1. I'll Take My Stand: the South and the Agrarian Tradition by Southerners, Twelve (New York: Harper, 1930)Google Scholar was reprinted as a Harper Torchbook in 1962. All references arc to the Torchbook edition and hereafter the title will appear as ITMS in the notes; page references will be incorporated into the text where possible.

The character and thesis of I'll Take My Stand have been commented on so often that a detailed account of the nature and content of that symposium scarcely seems necessary. (Perhaps a listing of the authors and the essay titles—as well as subjects when they are not evident—would be useful as a point of reference when rounding out the account.)

Planned and executed by Southerners, this collection of twelve essays was preceded by a “Statement of Principles” chiefly by Ransom but commented on and amended through several versions by a number of other Agrarians. The unity of their convictions was affirmed within the first paragraph of their manifesto: “All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book's title-subject: all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial” (ITMS, p. xix).

The contributors and their essays, without deliberate planning or consultative effort, created a book of remarkable organic unity–although individual stances on political, social, or economic issues range from somewhat right of conservative to somewhat left of liberal. Intended to show within particular contexts what is now an anachronistic avowal that “The theory of Agrarianism 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” (ITMS, p. xxix), the symposium included the following essays and contributors:

Throughout these essays, from various perspectives and areas, the Agrarian thesis was reinforced.

2. Rubin, Louis D. Jr., “The Writer in the Twentieth-Century South,” in The Writer in the Twentieth Century (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1972), p. 95.Google Scholar

3. To list all the journals and newspapers carrying reviews shortly after I'll Take My Stand appeared is impossible. The favorable and critical commentaries appearing in the press represented no predictable corollary to their place of publication. Reactions from Southern papers as well as from papers and journals of the North and Midwest—ranged from friendly to hyperbolic and heavily ironic. Among Southern newspapers, reviews appeared in the Dallas News, the Nashville Tennessean, the Atlanta Constitution, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Knoxville Journal, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Macon Telegraph, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In addition to the five New York papers (the Times, the Herald Tribune, the Sun, the Telegram, and the Morning World), a number of prominent journals, including the Nation, the New Republic, and Hound and Horn, published reviews. Over the decades since I'll Take My Stand was issued, discussions of the symposium have continued to appear. Indeed, an article of some length concerned with changing perspectives on the Agrarian movement should be written.

4. Knickerbocker, W. S., “Back to the Hand,” Saturday Review of Literature, 7 (12 20. 1930), 467Google Scholar. Editor of the Sewanee Review during the period when the Agrarians were most active in the cause, Knickerbocker continued to react to them, usually negatively. When the book first appeared, however, he noted that “on a number of matters” the symposium made “a vigorous declaration of social protest,” that it was “important as a prescription for current economic ills.”

5. Reich, Charles A., The Greening of America (New York: Bantam, 1970), p. 29.Google Scholar

6. Rubin, Louis D. Jr., “Introduction to the Torchbook Edition,” ITMS, p. xviii.Google Scholar

7. The Fugitives' Reunion: Conversations at Vanderbilt, ed. Purdy, Rob Roy (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 209–10.Google Scholar

8. Rather than “local,” “home,” or some other word suggesting locale or environment, the term “provincial” seems appropriate: it suggests (as the Agrarians thought of it) all the special personal and regional senses that impart a feeling of distinctiveness, a shared culture. In reviews and essays by a number of the group, “provincial” was used frequently. Davidson's delineation of the concept appeared in his book review page for the Nashville Tennessean, “Critic's Almanac,” some time before the Agrarian symposium was worked out. Characterizing purpose, functions, and responsibilities of a Southern (i.e., “provincial”) book reviewer, Davidson focused on one of the principles for which the Agrarians came to take their stand, namely, “a philosophy of life that begins with one's own rooftree. [Provincialism] is rebellious against the modern principle of standardization, as it is carried over from science and machinery into habits of thought. It believes in unity as a principle of convenience and beauty, but not in uniformity. It knows that harmony comes not from exact correspondence but from a certain amount of diversity. It begins its reasoning, not with the new but with the old and established things, wherever they are the marks of a native character and tradition that seem to have contributed something valuable and interesting” (Davidson, Donald, “Provincialism,” Nashville Tennessean, 04 22, 1928Google Scholar, rpt. in The Spyglass: Views and Reviews, 1924–1930, ed. Fain, John Tyree [Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1963], pp. 3–5).Google Scholar

The range of the use of “provincialism” as an epithet has been wide–from one extreme suggesting the simplistic view of the farmer as “country hick” to the sophisticated understanding of both Arthur Mizener and Allen Tate, concerned with how a “provincial” attitude (even with all its values and appropriateness in a particular context) may limit the perception and understanding of the “provincial” beholder who is locked in time and space. Tate's view of the “new provincialism”—announced in 1945—focused on a limitation in time; product of “industrial capitalism,” this provincialism “without regionalism, without locality in the sense of local continuity in tradition and belief” becomes a “regionalisxsm without civilization … without the classical Christian culture,” he asserted. Davidson probably would not have been happy with Tate's use of “provincial” in the conclusion: “From now on we are committed to seeing with, not through the eye: we, as provincials, who do not live anwhere.…” But Davidson could have had no quarrel with Allen Tate's analysis of how “the sociologists of fiction and the so-called ‘traditionalists’ view the ‘Southern subject’—a difference between two worlds: the provincial world of the present, which sees in material welfare and legal justice the whole solution to the human problem; and the classical-Christian world, based upon the regional consciousness, which held that honor, truth, imagination, human dignity, and limited acquisitiveness, could alone justify a social order, however rich and efficient it may be” (“The New Provincialism” in Essays of Four Decades [Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1968], pp. 538 ffGoogle Scholar). See also Mizener, Alfred, “The Provincial Mentality,”Google Scholar rev. of A Vanderbilt Miscellany, ed. R. C. Beatty, Sewanee Review, 53 (01–03, 1945), 159–64.Google Scholar

9. “A Statement of Principles,” ITMS, p. xxv.Google Scholar

10. A heated discussion about the title for the book came to a head just three months before the collection was published. Tate was so disturbed over the implicit suggestion of exclusiveness of region and a reactionary appeal to emotions, rather than to philosophical identification with their cause, that he threatened in July to withdraw from the symposium altogether. (I'll Take My Stand came out in November.) His proposed title was “Tracts against Communism,” for which he argued: “the title is just paradoxical enough to attract attention; it will at least startle the ordinary reader who might be inclined to call us ‘radical’ by charging him with ultimate ‘radicalism’ if he continues to support the industrial system.” As Tate understood their cause, Tracts more accurately reflected their intentions since it “implies the idea at the root of [their] position”: opposition to “all economic and social organization that imperils individualism” (Tate to E. F. Saxton, editor at Harper's, copy to Davidson, September 3, 1930).

On the basis of this appeal, Tate enlisted the support of Warren and Andrew Lytle, but the original title was retained after a letter from Davidson and Ransom was circulated among the “brethren,” pointing out the irresponsibility with which they could be charged if they insisted on a change after the book had been advertised and had had four notices in newspapers. Davidson and Ransom's appeal in their reply to Tate acknowledged that “communism” was a good issue but it had had only one brief mention; “The book as it stands will have only the slightest relation to such a title,” they concluded (September 5, 1930). In the end, Tate made one rather ambiguous reference to the nature of dissatisfaction in a footnote to his own contribution, reflecting little of the nature and intensity of the disagreement: “The writer is constrained to point out (with the permission of the other contributors) that in his opinion the general title of this book is not quite true to its aims. It emphasizes the fact of exclusiveness rather than its benefits; it points to a particular house but omits to say that it was the home of a spirit that may also have lived elsewhere and this mansion, in short, was incidentally made with hands” (ITMS, p. 155)Google Scholar.

To conclude this account about the dispute over the title: the predicted negative responses to the title came, and Tate wrote Davidson: “It is over now. Your title triumphs. And I observe that Alexander [of the Nashville Tennessean] today on the basis of the title defines our aims as an ‘agrarian revival’ and reduces our real aims to nonsense. These are, of course, an agrarian revival in the full sense, but by not making our appeal through the title to ideas, we are at the mercy of all the Alexanders—for they need only to draw portraits of us plowing or cleaning the spring to make hash of us before we get a hearing” (quoted by Davidson, in “I'll Take My Stand: A History,” American Review, 5 [Summer, 1935], 315).Google Scholar

11. See Lanier's essay, “The Philosophy of Progress,” in ITMS, pp. 122–53.Google Scholar

12. Tate, Allen, “The Mediterranean,” in Poems (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1961), p. 4.Google Scholar

13. Ransom, John Crowe, “The South Defends Its Heritage,” Harper's Magazine, 159 (06, 1929), 112.Google Scholar

14. Fletcher began his early education under private tutors with whom he studied Latin and German, then attended a private academy in Little Rock for three years, and was enrolled in Phillips Andover Academy to prepare for Harvard. Davidson, too, was first trained at home (by his parents); his father, co-principal of Lynnville Academy, “provided instruction in the Classical languages at home”; after attending Lynnville for a time, Davidson entered the Branham and Hughes School at Spring Hill, Tennessee, an institution which “had achieved a reputation as one of the most- successful preparatory schools for boys in the South.” There, in four sessions (1905–1909) he “was exposed to a vigorous curriculum of standard classical courses—four years of Latin, three of Greek—and four of English and mathematics.” Kline as a boy attended Massey Military School in Pulaski, Tennessee; and Lytle was graduated from Sewanee Military Academy in 1920 as class valedictorian. Like Fletcher, Owsley acquired his early education at a private school where he was taught by a relative. Ransom was greatly influenced by the learning of his father, John Ransom, a Methodist minister with a reputation as a linguist and theologian; his son's elementary education, like Davidson's, included attendance at a private preparatory institution, the Brown School in Nashville, where he studied “Latin and Greek”—a “secular education … in the best tradition of humane learning … derived from a coherent view of life.” Tate, too, went to a private institution, Cross School in Louisville, the only place he named in his memoirs among the many schools he attended for his early education during frequent moves from Louisville to Clark County to Nashville and Southern Illinois; there “he learned his first Latin declensions and conjugations, and read some of Cornelius Nepos' Lives, when he was ten.” He enrolled at Georgetown Preparatory School just prior to entering Vanderbilt in 1918. Young likewise shared the experience of a private education in Oxford, Mississippi, where by the age of twelve—as he recalls—he had studied nine subjects.

The information provided in this note is taken from Fletcher, John Gould, Life Is My Song (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), pp. 8, 13Google Scholar; Young, T. D. and Inge, M. Thomas, Donald Davidson (New York: Twayne, 1972), pp. 19, 21–22Google Scholar; “Author Lytle to Retire at Sewanee,” Nashville Tennesean, 03 7, 1973Google Scholar; Lytle, Andrew, “Notes on a Traditional Sensibility, Homage to John Crowe Ranson,” Sewanee Review, 56 (Summer, 1948), 371Google Scholar; Tate, Alien, “A Lost Traveller's Dream,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 11 (Fall, 1972), 232Google Scholar; Cowan, Louise, The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 36n., 37Google Scholar; Young, Stark, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places (New York: Scribner's, 1951), p. 21.Google Scholar

15. The Pavilion, p. 125.Google Scholar

16. Interview with Virginia Rock, September 27, 1957.

17. Fletcher, , ITMS, pp. 103, 120.Google Scholar

18. Tate, , “A Southern Mode of the Imagination,” Essays, p. 581Google Scholar. This essay was presented originally as a lecture at the American Embassy in London on November 25, 1958, and appeared first in Carleton Miscellany, 1 (Winter, 1960), 9–23.Google Scholar

19. For a reflection of this characteristic in the works of the Agrarians, see, for example, Stark Young's novels, especially River House (New York: Scribner's, 1929)Google Scholar; The Torches Flare (New York: Scribner's, 1928)Google Scholar; and So Red the Rose (New York: Scribner's, 1934)Google Scholar. Young has been described as a novelist expounding “a genealogical interpretation of Southern leadership” in Lively, Robert A., Fiction Fights the Civil War: An Unfinished Chapter in the Literary History of the American People (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1957), p. 170Google Scholar. See also Tate, Allen's only novel, The Fathers (New York: Putnam's, 1938)Google Scholar; and several poems, including “Records,” “The Oath,” and “Sonnets of the Blood.” See Lytle, Andrew's The Long Night (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936)Google Scholar, the theme of which is a Southern family's vendetta during the Civil War; and The Velvet Horn (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957)Google Scholar. Also see Ransom, John Crowe's “Dead Boy”; Nixon, H. C.'s Possum Trot, Rural Community South (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1941)Google Scholar; and Nixon, , Lower Piedmont Country (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946)Google Scholar. Finally, Davidson, 's “The Tall Men,” in Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (New York: Scribner's, 1938)Google Scholar; various poems by Robert Penn Warren, for example, the early “Genealogy” and “Court Martial,” both concerned with his grandfather, a Civil War veteran [Charles Bohner, in Robert Penn Warren (New York: Twayne, 1964)Google Scholar, notes that “Warren fully shares the Southern feeling for family, the sense of the continuity of generations.… This interest appears in his fiction in the attention he devotes to the family trees of his characters. He is fascinated by the way a son may inherit his father's Roman nose, his quirks of speech, or his tendency toward abstraction or violence” p. 21].

