The Tennessee Agrarians by Richard M. Weaver

The Tennessee Agrarians

by Richard M. Weaver | Originally published in Shenandoah 03.2, 1952.

The often quoted saying of President Davis that if the South lost the war, its history would be written by the North, proved partly wrong and party right. Between 1865 and 1900 the South wrote its history with vigor and in volume, and the literature of Southern apologia published in that period makes a fair-sized library. But there is some room for saying that the writers of these years wrote well rather than wisely, so that Davis’s prophecy was in one point borne out. It was not so much history as special pleading which was presented; and while this may have softened, it did not materially change the national verdict.

This statement should of course not be made without due recognition of the genius and energy which were spent in defending the South’s cause and in justifying its culture. The literature of the post-bellum era falls into three rather distinct phases: military and political defenses written in the shadow of defeat; romantic recreations of ante-bellum civilization, chiefly in fiction; and continuations of the political and social argument, with some addition of perspective and objectivity. The first group contains some brilliant effort; and the South should never have been allowed to forget the herculean labors of Albert Taylor Bledsoe, whose Is Davis a Traitor? is one of the great American polemics, or the militant work of Robert Lewis Dabney, whose A Defense of Virginia and Through her of the South is a tough piece of reasoning. The second group was in milder vein. Represented most completely by John Esten Cooke and Thomas Nelson Page, it threw a silvery romance over all things Southern which was not entirely to the South’s advantage, although the motives were unimpeachable. In the third group appeared men of such differing talents and vocations as Woodrow Wilson, Basil Gildersleeve (whose article “A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War” is worth reading today), J. L. M. Curry, and John S. Wise. To their exposition they brought the detachment of time and some feeling of reincorporation in the Union. Yet as the period closed with the South trying to explain itself and gain recognition, there is reason to say that its history was still being framed from the outside.

The effective statement of its cause did not appear until a quarter of a century later, from men who had never worn Confederate gray, or witnessed the chaos of Reconstruction, or even cherished political ambition, These were a group of scholars and writers having a kind of center at Vanderbilt University, who found, mainly through their literary and philosophic disciplines, the means of giving the South what it had so long needed—a doctrine resting upon independent assumptions. The Fugitive-Agrarian movement took form in the early 1920s, and it presented during the next fifteen years one of the few effective challenges to a monolithic culture of unredeemed materialism. This challenge received its most comprehensive expression in a symposium entitled I’ll Take My Stand, published in 1930. Here twelve self-confessed Southerners drew up a now classic indictment of the industrial society and its metaphysic “Progress.”

Although the Agrarians were men of academic and literary profession, two things had combined to turn their attention to the question of regional difference. First, a considerable number of them had enjoyed the opportunity of European education or residence, which the older Southern spokesmen generally had not. That experience had led them to look at the South in the broad picture of Western European civilization. What they saw—what they had to see—was that the South, with its inherited institutions and its system of values, was a continuation of Western European culture and that the North was the deviation. That discovery takes on significance as soon as one reflects that by rule the deviation, and not the continuation, requires the defense. Thus there appeared a logical ground for putting the South in the position of plaintiff and the North in that of defendant, a reversal of the roles which had been played for a hundred years.

Second, an important number of Agrarians were poets. The very acceptance of poetry commits one to the realm of value, and this meant that their judgments were to be in part ethical and aesthetic. They were thus concerned immediately with the quality of the South; and this orientation put the case upon an independent footing. It was of course impossible to revive interest in the South’s legal claims, and political claims alter with circumstances. But claims based upon ethical and aesthetic considerations are a different matter; they cannot be ignored at any time, and it was these which furnished the principal means of attack.

