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 ...
A lie.
I compared the attributes of the confederate cabal posters with the positions taken by David Duke. You can draw you own conclusions. It is not mere coincidence that confederate flags, swastikas, and burning crosses run in packs. If you disavow the positions taken by David Duke, I'd like to hear it. If you disavow some and embrace others, I'd like to hear that too.
For those who glorify the CSA and the goals of the insurrectionist leadership, hey, if the racist shoe fits, wear it. It is the height of hypocrisy to claim that the southern ("RAT") insurrection was about southern liberty, when the southern leadership was denying fundamental human rights and liberties to millions - black, white, brown, and red. The CSA was a racist organization and planned to be forever.
I say lots of good things about the South and the southern people. I have, in part, a southern heritage. I simply don't tolerate the glorification of racism and anti-Americanism.
No oil on the waters. But plenty of oil on the fire. You can't get out of it either, capitan: Lincoln's behavior during this critical period wants a thorough review. Did he or didn't he want to preserve the peace? I am being gradually moved more and more to believe that he didn't -- particularly after reading his confession, in a letter of 1855 (printed and discussed in David Donald's Lincoln [1999]), that he could not find a constitutional way to abolish slavery and remove the cognitive dissonance from the American vision statement, the Declaration of Independence, in contrast with the Constitution and American socioeconomic folkways.
I think he decided for war -- war that would be their fault. And he got it. Was the war an accident instead? Accidents do happen, but when they're this big, and you have as large a player as Lincoln at the center of events, you really have to wonder, particularly when the events happened to be exactly what he needed, to obtain the outcome he wanted, given the situation as he found it.
LOL! Consid'ring the source......
Another example, I suppose, of American businessmen going for the near money rather than undertaking the risk and expense of modernization. But that's interesting that they did the same thing in the 19th century that they later did in the 1980's when voluntary import restrictions on foreign automobiles were promulgated. The Japanese manufacturers promptly began to load out every vehicle shipped with the maximum possible burden of invoiceable options, effectively raising prices, and American car manufacturers equally promptly, led by Roger Smith and General Motors, raised prices -- notwithstanding that they hadn't added a dollar's worth of value to their manufactures. Smith led GM from 51% market share to about 30% during his tenure as chairman of the board and CEO.
Similar measures get similar results?
Well, careful with the overgeneralization. One of Jackson Turner Main's interests in studying the Antifederalists was to see whether he could discern a common thread of interest among them. He found interesting demographic divergences on different axes (e.g. professionals versus farmers), but they tended to vary from area to area. In South Carolina, the biggest planters, concentrated in the coastal counties, tended to adhere to Federalism, and as I posted above, they were able to deliver a solid vote for ratification -- notwithstanding, by the way, that they were definitely in the minority in the State, being vastly outnumbered by Antifederalist freehold farmers in the interior and "border" counties. It was a peculiarity of South Carolina politics, that something like a "rotten borough" system worked to leverage the votes of the landowners in the older, coastal counties to the disadvantage of the yeomanry in the interior.
After much parsing and prosopographic research and counting of heads in ratification conventions, author Main came down to one gross criterion as the predictor for final adhesion to the Federalist Constitution or the Antifederalist rejection caucus: whether one was a member of, or closely affiliated with, the commercial interests and classes of one's State and community. The fact that people tended to nominate as convention delegates educated men who owned property likewise worked to the Federalists' advantage, because even Antifederalists of this class tended to rally to the other members of their socioeconomic group, leaving their numerous humbler constituents at home holding the bag, and a few rationalizations about "best judgment" and promised amendments. Thus, as I noted earlier, both Adamses and John Hancock came across and voted for ratification, sometimes against their instructions.
The Tenth Amendment, as an article of amendment, need not conform to anything in the foregoing articles and clauses, which were Madison's subject in Federalist 45. The amendment changes the document, and the social compact. That is the significance of the Tenth Amendment: it is completely transformational.
Notwithstanding the post-Lincolnian Imperial State's propaganda minimizing the Tenth, the Amendment has not been repealed, but only violated in gross terms by open warfare.
And, for the last time, all powers are reserved to the States which are not explicitly granted to the federal government under the terms of the Constitution. That is the criterion for discerning whether the People or the State possess a reserved power.
Unilateral secession purports to abandon that system and deny the citizens of their Constitutional rights and protections.
The problem with abstracting an action and making it the subject of a sentence, the object of which is the real agent of the action, is that it is inherently confusing. The citizens, the People, seceded. They walked away from the Constitution, and wrote themselves another. Your pretense that "someone done them wrong" and that somehow, an unspecified Somebody did something wicked to the citizens, is simply absurd here.
The Democrats still had enough votes in the Senate to block anything of that nature.
