Agrarian Doubts: The Southern Agrarians of the 1920s

This segment of Agrarian Doubts is the culmination of our historical trip through the American South that forged a mix of cultural and political concerns into Southern Conservatism.   While it is my intention to shift our focus back to Great Britain’s agrarian tradition in the future, we may yet again poke our heads into this region of the world.

Many would assume that given the trajectory of this series, the Civil War would have been the next topic to be covered.   However, for our purposes it is what happened after the Civil War that matters more.   Or rather, how the Civil War was remembered and memorialized by those who lost the struggle.

It may come as a surprise to some readers but during the 1920s when America was in the midst of unbridled economic prosperity – Southern Agrarianism found a voice once again.   Or rather it found 12 voices.   These men were not planters or farmers or soldiers.  They were in fact a collection of novelists, writers, and poets based out of Vanderbilt University, who joined together to create a manifesto entitled I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.

The primary concern of these writers was the growing industrialization of the South during the 1920s-30s.  In their view, modern industrial capitalism was a dehumanizing force.   This line of argument may have some resonance for the followers of Karl Marx, which is ironic given that the Southern Agrarians in a sense condemned both Communism and Capitalism as being Anti-Conservative.   To quote a passage from the Introduction of I’ll Take My Stand:

We look upon the Communist menace as a menace indeed, but not as a Red one; because it is simply according to the blind drift of our industrial development to expect in America at last much the same economic system as that imposed upon Russia in 1917.

In place of the option of choosing either materialistic system, these intellectuals offered up the Antebellum agricultural model as the panacea and future of the South.

Their critics found that the Southern Agrarians understanding of their heritage was a bit too…..sentimental.

Take the issue of farming for instance.   The essayist Andrew Lytle had written that “The farm is not a place to grow wealthy; it is a place to grow corn.”     While these sentiments may be shared by our modern day Green and Organic food movements, economists and historians will be quick to point out that agriculture tends to bend away from subsistence farming toward cash crops.   After all, we cannot forget that cotton was king in the Pre-Civil War South.   The labor intensive nature of Cotton farming necessitated the use of slaves.   The sale of cotton to Great Britain was also an important source of revenue for the aristocratic south.

Another Southern Agrarian and well-noted 20th century modernist writer Allen Tate attempted to live out the principles he advocated for.   It is however, much easier to write about the joys of farming than to actually perform its duties.   From what I gather, Mr. Tate had to hire a family to do the farm work.   And it is no small point of irony, that Mr. Tate could only acquire his farm with the help of his brother…. who happened to be a successful banker.

It could be argued that the Southern Agrarians were constructing their worldviews from within the set of beliefs dubbed by social scientists and historians as the Lost Cause of the South.     I believe this quotation from Wikipedia best summarizes this phenomenon:

The Legend of the Lost Cause began as mostly a literary expression of the despair of a bitter, defeated people over a lost identity. It was a landscape dotted with figures drawn mainly out of the past: the chivalric planter; the magnolia-scented Southern belle; the good, gray Confederate veteran, once a knight of the field and saddle; and obliging old Uncle Remus. All these, while quickly enveloped in a golden haze, became very real to the people of the South, who found the symbols useful in the reconstituting of their shattered civilization. They perpetuated the ideals of the Old South and brought a sense of comfort to the New.

-Yale Professor Roland Osterweis

This mytho-narrative arc perpetuated a few inaccuracies – the race relations between the African Americans and Caucasians in the Old South being a primary issue.

Several historians and writers have explored the idea of the Lost Cause of the South and came upon a fascinating conclusion – that this was all about national reconciliation.

The historian David Blight for instance noted a particularly intriguing trope in postwar fiction.   A young, materialistic, and utterly rich Yankee man marries impoverished but spiritual Southern bride.   He represents the power of industrialization and its brutality when unchained.  She represents the chivalry and honor of a time long gone.   Perhaps her social graces will be a civilizing influence on the young man.

