Andrew Lytle & the Politics of Agrarianism

Automated and impersonal, American society, Andrew Lytle feared, was coming to be peopled by the rootless masses ensnared in dreary, routine, unimaginative, and irrelevant occupations—a society of interchangeable parts and interchangeable men. This condition was the very antithesis of the Christian economy.

I.

By the 1930s, Andrew Lytle thought the signs of impending disaster everywhere in evidence. Affluence had proven illusory. Fervid efforts to obtain or to manufacture wealth had generated not only conflict among nations over diminished resources and languishing markets, but had also compromised the freedom of ordinary citizens, removing the “concept of liberty from political consciousness” and transmuting “the pursuit of happiness into a nervous running-around which is without the logic, even, of a dog chasing its tail.” To discard “the ordinary human functions of living,” Lytle warned, was “moral and spiritual suicide, foretelling an actual physical destruction.”[1] Such an aggressive program of economic imperialism was cataclysmic for the traditional agrarian South.

Proud, steadfast, independent, and tough, southern farmers were nonetheless vulnerable to the politicians, technocrats, and reformers who, often with good intentions, implored them to become more efficient and more productive in order to take better advantage of the many opportunities a modern economy afforded to get rich. Those who lived on the land and tended the soil had been too poor for too long not to listen. But, Lytle insisted, “a farm is not a place to grow wealthy; it is a place to grow corn.” He exhorted farmers to disdain such “heresies . . . for they roll from the tongue of false prophets.”[2] The eclipse of farming and the agrarian way of life were not inevitable if men elected to fight for their inheritance, however desperate the struggle.

Resistance was crucial, for the temptations to surrender were overwhelming. The construction of new roads was the first initiative to herald for southern farmers the loss of their hereditary estate. Paved roads betokened an end to the historic isolation that progressives assumed had fettered southern development. Ease of transportation ensured access to a more varied and plentiful assortment goods and services, which could only render the hitherto primitive lives of farmers and their families less somber and monotonous. Yet, the cost of these alleged blessings was dear and, Lytle maintained, fell inordinately upon the farmers themselves. When state governments issued bonds and imposed taxes to fund highway construction and repair, the farmers paid.  By the time the roads were built, advertizing propaganda had convinced them, or had at least persuaded their wives and children, that they needed an automobile. The farmers went into debt to accommodate their wishes. Installment payments, along with the regular purchase of gasoline and motor oil, meant that the banks, the automobile manufactures, and the oil companies all profited from the farmers’ labor, while they sweated to pay the bills, which fell due “as regular as clock stokes.”[3] Under such circumstances, Lytle surmised, wealth became an abstraction, since the men who produced it could not also enjoy it.

In their isolation, farmers had relied on their kin, their neighbors, and their own callused hands and strong backs to fell trees, cut timber, chop firewood, clear fields, plant and harvest crops, tend livestock, and do all the additional chores that operating a farm required. They grew the food for their table. Their wives and daughters fed the chickens, slopped the hogs, milked the cows, churned the butter, tended the garden, cooked the victuals, cleaned the house, and sewed, mended, or washed the clothes. They worked hard, and sometimes they worried lest nature withheld the rewards of their travail, but they were free. For entertainment, they used their homemade talents or their spirited imaginations to amuse themselves.

New roads begat dependence. Shipped long distances, food appeared on the shelves of the local general store, and more of it found its way into the larders and onto the tables of farm families. Farmers began to neglect their gardens, to slaughter fewer hogs, to cure less meat, and to sell their extraneous livestock. The clothes they wore were also more often store-bought than homespun. Recreation necessitated driving to the latest picture show in town. To furnish these once inconceivable extravagances, farmers turned increasingly, if not exclusively, to cultivating cash-crops, which bound them to the money economy and the world market.

Lytle’s concerns had merit. Economic changes that occurred in the South after the First World War helped to condition, but also supported, his analysis. As cotton prices soared, reaching forty cents a pound in 1919, every farmer who could get credit bought as much land as he could afford and then some at vastly inflated prices, which at times exceeded $300 an acre for parcels that only a decade earlier had sold for two dollars. They expected to profit from the cotton boom and, subsequently, from reselling the land. When the price of cotton declined in the early 1920s, many southern farmers actually increased their land holdings and planted even more acres in cotton, trying to make up in volume what they were losing per unit. They also doubtless hoped that the post-war drop in cotton prices would, in short order, reverse its course. As a result, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, banks and mortgage and insurance companies often held notes on half the land in the cotton-growing regions of the South. Plagued by mortgage and interest payments, continuously falling cotton prices, and rising costs of living, southern farmers did, indeed, have to fight to keep their land.

