Customer Reviews

I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Library of Southern Civilization)

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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.

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.

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.

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.

These southern writers of I'll Take My Stand, sounded like farmers, but were mostly professors who originated from the south. Many of them lived and taught outside the south, but still had Dixie on their minds. All of them were connected in some way with Vanderbilt University. These are southern gentleman writers with flowing prose and show that the south is not completely anti-intellectual, though one writer says that southerners were not into learning just for learnings's sake, like in the north. I will say anti-intellectualism does shield people from bad ideas and keeps them to the tried and true old ways.

In general, the argument is that the agrarian culture of the south was superior to the industrial culture of the north. Farmers were self-sufficient and were able to remain independent from the government and the money economy by growing their own food, making their own clothes, and building their own shelters. The ideal farming which preserves the southern culture is pre-dominately subsistence farming and does not depend on money crops and the boom and bust economy. The King Cotton cash crop was criticized because once it was over-produced and prices for it fell, farmers fell into never ending debt. One writer mentions that farmers should not be into farming to get rich, but to preserve an agrarian lifestyle.

It is also mentioned that farm work was not as mechanical as the factory work of the North. It was claimed that the South had more time for leisure to support a richer cultural life than the North. The North is accused of money-grubbing, emphasizing economic concerns over quality of life concerns. One writer regrets that the South did not become a hot spot for higher learning, like the North East had become. If only the South hadn't been invaded by Yankees, their culture would have developed more and became permanent!

There are some complaints about cars and how the roads are detrimental to farming life and the agrarian culture of the South. In general, the authors were concerned with preserving this culture and were worried that since they lost the Civil War, they would eventually lose their culture to the industrial culture of the north. It is a good book to find out about what life was like for southerners after the war--what pressures and problems of survival they had and the poverty they faced.

There is some discussion of the civil war. One author saw the war as war between two cultures that were diametrically opposed to one another. The north needed the south to live off of and so it could not let her go. It is also interesting to note that the south did not like tariffs because they were detrimental to farmers, but the north did.

The problem of slavery is presented as something that was forced on America by England, since England was making a fortune off the slave trade. The south was not blamed for having the pre-dominate share of slaves until about 1830 when a fanatical abolitionist by the name of William Lloyd Garrison started circulating "stories" about "evil" slave owners who mistreated their slaves terribly.

The agrarian south and its culture is a ghost of its former self, but some of these issues live own with writers like Wendell Berry who advocate going back to the farm and becoming more self-sufficient, while being less southern and more racially egalitarian. Luddites will like this book. The book shows convincely that if technology changes, it changes the culture and many people won't like those changes. The writers often seem justifiably bitter about the way things turned out for the south, with their nation and culture being conquered and all. And what can I say? The book is bedrock conservative, sometimes stultifyingly so, you'll have blow the dust off this one!

The previous review makes mention of the theme of this collection as "sentimental romanticism" and totally misses the point in the process. The fact that the reviewer is a Southerner (or at least southern educated) and doesn't have the ability to put these essays in proper context is disturbing. These essays provide a basis for comprehending the context of the consistent theme of Southern life, agrarianism. This is the nature of our origin and that which has shaped us as a culture and collective. Given the track of society and evaporation of regional and cultural distinction in our country over the past 30 years I guess it shouldn't surprise. This work does not represent a sentimental, romantic glance over the shoulder. It is a statement and muted plea for recognition of our roots and for strengthening what was then a weakening grasp of basic understanding. Given that Ned is educated and intelligent and yet fails to comprehend the concepts discussed, feeling that they are sentimental (out of touch), shows that we have lost something very precious along the way.

I was doing research on the Agrarians and was recommended this book. It was exceptionally helpful, as well as interesting!! I'll Take My Stand includes essays from 12 famous Agrarians: Ransom, Davidson, Owsley, Fletcher, Lanier, Tate, Nixon, Lytle, Warren, Wade, Kline, and Young. The 12 speak out against the changes that were occuring in the South at that time (after the Civil War). Topics include industrialism vs. agriculturalism, religion, education, art, etc. The book also contains an informational intro and conclusion. If you have no idea what an Agrarian is or what their beliefs are, this is the place to find out!! If you already know this and want to futher your knowledge, this, too, is the place to go! It was a big help to me.

I would not go so far as to say any of these gentlemen is absolutely correct in their work, but this collection is extremely important if you want some understanding of the southern mind at the begining of the Great Depression. This is very much a regional book and will have little interest to anyone who isn't searching for some meaning from the South. It is great reading however. Although the essays in the book are not connected, the general theme is one of a general distrust of the modern industrial world where people have no connection to place and stable values and ideals. There is a definate feeling of longing for the agrarian South of old that was slowly slipping away at the time. Very interesting.

These essays are written by Southerners who are able to look objectively at the Old South. One of its strengths, they all agree, was its focus on the "good" life. This simple agrarian life is still a dream that many hold today, whether from the North or the South.