[em]The Attack on Leviathan[/em] at 75:[br] A Commemoration and a Critique

This essay appears in the Fall 2013 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

An “impassioned idealist” and a relentless advocate of traditional southern values, Donald Davidson chose a life of insubordination.¹ In poetry, essays, scholarship, and criticism, Davidson challenged prevailing orthodoxies that he believed condemned men in the twentieth century to endure an impersonal and dehumanized existence. This confrontational spirit, evoked in defense of the humane tradition, informed much of Davidson’s work, nowhere more so than his neglected masterpiece, The Attack on Leviathan.

In the prevailing intellectual climate of the 1930s, a defense of the southern agrarian tradition seemed to many hopelessly out of touch with the realities of modern American life. Critics of The Attack on Leviathan when it appeared in 1938 objected that Davidson’s analysis and recommendations were unrealistic, since he had failed to understand that economic collectivism and political consolidation were inevitable. They, of course, championed utopian experiments that, in retrospect, appear far more preposterous or menacing than anything that Davidson put forth.

The gradual but steady deterioration of the American economy after the stock market crash of October 1929 invited an assortment of diagnoses and antidotes. Liberal heirs to the Progressive movement such as George Soule, editor of the New Republic, at first identified no structural weaknesses in the economy but saw only temporary imbalances between production and consumption that a coalition of businessmen, politicians, and union officials could repair through a vigorous and efficient agenda of planning, legislation, and reform. As the Depression worsened, proposed solutions became more extreme, involving the fundamental reorganization of American society to the detriment of many traditional rights of property and citizenship.

In Farewell to Reform, published in 1932, John Chamberlain, who wrote book reviews for the New York Times, issued a revolutionary indictment of American capitalism. Chamberlain denounced free enterprise and economic individualism and heralded in its place the advent of corporate monopoly, economic centralization, and political consolidation. For V. F. Calverton, Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, Edmund Wilson, and others who embraced Marxism, the Depression presented an opportunity at last to dismantle the capitalist system by abandoning competition in favor of cooperation. Never affording social justice, capitalism could now no longer deliver even economic stability.

To devise a new, collective social, political, and economic order, Marxists and non-Marxists alike appealed to the example of the Soviet Union. “For Russians,” declared Stuart Chase, “the world is exciting, stimulating, challenging, calling forth their interest and enthusiasm. The world for most Americans is dull and uninspiring, wracked with frightful economic insecurity.”² Like Chase, many on the Left regarded the USSR as a political and moral alternative to the United States; Russia was the model of the ideal future they imagined. Their prescience speaks for itself.

To forestall socialist revolution, end the Depression, and save capitalism, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the liberal architects of the New Deal sought not to restore the era of unrestrained competitive individualism but rather to ensure greater social and economic equality by regulating big business. As much as did their militant counterparts, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Henry Wallace deplored the anarchy of the market and the chaos of what they identified as primitive capitalism. Anticipating crucial aspects of Davidson’s thesis in The Attack on Leviathan, Wallace, in New Frontiers (1934), lamented that America was coming more fully to resemble Europe. Yet, unlike Davidson, Wallace believed the key to the future lay not in safeguarding private property or revitalizing individual liberty, but in the effective management and equitable distribution of the abundant goods and resources that the industrial economy had produced, tasks that only the state could perform. A vast expansion of federal power was as necessary as it was inexorable. Davidson rejected this perspective, as he did the more radical options, and remained skeptical about the New Deal, fearful he was witnessing the birth of a corporate dictatorship in the United States.

Southerners were not alone in their quest to exalt “the culture of the soil” and to circumscribe “the American industrial ideal.”³ The sociologist Carle Zimmerman, the economist Ralph Borsodi, the novelist Louis Bromfield, and the Roman Catholic priest Luigi Ligutti, to name but a few, also endorsed the “back-to-the-land” movement.⁴ Even some liberal and leftist intellectuals, such as Stuart Chase and Waldo Frank, showed an uncommon attraction to, and an extraordinary sympathy for, folk cultures and agrarian communities, attitudes that were, if anything, more romantic than Davidson’s fidelity to the South. Organic, cohesive, self-sufficient, and independent, peasant societies, such as those Chase found in Mexico, evidently provided a sane alternative to the vulgar, restless, incoherent, and neurotic American way of life, in which men were subservient to money and enslaved to machines. Davidson could not have been in more complete agreement.

