It provides an insightful account of the Populist movement, and in particular the complex relationship between the Colored Farmers Alliance and the Southern Alliance. In his second major work, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951), Woodward treated the events that led to the removal of federal troops from the South, the official end of Reconstruction, and their consequences. As late as 1895 he denounced the legal disenfranchisement of blacks with the statement that “All this reactionary legislation is wrong” and that “Old fashioned democracy taught that a man who fought the battles of his country, and paid his taxes of his government, should have a vote.”īy 1906, having concluded that populism would become a serious force only when blacks were excluded from political life, Watson had become an aggressive race-baiter, representing what Woodward called “the most ignorant, bigoted and reactionary forces in American life.” Watson began his life as a radical who vigorously attacked the moneyed interests. Woodward's first major work, Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel (1938), examined the life of the Georgia Populist whose career in some ways exemplified the political contradictions of the post-Civil War South. In Atlanta in 1932 he associated himself with the defense of Angelo Hernandez, a young black man and CP member, who was accused of subversive activities. On a trip to Europe, according to the New York Times' obituary, he was given a tour of Berlin by a Communist Party member.
While in New York he met Langston Hughes and other members of the Harlem Renaissance group, many of whom had left-wing sympathies. He began taking graduate courses at Columbia University in New York City in 1931. By the time of his graduation from Emory, the Depression had hit, a development that radicalized the future historian, like a good many other American intellectuals. After two years he transferred to Emory College in Atlanta. After attending high school in Morrilton, a town fifty miles northwest of Little Rock, Woodward enrolled at a small Methodist college in Arkadelphia, Ark.
Woodward, some of whose ancestors had been slave-owners, was born in Vanndale, a small town in Arkansas named after his mother's family, in 1908. Woodward is perhaps best known for his work The Strange Career of Jim Crow, published in 1955, which did a good deal to debunk the myth that segregation was the inevitable consequence of Southern culture, and pointed instead to its roots in social and political relations. Vann Woodward, who contributed much to an understanding of the American South, died December 17 at his home in Connecticut at the age of 91.
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