With debts mounting, creditors, who were, in effect, as Lytle pointed out, absentee landlords, obliged farmers to plant only cash-crops and to eschew subsistence agriculture. In the year or so following the publication of I’ll Take My Stand disaster befell southern farmers when they produced a huge cotton crop of approximately 17 million bales. This surplus inundated an already swollen market, and the international cotton economy disintegrated. Across the South, local financiers responded by withdrawing credit and vacating loans, for which they now demanded full payment from farmers who lacked the means to comply. The results were depressingly predictable. Lenders foreclosed. Farmers relinquished their land and forfeited their way of life.[4] They had gambled a secure if modest living for the prospect of wealth, and they had lost.

Lytle’s dismay was palpable, but the staunch defense that he had made of local independence was a motif long familiar in southern thought. His reproof, for instance, echoed the lament of Frank Meriwether, the fictional patrician hero of John Pendleton Kennedy’s antebellum novel, Swallow Barn.[5] The proprietor of Swallow Barn, Meriwether, as his name suggests, is of good nature and happy disposition. But he is disturbed by the growing trend toward what he calls “consolidation,” fearing it will rob Virginia of its distinctive character. Devoted to his household, his family, and his locality, Meriwether stands as the epitome of the conservative Virginia country squire, proud of his heritage and his history. He has seldom ventured beyond the confines of Virginia and, in fact, has made only occasional excursions as far as Richmond. Although he corresponds regularly with friends, all of whom have now gone on to prominence in state or national politics, Meriwether is content to spend his days tending to his private affairs and those that may occur in the vicinity of his plantation, savoring the pleasures of tranquil domesticity in rural Virginia.

Neither a recluse nor a misanthrope, Meriwether is hospitable. He welcomes strangers rather than fears them, and is happiest when he has guests at Swallow Barn so that he can share—and show off—the bounty that God, and his own efforts, has provided him. But Swallow Barn is removed from the competitive marketplace and political arena. An unwavering enemy of nationalism, Meriwether fears that it will destroy the splendor and independence of his beloved Virginia. He is at war with the modern world, of which the growth of nationalism is but a single manifestation. He opposes not only centralized government, but also progress itself. A century before Lytle denounced the detrimental effect of new roads on the rural South, Kennedy, through Meriwether, condemned the steamboat as precisely the kind of technological innovation that would end the cherished isolation, and thus the independence, of Virginia. Meriwether explains to his guest Mark Littleton:

I don’t deny that the steamboat is destined to produce valuable results—but after all, I much question . . . if we are not better without it. I declare, I think it strikes deeper at the supremacy of the states than most persons are willing to allow. This annihilation of space, sir, is not to be desired. Our protection against the evils of consolidation consists in the very obstacles to our intercourse. . . . [T]he home material of Virginia was never so good as when her roads were at their worst.[6]

Lytle could not have said it better.

The strictures of the economy that held them in thrall now constrained southern farmers to become more productive. They had no choice save to abandon their traditional methods, exchanging mules for tractors, manure for chemical fertilizers, and home-grown for manufactured seed. Their debts mounting, numerous farmers mortgaged their land, and yet “each day” they purchased Amore and more from the town and [made] less and less at home.”[7] Many added a generator to power the machines that gradually assumed the tasks that they, their wives, and their children had once performed.

Daughters were the first to become economically superfluous. If farmers were not fortunate enough to marry them off, they had, perforce, to send them to town to clerk at the five-and-ten. Nor, in time, could sons linger on the old place, if they had no steady work to do and little to contribute to the household economy. As machines displaced them, they also had to leave home to earn a living. Perhaps farm wives languished to an even greater extent than did their children, if for no other reason than they had fewer options. Wives became menials in the homes over which they once reigned. Condemned for life as “assistants to machines,” farm wives grew fitful and uneasy. Disconsolate because their responsibilities were “almost as great without the compensation of the highest place in the old scheme, “wives could not Abe recompensed in gold, and gold was the only currency.”[8] Technology may have alleviated the rigor and inconvenience of certain occupations but, Lytle concluded, machines also belittled human intelligence and purpose and divested life of meaning. “Run mad by their inventions, supplanting themselves with inanimate objects,” men evinced an “awful spectacle.”[9] Machines commanded; men obeyed.

