Tom Watson revisited.

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 the New York Review of Books, no more platform appearances at conferences with his friend William Styron, no more summer martinis with the 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 the fiftieth anniversary of Origins of the New South. (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 the moral problems about race, the character of American and southern history, and the integrity of the historian's craft. These issues are no less relevant today than they were fifty years ago.

Long before the Yale professor died in December 1999, I had 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 the rapier parries of debate about his many publications. In the Journal of American History, his spirited response to critics of Strange Career of Jim Crow bore the 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 the famous biography was published in 1938, contemporary critics were justly generous and enthusiastic. By and large, more commendations than questions continue to descend upon the literary classic, almost epic in its sweep. (4) Yet, early on, the redoubtable Frank Owsley sounded a critical note. He complained that Woodward had been much more effective in treating Watson the Populist "crusader" than in rendering "Watson, the apostate." The biographer, Owsley went on, proposed that Watson "had been driven almost mad by the constant defeat of his great ideals, and by the death of his beloved children." But, the 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 the Great War in 1917. Owsley, however, had 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 the one hand, in Woodward's perspective the fledgling Georgia Populist began as a Dr. Jekyll, or "the tribune of the underdog in the early 1890s" to use O'Brien's words. (The Robert Louis Stevenson image as applied to Watson was used by the 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, the Georgia leader scourged the Democrats for raising up fears of "the nigger question." For a brief but heady time in the early 1890s Watson insisted that it was simply an imaginary evil. Before large crowds he explained that the rural poor were apathetic, but not because of "carelessness and indolence." Rather, "repeated failure, constant discouragement" had sapped their energy. In 1889 Watson told delegates at a National Farmers' Alliance convention in Atlanta, "There is no room for divided hearts in the South." At Murray's Cross-Roads he denounced the political bosses and landholders who had made "slaves out of the whites, have kept the two races from acting together by fanning the 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. To meet the disastrous slide in farm prices and industrial employment in the early 1890s, the Populist leader of Georgia urged the union of the downtrodden, white and black, to set the region on a new and radical course. When Watson and his friends protected the Reverend Seb Doyle, a black Populist leader, from an armed mob, Georgia Democrats were certain that Watson had lost his mind. (7)

In the next century, though, as O'Brien proposes, Jekyll became Hyde. Watson was the quintessential demagogue and bedeviled the "Negro, Jew, and Catholic." O'Brien submits that by keeping the two parts of the biography "distinct," Woodward skirted "a considerable difficulty for himself as a Southern dissident." The "splitting" of Watson's career by that chronology "neutralized the issue" of how reform might actually come about. According to O'Brien, it was all part of a doomed attempt to find a liberal strain in the South. By that means the region would prove capable of leaving a sordid trail of racial atrocity and injustice behind. In sum, O'Brien writes, Woodward "stressed change in the Southern past, because he has wanted change." (8) Quite clearly, Woodward was already doing battle with the "continuitarians," as he later in conversation and in print called those who argued for a changeless, intractable South. That position he then enhanced in The Strange Career of Jim Crow. O'Brien's insight is illuminating. Yet, was Woodward's moral choice a fault, as O'Brien implies? Woodward slyly denied it in his 1988 article about Strange Career. During the civil rights years, when Woodward was most influential, his historical thrust gave intellectual heft to Martin Luther King's crusade. (9) I suspect that something of the Methodist still occupied a place in Woodward's psyche, agnostic though he was. The South could be redeemed, Woodward hoped, not in the terms of the postwar triumph over Reconstruction, but in a gentler, amelioristic movement toward justice and equity. Perhaps, given our current military circumstances, his exploiting of a past thus made usable could once more prove pertinent--so long as it does not become sentimental or unfittingly programmatic. A second look at Watson's temperament and self-identity, rather than his work as politician and editor, may reveal the truth of William Faulkner's dictum, "the past is never past."

All that aside, Owsley, who was the first to notice Woodward's trouble with Watson the apostate, was on to something important. What does shed light on a forceful, charismatic leader and gifted writer so filled with venomous hatred of groups who were either powerful or powerless--from corporate capitalists to rural Catholics and poor blacks? Still more baffling, there was a shrewd, even cynical unevenness in this wide-sweeping assault. The rich and mighty seemed to get off fairly lightly. Watson complained grandly about such distant "villains" as J. P. Morgan or John D. Rockefeller, but he would defend the right to property to the death and had nothing but contempt for socialism and Marxism. Yet the powerful were quite unaffected by what a Georgia journalist wrote to please his southern, white, rural constituents. The ones whom Watson most severely chastised were not the wealthy, the corporate bigwigs, the trusts. Calling for organized and even mob insurgence, the Georgia Populist reviled the vulnerable ones. These were people supposedly out of line. They possessed the wrong color of skin, spoke foreign tongues, or were faithful to objectionable religions.

For an analogy of hate and prejudice on Watson's scale, we might well think of an Arab fanatic close at hand. He also stirs destructive passions and hates with a religious fervor. The Afghan novelist Tamim Ansary writes, "When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think `the people of Afghanistan[,]' think `the Jews in the concentration camps.'" (10) Indeed, one automatically recalls the Austrian sociopath with his loathing of most non-Aryans within reach, including elements of his own people, especially Jews both in and outside Germany--and they, above all. Like Watson, Hitler cursed the First World War and despised the League of Nations and, to rationalize Germany's defeat, sought scapegoats similar to the ones Watson selected. The analogy is not far-fetched. The grim, self-destructive leader of Nazi Germany sacralized "German blood" and "German honor"--Blut und Ehre--a slogan often shouted by the Waffen-SS and sung by Hitler Youth choristers. (11) Watson's demagoguery about southern womanhood and the dangers of mongrelization created a similar ideology. To be sure, Watson was by no means the embodiment of evil that Hitler attained. Unlike the Nazi leader, the Georgia leader lacked the persistence, political power, and military resources to do more than speak and publish his extravagant philippics. Yet, in one respect the analogy is not overdrawn. Like Hitler's, Watson's pathology of hatred was deep enough to reach a stage of near purity, and it licensed others to express their bigotries.

Historians tend to offer institutional explanations for events, even those in which emotions have run riot. Richard Nelson proposes that Watson's behavior can be explained in terms of republican ideology and economics--the conflicting visions of subsistence farming in the Jeffersonian mode and the "expansive system of industrial capitalism." That duality was supposed to create unbearable tensions that Watson both epitomized in himself and projected to his agrarian following. (12) Nelson's interpretation is based upon rational and intellectual premises. He underscores the paradigm of republican ideology and Machiavellian precepts. This approach scarcely explains the visceral inhumanity of Watson's wide-ranging assaults. Nor does it account for the hearty and intense popular reception that Watson's diatribes received. Another approach is ventured here. For a number of years the ethic of honor, emotional depression, and their interconnections have been particular concerns to me. (13) Watson was steeped in the usages of the ethic--its sanction of violent response to insult, its hierarchy of such ascriptive matters as race, sex, and ethnicity. From the psychological perspective, honor involves a close interchange of public assessment and personal self-worth. If a claim to honor is refused or set aside, the individual feels oppressed, furious, humiliated. The reaction to alleged insult may be violent, even murderous. Historians now understand this essential psychological concept better than they did before. They have largely left behind W.J. Cash's concept of the "Savage Ideal" and adopted a more sophisticated appreciation of honor's complexities and inner contradictions. (14)

Likewise, the trials of mental depression have received much academic and medical attention in recent years. Partly because we live in a confessional age, the intimate exposures of such depressed writers as William Styron, Wilfred Sheed, Andrew Solomon, and psychoanalyst Kay Redfield Jamison make unipolar and bipolar disorders almost a signal of high intellect. In the realm of literary criticism, Julia Kristeva and Jonathan Dollimore have dealt brilliantly with suicide and depression and how they may affect the creative faculties. (15)

