Rewriting Southern History

Thirty years ago, the shrouds of myth surrounding post-Civil War Southern history were torn apart by the aggressive scholarship of C. Vann Woodward. Generations of Southern apologists and Yankee "reconcilers " had woven a tapestry of the Solid (white) South with yams about the paternalism of slavery; the righteousness of the Lost Cause; the chaos and corruption caused by carpetbaggers and Reconstructors; the elevation to hero status of the white "Redeemers " and New South entrepreneurs; the depiction of the Progressive Era as a swell of humanitarian reforms; and the denigration of poor whites and blacks and their protest movements. 

It was a bedtime story, calculated to keep the South sleeping, put blacks in their place, console poor whites with white supremacy, while elites North and South profited. 

Comer Vann Woodward's forceful revision of Southern history challenged the myth of an harmonious, solid South, and revealed the reality of conflict, disunity, and discontinuity. By 1951, three Woodward books — Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel; Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction; and Origins of the New South 1877-1913 — had demolished Old South romance and New South optimism. In so doing, Woodward inspired a subsequent generation of historians of the South to rewrite and retrieve our past. 

Many of Woodward's own students have worked within a liberal framework, emphasizing the politics of reaction and reform, as we can see in many of the contributions to a new book of essays written in the master's honor.¹ Others have carried on Woodward's work in a more radical vein. For example, Lawrence Goodwyn's studies of populism were inspired by the essentially populist, anti-elitist thrust of Woodward's work.² Socialist historians have extended the consistent class analysis of books like Origins of the New South and applied it to issues like racism, populism, and the rural economy,³ while other Marxist historians have criticized Woodward's class analysis for ignoring the continuity of the Southern planters as a ruling class.⁴ 

Woodward offered a radical new interpretation of Southern history. Some of those heroic Redeemers were revealed to have been as venal as the carpetbaggers they overthrew, and to have been front men, as well, for Northern capitalists and Northern values against which the ante-bellum South had fought. The declining planter aristocracy, ineffectual and money-hungry, subordinated their Jeffersonian political and social heritage in order to maintain control over the black population. Poor whites suffered from malignancies of racism and conspiracy-mindedness; and the rising middle class was timid and self-interested even in its reform movement — Progressivism for whites only. The Democratic Party of white supremacy maintained itself in power against the challenge of white dissidents by subverting and manipulating black votes. The New South industrial gospel produced educational regression, rural poverty, and a colonial relationship with the North. 

One newspaper reduced Woodward's themes to the succinct headline, "New South Fraud Papered by Old South Myth.'' Says Woodward, "Sure, I was attacked, publicly and privately. I didn't mind being attacked for my views, by the conservatives and the reactionaries. I welcomed it. It was part of the game, and I was on the other side." 

Woodward's revision of Southern history has as many lessons for Northerners as for Southerners. After all, he pointed out, the South's experience of defeat and underdevelopment and poverty and guilt was shared by much of the rest of the world. In this wider perspective, the American experience, not the Southern, was the anomalous one. 

(Additional material for this article comes from an interview with Woodward conducted by Tom Blanton.) 

 

The part of Arkansas I grew up in in the early part of the century was very Southern. I lived in the Black Belt in the eastern part of the state. Cotton was the staple crop in all of the areas I lived in and that meant blacks as sharecroppers. Race dominated society. 

I remember Klansmen who came in in robes to make a gift to the church in the course of the service. It made a profound impression. There was a lynching incident I didn't see, but I saw the mob gathering. I do remember these incidents very strongly; they affected my attitude. I was in adolescent rebellion, and part of my rebellion was against the church. 

My Uncle Comer seemed to me a model in many ways. He was a minister himself, but he was very critical of the Klan, and for his time, forwardlooking in the race business. He worked with and knew black leaders in Atlanta like John Hope, who was head of Atlanta University. I met him through my uncle along with other people of like mind [while in college at Emory]. My uncle was a mild-mannered man and not at all radical, but still he and his associates were doing things the culture didn't approve. 

Rebellions take many forms, and I was very much a reader, and I came into contact with critical ideas. I remember the first movement I was a part of was the opposition to Marine intervention in Nicaragua in the 1920s when Sandino was rising. 

I went to New York to study for a masters degree at Columbia. I got there in the fall of '31, and things were popping. I did participate in the sense of attending meetings and rallies. I was a spectator. I may have signed a petition or two, but I can't remember anything active I did. I knew the Communists and I knew the Socialists — some of them. I got an insight into Harlem through a friend who knew the poet Langston Hughes, who was then quite a young man. 

