Those Who Felt the Tremor: A Bibliography of Industrial Reckoning

“Ambitious men fight, first of all against nature; they propose to put nature under their heel; this is the dream of scientists burrowing in their cells, and then of the industrial men who beg of their secret knowledge and go out to trouble the earth.” - John Crowe Ransom

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.

The modern industrial urban centers are “pluralistic” because they are full of refugees from destroyed communities, destroyed community economies, disintegrated local cultures, and ruined local ecosystems.

“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 industrial revolution has thus made universal the colonialist principle that has proved to be ruinous beyond measure: the assumption that it is permissible to ruin one place or culture for the sake of another.

“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.’”

The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community.

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.

There is something about the nature of modern industry that inevitably creates a sense of void and aloneness.

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.

The Industrialization of the South