Why I Am A Southerner

The Fugitives

    In the winter of 1781–82, Thomas Jefferson wrote,

"Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God …, in whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."

In 1930, this Jeffersonian strategy was invoked for one last time by a group of twelve Southern Americans whose essays were compiled in a book entitled, "I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition." One of the book's contributors, Donald Davidson, said their work described, "the cause of civilized society against the new barbarism of science and technology controlled and directed by the modern power state." (Otherwise known as Yankees and other miscreants.

Of the twelve Southerners who wrote these essays, four had been members of a group of student and teacher poets at Vanderbilt University; Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. They subsequently became known as "The Fugitives" through the magazine by that name which they published from 1922 to 1925. They espoused the principle that, "a society operating by agrarian standards was in every way superior to the industrial culture that prevailed in the United States."

As we look around us today; Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, is there any doubt?

More @ Freedom Outpost