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The Strange Career of C. Vann Woodward
| Article
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13148 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
5,296 Words |
| Author
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M.E. Bradford
M.E. Bradford is professor of English and American studies at
the university of Dallas. His forthcoming book, Original
Intentions: Essays on the Origins and composition of the U.S.
Constitution; will be published by the University of Georgia
Press. |
Sometimes an image can teach us more about our times than volumes of exposition. This is especially the case when it is a poet who has framed the image, finding a meaningful metaphor in the raw materials of a familiar world. When, in the spring of 1961, the Southern literary critic Donald Davidson cast about for a contemporary historian whose views would chastise his "too, too Southern flesh," he turned to C. Vann Woodward. In an address delivered at Nashville's Belmont College, Davidson spoke of sitting "puritanically upright" in an "uncomfortable chair," enduring the requisite mortification of reading Woodward's The Burden of Southern History. Clearly the Tennessee traditionalist knew what he was doing when he selected a representative of the "new breed" of Southern scholars as a symbolic adversary, and The Burden of Southern History to represent that new breed.
U.B. Phillips had been the figure of reference among Southern historians in the 1920's and '30s and Frank Owsley the most important authority in the same field in the '40s and '50s. Well before Davidson poked fun at him, Comer Vann Woodward of Arkadephia and Morrilton, Arkansas, had become the leading spokesman and role model for a group of Southern historians who reached the top of their profession after World War II and who had a more difficult, problematic relation to the regional past than had their most eminent predecessors in the discipline. These historians worked to change the accepted view of the southern past and they reshaped it to suit the preoccupations of the country at large during the era of the Warren Court, the New Frontier, and Great Society: to mesh properly with the Second Reconstruction, which was well under way in 1961. C. Vann Woodward's career after 1947 and the publication of his non-political The Battle of Leyte Gulf were certainly made possible by this atmosphere of progressive expectation and expansive compulsory reform. In his choice of themes and his organization of evidence, Woodward's mature work is affected by the political battles of his time.
Woodward was something beyond a rank-and-file revisionist. He was not just a representative of this new group but among its best and involved with assorted causes, by his own description, as a "presentist," "moralist," or "activist partisan." In his books and essays, and in the training of his graduate students, Woodward has been at the cutting edge in the continuing attempt to "tell about the South": in the now fashionable analysis of dissident eccentrics in the region's history, in the focus on populism and economic conflict, and in addressing the black experience, the myth of the "New South," and the value of cross-cultural comparisons. He has led the way in the kind of
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