THE RENAISSANCE OF SOUTHERN HISTORY: OR THE LIFE AND WORK OF C. VANN WOODWARD

...When the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s failed to achieve its objective of full racial equality and the limitations of optimistic Yankee liberalism again became apparent, Woodward expressed his skepticism about the North's "commitment to equality" in the nineteenth century more vigorously (he actually retracted an earlier assertion that such a commitment had in fact been made, albeit made hesitantly and halfheartedly), and he helped to inspire the general shift away from neo-abolitionist assumptions which became fully apparent in the 1970s...

...Woodward's early position, as it emerged in Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, might be defined as a kind of left agrarianism...

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...but they are not presented as abstract propositions divorced from the flow of events and the attitudes and actions of individual human beings...

...In the process, Woodward has come to be regarded by many as the most distinguished living historian of the United States...

...But he subtly suggests that the virtues of the traditional premodern South were on as grand a scale as its vices, and that these virtues deserve to be kept in mind in times when everything—good as well as evil— seems to be reduced in size or grandeur...

...Most obviously, there is the example of twentieth-century southern literature, which reveals how one can hate the cruelty and injustice of the region while still identifying with it and appreciating the nobility that southerners, white and black alike, have sometimes manifested...

...This flexible and experimental attitude has preserved him from binding allegiances to tran69 sient forms and fashions in historiography and has helped to give his work greater staying power than it would have had if it had been easier to locate precisely within a school or movement...

...To justify his sense of involvement and concern, Woodward quotes the historian H. Stuart Hughes: "Unless there is some emotional tie, some elective affinity, the results will be pedantic or perfunctory...

...But many of the essays in The Burden of Southern History and American Counterpoint have a rhetorical quality that seems to derive more from the great tradition of essay writing in AngloAmerican letters than from the no-nonsense expository mode of the typical article in historical journals...

...He has neither founded a school nor given unqualified allegiance to one...

...Conclusions about the rise or fall of classes and the success or failure of movements emerge organically out of a rich and nuanced account of how the flesh-and-blood people of the time perceived their problems and reacted to them...

...in political science at Columbia...

...This is not the place to examine this debate in depth...

...No one denies that some things changed greatly and other things remained similar...

...During the late 1960s and 1970s, Woodward showed greater respect than most liberal historians for the emerging neo-Marxist view of the Old South as a precapitalist society with an antibourgeois world view...

...Not only had they been utterly defeated, but Tom Watson, their most eloquent and impressive spokesman, had turned to race-baiting and other assorted bigotries later in his career and had carried much of his following with him...

...If it is asserted, however, that the Old South was categorically or systematically different in its fundamental values from the North and the New South then the argument becomes problematic...

...Woodward's account of Watson's career portrays a tragedy with elements of farce, not the kind of morality play that he might have produced if he had allowed his reformist commitments to overshadow his sense of the complexity and integrity of human experience...

...Woodward has not written extensively or in detail on the Old South, but a sense that it differed radically from both the North and the New South has been an underlying assumption in his work...

...As a profound student of southern racism, he has tended to resist neo-Marxist interpretations whenever they have played down consciousness of race to the point of denying it a substantial independent significance in southern history...

...With the possible exception of the colonial and revolutionary periods, the South in the nineteenth century has become the liveliest and most creative field within American historical studies...

...They also may be tempted to conclude that Woodward is whistling in the dark when he finds a distinctive southern basis for judging and reforming, not only the South itself, but also the nation as a whole...

...In his writings on the history of race relations, he has sometimes seemed to be searching a bit too zealously for a southern tradition of racial egalitarianism, or at least tolerance, to set against the admittedly overpowering tradition of white supremacy...

...But Woodward continues to be an unreconstructed "humanist" and would be loath to concede that there is a difference between the historical "truth" of something and a narrative account of it...

...If the South turns out to be less exceptional than he has argued, it may well be because the northern experience exhibits comparable conflicts, ironies, and paradoxes...