In sum, it was not until about 1925 that Southern intellectuals caught up with Lee and Jackson. The latter had known in 1862 that the one chance for the South was to carry the fight to the enemy. They fully appreciated the principle, only recently brought to public attention, though actually as old as warfare, that the best defense is a good offense. For various reasons, chiefly political, they were prevented from carrying out that policy, and the defensive struggle ended in defeat. A comparable fate overtook the Southern apologists of the next fifty or sixty years, as we have already indicated. They spent themselves in parrying, denying, and defending, and their victories were defensive victories. But with I’ll Take My Stand the turn came; here Southern intellectuals for the first time conducted a general offensive against the enemy positions, with some excellent results. Penetrations were made and flanks were threatened; and the enemy was alerted to a degree he had not experienced in decades. I stress this aspect despite the suggestion of the book’s title and titles of some of the contributions. They sound defensive, but the tactic was actually offense. A few representative quotations will make that apparent enough.

No reader of the volume will forget, for example, John Crowe Ransom’s demolishing attack upon the theory of industrial society.

Progress never defines its ultimate objective, but thrusts its victims at once into an infinite series. Our vast industrial machine, with its laboratory centers of experimentation, and its far-flung organs of mass production, is like a Prussianized state which is organized strictly for war and can never consent to peace.

There can never be stability and establishment in a community whose every lady member is sworn to see that her mate is not eclipsed in the competition for material advantages; the community will fume and ferment, and every constituent part will be in perpetual physical motion. The good life depends on leisure, but leisure depends on an establishment, and the establishment depends on a prevailing magnanimity which scorns personal advancement at the expense of the free activity of the mind.

Industrialism is an insidious spirit, full of false promises and generally fatal to establishments since, when it once gets into them for a little renovation, it proposes never to leave them in peace. Industrialism is rightfully a menial, of almost miraculous cunning but no intelligence; it needs to be strongly governed or it will destroy the economy of the household. Only a community of tough conservative habit can master it.

John Gould Fletcher took the subject of education. Traditional Southern education of the classical type had as its aim the producing of good men. Now we are being asked to surrender that in favor of the type which makes “the public-school product of New York City or Chicago a behaviorist, an experimental scientist in sex and firearms, a militant atheist, a reader of detective fiction, and a good salesman.” Furthermore:

We achieve character, personality, gentlemanliness in order to make our lives an art and to bring our souls into relation with the whole scheme of things, which is the divine nature. But the present-day system of American popular education exactly reverses this process. It puts that which is superior-learning, intelligence, scholarship—at the disposal of the inferior. It says in effect that if the pupil acquires an education, he will be better able to feed and clothe his body later. It destroys the intellectual self-reliance of character, and the charm of balanced personality, in order to stuff the mind with unrelated facts. Its goal is industry rather than harmonious living and self aggrandisement rather than peace with God.

Stark Young expressed the choice before us:

It would be childish and dangerous for the South to be stampeded and betrayed out of its own character by the noise, force, and glittering narrowness of the industrialism and progress spreading everywhere, with varying degrees, from one region to another.

We can put one thing in our pipes and smoke it—there will never again be distinction in the South until—somewhat contrary to the doctrine of popular and profitable democracy—it is generally clear that no man worth anything is possessed by the people, or sees the world under a smear of the people’s wills and beliefs.

This, at present, un-American idea of education may spread il in our schools and universities a less democratic, mobbed, and imitative course of things should come to be; with less booming and prating, organizing, unrest, babble about equipment, election of trustees from the Stock Exchange—all signs of an adolescent mentality and prosperous innocence of what culture may mean. I shall never forget the encouragement with which I saw for the first time that some of the dormitory doors at the University of Virginia needed paint, so sick was I at the bang-up varnishing, rebuilding, plumbing, endowing, in some of the large Northern institutions. If they learn little at these Virginia halls, it is doubtless as much as they would learn at the others, and they at least escape the poison of the success idea that almost every building is sure to show, the belief that mechanical surface and outer powers of money are the prime things in living.

