Posted on 11/13/2004 11:12:00 AM PST by LouAvul
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Based on Margaret Mitchell's hugely popular novel, producer David O. Selznick's four-hour epic tale of the American South during slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction is the all-time box-office champion.
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Considering its financial success and critical acclaim, "Gone With the Wind" may be the most famous movie ever made.
It's also a lie.
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Along with D.W. Griffith's technically innovative but ethically reprehensible "The Birth of a Nation" (from 1915), which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroic, "GWTW" presents a picture of the pre-Civil War South in which slavery is a noble institution and slaves are content with their status.
Furthermore, it puts forth an image of Reconstruction as one in which freed blacks, the occupying Union army, Southern "scalawags" and Northern "carpetbaggers" inflict great harm on the defeated South, which is saved - along with the honor of Southern womanhood - by the bravery of KKK-like vigilantes.
To his credit, Selznick did eliminate some of the most egregious racism in Mitchell's novel, including the frequent use of the N-word, and downplayed the role of the KKK, compared with "Birth of a Nation," by showing no hooded vigilantes.
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One can say that "GWTW" was a product of its times, when racial segregation was still the law of the South and a common practice in the North, and shouldn't be judged by today's political and moral standards. And it's true that most historical scholarship prior to the 1950s, like the movie, also portrayed slavery as a relatively benign institution and Reconstruction as unequivocally evil.
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Or as William L. Patterson of the Chicago Defender succinctly wrote: "('Gone With the Wind' is a) weapon of terror against black America."
(Excerpt) Read more at sacticket.com ...
1. the person is not qualified to have an expert opinion on the subject,
2. experts in the field disagree on this issue.
3. the authority was making a joke, drunk, or otherwise not being serious
Satisfying, or pointing out in argument the satisfaction of, one of these conditions is referred to as "subverted authority". I used it in pointing out that Gordon Wood is an author of markedly antirepublican and antidemocratic views who considers the American Revolution a failure and Hamilton as some sort of demiurge. You used it in dishing up the speckled career and deep-pink sympathies of Jack Rakove, and his lack of credentials in the field in which he was writing.
He was a better defender of freedom than you are.
Better check with the Draft Board, btw -- they might not have your cell-phone number. Though I'm sure they have your Social and can find you in five minutes if they have to.
Oh, the South didn't institute a draft?
Yes, modern technology is grand. If we had it back in the 19th century, just think how difficult it would have been for those ungrateful slaves to escape their wonderful condition.
No, it elevated Lincoln into the American pantheon and terminated all rational discussion of his policies and constitutional pretensions. Had he lived, there would have been some sort of reaction against what he did to the country. His death and monumentalization arrested that.
Couldn't have the South lose all that money now could we?
The worst thing that could have happened for the South was Lincoln's death.
That, or watching Wlat's videos while dropping Paxil and Viagra.
Woo hoo. Big night in Oxnard.
Oh, by the way, I didn't wait to get drafted, I voluntered to defend my country-how about you?
You might run your view of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments as suckerbait for the rubes past Chief Justice Rehnquist, who (with J's Scalia and Thomas) has been very active in the rehabilitation of the Tenth Amendment and the limitations it places on assumptions (usurpations) of federal power. Particularly since, as I posted to you and you seem to be ignoring pretty obdurately, the Tenth Amendment was the one which in particular allowed the Constitution itself to be ratified -- the sine qua non, the one that gets Hamilton's eggs sent back if the Federalists don't come across.
At least you've told us something important about yourself -- that you believe in easy promises and welshing. Very Clintonoid of you.
Tell your interesting theory about the Tenth Amendment to Scalia and you'll wind up asking a proctologist to perform an emergency amendmentectomy.
The real historical fact is that the Springfield Argus broke the story that the real owners of Dred Scott were Massachusetts Congressman Calvin Chaffee and his wife Irene. That was quoted in the Boston Post on June 1, 1857. The Cleveland Plain Dealer commented, "The decision confirms to this free soil hypocrite [nc - Congressman Chaffee who had actually changed from Free Soiler to Abolitionist] by right of his wife, the body and blood of Dred Scott and his family."
