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 ...
Professor Wood being a historian does not give him credentials for you to constantly invoke him as a legal expert. He does not provide expert legal opinion.
NYU, Harvard, Harvard attorneys. Brown U. historian.
I guess he was looking for some folks to act as a counterpoint to his Conservative viewpoint.
We were with Grant's troops and our secret mission was to capture the Jim Beam distillery.
"Personal spite is visible in Taney's treatment of his colleague from Massachusetts {Curtis], a state he detested. After all, Justice McLean had also sinned against judicial propriety by rushing his opinion into print, and yet there is no indication that the Chief Justice ever censured him for doing so...."
"In virtually forcing his younger associate off of the bench, the Chief Justice was undoubtedly venting his hostility to the antislavery movement and his resentment of the personal abuse to which he had been subjected since the announcement of the Dred Scott decision."
Fehrenbacher, p 318-319.
The Professor also notes, "[T]hat as a dissenter, [Curtis] was contributing nothing to the authoritative decision. All dissenting opinion is on level with dictum in the sense of being outside the ratio decidendi."
With regard to Benjamin Howard were read:
"For Benjamin C. Howard, the Dred Scott decision thus constituted 'a kind of windfall,' which his friend the Chief Justice was anxious to protect (Howard, a fellow Marylander and Democrat, and a family connection with Taney through the [Francis Scott] Key family). This was one reason Taney objected to the early release of the McLean and Curtis opinions. Competitive publication could not be prevented, however. Arrangements were soon being made to print 20,000 copies of the decision for senatorial distribution. Howard protested and received an indemnity of #1500, but that was about the extent of his good fortune. His own pamphlet edition, published by D. Appleton and company, did not become a best seller. In August 1858 he learned there had been 'no sales' during the previous six months and, indeed, an increase in stock owing to returns. By no means did this reflect a lack of public interest in the decision. Howard's expectations were blighted by just too much cheap competition, such as the twenty-five-cent pamphlet rushed into publication by the new York Tribune, containing the Taney and Curtis opinions in full, plus summaries of the others."
Your suggestion that Howard was damaged by the Tribune's release before the official release is incorrect. The Tribune pamphlet contained the full, rewritten Taney decision, and therefore must have been, and after from the "official release." Howard simply priced himself out of the market. Given that he had a negative number of sales in 1858, due to returns, I hesitate to think how he might have ranked on an antebellum Amazon list.
The term "American" as applied to British colonists in North America, had been in use for some time. It was often used by the British in a derisive sense. You might find amusing the Swift essay, "A Modest Proposal" (circa 1727) and its characterization of Irish and Americans. He uses both term with a decided nationalistic sense.
nolu coward is well-known for his lengthly and often meaningless posts. They have come to be known as "hairballs" - meaningless tripe he coughs up from time to time. If he can't get to the point on the first page, I usually ignore it.
Thanks.
Some people think quanity of information makes up for the quality of it.
Well, as long as you had a good reason!
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.
Not only is Wood a pessimist about the American Revolution and its purposes (which, btw, would seem to put him at odds with the proclaimed purposes of the same Declaration of Independence for which our interlocutors continually proclaim as the fons et origo of the American compacted society), and a detractor of democratic republicanism, but Justice Scalia now locates him for us in the crowd of wilful "living Constitution" circus acts that legal positivism has begotten.
Uyup. Give the boy this -- at least he knows when it's time to start crayfishing.
Eh?
Others ignore information entirely and continue to lie like sleeping vermin (sorry, dogs and pigs are too likeable to make the comparison).
So was Lincoln impeached by Congress for violating his oath and taking this unconsititional action?
http://hometown.aol.com/gordonkwok/habeas_corpus.html
The majority of the Maryland legislature fortunately refused to consider a secession ordinance, thus, saved the Capital. In order to take a preventive strike against any probable plots by the Confederate sympathizer, Lincoln ordered the suspension of the writ of habeus corpus, covering the departments in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Washington. General Scott ordered General Montgomery Meigs to arrest any suspicious disloyal citizens. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (a Marylander, and he was the same Supreme Chief Justice who decided the notorious Dred Scott case, which was overturned by the later U.S. Supreme Court cases, after the passing of the 13th Amendment.) protested strongly and argued only Congress had the authority to suspend habeus corpus. In examining the language of the Constitution, it did not address which branch of Government had that authority. Lincoln just assumed that power and ignored Taney's protest. Lincoln believed he had to take bold step to preserve the Union during the emergency of the nation. The Taney Court decided the Dred Scott case (7-2) in favor of the South, voiding the Missouri Compromise, upholding the Fugitive Slave Act, and extending its long arm to the Land of the Free.
