Richard Weaver claimed his homeland was the “last nonmaterialistic civilization in the western world.” Modernity to him meant at bottom institutionalizing most of the Seven Deadly Sins…

Though his worth and stature were early established among them, while yet living Richard M. Weaver was something of a puzzle for his friends within the American “conservative establishment.” And despite some valuable consideration of his work occasioned by his death (1963) and the posthumous publication of compositions left upon his desk with that untimely event, the original confusion persists, perhaps even deepens.[1] Southern origins, humanistic training, and a deep, special learning (plus long exposure to Chicago and its university) offer only a modicum of clarification. And earned reputation for dour sobriety adds but a little more. Only in the strictest sort of intellectual history are there appropriate instruments for the necessary explanation/remedy. Such is here undertaken.

Weaver himself in the autobiographical “Up from Liberalism” pointed the way for the work at hand.[2] There he specified how his life had turned upon his first acquaintance with the Agrarians of I’ll Take My Stand, with his reading of their books and papers and his experience of their tutelage.[3] These facts are well-known to Weaver’s admirers: the facts, but not their significance. I suspect the process of their reception goes something like this: “In Nashville, Weaver accepted being Southern; Baton Rouge finished the job. That was predictable. There was nothing particularly intellectual about the change. Even after persuasion to the contrary, they all come to it—or else go mad. And we know ‘good’ Southerners ordinarily ‘lean to the Right’—though they don’t think about it much. Besides, some of those fellows were poets. I’ve read a little of them, once or twice.” Such obfuscation is not vicious or even ill-intentioned. It is only the usual, historically explicable Yankee (and most identified American conservative intellectuals are Yankees) shortcut, a shortcut that transcends ideology. The Agrarians are only names to most of the spokesmen for the company Weaver joined soon after World War II. Vigorous and informed regionalism intimidates them, sets back at arm’s length their “should-be” allies. And Southerners are of course, by definition, intellectually unimportant. They may distinguish themselves in literature, politics, or the church; but that’s not what we mean by intellectual. In accepting the Weaver of Chicago, his new friends, therefore, found it impossible to make a serious attempt at explaining the North Carolinian who had surfaced curiously in their midst. Hence for two reasons an orderly exposition of Agrarian doctrine and application of that overlay to Weaver’s total production is at this time in order: first, because it might help stifle the sort of reflex before Southern men and materials illustrated above; second, because Weaver deserves the intelligibility it should provide for his career.

Since it is not possible to survey here the variety of Agrarian teaching in detail, the reader must permit me the liberty of a private synthesis from their writings. For my comment, the obvious locus lies in the 1930 manifesto itself, and more specifically in the “Statement of Principles” with which I’ll Take My Stand was prefaced and to which all twelve of its contributors subscribed.[4] What I choose to emphasize in the way of implicit moral and political philosophy is not, however, merely a concession to convenience, a preparation for study of Weaver in his own right. For my argument is not simply that Weaver had so and such intellectual antecedents. Instead, I contend that what was essential to the Agrarian enterprise—fundamental though often concealed in an emphasis on this or that topical difficulty—found its final completion in Weaver’s more general and sustained excursions into social theory, rhetoric, educational philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields. That Weaver knew he was doing this is evident in his correspondence with Southern friends during the years he labored on Ideas Have Consequences, The Ethics of Rhetoric, and Visions of Order.[5] Evident there, and in his decision to return upon historic (and often Southern) subjects, once that work of theory was done. But more of this hereafter.

To begin, because they were Southern (and hence rather more European by inheritance than American intellectuals from north or west), the political vision of the Agrarians conformed not at all to the familiar native political categories: in a word, they were neither “liberty men” nor “equality men.” Yet neither were they rank Tories. Their measure of any polity was its human (and not its legal or economic) product. As a body, they were doubtful about “Progress”—and even doubtful that the appearance of the “progressive,” the postbellum United States on the stage of history was, in the long run, to be of certain benefit to Western man. And though respectful of human dignity, they were submissive before “the frame of Creation” in a way that would seem to most Americans not of their regional patrimony both radical and surprising. Reason, therefore, was not their “strange god.” However, they were eminently “reasonable” and made few prescriptive appeals to custom or usage alone.