20. The Pavilion, pp. 77–78Google Scholar; “Cousin Micajah,” in Feliciana (New York: Scribner's, 1935), p. 5.Google Scholar

21. Davidson to Tate, July 29, 1931, on file at the Princeton University Library (hereafter PUL); published in The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, ed. Fain, John Tyree and Young, Thomas Daniel (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1974), pp. 262, 264Google Scholar (hereafter Literary Correspondence).

22. Simpson, George Lee Jr., The Cokers of Carolina, A Social Biography of a Family (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1956), p. 307Google Scholar; Odum, Howard, “On Southern Literature and Southern Culture,” in Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South, ed. Rubin, Louis D. Jr, and Jacobs, Robert D. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), p. 92Google Scholar; Sullivan, Walter, “Southern Novelists and the Civil War,” Southern Renascence, p. 121.Google Scholar

23. Anderson, Sherwood, Memoirs (New York: Harcourt, 1942), p. 323.Google Scholar

24. Lower Piedmont Country, pp. xiii–xiv.Google Scholar

25. Davidson, Donald, “Geography of the Brain,” in The Tall Men (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1927), p. 30.Google Scholar

26. Davidson to Tate, October 26, 1929, PUL; also in Literary Correspondence, p. 239.Google Scholar

27. Warren, Robert Penn, “Croesus in Autumn,” Literary Digest, 11 19, 1927, p. 34Google Scholar; first appearing in the New Republic, 52 (11 2, 1927), 290Google Scholar, this poem was reprinted in Fugitives: An Anthology of Verse (New York: Harcourt, 1928)Google Scholar; and Selected Poems, 1923–1943 (New York: Harcourt, 1944)Google Scholar. About the imminence of death, Victor Strandberg concludes that in this passage, “Warren's last word … is to summon Croesus home out of the land of eternal green and permanent gold, and into the world of time's reality” (A Coldest Fire: The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren [Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1965], pp. 49, 51).Google Scholar

28. River House, p. 229Google Scholar; “Admonition to the Pocahontases,” New Republic, 63 (07 9, 1930), 208Google Scholar. Hereafter, where possible, page numbers are given in the text immediately after extended quotations.

29. The charge is by John A. Rice in I Came out of the Eighteenth Century, quoted by Davidson, in “The ‘Mystery’ of the Agrarians: Facts and Illusions about Some Southern Writers,” Saturday Review of Literature 26 (01 23, 1943), 6.Google Scholar

30. ITMS, p. xix.Google Scholar

31. The charge that the Agrarians were mere “typewriter” farmers, inexperienced in the ways of the land, is a common error. Even as late as 1963 a historian, Idus A. Newby, insisted in “The Southern Agrarians: A View after Thirty Years,” Agricultural History, 37 (07, 1963), 144Google Scholar, that “they were not farmers. Apparently only one owned and lived on a farm in 1930. Their connection with the land and farming was likely to be through plantation owners and substantial independent farmers; they had only abstract acquaintances with agricultural laborers, tenants or sharecroppers.…” Davidson had anticipated this charge some twenty years before: “At the time when I'll Take My Stand was published … a number of the group were landholders endeavoring to supplement through crops and cattle the meager stipend which the industrial order grudgingly permitted them to draw as poets and professors” (“The ‘Mystery’ of the Agrarians,” p. 6Google Scholar). The non sequitur of noting the possible number of Agrarians who were living on a farm in the year the symposium was published suggests the fallaciousness of Newby's implicit conclusion—that the Agrarians' analysis and argument must be dismissed since they lacked a total personal experience with both farming and the great variety of workers of the soil. Like a number of other critics, Newby limits his understanding by his literalness.

32. “Geography of the Brain,” The Tall Men, p. 32.Google Scholar

33. Lower Piedmont Country, p. xviiGoogle Scholar; Possum Trot, p. 5.Google Scholar

34. Lytle, Andrew to Rock, Virginia, 09 5, 1957Google Scholar; for some years he combined writing and farming. Letters to Warren (April 16, 1935) and to Owsley (March 18, 1943) reveal some of the difficulties experienced in attempting to be “a proper farmer,” writer, and teacher: to Owsley he admitted, “I'm getting restive, my farm needs me, and I think I can write better there. I don't really mind teaching, but two jobs, what with periodic trips to the farm, make it hard to do my own work.”

35. Davidson, Donald, “I'll Take My Stand: A History,” American Review, 5 (Summer, 1935), 309.Google Scholar

36. Wade, John Donald, “Southern Humor,” in Culture in the South, ed. Couch, W. T. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, 1934), p. 617.Google Scholar

37. Tate, , Essays, p. 584Google Scholar. Robert Penn Warren, regarded by some critics as having transcended what has been perceived as the limitations of a narrowing “conservative” Southern heritage, has nevertheless quite properly been characterized in the first chapter of a biographical-critical study as a “Southern man of letters”; Charles Bohner notes that among all the diversity of talented Southern writers, “a deep attachment to and a sense of place” are shared: “the milieu in which the Southern writers function is at once nurturing and stultifying. Even in revolt from his region, the Southern writer has felt himself compulsively drawn to articulate its meaning.… The tension generated by the opposing forces within Southern society is one of the central facts in the work of Robert Penn Warren” (Robert Penn Warren, p. 20).Google Scholar

38. Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (1941; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1960), pp. 106–07.Google Scholar

39. Twentieth Century Authors, ed. Kunitz, Stanley J. and Haycraft, Howard (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1942), p. 1386Google Scholar. In the first published section of his memoirs, Tate reports, “I have a letter written by Major Bogan to his daughter, my grandmother, a year after the burning of Pleasant Hill, in which the old man said that were he not so old (he was sixty-eight) he would enlist as a private in the Confederate Army. In my novel I made him a Unionist for the sake of the plot, history seldom being as dramatic as one would like it to be; and I think Cousin Fred [a grandson of the major's; Fred's father, Tate's Uncle Sam, had supported the Union] didn't like that part of it because in retropsect he felt like a Confederate in defiance of his father's Unionist anger and the worthless Confederate bonds [representing the loss of the brothers' patrimony]” (“A Lost Traveller's Dream,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 11 [Fall, 1972], 230).Google Scholar

40. Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, p. 36.Google Scholar

41. Tate, , The Fathers, p. 303.Google Scholar

42. Young, , The Torches Flare, p. 274.Google Scholar

43. Young, , So Red the Rose, pp. 321–26.Google Scholar

44. Quoted by Arthos, John, “In Honor of Stark Young,” Shenandoah, 5 (Summer, 1954), 24.Google Scholar

45. Cited by Harkness, David J., “Tennessee in Literature,” University of Tennessee News Letter, 27 (11, 1949), 22Google Scholar, in Young, T. D. and Inge, M. Thomas, Donald Davidson, p. 19.Google Scholar

46. Davidson, , “The Sod of Battlefields,” The Tall Men, Poems 1922–1966 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 128.Google Scholar

47. Davidson, Donald, “The New South and the Conservative Tradition,”Google Scholar lecture given April 16, 1958 at the Biennial Institute of Bowdoin College; rev. for National Review, 9 (09 10, 1960), 143–44.Google Scholar

48. “The Sod of Battlefields,” The Tall Men, p. 130.Google Scholar

49. Wade, to Rock, Virginia, 07 17, 1958.Google Scholar

50. Davidson, to Knickerbocker, , 03 31, 1931Google Scholar, Joint University Libraries, Nashville, Tennessee (hereafter JUL).

51. Davidson, to Tate, , 04 14, 1931, PUL.Google Scholar

52. Young, , The Pavilion, p. 61.Google Scholar

53. Ransom, , “The South Defends Its Heritage,” p. 108.Google Scholar

54. The Mind of the South, p. viii.Google Scholar

55. In 1928 the Departments of Chemistry, History, and English were authorized to grant doctoral degrees. Owsley, Ransom, and Wade, among others, were instrumental in developing programs: “The Ph.D. program … was being created when I went there, and my impression is that my being asked to come was based on the idea of my ‘heading-up’ the section dealing with American Literature” (Wade, John Donald to Rock, Virginia, 08 5, 1958).Google Scholar

56. Fugitives' Reunion, pp. 104, 116, 105Google Scholar. Before World War I a student seeking admission to Vanderbilt University for a liberal arts degree was expected to have had four years of Latin and three of Greek; if he sought a major in English literature at least two more years of Latin, Greek, French, and German were required, along with two and a half of Biblical literature and one of Anglo-Saxon. Cowan, , The Fugitive Croup, p. 33.Google Scholar

57. “Note on a Traditional Sensibility,” pp. 371–72.Google Scholar

58. Warren, , Fugitives' Reunion, p. 117Google Scholar. See also Wells, Henry' biography of Merrill Moore, Poet and Psychiatrist, Merrill Moore, M.D.: A Critical Portrait (New York: Twayne, 1955), p. 38Google Scholar; and comments by Jesse Wills, a Fugitive, in Fugitives' Reunion, p. 92.Google Scholar

59. Young, and Inge, , Donald Davidson, p. 24.Google Scholar

60. Tate, , Essays, p. 580Google Scholar. Sharing this admiration for Ransom was another Fugitive student, William Yandell Elliott, who became Professor of Government at Harvard University: “No one who went through Beowulf with Johnny, or listened to him expound Hamlet, or read some of Shakespeare with that restraint that was so unusual … could fail to say that his … characteristically modest statement, was an understatement completely. I mean, he had a very right critical sense marked by that kind of detachment and somewhat courtly wit, that was a refreshing and rare thing in the sentimentality with which we were bathed at the time. … When I spoke of Johnny's courtly manner … I was perhaps giving a little of the hint of the complete fairness and the very, very moving quality of understanding that he brought, which you may call gentilesse if you like. …”.Tate added: “He had no animus about him; he was detached, and that's how we learned from him” (Fugitives' Reunion, pp. 88–90).Google Scholar

61. Young, and Inge, , Donald Davidson, p. 25Google Scholar. Louise Cowan, in The Fugitive Group, p. 37Google Scholar, and Radcliffe Squires, in Allen Tate, pp. 23–24Google Scholar, have noted that Curry recognized Tate as “a brilliant student, lent him books, talked with him about literature … made his bachelor quarters at Kissam available to him” and encouraged him to write poetry. Tate's first published poems, “Impossible” and “Red Stain,” appeared in the same journal that was accepting Curry's, American Poetry Magazine (in Milwaukee).

62. Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, p. 7Google Scholar. Of Tolman, Tate observed: “[he] was one of the greatest scholars in this country and one of the greatest human beings I have ever known”; Alex Stevenson, among the original Fugitive group, added, “a man of great charm [whose] interest in all languages was not only that of a research man, an analyst, but also that.… really of a poet.” “… a very great scholar in the complete sense of the term.… There was a real charisma,” William Yandell Elliott insisted–and Tate agreed it was the right word (Fugitives' Reunion, pp. 111–12Google Scholar). Both Tate and Ransom contributed verse to a memorial volume for Tolman, published in 1926, three years after his death–In Memorian (Nashville, 1926), pp. 73 ff.

63. Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, p. 15Google Scholar; Fugitives' Reunion, pp. 107–08Google Scholar; Stewart, John L., The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and the Agrarians (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stewart's statement is based on a letter from Tate to Stewart, September 10, 1953. Obviously, Sanborn impressed others with the difficult quality of his mind and his “very great intellectual stimulation”; Elliott recalled at the Fugitives' reunion: “In spite of the tremendous learning … he was so dogmatic that he really provoked all the independent minds into doing some thinking of their own” (p. 107). Davidson captures Sanborn's personality as both teacher and scholar: “One could not but be awed and obedient when Dr. Sanborn strode vigorously to his desk, cloaked in all the Olympian majesty of Leipzig and Heidelberg, and without a book or note before him, delivered a perfectly ordered lecture, freely sprinkled with quotations from the original Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, French, or Italian, which of course he would not insult us by translating” (Davidson, Donald, Southern Writers in the Modern World [Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1958], pp. 11–12).Google Scholar

64. Fugitives' Reunion, p. 118.Google Scholar

65. Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 32–33.Google Scholar

66. Head of the English department at Vanderbilt for thirty years, Mims had brought Ransom to Vanderbilt in 1914.

67. See Squires, , Allen Tate, p. 23Google Scholar. At the Fugitives' reunion, members of the group recalled that their study with Mims was characterized by a customary spiritual autobiography, a wide reading in romantic and Victorian poetry, and a memorizing of certain poems and passages (the last forty lines of Tennyson's Ulysses was a traditional assignment). Davidson, whose reaction to Romantic and Victorian poetry was less militant than Tate's or Ransom's (although Tate insisted he thinks highly of Tennyson and Browning), however, found some desirable effects in Mims' classes: “He drove us into [a study of literature], literally shouted at us until we took hold, somehow. And even if you responded negatively, if you didn't like the kind of teaching he did, there was something there you had to do. You were just carried on irresistibly” [Fugitives' Reunion, pp. 110–11).Google Scholar

Tate's negative reaction to Mims' literary criticism was public and astringent; Mims, he charged, suffered from cultural astigmatism and had “succumbed to the sentimental local-color fallacy—the ingenuous opinion that a particular setting is intrinsically more ‘poetic’ than another” (Tate, Allen, “Last Days of a Charming Lady,” Nation, 10 28, 1925, p. 486).Google Scholar

68. Mims, Edwin, “Intellectual Progress in the South,” Review of Reviews, 73 (04, 1926), 367Google Scholar; The Advancing South: Stories of Progress and Reaction (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1926), p. 135.Google Scholar

69. For a comprehensive and detailed study of both the magazine and the group who made it, see Louise Cowan's authoritative The Fugitive Group, based primarily on unpublished material. In addition, Allen Tate's brief account is both engaging and informative: “The Fugitive 1922–1925: A Personal Recollection Twenty Years After,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, 3 (04, 1942), 75–84Google Scholar; The Fugitives' Reunion: Conversations at Vanderbilt, ed. Rob Roy Purdy, is an invaluable source; a record of the sessions at which most of the living Fugitives gathered at Vanderbilt University in May, 1956 to exchange recollections and to “re-create” history—it reveals both the spirit of the group and the personalities of the individuals. Donald Davidson's Mercer Lectures, issued as Southern Writers in the Modern World, contains an excellent account of the Fugitive group, its genesis, and contributions in “The Thankless Muse and Her Fugitive Poets,” pp. 1–30, also published in the Spring, 1958 Sewanee Review. His more recent Introduction to the reprint of The Fugitive, April 1922-December 1925 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967), pp. i–vii (hereafter The Fugitive 1922–1925) is both an engaging personal recollection and a historical account that sets the record right, correcting some of the errors appearing in Bradbury, John's The Fugitives: A Critical Account (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1958), pp. 3–27Google Scholar; and Stewart, John's The Burden of Time, pp. 32–90Google Scholar. A perceptive Introduction by William Pratt, “In Pursuit of Fugitives,” for the paperback anthology The Fugitive Poets (New York: Dutton, 1965), pp. 13–46Google Scholar, not only recounts the group's history in a regional, esthetic, and cultural context of the Western world but also comments succinctly on some of the poems and poets in their literary and social milieu.

70. Although Andrew Lytle might be considered a fifth member of both groups, since his poem “Edward Graves” was published in the first issue of the last Fugitive volume (March, 1925), he was never invited formally to membership at the time of its meetings; however, he did attend their sessions in the last year. Davidson called him “a Fugitive de facto if not by formal election.” Davidson, “Introduction,” The Fugitive, 1922–1925, p. iii, Lytle, First Session, “Agrarian Conversations at Dallas,” unpublished transcript, April 20, 1968, p. 1.

71. Rubin, Louis D. Jr., “Fugitives as Agrarians: The Impulse Behind I'll Take My Stand,” in A Catalogue of the Fugitive Poets (Andes, N.Y.: J. Howard Woolmer, 1972), pp. 9, 10.Google Scholar

72. Fugitives' Reunion, p. 179.Google Scholar

73. Davidson, , “Introduction,” The Fugitive, 1922–1925, p. viGoogle Scholar. Davidson's brief account here corrects certain errors in John Stewart's The Burden of Time.

74. Louise Cowan suggests that his tradition of conversation in the literary club had a marked impact on the young Vanderbilt students and faculty who became members of the Calumet Club, a literary group which met in Kissam Hall to talk as gentlemen educated to the tradition of town organizations like the Round Table, the Coffee House Club, the Old Oak Club. Among the future Fugitives who were thus initiated to discussions about literature and modern authors were Ransom, Alec Stevenson, Tate—he became president in 1921–Walter Clyde Curry, Davidson, Jesse Wills, William Yandell Elliott. Their gatherings developed informally as a continuation of their arguments about, and study of, modern poetry, philosophy, and esthetics, in a sense an extension from Calumet Club affairs, eventually to be formalized into a publishing group—an idea perhaps planted by Witter Bynner, a distinguished poet, who had been invited by the Centennial Club in 1921 to speak in Nashville; impressed with their poetry (he visited the group at one of their meetings), he “predicted that an audience could be found for a publication by the group”; other distinguished invited writers were Horace Walpole, who expressed some years later an admiration for the Fugitive as a fine piece of work with “no mediocre poetry in it,” and in 1927 John Gould Fletcher, who at last met the Nashville poets he had lorg been interested in, not just because they were good poets, he said, but because they were Southern poets who still kept “a local point of reference for their art, in the shape of their feeling for the Old South and its tradition.” As a result of this meeting, when the Agrarian symposium was being planned, Ransom and Davidson enthusiastically endorsed Tate's suggestion to invite Fletcher to join the group. Louise Cowan notes that the Calumet Club—from which a member of the Fugitives acquired a delight for conversation, argument, and study— “was to exert strong influence at Vanderbilt during the twenties and to continue on up to the present day.” Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 10, 35, 37–38, 43–44, 239Google Scholar; Fugitives' Reunion, p. 91Google Scholar; Life Is My Song, pp. 341, 343, 356.Google Scholar

75. Ridley Wills subsequently became a novelist and journalist. The late Stanley Johnson, at one time a Vanderbilt faculty member, published a thinly disguised satirical novel, The Professor, the last year of The Fugitive's existence, in which he depicted personalities and activities of his Fugitive days. Other members of the group became businessmen: James Frank; Alec B. Stevenson—a Nashville investment banker who named the Fugitive (not Hirsch, according to Davidson); Jesse Wills, an executive vice president of an insurance company (his interest in Fugitive history has continued: he was responsible for the establishment of the Fugitive-Agrarian Room at Vanderbilt University and has assisted in the development of the rich collection of manuscript and published materials now in the H. Fort Flowers Graduate Library Wing of the Joint University Libraries at Nashville); Alfred L. Starr, president of a theater chain, whose membership in the group was nominal—he was named in the last issue of the Fugitive, but was never published in the little magazine.

Others of the group found activities to engage their attention quite removed from a dedication to literature or business: Sidney Mttron Hirsch was perhaps the most unusual, a student of the occult, “a mystic and … a Rosicrucian,” his fame in Nashville was established with a Greek pageant in 1913, The Fire Regained, which he wrote, produced, and directed in front of the Centennial plaster replica of the Parthenon—Hirsch's importance in the Fugitive group has been disputed, with John L. Stewart claiming that “in many ways” he was “the nearest thing to a leader the Fugitives had,” that “he made the Fugitives,” while Davidson insisted that he was not their leader, nor were the early regular Fugitive meetings over which he presided “the prime cause of the ‘Fugitive movement.’” Stewart's assertion that “without Sidney Hirsch this group would never have come into being or continued long enough to matter” was “utter nonsense,” Davidson said; “the real life of the group was external to the meetings with Sidney Hirsch, valuable and interesting though these were to all concerned, including Hirsch himself.” William Yandell Elliott, channeling his interests into the field of political science, became head of the Department of Government at Harvard, while Merrill Moore, in Boston, combined careers of psychiatry with poetry—writing more sonnets than any other poet has produced in the history of literature. Even in his Fugitive days he was prolific: William Pratt has noted that “he seemed to be the nearest thing to a poetry-machine,” a source of amazement to the group, bringing “at least a dozen poems every meeting,” on some occasions as many as fifty or sixty, while others struggled to produce one or two; with his instantaneous style, his poems, said Pratt, could be read “as quickly and effortlessly as a newspaper”; most of them were not worth keeping, Pratt concluded, but “he scored an occasional hit among his thousands of sonnets.” Laura Riding (Gottschalk), hailed as “the discovery of the year” in 1924 and awarded the Fugitive's Nashville Prize of $100, was never personally a close associate of the group, although she was elected to membership and was a vigorous supporter of the magazine in her efforts to find subscribers and patrons. Her poetry was praised in an editorial statement for its “diverse play of imagination … [its] sound intellectuality and a keen irony,” and its concern with profound issues in “her own idiom of expression.” She made only two visits to Nashville in the days of Fugitive publication, one of them something of a disaster, Professor Cowan suggests: “To these serious rather courtly gentlemen, it must have seemed somewhat odd to admit a pert young woman on an equal basis. … [She] and Hirsch quarreled, and the whole event ended in confusion.… She was not really influenced by the Fugitive approach to poetry” and by the time the Fugitive anthology was being planned, she was writing Davidson an objection to a preface, arguing against the temptation to show similarities and relationships where none actually existed.

At the time of the Fugitives' reunion in 1956 there were twelve living members of the original Fugitive group (those who were dead at that time were Ridley Wills, William Frierson, Stanley Johnson, and James Frank), and all but two (Curry and Riding) participated; as of March, 1975, the living Fugitives were Tate, Warren, Elliott, Riding, and Jesse Wills—Moore died in 1957, Starr in 1957, Hirsch in 1962, Curry in 1967, Davidson in 1968, Stevenson in 1969, Ransom in 1974.

Information for the above account appears in Bradbury, , The Fugitives, p. 4Google Scholar; Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. xvi–xvii, 53, 58, 87, 114, 139, 182–84, 250–51Google Scholar; Tate, , “The Fugitive, 1922–1925,” p. 79Google Scholar; Stewart, , The Burden of Time, pp. 3, 31, 33, 81–84Google Scholar; Davidson, , “Introduction,” The Fugitive, 1922–1925, pp. i–viiGoogle Scholar; Davidson, , “A List of Errors in The Burden of Time by John L. Stewart,”Google Scholar unpublished document (n.d.) sent to Virginia Rock in March, 1966; John Seigenthaler, Nashville Tennessean, May 3, 1956; Fugitive, 1 (December, 1922), 106; 3 (December, 1924), 130; Pratt, , The Fugitive Poets, pp. 45–46Google Scholar; First Session, “Agrarian Conversations at Dallas,” unpublished transcript, p. 1; Susan Haddock, Special Collections Librarian, JUL, to Virginia Rock, February 8, 1973; Haddock to Rock, April 12, 1973.

