RESPONSIBILITY POLITICS: FAULKNER’S 1952 ADDRESS TO THE DELTA COUNCIL 

On May 15, 1952, William Faulkner delivered the keynote address to the Annual Meeting of the Delta Council in Cleveland, Mississippi. Organized in 1935 to promote agricultural interests, flood control, and regional development, the Delta Council has long counted powerful and influential planters, politicians, and business leaders among its members. Faulkner’s speech has received passing mention in biographies, leaving room to delve deeper into an intriguing rhetorical performance evident from the text and found audio footage shared publicly for the first time. Faulkner’s paean to core American values essential to American exceptionalism appeared tailor-made for the well-heeled, cotton-clad assembly of Mississippi Delta elites but remains open to interpretation as more than crowd-pleasing. Faulkner called for a renewal of personal responsibility, claiming it was in peril due to increased reliance on the federal government for assistance since the New Deal. While Faulkner’s attack on the welfare state envisioned a teeming mass feeding at the federal trough, it is plausible that he also sought to indict by implication Delta planters whose fortunes had risen because of federal farm subsidies established under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and greatly expanded by the early 1950s. 

Ted Atkinson is an associate professor of English (full professor, as of August) at Mississippi State University and editor of Mississippi Quarterly. Atkinson is the author of Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2006. His second monograph, Monumental Designs: Infrastructure and the Culture of the Tennessee Valley Authority, is forthcoming (and now available for pre-order!) from the University Press of Mississippi in October. Atkinson has published numerous articles in journals such as American Studies, the Journal of American Studies, the Faulkner Journal, Southern Quarterly, and the Southern Literary Journal. In addition, he has contributed to edited collections, including A Literary History of Mississippi, Reassessing the 1930s South, Queering the South on Screen, Keywords for Southern Studies, and The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South. A frequent presenter at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, Atkinson’s work is included in the following volumes: Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text, Fifty Years After Faulkner, Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas, and Faulkner and Money. 

Atkinson’s current projects include a book in progress on New Hollywood’s turn to the 1930s for cinematic inspiration and an essay slated to appear in The Oxford Handbook to the Southern Gothic. 

After receiving a BA from the University of Mississippi in 1990, Atkinson worked in communications, including a stint at the Delta Council from 1992 to 1994. Part of his job was to help plan the organization’s annual meeting. He earned an MA in English from Mississippi College in 1997 and a PhD in English from Louisiana State University in 2001.