biographies of Confederate generals, an eyewitness account of the eighteenth-century Haitian revolution, the secrets of modern hurricane forecasting.3

Ellegood’s eye for talent extended beyond manuscripts to people. In 1959, he hired Richard Wentworth as sales and promotion manager; in 1962, Charles P. East joined as acquisitions editor. Both would later succeed him as director. Among his other hires: Staige Blackford, who would become editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review; Ernst Seemann, future director of the University of Alabama Press; and Barney McKee, who would head the University Press of Mississippi.

When Charles P. East arrived in 1962, he discovered that Ellegood had initially offered the position to poet James Dickey, then in England. “I can’t imagine now that he would have taken the job, or if he had, that he would have stayed very long,” East later wrote. “It was not his kind of job or his part of the country.” Within months of East’s arrival, Ellegood departed for Seattle and the directorship of the University of Washington Press.4

Though Richard M. Weaver’s Visions of Order was published by LSU Press in 1964, after Ellegood had left for Washington and a year after Weaver’s death, it was Ellegood who, in January 1961, responded to Weaver’s inquiry with a prompt invitation to submit the manuscript for review. Weaver accepted at once. But for more than two months he revised, consulting friends, adjusting chapters, polishing lines. Only on April 4, 1961, was the manuscript finally sent to Baton Rouge.5

In Seattle, Ellegood pioneered co-publication with Japanese and other Asian publishers, developing distinguished lists in Asian history, marine sciences, and art history. At the State Department’s behest, he traveled to Russia and China to establish working relations with Soviet and Chinese publishers. He served as president of the American Association of University Presses, cementing his reputation as one of the most innovative publishers of his generation.6

Donald Russell Ellegood died in 2003.7

The Books (164 of them)

1954

Davis, Edwin Adams. The Barber of Natchez.

Emerson, Everett H. Contributions to the Humanities.

Falconer, A. F., ed. The Percy Letters v. 4, The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes.

Land, Mary. Louisiana Cookery.

Markham, James Walter. Bovard of the Post-Dispatch.

Masterson, William H. William Blount.

Parks, Joseph Howard. General Edmund Kirby Smith, C.S.A.

Prothro, James Warren. The Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920’s.

Smith, T. Lynn. Brazil: People and Institutions.

Uhler, John Earle. Morley’s Canzonets for Two Voices.

1955

Charmatz, Jan P. Comparative Studies in Community Property Law.

Edgerton, C. W. Sugarcane and Its Diseases.

Fliess, Peter J. Freedom of the Press in the German Republic, 1918-1933.

Howe, Henry V. Handbook of Ostracod Taxonomy.

Lowery, George H. Louisiana Birds.

Rubin, Louis D. Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth.

Stephenson, Wendell Holmes. The South Lives in History: Southern Historians and Their Legacy.

Stone, Kate. Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868.

Watkins, W. B. C. An Anatomy of Milton’s Verse.

Whitfield, Irène Thérèse. Acadian Folk Songs.

Williams, Aubrey L. Pope’s Dunciad: A Study of Its Meaning.

Williams, T. Harry. P.G.T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray.

Winzerling, Oscar William. Acadian Odyssey.

1956

Clark, William Bell. Ben Franklin’s Privateers: A Naval Epic of the American Revolution.

Fordham, Jefferson Barnes. A Larger Concept of Community.

Gellhorn, Walter. Individual Freedom and Governmental Restraints.

Horn, Stanley F. The Decisive Battle of Nashville.

Longstreet, Stephen. The Real Jazz, Old and New.

Snell, John L. The Meaning of Yalta: Big Three Diplomacy and the New Balance of Power.

Vandiver, Frank E. Rebel Brass: The Confederate Command System.

Voegelin, Eric. Order and History I: Israel and Revelation.

Watson, Melvin Ray. Magazine Serials and the Essay Tradition, 1746-1820.

Williams, T. Harry. With Beauregard in Mexico: The Mexican War Reminiscences of P.G.T. Beauregard.

Wittke, Carl Frederick. The Irish in America.

1957

Alden, John Richard. The South in the Revolution, 1763-1789.

Baker, James Volant. The Sacred River: Coleridge’s Theory of the Imagination.

Beers, Henry Putney. The French in North America: A Bibliographical Guide to French Archives, Reproductions, and Research Missions.

Berns, Walter. Freedom, Virtue & the First Amendment.

Davidson, Donald. Still Rebels, Still Yankees, and Other Essays.

DeVane, William C. The American University in the Twentieth Century.

Duffy, John. Parson Clapp of the Strangers’ Church of New Orleans.

Dufour, Charles L. Gentle Tiger: The Gallant Life of Roberdeau Wheat.

Hassler, Warren W. General George B. McClellan: Shield of the Union.

Hoffman, Frederick John. Freudianism and the Literary Mind.

Hopkins, William C. Special Problems in Southern Forest Management.

Howard, Perry H. Political Tendencies in Louisiana, 1812-1952.

Lewis, Aneirin, ed. The Percy Letters v. 5, The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Evan Evans.

Sugg, Redding S. Nuclear Energy in the South.

Uhler, John Earle. Morley’s Canzonets for Three Voices.

Voegelin, Eric. Order and History II: The World of the Polis.

West, Robert Cooper. The Pacific Lowlands of Colombia: A Negroid Area of the American Tropics.

Yates, Norris Wilson. William T. Porter and the Spirit of the Times: A Study of the Big Bear School of Humor.

1958

Brownlee, Richard S. Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861-1865.

Cunningham, Horace Herndon. Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service.

Duffy, John. The Rudolph Matas History of Medicine in Louisiana.

Dunbar, Gary S. Historical Geography of the North Carolina Outer Banks.

Grantham, Dewey W. Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South.

Haag, William George. The Archeology of Coastal North Carolina.

Hopkins, William C. Management of Bottomland Forests.

Howe, Henry V. Introduction to the Study of Cretaceous Ostracoda.

Kyle, John H. The Building of TVA: An Illustrated History.

Loggins, Vernon. Where the Word Ends: The Life of Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

Mason, Alpheus Thomas. The Supreme Court From Taft to Warren.

McIntire, William G. Prehistoric Indian Settlements of the Changing Mississippi River Delta.

Nafziger, Ralph O. Introduction to Mass Communications Research.

Sittler, Joseph. The Structure of Christian Ethics.

Stewart, Randall. American Literature & Christian Doctrine.

Walker, Robert Harris. American Studies in the United States: A Survey of College Programs.

Wallach, Kate. Research in Louisiana Law.

1959

Bedsole, Vergil L. Louisiana State University: A Pictorial Record of the First Hundred Years.

Brown, Clair A. Vegetation of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History.

Craven, Avery. Civil War in the Making, 1815-1860.

Cumming, Kate. Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse.

Curry, Walter Clyde. Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns.

Davis, Edwin Adams. Louisiana, the Pelican State.

Glass, Bentley. Science and Liberal Education.

Hayes, Rutherford B. Teach the Freeman: The Correspondence of Rutherford B. Hayes and the Slater Fund For Negro Education, 1881-1887.

Kramer, William B. Louisiana Law Enforcement Handbook.

Leach, Richard H. The Administration of Interstate Compacts.

Loos, John L. Oil On Stream!: A History of Interstate Oil Pipe Line Company, 1909-1959.

Merrill, John Calhoun. A Handbook of the Foreign Press.

Nichols, Roy F. Religion and American Democracy.

Parham, Althea de Peuch. My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions.

Patrick, Robert. Reluctant Rebel: The Secret Diary of Robert Patrick, 1861-1865.

Vickery, Olga W. The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation.

Warner, Ezra J. Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders.

1960

Brown, William Burlie. The People’s Choice: The Presidential Image in the Campaign Biography.

Brunn, H. O. The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

Burns. Paul Y. Southern Forest Soils.

Buttrick, George Arthur. Biblical Thought and the Secular University.

Clark, William Bell. George Washington’s Navy: Being An Account of His Excellency’s Fleet in New England Waters.

Dellis, Nicholas P.; Herbert K. Stone. The Training of Psychotherapists: A Multidisciplinary Approach.

Donald, David Herbert. Why the North Won the Civil War.

Dunn, Gordon E. Atlantic Hurricanes.

Halstead, Murat. Three Against Lincoln: Murat Halstead Reports the Caucuses of 1860.

Harris, Robert Jennings. The Quest for Equality: The Constitution, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

Lowery, George H. Louisiana Birds.

McNeir, Waldo F. Studies in American Literature.

Patrick, Rembert W. The Fall of Richmond.

Rodman, Selden. The Insiders: Rejection and Rediscovery of Man in the Arts of Our Time.

Sugg, Redding S. The Southern Regional Education Board: Ten Years of Regional Cooperation in Higher Education.

Williams, T. Harry. Americans at War: The Development of the American Military System.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History.

1961

Abernethy, Thomas Perkins. The South in the New Nation, 1789-1819. A History of the South 4.

Alden, John Richard. The First South.

Bettersworth, John Knox. Mississippi in the Confederacy, As They Saw It.

Cullen, John B. Old Times in the Faulkner Country.

Czarnowski, M. S. Dynamics of Even-Aged Forest Stands.

De Grummond, Jane Lucas. The Baratarians and the Battle of New Orleans.

Dyer, John P. From Shiloh to San Juan.

Greene, John C. Darwin and the Modern World View.

Jones, Archer. Confederate Strategy From Shiloh to Vicksburg.

Larson, Arthur. When Nations Disagree: A Handbook on Peace Through Law.

McCracken, Harlan Linneus. Keynesian Economics in the Stream of Economic Thought.

Perkins, Dexter. The United States and Latin America.

Rabel, Lili. Khasi, a Language of Assam.

Richardson, Walter Cecil. History of the Court of Augmentations, 1536-1554.

Rutland, Robert Allen. George Mason, Reluctant Statesman.

Sasek, Lawrence A. The Literary Temper of the English Puritans.

Sauer, Jonathan D. Coastal Plant Geography of Mauritius.

Silver, James W. Mississippi in the Confederacy: As Seen in Retrospect.

Slichter, Sumner H. Economic Growth in the United States: Its History, Problems, and Prospects.

1962

Ambrose, Stephen E. Halleck: Lincoln’s Chief of Staff.

Anderson, John Q. Louisiana Swamp Doctor.

Bertrand, Alvin Lee. Rural Land Tenure in the United States: A Socio-Economic Approach to Problems, Programs, and Trends.

Glaze, Thomas Edward. Business Administration for Colleges and Universities.

Hassler, Warren W. Commanders of the Army of the Potomac.

Havard, William C. The Politics of Mis-Representation.

Howe, Henry V. Ostracod Taxonomy.

McNeir, Waldo F. Studies in Comparative Literature.

McNeir, Waldo F. Studies in English Renaissance Literature.

Noggle, Burl. Teapot Dome: Oil and Politics in the 1920’s.

