William Terry Couch and the Politics of Academic Publishing

You ever look at someone familiar and see them, really see them, for the first time? My writing trickles along because my research moves like groundwater. For my Attack on Leviathan series, I’ve been tracing the feud between Donald Davidson and Howard Odum’s Chapel Hill sociologists, a conflict that has left a long trail of ink—a trail I’ll guide you down one day.

That “seeing someone anew thing” happened to me recently when a book emerged like a spring in dry ground—the source of this essay—Orvin Lee Shiflett’s William Terry Couch and the Politics of Academic Publishing: An Editor's Career as Lightning Rod for Controversy published in 2015 by McFarland & Company. I thought I knew W.T. Couch but he refuses to settle neatly into my essay on Odum, not least because he harbored his own doubts about the Tar Heel Planners. And so, he must be dealt with on his own terms.

The Man

William Terry Couch’s life was a curious mixture of the old and the new, the rooted and the restless. Born in Pamplin, Virginia in 1901, into a family ruined by the Civil War and shuffled from town to town by a preacher father. His father’s decision to abandon the itinerant life and settle near Chapel Hill in 1918 marked a turning point.

In 1925, university presses served a single purpose: publishing academic works for other academics. Still an undergraduate, Couch took control of the University of North Carolina Press believing that scholarly works ought to reach beyond scholarly minds. By 1932, he had succeeded so thoroughly that he was named director. However, the man who once fought for progress would later take up a quieter battle for tradition, a shift ignored by the few who’ve written about him.

According to Shiflett, in the offices of American publishing houses, William Terry Couch helped lay the foundation of twentieth-century American Conservative thought. He was an early contributor to Modern Age and handled manuscripts that would define a movement—works by Russell Kirk, Donald Davidson, Richard M. Weaver, Albert Hoyt Hobbs, and Willmoore Kendall. At North Carolina, then Chicago, and finally Collier's, he shaped a conservative renaissance that his liberal superiors neither expected nor welcomed. By 1945, Couch had chosen his path, steering American intellectual life toward conservative shores despite institutional resistance.

The Project

In 1928, Couch conceived Culture in the South to capture the essence of Southern life beyond academic abstraction. He had in mind a Southern version of Harold Stearn’s Civilization in the United States, entitled “Civilization below the Potomac.” He picked Howard Mumford Jones as editor. When the early drafts came back, Couch thought they were a mess except for Donald Davidson’s on Southern literature. He didn’t mince words about it and he took charge, determined to prevent the project from becoming another sociological treatise or, worse still, another I'll Take My Stand, which he considered “smooth and vapid.” That made me give the ol’ head tilt and eyebrow raise. I added the head scratch after he reached out to Andrew Lytle.

Couch offered Lytle two choices: document the South's lumber workers or explore its backwoods communities. Lytle accepted the latter option and sent it to Couch. Couch wasn’t a fan and when he wrote to Lytle about the backwoods people, he didn't ask for history or sociology. He wanted to know what hung on their walls, what stories they told, how they made sense of a world that was vanishing beneath their feet. Even the deadline he set—one month—spoke of urgency, as if the South he sought to capture might disappear before the words could fix it to the page.

Lytle refused, calling Couch’s vision a relic of a South long gone. To Allen Tate, he mocked the request: “They want curtains in cabins, but folks don’t hang curtains anymore—they wear them.” Couch, unwilling to let the matter rest, turned to Davidson for help. It didn’t matter. Lytle was done. Considering what follows, you should know Donald Davidson, H.C. Nixon and John Donald Wade contributed essays to Culture in the South.

The War

The book came in 1934—700 pages of it. But it was a handful of words in Couch’s preface that ignited a blood feud. Couch called out I’ll Take My Stand by name. Though he wasn’t wholly negative, a few of the Twelve Southerners took that personally. Seward Collins wired John Crowe Ransom seeking a champion to take on Chapel Hill. Ransom named Tate without hesitation. His words counseled wisdom while Davidson called for salted earth.

In his American Review essay “A View of the Whole South,” Allen Tate mounted a serious challenge to Culture in the South. Although he gave a nod to a few contributors, Donald Davidson among them, Tate argued that Couch's liberal approach exemplified everything wrong with academic treatments of Southern problems—endless observation masquerading as insight. Here was Professor Couch, wringing his hands over the South's poor whites while offering nothing more substantial than research notes. Couch answered in the summer of ’34, in the pages of the American Review.