Perceptive readers may notice similar themes brought up in a previous blog post, Agrarian Doubts: Sir Walter Scott and Trans-Atlantic Conservative Romanticism.

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The legacy of the Southern Agrarians is rather mixed.   Their “leader,” the scholar-poet John Crowe Ransom, grew disenchanted with the movement and publicly repudiated it in 1945.

I find an irony at my expense in remarking that the judgment just delivered by the Declaration of Potsdam against the German people is that they shall return to an agrarian economy. Once I should have thought there could have been no greater happiness for a people, but now I have no difficulty in seeing it for what it is meant to be: a heavy punishment. Technically it might be said to be an inhuman punishment, in the case where the people in the natural course of things have left the garden far behind.

The question, then, is this: of what value could the Nashville group’s thesis be to a people who had “left the garden far behind”? Would their argument serve no better purpose than to offer up ironies concerning a road not taken? Once the garden has been left behind, does the idealistic contemplation of it, even in art, become much more than a symptom of a neurotic urge to escape what lies ahead of the garden?

One of his colleagues Robert Penn Warren, the first poet laureate of the United States, eventually joined the civil rights movement and supported a variety of progressive causes -because- of his belief in agrarianism.

And for a certain few, the enthusiasm for the agrarian way of life has never died. Stark Young‘s cousin, Stephen Clay McGehee, actually runs a website called The Southern Agrarian – http://www.southernagrarian.com/.   It is as one may expect – a website that touches on the practicalities of farming, southern culture, honoring the heroes and legacy of the Civil War, and religion.

 

 

Agrarian Doubts: Industry vs. The Yeoman Farmer

Before I get started on this bit of the “Agrarian Doubts” series, I wanted to remind my gentle readers of a pointed fact:  Not until the 1950s with the advent of William F. Buckley’s National Review, could it ever be said that there was such a thing as a “Conservative movement” within the United States.   This is unlike the case in Great Britain, where the Tory party has more or less since its inception represented Anglo-American conservative values.

This will sound strange to modern ears, since in our current environment to be a Republican is to be some type of Conservative and to be a Democrat is to be some type of liberal.     However, this wasn’t always the case.   You had liberal and conservative philosophies, sometimes with a distinct regional character, mixed into the agenda of political parties that were divided on other issues.

Such is the situation with Jeffersonian Democracy in the American South.  On the one hand, Thomas Jefferson is often claimed by modern day Democrats as one of their own given the lineage of the party.   This may also have to do with the fact that Jefferson’s personal beliefs on religion, science, and political freedom is compatible with modern liberal politics in a way that say… Andrew Jackson’s views are not.

One of the issues that can be considered a strain of Southern Conservatism supported by Jefferson’s party would be the concern for the yeoman farmer.    Jefferson’s political inheritors in the South often chaffed at the Federalists party’s attempt to give power to a centralized government and to diversify the economy in aid to Northern industrialists.

Like their landed gentry cousins in Great Britain, the Southern plantation owner viewed himself as an aristocrat and brooked no interference in his traditional way of life.   In their mindset, the United States was first and foremost a farmer’s republic.   Following Jefferson’s own views, many southerners believed that farmers were intrinsically more virtuous than city dwellers.

This a rather ancient opinion, older than the United States, older than Great Britain.   It is an opinion that is even older than Christianity in the West.   One need only look back at the historical experiences of both the Roman Republic and Athenian Democracy to see its roots.     Up until the modern era, there has always been a kind of social distrust of merchants who didn’t make a living working off the land.

This opinion isn’t even limited to Western culture, as China, Japan, and Korea traditionally placed merchants at the bottom of the Confucian social hierarchy.

And where do merchants congregate?   Where does the use of money to make even more money occur?

It happens in Cities where the excess of wealth gives rise to other jobs that are also not connected to the land.   This concentration of people also comes with an increase of crime and vice in the locality.

