Agrarian Reflections on Civil Rights
Philadelphia Society Regional Meeting,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 1-2, 2004

Steven D. Ealy
Senior Fellow, Liberty Fund, Inc.

I.

“The Southern people are not actually united on anything these days–except the Negro question,” Donald Davidson wrote to Allen Tate in October 1929.[i] Davidson and Tate had been discussing the possible subjects and authors to be included in a symposium defending the rural South against encroaching industrialization and the proponents of the “New South.”[ii] In any such defense of the South, the “Negro question” would be a crucial issue, especially if Davidson’s sense of a Southern consensus on race was correct.  When Davidson finally agreed to give Robert Penn Warren the assignment on race, he wrote to Warren that “It’s Up To You, Red, to prove that Negroes are country folks . . . ‘born and bred in a briar-patch’.”[iii] Thus the genesis of Warren’s contribution to I’ll Take My Stand.

            Two assumptions supported Warren’s argument in “The Briar Patch.”[iv] First, regardless of how blacks came to America, or how oppressed they may have been once here, America was the contemporary home of the descendants of the slaves. Both blacks and whites must come to terms with the implications of this fact. Second, blacks and whites share a basic interest in how society develops, and their fates are inextricably linked together.

            After an argument for vocational education and the development of the professions for blacks Warren began a more general discussion of the requirements for the development of strong black communities, a topic he approached through a discussion of why educated blacks had moved from the South. Warren noted that the most common reasons for this movement were a lack of opportunity and discrimination, and he collapsed these two issues into the single question of equality. While acknowledging that equality was a complicated question, Warren thought it could be untangled.

Warren—optimistically, naively, or disingenuously, wrote—“The simplest issue, and probably the one on which most people would agree, is that of equal right before the law” (ITMS, 252). Justice before the law, so often unavailable to the black, “is the least he can demand for himself or others can demand for him.” Warren underlined the broader social importance of racial equality before the law, without spelling out the implications of his comment. “The matter of political right carries repercussions which affect almost every relation of the two races,” he wrote, but then concluded by merely reiterating “the least that can be desired in behalf of the negro is that any regulation shall apply equitably to both him and the white man.” (ITMS, 252)

The question of industrial development stood at the heart of agrarian concerns, if not at the heart of Warren’s essay. The agrarians of I’ll Take My Stand were motivated both by their opposition to the “industrial gospel” (ITMS, xx) and by their belief that “the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations” (ITMS, xxix). Applying both the positive and negative elements of the agrarian position to the question of black society, Warren offered a two-fold argument: industrial development was not a panacea for the black community and agriculture provided the surest means to black self-sufficiency.

 Warren thought that efforts toward industrialization and the development of organized labor in the South would encounter white resistance at two levels. At the elite level there was a “naïve distrust of most types of organization” (ITMS, 257). Equally important was the attitude of “poor whites” that saw themselves threatened if blacks become economically independent. The danger from the white lower classes stemmed from the willingness on the part of these whites to use violence against individual blacks who were seen as potential threats (ITMS, 258-59).

            Warren thought that the only way to avoid racial violence under the conditions of increased industrialization in the South was through the recognition that “the fates of the ‘poor white’ and the negro are linked in a single tether. The well-being and adjustment of one depends on that of the other” (ITMS, 259). White labor could attempt to retard the development of black labor through intimidation or violence. Or white labor could learn “that color has nothing to do with the true laying of a brick and that the comfort of all involved in the process depends on his recognition and acceptance of the fact” (ITMS, 260).

            Unless white labor learned this lesson industry would play black labor off against white labor to the detriment of both. A peaceful solution to changing labor conditions brought about by industrial expansion “will demand tact on the part of the employer, judgment and patience on the part of both the negro and white workman, effective legislation, and the understanding by the ordinary citizen” (ITMS, 260). Warren did not answer the crucial question of whether Southern reserves of tact, judgment, patience and understanding were adequate to handle the inevitable stresses created by industrial growth.

            Warren concluded his discussion of industrialization by noting one final lesson that must be learned by the white laborer if these changes in the labor market were to occur peacefully. “What the white workman must learn . . . is that he may respect himself as a white man, but if he fails to concede the negro equal protection, he does not properly respect himself as a man” (ITMS, 260). Warren was not optimistic that this lesson would be learned easily.

