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14 Chapter One “THE LOOK BACK HOME FROM A LONG DISTANCE” Robert Penn Warren and the Limits of Historical Responsibility Unlike the other authors considered in this project, early in his career Robert Penn Warren offered a full-throated defense of southern innocence , which is to say segregation. His first book, the biography John Brown: The Making of a Martyr, published in 1929 while he was at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, treats the abolitionist radical not as a symptom of the polarizing force of slavery, but as a violently unbalanced man driven by an otherworldly megalomania to reckless acts of violence justified by his opposition to slavery. This text is of a piece with the continuing revisionist project of the Lost Cause, as is his next publication , a rationalization of southern exceptionalism titled “The Briar Patch” included in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). Although Warren’s views on the South evolve dramatically from the positions he stakes out in these initial pieces, he never fully rejects certain premises expressed therein, even as he finally discards the ideology of southern innocence. The opinions and observations Warren expresses in his three civil rights texts, Segregation: The Inner Conflict of the South (1956), The Legacy of the Civil War (1961), and Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), remain qualified by elements of conservative Agrarianism not tied to matters of race but concerned instead with Cold War notions of exceptionalism. Agrarianism was both an insular and catholic movement from its beginnings.1 The introduction to I’ll Take My Stand, subtitled “A Statement of Principles” declares that “no single author is responsible for any view outside his own article” although all “the articles . . . tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or Warren and the Limits of Historical Responsibility 15 prevailing way” (xix). Agrarianism, a defensive response to attitudes outside the South, was conceived in opposition to the Fordist society that came to dominate manufacturing during the Roaring Twenties. The Agrarians considered the cosmopolitan, proindustrial, urban society produced by the assembly line as inappropriate for their region, and by extension, much of the nation. Although I’ll Take My Stand offered a strong critique of industrial capitalism, the Agrarians rejected Communism as a suitable alternative on the grounds that both systems were equally committed to a technological development they found relentless and alienating. Rather than endorsing capitalism or Communism, I’ll Take My Stand attempts to articulate a humanistic way of life tied as closely as possible to the land, “not an abstract system, but a culture, the whole way in which we live, act, think, and feel. It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition. And, in the concrete, we believe that this, the genuine humanism, was rooted in the agrarian life of the older South” (xxvi). This argument subordinates economic productivity to the restricting necessities of regional culture. The Agrarians felt that only in the South could one escape the hastening tempo of modern life in a society that provides more and more material goods, but fails to deliver the time or the means to integrate these goods into “the life pattern of the community ” (xxix). Agrarianism celebrates the contemplative leisure necessary to achieving balance between the economic, social, and cultural phases of life and scoffs at the notion that rising wages or increased productivity are worth the sacrifice of man’s speculative time.2 “The Briar Patch,” Warren’s contribution to I’ll Take My Stand, concerns itself with Agrarianism’s capacity for permitting the development of the Black community in the South, for, if “the Southern white man feels that the agrarian life had a certain irreplaceable value in his society, and if he hopes to maintain its integrity in the face of industrialism . . . he must find a place for the negro in his scheme” (263). Warren’s paternalistic assertion that Agrarianism must account for the status of its minorities if it hopes to maintain legitimacy was simultaneously conservative—since Warren conceives of Black southerners as serfs, dependent for the foreseeable future on the largesse and equanimity of a white southern gentry— and progressive, because, as Warren is painfully aware, many southerners would happily “keep the negroes forever as a dead and inarticulate mass” instead of permitting a course of action that allows for their gradual economic development (248). Acknowledging...

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