Opposed to both corporate capitalism and the bureaucratic state, Davidson’s neo-Jeffersonian perspective put forth in The Attack on Leviathan retains its value, defending as it does the widespread ownership of property and decentralized government as the foundation of individual liberty and the responsible life. Such a vision ought even now to affect public discourse on the nature of the good society; for Davidson, it constituted nothing less than the original American Dream.

Unwavering in his allegiance to the South, Davidson nonetheless embraced his own version of American exceptionalism, which in his rendering meant that the United States was destined not to fulfill history but to transcend it. Davidson conceived of America as an alternative to Europe. To the novelist, poet, and editor Hervey Allen, Davidson announced that he felt “the sense of separateness, of almost final separateness, from European concerns.”⁵ In The Attack on Leviathan, he undertook to explain the principal difference that set the New World apart from the Old. Unlike those European nations that, whether ruled by old-fashioned monarchies or modern dictatorships, endured centralized, bureaucratic, authoritarian governments, the United States was a land of autonomous sections that remained virtually impervious to national control. The distinctive historical character of the United States marked its fundamental divergence from, and superiority to, Europe.

Until the 1870s, Davidson argued, the contours of American and European history had diverged. The American Revolution differed markedly from its French counterpart in nature, extent, and influence. Europe experienced no corollary to westward migration. The Civil War had nothing in common with the revolutions that erupted during the 1820s in Naples, Spain, and Russia, in 1830 in France, and in 1848 throughout Europe, although the last episode, along with famine in Ireland, contributed to the mass immigration that further distinguished nineteenth-century America from nineteenth-century Europe.

The deeper assumptions about the United States that underlay and reinforced Davidson’s attack on Leviathan originated in one of the two perspectives shared among members of the founding generation. Like Washington, Jefferson, and Adams, Davidson thought it absurd and ruinous for the United States to aspire to limitless power and unrivaled dominion. His own exceptionalist vision notwithstanding, he recoiled from the conviction that he saw embodied in the Puritan ambition to make America “a City upon a Hill,” serving either as a luminous exemplar or a permanent rebuke to the rest of mankind.⁶ America was not, in Davidson’s mind, the “hope to the world for all future time” or “the last, best hope of earth.”⁷

Not a nation on the European model and not an imperial power, America was designed instead to be an agrarian republic of modest, but comfortably prosperous, farmers, each savoring the bounty of his own labor. Having escaped the evils that contaminated, and very nearly wrecked, civilization in Europe, this “traditional society of the New World type” offered hope that men could live together in peace—a hope that had long ago withered in Europe.⁸ Jefferson, Davidson affirmed, had emphasized the differences between America and Europe and had nurtured the growth of an independent agrarian republic in the United States. At the same time, Davidson cautioned, Jefferson was not a doctrinaire agrarian, never desiring to exclude manufactures from the United States. As a dedicated philosophe, Jefferson had even welcomed technological innovations that promised to improve the condition of mankind. Yet Davidson believed that Jefferson had foreseen the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, ascertaining how easily men could submit to the bondage of machines, money, and commerce and thereby forfeit their property, virtue, citizenship, and independence. Like Jefferson, Davidson sought, if possible, to avoid the crisis that had already befallen Europe and now threatened to engulf the modern world.

It should come as no surprise that Davidson identified Alexander Hamilton as la bête noir of American history. “Jeffersonian liberalism,” Davidson wrote, intended to give the common man:

his fair chance along with the “rich and well-born” on whom Hamilton wished to confer power. It was backed by a definite theory of government which in turn was fortified by practical economics. As for the government, it should be little, and that little was not to be trusted overmuch, since Jefferson understood how men allow institutions to become the instruments of oppression. The economics was based upon a theory of land and the cultivation of land. Jefferson was an agrarian, who thought that only a society which gave farmers a considerable preference could be expected to preserve its independence and economic health. Above all things Jefferson feared the Leviathan state and denounced the tendencies toward “consolidation” that Hamilton and Marshall were busily forwarding.⁹

