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Dr Lawrence Goodwyn

Birth: 1928
Cochise County
Arizona, USA
Death: Sep. 29, 2013
Durham
Durham County
North Carolina, USA

Dr. Lawrence Goodwyn
Durham
The author of a seminal history of Populism died at his home in Durham, North Carolina on September 29th.

Lawrence Goodwyn was a professor of history at Duke University for 32 years and a theorist of social movements. His book, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America redefined the most important reform movement of the 19th century. He also authored Breaking the Barrier: The rise of Solidarity in Poland.

The son of a career army officer, Goodwyn was born in Ft. Huachuca, Arizona in 1928.


After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Texas, Goodwyn founded the Oral History Program at Duke. He helped lead the successful campaign to keep the Nixon Presidential Library out of Duke University. He was an impassioned fan of the Dallas Cowboys, the Atlanta Braves, and, especially, the Duke Blue Devils basketball team.
He is survived by his wife of 55 years Nell; his son, Wade, and daughter-in-law, Sharon; his daughter, Lauren, and son-in-law, Michael Whalen; his grandson, Rynne Whalen; and his three granddaughters, Kiera Whalen, and Hannah and Samantha Goodwyn.


Published in The News & Observer on October 6, 2013



Burial:
Unknown

Created by: Alma Smith
Record added: Oct 06, 2013 
Find A Grave Memorial# 118291537
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The New York Times     http://nyti.ms/GDCv9V

[Second photo (office) accompanies this article. Lawrence Goodwyn, sitting on the floor, during  interviews for Duke's oral history project in the mid-1970s.]

Lawrence Goodwyn, Historian of Populism, Dies at 85
By WILLIAM YARDLEY OCT. 4, 2013

Lawrence Goodwyn, whose experience building cross-racial political coalitions in the 1960s led him to write an authoritative history of the rise of American populism in the 19th century, died Sunday at his home in Durham, N.C. He was 85.

The cause was emphysema, said his son, Wade.

Dr. Goodwyn’s 1976 book, “Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America,” became a standard text in colleges and something of a blueprint for activists hoping to harness grass-roots support to force political change. (An abridged version, “The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America,” was published in 1978.)

Yet Dr. Goodwyn, who had helped build political coalitions of blacks, Mexican immigrants, liberal whites and labor unions in Texas before shifting to academics, made it clear in the book that a truly effective populist movement, conceived and mobilized at the ground level, was difficult to create and sustain.

“Democratic Promise,” a finalist for the National Book Award in 1977, described how farmers, particularly in the South and Southwest, began forming alliances after currency changes in the 1870s caused severe reductions in the prices they were paid for crops. Left to the mercy of banks and their lending policies, they spurned outside help and formed cooperatives to buy seed and equipment and then sell their crops.

“To describe the origins of Populism in one sentence,” Dr. Goodwyn wrote, “the cooperative movement recruited American farmers, and their subsequent experience within the cooperatives radically altered their political consciousness. The agrarian revolt cannot be understood outside the framework of the economic crusade that not only was its source but also created the culture of the movement itself.”

By the late 1880s, the alliance had given rise to a new political party, the People’s Party, and in 1892 it helped elect candidates to state legislatures, Congress and the governorship of Colorado. Its presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, a former Iowa congressman, received more than a million popular votes and 22 electoral votes. In 1896, he and the People’s Party supported the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan.

That was the peak. The People’s Party soon lost cohesion, and the farmers’ cooperatives never achieved the financial independence the organizers had hoped for. But the effort influenced later policies, including the New Deal, and Dr. Goodwyn showed that the alliance fostered more cooperation between blacks and whites than earlier histories had recorded, even though the whites did not necessarily treat blacks equally.

Dr. Goodwyn was drawn into political and civil rights activism in the early 1960s while working as a reporter and editor for The Texas Observer, a news magazine. He helped galvanize support for liberal Democrats, including Ralph W. Yarborough, who ran for governor several times in the 1950s and eventually became a United States senator, and for Don Yarborough (no relation), who narrowly lost the 1962 Democratic primary for governor to John B. Connally Jr.

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In 1963, Dr. Goodwyn helped create the Democratic Coalition, a more formalized version of the multiracial grass-roots groups that had come together for Don Yarborough’s 1962 campaign. As he traveled the state and the South, as both an activist and a freelance journalist, he found that the lore of the populist moment had endured.

“He was starting to hear whispers of this earlier coalition,” said Max Krochmal, a historian at Texas Christian University who interviewed Dr. Goodwyn for a book he is writing. “Some of those memories were still alive, and that’s what drove him to want to dig deeper.”

Lawrence Corbett Goodwyn was born July 16, 1928, in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., an Army base where his father, Col. Carey Edwin Goodwyn, was stationed. After graduating from Texas A&M University, he joined the Army, rising to captain before he was discharged and moved to Austin in the early 1950s. He began his doctoral work more than a decade later at the University of Texas.

He became a professor at Duke University in 1971 and remained there 32 years. He founded Duke’s Oral History Project, which gathered interviews throughout the South, focusing on blacks involved in the civil rights movement. The project employed many black graduate students, in part because Dr. Goodwyn insisted that whites should not have sole possession of Southern history.

In 1991, Dr. Goodwyn wrote “Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland,” tracing the development of worker-organized efforts in Poland.

In addition to his son, Dr. Goodwyn is survived by his wife of 55 years, the former Nell DeReese; a daughter, Lauren; and four grandchildren.