Making It New: 1900–1945 433innocence and perfectibility of the individual, the possibility of progress, and the
improvement or even perfecting of an entire society. The Fugitives were very
different. Classical humanists or, alternatively, typical products of the Bible Belt,
they believed in the reality of evil: inherited and tested forms and principles
were necessary, they felt, to support the individual in his weakness, to focus his
vision and prevent him from wandering. Perhaps the Imagists could be called a
movement, in the loose sense. Innovative, enthusiastic, revolutionary in impulse,
and alive with the unexpressed possibilities and the mobility of the present, they
helped lay the foundations for modernism. If so, the Fugitives should be called a
school. Disciplined, cautious, deliberate, and aware above all of an immense debt to
the past, they served the forces of reaction and acted as a nucleus, a catalyst for
traditionalism.
The impulse toward traditionalism assumed a more regional character among
those who had made up the Fugitive group after their magazine ceased publication.
Moving away from the South, as many of them did, it became a faraway country for
them: an attractive alternative to the urban, cosmopolitan centers, where they were
now living – a place perhaps idealized by memory and distance. Then came the
Scopes trial in Tennessee, popularly known as “the monkey trial.” The attacks on
the benighted backwards population of the South, and the Bible Belt in general,
that accompanied reports on the trial prompted people like Tate and Ransom to
draw together again to defend their homeplace. With allies old and new, they began
to argue the case not only for traditionalism but regionalism. The result was the
formation in 1926 of a loose but mutually supportive association of individuals
who shared concerns that were distinctively Southern; they were eventually to be
known as the Agrarians. Along with former Fugitives, they included Andrew Nelson
Lytle (1902–1999) and Stark Young (1881–1963). Lytle was later to produce major
traditionalist, mainly historical fiction, such as The Long Night (1936) and The Velvet
Horn (1957), novels set around the time of the Civil War, a historical biography,
Bedford Forrest (1931), and a family chronicle, A Wake for the Living (1975). Young
published, among many other works, one of the most popular romances of the time,
So Red the Rose (1934), set in Mississippi before and during the Civil War. Responding
to the shared impulse to look backward to the inherited forms of the South, Ransom
wrote God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (1930). In it, he
dismissed what he saw as the contemporary deification of science; and he defended
fundamentalist belief in the mysterious God of the Old Testament as a necessary
corrective to human pride. Tate, in turn, declaring that he had “attacked the South
for the last time,” began a search for spiritual roots that led almost immediately to
his major poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (1928, 1937), and then, later, his
novel The Fathers (1938). And, working together, the Agrarians, as they were later
to be called, produced I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition
(1930) by “Twelve Southerners.” The approaches and arguments of the essays in
this volume necessarily reflected the individual training and interests of the con-
tributors. But they were all characterized by three things: a hatred of contemporary
society in all its aspects, a commitment to the heritage of the South and, related toGGray_c04.indd 433ray_c 04 .indd 433 8 8/1/2011 7:53:58 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 58 AM