As early as the 1790s, Davidson argued, progressive and nationalist ideologues had betrayed Jeffersonian ideals and mounted an imperious campaign to destroy the liberty of the common man by adopting the same utilitarian philosophy that had ravaged Europe. Hamilton and the Federalist Party sought to transform the United States into the wealthiest and most powerful nation-state in history, able to compete politically, economically, and, if necessary, militarily with its European rivals. To that end, Hamilton used the new national government to stimulate the growth of manufacturing and commerce. In his famous reports on public credit, the national bank, and manufactures, Hamilton proposed, first, that money replace land as the primary measure of wealth and, second, that Americans relinquish their local allegiances and develop a national consciousness.¹⁰ Hamilton’s policies, Davidson maintained in The Attack on Leviathan, were incompatible in every respect with Jefferson’s vision of the republic, the future of which Hamilton had placed at risk.

In The Attack on Leviathan, Davidson acclaimed the wise efforts of the Founding Fathers to preserve “local autonomy and federation,” but at the same time he repudiated, or at least questioned, the nationalist implications of their handiwork.¹¹ “We are a federation of states,” he declared, “but we are a nation of sections. The unwritten constitution of that nation is a sectional constitution as apparent in folkways and political predilections as it is not in the written document.”¹² Writing to his friend and fellow Agrarian John Donald Wade, Davidson clarified the basic premises of his argument. “I can’t conceive of our country as offering a fixed hierarchy of values, . . .” he told Wade, “Something called a nation, of which you must think first; Something called a region, of which you are privileged to think, if you are careful to give it second place. Such a hierarchy of values is conceivable in a military organization . . . but normally, how can we propose such a hierarchy for our national life?”

Davidson aspired, rather, to think of “the nation in its proper place and of the region or section in its place, without elevating one above the other.”¹³ Not only were the nation and the national government abstractions, but so, too, were the states and the state governments. The sections, by contrast, were real, concrete, and organic, a “‘living form’ in all periods of our history.”¹⁴ American civic nationalism, which the Constitution itself had enshrined and authenticated, rested not on blood and soil but on nothing more than the acceptance of a common government. It was an artificial concept. “I have no abstract devotion to some entity called the nation,” Davidson proclaimed, “but I am loyal to a loose historic unity called the United States. . . . The kind of nation that requires me to heave a sacrificial sigh and immolate my cherished sectional peculiarities, hopes, pleasures, and means of life on the altar of some theoretic national good is not the nation that I hope the United States becomes.”¹⁵

Acknowledging and respecting the cultural and regional diversity within the United States, Davidson contended, was paradoxically the most reliable guarantee of national unity and individual freedom. Attempts to invest a people with a common identity and nationality through the apparatus of the state, even when successful, were contrived, false, and usually oppressive. Modern nations, Davidson complained, relied on the increasingly manipulative artifice of propaganda to fabricate the illusion of a community depicted as at once ancient and eternal. To command the allegiance of the citizens, nationalists inculcated in a people the myth of a homogeneous origin, history, culture, and destiny. Even harmless departures from national standards became unrecognized or unacceptable and, in moments of crisis, were utterly intolerable.

Through the media, the public schools, the state, and an array of monuments and symbols, nationalists, Davidson charged, had invented the nation.¹⁶ Beneath this spurious national identity, Davidson observed genuine and vibrant ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic affinities embedded in the different sections of the country. These multiple traditions and inheritances constituted the United States, not “one nation indivisible,” but, as Davidson wrote, “a flexible, decentralized society, allowing for the maximum of tolerance” and thus preserving “the oldest and sturdiest American aspirations: the idea of freedom.”¹⁷

During the American Revolution and the early days of independence, Davidson conceded, improvised nationalism may have been necessary so that the government could display a semblance of fortitude and efficiency to an insecure people at home and resilience and unity in a menacing world. By the 1930s, Davidson thought that nationalism itself had become dangerously oppressive. With the rise of communism, fascism, and national socialism in Europe, to say nothing of “the Rooseveltian consolidating program,” the neglected and long discredited sectionalism of a bygone age might yet prove the best, and perhaps the only, antidote to tyranny.¹⁸

Anchored within the tradition of exceptionalist thought, Davidson nonetheless envisioned the United States as unique among the nations of the earth: the archetype not only of a democratic state but also, and more important, of a democratic society. To confirm this judgment, Davidson appealed to the work of Frederick Jackson Turner. For Davidson, Turner “seemed to offer the key to American history,” demonstrating the importance not merely of the frontier but also of the sections in preserving independence from Europe and sustaining democracy in America.