The historian can read the life of Watson in light of these two themes, honor and depression. With his array of ethnic and racial abominations, Watson was afflicted with very pernicious forms of both the ideal of honor and the acute pain of depression. Why this should be so can never be fully uncovered. Woodward's biography unmistakably reveals that for at least the greater part of Watson's life--his post-Populist period as it might be called--he was essentially mad. A fanatical sense of honor and dread of shame fed his black bile, as the ancient Greeks would have identified it. This evaluation will come as no surprise. When he died in 1922, a New York Times columnist explained: "For much in `Tom' Watson's violent career as a politician and a journalist the most charitable and plausible explanation is a certain mental instability, an overexcitability of temperament, even the presence of actual delusions, such as the hallucination of persecution." With regard to his senatorial addresses, the journalist detected "a strain that went far beyond mere eccentricity...." Watson's performances on the senate floor reminded the writer of the "rambling speeches" of "John Randolph of Roanoke." In an illuminating article Janet Brenner Franzoni points out that Watson himself showed an odd fascination with insanity even in his immature years. In a scrapbook of miscellaneous clippings, young Watson had written, "The whole number of lunatics, idiots, and persons of unsound mind in England and Wales in January of the present year was 58,640, being an increase of 9,885 upon the cases recorded on 1st Jan. 1871." (16)

Writing during the Great Depression under the influence of Charles Beard, Woodward quite naturally stressed Watson's political life during economic crisis and his transformation from rebel to racist. He did not, though, offer more than a few highly suggestive references to Watson's state of mind. The young scholar, a radical by the standards of his day, preferred to see Watson as a warrior in the class warfare of Populist underdog versus New South capitalist. Watson's later diatribes therefore seemed to spring from crushing political defeats and not from some inner fury. His misery arose in part from an exaggerated sense of humiliation, personal inadequacy, and susceptibility to public ridicule and rejection. As a result, those defeats might be seen psychologically as the trigger that set Watson on the course to despair and passionate outburst. Bearing in mind the emotional powers of chronic melancholy and a sense of violated respectability, we may discover a more accurate diagnosis of Watson's pathology than Woodward and Franzoni have offered. At the same time, it must be conceded that this concentration stresses the negative aspects of a brilliant and many-sided figure. Only a full-scale biography could perform that multidimensional task in which Watson's strengths as orator, father, writer, and attorney would receive their due. That would be a daunting undertaking in light of Woodward's formidable achievement.

In this consideration of Watson's mental state, the signs of melancholy first deserve immediate attention. The etiology of Watson's illness carries us to his early life and then forward through his career. In the second part of this discussion, the role that the southern ethic of honor played in shaping Watson's temperament requires exploration. This strategy brings us once again to his developing years and onward into the later years. Admittedly such a division is undertaken strictly for reasons of clarity, but in actual fact, honor and depression were so interconnected in Watson's case that they cannot be entirely separated. Finally, we specify the way in which these two themes of depression and honor led to such tragic results and reveal the extent of Watson's tragic betrayal of his own potentiality and the welfare of the southern people. For all his belligerence as a boy, politician, and editor, Watson never knew exactly who he was and built his personality upon shifting sands.

Melancholia has deep roots. Those afflicted with chronic depression have often been found to suffer from the double effects of familial dysfunction--that is, genetic and environmental distortions. (17) Although we can never know the role of genetics in this case, John Smith Watson, Tom Watson's father, very likely suffered from the illness that gripped his son in later years. Surviving records reveal that John Watson, like a good many other young planters, had caroused too much in the years before the outbreak of war. Even before he had reached the age of forty, his son remembered, John Watson had suffered from bouts of depression. Tom Watson speculated that his father's melancholy state had already left its loathsome mark upon his son. (18) In the war years John Watson had served in the Confederate army, was twice wounded, and came home in 1865 an emotional cripple. Like many other veterans, the elder Watson suffered from the humiliation of rebel collapse, the sense of helplessness in the face of a changed and ruined economy, and perhaps some unrecognized scars that we would now cumbersomely call post-traumatic stress disorder. In the years after the war, he drank, gambled, and whiled away the hours with other veterans. He lived on dreams of glory, a state of mind that his son Tom appropriated in his own fashion. As Woodward points out, in the post-Civil War South, public roads and farmers' fields lay untended for lack of labor. Credit had vanished. Prices were unreachably high. Yet, amid the ruins, John Watson tried to build a mansion with the customary balcony, portico, and tall columns. In 1868 he had to sell it to satisfy creditors. According to Tom Watson's granddaughter Julia, her grandfather "was unable to adjust to the change that the whole country was going thro" because he had known nothing but "ease and plenty" in the prewar days. (19) The consequences for the family were dire.

As young Watson was growing up, he watched John Watson slide into a morass of hopelessness. "My father used to be virtually paralyzed for weeks by what he called `the blues,'" Watson later recalled. He went on to say, "It was my misfortune to inherit the sanguine temperament heavily shaded by melancholy," a legacy that he attributed to his father. Moreover, he quite naturally resented John Watson's worsening alcoholism. (In later years Tom Watson would also succumb to that malady.) In his autobiographical novel, Bethany, the narrator, a Georgia boy, worships Senator Robert Toombs, the crusty, garrulous, and bibulous old Rebel. But the author-narrator has his father die of pneumonia within a few months of his son's birth. (20)

As a child in rural Georgia during the Civil War, Tom Watson grew up in a time of profound social breakdown. The postwar years were filled with the violence that returning veterans visited on each other and on the newly freed people. Kept in scrapbooks, Tom Watson's juvenilia and cuttings of poetry revealed a preference for the macabre and doleful. With few exceptions they dwelt upon the South's defeat and the honor attached to the armed services despite their surrender. The boy pasted in poems and articles about the Lost Cause that expressed such sentiments as "Sumter in Ruins," "I Am Dying, Children, Dying," "Land of Defeat! Misfortune!! Wo!!!/Still, still to honor true thou art," "The Southern Dead," "Conquered Banner," and "Land where the desolate weep!" Sometimes, under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, one of his favorite poets, he wrote his own verses. A stanza of "A Reverie" reflected his own mood:

   I love a night of bitter gloom,
      When slowly falls the dreary rain;
   While o'er the heavens flit the clouds,
      Like mourners in a funeral train. (21)

Reflecting on his early years long before his Populist days, Watson wrote his wife, Georgia Durham, "The better part of me is poisoned. A mistaken training leaves a trace from which there is no escape. Between the warp and woof of my life its busy shuttle will carry the black thread till the loom stops." His physical slightness was a psychological handicap in a society that favored virility and strength. A reporter later wrote, "His frame is small; he is meager in flesh, and what there is seems laid on grudgingly as if nature hesitated to make the man at all. The entire individual won't weigh 120 pounds." Worry about his masculinity might well have added a never-to-be-acknowledged element to his wretchedness. Watson did, though, confess to a "sensitive spirit." He had been "wounded," he declared, by an uncaring, overly critical father. In reaction, Watson wrote, he became a soul "proud of its own isolation" but overzealous in self-recrimination. He felt unprepared to meet the world's trials. (22) In his scrapbook and diary, the sixteen-year-old Watson penned a quatrain:

   I never had a "Home, Sweet Home,"
      To glad me with domestic life,
   I've spent my days forsaken by all
      With poverty, in strife. (23)

A decade later Watson confessed that his juvenile angst had not lifted. A reason was the number of deaths surrounding him. During his sojourn at Mercer College, which had been cut short by his father's crumbling finances, he lost a number of close friends in a meningitis epidemic. An uncle whom he had idolized as a war hero died on sick leave in 1863. Not long afterward his much beloved grandfather died. Death and loss may foster in young people feelings of guilt, resentment, and a sense of abandonment. So long as such emotions remain unreconciled, they could damage the developing temperament in grievous ways. (24)

Whenever he wished to articulate what he felt, Watson revealed the common symptoms of chronic manic-depression. For instance, like other notables of similar bearing, he fashioned a non-human embodiment of the illness. The "shadow" that dogged his footsteps, he declared, bore a likeness to "a hungry wolf." The notion that the gloom enveloping the mind resembled some external figure--a beast or apparition--seems to be a common pattern among depressives with an imaginative turn of mind. William Styron adopted the image of flightless birds. Winston Churchill called it the "Black Dog." The poet Sylvia Plath named her nemesis "my demon of negation," and the novelist Walker Percy called it "the sweet beast of catastrophe." Edgar Allan Poe's famous Raven could be so interpreted as well. (25) In using this form of expression, the afflicted seemed to experience the melancholy episode as if an outside force had entered, without warning or welcome, to disarrange the mind. As the young lawyer wrote his bride, "I have imagined enemies where there were none: been tortured by indignities which were the creatures of my own fancy." (26)

