What does it mean to be an “agrarian”?  In reading Southern literary journals, I get the impression that the “agrarians” were an isolated group of writers who, nostalgic for the preindustrial South, celebrated in prose and verse the bygone beauties of rustic life.  In this sense, they were like the early Romantics, and their movement, if it can be called that, represented more a literary tendency than any coherent political or social vision.  Such a description certainly fits some of the Nashville Agrarians, particularly in their later years, but it is at odds with the basic meaning of the word agrarian, and, before we can begin to assess agrarianism, we have to know what the word means and the long tradition that gives it meaning.

Sometimes, in trying to solve an American puzzle, it helps to go abroad.  Over the years, I have been called upon to explain the Southern agrarian tradition to Europeans.  In the lectures and interviews I have given, the first problem I face is the word agrarian.  The subtitle of I’ll Take My Stand is “Essays in the Agrarian Tradition.”  The phrase is Davidson’s, but Ransom uses the term several times in his introductory statement of principles, where it seems to mean something like “pertaining to the life of the farm,” as in the “agrarian life of the South.”  Ransom says that agrarianism is opposed to the industrial way of life and that it “does not stand in any particular need of definition.”  That is simply not true, and either Ransom and Davidson were ignorant of common English usage or else, as I think, pulling a fast one.

Agrarian, as anyone who survived first year Latin knows, comes from the Latin ager, meaning a field or land that is owned and cultivated, as opposed to campus, which also means field, in the sense of a level piece of unforested ground that is not under cultivation.  The Latin adjective agrarius, then, was applied to anything having to do with the possession and management of cultivated land, but it acquired a very particular meaning in the period after the Punic Wars, when land-hungry veterans were demanding a share of the territory that had been conquered by the Roman republic.  The Gracchus brothers who led this insurgency, which more than once turned violent, hoped to gain power and influence by passing agrarian laws, which were supposed to reduce the amount of public land that wealthy senators could own or lease or use and redistribute some of the surplus to the poor.  This was neither the first nor the last time in history when the very rich would use the government to increase their wealth at the expense of poor and middling farmers.  When Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, told American farmers to “get big or get out,” he did not have to exercise his prophetic powers to predict the result.

From this bit of history, it has developed that, even in English, agrarian has been used most often in the sense of agrarian reform laws that take land from the rich and give it to the poor, and that is the only sense in which the term is used in Italian and French.  In fact, the earliest English uses noted in the OED have to do with agrarian legislation, and even the later, more general meaning—that pertaining to land and agriculture, cited from 19th-century writers—almost always refers to unrest and strife among the discontented rural poor.  It is clear when we come to agrarian as a noun in English: An agrarian is one who favors a more equitable redistribution of farmland.

This is a very important fact, and one not likely to have been unknown to Donald Davidson and John Crowe Ransom and their colleagues, and it suggests that any true agrarian movement is as much a political and economic program as it is a romantic defense of rural life.  Why the apparently sly twist of the word, if my interpretation is correct?  It may well have been unconscious: A group of friends gets in the habit of using a word and eventually forgets where it came from.

On the other hand, we should remember the context.  The core contributors of the book were predominantly conservatives who thought of themselves as classical liberals—that is, opposed to collectivism.  Allen Tate, as is well known, did not like the title I’ll Take My Stand, and he and Robert Penn Warren proposed Tracts Against Communism.  Donald Davidson replied that it was a fine title, but perhaps the volume should then include something on the topic.  Tate’s alternative did have one virtue: It would show the world that the Twelve Southerners were not wild-eyed Bolsheviks eager to confiscate private property.

A few of them, at least, were agrarian in the traditional sense.  In his essay in Who Owns America?, John Crowe Ransom was as explicit as Chesterton and Belloc in advocating a more widely diffused ownership of lands and business, and that is the real heart of agrarian political theory.

We Americans like to flatter ourselves that we have created a genuinely new world—“a new nation, conceived in liberty,” a “city on a hill,” and the home of the new “democratic man.”  This all, as the preacher would say, is vanity.  America has contributed little to the world that we did not receive from our European ancestors.  This is equally true of agrarianism.  All the fundamental ideas of the Southern Agrarians go back to the ancient world, though sprinkled with the dust of Romanticism that projects the rather dangerous illusion that country people are more virtuous than city people.  The ancients knew otherwise: Man is a social animal, and the desire to go live in the woods or on a solitary farm—the dream of Thoreau in Walden, for example—is perilous in the extreme.  The old man of the woods, let us remember, is the Devil, who is forever luring us into the wilderness in order to tempt us.

