From the Archives: The South and American Conservatism
At 12:30 p.m. on Friday, October 12, 1979, the Philadelphia Society opened its Southern Regional Meeting in Grand Ballroom B of the New Orleans Hilton Hotel. The Society's event page carries the original program and recordings but no transcripts. The Cleanth Brooks talk and M.E. Bradford/Jaffa debate Lincoln recordings are the ones missing, of course. I attempted to clean the audio, which is in rough shape, and transcribed all eleven sessions. They are available for download below.
“The South is a great place for all of you to gather for a reexamination of conservative principles.” — James Jackson Kilpatrick
Friday: James Jackson Kilpatrick
John A. Howard, the Society's president, thanked M.E. Bradford, T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., William F. Campbell, and Don Lipsett for putting the meeting together, then introduced James Jackson Kilpatrick. "Reflections on a Conservative Trend" was the prolific Newspaperman’s theme.
“I’m going to submit to you that there is a mild conservative resurgence in the country, nothing so definite, so strong as to be described as a Conservative Movement, perhaps not even as a conservative trend, but I think there is a very definite sort of conservative drift that is reflected in various ways.”
The meeting was held thirteen months before Reagan won the presidency and four days before Carter signed the bill creating a cabinet-level Department of Education.
“Those of us on the conservative side, and especially Southern Conservative, cling to old buildings, old landmarks as anchors against the winds of innovation.”
He remembered interviewing one of the old grande dames who lived at the Hotel Jefferson in Richmond, around 1941, when he was a young feature writer newly arrived from Oklahoma by way of Missouri. “The first thing you should know, young man,” she told him, “is that we have lived longer under the flag of England than we have lived under the flag of the United States.” Later he did the subtraction and found she was right. “They had, in fact, lived longer under the flag of England, and she meant to keep it that way if she could.”
“We are children of God and not mere wards of the state.”
The part of the speech most likely to catch a reader now is the part about corporations and how Conservatives apply Lord Acton selectively.
“The great thing about Southern manners: it is the old oil that lubricates the gears of society. And here in the South we are full of the old oil, among other things we are full of—bourbon whiskey and other good things.”
Saturday morning: Southern Letters in the Twentieth Century
T. Kenneth Cribb Jr.’s recording opens mid-sentence. Richard “Weaver saw the Southern experience as a minority report to the bustling commercial optimism that has been celebrated as the American dream.” The South’s great defeat, on Weaver’s account, “was not Appomattox but, rather, its failure to articulate the ground of its latent metaphysics.”
Marion Montgomery’s paper was called “In Defense of Evil,” and he explained the title in his opening remarks.
“It’s easy enough to get people to defend good. I have in mind, in my defense, Baudelaire’s remark a long time ago that the devil’s cleverest wile is to convince the modern world that he doesn’t exist. For that reason, we have to be reminded that perhaps, indeed, he does. Hence the necessity of defending evil as evil.”
He describes a type of Southern writer he calls “our writer.” The man stays in his own neighborhood or comes back to it. He knows the doctrine of original sin to be true and isn’t scared to name evil by its Christian name. The local, for him, is where the larger mystery of creation becomes visible. His art is tethered to reality and accepts human limits with humility and humor. He is, as Montgomery’s puts it, “a spiritual regionalist, not an intellectual provincial.”
“Now the modern reader hungers for the redemptive act in spite of his being inhabitant of a world which tries to deny redemption, except, as it may be used metaphorically to describe some psychological or sociological recovery that implies man, the ultimate God of the meaningless middle.”
Thomas H. Landess follows, opening on the Philadelphians present. “All the standardized tests prove that Yankees are smarter than Southerners. If we’d only had the IQ and the SAT scores in 1861, we could have predicted the outcome of the war and saved half a million lives.”
Landess argues that the best Southern literature reaches the universal by refusing to leave home. It stays with the family, the county, the old sins, the scandal whispered about at reunions for the next hundred years. What he calls its “ontological orthodoxy” rests on the Incarnation. Southern writers believe in it, and so the flesh and the concrete particulars of time and place are important, good, and hence sacred. Evil is a common inheritance, the innate wickedness Mississippi shares with Pennsylvania and New Jersey and every other place on earth.
Working from inside a family, the writer cannot climb above his characters or hand them over to an ideology. Poverty does not exonerate them, and the sinner is not cast out. He is claimed the way the executed man is claimed at the end of Go Down, Moses, and the way Tate claims the lynched man at the end of The Swimmers, as kinsman to every man who suffers the indignity of being human. So the power of Southern fiction lies in the fact that it is “not about the South, but merely takes place there.” Its “fine particularity” gives “flesh and bone to its universal soul.”
“In one sense, the power of Southern fiction lies in the very fact that it is not about the South, but merely takes place there. Thus it has a fine particularity that gives flesh and bone to its universal soul. In that respect, it is analogous to the created order itself.”