In 1935, Couch took aim at everyone—his UNC peers, the Agrarians, the whole lot—for proposing nothing workable for the South. He implied that social scientists offered their brains to the highest bidder, which usually meant the man in charge of the purse. Leaning too near Communist talk drew a swift letter from Frank L. Owsley, who feared Couch had lost his bearings. Communists, Owsley warned, wouldn’t heal wounds but tear them open. Couch, startled, admitted he scarcely knew their doctrine. He’d only noted that Communists, at least, tackled race head-on.

Following the release of Who Owns America? in 1936, a debate was scheduled in Nashville. On one side, the Chapel Hill Planners–W.T. Couch, Rupert Vance, Howard Odum–armed with their numbers and charts, the dry bones of science. On the other, the Agrarians–led by Allen Tate–carried the fire. “Odum and Vance tried to pour scientific oil upon the troubled waters,” recalled a student. Tate was primed for a ruckus.

A young historian named C. Vann Woodward watched it all unfold. “Couch had his hands full,” he remembered. Voices rose, tempers flared. And then Tate stood, the others with him. They filed out, Tate shouting curses all the way up the center aisle, “Your abstractions have no power here!” Later, Andrew Lytle invited Woodward to join the victors as they toasted their “triumph over poor Couch.”

At the Southern Historical Association Convention of 1936, the feud continued. Before Davidson and the other assembled scholars, Couch launched a calculated assault on the Agrarians' positions, focusing particularly on Ransom, Tate, and Lytle. Ransom rose, trembling with anger, to defend his words and his honor. The next morning, he regretted his hot blood, but as Caroline Gordon observed, the rest of their circle rather enjoyed the show.

The Leviathan

Old quarrels or not, Couch wanted to publish Davidson’s Attack on Leviathan. Davidson, cautious, sought counsel from the Agrarians. On March 31, 1937, he told Tate he couldn’t withhold the book just because Couch annoyed him. “I would prefer a true Confederate,” he admitted, “but UNC Press is the best we have for the South.” Allen Tate agreed but saw Couch for what he was. Writing to Cleanth Brooks about his own novel, The Fathers, Tate described Couch as vain, ignorant, and best handled with a wary touch.

In 1938, Couch published Attack on Leviathan. Davidson’s words needed no heavy-handed editor, only a few small corrections. Years later while working at Collier’s he would put his job on the line to fight to include encyclopedia entries penned by Davidson, Russell Kirk, and other conservatives. A quarter-century later, Couch would call Attack on Leviathan one of the two greatest books he’d ever published.

The Consequences

The manuscript that would become The Southern Tradition at Bay began as Richard M. Weaver's doctoral thesis at LSU. At Cleanth Brooks's urging, he sent the manuscript to W.T. Couch at UNC Press. Couch saw merit in the work but requested bookends—an introduction and conclusion to frame the argument. Weaver obliged, only to have fate intervene when Couch departed for the University of Chicago Press, leaving his manuscript orphaned by the incoming director.

In Chicago, W.T. Couch still thought Weaver’s dissertation had merit but turned it down for being too Southern. Couch urged Weaver to broaden the conclusions to fit the modern world. Reluctantly, Weaver set it aside and, with Cleanth Brooks’s informal help, wrote The Adverse Descent, later published by the University of Chicago Press in 1948 as Ideas Have Consequences—a title Weaver loathed. Couch promoted the book heavily, but Weaver bristled at the advertising, claiming it “reminded one of advertisements for prophylactics.”

Weaver’s book met a mixed fate, scorned by some on the Chicago campus but destined for a larger judgment. Henry Regnery put it plainly: Ideas Have Consequences, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Kirk’s The Conservative Mind formed the foundation of modern Conservatism. Couch, who shepherded over two hundred books through the University of Chicago Press, took the most pride in Weaver’s work, a work he said cost him the goodwill of the trustees and, in the end, his job. Russell Kirk writes about Couch’s Windy City years in Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition, published by Regnery in 1955.

