Politics was [for Watson]... a potent magic whereby a distraught and oppressed people might conjure up forgotten, as well as imaginary, grandeurs, unite with intense purpose, and cast off their oppressors.—C. Vann Woodward
Paul Greenberg has described the Pulitzer Prize winning historian C. Vann Woodward as the “quintessential quiet Southerner.” The Arkansas scholar listens, ponders, weighs things carefully, and creates “a quiet bulwark of reason and imagination” in his works in order to give us a lasting understanding of “the sorrowful but redemptive qualities of Southern history.” In this way he is very different from the strident Tom Watson (1856-1922), the Georgia populist, whose career Woodward studied at length. This other sort of Southerner, according to Greenberg, is “by turns scholarly and unlettered, slovenly and eloquent, decadent and noble.”
