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:
“Our loss put six feet under ground
Is measured by the magnolia’s root;
Our gain’s the intellectual sound
Of death’s feet round a weedy tomb.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)