Parks, Joseph Howard. General Leonidas Polk, C.S.A., The Fighting Bishop.

Post, Lauren C. Cajun Sketches From the Prairies of Southwest Louisiana.

Rickels, Milton. Thomas Bangs Thorpe: Humorist of the Old Southwest.

Schmitt, Hans A. The Path to European Union: From the Marshall Plan to the Common Market.

Schuman, Frederick L. The Cold War: Retrospect and Prospect: Three Lectures.

Simpson, Lewis P. The Federalist Literary Mind: Selections from the Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review, 1803-1811, Including Documents Relating to the Boston Athenaeum.

Staar, Richard Felix. Poland, 1944-1962: The Sovietization of a Captive People.

Yiannopoulos, A. N. Negligence Clauses in Ocean Bills of Lading.

1963

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country.

Casey, Ralph Droz. The Press in Perspective.

Cunningham, Edward. The Port Hudson Campaign, 1862-1863.

Delaney, Patrick J. V. Quaternary Geologic History of the Coastal Plain of Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil.

Ford, Margaret Patricia. Who’s Who in Faulkner.

Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson. Collected Stories.

Green, Adwin Wigfall. The Man Bilbo.

Hall, Jerome. Comparative Law and Social Theory.

Hammer, Carl. Studies in German Literature.

Hartt, Julian Norris. The Lost Image of Man.

Havard, William C. The Louisiana Elections of 1960.

Morgan, James P. Mudlumps at the Mouth of South Pass, Mississippi River: Sedimentology, Paleontology, Structure, Origin, and Relation to Deltaic Processes.

Nafziger, Ralph O. Introduction to Mass Communications Research.

Nichols, Marie Hochmuth. Rhetoric and Criticism.

Poggie, John J. Coastal Pioneer Plants and Habitat in the Tampico Region, Mexico.

Pritchard, John Paul. Literary Wise Men of Gotham: Criticism in New York, 1815-1860.

Read, William A. Louisiana-French.

Robertson, James I. The Stonewall Brigade.

Saucier, Roger T. Recent Geomorphic History of the Pontchartrain Basin.

Simkins, Francis Butler. The Everlasting South.

Smith, T. Lynn. Brazil: People and Institutions.

Taylor, Joe Gray. Negro Slavery in Louisiana.

Wilz, John Edward. In Search of Peace: The Senate Munitions Inquiry, 1934-36.

Winters, John D. The Civil War in Louisiana.

This interview between Professor Marion Montgomery (1925-2011) and Dr. Alan Harrelson took place on April 17, 2009, in Crawford, Georgia. The recording preserves their exchange as it occurred, edited only to remove repetitions and verbal stumbles. This conversation, previously unknown and never before published, appears here for the first time. I am grateful to Patrick Seay for introducing me to Dr. Harrelson, and to Dr. Harrelson for his permission to transcribe and share this important conversation. The transcript and audio file is available to download below.

The Transcript

Harrelson: All right, Professor Marion Montgomery here, April 17, 2009. Professor Montgomery, could you start with a brief story of your career describing some of the high points that you’ve experienced?

Montgomery: Well, I celebrated my 84th birthday yesterday, and so you’re asking me for several volumes. I don’t know whether to get into it too much. I was born in the small town of Thomaston down in middle Georgia, and lived there until World War II when I went into the Army. When I came out, I came up to the University of Georgia to do my undergraduate work, and have lived in this part of the state ever since. That was in 1947, so we’ve been here a good long while, this part of the state.

Harrelson: And you taught at the University of Georgia for how many years?

Montgomery: I taught there for 35 or 40 years. Looking back, I can’t count and be sure how long, but for a considerable time. And I’ve been retired since, oh, let’s see. December of 1987, so.

Harrelson: My goodness. That’s a good spell of time since teaching.

Montgomery: Yes sir. Though I lecture around and travel here and there.

Harrelson: Professor Montgomery, do you sympathize with 20th century Southern Conservatism, Agrarianism, things of this nature?

Montgomery: Well, of course, for many years while I was teaching, my office mate was William Davidson, who was Donald Davidson’s brother. So I was tuned in to the Fugitive Agrarians very early. He was an undergraduate teacher for me and so I’m pretty well tuned in to that dimension of Southern history.

Harrelson: Did you ever have any relations particularly with Donald Davidson?

Montgomery: Indeed. I met him several times and was rather closely familiar with him through his brother, of course, since his brother was my office mate. He was of importance to me in his work, of course. And we corresponded some. I remember, for instance, I did a little book on T.S. Eliot, and he taught Eliot for years at Vanderbilt. And so I got him to read it for me, and he liked pretty well what I was doing with it.

Harrelson: Were there any other of the original Twelve Southerners who composed I’ll Take My Stand that you were familiar with personally, or at least acquainted with?

Montgomery: Oh, yeah. Andrew Lytle was a good friend. He’s been here to Crawford two or three times, I think. And there’s the next generation that included Cleanth Brooks, who participated in Allen Tate’s Who Owns America. He and I were good friends as well. I knew Tate and we corresponded some. There were several of those people that I was on the periphery with, you know.

Harrelson: Well, I think that’s extraordinarily important.

Montgomery: Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate’s first wife, was a good friend as well.

Harrelson: My goodness, so you were familiar with a goodly portion of the original Agrarians. As far as Andrew Lytle is concerned, he wrote The Long Night, I think is what it was.

Montgomery: Amongst other good novels.

Harrelson: Yes, sir, and a biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest. I had an opportunity to write a research paper on Andrew Lytle and Mel Bradford’s understanding of the Southern past. So, I did research on Andrew Lytle rather significantly.

Montgomery: Well, good. You did properly.

Harrelson: Yes, sir. I think I did. As far as Andrew Lytle’s character was concerned, was he more in tune, did he sympathize with Southern yeomanry more so than the plantation aristocracy?

Montgomery: Well, you know he farmed some in North Alabama for a while. He also began his intellectual career, I suppose you would say, as an actor. Did you know that?

Harrelson: Yes, sir. I do remember reading that. What was the name of that place where he farmed? Cornsilk or something like that.

Montgomery: Yeah, that sounds close to it. I don’t remember precisely.

Harrelson: And he lived until 1995, I do believe.

Montgomery: I think so. I spoke to him. He was on his deathbed and we had a brief chat at that time.

Harrelson: I’ve always heard a lot about his character and I’ve read a lot about his personality. He seems to have been a rather amiable person.

Montgomery: Amiable, good humored, direct, and very firm in his position. He was a delight. He loved to sing. That was one of the things that often happened. He came out here one time, a good while before he died, and there were a bunch of us here and we were singing old songs and so on. We asked him if he knew that one called “I Am an Old Confederate.” And he said no, he didn’t think he’d heard it. So we sang it for him. He was much taken with it and he said, I never heard that one before. And at that time we had one of our grandsons here with us and he was, how old was Josh? He was seven or eight years old and he was distressed that Mr. Andrew didn’t know that song and he disappeared, the child did. In a few minutes he came back and he had laboriously copied out the words and Mr. Lytle folded it up and took it with him, you know. And Josh is now a lieutenant in the Army in Alabama, you know, but that was something I remember very fondly.

Harrelson: Well, it sounds like your relationship with Mr. Lytle was beneficial for the both of you.

Montgomery: Oh, it was and I was a trust for him.

Harrelson: Oh, yes sir. That’s most interesting. I regard the works of Andrew Lytle very highly as well as yours and I think it is an outstanding story.

Montgomery: Do you know his A Wake for the Living?

Harrelson: A Wake for the Living? Yes. He wrote that in the ‘70s for his daughters, I think.

Montgomery: It’s a fine book.

Harrelson: And in that book he talks about the Southern family, the family as being the fundamental foundation of Southern society.

Montgomery: Well it’s the fundamental foundation of civilization, not just of Southern society. That was one of the reasons that somebody like Russell Kirk, was tuned into it. He was a good friend of Davidson’s and it was exactly that common understanding that drew them together. So Kirk was not Southern, but “Southern” as put in quotation marks, which I often do. I have an essay called “Solzhenitsyn as Southerner,” for instance. So I think one of the dangers of not understanding tradition as larger than regional, is that you get separated from kindred in distant places like Solzhenitsyn, like Russell Kirk up in Michigan, you see.

Harrelson: I remember you writing an essay on that in your book entitled On Matters Southern.

Montgomery: I imagine I did.

Harrelson: I’m here to tell you right now, I think you’re right on par with that interpretation. I’m looking here through my notes just now trying to find a quote, yes here it is, Russell Kirk in his Conservative Mind, he wrote this, “The modern South cannot be said to obey any consciously conservative ideas—only conservative instincts, exposed to all the corruption that instinct, unlit by principle, encounters in a literate age. The affection of state sovereignty, the duties of a gentleman, and the traditions of society, which Randolph and Calhoun,” John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, for any listener who doesn’t know who those people were, “extolled found their finest embodiment in General Lee,” these Southern characteristics that Russell Kirk recognizes. He recognizes General Lee as embodying all of them. And Russell Kirk states that with Lee these ideas yielded to superior force at Appomattox. To what extent do you think that’s the case, Professor Montgomery?

Montgomery: Well, I think it’s in general a true summary of which I would qualify in one way. Russell uses the term instinct, and I prefer another term given that in the past two or three hundred years we’ve tended to lose sight of what is something more deeply fundamental in human nature than instinct, in that instinct tends to be associated inevitably with evolution, you see. And what I prefer is the term intuition, and that’s why I said in my lectures Possum and Other Receipts for the Recovery of “Southern" Being I have a secret title, Thomas Aquinas as “Southerner”, in quotation marks. Because Aquinas argues, and I think rightly so, that we are by the nature of our creation intellectual souls, and our intellect by its very nature is gifted with two modes of action toward immediate creation.

And one of them is an intuitive response of openness and love to things perceived as good because they are. And that’s why place—the local—is important to civilized community, you see. And he says that that’s a mode, that’s not a separate intellect, it’s a mode of action of intellect. It has to do with an openness of love toward a thing because it is, and he says an extension of that mode of the intuitive is the rational intellect. And he says the rational intellect has to come up to the level of the intuitive finally, but it’s a labor that you have to make through discursiveness.

We are unlike the angel, discursive. The angel is purely intuitive, knowing immediately, you see. We have to labor for it with a vow of very nature as complicated by original sin, you see. So that you see where somebody talks about instinct, I’ve shied from that a little bit. It’s not that whoever is saying it, as Kirk is saying it, doesn’t recognize the thing for what it is, but I think there’s a better term for it than instinct.

By the middle of the 18th century, instinct was taking over and in reducing man to his animal nature, you see. And an inclination for a long time underway but exacerbated by Darwinian evolution, you see. And what happens is you begin to get instinct on one side and reason on the other and get them embattled. And the point is that they’re complementary and not to be embattled. That’s why 18th century enlightenment was so destructive of civilized community, you see.

