C. Vann Woodward was one of the most influential historians of the post-Reconstruction South, winner of both the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes, president of a number of scholarly associations, and a Jefferson Lecturer. What follows are excerpts from The Letters of C. Vann Woodward, published this month by Yale University Press and edited by his friend and correspondent Michael O’Brien, a professor at the University of Cambridge. The letters start in 1926, many of them to a friend, Glenn Weddington Rainey, whom Woodward had met as an undergraduate at Emory University. They cover the period he earned an M.A. in political science at Columbia University, his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his teaching tenure at the Johns Hopkins University, among other institutions, and then as Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, as well as the years until his death, in 1999.
October 1, 1930
To Glenn W. Rainey
Atlanta, GA
An incident occurred yesterday which you only have an ear for. An accident two blocks from here happened, in which a Negro was seriously hurt. A large crowd gathered about the man. An ambulance arrived, a way was cleared for the stretcher bearers who no sooner found that the man was black than they folded up the stretcher, got back into the machine and drove off. The Negro lay there until a colored ambulance arrived. The whole meaning of the incident, however, was more in the faces of the crowd. Their reaction stirred me considerably. I simply had to tell someone about it.
October 20, 1931
To Glenn W. Rainey
New York, NY
You know that I left for New York with but the vaguest notions of what I was going to do. ...
I have about decided that unless I hit upon a field that really challenges my interest, something that I can be happy in studying that I shall turn to something besides teaching—anything. Anything would be better than becoming something that I despise when I see it in another person.
March 26, 1939
To Glenn W. Rainey
Gainesville, FL
The Debs venture [After his first book, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, Woodward considered a biography of the American union leader Eugene V. Debs] has been laid aside for at least three years, perhaps longer. ...
Then came an invitation from Prof. Ramsdell of the Univ. of Texas asking me to agree to write volume nine, “The Origins of the New South” for the series, “The History of the South, 1607-1940" that he and Stephenson of LSU are editing. [The History of the South series was first edited by Charles W. Ramsdell and Wendell Holmes Stephenson.] The series is heavily subsidized by a foundation and promises to be something really good. ...
Whereas there are scores of books and monographs on such periods as the Confederacy or Reconstruction, the New South period has hardly been opened to research. It seems to me then that there is a chance to lay down the main lines of interpretation and to do something fairly definitive rather than merely summarizing or condensing. Naturally, there is the other side of the coin. The fact that there has been so little published on the period means that the pick-and-shovel work is much vaster than that demanded by any other volume. That was the reason they gave me three years, and the others only two.
December 18, 1947
To the Board of Governors
of the Johns Hopkins Club
I understand that a ruling of the Board of Governors made several years ago now stands in the way of admitting a Negro graduate student of the university to membership in the Johns Hopkins Club.
As a member of the club I should like to ask the gentlemen of the present board to reconsider this old ruling. It seems to me that changed conditions call for new rules. In the first place the university has demonstrated its willingness to accept Negro students on an equal basis. This would seem to call for a new policy of the Hopkins Club to bring it into harmony with university conditions.
It is my hope that the change can be made in the club as it was in the university, where it was accomplished quietly and effectively and without adverse criticism. The cheerful acceptance of the new university policy reflects credit on the good sense of the students, the faculty, and the administration. It is my belief that a corresponding change in club rules would be accepted in the same spirit. The issue will inevitably have to be faced in the club, and if it could be settled by the board at an early meeting the problem would be disposed of with a minimum of difficulty.
In addition, I feel that a rule which discriminates between students on the basis of race is not consistent with the liberal tradition of the Johns Hopkins campus.
To John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
[Confidential report on John Hope Franklin’s application for a fellowship, November 1949]
For a long time American historians have been hopefully awaiting the emergence of a Negro historian for whom it was not necessary to make any apologies or allowances on account of his race. There have been some vigorous Negro scholars who have written important historical works, but their primary interest has usually been the promotion of a cause—the cause of their race. This is understandable and laudable in its way, but it has set the Negro scholar apart, sometimes distorted his work, and prevented wholehearted acceptance among the craft of professional historians.
