In 1930, “Twelve Southerners” published a thick volume of essays entitled I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Led by the already venerable poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, the contributors responded, at once, to the increasing industrialization of the southern states over the previous few decades, the sudden trials of the Great Depression, and the rising threat communism posed to free societies, in a manner consonant with that of many other American and European social critics active during the tumultuous interwar period.
While the revolutionary ideologies of fascism and communism live on in infamy, I’ll Take My