Regarding Calvin Chaffee's attempts to lie his way out of responsibility, Fehrenbacher charitably wrote, "One suspects that either Chaffee was dissimulating or that he had been misled by his wife." He did not "dissimulate," he lied. He got caught. He did not run for re-election.
The Agreed Statement of Facts, falsely sworn to by the colluding parties, averred that Sanford purchased Scott directly from John Emerson. Emerson died in 1843, more than a decade before the alleged sale. Both sides knew that.
Fehrenbacher notes there is no evidence that Sanford so much as ever laid eyes on Scott.
"It looks," said Caleb Cushing in a speech in October, 1857, "like a fancy case, got up and carried on for the public edification and amusement."
The entire case was a pack of manufactured lies. It was falling apart.
It was Curtis who had already earned the title of the "Slave Catcher Judge."
Chief Justice Taney challenged Justice Curtis. Justice Curtis resigned.
[cr #898] Taney changed the decision between the time he delivered it from the bench, to the time it was published, contrary to the rules of the Court. Taney admitted it, and rationalized his conduct. There really isn't any more to be said on the subject.
This is merely a rerun of your dishonest comments about the case of Mitchell v. Harmony. After days of listening to capitan_kerryfugio blather, we wound up with this: LINK
I have not read Mitchell, but the description in the Hamdi footnote is that the plantiff was a US citizen. As such, it is not applicable to the southerners in the ACW.
So, you had to admit that you had never read the decision in Mitchell. I then proved that what you attributed to a footnote was not a footnote at all. Furthermore, I proved that it did not come from the decision of the court in Hamdi but it came from a petitition filed by a public defender.
And here we are again.
capitan_refugio, you have never seen any transcript of the comments of Chief Justice Taney as read from the bench.
capitan_refugio, you have never seen any copy of any draft of Chief Justice Taney's official opinion.
You have talked and talked about things you have never seen.
In your #663 to 4CJ you say "The documentation exists in the National Archives, which contain two sets of printer's proofs, demostrating (sic) Taney's substantial changes. (Supreme Court Records, RG 267, Opinion in Appellate Cases, Box no. 52, National Archives)"
Fehrenbacher at page 320 wrote, "If so the opinion was ultimately expanded about 50 per cent, making it some eighteen pages longer, as Curtis calculated. This conclusion is partly confirmed by more definite evidence in the National Archieves, where two different sets of page proofs of the Taney opinion have been preserved. Handwritten additions to the proofs constitute about eight pages of the version finally published. [34]
Footnote 34 at page 670 reads, "Supreme Court Records, RG 267, Opinions in Appellate cases, Rox no. 52, NA."
It demonstrates that there were drafts and handwritten changes made to drafts. It does NOT demonstrate "substantial" changes or material changes
Fehrenbacher does not provide a quote of anything from the archives. For that reason, neither does capitan_kerryfugio.
Fehrenbacher writes, "Now, if Taney added eight pages after the document had been set in type, it is not difficult to believe that he had expanded the original manuscript by as much as ten pages before he sent it to the printer."
That does not demonstrate anything. It says if A it is not difficult to believe B.
Fehrenbacher continues, "It therefore appears that Curtis was substantially correct in his critique of the published opinion.
It appears that Fehrenbacher and capitan_kerryfugio are unable to demonstrate much, they can only refer to appearances and things not difficult to believe.
Fehrenbacher continues, "Taney's denial of having made any significant changes, though perhaps not untruthful according to his own peculiar lights, must be labeled inaccurate."
It must be noted that Fehrenbacher's assertion that Taney denied he "made any significant changes" though perhaps not untruthful according to his own peculiar lights, must be labeled inaccurate. That is not what Taney wrote. What Taney wrote was, "There is not one historical fact, nor one principle of constitutional law, or common law, or chancery law, or statute law, in the printed opinion, which was not distinctly announced and maintained from the bench; nor is there any one historical fact, or principle, or point of law, which was affirmed in the opinion from the bench, omitted or modified, or in any degree altered, in the printed opinion."
Nobody has demonstrated any material change. By providing not one quote of the archival drafts, Fehrenbacher did not even make an attempt to do so. capitan_kerryfugio cannot even demonstrate that he has ever seen the draft material of which he "demonstrates" such knowledge.