“The truth is,” Davidson wrote in The Attack on Leviathan, “that Turner’s thesis implied from the beginning much more than the frontier theme. It implied the differentiation of the settled areas into sections or regions as soon as they had passed through a colonial stage and become stable, or, in another and mature sense, settled parts of the American nation.”¹⁹ The United States, in Davidson’s view, thus constituted a “sectional union” that permitted the “matured sections a kind of unofficial autonomy.” The stability and security arising from such a social and political organization muted the centrifugal forces that opposing interests generated and, at least until the Civil War, held the Union together through sectional equilibrium and compromise, without the need to resort to arms.

Following the disintegration of a unified Christendom, Europe, unlike America, had “no Federal principle,” and nothing short of conquest would bind together sharply differentiated nations.²⁰ The ensuing rebellions and civil wars thrust the continent into an era of bloodshed, tumult, and chaos that lasted for more than 150 years. In Europe, diversity bred conformity, oppression, and slaughter. Common experiences, beliefs, and ideals, by contrast, bound Americans together in an organic unity that nevertheless preserved their social, cultural, political, economic, and religious independence. Dynastic and confessional strife had torn Europe apart, and, in the escalating battle for power, Davidson pointed out, monarchs had finally embraced absolutist policies to silence dissidents and radicals, to reestablish order, and to control the masses. Such were the very circumstances that had given rise to the leviathan state.

With his customary fervor and occasional venom, Davidson assailed such prophets of American nationalism, collectivization, planning, and homogeneity as the historians Charles A. Beard and Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., the sociologists Rupert Vance and Howard Odum, and the southern liberal journalists, educators, and reformers Stringfellow Barr, Virginius Dabney, George Fort Milton, Walter Hines Page, Edwin A. Alderman, Charles B. Aycock, and Seaman A. Knapp. Contrary to Turner, Progressive historians of “the economic determinist school” dismissed sectionalism as a temporary and insignificant obstacle in the relentless advance of civilization. Schlesinger and Beard reduced American history to international history, “a trans-Atlantic phase of a general and irresistible social-economic process” in which “the American scene” became virtually indistinguishable “from the European scene.”²¹

Following Turner, Davidson’s counterinterpretation of the American past took sectionalism more fully into account. Before the Civil War, all Americans, northerners as well as southerners, abided by the ideals and intentions of the Founding Fathers to respect the integrity of the sections. In the interest of expedience and power, so Davidson insisted, northerners betrayed these generous principles and set out to devise a centralized, efficient, and omnipotent nation-state. Although distressing, such an act by itself might have been tolerable had northerners not coerced southerners to go along with northern enthusiasms. According to Davidson, among the first to appreciate the risk this transformation posed was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who saw that it would end in the oppression of the South and the annihilation of the southern way of life.22

A century later Davidson similarly reproved “those forms of sectionalism which parade themselves as ‘national.’” To Wade he complained that since before the Civil War “the East has assumed that its opinions, no matter how thoroughly Eastern, were the only true national opinions, and that all opinions identifiable as Southern were ‘sectional’ opinions, and accordingly to be scorned and depreciated.”²³ In The Attack on Leviathan, Davidson issued an equally acerbic indictment:

The sectional domination of the Northeast for the seventy years following the War Between the States took on an exploitative character and can only be described as a form of sectional imperialism, with the other sections having in greater or less degree, the status of colonial regimes dominated by an imperial or capital regime^.24

The wanton violations the South had endured during the seventy years of uncontested northern ascendancy had, in Davidson’s judgment, effected a spectacle of intemperance, debauchery, and chaos unprecedented in the annals of the civilized world.