Such was the opinion of many southerners, especially intellectuals like John Taylor of Caroline, Virginia.   Taylor wrote a kind of encomium to the wonders of rural life in his rather dense work known as the Arator.  The Arator is a collection of philosophical, practical, and political essays on the nature of agriculture.   In one line on the act of farming, Taylor waxes poetic saying that in farming:

the practice of every moral virtue is amply remunerated in this world, whilst it is also the best surety for attaining blessings of the next.

Or to put it plainly – Farming makes life better and it will secure your afterlife as well.

Predictably, Taylor contrasted the bucolic nature of rural life against the forces of industrialization –  “the stock jobbers, the banks, the paper money party, the tariff-supported manufacturers.”   These corrupt industrialists would be the undoing of the virtue necessary to maintain the landowner society that is the republic.  Invoking an ancient theme as old as Rome itself, without civic virtue there would be no way for a republic to safeguard its political independence and freedom.

John Taylor’s adversary in the Federalist camp was the renowned Alexander Hamilton.    Hamilton’s goal was to essentially turn the United States into an industrial and commercial power to rival any European nation.     To accomplish task, Hamilton would pursue every avenue possible by advocating for a strong central government, creating reliable financial institutions such as the Bank of the United States, and even advocating for industrial espionage against Great Britain.

If Alexander Hamilton wanted to push America into an industrial future, Taylor would seek the opposite.  He made a very familiar argument:  if people gather more into cities, they will be susceptible to luxury and vice.  This will cause the erosion of virtue and manly independence and bring about a decline of the Republic.  

As such, Taylor became an implacable opponent of infrastructure projects such as the building of canals and roads which would contribute toward the industrialization of the nation.   He also was a strong supporter of the States Rights movement, seeking to curtail the power of a seemingly dictatorial central government in order to protect the Southern farmer’s way of life from capitalist tyranny.

 

Agrarian Doubts: Industralization and Capitalism in Britain

One scholar of English history once wrote that the birth of conservative philosophy was an attempt to answer a very important question brought on by the Industrial Revolution:

How do we deal with politics in countries full of large cities, where concentrated working populations live, and that gradually become educated…and eventually dissatisfied?

Britain first addressed this prior to the Americans during the tenure of William Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister of England.   There was an issue of rural depopulation, of the type one is prone to see in developing countries in the modern era, as people seeking a better livelihood flocked to what would become the industrial centers of Great Britain.

However, many of these new industrial towns lacked adequate representation in Parliament.  Furthermore, the phenomenon of the rotten borough came into existence as nearly depopulated regions of the country still could elect several members to Parliament.  Many of these industrial centers, aside from not being represented in government, were also deemed to be politically unstable due to the socioeconomic factors of the environment

We do not need to stretch our imaginations too far to think about what working conditions in these localities must have been like.  We could also understand why artisans and workers living in such conditions would be more susceptible to the suggestion of radical political reform.   It then becomes understandable that the governing classes could legitimately fear for their lives when Britain and Revolutionary France went to war in 1793…as Paris’ revolutionary government encouraged the lower classes to cast off the chains of the old society.

Coupled with this issue about population migration was the rise of a new class of people within society – the industrialists.   Here the problem can be stated as:

How do we treat capitalists, who are often very dissatisfied with the distribution of power amongst the landed elite?

Such a complaint may sound incredibly strange to modern ears.  After all, we tend to associate the business community with the power holders in any political system.   Up until the rise of financial services  sector and the dot.com boom, it was also a bit of stereotype to consider industrialists as part of the conservative movement on both sides of the Atlantic.

As will be demonstrated in the following posts – this wasn’t always the case.   The Industrialists as a class of people were originally quite disruptive to both the guardians of traditional values and those who wished to bring about a more radical and utopian reform.   Both the Left and the Right would eventually have to make their peace with Capitalism, although partisans would remain every wary about their excesses.

