As white Americans embraced the moonlight and magnolias
The Times in June 2020 on this business of making moral judgements about the past, in particular with regard to slavery and the ways of thinking that made it possible:
But the 1939 classic — still the highest-grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation — has enduringly shaped popular understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction perhaps more than any other cultural artifact.
Before that of course it was The Birth of a Nation, as we talked about the other day. Both are disasters as shapers of popular understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction. You might as well let Hitler’s favorite niece tell the story of the Holocaust. [Hitler had no niece. Hold the phone calls.]
The book was a surprise best-seller of massive proportions, and the movie broke all records. The thing mattered.
But even as white Americans embraced the moonlight and magnolias, African-Americans were registering objections. Soon after the producer David O. Selznick bought the rights, there were complaints that a movie version would incite violence, spread bigotry and even derail a proposed federal anti-lynching bill.
Something else it did, in my view, is plant and entrench an idea of Black people as born servants – as a kind of separate sub-species of human that is there to tighten the corsets and pick the cotton. Not bad, not necessarily officially inferior, just…destined. Destined to work for the white folks, and nothing else. All those movies and tv shows with a Mammy-equivalent in the kitchen and the nursery. She may even get some good lines, she may be shrewd or witty or both, but she is and always will be in service to the white folks. She won’t be doing the math for John Glenn, she won’t be Fanny Lou Hamer, she won’t be a doctor or lawyer or historian. She has her Place.
In 1936, Walter White, the secretary of the NAACP, wrote to [Selznick] expressing concern, and suggesting he hire someone, preferably an African-American, to check “possible errors” of fact and interpretation. “The writing of history of the Reconstruction period has been so completely confederatized during the last two or three generations that we naturally are somewhat anxious,” he wrote.
Selznick initially floated the name of one potential African-American adviser, but ultimately hired two whites, including a journalist friend of Mitchell’s, tasked with keeping the Southern speech authentic (a matter of great concern to some white fans of the novel who wrote to Selznick) and avoiding missteps on details like the appropriateness of Scarlett’s headgear at an evening party.
Point entirely missed.
[T]he film put the nostalgic Lost Cause mythology — by that point, the dominant national view of the Civil War — front and center, starting with the opening title cards paying tribute to “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton fields,” a “pretty world where Gallantry took its last bow.”
Are you able to hold on to your lunch? It’s a struggle here.
Among those who saw it around this time was a teenage Malcolm X. “I was the only Negro in the theater, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug,” he wrote in his autobiography.
It is very very very cringe.
So. Sure, you can say that quarreling with GWTW is “virtue signaling” but you can also, or better yet instead, notice that the movie and the novel are full of racism signaling. Your call.
You might as well let Hitler’s favorite niece tell the story of the Holocaust. [Hitler had no niece. Hold the phone calls.]
Geli Raubal would like a word.
That point about Reconstruction being Confederized is so important. I grew up not with a “Birth of a Nation” view of Reconstruction, but plenty of the “Carpetbagger” legends.
I am so glad that my own research into Reconstruction in my own region showed me the truth. Good work to assure the economic independence of freed slaves happened. I believe much more of it should have happened. We might be mostly over all this by now.
Colin – oops! I did know that once…I suppose that’s why I chose “niece” – the buried memory remembered while the surface one forgot.
I’m not sure how it happened; Oklahoma isn’t noted for it’s liberalism, and has a very racist past and present, but I was taught the truth about Reconstruction. So I would hear people saying these things (I was still a kid; my first exposure to the Civil War was in grade school) and I would think, but that’s not right! The black leaders weren’t incompetent fools….
I’ve felt fortunate for a long time that both that and the Trail of Tears story were not taught from a white supremacist perspective, but from the perspective of someone who wanted to tell the truth about history. I wish we could get that sort of teaching everywhere. It also made the story more interesting than the dry, boring noble South and white man good narrative I have found in other sources. It stuck with me better.
Well we were taught the same in the state of Tennessee, despite at least one ACW battle occurring in the middle of our downtown. Of course, much like Kentucky, the state wasn’t all-in on treason (weren’t many slaves in East Tennessee, so not something the hillbillies were much interested in).
