Southern Life, Agrarian Vision: The Apprenticeship of Andrew Lytle

The South, Andrew Lytle feared, had been poor and virtuous for too long and now found the temptations of industry and commerce too alluring to resist. Material prosperity weakened family, community, and tradition and deprived rural southern life of its vitality, rendering it both tumultuous and desolate.

Born in Mufreesboro, Tennessee on the day after Christmas in the second year of the twentieth century, Andrew Lytle came early to Alive in a sense of eternity.[1] Lytle entered a world of settled customs and enduring associations. The web of family and community defined his youth. His long intimacy with the soil recalled the human frailty and imperfection that it is the lot each man to bear. In mind and spirit Lytle was closer to the twelfth than to the twentieth century for, as he later wrote, he “knew the orderly return of the seasons” and “saw the natural in the supernatural.”[2] Such an existence, above all, reminded him that he was mortal, a creature made and not begotten, fated like all creatures to return to the dust and ashes from whence God had called him forth. “What a small fragment time is before things eternal,” he marveled.[3] Yet, by the 1930s, Lytle understood that his perspective was becoming old-fashioned. “The momentary man,” who led a transient, nomadic existence, who resided in the eternal present, and who, if he believed in anything, believed in the possibility of a heaven on earth, was the characteristic figure of the late Modern Age.[4] The moral and spiritual confusion that ensued from his ascendancy infected every aspect of life, from religion to politics, from economics to the arts. In the eternal struggle for order and truth, all was chaos.

As his thought matured, Lytle turned increasingly to the history and culture of his native South to find an antidote for the ills of the modern world, though his recovery of the southern tradition was somewhat discursive. Three weeks after entering Exeter College, Oxford in 1921, Lytle returned to Tennessee upon the death of his maternal grandfather, John Nelson. To remain closer to his family, particularly his widowed grandmother, Molly, Lytle enrolled in Vanderbilt University, where he became a student of Donald Davidson and John Crowe Ransom and a classmate of Robert Penn Warren. While at Vanderbilt, Lytle attended some of the final gatherings of the Fugitive Poets, and published “Edward Graves” in the March 1925 issue of The Fugitive.[5]

In 1914, Ransom, along with Walter Clyde Curry, a colleague in the Department of English, had begun to meet informally with a group of undergraduates to discuss poetry and ideas. They frequently convened at the apartment of a local eccentric named Sidney Mttron Hirsch, who presided over the assembly from his chaise lounge. These relaxed conversations evolved into the regular meetings of the Fugitive Poets. American entry in the First World War dispersed the group, several of whom enlisted in the military. By 1920 the principals had reconvened at Vanderbilt. Besides Ransom, Curry, and Hirsch, the original Fugitives included Donald Davidson, William Yandell Ellliott, Stanley Johnson, and Alec B. Stevenson. After the war a number of students and poets from outside the Fugitives’ circle also began to attend the meetings. Among their number were Merrill Moore, Allen Tate, Jesse Willis, and subsequently Alfred Starr, Robert Penn Warren, and, of course, Lytle himself.

By the autumn of 1921, when Lytle came to Vanderbilt, the Fugitives were meeting fortnightly at the home of James M. Frank, a Nashville businessman and Hirsch’s brother-in-law. These meetings followed no prescribed organization. Participants to turns reading one of the poems they had written, always providing copies for the audience. An intense and relentless critical discussion followed each presentation. No aspect of a poem escaped scrutiny. Exquisite or daring poems often inspired the greatest controversy, while mediocre or conventional poems evoked little comment. “In its cumulative effect,” Davidson remembered, “this severe discipline made us self-conscious craftsmen, abhorring looseness of expression, perfectly aware that a somewhat cold-blooded process of revision, after the first ardor of creation had subsided, would do no harm to art.”[6]

At Hirsch’s suggestion, the group agreed to publish a magazine of verse. Having already accumulated a substantial collection of work, they needed only to select the poems to comprise the first issue. They did so by secret ballot without designating anyone to assume editorial responsibilities. Davidson recorded the outcome of the first vote on the back of a letter from Vanderbilt chancellor James H. Kirkland informing him that no university apartments were available.

