ABSTRACT
The import of Cooper's findings for the thesis of Origins of the New South is less clear because South Carolina may be a special case. As Cooper himself points out, the major reason for Whiggery not to persist in postwar South Carolina politics is that there was no significant Whig party before the war. Woodward's sensibility is both Beardian and Faulknerian, and the combination of the two is the source of the continuing appeal of Origins of the New South. Origins of the New South presents the Populist movement in the tradition of The Populist Revolt of John D. Hicks as a rational, economic-interest political movement. The ingrained racist feelings of the white Populist constituency contributed to the downfall of Populism. Origins of the New South has survived relatively untarnished through twenty years of productive scholarship, including the eras of consensus and of the new radicalism, and remains the last of the Beardian syntheses.