Harrelson: That’s entirely correct. I agree wholeheartedly.

Montgomery: And you see, I think it’s this sort of thing that we tend to lose sight of if we don’t understand the nature of tradition. Tradition is an inheritance that is, as T.S. Eliot says, partly of the blood, which he says has to be complemented by orthodoxy, which is of the reason. And it’s not that you’re either orthodox or traditional, it’s that by orthodoxy you sought tradition and rescued the viable in it out of tradition because we inherit things that need to be discarded. And if we discard all of tradition, we discard inheritance that needs to be preserved. And the responsibility is to sort that with reason and rescue the viable that is life-giving. And if you fail to do that, it erodes community. Your community is reduced to mere society and society needs regulating by form imposed upon it—rationalistically. And who urges that to us? Enlightenment rationalism, you see. And so we lose the validity of the intuitive, which the rationalist says is merely a sentimental, animal-like reaction in our nature. And that has to be expunged. It has to be exorcised, you see. So you end up with sentimentality on the one hand and rationalism on the other, butting heads, and it runs all the way now through Western civilization down to the local level, yea, even unto the South.

Harrelson: Well, Professor Montgomery, that is some valuable insight from a Southern intellectual such as yourself. Professor Michael O’Brien, who is considered along with Eugene Genovese to be one of the preeminent scholars of Southern intellectual history, maintains that in the South during the 20th century, particularly during the interwar period, there was basically no intellectual vigor. There was no vigorous intellectual life in the South. I disagree wholeheartedly with that assertion.

Montgomery: There was, but it was, what I contend is that there is a diaspora of people that you do not necessarily locate geographically, though there is, I guess, almost by hesitation, a preserving of it somewhat longer in the South, and Russell Kirk, I think, tuned into that. It doesn’t mean that you don’t end up with it in islands here and there, and meanwhile the larger spectacle of the New South overwhelms it, and that, of course, was one of the points that led the Fugitive Agrarians to what they did, you see. They recognized this and responded to it.

Harrelson: I believe, speaking of the Fugitives, their 1930 agrarian manifesto, I believe it was John Crowe Ransom who wrote “The Introduction to Principles.” Could you elaborate somewhat about your understanding of what the purpose of I’ll Take My Stand was?

Montgomery: Well, undoubtedly it was an attempt to recover some of the things they recognized as being rapidly lost in the South, and I think it probably came as a shock to them. The Monkey Trial in Dayton was one of the shocking things that woke them up. They had, up to that point, been largely interested in poetry, publishing The Fugitive and so on, and they began to wake up, and it took some of them a long while, I think, to tune into what was going on and to understand its origins as more than simply in recent Southern history going back to the 1860s. It was longer in the works than that. Alan Tate tuned into it gradually.

Alan Tate in I’ll Take My Stand writes the essay on Southern religion, and in it with the perspective that you have to value Tate as having made possible to me, but looking at it, what I notice is that he was very skeptical of St. Thomas and scholasticism and was more partial to orthodoxy than to Catholicism, but by 1950, through Jacques Maritain, he becomes a Catholic, you see. And I appreciated that in him, and I think he appreciated my recognizing it in him, you know.

And meanwhile, he and Ransom were often in contention with each other. Why? Because Ransom was fundamentally a skeptic—an intellectual skeptic. He was given to aesthetics of a Kantian dimension, and that is a skepticism that is not only a kind of criticism, but implies and sometimes deliberately denigrates the religious. And I don’t know whether you remember it or not, but he and Tate almost came to a fistfight that was sort of heeled over by Donald Davidson in arguments over Eliot’s The Waste Land, because, you see, Eliot of New England is going through the same developments as he did in the late out of his New England inheritance. Notice, if you haven’t read it, or if you need to reread Davidson’s essay “Still Rebels, Still Yankees.”

Harrelson: Was that in Attack on Leviathan?

Montgomery: No, it’s in a collection of essays that LSU published with that title of essay. But at any rate, Tate almost intuitively, not instinctively, recognized that there’s this danger. And Ransom was highly skeptical of Eliot as poet, in the nature of his prosody. Whereas Tate was responding to Eliot, I think, I’m being speculative here, at a time when he was intuitively recognizing what was going on with Eliot at a level deeper than the aesthetic. And as a matter of fact, the same sort of thing was happening to Eliot that Donald Davidson recognized in The Waste Land, and it led Davidson almost in opposition to answer The Waste Land with his long poem called The Tall Men. Do you know The Tall Men?

Harrelson: Yes, sir.

Montgomery: Well, in that little Eliot book that I mentioned to you that Davidson read for me when it was in the manuscript, he especially appreciated my noticing that The Tall Men is an answer to The Waste Land. What I say is that by the time Davidson wrote The Tall Men, Eliot had reached Davidson’s position. And with The Waste Land, Eliot is experiencing what his friends called a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t, it was a spiritual crisis. As he realized that there was a spiritual collapse. He recovered from it and wrote “Ash Wednesday” and the full quartet, so that “Ash Wednesday” is almost contemporary to The Tall Men, and they fall right in together.

Harrelson: Well, I do declare I enjoy this. I have enjoyed this conversation immensely thus far. Uh let’s speak about Mel Bradford for a few minutes.

Montgomery: Oh, gosh, I remember. Where is my picture of Mel? It’s usually up here. It must have fallen down, but I have a great picture that he sent me of him here somewhere. Mel and I were good friends. I met him over at Alabama. We were at the university over there. We were on some sort of joint to do, and the first time I met him, we walked up and down on the campus there talking about Faulkner, and it was a great encounter, and we were good friends from that point on. I have a long piece in On Matters Southern on Mel, as you know, remembering my last meeting with him.

Harrelson: My goodness. Mel Bradford taught at the University of Dallas, I think, what it was, a professor of English.

Montgomery: Yeah, for a long time, yeah. Now, he taught with Tom Landess, whom I mentioned to you, who’s over in South Carolina now there in Columbia. I think he’s in the governor’s office. They taught there together. Our oldest daughter, who’s just here with her children last week, finished high school early and got a scholarship to the University of Dallas, and Tom [Landess] and Mary Beth were on their way there with all of their children. They came through from South Carolina, picked up our daughter Priscilla, went up to pay their respects to Andrew [Lytle] up at Monteagle. They were old friends, too, and went out there, and eventually Priscilla ended up as assistant to Caroline Gordon when she went out there.

Harrelson: I was having a conversation a few weeks ago with historian Orville Vernon Burton.

Montgomery: I don’t know him.

Harrelson: Well, he’s from Ninety Six, South Carolina, and he’s now the chair of the history department at Coastal Carolina University in Horry County. He informed me at the South Carolina Historical Association’s annual conference that he and Mel Bradford conducted a debate several years ago. Vernon Burton has just written a book entitled The Age of Lincoln.

Montgomery: I imagine that Mel did engage in that.

Harrelson: Oh, yes. In The Age of Lincoln, Professor Burton’s thesis is that Lincoln was a Southerner. He and Jeff Davis were born fairly close together.

Montgomery: Yeah, up in Kentucky.

Harrelson: And for some inexplicable reason that I probably will never understand, he is of the opinion that Lincoln was, in fact, a Southerner. But anyhow, I was delivering a presentation that day on Mel Bradford and Andrew Lytle, and Professor Burton informed me of this debate. He said that I ought to become acquainted with that debate and get a copy of it somehow or another.

Montgomery: I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it, but I’ve heard Mel on the subject.

Harrelson: That’s what I’m getting to—Mel Bradford and Lincoln. Have you ever conducted conversations with Bradford about his views regarding Lincoln?

Montgomery: Oh, I’ve read him on Lincoln and heard him debating with other people. There’s a Straussian out in California whose name—you see, when you get this age, you begin to lose names—whose name I don’t remember now, but they were old antagonists on the question of Lincoln. So I remember Mel on Lincoln. I’ll point you to a book. We were talking a while ago about how you have to sort tradition and seek the viable. There’s a book that’s well worth your knowing about. It’s from the 1960s, it’s by a man named Fredrickson and it’s called The Inner Civil War and its subtitle is Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. And he has an interesting account of Lincoln in there that I think is exactly right in which he argues that Lincoln as politician—as he was rising to public recognition—saw the advantage of adapting evangelical Christianity to politics without the primary emphasis on God himself, you see. And he does a pretty good job of looking at the rhetoric in some of Lincoln in relation to this and how persuasive it was to the yeomanry level of America at that time. And it’s right persuasive and worth looking into. I think Mel was tuned into some of this too.

Harrelson: I think he must have been. Of course you know that this year is the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth and I declare everywhere you turn nowadays you hear of Lincoln. But that’s just the way it is I suppose.

Montgomery: Some time you need to read The Inner Civil War. I used to always give my students a long reading list and it would include things like this in a modern poetry course and how in the hell does that get into a modern poetry course? But that and the work of Eric Voegelin, have you run into him? Science, politics, narcissism and that sort of thing. Gerhart Niemeyer and that sort of…

Harrelson: Yes sir. Well that’s good you found a way to incorporate that into a poetry course.

Montgomery: Well it fits right in, for instance, notice as you read Eric Voegelin’s work how in his later work as he moves along in that long history thing, more and more he begins to cite and quote T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. They’re seeing the same sorts of things that Davidson saw and that Eliot saw.

Harrelson: Yes sir. Professor Montgomery, if you don’t mind let’s talk about some terminology here for a few minutes. Every once in a while I encounter a Southern intellectual historian, somebody who studies the history of intellectuals in the South, and they have a hard time describing what Southern Conservatism was or is. Now Mel Bradford once wrote, if I can recollect precisely, “that you can be a Southerner and a conservative. You can be in the South and call yourself a conservative, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a Southern Conservative.” How would you define that term, Southern Conservatism, as it existed during the 20th century more particularly?

Montgomery: Montgomery: Well the reason it’s so difficult to define it I suspect is that it was made very quickly a pejorative term and particularly in the interval between the two World Wars and very particularly in opposition to I’ll Take My Stand. So that conservative began to have a pejorative sense and the Southerner was a particular species of that sort of ideological reaction, you see. So it’s difficult to define for that reason, particularly, to define to some people who by instinct and not intuition resisted. They are modernists by having breathed modernism all their intellectual life long and it makes it difficult for them to quit smoking modernism as it were and get the lungs clear for a time. So that’s why it’s difficult for that term.

That’s why I keep coming back to join—I avoid it because it’s so easy to misunderstand conservatism—so I tend to talk about tradition and orthodoxy in relation to each other at the metaphysical level of the nature of man as, notice the terms, intellectual soul incarnate. And it’s from the incarnate that the intellect moves. St. Thomas for instance says, and he’s answering Descartes before Descartes was even born, you see, St. Thomas says that born into the world the first action of the person is an immediate open response to a thing that exists, and it is an action of love accepting the thing because it is and it is only from that, that you suddenly realize that you exist.