Fehrenbacher writes that Taney's explanation, "was the plain acknowledgement that the Taney revisions were indeed rebuttal to certain parts of the dissenting opinions." Assuming that to be absolutely true, it does not aver any change to the holdings of the court as read from the bench.
Of course, as we know, capitan_kerryfugio can even "demonstrate" knowledge of Supreme Court cases that never existed. When speaking about Lemmon v. The People, at capitan_refugio #386, capitan regaled us with this mush about a case that never went to the Supreme Court: "Lemmon v the People was a case which foreshadowed Dred Scott. The Taney Court overturned a New York State statute which immediately freed slaves brought into the state. The decision guaranteed "sojourn and transit" and transit rights to slave-owners through free states. It did not address, to my knowledge, the issue of residence." Every stated position about the outcome of the case is wrong. Lemmon was decided by the New York State Court of Appeals in 1860, about 4 years after the U.S. Supreme Court decided Scott v. Sandford.
As for what the people got to read, we must follow the story of Benjamin Howard, the official Supreme Court reporter. He earned his living by his salary and publishing of Court decisions. Thus, besides being grossly unethical, the conduct of Curtis and McLean of releasing their opinions to the press deprived Mr. Howard of his livelihood. Howard protested and received $1500. Howard was unable to sell his own publication because, before the official release of the opinions, the New York Tribune had already flooded the market with a 25-cent pamphlet.
So, that 25-cent pamphlet was what the people read. That pamphlet contained the full version of the Curtis and McLean opinions. And the New York paper provided its own summary of the other opinions.
That is something like the people getting the O.J. trial from the evening news reports and talk shows and hearing over and over about how the limo driver, Alan Park, observed a black male, approximately OJ's height and weight, run across the lawn and enter the house.
Despite the great spin by the New York press, and others, the story was unraveling for what it was -- a conspiracy by colluding parties to manufacture a falsified set of "facts" and present a bogus case to the Supreme Court.
When are you ever going to tumble to the fact that what you are repeating is just a lot of authoritarian, antirepublican propaganda uttered in order to overawe the People and the States into obedience to a self-promoting business class? When are you ever going to get it?
This "Mystical Union" stuff would put me to sleep, if I weren't aware how obnoxious it is, and how nefarious the intentions of the people promoting it.
Anyway, the foundation of the current Government and social compact rests on the Constitution, not the Declaration or any Revolutionary document. The Treaty of Paris has more legal significance for the United States than the documents you're arguing over. Even the Declaration of Independence is a scoping document and a statement of causes and mission, not a social compact or the foundation of a government -- or the Union.
Here is more to help you understand who Gordon Wood is.
GOPcap: Is it my turn to water the plant, or yours?
[cr #807 to GOPcap] Do you know who Gordon Wood is?
Answer: A history professor.
This is very distinguished legal company, and I confess to wondering about my qualifications to be a commentator on Justice Scalia's paper. I do not seem to have too many of them. I have never been to law school, so I have not experienced that intellectual rebirth which Justice Scalia says every first-year law school student experiences. I am not a jurist. I am not a legal philosopher. I am not even a legal or constitutional historian. I am just a plain eighteenth-century American historian who happens to have written something on the origins of the Constitution. I am not sure that this suffices.
Source: Gordon Wood, from his essay which appears in A Matter of Interpretation, Federal Courts and the Law, by Antonin Scalia, 1997, p. 49.
THAT IS GORDON WOOD.
[nc] Do you know who Antonin Scalia is?
Answer: A Supreme Court justice.
In A Matter of Interpretation, Federal Courts and the Law, by Antonin Scalia, 1997, Scalia provided his essay on interpreting the Constitition and the laws to Gordon S. Wood, Laurence H. Tribe, Mary Ann Glendon, and Ronald Dworkin for their critical review. Scalia provided a short response to the reviews. Below is the response of Justice Antonin Scalia to the comments of history Professor Gordon S. Wood.