When an U.S. President takes his oath, he swears "that he will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." If there were only one choice between saving the Union or upholding the law, I believe Lincoln would not hesitate to take the former, a more important aspect of the Constitution. Habeus corpus should not be suspended, except in war, riot and insurrection. It is clear that Lincoln had such authority under this exception rule. The U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 9, paragraph 2, says,"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." The delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1778 voted unanimously on the first clause. Later, Gouverneur Morris introduced a qualifying second exception clause adapted from the Massachusetts state constitution, and the provision were passed by a vote of 7 states to 3 states. So, it is clear that Pres. Lincoln did not violate anybody's Constitutional right by suspending habeus corpus. But the question went further to examine whether or not the conditions in 1861 constituted war, riot and insurrection? Let's look at the facts again. As secession began, many Federal forts fell into the hands of the Confederates; military officers of the southern extraction resigned in drove from the old Army and went South; Gen. David Twiggs of Georgia surrendered his Federal Military Department to the Texans without a fight; Secretary of War Floyd of the Buchannan Administration amassed huge amount of military equipment in the hands of the military authorities with Southern sympathy; and crisis at the two forts, Pickens in Florida and Sumter in S. Carolina of which, nobody knew which one would blow up first at that time. All these facts were pointing to riots, insurrection and act of war. Certainly the conditions satisfied the exception clause to suspend habeus corpus.
In time of war, the laws are silent. (A Latin phrase: inter arma silent leges)
It would seem that you special talent for gnat straining.
Au contraire, the right to get it wrong is called freedom. If people haven't that right and freedom, they are not free.
Lincoln's decision was that it was better that the South not be free, that it be devastated and occupied by a vast and vindictive army of soldiers, carpetbaggers, and tax (confiscation) agents, than that he, Lincoln, should have to continue to endure the agony of Europeans' pointing out the inconsistencies between the language of the Declaration and the laws of the established government of the United States. Let the South burn -- but Abe's embarrassment must end.
He killed 620,000 men over that.
Without that principle, the Declaration, hence the Nation, hence the Constitution are meaningless.
Awww, too bad -- here, cheer up, have some rat poison. You can make it a protest statement, a statement of high moral principle, and the rest of us will just have to struggle along without you.
But no, we have to do it the other way -- 620,000 other people have to die. I get it.
Have you tried prune juice and aspirin instead?
NC - "Professor Wood being a historian does not give him credentials for you to constantly invoke him as a legal expert. He does not provide expert legal opinion."
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/fulltime/Wood/Wood.html
RESEARCH INTERESTS AND CURRENT PROJECTS:
Gordon Wood spent the fall term, 2003, teaching the Revolution and the origins of the Constitution at Northwestern Law School. During the fall term he lectured at the National Conference of Editorial Writers, which was held in Providence; at a conference of Massachusetts school teachers in Worcester; at the Society of the Cincinnati in Washington, DC; at the Chicago Humanities Festival; and at Washington University. He taught at Brown during the spring 2004 semester. Professor Wood lectured during the winter and spring at the University of Chicago Law School; at Colonial Williamsburg; at the Aspen Institute; at Portsmouth Abbey; at Princeton University; at the University of Kentucky; at a conference of federal court judges at Tucson; at Northwestern University; at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia; at the New York Historical Society; and at a conference of school teachers in Honolulu. He also acted as a commentator at the Organization of American Historian’s Convention and at the convention of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History. He wrote several reviews for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and The New Republic. In May he published a book entitled The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. Professor Wood served as a consultant to the National Constitution Center and to the US Capitol renovation and continues to serve on the Board of Trustees for Colonial Williamsburg.
e:mail Gordon_Wood@brown.edu
Tell him yourself.
A new low - even for you.
He murdered people who were minding their own business, duhh!
As for Kansas, you Slavers attempted to hijact the gov't and were stopped. Even Judge Douglas knew it was the takeover of Kansas was a farce and fought his own Party on it.
The Missouri redlegs just took the Act at face value and organized a territorial convention. What, should they have stopped to get permission from someone in Massachusetts first?
The freesoilers did the exact same thing in California and shut out the Southerners completely, then applied for admission to the Union on that basis. Do you, in the spirit of fairness, want to complain about that? Don't be shy, talk to me about California.
http://www.thehistorynet.com/mhq/blfreedomsundersiege/index1.html
Not until March 1863 did Congress act to suspend habeas corpus retroactively to the beginning of the war, although early on it did take other measures aimed at the rebellion and its sympathizers: the Conspiracies Act (July 31, 1861), the First Confiscation Act (August 6, 1861), and the Treason Act (July 17, 1862). Prosecutions resulting from these laws were few.
Duhh, you brought him up as if the North had something to do with his raid.
As for Kansas, you Slavers attempted to hijact the gov't and were stopped. Even Judge Douglas knew it was the takeover of Kansas was a farce and fought his own Party on it. The Missouri redlegs just took the Act at face value and organized a territorial convention. What, should they have stopped to get permission from someone in Massachusetts first?
No, they should have recognized that the people of Kansas did not want to be a slave state.
Not many people would.
The freesoilers did the exact same thing in California and shut out the Southerners completely, then applied for admission to the Union on that basis. Do you, in the spirit of fairness, want to complain about that? Don't be shy, talk to me about California.
Wow, so the Confederates were trying to spread slavery even into Calif.
What cotton fields were the slaves going to work in Calif?
Do you guys even know what you sound like when you talk about spreading slavery?
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