-
9 Professional Success, Personal Turmoil
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
- Additional Information
nine Professional Success, PersonalTurmoil Extremely high unemployment, low farm prices, and numerous bank failures were among the litany of economic horrors gripping the nation as Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed the presidency of the United States in March 1933. Although the Great Depression hit many areas of the American South especially hard, in Virginia, where Simkins lived, many inhabitants suffered less from the effects of the economic decline than did the residents of other states.1 With a decent salary, a young wife, and a small house, he also suffered less than many individual southerners during the Great Depression, and his relative security may have colored his opinion of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Simkins never counted himself among the FDR partisans. In the 1940s, Simkins apparently supported at least two Republican candidates for president , Wendell Willkie, who was unsuccessful in his attempt to unseat FDR in 1940, and Thomas Dewey, President Harry Truman’s opponent in 1948. In a 148 review published ten years after FDR’s death, Simkins praised the Charleston newspaper editor William Watts Ball for “[refusing] to budge from his opposition to New Deal policies which were bringing wealth to the politicians and businessmen” in Charleston.2 While many Americans struggled to remain afloat financially, Simkins concentrated on his teaching, his reading, his researching, and his writing. The 1930s stood out as a productive time for him. During the decade, he published two books, and no less than five articles, some with the help of coauthors. He alsocarriedoutextensiveresearchforabiographyofBenTillman,whichwould be published in the mid-1940s. The national calamity failed to slow his study of the South’s past, especially Reconstruction, the Civil War, and agrarianism. The Great Depression also apparently failed to alter Simkins’s worldview. He was almost thirty-two years old at the time of the stock market crash, and by 1929, his historical thought had already been largely formed. As many scholars turned to socialism and communism, Simkins resisted the lure of these ideologies , continuing to draw, in his historical analysis, on his experiences prior to the Great Depression. The 1930s was also a time of personal loss for him. Simkins’s mentor at the University of South Carolina, Yates Snowden, died on February 22, 1933. As a young scholar, Simkins had been captivated by Snowden’s voluminous but disorganized library filled with materials on southern history, and, later, he used sources from the collection in his researches.3 Throughout his life, Simkins recalled Snowden with fondness. To him, Snow den had been an exceptional mentor, and there is little doubt that the flamboyant and romantic aspects of Simkins’s personality and writing came partly through Snowden’s example. As far as scholarship was concerned, events were occurring at this time that would boost Simkins’s reputation. In the early 1930s, the Atlanta University professor W. E.B. Du Bois, a scholar more radical in outlook than Simkins and Woody, was planning to write a book on Reconstruction challenging the Dunning school. Rayford Logan, who had reviewed South Carolina during Recon struction for the Journal of Negro History, helped Du Bois with his research . Simkins and Woody, as well as Alrutheus Taylor, thus played a major role in shaping Du Bois’ thought toward Reconstruction. The themes of Taylor’s and Simkins and Woody’s Reconstruction books offered Du Bois important ideas to ponder for his own study, but, as David Levering Lewis has explained, “What Du Bois borrowed, he invariably transformed and enlarged.”4 Du Bois made ample use of South Carolina during Reconstruction in his work, Black Reconstruction. In one footnote appearing at the end of a chapter titled “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina,” he pointed out that, in writing Professional Success, Personal Turmoil 149 [3.133.79.70] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:51 GMT) 150 Francis Butler Simkins: A Life the chapter, he borrowed heavily from South Carolina during Reconstruction, citing the Simkins and Woody study seventeen times in that chapter alone. By contrast, he cited Taylor’s book on blacks in Reconstruction South Carolina only twice.5 An intellectual nexus, as Lewis pointed out, clearly existed between the two white scholars, Simkins and Woody, and the two black thinkers, Taylor and Du Bois. In “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina,” Du Bois explored what he considered to be a postbellum revolution pitting “Capital, Land, and Privilege against white and black labor.” The effort of “the proletariat,” that is the poor whites and blacks, to seize economic privileges...