(unamed)

C.Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History emeritus at Yale University, the most widely admired historian of the United States in the twentieth century, died at his home in Hamden, Connecticut, on 17 December 1999. He was ninety-one years old.

Through superbly graceful prose and a gift for carefully qualified generalizations, Woodward recast the history of the American South in the period from Reconstruction to World War I, used the history of race relations in the South to instruct the nation on the possibility of overcoming racism, and accomplished the remarkable feat of shaping a distinctive understanding of the American identity by illuminating the story of the region that served as its foil and counterpoint. His sensibility was essentially ironic, steeped in the wisdom of human experience that assures us of the likelihood of our failure but the moral necessity of our effort.

Born and raised in Arkansas, the son of a Latin teacher and school principal, Woodward came of age in the 1930s, which were beset with the Great Depression and the politics of scarcity. His sympathies were with the poor and the progressive, and his writing always reflected a keen awareness of contemporary political and intellectual debate, yet his scholarship was rigorously grounded in evidence and free of tendentiousness.

He produced masterful work in all the major modes of historical writing, and his bibliography runs to sixteen pages in John Herbert Roper (ed.), C. Vann Woodward: A Southern Historian and His Critics. He was recognized in almost every way a scholar can be recognized. He served as the president of all three of the relevant historical organizations: the Southern Historical Association (1952); the Organization of American Historians (1968-1969); and the American Historical Association (1969). He was chosen as the Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, and was also elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society. Mary Chesnut's Civil War, which he edited, won the Pulitzer prize in 1982.

Woodward came to the practice of History late and reluctantly, having been first attracted to literature as an undergraduate at Henderson College in Arkansas and also at Emory University where he transferred for his final two years. He continued to love literature and to read broadly all of his life, a practice that is evident in his own writing and in his friendships with Robert Penn Warren and William Styron, among others.

Still with vague literary ambitions, and after a disillusioning year trying social science at Columbia graduate school, he began to work on a biography of Thomas E. Watson, a larger than life figure in Georgia politics. While engaged in this effort he met Howard Odum who, with Rupert Vance, was the major intellectual magnet that made the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill an exciting place in the 1930s. Odum was impressed with the young writer and arranged a history fellowship for him at Chapel Hill.

Woodward arrived in Chapel Hill in 1933-1934 with four chapters written and much of the research done on his biography of Watson. Four years later he submitted the typescript to his advisor, Howard K. Beale, as his Ph.D. dissertation and sent a carbon copy to his publisher. It appeared in 1938 to warm reviews as Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel.

On the strength of that first book, Woodward was invited to do a volume in the Louisiana State University series on the history of the South. That work was interrupted by World War II and his service as an officer in the Navy, where he wrote instant histories of naval battles, the last of which was published in 1947 as The Battle for Leyte Gulf. After the war, Woodward returned to the archives and to teaching, settling at The Johns Hopkins University in 1946, where he remained until moving to Yale in 1961.

The first product of his archival research came in 1950 with the publication of Reunion and Reaction, an intricate detective story that revised the existing understanding of the deal that ended Reconstruction in 1877. The story is summarized in the first chapter of Origins of the New South, 1877 - 1913, his major synthesis and reinterpretation that appeared in 1951.

Not only is Woodward's version of the "Compromise of 1877" a fascinating story of intrigue at the highest level, but it introduces into the history of the post-Reconstruction South the theme of economic self-interest as a motivating force among the southern Redeemers, a radical departure from the conventional view of the time. The Redeemers had been seen not only as selfless regional patriots, but also as embodying the antebellum ruling class rising from the rubble of war, this time to rebuild a South on the northern industrial model while preserving what was best about antebellum culture. In short, the pre-Woodward celebratory history of the post-Reconstruction South was an apology for the existing regimes.

Origins of the New South changed all of that. Woodward's telling of the story is anything but celebratory. He traces the decay and decline of the aristocracy, the suffering and betrayal of the poor whites, the eventual subordination and segregation of blacks, and the rise and transformation of a middle class. It is not a happy story. The Redeemers were rapacious capitalists who mobilized the symbols of tradition in the service of change. The declining aristocracy were ineffectual and money-hungry, and in the last analysis they subordinated the values of their political and social heritage in order to maintain control over the black population. The poor whites suffered from strange malignancies of racism and conspiracy-mindedness, and the rising middle class was timid and self-interested even in its reform movement. There are no heroes in Origins.