            Having dealt with industrialism and the demands that it would place on Southern society, Warren then turned to a defense of rural life as offering blacks the best opportunity for economic independence and development of strong communal structures. Warren argued that, by “temperament and capacity,” the southern black belonged in the small town or on the farm. A return to rural life would provide the blacks with “the status of a human being who is likely to find in agriculture and domestic pursuits the happiness that his good nature and easy ways incline him to as an ordinary function of his being” (ITMS, 260-261).

Warren argued that a move toward the land would provide the “readiest and probably surest way for the greater number of the negroes to establish themselves” (ITMS, 261). In addition to providing for financial independence, such a move would save blacks from the “formalized and impersonal” group relations of the city (ITMS, 262). There was more opportunity for contact between the races in a rural setting, and this contact allowed for the development of personal relations that transcended race.[v] Warren in fact maintained that “the rural life provides the most satisfactory relationship of the two races which can be found at present” (ITMS, 262).

The movement of blacks into agriculture, however, again raised “the difficulty of competition between the two races” (ITMS, 263), which again raised the question of racial violence. Warren thought that in a rural setting the issue was “more readily ponderable,” but he offered no plan to deal with the type of violence he had emphasized in talking about urban competition. Warren seemed to think of rural whites as having more patience, prudence, and good will toward blacks than their urban counterparts. In fact, racial violence in the South was as likely to be found in rural areas and small towns as in urban industrialized areas.[vi]

Ultimately Warren set forth a challenge to Southern whites, and this challenge was, intentionally or unintentionally, aimed directly at his agrarian brothers. “If the Southern white man feels that the agrarian life has a certain irreplaceable value in his society, and if he hopes to maintain its integrity in the face of industrialism or its dignity in the face of agricultural depression, he must find a place for the negro in his scheme” (ITMS, 263).

In keeping with the theme of the symposium, Warren proposed that that place is the agrarian society, and he identified a number of issues that needed to be addressed if the movement of blacks into agriculture was to be successful. Agricultural education was a necessity, and blacks had to “receive equal consideration” in cooperative and protective efforts (ITMS, 264). More generally, the conditions necessary for the development of the black community had to be recognized and respected. Whites had to understand that the black community “must have such roots as the white society owns” (ITMS, 264). Warren concluded with the claim that “the chief problem for all alike is the restoration of society at large to a balance and security which the industrial regime is far from promising to achieve” (ITMS, 264).

Warren’s essay is not so much an argument for segregation as it is an acceptance of segregation as a given within which action must take place. Warren certainly accepted the outlines of the segregated society that already existed as the basis for his analysis: “Let the negro sit beneath his own vine and fig tree” (ITMS, 264). Warren accepted the distinction between political discrimination and social discrimination as delineated by the Supreme Court, and therefore he accepted the doctrine of “separate but equal” as a legitimate rule for social life.[vii]

That stated, it must be immediately noted that Warren did not simply accept all discriminatory acts as inevitable and legitimate. Warren argued for the absolute importance of equal treatment before the law for blacks, for the importance of black self-sufficiency and control of their own communities. Warren recognized the human equality of blacks, and not just legal equality, when he argued that “this negro community must have such roots as the white society owns” (ITMS, 264). Warren argued that in the marketplace, color was not important for success but that ability and performance were the keys to economic success. He challenged white laborers to show respect for themselves as men by acknowledging the legal equality of blacks and eschewing violence. He challenged the white intellectual who sought to defend the “Southern way of life” to “find a place for the negro in his scheme.” The essay, in passing, also stressed that legal equality “carries repercussions which affect almost every relation of the two races” without delineating those repercussions (ITMS, 252). While it would be pushing the point to argue that “The Briar Patch” was a direct attack on the “Southern way of life” when it came to race relations, it was, in the words of Louis Rubin, Jr., “implicitly disruptive of the southern racial status quo.”[viii] 

II

A brief survey of the treatment of race in the other contributions to I’ll Take My Stand will situate Warren’s argument within the context of the entire symposium. Whether one treats I’ll Take My Stand as a set of practical proposals for political and social reform or as an expression of moral and artistic vision, it is legitimate to ask if agrarianism has anything of importance to say regarding race relations and racial justice.