...Whatever might be true of the rest of the country, the South had never had a liberal consensus but had been a battleground for conservative, liberal, and radical persuasions...

...A major theme of Thinking Back is that the Civil War and Reconstruc71 tion constituted a radical break in the life of the region...

...WOODWARD WAS BORN IN 1908 AND RAISED in Arkansas, the son of a public school administrator who later became the president of a small Georgia college...

...For the "new continuitarians," the abolition of slavery meant either that the capitalists of the South simply diverted their entrepreneurial energies from plantation agriculture to commerce and industry and shifted from one type of market-oriented labor system to another or that its precapitalists merely replaced one form of paternalistic labor coercion with another...

...In an era when many historians have been identified with particular schools of interpretation or historiographic "paradigms," Woodward has defied precise classification...

...He does not, of course, write fiction or poetry...

...In several essays, he dissented from what he called "the antislavery myth" of northern virtue and southern villainy during the sectional struggle and the Reconstruction era that was then being advanced by some northern liberal historians...

...The vision of a "New South" was partly propaganda for the economic and political ambitions of a rising middle class, but it was also shaped by cultural expectations that are not reducible to conscious material interests...

...It is not autobiography in any usual or conventional sense because it pays relatively little attention to the author's personal life or to the academic or other institutional settings within which he has functioned professionally...

...Besides defending the Populists against charges that they were animated mainly by anti-Semitism, nativism, and outworn pastoral mythologies, he also took seriously the antiliberal or anticapitalist pretensions of the champions of slavery and the Old South...

...In 1950 and '51, he published the two major works that firmly established his reputation as one of the foremost American historians of his generation—Reunion and Reaction, an entirely original account and analysis of the intersectional deal that ended Reconstruction in 1877, and Origins of the New South, a magisterial survey and reinterpretation of southern history from 1877 to 1913...

...Clearly the abolition of slavery demolished an institution that sustained conservatism and hierarchy in a unique fashion, but the Old South was hardly devoid of entrepreneurial, individualistic, and democratic impulses (so long as one acknowledges the racial qualification in its version of "democracy...

...Modern historians, especially those who have fallen under the influence of the social sciences, tend to be suspicious of narrative, preferring an analytical mode of discourse akin to reports of new findings in the natural sciences...

...Woodward then taught English at Georgia Tech and earned an M.A...

...But he was too much of a realist to maintain that the Populists had left a tangible legacy on which the New Dealers and radical reformers of the 1930s could build directly...

...But in 1955 Woodward published a shorter and less definitive work that would bring him broad recognition and public attention...

...He also hints at an emotional affinity with certain aspects of the civilization of the Old South, an attraction or at least a fascination that he shares with such writers as Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Ellen Glasgow, and Allen Tate...

...WOODWARD DERIVES THE AUTHORITY for his severe judgments on the dominant classes of the New South less from modern ideologies than from moral values that he believes were part of the cultural traditions of the South itself...

...He also has a commitment to narrative as an essential aspect of historical writing...

...When white backlash and black power cast a pall on integrationist optimism in the late 1960s, revisionists argued that Woodward had underestimated the historical and psychological depths of southern racism, a critique which obliged him to modify or clarify his argument in a series of revised editions of The Strange Career...

...Although he transcended Progressivism, Woodward remained aloof from the dominant "consensus" school of historiography in the 1950s...

...Backtracking somewhat from the emphasis on Populist rhetoric defending equal rights for blacks in Tom Watson, Woodward now wrote that: A dilemma with roots as deeply struck in the history of a people as were those of the South's 68 ancient [racial] problem could not be expected to yield to political formulas, and certainly not the Populist formula of "self-interest...

...Often oversimplified or even misinterpreted, the Woodward thesis had its own career as part of the ideological arsenal of the anti-segregation movement of the 1960s...

...The "new continuitarians," as Woodward calls them, actually argue from two opposing perspectives...