For Lytle, the introduction and extensive use of technology had ravaged the culture of the agrarian South. Although his grievances may seem extravagant, similar indictments emerged from various quarters throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. Studying the middle- and working-class residents of Muncie, Indiana, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd found that technology and industry had devastated traditional communities, dissociated men from one another, and created the pervasive impression that modern life was beyond human understanding and control.[10] Whether toiling in a factory or an office, American workers no longer felt pride or satisfaction in their jobs. Deadening the personality and extinguishing the intelligence, workers had to yield to the impersonal standards of the machine or the perfunctory routine of the office. They saw no alternative if they wished to earn a living. Leisure, too, became a hectic, fatuous, and indiscriminate orgy of getting and spending, as people tried urgently to fill the void in their lives with things. The automobile and the movies, the Lynds agreed with Lytle, contributed to the breakdown of family and neighborhood. At the same time that entertainment was becoming less a communal and more an individual activity, old, and perhaps eccentric, customs, habits, attitudes, values, and beliefs were fast disappearing, merged into a deadening uniformity. Formulaic, conventional, and superficial, modern life seemed to verge on apathy, chaos, and madness.

However doleful and confounding the present, the Lynds, unlike Lytle, anticipated the return of social equilibrium when thought and conduct adjusted to the technological developments that had for the moment outstripped them. More pessimistic was Stuart Chase. Writing shortly before the publication of I’ll Take My Stand, Chase worried about the problem of technological unemployment that, a year later, Lytle depicted in “The Hind Tit.” Technology, Chase suggested, no longer attended human needs. Technological innovation had once bred economic opportunity. Now, Chase reflected, new jobs cannot Abe created as fast as the machine tips a man out of an old one.”[11] The technological displacement that Lytle believed had cheated farm life of its allure and purpose was, according to Chase, a more general phenomenon in modern American society. Each advance in technology augured not prosperity but overproduction, mass unemployment, and economic ruin. “The better we are able to produce,” Chase brooded, “the worse off we shall be. This is the economy of a mad-house.”[12] Against all logic, technological progress had led to human calamity. The disease, which Chase likened a disorder of the central nervous system, was crippling and perhaps fatal.[13] Social and political action were useless. Neither reform nor revolution could surmount the impasse at which modern civilization had arrived.

Lytle and the Agrarians, of course, did propose an alternative. If Americans were to remain independent, the majority had better go back to the land. “The answer,” Lytle proclaimed, “lies in a return to a society where agriculture is practiced by most people.”[14] Machines had obscured the human condition, enticing men into sin with a false image of their own power. Inevitably, they would exploit that power, without seeing that it led to their own destruction, of which they were both victim and agent. Enjoining farmers, and all conservative peoples throughout the United States, to boycott manufactured goods, Lytle at the same time implored them to combat the vast propaganda machine that instructed them to despise themselves and their way of life, and to deny their ancestors and their inheritance, or to remember them only with shame. “This is the biggest hoax that has ever been foisted upon a people,” he announced.[15] A ban on the merchandise of the factory was not, after all:

so impossible as it may seem at first, for, . . . the necessities they machine-facture were once manufactured on the land, and as for the bric-à-brac, let it rot on their hands. Do what we did after the war and the Reconstruction: return to our looms, our handcrafts, our reproducing stock. Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall. Forsake the movies for the play-parties and the square dances. . . . Any man who grows his own food, kills his own meat, takes wool from his lambs and cotton from his stalks and makes them into clothes, plants corn and hay for his stock, shoes them at the crossroads blacksmith shop, draws milk and butter from his cows, eggs from his pullets, water from the ground, and fuel from the woodlot, can live in an industrial world without a great deal of cash. Let him diversify, but diversify so that he may live rather than grow rich.[16]

By these means, Lytle hoped, southerners could be induced not only to think, but also again to live, as free men.