The recommendation of a title for the magazine, and hence the name of the group itself, came from Stevenson. No one was fully certain about the meaning of The Fugitive or the rationale for selecting it. In his memoir about the group, Tate explained that Aa Fugitive was quite simply a Poet: the Wanderer, or even the Wandering Jew, the Outcast, the man who carries the secret wisdom around the world. It was, he added, “a fairly heavy responsibility for us to undertake, but we undertook it, with the innocence of which only the amateur spirit is capable.”[7] The first number appeared in April 1922. The journal continued for more than three years until the group, still lacking a full-time editor to perform administrative duties, suspended publication in December, 1925. Unlike many of the other “little magazines” that emerged and vanished during the 1920s, The Fugitive did not suffer from a deficiency of funds. An annual subscription rate of one dollar and the patronage of the Associated Retailers of Nashville kept the magazine solvent throughout its brief existence.

Much of the poetry to appear in the pages of The Fugitive was tentative and experimental. With the exception of Ransom, who had published a slender volume titled Poems about God, the rest of the Fugitives were apprentices at their craft. Yet, they instinctively rejected the sentimentalism of Romantic poetry and consciously embraced the formalism of the Classical tradition. Preferring adaptations of classic poetic form to rash and careless innovation, they also called into question the tenets of modernist poetry. Although they did not categorically repudiate novelty, the Fugitives insisted that poetic experimentation must stand up to the most demanding critiques and the most meticulous judgments.

The Fugitive poets may be unique in the annals of American literary history. With the partial exception of the New England Transcendentalists, there has never been another coterie of writers who, like the Fugitives, shared so many assumptions about nature, society, humanity, and God. Nowhere has there been a group so united in its singular devotion to poetry as were the Fugitives between approximately 1920 and 1928. Davidson portrayed this common attachment metaphorically as the “cousinship of poetry.” He wrote of the Fugitives that “the pursuit of poetry as an art was the conclusion of the whole matter of living, learning, and being. It subsumed everything, but it was also as natural and reasonable an act as conversation on the front porch.”[8]

The Fugitive movement effectively came to an end with the publication of the Fugitive Anthology in 1928. As early as 1925, some of the Fugitives had already sensed new concerns entering their discussions, which had hitherto focused exclusively on poetry and literary criticism. Although poetry still dominated their conversations, Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren, now began to talk and to correspond about the history and culture of the South and to voice their growing opposition to science, industrialism, capitalism, socialism, and the other forces shaping the modern world. They sought to produce a manifesto in which to set forth Southern Agrarianism as a moral alternative to the “American industrial ideal,” which in their conception amounted to a national myth of innocence, omnipotence, and invincibility.

During the next several years, Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren conferred with thinkers outside the Fugitive circle, including the psychologist Lyle H. Lanier, the political economist Herman Clarence Nixon, the historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, and the literary scholar John Donald Wade, all of whom, like Ransom and Davidson, were then members of the Vanderbilt faculty. Lytle and Henry Blue Kline, the latter of whom had completed a Master’s degree in English at Vanderbilt in 1929, also participated in these deliberations. The most celebrated figures of the 1920s associated with Southern Agrarianism were John Gould Fletcher, who enjoyed an international reputation as an Imagist poet, and Stark Young, already renowned as a playwright, journalist, and theater critic. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, published by Harper and Brothers in 1930, was the result of these efforts.

Although Lytle embraced the Agrarians’ critique of modernity, he initially gave little thought to mounting a philosophical defense of the South. Instead of vindicating the agrarian way of life, he lived it by returning to the land.  After graduating from Vanderbilt in the spring of 1925, Lytle went home to help his father, Robert, manage Cornsilk, the 1,200-acre family farm near Guntersville, Alabama. But in the fall of 1926, set on pursuing a career in the theater, Lytle left the farm and enrolled in the Yale School of Drama to study acting at George Pierce Baker’s celebrated 47 Workshop. Lytle spent most of the next three years, between 1926 and 1929, studying in New Haven and working as an actor and playwright in New York. It was during this northern sojourn that Lytle’s identification with southern attitudes, manners, customs, and traditions emerged and grew.[9]  His time away from the South, in an alien, frenzied, and often hostile culture, did not establish but rather clarified Lytle’s southern inheritance. “I am writing… to tell you,” he confided in a letter to Davidson, “that this barbaric city [New York] is no place for a Christian to spend much time in.”[10] Lytle knew from his upbringing, education, and experience, that the South did not warrant the national ridicule and disdain heaped upon it in the popular media from the likes of H. L. Mencken and Gerald W. Johnson.  Yet, to his sorrow, Lytle also discovered that if he wished to succeed as a writer in the New York theater, he had to “disavow or satirize anything that was particularly Southern,… to cut himself off from his place of nativity and become a New Yorker.” Even as a young man, Lytle recoiled from such a prospect, and disavowed what he characterized as a “colonial state of mind” and the ominous constrictions that it placed on his art. Lytle received timely encouragement in his quest to explore the “richness” of the southern past from Allen Tate, a fellow Vanderbilt alumnus, Fugitive poet, and future Agrarian.[11]

