Talk:Southern Agrarians/Archives/2014

Fascism

I hope someone with more knowledge of this movement than I can add more material to balance out the connections this group had with fascism. From reading Robert Warren's All the King's Men, and more recent authors who align themselves with this movement (Peter Taylor & Wendell Berry), I know that there humanistic elements in this movement: one cannot miss the sympathetic portrayal of characters in Taylor's short stories, nor the sense of community in farming communities that Berry's essays celebrate. -- llywrch 16:48, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

There's an article online, a review of a 2001 book The Rebuke of History, published by UNC Press, about the Agrarians that gives a fuller account. --Parkwells 16:59, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

As Peter Taylor usually wrote about people in cities and towns, I don't think he was much aligned with the Agrarians. His writing did not seem to long for or idealize an agrarian past, although he did write about people at a time of social change. --Parkwells (talk) 00:23, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Needs more citations/references

This article needs citations to back up references to critics and commentators on the writings. Near the end, the article notes certain scholars have made a re-appraisal of "I'll Take My Stand", but doesn't say what they concluded.--Parkwells 16:46, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

An editor has reverted my edits, but added no references to support statements in the article, nor added any fuller conclusions to scholars' supposed "second look" at I'll Take My Stand. The article is poorly supported.--Parkwells 21:18, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

The Agrarians repeatedly denounced fascism and (esp Davidson) distrusted the New Deal because they thought it was too similar to fascism. Fascism at this time meant Germany and Italy, with special emphasis on modern technology (the trains ran on time in Italy, Mussolini boasted), and Hitler was notorious for his very advanced air force.) Fascists built up industry as fast as they could, which was the opposite of the Agrarian position. There is no source for the claim that the Agrarians read 19th century Germany Volkish literature--they never referred to it in "Take my Stand". There was one Agrarian (Collins) who later came to admire fascism, and the other Agrarians distrusted him for that reason. The Agrarians never endorsed Ezra Pound, the American poet who did support fascism. Wiki drops unsupported speculation and original research, espe with a heavy POV flavor. Rjensen (talk) 02:12, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree - the claims of admiration for Fascism didn't conform to anything I had read about the Agrarians.--Parkwells (talk) 13:49, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Southern Agrarians vs. Lost Cause of the Confederacy

How did the Southern Agrarians relate to the so-called "Lost Cause of the Confederacy", and what were there views on slavery and Reconstruction? 195.73.22.130 (talk) 15:19, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Asking someone to do your homework for you? ---RepublicanJacobite_{The'FortyFive'} 17:16, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Bias in Article

This article has a clear bias in support of the ideas behind the Southern Agrarian movement. Being an encyclopedia article, this bias is inapproriate. The Southern Agrarian movement was and is extremely controversial (even among conservatives) and there isn't even a hint of this in the article. Those who have done more substantive research on the subject should work at presenting a balanced and more neutral view of topic.Jpcohen (talk) 20:51, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I added a section on their critics, with citations. Rjensen (talk) 03:43, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the added section. I was actually talking about a bias within the content that already exists. For that reason, I'm going to add the bias note at the top of the article. As I noted, the Agrarian movement was and is extremely controversial, and I still don't think that the nature of that controversy is clearly communicated in this article. Jpcohen (talk) 17:32, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

until someone like Jpcohen can articulate what the "bias" actually is, the POV tag is useless. Rjensen (talk) 18:59, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

In my opinion, the last two paragraphs of the "Background" section are full of a clear bias. This section of the article makes it sound as if all criticism of the movement was unfounded and that the consensus of contemporary critics is that the Agrarian movement's arguments were sound. But I did some research on the Agrarians in grad school and I know that scholarship on the Agrarian is extraordinarily critical of the movement's ideas (not just liberal scholars but also conservative ones). Even the founder of the movement, John Crowe Ransom, was sharply critical, in his later years, of Agrarian ideas (I believe he called the group's ideas "a fantasy"). There are a number of contemporary scholarly books on the Agrarians that are highly critical of the group. If I still had access to a university library, I could quote them.

Please don't remove the bias note until this issue is resolved. I think the "Criticism" section is a good start. But there is still a great deal of bias in this article (in my opinion).Jpcohen (talk) 19:20, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

You have to do better than that--vague memories of something someone said years ago are not encyclopedic. the last two paragraphs in the Background are: "I'll Take My Stand" was originally criticized as a reactionary and romanticized defense of the Old South and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Some critics considered it to be moved by nostalgia. More recently, however, scholars such as Allan C. Carlson, Joseph Scotchie, and Eugene Genovese have re-evaluated the book in light of the problems of highly urbanized/industrialized modern societies. They acknowledge the effects which such urban-technological-industrial systems exert on human society as a whole, as well as on individuals, the environment, politics, economics, etc. Today, the Southern Agrarians are lauded regularly in the Southern Partisan. Some of their social, economic, and political ideas have been refined and updated by writers such as Allan C. Carlson and Wendell Berry. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has published books which further explore the ideas of the Agrarians. These are pretty straight-forward statements of fact--where is the "bias" ??? I think the problem is that Jpcohen disagrees with the ideas of the Agrarians as poor public policy, which is his POV and is not allowed in Wikipedia. Many Wiki articles discuss political philosophies that I dislike, for example, but that is what encyclopedias are for. Rjensen (talk) 19:41, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Okay, well the beginning of this passage, just to take one example, reads, "I'll Take My Stand was originally criticized as a reactionary and romanticized defense of the Old South and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Some critics considered it to be moved by nostalgia. More recently, however, scholars such as Allan C. Carlson, Joseph Scotchie, and Eugene Genovese have re-evaluated the book..." This passage implies that criticism of the book I'll Take My Stand (which has charaterized the book's essays as "reactionary" and presenting a "romanticized" view of the history of the American South) is something from the distant past that's no longer aimed at the book. That contention is false. Instead of simply stating the criticism (which is a very common and contemporary one), there is a biased defense of the book. Now, I think, whenever you have an article on a controversial topic (like the Southern Agrarian movement), you have to be very careful about how you word things and that you aren't letting your own bias bleed into the presentation of facts. The passage that you quoted in full is not simply a statement of fact; rather, it contains a twisting of the facts to defend the subject and present the subject in a more favorable light than the facts, simply stated, would allow.Jpcohen (talk) 04:12, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

finally the actual complaint, which has now been solved (see revised text). Rjensen (talk) 04:20, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Good job with the revisions. Now I think you understand what I was referring to (I had wrongly assumed the bias in there was self-evident).Jpcohen (talk) 15:54, 10 December 2011 (UTC)