by John Egerton
Two other currents of intellectual stimulation in the twenties that attracted broad public notice were especially important to the South, and their effect was long-lasting. One was generated by the H. L. Mencken school of iconoclasts and debunkers emanating from Baltimore. The other was a running battle between social scientists at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill—the so-called Regionalists—and a band of poets and critics in and around Vanderbilt University in Nashville who called themselves first the Fugitives and then the Agrarians.
As a second-generation German-American who spent his entire life in Baltimore, a tightly segregated border-South city below the Mason-Dixon line, Henry Louis Mencken could and often did lay legitimate claim to both Southern roots and Northern sensibilities. Notwithstanding his common-folk immigrant heritage and his polytech education, he was heart and soul an intellectual, an elitist, an aristocrat, a brilliantly bombastic and slashing social critic whose printed assaults struck their intended targets with the indiscriminate force of a Gatling gun.
Before he was thirty, Mencken was an established and respected writer for the Baltimore Evening Sun, and from that base (which he would maintain for fifty years), he gained further influence beginning in 1914 as the guiding spirit and leading editor of two national magazines, Smart Set and American Mercury. Other newspapers and magazines also loved his pugnacious style and sought his byline avidly, so that by 1920 the prolific “sage of Baltimore,” a wartish, cigar-chewing character with the vocabulary of a Harvard-educated street fighter, was one of the best-known journalists in America, revered by some and reviled by others, but read by almost all.
In 1917, Mencken had written a critical essay for a New York paper on the emptiness of the Southern cultural landscape. Three years later he expanded the piece substantially and included it in the second volume of what he proudly called Prejudices, his collected journalistic output. His essay “The Sahara of the Bozart” (a play on the French beaux arts of high culture) was a frontal attack on the South, which, in Mencken’s acerbic view, had become “almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.” With ruthless and derisive glee, he stained the region with a poison pen as deadly as Sherman’s sword, citing real or invented examples of social-cultural-political degradation. Along the way, he made clear his utter disdain for small-d democracy, large-P Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, Methodists (by which he meant practically all religious faiths), Anglo-Saxons, romantic writers of the old school, and pretense in any form. Practically no one, white or black, Southerner or Yankee, Gentile or Hebrew, escaped his wrath unless he or she had demonstrated creative ability.
A great aristocratic culture of superior men had once ruled the Old South, Mencken declared, but the region had since been “drained of all its best blood” by hordes of “poor white trash” driven by phony Puritanism, political demagoguery, and ignorant hostility toward the arts and letters. His relentless diatribe went on for pages; in its wake, the meager and fragile cultural institutions of the defenseless South lay in ruins.
Though he had been writing critically about Southern literature and culture for well over a decade, Mencken was hardly prepared for the double-barreled reaction that followed his “Sahara” indictment. There was a more or less predictable scream of outrage at first from various aggrieved parties—but then, from all over the South, whispers of acknowledgment and affirmation and even appreciation began to be heard. He was taken aback, rendered almost speechless—but only momentarily. Soon Mencken was saying to the scholars, writers, and others who had found bracing truths in his broad-brush screed that they must become the critics of their own society, for that was the primary role and calling of every serious literary artist. To that end, he helped to open the pages of his magazines and of several influential newspapers to a far-flung regiment of Southern writers who dared to take his advice, and all through the 1920s these grateful disciples of the Baltimore bomber slowly raised their voices.
The excessive and outrageous richness of Mencken’s language was so mesmerizing that neither his detractors nor his defenders tended to get beyond his attack and into a consideration of remedies. Style simply overwhelmed substance. So much was wrong with the South, and so much of it had been ignored for so long, that a cataloging of the sins, whether overstated or not, was bound to get attention. Spelled out with Mencken’s gift for invective, the catalog drove his enemies into almost incoherent rage and dazzled his liberated allies into uncritical obedience.
