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 ...
You attempted to steal the gov't of Kansas and invaded neutral Kentucky.
As for Maryland and Missouri, if they had traitors in them, they had to be weeded out.
That was in a war situation.
Yes, a man who thinks that a race should be kept in slavery is a very noble man.
Rank speculation on your part. What is more likely is that Lincoln would have kept the more radical reconstructionists in check, and the "heaven-sent" (to use your terminology) actor John Wilkes Booth would have been littel remembered.
Wrongo. The stakes were higher than that, and you don't understand where the passion was.
For example, and please don't do a capitan and demand -- out of blind screw-with-em'ness -- full footnotes and Modern Library Association end notes, biblio, etc., the social divisions apparent during the ratification debates in 1788-90 were still apparent in the South in 1860.
In 1787, men of property tended to go with the Federalists in favor of the new Constitution, since they were strongly attracted by the idea of the Government as a hobby horse for business interests and had a laundry-list of things they thought the government could do for business, beginning with the improvement in the creditworthiness of the federal government if it were given the power to lay direct taxes on the People.
Tidewater planters went for the Constitution, and the Antifederalists who were either wealthy themselves or educated professionals were likely to be won over during the debates by promises to amend the Constitution. John and Sam Adams and John Hancock in Massachusetts were among these Antifederalist luminaries who changed sides.
Three generations later, something of the same social and property division appeared again in the South when the biggest planters tended to rally to the Constitutional Union Party and the candidacy of John Bell:
The single unifying national party in the United States [the Democrats] was now hopelessly sundered, but this was not enough; the conservative Southerners split off from the dominant radicals. The conservatives organized their own Constitutional Union party at Baltimore.This last group contained and represented most of the men of property, including the largest slaveowners, in the South. Secession frightened these men. They declared it would be ruinous to the South. They represented the calmest and best-educated elements in their states, with the least parochial view, and their platform was that the property-holders of the South must fight encroaching industrialism and abolition within the framework of the Constitution. If the South had been a genuine "aristocracy," they might have prevailed.
Sam Houston of Texas received fifty-seven votes as the Constitutional Union standard bearer on the first ballot, but John Bell, of Tennessee, got sixty-eight. Bell carried the second ballot, and Edward Everett was selected for Vice President. [Edward Everett, three years later, delivered the two-hour address at Gettysburg that introduced President Lincoln's brief remarks.]
Further along, the "industrialism" that the planters opposed is described this way, as it operated in the North during the Civil War:
While the war itself was moving political power irresistibly toward the Federal capital in Washington, money power was centralized in New York through the wartime Currency Acts. And an enormous centralization, through economic expansion, was going on. Businesses and enterprises were being formed that soon transcended the states themselves. All these currents moved together. The removal of real power to a national capital was the first necessity for an expanded transportation and industrial complex that lay across many states. The concentration of fiscal power in New York broke the monetary freedom of state legislatures. As business enterprise became more and more national and spread on rails, old boundaries were, and had to be, meaningless.....If the men and interests behind the rise of the new industrial America did not realize fully where they were going, they understood their basic imperatives well enough. They needed certain things from government: high tariffs on industrial products; business subsidies and the diversion of public finances to railroads; centralized money control; continued massive immigration to curb native workers and create a labor pool ; and a hard money policy, without which a solid financial-industrial complex was difficult to build.
-- T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans, McMillan, 1968, pp. 339-340, p. 404. (Emphasis added.)
WHEN are you going to admit that the WBTS was NOT about the preservation of chattel slavery since,
1. the damnyankees planned to keep THEIR slaves & ONLY free those slaves belonging to southerners????
2. lincoln said in 1862 that he had NO INTENTION to free the slaves ANYPLACE. (it was ONLY after it became likely that the South would win AND that he would lose the 1864 election, that lincoln decided to "sell the war" as a crusade against slavery).
3. GEN U. S. GRANT said NUMEROUS times, " had the late war been to preserve the institution of chattel slavery, i would have offered my sword to the South. the war was ONLY to preserve the union." [emphasis: mine]
AND when are you going to tell us how you feel about NORTHERN persons, banks,shipping companies, insurance companies, railroads, etc OWNING slaves both in the USA & abroad?? was that practice A-OK, as they were yankees/yankee-owned companies, rather than southerners?
inquiring minds want to know.
free dixie,sw
Just put up or shut up. I'm done screwing around with you. Quote him in extenso to show me wrong, or I'm not listening.
Now go away, I'm busy.
That's "habeas corpus".
free dixie,sw
However, while Lincoln was not fighting to end slavery, the South was fighting to keep it.
Two sets of printers proofs containing demonstrable changes:
(1). Five paragraphs from the proofs plus three other paragraphs (added after delivery from the bench) in rebuttal to dissent that "Taney's opinion was without authority."
(2). Fifteen paragraphs of rebuttal to McLean to explain why Taney differs from a prior opinion given by John Marshall.
(3). Three paragraphs "denouncing the manner in which the case had been brought before the Supreme Court ... introduc[ing] a new question that had not been argued by counsel.
These, as Professor Fehrenbacher notes, were just the more lengthly changes between the two sets of proofs. Fehrenbacher also provides convincing evidence which validates Curtis's charges of substantial changes by Taney.
All of this of this intrigue by the dishonest Chief Justice led Fehrenbacher to ask, in the last sentence of the chapter:
"Another complication is thereby added to an already labyrinthine case, and especially to the question that has fascinated and confused several generations of historians and legal scholars: What did the Court actually decide?"
Thank you.
was that OK in your fevered mind?
Why do you think Justice Scalia chose the persons he did to review his essay?
Unless you can support your assertion with documentation, you are just blustering
Lincoln's political operators also kept National Democracy campaigners away from the Army, and soldiers were given passes to go home -- all the way home, from operational areas -- to vote. If they were going to vote Republican, that is, and not waste their votes on "Copperheads" (Democrats).
Based on what has happened in just about every other two-term President's second term.
Did they secede from the Union to keep the profits going?
face it, lincoln HATED & FEARED all "persons of colour",indians, jews,latinos,asians, catholics & "muddy-coloured people" (mixedbloods like ME!).
lincoln was a stone racist, by the standards of the 19th/20th/21st/ANY century.
free dixie,sw
Which is why he is a historian rather than a lawyer. It is interesting to note, however, that the legal community has an appreciation for his insight into the historical foundations of American jurisprudence.
was it OK (in YOUR mind) for the damnyankees to hold slaves AND at the same time to attack southerners for owning slaves?
doesn't that plainly show what HYPOCRYTES damnyankees WERE/ARE?
free dixie,sw
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