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The Rebuke of History

The past is always a rebuke to the present. . . . It's a better rebuke than any dream of the future. It's a better rebuke because you can see what some of the costs were, what frail virtues were achieved in the past by frail men. —Robert Penn Warren at the Fugitives' reunion, May 1956

In 1980, the three surviving contributors, novelists Robert Penn Warren and Andrew Nelson Lytle and psychologist Lyle Lanier, attended the Vanderbilt symposium to listen to papers analyzing their achievement and to participate in their own discussion of the book moderated by literary critic Cleanth Brooks, a longtime associate of the Agrarians. An essayist in Time magazine, claiming that 150 doctoral theses had been written about the book, remarked on the appeal of Agrarianism to modern-day environmentalists and theorists of the "zero-sum" society. "Why do the Agrarians, with their crusty prophecies and affirmations, still sound so pertinent, half a very non-agrarian century later?" he asked. The answer, he felt, lay in the power of Agrarianism as a poetic metaphor. This was a view shared by the organizers of the event, who, in a volume derived from it, argued that I'll Take My Stand was a prophetic book. Once dismissed as a nostalgic, backward-looking defense of a romanticized Old South, the book was rather "an affirmation of universal values" and a defense of the "religious, aesthetic, and moral foundations of the old European civilization."[1]

The book appeared at the end of a decade that had seen numerous anthologies of original essays designed to assess the state of modern civilization. Yet this collection stood out and continues to fascinate because of the sheer intransigence of its stance. Industrial society devalues human labor by replacing it with machines, argued the Twelve Southerners. Machine society undercut the dignity of labor and left modern man bereft of vocation and in an attenuated state of "satiety and aimlessness," glutted with the surfeit of consumer goods produced by the industrial economy. Industrialism, they argued, was inimical to religion, the arts, and the elements of a good life—leisure, conversation, hospitality. Modern Americans, Donald Davidson declared elsewhere, live a scattered life, condemned to follow a "thousand highly specialized pursuits" and consumed by "bits of urban piece-work." "In civilization," he argued, "time is measured in tiny units held in delicate synchronization to the central master-clock, which jerks with it, minute to minute, second to second, the servile movements of men." The critic Stark Young, who scathingly attacked the austere banalities of former president Calvin Coolidge in his contribution, imagined the boast of a modern booster: "In our town we've got twenty thousand miles of concrete walks." "And where do they lead?" was his retort.[2]

The Twelve Southerners were frankly reactionary and seriously proposed returning to an economy dominated by subsistence agriculture. The best terms to represent the opposition between southern and American ways of living, they argued, were agrarian versus industrial. The theory of agrarianism, they declared, "is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers." Why, they asked, should modern men accept a social system so manifestly inferior to what had gone before? "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," the Twelve Southerners declared, "it must find the way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous." They infused their antimodernism with southern bravado and a declared willingness to live within the narrow bounds of a traditional life. As was evident in the title's reference to "Dixie," I'll Take My Stand was a self-conscious defense of the South, undertaken sixty-five years after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House. The Twelve Southerners were "reconstructed but unregenerate," John Crowe Ransom suggested. In confronting the forces of modernity, the Southern Agrarians adopted the strategy of the quintessential traditionalist described in John Donald Wade's essay, a man who "went about fortifying himself by his knowledge of history and of ancient fable, telling himself that man had immemorially drawn his best strength from the earth that mothered him."[3]

The passage of years revealed an almost protean quality to Agrarianism. It came to mean very different things to a variety of different thinkers. Indeed, the contributors themselves, over the years, interpreted and reinterpreted their original impulse in light of changing convictions and interests. In 1930, I'll Take My Stand was an indictment of industrial capitalism and a warning of its potential to destroy what the Agrarians considered a more humane and leisurely social order. For some, it later came to be a statement of Christian humanism. For others, it was a rousing defense of the southern heritage and southern culture, which, in turn, meant a defense of the Western tradition. For others, Agrarianism was merely a metaphor for the simple life—one not consumed with materialism. For others still, the symposium was part of a traditional southern political discourse, which warned against centralized power and a strong state and which stood against bourgeois liberalism. After World War II, the nascent conservative movement—poised against what it perceived to be an unwise liberal elite and in defense of traditional values and American capitalism—subsumed the Agrarians within its intellectual tradition. The Agrarians became respected, if quixotic, dissenters from the main trend of American progressivism.

The question asked by the Time essayist in 1980 remains, however: Why do the Agrarians remain so pertinent years after I'll Take My Stand was first published? In 1980 Robert Penn Warren and Lyle Lanier did not dwell on the metaphorical implications of Agrarianism. At the symposium, they commented on the problems of contemporary American society. In an interview a few months before the symposium, Warren argued that technology was destroying the "human personality" and threatening the very basis of democracy. Earlier in the year, Lanier, anticipating the Vanderbilt conference, confided his doubts about the value of his own thoughts to Warren. "I don't feel overly confident now that I can have anything worthwhile to say then about what I stand for in these dismal times," he wrote. "As in 1930, what to stand against seems much easier to identify."[4] Lanier had plenty to say by the following November, listing the ills of modern America, from the condition of the environment to the prevalence of ghettos to the southward movement of midwestern industries in order to exploit cheap labor (a new kind of carpetbagger, in Lanier's view).[5] While Warren and Cleanth Brooks fretted about the social effects of machines and high technology, Lanier cited Barry Commoner on the decentralization of electric power and speculated about the nationalization of some multinational corporations.[6] Brooks cited the historian Christopher Lasch's pessimistic analysis of American culture, The Culture of Narcissism (1979), in support of the arguments in I'll Take My Stand, and Lanier confessed to checking the Wall Street Journal periodically, "just to keep up with what the enemy is up to"![7] Agrarianism had been, and remained, more than a metaphor to these men. It was a program of action, and the enemy was still industrial capitalism.