76. Davidson, , Southern Writers in the Modern World, pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

77. “Foreword,” The Fugitive, 1 (04, 1922).Google Scholar

78. Davidson, Donald to Allen, Charles, 05 30, 1939Google Scholar, quoted in The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography, ed. Hoffman, Frederick, Allen, Charles, and Ulrich, Carolyn F. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946), p. 121.Google Scholar

79. Glasgow, Ellen, The Woman Within (New York: Harcourt, 1954), pp. 104–05.Google Scholar

80. Tate, Allen, “The Fugitive, 1922–1925,” p. 79.Google Scholar

81. The editors, The Fugitive, 1 (06, 1922), 34.Google Scholar

82. Gerlach, Lee, “The Poetry and Strategies of Allen Tate,” Diss. Univ. of Michigan 1955, p. 90Google Scholar. Gerlach's discussion of the Fugitive activity, pp. 75–91, is both informative and succinct, although it did not have the reminiscences of the Fugitives to draw on.

83. J. C. R., “Editorial,” The Fugitive, 1 (10, 1922), 66.Google ScholarPubMed

84. Davidson, , “Introduction,” The Fugitive 1922–1925, p. ivGoogle Scholar; Stevenson, Alec B., “Editorial,” The Fugitive, 1 (12, 1922), 98.Google Scholar

85. Davidson noted in his Introduction to the reprinted edition of the Fugitive that the venture “never had any official support from the University and never had any official recognition until, in 1956, the University was host to [the] “Fugitives' Reunion … largely financed by a private foundation” (“Introduction,” The Fugitive, 1922–1925, pp. vi–viiGoogle Scholar). Tate recalled nearly twenty years after their first issue of the Fugitive that “While the Fugitive poets … were well-known at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, they were a petty nuisance on the campus of Vanderbilt” (“Letter to Editor,” The Alumnus, 26 [03, 1941], 15Google Scholar, in Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 48–49Google Scholar); Edwin Mims attempted to dissuade the young poets from publishing—apparently thinking that if they were any good, they could be published in eastern journals. Sidney Hirsch recalled in an interview at the time of the Fugitives' reunion that “the group was not founded at Vanderbilt and … was not approved in the beginning by the chancellor of the university” (Seigenthaler, John, “Poet Returns, Recalls Fugitives,” Nashville Tennessean, 05 3, 1956).Google Scholar

86. Braithwaite, William Stanley, “Through the Year with the Poets,” Boston Evening Transcript, 11 21, 1925Google Scholar, quoted by Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 218–19Google Scholar. Braithwaite, a black American poet who had been publishing anthologies since 1913 of “the best magazine verse” each year, recognized and praised the “character and originality” of The Fugitive already in 1923, selecting for his anthology seventeen poems from the group. Especially impressed by the group's absorption in functioning artistically,. he noted that they wasted “no time on propaganda or self-advertising” (Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 134–35).Google Scholar

87. “Introduction,” The Fugitive 1922–1925, p. xviii.Google Scholar

88. Tate, Allen, “Whose Ox,” The Fugitive, 1 (12, 1922), 99.Google Scholar

89. The Fugitive Poets, p. 44.Google Scholar

90. Except for Merrill Moore, Stanley Johnson, and Laura Riding, the Fugitives did not contribute a large number of poems (excluding, of course, the four who remained devotees to the “Thankless” Muse). Stanley Johnson's contributions totaled thirty-two; Laura Riding's, twenty-seven (appearing in all but two issues between August, 1923 and December, 1925); Alec Stevenson's, seventeen; Jesse Wills appeared with twelve; Walter Curry, eight; Wiliam Elliott, seven; Ridley Wills, six; Sidney Hirsch, five; and James Frank, four.

That the less well-known Fugitives had so few poems in their own publication is to be explained in part by the exacting standards applied to their own membership. Davidson recalls that “disagreements about poems of Fugitive members were more brisk than the dissatisfaction with visitors. The smoothly versified occultisms of Sidney Hirsch, elaborated as they generally were in a robustly romantic style, met strong objections from the Moderns when the time came to print” (“Introduction,” The Fugitive, 1922–1925, p. vGoogle Scholar). Not all of the verse written by the group and published in The Fugitive proved against the perspective of time to be of consistently high quality. Louise Cowan's history notes both strengths and weaknesses of some of their contributions: in one issue, a number of the poems, she concluded, “fail[ed] to exhibit any artistic merit”; particular lines in various poems were described as “technically unimpeachable,” of “striking lyric beauty,” “vigorous and strong,” on one hand, whereas others were “unkempt and neglected,” “limp and ineffectual”; the diction of particular poems (Curry's) was “seasoned with a tentative, wry irony” or was “smoothly competent and polished” (Stevenson's), and Elliott's exhibited “a vigor of phrase and rhythm” (Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 52, 53, 87, 215Google Scholar). Since those exciting days, some of the Fugitives who had chosen careers outside the world of letters have continued to write poetry. Merrill Moore published eighteen volumes of verse between 1929 and 1959—the last two appearing posthumously: Poems of American Life (1958)Google Scholar and The Dance of Death (1959)Google Scholar. Jesse Wills' two collections, Early and Late: Fugitive Poems and Others (1959)Google Scholar and Conversation Piece and Other Poems (1965)Google Scholar, and the poetry Alec Stevenson continued to write were saluted by Davidson, , “Introduction,” The Fugitive, 1922–1925, pp. v, viiGoogle Scholar; Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 52, 53, 87, 215Google Scholar; Stewart, , The Burden of Time, p. 72Google Scholar; Pratt, , The Fugitive Poets, pp. 153–54.Google Scholar

91. Davidson, , “The Other Half of Verse,” The Fugitive, 2 (08–09, 1923), 98Google Scholar; Warren, Robert Penn, interview, “The Art of Fiction XVIII,” Paris Review, 6 (Spring-Summer, 1957), 122.Google Scholar

92. Postscript, June 25, 1939, in The Fugitive Clippings and Comment, coll. Merrill Moore (Boston: Privately printed, 1939), p. 11.Google Scholar

93. Warren, , “The Art of Fiction,” pp. 121–22Google Scholar; Cowan, , The Fugitive Croup, p. 131.Google Scholar

94. After hearing the discussions at four sessions and reading the transcripts of the Fugitives' reunion, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., observed in his Introduction: “once the individual Fugitives were convened together behind closed doors … they became a group again. … They began arguing, and the argument soon assumed … precisely the same lines of demarcation that had existed in the 1920's” (Fugitives' Reunion, pp. 19–20).Google Scholar

95. An examination of the Fugitives' poems appearing in their journal suggests that few of them attempted experimenting in free verse (except for Laura Riding, whom the group came to consider finally as a contributor rathern than a member). The question of the relation of free verse to traditional forms was debated in the editorials appearing in the Fugitive, with Tate willing to concede the value of free verse for certain writers, whereas Ransom seemed to lament the tendency, perceiving the options as posing an unresolvable dilemma. See Tate, , “Whose Ox,” The Fugitive, 1 (12, 1922), 99–100Google Scholar; Ransom, , “The Future of Poetry,” The Fugitive, 3 (02, 1924), 2–4Google Scholar. Tate, in a later editorial, suggested an escape through the use of Baudelaire's Theory of Correspondences—“that an idea out of one class of experience may be dressed up in the vocabulary of another … the backbone of Modern poetic diction and the character which distinguishes it from both the English Tradition and free verse” (“One Escape from the Dilemma,” The Fugitive, 3 [April, 1924], p. 35.Google Scholar

96. Ransom, John Crowe, Fugitives' Reunion, p. 102Google Scholar; Rubin, Louis D. Jr., “Introduction,” Fugitives' Reunion, p. 17Google Scholar. The sessions at the reunion revealed the kind of dynamics that must have obtained when the Fugitives were trying out their theories and poems on each other. Rubin, in his Introduction, caught something of the spirit of the occasion, observing that “it was exciting to see how each of the Fugitives drew profit from the insights of the others, how a structure of ideas was pyramided … as each member's responses helped another to develop his own ideas still further. One caught a glimpse … of what it meant to be one of a group of gifted, enthusiastic young writers possessed of a cultural and historical background roughly homogeneous in nature” (Fugitives' Reunion, p. 23).Google Scholar

97. Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 131, 197.Google Scholar

98. Letter dated April 25, 1925, PUL.

99. Jacques Back, manager of the advertising agency underwriting the costs of The Fugitive publication after its first year, had lost about $450 and the subscription list at that time had only 144 names. Also a debt of almost $100 was outstanding from the first year of printing to Cullom and Ghertner. Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 148–49, 156.Google Scholar

100. Ransom to Tate, May 6, 1924, in Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 158–59.Google Scholar

101. Davidson, to Tate, , 11 29, 1925Google Scholar, in Literary Correspondence, p. 151.Google Scholar

102. January 27, 1928, in Literary Correspondence, p. 206Google Scholar. The anthology contains a selection of ninety-four poems (almost half of them first appeared in The Fugitive) by eleven of the Fugitives from the body of their work of the preceding four years (Starr, Ridley Wills, Hirsch, Curry, and Frierson were not represented). Generally well received, Fugitives, An Anthology of Verse merited from Edmund Wilson praise for “an original vein of imagery … an accent of irony, a ‘metaphysical’ turn and a rich English vocabulary. … Now … we are beginning to get a literature … as free from the flowers of rhetoric as from the formulas of gallantry … capable of being merciless and astringent.” It was evidence, Howard Mumford Jones averred, that “the Sahara of the Bozart is a mirage.” But the most penetrating and accurate evaluation of the volume, according to Louise Cowan, was that of Mark Van Doren, who singled out the “spirit of their intentions”—to get “vital poetry written” through “friendship and discussion”; “it is not surprising,” Van Doren observed, “that they stumbled upon the real thing or that they made a permanent contribution to American poetry.” A recent recognition of the group focuses on precisely this aspect—their “corporate achievement” rivaling any other in American history, according to William Pratt; in the Preface to his anthology, he concludes that “the Fugitives still belong together, and [the anthology] marks, not an end, but a new beginning for the most durable school in American letters.” Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, pp. 253–56Google Scholar; Wilson, , “The Tennessee Poets,” New Republic, 54 (03 7, 1928), 103Google Scholar; Pratt, , The Fugitive Poets, p. 9.Google Scholar

103. Fugitives' Reunion, p. 178.Google Scholar

104. Wells, , Poet and Psychiatrist, p. 34.Google Scholar

105. Pratt, , The Fugitive Poets, p. 18.Google Scholar

106. Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, p. 257.Google Scholar

107. For critics not really interested in either of the movements as group activities and not adequately cognizant of the historical, social, and personal milieu from which the two activities emerged, it is easy to treat members of either group, apart from Tate, Ransom, Warren, and Davidson, with a mere “also included” listing—if they are mentioned at all. In the only booklength study of the Agrarians to date, Alexander Karanikas' Tillers of a Myth: Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics, Andrew Lytle's contribution to the Agrarian symposium, for instance, is discussed in three sentences of fewer than 100 words and little note is made of his considerable activity in the movement (there is a brief, 15-word summary of his essay in Who Owns America?); his only other appearance in this study is a reference to his “practice of subsistence farming [and writing] historical novels such as Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company (1931)Google Scholar and The Long Night (1936)Google Scholar inspired by Tate's biographies of the Confederate heroes Jackson and Davis” (pp. 15, 173, 16). How Karanikas made such errors as to call the biography of Forrest a novel and to infer that Tate's biographies had to be the inspiration for Lytle's first novel (when the work grew out of a personal experience of an uncle of Frank Owsley's) is perhaps to be explained by Karanikas' evident lack of interest in, and knowledge of, Lytle and, indeed, of most of the other Agrarians. In fact, interest in the two movements has been narrowed so consistently to the four men whose literary reputations have been firmly established or whose identification with the South and contribution to Fugitive and Agrarian activities so exceptional that, frequently, critical and historical discussions devolve into studies of these four writers (often just three)—Ransom, Tate, Warren, and Davidson—and at times one or two are assumed to be spokesmen for an entire group effort.

