Editing Allen Tate (section)

===1930s===
After two years abroad, the Tates returned to the United States in 1930. During two months in New York, Tate secured a publisher for a symposium on the South and agrarianism that he and Ransom, Davidson, [[Andrew Nelson Lytle|Andrew Lytle]], and others had been planning.  In Tennessee, the Tates took up residence at Benfolly in Clarksville, Tennessee|<ref name="nrhpdocriverview">{{cite web|url={{NRHP url|id=79002450}}|title=National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination: Riverview |publisher=[[National Park Service]]|access-date=July 20, 2018}} With {{NRHP url|id=79002450|photos=y|title=accompanying pictures}}</ref>  an [[Antebellum architecture|antebellum]] mansion with a 185-acre estate attached.  Allen's brother Ben Tate, "who had made a lot of northern money out of coal.", purchased the house for them.  House guests at Benfolly were frequent: [[Ford Madox Ford]], [[Edmund Wilson]], [[Louise Bogan]], [[Phelps Putnam]], [[Stark Young]], the [[Howard Baker]]s, the [[Malcolm Cowley]]s, the Ransoms, the Warrens.<ref>[[Ian Hamilton (critic)|Ian Hamilton]], ''Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth Century Poets'', Viking, 2002, p. 134. {{ISBN|0-670-84909-X}}</ref>

Meeting at Benfolly and in Nashville, Tate, Ransom, Davidson et al. completed work on their symposium, ''[[I'll Take My Stand]]'' by [[Twelve Southerners]], published in 1930.  Tate didn't like the title; he had argued for "Tracts Against Communism."  His contribution was "Remarks on the southern Religion": the Old South was a feudal society "without a feudal religion"; her Protestant "religious mind was inarticulate, dissenting, and schismatical."

In 1933 [[Lincoln Kirstein]], co-founder and editor of ''[[Hound & Horn]]'', wrote Tate, the Southern editor, that he "would like very much to know what all you people think could be done in relation to black and white." . . . Was the friction "inevitably racial, or accidentally economic?" Why were sexual relations between a white man and a black woman tolerated but not the reverse? Tate stated that there was "absolutely no 'solution' to the race problem in the South. That is, there is no solution that will remove the tension and the oppression that the negro must feel. . . . When two such radically different races live together, one must rule.  I think the negro race is an inferior race." The key was social order, which served not [[social justice]] but "legal justice for the ruled race.  . . . Liberal agitators" deprived "the negro of even the legal justice." Liberal policy was like "that of the Reconstruction, . . . a steady campaign against the Southern social system . . . to crush absolutely the remaining power of independent agriculture."  As for the sexual question, "it is upon the sexual consent of women that the race depends for the future. . . . Under the industrial capitalist regime . . . women are no longer the very center of the social system. . . . What is to be done about all this I do not know; and I am inclined to think no one else knows."       
  
During this time, Tate also became the ''de facto'' associate editor of ''[[The American Review (literary journal)|The American Review]]'', which was published and edited by [[Seward Collins]].  Tate believed ''The American Review'' could popularize the work of the [[Southern Agrarians]].  He  objected to Collins's open support of [[Benito Mussolini]] and [[Adolf Hitler]], and condemned [[Fascism]] in an article in ''[[The New Republic]]'' in 1936.   Much of Tate's major volumes of poetry were published in the 1930s, and the scholar [[David Havird]] describes this publication history in poetry as follows: <blockquote><small>By 1937, when he published his first ''Selected Poems'', Tate had written all of the shorter poems upon which his literary reputation came to rest. This collection--which brought together work from two recent volumes, ''Poems: 1928-1931'' (1932) and the privately printed ''The Mediterranean and Other Poems'' (1936), as well as the early ''Mr. Pope''--included "Mother and Son," "Last Days of Alice," "The Wolves," "[[The Mediterranean (poem)|The Mediterranean]]," "Aeneas at Washington," "Sonnets at Christmas," and the final version of "[[Ode to the Confederate Dead]]."  While visiting in Washington in 1936, Tate was interviewed by the Washington "'Post'": "South Is U.S. Literary Center, Asserts Allen Tate, Noted Poet."<ref>Havird, David. ''American National Biography''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.[http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/tate/life.htm]</ref></small></blockquote>

Ford dedicated his book ''Provence'' to Gordon and Tate writing 'who came to Provence and there wrote to "That Sweet Land" the poem called "The Mediterranean" and where we went in the boat was a long bay".

Tate and [[Herbert Agar]] in 1936 put together a symposium entitled ''Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence'' (Houghton Mifflin); the 21 contributors included eight Agrarians{{who|date=May 2024}}, three economists{{who|date=May 2024}}, a woman [[psychologist]]{{who|date=May 2024}}, and an English [[Distributism|Distributist]]{{who|date=May 2024}}.  The book made the bestseller list; it was reissued in 1999 by ISI Books. In 1936 also Scribner's published Tate's ''Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Idea''; [[Maxwell Perkins]], editor to both Tate and Gordon, told Tate, "It is an honor to publish this book."

In 1938 Tate published his only novel, ''[[The Fathers (novel)|The Fathers]]'', which drew upon knowledge of his mother's ancestral home and family in [[Fairfax County, Virginia]].