In the summer of '32,1 spent about a month in Russia. The Russian trip was inspired by a lot of things. It looked like the Depression was crumbling the Western system. I was told by Lincoln Steffens that he had seen the future and it worked. And I wanted to see how it worked. Russia had a lot of glamour. But it turned out to be a bad year for Russia in 1932. There was famine and there was violence and there was oppression of kulaks. 

It was a sobering experience, and not much of an encouragement to leap toward the Soviet system. I remember one incident: a man left the assembly line and came over and made a passionate speech about being a slave. I also remember a big peasant got up on a train and made an eloquent denunciation of the system. The guide sent up for a soldier, but the peasant jumped off the train. It was a confusing and sobering experience for some time. I think I was ready to embrace some such philosophy and I continued to be interested and sympathetic. But that experience was important in sobering me up. 

 

While traveling in the Soviet Union in 1932, Woodward found himself having to explain the famous Scottsboro case. In 1931 eight black teenagers were sentenced to death in Scottsboro, Alabama, for allegedly raping two white girls. For several years the case was an international cause, with the "Scottsboro boys " symbolizing victims of American racism and capitalism. 

 

They were making a lot of it. And there were posters not only in Russia but also in Germany, France, and England. And I felt it as I hadn't at home — that this case was an international scandal. I had known something about it before I left, but [my experience in Europe] inspired me to do something about such incidents when I got back. In fact, I became involved in a similar case [the Angelo Herndon case] in Atlanta. 

 

In 1932, Angelo Herndon, a young black Communist, was charged with sedition in Atlanta. Woodward had just started as a teacher at Georgia Tech. As a result of his work on the Herndon case, Woodward fell into "deep trouble" with the Georgia Tech administration. He was soon laid off with about 30 other faculty on "budget grounds." 

 

I was interested in the thing and somebody told me about a committee that was being formed. And I went. It was obvious they were looking for people with reputable credentials. They could say a professor from Georgia Tech was involved. I was suddenly catapulted into prominence by the resignation of the chairwoman. That left me holding the bag. 

I was called in by the president and talked to very seriously about my involvement. He wanted my account of it. He never said he was going to fire me, but I did get fired. 

After I got fired from Tech, I didn't have a job and thought I'd write a book. I started out to write a book about seven demagogues. I didn't know much about Tom Watson or any of the others, but as soon as I started to find out about Watson, he became the subject of the book. 

Tom Watson had only been dead 10 years when I started. Everybody knew who Watson was, the demagogue who lynched Leo Frank, who persecuted the Jews and the Catholics and the blacks. I started with the assumption that this is what he meant. And then I discovered Populism. 

 

Loss of the Georgia Tech job sent Woodward, palm out, to the Rockefellers' General Education Board which came through with the princely sum of $900 towards graduate school. Since the Watson papers resided at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Woodward went there. 

 

I had written about four chapters before I went to Chapel Hill. I began to see Watson as a voice of courageous dissent in the Populist period, one that challenged a lot of sacred cows. The tragedy of his career came home to me when I saw how this kind of man wound up the way he did — as the very archetype of the racist demagogue. 

It looked different in the mid-1930s than it does now, than it does after the Civil Rights Movement. The racism was so solid, so unyielding at the time I wrote the book, that one had to seize upon any departure from it, as I did, and doubtless overdid. I would not write it the same way now. I couldn't. But then I think I could not have written Tom Watson any other way. To have subordinated his role in trying to combine with blacks would have been to miss the most exciting potentialities of the story. 

I was interested in the theme of dissent. Being a dissenter myself, I looked for evidence of it and found it. I am accused of exaggerating it, and I am probably liable to some such criticism. However, I wasn't picking typical Southerners. I considered working on a book about Southern abolitionists, which was the same theme. It was part of my rebellion against the dominant historiography I was exposed to — that is, the solidarity of the South and the continuity of the culture. I was saying it wasn't that solid and there wasn't all that much continuity. There was a good bit of change and discontinuity. 

[Currently], I see a movement back to what I call the old orthodoxy of continuity in Southern history. It is manifested both on the left and on the right and in the center — for very different purposes. On the right it denies the dissent, the radicalism, the change that conservatives find unwelcome. For the liberals, it makes change more acceptable to say that the new is really like the old order in many ways. As for the radicals, take Jon Weiner as an example: [he said] the planters were continuous as a class; they persisted, proving there was no essential change, and therefore that drastic change was necessary. 