That such a synecdochial reduction leads to misrepresentation of both the men and the group activities is evident from an examination of the critical commentary on the groups. The casualness with which a number of scholars have persistently blurred the distinctions among the Fugitives, and the Agrarians (and on occasion the New Critics)—discussing them interchangeably—has contributed to misreadings of the Agrarian position and of the character of that movement, its aims, and achievements. Among those who have confused the membership of the groups, their views, and their activities are Gay Wilson Allen (Cleanth Brooks did not take “a prominent part in a movement called Agrarianism”); Irving Howe (the Fugitives were not the group who “shared the hostility of their people toward Northern urbanism”);Edna B. Stephens (it was the Agrarian symposium, not one by the Fugitives, to which Tate invited Fletcher to contribute, and it was the Agrarian movement, not the Fugitive, which Fletcher must have seen “as an answer to a prayer he had cherished … to the effect that some section of America might be stirred to revolt against the civilization of the machine”—in this instance Fletcher himself failed to distinguish between the two movements in his autobiography); George Core (the Agrarians, not “the Fugitives … used every literary means at their disposal: history, political and economic theory, criticism, fiction and poetry”—and more than Tate, Ransom, Davidson, and Warren were involved in this kind of campaign). See Allen, Gay Wilson, “Criterions for Criticism,” Saturday Review, 49 (06 11, 1966), 64Google Scholar; Howe, Irving, “They Took Their Stand,”Google Scholar rev. of The Burden of Time, by Stewart, John L., New York Times Book Review, 08 8, 1965, pp. 1, 26Google Scholar; Stephens, Edna, John Gould Fletcher (New York: Twayne, 1967), p. 129Google Scholar; Core, George, “Southern Letters and the New Criticism,” Georgia Review, 24 (Winter, 1970), 425.Google Scholar

108. Wells, , Poet and Psychiatrist, p. 19Google Scholar; Marvin, George, “Progress and the Parthenon,” Outlook, 139 (04 29, 1925), 653Google Scholar. The total of ten colleges and universities in Nashville by 1930 included, in addition to Vanderbilt, the George Peabody College for Teachers, Scarritt College, David Lipscomb College, Ward-Belmont College, Fisk University, Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Teachers College, Meharry Medical College, Tre Vecca College, and Roger Williams University (four of these institutions were for black students). Patterson's American Ecucational Directory, comp. and ed. Patterson, Homer L. (Chicago: American Educational Co., 1931), XXVIII, 514.Google Scholar

Journalist George Marvin, who visited and wrote studies of various cities, called Nashville “the Athenian Pittsburg of the South”—a city of two atmospheres, one “palpable of soft-coal smoke”; the other of “aspiration, impalpable, but with its local habitations and its names.” Paraphrasing its inhabitants' “boosterism” (“the average Southerner is a born booster,” Marvin declared), he reported what he had heard about Nashville—that “it publishes more religious periodicals … than any other city in the United States; it makes more soft collars for men, retails more automobile tires, packs more meat, turns out more feather pillows, makes more bed-springs and mattresses, ships more eggs, has more square feet of cold storage, manufactures more bricks, grinds more wheat, than any other city in the South” (“Progress and the Parthenon,” Outlook, 139 [04 29, 1925], 655).Google Scholar

109. Originally, Nashville's Parthenon was erected in plaster on brick for the Centennial of 1897, commemorating Tennessee's admission to statehood. It was permanently cast in “composite stone” in the decade 1921–31, a reconstruction of the replica, which had become unsightly. In that period, casts of the Elgin Marbles were taken—not for the original construction as Stewart, in The Burden of Time, had assumed (p. 6). Clarence Poe, editor of the Progressive Farmer in the twenties, considered it “one of the few art museums worthy of the name to which the South can lay claim. … (“America Discovers Dixie,” Review of Reviews, 73 [04, 1926], 385).Google Scholar

110. “Notes on a Traditional Sensibility,” p. 371.Google Scholar

111. Albright, A. D. and Sloan, Gene H., Tennessee, Current and Historic Facts (Nashville: State Department of Education, 1948), p. 34.Google Scholar

112. Tennessee: A Guide to the State (New York: Viking, 1939), p. 5.Google Scholar

113. Monroe, Harriet, “The Old South,” Poetry. 22 (05, 1923), 91.Google Scholar

114. Davidson, , “I'll Take My Stand: A History,” p. 308.Google Scholar

115. Kline's educational experience outside the South included not only high school in New York State, but also two years at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland; Warren, after completing an M.A. in English at the University of California (1927), went to Yale for a year before sailing to England to study at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar (1928–30); Lytle, too, headed for Yale after receiving his B.A. in English from Vanderbilt in 1925, to attend the School of Drama (1927–28) and to try his hand at writing plays and acting professionally with the Hampton Players, a Yale group (1929); Lanier was an instructor of psychology at New York University from 1926 to 1928; Owsley and Nixon followed the same path from Alabama Polytechnic Institute to Chicago to study under William E. Dodd, with Nixon remaining afterward in the Midwest for three years, teaching at Iowa State College. Wade, too, left the South for graduate study, first at Harvard (1915), then Columbia, where he completed his Ph.D. under W. P. Trent in 1924. Stark Young, a graduate student at Columbia University (1902), returned to the North after several years at Mississippi and Texas to teach at Amherst College (1915–21).

116. Squires, , Allen Tate, p. 91.Google Scholar

117. Davidson, , Southern Writers in the Modern World, p. 15.Google Scholar

118. Fletcher, , Life Is My Song, pp. 195–96.Google Scholar

119. Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, p. 14.Google Scholar

120. “The South Defends Its Heritage,” pp. 109, 111.Google Scholar

121. Fugitives' Reunion, pp. 208–09Google Scholar; “The Art of Fiction,” p. 121.Google Scholar

122. Fugitives' Reunion, p. 204.Google Scholar

123. Weaver, Richard C., “Agrarianism in Exile,” Sewanee Review, 58 (10–12, 1950), 589.Google Scholar

124. “The Art of Fiction,” p. 123.Google Scholar

125. Robert Lowell's term in “John Ransom's Conversations,” Sewanee Review, 56 (Summer, 1948), 375.Google Scholar

126. Tate, to Davidson, , 05 7, 1924Google Scholar, PUL; quoted by Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, p. 163.Google Scholar

127. Tate, Allen, Essays of Four Decades, pp. 531, 532.Google Scholar

128. Tate, Allen, “Last Days of a Charming Lady,” pp. 485, 486.Google Scholar

129. Davidson, to Tate, , 11 29, 1925Google Scholar, PUL; in Literary Correspondence, p. 152.Google Scholar

130. Davidson, Donald, “The Artist as Southerner,” Saturday Review of Literature, 2 (05 15, 1926), 782Google Scholar. This article appears to be the first public statement in a national journal of Davidson's conscious and explicit affirmation of the Southern heritage as legitimate material for the artist.

131. Tate, to Davidson, , 03 1, 1927Google Scholar, in Literary Correspondence, p. 191.Google Scholar

132. Knickerbocker, William S., “The Return of the Native,” Sewanee Review, 38 (10–12, 1930), 480.Google Scholar

133. Vidal de la Blache, a human geographer of the early twentieth century, used this term to represent the totality of existence, encompassing everything that makes up a whole way of life; it assumes there is a tradition involving economic, social, cultural factors, even manner of expression.

134. Gaston, Paul M., The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Myth Making (New York: Knopf, 1970), p. 8Google Scholar; Warren, Robert Penn, “John Crowe Ransom: A Study in Irony,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 11 (01, 1935), 97.Google Scholar

135. In a literary context—and many of the Agrarians would think of “myth” in this form—myths are “dramatic or narrative embodiments of a people's perceptions of the deepest truths” (Holman, C. Hugh, A Handbook to Literature, 3d. ed. [Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1972], p. 334).Google Scholar

136. C. Vann Woodward, in the Preface to his Origins of the New South 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1951)Google Scholar, remarked, “If it were possible to dispense with a phrase of such wide currency, I would not use the name ‘New South’ except to designate an ill-defined group of Southerners.” Woodward's use of the term was “disinfected as much as possible” of “its slogan-like connotations” (pp. x, xi).

George B. Tindall, in his later volume of the History of the South Series, confesses to a similar reluctance about using “New South.” “It might have been better to have dropped that shopworn phrase ‘New South’ but I have been no more able to dispense with it than the author of the preceding volume.…” Tindall's use of it focuses on a period, not a doctrine, “yet much of what happened in the first half of the twentieth century fulfilled the nineteenth-century creed of the New South” (The Emergence of the New South 1913–1945 [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1967], p. x).Google Scholar

137. Gaston, , The New South Creed, pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

138. In the nineteenth century, New South journals “championed industrialism, high tariffs, and social Darwinism,” Gaston notes. In the twentieth, the name was given to “the voice of Southern communism,” for a journal published in the 1930s at Chattanooga and Birmingham, while in 1944 the name was taken over by the Southern Regional Council for its magazine advocating “a South free of racial discrimination” (The New South Creed, p. 5).Google Scholar

Donald Davidson described his reaction to one of the New South journals in terms so excessive that his opinion of its value as a Southern publication was unmistakable: “When I see the so-called magazine, The New South, published at Chattanooga, with a reputed circulation of 80,000 (padded, no doubt), I get sick with the black vomit and malignant agues” (Davidson to Tate, May 9, 1927, PUL; published in Literary Correspondence, p. 201).Google Scholar

139. Woodward, , Origins of the New South, p. ix.Google Scholar

140. Trent, William P., “Dominant Forces in Southern Life,” Atlantic Monthly, 79 (01, 1897), 50.Google Scholar

141. “The New South and the Conservative Tradition,” pp. 4. 7.Google Scholar

142. H. C. Nixon, in Lower Piedmont Country, pointed out that Grady was said to have used the term “New South” in an editorial as early as March 14, 1874, when he endorsed a plan “to build Atlanta's first cotton mill by public subscription. … For the next fifteen years of his life he made constant and consistent use of the words and ideas. …” (p. 51).

