Francis Butler Simkins: A Life

Introduction

Introduction In 1953, historians who attended the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Jacksonville, Florida, witnessed a bizarre incident. As Kathryn Abbey Hanna gave her presidential address, Francis Butler Simkins, then vice-president and a well-known southern historian , fell asleep on stage behind her. For those members in the audience with a sense of humor, the sight of Simkins snoozing behind Hanna must have been a golden moment. For those without one, it was surely an embarrassing scene. The man asleep on stage would be president in 1954.1 In the minds of many historians, Simkins’s faux pas was only appropriate, because he constantly engaged in odd behavior that both amused and frustrated those who knew him. To his colleagues, he seemed interminably enmeshed in his own disorganization and absentmindedness, making him the brunt of jokes. The sleeping incident, however, also held a larger meaning. Like Rip Van Winkle, many scholars believed, Simkins seemed to be sleeping through the tumultuous events of the mid-twentieth century that were irrevocably altering race relations in the United States and, as a result, the writing of southern history. As the civil rights movement descended on Dixie, Simkins boldly expressed traditional notions concerning race relations and argued against the possibility of any substantive change in the South’s racial pattern. By the time of his death in 1966 at the age of sixty-eight, he was already being 1 2 Francis Butler Simkins:     A Life forgotten by the historical guild as the outstanding scholar he had once been, his inability to accept new dispensations concerning race and southern history dooming him to obscurity. There was a time, though, when Simkins, who possessed an impressive academic pedigree, seemed destined for a happier fate. As a graduate student at Columbia University, he learned the craft of scientific history and studied under one of the United States’ premier scholars, William Archibald Dunning, a member of the country’s first generation of trained historians. Graduating from Columbia in 1926 with a doctoral degree, Simkins, who belonged to the third generation, developed the ability to find spots in the historical record that merited greater attention from scholars, and he also became a gifted stylist . Clement Eaton, another significant historian of the South, once noted the “verve and salty paradox” of Simkins’s prose.2 Writing history developed into a passion for him early in life and only waned in his last years as sickness overtook him. Simkins’s attempt to illuminate neglected areas of history resulted in major scholarlyaccomplishments.Hiswritinghelpedalterthepathof Reconstruction historiography. His books on the nineteenth-century agrarian revolt against South Carolina’s Bourbon political establishment stand out as the first scholarly writing on the subject. He coauthored a book on women’s history long before the subject gained acceptance in academe and later produced a widely used textbook on southern history that remained in print more than two decades . Fellow historian William Hesseltine called the textbook “a must . . . for every Southerner interested in understanding his section.”3 In these three fields, then—Reconstruction, southern agrarianism, and women’s history— Simkins’s efforts were those of a pioneer, his work providing a foundation on which later historians would build. Much of his scholarship is still considered credible today, an outstanding feat considering that his first major book came out in the early 1930s. Rarely has his work been rejected in toto, although present historians consider a number of his ideas inaccurate or archaic. When Simkins began his career in the 1920s, the field of southern history was only in its nascent stages, but it would over time expand into a major discipline in academe, thanks in part to his efforts. Numerous historians benefited from his insight, most notably C. Vann Woodward, who sought Sim­ kins’s advice when writing Origins of the New South, arguably the most important book on southern history ever produced. In recognition of his achievements, Simkins’scolleaguesselectedhimtoserveaspresidentoftheSouthernHistorical Association in 1954. “Few contemporary scholars have contributed more during the last generation to the teaching and writing of southern history than Francis Butler Simkins,” Vanderbilt University historian Dewey Grantham wrote in the mid-1960s, shortly before Simkins’s death, yet Simkins remains a marginal figure.4 Simkins’s fate is ironic, considering his scholarly achievement and his reputation as a racial liberal prior to World War II. His writing invested blacks with an agency few historians were willing to grant...