The “Statement of Principles” (ITMS, xix-xxx) that opens the collection perhaps sets the tone for the entire work. It states that the essays included in the collection “all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way” (ITMS, xix). While the racial mores of the South might be thought to be a part of the “Southern way of life” the agrarians intend to defend, there is no mention of race relations in the “Statement of Principles” at all. The only use of the word “race” in this “Statement” occurs in its final paragraph:

For, in conclusion, this much is clear: If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence. (ITMS, xxx)

The agrarians saw industrialism as the great enemy to the good life, in

part, because of its impact on labor. The “Statement of Principles” says this: “The first principle of a good labor is that it must be effective, but the second principle is that it must be enjoyed. Labor is one of the largest items in the human career; it is a modest demand to ask that it may partake of happiness.” (ITMS, xxii) Labor that can be “enjoyed” and that can lead to “happiness” is thus a part of living a full human life. The final passage from the “Statement of Principles” quoted above invokes the image of Hebrews in bondage toiling under tyrannical pharaohs when it speaks of “a race groaning under industrialism.” John Crowe Ransom refers to “the new so-called industrial ‘slavery’ ” (ITMS, 23) in his essay, and he does not intend the phrase to be taken ironically. What is ironic is that a work motivated by a fierce desire to protect the traditions of personal and community liberty should take such a nonchalant attitude toward real slavery and its aftermath.

Except for Warren’s essay, those chapters that touch on race do so only incidentally, and in most cases they refer back to the history of slavery in the antebellum South. In his opening essay John Crowe Ransom wrote, “Slavery was a feature monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice; and it is impossible to believe that its abolition alone could have effected any great revolution in society” (ITMS, 14). Slavery was not crucial to the life of the Old South; if it were a vital part of that culture, however, it was not so bad.[ix]

The most extensive discussion of slavery in I’ll Take My Stand besides that offered by Warren is found in Frank Owsley’s “The Irrepressible Conflict,” which treats race primarily in terms of the history of slavery and its abolition. Owsley agreed with Warren that efforts at colonization as a way to eliminate the racial problem generally had been opposed by blacks (ITMS, 78). Owsley argued that “Slavery was no simple question of ethics; it cut across the categories of human thought like a giant question mark. It was a moral, an economic, a religious, a social, a philosophical, and above all a political question” (ITMS, 76). The irrepressible conflict of his title, however, was not between the forces of slavery and the forces of freedom, but “between the industrial and commercial civilization of the North and the agrarian civilization of the South” (ITMS, 74). Despite an absence of focus on contemporary race relations, an insight into the agrarians’ view of the contemporary race question can be gleaned from Owsley’s essay. He wrote that there is an explanation for slavery “which the North has never grasped–in fact, never can grasp until the negro race covers the North as thickly as it does the lower South” (ITMS, 68). Blacks were imported into the Southern Colonies in such numbers that whites feared for their racial integrity. The blacks brought into the colonies “were cannibals and barbarians, and therefore dangerous . . . . Even if no race wars occurred, there was dread of being submerged and absorbed by the black race” (ITMS, 77).

This view of blacks as barbarians, and the attendant fear that it generated, appears to be the operative view of at least some of the agrarians. Andrew Lytle, in “The Hind Tit” (ITMS, 201-245), argued in similar fashion that long after the conclusion of the Civil War, the “menace of the free negro” helped to insure that farmers would give their allegiance to leaders who had left the countryside to enter industry and urban life (ITMS, 215). Ransom also alluded to the problem of the “professional demagogue” without explicitly raising the question of race (ITMS, 24).

The essay on education, written by John Gould Fletcher, paralleled Warren’s argument for vocational education for blacks. “Although there is no doubt that the negro could, if he wished, pass easily through the high school and college mill,” under present circumstances it would be a waste of time (ITMS, 119). Far better to support blacks at “Tuskegee and the Hampton Institute, which are adapted to the capacity of that race and produce far healthier and happier specimens of it than all the institutions of ‘higher learning’ than we can ever give them” (ITMS, 121).

Finally, in “Whither Southern Economy?” Herman Clarence Nixon pointed toward the need for agricultural education if blacks were to thrive. Nixon noted that agriculture, especially the production of cotton, had been the chief economic activity of Southern blacks since the end of the Civil War. These blacks (and those who exploit them) had been primarily responsible for “overemphasizing a commercialized cotton production and delaying a wholesome agricultural diversification” in the South (ITMS, 190). Nixon praised Booker T. Washington for “the persistency with which he urged his people to get more land and to keep it and to grow something besides cotton” (ITMS, 190).