When I arrived at Chapel Hill, it was a totally segregated university system. There weren't any blacks at UNC. Not a one. That was the law and the system and it was universal. There were dissidents who criticized it. I knew them. I criticized it myself but in no effective public way. But it was not peculiar to Chapel Hill. It was Southern, almost universally Southern. 

Chapel Hill deserves some distinction for its openness and receptivity to dissidents. It had them and it kept them. There was a professor in the English department who was known as a Socialist and two or three of my graduate contemporaries were Communists or Socialists, certainly leftists. And these people were not excluded. But they were white. 

 

Woodward was not impressed by the regional social science research then going on at UNC under the leadership of Howard Odum and Rupert Vance. 

 

I read Odum but I couldn't make much of him. He was a terrible writer and I was often at odds with his academic views. I didn't go for the Regionalists too much, but at least they were interested in the South. And Vance in particular was an astute man and a very real influence. He was open, available, and easy to talk to. 

As preached and practiced, Regionalism was bent on industrializing the retarded region. That meant improvements in some respects — in education, welfare, and health. They were sincere about that. But they didn't want to rock the boat — to precipitate the issue of racial discrimination or segregation. They were also cautious about such manifestations as strikes. 

W.T. Couch [editor of the UNC Press which published the Regionalists' works] had his problems with Odum about publishing. Couch was interested in substance and impatient with political bias against authors. If you had something to say he wanted to publish it. But he was taken aback when he invited this book on What the Negro Wants,⁵ because they told him! He was shocked. It was a bit much for him. He got in trouble with it. 

Still, Couch was more open than the others. He did not come from a privileged background but from the people. He had worked in a utilities shop, in a factory, and in the cotton fields. He had contact with the popular mind and he was not going to suppress writing about that. 

 

Among the other influences on Woodward were Charles Beard's class analyses and W.E.B. DuBois, whose Black Reconstruction struck down the prevailing racist interpretation of Reconstruction. 

 

Indeed, DuBois was the most vocal historian dissenting from the prevailing view. I read Black Reconstruction with great interest and wrote to DuBois about it and he was kind enough to reply. The work of Beard and [Howard K.] Beale ignored the aspect of black rights emphasized by DuBois. I saw that shortcoming. 

 

When Woodward finished his PhD in 1937, he sent the carbon copy of his dissertation on Tom Watson off to the Macmillan Publishing Company in New York. In 1938, the New York Times put Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel on the cover of its book review section; ever since it has been a classic in political biography. 

Woodward's pioneering research on Populism has spawned several new works in recent years that take different views of that movement. James Green and Bruce Palmer see it as a movement that emerged from specific class interests, those of yeoman farmers, and not so much those of tenants, croppers, and wage laborers. Lawrence Goodwyn, however, sees these class distinctions as Marxist abstractions that mislead students ofPopulism.⁶ 

 

I am familiar with the controversy. I think the Populists were faced with a class contradiction that was insuperable, particularly in their gestures towards blacks. Blacks were sharecroppers; they were subordinates; they were employees; they were dependents. The movement was plagued by that class contradiction at least in its interracial aspects. 

 

In his acknowledgements in The Populist Moment Lawrence Goodwyn wrote: "I doubt that anyone can overstate the impact Origins of the New South had on those students who reached maturity in the '50s. Surrounded as we were by tomes of limp apology for the Bourbons, Origins opened new ways of thinking about the Southern and national heritage." 

One of the controversial aspects of Origins is the thesis about the South as a colonial economy. 

 

The economic theorists have attacked that thesis. They say it was perfectly natural for the South to have a specialization of crops; they discount the domination of Southern industry by outsiders. The thesis needs critical attention but I think it is a valid shorthand expression. 

The political scientists have quite a literature based on dependency theory; it centers on the character of the Third World's relationship to industrialized economies. They are using concepts and language that apply to the South's relationship to the metropolitan North and the way dominant forces work together. They did not conspire. They simply applied a system of railroad rates, highways, pricing, taxes, patents, and that concentrated economic power in one region at the cost of another. 

 

Another aspect of Woodward's work that inspired radical historians was his willingness to consider "forgotten alternatives." In fact, those are the words used as the title of a chapter of The Strange Career of Jim Crow. That book, in part, grew out of Woodward's involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. 