In Mr. Franklin I believe we have a Negro historian of the type we have been hoping to see. It is true that his published work so far has been primarily in the history of the Negro, but it is freer of race-consciousness and propaganda than preceding works of the kind. I am pleased to see that he is turning in his future research to non-racial subjects. ...
As Chairman of the Program Committee of a recent meeting of the Southern Historical Association at Williamsburg, I was mainly responsible for inviting Mr. Franklin to present a paper. He did this in a first-rate style and was cordially accepted. It was the first time in the life of the association that a Negro historian took part in one of the programs. The success of the experiment was in large part due to Franklin’s good judgment. ...
August 2, 1954
To Clinton Rossiter
Let me say in general how much I enjoyed the book [Rossiter was completing his Conservatism in America] and how much I was impressed with the astuteness and penetration of your treatment. One thing that fascinated, and at the same time exasperated me was the strong sympathy I have felt for the abstract treatment of Conservative doctrine as you described it, and then the almost uniform disappointment and sometimes revulsion I felt toward the individual exponents of the Right. One preconception I found ably confirmed in your treatment was the intellectual bankruptcy of the American Right. It is most astonishing to find repeatedly such liberals as the junior Schlesinger and such complicated liberals as Niebuhr turning aside from their own doctrines to give aid and assistance to conservatism, and to beg the conservatives to state their own case with a minimum of intelligence. I realize I am not telling you anything you do not know. ...
September 28, 1958
To Richard Hofstadter
The Ford people sent me your manuscript [most likely an early version of The Paranoid Style in American Politics] on the “Extreme Right Wing” and I read it yesterday. I think it is a really fine thing, written with a new confidence and assurance that comes out in deft use of understatement. I like many things about it, particularly the undercurrent of compassion, the almost affectionate appreciation of the cranks, avoidance of the stiff-necked disdain, achievement of an earthy touch. If you are specializing in cranks, after all, there is no more fruitful field of research than among the highbrows. And I don’t think it will do to be too high handed about the cranks. The dividing line is a narrow one and one could easily mistake a saint or so for a mere crank. Personally I would rue the day the last crank disappeared from American politics. The passing of Jenner [Republican Sen. William Ezra Jenner, a supporter of Joseph McCarthy] almost causes me a pang, unfelt in the passing of McCarthy. ... But I’m wandering. On the negative side I can’t help feeling you are missing a few nuances. Lumping together the Antimasons, Know Nothings, APA, KKK and McC. with the Pops seems to me to obscure some distinctions. The Populists (and I do think you confuse things by using caps and lower case too indiscriminately) particularly differ from the others too much to be used as the prototype. Admittedly there is no better example of the Populist crank become reactionary than Tom Watson. But the Pop crank is the Pop frustrated, where the rest of the gang start out cranks at the beginning. ...
June 7, 1960
To David Riesman
I am more than happy to uphold your hand in defending protest and dissent from the charge of irrationality. For that, I am afraid, is what the psychological interpretation of history often comes to of late. It tends to postulate a norm—the status quo, the consensus, the establishment, the American Way, as the case may be—and to regard any serious deviation as abnormal, if not irrational. And this without substantive reference to the causes and environment of protest and dissent: poverty, hunger, insecurity, alienation, unemployment, frustration, all in the midst of potential abundance and fulfillment.
September 4, 1960
To Robert Penn Warren
I think the puzzle “inevitability” is indeed one of the ways in which the Civil War has stirred the American imagination. Of course that is one for the metaphysician and not the historian. It was no more or less “inevitable” than any other war. But the main thing, it seems to [me], is not the answer to the question, but why the question clings to the Civil War. Why not any other of our wars?
March 4, 1969
To Kingman Brewster Jr.
May I put in a word of unsolicited advice about the proposal to establish a black student center on the campus? My advice is that whatever response you make should be on a temporary basis. The demand as I understand it comes largely from the freshmen and sophomores rather than from the upperclassmen. Insecurity among freshm[e]n is not an unusual phenomenon, and among black ones it is to be expected.