Looking at the landed elite of Britain during the 1700s, the challenges presented by the rising industrial class was more than just an influx of wealth from sources they did not control.    The industrialists also tended to be nonconformists, or Protestants not part of the Church of England like the gentry.  One individual who might stick out in a reader’s mind would be James Watt, a Presbyterian who invented the Steam Engine and whose last name is used to describe rate of energy conversion in joules per second, ie: Watts of a light bulb.   A more obscure reference would be Charles Darwins’ grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood – mostly remembered today for his company that produces fine china and porcelain.

Many of these nonconformist industrialists held great affection for the events of the American and French Revolutions, seeing them as ways to redress the power imbalances between the landed elite and themselves.

In doing so they would start a current of thought, articulated by thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, which would place their interests as capitalists at the heart of the modern world.

This trend, although eventually accepted by both mainstream conservatives and liberals, would face stiff resistance from other voices on the Left and the Right.

In the case of conservatives who honored the traditions and customs of the old “economy of personal loyalties,” it would be the agrarian voices that screamed the loudest when confronting the issue of capitalism.

 

 

Edmund Burke: Anti-Imperialist Founder of Modern Conservatism

studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, oil on canvas, (1767-1769)

Who was Edmund Burke?

An Irishman who as a member of Parliament argued eloquently in favor of the grievances of the American Colonies against the British Crown.   He made his case based on the fact that the Americans were fighting for their rights as Englishmen against the Crown which had violated custom and tradition for the sake of taxation.  Burke was also part of the effort to reconcile Great Britain with the United States after the War of Independence had ended.

A skilled Orator who impeached the Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings, for unscrupulous, arbitrary, and tyrannical conduct against the Indian people.   While Burke acknowledged the necessities of commerce by the East Indian Company, he pointed out that Hastings and others had essentially extorted or plundered their way to vast wealth – conduct that put them beyond the pale of what was deemed moral.

A lawyer who favored a policy of tolerance to Roman Catholics in English political life.   He sought to enfranchise the Irish people, allowing Catholics to stand for election in Parliament.

And finally an excellent political essayist, who foresaw the bloodshed that would be caused by the French Revolution.   At first he was accused of being an alarmist, as those sympathetic to the wave of revolution in America and France thought this would lead to a new era of reason and rational government.     However, with the death of the Bourbon monarch Louis XVI and the beginning of the Terror, Burke’s views would come to be vindicated.

As a proponent of moderate political reform and champion of the underdog, most today may find it confusing that Edmund Burke also has the distinction of being the Originator of Modern Conservatism.

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At first glance, it is a difficult thing for a reader to evaluate the political thought of Edmund Burke.  He was no academic, but rather a man in the midst of the action – writing speeches, pamphlets, and essays as an active member of the political class.     He wasn’t theorist, he was a do-er.

Burke also had a powerful allergy against philosophical abstraction.   This forms the basis of his critique around the ideas that motivated the French Revolution.  His key work remains the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), here he takes aim against a certain conception of natural rights.

For Burke, an appeal to natural rights would lead to “the commonwealth itself in a few generations, crumble away…into the dust and powder of individuality.”   This may sound incredibly strange to modern ears, but it depends on how a person understands “natural rights.”

1. John Locke:  Natural Rights derive from the State of Nature.  They are preserved by and form the basis of the powers of the government.  In fact, government can be called to account for infringement upon these rights.
2. Thomas Hobbes:  Natural Rights  are whatever promotes survival.  They must be surrendered to the State which rescues people from a life that is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Therefore, appealing to natural rights is destructive of State power and returns us back to that Dog-Eat-Dog existence.

 

Burke is reacting to the Hobbesian definition.   In his view, the viability of government rests on customs, conventions and traditions which form the habits and expectations of the populace.   These “prejudices” (or rather pre-judgments) form the real basis for the rights of man and are particular to the countries of origin.