Agrarianism has little to do with a romantic celebration of the traditions of rural life; it is, instead, a way of viewing the world and its problems from the very basic and earthy perspective of the farmer.  The questions asked by agrarian writers from Hesiod to Mel Bradford include: What is the best sort of life that the gods or God has designed for man?  What are the political, social, and economic institutions or policies that will help us to lead this life?

Life on American farms and plantations was a life lived in community, whether that community was formed by the planter, his family, and his people or by the church and hamlets around which smaller farms are inevitably clustered.  This is the normal life for man, and the ancient Greeks, who preferred to live in cities and villages, were, for the most part, farmers who spent their working days out on their farms, even when this meant getting up well before first light to begin the long walk into the country.

To understand Greek agrarian attitudes, we must go back to basic texts, particularly to Hesiod’s Works and Days.  Near the beginning, the poet launches into a discourse on competition.  There are two kinds of strife or emulation, he says: one that fosters war, and the other that stimulates even lazy and shiftless types to work hard, because the lazy man can see that, in his neighbor’s case, hard work pays off.  Hesiod is deeply suspicious of the rich and praises the life of the sturdy yeoman class.  Hard work is good for a man, who might otherwise do enough work in a day to supply him for a year.  In the end, he would give up working, and his farm would go to rack and ruin.  But Zeus, to punish Prometheus through mankind, hid the secret of easy living.

Man might have lived forever in paradise if he had contented himself with being a farmer without technology.  In fact, it is Prometheus, the patron saint of technology, who fashions the woman that is man’s undoing.  This is the first Western attempt at drawing up a theodicy, and it explains why work, specifically farm work, is both a punishment and the only way of life proper to man.

Eight centuries later, the Roman poet Vergil, himself a dispossessed farmer, picked up where Hesiod left off, explaining the necessity of work and advancing the Augustan agenda of increasing the class of independent farmers.  In the Georgics, Vergil tried to revive the ideal of the sturdy yeoman, but his poem, as beautiful as its descriptions of rural life (with all its harshness) are, has a philosophical and political purpose.  Anticipating Ovid’s amor omnia vincit, Vergil says it is improbus labor that conquers all.  Civilization is like man rowing laboriously upstream: Slack off for a moment on the oars, and you will be swept back downstream.

Time passes.  The empire rises and falls; the Christian Age rises and decays into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.  The settlers of the English colonies in North America, however, return to a way of life more like the 12th century or the early Roman republic.  On the eve of the Revolution, Americans typically lived together in family settlements of two to three generations; they tended to be rather religious; most importantly, they had arrived in the New World not so much to change their mode of life as to acquire new lands.  Before industrialization, the United States as a whole was a nation of reactionary farmers who had rebelled against the king with the intention of restoring what they thought was the old English constitution and in order to remain in possession of the traditional and chartered privileges of the colonies of Massachusetts, Virginia, and Carolina.

After the Revolution, the Northeast became, little by little, a commercial and industrial society.  Nevertheless, the people of the South and West conserved their agricultural character.  The struggle between these two sectional interests—the one, commercial; the other, agricultural—defines, in part, American politics up to the present, and it was this conflict that was the principal cause of the War Between the States.

During the presidency of George Washington, this political division split the Cabinet in two.  Alexander Hamilton upheld the interests of the bankers and businessmen of the Northeast, while Thomas Jefferson made himself the spokesman for the farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers of the entire country.  Jefferson insisted that the people of America—in particular, the small to middling farmers—were in a position to look after their own interests without the kind attention of the national government, and the presidential election of 1800 has been seen as a second American revolution.

Jefferson dedicated a large part of his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to questions of farming.  Jefferson also kept diaries on his gardens and farms.  One year after drafting the Declaration of Independence, he was recording the peas and spinach he planted, the number of blankets distributed to his slaves (he called them, collectively, his “family”).  According to Jefferson and his followers, agriculture is both the best means of gaining a living and the only secure foundation of a republic.  In a letter to John Jay, he wrote:

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens.  They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.  I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or anything else.

Jefferson saw that the growth of population and expansion of manufacturing would change the situation, but, he added, he would prefer to send farmhands to sea than to turn them into industrial workers: “I consider the class of artificers as the panders of vice and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned.”

