C. Vann Woodward - Intellectual Influence

Intellectual Influence

Woodward, starting out on the left, wanted to use history to explore dissent. He approached W. E. B. Du Bois about writing about him, and thought of following his biography of Watson with one of Eugene V. Debs. He picked Georgia politician Tom Watson, who in the 1890s was a leader of Populism focusing the anger and hatred of poor whites against the establishment, banks, railroads and businessmen, and who a decade later became the leader in mobilizing the hatred of the same poor whites against blacks, and a promoter of lynching.

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