Industrialism and applied science were the immediate villains in the Agrarian analysis of Southern difficulties after the crash of ’29. In this season of ecology and runaway conservation, it is more or less difficult to write off Agrarian alarm concerning such aggression against nature: at least more difficult than at any other time in the last four decades. But unlike contemporary enthusiasms for “clear water in the sun,” Agrarian suspicion of the Faustian temptation as it made an appearance among their kinsmen was utterly unsentimental. Indeed, it was just the opposite—based on the assumption that external nature was for man’s use and keeping, to be cooperated with, not controlled (and certainly not remade into a refuge from peculiarly human responsibilities). Moreover, that suspicion was consistent with the group’s position on other matters. All agreed that industrialism and its instruments were in themselves morally neutral, dangerous only insofar as they encouraged men to misconceive of their condition. Yet because of what brought them into being, the results of the new juggernaut had been for the United States worse than apostasy or abolition. And, law or history aside, they were, for these specifically philosophical reasons, certainly to be resisted by a pious people. The Book does not anticipate good fortune for the children of Pride. And the modern economy, come southward by way of Manchester and then Lowell, appeared to go with the hegemony of that breed. To submit to them was damnation by adoption, an immigration to the Cities of the Plain. Pride was, obviously, for the Agrarians the identifying vice of the modern dispensation. And this was reason enough for their “thundering negations.”[6]

Though he conceded nothing concerning Agrarian tactics for specific reformations (and defended their proposals in a variety of practical connections), Richard Weaver chose to continue the work of his masters by tracing their “contextually colored” positions back to the first principles out of which those positions emerged. And, more importantly, he attempted to give order and connection to these principles, to supply the lack of system and depth of thought which he always identified as the great weakness of his people in their dealings with mortal enemies.[7]

After early graduate study at Vanderbilt, an interval of teaching, and completion in 1943 of work on his terminal degree at Louisiana State University (work that led to The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought), Weaver turned back in time to consider the sources and the unfolding of those ideas, hostile and friendly, which “had consequences” in the life of the South.[8] For he sensed from the first that the record of his own subculture was a late chapter in a very long story. Moreover, he had learned from his survey of Southern thought in the decades just before hard nationalizing set in that all major cultural changes are “moral creations” and issue from the “obscure depths of men’s wanting” and from the ontological or religious posture they assume in answering those needs of flesh and spirit.[9] The reception given some of his early Agrarian connected essays and the imperception with which the major university press of his native state greeted his dissertation forced Weaver to create his own intellectual history of the West—or at least a history of those ideas on which turned his arguments concerning the Southern past. John Crowe Ransom’s God Without Thunder (the most important of Agrarian documents for Weaver) had anticipated Ideas Have Consequences, as had a few other pieces by members of the group.[10] But it is true that his first book publication “got Weaver going.” In addition, it did what Ransom’s astonishingly prophetic (and previous) exposure of utopian ideology failed to accomplish: divested the Agrarian calculus of its diverting topically and “merely regional” connotations.

There were also other important factors influencing the direction taken by Weaver’s career after original immersion in things Southern: the breakup of Agrarianism as a movement; a deepening interest in theology and in the true nature of the liberal education; the full flowering of the Southern Literary Renascence and of a body of criticism which accounted for it; the fresh spate of political attacks on the Southern “regime” after World War II; and the appearance of (along with his personal involvement in) a nationwide network of intellectuals on the Right. However, more significant than all of these influences toward complexity and sophistication was the discovery behind the next stage in his development. Stated briefly, that discovery was of a causal link between corruption of the language, rhetorical illiteracy, and the characteristic modern errors of doctrine: the general contemporary acceptance of debilitating materialism or gnostic conceptions of man’s condition, nature, and destiny. Out of this revelation came Weaver’s least understood work, The Ethics of Rhetoric.[11] In this connection he authored a fine textbook; and he also began to practice the part of rhetor, both in political journalism and on the platform.[12]

