Waking Their Neighbors Up

Stung by attacks upon the South following the celebrated Scopes monkey trial in the 1920s, some of the poets comprising the Fugitive group at Vanderbilt Universitynotably John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren conceived the idea of a symposium that would argue for the worth of an ordered, traditional society as an alternative to what they perceived as the increasing materialism of their times. The Fugitives were joined by eight other southerners, and the result was the 1930 Agrarian manifesto Ill Take My Stand. Published in 1982, this retrospective look at the Nashville Agrarians traces the evolution of Ill Take My Stand, explains what the men who made it were trying to do, and argues that time has proved them to be prophets.