The Future of the Past.

UNTIL THE END of the nineteenth century, the writing of history in America was a calling" or avocation practiced by gentlemen (and sometimes ladies) of leisure and letters. The most successful were Wil-

liam Prescott, Francis Parkman, and George Bancroft, contemporaries of the great Scottish historians Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Macaulay, whose works the Americans outsold. Historians addressed an unspecialized public -history was the best selling and most prestigious branch of literature and they were at pains to write on subjects of common interest in lan- guage that the public could and did understand.

Then, at the turn of the century, the craft was taken over by professionals, people who were trained in newly established graduate schools, earned their livelihoods by teaching in colleges, and garnered status among their peers-and, incidentally, jobsby writing history books for one another. Their standards of research were rigorous, and because they conceived of themselves as scientists, they were loath to commit to writing anything they could not document abundantly. Their works were solid, analytical rather than narrative, and impossible to read. They did not, as C. Vann Woodward puts it, "so much lose the public as abandon it." The popular appetite for history was thenceforth filled by freelancers, journalists, and novelists, whose books were as unreliable as the historians' were dull. Moreover, the profession itself has been engulfed from time to time (never more than during the last quarter-century) by ideological and

methodological fads that have rendered its own work untrustworthy. It is small wonder, then, that the United States has become a nation of historical illiterates, despite the huge number of history books published every year.

There have been exceptions, by which I mean professionals who adhere to the highest scholarly standards and yet manage to write in a fashion that is challenging, stimulating, exciting, and a joy to read. Today there may be as many as twenty Americans, still active, who fit that description. Of these, the dean is C. Vann Woodward, now in his 81st year and, though not as prolific as he once was, still writing with the vigor, the perceptiveness, the wit, and the charm that have marked his work throughout a brilliant career. The Future of the Past, his latest, is a collection of 23 pieces, all but two of which have been published before. Some, as is to be expected, concern the area of his greatest expertise, the South since the Civil War. The others deal with broader themes-myths, history, fiction, reinterpretations which he is able to see from a special perspective growing out of his immense learning and his sense of tragedy and irony. These senses, without which the historian of the South is as nothing, Woodward possesses in abundance. Put all this together, and one has some notion of what an invigorating and pleasureable experience it is to read the essays under review. One also has an encapsulated survey of Woodward's life's work.

But there is more here, just as there is more to the strange career of C. Vann Woodward. From the beginning, with the publication of Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938), Woodward has been a political activist as well as a scholar. In 1955, for instance, he published an extremely influential book called The Strange Career of Jim Crow; in answer to segregationists who insisted that it is not possible to legislate social custom, Woodward demonstrated that racial segregation itself had been the product of legislation enacted by Southern states during the late nineteenth century. There is nothing inherently wrong in such "relevant" history, provided that one resists the temptation to distort in behalf of one's

causes; and Woodward always adhered to the canons of disinterested scholarship.

It was the blights that plagued the South of his childhood and young-manhood that Woodward most wanted to understand as a historical problem, and to remedy as social and economic evils. As he saw things, Jim Crow was the greatest injustice that cried out for remedy, and it was exacerbated by the South's having been reduced to colonial dependency by unbridled Northern capitalism. Two of his most powerful books, both published in 1951, were focused upon the roots of those problems: The Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 and Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Recon-

struction. These and other works raised him to the pinnacle of his profession, the culmination coming with back-to-back presidencies of the Organization of American Historians (1968) and the American Historical Association (1969).

By that time, however, things had gone dreadfully awry. First the civil-rights movement, long dear to Woodward's heart, went berserk, degenerating into riots and the "black power" movement-and resegregation by blacks themselves-and the irreversible decline into poverty that followed inexorably from Lyndon Johnson's War of the same name. Then came the "student protest" movements, in which students attempted to trash the academy (only partially succeeding; they finished the job a generation later when they had become the professors), and in the face of which college administrators capitulated disgracefully. Simultaneously, New Left historians were trashing the study of history and Woodward himself in the bargain. Finally, he endured a personal tragedy, losing to cancer, in rapid-fire order, his son and three of his best friends, Richard Hofstadter,

David Potter, and Alexander Bickel.

All this left Woodward disturbed, disillusioned, and somewhat confused. A Northern liberal might have reacted, as many did, by becoming neoconservative. But Woodward had been a Southern liberal, and he responded by rediscovering the virtues of the South (both Old and New, antebellum and postbellum) that he had worked so long and so diligently to change. The essays in The Future of the Past echo with an appreciation of the South, its literature and history and culture; and, with thinly disguised regional pride, Woodward points out that the South is an exception to American exceptionalism, meaning that it knew a semifeudal past and invasion and conquest, whereas

the rest of the nation lacked those soul-enriching experiences.

How far Woodward has traveled toward becoming a Southern conservative and how many light-years he remains from completing the journey are both illustrated by a witty essay, previously unpublished, called "Reconstruction: A Counterfactual Playback." This is "What if'.?" history, and understanding it requires a little background. For nearly a century after the collapse of Radical Reconstruction, history judged the phenomenon a tragedy because it went too far, Congress having trampled the judicial and executive branches and the Constitution itself. In the 1960s radical historians turned this interpretation upside down: without a shred of new evidence, they pronounced Radical Reconstruction a tragedy because it did not go far enough, did not effect a genuine revolution.

There is no need, Woodward writes, "to be flanked on the Left in speculative audacity," and he tries out a few revolutionary proposals of his own. Suppose Congress had passed the bill, sponsored by the Radical Thaddeus Stevens, for the confiscation of the

land of rebels and its redistribution to the freedmen. We cannot know for sure what would have happened, of course, but Congress already had control of a vast public domain which it made available for blacks under a Southern Homestead Act. Nearly all this land ended up in the hands of railroads and Northern speculators, and there is no reason to suppose that confiscated rebel land would have done otherwise.

But this is piddling stuff, Woodward goes sardonically on. If we truly want a revolution, "we must be cruel in order to be kind," we must be " the social engineers of the future," and thus must "compassionately" off all white Southerners-some to Gulags, Alaska serving in lieu of Siberia, but most simply slaughtered. What then? That would leave the South occupied by black people under the benevolent guardianship of well-meaning whites sent down from Washington. As it happens, we have a test case to cover this speculative proposal as well: the West was occupied by red people under the benevolent guardianship of well-meaning whites sent out from Washington, and we know what happened there.

Having disposed of the radical his- in a way that would meet the approval of any Southern conservative, however, Woodward unwittingly makes it clear that he is not of that breed. He confesses "a failure of my own, the failure to find a satisfactory explanation for the failure of Reconstruction." This, he writes, is a problem that "remains unsolved." To a conservative it is no problem at all: the attempt to engineer a revolution failed because it is impossible to engineer a revolution. Conservatives understand this, understand that there can be no clean, rational break with the past, that what can be is delimited if not determined by what has been. Far from grasping that truth, Woodward writes that "revolutions are not invariably successful." As I said, in regard to certain fundamentals we are still light-years apart.

But I would not close on a negative note. Vann Woodward has contributed to making an enlarged understanding of the American past accessible to lay readers as well as professionals. If conservatives cannot give him the full complement of three cheers, we owe him at least a rousing two.