Davidson’s exaggerated rhetoric should not disguise the substance of his argument. The federal republic was, after all, a casualty of the Civil War. As James McPherson has shown, the old republic gave way to a more centralized nation-state that levied and collected taxes, conscripted men into military service, enlarged the domain of the federal courts, issued a national currency, instituted a national banking system, and, with the inception of the Freedmen’s Bureau, organized the first national welfare program in American history. Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution, McPherson continues, limited the power of the national government. Six of the next seven, beginning in 1865 with passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, augmented those powers while expressly curtailing the powers of the states.²⁵ Union victory, Davidson believed, reduced the South to the economic and political colony of the North. McPherson seems in part at least to have confirmed Davidson’s historical judgment.

The instruments of continued sectional oppression in the twentieth century were no longer the tariff and war, but rather science, technology, industrialism, and planning. “The war of cultures in our time . . . ,” Davidson wrote in 1935, three years before he published The Attack on Leviathan, “is a war between urban civilization—which is industrial, progressive, scientific, anti-traditional—and rural or provincial civilization—which is on the whole agrarian, conservative, anti-scientific, and traditional.”²⁶ National policy supported the progressive, scientific, industrial regime. To cripple Leviathan, Davidson proposed, among other measures, that the federal government withdraw economic subsidies from industry and legal protection from corporations, thereby ending what he called the “privilege of irresponsibility.”²⁷

Agriculture, and the craftsmanship that accompanied it, were labor intensive, and labor, Davidson affirmed, was not an evil to be avoided but rather a joy to be savored. He recommended that all labor-saving, or, as he characterized it, “labor-evicting,” machinery be strictly regulated or altogether eliminated. He further objected to the mass market, endorsing instead production for use and for local markets. Only an agrarian economy, which Davidson at times seems to have regarded as a virtual autarky, guaranteed a measure of security and comfort without engendering the human casualties attendant upon industrial capitalism, Soviet communism, or German national socialism.²⁸ If men wished to retain and to cultivate their humanity, they had to reject the mechanical conformity that industrialism and bureaucracy imposed upon their lives and to embrace in its stead the dignity and freedom that emanated from traditional society.

Revolutionary in its every appearance and expression, modernity threatened to dispossess Americans of the greatest moral necessity of a living culture: their genius as a people. To get in step with the national procession, to merge into the frenzied anonymity of modern society, Davidson feared, would induce Americans, and especially southerners, not only to relinquish their sectional identity and their individual self-respect but would also require their souls. The “cosmopolitanism” of the industrial age homogenized diversity and eradicated individuality. “I should like to see the South retain its character,” Davidson had written to A. C. Aswell of Forum as early as 1927, “not melt into the general mass.”²⁹ The triumph of cosmopolitanism ensured that one section and people would come to resemble every other. Cosmopolitanism reduced complex human beings to simple interchangeable parts, a fitting tribute to the pervasive and corrupting influence of that arch-modernist Henry Ford.³⁰

To negate the “cosmopolitanism of the world-city,” Davidson advanced the “philosophy of provincialism,” which valued diversity and unity but reviled standardization and uniformity. Sectionalism was the political expression of “the provincial habit of mind.” Contrary to the delusions of the machine age, in the United States there was not and never had been a sovereign national culture. Instead, a congeries of disparate though united sectional cultures had flourished throughout New England, the Midwest, the South, and the West. Apart from these, the fictive national culture did not exist. Although often unacknowledged, sectionalism was the effective reality of American life, “no matter how assiduously historians and politicians may veil its appearance under one or another sort of euphemism.”³¹ The euphemism for sectionalism that most troubled Davidson at the time he wrote The Attack on Leviathan was the “regionalism” of sociologists Howard W. Odum and Rupert B. Vance.

Odum and Vance, Davidson charged, had subordinated the region to the nation. Replacing partisan politics with an apparently objective social science, they never imagined that a sectional interest, masquerading as the national interest, could seize control of the government and pursue sectional aims unscrupulously concealed as national purpose. Davidson thought it imperative, therefore, to devise a new theory of federalism that endorsed sectionalism and ensured the continued vitality of the sections within the nation. Odum and Vance, on the contrary, dreaded the “ ‘revivification’ of sectionalism. . . . The claim is that regionalism will not stimulate Federal co-ercion but that sectionalism will. I am more and more afraid . . . ,” Davidson wrote to Wade, “that Odum is conceiving regionalism as a very submissive, decent, orderly kind of thing–almost a servile creature. . . . I would simply maintain that any Federal government which found it necessary to coerce a genuine and reasonable sectionalism would be a bad Federal government.”³² The reconciliation of nationalism and sectionalism was the foremost impediment that those who wished to save democratic institutions, republican government, and individual freedom in the United States had to overcome.

