C Vann Woodward Quotes

The other was that all the major civil rights organizations, new as well as old, were committed to the philosophy of non-violence, the doctrine preached by the most conspicuous leader in the Negro movement, Martin Luther King. ‘We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer,’ he told the whites, ‘and in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.

The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South,’ he said. ‘Where legal remedies are not at hand, redress is sought in the streets in demonstrations, parades and protests, which create tensions and threaten violence—and threaten lives.

Eight days later he sent to Congress the most sweeping bill for civil rights up to that time, and urged it ‘not merely for reasons of economic efficiency, world diplomacy and domestic tranquility—but above all because it is right.

The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward

a campaign of mendacity unprecedented since Napoleon proclaimed the destruction of Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar.

The success of Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for the presidential nomination and the management and direction of his race for President were in very considerable degree the work of an able school of Southern progressive politicians. Likewise the striking success of the progressive reforms of Wilson’s first administration owed much of their vigor to the work of Southern cabinet members

Unfettered by the Supreme Court, Jim Crow became the law of the South. When the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was announced, there were 130,334 registered Black voters in Louisiana. Eight years later, there were only 1,342.65 “Between the two dates the literacy, property, and poll tax qualifications were adopted,” wrote historian C. Vann Woodward in his 1955 book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. “In 1896, Negro registrants were in a majority in twenty-six parishes—by 1900, in none.”66

The history of the American intellectual community is beset with violent love affairs with other classes. Those of a certain age will be able to recall the one of the thirties. That one was conducted across class lines and its object was the workingman, but its course was quite as tempestuous as the more recent affair. Such affairs of the heart have been in the romantic tradition that endows the object of love with exalted virtues and sublime attributes and at the same time indulges the lover in dreams of glory and self-flattery.

The gap between living memory and written history a “twilight zone” which serves as one fo the favorite breeding grounds of mythology

Perhaps it was because his hair was a shade too dark that his schoolmates did not call him “Red,” and perhaps it was because of something else. At least four of his schoolmates, now living, agree that he possessed an unusually quick temper and a disposition to attack with waspish fury on small provocation

A sensitive spirit wounded by those who should have nurtured, sees all things in a false color, is proud of its own isolation, magnifies its defects, is unfitted for the intercourse of the world and as far as the necessities will allow retires within itself and imagines that all others are more fortunate, more deserving and more happy.

Watson knew that the lien system merely provided the shackles of the farmer’s economic slavery. It was only the machinery of exploitation. How was it that cotton had fallen from a dollar a pound at the close of the War to an average of twenty cents in the ‘seventies, nine cents in the ‘eighties, and seven cents in the ‘nineties—a level below the cost of production—and had stayed there?

the railroad owners, who evaded taxes, bought legislatures, and overcharged him with discriminatory rates;

A sword may be surrendered with more grace and dignity than a point of view.

Segregation in complete and full developed form did grow up contemporaneously with slavery, but not in its midst. One of the strangest things about the career of Jim Crow was that the system was born in the North and reached an advanced age before moving South in force.

On a different plane there were the less idealistic, less publicized aims of Northern policy during the war and the period following. These aims centered in the protection of a sectional economy and numerous privileged interests, and were reflected in new statutes regarding taxes, money, tariffs, banks, land, railroads, subsidies, all placed upon the law books while the South was out of the Union.

There was something else at stake, and it was probably of more consequence in the long run than any of the previous considerations. This was the question of whether the country could regain the ability to settle Presidential elections without the resort to force.

Despite its professed radicalism, the Republican party had obviously become the conservative party, spokesman of vested interests and big business, defender of an elaborate system of tariffs, subsidies, currency laws, privileged banks, railroads, and corporations, a system entrenched in the law by Republicans while the voters were diverted by oratory about Reconstruction, civil rights, and Southern atrocities.

If state rights and laissez faire meant an end to force bills, removal of Federal troops from Southern state capitals, and abandonment of intervention in local politics and race discriminations, the South was for them strong. On the other hand the South had no patience with state rights and laissez faire if they implied abandonment of Federal subsidies, loans of credit, and internal improvements. Of these the South believed she had not had anything like her just share and she meant to have a lot more.

While Kuklick attributed part of the failures of A People’s History to the “textbook genre,” he preferred Carl Degler’s Out of Our Past, published back in 1959: “Degler’s biases are liberal, but he brought to his task a subtlety and sophistication that Zinn doesn’t possess.” According to Kuklick, Degler’s book covers much of the same ground and should be read before Zinn’s book.82 Out of Our Past had been described on January 1, 1959, in the New York Times as a discussion of “the developments, forces and individuals that have made this country what it is” and of such subjects as “how racial discrimination began and what schools and churches have done about it.”83 Degler had the bona fides, as the headline to his obituary on January 14, 2015, in the New York Times attested: “Carl N. Degler, 93, a Scholarly Voice of the Oppressed.” The Stanford University scholar had “delved into the corners of history” and “illuminated the role of women, the poor and ethnic minorities in the nation’s evolution.” His 1972 book about slavery, Neither Black nor White, won him the Pulitzer. And Degler’s work did not suffer from Zinn’s lack of familiarity with women’s issues. As early as 1966, he had been invited by Betty Friedan “to be one of [the] two men among the founders of the National Organization for Women.” Degler had the respect of colleagues, winning praise from Princeton professor Lawrence Stone for his 1980 book At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present and from C. Vann Woodward for Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century.84 Out of Our

...Bayard Rustin has hewed to the line he has pursued all along. This is the line of civil rights, equality, and integration, and the strategy of the ballot, the union card, and coalition politics. While the demand for equality itself is not revolutionary, he insists that "the response that must be made in order to satisfy the demand very much is. By this I mean that justice cannot be done to blacks in the absence of a total restructuring of the political, economic, and social institutions of this country." Never willing to settle for a "symbolic victory" or a pseudo-revolution, he holds out for "nothing less than the radical refashioning of our political economy.

It may provide emotional release "to think black, dress black, eat black, and buy black," but it places one on a reactionary course. The real problems, from which all this is escape, are those of employment, wages, housing, health, education, and they are not to be solved by withdrawal and fantasy. They can only be solved in alliance with elements from the majority of the electorate, and the cement for such a coalition is not love but mutual interest. The way lies through nonviolence, integration, and coalition politics.

While it would not be accurate to say that we were influenced by public opinion,” testified Admiral Toyoda,

The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the greatest naval battle of the Second World War and the largest engagement ever fought on the high seas.

At Leyte Gulf we used eight carriers, eight light carriers, and sixteen escort carriers — thirty-two in all.

In our two fleets participating in the Philippines battle we had twelve battleships to the enemy’s nine.

approximately 2,014,890 tons at Leyte.

The Musashi was the third Japanese battleship definitely known to have been sunk by our Navy, the first in nearly two years, and the only one up to that time sunk entirely by air attack.

It is substantially a proposition,” concluded the two Northern Democrats and three Republicans, who signed the Minority Report on the bill, “to build this road and the branches on Government credit without making them the property of the Government when built. If there be any profit, the corporations may take it; if there be loss, the Government must bear it.

Lamar related the Texas & Pacific bill to the national political crisis by presenting it as a means of “reconciliation” between the sections, “material reconstruction” of the South, and a way of restoring “mutual respect and affection” at a moment when those sentiments were desperately needed.