Lytle had not known Tate when the two studied at Vanderbilt during the early 1920s. Tate had preceded Lytle to Vanderbilt by three years, entering in 1918, and was not in continuous residence. “I was a freshman at Vanderbilt when Allen Tate was an upperclassman,” Lytle explained. “I did not know him then.”[12] During Tate’s senior, and Lytle’s freshman, year, Tate’s health deteriorated. He suffered from a respiratory ailment, which had troubled him since childhood, and may have developed into pneumonia or tuberculosis. In June, 1922, after a brief hospital stay, Tate journeyed to the mountains of Valle Crucis, North Carolina for an extended period of rest and recuperation.

When Tate left Valle Crucis in November, he lacked the funds to resume his education. Poverty compelled him instead to return to his boyhood home of Ashland, Kentucky, where he took a job in the offices of United Collieries, the company that his older brother Ben owned.[13]  Tate did not come again to Nashville until February, 1923. Denied a scholarship to undertake graduate study in the classics, Tate left Vanderbilt a year later, having accepted a teaching position at the high school in Lumberport, West Virginia. While visiting Robert Penn Warren in Guthrie, Kentucky during July, 1924, Tate met and, on December 27, married Carolyn Gordon.[14] The couple moved to New York City, where Tate initially worked as a free-lance journalist; in 1925, he became a writer and editor at the Climax Publishing Company, acclaimed for its lurid magazines and pulp fiction. John Crowe Ransom told Lytle that Tate was living in New York City. At the same time, Ransom wrote to Tate that Lytle was studying at Yale, and urged them to get acquainted.

“It was John Crowe Ransom who introduced me to Allen Tate,” Lytle recalled. “I was at Yale working with George Pierce Baker…, and he wrote me there and gave me his [Tate’s] address in New York. So I owe to John Ransom, among other things, a long and cherished friendship.”[15] On March 15, 1927, Tate invited Lytle to “call upon us here the next time you are in New York, if you have an hour or two to spare. Interesting things are, I believe, at last stirring in the South,” he continued, “and in that part of the South which we cannot help taking about with us forever, wherever we may go.”[16]  Lytle accepted Tate’s offer to visit, and soon presented himself “at the basement entrance of 27 Bank Street” in Greenwich Village, where Tate introduced himself “with a severe and courteous formality.”[17] The preliminaries at an end, Lytle and Tate quickly found themselves engaged in a discussion the Scopes “Monkey” trial, which had taken place in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925.

By itself, the trial did not provoke the Agrarians to action; it rather marked the culmination of the battle over evolution, which had begun several years earlier.[18] Lytle and Tate nevertheless thought that the trial exemplified all that they detested about modern values, convictions, and sensibilities, and that the media coverage had intentionally denigrated southern culture and humiliated the southern people. The event began as a publicity stunt when George Rappelyea, the manager of the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company in Dayton, convinced a reluctant high school science teacher named John Thomas Scopes to violate state law by teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in his biology classes.[19] Considering the anti-evolution law absurd, Rappelyea, a native of New York, had questioned its merits on numerous occasions in the informal debates with locals that took place at Robinson’s Drug Store. Encouraged by the American Civil Liberties Union, Rappelyea at last decided to challenge the constitutionality of the law. But he acted from other than purely legal or idealistic motives. A sensational trial, he fancied, would rivet national attention on Dayton, making it the most important small town in America.

