C. Vann Woodward Quotes
One must expect and even hope that there will be a future upheavals to shock the seats of power and privilege and furnish the periodic therapy that seems necessary to the health of our democracy.
Although there are many historical and political thinkers who do not agree that upheavals are inevitable or desirable in America, Vann Woodward and many others follow the school of American thought led by Thomas Jefferson and others of the founding fathers. With the exception of the Civil War most of the American upheavals, though painful to many losing privilege and power have not been massively bloody and have been mostly political.
C. Vann Woodward 1959 Quoted in Michael Kazin, Trump and American Populism Foreign Affairs. November/December 2016 Volume 95, Number 6
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The South at the time had a virtual caste system with a few families in each area controlling and leading. Many Unionists from the argued that the lower and middle class whites had to be given more power and education about their rights. Of course the controlling families had a strong vested interest to see that Reconstruction failed and the “Yankees” were hated. Anti-Negro racism was just a part of the motivation. Maintaining the elite families power of the pre-war political culture was also critical. The Northern Reconstuctionists were therefore twice dangerous.
The Turkish revolution was by historical standards relatively bloodless as compared especially with other republican revolutions like the United State and France. However, the revolution that brought Ataturk to power was a relatively mild one in terms of the immediate changes that unlike many revolutions which produced instant radical change. In Turkey, the radical change took place in the years after the revolution when Ataturk with hardly any bloodshed produced compulsory public secular education, scientific elevation in society, separation of mosque and state, gender equality including universal voting, change to western dress, elimination of the caliphate, speech and press freedom, and many others including changing the entire language to use the Latin alphabet instead of Arabic. No nation in history has gone thought more social and cultural change and modernized so fast as Turkey after its revolution. The result is the most modern and successful Islamic country in the world.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
This president served his terms as allowed by the Constitution but then moved to change the constitution so that he could be the dictator as perpetual president. The purpose of constitutions is to limit and control the day to day political process and processes of reform. This stands the purpose of a constitution on its head. Modern totalitarian states almost all have constitutions. However where they differ from democracies is that the dictatorships ignore their constitutions, constantly suspend them in “emergencies” or change them at will to serve the interests of the ruling authorities. See {622125} for a Supreme Court Justice’s view of this kind of situation.
Comer Vann Woodward was a Pulitzer-prize winning American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations. He was long a supporter of the approach of Charles A. Beard, stressing the influence of unseen economic motivations in politics. Stylistically, he was a master of irony and counterpoint. Woodward was on the left end of the history profession in the 1930s. By the 1950s he was a leading liberal and supporter of civil rights. His demonstration that racial segregation was a late-19th-century invention rather than some sort of eternal standard made his The Strange Career of Jim Crow into "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement", said Martin Luther King Jr. After attacks on him by the New Left in the late 1960s, he moved to the right politically.