None of the other authors in I’ll Take My Stand sought to “find a place for the negro in his scheme.” As Louis Rubin observed, “Generally the black man in I’ll Take My Stand is viewed as a kind of peasant, an element in southern society fitted to be the hewer of wood and drawer of water, and one that can be accommodated within an Agrarian dispensation without too much adjustment.”[x] Virginia Rock confirms that “most of them did not even discuss the Negro,” and concludes, “Those who did take cognizance of the race question in their essays would not have aroused the ire of Southern traditionalists.” (Rock, 303) I agree with Paul Conkin’s observation that “The presence of [Warren’s] essay thus early revealed the one time bomb lurking beneath the seeming consensus in I’ll Take My Stand–race.”[xi]

III

            In his discussion of the prospects for agrarianism, Mark Malvasi takes as exemplars of the generation following on the contributors to I’ll Take My Stand Mel Bradford and Richard M. Weaver.[xii] I will conclude this overview of the agrarian position on race by comparing the writings of Weaver and Warren from the 1950s and -60s. At least since Socrates claimed that the polis could be understood as man writ large,[xiii] political thinkers have been drawing analogies between the body of man and the body politic. So I conclude with a brief discussion of the question of personal and social integration.

            In “Individuality and Modernity” Weaver maintains, “It seems a threshold fact that personality is some kind of integration. The individual whom we regard as having authentic personality appears to possess a center, and everything that he does is in relation to this.”[xiv] Weaver contends that personality is under attack today from a number of directions and the “forces …most inimical to personality” include assaults on memory (IM, 75-78), on status (IM, 78-80), and on privacy (IM, 80-82).

            This center that is the heart of personality is not something given to us. Rather, “The fact that one has this kind of center means that one has created something as a result of his effort in living” and it is this something that “gives one a defined character, or a self” (IM, 78).

            Weaver suggests that “man is happiest …when he enjoys a kind of equipoise of status and function, or of being and action” (IM, 78). One component of the modern attack on personality is the over-emphasis or exclusive focus on function (action) and the denigration of status (being). Now, status may be either earned or prescriptive. It is clear from Weaver’s discussion, I think, that he has earned status in mind when talking of personality. Let me quote his argument at length on this point. “The idea of status,” Weaver writes,

while certainly capable of abuse, is an important element in one’s psychic well-being. It is natural and it is right for a man to wish to be seen as something more than he is at a random moment. He wishes to be known as an individual, and individuality requires historicity. If he has by effort and sacrifice won himself a position among men, that position is part of his being; when you touch him, you touch it. When you address him, you are not addressing merely the externals of indifferently preserved flesh; you are addressing the man within, who has achieved a state of being. (IM, 79)[xv]

Although I can do little more than point to it here, a coupling of Weaver’s understanding of human personality with his defense of “cultural freedom”[xvi] provides a solid basis for understanding the importance of regionalism or localism in political and social affairs. In “The Importance of Cultural Freedom” Weaver builds the case for “the right of cultural pluralism” and “the right of cultural freedom” (CF, 408). I simply highlight a few of Weaver’s most significant claims: 1) “all cultures are necessarily regional” (CF, 407); 2) “Culture grows from roots more enduring than those of the political state” (CF, 408); 3) “No government and no ideology which try to cut a people off from its past can be friendly to culture” (CF, 411).

            One could conclude, on the basis of Weaver’s writing, that the core of agrarianism is a defense of the individual personality understood in all of its fullness, which includes its relation both to the past and to its current community. On the few occasions when Weaver turns explicitly to questions of race, however, his robust understanding of personality and cultural pluralism seems to disappear.

We could approach this issue through an analysis of Weaver’s discussion of black culture in Ideas Have Consequences, but in the time allotted I will use a blunter instrument provided by Weaver himself, a book review published in National Review in 1957 entitled “Integration Is Communization.”[xvii] Among the books Weaver reviews is Passive Resistance in South Africa, in which the author “notes that Communism is there being progressively redefined in racial terms. That is to say, Communism is coming to be identified with racial integration” (IC, 555). Now, assuming this to be a correct analysis of the situation, there are a number of directions in which one might proceed. One possible approach would be to argue that as political operatives communists were cagey enough to look to the easiest targets of interest in order to promote their agenda. This approach to the question would require that one at least consider the possibility that there were legitimate grievances which were then slyly and amorally exploited by communists to promote their revolution. Weaver seems to reject this possibility when he writes that “The blame for this [communism coming to be identified with racial integration] he tries to shift to the apartheid laws themselves. But surely this is artless” (IC, 555-56).