Sidney Lanier defined and used the term as a synonym for small, diversified farming; in his article “The New South,” published in Scribner's Monthly, 20 (1880)Google Scholar, he focused on an agrarian “New South,” by which he meant “the quiet rise of the small farmer.” Contrasting large-scale farming in the Northwest, which he related to a manufacturing company, Lanier contributed to the reviving myth of the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer who raised his own meat and made his own bread “for which there are no notes in the bank”; fed his pigs with homegrown com, spun his yarn, knit his stockings, made his butter and sold eggs and chickens (pp. 840–41, 843). Lanier's definition of the “New South” did not, however, become attached to the concept. It was, said C. Vann Woodward, “an inspired vision,” but “it represented everything that the Southern farmer was not and had not” (Origins of the New South, p. 175).Google Scholar

143. Grady, Henry, “The New South,” The Complete Orations and Speeches of Henry W. Grady (New York: Hinds, Noble and Eldredge, 1910), II, 18, 19Google Scholar. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, wielded a magic that for many Southerners of the late nineteenth century was equaled only by the name of Robert E. Lee. Donald Davidson, whose middle name was Grady, recalled, “I can truly report to you that I am a living symbol of Southern faith in that name. When I was born … it was my father, a hopeful young schoolteacher, who chose for his son's middle name the name of the admirable Peacemaker—Grady. And I dutifully exulted in it until, through some uneasiness that I cannot explain, I discarded it in early college days and have since avoided it except for purposes of legal identification” (Southern Writers in the Modern World, p. 33).Google Scholar

144. Described by Paul Gaston as “one of the anomalies in the New South movement,” Page wanted the South to look to both the past and the future—and his version of a New South would “vindicate the authentic Southern tradition—the tradition of Jefferson.” Regarding the cult of the Lost Cause “as a liability of the first order,” Page was considered by the Agrarians in the 1930s “an enemy of Southern tradition more formidable than Grady,” according to Gaston. The New South Creed, pp. 165–67.Google Scholar

145. In 1890, Page pointed out, 26 percent of the white population of North Carolina were unable to read or write—and the result was the the forgotten man became “a definite opponent of social progress.” The situation was not much better in other sections of the South: in 1901 those who were lucky enough to go to school attended an average of only eighty-seven days a year. The proportion of native white illiterates in the South in 1900 was about 12 percent, compared to the national average of 4.6 percent. North Carolina still had almost 20 percent and Tennessee, 14.2. Black illiteracy was appallingly high, nearly 50 percent, although it had been reduced 25 percent in two decades. Woodward, , Origins of the New South, p. 400.Google Scholar

146. An address given at the State Normal School, Athens, Georgia, in 1901. Page, Walter Hints, The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902), p. 102.Google Scholar

147. Spokesmen for a “New South,” recognizing that “internal opposition to the movement would diminish in proportion to the degree of ‘Southern-ness,’ found values and aspirations from the past which they could warmly espouse. “No sane advocate of change,” Gaston suggests, “wished to be cast in the role of a revolutionary.” Janus-like, unaware of the ironies they were propounding, they would “preface a New South pronouncement with warm praise and nostalgic sighs for the golden age that had passed” (The New South Creed, pp. 167, 168).Google Scholar

148. Thompson, Edgar T., ed., Perspectives on the South: Agenda for Research (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1967), p. xiGoogle Scholar, quoted by Gaston, , The New South Creed, p. 11.Google Scholar

149. In Woodward, , Origins of the South, p. 148.Google Scholar

150. Watterson, quoted in the New York Herald Tribune, 11 21, 1877, p. 151Google Scholar; Vicksburg Herald, quoted in American, 2 (1881), 166.Google Scholar

151. Twain, Mark, Life on the Mississippi (1883; rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1945), p. 278.Google ScholarPubMed

152. Quoted by Woodward, , Origins of the New South, p. 174.Google Scholar

153. Barr, Stringfellow, “Shall Slavery Come to the South?” Virginia Quarterly Review, 6 (10, 1930), 491.Google Scholar

154. Clark, Neil M., “Birmingham—The Next Capital of the Steel Age,” World's Work, 53 (03, 1927), 534.Google Scholar

155. Barr, Stringfellow, “The Uncultured South,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 5 (04, 1929), 192.Google Scholar

156. Haardt, Sara, “Alabama,” American Mercury, 6 (09, 1925), 85–86.Google Scholar

157. Cason, Clarence, “Is the South Advancing?” Yale Review, 20 (03, 1931), 505.Google Scholar

158. June 1, 1930, quoted by Tindall, George B., The Emergence of the New South, p. 99.Google Scholar

159. Hesseltine, William B., The South in American History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1943), pp. 585–86.Google Scholar

160. Clark, , “Birmingham-The Next Capital of the Steel Age,” p. 534.Google Scholar

161. Quoted by Barr, Stringfellow, “Shall Slavery Come to the South?” p. 489.Google Scholar

162. Poe, Clarence, “America Discovers Dixie,” p. 371Google Scholar. In 1913 Poe, editor of the Progressive Farmer, was proposing an extension of segregation to rural land ownership, an idea endorsed by the North Carolina Farmers' Union; in 1934 he was arguing vigorously for government control of cotton production, insisting that “The Bankhead Law represents an historic attempt to win new frontiers for democracy—to carry into economic life the same … willingness of the individual to bow to the will of the majority, that has distinguished our political democracy” (Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, pp. 145–46, 398).Google Scholar

163. Maclachan, John and Floyd, Joe Jr., eds., This Changing South (Gainesville, Fla.: Univ. of Florida Press, 1956), pp. 28–29.Google Scholar

164. Poe, , “America Discovers Dixie,” p. 371.Google Scholar

165. Maclachan, and Floyd, , This Changing South, p. 29.Google Scholar

166. Holman, Ross, “The Flight from the Farm,” North American Review, 227 (04, 1929), 483, 485Google Scholar; The Emergence of the New South, p. 320Google Scholar. A sizable percentage of these 2 million leaving the land yearly probably were Black. Based on the information then available, the United States Department of Labor, for instance, announced on October 24, 1923, that “487,700 or nearly half a million Negro migrants forsook their abodes and occupations in 13 southern states during the year September 1, 1922, to August 31, 1923.” A large proportion of these must have come from the rural South. Lois V. Kennedy, in a study of Black migration to Northern cities, noted that “[the] unprecedented economic opportunity in the North exerted the ‘pull’ upon southern Negroes. At the same time,” she adds, “the agricultural situation and prevailing low wages in the South acted as a ‘push’ that made response to the ‘pull’ inevitable. The share-tenancy mode of farming characteristic of the South usually involves crop liens and an unsound credit system which have often prevented, the Negro tenants from making an economic profit from a year's work.” She suggests also—as other factors contributing to the large numbers of Negroes leaving the South—crop failures, spreading agricultural depression—especially in the Cotton Belt—indebtedness incurred from charges at the local store for supplies, ravages of the boll weevil, low wages, and floods. Kennedy, Lois V., The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward: Effects of Recent Migrations to Northern Cities (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1930), pp. 35, 44, 46–47.Google Scholar

167. Morrow, L. W. W., “The Interconnected South,” Electrical World, 91 (1923), 1077, 1084Google Scholar, quoted in Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 71.Google Scholar

168. Morrow, , “The Interconnected South,” p. 99.Google Scholar

169. Terry, John Skelly, ed., Thomas Wolfe's Letters to His Mother (New York: Scribner's, 1943), pp. 49–50.Google Scholar

170. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 110.Google Scholar

171. Davidson, , Southern Writers in the Modern World, p. 37Google Scholar; “I'll Take My Stand: A History,” p. 304.Google Scholar

172. Davidson, , Southern Writers in the Modern World, pp. 35–36.Google Scholar

173. Mencken, H. L., “The Sahara of the Bozart,” Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Knopf, 1920), pp. 136Google Scholar ff. The essay first appeared in the New York Evening Mail, 11 13, 1917Google Scholar, but not until it was published in his Prejudices series did it have a wider and more sustained hearing. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 286.Google Scholar

174. Johnson, Gerald W., “The Congo, Mr. Mencken,” Reviewer, 3 (1923), 891, 892–93Google Scholar, quoted by Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, pp. 286–87.Google Scholar

175. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 287.Google Scholar

176. Tate, Essays, p. 533Google Scholar; “The Fugitive, 1922–1925,” p. 75.Google Scholar

177. Jesse Wills, at the Fugitives' reunion, recalled the power and attraction of H. L. Mencken in the early twenties. Characterizing the pervasive spirit at Vanderbilt University and in America shortly after World War I had ended, Wills observed: “There was a sort of atmosphere, not of violent revolt because we weren't politically-minded and didn't know what we were revolting against, but we didn't like regimentation; and there was some reaction from idealism … also we had heard a lot of talk about the ‘New South,’ the South of Henry Grady, the South of industrialism; and even the potential businessmen among us were not particularly enamored of that. And it was a time when the late H. L. Mencken was the idol of the students. Even Allen, before he found T. S. Eliot, used to carry Mencken around under his arm.” “Yes, that's true,” Tate admitted. (Fugitives' Reunion, pp. 91–92).Google Scholar

178. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, pp. 186–87Google Scholar; Carter, Everett, “Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of The Birth of a Nation,” American Quarterly 12 (Fall, 1960), 354–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The film has had numerous revivals and as of 1937 had grossed about $18 million.

179. Cash, , The Mind of the South, p. 345.Google Scholar

180. An announcement of the revival of the order appeared next to the advertisement of the premiere of The Birth of a Nation in the Atlanta Journal, Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 187.Google Scholar

181. Hall's editorials against the Klan were published in the Montgomery Advertiser and won him the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1928. Cash, , The Mind of the South, p. 348Google Scholar; Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, pp. 193–95.Google Scholar

182. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, pp. 189, 191.Google Scholar

183. The Mind of the South, p. 350.Google Scholar

184. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 205.Google Scholar

185. Krutch, Joseph Wood, “Tennessee: Where Cowards Rule,” Nation, 121 (07 15, 1925), 88–89.Google Scholar

186. Mencken, H. L., “In Tennessee,” Nation, 121 (07 1, 1925), 21–22Google Scholar. Scopes was a chemistry and algebra teacher, not a biologist; ironically he was not even certain he had “taught” evolution while he was a substitute for two weeks, although he was reasonably certain he had assigned for review the section in the approved text explaining the theory of evolution.

187. Owen, Russell D., “The Meaning of the Scopes Trial,” in Controversy in the Twenties, ed. Gatewood, Willard B. (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 345, 332Google Scholar. Owen's article points out the intense personal involvement of the two lawyers in just these issues; Bryan, Owen reported, in answer to the attorney general's question—“What is the meaning of all this?”—shook his fist at Darrow and cried, “To protect the Word of God from the greatest atheist and agnostic in the United States,” and Darrow roared in return, “To show up Fundamentalism! To prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the educational system of the United States” (pp. 344, 351). Mencken's judgment appeared in a letter to Howard W. Odum, June 28, 1925, quoted in Controversy in the Twenties, p. 333Google Scholar; “Modernists and Fundamentalists at Armageddan: The Scopes Case,” also in Controversy, p. 332.Google Scholar

188. In addition to the revealing contemporary accounts appearing in journals and newspapers (see n. 196 below), the following extensive studies and records are especially informative and rich in detail: Ginger, Ray, Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (Boston: Beacon, 1958)Google ScholarPubMed; Scopes, John T. and Presley, James, Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967)Google Scholar; Shipley, Maynard, The War on Modern Science: A Short History of the Fundamentalist Attacks on Evolution and Modernism (New York: Knopf, 1927)Google Scholar; Tompkins, Jerry R., ed., D-Days at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1965)Google Scholar; The World's Most Famous Court Trial: State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (1925 rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1971).Google Scholar

189. The Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee version of the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, directed by Margo Jones in Dallas, opened at Theatre '55 on January 11, 1955; but its fame developed from the Broadway production under the direction of Herman Shumlin, first starring Paul Muni as Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow) and Ed Begley as William Brady (Bryan). Several feature articles and an editorial page column in the New York Times, appearing both before and during the run of the play, focused attention on the leads and the nature of the issues inherent in the trial. Opening in New York on April 21, 1955, at the National Theater, the play elicited from critics high praise for Muni's performance as “brilliant,” “magnificent,” “superb,” “unforgettable.” Even a month later for almost every performance standing room places were sold. After his 668th performance—June 1, 1955—Muni left the cast (it was the 779th production) and Begley took over Muni's role for a continued run. (Muni had left the play for a serious eye operation, but because the show was so successful, it was continued with Melvyn Douglas starring for three months in the role of Henry Drummond. Muni returned December 1, 1955. The authors of the play, in a pre-opening interview, had asserted that they withheld an earlier version, finished in 1952, because “the intellectual climate was not right.” A New York Times editor concluded in his column that the Scopes' trial illustrated “the great danger to freedom, particularly academic freedom … that what happened in Dayton in 1925 was not in the remote past and could have happened yesterday.”