In all these undertakings Weaver followed well established Agrarian precedent.[13] Yet none of the original dozen (nor, indeed, any later recruits) became professional rhetoricians. Weaver did, even earning the respect of authorities in the discipline who shared nothing but that interest with him. Once again, the necessity for depth and organization (plus a willingness to go the long and certain way around) determined Weaver’s course. Implicitly, in this vocational detour, he acknowledged that more than philosophical penetration was required for the counterattack in which he had enlisted.[14] For the vehicle which carries it effects the purchase and authority of any wisdom that deserves circulation. And, as Weaver insisted, most of the accepted vehicles, the systems or “universes” of discourse available for his use in the mid-twentieth century, were perverted by a built-in hostility to his purposes. Nominalism, primitivism, egalitarian fancies and their pseudo-scientific derivatives had poisoned the wells of truth, forbidden the teaching of logic and the rules of discourse, undermined man’s ancient faith in the imagination, derided custom, and in general spread sentimentality and barbarism.

Which is to say nothing of the strictly social implications of the “democratic” public school. A concern for valid rhetoric and honest dialectics remains as an ingredient in everything Richard Weaver wrote after 1948. With these instruments perfected and a backdrop in the history of ideas sketched out, he was ready to work toward certain positive, normative statements: essays focusing upon pressure points inside what remains of the permanent in the going order, essays toward the restoration of a civil polity. Visions of Order is what resulted.[15]

At the time of his death, Weaver was finally ready to make his case for the South. He had established an audience to hear it and a context to ensure its plausibility. Moreover, he was once again ready to submit for publication the work with which his scholarly career began. As is indicated by the manuscripts Weaver left (plus certain late publications), he had organized his life out of that original effort, his understanding of the Southern experience. And he intended much more in the same vein: a series on Southern letters; an American Plutarch, comparing exemplary Southern and Northern types; a collection of papers on American rhetorical landmarks; a study of conflict in the American churches over slavery; and a few other items reaching out toward a transregional definition of the national character. A sample of this material is the “Two Orators,” printed in this same issue; and there is more, in print and forthcoming.[16]

Weaverville’s loyal son, therefore, may be said to have moved, twice over, “out and then back.” The total pattern of his life almost fits the old Hegelian diagram: from unselfconscious immersion, to conscious alienation, and from thence again to the point of beginning, to subsist there finally, but this time on purpose.[17] Yet the Weaver we confront in his writings belongs only to the last of these stages. The variety of his interests described above was, as I have already inferred, only apparent. Always Weaver remained inside the tradition he appropriated through the Agrarians, a tradition always “at bay” and always defensible. And there was another difference in his second “returning.” For in making public the reasoning which “paved his way home” he made it possible for a whole people to come along behind, to discover and to accept themselves in an act of mind. In truth, he became much of the Southern philosopher for whose appearance he had called since 1943. He supplied the central lack on which he placed the blame for the South’s prolonged and unamenable “embattlement.” The men who had pointed him this way were, by and large, delighted. I believe that they alone recognized from the beginning what Weaver was up to.[18]

A few unmistakable points of tangency identifying my subject with his immediate forebears in spirit are worth special attention. A brief glance in their direction should leave few doubts among close readers of both that such a connection exists. Apart from the dissertation and compositions overtly in tribute to (or analysis of) the Agrarians, Weaver is closest to them in such works as “Aspects of the Southern Philosophy,” “The South and the American Union,” “Lee the Philosopher,” “Life Without Prejudice,” “The Regime of the South,” “Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric,” “The Spaciousness of the Old Rhetoric,” “The Southern Tradition,” “Status and Function,” “Forms and Social Cruelty,” “Piety and Justice,” and one or two other papers appearing finally in Life Without Prejudice.[19] Weaver had his nationalist side. Often he spoke as one generically American.[20] (Why I shall explain in concluding.) But it is unlikely that any citizen of the Republic not a Southerner—and a Southerner “educated” by the Nashville brotherhood—would have written this group of essays. For one thing, Weaver’s emphasis on roots, on memory, on cultural pluralism (or regionalism), on ineradicable human differences, and on the right of a regime to protect itself—a right balanced by its duty to avoid “over-formalization”—reduces easily to the social paradigms rendered in works such as Donald Davidson’s Attack on Leviathan, “The New South and the Conservative Tradition,” or his cultural analyses in Still Rebels, Still Yankees; John Donald Wade’s “The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius,” “The Dugonne Bust,” and “What the South Figured: 1865-1914”; Frank Owsley’s “The Pillars of Agrarianism,” “The Soldier Who Walked with God,” and “Democracy Unlimited”; John Crowe Ransom’s “Happy Farmers,” “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” and “What Does the South Want?”; Andrew Lytle’s comments on Calhoun of Carolina, John Taylor of Virginia, Lee, and Nathan Bedford Forrest; Robert Penn Warren’s portrait of John Brown ; and Allen Tate’s biographies of Jeff Davis and Stonewall Jackson (to say nothing of another hundred kindred affirmations or of the oblique evidence from poetry and fiction issuing from Agrarian inspiration).[21]