Often these conventions are not capable of rational demonstration.   They may even rest on historical fictions.  But that doesn’t really matter to Burke, because as long as they are believed they work to hold society together.  

Here we see that pragmatic sense of the art of politics, rather than an abstract understanding of how the state should operate.   It is for this reason that Burke has a sincere attachment to the British Constitution and other bodies of traditional law in other countries.

Ultimately, all law is a kind of historical achievement whose authority depends on their age rather than on abstract rights.  This is the reason why when new unpopular laws are passed, they are often difficult to enforce even if they can be articulated in terms of natural rights.   People only begin to respect laws that have been in effect for a very long time as they become “the norm.”  And in some cases the law isn’t respected at all if it clashes too much with the character of the population.

Prudential management and practical statesmanship must triumph over abstract plans, or else the result will end not in the rule of reason, but the rule of brute force.   The outcomes of the French Revolution validated this viewpoint as factions with different interests justified actions based on their understanding “natural rights” and the extant of government power should be.   And when an impasse was reached – one group was purged at the expense of another.

 

 

The Glorious Revolution and the Seeds of Two Ideologies

Picture this – James II, a Catholic monarch of a thoroughly Protestant England is forced to flee his kingdom for France, much in the manner his father Charles II had to at the outbreak of the English Civil War have a century earlier.

This is for all intents and purposes, a power struggle between a monarch subscribing to the idea of the Divine Right of Kings versus a Parliament seeking to expand its own power.

The Issue at Hand:  Religion.

Since the time of Henry VIII, Catholicism had been always held in suspicion by the power holders within the British Isles.  “Popery”was often associated with England’s most hated rivals – France and Spain.    Furthermore, since the Bourbon monarch Louis XIV ruled France in an Absolutist manner, where power was directly centered upon the king, many within England considered Catholicism to be associated with arbitrary rule.

Although not quite political parties in the modern sense, the Tories and Whigs who comprised parliament had two specific fears:

1. The Whigs believed that Catholic Absolutism would endanger Protestant Religion, Liberty, and Property.
2. The Tories had similar fears, but these were complicated by a respect for the traditional authority of the Crown.   However, they did seek a Unity of Church and State for the sake of Stability – which would ideally make the Monarch of England a member of the Church of England.

Look closely enough and one can see the seeds of Anglo-American Conservatism and Liberalism starting to form.

For his own part, James II did little to endear himself to either group.    James attempts to secure Catholic emancipation alienated his original supporters in the Tory party, which feared that his actions would lead to the disestablishment of the Anglican Church.

In a bid to create his own power base, James II held a policy of religious toleration, hoping to forge his own party out of the Catholics and Nonconformists (ie: Protestants who didn’t “conform” to the Church of England).  His Declaration of Indulgence, which would enshrine religious toleration across his kingdom, was seen as a direct stab at the heart of Anglican power.

What followed was perhaps some of the most heavy handed tactics for a peacetime monarch during his era.   It seemed that James II was single-handedly attempting to turn back the clock,  using his power as monarch to purge his opposition (usually Anglican Protestants) from within the government and military.   They were of course replaced with people he could trust (usually Catholics).

This was the proverbial last straw.  Tyranny and Arbitrary Rule seemed like a reality.

In November of 1688, William of Orange stadtholder of the Netherlands and husband to Mary Stuart (James’ daughter) crossed the North Sea with an army to England in an attempt to overthrow his father-in-law.   William was a Protestant hero who valiantly fought alongside other Protestant monarchs against Louis XIV during the War of the Grand Alliance.  As such, he was deemed a more preferable monarch to many factions within the British elite.   And so a conspiracy was formed in order to finance William’s “invasion.”

The rest as they say is history – James II fled to France where to this day his descendants hold a claim to the throne of Great Britain.  This event was commemorated as the Glorious Revolution, specifically because the amount of bloodshed during this transition of power was well below average.

Although William was obviously pleased by the outcome of events, he found that there was some…..interesting legislation waiting for his approval upon ascending the throne.

