Stung by attacks upon the South following the celebrated Scopes "monkey trial" in the 1920s, some of the poets comprising the Fugitive group at Vanderbilt University--notably John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren-- conceived the idea of a symposium that would argue for the worth of an ordered, traditional society as an alternative to what they perceived as the increasing materialism of their times. The Fugitives were...