From Lytle’s perspective, southerners were a heroic people who could boast a proud history. Seeking to live quietly on their own resources, to work, to pray, and to endure, they were the model of Christian piety, but they could not envisage their approaching doom. Like other imperious races before them, convinced that their way of life was unassailable and permanent, southerners paid exorbitantly for their folly and conceit. Afterward, few remained to tell the story or detail the virtues of the agrarian South, which quickly faded from memory. “Oblivion,” noted Lytle, “has almost covered it in a generation.”[17] Vanquished by Union armies, preyed upon by carpetbaggers and scalawags, southerners, by approving the money economy, had done more harm to their way of life than their combined enemies.

They had deceived themselves and betrayed their heritage. That act of treachery constituted the true defeat of the South, which was moral and spiritual rather than economic, political, and military. Southerners had lost a great war, but in so doing they had also lost their character as a people. As a consequence, since 1865 southern farmers had lived in a divided, antithetical world that “rendered impotent the defense of [their] natural economy and inherited life.”[18] Having managed to bind together and cling to the surviving fragments, they still faced harrowing prospects, for Athe next, the fatal step,” was to become progressive farmers. When they did, they “must reverse this dualism and think first of a money economy, last of a farmer’s life . . . . The precedence of the money economy means the end of farming as a way of life.”[19] It was that baneful future which Lytle assayed to prevent.

II.

Following the publication of I’ll Take My Stand in 1930, Lytle joined his Agrarian colleagues in framing a reform program designed to keep the small farm intact and the independent farmer from extinction. Troubled by criticism that their prior recommendations were either naive or theoretical, the Agrarians undertook to expound a sensible and coherent political economy.[20] The results were mixed, ambiguous, and at times, contradictory. Lytle’s contributions to this literature were comparatively modest, but nonetheless signaled an earnest response to the worsening conditions of the 1930s. As a group, the Agrarians were early critics of capitalism. Although the onset of the Great Depression invited an assortment of diagnoses and remedies, it did not convince most American thinkers straightaway to reevaluate their perspectives. Liberal heirs to the Progressive movement such as Bruce Bliven, Stuart Chase, John Dewey, George Soule, and Rexford Tugwell at first identified no structural weaknesses in the economy. Instead, they saw only temporary imbalances between production and consumption that a coalition of businessmen, politicians, union officials, and scientific experts could repair though a vigorous agenda of planning, legislation, and reform. To that end, liberals called for expanded government regulation of the economy in the form of emergency aid to the indigent, national unemployment insurance, subsidized public housing, lower tariffs, federal management or ownership of the railroads and other utilities, support for labor unions, and comprehensive economic and social planning.[21] Initially foregoing revolutionary alternatives to capitalism, they sought instead to eliminate the defects of an otherwise perfectible system in the hope of making its operation more efficient and predictable.

With the steady deterioration of the economy, proposed solutions became more radical, involving a reorganization of American society to the detriment of traditional rights of property and citizenship. For V. F. Calverton, Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, Edmund Wilson and others who embraced Marxism or socialism, the Great Depression presented a unique opportunity to dismantle the capitalist system by abandoning competition in favor of cooperation. “One must decide now between two worlds,” Gold declared, “cooperative or competitive, proletarian or capitalist.”[22] Avaricious and insatiable, capitalism had promulgated untenable extremes of opulence and deprivation that portended social unrest and atomism. Capitalism, which had never afforded social justice, could now no longer even warrant economic stability.

Echoing the militant denunciations of capitalism rather than the liberal calls for reform, the Agrarians just as quickly diverged from their counterparts on the Left. In 1932, John Chamberlain, a book reviewer for the New York Times, deprecated free enterprise and economic individualism but heralded in their place the advent of corporate monopoly, economic centralization, and political collectivism.[23] To devise a new, cooperative social, political, and economic order precisely of the sort the Agrarians condemned, Marxists and non-Marxists alike appealed to the example of the Soviet Union. “For Russians,” trumpeted Stuart Chase, “the world is exciting, stimulating, challenging, summoning forth their interest and enthusiasm. The world for most Americans is dull and uninspiring, wracked with frightful economic insecurity.”[24] Like the liberal Chase, many on the Left regarded the Soviet Union not only as a political and economic, but also as a moral, alternative to the United States.