Below is the speech from Alexander Stephens, against secession
But it is said Mr. Lincoln's policy and principles are against the Constitution, and that, if he carries them out, it will be destructive of our rights. Let us not anticipate a threatened evil. If he violates the Constitution, then will come our time to act. Do not let us break it because, forsooth, he may. If he does, that is the time for us to act.
(Applause.) I think it would be injudicious and unwise to do this sooner. I do not anticipate that Mr. Lincoln will do anything, to jeopardize our safety or security, whatever may be his spirit to do it; for he is bound by the constitutional checks which are thrown around him, which at this time render him powerless to do any great mischief.
This shows the wisdom of our system. The President of the United States is no Emperor, no Dictator-- he is clothed with no absolute power. He can do nothing, unless he is backed by power in Congress. The House of Representatives is largely in a majority against him.
In the very face and teeth of the majority of Electoral votes, which he has obtained in the Northern States, there have been large gains in the House of Representatives, to the Conservative Constitutional Party of the country, which I here will call the National Democratic Party, because that is the cognomen it has at the North.
There are twelve of this Party elected from New York, to the next Congress, I believe. In the present House, there are but four, I think. In Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, and Indiana, there have been gains. In the present Congress, there were one hundred and thirteen Republicans, when it takes one hundred and seventeen to make a majority.
The gains in the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Indiana, and other States, notwithstanding its distractions, have been enough to make a majority of near thirty, in the next House, against Mr. Lincoln.
Even in Boston, Mr. Burlingame, one of the noted leaders of the fanatics of that section, has been defeated, and a Conservative man returned in his stead.
Is this the time, then, to apprehend that Mr. Lincoln, with this large majority of the House of Representatives against him, can carry out any of this unconstitutional principles in that body?
In the Senate, he will also be powerless. There will be a majority of four against him. This, after the loss of Bigler, Fitch, and others, by the unfortunate dissensions of the National Democratic Party in their States.
Mr. Lincoln can not appoint an officer without the consent of the Senate -- he can not form a Cabinet without the same consent. He will be in the condition of George the Third (the embodiment of Toryism), who had to ask the Whigs to appoint his ministers, and was compelled to receive a Cabinet utterly opposed to his views; and so Mr. Lincoln will be compelled to ask of the Senate to choose for him a Cabinet, if the Democracy or that Party choose to put him on such terms. He will be compelled to do this, or let the Government stop, if the National Democratic Senators (for that is their name at the North), the Conservative men in the Senate, should so determine.
Then how can Mr. Lincoln obtain a Cabinet which would aid him, or allow him to violate the Constitution? Why, then, I say, should we disrupt the ties of this Union, when his hands are tied-- when he can do nothing against us?
I have heard it mooted, that no man in the State of Georgia, who is true to her interests, could hold office under Mr. Lincoln. But I ask, who appoints to office? Not the President alone; the Senate has to concur. No man can be appointed without the consent of the Senate. Should any man, then, refuse to hold office that was given him by a Democratic Senate?
The South had full representation in Congress.
What they did not like is the trend that was moving away from them in the House and the addition of free states to diminish their power in the Senate, which would have eventually led to limitation of slavery
No one was abusing them with taxation.
http://www.pointsouth.com/csanet/greatmen/stephens/stephens-speech.htm
No impeachement.
War time conditions.
Davis also suspended the writ.
Sorry, Lincoln will still be remembered as one of the great Presidents and Jeff Davis as a traitor.
I told you not to spam me with your nonsense.
You can link me.
Below is for the lurkers who cannot make any sense of your babbling.
Did President Lincoln suspend the U.S. Constitution?
Answer: No
Did President Lincoln suspend Habeas Corpus?
Answer: Yes, in 1861 and 1862
Was Habeas Corpus ever restored?
Answer: Yes, in 1866.
Here's the story:
As the Civil War started, in the very beginning of Lincoln's presidential term, a group of "Peace Democrats" proposed a peaceful resolution to the developing Civil War by offering a truce with the South, and forming a constitutional convention to amend the U.S. Constitution to protect States' rights. The proposal was ignored by the Unionists of the North and not taken seriously by the South. However, the Peace Democrats, also called copperheads by their enemies, publicly criticized Lincoln's belief that violating the U.S. Constitution was required to save it as a whole. With Congress not in session until July, Lincoln assumed all powers not delegated in the Constitution, including the power to suspend habeas corpus. In 1861, Lincoln had already suspended civil law in territories where resistance to the North's military power would be dangerous. In 1862, when copperhead democrats began criticizing Lincoln's violation of the Constitution, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus throughout the nation and had many copperhead democrats arrested under military authority because he felt that the State Courts in the north west would not convict war protesters such as the copperheads. He proclaimed that all persons who discouraged enlistments or engaged in disloyal practices would come under Martial Law.