One side gets accused of virtue signalling, the other of dog-whistling. We’re all deeply cynical about our political opponents’ motives. Is X talking about GWTW because he has something interesting to say about its whitewashing of slavery, or is he really just interested in promoting his oh-so-Woke political views? If Y says, “I think some people divide human history into Oppressors vs victims, and that’s counterproductive,” is she really a racist who would secretly be quite happy to defend slavery?
There’s a great deal of ‘virtue signalling’ on the right, but the right appears to lack the ability to reflect upon what in fact they are doing and recognise it for what it is; perhaps it is because they assume it is solely a ‘woke’ failing, or, more simply & cynically, a useful insult. I suggest it might it be a an idea to cast it back at them, along with another favourite insult of theirs: ‘snowflake’. There is a strong similarity between the extreme left and the extreme right, and the kind of things that ‘trigger’ them.
I had known my (now) ex-wife for a year before we got married, and I knew she liked the movie. She was born in Louisiana, and would sometimes say things that made no sense to me as her personal point of pride at being from one of the 4 states that are the “real South.” The Mason-Dixon line was BS, she said. Only Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were the Real South. So, you can imagine what it felt like as we were driving through Mississippi on our way back from a honeymoon in New Orleans for her to say “Slavery wasn’t so bad. Some of them were even treated like members of the family.” It was one of the most sinking feelings I had ever had (and I’m a Minnesota Vikings fan, so you can imagine the depths.)
She didn’t get what is so wrong about people owning other people, let alone the subjection to whippings, rape, family separation, torture, and murder that the slaves were subject to. Imagine even living your whole life without the hope of every being free from the yoke of another. I think that’s the worst torture.
Do these people who romanticize the Old South and tour the Plantation homes in awe of their splendor have an ounce of human empathy? She didn’t get that someone who was a ‘house nigger” faced being sent out to the fields on a moment’s notice if they were imagined to be looking the wrong way at the daughter of a plantation owner, or for trying to learn to read. I tried to reason with the woman I had just married, but it was so ingrained in her by growing up in a culture that embraced such romanticism as depicted in this story. “Gone with the Wind” isn’t the only movie to depict the Reconstruction this way, either. “The Outlaw Josey Wales” is the story of a former Confederate driven from his land and his family murdered by the Union. And he was depicted as a hero, while the Union soldiers were depicted as bloodthirsty avengers.
It’s not virtue signaling to be disgusted by the influence that “Gone with the Wind,” movie and novel, have had on our society. It excuses the worst excesses of our history. And the attitude enables idiots to fly both the US Flag and the Stars and Bars on their trucks as patriots.
GWTW was not the reason we got divorced, but it was a sickening foreshadow of some of the conflicts to come.
(I never understood why Joan Baez covered “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down.” There must be some hidden meaning that I miss. Robbie Robertson said he got the idea from listening to family of Levon Helm talk about Reconstruction, and one could perhaps think of Virgil Caine, who was not a slaveholder, as an innocent victim in an existential power struggle in a country at war with itself.)
Oooof. That does sound like a terrible moment.
I’d like to guest post this, but not if it’s too personal. Say if you’d rather not.
There’s a Rest is History podcast on this, with as guest Sarah Churchwell who wrote “The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells”.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/southern-comforter
The podcast is available on all sorts of providers like Audible, Youtube, Goldhanger.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/gone-with-the-wind/id1537788786?i=1000569080249
@Mike Haubrich – I do like The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Band version rather than Baez (she muffs some of the words). I am of course cheering on Stonewall tearing up the tracks. Defeat has never sounded so pretty. Virgil Caine does come across as a simple country boy caught up in a conflict, on the side of his tribe.
Ophelia, it’s quite alright. I see anything I post as a comment as public, and I’m always honored when you Guest Post something I write.
Excellent.
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The Franco-German channel Arte showed Gone with the Wind earlier this week. I saw it many years ago and enjoyed it, but I didn’t think I would enjoy it now. I was right. My wife watched it until after midnight (0.40), but I went to bed after about 2 hours (about 2 hours more than I wanted to see). I agree with all that Mike Haubrich says above, so I don’t need to repeat it.
From the background information (maybe it’s in Wikipedia, I don’t remember, but I can’t find it now) I learned that Eleanor Roosevelt, someone I thought of as one of the good guys of the first half of the 20th century, liked the book so much that she wanted her black maid to have the role that Hattie McDaniel played. I was rather shocked at that information.
It’s quite a lesson in how profoundly things can change in a decade or two.