...Hence it has been easy for Yankee liberals and radicals to conclude that Woodward's regional affinities have made him, if not a southern apologist, at least the captive of a version of the "southern mystique" that allows him to fudge the obvious conclusions about unmitigated southern depravity...

...But perhaps it is a suitable occasion to observe that Woodward seems to have involved himself, somewhat uncharacteristically, in a conflict of grand abstractions based on the assumption that there must be either categorical differences or virtual identities between societies that inhabit the same nation state or succeed each other in the same region...

...I'm personally attracted to the view of Woodward's compatriot and friend David Potter that the South has always been Janus-faced or ambivalent about the merits of "tradition" and "progress...

...Yet Woodward at no time has embraced a consistently Marxist or "class" interpretation of southern history...

...His decision to work for a Ph.D...

...His initial, preprofessional interest 66 in Watson appears to have been closely related to his youthful radicalism and dissent from the southern status quo...

...Wood*Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History by C. Vann Woodward (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986...

...It was not difficult for him to show that the North was just as racist as the South, if not more so, during the middle decades of the nineteenth century and to find ulterior motives for Radical Reconstruction...

...it even failed to win the Pulitzer Prize it so richly deserved...

...This concentration of attention and talent on the South—Old and New—is due in large measure to the achievement and influence of C. Vann Woodward...

...Woodward is no detached observer of the New South...

...Thinking Back* presents Woodward's reflections on his career as a historian...

...The leaders of the New South, as Woodward indicates so effectively in Origins, found new ways to sustain privilege and inequality and give their system the aura of traditionalism, but not without major dissension from Populists and other protesters...

...continuity argument is, as Woodward points out, a matter of relative rather than absolute disagreement...

...Arguing that the imposition of legalized segregation had been a political act, reflecting the special circumstances that existed in the South around the turn of the century, it suggested to many people that segregation could now be readily dismantled by concerted political and legal action— that it was not an immutable "folkway," a permanent and necessary aspect of the southern way of life...

...Woodward's instinct, and it is a thoroughly justifiable one, is that such a cataclysmic experience as the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves must have made a great difference...

...But Origins of the New South, the broader study from which Reunion and Reaction spun off, transcends Progressive historiography, not only in its emphasis on conflict within the South as well as simply between the sections, but also in its sophisticated understanding of the role of ideologies and myths...

...in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill came, interestingly enough, only after he had started to work on a biography of Tom Watson, the Georgia Populist leader, and come to the realization that a graduate fellowship enabling him to persist in this endeavor would be most convenient...

...Since Woodward himself is a believer that the most important historical questions are never fully resolved and that courteous controversy among historians is healthy, it may also be proper to raise some questions about his overall interpretation of southern history...

...Origins of the New South is such a stunning achievement because it so successfully fuses narrative and interpretation...

...indeed it has yet to be displaced as the standard general interpretation of the origins of legalized segregation...

...He has listened to his younger critics, even when their manners have not been as good as his own, and has readily amended his own interpretations when he thought they had a good case...

...His critique is all the more effective because it generally comes in the form of ironic narrative rather than being expounded directly in argumentative or polemical prose...

...A distinctive feature of Woodward's achievement that has helped to give his work its exceptional durability is its individuality and relative immunity from shifts in historiographic fashion...

...His work in general, as has been much noted and appreciated, makes extensive use of wit, irony, metaphor, and other literary devices that most modern historians shun...

...All that has changed...

...Since Woodward's greatness can be taken for granted, such an assessment is more a matter of understanding and explaining the nature of his genius or distinctiveness than of trying to measure his achievement...

...then perhaps we can begin to assume "the burden of American history...

...In my opinion, and I think many other historians would agree, Origins is the finest single piece of scholarship and writing in the field of American history that has appeared in the past halfcentury or more...

...Woodward is now willing to make substantial concessions to critics of its economic-determinist, "muckraking" emphasis...

