The New Agrarian Mind by Allan C. Carlson

Author:Allan C. Carlson [Carlson, Allan C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765805904
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2004-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

A Curious Convergence

Were the Southern Agrarians actually partisans of the New Agrarian Mind? Did they share in the same novel attitudes born in the quintessential^ Yankee mind of Liberty Hyde Bailey? While the direct influence is problematic (although Davidson did emphasize their awareness of “malcontents even in the North who were asking embarrassing questions”),65 the accent surely different, and the writing definitely of higher stylistic caliber, the answer to both questions appears to be yes.

To begin with, the Southerners were fervent believers in the engineering of a whole new economic order. Owsley’s advocacy for an unprecedented land redistribution, the transformation of property ownership into “a modified form of feudal tenure where, in theory, the...state has a paramount interest in the land,” and the complete reconstruction of the American nation and Constitution were, taken altogether, staggering in their scope.66 Add to this Cauley’s statement that “Democracy, both political and economic, is impossible once the principle of the corporation is established,” and his call for abolishing all joint-stock corporations, and you have a political program almost unprecedented in ambition.

Moreover, the needed social engineering would include a thorough remaking of the existing farming population, another New Agrarian idea. Despite Lytle’s words of praise for the Highland Southerners, the Tennessee Agrarians as a group had no more respect for existing farmers than did Bailey, Borsodi, or Bromfield. Ransom decried the “apostasy of American farmers from primary subsistence farming,” terming it “the greatest disaster our country has yet suffered.” These farmers now were “economically ruined” and “spiritually desperate,” and in urgent need of reconstruction.67 Owsley concluded that many white tenant farmers of his time were “beyond redemption,” to be permanently consigned to weak minds, bad food, and disease. He called on county and state pubic health departments “to take the steps necessary to salvage the children of such families”—presumably by taking them away from their parents—so that the offspring of “po’white trash” might become good farmers and citizens in the future.68 Lanier termed the agrarian project one that demanded “far-sighted ‘social engineering,’” including the remaking of the rural population, the huge task of creating “a synthesis” of rural family and community bonds with “the energy and inventiveness that has been diverted into industrialism.”69

While their diagnosis was somewhat different, the Southern Agrarians also tended to view rural Christianity and rural churches as problems needing correction. They were advocates for Christian humanism. They were motivated to their project, in part, by the negative publicity surrounding the Scopes trial. And they distrusted scientism. All the same, the Tennessee Agrarians had few good words for the dominant religious expressions of the Southern folk: Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Church of Christ.

Some of their criticisms did focus on the inroads being made by modernist philosophy. As Lytle urged near the end of “The Hind Tit”: “turn away from the liberal capons which fill the pulpits as preachers. Seek a priesthood that may manifest the will and intelligence to renounce science and search out the Word in the authorities.”70 Ransom’s book, God

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