Comer Vann Woodward (November 13, 1908 – December 17, 1999) was an American historian who focused primarily on the American South and race relations. He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A. Beard, stressing the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics.
Woodward was on the left end of the history profession in the 1930s. By the 1950s he was a leading liberal and supporter of civil rights. His book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which demonstrated that racial segregation was an invention of the late 19th century rather than an inevitable post-Civil-War development, was endorsed by Martin Luther King Jr. as "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement". After attacks on him by the New Left in the late 1960s, he moved to the right politically.[1] He won a Pulitzer Prize for History for his annotated edition of Mary Chestnut's Civil War diaries.
He did graduate work in history and sociology at the University of North Carolina. He was granted a Ph.D. in history in 1937, using as his dissertation the manuscript he had already finished on Thomas E. Watson. Woodward's dissertation director was Howard K. Beale, a Reconstruction specialist who promoted the Beardian economic interpretation of history that deemphasized ideology and ideas and stressed material self-interest as a motivating factor.[4]
In World War II, Woodward served in the Navy, assigned to write the history of major battles. His The Battle for Leyte Gulf (1947) became the standard study of the largest naval battle in history.
Career
Woodward, starting out on the left politically, wanted to use history to explore dissent. He approached W. E. B. Du Bois about writing about him, and thought of following his biography of Watson with one of Eugene V. Debs.[5] He picked Georgia politician Tom Watson, who in the 1890s was a populist leader focusing the anger and hatred of poor whites against the establishment, banks, railroads and businessmen. Watson in 1908 was the presidential candidate of the Populist Party, but this time was the leader in mobilizing the hatred of the same poor whites against blacks, and a promoter of lynching.[6][7]
The Strange Career of Jim Crow
Woodward's most influential book was The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which explained that segregation was a relatively late development and was not inevitable. After the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, in spring 1954, Woodward gave the Richards Lectures at the University of Virginia. The lectures were published in 1955 as The Strange Career of Jim Crow.[8] With Woodward in the audience in Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed the book "the historical bible of the Civil Rights Movement."[1] It reached a large popular audience and helped shape the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.[citation needed]
Jim Crow laws, Woodward argued, were not part of the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction; they came later and were not inevitable. Following the Compromise of 1877, into the 1880s there were localized informal practices of racial separation in some areas of society along with what he termed "forgotten alternatives" in others. Finally the 1890s saw white southerners "capitulate to racism" to create "legally prescribed, rigidly enforced, state-wide Jim Crowism."[9]
Origins of the New South, 1877–1913
Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 was published in 1951 by Louisiana State University Press as multivolume history of the South. It combined the Beardian theme of economic forces shaping history and the Faulknerian tone of tragedy and decline. He insisted on the discontinuity of the era and rejected both the romantic antebellum popular images of the Lost Cause school and the overoptimistic business boosterism of the New South Creed. Sheldon Hackney, a Woodward student, hailed the book.[10]
Woodward taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1946 to 1961.[13] He became Sterling Professor of History at Yale from 1961 to 1977, where he taught both graduate students and undergraduates. He did much writing but little original research at Yale, frequently writing essays for such outlets as the New York Review of Books.[14] He directed 25 PhD dissertations, including those by
John W. Blassingame, former chair of the African American studies program at Yale;
In 1974, the United States House Committee on the Judiciary asked Woodward for an historical study of misconduct in previous administrations and how the Presidents responded. Woodward led a group of fourteen historians, and they produced a 400-page report in less than four months, Responses of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct.
In 1978, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Woodward for the Jefferson Lecture, the federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. His lecture, entitled "The European Vision of America",[15] was later incorporated into his book The Old World's New World.[16]
Peter Novick stated, "Vann Woodward was always very conflicted about the 'presentism' of his work. He alternated between denying it, qualifying it, and apologizing for it."[17] The British historian Michael O'Brien, the editor of Woodward's letters in 2013, says that by the 1970s
He became greatly troubled by the rise of the black power movement, disliked affirmative action, never came to grips with feminism, mistrusted what came to be known as "theory," and became a strong opponent of multiculturalism and "political correctness."[18]
In 1969, as president of the American Historical Association, Woodward led the fight to defeat a proposal by New Left historians to politicize the organization. He wrote his daughter afterwards, "The preparations paid off and I had pretty well second-guessed the Rads on every turn."[19]
In 1975–186 Woodward led the unsuccessful fight at Yale to block the temporary appointment of the communist historian Herbert Aptheker to teach a course.[20] Radicals denounced his actions but a joint committee of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association exonerated the process and found that there was no evidence that political criteria had been used. In 1987 he joined the conservative scholars who made up the National Association of Scholars, a group that explicitly opposes the academic left. Woodward wrote a favorable review in the New York Review of Books of Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. It said that Duke University used racial criteria when it hired John Hope Franklin, who public feuded with Woodward.[21] Hackney stated, "Woodward became an open critic of political correctness and in other ways appeared to have shifted his seat at the political table."[22]
Woodward cautioned that the academicians had themselves abdicated their role as storytellers:
Professionals do well to apply the term "amateur" with caution to the historian outside their ranks. The word does have deprecatory and patronizing connotations that occasionally backfire. This is especially true of narrative history, which nonprofessionals have all but taken over. The gradual withering of the narrative impulse in favor of the analytical urge among professional academic historians has resulted in a virtual abdication of the oldest and most honored role of the historian, that of storyteller. Having abdicated... the professional is in a poor position to patronize amateurs who fulfill the needed function he has abandoned.[24]
The Southern Historical Association has established the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, awarded annually to the best dissertation on Southern history. There is a Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Chair of History at Yale; it is now held by southern historian Glenda Gilmore. (Peter was Woodward's son, who died at the age of 26 in 1969.[25])
^Hackney, Sheldon; Scott, Anne Firor; Wyatt-Brown, Bertram; McFeely, William S.; Powell, Lawrence N. (2000). "C. Vann Woodward, 1908–1999: In Memoriam"(PDF). Journal of Southern History. 66 (2): 207–220. JSTOR2587657. Retrieved March 19, 2024.
^C. Vann Woodward, "The Great American Butchery," New York Review of Books (March 6, 1975) online.
^Woodward, Susan Lampland. "In Memoriam: Pete Woodward". Yale University Class of 1964. Retrieved December 15, 2016.
^Woodward, C. Vann, and Edward L. Ayers. 2020. The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward. Edited by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Further reading
Boles, John B., and Bethany L. Johnson, eds. Origins of the New South Fifty Years Later (2003), articles by scholars online review
Ferrell, Robert. "C. Vann Woodward", in Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945–2000. ed. Robert Allen Rutland (2000), pp. 170–81
Hackney, Sheldon. "Origins of the New South in Retrospect," Journal of Southern History (1972) 38#2 pp. 191–216 in JSTOR
Hackney, Sheldon. "C. Vann Woodward: 13 November 1908 – 17 December 1999," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (2001) 145#2 pp. 233–240 in JSTOR
Hackney, Sheldon. "C. Vann Woodward, Dissenter," Historically Speaking (2009), 10#1 pp. 31–34 in Project MUSE
Kousser, J. Morgan and James M. McPherson, eds. Religion, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (1982), festschrift of articles; also lists most of his Ph.D. students
Lerner, Mitchell, "Conquering the Hearts of the People: Lyndon Johnson, C. Vann Woodward, and 'The Irony of Southern History'", Southwestern Historical Quarterly 115 (October 2011), 155–71.
Potter, David M. "C. Vann Woodward", in Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians, ed. Marcus Cunliffe and Robin W. Winks (1969).
Rabinowitz, Howard N. "More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow," Journal of American History (1988), 75#3 pp. 842–856, in JSTOR
Woodward, C. Vann. "Strange Career Critics: Long May They Persevere," Journal of American History (1988), 75#3 pp. 857–868. a reply to Rabinowitz in JSTOR
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