ESSAY
THE ATTACK ON
LEVIATHAN AT 75
A Commemor ation and a Critique
Mark G. Malvasi
A
n “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,
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.
47
MODERN AGE
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 nonMarxists 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
48
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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 neoJeffersonian 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 ATTACK ON LEVIATHAN AT 75
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 nineteenthcentury 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
49
MODERN AGE
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 nationstate in history, able to compete politically,
economically, and, if necessary, militarily
with its European rivals. To that end, Ham50
FALL 2013
ilton 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
THE ATTACK ON LEVIATHAN AT 75
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
51
MODERN AGE
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.
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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 ATTACK ON LEVIATHAN AT 75
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
53
MODERN AGE
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.
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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
THE ATTACK ON LEVIATHAN AT 75
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 invest-
ment, 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
1939–4075
1940–41 6 55
MODERN AGE
1941–42 1942–43 1943–44 1944–45 1945–46 1946–47 1947–48 1948–49 7
9
8
12
10
29
16
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.
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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 ATTACK ON LEVIATHAN AT 75
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. 57
MODERN AGE
1
2
3
FALL 2013
Donald Davidson, Southern Writers in the Modern World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), ix–x.
Stuart Chase, “The Engineer as Poet,” New Republic, May 20, 1931, 24.
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).
11Davidson, Attack on Leviathan, 368.
12 Ibid., 6. The emphasis is in the original.
13 Davidson to Wade, March 3, 1934, Davidson Papers.
14Davidson, 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).
17Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 38.
18 Davidson to Ferris Greenslet, October 18, 1933, Davidson Papers.
19Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 12.
20 Ibid., 19.
21Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 31, 34.
22 Ibid., 268–70.
23 Davidson to Wade, March 3, 1934, Davidson Papers.
24Davidson, 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.
31Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan, 24.
32 Davidson to Wade, March 3, 1934, Davidson Papers.
33Davidson, 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.
58