Weaver turns from the book on South Africa to a discussion of the United States in order to apply his argument here: “The communist tactic most aggressively used in this country now is the one hinted at by Mr. Kuper—the approach through the idea of ‘racial collectivism’.” (IC, 556) From the standpoint of communists and their stooges this strategy has two advantages: argument for racial integration “can now be presented with a great deal of moral unction” and “the tactical advantage of undermining our historic constitutional structure” (IC, 556). Even if American intellectuals and politicians are deceived, Weaver suggests that the common people are not. “To them Communism has always signalized its advent by an ostensibly free and natural but actually self-conscious and tendentious racial mingling” (IC, 556).

It strikes me that Weaver’s normally careful use of language is lost in this discussion. He writes, “ ‘Integration’ and ‘Communization’ are, after all, pretty closely synonymous. In the light of what is happening today, the first may be little more than a euphemism for the second. It does not take many steps to get from the ‘integrating’ of facilities to the ‘communizing’ of facilities, if the impulse is there” (IC, 557).

Contrast Weaver with Warren on this point. Remember that “The Briar Patch” acknowledged that there is a reciprocal relationship between one’s self-understanding and one’s understanding of others. Just as the split between men is a reflection of the split within the individual man, the manner in which one treats others is a reflection of how one understands oneself. In “The Briar Patch” Warren argued that if the white man “fails to concede the negro equal protection, he does not properly respect himself as a man” (ITMS, 260). In the self-interview that concludes Segregation, the same point is made forcefully:

Q: You mean they ought to let the South work out a way to live with the Negro? A: I don’t think the problem is to learn to live with the Negro.       Q: What is it, then? A: It is to learn to live with ourselves. Q: What do you mean? A: I don’t think you can live with yourself when you are humiliating the man next to you. (Seg, 63)

The “self-division” that Warren explored in Segregation is the result of “some failure to find identity.” (Seg, 54) “Identity,” in turn, became one of the major lines of investigation followed by Warren in Who Speaks for the Negro? As Warren pushed to understand the identity of the American black, he ultimately pushed beyond that limited identity to see it merge with the question of what it means to be a human being. Warren quoted Robert Watson, a student at Southern University in Baton Rouge, to that effect.

What am I struggling for? I’m struggling for the heights of a man. Regardless. I think that if I reach the heights of a man in a limited all-Negro society, I have not reached the heights of a man by world standards. (WSFN, 364)[xviii]

In a similar vein, Warren came to see the word “integration” in terms of the split within the individual that is the foundation of the split between men. Although James Baldwin presented an apocalyptic vision of personal and racial integration, (WSFN, 282) Warren’s model for integration as human wholeness was Whitney M. Young. Young had begun to connect the necessity of “making a living” with “the act of living.” Young had come to see work as an element of human fulfillment, and not just an instrumental means to a greater end. If this assessment is correct, Warren wrote,

Young is up to more than an attack on segregation and poverty, up to more than a program of integrating the Negro into American society. He is attacking, instinctively, perhaps, the great dehumanizing force of our society: the fragmentation of the individual through the fragmentation of function and the draining away of opportunity for significant moral responsibility–the fragmentation of community through the fragmentation of the individual. In the end, then, the integration of the Negro into American society would be, if I read Young aright, a correlative of the integration of the personality, white or black. (WSFN, 171)

This vision of the integrated personality as the foundation for moral responsibility was the key to Warren’s hopes that the racial split in American society could be healed. A truly integrated society will be a reflection of truly integrated individuals.

I would argue that Weaver and Warren share many points of agreement in understanding the dynamics of human personality—each sees the self as the creation of moral choice and action, each understands that men are not social atoms but are embedded both in a contemporary community and an historical narrative, and each emphasizes the importance of piety in living a grounded moral life. I would suggest, however, that Warren was able to maintain his robust understanding of human personality when he turned to questions of race relations, and Weaver was unable to do this.

Warren’s challenge in “The Briar Patch,” a challenge made in 1930 to himself and his fellow agrarians can be given a more general cast for us today: “If the conservative feels that tradition, piety, and liberty have a certain irreplaceable value in his society, and if he hopes to maintain conservatism’s integrity in the face of social turbulence, moral disintegration, and political divergence, he must allow for a full and free role for people of color in his scheme.” This challenge stands before us today as it has throughout our history as a nation. Should we shirk or ignore this challenge, our failure should be seen not only as an important political opportunity lost, but would stand as evidence of conservativism’s limited moral and spiritual vision.