History, Davidson presumed, ought to have confirmed for Americans the imprudence of disregarding the sections in a country so large and diverse. Should the equilibrium between the sections again break down, as it did during the 1850s, not only the nation but this time civilization itself would be in peril. Unless the present generation maintained the sections and solved the problem of their relation to the nation at large, Davidson imagined some future historian pausing in his lecture to comment: “At this point regional differences passed beyond the possibility of adjustment under the Federal system, and here, therefore began the dismemberment of the United States, long since foreshadowed in the struggle of the eighteen-sixties.” Davidson considered another, even darker possibility: “At this point the ordinary processes of Federal government failed to serve the national purposes. A dictatorship ensued.”³³

The foremost hazard to the prolonged sectional equilibrium of the United States, Davidson feared, was the very mechanism that Odum and Vance had applied to establish it: regional planning on a national scale. Planning inclined toward tyranny. Would the intervention of the centralized state into traditional sectional arrangements, Davidson asked, respect the democratic right of self-government? Under the deliberate scrutiny and thoughtful supervision of Odum and Vance, he conceded, perhaps it would. But what if the process fell under the sway of extremists who agreed that Leviathan was the only way to maintain order while securing the benefits of technological advancement and industrial prosperity? Planning would then become an instrument of totalitarianism. Intent to construct a scientific, efficient, regimented, corporate society, the radicals would hasten to trade diversity and freedom for stability and affluence. Through planning, the “Functionalists,” as Davidson called them, would bring sectionalism and democracy viciously “to heel with the lash of a dictatorial whip.”³⁴           

In The Attack on Leviathan, Davidson proposed the creation of “regional commonwealths” to avoid such repugnant circumstances. These regional commonwealths, designed to supplant the states as the seats of local government, constituted the basis for a “New Federalism,” which would protect the sections at once from economic exploitation and political oppression. Within the regional commonwealths, governing councils would exercise authority over such fiscal and economic policies as taxation, capital investment, the money supply, and credit. They would have the power to limit the industrial monopolies that endowed one section of the country (the Northeast) with the virtual right of conquest over another (the South). At least in the South and the West, the regional councils should encourage agriculture and promote small business as the material bases for a humane social order.

Perhaps, too, Davidson conjectured, these commonwealths ought to possess a veto similar to Calhoun’s doctrine of interposition, enabling citizens to safeguard their customs, culture, social practices, and way of life without resorting to furtive evasions or raw violence. If this arrangement did not “form a more perfect union,” Davidson hoped that it might still restore a union better suited to longstanding American preferences, traditions, and realities.

The Attack on Leviathan deserved a more generous fate. In a letter dated December 16, 1948, Lambert Davis, director of the University of North Carolina Press, informed Davidson that two years earlier the publisher had destroyed the remaining sheet stock of the book, amounting to 870 unbound copies. “We printed 1620 copies,” Lambert wrote, “of which 750 were bound. The remaining stock was in sheets, and when my predecessor, T. J. Wilson, took over in 1946, there was an acute shortage of storage space which made it necessary for him to cut down our inventory. So at that time, along with many others, the sheet stock of THE ATTACK ON LEVIATHAN was pulped.”35 Sales had lagged. In a subsequent letter of January 4, 1949, Davis listed the sales figures for the volume between 1938 and 1949:

1937–38      206  
1938–39      204                          
1939–40      75        
1940–41      6                       
1941–42      7
1942–43      9
1943–44      8         
1944–45      12
1945–46      10
1946–47      29
1947–48      16
1948–49      336

Before going out of print, The Attack on Leviathan sold 585 copies, 485 of them by 1940. Judged by numbers alone, Davidson’s polemic had failed to advance the cause of sectionalism.

