The Strange Career of C. Vann Woodward

One of the greatest historians of the American South was C. Vann Woodward who, in his 1955 classic The Strange Career of Jim Crow, shattered the belief that segregation was an inevitable outcome of Reconstruction. But later in life, his career took a strange turn. Once a darling of the left, he became its greatest critic, opposing the radicalism of the day and eventually shifting to the right.

Born in 1908 in Vanndale, Arkansas, Woodward was a privileged white man if ever there was one. Vanndale itself was named after his mother’s family, and he later attended Emory University, where his uncle was dean of students. He went on to study at Columbia and then Chapel Hill, where he encountered the literary currents of the Harlem Renaissance—and actually met giants of the movement such as WEB Du Bois and Langston Hughes.

Around this time, he also became familiar with the hard-nosed economic determinism of Charles A. Beard, whose 1913 book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States argued that the Founding Fathers were motivated by market rather than philosophical considerations.

During World War II, Woodward chronicled naval battles for the military, his first real foray into history as a storyteller. He then turned his attention to the South, describing how populism had once united poor whites and blacks before calcifying into the politics of racial division. The Strange Career of Jim Crow is not as widely known today as it perhaps should be, but its influence on American life has been incalculable. It became the intellectual scaffolding of the civil rights movement and a revelation to any who ever assumed segregation was a permanent fact of Southern life.

In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech on the steps of the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama. In his speech, popularly known as “Our God Is Marching On,” King delivered some of his most powerful lines, including one of my favorites, “Our feet are tired, but our souls are rested.” At the climax of his sermon, he explained:

Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.

You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests.

Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South. To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society.

In other words, Populists were telling poor whites and blacks they were united by class whereas Bourbon Democrats were ramping up racial division. This echoes events today, though we must be careful not to draw too close a comparison between Bourbon Democrats and Democrats now, given that the former were conservative, pro-business, and aligned with the planter aristocracy and industrial capitalists.

By the time of his writing, the political landscape had gone through a radical transformation, and Woodward found himself increasingly at odds with the New Left. The movement had replaced reason with dogma, scholarship with ideological purity, made a practice of mob shame and coercion, and expressed growing praise for certain groups on the basis of immutable characteristics such as race.

In 1969, as president of the American Historical Association, Woodward led the charge against efforts to turn the organization into a base for radical activism. But as identity politics gained traction in academia, Woodward recoiled from what he saw as the replacement of merit with quotas—and scholarship with political orthodoxy.

At one point, he tried to block the appointment of communist historian Herbert Aptheker at Yale, an arguably authoritarian tactic to address the very lack of free expression he feared would result if communists subverted the nation. Woodward also joined the National Association of Scholars, which fought the encroachment of ideological conformity in higher education. And he authored the Woodward Report, or the “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale,” which established the university’s policy on free speech.

The primary function of a university is to discover and disseminate knowledge by means of research and teaching. To fulfill this function a free interchange of ideas is necessary not only within its walls but with the world beyond as well. It follows that the university must do everything possible to ensure within it the fullest degree of intellectual freedom.

Later, his review of Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education marked the end of his rightward trajectory and final intellectual resting place. Woodward died in 1999, and his legacy today is claimed by both liberals and conservatives. But one thing remained constant throughout his strange career. As he wrote in The Burden of Southern History, “The painful truth that Americans were so frantically fleeing was that history had at last caught up with them.”

Woodward always found a way to make us stop and look.