Even after selection, this is an unmanageable mass of documentation. There is however one common denominator uniting everything contained in both lists. For every item in them articulates a horror of atomistic man and therefore of the arrangements (economic, political, pedagogical, and aesthetic) that tend to produce him. Weaver spoke of the phenomenon as “depersonalization.”[22] Its domestic face is statism, a passion for “Union.” In the international framework it appears as ideological imperialism, an armed doctrine on the march. In art, Mr. Tate has appropriately named it “angelism.”[23] In commerce, it is any system which defines the species in terms of goods and services. And in the schools its aim is “life adjustment.” The thrust behind all these phantasms seeking form is a fusion of those old enemies of the Godsweal, perfectionism and its twin, the envious and cowardly dream of uniformity: the impulse to “fix everything” and thus pretend to create it, to cover with uniforms and affix numbers. Of course, I return again to the yardstick with which I began this essay—Pride. Southerners like Weaver and his predecessors attempt to keep clear of this first error by “seconding God’s motion,” by approving the variety inside of Being, what the theologians call “plenitude.” They doubt that the given world requires repairing. The Turkish qualities of Turkey, the flatness of plains and the vaulting upreach of mountains call forth from them no restless ingenuity. Their uneasiness about “homogenizing” schools is notorious. The poetics operative in their just concluding half-century of literary flowering has been well called “submissive.”[24] And they can wait for heaven.

Why Weaver claimed his homeland was the “last nonmaterialistic civilization in the western world” should by now be clear.[25] Modernity to him meant at bottom institutionalizing most of the Seven Deadly Sins; and each of those follies, in its turn, presupposes a denial of the finiteness of finitude, of “contingency” (to use a favorite Agrarian word). It has never been difficult to prove that the South was slow in “getting modern.” In his life, it remained, though declining, as a facet of the nation’s conscience—or, if you like, of its sanity. Hence Weaver addressed much of his Southern (yet more than Southern, because well examined) argument to the nation at large. As he sometimes remarked, the South was never more loyally American than when it was being most Southern—even in secession.[26] These were Agrarian assumptions.[27] And where the present South did not suit well their admonitory ends, Weaver and the Agrarians were quick to use even its decline for instruction. Which brings me to my last point.

Richard Weaver never lost interest in defending what survived of the historic Southern order. His political journalism plus certain of his papers in opinion document this devotion. Indeed, it was so strong as to move Weaver into a dangerous public support of the South’s position in racial matters. For he perceived from its start that this Second Reconstruction had objectives far more ambitious (and perhaps other than) ”justice for the Negro”: in a word, abolition of the subculture itself, which could not survive such coercive dislodgement of its “wisest prejudice.”[28] However, the fortune of the Agrarians (and their individual experiences after dispersal) had convinced him that such defendings were in vain—that is, unless the set of mind that made them necessary be discredited at its source: unless liberalism (as we speak of it loosely) be exposed for the pathology it is. The mind informed by memory (history humanized), by literature (rendering the real, including memory), and by rhetoric (bringing memory and its rendering to hear) cannot find in the South only a scandal. The universities were the place for that labor, or most of it. They were a base of power. Since the English Revolution of the 1640’s, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Communist triumph in Russia, our wars have been wars of doctrine. They are won or lost on that ground. And what is needed for them is an aristoi, a new version of the old idea called “gentleman”: a body of informed men and women within the Academy—personally loyal to one another, courageous, and indefatigable. Pelham needed only a few to man his guns, hold the high ground, and turn back hosts. Only a few, because they knew their business and could trust each other. The intellectual counterpart of that astonishing battery exists today, in part thanks to this quiet little man.

