"And it is here, under this oak where Evangeline waited for her lover Gabriel, who never came. This oak is an immortal spot, made so by Longfellow's poem, but Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment.
Where are the schools that you have waited for your children to have, that have never come? Where are the roads and highways that you send your money to build, that are no nearer now than ever before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and disabled? Your tears in this country have lasted for generations. Give me the chance to dry the eyes of those who still weep here."
— Huey Long,
Evangeline Oak campaign speech,
St. Martinville, La,
1928
"The Night Writer assault of 1930 through '31 launched a five-year campaign of frenzied promotion, during which the Agrarians were a central part of the cultural opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the agitation for appeasing Hitler and Mussolini. Roosevelt was engaged in a campaign to revive Lincoln's age of technological progress, which had been slowed and reversed by the preceding sixty-five years of assassinations, shooting war, and cultural war. His plan to destroy Wall Street's "economic Royalists" included the invasion of the old Confederacy with such projects as the Tennessee Valley Authority, to forever destroy the Southern bastion of Feudalism.
A key parallel to Roosevelt on this point, was Louisiana's pro-Lincoln, pro-industrial Senator and Governor, Huey Long, who was subjected to a campaign of vilification which the Agrarians continued for at least fifty years after his 1935 assassination. It was against this Roosevelt revival of the American Tradition, that our American Tory plague, with backing from their Brutish and European cousins, launched the Agrarian counterattack.
*****
Most historians of the Agrarians claim that after 1936, the group returned to "littachah" and dropped their "Agrarian" concerns, but this is a blatant lie. Each of the core members we deal with here, Democrats and Republicans, Pulitzer Prize winners, those who remained in Tennessee and those who re-located to Yale or Harvard, participated in Agrarian organizing against the Constitution of the United States, through Agrarian events and publications, until their deaths. Each of the Agrarians then living, collaborated with the Buckley-supported, openly pro-Ku Klux Klan and anti-American Southern Partisan magazine, which launched a re-birth of the movement in 1979. In 1980, the most "liberal," of them, they say, Robert Penn Warren, wrote "Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back," for The New Yorker on the occasion of the U.S. Congress' and Jimmy Critter's posthumous "exoneration" of the traitor. In it, he maintained the old Agrarian message of 1931: Davis' courageous, statesman-like resistance against the tyrant Lincoln. In 1981, they staged a highly publicized 50th anniversary celebration for I'll Take My Stand at Vanderbilt. In 1985, they publicly celebrated the assassination of Huey Long with help from Louisiana State University, which Long had built, and the Public Broadcasting System. Agrarian disciples continue to publish Southern Partisan, Southern Patriot, Modern Age, Chronicles, and books like Charles Adams' The Case for Southern Secession, with support from Cabinet members and Senators.
After the American Review period, the Night Writers continued to operate in two, related directions, which characterize their activity up till today. First, they vigorously organized for a new Global Empire under the control of Britain, in collaboration with the Wells/Russell British-American-Canadian, foreign policy, intelligence, propaganda, and psychological warfare services, official and unofficial. Secondly, they took over a commanding position in the English-language literary establishment, and a powerful position in historical—especially American History—studies. It is notably typical of this intellectual and moral corruption, that Tate's derivative and partially plagiarized biographies had already won the praise of noted historians Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager. Through both prongs of this offensive, the Agrarians achieved total, direct, intellectual mastery of the post-War Conservative movement in the United States—as typified by the Buckley interests and the later "Religious Right," and their Global anti-Industrialism has been integrated into the so-called "left-liberal" establishment constellation of forces and issues.
As we shall now see, the intention of the Fugitives' "littererah work," the "New Crittercism," was precisely the same as the Godzilla and Little Green Men theology of I'll Take My Stand and God Without Thunder.
*****
Within several months, Huey Long was killed by the Louisiana social set Warren and Brooks had joined. He was shot by Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, the son of Brooks family physician, Dr. Carl Adam Weiss. The shooting seriously injured Long. The medical treatment that followed killed him. Three weeks earlier, the assassin had treated Cleanth Brooks' foster brother in Brooks' home. Fifty years later, Robert Penn Warren commissioned current Public Broadcasting System superstar, Ken Burns, to produce a film celebrating the assassination, as part of the Agrarians' entertainment for Southern Review's jubilee anniversary party.
According to statements by Mrs. Hodding Carter II and others interviewed on that film, the entire Baton Rouge and Louisiana upper crust had been openly clamoring for Long's assassination. She reports that when the shooting was announced, she started shouting, "Where's Hoddin'? Where's Hoddin'?" because she, like each of her friends, thought that her husband might have been the shooter. The aging Warren creaked out, venemously, that Long was a "Mussolini," apparently hoping that no one remembered how fond he and his friends had been of Il Duce at the time.
After the Southern Review was closed during the War, the Critter influence spread like the metastasization of a cancer. Warren and Brooks' joint effort Understanding Poetry, became the leading "Poetry 101" textbook used in America. Brooks finished out his career at the elite Yale University, as, amongst other things, the leading interpreter of novelist William Faulkner's drunken ramblings. He also was appointed for a term as U.S. Cultural Attaché, under James Branch Cabell's cousins, the Bruces, in our London Embassy.
Warren also taught, for a time, at the prestigious Yale Drama School, which continues to serve as one of Hollywood's main training centers, having produced "stars" including Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, and Glenn Close. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, had two Hollywood movies made from his novels (most notoriously, his attack on the murdered Huey Long, All the King's Men, which won three Oscars), and he was named the first "Poet Laureate of the United States." In 1981, Democratic Gov. John Y. Brown of Kentucky arranged to fly Warren in his personal jet to the I'll Take My Stand Fiftieth Anniversary celebrations in Nashville.
The Critters' influence was also spread by protégés who may not have fully embraced the Agrarian cause. PBS "superstar" Ken Burns' fame stems largely from his Civil War series. Warren was so delighted with Burns' work on the fifth assassination of Huey Long (the second, third, and fourth being the book, play, and movie versions of Warren's All the King's Men), that he suggested Burns collaborate with Agrarian historian Shelby Foote on a like-spirited treatment of the Civil War. Though, at first glance, the series may appear to be informative and "balanced," think about it. Does it actually present the truth about the War, "testing," as Lincoln said, "whether this Nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated can long endure?" Or is this Truth buried under interminable soap-opera spinning of the personal stories of people whose life's meaning is, thereby, cheapened by Burns?
In the film Foote declared his mystic reverence for the sword of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and in Memphis he publicly opposed a campaign initiated by Lyndon LaRouche to remove Ku Klux Klan founder Albert Pike's statue from Federal land in Washington, D.C."
Stanley Ezrol,
SEDUCED FROM VICTORY - How the Lost Corpse Subverts the American Intellectual Tradition
https://vimeo.com/117616656
No comments:
Post a Comment