Among the 13,000 people arrested under martial law was a Maryland Secessionist, John Merryman. Immediately, Hon. Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States issued a writ of habeas corpus commanding the military to bring Merryman before him. The military refused to follow the writ. Justice Taney, in Ex parte MERRYMAN, then ruled the suspension of habeas corpus unconstitutional because the writ could not be suspended without an Act of Congress. President Lincoln and the military ignored Justice Taney's ruling. Finally, in 1866, after the war, the Supreme Court officially restored habeas corpus in Ex-parte Milligan, ruling that military trials in areas where the civil courts were capable of functioning were illegal.
As for Congress, the question you raised was did Congress give support to what Lincoln did and they had by protecting his actions retroactivly in 1863
And I don't accept homework assignments any more, not since I wised up, anyway, to that particular eye-gouging technique. Read the essay, though, and it was interesting in the degree to which it diverged tonally from the quoted passages from his Pulitzer-winner of 1991, in which he sounds like a pretty full participant in what he now seems to be preparing to call a major historiographical stumble by post-Vietnam historians.
I suspect he is a liberal who feels challenged by George W. Bush's vision and is scrambling to answer and compete in terms and themes he knows from his training the People are responding to in Bush's ideational platform.
Then you'd damn well better prove it before you go around accusing people of it, boy.
You'll never accuse me of that crap. So knock it off.
He believed the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus and all civil liberties to be sacrosanct, but his duty was clear.
While he did suspend the writ of habeas corpus eight different times during the course of the war, it was intended as a “preventative precaution, not as a punitive weapon”.
It was to be an exception for a temporary emergency. The early suspensions, I believe, were justified.
However, his administration did at times go to extremes and make a number of mistakes. Not all of the suspensions throughout the course of the war were justified.
In addition, the suppression of the New York newspapers, censorship of the mails and telegraphs, Fremont’s draconian measures and martial law established in Missouri, and the trial by a military commission of the Indianapolis defendants were all cases of an administration and military run amuck, exercising dubious authority at best.[18]
While Lincoln made debatable decisions concerning civil liberties during the Civil War, he never did waver from his primary goal. The goal he achieved in holding the nation together under one constitution is how most people today evaluate his performance as president.
The daunting task of fighting and winning a civil war cannot even be imagined today. Clearly, strong leadership skills were necessary.
And no man, except those who have taken the presidential oath of office, can fully appreciate the awesome responsibility of being President of the United States.
The most obvious sign to the public that each man, before and since Lincoln, has been transformed by the job is his aged appearance when leaving office. They were all transformed by the presidency, but only some reciprocated in kind.
Every United States President has taken some action or made some decision that has been construed to be at the least questionable, at the most impeachable.
Even William Henry Harrison made at least one questionable decision in his brief tenure as president when he chose to give a lengthy inaugural address on a cold windy day without his gloves, overcoat or hat.
These men are not gods. They aren’t even angels. They are, simply put, exceptional men (for the most part) who have been chosen by the electorate to lead a nation at a given time to serve a specific purpose.
Lincoln was one of the most exceptional of these men. We see that in his legacy. I know of no other President that we have had before or since (during their own particular time in office) who could have come into office facing civil unrest and then civil war, deny civil liberties to the extent that they were denied, withstand harsh criticism only to be re-elected by a landslide (in the electoral college), and preserve a presidential legacy that continues to rank him #1 among all of our past presidents by respected historians.
The point is that we choose not to highlight his poor decisions and shortcomings, but to view him as the man who used all of his executive resources to save a nation from destroying itself, the man who preserved the Union and ultimately ended slavery.
One of the most important reasons we remember him this way is because of who he was as a man, because of his character.
While he did make mistakes and he did usurp power not specifically granted to the executive branch in the Constitution, he did not do it selfishly.
As he struggled to fulfill his oath of office and persevere in the most trying time in our history, Lincoln was genuine and unassuming. His legacy was not an issue for him, which should be a lesson for Bill Clinton.
Character does matter.
(emphasis were added)
http://www.raleightavern.org/lincoln.htm
Before you call Jeff Davis a traitor, you'd better prove he was one.
Go ahead, prove it. The United States Government couldn't, but perhaps your superior insight will allow you to succeed where they knew better than to try -- and they had the man in prison!
Go ahead, ideologue, make my day.
Of course, in the event, they'd have had to wait out the entire industrial revolution -- which is more like what they were seceding from: dehumanization of citizens (to a status very much nearer that of slaves than that of 18th-century citizen-farmers), time-clocks, humiliation by corner-office Napoleons and industrial tin gods. They saw it all coming, armed and liberated from State and regional control by the business faction in control in DC, and they wanted out.
But that isn't what we're arguing.
The fact was, the South seceded, and the argument is over whether they were within their rights so to do.
