William F. Winter: The Politician as Historian

During William F. Winter’s first months as Mississippi governor, in the spring of 1981, he participated in a symposium at Millsaps College with two distinguished Southern authors: Willie Morris and William Styron. The panel discussion examined the rich literary tradition of Mississippi and other Southern states, how the “burdens” of Southern history had contributed to this cultural outpouring, and how recent changes in the region might affect the literary landscape. Many of those present, including the other participants, believed Winter “stole the show.” Journalist Bill Minor noted that the governor “was not put there as a prop or to prove to anybody we had a nice new pin-stripe governor whose taste did not run to bouffant hairdos. Winter was there as a serious student of Southern literature and history, whose comments and questions were often more incisive than those of the guest literary figures” (“Governor”). Willie Morris agreed. During the event, the author wrote a note to himself: “He is saying things which no Governor of a Deep Southern state has ever said, and with the eloquence of a Stevenson or a John Kennedy. This is a historic moment for Mississippi” (214–15).

Winter’s performance at the Millsaps event offered an early example of the governor’s ability to transform the negative stereotypes of his native state, often through the sheer force of his personality and intellect. Whenever he spoke to audiences around Mississippi and the nation and at the salon-style Dinner at the Mansion events he and his wife, Elise, held throughout the Winter administration, people saw and heard a politician but also an intellectual—or more specifically a historian—at work. Throughout his life, Winter studied the past, especially Southern history. His understandings of this past shaped and guided his ideas about political possibilities in Mississippi and the larger region. Like most historians, Winter’s ideas about the past changed over time. From the time of Winter’s youth through the 1960s, almost all Southern historians embraced Lost Cause notions about the “noble” cause of the Confederacy and the “tragic” nature of the Reconstruction that followed. For Southern whites, these memories of the Civil War era provided the rationale for the maintenance of white supremacy in the region. However, by the time Winter became governor, in the wake of the black freedom movement, a more complicated yet more complete version of the region’s past had emerged (E. Winter; Wilson, esp. ch. 5). After the civil rights movement, Winter, like most academic historians, embraced what historian David Goldfield has called “an alternative historical vision” (251) of the South, one that showed “white supremacy was not synonymous with Southern history; in fact, it was inhibiting a more accurate perspective on the past” (255).

William Winter developed an interest in history from an early age. His father, William Aylmer Winter, a farmer and state legislator, had a large library and read avidly, especially biographies and Southern history. As a boy, William would spend many evenings on the front porch of the Winter home listening to Aylmer expound on US and Southern history. Later, William began to work his own way through Aylmer’s massive library, perhaps the largest one in Grenada County, at least until a 1938 house fire destroyed most of the volumes during William’s junior year of high school (W. F. Winter, Bass interview; “W. A. Winter”). During the first six years of his life, William also had a living link with the Civil War. His grandfather, William B. Winter, who had joined the Confederate Army at age sixteen and served with the famous Confederate cavalry unit of Nathan Bedford Forrest, lived in Aylmer’s household until his death in 1929. The aging Civil War veteran regaled the young William Winter with tales of his exploits with Forrest’s cavalry, especially the daring romp into the lobby of Gayoso Hotel in Memphis in 1864 in a failed attempt to capture a Union general. Grandfather Winter also from time to time bought his grandson small gifts, including a pup tent. The young boy would set the tent up in the...