"Origins of the New South in Retrospect" Thirty Years Later 1

Thirty-two years ago, in 1971, the author was invited to deliver a paper at the spring meeting of the Organization of American Historians evaluating Origins as it celebrated its twentieth birthday and as a second edition was being published. Origins opens with a synopsis of Reunion and Reaction, Woodward's economic conspiracy theory of the Compromise of 1877. Woodward's Redeemers were an unattractive lot, selfish and manipulative, but the more historians look at them, the more they seem to be representative of the cross section of humanity. Many were venal and self-serving, but there were those who thought they were pursuing their community's best interests as well as their own through industrialization. In contrast, Woodward's story in Origins was a time and place in which defeat, poverty, and gloomy prospects were everyday realities for a lot of Americans.