In any event, as Woodward points out, despite Watson's grumbling, the blame should not rest on his parents' behavior. True, postwar life was hard, especially with the old man unable to regain his financial sea legs, retiring into his cups, and constantly complaining about his son's interest in books. In desperation the father wanted his son simply to add to the family income. Aware of that sort of pressure and with the help of a schoolmaster, Watson managed to overcome obstacles and enter the legal profession. When his patron helped him by underwriting his boarding expenses at Thomson, Georgia, the county seat, he was as elated as if the heavens had opened and divine blessing had shined down. "Riding back home from the station where I had received his letter the glad, fierce feeling of a new life opening to me rose and swelled till the woods rang with the whoop that burst from my lips. It was a glorious feeling and right there did my destiny turn the corner." (27)

Of course, Watson had every reason to rejoice, but such moments of ecstasy are part of the burden that a manic-depressive bears in sometimes wide swings of mood. (28) Likewise, during a down-turning spell in the summer of 1877, he reported lying on his sofa in the office "perfectly benumbed." Woodward interprets Watson's misery as lovesickness, and he may be right. Yet, Watson's reaction was so extreme that his malaise undoubtedly had deeper sources. He became, he said, "morose, moody, and well nigh desperate." Sometime later in January 1878, while still in the midst of a severe emotional maelstrom, he "accosted" Shep Wright, an old enemy, snatched away Wright's riding switch, and began to whip him. The fight that followed could have led to the death of one or both. Oddly mystified by his own angry behavior, Watson plaintively asked his diary, "what was all this grieving about?" He had no clue. But, he added, "If I ever get over it I shall write it down in this book--not before." (29)

But soon enough Watson's mood abruptly changed again when marriage to his beloved Georgia Durham filled him with transitory happiness. He felt "like a storm tossed vessel safely anchored." (30) Addressing juries and great political crowds also swung him away from melancholy and gave him a sense of power and purpose. Desperately determined to succeed in all his endeavors, he dreamed of grandeur and immortality. Throughout his years as a Populist reformer, Watson gloried in what he considered to be a noble cause. If doubts and gloom assailed him during political campaigns, such troubles were not visible. Woodward was wholly justified in pointing out how Democratic skulduggery at the polls cast Watson out of Congress, blasted his illusions, and warped his sense of racial justice. His nomination for vice president on the Populist ticket in 1896 offered little gratification. When the election was over, he fell into a deep despondence, feeling that he had been forced into retirement, "persecuted and misrepresented and howled down and mobbed and threatened until he was well nigh mad...." Watson recalled some years later, "How near I came to loss of mind only God who made me knows--but I was as near distraction, perhaps, as any mortal could safely be." (31)

Woodward points out that for some years afterward, "Watson became virtually a political recluse"--a period of hibernation, as it were. (32) To be sure, Watson was active in the lucrative business of saving offenders from the hangman's noose. Nonetheless, his chief occupation was solitary writing, performed with a heightened zeal. A two-volume history of France sold at a great pace. His prose reflected his passionate mood precisely. In the first volume, he shows his admiration for the Celtic tribes of France, with their warrior spirit, hospitality, high sense of honor, and disdain for worldly transactions--virtues that he thought had prevailed in the Old South. In the second volume, accounts of Revolutionary bloodthirstiness against corrupt churchmen, tyrannical kings, and haughty nobles held American readers spellbound. (33) Other works on such heroes as Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, all of whom had occupied the fantasies of Watson's youth, stressed their glorious sway over others and their grand achievements. As Franzoni observes, Watson admired Napoleon's manipulation of others to advance some personal objective. The dictator's cynical disenchantment with "the world as he found it" mirrored Watson's own bitterness over his political ill-fortunes. Richard Nelson shrewdly notes Watson's awareness of the self-destructiveness of Napoleon's career--and also Watson's attraction to that grim aspect of the emperor's life. (34)

Yet even favorable responses to his publications did not lighten his spirits. In 1905 Watson descended into the abyss of gloom, owing in part to a serious illness. In Tom Watson's Magazine, he confessed to his readers that he had been neglecting his wife and family and indulging in morose ruminations about his childhood. Although he had amassed "thousand upon thousand," he felt himself "a disgraced and ruined man." He was half sorry, he claimed, to have survived his illness. With his imaginative use of language, he wrote, "The horse goes back to the treadmill and the dull march around the circle goes on as before." Somehow he had learned to swallow "the bitter pill of failure" and submit to "the pangs of unconditional surrender. What was left?" (35)

From 1908 to 1915 Watson showed increasing signs of mental distress. With a white supremacist bias for black disfranchisement and defense of lynching, Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine exercised considerable influence in Georgia politics. Yet, despite the popular enthusiasm for his reactionary causes, Watson's rivalry with governor, and later senator, Hoke Smith became a matter of mad obsession. On one occasion Watson drafted a telegram to show his disrespect for his erstwhile political ally: "I give you one more chance to save your wife & son. Resign by two o'clock today, or your crimes will be known to all the world." Perhaps he was wise enough not to fire it off. (36) Armed with highly questionable rumors, Watson accused Smith of sexual improprieties on what we might nowadays call a massive, Clintonian scale. Smith defied his former friend by handily winning re-election. Even Watson's loyal acolyte, the biographer William Brewton, had to concede the gross injustice and biting sarcasm of Watson's editorials on a range of subjects. They won snickers from readers but were based on misrepresentations or outright lies. Brewton labored to explain away how Watson, so filled with anti-Smith hatred, had fallen for a cunning hoax perpetrated by F. L. Seely, a fellow journalist. "The state rocked with laughter," Woodward writes about the episode. Public ridicule made Watson feel even more belittled than his ill-success in preventing Hoke Smith's victory at the polls. (37)

In this period, without losing his sizable audience, Watson suffered paranoid delusions. Paranoia sometimes may accompany extreme affective disorders because the mind, frightened of itself, conjures up enemies to account for the unbearable wretchedness. (38) Yet Watson's internal distress was punctuated with signs of exultation that could be interpreted as a manic upswing of mood. Public speaking had a narcotic effect. After several successes before juries in April 1881, he wrote, "I never fail when I have a large crowd to speak to." Recalling another triumphant courtroom performance, he declared, "I almost forgot where I was and seemed to tread on air." On another occasion Watson waxed even more enthusiastically: "Stump speaking is glorious! The inspiration of the Band, the cheers of the people[,] the ready echo of every blazing sentiment, every dashing attack, every sword thrust of retort lead the orator to a feast more splendid than ever honored `the Field of the Cloth of Gold.'" (39) This style of unrealistic grandiosity could well be a sign of a manic impulse. Although not identifying this syndrome with affective disorder, Karen Horney argues that the victim of this illusion may feel "miserable and downtrodden" while at the same time he would be "furious that anyone should think him in need of help." The process, the psychoanalyst says, arouses ever greater wrath as the ups and downs of emotion accelerate. Watson's growing anger was evident even in the typography of his publications. Woodward describes an increasing use of exclamation points, headlines in red ink, sprinklings of capital letters, and wildly false scandal-mongering of politicians, so-called plutocracies, and various minorities, especially Roman Catholic prelates, nuns, and monks. In fact, the attack on Catholics had garnered him his first subscribers when he launched Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine in early 1907. (40)

Suspicions of lurking enemies consumed Watson much of the period from 1908, the year that he began his anti-Catholic crusade in earnest, through 1911. At Hickory Hill, his pillared mansion in Thomson, Georgia, the owner was convinced that assassins were ready to run through the house to seize him unawares, blow him up, or have him fixed in crosshairs when he was strolling in the nearby woods. Certain that his political rival Hoke Smith was behind the plot, Watson expressed his fears to Congressman Clark Howell: "Neither your father nor Henry Grady would have doubted that Smith is capable of plotting an assassination. That is just what he & [Congressman Thomas W.] Hardwick have done; & both of them know that I know who it is that sent those dynamiters to `get' me." (41)

To meet the imagined threat, Watson hired private investigators to ferret out the Georgia governor's henchmen. Bodyguards accompanied Watson during this crisis and afterward. But in his unstable condition, he was a poor judge of character. A. S. Colyer, for example, wheedled expense money from Watson for a while. Later the gullible Georgian learned that the operative Colyer was a notorious scoundrel currently under indictment for swindling $150 out of the University of the South in Tennessee. Watson fired one investigator after suspecting that he might actually be the cutthroat they were looking for. Watson's publications kept readers well informed of the perils he was facing so manfully. (42)

Watson's mental deterioration grew so ominous that his private secretary, Alice Louise Lytle (who shared all his bigotries), urged a political ally to send Watson compliments about his literary gifts. If he did so, "you will be helping to get a good man back to the great work he can do, and you will be helping a devoted wife--for I assure you we have almost had a tragedy here as a result of the lengths to which A Certain Person went in his frenzy at what he thought was an attack from some of the enemies he had made." Watson, though, proudly dismissed all questions about his mental health. He wrote Clark Howell, an old friend, "Like Isma Dooly, you imagine me excited, hallucinated, etc. Bosh! I'm as cool as the inevitable cucumber: sleep like a child, & am not worried." (43)

Although Watson gradually emerged from the dark cave of imagined stalkers, his last years from 1913 to 1922 showed that a hatred of Jews, most notably Leo Frank, victim of his powerful editorials and lynch law, reflected a despising of himself. Watson was aging, and sometimes fear of losing physical and mental control may play havoc with an unsettled mind. Another factor present in all his angry outpourings was his sense of honor, which in his mind involved the duty of the male species to protect the purity of white womanhood.

