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1. “Not a Mere Real Estate Development”: Capital, Land, and the Agrarians’ Proprietary Ideal In “The Irrepressible Conflict,” his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), historian Frank Owsley wrote that “[w]hen America was settled, the tradition of the soil found hospitable rootbed in the Southern colonies, where climate and land combined to multiply the richness of an agrarian economy. . . . Thoughts, words, ideas, concepts, life itself, grew from the soil.” Here, Owsley presents a traditional South, and an economic system, that was at one with nature. The “richness” of the region’s “agrarian economy” fairly burst forth from the South’s fecund loam. But Owsley and his fellow Agrarians never—any more than the early colonists Owsley describes—“discovered a ‘natural’ order” in the South’s physical geography. As Michael Kreyling has observed, they themselves invented this supposedly “natural,” “organic” South. Thus the Agrarian construction of “the South” is often as notable for what it excludes as for what it includes. To cite only one glaring example, when Owsley refers to southerners’ “endless enjoyment of the fruits of the soil,” he fails to mention the slave labor often involved in farming these “fruits.” For Owsley to maintain his image of a “natural” society, this strategic exclusion is a structural and ideological necessity.1 Throughout I’ll Take My Stand, both slavery and postbellum race relations jeopardize the Agrarians’ collective e≠ort to construct “the South and the Agrarian Tradition” as natural and benevolent. John Crowe Ransom attempts to slide smoothly from “the social organization” of “squirearchy” into the supposedly natural relations of master and slave: “people were for the most part in their right places. Slavery was a feature monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice.” In “The Briar Patch,” Robert Penn Warren provides rhetorical sanction for racial segregation by arguing that “the small town and farm” was the natural, biological, even metaphysical , “place” for “the Southern negro.” Warren concludes: “That is where he 1. Frank Owsley, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” in Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand (1930; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 69; Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature, 6. 4 : Capital, Land, and Place still chiefly belongs, by temperament and capacity; there he . . . is likely to find in agricultural and domestic pursuits the happiness that his good nature and easy ways incline him to as an ordinary function of his being.” Ransom and Warren’s essays exemplify the pernicious way in which, as Charles Reagan Wilson has noted, “southern whites [have] frequently used place to indicate the status of blacks.”2 The Agrarians’ “natural” rhetoric also failed to obscure what Richard Gray has called the “doubleness” running through I’ll Take My Stand’s representation (s) of “the regional tradition.” The Twelve Southerners’ vision of “the South and the Agrarian Tradition” is divided between the antebellum plantation and, more usually, the yeoman farm—or, in some cases, it includes an unconvincing admixture of both. Stark Young claims that “our traditional Southern characteristics derive from the landed class.” This class bias led Young to confront the thorny issue of slavery more explicitly than Ransom did; he acknowledged that “we are talking largely of a certain life in the Old South, a life founded on land and the ownership of slaves.” In stark contrast to Young, who damns the “respectable and sturdy” yeomanry with faint praise and scorns the “shiftless” poor whites, Andrew Lytle sees the South’s man at the center as the small farmer. Somewhere in between, Owsley describes a South that, presumably by virtue of being “close to the soil,” could naturally encompass both the plantation and the small farm.3 These divisions and elisions in Agrarian thought circa 1930 have been well documented by Gray and other scholars. I have touched on them here in order to make an important point that serves as the springboard for the argument that follows. My point is that, whatever the fraught and flagrant problems regarding the place of “race” (or the race of “place”), and however di∞cult the farm/plantation dichotomy, the Twelve Southerners were compelled to construct “the Agrarian Tradition” along these complicated and often contradictory lines because they feared the impact of modern capitalism upon the contemporary South. In this opening chapter, I will argue that Agrarian images of southern “place” were conceived primarily as 2. John Crowe Ransom, “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” I’ll Take My Stand, 14...

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