According to Jefferson, republican liberty depends on independent farmers who would defend their own land.  This conviction was shared by his follower, John Taylor.  It was no accident, Taylor explained in Arator, that the divine intelligence chose the agricultural condition as the human paradise.  The farmer’s life is peaceful and honest, he writes, but military imperialism not only despoils the conquered but also imposes

a permanent system of heavy taxation than which nothing can more vitally wound or kill the pleasures of agriculture; and to pillage or steal under the sanction of the statute books is no less fatal to the happiness of agriculture than the pretended sanction of God, or the feudal tyranny over the body, under the equally fraudulent pretence of defending the nation.

Taylor deplored the money culture established by bankers and financiers who sucked up the farmers’ surpluses and drove the farmers themselves into a suicidal pursuit of bigger and easier profits.  This encouraged them in a reckless disregard for improving the soil and establishing a stable civilization.  Farmers were forced, as Andrew Lytle would later put it, to live off of the topsoil.  While this tendency is aggravated by the system of money and debt, Taylor also understands that wanderlust is the original sin of our American character.  He cites what he calls “the terrible facts” that are responsible for the exhausted condition of agriculture: “that the strongest chord which vibrates on the heart of man, cannot tie our people to the natal spot, that they view it with horror, and flee from it to new climes with joy.”

The Southern Agrarians owed a great deal to Taylor.  He anticipated John Crowe Ransom’s condemnation of mobility in I’ll Take My Stand, and both Andrew Lytle and M.E. Bradford, who edited Arator, learned much of their own political wisdom from Taylor.  As varied as Taylor’s political struggles were, Bradford glimpsed the thread: a relentless opposition to the centralization of power in the hands of Washington politicians, to the centralization of wealth in the hands of Northeastern bankers, and to the centralization of force in the hands of a nationally controlled army.

The progressive deterioration of the soils, caused in part by an exploitative economic system, was partly to blame for the westward migration that destabilized American social and cultural life.  In the antebellum South, however, many planters did take a serious interest in improving the condition of the soil.  Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia planter, gained a reputation as an agronomist from his success in renewing exhausted lands in the James River valley.  In 1843, James Henry Hammond, governor of South Carolina, invited Ruffin to take a survey of South Carolina’s failing agriculture.  The two men, though quite different in many ways, adhered to the agrarian political program of Jefferson and Taylor.

Ruffin was not simply a technician concerned only with the economic aspects of farming.  He also feared that the states of the agricultural South were losing their economic as well as their political independence.  He returned to South Carolina at the end of 1860 and accepted the invitation to fire the first shot in the War for Southern Independence.  The war was about many things—tariffs, freight rates, the expansion of slavery, the conflict between Yankee and Southern pride, a cultural clash between Unitarian Deists and Trinitarian Christians—but it was most obviously a war between a Jeffersonian view of a republic based on land and the Hamiltonian desire, shared by much of the Northern leadership, to create a centralized state that would enrich the bankers, merchants, and manufacturers.  In the end, when the war was lost, Ruffin fired another fatal shot—one that took his life.  It is a terrifying image of the South’s failure that he chose the path of the pagan Cato the Younger rather than accept the martyrdom of living under the rule of men he despised.

The victory of the Northeast signaled the triumph of capitalism over the rural South, Midwest, and West.  It also introduced political corruption on an unprecedented scale and an exploitation of both rural and industrial labor that led inevitably to class struggle and socialism.  It is against this Scylla and Charybdis of hedonistic capitalism and collectivist socialism that the Nashville Agrarians wanted to warn their neighbors.

Americans today are caught between two false principles about property.  If we emphasize the rights of ownership, the result is some form of capitalism that destroys citizenship and invites both revolution and dictatorship, but, if we emphasize redistribution of land through agrarian laws, in contempt of private property, the result is a Marxist state that enslaves all the people for the benefit of a party bureaucracy.  And between those two poles—exploitative capitalism and oppressive Marxism—most political business in the world is carried on, with never a glance at the agrarian principle that is the only viable third way.

If the agrarians from Hesiod to Bradford were right, then a free people must be predominantly a farming people—or, at least, in more abstract economic terms, a people who own the means of production, as the master carpenter owns his tools.  If they were wrong, then where are the exceptions in history of an urban race of consumers who preserved their virtue and their independence?  The histories of Athens and Venice, England and New England, are not encouraging.  If they are right, then none of the programs being proposed to restore economic or social health to these United States, from the Flat Tax to a Human Life Amendment, will amount to a hill of beans.