It was this second group—the prisoners he freed—that was so surprising and so remarkable. In one way or another, to one degree or another, for a short while or for the rest of their lives, dozens of Southern writers, including some who went on to distinguished careers, got a tremendous psychological and artistic boost from H. L. Mencken. This is just a partial list: novelists James Branch Cabell, Ellen Glasgow, Thomas Wolfe, Julia Peterkin, DuBose Heyward, Frances Newman, and Walter White; poets Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Countee Cullen; critics Hunter Stagg, Addison Hibbard, John McClure, and Nell Battle Lewis; playwright Paul Green; scholars Archibald Henderson, William L. Poteat, and Howard W. Odum; journalists Joseph Wood Krutch, W. J. Cash, Julian Harris, Julia Collier Harris, Grover C. Hall, Gerald W. Johnson, Virginius Dabney, George Fort Milton, John Temple Graves, and Louis I. Jaffé.
Mencken gave encouragement and aid to the little magazines, too—especially the Reviewer in Richmond and the Double Dealer in New Orleans. Even many writers who had no direct contact with him were inspired by the potency of his pen. Ralph McGill, a football player and English major at Vanderbilt in 1921, spoke of him reverently as “our knight in shining armor.” In Memphis in 1926, eighteen-year-old Richard Wright, a refugee from rural Mississippi, read a thundering denunciation of Mencken in the local paper and decided that he had to know what this white man had said to cause such an outburst of rage. Using a library card he had borrowed from a sympathetic white man where he worked, Wright went to the segregated public library with a note that said, “Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?” Thinking Wright was a messenger for the white patron, the librarian gave him a volume of Prejudices—and thus began the future novelist’s education in the use of words as weapons of liberation.
The curious little cluster of faculty members, students, and townsmen around Vanderbilt who kept up a running literary discussion as self-styled Fugitives between 1915 and 1925, and who published a poetry journal, the Fugitive, in the latter years of that period, were certainly aware of Mencken, and he of them. English teachers John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson were the instigators of the Fugitive group, and two of their rising young compatriots were students Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. They all agreed with Mencken that orthodox Old South romanticism was a literary dead letter—but beyond that, there was almost nothing to draw the two camps together.
Mencken was intent on recruiting activist prose critics to deliver a self-conscious new literary style to the South; the Fugitives were not activists, not prose writers, and not even all that interested in the South. What they cared about was the craft of poetry and the intellectual stimulation they derived from writing it and discussing it. Tate admired Mencken, corresponded with him, and submitted poems to Smart Set and American Mercury (none were accepted); Davidson also sought to write for the magazines, but no warmth developed between him and the Baltimore iconoclast. No doubt Mencken perceived that he would find no sycophants in this den of bards, and no renegade South-bashers; for their part, the Nashvillians saw that Mencken knew little and cared less about poetry. They must have winced at his crude and incendiary manner, and felt a twinge of jealousy at its effectiveness. In any case, their contact remained formal—and turned downright hostile after a Mencken foray into the backwoods of Tennessee in 1925.
The scene was different at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. There, something close to a new school of social criticism blossomed in response to the Mencken bo
mbardment. Archibald Henderson, biographer of George Bernard Shaw, was among the first Southerners to praise “The Sahara of the Bozart.” Addison Hibbard, author of a widely distributed column on books, called “Literary Lantern,” was another early and enthusiastic Mencken adherent. Other Chapel Hill scholars, including historians Fletcher M. Green and Frank Porter Graham, looked with quiet favor on the dust stirred up by the wind out of Baltimore. Mutual admiration had long bound Mencken and UNC playwright Paul Green, and those ties grew stronger in 1924 when the Reviewer moved from Richmond to Chapel Hill and Green became its editor. In that same year, Gerald W. Johnson of the Greensboro Daily News, a devoted Menckenite who mimicked the master’s acerbic style, moved over to Chapel Hill to teach journalism and work on a fledgling journal called Social Forces. And, probably most important of all, the founder and editor of that journal, sociologist Howard W. Odum, overcame some initial hesitancy to form a close professional and personal bond with Mencken.
