I'll Take My Stand

The Southern Agrarians (also the Twelve Southerners, the Vanderbilt Agrarians, the Nashville Agrarians, the Tennessee Agrarians, and the Fugitive Agrarians) were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who united to write a pro–Southern agrarian manifesto, published as the essay collection I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). The Southern Agrarians greatly contributed to the Southern Renaissance, the revival of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s, and were based at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, with John Crowe Ransom as the unofficial leader.

The Southern Agrarians included:

The Agrarians 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 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 attacked 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.

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.

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