Yes, Weaver was perhaps an optimist. The gentleman is always that way, at least functionally. The alternative is bad stewardship. Moreover, the Agrarians had taught him the necessity of working optimistically. For “a community…groaning under…an evil dispensation…must find the way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community…thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence.”[29]

Republished with gracious permission from Modern Age (Summer/Fall 1970).

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Notes:

[1] I refer especially to Eugene Davidson’s “Richard Malcolm Weaver—Conservative,” Modern Age, VII (Summer, 1963), 226-230; Eliseo Vivas’ Introduction to Weaver’s Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965), pp. vii-xvii; James Powell’s “The Foundations of Weaver’s Traditionalism,” New Individualist Review, III, No. 3 (1964) , 3-6; Willmoore Kendall’s “How to Read Richard Weaver: Philosopher of ‘We the (Virtuous) People’,” Intercollegiate Review, II (Sept., 1965), 77-86; Russell Kirk’s “Foreword” to Weaver’s Visions of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), pp. vii-ix, and his “Richard Weaver, RIP,” National Review, XIV (April 23, 1963), 308.

More penetrating comments have recently appeared in H.L. Weatherby’s “A Southern Rebuttal,” Triumph, IV (April, 1969), 31-33; in Donald Davidson’s “Foreword” to George Core’s and this writer’s edition of Weaver’s The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1968), pp. 13-25; and in Marion Montgomery’s “Richard Weaver Against the Establishment,” Georgia Review, XXIII (Winter, 1969), 433-459.

[2] Modern Age, III (Winter, 1958-59), 21-32.

[3] Weaver received his first education at the University of Kentucky, came from a poor area of North Carolina, had received a religious upbringing, and therefore fell briefly under the spell of some witches’ brew called “Christian socialism” in Lexington. In some ways this interlude had prepared him for the “religious” side of the Agrarian argument.

[4] Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), pp. ix-xx.

[5] I have examined a number of his letters to Randall Stewart and Donald Davidson.

[6] I have purposefully drawn this redaction from Weaver’s own writings about Agrarianism: “Agrarianism in Exile,” Sewanee Review, LVIII (Autumn, 1950), 586-606; “The Tennessee Agrarians,” Shenandoah, III (Summer, 1952), 3-10; ”The Southern Phoenix,” Georgia Review, XVII (Spring, 1963), 6-17: and the aforementioned “Up from Liberalism.

[7] The Southern Tradition at Bay, p. 390.

[8] I use the title of Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). “”The Southern Phoenix,” p. 16.

[9] God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1930). The book anticipates much “neo-orthodox” theology and in part concludes (pp. 327-328) with the admonition: “With whatever religious institution a modem man may be connected, let him try to turn it back towards orthodoxy. Let him insist on a virile and concrete God, and accept no principle as a substitute. Let him restore to God the thunder….

[10] The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953). The book, as a piece of strategy, has misled many of Weaver’s admirers. Its contents emphasize what is confused in contemporary rhetoric, and maneuver to that end by disarming means (i.e., praising part of Lincoln, faulting part of Burke, etc.). It is unwise to infer over much from his choice of illustrative materials.

[12] I have no idea if unsigned Weaver appeared in National Review. I count thirty-seven signed items there, plus a dozen elsewhere. And he made two score public lectures in his last decade. The textbook is modestly entitled Composition: A Course in Reading and Writing (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1957).

[13] Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren have a rhetoric text, Modern Rhetoric (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949). Davidson’s American Composition and Rhetoric (New York: Scribner, 1939) is one of the best established in the field. Ransom also authored the similar A College Primer of Writing (New York: Holt, 1943).

Ten of the twelve Agrarians are (or were) accomplished public speakers. Several of them defended their position in the forum, sometimes before considerable audiences.

[14] “The Tennessee Agrarians,” p. 5.

[15] Willmoore Kendall, however, has done well to insist that we take Weaver primarily as a “political theorist” (op. cit., p. 78).

[16] An essay on William Byrd and Cotton Mather appears to be salvageable. Likewise, another on Parson Weems. I will not predict what may be done with the rest of his unpublished works.

