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Title of sound recording: Oral History Interview with C. Vann Woodward,
January 12, 1991. Interview A-0341. Southern Oral History Program
Collection (#4007)
Title of series: Series A. Southern Politics. Southern Oral History
Program Collection (A-0341)
Author: John Egerton
Title of transcript: Oral History Interview with C. Vann Woodward,
January 12, 1991. Interview A-0341. Southern Oral History Program
Collection (#4007)
Title of series: Series A. Southern Politics. Southern Oral History
Program Collection (A-0341)
Author: C. Vann Woodward
Description: 153 Mb
Description: 36 p.
Note:
Interview conducted on January 12, 1991, by John
Egerton; recorded in New Haven, Connecticut.
Note:
Transcribed by Jane Burgess.
Note:
Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007): Series A. Southern Politics, Manuscripts Department, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Note:
Original transcript on deposit at the Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.
Editorial practices An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition. The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original. The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in
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Interview with C. Vann Woodward, January 12, 1991. Interview A-0341.
Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Woodward, C.
Vann, interviewee
Interview Participants
C. VANN
WOODWARD, interviewee
JOHN
EGERTON, interviewer
[TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Page 1
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I never met him [Robert Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh
Courier, a black newspaper]. I always thought of him as coming
by his name in the way you might suspect. He came from North Carolina.
My family came from there, the Vann part of it did, were slave-owning
planters. Let's see, there's several generations, I think, the first one
was the one that surfaced in Philadelphia, of any importance.
JOHN EGERTON:
Right. Did you ever see his picture?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I may have, but I don't know.
JOHN EGERTON:
That's Robert Vann of Ahoskie.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, he sure looks white to me.
JOHN EGERTON:
Yeah, he really does. This is an interesting piece out of a local history
from Ahoskie, in Hertford County, and he talks about growing up
there.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
That's my people's country all right.
JOHN EGERTON:
He was quite a good journalist, and hard hitting. Pretty tough
fellow.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
[inaudible].
JOHN EGERTON:
I believe that's right. I just thought I'd bring that along to show it to
you in case you haven't seen it.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Probably the nearest kin I've got [laughter] for all I know.
JOHN EGERTON:
It's quite possible. Do you remember, by chance, election night in
November of '32? I believe you probably were at Emory. Were you there by
then?
Page 2
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I would have been teaching at Georgia Tech.
JOHN EGERTON:
You were teaching at Tech. So you were in Atlanta. Do you by any chance
have any particular recollection of that election or that victory of
Roosevelt, and whether it represented any significance in your mind?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Nothing that flatters the historical mind because I had been influenced,
I think, by Walter Lippmann and other commentators who underestimated
Roosevelt. I didn't expect much of him, and I guess I'm not alone in
that. He really was vague, and his plans were indefinite. I do
[remember], as part of the anecdote, winning five bucks very easily. It
was the day of his inauguration in March, and at lunch with my
colleagues at Tech, we were talking about the future and some of them
were saying, "Things are looking up, you know."
'Course, every bank in the country was closed that day. So I said,
"So you're all optimists? Well, I've got five dollars to bet
here that every bank in this country will be closed next year at this
time." I have to correct that story. I said, "I'll be
happy to bet anybody here five bucks that four months from today every
bank will be closed." Would be July 4th. That was a cheap trick
I played on them.
JOHN EGERTON:
In that early period when you had gone from Arkansas to Atlanta, you
speak of the influence of your uncle Comer and of Rupert Vance and Will
Alexander. Will Alexander at that time was in Atlanta and head of the
Interracial Commission. I remember the little anecdote about some
disparaging remark you made about him that got used to embarrass both of
you. Something having to
Page 3
do with the Angelo Herndon
case, and someone asked you if Will Alexander could be depended on, and
you sort of dismissed him as a conservative.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
That's right. This was in a private conversation and this turned out to
be a communist who published that in the [laughter] . . . .
JOHN EGERTON:
Somewhat to your embarrassment?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Somewhat to my embarrassment then. Dr. Will sent me a clipping from it.
Said, "The cut of a friend is the unkindest of all."
[Laughter]
JOHN EGERTON:
Was he, in fact, sort of a hopelessly paternalistic man as you look back
on him, or did he have some vision about what this country needed?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No. We're talking about 1933-4. He was talking to black leaders and knew
them. He wasn't paternalistic. Of course, nowadays he would be judged,
and I judged him then, as a conservative, and he was a conservative
compared with a young nut like myself. But that's no discredit to him at
the time. He's like my uncle. My uncle introduced me to John Hope,
president of Atlanta University, and similarly I met Arthur Raper in
Will Alexander's office and got to know him very well. Those
acquaintances meant a great deal to me.
JOHN EGERTON:
And as you think back on them now, were they men who saw down the road
enough to recognize that the South, and indeed the country, was going to
have to address the racial issue in some substantive way, or was it just
too early for that?
Page 4
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, they were notable because they were informed and were seeking to
inform themselves, and Raper was writing some interesting monographs, at
that time, on lynching, tenant farmers, property system, and all that.
Yeah, that was unusual. But this is a very relative matter. To think, at
that time, of abolishing segregation. . . .
JOHN EGERTON:
It was an unthinkable thought, wasn't it, at that time?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, maybe in a hundred years or more, but not within a few years. And I
would never have predicted, myself, what would actually happen.
JOHN EGERTON:
Another of the friends you made along about that time was Saunders
Redding. Was he teaching at one of the Atlanta universities then?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
At Atlanta University, I think, in the English Department.
JOHN EGERTON:
Was he about your age?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
About. I think he's still living.
