C. Vann Woodward and the Burden of Southern Populism

IN THE SPRING OF 1939 C. VANN WOODWARD WAS BASKING IN THE GLOW of critical acclaim for his first book, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel and casting about for a new subject. (1) He had already done some reconnaissance on a biography of Eugene V. Debs but had decided to lay that project aside for "at least three years, perhaps longer." In a letter to his friend and confidant, Glenn W. Rainey, Woodward explained that a new opportunity had just presented itself: "Then came an invitation from Prof. Ramsdell of the Univ. of Texas asking me to agree to write volume nine, `The Origins of the New South' for the series, `The History of the South, 1607-1940,' that he and Stephenson of [Louisiana State University] are editing." The thirty-year-old Woodward, who was just two years out of graduate school, recognized that this was too good an opportunity to pass up and accepted Ramsdell's offer immediately. "After all I don't see how I could hope for a better chance of having my say on the period.... It seems to me then that there is a chance to lay down the main lines of interpretation and to do something fairly definitive rather than merely summarizing or condensing." (2) Those "main lines of interpretation" have defined a field and shaped its debates for half a century. Beyond those specific points of interpretation, as Drew Gilpin Faust has said, "Woodward's achievement rests on the central place he established for Southern history in our understanding of the nation's identity and moral character. The Southern past appeared to Woodward as burden and opportunity, the key to injustices, delusions, and oppressions of his own time." (3) That vision of southern history as burden and opportunity and as somehow bound up with his own time was already discernible in Tom Watson, a story of contingency and choice, a history of the awful commingling of good and evil within one tribe and within the soul of one human being. Writing at a moment when the seemingly timeless South was poised on the brink of massive transformation, Woodward told stories of long-forgotten southerners, black and white, who struggled to create better futures for themselves and their people. In Woodward's skillful telling, even their failures allowed modern-day Americans to imagine alternatives to the segregated status quo and to envision a biracial coalition of working people capable of reclaiming the democratic promise of Populism. No wonder that his writings inspired many of us to believe that "[t]heirs is a legacy waiting to be fulfilled." (4) Woodward's eye toward the here-and-now led some library-bound historians to fling at him the epithet "presentist"--an odd criticism coming from scholars who would presumably wish the past to speak wisely to our present needs, but a slur nevertheless. Reflecting decades later on this criticism and the related charge of believing the historian's craft was more closely tied to literature than to science (which he freely acknowledged), Woodward feigned alarm that he might be remembered as "a presentist, ... a chronicler with a weakness for history-with-a-purpose and ... [worse,] a historian, presumably dedicated to fact, who is inspired by fiction." (5) The young Woodward could not have avoided "history-with-a-purpose" even if he had tried. In 1928 he left his native Arkansas for Atlanta, where he completed his undergraduate studies at Emory University and then briefly taught at Georgia Tech. In Atlanta Woodward came under the influence of progressive thinkers who were striving to pull the region out of poverty and social reaction and, in the process, to create a more humane South. In those desperate years he came face-to-face with grinding rural poverty in ways he had never before witnessed. Moving on to Chapel Hill to write Watson's biography (and, incidentally, to pick up a Ph.D.), Woodward watched the general strike of 1934 unfold before his eyes. (6) The desperation of embattled textile workers and down-and-out sharecroppers seemed to converge in his mind with the struggles of Watson's Populists, all of them tied up somehow with the world of politics and state power. …