More importantly, Woodward successfully challenged the assumption of historical continuity across the Civil War and the notion that American history functions within a consensus that is free of class conflict. Origins is a lament for paths not chosen. The colonial economy that resulted from Redeemer regimes was not good for the economic development or human welfare of the South. In particular, the failure of the Populist crusade, and the subsequent disfranchisement of blacks and poor whites, saddled the region with poverty, economic backwardness, an unresponsive political system, and the human misery that results from those things. Emblematically, Tom Watson, leader of the class-based Populist movement in the 1890s, soured into a race-baiting, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic demagogue in the first two decades of the new century.

Woodward pursued the theme of "paths not taken" with regard to race relations in the Richards Lectures in October 1954 at the University of Virginia. They appeared in 1955 as The Strange Career of Jim Crow. It was by far the most popular book Vann Woodward produced, going through five editions and three revisions. At the end of the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, with Woodward standing in the front row, Martin Luther King, Jr., called it "the Bible of the Civil Rights Movement."

What was strange about the "career" of Jim Crow was, of course, that it was of such recent origin. Segregation, far from being embedded in the folkways of the South, was a method of racial subordination that the white South stumbled toward fitfully after the end of Reconstruction. This implies a period of flux in race relations that might have yielded a different outcome, had there been different leadership or different circumstances. After Jim Crow statutes were enacted, however, the system of racial subordination became fixed and virtually universal. The aspect most crucial to the 1950s and 1960s was the understanding that if the law were used to create segregation, it could be used to end it.

Almost every historian who writes about the South tries at some point to capture "the central theme" of southern history. None has written more seductively than Woodward. Influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr, and alluding to his book, The Irony of American History, Woodward sought the wellspring of the southern identity in 1952 in "The Irony of Southern History" and in a series of other essays collected first in 1960 as The Burden of Southern History. The South's regional history, Woodward argues, differs from the major national myths of innocence, affluence, and invincibility because the South has experienced the guilt of slavery and subsequent systems of racial subordination, defeat in the Civil War, and wrenching poverty. Had the nation learned the lesson Woodward was trying to teach, it would have been spared the bitter lessons of Vietnam.

The most instructive contradiction in Woodward's professional life was that he was a politically engaged scholar who opposed the politicization of the academy. He committed himself very early in his political maturity to racial justice, and he never wavered from that commitment. He and John Hope Franklin provided historical essays to Thurgood Marshall and Jack Green for their legal brief in the historic Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case. The Strange Career of Jim Crow was a work of scholarship aimed directly at the most important domestic political issue of the twentieth century. He marched in Selma, and in the 1980s testified in favor of the extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the major legislative outcome of the Selma protests. He also joined over four hundred historians in the 1990s in an open letter arguing that impeachment was a disproportionate response to President Clinton's indiscretions.

Yet he also opposed high profile appointments at Yale that seemed to be based more upon politics than scholarly merit. He was the chair of a famous committee at Yale in 1974 that issued an eloquent report defending free speech and academic freedom from the threat of the radical Left within the university. He joined the National Association of Scholars, an organization dedicated to resisting the radicalization of the academy.

The trait of character that dissolves any apparent contradiction was Woodward's intellectual integrity. He believed quietly but passionately in the idealistic myth that the search for truth is a cooperative enterprise. Critics are actually allies. Thinking Back, his intellectual autobiography published in 1988, is a gentle conversation between Woodward and his critics in which he expresses his indebtedness to various critics who have changed his understanding of a subject. It was his custom to reply graciously, even when he was not convinced by the criticism, and he readily changed his position when he was shown to be wrong or when a better interpretation was suggested. Woodward's search for truth was not only cooperative, but had to be rooted in evidence.

Woodward supervised the dissertations of forty-two students. He proudly arranged their books together on a shelf in his sunroom. In him, his students had a model of intellectual integrity and scholarly civility, and from him they received encouragement to pursue their own ideas, even if that brought them into disagreement with him, and even if it involved methodologies that he did not trust. He trained no acolytes. His subtle and self-deprecating wit, along with a keen intelligence that was always alive in the world, made him a delightful companion. His capacity for friendship was enormous.

He retired from active teaching in 1977 and spent an admirably productive retirement, despite the premature loss of his wife and the death of their only child, Peter. Up until his surgery in July 1999 to repair a heart valve, he was traveling on his own, working every day, taking long walks, relaxing with a drink in the evening, and enjoying friends and loved ones. He never fully recovered from surgery and died at home, sitting in his desk chair, amidst his books.

Sheldon F. Hackney is professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.