Madison Jones, the former student of Donald Davidson and Andrew Lytle, went last and over his allotted time.
He wasn’t as optimistic as Montgomery and Landess. “I wish I had as much optimism as is implied in the statements about Southern writers and Southern writing for the future, but I know a lot of writers, and I don’t see so much of what Marion and Tom have been talking about as being present anymore… I just wonder how much is still left of what the Southern writer had. Something, certainly.”
His family considered writing eccentric, and poetry that would have folks whispering about you. His grandfather, born in 1856, read the Old Testament aloud to him and told him war stories.
“When I’m asked, “Who was the greatest literary influence on you?” I usually answer, “Moses,” because my grandfather always read to me from the Old Testament, the wonderful stories, the greatest stories ever told.”
Saturday lunch: King Hog
William F. Campbell introduced Forrest McDonald with Scottish Clan history and a pun on “oinkonomics.” McDonald’s talk was how the antebellum Southerner came by his ways. His talk is a working draft of what became his Prologue to Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture.
“The Southerner has no pleasure in labor. He enjoys life itself. He is content with being.”
McDonald calls the antebellum plain folk of the South, herdsmen. The settlers came mostly of Celtic stock and had kept livestock rather than plowed ground long before they saw Carolina. He calls the persistence of that custom cultural conservatism. Celtic Southerners were hospitable and proud and warlike—loved to punch anything but a clock—quick to catch fire and slow to be extinguished.
His conclusion:
Modern industrial civilization, for all of its material benefits, was purchased at a staggering cost in the form of alienation, depersonalization, regimentation, and bureaucratization.
Now, Southerners knew that all along.
They resisted the building of such a civilization in America and continued to be ill-fitting members of it.
Perhaps, after all, it is better to go hunting and fishing than to work nine to five in an office or factory. Perhaps it is more important to visit and talk with friends and family than to chase the almighty dollar. Perhaps it is more rewarding to know the joys of dreaming and bragging than to know the frustration and heartache of attempting to accomplish.
As a 20th-century American, I’ve been conditioned to believe otherwise. But as a born and bred Celtic Southerner, I suspect I’m wrong.
Saturday afternoon: They Took Their Stand
Jeffrey Hart opened the panel.
Andrew Lytle—one of three living contributors to I’ll Take My Stand as of 1979—began by singing. “I think it would make a very fine transition if I could give you a concrete instance to sustain Mr. McDonald’s argument. There used to be a play-party game called Hog Drovers, and I will sing you the song that goes with it.”
Lytle used to ride with his father to collect toll on the roads out of Murfreesboro. If you wanted to drive to Nashville you would hit a privately owned toll gate about every five miles. All the coins smelled of snuff. A man did not leave home idly. He mostly lived inside a five mile world. That is the world I’ll Take My Stand was written to defend. The Statement of Principles left room for industries, professional vocations, scholars, artists, and a dance floor or two. The Agrarians wanted families held on ground that carried the memory of past generations, farms and businesses owned by the people who worked them, and work answerable to something besides money and physical comfort.
By 1930 nothing was settled yet. Enough families still worked their own land, and enough shopkeepers still owned the shop under their own name, to resist Leviathan. The Agrarians went after industrialism the day it hardened into the single permitted shape of a life. And the farms went from six million to a little over two million between 1940 and 1974, and after the war thirty million people left the country for the city.
“Industry today uproots. Promotion, except among the basic workers, means pulling up roots and being sent elsewhere, with the promise of a better car and more rooms to the house.
The children, just as they are making friends and getting used to school, must begin all over again somewhere else.
This is a modification of the Spartan state, which reduced the family to a minimal role. You don’t need but one wrong idea to destroy a state.
I can’t believe that any society is strong which holds physical comfort as its best quest.”
Lytle thought the Twelve were better prophets than they knew. He said they should have found a larger word than “agrarian,” since what stood in danger was the whole country’s Christian inheritance.
“Nobody could imagine that the world they were born in, had lived in, and were still living in could disappear. Well, it has.”
This talk was published as Reflections of a Ghost: An Agrarian View After Fifty Years.
Harriet Chappell Owsley followed, opening with something she had lately heard said at Vanderbilt: “Whether you like it or not, Vanderbilt University is known away from Nashville as the home of the Agrarians.” She read from her late husband, Frank L. Owsley’s, remarks at the 1956 Fugitive Reunion, on a generation of friends watching “that money value had become the real basic value; that the sense of community was disappearing; that the whole civilization in this country was becoming cruder and cruder.” Mrs. Owsley took the Agrarian movement for a revolt against materialism and a call to recover the conditions of a civilized life.
“At this time of economic turmoil and industrial disaster, many thoughtful people are taking a second look at the proposals made 50 years ago by the Twelve Southerners.”
The only remnant of Southern Conservatism today is our generational memories and the books in our libraries.