Southern Agrarians

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The Southern Agrarians (also known as the Twelve Southerners, the Vanderbilt Agrarians, the Nashville Agrarians, the Tennessee Agrarians, or the Fugitive Agrarians) were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a collection of essays published in 1930 entitled I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (ISBN 080713208X).

The Southern Agrarians formed an important branch of American populism. They contributed to the revival of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s now known as the Southern Renaissance. Most met each other as faculty and students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Members

The Southern Agrarians included:

• Donald Davidson, poet, essayist, reviewer and historian
• John Gould Fletcher
• Henry Blue Kline
• Lyle H. Lanier
• Andrew Nelson Lytle, poet, novelist and essayist
• Herman Clarence Nixon
• Frank Lawrence Owsley, historian
• John Crowe Ransom, poet, professor, essayist
• Allen Tate, poet
• John Donald Wade
• Robert Penn Warren, poet,novelist, essayist and critic
• Stark Young, novelist, drama and literary critic, playwright

Background and general ideas of the Southern Agrarians

The Agrarians evolved from a philosophical discussion group known as the "Fugitives" or "Fugitive Poets". Many of the Southern Agrarians and Fugitive poets were connected to Vanderbilt University, either as students or as faculty members. Davidson, Lytle, Ransom, Tate, and Warren all attended the university; Davidson and Ransom later joined the faculty, along with Wade and Owsley. They were moved to respond to their studies of poetic modernism and of H. L. Mencken's scathing critique of Southern culture. They were offended by his widely publicized essay "The Sahara of the Bozart". They wanted to confront the widespread and rapidly increasing effects of modernity, urbanism, and industrialism on American (but especially Southern) culture and tradition. The informal leader of the Fugitives and the Agrarians was John Crowe Ransom, though he formally repudiated agrarianism in a 1945 essay.^{[citation needed]} The most eloquent exponent of the Agrarian philosophy eventually proved to be Ransom's student Richard M. Weaver, a friend of Donald Davidson.^{[citation needed]} Unlike the others, Weaver taught at a Northern institution, the University of Chicago.

The Southern Agrarians bemoaned the increasing loss of Southern identity and culture to industrialization. They believed that the traditional agrarian roots of the United States, which had reigned since the nation's founding in the 18th century, were important to its nature. Their manifesto was a critique of the rapid industrialization and urbanization during the first few decades of the 20th century in the southern United States. It posited an alternative based on a return to the more traditionally rural and local culture, and agrarian American values. The group opposed the changes in the US that were leading it to become more urban, national/international, and industrial. Because the book was published at the opening (1930) of what would eventually become the Great Depression, some viewed it as particularly prescient. The book was anti-communist.

Seward Collins, editor of The American Review, praised Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler for thwarting a communist revolution in Germany. He published some essays by Agrarians in 1933. In 1936, Allen Tate published a critique of fascism in The New Republic to distance the Agrarians from Collins.

Robert Penn Warren emerged as the most accomplished of the Agrarians. Later he repudiated most of their views.^{[citation needed]} He became a major American poet and novelist, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his 1946 All the King's Men. He acted as a mentor to the African-American author Ralph Ellison, among many others in his career, and supported him for awards and memberships in prestigious cultural organizations. Warren left the Agrarians behind as his political and social views evolved. He came to support more progressive ideas and racial integration.

I'll Take My Stand was originally criticized as a reactionary and romanticized defense of the Old South and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Some critics considered it to be moved by nostalgia. But, in more recent years, scholars such as Carlson, Scotchie, Eugene Genovese, and others have re-evaluated the book in light of the modern problems of highly urbanized/industrialized societies. They acknowledge the effects which such urban-technological-industrial systems exert on human society as a whole, as well as individuals, the environment, various social issues, politics, economics, etc.

Today, the Southern Agrarians are lauded regularly in the Southern Partisan. Some of their social, economic, and political ideas have been refined and updated by writers such as Allan C. Carlson and Wendell Berry. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has published books which further explore the ideas of the Agrarians.

Quotes

A key quote from the "Introduction: A Statement of Principles" to their 1930 book I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition:

"All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book's title-subject: all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial. ... Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition. An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige - a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism 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." [1]

See also

• Agrarianism
• Localism (politics)
• Luddites
• Physiocrats

Bibliography

• Twelve Southerners. I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. 2006 [75th Anniversary Reprint], Louisiana State Univ. Press. ISBN 080713208X.
• Twelve Southerners: "INTRODUCTION: A STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES" from I'll Take My Stand (1930)

• Bingham, Emily, and Thomas A Underwood, eds., 2001. The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays After I'll Take My Stand.
• Carlson, Allan, 2004. The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.
• Morton, Clay, 2007. "Southern Orality and 'Typographic America': I'll Take My Stand Reconsidered", Themes of Conflict in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature of the American South.
• Murphy, Paul V., 2001. The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought.
• Scotchie, Joseph, "Agrarian Valhalla: The Vanderbilt 12 and Beyond", Southern Events.