To forestall socialist revolution, end the depression, and save capitalism, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the chief architects of the New Deal sought not to restore the era of unrestrained competitive individualism but to ensure greater social and economic equality by regulating big business and managing the economy. As much as did the nascent revolutionaries, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Henry Wallace deplored the chaos of what they called primitive capitalism. In New Frontiers, published in 1934, Wallace argued that the key to the future lay not in safeguarding private property or in revitalizing individual liberty, but in the effective management and equitable distribution of the abundant goods and resources that the industrial economy had produced, tasks that only the state could perform. Three years earlier, in 1931, an editorial in the New Republic had reached much the same conclusion. “Our mechanized civilization has advanced to a point where it cries out for planning and control in the interest of all-Ba sort of planning and control which cannot possibly be executed without encroachment on vested interests and traditional property rights.”[25] A vast expansion of national power was, therefore, as necessary as it was inexorable. Although Lytle and the other Agrarians unconditionally rejected this prospect, many of the essays that they wrote during the 1930s also solicited federal intervention to complete an aggressive campaign of land redistribution and population resettlement.[26]

John Crowe Ransom endorsed a comprehensive program of legislation to discourage commercial agriculture and implement an agrarian economy. The national government should tax credit as well as the purchases of agricultural machinery and chemical fertilizers to punish commercial farmers who expected to make money and buy themselves a better life. “The farmer has sinned,” Ransom explained, “and he ought to pay for future indulgence by meeting a tax.” Conversely, taxes on land should be lessened or supplanted by a graduated tax on incomes, a measure that once more penalized those who made money from farming. Subsides paid to inflate the price of cash crops should also be withdrawn until Athe money farmers retired from the field and the business of supplying the market fell more largely into the hands of the multitude of agrarian farmers.”[27] Finally, the state should finance the purchase of land for the unemployed and the destitute. These economically superfluous men must no longer be the objects charity, but must instead recover the privilege of earning their livelihood. Farming was that “admirable occupation which was always ready . . . to save society from its own mistakes.”[28] The land was a refuge, the fount of economic deliverance and salvation. Those who produced for their own consumption, after a thorough investigation, ought to receive clear title to the land that they worked. To the homesteaders who planted crops primarily for sale, the government, by contrast, ought to serve an eviction notice.[29]

More radical propositions came from Frank Owsley. In any agrarian society worthy of the name, farmers and those in some capacity associated with farming had to dominate the social, political, economic, and cultural life of the nation, as was the case in Scandinavia and France. For such measures to flourish, the rural population of the United States had first to be rescued from the appalling circumstances brought on by debt, insolvency, and tenantry. “Industrialism,” Owsley grumbled, Ahas persuaded, or created a public opinion which has virtually driven the farmer to accept industrial tastes and standards of living and forcing him to mortgage and then to lose his farm. Battered old cars, dangling radio aerials, rust-eaten tractors, and abandoned threshing machines and hay balers scattered forlornly about are mute witnesses to the tragedy of Industrialism’s attempt to industrialize the farmer and planter.”[30] Ill in body, mind, and spirit, countless tenants were already beyond redemption. The state must intercede to save the children of these “po’ white trash,” as Owsley described them, so that at least they could grow up to become good farmers and responsible citizens.

Additionally, the national and state governments should purchase all the land owned by the banks, real estate, mortgage, and insurance companies, and other absentee landlords, and a portion of the land owned by big planters, and award every capable tenant farmer in the South, white or black, eighty acres. At government expense, each farmer should then receive a “substantial hewn log house and barn, . . . twenty acres for a pasture, . . . two mules and two milk cows and. . . $300 for his living expenses for one year.” The government could also return jobless urban residents to the land as tenants, educating them in the requirements of subsistence agriculture and granting them the option after a brief period to become landowners themselves. “Subsistence farming must be the first objective of every man who controls a farm or plantation. The land must first support the people who till it; then it must support their stock.”[31]

Proprietors had the responsibility to conserve the land for future generations. If they reneged on that commitment, ownership should revert to the state. The courts ought to impose substantial fines on those who had acquired land through inheritance or purchase, with the provision that the fine be collected if they failed to make the requisite improvements in a specified period. State constitutional amendments should prohibit mortgages, save by special consent of the courts, and all speculation in land must be forbidden by statute. At the same time, the law should proscribe banks and real estate, mortgage, or insurance companies from acquiring land by purchase or any other means. Calling for the “constitutional reconstruction of the United States . . . to put private property back into the hands of the disinherited American people,” Owsley posited severe legal restrictions on corporate ownership.[32] Under his plan, the state, in effect, intervened to administer the distribution and management of the land, and “could exact certain services and duties” from those who possessed it. Once established according to Owsley’s blueprint, the agrarian society would “grow. . . spontaneously. . . . The old communities, the old churches, the old songs would arise from their moribund slumbers.”[33] No longer needed, the state, as in the proletarian utopia of Karl Marx, would all but wither away.

