The story of Georgia’s political firebrand Tom Watson will never be a defining national myth. Its extraordinary implications for American democracy notwithstanding, Watson’s life is saturated with too much tragedy to qualify for the righteous optimism demanded by the national canon. When Watson’s statue was removed from the steps of the Georgia state Capitol in 2013, the event went virtually unnoticed outside Atlanta. Without historian C. Vann Woodward’s transcendent 1938 biography, Watson would have surely disappeared even from academic study, like most politicians of his era.

But Watson’s life retains an unsettling power that, once encountered, inescapably colors interpretations of the American past and present.