I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition

In spite of the title (it comes from the chorus of "Dixie"), this book is not about the War, or a celebration of the Old South. It is rather a collection of essays in support of the Southern Agrarian movement centered at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and 30s. The unique thing about this book is the uniformly high literary quality of the essays. Take a look at the table of contents. One would be hard-pressed to find another collection of essays by such an ensemble of writers, poets, and historians. Anyone interested in who we are and how we got here as Americans should read this book.The views expressed in this book may not ultimately make sense when considered from the point of view of an economist. Nonetheless, after reading it, you'll wonder whether there might not have been an alternative to either the brutal, dehumanizing calculations of the socialists in their various guises, or the materialistic worship of progress and the almighty dollar that capitalism brings us. It is a book with an old-fashioned humanism and dignity that is seldom encountered anymore. The modern reader may be startled, for example, to be presented with the idea that education is something more than the vocational training it is today, but rather a course of personal development in which the pupil comes to understand his place and role in society, in which the pupil becomes cultured, if you will. Nowadays, "culture" means that we play Mozart to our children in utero, so that when ill-mannered little Brandon grows up, he'll be one leg up on the competition for that lucrative securities analyst job on Wall Street.I can well remember reading "The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius", from this book, in school growing up. Many of the essays stick with you, and stand up to multiple re-readings.Even if you don't agree with a call for a return to a rural, agrarian society (and I don't, but even that fact makes me sad after I read this book), it's well worth reading.

The south as a region with a distinct culture and way of life is the subject of this fascinating book. It includes essays by some of the great literary minds of the mid century -- Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson -- and it speaks to the great traumas unleashed by industrialism on southern culture and traditional local communities. Many memorable lines and some beautiful writing are contained within. Ransom argues that American society, in the guise of progress, was waging an unrelenting war against nature. Lytle reminds us that prophets do not come to us from cities encouraging us to buy new clothes, but rather come from the wilderness stinking of goats. The southerners here were burdened with a racial legacy that undercut their view for a time, but their basic point remains just as valid today -- do we as a society really benefit from destroying local communities, losing respect for tradition and nature, and disrupting our cherished ways of life? Carson, Toffler and Pirsig will remind us that these "romantic" southerners were actually raising important issues about the kind of culture and society we will bequeath to future generations. A proper respect for land and soil is a deep rooted American idea. It is put forward with poetry and skill by these writers. The great urban turmoils of later decades: the break up of the American family, the flight of black Americans to cities that would leave them abandoned, the great losses in nature; all of this is part of the tragedy wrought by industrialism and modernity which these writers, and others (Eliot, Chesterton) warned. This is not to suggest that this is a programatic book -- it is a poetic insight that finds a noble follower in Wendell Berry. It is an important piece of work, and not so dated as some might wish.

In this age where the homogenization of our culture is nearly complete, thanks largely to widespread media and rampant industrialism, I'LL TAKE MY STAND remains as fresh and relevant as the day it was published more than seventy years ago. Instead of indulging in reactionary daydreams or nostalgia, as some of the book's less perceptive critics have claimed, the Twelve Southerners marshalled all their intellectual and literary powers to defend a way of life, rooted in the land and in the customs of small town living, that was very much in evidence prior to the War for Southern Independence and which really provided the anchor for the freedoms and liberties Americans enjoyed up to that time. Their criticisms circa 1930 have proven frighteningly prescient for our own times in which any individuality we might have as separate regions of a great nation have been almost entirely swallowed by mass production, mass culture, and centralized government.There are some truly astonishing pieces here, all forthright, honest, and so logically argued they are hard to refute. Among them I would cite Ransom's opening "Reconstructed but Unregenerate", Owsley's "The Irrepressible Conflict", and Lytle's "The Hind Tit." Most impressive of all is John Donald Wade's beautiful "The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius", really a novel encapsulated into little more than thirty pages, in which the Agrarian ideal is exemplified in the life (and death) of one simple Georgia farmer. Other essays I find less satisfactory if not downright obtuse - Tate's "Remarks on the Southern Religion" (disappointing and inconclusive by his normally high standards) and Stark Young's rather coy "Not in Memoriam, But in Defense." But even the lesser essays leave one much to think about and ponder over and worry about.You can scoff at the Twelve Southerners and consign them to the intellectual dustbin as daydreaming rednecks and mossbacks, but you do so at your own peril. In any event they should be read before they are condemned. And I predict they will be read a hundred years from now and beyond, so long as there are people concerned about the state of their communities, their liberties, and their own souls.

The footnotes of so many books about the South reference this book that a visit to the source was inevitable. This book captures the best and worst of our Southern heritage. It is not a prescription for economics. It was environmental before the term was coined. It also portrays with poetic beauty at times the organic symmetry of a kinder gentler time when people were in tune with the rythmns of nature. Some of the essays are better than others and a couple are outright tomes. But there is a reason it has always been visited by any serious student of the South.

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of essays by Twelve Southerners who write of the South's agrarian tradition and its temptation to abandon it for the rootless money-grubbing way of the industrial north. Their prophecy that the South would join the mindless, generic and robotic industrial culture of the north unless she defended her roots in the soil has nearly come true. This book serves as a great treatise on what the South was really fighting to preserve in the War Between the States; her agrarian culture. It is a must for those wanting a look at the true Southern Culture-not that of Hollywood or her enemies in the north.