PROFESSOR WOODIn Professor Wood's scholarly presentation, the principal point with which I take issue is his assertion that in the English legal system statutes "had to make sense in terms of the rest of the common law," i.e., that there was an inherent judicial power to ignore statutory law. Professor Wood accepts as orthodoxy Lord Chief Justice Coke's statement in Dr. Bonham's case (1610) that "in many cases, the common law will controul Acts of Parliament and sometimes adjudge them to be utterly void: for when an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will controul it and adjudge such Act to be void." [1] It was not orthodoxy at all, but an extravagant assertion of judicial power, scantily supported by the authorities cited, [2] vehemently criticized by contemporaries, [3] and seemingly abandoned by Coke himself in his Institutes. [4] As Professor J. H. Baker describes it, "[l]ittle more was heard in England of judicial review of statutes, and Coke's doctrine of 1610 was whittled down into a presumption to be applied only where a statute was ambiguous or in need of qualification by necessary implication." [5] The genuine orthodoxy is set forth in Blackstone:
I know it is generally laid down more largely, that acts of parliament contrary to reason are void. But if the parliament will positively enact a thing to be done which is unreasonable, I know of no power that can control it: and the examples usually alleged in support of this sense of the rule do none of them prove, that where the main object of a statute is unreasonable the judges are at liberty to reject it; for that were to set the judicial power above that of the legislature, which would be subversive of all government. [6]The record does not, I think, support Professor Wood's belief that Blackstone was setting forth a new, eighteenth-century doctrine, spawned by "the emergence ... of the idea of parliamentary sovereignty and the positivist conception of law." Blackstone was not new; Dr. Bonham's case was eccentric. I agree with Profesor Wood's contention that English judges claimed "to have the capacity to interpret and construe parliamentary statutes in such a way as to fit them into the entire legal structure." My essay acknowledges (and indeed insists) that modern American judges have the same capacity (see pp. 16-17). But construing statutory ambiguities to be harmonious with the common law is quite different from ignoring plain texts that contradict the "right and reason" of the common law. The quotation from Blackstone suggests another point on which I disagree with Professor Wood. From the premise that "[t]he sharp distinction we recognize between legislation and adjudication is a modern one," he concludes that "there are very good deeply rooted historical reasons why statutory construction in both England and America has involved a good deal of judicial common-law type interpretation." I am sure what he means by his premise is not that the inherent difference between legislation and adjudication has been recognized only in modern times (Aristotle saw it quite clearly); [7] but rather that appreciation of the desirability of separating the adjudicative function from the legislative one is a modern development (modern, that is, as historians rather than journalists use the term, whereby Montesquieu is modern). I suppose that is correct. In this country, colonial legislatures often sat as courts and rendered their decrees in laws. [8] But while legislatures regularly adjudicated, I am not aware of any evidence that adjudicative tribunals (the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, for example, as opposed to the General Court, which is its legislature) felt free to legislate—that is, to change or depart from statutory law in the course of promulgating their adjudicative degrees. To the contrary, it was accepted (Lord Chief Justice Coke in Dr. Bonham's case notwithstanding) that courts were in principle bound by statutory enactments.
This is not to say that I take issue with Professor Wood's conclusion that the problem of judicial rewriting of democratically adopted texts is "deeply rooted in our history" and that "judges have exercised that sort of presumably undemocratic authority from the very beginning." To acknowledge that is simply to acknowledge that there have always been, as there undoubtedly always will be, willful judges who bend the law to their wishes. But acknowledging evil is one thing, and embracing it is something else. It seems to me that Professor Wood neglects that distinction when he surmises that "the enhanced judicial discretion and judicial lawmaking of the past three or four decades represents a change in degree, not one in kind." There has been a change in kind, I think, not just in degree, when the willful judge no longer has to go about his business in the dark-- when it is publicly proclaimed, and taught in the law schools, that judges ought to make the statutes and the Constitution say what they think best.
Professor Wood thinks that textualism, as I have described it, is "as permissive and as open to arbitrary judicial discretion and expansion as the use of legislative intent or other interpretative methods, if the text-minded judge is so inclined." I do not agree. No textualist-originalist interpretation that passes the laugh test could, for example, extract from the United States Constitution the prohibition of capital punishment that three nontextualist justices have discovered, or the prohibition of abortion laws that a majority of the Court has found. Moreover, the judge who uses "legislative intent or other interpretative methods" does not entirely abandon text, but rather adds to whatever manipulability text contains the (much greater) manipulability of his ex-tratextual methodology. I concede, of course, that textualism is no ironclad protection against the judge who wishes to impose his will, but it is some protection. The criterion of "legislative intent," by contrast, positively invites the judge to impose his will; by setting him off in search of what does not exist (there is almost never any genuine legislative intent on the narrow point at issue), it reduces him to guessing that the legislature intended what was most reasonable, which ordinarily coincides with what the judge himself thinks best. Other nontextual methodologies are similarly wish-fulfilling.
