William Dodd (ambassador) - Early Years and Academic Career

Early Years and Academic Career

Dodd was born on October 21, 1869, in Clayton, North Carolina. He earned his bachelor's degree from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in 1895 and a master's degree in 1897. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Leipzig in 1900. He and his wife, Martha, married on December 25, 1901. They had two children, a daughter, Martha, who became a Communist agent, and a son, William E. Dodd, Jr.

He learned a class-conscious view of Southern history from his family, which taught him that slaveholders were responsible for the Civil War. His semi-literate and impoverished father supported his family only through the generosity of wealthier relatives, whom Dodd came to view as "hard men, those traders and aristocratic masters of their dependents!". Dodd taught history at Randolph–Macon College from 1900 to 1908. His instruction there was at times controversial, because it included attacks on Southern aristocratic values. In 1902, he wrote an article in The Nation in which he complained of pressure to flatter Southern elites and their view that slavery played no role in the onset of the Civil War. He criticized the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans by name. Confederate societies called for his dismissal. Dodd explained that "To suggest that the revolt from the union in 1860 was not justified, was not led by the most lofty minded statesmen, is to invite not only criticism but an enforced resignation." University administrators supported him and he attacked his accusers and detailed their distortions of Southern history. When recruited by the University of Chicago, he began his 25-year career as Professor of American History there in 1908.

Dodd was the first, and for many years the only, college or university professor fully devoted to the history of the American South. He produced many scholarly works, both articles and books, and won excellent reviews as a teacher. Though much of his scholarship was superseded in later years, he helped to model a new approach to regional history: sympathetic, judicious, and less partisan than the work of earlier generations. In a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt, he described his approach: "The purpose of my studying and writing history is to strike a balance somewhat between the North and the South, but not to offer any defense of any thing."

Dodd wrote a biography of Thomas Jefferson in German. Dodd was a Democrat, active in Chicago politics. In 1912 he wrote speeches for presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson. He became a friend of President Wilson, visited him in the White House frequently, and authored a biography of him, Woodrow Wilson and his Work, that appeared in 1920. He was an early opponent of the theory that German imperialism was solely responsible for World War I. He gave speeches on behalf of Wilson and U.S. participation in the League of Nations, and in 1920 he reviewed the League-related parts of the speech Ohio Governor James M. Cox gave when accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency. In the 1920s, following Wilson's death, Dodd lectured on his administration and its accomplishments, revised the biography he had written, and co-edited the six-volumes of The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson. He wrote in defense of Wilson for both scholarly journals and the popular press. Through these efforts, he developed connections to a number of figures in the Democratic Party establishment, including Josephus Daniels, Daniel C. Roper, and Edward M. House.

Dodd held several positions as an officer of the American Historical Association and was named the organization's president for 1934.

Dodd long planned to write a multi-volume history of the American South. As he reached his sixties, he found the prospect of completing it increasingly unlikely, given his academic responsibilities.