Table of Contents		In Memoriam C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999)
Woodward		Sheldon F. Hackney C.Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History emeritus at Yale University, the most widely admired historian of the United States in the twentieth century, died at his home in Hamden, Connecticut, on 17 December 1999. He was ninety-one years old. Through superbly graceful prose and a gift for carefully qualified generalizations, Woodward recast the history of the American South in the period from Reconstruction to World War I, used the history of race relations in the South to instruct the nation on the possibility of overcoming racism, and accomplished the remarkable feat of shaping a distinctive understanding of the American identity by illuminating the story of the region that served as its foil and counterpoint. His sensibility was essentially ironic, steeped in the wisdom of human experience that assures us of the likelihood of our failure but the moral necessity of our effort. Born and raised in Arkansas, the son of a Latin teacher and school principal, Woodward came of age in the 1930s, which were beset with the Great Depression and the politics of scarcity. His sympathies were with the poor and the progressive, and his writing always reflected a keen awareness of contemporary political and intellectual debate, yet his scholarship was rigorously grounded in evidence and free of tendentiousness. He produced masterful work in all the major modes of historical writing, and his bibliography runs to sixteen pages in John Herbert Roper (ed.), C. Vann Woodward: A Southern Historian and His Critics. He was recognized in almost every way a scholar can be recognized. He served as the president of all three of the relevant historical organizations: the Southern Historical Association (1952); the Organization of American Historians (1968-1969); and the American Historical Association (1969). He was chosen as the Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, and was also elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society. Mary Chesnut's Civil War, which he edited, won the Pulitzer prize in 1982. Woodward came to the practice of History late and reluctantly, having been first attracted to literature as an undergraduate at Henderson College in Arkansas and also at Emory University where he transferred for his final two years. He continued to love literature and to read broadly all of his life, a practice that is evident in his own writing and in his friendships with Robert Penn Warren and William Styron, among others. Still with vague literary ambitions, and after a disillusioning year trying social science at Columbia graduate school, he began to work on a biography of Thomas E. Watson, a larger than life figure in Georgia politics. While engaged in this effort he met Howard Odum who, with Rupert Vance, was the major intellectual magnet that made the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill an exciting place in the 1930s. Odum was impressed with the young writer and arranged a history fellowship for him at Chapel Hill. Woodward arrived in Chapel Hill in 1933-1934 with four chapters written and much of the research done on his biography of Watson. Four years later he submitted the typescript to his advisor, Howard K. Beale, as his Ph.D. dissertation and sent a carbon copy to his publisher. It appeared in 1938 to warm reviews as Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel. On the strength of that first book, Woodward was invited to do a volume in the Louisiana State University series on the history of the South. That work was interrupted by World War II and his service as an officer in the Navy, where he wrote instant histories of naval battles, the last of which was published in 1947 as The Battle for Leyte Gulf. After the war, Woodward returned to the archives and to teaching, settling at The Johns Hopkins University in 1946, where he remained until moving to Yale in 1961. The first product of his archival research came in 1950 with the publication of Reunion and Reaction, an intricate detective story that revised the existing understanding of the deal that ended Reconstruction in 1877. The story is summarized in the first chapter of Origins of the New South, 1877 - 1913, his major synthesis and reinterpretation that appeared in 1951. Not only is Woodward's version of the "Compromise of 1877" a fascinating story of intrigue at the highest level, but it introduces into the history of the post-Reconstruction South the theme of economic self-interest as a motivating force among the southern Redeemers, a radical departure from the conventional view of the time. The Redeemers had been seen not only as selfless regional patriots, but also as embodying the antebellum ruling class rising from the rubble of war, this time to rebuild a South on the northern industrial model while preserving what was best about antebellum culture. In short, the pre-Woodward celebratory history of the post-Reconstruction South was an apology for the existing regimes. Origins of the New South changed all of that. Woodward's telling of the story is anything but celebratory. He traces the decay and decline of the aristocracy, the suffering and betrayal of the poor whites, the eventual subordination and segregation of blacks, and the rise and transformation of a middle class. It is not a happy story. The Redeemers were rapacious capitalists who mobilized the symbols of tradition in the service of change. The declining aristocracy were ineffectual and money-hungry, and in the last analysis they subordinated the values of their political and social heritage in order to maintain control over the black population. The poor whites suffered from strange malignancies of racism and conspiracy-mindedness, and the rising middle class was timid and self-interested even in its reform movement. There are no heroes in Origins. More importantly, Woodward successfully challenged the assumption of historical continuity across the Civil War and the notion that American