All weekend long on booktv. For a complete schedule visit booktv. Org. In 1936, five years before they published let us now praise famous men, james agee and photographer walker evans produced a feature article for Fortune Magazine titled cotton tenants. It was about three poor families in alabama living through the great depression. The 30,000 word article and accompanying photos were never published by fortune, but cotton tenants was discovered decades later in a collection of agees manuscripts housed at the university of tennessee. During this event hosted by the Jimmy Carter Library and museum, editor john summers leads a Panel Discussion about the book and the work of james agee and walker evans. Carter library, president ial library here in atlanta, georgia. Im thrilled to be moderating this illustrious panel tonight. I think we will begin by introducing the book that we are going to be talking about, cotton tenants. James agee, walker evans. We will get started. In 1936, Fortune Magazine, which was a relative babe among business magazines in this country, sent one of its staff writers, james agee, the hale county and west Central Alabama with the assignment detail the stories of the abject poverty and their lives of tenant farmers. Agee, a tennessean by birth, educated at harvard, was but 26, 27. Known mostly as a poet, film critic and a writer of screenplays, but he was also developing some talent as a long form journalist, ma a style that fortunes editors liked. And he drew the assignment. At his request, fortune paired him with a documentary photographer agee barely knew, walker evans, whose previous work in the south had drawn good news. The two of them spent two months in hale county with three different families, and they produced by magazine standards a mammoth and powerful piece of work, a 90 page, 30,000 word manuscript, and more than 50 images. For reasons that remain the subject of debate and speculation to this day, Fortune Magazine never ran the manuscript. Five years later, agee and evans, to use the current parlance, repurposed the manuscript into a 471 page book, let us now praise famous men, which was published in 1941, five years after fortune had turned down the manuscript. It didnt survive. It quickly went out of print after selling a paltry 600 copies. It won some praise, but it was criticized for its inconsistent voices, the clashing styles of presentation, long winded string of consciousness and indole justness. James agee died in 1955 at age 45 of a heart attack. He has been described as a hard liver, an alcoholic, chainsmoker, the serial merrier who lived a life of self neglect. Sounds like a journalist. [laughter] by the time he had his happiest achievement, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his biograph autobiographical book, a death in the family. He had been dead for three years. But there was life after death for let us now praise famous men. Nearly 20 years after it failed to ignite, 1960 it was courageously, i might say, republished to a much different reception. The book hit american readers differently this time. It caught on. It became an iconic mainstay in the book bag of College Students all across the country. But the original manuscript had remained unpublished. It resided in Greenwich Village in the basement, in agees papers for years, until his daughter dont need papers to the university of tennessee. The manuscript is now published by Melville House in conjunction with the baffler magazine. The baffler ran an excerpt in the last several months. Its on sale here later. Im going to stop there. Am going to introduce our guests who will tell you the rest of the story, and we will try to save some time at the end for your questions. First of all, john summers. John is the editor of cotton tenants, and we owe him a great deal of gratitude for the presence of the book today. The baffler magazine is in print and Digital Journal of art and criticism now in its 25th year. John and the Baffler Foundation purchased the magazine two years ago and he runs it from cambridge, massachusetts. John has his ph. D and intellectual history and universe of rochester and is the editor of three books of cultural criticism. He was born and raised in gettysburg, pennsylvania, on the masondixon line, it just to show how he still has some geographical confusion, he claims he is very much a southerner. I said almost a southerner. [laughter] well, thats relative, you know, down here. Okay, hugh davis, associate professor of english at Piedmont College in georgia. He is the author of the making of james agee, which came out in 2008 and is the editor of a new scholarly edition of let us now praise famous men that will be coming out next year, i believe. Currently, he is working on an edition of agees letters. He got his bachelors degree in jackson which i can tell you having lived across the street from is in the shadow of his masters at the university about them and ph. D in english at the university of tennessee where, agee papers are housed. Is of course titles make me want to sign up for his classes. Southern literature and black and white is one. Freaks is another. And rednecks, hillbillies and georgia crackers, the south and its representation from the bottom up. [laughter] chip simone and like someone of us is a transplanted atlantan from worcester, massachusetts. He studied under the famous Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of design and has been making photographs for more than five decades. Two years ago the high museum here in atlanta brought special attention to chips work, and a show that exhibits 64 of his prints. Capture a watershed period and his professional career. His transition, not only digitally generated images, but also to color. You will know why chip is here to discuss walker evans when i read you this, which he wrote, im at the