JOHN EGERTON:
No, I don't think so. At least, John Franklin told me that he was
not.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
[inaudible]
JOHN EGERTON:
Then you went to Columbia and you traveled some. I can't remember if you
came back to Atlanta before you went to Chapel Hill, or did you go from
Columbia to Chapel Hill?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I came back and taught a year at Georgia Tech and then another year after
that I lost my job there. That was the year of Angelo Herndon.
Page 5
JOHN EGERTON:
Right. Do you think there was any connection between your losing the job
and that incident?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I honestly couldn't claim it so. I was called in by the President.
"You know where we live and how things are down here, I've got
a job to hold," things like that. Mr. Britton was his name, but
the thing was about thirty of us lost our jobs at one time.
JOHN EGERTON:
And it was an economic thing.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, rather than my action.
JOHN EGERTON:
When you went to Chapel Hill you had already known Howard Odum through a
family connection. Is that right?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, but just. I met him and his parents lived about a mile down the road
from my father who was then the head of Emery junior College at Oxford.
I must have had some correspondence with him. At any rate, I wrote him
about the Tom Watson project and that I wanted to get money to go to the
University and he'd said he'd be in Oxford visiting his parents and why
didn't I drop in. I did.
JOHN EGERTON:
And had you known Vance before also, again through a family
connection?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, much earlier because his father lived in Marrilton, Arkansas, and
while I was in high school there in the twenties, his father built and
ran a swimming pool. He hired me as one of the flunkies; not a
lifesaver, but a bath-towel man. I knew Vance, but not very well. I knew
him after I got to Chapel Hill.
JOHN EGERTON:
And you spent four or five years at Chapel Hill?
Page 6
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No, three.
JOHN EGERTON:
Three years through the middle of the thirties where Odum and Vance and
Guy and Guion Johnson were, and W.T. Couch and Paul Green. Chapel Hill
was sort of a beacon in the South, wasn't it, in those years?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes
JOHN EGERTON:
. . .Frank Graham. Was there any other university in the South of that
stature?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, it depends on what you are looking for. There was certainly an
intellectual community of a thriving kind at Vanderbilt in the same
years, and a little earlier the Fugitive poets were there. Later on,
about in the thirties, Cleanth Brooks and Red Warren went to LSU and
started the Southern Review, so it [UNC] wasn't unique.
JOHN EGERTON:
But in terms, again, coming perhaps back to the focus on social issues
and a more progressive way of looking at problems and whatnot,
practically all these people I've named took some interest in those
things one way or another. The Regionalists did, certainly Frank Graham
did. Paul Green did. Couch had probably more black writers published at
UNC Press than anybody in New York was publishing at that time.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
That wouldn't have taken a lot, you know.
JOHN EGERTON:
That's true. Nevertheless, it's sort of an unusual thing to see that
interest.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
He published one book that shocked the hell out of him and that was
called, What the Negro Wants.
Page 7
JOHN EGERTON:
I'm coming to that because in a way, I'm sort of building up to a point
here that I want to make in that I keep running into people who tell me
now that when they were thinking of going to college or thinking of
going to graduate school in the thirties that was their aspiration, to
go there and work under Howard Odum, to go there and be a part of that
whole social science thing.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well that wasn't true of me.
JOHN EGERTON:
It wasn't in your case, I know.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I didn't take any work with Vance or Odum. I knew them and I feared Odum
and I loved Vance.
JOHN EGERTON:
The sort of running scrap that was going on between the Fugitive-Agrarian
school and the Regionalist school kind of continued through that period.
They debated one another and so forth.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, they needled each other.
JOHN EGERTON:
Did you think of the Agrarians, then or now, as a. . . . Would it be too
much of as a simplification to think of them as sort of arch
conservatives in this sort of philosophical construct?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, some of them. They were different from each other. I knew some of
them. I knew that they were not reactionaries like Warren. But I knew
that Donaldson [Donald Davidson] was as conservative as you get. Some
others were. But then there was that economist.
JOHN EGERTON:
H.C. Nixon? He turned out to be pretty-liberal.
Page 8
C. VANN WOODWARD:
We had the same ideas at that time. So I was glad to meet them. I did
meet them in connection with an exchange of. . . . We had a debate.
Actually, Couch did the debating, but I went along and met them all.
JOHN EGERTON:
Another sort of contentious relationship in that same period had nothing
to do with Chapel Hill. I don't know if you knew either of these men,
but Erskine Caldwell and James Agee had a running dislike for each other
that centered on their interpretations of the poor South. You remember
in addition to his novels, Caldwell wrote that book, You
Have Seen Their Faces, that Margaret Bourke-White took the
photographs for about two years before Agee and Evans went and did their
thing. Agee was absolutely livid at this jerk going down there and doing
that, you know, sort of flying in and flying out. So he went and stayed
four weeks which supposedly made a difference. Do you have any
reflections on either one of those kinds of interpretations?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, I met Caldwell, but much later, and he was pretty old. I was too.
And I never met Agee. I liked his book but thought he was somewhat of a
nut.
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes, he had a kind of an eccentric reputation. Strange fellow.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
So I never sought him out, though he was about my age, I think. A little
younger maybe. I did not know either of the two photographers.
JOHN EGERTON:
Some journalists out of this period who called themselves liberals in a
sort of classic sense—Virginius Dabney
Page 9
being maybe the most prominent because he wrote a book called Liberalism in the South in '32, and George Fort Milton
in Chattanooga and John Temple Graves in Birmingham. These were men who
didn't shrink from the tag "liberal" at that time.