The broad cultural ideal of honor flowed into Watson's mania and then through his collapses into gloom and sapped self-respect. Woodward failed to note Watson's long-standing sense of honor and dread of public opprobrium, though Watson courted the public as if to test his masculinity and powers of persuasion. As early as his teens, like other southern boys of his age, he dwelt upon the glories of the rebel forces and mourned their loss as if he had been a veteran himself. In 1871 his first school oration was entitled "Character of Lee." A poem that he wrote at fourteen had the memorable lines, "Land of the South, oh, do not despair" because, the poet promised, "Soon will cease the Yankee thy soil to stain.... Yes soon will come that shining ray/To lead us forth to glorious day!" (44) One would expect such responses at his age and time. Yet throughout his life Watson never relinquished a firm faith in the code, the language, and the style of honor. The dashing, handsome cavalier General John B. Gordon of Georgia was Watson's youthful hero, whom he thought more courageous than Lee himself. (45) He would not be so kindly disposed toward Governor Gordon in later years. Nonetheless, the ideal of romantic heroism remained uppermost on Watson's roll of masculine virtues.

In 1860 Watson's hero Robert Toombs and other southern notables felt obliged, in the name of honor, to answer northern insult for electing an antislavery president. Their response was secession and war. They rebuked those who failed to agree as cowardly slaves to a deceitful Union. Even in his brief egalitarian Populist period Watson approached the task with rhetoric that would have sounded familiar to Jefferson Davis, Toombs, and other disunionists. Watson had been repudiated by the Democratic Party, who called him, as Watson put it, "Traitor! Traitor!" and who "drove me from the halls of Congress" by fraud in the 1892 election. Nevertheless, he would never stoop to "craven silence, or cowardly submission--The case of the South shall be heard--The wisdom of our fathers shall have a defender. Jeffersonian Democracy shall not die!" The message and the language Watson used had a familiar rhythm and flourish: "I plead for the fatherland as against the despoiler who desolates it: for the temples of my people as against the mercenary hordes that defile them: for the principles of our fathers as against the false teachers who repudiate & despise them." Intoning the language of honor, Watson declared, "my crime was that I loved the South too well to desert her sacred rights and barter away her future [in] the base traffic of the political market." (46)

Compare the style to that of Congressman William L. Yancey, the Alabama secessionist leader, whom Watson also greatly admired: "Ours is the property invaded; ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the peace that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake--the honor of children, the honor of families, the lives, perhaps, of all--all of which rests upon what your course may ultimately make a great heaving volcano of passion and crime...." Watson had spent hours studying the speeches of the great orators of the antebellum past, including Senator Seargent S. Prentiss. The Mississippi Whig was considered one of the most effective speakers of the 1840s and 1850s. (47) Charles Crowe criticized Woodward for failing to recognize just how much of a "professional Southerner" Watson had been as early as the 1880s. "In this role," Crowe points out, "he celebrated the nostalgic dream of Eden in `the old time' slave South and denounced New South publicists as `unpaternal' and `patricidal' traitors who offered `abject submission' and `sycophancy' to the North." Sometimes Watson seemed to weave his own feelings of loss and despondency into his speeches, and the combination gave them a romantic, touching poignancy. At Athens in 1893, for example, he concluded that he intended not to quit the struggle. "The tired hands grow discouraged, & the weary feet long for rest. But Duty unveils her starlike face & says `Weary hands--fight on:--Tired feet--march on:--."' If the South was true to its glorious past, he continued, "we shall succeed with all the splendor of righteous success." (48)

Watson's nostalgia for the Old South and its faithful adherence to the honor code was no less apparent than the Lost Cause rhetoric of Henry Grady and other New South boosters to whom Woodward attributed a capitalistic cynicism. For instance, Watson contrasted the honor and honesty of the Old South's leading politicians with contemporary southern and Democratic politicians whom he claimed were in the pay of corporations and banks. In April 1902 a Memorial Day address extolled the merits of Jefferson, Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, Stephens, Cobb, Toombs, and many others--men, Watson thundered, who "never went" into office "poor & came out rich! Never!" Likewise, the plantation women of the Old South had been models of modesty, chasteness, and motherly care. "They lived & loved & toiled that their daughters might ever be pure & their sons forever true to the highest standard of manhood." (49)

Yet the darker sides of honor also held Watson in their grasp, the first aspect of which was the matter of personal vindication with firearm, lash, or fist. According to a New York Journal article, the bantamweight Watson had a "sense of honor" that was "not only high but acute." As if aware that Watson lived partly in the romantic antebellum past, the reporter observed, "When the North produces a John Brown, the South puts forth a Watson.... He is essentially a creature of his environment, believes in the [code] duello and the personal responsibility of men for their words and deeds." The journalist noted that Watson had "once shot several very satisfactory holes in a fellow attorney." His victim had blundered into crossing Watson's "sensibilities." (50)

The second and more pathological was Watson's translation of the code into justification of lynch law, the re-establishment of the Ku Klux Klan, and the rooting out of alleged sexually depraved monsters. Nancy MacLean's 1991 article on the Leo Frank case stresses a Populist motive in Watson's fulminations against the affluent Jewish pencil factory manager, accused of raping and murdering his young employee, Mary Phagan. Watson had always been hostile to "`unproductive' finance capital," as MacLean puts it, and in this instance he took his fury out on a Jewish representative of that class. (51) But Watson's concern about sexual deviancy was equally significant if not more so. To have convicted Jim Conley, the lowly black janitor with a prison record who actually did commit the crime, would not have lent as much sexual titillation and drama to the case. Frank--a Yankee, a Jew, and a corporate official--made a highly visible, public target. To have selected the black janitor as the offender would have been no challenge. Watson's paper expended much ink on "the typical young libertine Jew" whose "bulging satyr eyes[,] ... fearfully protruding sensual lips," and "animal jaw" disclosed a monster with "a lustful eagerness" for the flesh of a white, Christian virgin. (52)

In 1915 Mary Phagan's relatives and others kidnapped Frank from the state penitentiary and hanged him for the sake of her family's honor. Watson was delighted with the outcome. He defended the mob who happily belonged, he wrote, to "the old days before we became lolly-pops, vegetarians, grape-juicers, and sissy-boys...." (53) Frank's lynching seemed to demonstrate that the Old South's code still stood for something noble, virile, and pure and that crusades against sexual vileness should be energetically pursued in other quarters too. An eight-page editorial summed up Watson's rationale for the lynching in a short phrase: "Womanhood is made safer, everywhere." Moreover, his position sold thousands of copies of the Jeffersonian Magazine, his weekly paper. The U.S. attorney general proposed to charge Watson with incitement to riot under a federal statute against kidnapping across state lines. Promised Watson's support for re-election, however, Governor Nathaniel E. Harris went to Washington to quash the effort. But when questioned about his motives, Harris fell into the familiar rhetoric that Watson used himself. He told the federal official "to let Mr. Watson alone for the sake of the honor of my own state and people." The governor's gesture did not pay off. With his accustomed inconsistency, Watson betrayed Harris and chose a different candidate to support in the next gubernatorial campaign. (54)

Watson's anti-papist drive reached new heights in 1910, continuing after his anti-Semitic explosion and revealing still more sexual fantasies that the editor projected upon male ecclesiastic and lay Catholics. In correspondence, Watson harbored a political aim. He informed a colleague that he hoped to puncture the European socialism that he believed was spreading through urban America. He reasoned that a concerted effort with moderate socialists (presumably white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) could be made to thwart "the encroachments of the Catholic Hierarchy." (55) Publicly, though, the sensationalism of sex took up more newspaper space. Watson worried that black Catholic priests might rape or seduce white women in the confessional, or that to gratify their lust, prelates and monks were holding Protestant women in convents, hospitals, asylums, and schools against their will. He helped to push a patently unconstitutional bill known as the Veazey Law through the Georgia legislature, where it remained on the books from 1916 until 1966. Under Code Chapter 59-4, every three months county grand juries were enjoined to inspect all Catholic institutions to ascertain if anyone was being held under duress, supposedly, no doubt, with white maidens particularly in peril. (56)

Watson's scurrilous rantings against the Catholics were so over-laden with sexual references that as early as 1911, Catholic leaders were complaining to the Department of Justice about the "filth and obscenity" to be found in his publications. In 1912 Watson was arrested for abusing the mails with what the postmaster general thought to be pornographic literature. A grand jury returned a true bill. Judge Rufus E. Foster, however, dismissed the charges of lewdness since the prosecution had presented as evidence only the offensive passages from texts and not whole documents. Foster permitted the Justice Department the opportunity to re-indict. Because of various delays in finding a judge eligible to try the case, the second trial opened after Watson had begun his equally manic agitation in the Leo Frank uproar. Watson's political influence in Georgia was sufficient to end the obscenity charge in a hung jury in 1915. It was rumored that ten of the twelve jurors had voted for an acquittal. (57)

At the third trial in November 1916, Watson, acting as one of his own attorneys, denounced federal judge W. W. Lambdin, a strict Presbyterian, as a tool of the Pope. That was only one of several outbursts. One of his lawyers tried to apologize for his client's behavior, but Watson shouted that he "had no apology to make to anybody!!!" The defendant had the good sense to surround himself with able counsel, and soothing words mollified the judge so that their client avoided charges of contempt of court. (58) The trial jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The case was flimsy to start with. The passages that the prosecution found most obscene were all in Latin. The defense argued that it would take Latin scholars, of whom there were precious few in Georgia, to understand their meaning. Ordinary school children in a rudimentary Latin class would hardly have found the lines salacious. Serving frequently as his own defense, Watson demonstrated his intimate knowledge of Latin, literature, European history, and theology. The members of the jury were impressed. They also took notice of Watson's disclaimer that he stated over and over in his writings: He assured the public that he was not attacking anyone's right to worship but just the Catholic hierarchy. In any event, his crusade against popery was too popular in Georgia to permit any other verdict. (59)

As if to be slightly ecumenical in his broad campaign of revilement, Watson charged that Episcopalians were almost as haughty and authoritarian as the Catholics. In 1916 he also turned his fire on the foreign missionary cause. He asked a crowd jammed into the McDuffie County Courthouse if good Baptists and Methodists should spend money to educate "children in China, and Japan, and Hindoostan!!" The line drew applause, but evangelical clergy and laity were unhappy. Denouncing Protestants, however, was a minor aggression. The main objective remained the Catholic Church--small, rural, and underfinanced though it was at that time. Watson complained that Catholic chaplains in the American army were coercing Protestant boys to attend Catholic services--all at taxpayers' expense. Still worse, the church was importing Poles, Italians, and other undesirables throughout the nation. (60)

During World War I and after, Watson's power was gradually spreading into other states, and letters arrived from as far away as New Zealand to support his anti-Catholic campaign. In 1917 he aimed his polemical guns at Florida Catholics and publicly accused the Benedictines--"those murderous monks"--of St. Leo Abbey in Pascoe County of planning a gubernatorial candidate's assassination in a grab for power over the Democratic Party. (61) Such tracts and editorials as these helped to breed much mistrust of Catholicism throughout the small towns of the state. "We learn that 65,000 girls disappeared from their homes last year," Watson announced. A high percentage, he estimated, had become the sex slaves of Catholic priests. Without a shred of evidence, he claimed that "a score or more of these `missing girls'" were captives in Father "Reiley's establishment at Savannah." (62)

Along with the rise of anti-Catholicism in other southern states after the First World War, the nativist movement that Watson sponsored extended beyond his death in 1922 and found a home in the Ku Klux Klan organization. (63) In Gainesville, Florida, a year later, the mayor--a leading Methodist--the police chief, and members of Ku Klux Klan Alachua Chapter No. 46 began a vitriolic and wholly slanderous campaign against Father John Conoley, the Catholic chaplain to the students at the University of Florida. The climax came some time later when the city leaders and their friends kidnapped Father Conoley and castrated him. (64) Watson never belonged to the Klan, but he applauded its violence with the delectation of a Robespierre. Woodward writes, "if any mortal man may be credited ... with releasing the forces of human malice and ignorance and prejudice, which the Klan merely mobilized, that man was Thomas E. Watson." (65)

All in all, the anti-Catholic issue served Watson well. His campaign against Rome and Catholic licentiousness helped enormously to swell the list of subscribers to Watson's Jeffersonian. It certainly assisted his capture of a U.S. Senate seat in 1920. Also aiding his candidacy was his long warfare against Woodrow Wilson, whom he labeled a Judas Iscariot to the South, a pawn of the papacy, and a dispenser of offices to black bureaucrats. Watson's opposition to the war effort and conscription in 1917 prompted the postmaster general to close the mail system to his publications for a while. But popular disillusionment with the war made his truculent dissidence seemingly prophetic. (66)

A final point: the interaction of chronic or clinical depression and Watson's sense of honor, power, and ambition came to a head in his closing decade and revealed the instability of his conscience as well as his mind. Addressing the young male graduates at the commencement ceremony of Mercer University in 1886, Watson had challenged them to "[a]dmit that honor is a myth, truth a dream, friendship a deception, love a sensuality and it does seem to me that the Evil Spirit of the world could but whisper in your ear his old time advice `Curse God and die.'" (67) The temptations for grasping power that he had so succinctly summed up would seem to have become his own creed.

In the midst of his campaigns against Catholics, denunciations of black aspirations, and his persecution of Leo Frank, Watson was suffering from causes he could not fathom. He wrote a friend in the medical field, "I wish it were possible for me to consult you professionally. A baffling nervous trouble returns on me, about once a month, & for several days I am so despondent & distressed, about nothing, that it is difficult to live." (68) The intensity of his tirades against minorities seemed to be directly connected with his mental anguish, as if he did not know who he was. The more he denounced others, the more lost he felt. One might speculate that the guiltier, less confident, and more dejected he became, the greater was his sense of terror about his sanity and well-being. Even his appearance in his latter days suggested a man under great stress. "He is painfully lean and hungry looking," wrote a reporter, "with a cadaverous, rawboned face and sunken cheeks, and dark eyes that repel while they attract. They are deep, thoughtful, dangerous eyes...." In a reply to the inquiries of a solicitous friend, Watson confessed his emotional and bodily wretchedness: "After months of recurring sickness, physical & mental, in which I have been more than once at the very gates of death, my strength is just sufficient for me to be up and about the house." (69)

Watson's inability to stay the course with one theme and his easy switch of loyalties from one side to another suggest a leader so bent on proving that he was significant that he took pleasure in the potency of betrayal. Although less studied than other aspects of his mercurial career, this turn toward religious intolerance paralleled three earlier treacheries. The first is the familiar story of his perfidy against the black race. It requires only brief summary here. Moreover, the narrative has already been well documented, especially by Woodward and by such critics as Charles Crowe and Barton C. Shaw. (70) In the early 1890s Watson's attempt to unite the small farmer, industrial worker, and black sharecropper failed disastrously. Some years later he advocated black disfranchisement by constitutional revision, even though by the early 1900s few members of the race dared cast a ballot, thanks to the white primary already enforced. (71) No doubt a cynical reappraisal of his political position occasioned that switch. But it was not the only occasion in which Watson repudiated former affiliations. A second betrayal was Watson's long battle with Hoke Smith, and a third was his desertion of Governor Nat Harris. Watson's code of honor should have required allegiance to allies and friends. Yet, he always found means to claim that others had proved shamefully false to him instead of the reverse.

With regard to the Jews and Catholics, whom he had once defended but had come to despise, he showed the same deficiency of conscience and loyalty. In 1901, for example, he had successfully defended a Jewish merchant of Adrian, Georgia, who had been accused of and nearly lynched over a so-called murder. Summing up the argument for self-defense, Watson swayed the jury with these words: the defendant, Sigmund Lichtenstein, "is a member of that noble race of people in whose veins flow the godly blood of Moses, David, and the prophets." (72) Similarly, a year earlier Watson had no quarrel with the Catholic Church. In 1900 he had sent his daughter Agnes to a convent school in Augusta, Georgia, until illness required her withdrawal, without once complaining of its management or her treatment there. Agnes had consistently sent "loving messages" to the sisters up to 1917, the year she died. According to William Brewton, her death "brought a despondency from which it was almost impossible for [Watson] to be freed at any time, and from which he never recovered." (73) Indeed, Watson's fury and grief over young Agnes Watson's death seemed to provoke the escalation of his anti-Roman harangues. Making matters worse was the unexpected death of his adult son John Durham Watson, who had collapsed in his father's arms less than a year after Agnes's death. John Durham was the last of Watson's offspring. The biographer William Brewton remarked, "His children gone, his work gone, the Sage of Hickory Hill was now indeed a figure of tragic gloom." (74)

Physical collapse accompanied Watson's inconsolable grief. So severe were his asthma attacks, only partly relieved with increasing drug dosages, that he claimed to have long hovered "at the very gates of death." Watson sounded an uncharacteristic note of humility, when he told a friend in early 1918 that "my spirit is so broken and chastened by prolonged suffering that I crave peace with all the world." (75) But reconciliation and good feeling were never a priority, particularly in his declining years. In fact, as late as 1921 lawyers had to settle a dispute with a Miss Sallie Wiley, in whose presence he had used "obscene, vulgar and profane language." In some altercation in the same month, he threw a book at a colleague that, according to a witness, "endangered Gordon's anatomy," but a well-disposed judge dismissed the charges and costs. (76) Irascibility could not keep him alive. Age, asthma, and alcohol made a lethal draft. He died at Hickory Hill on September 26, 1922, just three weeks after his sixty-sixth birthday. (77)

In his brilliant and elegant biography, Woodward's Watson represented the possibilities of change in the South for the better. Yet, rather than pursue that course of racial and political reform and thus establish a new and better continuity, the tragic protagonist did the changing, not the South. In doing so, he was moving with the currents of prejudice, ignorance, and dread of shame that were all too familiar in his southern homeland, both Old and New. Tom Watson nourished much more of the ancient ethic in his heart than Woodward could admit. Why Watson did so was intimately related to his volatile state of mind. He knew that the demon of depression hounded his footsteps and left him feeling inadequate, unappreciated, and insensible. Unlike some of the great writers of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South, Mark Twain and William Faulkner among them, Watson found no release from the agonies of despondency by writing fiction or poetry. Tragically for himself and his unnumbered victims, he instead wielded his malignant philippics like a knife to win applause from those thousands of white southerners who shared his ethnic and religious loathings.

Americans, here and abroad, have lately become victims of similar fanatical abominations. Perhaps, we can now better appreciate why Woodward sought a way for his region to start morally afresh. In all of his work, he denied inevitabilities, predetermined forces, and the notion of endless continuity and replaced them with the nuances of irony, discontinuity, and above all, hope. He warned us against over-moralizing but admitted rather proudly that he had sometimes succumbed to that temptation. (78) It is scarcely the historian's routine duty to remake the past for new moral purposes. Yet, the story of Tom Watson and his baleful influence does point to a lesson for our day. It reminds us that the old Calvinists may have had it right about human depravity. Morally and practically we cannot afford a spread of hatred against Islamists like that which Watson unleashed against African Americans, Catholic Americans, and Jewish Americans. We must discover humane and effective means to disarm primordial evils in ourselves and in our current enemies. By re-examining the past through Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, Woodward was pointing the way to a new order of human relations that broke old conventions. His biography helped to set a historical stage for the nonviolent civil rights movement. We would be wise to follow his example. In this era of biological and nuclear warfare, the alternative is too tragic and apocalyptic to be imagined.

(1) The symposium has been published as "C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South, 1877-1913: A Fifty-Year Retrospective," Journal of Southern History, 67 (November 2001), 715-826. In the preparation of this text, I acknowledge with much gratitude the criticism and assistance of Randall Stephens and Anne Wyatt-Brown. I also mention with thanks Jeffrey Adler, Robert Zieger, and other faculty and graduate student participants at a U.S. History seminar, University of Florida.

(2) C. Vann Woodward, Torn Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York, 1938; reprint, New York, 1963).

(3) C. Vann Woodward, "Strange Career Critics: Long May They Persevere," Journal of American History, 75 (December 1988), 857-68; Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955).

(4) See the contemporary reviews of Tom Watson by Allan Nevins, in New York Times Book Review, April 3, 1938, pp. 1,26; W. M. Brewer, in Journal of Negro History, 24 (January 1939), 120-23; Alex Mathews Arnett, in American Historical Review, 44 (April 1939), 661-62; and John D. Hicks, in Journal of Southern History, 4 (November 1938), 538-39. For more recent considerations see Theodore Rosengarten, "`I Stand Where My Boyhood Put Me': Reconsidering Woodward's Tom Watson," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 72 (Winter 1988), 684-97; and my review essay of C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge and London, 1986), "The Sound and the Fury," New York Review of Books, 33 (March 13, 1986), 12, 14-15.

(5) Frank Owsley, review of Tom Watson, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 25 (December 1938), 431-32 (quotations on p. 431).

(6) Michael O'Brien, "From a Chase to a View: C. Vann Woodward," in O'Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore and London, 1988), 195; Charles Crowe, "Tom Watson, Populists, and Blacks Reconsidered," Journal of Negro History, 55 (April 1970), 102.

(7) Woodward, Tom Watson, 134 (second and third quotations); C. Vann Woodward, "Tom Watson and the Negro in Agrarian Politics," Journal of Southern History, 4 (February 1938), 14-33 (fourth quotation on p. 16); "South Georgia Campaign," Murray's Cross-Roads speech, n.d. [August 1893?], Folder 245, Series 2, Thomas E. Watson Papers #755 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) (fifth quotation). Barton C. Shaw, in The Wool-Hat Boys: Georgia's Populist Party (Baton Rouge and London, 1984), 88-89, argues convincingly that the Populist farmers rushed to Watson's Thomson residence not to protect Doyle so much as to rescue Watson himself from a rumored lynching.

(8) O'Brien, "From a Chase to a View," 195.

(9) On his notion of "continuitarianism," see Woodward, Thinking Back, 70. On his influence during the civil rights movement, see Thinking Back, 91-92. I am borrowing from my review of this book, "Sound and the Fury."

(10) Ansary adds, "The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan." Tamim Ansary, "An Afghan-American Speaks," Salon, September 14, 2001; on the web at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/ 14/afghanistan/index.html (accessed November 20, 2001).

(11) George Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil (Washington and London, 1998); Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siecle Germany (Princeton, 1994); Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel, trans. Anthony Williams (1991; Cambridge, Eng., 1995); Avner Offer, "Going to War in 1914: A Matter of Honor?" Politics and Society, 23 (June 1995), 213-41. Offer writes, "A festering sense of national dishonor threw up the manic personality of Hitler, and gave him a following" (235).

(12) Richard Nelson, "The Cultural Contradictions of Populism: Tom Watson's Tragic Vision of Power, Politics, and History," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 72 (Spring 1988), 1-29 (quotation on p.5).

(13) See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family (New York and Oxford, 1994); Wyatt-Brown, The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender, and the Southern Imagination (Athens, Ga., and London, 1994); and Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1890s (Chapel Hill and London, 2001).

(14) W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), 93-94; see also Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal: Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890-1914 (Baltimore and London, 1972), 1-3.

(15) William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York, 1990); Wilfrid Sheed, In Love With Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery (New York and other cities, 1995); Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York, 2001); Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide (New York, 1999): Jamison, An Unquiet Mind (New York, 1995); Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1989); Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York, 1998); Dollimore, "Diary," London Review of Books, 23 (August 23, 2001), 32-33. See also Anthony Storr, Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice, and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind (New York, 1988); Storr, Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus (New York, 1996); and Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York, 1988).

(16) New York Times, September 27, 1922, p. 18, c. 3. I am especially indebted here to Janet Brenner Franzoni, "Troubled Tirader: A Psychobiographical Study of Tom Watson," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 57 (Winter 1973), 493-510 (quotation on p. 494).

(17) Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven and London, 1986), 389-404; Silvano Arieti and Jules Bemporad, Severe and Mild Depression: The Psychotherapeutic Approach (New York, 1978), 224-29; Elliot S. Gershon, "Genetics," chap. 15 in Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness (New York and Oxford, 1990), 373-401; Peter C. Whybrow, Hagop S. Akiskal, and William T. McKinney Jr., Mood Disorders: Toward a New Psychobiology (New York and London, 1984).

(18) Thomas E. Watson to William W. Brewton, n.d. [1918?], in William W. Brewton, The Life of Thomas E. Watson (Atlanta, 1926), 367. On John Smith Watson's younger years see Woodward, Tom Watson, 9-10.

(19) Woodward, Tom Watson, 12-14; Julia Watson Cliatt, "Life and Genealogy of Thomas E. Watson," Folder 470, Series 4, Watson Papers.

(20) Watson quotations in Brewton, Life of Thomas E. Watson, 367 (Woodward incorrectly cites this letter as appearing on page 376; see Woodward, Tom Watson, 14); Thomas E. Watson, Bethany: A Story of the Old South (New York, 1904; reprint, Freeport, N.Y., 1972), 6. See also chap. 2 in Bethany, "Two of My Heroes," for Toombs.

(21) See the following clippings pasted in Watson's scrapbooks: "Sumter in Ruins," Vol. 1, p. 20; "I Am Dying, Children, Dying," Vol. 1, p. 16; "Memories and Traditions of the South," oration delivered at Emory College, Oxford, Georgia, July 20, 1869, Vol. 1, p. 23 (third quotation); "The Southern Dead," Vol. 1, p. 3; "Conquered Banner," Vol. 1, p. 3; "The Land We Love," Vol. 2, n.p. (sixth quotation); and "A Reverie," Vol. 3, p. 159; all in Series 6, Watson Papers.

(22) Watson to Georgia Durham Watson, August 4, 1883, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 17-18 (first and fifth quotations on p. 17; third and fourth quotations on p. 18): "Dan Quin Dissects Watson," undated clipping reprinted from New York Journal, in diary and scrapbook, Vol. 3, Series 6, Watson Papers (second quotation).

(23) Quoted in Franzoni, "Troubled Tirader," 496.

(24) Franzoni, "Troubled Tirader," 498-99; Glenn Wilson, "A History of Pine Top Farm and the Thomas Watson Family," on the web at http://www.pinetopfarm.com/history.html (accessed November 7. 2001); Cliatt, "Life and Genealogy of Thomas E. Watson." On the effects of childhood bereavement see Felix Brown, "Bereavement and Lack of a Parent in Childhood," in Emanuel Miller, ed., Foundations of Child Psychiatry (London and other cities, 1968), 435-55; Felix Brown, "Depression and Childhood Bereavement," Journal of Mental Science, 107 (July 1961), 754-77; O. W. Hill and J. S. Price, "Childhood Bereavement and Adult Depression," British Journal of Psychiatry, 113 (July 1967), 743-51; and Alistair Munro, "Some Familial and Social Factors in Depressive Illness," British Journal of Psychiatry, 112 (May 1966), 429-41.

(25) Watson to Georgia Watson, August 4, 1883, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 18; William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness: A Novel (New York and Indianapolis, 1951), 382; Storr, Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice, and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind, 5: Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Boston, 1989), 114-15; entry dated October 1, 1957, in Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough, eds., The Journals of Sylvia Plath (New York, 1982), 177; Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman (New York, 1966), 113; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Poe's Raven: Influence, Alienation and Art," Ideas, 6, no. 1 (1999), 16-35, esp. 28.

(26) Watson to Georgia Watson, August 4, 1883, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 17.

(27) Diary and scrapbook, Vol. 3, p. 191, Series 6, Watson Papers (quotation); Woodward, Tom Watson, 18-19, 35-38.

(28) Ronald R. Fieve, Moodswing: The Third Revolution in Psychiatry (New York, 1975); George Winokur, Paula J. Clayton, and Theodore Reich, Manic Depressive Illness (St. Louis, 1969).

(29) Diary and scrapbook, n.d., Vol. 3, p. 194, Series 6, Watson Papers (quotations); Woodward, Tom Watson, 45.

(30) Diary and scrapbook, March 1878 entry, Vol. 3, p. 210, Series 6, Watson Papers.

(31) Woodward, Tom Watson, 231-41, 331 (Watson quotations).

(32) Ibid., 332.

(33) Thomas E. Watson, The Story of France: From the Earliest Times to the Consulate of Napoleon Bonaparte (2 vols.; New York and London, 1899); Nelson, "Cultural Contradictions of Populism," 11. I am following Woodward's very accurate portrayal of Watson during this period; Woodward, Tom Watson, 332-39.

(34) Thomas E. Watson, Napoleon: A Sketch of His Life, Character, Struggles, and Achievements (New York and London, 1902); Watson, The Life and Times of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1903); Watson, The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson (Thomson, Ga., 1912); Franzoni, "Troubled Tirader," 503 (quotation); Nelson, "Cultural Contradictions of Populism," 12-13.

(35) "The Convalescent," Tom Watson's Magazine, 2 (August 1905), 139-42, quoted in Nelson, "Cultural Contradictions of Populism," 14 (first, second, and third quotations); Thomas E. Watson, Prose Miscellanies (4th ed.; Thomson, Ga., 1927), 32 (fourth and fifth quotations).

(36) Watson to Hoke Smith, September 27, 1910, Folder 156, Series 1.5, Watson Papers.

(37) J. Williams to Watson, September 23, 1911, Folder 157, Series 1.5, Watson Papers; Brewton, Life of Thomas E. Watson, 347-64. In dealing with the intricacies of Watson's political maneuvering and deviousness, Woodward's recounting of this phase of his life is masterfully concise. See Woodward, Tom Watson, 370-415 (quotation on p. 415).

(38) The interconnection between depression and paranoia is still a matter of medical guess work. According to Elio Frattaroli, "Psychoanalytically, the connection between mania and paranoia would be something like this: In a manic state the sense of self is inflated and idealized (grandiose self) in order to ward off awareness of the dark side (the forbidden drives of the id or the Jungian shadow ...)." Since paranoia is basically a means of warding off imagined peril, "[t]his dark side is then projected ... so that it seems to be threatening the self from without instead of from within." This explanation would certainly fit Watson at this period of his life. See Elio Frattaroli's communication to the subscribers to the Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts discussion list, May 25, 2001 (http://[e-mail]/archives/psyart.html; May 2001, Week 4, "Paranoia"; accessed October 16, 2001).

(39) Diary and scrapbook, April 1881, Vol. 3, p. 287 (first quotation): diary and scrapbook, March 17, 1879, Vol. 3, p. 212 (second quotation); diary and scrapbook, n.d., Vol. 39, p. 16 (third quotation); all in Series 6, Watson Papers.

(40) Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York, 1937; reprint, New York, 1964), 223-26 (quotation on p. 225); Woodward, Tom Watson, 418-22; Fred D. Ragan, "Obscenity or Politics? Tom Watson, Anti-Catholicism, and the Department of Justice," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 70 (Spring 1986), 23.

(41) Watson to Clark Howell, May 10, 1911, Folder 157, Series 1.5, Watson Papers. Numan V. Bartley, The Creation of Modern Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1983), 161-72, offers an effective summary of Watson's political machinations during his final years to humiliate Hoke Smith, assert the need for white supremacy, assail Leo Frank, and laud the Ku Klux Klan. Bartley quotes Hoke Smith's comment: Watson "hates everybody. He slanders everybody. He preaches no doctrines but bitterness and strife. He is radical and dangerous" (167).

(42) A. S. Colyer to Watson, September 11 and October 18, 1911, Folder 157, Series 1.5, Watson Papers; Lewis Shepherd to Watson, January 10, 1912, Folder 158, Series 1.5, Watson Papers; Woodward, Tom Watson, 423. Several reports from Watson's detectives and investigators from throughout the summer of 1911 can be found in Folder 157, Series 1.5, Watson Papers. On the bodyguards see Walter J. Brown, J. J. Brown and Thomas E. Watson: Georgia Politics, 1912-1928 (Atlanta, 1984; reprint, Macon, Ga., 1988), 37.

(43) Alice Louise Lytle to Clark Howell, May 15, 1911, Watson to Howell, May 13, 1911, both in Folder 157, Series 1.5, Watson Papers.

(44) "Character of Lee," 1871, in diary and scrapbook, Vol. 2, p. 55; "To the South," August 15, 1871, in diary and scrapbook, Vol. 2, p. 30 (quotation); both in Series 6, Watson Papers.

(45) Diary and scrapbook, Vol. 9, p. 109, Series 6, Watson Papers.

(46) "Athens Speech," July 25, 1893, Folder 244, Series 2, Watson Papers (first through fourth quotations); "South Georgia Campaign," Folder 245, Series 2, Watson Papers (fifth quotation).

(47) Yancey quoted in Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin, Tex., and London, 1979), 192; transcribed Prentiss speech, n.d., in diary and scrapbook, Vol. 39, pp. 25-27, Series 6, Watson Papers.

(48) Crowe, "Tom Watson, Populists, and Blacks Reconsidered," 102; "Athens Speech," July 25, 1893, Folder 244, Series 2, Watson Papers.

(49) "Address on Memorial Day: The Record of the South," April 1902, in diary and scrapbook, Vol. 35, p. 20 (first and second quotations), 25-26 (third quotation). Woodward persuasively demonstrates how New South leaders exploited popular reverence for the Confederate dead but does not show that Watson was as active in that endeavor as any other southern politician of the day. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 155-58.

(50) "Dan Quin Dissects Watson," undated clipping reprinted from New York Journal, in diary and scrapbook, Vol. 3, Series 6, Watson Papers.

(51) Nancy MacLean, "The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism," Journal of American History, 78 (December 1991), 917-48 (quotation on p. 942). See also Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York and London, 1968); and Jeffrey Melnick, "`The Night Witch Did It': Villainy and Narrative in the Leo Frank Case," American Literary History, 12 (Spring/Summer 2000), 113-29. The case still resonates in Georgia. See Jane Gross, "Georgia Town Is Still Divided Over the 1915 Lynching of a Jew," New York Times, August 26, 2000, p. A7.

(52) Quoted in Crowe, "Tom Watson, Populists, and Blacks Reconsidered," 100.

(53) Watson quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 441. Woodward sees the origins of Watson's bloodthirstiness in his work on Danton, Robespierre, and the French Revolution. Instead I highlight Watson's nostalgia for rebel times and the southern ethic, something closer to home.

(54) Woodward, Tom Watson, 442, 445 (Watson quotation), 447-48 (Harris quotation on p. 448).

(55) Watson to John M. Taylor, April 23, 1910, Folder 154 (quotation) and December 6, 1915, Folder 164, both in Series 1.5, Watson Papers.

(56) Transcript of U.S. v. Thomas E. Watson, November 27-30, 1916, Vol. 40, p. 33, Series 6, Watson Papers; Felicitas Powers, "Prejudice, Journalism, and the Catholic Laymen's Association of Georgia," U.S. Catholic Historian, 8 (Fall 1989), 203-4, 211-12.

(57) Ragan, "Obscenity or Politics?" 30-42 (quotation on p. 30).

(58) U.S. v. Thomas E. Watson transcript; Ragan, "Obscenity or Politics?" 43 (Watson quotation). This account of the trial largely relies on Ragan's fine article and on the delightful memoir by Walter J. Brown, J. J. Brown and Thomas E. Watson, 33-46. Brown was then a boy who accompanied his father, vice president of Tom Watson's publishing company, to Augusta for the federal trial. I am grateful to the author for the gift of a copy of his book.

(59) Brown, J. J. Brown and Thomas E. Watson, 41-43.

(60) Speech at Thomson, Georgia, February 12, 1916, Folder 268, Series 2, Watson Papers (quotation); U.S. v. Thomas E. Watson transcript, p. 33.

(61) H. H. Seabrook, Auckland, New Zealand, to Watson, February 28, 1921, Folder 171, Series 1.6, Watson Papers; Thomas E. Watson, Those Murderous Monks of Pasco County, Florida (Thomson, Ga., 1917), 1-16. The "French Huguenot" who supplied the material against the monks for Watson's magazine also thought that Watson was a potential target of Catholic plotters (3).

(62) Watson quoted in Charlton Moseley, "Latent Klanism in Georgia, 1890-1915," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 56 (Fall 1972), 373.

(63) John Higham, in Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1963; New York, 1968), 292, observes, "Tom Watson's Senatorial campaign spread about Georgia an impression that President Wilson had become a tool of the Pope; Governor Sidney J. Catts stomped up and down Florida warning that the Pope planned to invade the state and transfer the Vatican there...." See also P. J. Bresnahan, Seeing Florida with a Priest (St. Petersburg, Fla., 1937), 73-75. Bresnahan, a Catholic priest and former friend of Governor Catts, asked the official why he indulged in such vituperative anti-Catholicism where few had ever encountered a Catholic, lay or ecclesiastic. The governor smilingly replied, "it was all politics" (74). One might attribute the same reason to Watson's unrelenting polemics. Yet Watson began his crusade against the papacy so early and carried it on for so many years that cynical political advantage could not have sufficed as the sole rationale. A strongly Protestant Scots-Irish element in his family heritage added to such an antipathy, but it was also a matter of an unstable temperament to produce obvious falsehoods and lascivious slander. On anti-Catholicism elsewhere in the South see Wyatt-Brown, House of Percy, 226-38.

(64) In the eyes of the Ku Kluxers, the priest had become too popular with the merchants and townspeople by producing undergraduate theater productions that were both entertaining and civic-minded. Among other false charges, he was also rumored to be one of Tom Watson's "sissy-pants," a proselytizing homosexual. Stephen R. Prescott, "White Robes and Crosses: Father John Conoley, the Ku Klux Klan, and the University of Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly, 71 (July 1992), 18-40.

(65) Woodward, Tom Watson, 450.

(66) Brewton, Life of Thomas E. Watson, 364-65.

(67) Draft of a speech given at Mercer University, June 29, 1886, diary and scrapbook, Vol. 3, pp. 378-404 (quotation on p. 383), Series 6, Watson Papers.

(68) Watson to Dr. John M. Taylor, January 7, 1915, Folder 164, Series 1.5, Watson Papers.

(69) "Watson as Man and Politician," undated clipping in diary and scrapbook, Vol. 27, p. 76, Series 6, Watson Papers; Watson to H. McCorkle, January 1, 1918, Folder 167, Series 1.5, Watson Papers.

(70) Woodward, "Tom Watson and the Negro in Agrarian Politics," 14-33; Crowe, "Tom Watson, Populists, and Blacks Reconsidered," 99-116; Shaw, Wool-Hat Boys, 78-89, 109, 114, 200. Barton Shaw offers a very strong case for Watson's expediency when the Georgia Populist briefly championed African American aspirations as a way to win support for the Populist cause in the 1890s. Shaw's interpretation contrasts with Woodward's emphasis on the politician's early racial idealism. Woodward argues that Watson later repudiated his prior position so strenuously because of his political disenchantment.

(71) Moseley, "Latent Klanism in Georgia," 365-86.

(72) Louis E. Schmier, "`No Jew Can Murder': Memories of Tom Watson and the Lichtenstein Murder Case of 1901," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 70 (Fall 1986), 433-55 (Watson quotation on p. 453).

(73) Sister Sacred Heart to John Farrell, September 12, 1920, quoted in Powers, "Prejudice, Journalism, and the Catholic Laymen's Association of Georgia," 207-8 (first quotation on p. 207); Brewton, Life of Thomas E. Watson, 364 (second quotation).

(74) "Daughter Agnes and Son," [1918], in diary and scrapbook, Vol. 3, p. 447, Series 6, Watson Papers; Brewton, Life of Thomas E. Watson, 366. On his daughter Louise Watson's death in 1889, see "Louise," in diary and scrapbook, Vol. 3, pp. 444-46, Series 6, Watson Papers.

(75) Watson to H. McCorkle, January 1, 1918, Folder 167, Series 1.5, Watson Papers.

(76) Thomas W. Hardwick to Watson, January 11, 1921, W. E. Simmons to Watson, January 13, 1921 (first quotation), Watson to Simmons, January 16, 1921, Folder 170: Simmons to Watson, February 17, 1921, February 21, 1921, and February 22, 1921 (second quotation), Folder 171; all in Series 1.6, Watson Papers.

(77) New York Times, September 27, 1922, p. 18, c. 3.

(78) Woodward, "Strange Career Critics," 867-68.

MR. WYATT-BROWN is the 2001-2002 Douglas Southall Freeman Professor of History at the University of Richmond and the Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida. He delivered this paper on November 18, 2001, as the presidential address at the sixty-seventh annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in New Orleans, Louisiana.