In his letter of January 4, Davis unintentionally added insult to injury. He specified that

there is nothing in our contract, or any other ordinary book publishing contract that I have ever heard of, that requires a publisher to consult an author on such a business decision. . . . There was no obligation under the contract that I terminate the agreement, but it seemed to me decent to do so, and accordingly I wrote you that we would agree to transfer publishing rights to you or to any person you wanted us to. I go into all of this detail because I want to convince you that the whole publishing operation on THE ATTACK ON LEVIATHAN was done in good faith, both as to the letter and to the spirit of the contract. . . . I can find nothing in the record to indicate that Couch, Wilson, or myself violated any contract provision or any implied obligation thereunder.³⁷

Davidson in the end felt himself the victim of the business mentality and the economic calculations against which he had so bitterly objected in The Attack on Leviathan and many of his other writings.

For those already inclined to do so, disparaging or ignoring The Attack on Leviathan became, and remains, comparatively easy. Portions of Davidson’s analysis and interpretation are flawed, misleading, or irrelevant. Although he doubtless would have condemned impermanence of residence and detachment from place, Davidson never anticipated the transient society that the United States has become since the 1950s. The mobility of the American people has, paradoxically, rendered sectional cultures both more diverse and less distinguishable from each other than they were during the 1930s. Superhighways, airports, shopping malls, fast food restaurants, and subdivisions long ago blighted Davidson’s version of sectionalism.

In his survey of American history, Davidson also overestimated the importance of sectionalism in the United States and underestimated the strength of nationalism in the South. As early as 1821, Chief Justice John Marshall could announce that “the United States is for many, and for most important purposes, a single nation.” However impassioned local, state, and regional loyalties were, most Americans before the Civil War wished to see their country realize its “manifest destiny” as an expansive continental empire. The spirited American nationalism of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s was not limited to the North. Although southerners endorsed the theory that the United States was a federation and not a modern, centralized nation-state, in moments of excitement or enthusiasm, they sometimes forgot their political convictions and uttered incautious statements of nationalist sentiment. During the 1890s, few Americans, North or South, bothered their consciences about the American invasion of Cuba or the Philippines, undertaken from a mixture of noble ideals, vulgar avarice, and national pride.

The most obvious flaw in Davidson’s thinking lies in his view of race relations. Under the principles of the New Federalism, Davidson presumed that southern state governments had no legal obligation to obey or implement the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and, after 1954, the Brown decision. He never repudiated his position on segregation, never modified his views on race relations, and never abandoned his racism. In 1954 he helped to found, and later directed, the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, an umbrella organization that coordinated local resistance to the integration of public schools throughout the state by impugning the constitutionality of the law. From Davidson’s perspective, the struggle for civil rights was “nauseating and terrifying.”³⁸ The implications were unthinkable.

The late southern conservative historian George C. Rogers Jr. understood the legacy of race relations in the South far better and more clearly than had Davidson. Acknowledging that southerners “have affirmative action because the South was too slow in ending segregation and race discrimination,” Rogers exposed a critical weakness of Davidson’s sectional philosophy.³⁹ Southern defiance brought the invasion of federal troops in 1861, and the war that followed accomplished the mission of the abolitionists and the Radical Republicans to end slavery and humble the South. A century later, resistance to integration again made the South a battleground, with Congress, the Supreme Court, and, when necessary, federal troops intervening to force entrenched interests to make concessions to blacks. This expansion of governmental power appalled Davidson, but, unlike Rogers, he never appreciated the irony that the very recalcitrance he espoused invited federal encroachment in the name of justice, compassion, and munificence.

Davidson’s racism has tarnished his reputation and even diminished his stature as a poet, but we should not allow Davidson’s faults to eclipse his discerning insights and astute perceptions, many of them voiced in The Attack on Leviathan. Above all, Davidson understood the dangers attendant upon the rise of nationalism and the deification of the state. He observed with what merciless ease the individual could be, and, indeed, had been, sacrificed to the fatherland. Science, technology, and industry bestowed powerful instruments upon the modern state, which leaders around the world had misused and perverted.