This effort to remake the agricultural economy and rural society through political injunction, constitutional amendment, and legislative and judicial fiat distanced Lytle somewhat from his Agrarian colleagues, though such potential disagreements, even if ascertained, never came to public notice. Inimical to engineering social, political, and economic changeBa disposition that even certain of the Agrarians could not wholly resist—Lytle’s analysis heeded the original principles detailed in I’ll Take My Stand. “The theory of agrarianism,” the twelve contributors had agreed, “is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.”[34] Operating within a tradition of economic and political thought that dated at least to the seventeenth-century English theorist James Harrington, Lytle made widespread land ownership his cardinal tenet. As Harrrington, and later Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Taylor of Caroline, and a host of others had shown, the weak, the poor, and the landless were vulnerable to the strong, the wealthy, and the privileged. What had been true in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was even more so in the twentieth, when property no longer rested in individual hands but had instead become the province of large, impersonal, and irresponsible corporations. “Power always follows property,” Adams had written in 1776, and the present distribution of property in the United States, Lytle elaborated, rendered “the earth and its cultivators . . . the contemptible but useful sources of legal peonage.”[35] Land ownership was thus the lone antidote to corruption and the main source of virtue in the commonwealth.

Urging an agrarian rebirth, Lytle repeated his counsel that, if banished from the land, the human spirit withered and the land itself wasted away. Nature then became an enemy to be subdued and defiled, until men succeeded in destroying the very rudiments of life. Their triumph, ironically, was their undoing. Apart from these dire consequences, the system of industrial capitalism, which had displaced agriculture, encumbered and oppressed all who slaved under its dominion, while periodically thrusting them into want and misery. Lytle favored property in land because it assured independence and security. “The small farm,” he asserted, “is the norm by which all real property may be best defined. . . . It is a form of property that the average man can understand, can enjoy, [and] will defend.” Landowners relied on no one but themselves for their welfare and their liberty. They had at their disposal all the resources of nature essential to life, to which, Lytle thought, they were by natural right entitled. To a greater extent than other men, small farmers could savor the fruits of honest toil:

The man who owns a small farm has direct control over the life-giving source, the land. The three prime necessities, food, shelter, and clothing, he may command because he has a small inexhaustible capital. . . . . The family’s living is made by the family for itself. . . .[36]

Such economic autonomy, Lytle was convinced, reinforced the broad diffusion of wealth and power that was fast disappearing from modern American society. Capitalist political economy had ominously merged the two. According to the older definition of property to which Lytle subscribed, most Americans were no longer free. Beholden to others for their livelihood, they were servile. Tangible and static, land had once conserved the independence of the family in the present and ensured its survival into the future. Having lost access to the land, Americans became increasingly subject to governmental and corporate bureaucracies, which usurped the rights and liberties formerly reserved to individual citizens.

Now that system itself was disintegrating. Capitalism, it seemed to Lytle, as to many Marxists and socialists, had entered upon a protracted crisis from which it would not recover. For agriculture was “the life of the people, industry. . . its comfort, commerce its luxury. When this relationship is upset, we must expect the mechanics of civilization to come to a dead stop.” To offset the collapse of the global economy, Lytle contemplated relocating between twenty-five and thirty-three percent of the American people to the land. “This is a step toward a sensible political economy. It is a return to older policies and natural alliances.”[37] Unlike Ransom and Owsley, Lytle never clarified how this massive resettlement was to take place. As with the westward migration of the nineteenth century, he evidently considered the move back to the land to be a voluntary undertaking, carried out with the full support of, but with minimal interference from, the government. Any hope for “the betterment of country life” had to originate with the people themselves. Men needed to take hold of their lives, for a “life which has the vitality to endure must move from the inside out and not from the outside in.”[38] Unwavering in his georgic sensibilities, Lytle put his hope in the actions of obscure, anonymous individuals, each performing small tasks, the cumulative effect of which would change the world.

