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.
Read more about this topic: C. Vann Woodward
Famous quotes containing the words intellectual and/or influence:
“She keeps
The Topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
It is in truth a most contagious game:
Hiding the Skeleton, shall be its name.”
—George Meredith (1828–1909)
“Power lasts ten years; influence not more than a hundred.”
—Korean proverb, quoted in Alan L. Mackay, The Harvest of a Quiet Eye (1977)