Sinners in the Hands of Southern Studies

A Book Review

Started out with the intention of a quick post on X about this book I’m reading, but my blood pressure kept rising and I kept writing and here we are.

The book: Wilson, Charles Reagan. The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South. University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

Mr. Wilson comes off as a man so afraid of ordering wrong he’d rather go hungry than risk ordering off-script—one of those “I’ll have what they’re having” types. I wonder if the man has ever entertained a thought not cleared by the consensus committee.

I’ve read a book or two, and I’ve learned a man’s convictions show in his saints and his heretics. Wilson’s critique of the Agrarians is not so much criticism as catechism—one that’s unquestioned, and newly learned.

Wilson says I’ll Take My Stand, published in 1930, was the first articulation of a distinctly Southern way of life—one that prized the old over the new, the farm over the factory, the soul over the spreadsheet—that maybe the South didn’t need to become a carbon copy of the North. Maybe there was value in the land, in ritual, in memory. Maybe the Southern way of life—whatever its flaws—was worth a second thought before paving it over.

Wilson, it’s safe to say, is not a fan. He rattles off the modern shibboleths—alienated intellectuals, insecure provincials, patriarchal, racist, Neo-Confederates, Lost Causers . . . and then he says, without blinking or thinking, “they had little impact on the emerging group of writers in the region who would win acclaim in national circles.”

If I had horses, I’d be holding them (squints): “and they had little impact on the emerging group of writers in the region who would win acclaim in national circles.”

Ah, yes: Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Donald Wade, Robert Penn Warren, Stark Young—had little impact on Southern Literature.

Ah, yes, Davidson, whose students would go on to establish the Southern Review, had little impact on Southern Literature. Grok, who were some of the groups and writers involved in the Southern Renascence? Surely Wilson knows how deep the former Agrarian students bench runs.

The double standard operates with mechanical efficiency: The Agrarians warned against the “blind drift of our industrial development,” against the centralization of economic and governmental power, against the “Cult of Science” that reduces human beings to economic units. These concerns have not aged poorly. Indeed, they seem more prescient with each passing decade. Yet Wilson can see in them only reactionary nostalgia.

But, if you’re an “organizing commie sign-maker” chanting about the MAN (the industrialist the Agrarians warned about), or “leftist critics lauded your “proletarian novel” as the best thing since sliced bread lines . . . GOLD STARS! Fundamentalist Christians are benighted creationists, but fundamentalist progressives are visionary reformers doing the Lord’s work.

Wilson notes a few positive reviews of I’ll Take My Stand, but goes full expository preacher with many of the negative ones. He does mention the Agrarian debates that followed—events that drew thousands, mind you. A favorite nugget of mine regarding those debates is Caroline Gordon’s line about Donald Davidson making mincemeat out of poor W.S. Knickerbocker (then-editor of the Sewanee Review), which is to say, intellectually tenderizing the man until he resembled academic hash.

Wilson reserves special praise for Grace Lumpkin for “exposing the dark side of Agrarian writings.” He loves that she came from classic “Lost Cause–laced,” Georgia stock—but unlike the heretical White Southerners, she broke ranks and took up the hammer and sickle, or carried their card or whatever, redeeming herself—by repudiating the past, and aligning with radical reformers. That, for Wilson, is virtue. That earns her full sainthood in his telling.

“Lost Cause–laced.” Not quite soaked, not quite damned, but tainted—poisoned—like Southern lineage were a contaminant passed down in the blood, as though it names some inherited sin. Wilson mentions the “Lost Cause” 150ish times. Any positive mention of the South is Lost Cause infused or marinated in the drippings of the Lost Cause, not literally, but I’m pretty much over target.

He praises the progressive “William T. Couch” but of course the Dean of Southern Studies would know Couch’s biographer pretty much said, any one who thinks Couch was a progressive is an EG-NO-RA-MOOSE at best (fails Cracker Barrel pegiognomy check)

It’s almost funny. Wilson cannot speak of “The Southern Way of Life” without giving space—substantial space—to those irrelevant “insecure provincial intellectuals.” Because he knows that they cannot be written out. The Agrarians are not an aside. They are the threshold. Time will sort the lasting from the passing. Maybe somebody will scribble something nice about Wilson and his comrades in a hundred years. Or maybe they’ll be too busy reading some old dusty copy of I’ll Take My Stand. We shall see. As for the Agrarians—those names are already written.

Rating: 1 Commodus thumbs down.

P.S. I hold no personal quarrel with Mr. Wilson. He’s no doubt made meaningful contributions to Southern Studies, and I count several of his books among my shelves. But, I thought this one pretty lightweight for a man so heavily credentialed.

Update: I wrote the above review after reading the first half of the book. I've now read the whole thing, this guy is my enemy. Will update review.