Diverse, varied, and anomalous, the paramount virtue of agrarian life was its stubborn challenge to the regimented standards of industrial capitalism. Transforming the farm into an agricultural factory, or apportioning the labor of persons equally between factory and farm as Henry Ford had advised, were little more than temporary and desperate expedients begun in anticipation of an industrial resurgence. They had about them the odor of collectivization and dictatorship, which was, in Lytle’s view, a political, economic, and moral dead end. The solution lay Anot in socialism, in communism, or in sovietism . . . . These,” Lytle assured, “change merely the manner and speed of the suicide; they do not alter its nature.”[39] Nor was commercial agriculture an option. Commerce had bankrupted farmers by entangling them in a fluctuating world market over which they exercised no control, doing more to subvert than to foster prosperity and independence. Producing virtually all that they needed at home, farmers had little incentive to engage in commercial enterprise. Isolated from the anarchy of the market, farmers, in Lytle’s agrarian political economy, developed an ethic of mutual obligation, so conspicuously absent from the capitalist system, that was represented in the local exchange of goods and services for the common benefit of all.

Lytle never meant his insular household economy to breed an austere way of life. For that reason, he preferred the term “livelihood” rather than “subsistence” farm to describe his ideal. “Let the real farm be called . . . the livelihood farm,” he wrote. “The word is old and in good standing. It goes far back in the history of our common culture. Livelihood: to give the means of living.”[40] Lytle did not seek to reestablish a mere agrarian, but rather a specifically Christian, economy, the structure of which, as in Christendom of old, bound all men together from serf to king. Under such a dispensation, every man had his work, and provided some article or service of use to the community. In the process, he earned just compensation for his labor and rendered homage to God. Whether a farmer or an ironmonger, a priest or a monarch, each man saw in his craft the best part of himself, measured against the ultimate creativity of the Almighty. The modern, secular, industrial, corporate, capitalist society could not duplicate such expectations, at once concrete and transcendent. In place of genuine significance, the architects of modernity could offer only delusive assurances of comfort and progress. “The economy of modern times . . . has assumed that the greatest good lies in the alternate stuffing and purging of a man’s belly.”[41] Such unbridled appetite, such promiscuous materialism, was, Lytle complained, inadequate to the abiding needs of the soul.

Beyond the Agrarian critique of industrial capitalism, Lytle approached the more elemental predicament of how to exist in a world that had drained life and work of meaning and purpose. Like many of his fellow Agrarians, Lytle succumbed in his bad dreams to the ascendancy of a vulgar, inhumane, totalitarian regime that divested men of privacy, property, and freedom, and that lowered both the standards of taste and living among the masses in what had once been affluent and civilized nations. These evil portents, Lytle acceded, were more credible in the 1930s than Americans were wont to contemplate. If the traditional Christian commonwealth, which had nourished belief in the value and singularity of the individual, should ever disappear, he cautioned, “and it is going, we will find ourselves in the servile state, a state wherein authority is no longer at home, but where we follow rules and regulations from afar, from bureaucracy, which increases like the amoeba by division.”[42] From this enforced uniformity of thought and action, no one could stand aside.

This change, Lytle implied, would take place not as the result of some terrible disturbance, but imperceptibly, amid vows of a more bounteous and luxuriant future, until the consequences were too deeply embedded to reverse. No less revolutionary for having been incremental, it came to pass much as Lytle and the Agrarians had foreseen. In the last years of his life, Lytle acknowledged that Athe Agrarians failed. We failed at least to make any practical impact upon the amoeba-like growth of the machine and its technology.”[43] Gradually, automobiles and superhighways devastated the landscape and the countryside that Lytle treasured. Most persons did not go hungry; on the contrary, the deluge of prepared and synthetic foods eliminated “the taste and odor of family victuals, which as the common taste of a province or region, binds the solitary to the family and the family to a place.”[44] The appearance of self-government continued, but the substance had vanished, along with individual privacy, family autonomy, and durable property.

Automated (although not as it turned out industrialized) and impersonal, American society, Lytle feared, was coming to be peopled by the rootless masses ensnared in dreary, routine, unimaginative, and irrelevant occupations—a society of interchangeable parts and interchangeable men. This condition was the very antithesis of the Christian economy. “None is prepared for the violent revolution which changes the nature of the familiar. . . . [T] he communities threatened with extinction. . . could not believe that their way of living would disappear. Well, it has.”[45] Gouged, torn, and defiled, blanketed with steel and cement, fouled by eerie, windowless blocks that obscured the sun, the earth no longer belonged to the living, but was a wasteland through which drifted modern refugees who shared a dim half-life of alienation and despair, helpless to arrest what technocratic experts lauded as the March of Progress.

