Agrarianism

AGRARIANISM IS THE belief that true freedom belongs to the independent farmer who owns his or her own land. Only the yeoman farmer who can provide his own food from his own land remains truly independent and virtuous. Only the yeoman farmer truly has a stake in the land to defend it against attack in times of danger. Honest and incorruptible, independent farmers enjoy true freedom according to the agrarian view.

Agrarianism also harkens back to a more stable, settled social order of reciprocal social bonds that existed before the rise of cities and machines. Sir Roger de Coverley, a character from The Spectator by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, exemplifies the best kind of paternalistic and rural values envisioned by many agrarians. James Everett Kibler's study of a South Carolina plantation, Our Fathers' Fields, offers a historical portrait of a similar society and its devastating encounter with modernity in the Civil War.

Thomas Jefferson is the foremost American exponent of agrarian ideals. Although Jefferson himself remained mired in debt for much of his adult life and relied upon slave labor, he wrote eloquently of the life of the yeoman farmer. In “Query XIX” of Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God … whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example … Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” Many of Jefferson's political ideas grew from his agrarian views: in particular, his opposition to the commercial and political views of Alexander Hamilton. Hamiltonian attitudes would triumph in America with the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of southern writers and academics attempted to revive the agrarian ideal. Allen Tate, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Donald Davidson, and nine other southerners contributed to I'll Take My Stand, which they termed an agrarian manifesto. They constructed an elegant appeal to America to return to a traditional economic and moral order, and wrote with a deeply felt love of history and tradition. Southern agrarians also harkened back to an idealized version of antebellum southern life. I'll Take My Stand condemned both industrialism and socialism as soulless and equally destructive of freedom and Western civilization. In particular, I'll Take My Stand attacked the idea of progress, especially the American idea of progress not toward a goal, but for its own sake. The kind of conservatism espoused by southern agrarians differs sharply from the conservatism of the Republican Party with its closeness to big business. Seven years after the publication of I'll Take My Stand, some of the same authors reunited for [Page 505]Who Owns America?, a volume of essays that condemned both communism and capitalism as threats to freedom. At its core, southern agrarianism was a reaction against modernity and all of modernity's attendant societal ills.

Agrarian ideals harkened back to the days unspoiled by progress and were especially espoused by Thomas Jefferson. Southern agrarians in the United States conservatively reacted against modernity's social ills, such as poverty and alienation.

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