Its frivolous origins notwithstanding, the trial had serious political and religious implications. Lytle and Tate agreed that the trial represented “a Liberal attack on our traditional world.”  More important in Lytle’s view, the Scopes trial impugned religious faith and coerced acquiescence in a secular order of the universe, from which the divine presence had been eradicated. It was nothing less than an attempt to extend the economic and political dominance that had commenced with Reconstruction to a spiritual conquest of the South. “This,” Lytle complained, “is like the thief who robs the house a second time and complains that the owners do not eat with silver.”[20]

When, a few years later, the Agrarians at last mounted their defense of the southern way of life, Lytle resolved to join them. “I was interested in it,” he said in an interview with the novelist Madison Smartt Bell, “and there was a good deal of talk done, among Don and John, and they corresponded with Allen in Europe…. I just took it for granted I was taken into it; they didn’t know that until they had seen what I could do…. That’s the first writing, really serious writing, that I ever did…. “[21] In I’ll Take My Stand, as well as in dozens of essays written throughout the next decade, the Fugitive-Agrarians exposed the reality of southern defeat and tragedy amid the growing conviction of purity and righteousness that characterized America during the 1920s. For Ransom, Davidson, Tate, Warren, Lytle, and a new cadre of allies and friends, the defense of poetry that they had attempted, became, temporarily at least, inseparable from a defense of the South. Believing the “American industrial ideal” inimical to the humane traditions of the South, the Agrarians sought to develop political, economic, social, cultural, and moral alternatives. They argued that industrialism had enslaved human beings, rendering modern life hurried, brutal, servile, and mercenary. To rescue society from the rigors of the assembly line, the blast furnace, and the bookkeeper’s ledger, the Agrarians championed an “imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition.” In their view, the historic South offered ideal terrain from which to mount a defense of family, community, manners, art, and religion against the destructive and dehumanizing onslaught of unbridled industrial capitalism.

The onset of the Great Depression made the Agrarian critique of modern America seem even more credible and prophetic. Although their proposals to resolve the economic crisis of the 1930s often lacked specificity, most of the Agrarians remained ambivalent about New Deal policies and programs. Fearful that the rise of bureaucracy and the emphasis on planning characteristic of the New Deal would result in the establishment of a collectivist regime, the Agrarians suggested that Americans preserve their independence by returning to the land. Only the abandonment of commercial farming and the adoption of production for use, sustained through the widespread ownership of property, could restore economic health and safeguard political liberty.

In practical terms, the Southern Agrarians failed. They never organized an Agrarian political party, never secured control of a wing of the Democratic Party, and never cultivated a mass following among fellow southerners. The appearance in 1936 of Who Owns America?: A New Declaration of Independence, a sequel to I’ll Take My Stand, which brought the Agrarians together with Hillaré Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, and the English Distributists, could not prevent their movement from languishing. But whatever their political weaknesses and philosophical defects, the Agrarians did raise fundamental questions about the beneficence of American national development and the impact of industrial capitalism on the spiritual welfare of the American people. [22]

Contemporaries were skeptical. Most influential representatives of southern opinion dismissed the Agrarians’ praise of rural life as hopelessly naive and their enmity toward the industrial economy as dangerously improvident. Gerald W. Johnson ridiculed the Agrarians, wondering whether any of them had ever heard of hookworm or pellagra, the “two flowers of Southern agrarianism.”[23]  The Marxist critic V. F. Calverton, who had been born in Baltimore, assailed the Agrarians and the South in general for being “two hundred years” behind northern culture, and for having an outlook on the world “scarcely more progressive than a medieval village.” Ecclesiastical terrorism had brought southern culture “to an abrupt standstill,” Calverton asserted, and had “paralyzed the spirit of progress… and intellectual advance.” Like most other southern thinkers, the Nashville “literary clique” had done nothing to reverse the “cultural stagnation of the South.” By contesting the spread of industry, the Agrarians had, in fact, mired the South more deeply in its abounding ignorance and storied provincialism. Preoccupied with the remote grandeur of a “dead plantation world,” theirs was an “escape mechanism,” fleeing the wreckage of the southern present by embracing the romance of the southern past.[24]