Odum, a native Georgian with two doctoral degrees from the North and ten years of experience in research, teaching, and administration, was called to Chapel Hill in 1920 to establish the social sciences in the UNC curriculum, and in short order he started the Department of Sociology, the School of Public Welfare, the Institute for Research in Social Science, and Social Forces, the quarterly journal. Those entities also generated a major portion of the manuscripts that found their way into print at the University of North Carolina Press and helped that academic publishing enterprise, the South’s first of any consequence, make an early and influential name for itself. For reasons that never were entirely clear, the university had moved to the forefront of Southern higher education early in the twentieth century under the leadership of Harry Woodburn Chase, and during Frank Porter Graham’s tenure as president from 1930 to 1949 it flowed like a fountain of progressive teaching, research, and public service—unquestionably the region’s leading academic institution, and one of the nation’s best as well.
Howard Odum’s contribution to UNC’s lofty reputation was substantial. His roots in the rural South and his scholarly training combined to give him an authoritative perspective on social and cultural issues that tended to substantiate and legitimize the deficiencies cited in Mencken’s catalog of horrors. Odum neither looked nor acted the part of a bullying agitator; in fact, he disliked Mencken’s abrasiveness and gently chided him for ascribing broadly to poor people the blame for what political demagogues and assorted other reactionaries had done to the region. But if Mencken was crudely indiscriminate in his snide salvos, he was at least firing in the right direction, and Odum was impressed when the shots fell with such telling effect.
Mencken had great respect for science and scholarship, neither of which were part of his own experience, and he deferred to those qualities in Odum. The two men settled into a complementary relationship that made a one-two punch of activist bombast and scholarly criticism, and Gerald Johnson, a marksman skilled at shooting both from the hip and from the shoulder, was their connecting link. (In 1926, Johnson left Odum’s shop to join Mencken at the Sun, and remained there for nearly twenty years.) Odum also aspired to be a novelist, and in the late 1920s he penned a trilogy of folk chronicles built around a road-wise black Ulysses named John Wesley “Left Wing” Gordon. Mencken had high praise for the work.
The sheer volume of Odum’s written contribution to scholarship and literature—like that of Mencken’s to journalism—was impressively vast. Its quality may have been overrated, if the tendency of it to fade with time is any indication, but the quiet and cautious scholar had other strengths that earned him a lasting reputation. One was his ability to attract outstanding colleagues to his faculty, people like Rupert B. Vance and Guy B. Johnson; another was his influence on a long line of graduate students, from Arthur F. Raper in the 1920s to John E. Ivey in the 1940s. Considering all the people he influenced through his teaching, writing, and research, Howard W. Odum was one of the pivotal figures of the twentieth-century South—and in that respect, once again, he and H. L. Mencken stood together in very select company.
They also stood side by side physically once in a while—as, for example, in the summer of 1925, when they both went to the east Tennessee town of Dayton for the sensationally publicized trial of John T. Scopes, a high-school science teacher accused of violating the state’s law against teaching the theory of evolution. The famed attorney Clarence Darrow and a team of Yankee lawyers defended Scopes, and thrice-failed Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan headed the prosecution. Odum was there as an observer, and saw in the event a tragedy for all concerned; Mencken, covering it for his paper, ridiculed it as a comic spectacle, a “Monkey Trial” that made monkeys and boobs of the people of Tennessee and the South.
Across the mountains in Nashville, the remnant of Vanderbilt Fugitives—particularly Donald Davidson and John Crowe Ransom—at first looked away in detached indifference and then in embarrassment from the courtroom antics of the attorneys, the spectators, and the grandstanding H. L. Mencken, who slandered the state and the South as “the bunghole of the United States” and “a Holy Land for imbeciles,” and damned its people as “gaping primates” and “yokels of the hills” and “fundamentalist bigots.” As time went by, the Nashvillians felt their anger rising in reaction to the smug self-righteousness of all outside critics. Finally they decided to strike back.
