by John Egerton
Fletcher, a wealthy product of private schools who had spent most of his adult years in England, wrote the chapter on education, and it turned out to be a lament for the old private academies of classical instruction for the rich. He launched a fusillade of abuse against public education, calling it “a disaster of the first magnitude.” If it cannot be destroyed, he declared, it should be reserved for the intellectual elite, with perhaps a little manual instruction made available to the lower classes. “It is simply a waste of money and effort to send … an unspoiled country boy or girl” or “the negro” to high school or college, said Fletcher. “The inferior, whether in life or in education, should exist only for the sake of the superior.”
Robert Penn Warren’s essay was the only one to address race as a dimension of Southern life; in it, he invoked Booker T. Washington in calling for agricultural and vocational training for blacks, equal justice before the law, and a modicum of fairness within the prevailing system of segregation. (Davidson found the piece to be offensively progressive and wanted to leave it out of the book, but Tate, who was Warren’s close friend, prevailed in opposing the rejection.) H. C. Nixon, a political scientist at Tulane University, approached the question of industry versus agriculture from an economic perspective, and concluded that the South must limit industrial expansion—not eliminate it—and take pains to preserve and protect its farmers from industrial exploitation. (This essay, too, was adjudged weak and deviant by Davidson.)
Others, including Stark Young (the eldest of the group, at forty-nine), John Donald Wade, and Frank L. Owsley, drew from their understanding of the Southern past an implied or expressed vision of the future that reflected their longing for a culture of privilege such as the white landed gentry once enjoyed. John Crowe Ransom took a similar tack, praising what he called the “squirearchy” and a life of leisurely pursuits built upon a strong agricultural system, with industry decidedly secondary. Allen Tate’s contribution was a complex treatise on Southern religion that seemed curiously unfocused and shed no light on the then-current debates over fundamentalism and the social gospel movement.
Finally, there was Donald Davidson. As he saw it, the rich folk art of the Old South—storytelling, humor, oratory, crafts, writing—was in grave danger of succumbing to the impersonal and smothering threat of industrialism. The new wave of socially conscious writers had sold out to the Yankee dollar, he charged; DuBose Heyward and Paul Green were latter-day abolitionists, and T. S. Stribling was trying to be another Harriet Beecher Stowe or Clarence Darrow, and James Branch Cabell and Ellen Glasgow were similarly tainted. Their duty, Davidson clearly felt, was to forswear these sins and become once again Southern and provincial—and make “a last stand in America against the industrial devourer.” Davidson made no mention of Mencken or Odum, but their shadows fell oppressively over him as he wrote.
I’ll Take My Stand was professed by its planners to be a spirited defense of yeoman farmers and other salt-of-the-earth white folks—their work, their play, their religion, their art. Mencken had assailed these very people unmercifully, and unfairly; they certainly deserved better. But what they got from the Agrarians was a paean to farm life that celebrated the plantation squirearchy and glossed over contemporary realities of tenant farming and sharecropping and peonage. The book was a pedantic outpouring of philosophical ideas from an intellectual elite, rather than anything that even hinted at practical or political solutions to the plight of the agrarian South. These nonfarming dilettantes had almost nothing to say to the yeoman farmers who struggled to survive on Southern soil. Even in their condemnation of industrialism the Agrarians were sadly off target, seeing far more danger in the evils of communism, which had no economic power at all in the region, than in capitalism, which ran the textile mills and turpentine camps and coal mines with such utter disdain for their laborers.
The Agrarians claimed to be standing up for the South against the hordes of invaders from beyond; in truth, they were a tiny clutch of middle- and upper-class white males from the mid-South who spoke, by and large, for themselves—and even there encountered points of serious disagreement. Finally, as writers, they utterly failed to define or demonstrate what they had to offer to the South, agrarian and industrial, that was better than, or even different from, the prescriptions of writers in the Old South, the New South, or the Mencken-Odum schools of contemporary Southern social criticism.
