Allen Tate - Political Writing

Political Writing

In the 1930s, Tate worked on social commentary influenced by his agrarian philosophy. He contributed an essay, "Remarks on the Southern Religion" to I'll Take My Stand, a book of essays by the so-called Southern Agrarians that served as the movement's manifesto. Later, Tate co-edited Who Owns America?, which was a follow up to I'll Take My Stand and which contained Agrarian responses to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

During this time, Tate also became the de facto associate editor of The American Review, which was published and edited by Seward Collins. Tate believed The American Review could popularize the work of the Southern Agrarians. He objected to Collins's open support of Fascists Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and condemned fascism in an article in The New Republic in 1936. According to the critic Ian Hamilton however, Tate and his co-agrarians had been more than ready at the time to overlook the anti-Semitism and pro-Hitlerism of the American Review in order to promote their 'spiritual' defence of the Deep South's traditions. And when leftist New York critics pointed out that those traditions included slavery and lynching, Tate was untroubled, stating, "I belong to the white race, therefore I intend to support white rule...lynching will disappear when the white race is satisfied that its supremacy will not be questioned in social crises."