 

When I got to Yale in 1962, this place was a seething mass of missionary endeavor to save the South. They were off on Freedom Rides and all. And I was cheering, feebly, with divided mind. I was for the cause, and against the crusaders. And when I marched through the streets of Montgomery, I knew exactly what those people [watching the march] were thinking about me, and I shared those feelings: "That son of a bitch, coming down from Yale trying to tell us what to do." 

[Nevertheless], I felt a part of [the Civil Rights Movement], identified with it, felt protective about it and its success or failure. I guess I registered those feelings without much equivocation. If you believed the conventional version of Southern history that I grew up with you didn't see much hope for anything different; this is the way it was and there wasn't any break in it. I was criticized for holding out false hope for a racial solution. I was simply saying that I did not believe in the inevitability of the system that developed. It didn't just happen; it was consciously constructed. There could have been other choices and other people made other choices. Not all of those who were subject to the dominant system were in accord with it; that is, they dissented from it. 

 

In a series of influential and controversial essays in such forums as the New York Times, Harper's, and the American Scholar, Woodward called equality between the races a ''deferred commitment," and the new civil rights laws and court decisions "the Second Reconstruction." Woodward's main contribution was The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which a colleague called "the single most influential book ever written on the history of American race relations." 

Originally delivered as a lecture series to a University of Virginia audience in the fall of1954, Strange Career provided some usable history to back up that year's Supreme Court decision on school desegregation. The mostly white audience needed to know, Woodward thought, that the edifice of "Jim Crow" laws separating the races was not the immediate and inevitable consequence of the Civil War and Emancipation, but rather the deliberate creation of elite and middle-class "Progressive" white supremacists at the turn of the century. 

More than a half million copies of four editions of The Strange Career of Jim Crow have been sold. In a 1971 review of Eugene Genovese's In Red and Black and George Frederickson's White Supremacy Woodward took issue with Genovese's Marxist view "that economic developments are the main clues to the changes in the style and type of race and race relations" and that the Southern ruling class clearly determined the nature of racism.⁷ 

 

I hope I didn't misinterpret Gene. In normal circumstances and in the long run the relationship between capitalism and racism was important. But in the particular circumstances in question, the post-Civil War South, I said race relations were more affected by political and social than by economic forces. The economic changes of the postwar era, the coming of the cotton mills, the heavy industry, the sharecropper system: those adjusted to the prevailing racial system. So the cotton mill owners excluded the blacks, tobacco mills excluded the whites, and concentrated on blacks; they adapted. So I don't see them and their new institutions or the landowners as changing the racial system for their benefit; they adapted to it. In the long run, the disappearance of cotton from the Southeast is an economic fact of great power and influence. It's the main thing that sent the blacks to the North in waves of migration of unprecedented size. But it wasn't planned, it wasn't policy — now that is a long-run economic force. The system of domination itself, the laws of disenfranchisement and segregation, Jim Crow segregation, were politically motivated to construct a system to control a dominated race; that's what the Jim Crow system was about. These people came off the farms, into the cities; they were no longer subject to direct domination by the master; the whites had to get some abstract system to take over. 

Genovese's overall impact on Southern history is a very powerful and on the whole salutary influence. His work on the ante-bellum economy and institutions and slavery opened up many views that had never been opened up before. I am impressed with the breadth of his views and his willingness to acknowledge all kinds of influences: religion, popular folk culture, paternalism, and the complexity of master-slave relations. This it seems to me is more important for the civilizing of Marxism in terms of historical realities and complexities than anything in American historiography I can think of. The old simplifications of heroic slaves versus masters of the past was predominant in the generation of the leftists of the '30s. And he broke through that, to the level of serious history dealing with ambiguities, complexities that had not been touched. 

 

Besides his research, Woodward has made a notable contribution to the study of history by his advocacy of challenges to the prevailing trends of his profession, notably the "consensus school" which emphasized social harmony and political agreement in US. history. In a 1983 paper Jon Wiener described consensus history as a paradigm of "normal history" — set up in the '50s and '60s — that excludes Marxist work from the body of "real history." He cites Woodward (and secondarily Richard Hofstadter) as major historians who argued for the inclusion of Marxist and New Left History. In 1968, when the New Left collection Towards a New Past appeared, Woodward gave it a serious review when it was being rejected as "non-history" by others. He objected to those who would dismiss the New Left and asked historians to give them "a full hearing and a close reading."⁸ 

 

I felt that the tilt toward consensus history was a distortion of realities and I welcomed people who came along and said it wasn't that way, that there was conflict of many kinds, and class conflict was certainly one of them. That didn't comport with the simplifications of consensus history. 