The historian Stringfellow Barr, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, wrote to Davidson that the Agrarians, like the other critics of “the industrial culture of the world,” such as Ralph Adams Cram and Miguel de Unamuno, were “mere voices crying in the wilderness without a chance of getting anything done.” The industrialization of the South, Barr insisted, was an irresistible development, “as inevitable as cotton and rice and cane and tobacco once were and that the only Southern tradition worth fighting about is the responsibility of real leadership as against the irresponsible exploitation of a plutocracy kidding itself into calling itself a democracy…. The Southerner… now sees that the only good life possible in the economic sense must be got through industry.” Barr, from whom the Agrarians had solicited a contribution to I’ll Take My Stand, argued that “by importing the vaccine of… social responsibility,” in the form of child labor laws, collective bargaining agreements, and profit sharing among capitalists and workers, the South “can and should create a new society in line with its own traditions.” To denigrate industrialism as a matter of principle, Barr admonished, was, by contrast, to indulge “a childish longing for the past” without at the same time advancing a program to mitigate the worst evils of the industrial system.[25]

George Fort Milton, president and editor The Chattanooga News, declared that the Agrarians’ “remedy of the return to the past… is poetically appealing but I gravely question whether it is humanely practicable.” Like Barr, Milton sought to regulate the “spectre [sic] of industrialization” to serve “the common interest, rather than permit it to make slaves of our bodies and our souls…. That it would be possible to banish the machine, or to check the increasing use thereof, I doubt it.” Industry might yet be made to yield incalculable compensations for, Milton protested, “value can be derived from any successful purposeful expenditure of human energy, and it does not have to grow from the ground to have its value. In other words I disagree with the theory that only the products of the soil constitute an incrument [sic] to human possessions.”[26]

“How I wish that I could honestly see what you-all see in agrarianism,” intoned William S. Knickerbocker, editor of The Sewanee Review.  “And the joke is, that I am on the side of Calhoun, DeBow, Chancellor Harper while you-all are just outside the Southern tradition completely.” [27] Upbraiding the Agrarians for their surrender to a mawkish nostalgia, Knickerbocker added that a balanced, integrated:

economic life for the South was a major effort made by some of the best known and most inspiring leaders of the Old South. Those statesmen and publicists were aware of the dangers of an agrarian monopoly which excluded the possibilities of a fully-orbed economic, or indeed, cultural life…. I am merely defending the objects those earlier Southerners sought: that in defending the increasing industrialism of the South today, I am only demonstrating how that order is the fruition of their most ardent hopes.

The economic independence that the Agrarians expected to spring from the disavowal of industrialism and a return to the land was “an obsolete, romantic, impracticable survival of a brief period in the history of western Europe and America between the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.”[28]  Manufacturing was not at all inimical to agrarian ideals, proclaimed William Terry Couch, director of the University of North Carolina Press. “On the contrary, I believe that a certain amount of industrialization is absolutely necessary in order to make farm life at all bearable.” [29]

The Agrarians fired back. In an undated open letter to Barr, they contended that:

if your article in the October issue of the Virginia Quarterly correctly states the view of Virginians today, then it is time for the leadership of the South to pass from the keeping of the Old Dominion conscience. You have sold out to industrialism, but the South is not quite ready to follow you…. You have abandoned the Southern tradition. Its virtues were leisure, kindliness, and the enjoyment of a simple life. These are virtues which thrive in an agrarian climate but do very badly in an industrial.[30]

A more advisable and wholesome course for the South was to discourage industrial growth; any accommodation to temper its ruthlessness only lent it a validity that it would not possess if men glimpsed its true nature. The costs of prosperity and the dubious comforts that it bought were too dear, both to the “laboring classes” who attended the machines and the people who consumed the mechanized harvest. When at last southerners reflected on the bitter experiences of the industrial states to the north, the Agrarians were confident that they would not “be so anxious to duplicate their charming features” at the expense of their “traditional way of life.”[31]

Modern industrial nations were predatory, unable to survive except by invading and vanquishing foreign markets. The absence of a secure outlet for the immense volume of goods that the factory produced destined them to suffer economic ruin, as the Great Depression had confirmed beyond dispute. That possibility by itself afforded sufficient reason for the South to remain fundamentally agriculture. For his part, Lytle sought to confirm that southern farmers could make a better living on the land than industrial propaganda had led them to suppose. The farm did not constitute a farmer’s business, but was his home. Cultivated by the labor of his hands, its fields, orchard, garden, pasture, and dairy would supply all the luxuries and necessities, all the comforts and pleasures, that he and his family could ever need, imagine, or desire. Yet, beguiled into raising a money crop, the southern farmer had misused and nearly forgotten his birthright, laboring to promote the welfare of the industrial regime and thereby exchanging his independence and his dignity for the elusive promises of mammon.

