American Scholar: the Life of C. Vann Woodward
In spring, 1954, C. Vann Woodward — a noted political and military historian at Johns Hopkins University — was invited to give the annual Richards Lectures at the University of Virginia. Brown vs. the Board of Education had happened months before. Woodward chose as his topic the history of segregation. Unlike most scholars, who believed segregation to have existed since time immemorial, Woodward put forth a new and convincing argument – that segregation was invented only in the 1890’s, and that its arrival in history was far from inevitable.
The Richards Lectures were the genesis of “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” — a book that Martin Luther King Jr. would call “the historical Bible of the Civil Rights movement.” Its author was a complex man — radical and conservative, progressive and reactionary. In life and in death, C. Vann Woodward embodied the history and contradictions of the region that he would always call home — the American south.
Woodward was born in Arkansas, the son of a school administrator. After enrolling for a short time in Henderson-Brown College, Woodward transferred to Emory University, where he embraced the progressive ideals of the New Deal and became fascinated with history as a tool for dissent. Following a short stint as an English professor at Georgia Tech, Woodward attended graduate school at Columbia, where he met and was influenced by Langston Hughes, W. E. B. DuBois, and other figures in the Harlem Renaissance; much of his interest in Civil Rights history stemmed from his experiences in this period. For a time he worked on a campaign to free Angelo Herndon, an African American labor organizer accused of seditious activities.
At the University of North Carolina, where he obtained his Ph.D., Woodward began his first serious scholarly work – a thesis on Tom Watson, a Georgian politician of the late nineteenth century whose political evolution from multi-racial populism to white supremacist demagoguery provided a fascinating look into late nineteenth-century southern politics. The thesis, published as “Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel” established Woodward’s reputation as a historian of southern race relations, and one of the region’s most prominent liberals.
After serving in the navy during WW2 — an experience which inspired him to write his classic “The Battle for Leyte Gulf” — Woodward returned to academia with the publication of “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” his single greatest scholarly achievement. Woodward argued that segregation could have been avoided after the Civil War, and was largely a product of reactionary populists like Tom Watson in the 1890’s.
Southern populism, argued Woodward, initially began as an inclusive movement for economic reform but evolved into a reactionary movement against African Americans and the North. The south, suggested Woodward, passed through a series of stages – from Reconstruction era equality, to informal separation, to legal segregation – exploding the myth that segregation had always been featured in American life.
Woodward’s second major southern history, “Origins of the New South, 1877-1913,” gained praise for its expansive grasp of southern history and criticism of both the Lost Cause and the “New South” movement alike. As a professor at Johns Hopkins and eventually Yale, Woodward mentored dozens of future prominent historians and became widely known as an essayist, notable both for his accessibility and his elegant prose. In 1982 he went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for “Mary Chestnut’s Civil War,” the edited writings of the Civil War era diarist, southern aristocrat, and secret abolitionist. In his later years, he became known as the editor of the Oxford History of the United States.
Yet in later years Woodward began to break with the left – or to be more accurate, the left broke with him. Though he was a staunch supporter both of Civil Rights and of other progressive causes, Woodward became increasingly disturbed by the rise of the Black Power movement, New Left scholars, and the cultural radicalism of the 1960’s. It would perhaps be a mistake to say that Woodward turned to the right. On the contrary, to paraphrase historian John Hope Franklin, a radical in the 40’s was similar to a centrist in the 60’s and a conservative in the 80’s. Woodward did not evolve; his party merely shifted leftward, leaving him behind.
As president of the American Historical Association he fought efforts by New Left scholars to add a political bent to the AHA’s activities; as a Yale professor, he fought vigorously to stop Communist historian Herbert Aptheker from teaching a temporary course. He was unsure of affirmative action, nervous about feminism, and not entirely at home with the post 60’s Democratic Party.
He even joined the National Association of Scholars, now one of the largest right-wing advocacy groups in education. Yet he never fully abandoned his party; in 1998 he appeared with Sean Wilentz and Arthur Schlesinger to testify against the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Woodward continued to write and lecture until his death in 1999.
Woodward leaves a complex legacy for future biographers. He transcends both right and left, progressive and conservative, old south and new. As a public intellectual he is remembered not only for the quality of his scholarship but for his command of the English language and accessibility to the general reader. Whatever the state of his final political convictions, Woodward remains one of his generation’s greatest historians.