From faraway Baltimore, H. L. Mencken single-handedly commanded the attention of writers in every corner of the South, and others who had left the region in despair. He somehow found Olive Tilford Dargan (a.k.a. Fielding Burke) in the mountains of Appalachia, and Charles J. Finger in the Ozarks, and struggling advocates of social change such as Will Alexander in Atlanta, and expatriates black and white, from James Weldon Johnson to Thomas Wolfe, and scores of academicians and journalists all the way to Texas.
Mencken turned fifty at about the time the Agrarians were publishing their manifesto in 1930, and by then his muckraking attacks on the South had almost run their course. That same year he married Sara Haardt of Montgomery, Alabama, a former coed at Goucher College in Baltimore and a liberated Southern belle whose stories he had published in the American Mercury. The old curmudgeon’s views on the South seemed to soften after that—or perhaps it was just that he lost interest in the subject.
Mencken had a limited and distorted view of Southern history and almost nothing in the way of a blueprint for social change, but his paint-peeling style of invective and the dreadful conditions that undeniably existed in the region were an irresistible combination. Howard Odum had a much more realistic historical view of the South and a better vision of remedies too. Those assets did much to overcome the pedestrian quality of his writing and his deep dislike of activism and conflict; as different as Odum was from Mencken, he too built a following that dwarfed that of the Agrarians.
I’ll Take My Stand was widely reviewed in the South and beyond, and debates between one or more Agrarians and their critics took place before large audiences in Richmond, New Orleans, and elsewhere in the months after publication. But if the debates were spirited and close, the reviews were overwhelmingly critical, and the book sold barely more than two thousand copies before it went out of print in 1941, eleven years after it first appeared. Not until it was reissued more than twenty years later (by which time several of the contributors had gained fame and there was a general revival of interest in Southern letters) did the book enjoy a measure of success.
The Southern response to the Agrarian manifesto strongly suggests that people in the region who read books and thought about social issues at the beginning of the 1930s were generally more progressive in their outlook than the authors of the reactionary collection. An incident involving Allen Tate underscores that conclusion.
Twenty-seven-year-old Thomas D. Mabry of Clarksville, Tennessee (where Tate was living with his wife, Caroline Gordon), enrolled in 1931 at Vanderbilt for a master’s degree in English. His interest in race relations led him to make the acquaintance of James Weldon Johnson, who had just joined the English department at nearby Fisk University, and Langston Hughes, who was temporarily teaching there. Hoping to build some informal ties between black and white writers in Nashville, Mabry decided to ask the Fisk luminaries and some of the Agrarians to a social function at his home; among those he invited were Tate, Johnson, Hughes, and Donald Davidson.
Johnson attended, and he and Mabry subsequently formed a strong friendship. Hughes and Davidson apparently weren’t there. As for Tate, he not only spurned the invitation; he took offense at it, and used his response to lecture Mabry on racial etiquette, putting forth his theory that “there should be no social intercourse between the races unless we are willing for that to lead to marriage.” The rules of Southern civilization didn’t permit writers of the white and black races to meet socially, he said; maybe in New York or London or Paris, but not here—and furthermore, he added, he wouldn’t lift a finger to break the taboo, for that was “prob
ably beyond my powers and … certainly outside my inclinations.”
Mabry fired back a letter expressing contempt for Tate’s “vacuous and insulting essay on racial relations.” He accused him of “moral lassitude” and “intellectual dishonesty,” as well as “the sophistry so common among nigger-baiters.” Unfazed, Tate wrote back again, admitting his “moral lassitude” and acknowledging that Johnson and Hughes were “my intellectual equals.” But the thirty-one-year-old poet concluded that his refusal to meet with them was rooted in a desire not to see them “insulted or humiliated” by whites.