These were startling sentiments, but it can be said with truth, in looking back over the total response, that the nation as a whole welcomed this book. That is because the nation as a whole wishes the South to speak, and wishes it to speak in character. The last phrase is essential. Despite our excitement over differences, our pain over invidious comparisons, and our resentment of suspected superiorities, we desire, as long as we are in possession of our rational faculty, to hear an expression of the other point of view. That is a guarantee of our freedom and a necessity for our development. And the other point of view, to carry any conviction, must not be expressed apologetically. When you are impressed with the positive value of anything, whether it be a way of life or a creed or an artform, you do not fall back upon defensive postures, for that is to accept defeat in advance. You go forth in the evangelical spirit and seek out the opponent. That is why I’ll Take My Stand was read in quarters where the vapid professions of Southern liberals aroused no sign of interest.

Of course there were elements by which the book was not welcomed, and they can be pretty well tagged by the brickbats they threw. Among them were, as would be guessed, the philistines, including especially journalists of both the literary and newspaper variety. The ground of their opposition is not far to seek. Being opposed to culture as such, they no doubt realized that any genuine revival of culture would leave them exposed for what they are. The mortal enmity of philistine and poet was present in this clash. These opponents made much noise, but it is hard for them to touch people who work at the level of I’ll Take My Stand and other Agrarian publications.

There was another type of critic who summed up his opposition in the familiar saying, “You can’t turn the clock back.” The most charitable thing that can be said of him is that he is confused in a fundamental way. No one beyond the first grade in philosophy believes that time can be reversed. What the Agrarians, along with people of their philosophic conviction everywhere, were saying is that there are some things which do not have their subsistence in time, and that certain virtues should be cultivated regardless of the era in which one finds oneself born. It is the most arrant presentism to say that a philosophy cannot be practiced because that philosophy is found in the past and the past is now gone. The whole value of philosophy lies in its detachment from accidental conditions of this kind and its adherence to the essential. Any idealistic position must insist that circumstances yield to definitions and not definitions to circumstances. These opponents have not considered the saying of Spinoza: “In so far as the mind conceives a thing according to the dictate of reason, it will be equally affected whether the idea be of a thing present, past, or future.”

A more formidable opposition appeared among what might be called the Southern collaborationists. They are men who have accepted completely the doctrine of progress, and who have their entire investment of substance, position, and prestige in it. They are the ones who want more factories, more of everything which would make the South a replica of Lowell and Schenectady and Youngstown with a consequent swelling of bank deposits and pay rolls. Not all of them are disingenuous; some of them are simply unable to see an alternative. The collaborationists were not very vocal in the terms of this argument; but they work from richly upholstered offices, and it is they who have dealt the Agrarians their hardest blow. With the business man’s grasp of reality, they have sensed the opposition to their order in a vital religious-aesthetic movement, and they have countered with a shrewd stroke. They have dispersed the Agrarians. Undoubtedly the Agrarians would exert an immensely greater influence if they held some city or some university, if they had a concentration of forces which would serve as a radiating center of impulse—if they had a Rome, as it were. This the business men have seen to it they do not have. Scattered now from Nashville to New Haven and from Princeton to Minneapolis they are comparatively impotent. The collaborationists have had the best of this phase, and the Agrarians are left with only a rhetorical victory.

It would be false to deny that in the practical realm things have become very much worse. There is no more melancholy spectacle on the American scene than the fact that South Carolina, which in former times set the best example of the ideal of chivalry, is now the site of the hydrogen bomb project, which prepares for indiscriminate slaughter on a scale not hitherto contemplated. Thus far there has been no objection from South Carolina. And indeed other Southern states are in no way behind in asking for industrialism on any terms and for any purpose.

Yet over against these discouraging facts one may set certain facts about human history and development. One of them is that the potentiality for change is always greater than we realize at any given moment. There have been revolutions in human affairs which appear miraculous in the light of the conditions which preceded them. Ultimately it is the human psyche which determines the kind of world we live in, and history is marked with radical changes of phase which could undermine even so seemingly impregnable a thing as our modern scientific-technological order. One could not do better than close with the final sentences of the “Introduction” to I’ll Take My Stand. They are more important now than they were then, since an even greater fraction of our people seems to believe that we are being hurried along by uncontrollable forces toward a society like that depicted by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-four.

If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence.