I'll Take My Stand: The South And the Agrarian Tradition (Library of Southern Civilization) |...

I'll Take My Stand: The South And the Agrarian Tradition (Library of Southern Civilization) | Twelve Southerners | Poetic, Scholarly, Timeless

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I'll Take My Stand...

	I'll Take My Stand: The South And the Agrarian Tradition (Library of Southern Civilization) Twelve Southerners Louisiana State University Press, 2006 - 359 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great book, rotten intro...

I'd avoid this version of the book and instead seek out the older edition with the intro by Louis Rubin. He does a much better job of explaining the Agrarians' place and time (which is vital for understanding their 'project') and his grasp on the big picture of what they were trying to say is far more accurate than Ms. Donaldson's, whose feminist/multiculturalist approach is less than helpful, and rather silly in some places. Her point seems to be that while the Agrarians said they were alarmed at the commercialism and industrialism that were encroaching on the South, what they really were afraid of were upwardly-mobile blacks and 'modern' women. Uh...yeah, right.

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Poetic, Scholarly, Timeless

A scholar's view, poetically given, of what "Subsidiarity" and G.K.Chesterton earlier called "Distributism." At the essence of it is the romantic idea of the Jeffersonian "yoeman farmer" and what it means to have citizens tied to the land - their land - and the social and political consequences of such things in America. Likely, this book will be studied over a hundred years from now. So will the sole companion book later published, Beyond Capitalism & Socialism: A New Statement of an Old Idealby Kirkpatrick Sale.

Interesting Reading

I would not go so far as to say any of these gentlemen is absolutely correct in their work, but this collection is extremely important if you want some understanding of the southern mind at the begining of the Great Depression. This is very much a regional book and will have little interest to anyone who isn't searching for some meaning from the South. It is great reading however. Although the essays in the book are not connected, the general theme is one of a general distrust of the modern industrial world where people have no connection to place and stable values and ideals. There is a definate feeling of longing for the agrarian South of old that was slowly slipping away at the time. Very interesting.

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Falling Just Short Isn't Good Enough

One must keep in mind the time period of the book, which was the Great Depression. One must also remember that any kind of pervasive, endemic change on the scale of industrialism is bound to provoke a reaction. The stellar aspect of this book is the exhibition of a high order, intellectual critique of Modernism of a kind not usually originating from the South. Another stellar aspect of this book is the multitude of angles the attack is delivered from (historical, philosophical, religious, artistic). The one thing they all have in common is an astounding degree of rhetorical sophistication - these agrarians knew their adversary and were relentless in scourging it. For this, we owe them great thanks. That having been said, I doubt the Southern Agrarians could have ever conceived of man terraforming Mars, mining one of Jupiter's moons, or any of the things that we take for granted as inevitability. I never wish to be thought a better conservative than Edmund Burke, and he once remarked that when history has spoken, an opposing virtue may become not only immoral but perverse. It would seem that the record of history is against the agrarians. If man is to have the room and the land and the freedom they sought, it will have to be on the other side of the industrial Modernism they so hated and feared. Perhaps upon a green Mars, newly primed and ready for settlement?....

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A must-read for several reasons

It is important to read this book as a product of a point in time (the beginning of the Depression and the middle of the Jim Crow period) and a place (Vanderbilt). Or, rather, the place is a Southern ivory tower where intellectuals can prize anti-intellectualism as uniquely Southern and long for a South without roads or industry. In their own way, the Twelve Southerners are very like ancient urban Greeks creating and idealizing a pastoral landscape of the imagination. Several of them are also disturbingly racist, positioning the slaves as only a couple of generations removed from their native cannibal societies and repeating most of the arguments from the 1830s in defense of slavery, while simultaneously claiming that slavery--and, by implication, the slaves--were irrelevant to true Southern culture, which is of course a purely white
(pure white?) affair.

But the Twelve Southerners, as revealed by these essays at this particular point in their lives, are an important example of how ill-advised it is to too quickly whitewash or demonize the complicated motives of our very complicated ancestors. Their understanding of Reconstruction is flawed and their understanding of race is ludicrously off-base, but the standard of racial discourse wasn't much different in the North at that time. And contrary to the usual assumption that white Southerners spent every waking hour worrying about black people, these are men for whom race was clearly a secondary (at best) consideration, to the extent that they use the term "ethnic diversity" to refer to mixed influences from the English and the Scotch-Irish.

The essays are also eerily post-modern, questioning many of the same academic shibboleths the post-moderns questioned (for very different reasons), and prefiguring recent concerns about the sustainability of endlessly increasing production and consumption. I can't help feeling that, if these guys were around today, one or two of them would be scary white supremacists and the rest would be celebrating the mixed racial heritage of the South while running for office for the Green Party. Or maybe not. One of the lessons this book has to teach is that, while recent decades of political correctness and culture wars have taught us to expect attitudes and beliefs to be found in a few predictable constellations, it is all too easy when looking at other times or cultures to find the utterly repellant and the completely identifiable co-existing in one person, and in completely unfamiliar mixtures.

I suppose what I am saying is that there are really several reasons for reading this book. 1) It is an important and influential meditation on what it meant to be Southern in the early 1930s, 2) It is an idealized vision of white Southern culture and history that is important to understand, 3) It is an articulate challenge to values that had become the unquestioned values of the nation at large and are only now being questioned, 4) It is a sketch of a utopian vision that, with modifications allowing for the mixed-race reality of the South, is worth aspiring to even today, and 5) For those interested in identity politics, it is a fascinating collection of assorted voices engaged in a discourse with race, class, region, and the meaning of labor.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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