[17] I say he traveled biographically (and therefore spiritually) out and back because Weaver, as an upcountry man, was the born heir of the Tertium Quids, the Old Republicans of the stripe of Virginia’s John Randolph of Roanoke or John Taylor of Caroline and Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina. The upcountry was localistic, pious, and not at all sanguine. Historically, it came early to the Revolution proper, stood opposed to the ratification of the Constitution, remained persistently jealous of states’ rights, and (when the time came) was hot for secession. Moreover, it filled up the gray files of Mr. Davis’ armies. As one side of the South’s historic Whig/Tory (here meant in the English sense) syncretism, the yeoman counties were never Federalist and yet never unwilling (unless affronted) to be led by the gentry. Weaver’s “Aspects of Southern Philosophy,” with its paean of praise for an envy-free class society, a patriarchy sans class consciousness, is clearly in the Quid line (pp. 14-30 of Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs, eds., Southern Renascence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953)).

[18] Such is the testimony of two living Agrarians. Another, now deceased, concurred with them. And there is additional evidence in the Davidson correspondence collection at Vanderbilt.

[19] “The South and the American Union” appears in Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and James Jackson Kilpatrick, eds., The Lasting South (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957), pp. 46-68; “Lee the Philosopher” in Georgia Review, II (Fall, 1948) , 297-303; “Life Without Prejudice” on pp. 1-13 in the book by that title; “The Regime of the South” in National Review, VI (March 14, 1959), 587-589; “Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric” and “The Spaciousness of the Old Rhetoric” on pp. 211-232 and 164-185 of The Ethics of Rhetoric; “The Southern Tradition” in New Individualist Review, III (1964), 17-24;· “Piety and Justice” on pp. 170-187 of Ideas Have Consequences; “Status and Function” and “Forms and Social Cruelty” in Visions of Order, pp. 22-39 and 73-91.

[20] For instance, see George Core’s and this writer’s edition of Weaver’s ”The American as a Regenerate Being,” Southern Review, IV, n.s. (Summer, 1968), 633-646.

[21] The Attack on Leviathan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938); “The New South and the Conservative Tradition,” National Review, IX (Sept. 10, 1960), 141-146; and Still Rebels, Still Yankees (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957). The Wade essays all appear in Donald Davidson’s edition of Selected Essays and Other Writings of John Donald Wade (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966), pp. 23-45, 195-207, and 82-89. Owsley’s papers are all reproduced in Harriet Otappell Owsley’s edition of The South: Old and New Frontiers, Selected Essays of Frank Lawrence Owsley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969), pp. 177-189, 235-257, and 190-204. Ransom’s “Happy Farmers” first appeared in American Review, I (Oct., 1933), 513-535; his “Reconstructed but Unregenerate” on pp. 1-27 of I’ll Take My Stand; and his “What Does the South Want?” in Virginia Quarterly Review, XII (April, 1936), 180-194. Lytle’s “John C. Calhoun” and “Robert Lee” are together on pp. 205-239 of his The Hero with the Private Parts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966); “John Taylor and the Political Economy of Agriculture” in American Review, III and IV (Sept., Oct., and Nov., 1934), 432-447, 630-643, and 84-99. The biography here is Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1960). Warren wrote John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (New York: Payson & Oarke, 1929). Tate authored Jefferson Davis (New York: Minton, Balch, 1929) and Stonewall Jackson (New York: Minton, Balch, 1928).

[22] The word is central in Weaver’s vocabulary. The act it describes entails a rejection of Creation’s variety.

[23] “The Angelic Imagination: Poe and the Power of Words,” Kenyon Review, XIV (Summer, 1952), 455-475.

[24] “Donald Davidson, in “Why the Modern South Has a Great Literature,” Still Rebels, Still Yankees, 159-179.

[25] The Southern Tradition at Bay, p. 391.

[26] “The South and the American Union,” p. 67 in The Lasting South.

[27] And remain (or remained) so with most of the original twelve, as well as with later recruits to the cause. Evidence of the continuity will soon appear in the forthcoming edition of Conversations at Dallas: An Agrarian Reunion, April 1968.

[28] See ”The South and the American Union,” pp. 20 and 21 of Visions of Order; ”The Regime of the South”; and “Integration Is Communization,” National Review, IV (July 13, 1957), 67-68 for a sample.

[29] “Statement of Principles,” p. xx, from I’ll Take My Stand.

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