I don't think you can grapple with history without acknowledging and taking into account class differences, conflicts, alliances, and antagonisms. I think that to dismiss them is to dismiss very basic parts of the historical process. That aspect of the historical process is important to my writing and analysis and understanding. 

The last 15 years have been a highly productive period. Radical history of the South hasn't all taken the same line, but I would deplore it if it had. It's been critical of the predominant ideas, some of them my ideas. It's been independent, adventurous. Your [James Green] own work on the Socialists in the Southwest, Bruce Palmer on the Populists, the important work that's being done on the transition from slavery to freedom on the part of Michael Wayne, Steven Hahn, Barbara Fields, and other students, the study of racial politics and race policy of the whites. I think it's been a very productive few decades. 

 

One of Woodward's most important essays, "The Irony of Southern History," was written at the height of the Cold War in 1952, and he suggested then that the lessons of Southern history might or should lead Americans to be more tolerant, less anxious to enforce conformity at home and abroad, less willing to stake all on a single institution like slavery or segregation or laissez faire capitalism, and to be more cautious about engaging in diplomacy based on moral bigotry or even preventive war.⁹ 

 

The South has lately had its "Epitaph" written and its "Mystique" debunked. The implication would seem to be that the South's disputed "distinctiveness" and Southern identity inhere essentially in retrograde racial policies and prejudices. With the gradual disappearance of these, Southerners are expected to lose their identity in a happily homogenized nation. Quite apart from the South's preferences, there are other reasons for skepticism in this matter. The South has long served the nation in ways still in great demand. It has been a moral lightning rod, a deflector of national guilt, a scapegoat for stricken conscience. It has served the country much as the Negro has served the white supremacist — as a floor under self-esteem. This historic role, if nothing else, would spare the region total homogenization, for the national demand for it is greater than ever. 

 

Today there is a question whether the American people have learned the Southern lesson of defeat through Vietnam — that they no longer feel as immune from the forces of history? 

 

I wish I could give a ready assent to that, but I'm afraid I can't. Faced with a possible choice, the learners of the lesson will choose the wrong lesson, read the wrong meaning. It doesn't look like the memory of Vietnam is stopping the policy makers from adventures in Central America. But I think the experience of Vietnam has registered with the people, and it's giving the administration trouble. People are leery of intervention and don't want any more involvement in other people's civil wars and revolutions. Vietnam was a shock that brought the American people into opposition to their government in a dramatic way, brought down an administration in fact. I think it ought to have registered something against the legend of invincibility. 

In 1960, I announced the end of the era of "free security" for the U.S. and tried to assess how this influence had shaped our history.¹⁰ Insecurity has certainly been the successor to the age of security. The ironic thing is that today's powerfully military foreign policy is much more expensive than free security, and it is not effective. The more expensive it is, the less security it seems to bring. 

 

NOTES 

1. Race, Region and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1982). 

2. See introduction to Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York, 1978). 

3. See essays by Barbara Fields and Stephen Hahn in Race, Region and Reconstruction. 

4. See Jonathan Weiner, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge, 1978), and Dwight Billings, Planters and the Making of a "New South": Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1979). 

5. Rayford W. Logan, What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill, 1944). 

6. See James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 (Baton Rouge, 1978), and Bruce Palmer, "Man Over Money": The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill, 1980). For the controversy over Populism, see Lawrence Goodwyn, "The Cooperative Commonwealth and Other Abstractions," Marxist Perspectives 10 (1980): 8-42, and James Green, "Populism, Socialism and the Promise of Democracy," Radical History Review 24 (1980): 7-40. 

7. C. Vann Woodward, review of Eugene D. Genovese, In Red and Black, in New York Review of Books, August 12, 1971. 

8. C. Vann Woodward, "Wild in the Stacks," New York Review of Books, August 1, 1968. 

9. C. Vann Woodward, "The Irony of Southern History," in The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1960). 

10. C. Vann Woodward, "The Age of Reinterpretation," American Historical Review 66 (1960): 1-19. 

 

Selected works by C. Vann Woodward 

Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel (1938) 

Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951) 

Reunion, and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877and the End of Reconstruction (1951) 

The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) 

The Burden of Southern History (1960) 

American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (1971)