And you see how that is an answer to Descartes and his doubt, you know. I think therefore I am St. Thomas or the neo-Thomist would say he’s got it all upside down. He starts with his conclusion and therefore he loses himself. He’s separated from that possibility of an intuitive openness to the thing because it is and if it is it therefore is good. Not that it’s perfect but it can’t be and if you see that it’s not perfect if there isn’t a goodness of some sort in it because it is created and whatever is created is by its nature good and there’s a falling away from that good possible but it’s nevertheless good as long as it lives. That’s why even deathbed confessions are possible.

Harrelson: Oh yes sir. Well so what that demonstrates to a certain extent then is that Southern Conservatism, if we can call it that, a tradition/orthodoxy, is really a member of a broader Western civilization tradition.

Montgomery: Well there’s no question of it and what has happened which weakens Southern Conservatism is a loss of the whole history of our becoming as intellectual creatures. A neo-Thomist named [Étienne] Gilson did lectures at Harvard in the 30s just before World War II and he has a fascinating argument about the decline of Western philosophy into modernism, which he rejects, and very valiantly so. But one of the lines in the descent starts with Abélard. Do you know Abélard, back in about the 12th century?

Harrelson: No sir.

Montgomery: Abélard and what was his name? His Beloved. That’s a very famous romance. Abélard and I don’t know, see I told you I couldn’t always call up names now. But at any rate they were lovers, had a child, he was the philosopher of the moment and a very important one. And in response to this, the woman’s uncle had him castrated. And he ended up as a philosophical theologian in a monastery and he was a philosopher and he’s famous for his emphasis upon what Gilson points out as logicism, logic, you see. And the emphasis upon logic gets picked up in, I’ll come up with his name in a minute, Occam, William of Occam and nominalism. And that logic begins to suggest the possibility of intellect’s control of what is by the act of naming. And the naming not only defines but almost causes its be. So you go from Abélard to Occam to Descartes to Kant and you end up finally with Jean Paul Sartre and existentialism. And that is the decay of western philosophy.

Harrelson: That sounds very similar to what Richard Weaver wrote about.

Montgomery: Oh yeah, he talks about Occam.

Harrelson: I was sitting here thinking as you were telling me that, you know, I said, well my goodness that sounds like what Richard Weaver was saying.

Montgomery: Yeah, Ideas Have Consequences. And what Gilson is arguing is that bad ideas have bad consequences.

Harrelson: Yes sir. It seems to be common. It should be common sense.

Montgomery: So, you see that there’s this background, that say, the Fugitive Agrarians were beginning to tune into when they were about your age. Don’t you see it took them a while to get tuned into it.

Harrelson: Professor Mark Malvasi, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. He teaches history at Virginia someplace or another I believe. I don’t know particularly right now. But he wrote a book on the Agrarians. He concentrated on Ransom, Davidson and Tate. And his book was entitled The Unregenerate South. In there he argues that Southern Conservatives divinized the secular. They replaced a piety for God for a piety for history and tradition. They had taken the position of God and placed it below the position of tradition.

Montgomery: I think that’s a whole wrong thing. It certainly is. I’m not sure but you might make that argument in relation to aesthetics and Ransom. And I have another little book that deals with Ransom and Tate in relation to this. I can’t always remember the title of my own thing let alone somebody else’s.

Harrelson: Well you’re doing pretty good in my opinion.

Montgomery: The answer to him I think probably is in there. [hands his book to Harrelson]

Harrelson: This is your book, by Marion Montgomery, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate: At Odds about the Ends of History and the Mystery of Nature.

Montgomery: Yeah and it’s exactly about that.

Harrelson: I believe this would probably provide a productive rebuttal to Mark Malvasi’s assertions.

Montgomery: I think it would.

Harrelson: I was familiar and I knew that you wrote this but I’ve never read it. I was researching it.

Montgomery: Well you can’t, gosh you can’t read it all. Oh no, nobody can. Even me. I can’t remember it.

Harrelson: Your works in particular are very conducive to my personal interest at least. Let’s see here now. The Southern Past, Professor Montgomery, that’s a very large topic.

Montgomery: That is indeed.

Harrelson: In my own personal research I’m trying to understand what the understanding of the Southern Past was regarding the Southern Conservatives in the 20th century, particularly during the interwar period. And to what extent, the questions I’m asking are such things as to what extent did an understanding of the Southern Past shape a critique of the modern order? That sort of, because what I’m finding is that they possessed a particular understanding of the Southern Past that contradicts much of what modern historians have written about the South.

Montgomery: Well some of them did. You see, the problem is to distinguish many things going on at the same time, I think. And what I was thinking of immediately is an old idea of mind that suggests just how complicated it is. For instance, the University of Georgia was founded very early, but it was founded by New England minds, you see. And there is a dimension of the New England mind out of Puritanism that is quite unlike the Middle colonies, Virginia—Cavalier, feudal. And so you get that New England mind with almost an instinctive industrial inclination that gets sort of planted surreptitiously within the Southern culture. And it explodes out of it after 1865 through people like Henry Grady of the New South, you see. And there is that tension between that address to existence and the more intuitively anchored response that is signaled in Lee and his character, for instance, in the Middle colonies. And so you see, you’ve got internal ferment and factionalism all along the way. That’s why it’s so dangerous to try to talk about Southern Conservatism, you see, because it’s not a simple thing. It’s a complicated thing. And that’s why I tend to shy away from such things. I say, first let me footnote this with a volume. And then we’ll talk about it.

Harrelson: I understand. Exactly. There are various historians, and I’m having to speak from what I know about what historians have written. Fitzhugh Brundage as well as David Blight, they’ve started this new field of history that has to do with Southern memory, how Southerners remember their past. And what they maintain is that race relations is the central theme of Southern history.

Montgomery: Yeah, of course they do, yeah.

Harrelson: But I’m here to tell you.

Montgomery: That’s the modernist infection at work, really. It’s not that race isn’t an important element of it, but the truth of the matter is that the problem of racism has to do with the level of spectacle in communal life that doesn’t go beneath the level of spectacle, you see. So you talk about it up here, and you don’t talk about that marvelous mystery that the person has created an intellectual soul incarnate by his very creation. He has limits. If he didn’t have limits, he would not even exist. Without limits, he can’t exist. And you go from that to recognizing that each created intellectual soul incarnate is unique, and human dignity lies in a perfection of the limits of gift, and that means a responsibility to recognize limits and to fulfill them. And see, that’s much deeper than the level of social commerce that overlies it, and which too many intellectuals never bothered to get beneath.

Harrelson: That seems to be a problem, well, in my mind especially. That’s all I hear from most historians in the academy nowadays, is that race relations is the central theme of Southern history. What I’ve found in reading the intellectuals who were living in the South at the end of the war period, they viewed Confederate defeat at the crux of the Southern past. That really had explained a great deal about a pervasive decline of public morality and why the South was in the position it was in during that particular period in the 20th century.

Montgomery: What you have to remember too in relation to that is that they didn’t have much time to sit around thinking about it. They were too busy trying to survive after 1865, and you don’t debate these things until long after. And when you begin to debate, what happens is the ground is surrendered to abstractionism, and race is one of the terms. So, industry, you see, agriculture, all of those things are abstractions way up here that make sense only when they’re anchored at what I have called and then called before 9-11, ground zero. In this moment of my existence in this place, in these circumstances, and you go from there, you don’t try to leap uphill, you see. And what happens is that you make it abstract even such a thing as human dignity. You lose the ground of it as the responsibility of this person to his peculiar limits whereby he is this person and no other person.

Harrelson: Well, what you’re telling me, I think, is that in order to understand the South, in order to understand...

Montgomery: Or any place where you happen to be, it doesn’t make any difference whether you live 500 years ago in another place or here or now, and we happen to live here and now in the South.

Harrelson: That’s an outstanding point. It really is. Regarding your own lifetime, now I acknowledge a particular Southern tradition, a culture that we have here...

Montgomery: Which has to be sorted.

Harrelson: Exactly. What sort of changes can you talk about that you’ve witnessed during the course of your lifetime, positive, negative, what have you, in Southern culture and the way Southerners think about themselves?

Montgomery: Well, again, the danger of generalization is there. What I would say is that it becomes more and more apparent to me as a sort of a triumph of secularism in its modernist manifestation which conflicts with the residual intuitive sense of community in the South. And those things mix and mingle and react to each other, and it’s the sort of thing that Flannery O’Connor wrote about so well. Do you know any of her works?

Harrelson: Somewhat. Now, you befriended Flannery O’Connor, did you not?

Montgomery: Well, she befriended me. We were good friends, but she is very much tuned into this, and you need to read her. And one of the places not only is our importance is not only her fiction but those letters, posthumous letters called The Habit of Being. The habit of being, that’s what we’ve been talking about much of our interview here. The sorting of tradition, of the becoming comfortable and open to existence at ground zero as this person, and she’s very much tuned into that. And she and Walker Percy are Southern Catholic writers, you see. And I’ve got a book on Percy coming out that deals with this too. It’s called With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: in Company with Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, and Others And you see that brings the two together. What he says is that the Southern writer—Catholic or Protestant—is in quest of the Holy Grail and he discovers himself at a Tupperware party, you see.

Harrelson: Well that’s fascinating. My goodness, the more I sit here and talk with you, the more fascinating it becomes. I am here to tell you right now. Now, did you not write a book a few years ago on the nature of academia?

Montgomery: Oh, I’ve done two collections of essays on that actually, essays along the way. One of them was a series of lectures given over at Erskine in South Carolina. And the other was a gathering of essays from about the 1960s down to now here I have to go cite them again for you. See, I can’t remember my own. It’s like losing your children. The one is called Liberal Arts and Community and its subtitle is The Feeding of the Larger Body. This is coming through, isn’t it? And the other is one called The Truth of Things and its subtitle is Liberal Arts and the Recovery of Reality. And it’s all a part of what we’ve been talking about. Just how important that last one is, is signified I got my royalty statement on The Truth of Things the other day.

Harrelson: Really?

Montgomery: I thought I ought to put it up there to keep me at ground zero.

Harrelson: Yes, sir. I believe that will be the case. I’ll have to write that down in the field notes for this interview.

Montgomery: You see, it’s a very formal report.

Harrelson: Oh, yes.

Montgomery: Inside was that three by five card with the two quarters and a dime taped to it. Which has been a matter of much humor.

Harrelson: Well, good. I don’t doubt that it will. That’s just the way it is. There’s nothing we can do about works that should be appreciated and are not.

Montgomery: Well, some of them will be around for a while.

Harrelson: I hope so.

Montgomery: I’m pretty confident.

Harrelson: You lived through the Second World War.

Montgomery: Yeah.

Harrelson: Now, I have also read a few historians who maintain that the Second World War really brought the South down. That it did as much, if not more, to alter Southern society, its traditions and its norms, than the Civil War.

