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Title: I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Library of Southern Civilization) by Twelve Southerners, Louis Decimus, Jr. Rubin ISBN: 0-8071-0357-8 Publisher: Louisiana State University Press Pub. Date: January, 1978 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.07 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Chillingly prophetic classic, must read for all Southerners
Comment: The footnotes of so many books about the South reference this book that a visit to the source was inevitable. This book captures the best and worst of our Southern heritage. It is not a prescription for economics. It was environmental before the term was coined. It also portrays with poetic beauty at times the organic symmetry of a kinder gentler time when people were in tune with the rythmns of nature. Some of the essays are better than others and a couple are outright tomes. But there is a reason it has always been visited by any serious student of the South.
Rating: 3
Summary: Rebuttal to the Fascist Moron from Zurich
Comment: I felt I should take the time to respond to the ravings of the self-righteous, totalitarian imbecile who last reviewed this book. His assertion that the book is 'racist' because it doesn't include 'black views' of the South's agrarian tradition is moronic. The tradition being discussed in the book is one of small, private ownership of land, which in any agrarion society is the primary means of producing goods and thus, indirectly, of wealth. It is a pre-industrial version of the idea that wide ownership of capital is a pre-requisite for a good society - a notion proposed in more modern form in such books as "The Ownership Solution". It is thus by it's very nature opposed to the sort of massive agricultural operations invovled in running a plantation. This, of course, is why the previous reviewer's comments are so stupid - they literally have nothing whatsoever to do with the point of this book, but rather with an economic system utterly opposed to what the essays contained here espouse. Only one man in five in the South owned any slaves. To damn, as this idiot does, and entire people and way of life because of the crimes of their ruling class is the height of politically correct arrogance. Nowhere in his stupid ramblings are his totalitarian views better brought out than in his last comments, about how this book could not be published in his country of residence. This fool clearly considers this a good thing; anyone who believes in freedom of speech, in the right of people to hold unfashionable opinions, and indeed in the right of people to _think for themselves_ should recognize at once the beat of goose-stepping legions in the background when they read that retard's trash.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Agrarian South Vs. The Industrial North
Comment: These southern writers of I'll Take My Stand, sounded like farmers, but were mostly professors who originated from the south. Many of them lived and taught outside the south, but still had Dixie on their minds. All of them were connected in some way with Vanderbilt University. These are southern gentleman writers with flowing prose and show that the south is not completely anti-intellectual, though one writer says that southerners were not into learning just for learnings's sake, like in the north. I will say anti-intellectualism does shield people from bad ideas and keeps them to the tried and true old ways.
In general, the argument is that the agrarian culture of the south was superior to the industrial culture of the north. Farmers were self-sufficient and were able to remain independent from the government and the money economy by growing their own food, making their own clothes, and building their own shelters. The ideal farming which preserves the southern culture is pre-dominately subsistence farming and does not depend on money crops and the boom and bust economy. The King Cotton cash crop was criticized because once it was over-produced and prices for it fell, farmers fell into never ending debt. One writer mentions that farmers should not be into farming to get rich, but to preserve an agrarian lifestyle.
It is also mentioned that farm work was not as mechanical as the factory work of the North. It was claimed that the South had more time for leisure to support a richer cultural life than the North. The North is accused of money-grubbing, emphasizing economic concerns over quality of life concerns. One writer regrets that the South did not become a hot spot for higher learning, like the North East had become. If only the South hadn't been invaded by Yankees, their culture would have developed more and became permanent!
There are some complaints about cars and how the roads are detrimental to farming life and the agrarian culture of the South. In general, the authors were concerned with preserving this culture and were worried that since they lost the Civil War, they would eventually lose their culture to the industrial culture of the north. It is a good book to find out about what life was like for southerners after the war--what pressures and problems of survival they had and the poverty they faced.
There is some discussion of the civil war. One author saw the war as war between two cultures that were diametrically opposed to one another. The north needed the south to live off of and so it could not let her go. It is also interesting to note that the south did not like tariffs because they were detrimental to farmers, but the north did.
The problem of slavery is presented as something that was forced on America by England, since England was making a fortune off the slave trade. The south was not blamed for having the pre-dominate share of slaves until about 1830 when a fanatical abolitionist by the name of William Lloyd Garrison started circulating "stories" about "evil" slave owners who mistreated their slaves terribly.
The agrarian south and its culture is a ghost of its former self, but some of these issues live own with writers like Wendell Berry who advocate going back to the farm and becoming more self-sufficient, while being less southern and more racially egalitarian. Luddites will like this book. The book shows convincely that if technology changes, it changes the culture and many people won't like those changes. The writers often seem justifiably bitter about the way things turned out for the south, with their nation and culture being conquered and all. And what can I say? The book is bedrock conservative, sometimes stultifyingly so, you'll have blow the dust off this one!
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Title: The Southern Tradition : The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism by Eugene D. Genovese ISBN: 0674825284 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence by Herbert Agar, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Mary Shattuck Fisher, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davisdon, Cleanth Brooks, Lyle H. Lanier, Hilaire Belloc ISBN: 1882926374 Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) Pub. Date: December, 1999 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective (Southern Classics Series) by William Pratt ISBN: 1879941007 Publisher: J S Sanders & Co Pub. Date: December, 1991 List Price(USD): $17.90 |
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Title: The Mind of the South by W.J. CASH ISBN: 0679736476 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 10 September, 1991 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Southern by the Grace of God by Michael Andrew Grissom ISBN: 0882897616 Publisher: Pelican Pub Co Pub. Date: August, 1989 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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