Southern Agrarians

John Crowe Ransom was their unofficial leader, though Robert Penn Warren became their most prominent member. The membership overlaps with The Fugitives.

The twelve authors of the Southern Agrarians manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, were: • Donald Davidson, poet, essayist, reviewer and historian • John Gould Fletcher, poet and historian • Henry Blue Kline • Lyle H. Lanier • Andrew Nelson Lytle, poet, novelist and essayist • Herman Clarence Nixon • Frank Lawrence Owsley, historian • John Crowe Ransom, poet, professor, essayist • Allen Tate, poet • John Donald Wade, biographer and essayist • Robert Penn Warren, poet, novelist, essayist and critic, later first poet laureate of the United States • Stark Young, novelist, drama and literary critic, playwright Other writers associated with the Agrarians include Richard M. Weaver, Caroline Gordon, Brainard Cheney and Herbert Agar.

The Agrarians evolved from a philosophical discussion group known as the "Fugitives" or "Fugitive Poets". Many of the Southern Agrarians and Fugitive poets were connected to Vanderbilt University, either as students or as faculty members. Davidson, Lytle, Ransom, Tate, and Warren all attended the university; Davidson and Ransom later joined the faculty, along with Wade and Owsley. They were known also as "Twelve Southerners", the "Vanderbilt Agrarians", the "Nashville Agrarians", the "Tennessee Agrarians", and the "Fugitive Agrarians". They were offended by H. L. Mencken's attacks on aspects of Southern culture that they valued, such as its agrarianism, conservatism, and religiosity. They sought to confront the widespread and rapidly increasing effects of modernity, urbanism, and industrialism on American (but especially Southern) culture and tradition. The Agrarians were influenced by the medievalism of Victorian writers Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris, as well as the French right-wing tradition that began with Counter-Enlightenment philosopher Joseph de Maistre, which they accessed through the writings of contemporaries T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot and Charles Maurras. The informal leader of the Fugitives and the Agrarians was John Crowe Ransom, but in a 1945 essay, he announced that he no longer believed in either the possibility or the desirability of an Agrarian restoration, which he declared a "fantasy".

I'll Take My Stand was criticized at the time, and since, as a reactionary and romanticized defense of the Old South and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. It ignored slavery and denounced "progress", for example, and some critics considered it to be moved by nostalgia. A key quote from the "Introduction: A Statement of Principles" to their 1930 book I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition: Though the book was reviewed widely, it only sold about 2000 copies as of 1940. It has been reprinted several times. The current edition was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2006 to mark the book's 75th anniversary.

In the 1930s, the Agrarians were challenged by the modernizing social scientists (the "Chapel Hill Sociologists") based at the University of North Carolina (in Chapel Hill) and led by Howard W. Odum, on issues of urbanism, social progress, and the very nature and definition of the South. The sociologists produced Rupert Vance's The Human Geography of the South (1932), and Odum's Southern Regions of the United States (1936), as well as numerous articles in the journal Social Forces. The sociologists argued that the problems in the South stemmed from traditionalism which ought to and could be cured by modernization, the opposite of the Agrarian viewpoint.

Robert Penn Warren emerged as the most accomplished of the Agrarians. He became a major American poet and novelist, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his 1946 All the King's Men. At a reunion of the Fugitive Poets in 1956, Warren confessed that for about a decade — from just before World War II to some years after — he had shut Agrarianism from his mind as irrelevant to the cataclysmic social and political events then playing out in the world. Now, however, he believed that, rather than being irrelevant, his old Agrarian enthusiasms were tied into the major problems of the age. In the modern world, the individual had been marginalized, stripped of any sense of responsibility, or of past or place. "In this context," writes Paul V. Murphy, "the Agrarian image of a better antebellum South came to represent for Warren a potential source of spiritual revitalization. The past recalled, not as a mythical 'golden age' but 'imaginatively conceived and historically conceived in the strictest readings of the researchers', could be a 'rebuke to the present'." It was Warren's concern with democracy, regionalism, personal liberty and individual responsibility that led him to support the civil rights movement, which he depicted in his nonfiction works Segregation (1956) and Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965) as a struggle for identity and individualism. As Hugh Ruppersburg, among others, has argued, Warren's support for the civil rights movement paradoxically stemmed from Agrarianism, which by the 1950s, meant for him something very different from the Agrarianism of I'll Take My Stand. As Warren's political and social views evolved, his notion of Agrarianism evolved with them. He came to support more progressive ideas and racial integration and was a close friend of the eminent African-American author Ralph Ellison. While Donald Davidson took a leading role in the attempt to preserve the system of segregation, Warren took his stand against it. As Paul V. Murphy writes, "Loyalty to the southern past and the ambiguous lessons of Agrarianism led both men in very different directions."