Southern Agrarians


The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who united to write a pro–Southern agrarian manifesto, published as the essay collection I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. The Southern Agrarians greatly contributed to the Southern Renaissance, the revival of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s, and were based at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, with John Crowe Ransom as the unofficial leader.

Members

The Southern Agrarians included:
The Agrarians were offended by H. L. Mencken's attacks on aspects of Southern culture that they valued, such as its agrarianism, conservatism, and religiosity. They sought to confront the widespread and rapidly increasing effects of modernity, urbanism, and industrialism on American culture and tradition. The informal leader of the Fugitives and the Agrarians was John Crowe Ransom, but in a 1945 essay, he announced that he no longer believed in either the possibility or the desirability of an Agrarian restoration, which he declared a "fantasy".

Criticized as reactionary

I'll Take My Stand was criticized at the time, and since, as a reactionary and romanticized defense of the Old South and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. It ignored slavery and denounced "progress", for example, and some critics considered it to be moved by nostalgia.
In the 1930s, the Agrarians were challenged by the modernizing social scientists based at the University of North Carolina and led by Howard W. Odum, on issues of urbanism, social progress, and the very nature and definition of the South. The sociologists produced Rupert Vance's The Human Geography of the South, and Odum's Southern Regions of the United States, as well as numerous articles in the journal Social Forces. The sociologists argued that the problems in the South stemmed from traditionalism which ought to and could be cured by modernization, the opposite of the Agrarian viewpoint.

Revival

At a reunion of the Fugitive Poets in 1956, Warren confessed that for about a decade — from just before World War II to some years after — he had shut Agrarianism from his mind as irrelevant to the cataclysmic social and political events then playing out in the world. Now, however, he believed that, rather than being irrelevant, his old Agrarian enthusiasms were tied into the major problems of the age. In the modern world, the individual had been marginalized, stripped of any sense of responsibility, or of past or place. "In this context," writes Paul V. Murphy, "the Agrarian image of a better antebellum South came to represent for Warren a potential source of spiritual revitalization. The past recalled, not as a mythical 'golden age' but 'imaginatively conceived and historically conceived in the strictest readings of the researchers', could be a 'rebuke to the present'."
It was Warren's concern with democracy, regionalism, personal liberty and individual responsibility that led him to support the civil rights movement, which he depicted in his nonfiction works Segregation and Who Speaks for the Negro? as a struggle for identity and individualism. As Hugh Ruppersburg, among others, has argued, Warren's support for the civil rights movement paradoxically stemmed from Agrarianism, which by the 1950s, meant for him something very different from the Agrarianism of I'll Take My Stand. As Warren's political and social views evolved, his notion of Agrarianism evolved with them. He came to support more progressive ideas and racial integration and was a close friend of the eminent African-American author Ralph Ellison. While Donald Davidson took a leading role in the attempt to preserve the system of segregation, Warren took his stand against it. As Paul V. Murphy writes, "Loyalty to the southern past and the ambiguous lessons of Agrarianism led both men in very different directions."

Conservatives

In recent decades, some traditionalistic conservatives such as Allan C. Carlson, Joseph Scotchie, and Eugene Genovese have praised the Agrarian themes in light of what they see as the failures of highly urbanized and industrialized modern societies.
Today, the Southern Agrarians are regularly lauded in the conservative media such as 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.

Statement of Principles

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: