C. Vann Woodward | |
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| Born | Comer Vann Woodward (1908-11-13)November 13, 1908 |
| Died | December 17, 1999(1999-12-17) (aged 91) Hamden,Connecticut, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Emory University (BA) Columbia University (MA) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (PhD) |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral advisor | Howard K. Beale |
| Doctoral students | John W. Blassingame |
| Other notable students | |
Comer Vann Woodward (November 13, 1908 – December 17, 1999) was an American historian who focused primarily on theAmerican South andrace relations. He was long a supporter of the approach ofCharles 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 bookThe Strange Career of Jim Crow makes the case that racial segregation was an invention of the late 19th century rather than an inevitable post-Civil-War development. After attacks on him by theNew Left in the late 1960s, he moved to the right politically.[1] He won aPulitzer Prize for History for hisannotated edition of Mary Chestnut's Civil War diaries.
C. Vann Woodward was born inVanndale,Arkansas, a town named after his mother's family and the county seat from 1886 to 1903. It was inCross County in eastern Arkansas. Woodward attendedhigh school inMorrilton, Arkansas. He attendedHenderson-Brown College, a smallMethodist school inArkadelphia, for two years. In 1930, he transferred toEmory University inAtlanta,Georgia, where his uncle was dean of students and professor ofsociology. After graduating, he taught English composition for two years atGeorgia Tech in Atlanta. There he metWill W. Alexander, head of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, andJ. Saunders Redding, a historian atAtlanta University.[2]
Woodward enrolled in graduate school atColumbia University in 1931 and received his M.A. from that institution in 1932. In New York, Woodward met, and was influenced by,W. E. B. Du Bois,Langston Hughes, and other figures who were associated with theHarlem Renaissance movement. After receiving his master's degree in 1932, Woodward worked for the defense ofAngelo Herndon, a youngAfrican-AmericanCommunist Party member who had been accused of subversive activities. He also traveled to theSoviet Union andGermany in 1932.[3]
He did graduate work in history andsociology at theUniversity of North Carolina. He was granted a Ph.D. in history in 1937, using as his dissertation the manuscript he had already finished onThomas E. Watson. Woodward's dissertation director wasHoward K. Beale, aReconstruction specialist who promoted the Beardian economic interpretation of history that deemphasized ideology and ideas and stressed material self-interest as a motivating factor.[4]
InWorld War II, Woodward served in the Navy, assigned to write the history of major battles. HisTheBattle for Leyte Gulf (1947) became the standard study of the largest naval battle in history.
Woodward, starting out on the left politically, wanted to use history to explore dissent. He approachedW. E. B. Du Bois about writing about him, and thought of following his biography of Watson with one ofEugene V. Debs.[5] He picked Georgia politicianTom Watson, who in the 1890s was apopulist leader focusing the anger and hatred of poor whites against the establishment, banks, railroads and businessmen. Watson in 1908 was the presidential candidate of thePopulist 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]
Woodward's most influential book wasThe 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 inBrown v. Board of Education, in spring 1954, Woodward gave the Richards Lectures at the University of Virginia. The lectures were published in 1955 asThe Strange Career of Jim Crow.[8] Popular myth holds thatMartin Luther King Jr. calledThe Strange Career "the historical Bible of the Civil Rights Movement" in a speech at Montgomery, Alabama on March 23, 1956, though he did not do so; he did cite the book and aver that it proved racial segregation was "a political stratagem", in King's words, and not a natural state of American society.[9] 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 theCompromise 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."[10]
Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 was published in 1951 byLouisiana 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 theLost Cause school and the overoptimistic business boosterism of theNew South Creed.Sheldon Hackney, a Woodward student, hailed the book.[11]
Woodward was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958 and theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1959.[12][13]
Woodward taught atJohns Hopkins University from 1946 to 1961.[14] He became Sterling Professor of History atYale 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 theNew York Review of Books.[15] He directed 25 PhD dissertations, including those by
In 1974, theUnited States House Committee on the Judiciary asked Woodward for an historical study of misconduct in previous administrations and how thePresidents 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, theNational Endowment for the Humanities selected Woodward for theJefferson Lecture, the federal government's highest honor for achievement in thehumanities. His lecture, entitled "The European Vision of America",[16] was later incorporated into his bookThe Old World's New World.[17]
Woodward won thePulitzer Prize in 1982 forMary Chesnut's Civil War, an edited version ofMary Chesnut'sCivil War diary. He won theBancroft Prize forOrigins of the New South.
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."[18] 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 theblack power movement, disliked affirmative action, never came to grips with feminism, mistrusted what came to be known as "theory", and became a strong opponent ofmulticulturalism and "political correctness".[19]
In 1969, as president of theAmerican 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."[20]
In 1975–76 Woodward led the unsuccessful fight at Yale to block the temporary appointment of the communist historianHerbert Aptheker to teach a course.[21] Radicals denounced his actions but a joint committee of theOrganization of American Historians and theAmerican 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 theNational Association of Scholars, a group that explicitly opposes the academic left. Woodward wrote a favorable review in theNew York Review of Books ofDinesh D'Souza'sIlliberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. It said that Duke University used racial criteria when it hiredJohn Hope Franklin, who publicly feuded with Woodward.[22] Hackney stated, "Woodward became an open critic of political correctness and in other ways appeared to have shifted his seat at the political table."[23]
C. Vann Woodward died December 17, 1999, inHamden, Connecticut, at the age of 91.[24]
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.[25]
TheSouthern Historical Association has established theC. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, awarded annually to the best dissertation on Southern history. There is aPeter V. and C. Vann Woodward Chair of History at Yale; it is now held by southern historianGlenda Gilmore. (Peter was Woodward's son, who died at the age of 26 in 1969.[26])
He was a Charter member of theFellowship of Southern Writers.