The film Inherit the Wind (1960)Google Scholar, starring Frederic March as William Brady (Bryan), Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond (Darrow), with Gene Kelly as the reporter (Mencken), effectively recreated the boosterism and cheap county fair atmosphere of Dayton, as well as the dramatic confrontation in court. New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther hailed Stanley Kramer's production as a “triumph” in its dramatic confrontation of two men representing the basic conflict between “freedom of inquiry” and “the slavery of dogmatic thought”; the community, he noted, is “richly represented” in a “pointed-up” carnival atmosphere by “generally ignorant, bigoted people … a hayseed hero” on trial, “yokels who hoot … and hurl nasty insults” in the courtroom, “a fire-snorting fundamentalist,” and “hymnsingers howling defiantly, ‘That ol’ time religion is good enough for me’”; the “final showdown,” Crowther proclaimed, “is a triumphant moment for human dignity.” Bosley Crowther, “Screen: Triumphant Version of Inherit the Wind,” New York Times, 10 13, 1960, p. 41Google Scholar, cols. 1, 2; “Intellect in Films,” New York Times, 10 16, 1960, sec. 2, p. 1, col. 8Google Scholar.

A contrary judgment of the film and of Bryan appeared in the Christian Century, James H. Smylie presents sympathetically a Bryan deserving of recognition for his seriousness and his concern for law, the common man, and human values. In his undelivered summation prepared for the Scopes trial, Bryan was “after three things,” Smylie noted: (1)“to see that the law passed by the sovereign people of Tennessee was sustained. He did not consider himself or the people above the law. … As he saw it, he was defending the democratic process,” but “his opponents were incensed … that he was fighting for the right of the people to make fools of themselves”; (2) “to clarify publicly the fact that the evolutionary hypothesis about man was still an hypothesis. … Bryan maintained that the Tennessee law did not prohibit the teaching of evolution up to the line that separates man from lower forms of life”; (3) to [underscore] his opinion that “evolution meant ‘evil'ution,’ that the theory was likely to corrupt the school child's opinion of man. … A prisoner of his biblicism, Bryan may have misread Nietzsche and mistaken Darwin's intent,” Smylie agrees. “But by pressing his own convictions he was posing the basic question as to the ultimate source of human value. … An exposé can be cleansing when it is done without contempt for the person involved,” the critic notes, “but Inherit the Wind is devoid of such cleansing. … Darrow no less than Bryan must be held responsible for the circus atmosphere of the trial. And the writers of Inherit the Wind may be accused of resorting to a simplistic approach to the problem of human dignity, an approach which on the surface they appear to condemn roundly” (Smylie, James H., “In Memoriam: W. J. B.,” Christian Century, 49, (02 11, 1961), 49.Google Scholar

190. Quoted in “Modernists and Fundamentalists at Armageddon: The Scopes Case,” Controversy in the Twenties, p. 331.Google Scholar

191. The A.C.L.U. had advertised that it would be willing to help anyone interested in testing the antievolution law, and Scopes, denouncing it “bitterly as an unconstitutional restriction upon freedom of thought and teaching … consented to be a martyr for science … and was arrested.” Darrow's two chief aides, retained by the A.C.L.U., were Dudley Field Malone, “whose fiery oratory won even Dayton” and Arthur Garfield Hays, “who had gone to jail for defending what he believed to be’right.” The Tennessee defense lawyer brought into the case had had his own encounter with the forces of Fundamentalism: John Randolph Neal, formerly a Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee, had been dismissed in 1923 in a controversy involving a colleague, Professor Jesse W. Sprowls, fired for using James Harvey Robinson's The Mind in the Making, See Controversy in the Twenties, pp. 331–32, 345–46Google Scholar; Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 204Google Scholar; Shipley, , The War on Modern Science, p. 190.Google Scholar

192. “Tennessee vs. Truth,” Nation, 121 (07 8, 1925), 58.Google Scholar

193. Quoted by Mims, , The Advancing South, p. 248.Google Scholar

194. Quoted in Controversy in the South, p. 333Google Scholar. The specific statement from Mencken arousing the businessman's ire is difficult to determine, but such observations as the following appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun: “Nine churches are scarcely enough for the 1,800 inhabitants; many of them go into the hills to shout and roll. A clergyman has the rank and authority of a major-general of the artillery. A Sunday-school superintendent is believed to have the gift of prophecy …”; “Let no one mistake [Darrow's case] for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its swom officers of the law” (Mencken, H. L., “‘The Monkey Trial’: A Reporter's Account,” D-Days at Dayton, pp. 40–41, 51).Google Scholar

Although Davidson deplored and railed about the harsh attacks launched against the South in the later 1920s, he seemed to have had no personal animus toward Mencken during the period before he began to think of the South as a cause, judging from his review of Mencken's Notes on Democracy. Published about a year and a half after the Scopes trial, Davidson's commentary advises that despite Mencken's “rather destructive analysis” of democracy, lacking a “carefully symmetrical arrangement,” and a “neatly marching parade of thesis—data—proofconclusion … he must be taken seriously … as a social philosopher and critic.” Seeing Mencken also as “a gargantuan humorist with an immense capacity for invective and ridicule,” Davidson advised that he should be read as Mark Twain, enjoyed for his “vivacity and brilliance of his style,” not for his ideas: “he often draws on himself the just charge of malice because he is either too lazy or too prejudiced to separate truth from falsehood.” Nevertheless, said Davidson, “I do … venture … to express [some] agreement with his ideas,” though Mencken himself, “who uses the South as the butt of his jokes and represents it as wholly intolerant, would perhaps think that I would be in danger of assassination. …” Davidson was not always to maintain this equanimity and generosity when it came to critics of the South. In less than a year he was angrily vowing his intention to meet attacks on the South with counterattacks (see his letter to Allen Tate, May 9, 1927, n. 138). Davidson, , “H. L. Mencken,” Nashville Tennessean, 12 12, 1926Google Scholar, reprinted in The Spyglass, pp. 126–27, 129–31.Google Scholar

195. “Why the Dayton Trial Will Resound to the South's Good,” Manufacturers' Record, 88 (08 20, 1925), 70Google Scholar, quoted in Controversy in the Twenties, p. 354.Google Scholar

196. Straton, John R., “Dayton: A Fundamentalist View,” Controversy in the Twenties, p. 355Google Scholar. The outcome and judgments of the trial are well known from extensive contemporary editorials, columns, and news stories, as well as from recent scholarly commentaries and accounts. But some of the ironies in the series of events have been less widely noted: Bryan's betrayal of his ignorance of the “Good Book,” on which he considered himself an authority, has been pointed out by Darrow himself, whose merciless questioning revealed Bryan's inability to deal at all with Biblical scholarship and history; then his unwitting prediction, before the trial began, that it would be a “duel to the death” was a grim statement taken in the context of his death a few days after the verdict. Although Scopes was found guilty, it was Bryan who was the broken, beaten man. The hope Darrow had for testing the constitutionality of the law was thwarted: planning to appeal ultimately to the federal courts, Darrow was circumvented in his intention when the Tennessee Supreme Court still upheld the law, while it overruled the conviction and the levying of the $100 fine against Scopes for his “misdemeanor” on the technicality that the jury, not the judge, should have fixed the amount. The defense had no conviction to appeal after the chief prosecutor, Attorney General Tom Stewart, dropped the indictment on the advice of the higher court against “prolonging the life of this bizarre case.” There were other ironic repercussions: the sister of Scopes lost her position teaching mathematics in Paducah, Kentucky, because she refused to affirm her disbelief in evolution; bookshops and public libraries, according to a Harper's Weekly contributor, were deluged for three years with orders and requests for evolutionary works. Scopes himself, who had gone to the University of Chicago on a scholarship (arranged by a group of distinguished scientists) withdrew after his name was removed from a fellowship list by the President of the university, who told him he should take his “atheistic marbles and play elsewhere.” In 1965 a Baptist clergyman observed: “The old Tennessee law was never law and never mattered. It was a flag but that was all. Dayton settled nothing.” The law remained on the books in Tennessee until 1967, when the state senate concurred with the House on May 16 by a vote of 20–13 to repeal the law prohibiting the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution; the decision, which had been urged by the entire Divinity School faculty at Vanderbilt, was hailed by the Tennessean as “a progressive step” ending “42 years of pointless controversy over Darwin's theory.” (Passage of the repeal had not been easy: the matter had been debated fervently the month before when the senate had deadlocked 16–16 on a decision to rescind the prohibition.)

But the repeal was not the end of the historic controversy. Six years later, on May 8, 1973, a “Genesis bill” became law in the state of Tennessee when Governor Winfield Dunn failed to veto or to sign the Fundamentalists' new and successful effort to pass legislation permitting the teaching of the Biblical account of man's origin in public schools. This “new version of the old ‘monkey law’ requires all theories … to be given ‘equal emphasis’ in Tennessee's public schools” (except for “satanic theories,” specified in a legislative amendment). The bill originally required that the Genesis account appear in biology textbooks; the new law now provides that supplemental material on the subject may be used, but no account can be taught as fact. During the debate, which received national television coverage, the campaign of a biology professor, Dr. Russell Artist of Lipscomb College (a Church of Christ affiliate), was given a hearing, and a Tennessean reporter declared that “Legislative efforts … to require that state textbooks include various concepts on creation stem from [his efforts] to see that the Biblical version is taught.” At the time of the general assembly's consideration of the bill, there was apparently only one textbook, Biology, A Search for Order and Complexity, which contained the account of Genesis. Cooperatively written, with Artist one of its authors, the book was proposed for inclusion on the approved high school textbook list in 1970, but the State Textbook Commission did not approve it. (Artist points out that all royalties from its sale are given to the Creation Research Society of Ann Arbor to carry on studies of problems related to creation, evolution, and early earth history.) The law goes into effect at the beginning of the 1975–76 school year. See Kovach, Bill, “Darwin Theory Wins Over ‘Monkey Law’”;Google ScholarKovach, , “Memorable Day in the Senate,” Nashville Tennessean, 05 17, 1967Google Scholar; Haile, John, “Genesis Bill Wins House Passage,” Nashville Tennessean, 04 27, 1973Google Scholar; Gillem, Tom, “Prof's Textbook Campaign Led to Genesis Bill,” Nashville Tennessean, 04 30, 1973Google Scholar; Hatcher, Joe, “Great Monkey Trial of 1925,” Nashville Tennessean, 05 6, 1973Google Scholar; Daughtrey, Larry, “Dunn Signature Withheld But Genesis Bill Now Law,” Nashville Tennessean, 05 9, 1973Google Scholar.

In addition to the references already noted (see n. 188 above), tne account of the trial and its significance is indebted to the following sources: Armstrong, Orland K., “Bootleg Science in Tennessee,” North American Review, 227 (02, 1929), 138–42Google Scholar; Cason, Clarence, “Is the South Advancing?” pp. 506–07Google Scholar; Hartt, Rollin L., “What Lies Beyond Dayton?” Nation, 121 (07 22, 1925), 111Google Scholar; Krutch, Joseph Wood, “Darrow vs. Bryan,” Nation, 121 (07 29, 1925), 126–27Google Scholar; Krutch, , “Dayton: Then and Now,” Controversy in the Twenties, pp. 358–67Google Scholar; Krutch, , “Tennessee: Where Cowards Rule,” Nation, 121 (07 15, 1925), 88–89Google Scholar; Manchester, William, Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H. L. Mencken (New York: Harper, 1950), pp. 166 ff.Google Scholar; Milton, George Fort, “Can Minds Be Closed by Statute?” World's Work, 50 (07, 1925), 323–38Google Scholar; Milton, , “Saving Genesis,” Nation, 121 (07 15, 1925), 87Google Scholar; Tennessee: A Guide to the State, pp. 125–26.Google Scholar

197. Fugitives' Reunion, pp. 199, 178Google Scholar; Southern Writers in the Modern World, p. 30Google Scholar. At the 1968 gathering of the Agrarians in Dallas, Tate, Ransom, Lytle, and Warren, questioned about the effect of the Scopes trial on their thinking, seemed to attach less importance to it than Davidson had, although they were speaking of their responses immediately after the trial, while it seems evident from what Davidson wrote that he was thinking of their later reactions, retrospectively. Comments of the Agrarians recorded in their “Conversations” were all directed to the year 1925. Both Ransom and Tate declared that they did not “think that [the Scopes trial] was what caused us to make this defense of the South.” (Ransom attributed this opinion to John L. Stewart, but Stewart's judgment—that “it was the tragi-comedy of the Scopes trial” which led to their consideration of using the South as material—had for its authority Davidson's statements appearing seven years before Stewart's The Burden of Time appeared.) Warren, considering himself peripheral to the thinking of the Fugitives in that period, remarked at the Agrarian meeting that “I was so wrapped up [at Vanderbilt] in things like John Donne and William Blake that I wasn't paying much attention to the Scopes trial.” Like Ransom, who had said, “I don't think it affected our discussions about anything” (they were still meeting as Fugitives then), Lytle observed that he did not think the trial had “any immediate effect at all, really.” Ransom did answer “yes” to the question of whether “it was the reaction to the trial more than the trial.”