In my opinion this whole movement of black separatism is a reaction against the shock of white competition. Segregation has protected them from competition for generations. Southerners were not wholly hypocritical in saying that the Negroes preferred Jim Crow. Separatism is a militant stance but a defensive reaction—in effect a regression to the old way of dealing with competition.
October 5, 1973
To James M. McPherson
This is in response to your request of an opinion about Gene [Eugene] Genovese as a possible appointment at Princeton. I got to know him before he became so visible in the profession, though after he had become a controversial public figure. In spite of occasional brief misunderstandings, we have developed a personal friendship that I value very much. The relationship continues and should be taken into account in weighing my opinion of him. From the start I have found his writings stimulating and valuable. Partly because of their own merits, but also because of a long felt need that the American community of historians would profit by admission in full standing of a Marxist of intellectual reputability. Gene seems to fit the bill, and that was one reason for my cordiality. I found other reasons as I got to know him better. One was a growing faith in his personal integrity and his intellectual integrity. I think he is capable of mistakes of judgment and of passionate impatience that sometimes gives offense in personal relations, but I do not think him capable of anything low or mean or deliberately unfair. Some of the mistakes of the sort have cost him dearly. But his scrupulous fairness to opponents and his generosity of spirit to those with whom he is in complete disagreement have set a standard that few conservatives or liberals have matched. ...
I have a growing respect for Gene’s breadth of learning. His special field of scholarship has been rather narrow, but he brings to bear upon it an impressive command of historical and humane literature. As I told you, I have recently read his latest work, some 1,500 pages of it, entitled “Roll, Jordan, Roll” [Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made]. Each chapter begins with a quotation from the Scripture—and they were not lifted from Bartlett! This work revises upward my estimate and admiration for Gene’s scholarship. It has more of the enthusiasm for understanding and appreciating than the zeal for proving and disproving that often characterized earlier work.
March 1, 1991
To Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
I am enormously pleased to hear that you are doing a book [The Disuniting of America] on the Afrocentric nonsense. It’s a large subject, and the nonsense appears to expand daily (or maybe it’s because of black history month). As Anglocentric nonsense diminishes or yields to criticism, the black variety expands and gains immunity from criticism. It is difficult to get white academics, and even more black ones, to speak out. ...
But while you are at it I hope it is not too much to suggest that you add a chapter on Gendercentric nonsense and Homophobic nonsense. University curricula are already disgracefully cluttered with such stuff.
August 18, 1995
To Edward L. Ayers
I have long thought of myself as fortunate, or at least lucky, in the critics I have had. I mean the serious ones with real differences over facts, interpretations, and basic assumptions of the sort that regularly lead to bitter words. Instead they have maintained a high level of civility and—whatever their gut feelings—minded their manners. And they are by no means all southern bred. I count some of them my genuine friends to whom I am much indebted.
But what about critics from generations to come I asked myself sometimes—the ones after four, five, going on six decades, if the old books are remembered that long. It will be their duty, of course, to point out how dated, out-of-date, time-ridden, and downright quaint the old boy appears in the up-to-date enlightened present day. ...
Well, with more luck I have lived long enough to read a most reassuring answer from one of them, who had already gained my respect and admiration, and has now earned my gratitude. That piece of yours, “Narrating the New South” in the August JSH [Journal of Southern History] combines keen insight with a rare generosity of spirit. Your definition of “open” history writing as “a collaborative, cumulative enterprise” sets the tone. And you could not have defined more accurately the circumstances explaining and limiting my own books.
The first one, in 1938, came out of the depths, the Great Depression. Origins came out of the 40s and 50s when I felt oppressed by the tide of reactionism and McCarthyism. And the “Consensus” school was gaining recruits in my own profession. So it was I found Charles Beard, “old hat” as he was already deemed, the most congenial spirit around. So politics and economics and the seats of power and oppression and their many victims became my history subjects. The theme of irony could not have concealed the underlying indignation and anger. I could not have written different history in that time. And frankly I am glad I did not try. I thank you, my friend, for understanding.
