Land!: The Case for an Agrarian Economy - Softcover

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John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974) was an American poet and critic whose book The New Criticism (1941) provided the name of the influential mid-twentieth-century school of criticism. He taught English at Vanderbilt University and at Kenyon College, where he founded and edited the literary magazine The Kenyon Review. He published numerous volumes of poetry, including Selected Poems (1945, 1969), which won a National Book Award.

Jason Peters is associate professor of English at Hillsdale College and is a founding member of Front Porch Republic.

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In the wake of I’ll Take My Stand, economics became a main source of tension between Ransom and his New South opponents. Ransom’s agrarianism stood opposed to the capitalism of a predominantly industrialized society. But whereas I’ll Take My Stand addressed the multifaceted cultural problems related to industrialism, Ransom thought the book lacked a significant economic argument for an agrarian return. As he says in the preface to Land!, he saw the need for an “economic sequel to the group-book.” Land! would be that sequel, and its purpose would be to assess the unemployment crisis and to name its principal cause: the problem of overcapitalization. As Ransom observed, the percentage of farmers had severely dropped over the years as people vacated the countryside for jobs in the cities. With the unemployment crisis underway, he proposed that people return to the land: there was plenty of work to do on the farm. The book would also review commonly proposed solutions to the Great Depression, ranging from capitalist fixes to socialist schemes. Yet it would distinguish the agrarian program from both capitalism and socialism, arguing for the existence of a completely different economic option from the two prevailing systems. It was a system that would promote self-sufficiency and local interests, prioritizing farm life over manufacturing.

Inasmuch as he “debated and discussed and even wrote that topic” during the winter of 1931, Ransom concluded, “I might as well ‘capitalize’ my efforts into a book and get it behind me.” Ransom had been awarded a Guggenheim scholarship for the 1931–32 academic year, so bringing a bit of closure to his foray into economics would allow him better focus on his poetic calling. He proposed the book idea to Harcourt under the title “Capitalism and the Land” and hoped to finish writing it that summer before going overseas.

Summer ended and the book was not complete. Once in England, Ransom continued to work on the book, and he recruited Tate to serve as his stateside literary agent. Harcourt had declined his proposal, and, as appears from a letter to Tate, Scribner’s had too. With two rejections on the proposal, Ransom submitted part of the manuscript to Harper & Brothers with an offer to have a complete manuscript by January 15, 1932. Ransom instructed Harper & Brothers to send it to Tate if they decided not to publish it, with the idea that Tate could help pitch it to other publishers. Harper declined the manuscript.

As the New Year rolled around, Ransom continued to work diligently on his economic project. A small light of hope began to shine when The New Republic published an article from his labors under the title “The State and the Land.” With a little wind in his sail, Ransom approached Harcourt once again with a reworked book manuscript, to be titled simply Land! In May 1932 Ransom received a rejection letter from Harcourt. Discouraged, he let Tate know of his reticence to send it to any other publishers. He wanted Tate to see the manuscript in its present form, which he felt was much stronger than earlier versions, and he even considered having Tate propose the book to Macmillan. However, Ransom started to weary under the strain of negotiating the manuscript from overseas, and his confidence as a lay economist became shaky. Ransom lamented,

the economic subject matter shifts so rapidly that an utterance becomes an anachronism before it can get to print. Don’t peddle it any further, therefore. It may be that in the fall I can take it up again profitably. But it may be, on the other hand, that my kind of economics won’t do, and that I’d better stick to poetry and aesthetics. I’ve learned a lot of economics lately, too! But I must confess I haven’t the econo mist’s air, flair, style, method, or whatnot.

Nevertheless, not all was lost. Whereas Harper & Brothers had also declined the book at an earlier stage, they now agreed to publish part of his work as an article in the July issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine. It was given the title “Land! An Answer to the Unemployment Problem.”

When Ransom returned to the United States in the fall, his hopes of recovering the book project came to a decisive end. Writing of his dissatisfaction, Ransom told Tate:

My poor book is nearly a total loss—I don’t like it. It would have been a passable book published a year ago. Several publishers nearly took it. Within these next ten days I will have kicked it into the incinerator or else taken a grand new start and started over on a new outline together. The latter course would relieve my system, and I am getting a little bit gone on my new (hypothetical) approach.

As a book project, Land! had come to an end. Ransom gave up on publishing it. And his saying that in a few days he would have “kicked it into the incinerator” caused many later scholars to believe he had in fact destroyed the manuscript altogether. Ransom seems to have had a penchant for feeding the fire with old unwanted materials.

(excerpted from the introduction)