They [Agrarians] held that since the long prevailing contrary principles had worked out badly, especially for the South, it was time to reassert the old principles, or at least consider on what terms they might be reasserted. The upshot was that they recommended agrarianism as containing both the principles and the program in which Southerners would do well to be interested.
But upon entering the public forum they found that even to utter the phrase "agrarian tradition," was, in the opinion of many educated Southerners, heresy of the most absurd and violent kind.
The Northern press, with all of the Southern press that takes its cue from New York, have unanimously agreed that the South is guilty of numerous crimes against progress.
Since the days when abolitionism first began to be militant, the South has repeatedly served as a stalking home for a bagging game that in the last analysis had little to do with pious rewards and humanitarian reforms. Whenever the Northeast has felt a threat against its power or has wished to gain new power, the familiar story of the Southern "outrage" has flooded the press or appeared in the halls of Congress. The outcry against the "slaveocracy" paved the way for high tariffs...
So likewise in 1920 and later, when the major problem before the American people was how to adjust an overexpanded industrial machine to postwar conditions, it was again the Southern "outrage" that kept the public amused while the way was being greased for Hoover prosperity and the great debacle of 1929.
The technique is automatic. I do not agree that it represents some deliberate, highly wrought conspiracy against the South, but rather that it is the nature of an urban, industrialized society to behave thus towards whatever stands in its path, and to feel quite self-righteous in so doing.
Not only does it serve to discredit Southern opinion and prevent it from making headway in the nation, but it also indoctrinates the South, under present conditions, with a feeling of its own inferiority and so divides the South against itself. One is tempted to call it an item of salesmanship or a step in the process of "selling" the South devices that will make it feel less inferior...
The "high standard" of living has brought him into the indusrial system of buying continually a series of articles that must be continually replaced. The result of this process in the South has been a wholesale exportation of Southern cash, and, more devastatingly, of physical resources - and all without adequate compensation. It has meant depletion of resources, debt, and parasitism more vast than the South has ever experienced.
The cost of going modern for the South meant a sudden expansion of the functions of state and local governments throughout the South, and the correspondingly sudden and enormous increase of public expenditure thereby made necessary...for the South the improvements meant large borrowings and vast increases in taxation.
burden falls upon the farmer who tried to go heavily into cash crops.
He has had little success, and that little has been gained at the expense of his land and of his old independence.
The advance of industry and the simultaneous expansion of governmental functions have brought a painful increase in agricultural disability, a rapid exhaustion of Southern soil, a ravaging of Southern timber, and, most alarming of all, an increase in tenancy and a decrease in farm ownership.
Industries often came upon a promise of tax exemption. From Ben Tillman to Theodore Bilbo to Huey Long the story is the same. The moment when they are suddenly discovered - by the metropolitan press - to be wicked demagogues and dictators is generally the moment when they begin to rouse the people and to dictate the tax bills of big business...
a strategic problem: how to arrive at Southern policies that will be well founded historically and at the same time applicable to the existing situation.
The Southerner is always pleading a sectional case before a court that insists upon ruling sectional issues irrelevant. In this dilemma Harper and Dew were driven into a defense of slavery, and Calhoun into an attack upon majority rule and advocacy of secession.
In 1850 the logic of the Northern argument was: Southern notions about democracy and the Constitution are invalid because the Southerner is an inhumane slave-holder and belongs to an arrogant "slaveocracy," and he is speaking as a Southerner only, while we of the North are speaking as Americans and have the nation's good in mind.
In 1937 the argument runs: there is no merit in a Southern approach to regional or national affairs, because the South is a backward region, addicted to lynching, illiteracy, demagogues, and hookworm.
And so, if the Southerner voices a preference for a different brand of education from what is being offered, he is assailed as an enemy of education. If he questions the economy and usefulness of a certain road-building program on the ground that it serves the through-truck-and-tourist-traffic but does not help the farmer, then he is asked whether he proposes to return to ox-carts. If he points out that the Constitution gurantees freedom of worship and by no means charges the government with fostering pseudo-religion disguised as science, the he is called a fundamentalist from the Bible Belt. If he questions the wisdom of introducing large mass production units into an agricultural area, he is accused of wanting to do away with machinery. He must, in short, deal with arguments that continually beg the question. How shall the Southerner escape from this dilemma? How can he meet criticism, improve Southern tradition, and still be true to the South?
We must clear away the false issues, the confused and misleading terms. To do this it is necessary, for a time at least, to get away from expedients and back to principles.
And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people. This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government...They [the people] are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty...This reliance cannot deceive us, as long as we remain virtuous; and I think we shall be so, as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case, while there remain vacant lands in any part of America. When we get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there.
Southern history is the key to American history and to the puzzle of the contemporary South as well.
Jefferson's vision included a shrewd assessment of the differences between the conditions under which American liberty could flourish and the European conditions which were destined to permit liberalism into utilitarianism and laissez-faire.
Most important of all, America was comfortably distant from the exploitative commercialism, founded on manufacture and high finance, that was well under way in Great Britain.
John Taylor defined the danger of giving perpetual legal privileges to corporations. In a democracy there was peril even in the notion of inviolability of contract when it applied to corporate personalities.
In the name of the Union, a war was waged where the ultimate effect was to strike down obstacles to the development of a consolidated industrial empire, and through the 14th amendment, to set at nought Taylor's old suspicion of charters and to give the Northeast a great exploitative weapon.
-Donald Davidson
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