Montgomery: Well, it opened us to certain things. How could it not, given the kind of forced desperation that we were in at the moment, you know. And one of the things, I’ve been writing about some of this, as a matter of fact, recently, too. One of the things you notice, a very interesting thing to notice, is that from the 1940s to the 1960s, interesting things were happening all over the world, but in this country and in the South, too. And you begin to notice people responding to it. Elliot, for instance, wrote a couple of little books at that time, one of them is called The Idea of Christian Society. The other is Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. C.S. Lewis wrote The Abolition of Men, about what’s happening in education. C.S. Lewis also wrote The Screwtape Letters. Do you know that?

Harrelson: No, sir. And I hate to reveal my ignorance so much about all this.

Montgomery: You’re too young to have read all of this stuff yet, but you need to, somewhere along the line. But Screwtape is the chief devil who writes letters to his devil disciple, how to seduce his mind. And Lewis is writing this in the middle of World War II, but he’s not so much interested in that war, as he says in an introduction. He’s interested in what happens to society in those particular times. Richard Weaver is coming to Ideas Have Consequences. Gabrielle Marcelle in France under Nazi occupation is writing a book that he’s doing lectures and essays that come out as Homo Viator: A Metaphysics of Hope, in which he has a whole essay on the family that’s worth reading in relation to your interest in southerness. Jacques Maritain is writing things just all over the world. This sort of thing is cropping up, you see. Meanwhile, culturally, we are moving into the 1960s, and what happened in the 1960s, as I argue, happened in the 1860s, but in Russia at the time of Dostoevsky, at the time of Notes from Underground, which is a monologue of a modernist lost, you see, that leads Dostoevsky on then to write Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Devils, and it’s the period in Russia when the young revolutionaries, the nihilists, are revolting against their fathers, and who were their fathers? Dostoevsky says, the liberals. Now where does that crop up again? In the 1960s over here, you see. And it’s almost as if we are imitating what happened in Russia, you see, and the young revolutionaries are revolting. It’s very interesting to see what happens after the time of Dostoevsky in Russia, and maybe to watch what’s happening here after the 1960s.

Harrelson: So what we have, so to speak, is a generation of young people that were growing up in the Second World War and had gone to Europe.

Montgomery: The Baby Boomers.

Harrelson: The Baby Boomers, okay.

Montgomery: Not the ones who fought. See, their fathers and mothers, the war is over. We were triumphant. All evil is solved, you see. And there was that letdown as their children, the Baby Boomers, were coming up into the 1960s.

Harrelson: So these Baby Boomers, so to speak, were repudiating the values of their previous generations. I’ve never heard that comparison before between Russia and the 1860s. Right at the time you said 1860s, I thought, okay, he’s going to talk about the Confederacy. No, you’re talking about Russia.

Montgomery: But the 1960s were being prepared in our 1860s.

Harrelson: A valuable point, indeed. A valuable point.

Montgomery: I’ve just finished a long work that deals with that.

Harrelson: Let’s see. I’m trying to look here. Oh, yeah. Okay. I have another question that I would like you to respond to. To what extent do you believe Southerners today are motivated by historical consciousness? Do Southerners...

Montgomery: Let me answer that quickly. And with children who do not know whether the Depression came before or after the Civil War, you know, that sort of thing, how can you deal with a question like that?

Harrelson: Well, you’re right. You’re exactly right in that sort of the answer.

Montgomery: By accident you have been fortunate in learning some things that I dare say many of your contemporaries, many of your generation are unaware of.

Harrelson: That’s unfortunate, I think. Extremely unfortunate.

Montgomery: Of course it’s unfortunate. And a part of it is, I think, deliberate. I think it is a kind of educational brainwashing that goes on. As in the attempt to make positive law of the politically correct, which is in direct violation of all I’ve been saying about the human dignity as central to the existence of the person as this person and no other. And the politically correct deny that. And hence what is for me a diabolical principle of modern education, any child can be whatever he wants to be. And if I’m right about the nature of human dignity, then that is diabolical and destructive of that natural inclination by his creation to discover and come to terms with the limits of my existence. I can be Michael Jordan and shoot gold three pointers all day, you see. Even if I’m one-legged. You can be whatever you want to be. It’s diabolical, I believe.

Harrelson: Well, I think you’re right. That’s the conclusion at least that I’ve come to in reading about equality. That’s what I hear all the time is universal equality, that universal equality was what was founded in 1776 and 1787. When you read the works of Calhoun and Randolph and people like this.

Montgomery: They recognize it as more complex.

Harrelson: Yes, sir. If I talk about those things nowadays.

Montgomery: You get batted over the head.

Harrelson: Oh, an unpatriotic imbecile is the nomenclature that comes to mind.

Montgomery: Or they might as well say you’re a Southern Conservative. Don’t you think we ought to close it on that? Do you have any more central questions?

Harrelson: Well, I have one more question here. Do you think Southerners still have a sense of the past? And even if you get past the Baby Boomers.

Montgomery: Some do, and some discover it. See, you can’t say anything so general about Southerners. You’ll run into people who know. I ran into you, and you know more about Southern history than most people I’ve run into, whether they are young, middle-aged, old, you see. So what you have to be concerned for and value is what I call the diaspora, the scattered. They show up, oddly, here. You came from South Carolina, somebody comes from British Columbia, and down here at Bell’s calls when we were having 75 people at Easter, and wants to come talk to me about Eric Voeglin, you see. There is that diaspora that you have to value and keep in mind when you’re doing what you’re doing, where you are, and this sort of thing here seems to suggest nobody is paying attention. Somebody is paying attention, you see. And it’s not just Southerners, they’re persons coming to themselves in a dark wood, as Dante says as he begins the Divine Comedy, you see. And the dark wood may be even Crawford, George, don’t you see?

Harrelson: Well, Professor Montgomery, I think we’ll call our interview to a close. I have thoroughly enjoyed this.

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Marion Montgomery Alan Harrelson Interview

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These days, my time’s about as short as guys complaining about dating apps. As you age, scarcity and trade-offs compound like interest. Choices have to be made. Reading, researching, writing, scrolling, scanning. My list grows, shelves fill, files multiply. It’s a good time to pause and share the fruits of a few choices.

Reading

Spring has arrived in Dixie Alley. The old patterns follow. Hot-blooded Southern air meets dry cool Yankee air. Cavaliers and Roundheads in the wind. They do not make peace. They remember. As the air quarreled, I researched the subject and found this playlist; “Every Tornado Video on YouTube, 1933-1999,” a handful of books, and I listened to the audiobook Storm Kings: The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers by Lee Sandlin, my review:

Searching for colonial accounts of tornadoes, I came across Storm Kings. The audiobook’s worth a listen, though the title led me to expect something else. It's about how Americans came to study tornadoes, from John Winthrop to Increase Mather to Ben Franklin’s experiments to Signal Corps to War Department to Fujita. Some “experts”, naturally, refused to believe tornadoes rotated. And of course there's gatekeeping, petty squabbles, bureaucratic turf wars, data autists, and some men who thought, I'm going to spend my entire life learning everything one can about “a violently rotating column of air that extends from a thunderstorm to the ground.”

I recently finished Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson. It’s a foundational text, and I’m still digesting it. Though the book focuses mainly on the Northeast, I may follow some of the Southern threads for future research.

This project wouldn’t exist without Jordan Poss. I’d spent years reading, collecting, and researching, but never felt compelled to write—until one day I did. I came across Professor Poss’s blog while following a trail I couldn’t retrace now. His writing inspired me to reach out, and his thoughtful advice helped lead to this Substack. Thank you, Sir. You can read his work and find his books at Jordan M. Poss dot com. He also writes the Quid Substack.

Also, if you are ever in Middle Tennessee, visit Landmark Booksellers and Elder’s Bookstore.

Scanning

On the “scanning” front, here are a two expensive rare out-of-print books you might appreciate:

The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver (and reviews)

So Good A Cause: A Decade of the Southern Partisan

These books are portals, each with a few of my favorite essays inside.

Also, I’m the first to digitize a copy of The World & I.

Scrolling

On occasion, I go to abebooks, type in a keyword, and sort by highest price. You never know what’ll turn up. Like this collection I found last night.

Writing

A selection from the Folkchain.

Harvest of Oddities:

Southern Issues:

From the Archives:

From the Shelves:

South Bound:

My Favorites:

Some years back, I found myself on a private tour through a historic house in South Carolina. The gracious lady hosting us asked a question I hadn’t expected. “What are your thoughts on William F. Buckley Jr.?”

“Ma’am,” I said, after a moment’s reflection, “my leanings are nearer to M.E. Bradford and his camp, and though I respect Mr. Buckley, I never could get comfortable with how some men were cast out, nor how certain events unfolded.” I can’t recall her reply.

Later in the day, an accomplished gentleman privately thanked me for speaking plainly, quietly noting our hostess’s connection to Buckley. The stories of the National Review purges are well-known in certain circles, but the Southern Issue explored here predates those tensions.

The issue at hand, appeared in 1958 as a response to integration legislation, much as the Modern Age issue discussed previously. My purpose isn’t provocation or to editorialize, but to map this publication as one significant coordinate in a complex intellectual topography, one with numerous connections both before and after August 1958.

Those familiar with National Review’s recent ways might be surprised by its earlier stance. Though this territory has been extensively examined, some context seems warranted.1

The Context

After the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt, Republican strategists saw an opening to remake their party’s fortunes in the South. Eisenhower’s victories in 1952 and 1956 marked real progress in states like Florida, Virginia, and Texas, where a growing white middle class responded to his message of economic restraint and limited federal reach. Yet Eisenhower’s decision to send federal troops to enforce school integration in Little Rock got many Southerners fit to be tied. Still, the GOP pressed ahead with “Operation Dixie,” an initiative aimed at cultivating a new Southern base by recruiting young, college-educated professionals, many with moderately segregationist views.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, National Review (NR) became instrumental in steering the modern Conservative movement southward. William F. Buckley Jr. launched the magazine in 1955 as a bulwark against the centralizing reach of the federal government, against the abstractions of New Deal economics, against Communism’s tentacles. While seeking to forge a unified Conservative voice, Buckley and his editors recognized untapped potential in the South.

Unlike some Republicans, who approached the South cautiously, NR took a more assertive approach. They published sympathetic coverage of Southern resistance to federal desegregation efforts, framing these conflicts not in terms of race, but as battles over constitutional principle and local control. Contributors like Richard Weaver portrayed the South as America’s Conservative heartland, valuing tradition, established order, and community autonomy, qualities NR deemed essential to the broader Conservative vision.

Despite doubts about the Republican Party’s immediate viability in the region, NR initially placed greater hope in Conservative Southern Democrats. Throughout the late 1950s, the magazine consistently presented Southern opposition to civil rights initiatives as part of a legitimate Conservative defense against centralization.

Detour

I never paid much attention to magazine advertisements, until I read Caro’s LBJ biographies. He taught me a few things. You know, follow the money stuff. Several ads in these old National Review issues always piqued my interest—the Milliken ads.