“We’ve got to cut off from the rest of the South and set up our own school of thought and capture the young minds,” Lytle cautioned in a letter to Davidson, “or we’re lost.”  The advocates of southern economic progress, such as Messrs. Barr, Milton, Knickerbocker, and Couch, meant to do the Agrarians “a dirty turn” by suggesting that “nobody in the South takes us seriously.” The South itself, Lytle feared, had been poor and virtuous for too long and, like a lady who had lost the charms of youth, now found the temptations of industry and commerce too alluring to resist. “She must take to the streets, and so cannot refuse” the advances of “such trash” and their “degenerate endearments.”[32] The consequences were too menacing to ignore. The corruption born of material prosperity, or rather, the false assurances of prosperity that the charlatans and hucksters effused, weakened family, community, and tradition. The embrace of the money economy and the world market thus deprived rural southern life of its vitality, rendering it both tumultuous and desolate. Their world ravaged for a second time, the unsuspecting and luckless men and women of the South would become embroiled in the desperate, but ultimately futile, search for meaning so familiar among the masses that inhabited the modern world.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

This essay was first published here in December 2021.

Notes:

[1] Andrew Nelson Lytle, A Wake for the Living (Nashville, 1992; originally published in 1975), 3. In The Southern Vision of Andrew Lytle, (Baton Rouge, LA, 1986), ix, Mark Lucas gives Lytle’s birth date as December 2, 1902. In his essay “A Myth in the Garden,” Lytle notes that he was “born the day after Christmas, 1902.” See Andrew Nelson Lytle, From Eden to Babylon: The Social and Political Essays of Andrew Nelson Lytle, ed. by M.E. Bradford (Washington, D.C., 1990), 192.

[2] From Eden to Babylon, 192, 151; see also, 184.

[3] A Wake for the Living, 6.

[4] The concept of the “momentary man” appears throughout Lytle’s essays on politics, culture, society, and religion. By way of introduction, see “The Momentary Man,” in From Eden to Babylon, 179-83.

[5] Andrew Lytle, “Edward Graves,” The Fugitive IV/I (March 1925), 17.

[6] Donald Davidson, Southern Writers in the Modern World (Athens, GA, 1959), 22.

[7] Allen Tate, Memoirs and Opinions, 1926-1974 (Chicago, 1975), 29.

[8] Davidson, Southern Writers in the Modern World. 8. The most thoroughgoing history of the Fugitives remains Louise Cowan, The Fugitive Group: A Literary Study (Baton Rouge, LA, 1959). See also John M. Bradbury, The Fugitives: A Critical Account (Chapel Hill, NC, 1958); Rob Roy Purdy, ed., Fugitives’ Reunion: Conversations at Vanderbilt, Mary 3-5, 1956 (Nashville, TN, 1959); Louis D. Rubin Jr., The Wary Fugitives: Four Poets and the South (Baton Rouge, LA, 1978); John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians (Princeton, NJ, 1965).

[9] Lucas, The Southern Vision of Andrew Lytle, 4-7.

[10] Andrew Lytle to Donald Davidson, February 21, 1929, Donald Davidson Papers, Special Collections, The Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University.

[11] Andrew Lytle, “The Approach of the Southern Writer to His Material,” Atlanta Constitution, November 29, 1936, Book Section, 14.

[12] From Eden to Babylon, 201.

[13] Thomas A. Underwood, Allen Tate: Orphan of the South (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 57, 59, 68.

[14] Gordon later changed the spelling of her name to Caroline. See Tate to Davidson, May 21, 1925, Davidson Papers.

[15] Andrew Lytle, Southerners and Europeans: Essays in a Time of Disorder (Baton Rouge, LA, 1999), 183. See also From Eden to Babylon, 201.

[16] Allen Tate to Andrew Lytle, March 15, 1927, in The Lytle-Tate Letters: The Correspondence of Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate, ed. by Thomas Daniel Young and Elizabeth Sarcone (Jackson, MS, 1987), 4-5.

[17] Southerners and Europeans, 184.