They called themselves that and yet, as events were to prove, they
became increasingly disaffected with the notions of liberalism that had
anything to do with any kind of racial change, so that by the time Brown came along they were in the camp of the
archconservatives.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
They'd been there all along.
JOHN EGERTON:
You think they had?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I mean, I didn't know all of them. I knew some, but read them and. . .
no, know they were [conservatives] even for that time. They were all
what were called Henry Grady and Walter Hines Page liberals, when
liberal really meant jerk.
JOHN EGERTON:
It's kind of interesting to read some of Dabney's things and to see him
chiding the city of Richmond for giving some Communist itinerant a hard
time; locked some guy up over there, roughed him up and put him in jail
and he was saying, you know, this is sort of a tacky way to behave.
Everything was distanced from any kind of actual involvement. He was a
sort of a split-tails liberal, it seemed to me.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, he was a decent guy and came of an old tradition, but that was a
conservative tradition.
JOHN EGERTON:
Some folks of another vein, Myles Horton and Don West and H.L. Mitchell
and Howard Kester. Did you know any of those fellows?
Page 10
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, I think I knew all of those except the last one you mentioned.
JOHN EGERTON:
Howard Kester. Buck Kester he was called. He was a sort of. . .
Fellowship of Reconciliation and Committee of Southern Churchmen.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I may have and I may not. The rest of them I did, especially Don West.
West was a fellow-traveler and maybe further than that, I don't know,
with the Party, the Communist Party, but also a genuine countryman, a
Southerner. I liked him, I knew a good many fellow travelers.
JOHN EGERTON:
Well, in those times, I mean, it was not at all unusual for people to be
interested in the Communist Party was it?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No. I could have been called a fellow-traveler when I went to Russia in
'32. I went there to see the future. That's where they told me it was. I
came back somewhat more sophisticated.
JOHN EGERTON:
Did you come back impressed at all with what you had seen, or do you
think of it now as a turning point away from that whole ideology?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
More of a turning point away. Of course, I'd just spent a year in New
York in the bottom of the Depression and I got to Russia and I saw the
same thing.
JOHN EGERTON:
yes, right. A lot of poverty.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Worse.
JOHN EGERTON:
Another man in this period who fascinates me is Claude Williams. Did you
know him by any chance? He ended up being
Page 11
President
of that Commonwealth College in Meno, Arkansas, where Orville Faubus
spent a little time.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I remember him. I don't know whether I ever met him or not.
JOHN EGERTON:
He was a sharecropper's son from West Tennessee who got radicalized more
through religion than any other experience and that was the time of the
Social Gospel and whatnot. There were a number of people who kind of
came in from that point of view. He was one of them. He's a fascinating
man and I happened to find in the library at the University of Tennessee
a week or two ago a transcript of a trial. He was tried for heresy by
the Presbyterian Church in like 1951 or '52 for his Communist leanings
and it's like a morality play to read this transcript. It's just an
amazing document.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
And Myles Horton and his wife, they were fellow travelers, I guess you'd
call them.
JOHN EGERTON:
But there never was a time, was there, when the South was in any remote
danger from any kind of Communist. . . . I mean to look back on that now
and think about that, we're talking about a handful of people whose
ideas happened to coincide with some ideas, but in terms of a strategy
or any sort of anti-government activity, it just seems ludicrous, does
it not?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, in terms of reality and possibilities. You've read, I suppose about
the Alabama black radical? Well, you know, the Reds tried, but they
never got anywhere with the blacks.
JOHN EGERTON:
No, they couldn't seem to get very far with them or with the whites.
While you were at Chapel Hill the textile
Page 12
strike
happened and you took an interest in that and so did Couch and Green.
Were you close friends with the two of them?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Much closer to Couch than to Green, though Green was always friendly and
I liked him. But with Couch I was in and out of his house all the time
and I was very close to him.
JOHN EGERTON:
Skipping ahead just a little bit on my chronology here, by the time that
book came out, What the Negro Wants, which he had
commissioned but then had deep second thoughts about when he saw the
manuscript, and I think that Rayford Logan threatened him with a lawsuit
if he didn't go ahead and publish that book according to my notes.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Rayford did?
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes. He pressed him right to the wall. He said, "I've got a
contract."
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Did Rayford edit that?
JOHN EGERTON:
He edited the book.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
And blacks wrote it?
JOHN EGERTON:
Right. They had agreed on the people who would contribute the essays.
There was a careful construction of left, center, and right so that they
had broad representation. Every last one of the essays came in saying
segregation is the evil, that's what's got to go here, and Couch
couldn't believe it. Now this is my interpretation of the notes.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
The book came out a little after I left.
JOHN EGERTON:
'44. You'd been gone several years.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
But I remember the struggle.
Page 13
JOHN EGERTON:
And he wrote an introductory essay, Couch did, which did not do him any
good. I mean it reads now like a document he would be ashamed of if he
were still alive. I feel sure he would not wish that to have been
something he left. Did you think of him as somewhat like Dabney and
Milton and these other guys? A kind of a fair weather liberal?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No, I didn't. Couch wasn't more liberal than that and he came from the
poor folks and identified with them and there wasn't any Dabney
gentility about him. He had a job and he didn't want to lose it, but he
had courage, too. It failed him on that one. I don't know the details
about why he left Chapel Hill. I guess he got a better job.
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes, he went to Chicago. I'm not sure either. He and Frank Graham didn't
get along all that well, did they?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, they had problems.
JOHN EGERTON:
He and Odum also had some disagreements.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I was too junior then to be acquainted much with them. But I did get to
know Frank Graham and lived right behind him in the home of the editor
of the local paper—I just rented a room there—but I
walked over to campus with him every now and then.
