I'll Take My Stand

A recent blog by the Abbeville Institute was about the book I’ll Take My Stand, The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Google has a preview of the book which is missing a number of pages but still provides an oppotunity to see what it contains. Published in 1930, there are essays by twelve well-known Southern authors. Here is a link to the Google preview. A lot has changed since 1930, but these essays give some inkling of what the Old South was like after the Civil War and before wide-spread industrialization, a useful counterpoint to the seemingly ever-present condemnation of the South by liberal politicians and the liberal media. In Gone with the Wind, I see Rhett Butler as the representative of the New South, and Ashley Wilkes as the representative of the Old South. I’ll Take My Stand was the voice of the Old South, a call for gentility and grace, peacefulness in the face of industrialization It was made up of the voices of twelve Southern writers, including the poets from The Fugitive at Vanderbilt, including Robert Penn Warren.