Customer Reviews

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

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I'd avoid this version of the book and instead seek out the older edition with the intro by Louis Rubin. He does a much better job of explaining the Agrarians' place and time (which is vital for understanding their 'project') and his grasp on the big picture of what they were trying to say is far more accurate than Ms. Donaldson's, whose feminist/multiculturalist approach is less than helpful, and rather silly in some places. Her point seems to be that while the Agrarians said they were alarmed at the commercialism and industrialism that were encroaching on the South, what they really were afraid of were upwardly-mobile blacks and 'modern' women. Uh...yeah, right.

A scholar's view, poetically given, of what "Subsidiarity" and G.K.Chesterton earlier called "Distributism." At the essence of it is the romantic idea of the Jeffersonian "yoeman farmer" and what it means to have citizens tied to the land - their land - and the social and political consequences of such things in America. Likely, this book will be studied over a hundred years from now. So will the sole companion book later published, Beyond Capitalism & Socialism: A New Statement of an Old Idealby Kirkpatrick Sale.

Written by the Twelve "Fugitives" from Vanderbilt, this books is a timeless look at the benefits of the Southern agrarian life over and against the crass industrialism of the North.

When it was written, it appeared inevitable to the authors that industrialization was coming to their beloved South; they wrote these essays to warn against uncritical acceptance of that fate. Now, some 3/4 of a century later, their prophecy has proven correct but their warnings went by and large unheeded. Except for a small remnant, even Southerners have been fooled by the siren call of "Progress".

This book should be read by all, Northerners and Southerners alike, to help us remember that there is a good life consisting in love of the land, leisure, and small town communities that is being destroyed by the suburbanization of nearly every formerly distinct town in America.

It is important to read this book as a product of a point in time (the beginning of the Depression and the middle of the Jim Crow period) and a place (Vanderbilt). Or, rather, the place is a Southern ivory tower where intellectuals can prize anti-intellectualism as uniquely Southern and long for a South without roads or industry. In their own way, the Twelve Southerners are very like ancient urban Greeks creating and idealizing a pastoral landscape of the imagination. Several of them are also disturbingly racist, positioning the slaves as only a couple of generations removed from their native cannibal societies and repeating most of the arguments from the 1830s in defense of slavery, while simultaneously claiming that slavery--and, by implication, the slaves--were irrelevant to true Southern culture, which is of course a purely white
(pure white?) affair.

But the Twelve Southerners, as revealed by these essays at this particular point in their lives, are an important example of how ill-advised it is to too quickly whitewash or demonize the complicated motives of our very complicated ancestors. Their understanding of Reconstruction is flawed and their understanding of race is ludicrously off-base, but the standard of racial discourse wasn't much different in the North at that time. And contrary to the usual assumption that white Southerners spent every waking hour worrying about black people, these are men for whom race was clearly a secondary (at best) consideration, to the extent that they use the term "ethnic diversity" to refer to mixed influences from the English and the Scotch-Irish.

The essays are also eerily post-modern, questioning many of the same academic shibboleths the post-moderns questioned (for very different reasons), and prefiguring recent concerns about the sustainability of endlessly increasing production and consumption. I can't help feeling that, if these guys were around today, one or two of them would be scary white supremacists and the rest would be celebrating the mixed racial heritage of the South while running for office for the Green Party. Or maybe not. One of the lessons this book has to teach is that, while recent decades of political correctness and culture wars have taught us to expect attitudes and beliefs to be found in a few predictable constellations, it is all too easy when looking at other times or cultures to find the utterly repellant and the completely identifiable co-existing in one person, and in completely unfamiliar mixtures.

I suppose what I am saying is that there are really several reasons for reading this book. 1) It is an important and influential meditation on what it meant to be Southern in the early 1930s, 2) It is an idealized vision of white Southern culture and history that is important to understand, 3) It is an articulate challenge to values that had become the unquestioned values of the nation at large and are only now being questioned, 4) It is a sketch of a utopian vision that, with modifications allowing for the mixed-race reality of the South, is worth aspiring to even today, and 5) For those interested in identity politics, it is a fascinating collection of assorted voices engaged in a discourse with race, class, region, and the meaning of labor.