Perhaps it is worth noting that when Davidson first asserted—at the Fugitives' reunion in 1956—that the attacks on the South, induced by the Scopes trial, had played a part in the defensive thinking they developed later, none of the other Agrarians there (Ransom, Tate, Warren, Lytle, Owsley) questioned his comment, although there were other matters about which they did debate and disagree. First Session, “Agrarian Conversations at Dallas,” 04 20, 1968Google Scholar. unpublished transcript, p. 12; The Burden of Time, p. 112.Google Scholar

198. Krutch, , “Tennessee vs. Truth,” p. 58.Google Scholar

199. Mims' descriptions of liberal Southerners' attitudes toward evolution are found in “Why the South Is Anti-Evolution,” World's Work, 50 (09, 1925), 548–52Google Scholar; “Vanderbilt University's Liberalism,” Nation, 121 (09 30, 1925), 358Google Scholar; The Advancing South, p. 158.Google Scholar

200. Cowan, , The Fugitive Group, p. 207.Google Scholar

201. Stewart, , The Burden of Time, pp. 109, 110.Google Scholar

202. Davidson, , Southern Writers in the Modern World, pp. 35–36.Google Scholar

203. Ransom, John Crowe, Cod Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (New York: Harcourt, 1930), p. 101Google Scholar. At the Agrarian gathering in Dallas, Lytle remarked that both sides were bad—“one was irreligion and the other was religion of limited scope.” But he felt the supporters of religion “certainly had the right to say what kind of society they were going to have.” He recalls that this was his position at the time, a view derived, he believes, from Sanborn. First Session, “Agrarian Conversations,” pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

Professor Cowan, in her study of the Fugitives, noted that Sanborn “realized … the issue was not so simple as it seemed”; “evolutionary theory was not taught in public schools or state universities by instructors sufficiently well educated to perceive its tentative hypothetical nature” and the student who “was not taught a coherent philosophical view of life … did not comprehend the relation of science to religion, of politics to ethics, of morals to metaphysics.” The danger was implicit: “If moral values therefore were to be made the subject of the evolutionary naturalism of Darwin, a loss of any traditional moral code would necessarily occur” (The Fugitive Group, p. 207).Google Scholar

204. Davidson and Ransom were the two Fugitive-Agrarians Davidson had in mind as finding the prospects implicit in the Scopes trial especially distressing. Davidson, , Southern Writers in the Modern World, p. 40.Google Scholar

205. March 3, 1926, PUL; also in Literary Correspondence, p. 158Google Scholar. Tate's review incorporating some of these ideas was called “Fundamentalism” on Spengler's Decline of the West.

206. Bliven, Bruce, “Away Down South,” New Republic, 50 (05 4, 1927), 296–97.Google Scholar

207. Davidson to Tate, May 9,1927, PUL; also in Literary Correspondence, pp. 201–02.Google Scholar

208. Bliven, , “Away Down South,” p. 297.Google Scholar

209. Southern Writers in the Modern World, pp. 35–36.Google Scholar

210. Fugitives' Reunion, pp. 204–05.Google Scholar

211. Brooks, Van Wyck, America's Coming of Age (New York: Huebsch, 1915), p. 176Google Scholar. Among other critics who concerned themselves with the effect on man of industrialization (in the period of the Agrarian symposium) were Hicks, Granville, “Industry and Imagination,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 28 (04, 1929), 126–35Google Scholar; Untermeyer, Louis, “Worship of the Machine,” American Mercury, 22 (03, 1931), 270–81Google Scholar; Borsodi, Ralph, This Ugly Civilization (New York: Harper, 1929, 1933).Google Scholar

212. The Reverend Henry P. Frost, quoted by Chase, Stuart, “Slaves of the Machine?” Harper's Monthly Magazine, 158 (03, 1929), 480.Google Scholar

213. Chase, , “Slaves of the Machine,” p. 480Google Scholar. Chase himself objected to the idea that people would inevitably be enslaved by the machine, calling such a view “nonsense.”

214. The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926), p. 33.Google Scholar

215. The Golden Day, pp. 237–38, 281.Google Scholar

216. Aiken, Ralph, “More Machines—And Less Men,” North American Review, 231 (05, 1931), 397.Google Scholar

217. One Southerner involved in the labor movement at that time (a member of the militant Conference for Progressive Labor Action, which supported the strikers at Marion) gloomily predicted in 1931 that with the masses of depressed rural workers, “the well-spring of cheap labor … ‘cannot be exhausted for the next fifty years’” (Tippett, Thomas, When Southern Labor Stirs [New York: Cape and Smith, 1930], p. 6Google Scholar, quoted in Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 331).Google Scholar

The nature of the appeal to out-of-state manufacturers, convincing them that the South was a hospitable and profitable place to settle, was consistent, as a remark of a Southern business executive in 1954 makes evident: “Hell, what we've been selling is peace and order—telling 'em that what we've got down here is stability—friendly politicians who are not going to gut a business with taxes, and workers who are grateful for a job and are not going to be stirring up trouble.” Quoted by Harry Ashmore, An Epitaph for Dixie (New York: Norton, 1957), p. 119.Google Scholar

218. Woodward, C. Vann, Origins of the New South, p. 266.Google Scholar

219. Vorse, Mary, “Gastonia,” Harper's Magazine, 159 (11, 1929), 700–01Google Scholar; Blanshard, Paul, “One-Hundred Per Cent Americans, on Strike,” Nation, 128 (05, 1929), 554–55Google Scholar; Mitchell, Broadus, “Fleshpots in the South,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 3 (04, 1927), 170Google ScholarPubMed; Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 318.Google Scholar

Tindall points out that the “regional wage differential was a tenacious reality” during the first three decades of the twentieth century, in ten Southern states the wage average was only 60–70 percent that of the national average ($823 for the average annual earnings—in cotton it was $671). Emergence of the New South, pp. 319–20.Google Scholar

220. In Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, pp. 324, 327, 328.Google Scholar

221. Davidson, to Tate, , 26 10 1929, PULGoogle Scholar; published in Southern Review, n.s. 8 (Autumn, 1972), 865Google Scholar; and in Literary Correspondence, p. 235Google Scholar; Nixon, to Davidson, , 09 15, 1930, Davidson Papers, JUL.Google Scholar

222. Woodward, , Origins of the New South, pp. 131, 133Google Scholar; Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, pp. 342–43Google Scholar. The rapid development of the textile industry during the late nineteenth century in such states as North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—without social legislation—created the tradition of expecting a docile, native American hard-working labor force. The conclusion of a committee of “the influential Arkwright Club of New England” in 1897 suggests why the South eventually won the race for the textile industry: “We have … practically to consider only the problem that is presented by the fact that labor is cheaper in the South; that the hours of labor are longer, and that there is neither any of the restrictive legislation urged among us by the labor unions, and very generally placed upon our statute-books, nor any prospect even of an early agitation in behalf of such restrictions. … So far as we could learn there is no disposition to organize labor unions” (Manufacturers' Record, 32 [12 24, 1897]. 335Google Scholar, quoted in Woodward, , Origins of the New South, p. 307).Google Scholar

Over the decades an incredible increase of textile mills and production was the result of concerted efforts at promoting industries to settle in the South. Gaston County, North Carolina, for instance, adopted the wildly unrealistic slogan “Organize a mill a week,” and while its goal was unattainable, by 1929 it was the leading textile producer in all of the South and third in the nation. Year after year in the 1920s the South surpassed Northern mills in one form or another: by 1927, even with its markedly lower wages, it exceeded the New England textile industry in both total wages and total spindles. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 75.Google Scholar

223. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 333.Google Scholar

224. Nell Battle Lewis, in her column for the Raleigh News and Observer, labeled the mill town “barbaric Gastonia”; Presidents W. L. Poteat of Wake Forest College and Harry W. Chase of the University of North Carolina publicly stated that the workers' civil liberties should be respected; an editorial in the New Republic (09 25, 1929)Google Scholar commented: “Those with a progressive philosophy can point to the attitude of the few Southern editors like George Fort Milton of the Chattanooga News, who has courageously protested against the drift of affairs” (“Class War in North Carolina,” p. 138Google Scholar). Mary Vorse, in her partisan reportorial account of what happened at Gastonia, concluded: “If the Southern industrialists hold to their present policy [repression], they face a long and bloody war, bitter and costly. Sooner or later they will have to yield. Political equality cannot exist side by side with industrial feudalism” (“Gastonia,” p. 710).Google Scholar

225. Cash, , The Mind of the South, p. 363Google Scholar; Hesseltine, , The South in American History, pp. 608–09Google Scholar; Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, pp. 344–47Google Scholar; Vorse, , “Gastonia,” pp. 700–10Google Scholar; Matthews, T. S., “Gastonia in Court,” New Republic, 50 (09 18, 1929), 119–21.Google Scholar

226. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, pp. 345, 350–51Google Scholar. Tindall points out the role the press played in these labor disturbances; the Gastonia Gazette, for instance, seemed no different from a company house organ; advertisements it ran “warned against world revolution, irreligion, racial mixing, and free love”; another described the strike as started “simply for the purpose of overthrowing this government and to kill, kill, kill.” After the turn of the tide, a number of Southern newspapers joined “the call for reform” (Tindall names seven), church groups “passed resolutions on labor issues,” the United States Senate established a committee to investigate working conditions in the Southern textile industry, and out of the University of North Carolina came an impressive number of articles and books—channeled through the University Press, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Howard Odum's sociological journal, Social Forces, Some 415 citizens of the state joined History Professor Frank P. Graham, supporting his defense of workers' civil liberties, collective bargaining, better working conditions (fewer hours, ending of night work). Even certain Southern manufacturers gave evidence of a change in attitude, and welfare work was instituted at some of the strike centers. The Emergence of the New South, pp. 351–33.Google Scholar

227. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, p. 349.Google Scholar

228. Tindall, , The Emergence of the New South, pp. 347–49Google Scholar; Spofford, William, “Marion, North Carolina,” Christian Century, 46 (12 4, 1929), 1502–03Google Scholar; Cash, , The Mind of the South, p. 364Google Scholar. It is not surprising that appeals based on Southern tradition would persuade a jury. A great many workers, for whom a union and a strike would have been in their best interests, not only refused to participate in the effort but disavowed the action of the more militant workers and “sometimes … even lent their services to the opposition.” Cash notes that “if it was true that [the workers] had developed more coherent and fixed resentment than they had ever exhibited in the past, it was still far from true that they had developed enough of it to begin to break down the old common pattern in which they were fixed as completely as any group of Southerners” (p. 365). Such a pattern “at the core of the Southern mill workers' outlook on life … [is reflected in] the Sunday school, the Star Spangled Banner, and personal friendship for the boss” (Blanshard, Paul, “One-Hundred Per Cent Americans on Strike,” p. 556).Google Scholar

229. Davidson, to Tate, , 02 5, 1929, PULGoogle Scholar; published in Southern Review, n.s. 8 (Autumn, 1972), 852Google Scholar; and in Literary Correspondence, p. 221.Google Scholar