Doctoral student Jared Asser interviewed James Cobb about his new book on the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward. Professor Cobb, you attended the University of Georgia student both as an undergraduate and a graduate student. Did you have a favorite work of history during that time? It doesn’t quite qualify as history but I was just enthralled by W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South. It's a book that wrestles with the historical persistence of bizarre, savage, behavior by white southerners up to the point of its publication in 1941. It really intrigued me but then, of course, in graduate school I also encountered the work of C. Vann Woodward. In graduate school he was everywhere I looked, and I wound-up reading all of his books and just found it impossible to write anything without quoting something that Woodward had written. All along, then, there was this issue of what about this guy? What about his contributions to scholarship? What did he manage to achieve in writing for a broader audience? So, he was always on my mind, as Willie Nelson might say, as I was working on other books. His most powerful work of scholarship, The Origins of the New South, appeared in 1951, and Rice University held a conference marking its fiftieth anniversary. They asked me to participate and that led me up to Yale, to do some research in Woodward’s papers. That experience settled it for me. I needed to write a book about Woodward. Thankfully, I finally managed to get the dang thing finished, and actually lived to see it published! Could you tell me a little more about what the work itself is about and the research that supported it? Well, while it is a biography, Woodward was not a very forthcoming person about himself or his personal life, so he was a hard subject for a more traditional biography. It’s the best I could do on that front, and more than anybody else has done, but not quite what you’d expect perhaps in terms of personal details. Truth be told, my real concern in writing it was to capture what his career was like; how he affected the profession and how he affected how people inside and outside the profession viewed history—and so it mainly traces his career. He was a force in several ways as far as the historical profession was concerned. He basically took over Southern history. At the point he entered graduate school, in 1934, Southern history was still written as much as anything as a sort of defense, not simply of the South’s past, but of its present, meant to show that present as a logical and justifiable outcome of what had transpired in its past—and basically he turned that model on its head by showing that if you re-examine South’s past you can form a critique of what’s going on in the present that basically nobody had been willing to offer prior to his arrival. It’s no exaggeration to say that in the first twenty years of his career he revolutionized the study of southern history as a scholar—in addition, of course, to making the history he wrote more accessible to a much broader audience, and becoming a renowned and influential public intellectual in his own right. Is this more a biography of the man or a biography of the discipline? Well, I would say it’s both, in the sense that once Woodward shows up, what he did affected our essential core approach to Southern history, and thus the direction of historiography moving forward. So doing justice to Woodward’s story meant writing something of a biography of the historical profession, particularly the field of Southern history from the late-nineteenth century up until the middle of the twentieth. I was kind of obliged to do that if I was going to make people understand why knowing about Woodward was important, and that’s the reason it took me so long too! Why is this book important for all us in the profession in 2022? A harsher question would be: why did I think anybody would want to read a book about a white historian who has been dead for twenty-two years. Well, frankly, I wasn’t sure they would want to read it so much as I was convinced that they needed to. A new generation of scholars is less likely to be aware of how their work might be connected to Woodward’s and aware of Woodward in general. He thought that the real value of history was determining and demonstrating what it had to say to the concerns of the present. In this, his work fed into the same kinds of questions about the nature of the craft that are back in the spotlight again. The Strange Career of Jim Crow was a perfect example; there was an old axiom, that “state-ways,” meaning laws, could not overcome “folkways,” which meant popular habits and practices that had been in place for generations. He saw the perception of segregation as one of those invincible, long-entrenched folkways rear its head immediately in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown decision, and he set out to show otherwise. In fact, his argument was that segregation was neither ancient nor even a folkway, but in fact a stateway imposed by laws passed scarcely fifty years earlier in the 1890s. What can graduate students take from your interpretation of the life of Woodward? Well, I think that anybody would be well advised to consider both the pros and cons of his attempts to make the past speak to the concerns of the present. Your published writing is always going to be there on the shelf, and what it says won’t change. Meanwhile, what seem to be the primary concerns of today’s present might be very different from those of presents yet to come. Essentially, you’ve given an account of the past that is geared to a present that no longer exists. I think in looking at this, all historians want to think that readers can come away one of their books feeling that it offers something more useful than additional details of the Battle of Pea Ridge. Still, you need to be careful because what you’re doing is reflecting on history in a way that is going to have a lasting impact on the way history is perceived that’s wholly distinct from whatever impact your work might have on the way people react to the present. What’s next for you? Well, I’m hoping it’s not the undertaker! If it’s not, then I hope to update my little book, Georgia Odyssey. It originally appeared in ’98 and then about ten years later, I came out with an updated version. I haven’t had a chance to update it since. So, what I’m hoping to do, in say the next twelve months, is come up with a third edition that takes account of developments in the state during the last fifteen years. A hell of a lot has happened in Georgia in that period, so its going to be a challenge, but at least I won’t suffer from a lack of material. The book means a lot to me because I wrote it as a native Georgian who has genuine affection for the state, for all of its shortcomings, so I want to have my say about it one more time. ------