The textile magnate Roger Milliken didn’t just bankroll postwar conservatism, he helped build it. A key player in Strom Thurmond’s party switch, funder of Goldwater and Buchanan’s campaigns, and a major backer of Regnery Publishing, the John Birch Society, and the Manion Forum. He also helped launch National Review. Buckley once called him the magazine’s “most important asset.” Anyway, back to the point.

“Why the South Must Prevail”

Most of the editors had never sweated through a Southern summer. Buckley, however, had lived in South Carolina and his mother was a New Orleans-raised Southern belle, her grandfather a Confederate who bore arms at Shiloh. Early on, NR did have quite the roster of Southern contributors: Donald Davidson, Cleanth Brooks, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Richard M. Weaver, James J. Kilpatrick, Medford Evans, William T. Couch, Sam M. Jones, Robert Y. Drake Jr., J. Fred Rippy, M. Stanton Evans . . .

Relevant NR essays leading up to 1958:

1956-01-18: “National Trends” by L. Brent Bozell.

1956-02-29: “The South Girds Its Loins” editorial.

1956-03-21: “None So Blind . . .” editorial.

1956-04-25: “The Right to Nullify” by Forrest Davis.

1956-05-09: “Southern Discomfort” by Sam M. Jones.

1956-05-23: “Why the South Likes Lausche” by Jonathan Mitchell.

1956-06-06: “Notes from the Gulf Coast” by James Burnham.

1956-08-25: “From the Democratic Convention” by L. Brent Bozell and Willmoore Kendall.

1956-09-01: “The Campaign” by Sam M. Jones.

1956-09-15: “The Man Next to You” by John Chamberlain.

1956-09-29: “Reflections on a Right-Wing Protest” by Revilo P. Oliver.

1956-11-24: “The Liberal Line” by Willmoore Kendall.

1956-12-08: “National Trends” by L. Brent Bozell.

1957-07-13: “Integration Is Communization” by Richard M. Weaver.

1957-07-27: “Voice of the South” Sam M. Jones interviews Senator Richard Russell.

1957-08-03: “Utopia and Civil Rights” editorial.

1957-08-24: Buckley’s infamous editorial, “Why the South Must Prevail”.

1957-09-07: “The Open Question, Mr. Bozell Dissents from the Views Expressed in the Editorial, ‘Why the South Must Prevail’” by L. Brent Bozell.

1957-09-21: “The Court Views Its Handiwork” editorial.

1957-09-21: “Governor Faubus Clouds the Issue” by L. Brent Bozell.

1957-09-21: “The South’s ‘Granitic Opposition’” by James Jackson Kilpatrick.

1957-09-28: “No Trips to Newport” editorial.

1957-09-28: “Right and Power in Arkansas” by James Jackson Kilpatrick.

1957-10-26: “Britain Looks at Little Rock” by Anthony Lejeune.

The Issue

“Our Contributors—in this special issue on the South: Anthony Harrigan (“The South Is Different”) is an editorial writer on the Charleston (S.C.) News and Courier and a contributor to various magazines. James Jackson Kilpatrick (“But It Won’t Stay Buried”), author of The Sovereign States, succeeded the late Douglas Southall Freeman as editor of the Richmond News Leader, on which Richard Whalen (“Rural Virginia: A Microcosm”) is his editorial assistant. Andrew Lytle (“The Quality of the South”) teaches at the University of Florida. He was one of the contributors to I’ll Take My Stand, and has published four novels of which the latest is The Velvet Horn.”

The South Is Different: Anthony Harrigan

The South, Harrigan says, is still itself—not innocent, not unchanged, but whole in a way the rest of the country has forgotten. Though the highways came and the banks got taller, it didn’t sign on to the national conformity plan. It welcomes visitors, remembers its stories, holds fast to its customs. The court ruling of 1954 only deepened this resolve, uniting diverse communities through shared trial. He objects to being remade by advertising or national opinion. He says history isn’t just economics and politics. It’s Providence and people. People, remembering. This essay made it into the Congressional Record.2

Rural Virginia: A Microcosm: Richard Whalen

Whalen’s Virginia moves slow, and on purpose. It’s a place modern on the surface but ancient in its reflexes. He’s skeptical of Northern idealists who talk integration while living segregated lives. He says the South won’t change at gunpoint. If anything’s going to shift, it’ll be through jobs, migration, and the quiet, patient erosion of time.3

But It Won’t Stay Buried: James Jackson Kilpatrick

In “But It Won’t Stay Buried”, Kilpatrick counters Harry Ashmore’s obituary for the Old South, arguing that Southern identity remains stubbornly alive. He met Ashmore back in ’54, when the South was still reeling from the Court’s ruling but hadn’t yet hardened. Since then, the region has been pried open by strangers, “doctors of sociology,” and the New York Times to be examined and diagnosed.

Kilpatrick isn’t swayed. Yes, there’s change—factories, cities, the usual—but Ashmore’s mistake is thinking you can kill a culture by reporting on it. Far from fading, Kilpatrick argues, outside pressure has revived Southern distinctiveness, binding the region closer in defiance of its eulogists. Some things, once rooted, are not so easily pulled up.4

The Quality of the South: Andrew Nelson Lytle

Lytle reviews The Lasting South, focusing on the tension between two incompatible ways of thinking: Southern conservatism and the statist, secular impulses of liberal democracy. He frames the Southern mind as Apollonian, rooted in Christian tradition, reverent of limits, and wary of utopian abstractions, contrasted with the Faustian liberalism that promises power, equality, and immortality, but severs liberty from its theological roots. Lytle praises essays by Kilpatrick, Clifford Dowdey, and Richard Weaver, while criticizing others. Ultimately, he argues that as the South confronts liberal encroachment, its survival may depend on artists and writers to preserve its language, memory, and moral vision.5

National Review 1958-03-08 (The South, 1958)

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The student of the Southern Agrarians, if he keeps at it long enough, will find himself circling the same names. “Fain and Young” is one such pairing, a bibliographic shorthand for The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young and published by the University of Georgia Press in 1974.

Why bring this up? I recently came into possession of two books from John Tyree Fain’s own shelf. His handwriting runs in the margins, and it seems fitting to pause over those pages and say a word for the man who left them.

The Young Man

John Tyree Fain, Jr. was born in December 1904 in Nashville. His father, though a businessman, took an active role in Tennessee’s historical organizations. He contributed to the Tennessee Historical Society, served with the Sons of the American Revolution, and authored the Critical and Analytical Index and Genealogical Guide to Ramsey's Annals of Tennessee.

Mr. Fain received his early education at Wallace University School in Nashville. In 1914, Donald Davidson briefly taught there. As Mark Royden Winchell records, Davidson was financially strained and accepted a position teaching English, German, and Biblical History to younger boys. Decades later, Davidson described his schedule:

My five-day-a-week schedule at Wallace University School called for me to teach from 8:00 a.m. to about 9:45 a.m. I would just have time to walk to my 10 o’clock Vanderbilt classes. Immediately after my 11–12 V. U. class—or, rather, after the required 12–12:30 chapel was over—I would get back to Wallace School, take a bowl of soup and a meagre sandwich at the very spartan Wallace lunch-room, then teach until 3 p.m. I managed somehow (I don’t remember how) to get in Chemistry Lab. I would take Dr. Mims’s and Curry’s late afternoon classes.1

Fain entered Vanderbilt in 1922, when the ink was still drying on the first Fugitive poems. Studying under John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson, sitting alongside Robert Penn Warren, Merrill Moore, and Andrew Nelson Lytle, He found himself aligned with a time and company that comes along only once. These formative experiences shaped his academic trajectory and editorial work, demonstrated in the Davidson-Tate correspondence and his work on The Spyglass, Views and Reviews, 1924-1930, a collection of Donald Davidson’s book reviews from The Tennessean book page, published by Vanderbilt University Press in 1963.

Though John Tyree Fain secured distinction in Victorian scholarship, particularly in his analysis of Ruskin's ethical economy,2 he remained rooted in the Southern intellectual inheritance of his youth.

His formal education culminated in a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University in 1941, supplemented by periods of study at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois. He worked in the textile industry in Rochelle, Illinois for a few years, and worked as an economist for the War Labor Board and the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta during World War II.

Of his time in Illinois, Fain wrote “Most of the so-called intelligentsia of those days were pink, some deep red. When I went up to graduate school at the University of Illinois in 1930, I was invited to a party given by a noted political science professor, and when I got there I discovered it was a Communist cell. I was not enthusiastic and was not invited again. Those boys [Southern Agrarians] who took their stand at that time knew what they were doing and they meant business.”3

The Florida Man

In 1947, he moved with his family to Gainesville, Florida, where he became a professor of English at the University of Florida, a position he would hold for many years. The following year Lytle joined the faculty, intent on founding a creative writing program. Harry Crews passed through there, too, and there are expensive books to prove it. Professor John Morefield, who came to Gainesville in 1962, remembers meeting Dr. Fain, then advising new graduate students. He describes him as “a lovely man—white hair, tie, seersucker jacket (practically a uniform for professors it seemed)—a Southern gentleman of the old school,” connected to Ransom, Lytle, Tate, and Warren. Morefield also recalls that Fain was working on The Spyglass at the time.4

In my research for this essay I found a particular treasure, a transcribed conversation with the 82-year-old John Tyree Fain dated Sunday, August 17, 1986, captured in his Gainesville home. This exchange, taking place a mere four months his death in December, preserves on paper Fain's final public thoughts on the Fugitive-Agrarian movement and his decades-long friendship with Andrew Lytle.5

In 1970, when the university granted Lytle an honorary Doctor of Letters, they selected Fain to deliver the presentation address at the school's first literary symposium. This gathering, which brought Cleanth Brooks, Peter Taylor, and John Crowe Ransom to campus, marked one of Ransom's final public appearances.

In the ledger of things that last, I reckon you’ll find Fain’s name due to his diligent scholarly inquiry, devoted attention to those students placed in his charge, and a continued allegiance to those Southern writers whose legacy he did not discard.

I reached out to Dr. James Everett Kibler asking if he’d known Dr. Fain. “I did not know him,” he said, “but I admire his work, done at a time when it probably hurt, not helped him in academia. I know from experience. Also, you can tell who's the devoted scholar when he works without the rewards.”

The question came simply enough: “Do you want to go look at houses on Sunday?”

“Sure, but I don’t know anything about how to buy one. Never thought I would be able to afford a house.”

“It’s just for fun,” she assured me.

By Wednesday we were under contract and I was neck-deep in talk of basis points and radon levels, words that hadn’t meant a thing to me the week before.

We had toured several houses. Some were clearly beyond our means. All felt disjointed. Rooms that seemed placed by someone who had only heard about how people live. When we entered what would become our home, we both recognized it immediately. She was drawn to the entry hallway. I knew as soon as I saw the “bonus room” what it must become: The Library.

