Books: Tobacco War

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NIGHT RIDER—Robert Penn Warren—Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

The Tobacco War, which swept the tobacco land of Kentucky in 1905, was a strange, remote, bitter fight. It started when farmers' hatred of the newly organized Tobacco Trust exploded: warehouses were burned, an unknown number of barns destroyed, hundreds of tobacco farmers were arrested for arson, murder, conspiracy; martial law shut down.

This melodramatic, smoldering story is the background of Robert Penn Warren's Night Rider. Nobody agrees about the real Tobacco War. But there is no ambiguity in Warren's vivid account of it. Vigorous, lyrical, balanced, it portrays the actors of that little-known ruckus.

To Bardsville sensitive young Perse Munn returns after a term in a St. Louis law school, is mixed up in the affairs of the tobacco farmers' cooperative before he knows what it is to mean to him, to his pretty wife, or to the Trust. "Purposes and ideals of the Association," says a member, "is to make those son-a-bitching buyers pay me what my tobacco's worth."

The farmers hold their crop in the barns, while the Trust offers bribe prices to growers who do not belong. When recalcitrant growers refuse to join the Association, they are warned. After two warnings, masked night riders drag them out of bed, force them to destroy their own plant beds. If they still play ball with the Trust, their barns are burned. When the Trust strikes back, 2,000 armed growers march into Bardsville, seize the telephone and telegraph offices, lock up police and firemen, burn the brand-new million-dollar Trust warehouses.

As the violence spreads, Perse's lovely wife leaves him. His affair with the sensual daughter of his good friend, Mr. Christian, ends bitterly. He defends a grower on a charge of murdering a neighbor, gets him off, but finds his client was guilty and had framed an innocent man. The Association fails, and so does Perse: "The reason for things is gone. . . . Like flood water going down and leaving trash and stuff up in a tree."

The Author grew up in the Kentucky tobacco country described in Night Rider. Lanky, redheaded, softspoken, Robert ("Red") Penn Warren, 34, has written a biography of John Brown, a volume of verse (Thirty-Six Poems), a number of short stories, is an editor of The Southern Review, best of current U. S. literary quarterlies. Night Rider is his first novel. A literary gamut-runner, who works day & night, he is now writing a play about the contemporary South. He was educated at Vanderbilt, Yale, Oxford, the University of California. Since 1934 he has been an English professor at Louisiana State University. Coolest-headed of Southern agrarian writers, Author Warren declares "the danger of regionalism lies in the 'ism.' Meaningless as a fad, it is not a cureall, and gives the writer no substitute for talent or intelligence."