Fugitive poet, Agrarian social philosopher, and member of Vanderbilt University’s English faculty for forty-four years, Donald Grady Davidson was a major participant in two famous literary groups associated with that university: the Fugitives and the Agrarians. With Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, he was a leading member of the Fugitive poets—those Southern writers who edited and contributed poems, essays, and reviews to the Fugitive (1922–25), a literary magazine that played a significant role in the inauguration of the Southern literary renaissance. Later in the 1920s, Davidson led the Fugitives in adding social, economic, and political concerns to their literary interests, which resulted in the formation of a second group, the Agrarians. Attracting Andrew Lytle, Stark Young, John Donald Wade, and other conservative southerners, the Agrarians opposed the New South gospel of industrial progress and defended the South’s traditional agrarian way of life in their manifesto I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930).

The Agrarians described their defense of the Southern way of life by juxtaposing it to the “industrial.” Agrarian signified a traditional agricultural way of life based on stable, religious, politically conservative communities principally composed of land-owning families. Industrial signified a number of features of the modern industrial state that threatened a healthy family- and community-based political and cultural life: political centralization, secularism, materialism, consumerism, cosmopolitanism, urbanization, and standardization. Of the twelve souther-ners who contributed essays to the Agrarians’ manifesto, Davidson was the most faithful and stalwart explicator and defender of agrarianism. And while some of the Agrarians lost interest in the movement in the mid-1930s, Davidson campaigned for the cause until the end of his life, persistently defending traditional conservative principles.

Before the Agrarians publicly took their stand in defense of the traditional South, Davidson was preparing the ground for the movement as editor and chief reviewer of “The Spyglass” (1924–30), a book page for the Nashville Tennessean. His “Spyglass” essays and reviews anticipated many Agrarian themes. In them, he opposed science as an arbiter of moral and social values, and scientism, which destroys myth and religion. He expressed skepticism concerning the ideology of progress and the cult of novelty. He criticized the commercial spirit that regulates everything, even art, in the interest of the cash nexus, and he scorned the taste and values of New York City literati. He also rejected Marxism and every kind of economic and historical determinism. While he noted the deleterious effects of the machine age on the arts, Davidson celebrated folk song, the ballad, handicrafts, and other features of folk heritage. Finally, Davidson cherished sectional differences and praised the artist still in touch with and at home in his community.

Davidson’s contribution to American conservative thought is best discussed in terms of regionalism. When he took up the Agrarian cause, Davidson also embraced a regional poetic and social vision that appears in all of his post- Fugitive writings, whether its setting is middle Tennessee (as in his long poem The Tall Men [1927] and the two-volume history The Tennessee [1946]) or rural New England (some of the verse in The Long Street [1961] and his most frequently anthologized essay “Still Rebels, Still Yankees” [1957]). In literary, social, and political matters he always focused on the local scene, recognizing the community before the state, the state before the region, the region before the nation, and the nation before the world. His essay in I’ll Take My Stand, “A Mirror for Artists” (1930), advocates decentralization of the arts and stresses that the artist owes allegiance to his community as citizen as well as to his art as craftsman.

Davidson made the argument for political decentralization in “That This Nation May Endure: The Need for Political Regionalism,” his contribution to Who Owns America? (1936), a sequel to I’ll Take My Stand. In Davidson’s many contributions to the American Review (a short-lived conservative journal [1933–37] that published his best known work, “Still Rebels, Still Yankees” and “Lee in the Mountains”) he continued to attack national and cosmopolitan approaches to literary and social issues. These American Review essays, plus new material, went into The Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States (1938), Davidson’s most important work on American social theory. Like much of Davidson’s work, this book contains both stinging criticism and an affirmation. Negatively, he attacks Leviathan, the centrally governed industrialized state that (sometimes wittingly, sometimes accidentally) enforces political, cultural, artistic, and social conformity. Positively, Davidson defended the diversity of America: regionalism in education, in literature, in the arts, and in political economy.

Davidson wrote more than one hundred essentially pro-agrarian or traditionalist essays and reviews for a variety of journals of scholarship and opinion. His views on agrarianism, tradition, and the transmission of tradition, his appreciation for the regional past, and his celebration of folk art and community influenced Tate, Lytle, Wade, Frank L. Owsley, and other contemporaries. And as a teacher, poet, and scholar, he influenced later generations of teachers and men of letters, notably Richard Weaver, Randall Stewart, Russell Kirk, M. E. Bradford, Tom Landess, Robert Drake, Peter Stanlis, Madison Jones, and Marion Montgomery.

• Bradford, M. E. “Donald Grady Davidson.” In Fifty Southern Writers after 1900. Edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. New York: Greenwood, 1987.
• Davidson, Donald. Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957; reissued with a foreword by Lewis Simpson, 1972.
• Winchell, Mark Royden. Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2000.