...Against historians of various ideological and methodological persuasions who have asserted that there are basic continuities between the antebellum and postbellum South, he reaffirms his belief that a new ruling class and a new ethos emerged out of the wreckage of the Confederacy...

...Now retired from teaching but still extremely active as scholar, reviewer, editor, lecturer, and recipient of every professional honor that anyone can think to bestow upon him, he invites us in Thinking Back to attempt a general assessment of his contribution to southern and American history...

...Only in its role as protagonist in the sectional controversy and the Civil War did the South receive much attention from mainstream interpreters of the American past...

...In a series of books extending over almost half a century, Woodward has reinterpreted southern history, especially since Reconstruction, in ways that have inspired younger scholars (many of them Woodward's students) and pointed them toward fruitful new questions and subjects for investigation...

...If the shift from precapitalism to capitalism means simply that the forces resisting capitalist modernization in all of its aspects came out of the Civil War relatively weaker than before, then the case is a strong one...

...Reunion and Reaction, with its exposure of the specific economic interests that influenced the informal sectional compromise of 1877, is his most Beardian book...

...His argument in The Burden of Southern History and subsequent writings that southernism with its legacy of defeat and discontinuity should promote a realistic and critical attitude toward the nation's current international hubris or "arrogance of power" is hard to reconcile with the South's characteristic tendency to hypernationalism or superpatriotism (as Woodward himself concedes...

...It centers on his writings—the intellectual concerns and influences which inspired them and how they have been received and weathered the test of time...

...His judgments are rarely made didactically but are conveyed mainly through irony, especially the deliberate understatement of conclusions that seem inescapable in light of the facts and examples already presented...

...In his eloquent essay on Wilbur J. Cash and his The Mind of the South, Woodward rises to rare heights of righteous indignation because of Cash's insensitivity to the profound differences between the Confederate cause and the Rotary-Club boosterism of the New South...

...But reconsidering Woodward's view of southern and intersectional history would be a less useful endeavor for historians than attempting to view the history of the country as a whole from a Woodwardian perspective...

...Where, more precisely, does Woodward find southern ideals and idioms that can be used to condemn the crimes and injustices that have been perpetrated in the name of the South...

...WOODWARD FOUND CHAPEL HILL in the thirties stimulating, despite his dismay at the pedestrian and filiopietistic character of the work that he had to read in his own field of southern history...

...After a wartime interlude that included the chance to practice his craft as a historian of naval operations in the Pacific, Woodward returned to southern history and eventually to distinguished professorships at Johns Hopkins and Yale...

...A less widely noticed example of Woodward's resistance to historiographic fashions was his somewhat skeptical response to the neo-abolitionist view of the Civil War and Reconstruction that came to prominence in the 1960s...

...What, in other words, are the indigenous sources of his moral judgments...

...It is also possible that the Civil War, contrary to what Woodward tends to imply, caused almost as great a discontinuity in northern life as in southern...

...Woodward's perspective, in short, is the product of a Faulknerian love-hate relationship with the region and a sense of its history as reflecting both the best and the worst in human nature...

...In Atlanta, he was briefly the chairman of a committee to defend Angelo Herndon, a black communist who was on trial for his life for "inciting to insurrection...

...Furthermore, racism is treated as an autonomous force...

...The historian must contrive somehow to be in the stream and on its bank at the same time...

...The issue seems to come down to whether or not the defeat of the Confederacy fundamentally transformed the South's economic and social system and the ideology or "world view" that it engendered...

...In his essay on "The Southern Ethic in a Puritan World," he defends the Old South against charges of laziness and lack of community, suggesting instead that its positive evaluation of leisure was a healthy alternative to the compulsive "Protestant ethic" of the North...

...He quite often implies that antebellum southern civilization was different in kind from the bourgeois society of the North and the New South and thus a viable source of alternative values for those alienated from a modern capitalist culture...

