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7 THE FUGITIVE IMAGINATION A John Brown for the Old South In July 1925, Tennessee was thrust into national headlines. John Scopes, a Rhea County biology teacher, was charged with illegally explaining evolution in his high school science class. A bonanza for journalists, the trial exposed America’s sectional fault lines and reinforced long-standing national stereotypes of the South. H. L. Mencken, a writer for the Baltimore Sun and the country’s best-known columnist, aggressively chronicled what he considered the perfect encapsulation of an American backwater. Mencken’s columns on the trial were filled with references to the “yokels,” “primates,” “morons,” “half-wits,” and “hillbillies” who populated the South.1 In the hands of writers like Mencken, the trial crystallized the national perception of the South as intellectually, religiously, and culturally backward .2 For Southerners, the trial became, in the words of Fred Hobson, “a prototypic event, the single event that . . . brought to the surface all of the forces and tensions that had characterized the post-war South, the event that most forcefully dramatized the struggle between southern provincialism and the modern, secular world.”3 In nearby Nashville, an influential group of writers and intellectuals at Vanderbilt University were radicalized by that prototypic event. In no uncertain terms, the Scopes trial galvanized a new Southern intellectual movement and revealed the battlefield where the cultural honor of this maligned region could be reclaimed. Beyond making “Southern intellectual” an oxymoron, the Scopes trial showed that this battle would be fought not with bayonets but with words. The dynamic group of poets, writers, and academics who answered that call to arms included Robert Penn Warren, Bayonets and bullets and God’s will . . . with a “little touch of insanity.” . . . Captain Brown was a “higher law man.” He was “superior to any legal tradition”—just as most of these people felt themselves to be—and if he claimed to have a divine commission, they could understand what he meant, for they too were privy to God. —Robert Penn Warren, 1929 The Fugitive Imagination 121 Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, and Andrew Lytle—a collective known in the 1920s as the Fugitives. In their post-Scopes fervor , these men pursued a broad range of intellectual, cultural, and social projects to contrast the halcyon days of the antebellum years with the encroaching problems of the industrial North. Spearheaded by some of the leading writers of the period, the Fugitives revived the personalities and conflicts of the antebellum and Civil War eras in fiction, poetry, and biography . Often using the conflict-ridden language of the Civil War itself, the Fugitives set out to rewrite the past to create the future. The Scopes trial demonstrated to them the urgency of seizing the memory and future of the South, since failure to do so would be tantamount to conceding another defeat. The most intriguing response to the Scopes debacle came from a young Kentuckian named Robert Penn Warren. The only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry, Warren began his career with a biography straight from the belly of the Fugitive beast: John Brown: The Making of a Martyr.Warren’s study embodied the collective Fugitive campaign, a movement that culminated with the controversial volume of essays I’ll Take My Stand. While the Fugitives are mostly remembered for the literary impact of their individual members, this generation of Southern intellectuals and their propagandistic biographies, utopian schemes, and agrarian manifestoes successfully shifted national understandings of the New South as well as the Old. The insinuatory impact of their advocacy reveals the deep roots of America’s fractured national identity and the national traumas that continue to haunt us. In an unpublished essay from 1963,Warren wrote that although he had lived all over the world, “I have always felt myself identified with [the South].” He described his intense relationship with the region: “By blood, education, and formative experience, I was Southern. My two Grandfathers were at Shiloh, for what I consider good and sufficient reason, and I am proud of the fact. All the books I have written are about the South, for life there engaged my imagination more deeply than any other topic.”4 Warren’s conjured South, revealed through his publications and private correspondence, allows us to trace the Fugitives’ manipulation of John Brown and the imagined past they sought to revive. Using the authority of history, the group’s collective projects rehabilitated national opinion of not just a region but...

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