I don’t know a lot about Woodward’s arguments, so I can’t really judge this email from a longtime reader on the merits. But it’s an interesting case he’s making:
Dear Mr. Goldberg,
C. Vann Woodward’s value to the present actually *depended* upon his misreading of history. His books argued that Jim Crow was not a necessary part of Southern history–that with contingent events, the South could have escaped so terrible a cage of race–therefore, that the South could leave Jim Crow behind, and take up a vibrant, alternate tradition. I think Woodward was terribly wrong about the past of the South–I don’t think the alternatives to Jim Crow ever had a snowball’s chance in hell–but that his creative misreading of history did, in point of fact, help the South to escape from Jim Crow by pointing to a somewhat fictive past. His history was therefore quite useful for the present, precisely because it was inaccurate.