5. Eve of the New Deal
The Fugitives had declared themselves to be in flight from “the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South,” from sentimentality and self-delusion, from the substance as well as the form of poetry and fiction as it was written and revered in the nineteenth-century South. In their intensely cerebral pursuits, they were thus a part of the modernist breeze that wafted ever so gently through the region in the early 1920s. If any single individual could be said to have started that wind, it would have to be H. L. Mencken, with Howard Odum joining in and the black and white Southern expatriates in New York adding something from afar. (To keep all of this in perspective, remember that the “literary talk” of writers was essentially an intellectual exercise touching only a relative handful of participants and a larger but still elite and limited audience; meanwhile, the political and economic forces that drove life in the South and the nation continued apace, finding nothing compelling in the debate.)
But Mencken’s trashing of the Southern icons, highlighted by his Monkey Trial dispatches, and his successful enlistment of so many native Southern social critics had direct consequences in Nashville. Building on an impulse that predated the Scopes trial and reverberated far beyond Baltimore and Chapel Hill, the veteran Fugitives still at Vanderbilt, together with Allen Tate, who had moved to New York, began in the months and years after Scopes to articulate a defensive Southern self-consciousness that culminated in 1930 with a new fellowship of true believers—the Agrarians—and a book of essays defiantly called I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.
It was, in the most profound sense, a reactionary document, a lashing out at foreign forces (industrialization, communism, the North) and a defense of hoary Southern virtues, real and imagined. The discovery of those virtues had come late to most of the contributors to the manifesto—in fact, none of them were on record in, say, 1920 as ardent devotees of Confederate or antebellum sentiment—but latter-day conversion seemed only to heighten their devotion. The twelve men whose essays made up the book were actually quite different from one another in temperament and philosophy, and their essays reflected those differences to some extent. But the title (a line from the Confederate anthem “Dixie”), the introductory statement of principles (written mainly by John Ransom), and the polemical tone of the book itself were enough to assure that it and the authors would be heard as one loud voice of defiance.
The intellectual energy to produce the manifesto came primarily from Ransom, Davidson, and Tate, who had some significant differences among themselves but a galvanizing desire to start a movement of rebellion
against the Menckenesque literary current they saw racing across the country. These three recruited the other nine (they were turned down by several more) and tried with only limited success to mold them into a cell from which a body of adherents could grow. The book’s introduction described the Agrarians as “Southerners well acquainted with one another” (hardly the case, since some of them had never met) and declared that “all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way.” That distinction could best be characterized, the statement said, with the phrase “Agrarian versus Industrial.”
Industrialism was the paper tiger that all the writers were exhorted to confront with whip and chair, and most of them dutifully did so, calling up criticisms from as far back as the Iron Age. The Agrarian alternative was also an idea of convenience more than of conviction, for this was not a book by farmers about farming. By indirection and by determined avoidance of an overtly reactionary motive, the organizers of the Agrarian rebellion thus challenged an enemy they couldn’t defeat with an ideal they couldn’t defend, and the result was as predictable and decisive as it had been when their spiritual forebears first tried it in the 1860s.
Contradictions and gaping inconsistencies abounded throughout. The twelve writers (all but two of whom had ties to Vanderbilt, either as former students or as faculty members) were products of the rural South, with only one marginal exception in the case of John Gould Fletcher, born in the small city of Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1886. But none of them (again, with the possible exception of Andrew Lytle) could claim farming as a livelihood, then or previously—and some, like Tate, knew absolutely nothing about the soil. Lytle’s contribution was the only chapter specifically on agriculture, and it was a soft-handed scholar’s sweeping diatribe against paved roads, ledger books, radios, store-bought clothes, motorized machinery (which he crudely branded “the nigger in the woodpile”), and sundry other manifestations of modernism. Progressive farming, he concluded, “is the biggest hoax that has ever been foisted upon a people.”