cities. They thought that industrialization would destroy arts and culture and reduce human beings to little more than machines, preoccupied with efficiency in production above all else. They viewed industrialization as degrading, dehumanizing, and destructive, and they hearkened back to a "simpler" way of life where people lived off the land.

Of course, this peaceful agrarian past they wanted to go "back" to was largely imaginary, or else limited to a very small portion of the population. The only reason the upper class could live so comfortably in an agrarian economy in the South was the fact that farms were largely operated by millions of workers who made very low wages and were often heavily indebted. Industrialization dramatically raised the standard of living of the entire population and resulted in enormous improvements in health, income, education, and lifespan. Nor does it seem to have undermined arts or culture, though it surely changed them in significant ways.

But the Agrarians were not simply naive; they also made many serious critiques of the existing social and economic system, particular with regard to the rise of corporations and their contribution to vast inequality of income and wealth. They anticipated technological unemployment, though perhaps they over-anticipated it, as automation would not begin to seriously threaten aggregate employment until almost a century later (and many economists believe that the threat is still overblown today). While their "solution" of going back to agrarian society made little sense, many of the problems they wrote about were real and serious.