history functions within a consensus that is free of class conflict. Origins is a lament for paths not chosen. The colonial economy that resulted from Redeemer regimes was not good for the economic development or human welfare of the South. In particular, the failure of the Populist crusade, and the subsequent disfranchisement of blacks and poor whites, saddled the region with poverty, economic backwardness, an unresponsive political system, and the human misery that results from those things. Emblematically, Tom Watson, leader of the class-based Populist movement in the 1890s, soured into a race-baiting, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic demagogue in the first two decades of the new century. Woodward pursued the theme of "paths not taken" with regard to race relations in the Richards Lectures in October 1954 at the University of Virginia. They appeared in 1955 as The Strange Career of Jim Crow. It was by far the most popular book Vann Woodward produced, going through five editions and three revisions. At the end of the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, with Woodward standing in the front row, Martin Luther King, Jr., called it "the Bible of the Civil Rights Movement." What was strange about the "career" of Jim Crow was, of course, that it was of such recent origin. Segregation, far from being embedded in the folkways of the South, was a method of racial subordination that the white South stumbled toward fitfully after the end of Reconstruction. This implies a period of flux in race relations that might have yielded a different outcome, had there been different leadership or different circumstances. After Jim Crow statutes were enacted, however, the system of racial subordination became fixed and virtually universal. The aspect most crucial to the 1950s and 1960s was the understanding that if the law were used to create segregation, it could be used to end it. Almost every historian who writes about the South tries at some point to capture "the central theme" of southern history. None has written more seductively than Woodward. Influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr, and alluding to his book, The Irony of American History, Woodward sought the wellspring of the southern identity in 1952 in "The Irony of Southern History" and in a series of other essays collected first in 1960 as The Burden of Southern History. The South's regional history, Woodward argues, differs from the major national myths of innocence, affluence, and invincibility because the South has experienced the guilt of slavery and subsequent systems of racial subordination, defeat in the Civil War, and wrenching poverty. Had the nation learned the lesson Woodward was trying to teach, it would have been spared the bitter lessons of Vietnam. The most instructive contradiction in Woodward's professional life was that he was a politically engaged scholar who opposed the politicization of the academy. He committed himself very early in his political maturity to racial justice, and he never wavered from that commitment. He and John Hope Franklin provided historical essays to Thurgood Marshall and Jack Green for their legal brief in the historic Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case. The Strange Career of Jim Crow was a work of scholarship aimed directly at the most important domestic political issue of the twentieth century. He marched in Selma, and in the 1980s testified in favor of the extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the major legislative outcome of the Selma protests. He also joined over four hundred historians in the 1990s in an open letter arguing that impeachment was a disproportionate response to President Clinton's indiscretions. Yet he also opposed high profile appointments at Yale that seemed to be based more upon politics than scholarly merit. He was the chair of a famous committee at Yale in 1974 that issued an eloquent report defending free speech and academic freedom from the threat of the radical Left within the university. He joined the National Association of Scholars, an organization dedicated to resisting the radicalization of the academy. The trait of character that dissolves any apparent contradiction was Woodward's intellectual integrity. He believed quietly but passionately in the idealistic myth that the search for truth is a cooperative enterprise. Critics are actually allies. Thinking Back, his intellectual autobiography published in 1988, is a gentle conversation between Woodward and his critics in which he expresses his indebtedness to various critics who have changed his understanding of a subject. It was his custom to reply graciously, even when he was not convinced by the criticism, and he readily changed his position when he was shown to be wrong or when a better interpretation was suggested. Woodward's search for truth was not only cooperative, but had to be rooted in evidence. Woodward supervised the dissertations of forty-two students. He proudly arranged their books together on a shelf in his sunroom. In him, his students had a model of intellectual integrity and scholarly civility, and from him they received encouragement to pursue their own ideas, even if that brought them into disagreement with him, and even if it involved methodologies that he did not trust. He trained no acolytes. His subtle and self-deprecating wit, along with a keen intelligence that was always alive in the world, made him a delightful companion. His capacity for friendship was enormous. He retired from active teaching in 1977 and spent an admirably productive retirement, despite the premature loss of his wife and the death of their only child, Peter. Up until his surgery in July 1999 to repair a heart valve, he was traveling on his own, working every day, taking long walks, relaxing with a drink in the evening, and enjoying friends and loved ones. He never fully recovered from surgery and died at home, sitting in his desk chair, amidst his books. Sheldon F. Hackney is professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.