[18] William Jennings Bryan had initiated his efforts to prevent the teaching of evolution in public schools as early as 1921. In 1923, Oklahoma became the first state to pass an anti-evolution law. To review the scholarly debate about the impact of the Scopes trial on the Agrarians, see Fred Hobson, Serpent in Eden: H.L. Mencken and the South (Baton Rouge, LA, 1975), 150; Mark G, Malvasi, The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson (Baton Rouge, LA, 1997), 19-20; Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), 146-48; Edward Shapiro, “The Southern Agrarians, H.L. Mencken, and the Quest for Southern Identity,” American Studies 13 (1972), 75-92, especially 79; Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), 200-201. For the Agrarian view of the Scopes trial and its consequences, see Donald Davidson, “First Fruits of Dayton: The Intellectual Evolution of Dixie,” Forum 79 (1928), 896-907.

[19] Governor Austin Peay had signed the Butler Act, named for its sponsor John Washington Butler, into law on March 21, 1925.

[20] From Eden to Babylon, 202; see also 222.

[21] Ibid., 251.

[22] In addition to the sources cited in note 18, see Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge, LA 1977, originally published in 1930); Herbert Agar and Allen Tate, eds., Who Owns America?: A New Declaration of Independence (Wilmington, DE, 1999; originally published in 1936); Allen Carlson, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ 2000); Paul K. Conkin, The Southern Agrarians (Knoxville, TN, 1988); George M. Lubick, “Restoring the American Dream: The Agrarian-Decentralist Movement, 1930-1946.” South Atlantic Quarterly 74 (1985), 63-80; Louis D. Rubin Jr., “Trouble on the Land: Southern Literature and the Great Depression,” Canadian Review of American Studies 10 (1979), 153-74; Edward S. Shapiro, “The Southern Agrarians and the Tennessee Valley Authority,” American Quarterly, 22/4 (Winter, 1970), 791-806 and Shapiro, “Decentralist Intellectuals and the New Deal,” Journal of American History 58/4 (1972): 938-57.

[23] Gerald W. Johnson, “The South Faces Itself,” Virginia Quarterly Review 7 (1931), 157.

[24] V. F. Calverton, “The Bankruptcy of South Culture,” Scribner’s Magazine XCIX/5 (May, 1936), 294-98. Although Calverton underestimated the importance of religion in antebellum southern life, he did acknowledge the depth and substance of southern politics and culture before the Civil War.

[25] Stringfellow Barr to Davidson, February 15, 1930, March 11, 1930, and September 25, 1930, Davidson Papers.

[26] George Fort Milton to Davidson, June 7, 1930 and September 9, 1930, Davidson Papers.

[27] William S. Knickerbocker to Davidson, November 28, 1930, Davidson Papers.

[28] William S. Knickerbocker, “Mr. Ransom and the Old South,” Sewanee Review XXXIX/2 (April-June, 1931), 223, 225. Lytle singled out Knickerbocker for special reproof. In an undated letter to Frank Owsley, Lytle wrote:

I ran into Knickerbocker the other day and he tried to establish diplomatic relationships; but I had no desire to establish social relationships with a man I have called a son of a bitch to one of his students, who reported the message I had given and had meant to have it delivered. His greeting was this (after failing, or pretending to fail, to remember me) “Ah, you are a Southern gentleman. You have grown handsomer since I saw you.” The man is a pathological case.

Frank Lawrence Owsley Papers, Special Collections, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University.

[29] William Terry Couch to Davidson, May 2, 1932, Davidson Papers.

[30] The Agrarians to Stringfellow Barr, undated, draft copy in the Davidson Papers. The Agrarians were responding to Barr’s essay “Shall Slavery Come South?,” published in the Virginia Quarterly Review 6 (1930),482-94, in which he elaborated the program of industrial management and regulation that he had previously outlined in his letters to Davidson. On the relations between Barr and the Agrarians, see Conkin, Southern Agrarians, 62 and Emily S. Bingham and Thomas A. Underwood, eds., The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays after I’ll Take My Stand (Charlottesville, VA, 2001), 1-2.

[31] The Agrarians to Stringfellow Barr, Davidson Papers.

[32] Lytle to Davidson, November 2, 1932, Davidson Papers.

The featured image—“Forgiven” (1872) by Thomas Satterwhite Noble—and the image of Andrew Lytle are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.