...When the rest of the country finds historians of similar talent and skill, the general American past will take on greater meaning and cultural significance...

...Whatever one may think of the particular positions that Woodward has taken in relation to the historiographic trends and controversies of the past half-century, there is no denying that his viewpoints have been characterized by a lack of dogmatism, a refusal to allow his historical imagination to be fettered by an unchanging set of interpretive assumptions, and an openness to correction or revision...

...General arguments are made, and so effectively that older views of the period were simply blown away...

...Part of his resistance to the fashion of downplaying conflict and class division in American history stemmed from the inherent characteristics of his subject matter...

...Cautiously endorsing the arguments of Eugene Genovese, he wrote in 1971 that "the slave society of the South was a paternalistic order, perhaps the most paternalistic of the slave societies in the New World...

...Because Origins was a lengthy work on a period and a subject that had little attraction for the nonacademic readers of historical books, it achieved no great sales or general public notice...

...As he makes clear in Thinking Back, Woodward has always identified as much, if not more, with the literary figures of the Southern Renaissance than with professional historians of the South...

...GIVEN HIS ANIMUS AGAINST the business civilization of the New South and his desire to find dimensions of the southern experience that contradict presumptions of an emerging bourgeoisie to speak for an authentic Southernism, it is understandable that Woodward rejects views of southern history that stress continuity rather than change...

...Outsiders, especially northern liberals, may have different emotional links to the subject and are likely to approach the history of the white South with a touch of the disdain and self-righteousness that Woodward finds in some of the abolitionists and Radical Republicans of the nineteenth century...

...In an age when history has ceased to be a branch of literature or even to have many affinities with it, Woodward may be unique in his ability to exist simultaneously in the world of letters and historical scholarship...

...Toward the end of the book, he indicates that the kind of historical consciousness that he found exemplified in the writers of the Southern Renaissance "did not encourage sociological generalization about types, classes, or races—planters, yeomen, poor whites, or slaves—but rather supported the historian's concern for the particular, the concrete, the individual...

...Interpretive narration of this kind requires a finely adjusted balance between empathetic understanding and judgmental perspective...

...Woodward's special distinction among American historians cannot be adequately appreciated, however, merely by describing his creative and fluid involvement with the changing historiography of his time and field...

...Some neo-Marxists claim that a precapitalist, antibourgeois ruling class maintained its hegemony well into the post-war era, while some liberal historians with lingering affinities with the consensus school of American historiography have reasserted the view that the Old South was dominated by a capitalist, "liberal" mentality...

...One instance is the conclusion Woodward draws from the data showing the enormous profits made by early cotton mill promoters who presented themselves as motivated primarily by the philanthropic aim of providing employment for an impoverished class of poor whites: "The profit motive does not necessarily preclude the philanthropic motive, but it does seem to have outweighed it in some instances...

...it could be aroused and manipulated by groups with more immediate and selfish concerns than white supremacy as an end in itself but it also presented an almost insuperable stumbling block for radicals who aimed to divide the South politically along class lines...

...Yet he clearly diverged from the Progressive tradition in his penchant for uncovering historical ironies, paradoxes, and discontinuities...

...Winning as well as losing had its costs and complex legacies...

...In his early years he was, as he acknowledges, influenced by Charles A. Beard and the "Progressive School" of American historiography—and that influence persisted in his tendency to look for an economic basis for politics and ideology and to regard social conflict as a normal rather than an exceptional feature of the American past...

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...His family had owned slaves before the Civil War, and his childhood memories are of an era "when white racial orthodoxy and oppression were at their very peak and the revived Ku Klux Klan was most active...

...The history of the South holds such fascination these days at least partly because Woodward has written so well about it...

...This brings us to the subject of 70 Woodward's committed southernism—his insider's relationship to the historical experience he examines...

...12.95...

...But does it trivialize the drama and the sacrifice to find it signifying something less than a clearcut shift from a traditional, precapitalist society to a modern liberal-capitalist one...