Aside from such personal exchanges as this, it was rare for the literary, academic, artistic, and journalistic principals in the Southern renaissance of the twenties and thirties to engage in candid discourse on the thorny issue of race. They had little or nothing to say about white supremacy, the once and future problem that burrowed like a mole into the subconscious soul of the South. For all their differences, neither Mencken nor Odum nor the Agrarians came close to addressing the problems of segregation and discrimination and inequality. At best, they were paternalistic and patronizing; at worst, they were deeply racist believers in the innate superiority of Caucasians—and no matter where they fell on that spectrum, they rationalized their views and avoided facing the issue that could not be wished away.
Mencken could cheerfully and honestly encourage—and publish—black writers from Harlem, but have no interest whatever in the conditions of the black masses, whether they were in the cotton fields of Alabama or the slums of Baltimore. The University of North Carolina liberals were proud to feature James Weldon Johnson in a week-long forum of lectures and seminars on “Negro life” in 1927, and Langston Hughes in a public reading of his poetry in 1931, but they couldn’t figure out how to hire a black faculty member or admit a black graduate student for another twenty years. Some of the Agrarians, notably Robert Penn Warren and H. C. Nixon and even Allen Tate, came in time to a more equable view of race in America, but most of the others—Donald Davidson foremost among them—remained defiantly unreconstructed rebels to the bitter end.
By the time the Agrarians took their stand against industrialism, the South was already flattened; it had been the first to fall under the lumbering steamroller of the depression. Herbert Hoover, the third straight Republican in the White House, seemed helpless and immobilized against the economic forces that were pulling the country down. Only deepest Dixie—Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina—had voted against him, and even they were torn. All of the other Southern and border states, in the first major desertion from the Democratic Party in fifty years, had chosen Hoover, whom they considered “damp,” over Al Smith, who was not only openly “wet” but a Yankee and a Catholic to boot. Hoover, also a Yankee, rewarded the Dixie renegades by deferring to their racial views (when he didn’t share them outright); beyond that, he had precious little to offer them.
Industrialism did figure significantly in the problems the South faced in the 1920s and beyond, of course, and a number of issues the Agrarians alluded to—materialism, impersonality, environmental damage—eventually became vital and pressing concerns. But by and large, the economic and social issues of paramount importance to the South and the nation in the late twenties and early thirties concerned matters the Agrarians virtually ignored: labor-management relations, race relations, laissez-faire capitalism, exploitation of natural and human resources.
Some industrial giants had invaded the Southern states much earlier, in response to the New South boosterism of Henry Grady and others in the late nineteenth century. For the most part, they were extractive and exploitative—and worse, in a land full of hungry people, they produced little or nothing edible, not to say nourishing. They removed the iron ore and coal and timber, hauling it away on their railroads. They refined sugar in south Florida, made steel in Alabama and wood products in North Carolina, turned out textiles and tobacco products in the Piedmont region that stretched from Virginia to Alabama; later they struck oil and natural gas in Louisiana and Texas.
In all of those industrial ventures, it would be hard to point to a single community where the lives of ordinary people were measurably improved by the industry’s presence. These enterprises did put a little money in some people’s pockets, it’s true, but in terms of upgrading health and housing and education, or raising the quality of social and cultural life, or reducing race and class divisions, they did almost nothing. Those were the failings the Agrarians should have zeroed in on, instead of simply decrying another Yankee invasion; after all, some of the industries were Southern in origin, and all of them required the active cooperation of the region’s powerful leaders.
Tobacco was first among those industries, and the one most invigorated by Southern money. At the heart of it was the American Tobacco Company, an empire created by Washington Duke of North Carolina and his son, James Buchanan “Buck” Duke, in the decades after the Civil War. Their monopoly, enhanced by automatic cigarette-rolling machines (a Southern invention), was broken up by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1911, but the Dukes were hardly impoverished thereby. They had dominated not only the industry that manufactured tobacco products but also the network of farmers that supplied the raw materials; when their iron grip was broken, Buck Duke had enough resources left to build another fortune (in hydroelectric power development) and to create an endowment that transformed little Trinity College in Durham into Duke University.
