Origins of the New South Fifty Years Later: the Continuing Influence of a Historical Classic.

Origins of the New South Fifty Years Later: The Continuing Influence of a Historical Classic. Edited by John B. Boles and Bethany L. Johnson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 308. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8071-2920-8; cloth, $62.95, ISBN 0-8071-2905-4.)

Few works in American history have had a more far-reaching impact than C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South. Originally published in 1951 as a volume in Louisiana State University Press's new "History of the South" series, it upended the conventional wisdom about the sources of social, economic, and political power in the post-Reconstruction South and redrew the prevailing understanding of New South history. Origins has been read and reread, discovered and rediscovered by succeeding generations of scholars. Pathbreaking, deliberately revisionist, and intellectually subversive, Woodward's magnificent accomplishment departed from the common precepts of mid-twentieth-century historical writing. Breaking out of an optimist, neo-Whig paradigm, Woodward emphasized engagement over empiricism, irony over linearity, and self-criticism over celebration. The book's staying power and continuing impact remain nothing less than astonishing.

This new collection, an outgrowth of a 2001 Rice University symposium and a special issue of the Journal of Southern History, provides the first book-length consideration of Origins's significance. Editors John B. Boles and Bethany L. Johnson have included a range of contemporary assessments--from Allen Moger's 1952 review to Sheldon Hackney's very full and still excellent 1972 retrospective--as well as eight new articles written after Woodward's death in 1998. The editors reproduce Woodward's revealing response to his critics that appeared in his 1986 memoir, Thinking Back, in which he explained his intention to turn upside down the prevailing understanding of the New South and to replace "continuity with discontinuity, unity with disunity, and harmony with conflict" (p. 148). The editors also republish Origins's past critics. Two historians challenging Woodward's arguments in specific locales--Carl V. Harris, writing about post-Reconstruction "left-fork" southern congressional Democrats. and James Tice Moore, writing about Redeemers---contest the book's precepts. Yet these critics and others have found elusive quarry in this book: even Woodward's critics remain his admirers. They might agree with Howard N. Rabinowitz, who, writing about Woodward's Strange Career of Jim Crow, once noted that Woodward's critics are frustrated by his ability to "absorb what they see as a knockout blow and even to incorporate adversaries' weapons into his own arsenal" (Rabinowitz, "More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow," Journal of American History, 75 [December 1988], 846).

This volume's most important contribution lies in its reappraisal of Woodward's achievement. Co-editor Bethany Johnson's introductory essay examines the condition of southern history before Origins's publication and its jarring impact, while Bertram Wyatt-Brown's epilogue makes a case for the magnitude of the book's accomplishment. In an essay based on an exhaustive review of contemporary correspondence, Johnson assesses how Woodward came to write Origins, how he challenged the prevailing orthodoxy, and how he shifted his peers' attention away from the still-prevailing Dunningite emphasis. Other contributors examine Woodward's continuing legacy. Barbara J. Fields, rejecting race as a social construction, concludes that Origins successfully avoided the conceptual trap of "race relations" history. Contextualizing Woodward in his own time, James C. Cobb emphasizes the 1930s cultural and intellectual environment of the Southern Renaissance and an accompanying new intellectual paradigm. Robert C. McMath Jr. argues that Origins's emphasis on discontinuities between Populism and Progressivism remains ripe for reinterpretation. McMath maintains that a "Populist moment," in which southerners challenged long-held assumptions about political economy and political power, might have lasted beyond the 1890s (p. 192). Other historians suggest qualifications on Woodward's arguments. Harold D. Woodman finds that Woodward's portrayal of discontinuity in the post Civil War southern ruling class unpersuasive and maintains that the post-Civil War era marked the beginning of the end of southern distinctiveness. Nonetheless, Woodman concludes that Origins "turned our view of the post-Reconstruction South in a different direction, and now, fifty years later, that direction remains dominant" (pp. 239-40).

Origins is most glaringly out-of-date regarding gender. Women, as Glenda E. Gilmore writes, remain "scarcer than hen's teeth" in Origins; she counts only 16 in the 540 people listed in the index (p. 221). Gilmore and Anne Firor Scott offer differing explanations. Woodward ignored southern women, according to Scott, because "his ambition to redraw the nature of southern history did not include rethinking the way women were perceived" (pp. 289-90). In contrast, Gilmore argues that Woodward was seeking to avoid arousing white fears during the 1950s about the "race/sex dilemma" and "social equality" (p. 226). Woodward focused on race rather than gender because the convergence of the two would incite white fears about interracial sex. Origins thus provided a "signpost" for a later reinterpretation that places women at the center of the story.

Origins continues to be essential reading for anyone interested in the New South. Despite the ongoing flood of work about the post-Reconstruction period, the book's compelling narrative, with its emphasis on class, power, and persistence of hierarchy, still influences generations of southern historians. Situating Origins as great, timeless history but also the product of particular contexts, this volume provides an invaluable resource for students of southern history.

University of Florida 

WILLIAM A. LINK