JOHN EGERTON:
He comes across to me now as the most genuine kind of human being.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, I was devoted to him and would do anything he told me. To
illustrate, after the war I was called in. I'd been discharged. I mean,
I was in the Navy. Called down at the Pentagon and I knew this wasn't
anything usual. What they wanted was for me to write a history of the
Joints Chiefs of Staff
Page 14
during the Second World War.
That, I knew, was quite a job and I was tempted. But, they said,
"You've got to have an interview with our security
officer." The colonel said, "Let's go in my room. Now
look, my job is to get you in because they want you to do this. Not to
keep you out. But I've got to ask you some questions." One of
the first questions was about my relationship to the Association of the
Advancement of. . .
JOHN EGERTON:
NAACP?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No, the one that Frank Graham headed.
JOHN EGERTON:
The Southern Conference for Human Welfare?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I said, "Yes, I was in it." "Did you hold an
office in it?" I said, "I may have. I can't remember
exactly." He said, "Was it important?"
"Well, I'll tell you this right now. If Frank Graham had asked
me to do anything I would not have a doubt. But you're giving me a hard
time." So I didn't get the job.
JOHN EGERTON:
Did they turn you down?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes.
JOHN EGERTON:
They turned you down because you had been a member of the Southern
Conference?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, I couldn't prove that. There may have been some more things
too.
JOHN EGERTON:
Well, let's talk about the Southern Conference just for a minute. You
went to that meeting in Birmingham in '38. Your name, at least, shows up
on the. . .
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Does it? I can't remember.
Page 15
JOHN EGERTON:
You were at Florida and your name shows up as, I think in the newspapers,
as one of the delegates. You have no recollection of going there?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Not offhand. I know I was a member and went to something, but where it
was and when I. . . .
JOHN EGERTON:
The meetings took place in the Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, the
same auditorium where ten years later Strom Thurmond got the Dixiecrat
nomination. Some few years after that Nat King Cole of Montgomery was
beat up on the stage there and run out of town. That auditorium has had
a checkered history. It's kind of an interesting building. But some of
the meetings were also in churches nearby and the hotel and whatnot. One
of the myths that has continued to circulate about this meeting: Frank
Graham made the opening speech on Sunday night in the auditorium and
Mrs. Roosevelt came the next day to make a speech. The story has been
repeated in many versions that Mrs. Roosevelt came into this cavernous
hall and saw that it was segregated and went down to the front and took
a chair and put it in the middle of the aisle and sat in the aisle. I
don't think it happened. I think what did happen was that when she
arrived she was taken to a sort of a subcommittee meeting in a nearby
church and there was segregation. She was supposed to be one of the
speakers and she came in late with Aubrey Williams and sat down on the
black side and someone came up to her and said, "You're
supposed to be on the other side." She looked around and saw,
and so she said, "I'll just sit up on the stage since I'm going
to be speaking anyway." So she went up on the stage where there
were black and
Page 16
white people. The story has been
told many times and I was going to ask you if you. . .
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I can't remember.
JOHN EGERTON:
But since you don't have any recollection of having been there. . .
C. VANN WOODWARD:
And if I were there I was in a minor position.
JOHN EGERTON:
You were pretty young then, you know, just beginning at Florida. Okay,
skipping on a little bit, or in a way, looking back, by say 1940, that's
Roosevelt's third term. He was elected the third time in '40. By then,
whatever indications or feelings that seemed to have developed within
the New Deal or without the New Deal about what it was going to do about
the whole racial issue in the South had kind of settled down to an
answer that said, "Not much." There were very few
people there who stand out now. Aubrey Williams, Will Alexander, a few
others, Southerners, who were influential in any way in the
administration and whatever they were able to accomplish, and there were
some things, but overall, the sense I have is that by the '40's, by the
war, it was fairly clear that the New Deal had not, at least to that
point, gotten around to this issue.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No, they were backing off. By that time, of course, what was happening
then is happening now. I mean, everything was concentrated on the war
and its coming. But that doesn't explain or excuse the New Deal
performance on the racial front. They just did not. . .
JOHN EGERTON:
It wasn't impressive, looking back on it, was it?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No.
Page 17
JOHN EGERTON:
TVA, for example. I was really struck. Here are all these northern
liberals from Wisconsin, Ohio, Arthur Morgan and [David] Lilienthal and
these people are real liberal folks, but the policies at TVA really did
not contribute much at all to any kind of amelioration of racial
problems—in hiring let alone the people who were displaced by
dams, jobs within TVA. Any way you look at it, their contribution was
miniscule on this issue and yet they were talking a pretty good game
about social planning and progressive stuff and under a lot of fire for
being a kind of a left wing organization inside the government. Does
that seem right?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Seems right to me. No, I never was a fiery New Dealer. I was for it, of
course—it was the only thing around to be for—but I
saw them fail again and again on the racial front—accepted the
South as something they had to have.
JOHN EGERTON:
And they kind of used it pretty blatantly.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
And in my opinion, pretty much what J.F.K. did in 1960-61. He had to have
the South.
JOHN EGERTON:
And so he found a way to do it. In these war years, there are a couple of
things I want to ask you about. Well they kind of come together. Well,
no, I guess in a way they are two separate things. There were some
whites in that period, Lillian Smith, Dombroski, Foreman, Williams. .
.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Which Williams was that?
JOHN EGERTON:
Aubrey. And to some extent, Alexander, who I think in '44 or '45 wrote an
article for. . .
C. VANN WOODWARD:
When he was in the Agriculture administration.
Page 18
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes, right. And he finally wrote a piece for "Harper's"
or "Atlantic" in about '44 or '45 saying the real
problem here is segregation. "We'll never get the South
straightened out if we don't take care of that problem." And I
start wondering, can you think of anybody who you think was expressing
this point of view publicly, openly in writing or otherwise in that
period of time during the war or right after the war, saying,
"We've got to deal with segregation. Jim Crow is really a
problem that the South has to deal with."
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Anybody black you say?
JOHN EGERTON:
No, white at first.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Anybody white. At what time?
JOHN EGERTON:
Say in the war years or right at the end of the war?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
That would take a bit of mind searching, you know. I was saying things of
that sort myself, but I can't be sure that I'm in print on it. I think
my book on Tom Watson indicated this, but as far as flatly coming out
and saying, "Enough of this nonsense and it's unconstitutional
to deprive citizens of equal rights," it's hard to say.
JOHN EGERTON:
Essentially what the black people who wrote What the Negro
Wants were saying. There were no whites who were saying that at
that time who stand out in your mind?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, I couldn't be sure of that. I think Aubrey Williams is as likely as
anybody. You haven't mentioned Virginia Durr. She would have said it and
probably did.
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes. I suspect maybe so. Maybe Lucy Mason.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yeah, Lucy Mason would have said it. [Interruption]
Page 19
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No, I would hope you would check very carefully before they said there
were no whites.
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes, I will.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Because some of those people like Lucy Mason and Lillian Smith and
Virginia Durr. I knew people who felt that way, and we were talking. .
.
JOHN EGERTON:
That's really where your hearts were and your minds at that time.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, whether Virginia because her husband was in office at that time and
lost his office. Anyway, no I think there were people saying it.
Certainly they were feeling it and talking to each other.
JOHN EGERTON:
Right.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
To give you one example. It's a concrete example, and I think its worth
mention, and that is in the Angelo Herndon case. Mrs. Tyson was a
prominent social woman and also, oddly enough, a Socialist in Atlanta.
She was elected chairman of the committee that we organized. Her son was
in the [inaudible].
JOHN EGERTON:
I can't remember her name, but I know who you're talking about.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Anyway, she was elected chairman and the best they could do for a vice
Chairman was me because I had a job at Georgia Tech and they called me
professor—that would have been about 1932 or '33 so I would
have been about twenty-four. But anyway, we agreed at that meeting that
we were going to hold a big, as big as we could, a fund raising meeting.
We had a
Page 20
turnout of several hundred people at the
opera house and they all sat together [ie. not segregated by race].
JOHN EGERTON:
In '34 or '33?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
It would have been in '33. '32 or '33.
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes, that's unusual.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
It was a combination of labor and black folks, and the radical liberal
whites.
JOHN EGERTON:
The Southern Regional Council got its start in '44 arising out of a
meeting of blacks in Durham. Do you know about this meeting that was
followed by another in Atlanta and then another in Richmond and they
ended up coming back to Atlanta and forming this organization in
'44.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Those were war years and I wasn't here.
JOHN EGERTON:
You were away. That's right. Politicians in this time, like Maury
Maverick and. . .
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I knew Maury Maverick. Maury was much taken by my book on Tom Watson and
proposed that we collaborate on a book about Southern movements of this
sort. I said I wanted to write a biography of Eugene Debs and he said,
"For God's sake, come to your senses, man. They'll call you a
Red." So that ended that.
JOHN EGERTON:
Maverick had a very short career in Congress; just one or two terms and
he was gone before the thirties were over. Then he was in San Antonio, I
think, as mayor of San Antonio for a long time, so he stayed around.
Coming out of the war, when you went to Hopkins—and am I
correct—you stayed there until after Brown?
After '54?
Page 21
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I was there from 1947 to 1961 when I came to Yale. But I didn't start
teaching at Yale until '62. I got the job and left, went on leave. Then
there were three years in California where I taught at a college out
there.
JOHN EGERTON:
In those years when Truman became President, he took a couple of
executive order steps to address segregation and then appointed the
committee which Frank Graham and Mrs. Tilly from Atlanta were members
of, and that document reads like the first American government document
saying that segregation has to go. I think it may well be. Very straight
forward, what they suggest and recommend. That's '47. That's the Federal
government saying, "Jim Crow must go," for the first
time.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
That was in '47?
JOHN EGERTON:
That was in '47.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Those were Southern people?
JOHN EGERTON:
Well, two of them were. Frank Graham and Mrs. Tilly, but the others were
Truman's appointees from around the country; a couple of blacks and I
think Charlie Wilson from GM was the chairman of the committee. In a
way, I kind of see the years between the end of the war—this
is admittedly a sort of retrospective view, not one that I can imagine
might have been held at the time—but '45 say until the
election of '50 when Frank Graham and Claude Pepper and others lost, as
a kind of a golden opportunity for the South to have maybe made some
real strides to bring about some social change on its own terms.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
During the Truman administration?
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes. Do you think that's true or not?
Page 22
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I would like to. I liked Harry Truman. But I suggest that you talk to
Virginia Durr, but unfortunately, Virginia is biased because Harry
Truman fired Cliff Durr, her husband, and she didn't like that. She's
and outspoken woman. But she felt he let them down and the cause down
generally. But compared with Roosevelt, he was to the left and compared
with whatever came afterwards too, for quite a while.
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes, that's true. The South during all this time in these postwar years
showed some signs of wanting to move forward. It had a handful of
politicians like Sid McMath over in Arkansas and Jim Folsom and of
course, Pepper and Frank Graham and others who were somewhat
liberal.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Liberal Southerners in the Congress.
JOHN EGERTON:
But by the time Graham and Pepper lost, it almost seems as if the
demagogues were sort of back in control. They had the additional club of
Communism to bang people over the head with if they got too far out of
line and it got pretty quiet through the early fifties until Brown.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
And then all hell broke loose with that.
JOHN EGERTON:
Another thing that happened in this period. Paul Green brought Richard
Wright to Chapel Hill with Orson Welles to work on the stage play of
"Native Son."
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I wasn't there.
JOHN EGERTON:
You weren't there.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
When was that?
JOHN EGERTON:
In '45.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No, I left in the thirties.
Page 23
JOHN EGERTON:
But I thought that was kind of interesting and also about that same time,
maybe a year or so later, Bayard Rustin and a group of people came
through Chapel Hill riding a Greyhound bus to enforce the Supreme
Court's recent decision of interstate travel was. . .
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Freedom riders.
JOHN EGERTON:
Kind of the early freedom riders, and they got arrested and jailed in
Chapel Hill and spent time in jail there and had to come back a year
later and be tried there and were convicted. Kind of an interesting
little by-play during that time.
In reading [The Strange Career of] Jim Crow again, I
get this feeling that the great social revolution that almost happened
before the Civil War and then almost happened again in the
Reconstruction period could be said to have presented itself as an
opportunity for a third time right after World War II.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Are you thinking about Nat Turner?
JOHN EGERTON:
Well, I'm thinking that in the 1840's and fifties there was some
sentiment for abolition in the South.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, there was.
JOHN EGERTON:
There were people who felt the South could work out this problem if it
would put its mind to it and they were essentially overwhelmed by the
opposite view by the time the war came.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Pretty good book by Kenneth Stamp on those people of the South who were
abolitionists or near-abolitionists. Yes, there were those.
Page 24
JOHN EGERTON:
And then again, the people you found like Harvey Blair and. . .
C. VANN WOODWARD:
They were individuals and not members of anything, but much of this
earlier movement in the forties and fifties was religious. Quaker,
Primitive Methodists and guild people.
JOHN EGERTON:
By the late 1940s when you were at Hopkins, you were interested in
desegregating the Southern Historical Society which you and John Hope
Franklin successfully maneuvered at Williamsburg. You did some research
for Thurgood Marshall as background for the Brown
case, and then finally you came down to Chapel Hill and gave that
lecture right after Brown that became the Jim Crow
book.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
It wasn't at Chapel Hill. It was in Virginia.
JOHN EGERTON:
I'm sorry. The University of Virginia, and that was the basis of the Jim
Crow book. Did you feel any. . . . By this time your views were very
firm about what the South needed to do in terms of race, and Jim Crow, it seems to me, is an eloquent statement of
what history says the South by rights ought to do.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, I was putting it in what it had done and what it had not done.
JOHN EGERTON:
But the implication is fairly clear that here is where it ought to go.
You drew some criticism from some of your colleagues for that book and
kept on drawing it some down through the years. Did you ever feel that
it was in part, a resentment at your sense of activism, of taking a
position, of not being detached and disinterested and separated from
your subject?
Page 25
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, I never really felt any resentment or criticism. There were
critics, but I tried to treat them in this little book of mine called,
Thinking Back. You might be interested in
that.
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes, sir, I have read it.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
But I didn't feel much of that. Nothing much happened to the book in the
first two years, but then it caught on. It's the only book I ever wrote
that sold in the hundreds of thousands. Way up there. 700,000. Still
selling.
JOHN EGERTON:
Still selling. Where does it fit in with your own assessment of your
books? Do you think of it as being. . . . Well, how do you rank it?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
So far as books having an effect, I think it had more impact and
practical effect than anything else. As for its importance in revising
Southern history, it treated only one aspect and was narrowly focused,
and other books were, I think, much more important and more
difficult.
JOHN EGERTON:
With all that background and all that interest in race and the South
going all the way back to the thirties, and indeed with your own
involvement with Marshall and the NAACP prior to Brown, when that decision came down in May of '54, what feeling
did you get? Were you surprised? Did it shock you that it turned out the
way it did, or were you expecting that outcome?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Of course, I was very much involved and I knew what had gone into the
preparation of the case and the amicus curae brief prepared by the
NAACP, and all of that. And the court showed signs of welcoming interest
and I can't say it caught me off guard. I was of course enormously
pleased, though I admit that
Page 26
that phrase they put
in there about "all deliberate speed," and I thought,
"Well, how many decades does that mean?" Actually it
wasn't as bad as it sounded. But I was not caught off guard or
particularly surprised. Just very delighted.
JOHN EGERTON:
Did the unanimity of it surprise you?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I guess so.
JOHN EGERTON:
That seems to be what a lot of people say, that they could conceive of it
happening, but maybe five to four or six to three, not a nine to
nothing. I think it surprised a lot of the conservatives in the South a
lot, too. They were really caught off guard by that. I talked recently
to Herman Talmadge; had an interesting conversation with him and that
was one of the things that he said, that what surprised him most of all
was that it was unanimous and that he was just flabbergasted that it
was. He was fully expecting at least a couple or three members of the
court to go the other way.
Throughout the whole Jim Crow thing, the sort of historic acquiescence of
the North, and indeed, you say in Jim Crow that it was
a Yankee invention, that segregation was really. . . . I think I'm not
making that up.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, I think I was quoting deloqueville. At least I could
have—don't know if I did or not. The racial separations and
tensions were greater in those states and territories which never had
slavery than it was in the South. Of course, it's difficult to interpret
that. I think there's something to it. People who have lived together
for hundreds of years just are not going to be as tense about it. Their
relations are established.
Page 27
No doubt about that. So
it's not altogether a flattering conclusion.
JOHN EGERTON:
These are some of the things that I find myself beginning to conclude. I
guess I would appreciate more than anything your notes of caution if
these sound ridiculous to you. I have a feeling that by 1950 it was
fairly clear that the only way the South was going to change its racial
pattern of segregation was by at least the courts and possibly a revolt
among blacks and both of those things seemed out of the question at that
time. I mean there was no evident. . . . But the courts were beginning
and they had since the thirties had been handing down some decisions
that seemed to be moving, the Supreme Court seemed to be moving in that
direction, and so there was some reason to have hope there and then
there were blacks who since that book from Chapel Hill in '44 had said a
lot about race. But the institutions that had earlier been liberal,
white institutions, the church, the university, the press, the political
parties, even labor—it almost seems to me that in the thirties
when racial questions were more abstract, those institutions were more
potentially liberal in dealing with social questions than they had
become by 1950 when race was very much of a real and present issue and
the press. . .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Page 28
JOHN EGERTON:
. . . . Dabney, George Fort Milton in Chattanooga and John Temple
Graves.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
You see, I always thought of them as. . .
JOHN EGERTON:
And you've already said that that didn't represent a change.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No. They were there all along. In this connection. I'll mention a book
you'll run across eventually. It's not published yet, but will be
shortly by a man I don't know, but I'm reviewing it for the New York
Times and am very interested in it. It's by an author named Nicholas
Lemann of New Orleans. Do you know him?
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes, I know who he is.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, the book is called The Promised Land, and he
dates much of the change from the end of sharecropping and with the
mechanical cotton picker in 1944. I think he oversimplifies that, but
maybe there's a point there. After that, sharecropping was over and so
was dependence on labor for picking cotton and for weeding cotton, with
chemical weeders and mechanical cotton pickers. So was segregation
unnecessary.
JOHN EGERTON:
He sees that close a connection between the two?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
That may be putting it too strongly, but he's got a point.
JOHN EGERTON:
Well, do you see any case to be made that the institutions, the pillar
institutions, failed the South in a time when it. . . . You know, the
people in the South have always said, "Leave us alone and we'll
fix it." You know, it's just
Page 29
been part of
our history to say to the North, "We'll fix it. Leave us
alone."
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Said about slavery.
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes. Said it about slavery, said it about segregation. We've always said
it about race. If we had been left to our own devices, would we ever
have fixed it, in your view?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Not for a very long time. I think it won't be too many generations before
Americans will all be a little brown. But no, I think it would have been
a very long time.
JOHN EGERTON:
A very long while. And so I guess my question is, was it these
institutions that we look to for our wisdom, our belief structure, our
political and economic guidance, the press, the church, the university,
how did these institutions fare? How would you rate their performance
through that period of time?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
In the period of the forties?
JOHN EGERTON:
In the forties and early fifties in terms of helping the South come to
grips with its social problems.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, except for the war years and except for three years in California
which took me out of the racial issue at that time, but from the time I
went out of the Navy and into Johns Hopkins in '47, no we were
very—at least at Hopkins, I had some black students, mainly
interested in graduate training, but I had black students then. When I
came to Yale I made it known that I wanted good black students and I got
them. They are now leading their professions, I might add. I wouldn't
say that the educational institutions were [inaudible].
JOHN EGERTON:
What about the Southern ones?
Page 30
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Of course, I was out of the South by that time and not keeping up with it
and I'm not much help, frankly. I know the usual cases at Oklahoma Law
School and there were various professional schools that won decisions
admitting blacks, but those were legal and not moral questions. But I
guess that's all I can say on that.
JOHN EGERTON:
Would it seem to you that maybe I'm overstating the case to say that that
'45 to '50 period was a kind of a window of opportunity, if you will,
when the South might have been able to fix its own social wagon a bit
had it been willing to do it? And that when the time passed and the heat
of the anti-Communism and all of that came, that it seemed very unlikely
that it ever would? Or would it be more accurate to say that even in the
forties it really had no realistic hope of doing anything
voluntarily?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, it's of course speculation, but I think you've put your finger on
an essential point; that is, the Cold War came in '46 or '47 and that
changed the whole of politics. It took the wind out of the sails of
Truman and brought in General Eisenhower.
JOHN EGERTON:
In a way, it almost did to Truman what Vietnam did to [Lyndon B.]
Johnson.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Pretty much. You're not going to get into this as far as the Johnson
[presidency]?
JOHN EGERTON:
No, sir, I'm not.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, it's, I think, a reasonable expectation that if the Cold War hadn't
come when it did and with such force, that there
Page 31
were in the South forces that would have become more vocal, and more
courageous than otherwise.
JOHN EGERTON:
When do you think personally, looking back, when do you think you saw the
ultimate inevitability of Brown or of some kind of
very dramatic change finally come into the South?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, I guess it was in Atlanta.
JOHN EGERTON:
In the thirties?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes and there were big black universities and colleges there and I knew
people there. A simple minded anecdote, but, "Enough of this
nonsense," I said in 1932. I knew a woman, a librarian, at
Atlanta University; a young woman, but older than I was. In other words,
this wasn't an affair of the heart. I knew her and she said,
"There's going to be a big inaugural ball at Atlanta University
and why don't you go?" I said, "You're on."
So I went with her.
JOHN EGERTON:
An inauguration of the President?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes, I can't remember now what the occasion was. Anyway, I went and asked
the black students, the girls, to dance with me and they did. There had
never been more uncomfortable people on sidelines.