In The Attack on Leviathan, Davidson also sensed that the erosion of property, individuality, and freedom had as much to do with the advent of a bureaucratic society composed of mechanical, interchangeable, and disposable beings whose humanity had been exhausted and whose lives had become meaningless. Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated the sort of democratic totalitarianism that Davidson glimpsed. Men living in such a world were equal but restless, and indifferent to the welfare of all save themselves. Given to amusements that were dull, trivial, facile, and yet beguiling, they became pliant instruments in the hands of a benevolent but invincible state that managed every aspect of their lives. “Why,” Tocqueville asked, “should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?”⁴⁰ Implacable to the end, Donald Davidson never wearied of rousing men to care enough to take the trouble. ♦

Mark G. Malvasi is Isaac Newton Vaughan Professor of History at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. His latest book is The Finder and Other Poems.

1      Donald Davidson, Southern Writers in the Modern World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), ix–x.

2      Stuart Chase, “The Engineer as Poet,” New Republic, May 20, 1931, 24.

3      Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), xlvii, xxxviii.

4      For a detailed and critical account of these figures, their accomplishments, and their shortcomings, see Allan C. Carlson, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2000).

5      Donald Davidson to Hervey Allen, November 6, 1943, in the Donald Davidson Papers, Special Collections, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University.

6      John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity, in An American Primer, ed., Daniel J. Boorstin (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 40.

7      Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” February 22, 1861, and “Annual Message to Congress,” December 1, 1862, in Selected Speeches and Writings (New York: Vintage Books/Library of America, 1992), 282, 364.

8      See Davidson’s contribution to “A Symposium: The Agrarians Today,” Shenandoah 3 (Summer 1952): 19.

9      Donald Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), 267.

10    See Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton, American (New York: Free Press, 2000); Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982); Robert E. Wright, Hamilton Unbound: Finance and the Creation of the American Republic (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).

11    Davidson, Attack on Leviathan, 368.

12    Ibid., 6. The emphasis is in the original.

13    Davidson to Wade, March 3, 1934, Davidson Papers.

14    Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 4.

15    Davidson to Wade, March 3, 1934, Davidson Papers.

16    Recent scholars of modern nationalism have come to similar conclusions. Among the more important and influential studies are Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY; Cornell University Press, 1983) and Encounters with Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

17    Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 38.

18    Davidson to Ferris Greenslet, October 18, 1933, Davidson Papers.

19    Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 12.

20    Ibid., 19.

21    Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 31, 34.

22    Ibid., 268–70.

23    Davidson to Wade, March 3, 1934, Davidson Papers.

24    Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 26–27

25    James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 859–60.

26    Donald Davidson, “The Trend in Literature,” in Culture in the South, ed. William Terry Couch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 198.

27    Davidson to John Gould Fletcher, December 12, 1937, Davidson Papers.

28    See Donald Davidson, “The Restoration of the Farmer,” American Review 3 (1934): 96–101; “The First Agrarian Economist, American Review 5 (1935): 106–12; and “I’ll Take My Stand: A History,” American Review 5 (1935): 301–21. Davidson did not distinguish carefully between fascism and national socialism.

29    Davidson to A. C. Aswell, October 2, 1937, Davidson Papers.

30    Donald Davidson, The Spyglass: Views and Reviews, 1924–1930, ed. John Tyree Fain (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1963), 237–38, and “Where Regionalism and Sectionalism Meet,” Social Forces 13 (1934): 23–31.

31    Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 24.

32    Davidson to Wade, March 3, 1934, Davidson Papers.

33    Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 109–10. The emphasis is in the original.

34    Davidson, “Where Regionalism and Sectionalism Meet,” 29–30; see also The Attack on Leviathan, 102–28.

35    Lambert Davis to Davidson, December 16, 1948, Davidson Papers.

36    Davis to Davidson, January 4, 1949, Davidson Papers. See also Michael O’Brien, The Idea of the American South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 257–58, and Mark Royden Winchell, Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 217. William Terry Couch had been director of the press at the time Davidson published The Attack on Leviathan.

37    Davis to Davidson, January 4, 1949, Davidson Papers.

38    Davidson to Russell Kirk, June 10, 1955, Davidson Papers.

39    George C. Rogers Jr., “Foreign Policy and the South,” in Why the South Will Survive, ed. Clyde N. Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 89.

40    Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. by George Lawrence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 691–92.