The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought.

By Paul V. Murphy. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xiv], 351. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4960-X; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2630-8.)

The Southern Agrarians continue to fascinate. They do so as a group, as in Mark G. Malvasi's The Unregenerate South (Baton Rouge, 1997), and as individuals, as in Thomas A. Underwood's recent Alien Tate: Orphan of the South (Princeton, N.J., 2000). These contributions reinforce an already expansive historical literature. So do we gain by another collective study? With Paul V. Murphy's The Rebuke of History, the answer is yes, most definitely.

Murphy traces the intellectual influence of the Agrarians beyond their landmark debut, the 1930 publication of I'll Take My Stand, the anthology by "Twelve Southerners" (ten of whom were associated with Vanderbilt University). Murphy details their legacy by examining the subsequent careers of a familiar cast of personalities--John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren, among the first generation of Agrarians--then following their successors up to the present, among whom Murphy includes historian Eugene D. Genovese and ecologist Wendell Berry (a dubious selection).

The subtitle of the book gives it its special thematic place in the historiography on the Southern Agrarians. Reacting against the unaesthetic inroads of New South industrialization, the major contributors to the movement, if less successful at defending "agrarianism" itself, provided often-weighty critiques of modern culture, which they believed accompanied and abetted these economic incursions. Secular notions of progress, for example, headed their enemies' list. The Agrarians frequently invoked European notions of the leisured life and relied on a feudal motif as counterexamples to the frenzied and anomic society wrought by industrialization.

Murphy follows the connections the Agrarians made with other conservative thinkers from the 1930s forward. They had a not-unsympathetic relationship with the New Humanists, the critical movement led by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. They contributed heavily to the American Review, the publication started by fascist sympathizer Seward Collins and influenced by the English Distributists. Richard M. Weaver becomes the key figure of the second generation for Murphy. His Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1948) and Visions of Order (Baton Rouge, 1964) influenced many postwar conservatives and gave agrarianism a significant foothold in the Old Right, where Russell Kirk and others were key figures. Murphy brings the subject to the present with attention to Why the South Will Survive by "Fifteen Southerners" (Athens, Ga., 1981) and the journal Chronicles.

Murphy does not shy from assessments in discussing the Agrarians. He shows that the South of their construction wholly ignored the black people that so vitally shaped southern history. Indeed, with few exceptions, the Agrarians endorsed white supremacy and racial segregation. Nonetheless, I believe Murphy's book will inspire some appreciation for the first generation of Agrarians. Many encountered, learned from, and contributed to literary modernism. For me, Allen Tate emerges here as an admirably complex figure who upheld the modernist strain in the Agrarian movement. He contrasts with Donald Davidson, who increasingly hated all aspects of cosmopolitanism and modernism and clung to the folkways of white southerners. Is Murphy's book, then, a story of decline? I think so. It must give one pause to see the intellectual mantle of Tate, Ransom, and Warren fall to the likes of M. E. Bradford, Thomas Fleming, and Samuel Francis.

Readers might wish that Murphy exercised a greater precision with some of the terms he employs. His title, "The Rebuke of History," is adapted from a quotation by Robert Penn Warren that Murphy uses as an epigraph, but its thematic substance for his study is unclear; similarly, the "pragmatic agrarianism" in the title of chapter 7 is not sufficiently elaborated. Nonetheless, this excellent book offers much from which to learn and much on which to reflect.

J. DAVID HOEVELER
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee