Woodward's Origins of the New South

This research examines Woodward's Origins of the New South. The research will set forth a summary of the book's contents and then analyze the methodology Woodward employs to articulate the pattern of ideas that make up the text, with a view toward (1) assessing the book's contribution to the literature of the transformation of the South in the period following Reconstruction, and (2) identifying the degree to which the text deals with the subject of American populism in the last part of the 19th century until just before World War I.

In order for a 2003 reader to understand the content of Origins of the New South, it is essential to appreciate the chronological perspective from which it was originally written: 1951. The significance of that year is that it predated the enormous transformation of the structure of prevailing social custom and practice that was most visible in the South, namely, legally sanctioned segregation. Woodward's preface to the 1971 reissue of the original text acknowledges the enormous "social upheaval" (1971, p. vii) that occurred in the South between 1951 and 1971. Indeed Brown vs. Board of Education came in 1954, Rosa Parks's bus adventure and the Montgomery, Ala., boycott in 1956-1957, the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965. These events and others like them were to transform legal protections for segregation, but the run-up to them is the concern of Woodward's text.

The narrative plan of Origins of the New South is to track t

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also a complicated phenomenon because many poor whites resented being "leveled" socially and economically with freed Negroes, even in adversity; formerly, poor whites had the social advantage of feeling superior to slaves. . It is this self-defeating contradiction that Woodward is investigating. The method that Woodward uses to develop his argument is to devote chapters to key concepts and identifiable historical trends around which different constituencies that cropped up in the post-Reconstruction South were organized. In sorting out these multiple conflicts and alliances, Woodward works his way from 1877, when Reconstruction formally ended, to 1913, when Woodrow Wilson, a southerner, came to the presidency. In other words, he develops the history of how the Democrats, vanquished by the Republicans in the Civil War, gradually reasserted political power on a national scale, despite the fact (or perhaps for that very reason) that Democrats were identified so strongly with the South. The problem of constituency identification is a major theme of the text. Democrats were weak after the Civil War because the Republican agenda under Lincoln had triumphed. However, Republicans were divided into interest groups, with the Radicals bei

Category: History - W