By 1930 the factories that turned out packaged cigarettes and other tobacco products were just about the only industry in the South, and one of the few nationwide, that remained profitable. The product was virtually depression-proof: dirt-cheap (you could buy a pack of twenty smokes for a nickel or a dime) and habit-forming too. And still at the top of the industry pyramid was the American Tobacco Company. Its president by that time was George Washington Hill, Buck Dukes spiritual heir. He received well over a million dollars in salary and bonuses in 1930. Few if any of his factory workers—and probably none of the growers and harvesters of Southern tobacco—then earned as much as a thousand dollars a year.
The other major industry that stood figuratively on the edge of the growing fields was textiles. Cotton (and later synthetic fibers) made mill owners in the South as profit-hungry and as exploitative of labor as their New England predecessors were before the mills moved south, and when times got tough, a familiar and predictable pattern of conflict developed between management and workers. It had happened before, in the South and elsewhere, but virtually all efforts to establish collective bargaining for Southern workers had ultimately failed. Desperate conditions in the depression gave birth to another wave of attempts.
The first major clash occurred in some German-owned rayon mills at Elizabethton, Tennessee, in March 1929, when a group of women workers who were making about nine dollars a week decided to strike for higher pay. The plants were closed, and violence hovered over the dispute. The strikers had the support of the American Federation of Labor; the plant owners got the governor of Tennessee to send in a force of state militiamen—at company expense—to maintain order. In time, the mill owners succeeded in dividing the workers and breaking the strike.
Across the mountains in Gastonia, North Carolina, meanwhile, strikers shut down the Loray Mill, the largest of many plants in the area and thus the trendsetter on wages, working hours, and other labor issues. Though it was owned by a Rhode Island corporation, Loray had been founded in 1900 with local capital, and it maintained a position of paternalistic dominance in the community. Massive layoffs and wage cuts precipitated the strike, and in the months that followed, the management-labor dispute grew into a struggle that involved, among others, the state militia, the entire textile industry, the Communist-backed National Textile Workers Union, several religious denominations, outside pressure groups supporting both sides, and a corps of newspaper reporters from North Carolina, the South, and the rest of the country. The owners broke the strike, but not before two people died�
��Gastonia’s police chief, Orville Aderholt, and a martyred worker, Ella May Wiggins. (Five years later, a general strike in the textile industry would come to a similarly tragic and fruitless conclusion.)
Liston Pope, a North Carolina mill owner’s son and Duke University graduate who later became dean of the Yale University Divinity School, went to Gastonia a decade after the strike to gather material for what turned out to be a classic of social history, Millhands and Preachers. In it he described a conflict reminiscent of eighteenth-century Europe, with the captains of industry, supported by leaders of the churches and other local institutions, maintaining privilege in the depression at the expense of the millhands and laborers. It was, as Pope recognized, a class struggle among whites, since discrimination kept blacks out of all but a handful of the most menial jobs, but it cut to the heart of the South’s economic crisis; a pervasive and crippling vestige of feudalism still characterized the region’s economy.
Even as the strikes in Gastonia, Elizabethton, and other communities took place, voices in favor of better treatment of workers were raised in several quarters of the press, the church, the university, and industry itself. Howard Odum’s Social Forces and the Virginia Quarterly Review were among these; so were such newspapers as the Macon Telegraph under Mark Ethridge, the Chattanooga News under George Fort Milton, Josephus Daniels’s Raleigh News & Observer, the Montgomery Advertiser edited by Grover Hall, Sr., and the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot under Louis Jaffé. President William L. Poteat of Wake Forest College and M. Ashby Jones, a charter member of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation—both of them Baptist ministers—also took a progressive stance on the issue, as did textile manufacturer Donald Comer of Alabama and others. Frank Porter Graham got more than four hundred prominent North Carolinians to sign a forthright statement of support for new laws and policies to protect workers from exploitation and abuse.