The Conclusion

Consider a man who had once sparred with Southern Conservatives, yet later found himself wishing he had accepted a position under Henry Regnery, whose conservative publishing house would soon produce Russell Kirk’s seminal The Conservative Mind in 1953. Reflecting on his own publishing career, he wrote to a friend at Regnery with a frank admission: across twenty-five years of searching for substantive manuscripts akin to Kirk’s, he had found only two—Donald Davidson’s Attack on Leviathan and Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. Merely having brought those two works to the public, he believed, was enough to justify his entire tenure as a publisher.

I have touched on William Terry Couch’s life only lightly, much as one idly flicks a stone across a minor backwater. He merits more than a cursory glance. Had I not looked more carefully, I might have carelessly dismissed him as one of those self-hating Southern liberal hick-libs. But as with most people, he resists narrow classification. I shall return to Couch in my “South Bound” series. Meanwhile, let Shiflett’s William Terry Couch and the Politics of Academic Publishing serve as guide, for its notes and bibliography gleam like hidden gold deposits in an old riverbed. In the final reckoning, America’s Conservative tradition owes more than a passing nod to the Southern Mind.

The Reading

- Below the Potomac, University of North Carolina Library Extension Publication 1.2, 1935. “This program for study is based on the volume Culture in the South.”

- Brooks, Cleanth., Tate, Allen. Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: Collected Letters, 1933-1976. University of Missouri Press, 1998.

- Couch. “A University Press in the South,” Southwest Review 19.2, 1934.

- Couch, William Terry. “An Agrarian Programme for the South,” American Review 3, 1934.

- Couch. “Books That Ought to Be Written,” Library Quarterly 12.3, 1942.

- Couch. “Economic Planning in the South,” Westminster Magazine 23 (January-March 1935): 298-305. If someone could help me find this, that would be great.

- Couch. “Sainted Book Burners,” The Freeman 5.10, 1955.

- Couch. Southern Oral History Program Interviews.

- Couch. “Southern Publishing,” Sewanee Review 53.1, 1945.

- Couch. “Twenty Years of Southern Publishing,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 1950.

- Couch. "What It Takes to Start A University Press" The Saturday Review of Literature 28.23. 1945.

- Culture in the South. University of North Carolina Press, 1934.

- Cutrer, Thomas W.. Parnassus on the Mississippi: The Southern Review and the Baton Rouge Literary Community, 1935–1942. LSU Press, 1984.

- Davidson, Donald. The Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States. University of North Carolina Press, 1938.

- Davidson, Donald. The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate. University of Georgia Press, 1974.

- Kirk, Russell. Academic freedom: An Essay in Definition.Henry Regnery Company, 1955.

- Langdale, John J.. Superfluous Southerners: Cultural Conservatism and the South, 1920-1990. University of Missouri Press, 2012.

- Lytle, Andrew Nelson., Tate, Allen. The Lytle-Tate Letters: The Correspondence of Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate. University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

- Malvasi, Mark G.. “The Attack on Leviathan at 75, A Commemoration and a Critique,” Modern Age, 2013.

- Marion Montgomery’s intro to Donald Davidson’s “Regionalism”, Modern Age, 1995. “Davidson’s essay ‘Regionalism’ is here printed for the first time. Couch commissioned the essay when he became editor-in-chief for Collier's Encyclopedia, only to have its publication prevented (along with, he says, "pieces" by Richard Weaver that are now apparently lost).”

- Root, Merrill E.. Collectivism on the Campus: The Battle for the Mind in American Colleges. Devin-Adair, 1955.

- Roper, John Herbert. C. Vann Woodward, Southerner. University of Georgia Press, 1987.

- Shiflett, Orvin Lee. William Terry Couch and the Politics of Academic Publishing: An Editor's Career as Lightning Rod for Controversy. McFarland, 2015.

- Singal, Daniel Joseph. The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Especially Chapter 9. “The Critical Temperament Unleashed: William Terry Couch and Southern Publishing.”

- Stearns, Harold E.. Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans. Harcourt, Brace, 1922.

- Tate, Allen, “A View of the Whole South,” American Review 2, (February 1934).

- Underwood, Thomas A.. Allen Tate: Orphan of the South. Princeton University Press, 2000.

- Weaver, Richard M.. Ideas Have Consequences. University of Chicago Press, 1948.

- Woodward, C. Vann. The Letters of C. Vann Woodward. Yale University Press, 2013.

- Woodward, C. Vann. Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History. Louisiana State University Press, 1986.