Tom Watson Revisited

Abstract

SAD TO SAY, THE ERA OF C. VANN WOODWARD HAS COME TO A CLOSE. No more revised editions of Strange Career of Jim Crow will materialize, no more essays in New York Review of Books, no more platform appearances at conferences with his friend William Styron, no more summer martinis with sprightly conversationalist on his leaf-shaded stone patio. We still miss him. Yet we continue to write about him and honor his memory with symposiums. The latest one, held at Rice University last winter, celebrated fiftieth anniversary of Origins of New (1) The southern historical academy is bound to move on to topics not dreamed of in Woodward's prime. Nonetheless, another backward glance is very much in order. Vann Woodward will always be identified with moral problems about race, character of American and southern history, and integrity of historian's craft. These issues are no less relevant today than they were fifty years ago. before Yale professor died in December 1999, I begun some research on Tom Watson's life. I knew Woodward would not mind such an intrusion on his biographical domain. (2) In fact, he prized rapier parries of debate about his many publications. In Journal of American History, his spirited response to critics of Strange Career of Jim Crow bore subtitle Long May They Persevere. He thought such exchanges a gratifying way to remain professionally alive and honestly relevant. (3) Oddly, Woodward's Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel has received much less critical re-examination than his other books, even though many of his most salient ideas first appeared there. When famous biography was published in 1938, contemporary critics were justly generous and enthusiastic. By and large, more commendations than questions continue to descend upon literary classic, almost epic in its sweep. (4) Yet, early on, redoubtable Frank Owsley sounded a critical note. He complained that Woodward been much more effective in treating Watson Populist crusader than in rendering Watson, apostate. The biographer, Owsley went on, proposed that Watson had been driven almost mad by constant defeat of his great ideals, and by death of his beloved children. But, reviewer added, these factors, along with his Napoleonic complex, hardly accounted for the direction of his phobias against a wide collection of minorities and against American entry into Great War in 1917. Owsley, however, no space--and perhaps no relish--to develop a counter-explanation. (5) While making no mention of Watson's psychological makeup, Michael O'Brien has more recently pursued a similar line. Unlike Owsley, though, O'Brien explains why Woodward depicted Watson as he did. On one hand, in Woodward's perspective fledgling Georgia Populist began as a Dr. Jekyll, or the tribune of underdog in early to use O'Brien's words. (The Robert Louis Stevenson image as applied to Watson was used by historian Charles Crowe, whereas O'Brien simply notes a splitting of Watson's personality in Woodward's biography.) (6) With a radical vision that Woodward's biography justly applauds, Georgia leader scourged Democrats for raising up fears of the nigger question. For a brief but heady time in early 1890s Watson insisted that it was simply an imaginary evil. Before large crowds he explained that rural poor were apathetic, but not because of carelessness and indolence. Rather, repeated failure, constant discouragement sapped their energy. In 1889 Watson told delegates at a National Farmers' Alliance convention in Atlanta, There is no room for divided hearts in South. At Murray's Cross-Roads he denounced political bosses and landholders who made slaves out of whites, have kept two races from acting together by fanning ruinous fires of race hatred. That was indeed a novel approach in a South still nursing wounds from a futile war to save slavery and to make white hegemony unconquerable. …