C. Vann Woodward, 1908-1999

C. Vann Woodward, who died in December at the age of 91, was this century’s preeminent historian of the South. No other scholar, teacher, or writer more powerfully shaped our understanding of the region’s past or its complex legacies for the nation as a whole. And it was not because he avoided controversy.

Woodward was a rebel. He entered the doctoral program at Chapel Hill in the 1930s after being dismissed from a faculty position at Georgia Tech for political reasons, chief among them having chaired the defense committee for African-American communist Angelo Herndon. But the din of controversy was by no means left behind in Atlanta. Woodward stirred it, politically and professionally, wherever he went.

Indeed, the greatness of his work in good part derived from its irreverent quality. His seminal books — the brilliant biography of Georgia Populist leader Tom Watson (1938); the immensely ambitious reassessment of the post-Reconstruction era, Origins of the New South (1951); and the pioneering study of race relations and the rise of segregation, regarded by Martin Luther King as the “historical Bible of the civil rights movement,” The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) — challenged not only the orthodoxies and shibboleths of the South, but also the conventions and assumptions of his fellow historians.

Woodward wrote of change at a time when most historians emphasized stability and continuity. He identified conflict at a time when most historians touted consensus. He considered the political struggles of the poor and disadvantaged with seriousness and compassion at a time when most historians treated them with puzzlement and suspicion.

He asked us to ponder the painful legacies of war, compromise, and repression at a time when most historians celebrated the genius of American politics. In so doing, he utterly transformed the ways in which Southern and American history were viewed.

Woodward continued to stir the scholarly waters and imagination with The Burden of Southern History (1960), The Comparative Approach to American History (1968), and American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (1971). He then took on the task of editing the authoritative edition of Mary Boykin Chestnut’s Civil War diaries, Mary Chestnut’s Civil War (1981), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. More recently, he collected many of his essays and reflections on history and literature in Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (1986), and The Future of the Past (1989).

But Woodward made it his business to keep stirring the political waters, too. He helped prepare the successful brief that eventuated in the Supreme Court’s monumental Brown decision of 1954. He joined the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. And he gave congressional testimony to support extension of the Voting Rights Act. Throughout, he lent his voice to the causes of intellectual integrity, the open exchange of ideas, interracial cooperation, and civil conduct — even when it invited criticism and disappointment from some on the political left.

There were few institutions that Woodward defended more resolutely and consistently than the university, where he spent most of his working life. He taught briefly at the University of Florida, the University of Virginia, and at Scripps College in California before moving to Johns Hopkins for an extended stay.

Then, in 1962, he became the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, where he remained until his retirement. In the process, he trained innumerable graduate students and supervised nearly fifty doctoral dissertations, many of which became signal works in their own right. All along, he lectured widely in this country and abroad, and received most every distinction the intellectual and academic worlds have to offer.

Woodward’s ideas have been the starting point for virtually every important study of the post-Civil War South written during the past half century. The ideas have been adopted, incorporated, developed, and — most fittingly — challenged. There have been challenges from the left, from the right, and from the center.

Some of the challenges have come from his own students. He explained this trend, rather playfully, as a manifestation of what he called “gerontophogy:” the penchant of the young to devour their elders.

C. Vann Woodward was never devoured.