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Notes:

[1] Andrew Lytle, From Eden to Babylon: The Social and Political Essays of Andrew Nelson Lytle (Washington, D.C., 1990), 4.

[2] Ibid., 6.

[3] Ibid., 28.

[4] See Bell I. Wiley, “Salient Changes in Southern Agriculture Since the Civil War,” Agricultural History XIII (1939), 65-76.

[5] John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (Baton Rouge, 1986; originally published in 1832).

[6] Ibid., 72-73.

[7] From Eden to Babylon, 28.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 4.

[10] Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York, 1929).

[11] Stuart Chase, “Skilled Work and No Work,” New Republic LVII (March 20, 1929), 121.

[12] Ibid., 45.

[13] Stuart Chase, “Leaning Towers,” New Republic LVIII (March 27, 1929), 171.

[14] From Eden to Babylon, 5.

[15] Ibid., 31.

[16] Ibid., 32-33.

[17] Ibid., 9.

[18] Ibid., 33.

[19] Ibid., 13.

[20] See, for example, Frank Lawrence Owsley, “The Pillars of Agrarianism,” reprinted in Emily S. Bingham and Thomas A. Underwood, eds., The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal, (Charlottesville, VA, 2001), 200.

[21] See “Bankrupt Business Leadership,” New Republic LXV (November 19, 1930), 4-5; “A Progressive Program,” Nation CXXXI (December 3, 1930), 598; “What Congress Might Do,” New Republic LXIX (December 16, 1931), 120-22.

[22] Michael Gold, “Notes of the Month,” New Masses V (April 1930), 3.

[23] See John Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform (New York, 1932).

[24] Stuart Chase, “The Engineer as Poet,” New Republic LXVII (May 20, 1931), 24.

[25] See Henry Wallace, New Frontiers (New York, 1934) and “The Need for a New Party,” New Republic XLV (January 7, 1931), 204-205.

[26] See Allan Carlson, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ, 2000), 115-19 and Thomas L. Connelly, “The Vanderbilt Agrarians: Time and Place in Southern Tradition,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly XXII/1 (March 1963), 27, 33-34.

[27] John Crowe Ransom, “Happy Farmers,” American Review 1/ 5 (October 1933), 533, 534.

[28] John Crowe Ransom, “Land!: An Answer to the Unemployment Problem,” Harper’s Magazine 165 (July, 1932), 217. Long thought destroyed (Ransom announced that he had committed it to the flames), the complete manuscript of Land! has recently been found and published. See Land!: The Case for an Agrarian Economy, ed. by Jason Peters (Notre Dame, IN, 2017).

[29] Ransom, “Happy Farmers,” 535. See also Ransom, “The State and the Land,” New Republic LXX (February 17, 1932), 8-10. On Ransom’s economic thought, see Kelsie B. Harder, “John Crowe Ransom as Economist,” in Thomas Daniel Young, ed., John Crowe Ransom: Critical Essays and a Bibliography (Baton Rouge, LA 1968), 169-76; Mark G. Malvasi, The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson (Baton Rouge, LA, 1997), 48-58; Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), 68-69.

[30] Owsley,”The Pillars of Agrarianism,” in Bingham and Underwood, eds., The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal, 204.

[31] Ibid., 205, 206.

[32] Frank Lawrence Owsley, “The Foundations of Democracy,” in Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, eds., Who Owns America?: A New Declaration of Independence (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999; originally published in 1936), 82, 92.

[33] Owsley, “The Pillars of Agrarianism,” in Bingham and Underwood, eds., The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal, 211.

[34] “Introduction: A Statement of Principles,” in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge, LA, 1977; originally published in 1930), xlvii.

[35] John Adams to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776 in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston, 1850-1856 ),Vol. IX, 376-77; From Eden to Babylon, 36. On James Harrington’s political philosophy, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975), 383-400.

[36] From Eden to Babylon, 35. Italics in the original.

[37] Ibid., 34.

[38] Ibid., 36. Italics in the original.

[39] Ibid., 4.

[40] Ibid., 36.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid., 182.

[43] Ibid., 185.

[44] Ibid., 175.

[45] Ibid., 185.

The featured image is a conjectural painting of tobacco farming in Virginia, circa 1650, based on research by J. Paul Hudson, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.