...ward is justifiably proud of what he has accomplished, but he is totally immune from the arrogant, defensive, and condescending attitudes that sometimes mar intergenerational historiographic discourse...

...But he has not surrendered the central insights that have informed his work and is obviously pleased that younger generations of southern historians have tended more often to build on his interpretations than to play the "revisionist" game of turning them on their head...

...But he also responded, almost viscerally, to the tendency of consensus historians to make nineteenthcentury rebels, particularly southern ones, into liberals-under-the skin or irrational deviants...

...he is a passionate critic of its dominant groups and tendencies...

...Truth is in the telling...

...The Strange Career of Jim Crow began as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia...

...At the beginning of Thinking Back he quotes Robert Penn Warren's line "History is not Truth...

...But the book continues to be taken seriously...

...After beginning his higher education at tiny Henderson College in Arkansas, he transferred to Emory in Atlanta where he sat next to David Potter, another future luminary in the field of southern history, in his only undergraduate history course...

...This is a white man's country and will always be controlled by whites," wrote a Virginia Populist, introducing an essay on the rights of the Negro...

...Since the 1950s, Woodward has published several additional books—two notable collections of essays and six edited works, including the version of Mary Chesnut's diaries that won him a long-overdue Pulitzer Prize in 1982...

...Woodward is extraordinarily skilled at making commentary and analysis seem integral to narration and description...

...The task of the historian might be to analyze this conflict and assess the balance of forces in a given period...

...The change vs...

...On one occasion, Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Unlike the Nashville School, which combined a veneration of agrarian traditions with social and political conservatism, or the Chapel Hill "liberals," who cautiously sanctioned the growth of an urban-industrial society, Woodward showed that the kind of agrarianism that animated Tom Watson and the southern Populists of the 1890s combined loyalty to the region and its traditions with a socially radical agenda that included not only popular control of the corporations but also an end to the South's fixation with white supremacy and the color line...

...It was difficult from the vantage point of southern history to deny the importance of division and conflict—sectional, racial, and economic...

...Few eminent historians could carry out such an enterprise with such grace and panache...

...Relying mainly on primary sources, he covered an extended period in southern history with literary flair and narrative power, while providing a coherent general interpretation that was not only decisively new and "revisionist" but also sufficiently persuasive to stand virtually unchallenged for more than two decades...

...Woodward did not become a communist, a fellow traveler, or even a theoretical Marxist during the 1930s, but he did develop a lifelong sympathy with popular struggles against class and race domination...

...Writers, literary critics, and sociologists were then engaged in the spirited debate about the nature of the South and its traditions that the Nashville Agrarians had initiated, and Woodward concluded that historians could make a major contribution to this discourse if they could escape from conventionality and antiquarianism...

...even described it as "the historical bible of the civil rights movement...

...This is not to say that Woodward glorifies the Old South or denies its capacity for monumental injustice and flagrant irrationality...

...Writing from the perspective of a southerner who overcame the racism of his own heritage, he was suspicious of nineteenth-century northerners—abolitionists and Radical Republicans—who proclaimed their devotion to black liberation and equality in the South...

...Appearing shortly after the Supreme Court had declared racial segregation in the schools to be unconstitutional, it offered a badly needed and cautiously optimis67 tic perspective on the history of legalized racial discrimination in the South...

...Sounding even more like Genovese, he denounced Wilbur J. Cash's attempt to conflate the ethos of the Old South with that of the New because it failed to appreciate the fact that "A great slave society, by far the largest and richest of those that had existed in the New World since the sixteenth century, had grown up and miraculously flourished in the heart of a thoroughly bourgeois and partly puritanical republic...

...At a time when a great chasm has developed between narrative historians who write with stylistic felicity for a general audience and analytical historians who argue brilliantly in academic or social-scientific prose for the benefit of their peers in other history departments, Woodward's achievement in Origins is likely to seem almost miraculous...