generation that learned expressive photography in a very parochial way. Serious photography was done in black and white. Color was vulgar. The shape of the image was dictated by the format of the camera, as cropping was not acceptable. I have abandoned arbitrary rules like these and continued to open my mind to the potential of new technologies. After 35 years in the darkroom, i moved into the digital realm. Digital technology not only changed the apparatus and a medium that transform how i absorbed the Digital World and profoundly changed how i express what i see. So these are panelists, and were going to start with john. I would love to give you the first word here. I mean, lets talk a little bit about Fortune Magazine in the 1930s but it starts on the cusp of the depression. Henry decides to keep it going nonetheless. He had big ideas for a different kind of this is journalism. And hes hiring people like james agee, archibald Dwight Macdonald out of your mac. Tell us about that period of time and if you would, segue into cotton tenants and tell us about how that sure. I was just chewing over your idea that he could himself so badly in some respect because he was a journalist. I think is because he was a poet. Thats what he started out as. The other interesting thing about that, self conception as a journalist is that a lot of the people that emmylou hired on the staff of Fortune Magazine which was founded in 1930, he announced the new magazine the week of the stock market crash. Many of them didnt think of themselves as journalists either before or after. He had this idea, he founded Time Magazine in 1923 and he was a kind of, these magazines were very important to magazine very important period in the 20s as a way of guiding new College Educated opinion, especially in the rural areas. Readers digest was done at this time. The new yorker is often, it was founded at this time. The magazine which include time and fortune in 1930 in life magazine, 1936 were really carries hybrid. Luce himself conceived journalism as a technique. He wanted to provide brisk summaries of the news any particular week for his audience, very busy people, the striving middleclass, the upwardly mobile middle class. Fortune he conceived of specifically as an effort to reach Business Executives and managers. You have to remember when you think about agees journalism in this period in the early 30s, that the people he was writing for, they were business people. There were 100,000 of them by 1935, the subscription numbers were really good. It was a very successful magazine, as most things that luce put his hand to. Agee came to Fortune Magazine right out of harvard. He graduated, it must be may or june of 1932, and in some he got this job. As you mentioned, you know, agee made his adjustments as people like archibald made adjustments and macdonald did as well. But what happened at fortune, right around 1932, 33, 34, and would extend into 1936 was henry luce, you know, it was unusual in one respect in that he believed that business in america should serve some point. There should be an and the business. It didnt message you have to have a broad social and that there should be some point to it, which automatically testing wishes and for most of our business folks from today. He had kind of an enlightened sense of what this is journalism could be about. He didnt mind criticism of business. Thats right. Lets face it, when its 1933 and its 1934, its kind of hard to defend business. He had a henry hoover conception of heroic business, but in the early part of the depression it was almost impossible for any honest person to continue to take that line. So fortune and its writers including agee begin to confront some of the more unseemly side of the country. So fortune ran pieces about they ran a piece about the Tennessee Valley authority, which agee wrote and which luce told him was told there was one of the best things ive ever been printed since fortune had been around. So they were brought and pragmatically open to new deal reforms. And i keep mentioning Dwight Macdonald because he is a particular point of entry into the agee biography but in this respect its important. Like macdonald wrote a three or four part series on u. S. Steel in 1936 for fortune again is a subject of a great deal of controversy around the office. Previous to that theyve been plenty of corporate profiles. Infect Fortune Magazine more or less invest in the invented the corporate profile. It was a kind of task system that it been that way for some time to digital anybody looking come even from the person, so that luce editors, they would run along in Depth Profile and then they would show the subject of the profile, the draft and present them with well, were going to run this. So thats how they got that off the ground. The profile that macdonald was writing was a little bit hardhitting. He tried to put an epigraph on the fourth installment by linden, so that was a little bit too far. So this political change is happening right around tim aroue the agee come in the Office Politics you might say, around the time that trammell gets the assignment in the summer of 36. By the time he finished writing it that fall, there was a long fallout over the next 18 months. They are not quite sure why they didnt mind but we have a pretty good idea. It comes from a very political viewpoint, you can feel it as hes writing it. I would like you to show us the poet of james agee if you would, do a little reading here to set up anyway you like. I have read just a little bit from the beginning that says where agee talks a out what it s theyre doing. I would say its not quite, you can judge for yourself. I would say its not quite a political viewpoint but the passage im not ready to read definitely the moral charter in my say of the rest. Agee says, this is an introduction to a civilization for which