Finding Humanity in Gone With the Wind

The Atlantic ^ | July 16, 2015 | Cass R. Sunstein

[Mygirlsmom]

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme"

(Attributed to Twain)

[BlackElk]

The O’Haras are portrayed in the movie saying a rosary at home at Tara. I forget whether Scarlett’s mother (Miss Ellen?) led the rosary or whether it was said after her death with her coffin in the room. I need to see the movie again.

[BlackElk]

A thoroughly accurate (in every respect) and insightful post!

[donna]

Oh, very good. Now that is satisfying.

[Mygirlsmom]

The O’Haras are portrayed in the movie saying a rosary at home at Tara. I forget whether Scarlett’s mother (Miss Ellen?) led the rosary

It was early on, both in the book and the movie. Ellen is a staunch Catholic, and the rosary is said nightly. Scarlett is bored and annoyed by this, but during the night described she figures that she just needs to tell Ashley how she feels about him in order to win him over. Her realization fills her with such delight that she participates in the rosary session with a uncharacteristic fervor.

[Aliska]

I think in her crowd and younger age it’s more socially acceptable to be liberal....it means you “care”. They are unaware of dange

And they will vote for Hillary. They don't WANT to know about the corruption in that family and people they associate with. Some "millenials" are starting to see what they are up against financially and postpone marrying, families, etc., so maybe they will listen to some Republican candidates or I think Rand Paul will be popular with them.

To be fair, at 49, I was up to my eyeballs with my then-turbulent life so I tuned out politics. I wouldn't have voted for them, but it was the Clintons that made me take notice plus I had observed what was happening with job losses and outsourcing.

I have nothing but time on my hands so I've become somewhat of a news junkie. But I do some fact checking and digging deeper on some issues. FR is a help, too, if you try not to feed into getting jumped on now and then.

So that is what is scary. My university was liberal way back in the 60's when I think back on it but I took substantive courses where there wasn't a whole lot of room for influence peddling. We didn't have all that women's crap mickey mouse stuff.

I happen to care a lot about a lot of people, too, will often pray for people who have suffered tragedy and find myself in tears and crying. But to fix this country it is going to take some tough love. I just think we will keep on as we have, the media will have more sway, talk radio may phase out (mostly older people call our local show), keep on keeping on until we go over the cliff.

Trump isn't going to be able to fix it but not because he doesn't have good intentions. He's probably unelectable anyway plus if I'm around, I like most of what he is saying so far (he remonstrated with conservatives and said single payer health insurance because we need to cover everybody). I don't like government running the healthcare industry and realize how difficult insurance companies are in reality but I will need to look at what they are selling if we can know what's in it if and when it comes up again.

There I went off the deep end again lol.

[Mygirlsmom]

*an* uncharacteristic

[BlackElk]

Judah P. Benjamin was not only in Jefferson Davis's cabinet but he served at various times as Attorney General, Secretary of War and Secretary of State.

You are right about Lincoln's cabinet but, even though I am no fan of Dishonest Abe, I would not read too much into that fact.

The takeaway is the fact that, contrary to uninformed opinion, the South was quite hospitable to Jews. Jeff Davis, though an Anglican, received his elementary school education at Kentucky Catholic schools run by the Dominican Order.

[Aliska]

I'm glad for the good information on this thread about Margaret Mitchell. Writing as she did, I thought she was gifted but sometimes it's a love of the subject and sheer hard work.

Did anyone mention that she died tragically in a taxicab accident in New York City. I'll have to look up the date. I didn't get that quite right, did I? Peachtree Street has always stuck in my mind somehow.

"At 8.15 on the mercilessly hot evening of August 11th, 1949, Peggy Mitchell Marsh and her husband John parked their car at the side of Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia. On their way to see the film Canterbury Tales at the Peachtree Arts Theatre, they started across the road. They were half way over when a car was suddenly upon them from their right, driven too fast by an off-duty taximan who had had too much to drink. Peggy Marsh dodged back towards the kerb they had left as the driver desperately steered to his left to try to avoid the couple. She was hit, dragged along under the car and left unconscious with such severe injuries that she died at the Grady Hospital five days later. She was forty-nine."

historytoday.com also NYT from googling (tired of coding links . . .

Age 48 or 49, a genteel looking woman.

Just saw your post, BlackElk, thank you for that detail. It might be in segments on youtube.

mumblpeg, I doubt if I'll ever get down south but I wouldn't mind walking it either if I could walk better. It would be nice to put a token or flowers on his grave. I guess I could have it done and pray for his soul. In that part of Illinois, Knox, Fulton, Peoria Counties, I never came across too much about Catholics but Alonzo's surname was Kelly so they may have been from Ireland and Catholic.

I had a German Catholic great grandmother, the only Catholic ancestor I've found until you get way way back in England. It appears a lot of them quit practicing their religions on the Illinois prairie in those days but I may be doing them an injustice when I say that.

The Catholics are now more populous all throughout that part of Illinois and the whole country for that matter.

Almost forgot mumblypeg. Wasn't that a game we used to play with knives? I remember sitting with the boys and my pocket knife, dim memory that maybe we tossed the knives to stick in the ground and the one who got closest to the peg was the winner. Something like that.