Then there's all the other stuff about whether Southerners really are unpleasant racist knuckledraggers in Hitchcockian-caricature baggy clothes, snaggly teeth, three-day beards, and slouch hats.
Here is the typical legalistic mindset, if a man is not convicted he is not guilty.
So you must think OJ is not a murderer?
YOU said it. YOU prove it.
I'll just stand over here with folded arms, waiting.
Go ahead, prove Jeff Davis was a traitor. (Here's a hint: don't even try with Bobby Lee. That one's been fought out, and the name-calling side lost.)
How does the South fare in their protection of civil rights?
Southern Rights, Confederate Wrongs
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=8642948837872
Neely challenged this consensus by examining the available arrest records, court opinions, and other documents related to Confederate wartime arrests of civilians; in other words, he applied basically the same methodology which worked so well in Fate of Liberty. Focusing particularly on cases involving suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, declarations of martial law, draft evasion, and other expressions of dissent, he found that the Confederate record was not much different from that of the Union. Confederate authorities, Neely argues, used much the same pragmatic, flexible approach characteristic of the Lincoln administration. "Though Confederate measures taken for internal security, when noticed at all, have been assumed to be necessary, and, if anything, too mild, there is evidence of political repression," Neely wrote (p. 132). People in the Confederacy were arrested for their political beliefs, jailed without benefit of the writ of habeas corpus, and subjected to the sometimes not-very-tender mercies of martial law and military rule.
Given the South's self-proclaimed role as a champion of individual rights, one might have expected an outcry of protests, or at the very least a robust conversation about civil liberties among Southern politicians, lawyers, and newspapermen. But Neely argues that this was not the case. Most white Southerners quietly acquiesced in the suspension of the writ, declarations of martial law, and other such measures. Neely identified a "longing for order in the South, released by independence from the North and quite at odds with region's fabled desire for liberty or 'southern rights'" (p. 34). He was struck by the contrast with the North, where Lincoln's various attempts to curb antiwar protests triggered a boisterous debate about civil liberties in wartime. "It seems remarkable that there are no celebrated cases challenging the power of the Confederate government to interfere with the daily lives of its citizens," he wrote, "Confederate history does not have its equivalent of Ex parte Merryman or of General Andrew Jackson's fine for contempt" (p. 62). The Confederacy was no different from the North; it wanted to win the war. "Southern society was, at bottom, American and much the same as Northern society. It consisted of people who valued both liberty and order. They did not bridle more than normally at restrictive measures taken by the government to fight a war for national existence" (p. 79).
At its heart, Southern Rights is about what Neely perceives as an overweening Confederate streak of hypocrisy; the very title of his book is a statement of irony. Neely is impatient with what he characterizes as the "strident" and "noisy" posturing of Confederates on matters of civil liberties and individual rights. He is also deeply distressed by a tendency among Confederate historians to take Southerners' declarations of libertarianism at face value. "Antebellum politicians exaggerated sensitivity about southern rights as a means of combating northern power," Neely wrote, "but historians should not exaggerate as well" (p. 79
By Derek Alger
The problem of Davis, however, still remained. He was in custody, accused of guilt in the assassination conspiracy by Holt, with the judge advocate general logically maintaining that Davis should be charged with treason, tried before a military commission, and a date with the gallows the logical outcome.
According to historian William Hanchett in his book, The Lincoln Conspiracy Murders, "While it is unlikely that Holt doubted for a moment that Davis and the others were guilty, as charged, he and Stanton were too able and experienced to fail to recognize that the evidence presented at the conspiracy trial was not proof of guilt but only hearesay and that it was only as credible as the eyewitnesses who gave it."
As a result, on July 21st, a mere two weeks after Mrs. Surratt and the others were hanged for conspiring to assassinate Lincoln with Booth, Davis, and other Confederate leaders, the government decided to charge Davis with treason and not assassination. What's more, it determined that Davis would be tried in a civil court rather than a military one, with even Stanton voting in favor.
Jefferson Davis was eventually released from prison on bail in May of 1867 and never brought to trial. The tide had shifted, with the preoccupation of the Republican-dominated Congress moving from punishing Davis to removing Johnson from office....
The proclamation of May 2nd, signed by President Johnson, charging Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders with involvement in the plot to assassinate President Lincoln was never revoked.
http://www.hnn.us/articles/508.html
If it sounds like a duck....
I've been down this road with El Capitan several times now. Lie, get caught, refuse to acknowledge, repeat.
This time, it appears he has a friend who thinks that Congress supported the illegal suspension a la Farber. When the congressional record is posted demonstrating otherwise, it's labeled "spam." It's the kind of thing I'd expect from children or imbeciles, not self-declared conservatives.
Been busy, but been lurking. I see you haven't abandoned the cause.
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