I've never shared the full story of building my library, from start to finish. Every time I post a picture of it on X, it goes viral, which should feel good, but it doesn’t. It feels like a cheat code. So I mostly stopped sharing it. Then I posted a note here, on a whim, and that took off too. So, it felt like a good time to do a little DIY posting.

I don’t have a background in carpentry, but I had what men before me have always had: hands, time carved from the edges of the day, and a willingness to try. A few tools stood in the corner of the garage. The rest I could learn. YouTube helped. In June 2021 I measured and sketched on scrap paper. An awkward little unfinished room would serve as my workshop. And in that workshop, slowly, I worked nights and weekends.

June 2021 - Cabinets

Cabinet making, no, that wasn’t something I could take on. Not then. I bought them ready-made, a concession to time and skill alike. The color, if you’re wondering, is called Blue Endeavour from Sherwin Williams.

July 2021 - Oak

For the cabinet tops, big box wouldn’t do. I went down to Mimm's Lumber, a great family owned business in Nashville, TN.

September 2021 - Shelves

The shelves were the most difficult part. A friend came by to help me rip the plywood sheets on the table saw, but squaring them on my own was slow, stubborn work. I used birch, not because I wanted to, but because it was what I could find, and what I could afford. Supply was low, prices were high. One day, Lord willing, I’d like to build the library I dream of—walnut, tall ceilings . . . But for now, we live within our means (move at the speed of cash), and there’s something to be said for that.

December 2021 - Furniture

The furniture, ordered nearly half a year in advance, began arriving as winter settled in. December brought the pieces that would complete the space: an old trunk, a pair of club chairs, a writing desk, an antique rug, and a Chesterfield sofa.

January 2022 - Shelves Complete

February 2022 - Floor & Brick

Nobody tells you how much money you’ll end up spending on mortar. Mortar. And all the while, my back kept reminding me that human bodies weren't designed for the particular angles and efforts this work required.

June 2022 - Finishing Touches

And then the books, gathered over years, brought in boxes from old apartments, hunted in winding bookshops, ordered from distant sellers with hand-penned notes—placed where they belonged (yeah, the cabinets are also full).

The room took its final shape. No longer becoming, but being, No longer a project, but a place. The Library.

Progressive critics cataloged the sins of industrialization: the poisoned river, the worker's exploitation, various -isms and -phobias. Conservatives were not blind to these material consequences, especially where the land and farming practices were concerned. But many conservatives, Southern conservatives (traditionalists) above all, perceived threats of a deeper order. Threats to civilization itself. Threats to those structures that give meaning beyond material gain: the severance of present from past, the corrosion of community, the eclipse of the sacred by utilitarian calculus, and the deliberate emulsification of regional particularities into a bland chemical approximation of humanity manufactured for consumption by interchangeable economic units—a product for everyone from nowhere.

Some conservative minds, seeing clearly the all-consuming Caterpillar’s steady crawl across field and town alike, sought to negotiate terms, envisioning a Southern accommodation with modernity that might preserve the essential character of our inheritance while adapting to new economic realities.

Right and wrong, in matters like these, are rarely clean things. I can’t settle that for you. But I can point you to where others have gone to drink, wells dug and kept by those of an older order. Men who felt the tremor. Men who saw the iron come and knew what it cost.

The Bibliography

Well water differs in quality. Experience has taught me to discern whether to give it a quick look, wet my face, take a sip, or drink deeply, this bibliography offers every sort. You won’t find many books named “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Fields: Wherein Various Persons Attempt to Warn Us That the Machines Might Eat Our Souls.” I’ve skimmed through these books, some more than others, and each ties in, one way or another. I’m sure I’ve left out a few big ones, so let me know what I’ve missed.

Berry, Wendell. Wendell Berry: Essays 1993–2017, Library of America, 2019.

I hesitate to mention Mr. Berry, not for lack of regard, but because his presence in such matters has become almost customary, even expected. Still, in deference to the reader who may not yet have read him, and mindful that a tradition not transmitted is a tradition lost, a few passages.

“What does the death of a community, a local economy, cost its members? And what does it cost the country? . . . As people leave the community or, remaining in the place, drop out of the local economy, as the urban-industrial economy more and more usurps the local economy, as the scale and speed of work increase, care declines. As care declines, the natural supports of the human economy and community also decline, for whatever is used, is used destructively.”

“The Civil War made America safe for the moguls of the railroads and of the mineral and timber industries who wanted to be free to exploit the countryside. The work of these industries and their successors is now almost complete. They have dispossessed, disinherited, and moved into the urban economy almost the entire citizenry; they have defaced and plundered the countryside. And now this great corporate enterprise, thoroughly uprooted and internationalized, is moving toward the exploitation of the whole world under the shibboleths of ‘globalization’ ‘free trade,’ and ‘new world order.’”

Bradford, Melvin Eustace. Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative. University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Carlson, Allan C.. The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Transaction Publishers, 2000.

Davidson, Donald. The Attack On Leviathan. University of North Carolina Press, 1938.

“The artists have been among the first to realize that some of the dilemmas of an industrial civilization may be downed or avoided by reaffirming the ties, local and native, which were once only shackles to be cast off.”

The “technology of interchangeable parts” in certain ways did exactly what was claimed for it. Cities grew into extraordinary new shapes and sizes. Technological achievement rushed forward as aviation, radio, sound-movies, labor-saving machinery, and the discoveries of chemist and biologist rapidly exploited and consolidated the tentative advances of nineteenth-century science. Material comforts of the manufactured kind were more widely distributed in the United States than in any nation known to history before.

The “high standard of living” necessary to an expanding industrial system seemed in the way of becoming a reality as the great empire of business, working outward from its northeastern headquarters, annexed to its domain and forced into urban patterns one territory after another of the West and South which had been penetrated but not conquered by the cruder railroading and finance for which the war of the sixties had opened the way.

But aside from the political inequalities and economic weaknesses that were soon to bring Hoover prosperity into a decline, the system had a defect that endangered its cultural dominion and vitiated many of its material gains. It abstracted the economic function from its old place in the complex of human activities and made it the chief, and almost the only important, member of the hierarchy of social functions. Such abstraction and over-emphasis seem to be necessary features of an industrial system, which must depend upon a scheme of correlations and balances vast in extension but delicate and complicated in their inner workings.

Without pure devotion to economic purpose at every point in the gigantic scheme of manufacture and distribution, the whole thing may break down, like an automobile stalled on the road by the failure of some minute part. In the nineteen-twenties, therefore, everybody in America was tending to become producer, entrepreneur, or consumer. Nothing, not even education and religion, could be “put over” unless it was “sold.”

All cultural institutions had to be geared to the process of “selling” industrialism. Furthermore, in the process of elevating eco-nomic function to the highest place, this function itself be-came more abstract and specialized as the general system underwent new refinements and complexities. The country seemed about to turn into an enormous assembly line to which the American individual contributed, without vision of the whole, only a trifling bit of piece work. Persons were becoming negligible. Function was all.

Eliot, T. S.. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Harcourt, Brace, 1949.

Foster, Ruel E.. “Flight From Mass Culture.” The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring 1960), pp. 69-75.

Garrett, Garet. A Time is Born. Pantheon, 1944.

Garrett, Garet. Ex America: The 50th Anniversary of the People's Pottage. Caxton Press, 2004.

Genovese, Eugene D. The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism. Harvard University Press, 1994.

I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. LSU Press, 2006.: (Obligatory) The most famous collective warning against Southern industrialization, written just as the first wave of textile industries was transforming the Piedmont region.

Kohr, Leopold. The Breakdown of Nations. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.: Here’s a great primer on Kohr. Also check out his essay “The Economics of National Size” in Modern Age 07.3, 1963.

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W. W. Norton, 1991.

The propaganda of commodities serves a double function. First, it upholds consumption as an alternative to protest or rebellion. Paul Nystrom, an early student of modern marketing, once noted that industrial civilization gives rise to a “philosophy of futility,” a pervasive fatigue, a “disappointment with achievements” that finds an outlet in changing the “more superficial things in which fashion reigns.”

The tired worker, instead of attempting to change the conditions of his work, seeks renewal in brightening his immediate surroundings with new goods and services.

In the second place, the propaganda of consumption turns alienation itself into a commodity. It addresses itself to the spiritual desolation of modern life and proposes consumption as the cure.

Lewis, C. S.. The Abolition of Man. HarperCollins, 2001.

Lukacs, John. A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, 2004.

It was during the mid-fifties that the competitive quality of American manufactures began to decrease. It was then that the cities of the nation began to deteriorate and actually to lose population. It was then that the relatively short efflorescence of an urban and bourgeois culture in the history of American civilization came to its end.

It was in 1955-56 that for the first time in American (and in world) history the majority of a working population were no longer engaged in any kind of production but in “administration” and in “services,” leading to a post-urban, postindustrial, post-urbane, bureaucratic society. It was then that the often senseless cult of “growth” became an unquestioned American shibboleth, without any thought given to the affinity of the two matters: growth and inflation.

Lytle, Andrew Nelson. From Eden to Babylon. Regnery Gateway, 1990.

Malvasi, Mark. His essays on The Imaginative Conservative: “Andrew Lytle & the Politics of Agrarianism”, “Andrew Lytle and the Order of the Family”, “Choosing Southernness, Choosing My Father’s Way”, “Southern Life, Agrarian Vision: The Apprenticeship of Andrew Lytle.”

McWilliams, Wilson C.. The Idea of Fraternity in America. University of California Press, 1973.

Even if we accepted the idea that man is only a private being, it would be easy to build a case against modern industrial society. Unparalleled opportunities for fulfilling our material desires are inseparably associated with a technology which grows more threatening with each “advance” and with a system of organization which makes us dependent on masses of unknown others.

We become insecure, dependent, and fearful, losing dignity as we gain prosperity. Even our old delights pale with repetition, bringing into sharper focus the still frustrated desires for healthy youth and escape from death. Modern society, in other words, threatens as it rewards, frustrates as it gratifies, and creates dependence where it liberates. The sentiment of resentment inheres in those ambivalent relationships and will appear openly whenever prosperity falters or when state sanctions fail.

Montgomery, Marion. The Truth of Things: Liberal Arts and the Recovery of Reality. Spence Publishing Company, 1999.

The refusal to make such a distinction clouds our understanding of justice and leads us to take abstractions of reality as absolutes. It is this sort of transgression of reality that plagues us as a community of souls in our attempts to order community socially or politically or educationally.

One indication of the impasse we have reached from our failure to make fundamental distinctions is the present civil war conducted against industrialism’s abuses of creation. The laissez-faire uses of creation having lost orientation in responsible stewardship, the “environment” unquestionably suffers, though we are not always clear in our naming of that suffering thing.