[wardaddy]

There is a book The Jewish Confederates by I think Rosen

An attorney in the Carolinas from an antebellum Jew

Judah P Benjamen ....Jeff Davis number one assistant

South Carolina first govt ever to guarantee jewish religious freedom in a constitution

Mississippi and Alabama and Louisusna followed suit

Jews in antebellum south actually owned plantations and ventured beyond urban Jewish quarter pursuits that were the result of restrictions

New Orleans and Charleston largest Jewish pops prior to WBTS

I can go on and on

Mississippi my hometown is littered with scores of old rural temples from the old days....mostly from Sephardim stock

Where it went off the rails was freedom rider days when leftist jewish kids from Oberlin college etc swarmed the south doing voter registration and some chicanery and attracting the attention of violent white supremacist factions

Local Jews got tarred simply by association

That right there is where folks like Harvey Weinstein and David Geffen choose to focus

It’s unfortunate because that view even extends to some jewish conservatives

White christian southern folks are the most zealous jewish defenders in this dangerous world that exists
Even the most ignorant white trash here gets that

The term redneck defines an extinct dodo bird like creature

[wardaddy]

Exactly

When I was a boy we still had civil war era ruins covered in kudzu

The distance was same as WWI is to now

My dad knew people as a boy who were mid 80s who had witnessed the Civil War first hand

[Liz]

The Atlanta Railyard scene w/ Scarlet picking her way across the injured soldiers is a most compelling cinematic scene ....

.....and if you look closely, you'll see some of the injured are actually mannequins interspersed w/ real actors b/c the production needed to save money.

[Liz]

MORE GWTW LORE:

Margaret Mitchell has said she recaptured in GWTW the war stories she overheard her family talk about.

Clark Gable met privately w/ Margaret Mitchell and later said she was one of the most fascinating women he had ever met.

The Mitchell family were all devout Catholics---unusual for the South---and some of the valuable Mitchell artifacts were later bequeathed to the Catholic Church.

[trisham]

Thanks, Sontagged. Gone With the Wind is one of those movies that I have watched many times over the years, and I discover new perspectives about the characters and plot almost every time I see it. To me, that is the sign of an excellent piece of art/work.

What makes a great movie or book? Imho, it speaks to us about morality, character, courage, sin, betrayal and weakness, among other things.

[berdie]

The article was much better than I anticipated, given today’s penchant to moralize about how things were in the past.

GWTW is one of my favorite books and I have read it numerous, numerous times (like many on this thread). The character development is excellent.I will still read random parts. It’s like visiting old friends.

[Beowulf9]

I know all that you have said. I have read Gone with the wind several times. I love the movie and the book.

But as far as her research goes in the days she did it I don’t think there was much written about in the poor treatment of the slaves. It was not the common notion of the times and was not the common interest of the times.

If she knew, which likely she did she may have chose to leave it out of her book because just common sense tells you that when someone is owned as a slave it’s going to be a lot of abuse by petty tyrants. There is no reflection in her book of those abuses and we know they occurred.

I really think she veered off this course for the sake of producing a novel more based on something lighter and entertaining in the way of a romance.

[Beowulf9]

What do you mean, ‘Sontagged’?

[Sontagged]

Prior to GWTW, Mitchell wrote a short story about a biracial couple, extremely racy for her time. She was very much aware of the problem of racism.

Anyway, GWTW is not just a “romance”. It is a study of greed, national delusion, romantic idolatry, jealousy, war and insanity as well as the everyday racism of the Catholic “plantation aristocracy”. It properly positions Confederate “romance” into its socio-political backdrop.

Just as marriage is a building block of society, Mitchell properly used her heroine's romantic illusions and couplings as the structural vehicle for her plot in order to describe the Old South. The point of her book was not to show the evils of slavery, but to show how it was tolerated within the antebellum South.

I particularly appreciated how she weaved in the Ku Klux Klan as it was originally accepted, while leaving out some of its most evil origins with Albert Pike and pals. She reduced the Klan to what Southern women “commonly believed” about it. As a Lincoln fan, I also appreciated all the “anti-Abe” sentiments for their historical accuracy.

Just because GWTW was a tremendous popular success does not mean it was just a “romance” either; it was a tour-de-force on a cultural level precisely because Mitchell did so much research. Her research made the story come alive.

Perhaps Selznick produced it to make up for the racist and pro Masonic/Klan vision of the silent screen Civil War blockbuster, Birth of A Nation.

But Mitchell's point was to try to show how the Old South actually functioned — and she succeeded brilliantly.

(BTW, you discuss GWTW as being a “romance” as if Mitchell wrote a bad romantic comedy. LOL.)

[Sontagged]

I agree with you completely. I didn’t see your reply until after I just wrote post #58:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3313646/posts?page=58#58

[Beowulf9]

Yes, I do believe she showed many different sides of the day she wrote about, the people and humanity.

However, to me the main theme of the book was romance. The Civil War seemed to be a good backdrop.

I don’t consider it a light comedy. I consider romance to be an elevated state of mind that took place even during a war torn country. It was about a personal life during that time.