According to the poetry Editor of The New Criterion, David Yezzi, Tate held the conventional social views of a white Southerner in 1934: an "inherited racism, a Southern legacy rooted in place and time that Tate later renounced." Tate was born of a Scotch-Irish lumber manager whose Business failures required moving several times per year, Tate said of his upbringing ""we might as well have been living, and I been born, in a tavern at a crossroads." However, his views on race were not passively incorporated; Thomas Underwood documents Tate's pursuit of racist ideology: "Tate also drew ideas from nineteenth-century proslavery theorists such as Thomas Roderick Dew, a professor at The College of william and Mary, and william Harper, of the University of South Carolina — "We must revive these men, he said."