One such piece of legislation seemed obvious – the Act of Settlement of 1701 required the King of England to be a Protestant and could not marry a Catholic.   This particular law was only recently amended by the Succession to the Crown Act of 2013.

Another law was rather self serving, as the Triennial Act of 1694 required that Parliament would meet every year and have elections every 3 years.   Up until this time, only the King could have called Parliament to convene.

But of particular importance to history at large would be the Bill of Rights of 1689.   The Bill of Rights essentially limited the power of the king, but demanding things such as no taxation by royal prerogative, freedom of speech in Parliament, habeas corpus, and the denial of cruel and unusual punishment for crimes.

To our American readers, this may all seem rather familiar as the American Bill of Rights of 1789 was modeled on the English one.

But what these chain of events concluded was that power was ultimately held by Parliament in the British Isles.   And for the time being, the freedoms and stability held in common by both proto-Liberals and proto-Conservatives were safe.

 

 

 

On Conservatism

“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”

-John Stuart Mill, in Parliamentary debate with Conservative MP John Pakington circa 1886

Say the word “conservative” to an American audience and one is bound to raise a whole menagerie of associations and images.

From the Opposite side of the political spectrum, one may think of an overweight Caucasian male who hails from what those from the Northeastern Megalopolis and Southern California pejoratively call “Flyover country.”  The person will undoubtedly be characterized as unsophisticated, educationally-backward, mildly homophobic and racist, greedy, sexist,fat, and religious with a love of guns, football, and NASCAR.

And of course, he votes Republican.

As the quote from the classical liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, ironically a hero of modern conservatism, demonstrates – thinking of your opposition in the worst possible terms is a time honored tradition that humanity obeys whatever the age or era.

So what is Conservatism?    Where did it come from?  What are its origins?

If we take a few steps back from the perennial debate over value issues, what a person will find is a whole philosophical disposition, or to it plainly – a psychological attitude born of a strong human propensity to maintain things as they are.

One pundit likened it to the “feeling one gets when returning home from a long vacation in a far off land – a sense of comfort surrounded by what seems familiar.”

I like to think about it in terms that i’m sure everyone can relate to – namely the generational conflict a person has with his/her parents regarding tastes in music, food, clothing, art, and entertainment.  There is always a strong propensity to stay with the things and ideas that have worked for you.

In the arena of politics than, conservatism of a traditionalist bent can be summarized as: a skeptical outlook toward radical change.     This shouldn’t be interpreted as being against all change, that outlook is more reactionary than conservative.  Rather the conservative mindset understands that change will come, but greets these changes with a sense of caution and patience.   Prudence, not enthusiasm, remains the cardinal virtue.

Another central plank of the conservative attitude is a skepticism toward perfectionism, especially in terms of redesigning society.  

Whether we are speaking about Plato’s Republic, a 1,000 year German Fascist  Reich, an politicized Islamist Caliphate, or a Communist Worker’s paradise one thing remains common throughout all these blueprints for a better society – a sense of Utopianism wherein the supporters of those visions might bring about some sort of perfection in society that fits their taste.

Traditionalist conservatism rejects all those mirages.     All planned societies rest upon a set of first principles that cannot encompass the complexity and diversity found in the world.   This results in the use of coercion to enforce those principles upon a population that is found to be non-compliant.   Furthermore, the set of principles articulated at the beginning may not be able to withstand the force of social change brought on by chance or technological innovation.   After all, how can one predict and account for options that one didn’t even know existed?

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A question does linger in my mind though when stepping back and trying to evaluate traditional conservatism:  When is someone being conservative and when is he or she being reactionary?

While individual conservative thinkers and leaders have shown a remarkable adeptness to change with the times, one has to wonder a little about the actions of their supporters.

There are moments when one feels that the intransigence one encounters when dealing with a conservative seems more linked to a fear of change rather than the protection of a tradition.