Finally, I may respond to Professor Wood's disheartening perception that what I have addressed -- the proclivity of our judges to function like legislators -- is, after all, "only an aspect of the problem that we Americans have with our judges, possibly more a manifestation of the problem than a cause of it." Every issue, I suppose, is "only an aspect" of some other one -- the problem we Americans have with our judges, for example, being only an aspect of the problem we Americans have with our government, which in turn is only an aspect of the problem we Americans have with life. But whether life-tenured judges are free to revise statutes and constitutions adopted by the people and their representatives is not merely -- as Professor Wood describes it -- a question of some "importance," but a question utterly central to the existence of democratic government. Professor Wood is perhaps correct that the problem I have discussed is only a "manifestation" of a more fundamental ill; again, most things are. But whereas I do not know whether that more fundamental ill is treatable (or indeed even what it is), I am sure that we can induce judges, as we have induced presidents and generals, to stay within their proper governmental sphere.
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[1] Dr. Bonham's Case, 8 Co. Rep. 114a, 118a, 77 Eng. Rep. 646,652 (K.B. 1610).
[2] See Theodore F. T. Plucknett, Bonham's Case and Judicial Review, 40 Harv. L.Rev. 30, 35-48 (1926).
[3] Id. at 49-52.
[4] Edward Coke, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England 37, 41 (photo, reprint 1979) (London: M. Flesher 1628). See also J. H. Baker, An Intro duction to English Legal History 242 (3d ed. 1990).
[5] Baker, supra note 4, at 242.
[6] 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 91 (photo, reprint 1979) (1765).
[7] See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, in 2 The Complete Works of Aristotle 1795-96 (Jonathan Barnes ed., 1984).
[8] See the discussion of this point in Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc., 115 S.Ct.1447,1453-56 (1995).
When confronted with the erudition of Justice Scalia, the first thing Professor Wood did was note his lack of credentials for legal argument.
You won't make the rules around here, and we aren't going to play your little game. If you want to bring red-diaper historians and assorted campus Marxists in here, you do so at your own peril.
This isn't a "herstory" seminar in Ithaca or a moderated lit-crit belly-button feelathon in Berkeley. You're talking to Americans now.
You might want to retool your game, chump, because it isn't working in here.
Start with the lying.
They sure do. They're full of quotes of yours.
Sorry, sonny, but you're not old enough to sign the adults off around here.
capitan_refugio #237 8/29/2004 to GOPcap argued that "Bollman was not about habeas corpus...." Habeas Corpus, by Eric M. Freedman, NYU Press, 2001, devotes three entire chapters to Bollman.
capitan_refugio #384 8/31/2004 to nc purported three quotes to be about the SCOTUS case of Scott v. Sandford which were actually about the Missouri case of Scott v. Emerson.
capitan_refugio #386 8/31/2004 to nc vividly retold the story of how SCOTUS and CJ Taney decided the case of Lemmon v. The People. The case never went to the U.S. Supreme Court.
capitan_refugio #649 9/03/2004 to nc purported to quote from the Opinion of the Supreme Court in The Amy Warwick. The quote was of the argument of Mr. Carlisle, an attorney in the case of The Brilliante.
capitan_refugio #1370 9/18/2004 to nc attributed a quote to "Hamdi footnote." It was neither Hamdi nor a footnote. It was from a petition by an attorney.
Why, are you missing one?
So you defend that wonderful Confederate Consitution that has slavery built right into it?
The States had every right to leave the Union lest they be deprived of the value of their valuable 'property' (slaves)(according to Jefferson Davis)
And the Germans had a right to living space also.
LOL
This kind of reminds me of the mess around Harry Potter, that we're teaching kids about wizardry. Nobody has a problem with The WIZARD of Oz, one of my all time favorites. Did you know that it was up against GWTW for an Academy Award? I'm glad I didn't have to choose between those two.
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