Those who intuitively object to encroaching disorders rally persons who are most variously disaffected to “environmental” causes that more often than not lack an ordinate grounding in complex reality. Thus the vague doctrine called “environmentalism” lacks that old grounding in reality that could locate the disorder in the individual soul, and so require moral responsibility in the name of that soul, rather than in the name of an amorphous “environment.”

In that older vision of the orders of existence within which the soul flourishes or decays, the responsible office of stewardship related discrete persons to creation as stewards of creation. For stewardship recognizes and sets as central to the circumstances of human existence in nature man’s peculiar position.

Man differs from all other creatures within the orders of being itself, in respect to which difference the doctrine of stewardship affirms his responsibility for the well-being of the whole of creation. It is a responsibility consequent to his peculiar nature. Stewardship, then, is a more specific and concrete terming of the proper relationship of man to creation than that magic term extracted from the complexities of being and sterilized by abstractionism, “environmentalism.”

Nicholls, William Hord. Southern Tradition and Regional Progress. University of North Carolina Press, 1960.

Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. Skyhorse Publishing, 2023.

Nisbet, Robert A.. Twilight of Authority. Oxford University Press, 1975.

O'Brien, Michael. The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

“This region,” Howard Odum said in Southern Regions, “need not lag, on the one hand, nor, on the other, follow blindly the paths of a hectic, urban, technological, transitional period of civilization.”

Ortega y Gasset, José. The Revolt of the Masses. Taylor & Francis Group, 2021.

Panichas, George A.. Restoring the Meaning of Conservatism: Writings from Modern Age. ISI Books, 2008.

A central, interconnecting link in these selected essays, and what ultimately distinguishes their view of the world as an organic whole and their reverence for humanitas, is their affirmation of the continuity of thought and of the need to view humans in their unique bonds of identity and destiny transcending human fate in a collective, techno-logical, and industrial society.

Pearce, Joseph. Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as If Families Mattered. Skyhorse Publishing, 2023.

People, Land, and Community: Collected E.F. Schumacher Society Lectures. Yale University Press, 1997.

Reed, John Shelton. My Tears Spoiled My Aim and Other Reflections On Southern Culture. University of Missouri Press, 1993.

Reed, John Shelton. One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture. LSU Press, 1982.

Although it is harder to explain cultural differentiation in a mobile, urban, industrial society like the United States than in a society where more people stay put and where there is no “national” culture or an unobtrusive one, the United States has not been immune to the forces that produce regional cultures in less highly developed societies.

Ryn, Claes G.. Democracy and the Ethical Life, A Philosophy of Politics and Community. Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. Human Scale. Secker & Warburg, 1980.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.

Schumacher, E. F.. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered. Harper & Row. 1973.

Scruton, Roger. The Meaning of Conservatism. Penguin, 1980.

But now let us face, for a moment, the broad historical perspective. No society has successfully assimilated industrial production, or the discontents which stem from it. Nevertheless, industrialization, mobility, the divide between labour and management, the reckless pursuit of growth—all these have spread with such rapidity across the globe that it would be foolish to suppose their existence to be accidental.

The conservative task has been, not to oppose whatever force has wrought these things, but to maintain through all its onslaughts the reality of social order, and the continuity of political life.

Stangler, Ryan McKay. The Agrarian Rhetoric of Richard M. Weaver. University of Kansas, 2015. Dissertation.

Stegner, Wallace. Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature. University of Utah Press, 1990.

They’ve lost something in changing from a fully agricultural community to a potentially industrial one.

What would I vote for? My goodness, I would vote for a thousand things, but one of the things I wouldn’t vote for is the heavy industrialization of any part of the West.

Stegner, Wallace. The Sound of Mountain Water. Doubleday, 1969.

It seems to me significant that the distinct downturn in our literature from hope to bitterness took place almost at the precise time when the frontier officially came to an end, in 1890, and when the American way of life had begun to turn strongly urban and industrial. The more urban it has become, and the more frantic with technological change, the sicker and more embittered our literature, and I believe our people, have become.

Sullivan, Walter. Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations. University of Missouri Press, 2004.

Taylor, Jeff. Politics on a Human Scale: The American Tradition of Decentralism. Lexington Books, 2013.

The American South: Portrait of a Culture. Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays After I'll Take My Stand. Southern Texts Society, 2001.

Weaver, Richard M.. Ideas Have Consequences: Expanded Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Weaver, Richard M.., Smith, Ted J.. In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963. Liberty Fund, 2000.

Weaver, Richard M.. The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver. Liberty Press, 1987.

Weaver, Richard M.. The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought. Regnery Gateway, 1989.

* Really, everything by Weaver, Russell Kirk, M.E. Bradford, Donald Davidson.

What Made the South Different? Essays and Comments. University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

Wilson, Clyde N.. A Defender of Southern Conservatism: M.E. Bradford and His Achievements. University of Missouri Press, 1999.

Woods, Thomas E. “Defending the ‘Little Platoons’; Communitarianism in American Conservatism.” American Studies 40, no. 3 (1999): 127–45.

* Also, I recommend subscribing to Modern Age and Chronicles Magazine, but the treasure is in their back issues.

Random Selections of the Somewhat Relevant

Agrarian Landscapes in Transition: Comparisons of Long-Term Ecological & Cultural Change. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Baker, Andrew C.. Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South. University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Beatley, Timothy. Native to Nowhere: Sustaining Home And Community In A Global Age. Island Press, 2004.

Bell, Graham. The Permaculture Way: Practical Steps to Create a Self-Sustaining World. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2005.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay. Cornell University Press, 2016.

Brode, John. The Process of Modernization: An Annotated Bibliography on the Sociocultural Aspects of Development. Harvard University Press, 1969.

Conn, Steven. Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Cooper, Christopher Alan., Knotts, H. Gibbs. The Resilience of Southern Identity: Why the South Still Matters in the Minds of Its People. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Danbom, David B.. The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900-1930. Iowa State University Press, 1979.

Dickson, Keith D.. Sustaining Southern Identity: Douglas Southall Freeman and Memory in the Modern South. LSU Press, 2011.

Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South. University of Georgia Press, 2008.

Egerton, John. The Americanization of Dixie: the Southernization of America. Harper's Magazine Press, 1974.

Etzioni, Amitai. The Monochrome Society. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Freyfogle, Eric T.. Why Conservation Is Failing and How It Can Regain Ground. Yale University Press, 2006.

Francis, Samuel T.. Leviathan and Its Enemies: Mass Organization and Managerial Power In Twentieth-Century America. Washington Summit Publishers, 2016.

Gilbert, James Burkhart. Designing the Industrial State; The Intellectual Pursuit of Collectivism in America, 1880-1940. Quadrangle Books, 1972.

Gilbert, Jess Carr. Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal. Yale University Press, 2015.

Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization. Liverpool University Press, 2003.

Greenberg, Nadivah. The Green and the Right: Rival Views of Consumption and the environment in American Conservative Thought. University of Pennsylvania, 2006. ProQuest Dissertations.

Hall, Robert L.., Stack, Carol B.. Holding on to the Land and the Lord: Kinship, Ritual, Land Tenure, and Social Policy in the Rural South. University of Georgia Press, 1982.

Hart, David M.. Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921-1953. Princeton University Press, 1998.

Hoiberg, Otto G.. Exploring the Small Community. University of Nebraska Press, 1955.

Industrialization and Society. UNESCO, 1963.

The South, like Canada, remained largely unaffected by this transformation of the central sector of the continent. Southern nationalism had taken shape in the 1830’s, and Southern defensive tactics—reflected in states-rights claims, and in tariff, banking, and land policies—enabled basic Southern institutions to last despite Northern aggressiveness. The Civil War and its aftermath destroyed some of these defenses; but, as Douglas Dowd has shown, even this period of chaotic change left the established Southern institutions largely intact. The staying power of Southern institutions has its consequence in center-margin relationships similar to those Canada has with the United States.

Kiely, Ray. The Conservative Challenge to Globalization: Anglo-American Perspectives. Agenda Publishing, 2020.

Kirby, Jack Temple. Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960. Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Kolozi, Peter. Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization. Columbia University Press, 2017.

Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere. Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Langdale, John J.. Superfluous Southerners: Cultural Conservatism and the South, 1920-1990. University of Missouri Press, 2012.

Large Scale and Corporation Farming: A Selected List of References. USDA, 1937.

Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

On the question of homogenization, it is frequently said that MNCs are imposing themselves everywhere in a more or less single and convergent form, which, in a new version of imperialism, disseminates their values and exports their ways of operating worldwide. The same product is promoted in all countries by the same advertisements and the same films. Instead of heterogeneity, we are given the equivalent of Velveeta cheese one cheese for all purposes. Homogenization, in turn, it is said, is identified with Americanization.

Macekura, Stephen J.. The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic Growth and Its Critics. University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Mapping Region in Early American Writing. University of Georgia Press, 2015.

Regional literature developed only when actual regions as distinct cultural entities vanished. Regional literature was then granted a small presence in the national canon, but only as it recited its own elegy. As different regions or subregions came into contact with the vortex of industrialism and commercial consumer capitalism, they could either forfeit local distinctiveness to join the mass culture or cling to local identity, but only so long as it remained safely in the past.

Montmarquet, James A.. The Idea of Agrarianism: from Hunter-Gatherer to Agrarian Radical in Western Culture. University of Idaho Press, 1989.

Persky, Joseph. The Burden of Dependency: Colonial Themes in Southern Economic Thought. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Randall, John Herman. Our Changing Civilization: How Science and the Machine are Reconstructing Modern Life. Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1929.

Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place. Yale University Press, 1996.

Russo, John Paul. The Future Without a Past: The Humanities in a Technological Society. University of Missouri Press, 2005.

The City in Southern History: The Growth of Urban Civilization in the South. Kennikat Press, 1977.

The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America. Cornell University Press, 2001.

The Disappearing South? Studies in Regional Change and Continuity. University of Alabama Press, 1990.

The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life. Island Press, 2001.

Thomas, John L.. A Country in the Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard De Voto, History, and the American Land. Routledge, 2000.

Twitchell, James B.. Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America. Columbia University Press, 1992.

Industrialization had changed the seasonal habits of the common worker. Holidays geared to the hiring of field hands, or the reaping of crops, had all but disappeared in a manufacturing environment where all days and all weeks were standardized. There were no respites in which safely to vent curiosity, bonhomie, or even aggression.

Urbanization and Changing Land Uses: A Bibliography of Selected References, 1950-58. USDA, 1960.

Vallianatos, E. G.. Harvest of Devastation: The Industrialization of Agriculture and Its Human and Environmental Consequences. Apex Press, 1994.

Versluis, Arthur. Island Farm. Michigan State University Press, 2000.

Weisberger, Bernard A.. The New Industrial Society. Wiley, 1968.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913: A History of the South. LSU Press, 1971.: This historian, despite progressive leanings, acknowledged the “colonial economy” that drained Southern wealth northward—the resources taken, the profits diverted—a pattern Southern conservatives have long decried.

* I could keep going, but I’ll stop. Also, read George Santayana.