JOHN EGERTON:
You could feel it.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I could feel it. I went through with it, but that wasn't enough. There
was a social hour at the women's college there.
JOHN EGERTON:
Spelman.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Spelman. So I turned up at the tea hour and had tea with the coeds. [Laughter] A little story.
Page 32
JOHN EGERTON:
It's an interesting anecdote, though, because obviously you were giving a
lot more thought to this issue then in the early thirties than most
people were.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Well, yes, that was true.
JOHN EGERTON:
And indeed, I'm struck now by the number of people I've talked to of all
political persuasions in the South who when I say, "What was
your reaction when Brown came down?" they
say, "Utter shock and amazement. I never thought, I never
dreamed, I never. . ." It's as if they were awakened from a
deep slumber at the notion that this kind of social change was imminent
and yet a few people I've talked to recognized that twenty years before
Brown that it had to be imminent at some point, or
else the South. . . . No region as poor as the South, which could not
afford one school system, one housing system, one health system, could
ever dream of trying to have two and still catch up with the rest of the
country. And it seems so obvious to me now, and yet it was not obvious
to people then.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No it wasn't. Of course, I was naive in these actions, but it came along
within a few months, with the Angelo Herndon case and these two
instances that I've mentioned, but it showed thinking on impulses. Not
very rational.
JOHN EGERTON:
Yes. Do you think that you foresaw the indigenous uprising of blacks that
came pretty much with the Montgomery bus boycott and all that followed
that became the Civil Rights movement? Did you foresee that?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
It depends on what you mean.
JOHN EGERTON:
As a movement.
Page 33
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I did not foresee, and was appalled, at what began at Watts and went on
for four summers after, following Lyndon Johnson's civil rights and his
voting rights bill. Actually it just seemed to me preposterous and
outrageous. But that's not what you're asking about.
JOHN EGERTON:
No, I'm really wondering whether in '50, '51 and '52, even when you were
working on the background for Brown, or even when Brown came down, was it possible for you to look ahead
and say, "At some point the masses of blacks or large numbers
of black people who live in the South are going to go to the streets to
reinforce this court decision to bring about social
change."
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I may have misunderstood you, but I thought you used the term violence. I
don't consider that it became a movement of violence. It was
nonviolent.
JOHN EGERTON:
No, I didn't mean to. Not at all.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
It was nonviolent and I think the most important thing about it, it would
have failed if it hadn't been. It failed to do what the black power guys
wanted to do, but that was doomed to fail anyway. They'd have been shot
if they had carried on. But no, I knew that kind of person and I knew
Martin King and the type of person he represented with a northern
education and a southern background, so that didn't surprise me. And I
went to the march in Selma and all that without any fear of any
violence.
JOHN EGERTON:
I assume you never had any notion, even earlier on, that the idea of
separate but equal could ever be made to work as a social policy. The
Plessy policy, which by the time you came
Page 34
along was thirty years old, had already
demonstrated, had it not, that it could not rescue the South?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
It was a blatant rationalization of segregation, that's how it struck me.
Back to the period we've been talking about, it was a combination of
things that figured in my development in this lin, and that was in
Arkansas when I was going to school there. How old I was and just when
this happened I've forgotten now. But there was what was then called the
Elaine riots?
JOHN EGERTON:
That was in 1919 or '20 right after the war.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Was it that early? Well, I remember. Then I remember my father. . . . The
Governor was named Brough. I believe he was from Johns Hopkins. I
remember that name. He knew my father and entertained him at home. He
got him to serve on a commission to go out there and report, not that he
did anything or could do anything, but he did go. And through that I got
a notion of the horror of what might happen and what was happening. I
wasn't old enough to assess or understand it.
JOHN EGERTON:
Something your father conveyed to you verbally, do you suppose?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I can't remember. By that time I was only eleven or twelve years old. My
second such shocker about that time or maybe a little later was seeing a
Klansman in uniform come into the Methodist Church that my father was a
member of and march up and give a donation to the church and was thanked
by the minister and walked out. That would have been around the 1920's.
Page 35
JOHN EGERTON:
Do you remember Brown? The day of Brown? The day the decision came down, where you were? Did you
celebrate that in any way?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
May 17, 1954. Yes, I celebrated. I remember it coincided with what would
have been the last. . . . Well, shortly after or about that time, I got
an invitation from the University of Virginia asking me to lecture on
Southern history and I connected it to Brown.
JOHN EGERTON:
"This is my chance. This is my shot."
C. VANN WOODWARD:
Yes. And I had to do it fast because I had already accepted an invitation
to teach for a year at Oxford, so I did it that summer.
JOHN EGERTON:
Do you remember the audience at Virginia when you gave that lecture?
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I remember that there were blacks in the audience and that they were not
separate. How many I don't know. Maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred, but
I did watch a man who I had reason to respect in the law school. He was
a member of the law faculty there. I expected him to come up and say
something positive. He came up and he didn't say a God damn thing. But
that wasn't. . . . I don't think. . . .typical. I was received
respectfully, but there weren't any fireworks about it. I was just a
visiting professor.
JOHN EGERTON:
Well, it's a fascinating period of time. What I'm going to end up doing
with this, I truly don't know. That probably sounds a little. . .
Page 36
C. VANN WOODWARD:
No. You have got quite a subject. I'm sorry I've been so
autobiographical, but. . .
JOHN EGERTON:
This is exactly what I wanted you to do, though. That's why I was so
eager to come and talk to you.
C. VANN WOODWARD:
I've tried to be accurate and may have made mistakes. One does in these
things. But I have recorded some of it in the book I mentioned, Thinking Back, although I haven't written much since
then.