Donald Davidson and Modern American Conservatism

Abstract

26Historically Speaking · November 2003 Donald Davidson and Modern American Conservatism Paul V. Murphy T he presidency of George W Bush has, amongotherthings, laid bare the current dominance of conservatism in the United States. Despite runningforthe presidency as a moderate (tirelessly campaigning as a "compassionate conservative"), Bush's administration has successfuUy pursued an aggressively conservative agenda both in domestic and international affairs. Historians are increasingly analyzing the roots ofthis current conservative era, charting the initial rise ofpotent and mainstream conservative poUticians. In order to explain why conservatism triumphed, however, one must look beyond the particular causes of conservative political success in the 1960s and 1970s and study the roots ofAmerican conservatism and the Uves and ideas ofolder conservatives. One figure worthy ofrenewed attention is the southern poet and essayist Donald Davidson. Remembered, if at all, as a minor poet given to loving and elegiac celebrations of southern culture and the Confederate past, Donald Davidson pursued a long, frustrating career on the margins ofthe national Uteraryculture . His obscurityrests, in part, on his stubbornlyanti-modern aesthetic; he simply did not accommodate the dominant Uterary modes ofhis time. Neither, however, did he accommodate its dominant social and cultural trends. He was a key leader ofthe Southern Agrarians, the group ofpoets and professors associated with Vanderbilt Universityin NashviUe, Tennessee. In 1930 they co-authored a much-noted attack on industrial capitalism and modern culture entided I'll Take My Stand: The South and theAgrarian Tradition. Unlike his peers, Davidson did not gracefully navigate the transition from crankysouthernpubUcistto respected man of letters. While most ofhis more famous confreres —including John Crowe Ransom, AUenTate, and RobertPermWarren—pubUcIy repudiated segregation and embraced integration, Davidson remained an intransigent defender ofsegregation, identifying it with his core project ofdefending southern culture and traditions. This undoubtedly contributed much to his present obscurity. Andyet, given the current ascendancyof conservatism, Davidson's career is due for réévaluation. In some ways, he seems far more relevant and prescient than Ransom, Tate, or Warren today. The winners write the history, and Davidson alUed himselfwith the conservative movement in the 1940s and 1950s. He saw the potency ofa raciaUst politics ofculture in the South, anticipating the Republican Party's "southern strategy" by a number ofyears. Davidson early aligned himselfwith the Dbdecrat rebels within the Democratic Party; many Southerners would Ukewise leave the Democrats in the future. In his devout loyalty to the Confederate cause, he was the avatar of the huge Confederate nostalgia industry that attracts so many adherents today, from such distinguished figures as SenatorTrent Lott to the Civil War reenactors starving themselves to attain a properly haggard look.1 Moreover, Davidson was acutely aware of the way in which modernization undercut the taproot ofhis own cultural and social identity. This awareness was at the core of his Ufe's work. Far from being an anachronism, Davidson looms as one ofthe most instructive ofsouthern conservatives. Scholars have little appreciated Davidson 's ability as a cultural historian and, in a sense, as a cultural poUtician. Partial evidence of this lies in the way Davidson carefully crafted the historical memory of the most important coUective project ofhis Ufe—the writing ofI'll Take My Stand. His friends came to beUeve that Davidson could not get over his earlyAgrarianism and dismissed him because ofhis sometimes difficult personalityand the fact that, in theirview, he just did not seem to grow, to evolve. Davidson stubbornly held to what he conceived Agrarianism to be. Yetitis interestingtonote the malleabiUty ofDavidson's memory. In 1930 the Agrarians had railed against industrial capitalism because it damaged the sources of southern culture and values. What they diemselves felt distinguished their anti-modern manifesto from other Uterary symposia ofthe period—and specificallyfrom the quite similar anti-modern musings oftheir chief rivals, the New Humanists, led bythe prominent academics Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More—was their ability to situate their criticism ofmodern culture in a Uving social and historical context. Culture is not some soft material poured into socialvessels from the top, they argued. Rather, a social and economic context precedes and conditions cultural forms. With the quixotic claim that the South should, at least in part, renounce the promise of industrialization and modernization—this as...