any reason puts a human life at a disadvantage. Civilization which can exist over putting human life at a disadvantage. Is where the night of the name nor of continuous. And human beings whose life is nurtured in an advantage which is accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings. And who prefers that this should remain as it is in the human being by definition only. Having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer and the scavengers of the deep sea. And heres than what followed the instructions for you, the reader. Only if we hold such truth to be selfconfident and inescapable and quite possibly more serious and quite certainly more indie than any others, may we in any honest and appropriateness proceed to our story, which is a brief account of what happens to the human life and what human life can and no essential way to escape, under certain unfavorable circumstances. The circumstances that are out of wedge and into which the cotton tenants is born. And other steady rain at which he stands up the years into his distorted she. Meet the reach of which he declines into death. The fact that the circumstances are merely local specialization of huge and ancient at all but racial circumstances of poverty, of life so continuously and entirely consumed into the effort nearly and very to sustain itself. So profoundly deprived and harmed an attribute in the courses of that effort, that it can be called a life at all only by biological courtesy. This fact should not confuse and, indeed, can only sharpen our discernment. We would be dishonest for instance, to cheer ourselves with the thought that in a newly rating the status of the cotton tenants alone, any essential problem whatever would be solved, and we would be merely fools to comfort ourselves with reflection of the south is a weird country. Our story, however, is limited. We would tell you only of the three living families, children with all possible care and fully and fairly to represent the million and a quarter families, the eight and half to 9 million human beings, who are the tenant farmers of the cotton belt. The families are those of Floyd Burroughs, and the bud fields, his fatherinlaw, and have his half brother in law frank king coal to be live on the list of red clay called mills hill in hale county in west Central Alabama. Fields entangled work for the brothers and partners jay watson and j. Christopher did more to live in moundsville. Small town red clay and highway miles north of them. We should begin with an outline of those business arrangements between attendance and the land owners whereby burroughs and his wife and their four children live. Thats the end of the first introduction. You get a real flavor of his writing style there. I want to turn to you, if you would, you know as much about james agee as anyone around. Tell us who he was. Am i right that he himself had conflict about doing this and about exposing these people to sort of national, ma i dont know, criticism or national, you know, approval, whatever it would be . One of the things agee was trying to remedy, is the idea that rural poverty had become, if People Living in rural poverty become poster children for the depression, and evans worked for the Resettlement Administration did his job was to go out and take pictures, propaganda, take pictures of poor people and then go back and show them happy after the new deal had intervened in their life. And agee was writing against the tradition of representing people like Floyd Burroughs as poster children for the depression and thats one of things you would really working on. Working against. Now, when he went to the south in 1936, his first inclination was actually to do a piece on Union Organizing in the south. And, in fact, i have a quote from his note buds what he describes giving the assignment, any was pretty important immediately. He writes, i was intensely interested to learn all i could about the unions, especially a straight communist Sharecroppers Union and he was my chance on that, too. I knew i could get help and get all this stuff. I intended to write three pieces. Which led us quite sure i could beautifully hang themselves on their own will. And the third, a straight union peace starting with the inch by inch process of a couple of organizers opening up New Territory right on through the night writing, et cetera and mushroomed into a history of both unions. And so from the very beginning the first person he called after receiving this assignment was a mechanic who was a communist organizer who would work with the International Labor defense on a case in alabama and she put him in touch with sometimes organizers. And then let us now praise famous men he writes actually, he met with them several times, and in let us now praise famous men when he talks about meeting with people who were quote also spies and enemies of our enemies, thats who hes talking about. On his first night in alabama actually went to the county where the all black communist Sharecroppers Unions have been founded, to hear a speech by quote a negro comrade. And so we went to the south he was very much within the context of communist party organizers. Over the next five years, his attitudes towards communism and towards the communist party changed. But you can see that come you can see that conflict in the epigraphs to let us now praise famous men which begins with a quote from king lear, juxtaposed a quote from the communist manifesto. But the footnote to the Congress Manifesto reads these words are here to mislead those who will be misled by them. And so with agee you always get the pointcounterpoint and the conflict which is laying bare right there. Are you saying then the families are merely actors in some play he is trying to write for the purpose of advancing a cause . One thing well, the cause is maybe not the right word becaus