Southern Agrarians - Background and General Ideas of The Southern Agrarians

Background and General Ideas of The Southern Agrarians

The Agrarians evolved from a philosophical discussion group known as the "Fugitives" or "Fugitive Poets". Many of the Southern Agrarians and Fugitive poets were connected to Vanderbilt University, either as students or as faculty members. Davidson, Lytle, Ransom, Tate, and Warren all attended the university; Davidson and Ransom later joined the faculty, along with Wade and Owsley. They were moved to respond by their studies of poetic modernism and by H. L. Mencken's scathing critique of Southern culture. They were offended not so much by Mencken's widely publicized essay "The Sahara of the Bozart", with which they tended to agree, but by his subsequent bitter attacks on aspects of Southern culture that they valued, such as its agrarianism, conservatism, and religiosity. They sought to confront the widespread and rapidly increasing effects of modernity, urbanism, and industrialism on American (but especially Southern) culture and tradition. The informal leader of the Fugitives and the Agrarians was John Crowe Ransom, but in a 1945 essay he announced that he no longer believed in either the possibility or the desirability of an Agrarian restoration, which he declared a "fantasy". The most eloquent exponent of the Agrarian philosophy eventually proved to be Ransom's student Richard M. Weaver, a friend of Donald Davidson. Unlike the others, Weaver taught at a Northern institution, the University of Chicago. Other writers associated with the Agrarians include Caroline Gordon, Brainard Cheney and Herbert Agar.

The Southern Agrarians bemoaned the increasing loss of Southern identity and culture to industrialization. They believed that the traditional agrarian roots of the United States, which dated back to the nation's founding in the 18th century (with many of America's most important Founding Fathers being farmers), were important to its nature. Their manifesto was a critique of the rapid industrialization and urbanization during the first few decades of the 20th century in the southern United States and elsewhere. It posited an alternative based on a return to the more traditionally rural and local/regional culture, and agrarian American values. The group opposed the rapid and destabilizing changes in the U.S. that were leading it to become more urban, national/international, and industrial. Because the book was published at the opening (1930) of what would eventually become the Great Depression, some viewed it as particularly prescient. The book's stance was anti-communist.

Seward Collins, editor of The American Review, praised Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler for thwarting a communist revolution in Germany. He published some essays by Agrarians in 1933. In 1936, Allen Tate published a critique of fascism in The New Republic to distance the Agrarians from Collins.

Robert Penn Warren emerged as the most accomplished of the Agrarians. He became a major American poet and novelist, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his 1946 All the King's Men.