I'll Take My Stand
I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition
by Twelve Southerners
Among those who consider the South, not a single writer about the modern South has failed to mention and discuss I’ll Take My Stand.
The image of the agrarian South in I’ll Take My Stand is one in which men could live as individuals and not as automatons, aware of their finiteness and their dependence upon God and nature, devoted to the enhancement of the moral life in its aesthetic and spiritual dimensions, possess of a sense of the deep inscrutability of the natural world.
The Twelve Southerners believed in the superiority of an organic, agrarian southern culture over a fragmented industrial, northern society.
The Twelve Southerners believed that there was a southern tradition worthy of preservation—that of the good society, the community of individuals, the security and definition that come when men cease to wage an unrelenting war with nature and enjoy their leisure and their human dignity.
The book’s real importance is its assertion of the values of a humanitarian society and its rebuke of materialism.
The critique that I’ll Take My Stand offered of the social effects of capitalism and industrialism and the dangers they posed to the quality of human life and to the natural environment has become increasingly relevant over the years.
The real values they were asserting in 1930 were those of thoughtful men who were very much concerned with the erosion of the quality of individual life by the forces of industrialization and the uncritical worship of material progress as an end in itself. They insisted that any attempt to divorce economics and labor from “the more spiritual side” of one’s life brutalized the labor and cheapened the humanity.
In 1942, twelve years after its publication, Allen Tate wrote to Donald Davidson, “I think it was and is a very great success; but then I never expected it to have any political influence. It is a reaffirmation to the humane tradition, and to reaffirm that is an end in itself. Never fear: we shall be remembered when our snipers are forgotten.”
The Twelve Southerners: John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Gould Fletcher, Lyle H. Lanier, Allen Tate, Herman Clarence Nixon, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, John Donald Wade, Henry Blue Kline, & Stark Young.
All were born in the South, chiefly in rural areas or small towns; almost all at some critical point in their lives were connected with Vanderbilt University. The two “outsiders,” John Gould Fletcher and Stark Young, were invited to join the group in part because their stature as men of letters was already well established outside thee South and in part because their attachment to their region was consciously vital.
Critics of I’ll Take My Stand, and there have been many, have difficulty reconciling their lack of respect for what they perceive as simplistic agrarian views of economics and political reality with the achievements of individual members of the group who have been honored with an array of awards not to be matched by any other collection of writers grouped in a common cause.
HCS always has copies of I'll Take My Stand for sale.