Commentary: Truth blown away in sugarcoated 'Gone With the Wind'

sacbee ^ | 11-13-04

[LouAvul]

....snip......

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.

.......snip........

Considering its financial success and critical acclaim, "Gone With the Wind" may be the most famous movie ever made.

It's also a lie.

......snip.........

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.

......snip.........

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.

.....snip.........

Or as William L. Patterson of the Chicago Defender succinctly wrote: "('Gone With the Wind' is a) weapon of terror against black America."

[lentulusgracchus]

he was just a man, no better & frequently WORSE than most.

As witness his choice of profession. Lawyer, and politician.

Just like Aaron Burr, Earl Warren, and Richard Milhous Nixon.

And, of course, Willie Jeff Willie Willie Willie Won'tie, whose sacral mobile-home-of-memories was just consecrated in downtown Bugsquat, Arkinsaw, overhanging the undermined cutbank of the Arkinsaw River.

[lentulusgracchus]

I am a Hamiltonian, about as far from Marxism as one could get.

Only in this: who gets to drive the bus.

Hamiltonianism has a lot in common with corporofascism.

[lentulusgracchus]

Don't you love it when these Rushmore idolaters mount the high podium of the Temple of Omniscience, and declaim cant and buncombe with a straight face and a loud and thunderous voice, as if they were all Billy Graham reading Jeremiah to the unbelieving?

[lentulusgracchus]

Without solid information returns for the Armies, you're guessing and inferring from whiffenpoofs.

Nobody has solid info on this. But I like your brio, in telling history what it can't do.

[lentulusgracchus]

Bringing up Peter's sin hardly excuses Paul's.

Which is why I'm constantly amazed at you Rushmorites, damning the Confederacy to hell, to bail out ol' Abe, from the charge that he killed 620,000 men on the battlefield and many score thousands more in collateral war deaths, just to have his way on policy.

Or perhaps you don't agree with me that one of the best ways to tell a civilized person from one who is less so, is by his readiness to scruple at killing masses of fellow-citizens over the housekeeping arrangements.

[capitan_refugio]

Certainly one line of evidence for africans in the confederate service are the pension applications. Then there are the accounts and histories written about certain units, where incidental or direct evidence can be gathered. No one is saying there are iron-clad southern records, because so many were destroyed. A number of scholars have investigated the issue and have given various estimates. Sadly, their criteria for deciding who was a "combatant" varies.

[lentulusgracchus]

[unspun, furiously spinning a historical question] A: Whaddya do, when the Constitution contradicts itself?
Q: Why, refer to higher authority of course. That is the only thing one can do.

The higher authority in this case being the People.

Which was what happened.

(Remember the pecking order? It didn't go through Theodore Weld and Henry Ward Beecher, btw.)

[lentulusgracchus]

scum doesn't even start to cover it. he BURNS in eternal fire for what he was & did.

Actually, I wonder whether ol' Ben mightn't have been scummy enough to put the sucker out! You know, like fire-fighting foam.

Either way, bet ol' Debbil had to get his demons to stoke the place up plenty hot in anticipation of "Spoons" arriving.

[lentulusgracchus]

[justshutupandtakeit, menacing nolu chan] Come up to Chicago sometime and I will show you what a REAL liberal thinks since obviously you have no idea.

Whoa, you need the whole neighborhood to back you up?!

But nolu chan is just one guy......hardly 150 pounds, wringing wet!

&;^D)

<ducks, runs away>

[GOPcapitalist]

A wise man once told me that all men have a right to be ignorant or a right to be arrogant, but no man has a right to be both ignorant and arrogant at the same time.

The Church of Saint Abe personifies that characteristic of simultaneous ignorance and arrogance. They do it with the hope that nobody will question them or scrutinize what they say. Hence capitan thinks he can spout outright falsehoods (such as his claim about Virginia) or engage in outright historical embellishments and exaggerations (such as his line about the "capture" of Fort Davis) without any penalty or responsibility to the act. Call him on his ignorance though and he gets arrogant about it all and lashes himself to the sinking bow of his own false argument, defending his previous act of ignorance at all cost.

[lentulusgracchus]

Done deal, thanx for the note, stand.

[capitan_refugio]

You are simply wrong as usual. The first constitution of Virginia, adopted in June of 1776, refers to the government it creates as a "State" at least four times and as a "Commonwealth" at least five times. Official commissions granted by the state are also to read "In the name of the Commonwealth of Virginia."

We have here the old GOPcrapulist shuffle. At no point in the Virginia constitution do we have a declaration of independence. There is the statement that "That all men are by nature equally free and independent" and "That the people have a right to uniform government; and, therefore, that no government separate from, or independent of the government of Virginia, ought to be erected or established within the limits thereof."

In fact, the key phase in the whole document is, "By which several acts of misrule, the government of this country, as formerly exercised under the crown of Great Britain, is TOTALLY DISSOLVED." This, although rebellious, is not an act declaring independence. That would come, in conjuction with the other colonies, shortly.

[lentulusgracchus]

And it did so without consequence and with good reason. The first shot on a flag was on the Star of the West, which had troops for Fort Sumter hidden below its decks on a false resupply mission.

Good point, often overlooked. It didn't really start that night in April. This crab-dance had been going on for a while.

Someone really needs to write a book about the diplomacy, or should I say skunkery, that led up to Fort Sumter.

[capitan_refugio]

You've got my goat?

Baaaaah! ;^0

[lentulusgracchus]

Thanks for your apology. I shall endeavor to be more careful with certain words since, like a shotgun, once discharged they become exponentially harder to explain to the neighbors down the street what you were really doing.

It is true that I have extreme animousity toward the ruling class of the Slaverocracy and see few examples of a more inhuman social structure as existed there in 1860.

Well, history is rich with iniquitous arrangements; it's just a little harder to take when the society is your own. Every American who feels his buttons popping off with pride every time the flag goes by, could stand to take a course in the history of industry and labor relations, or maybe read up on the Johnstown Flood (nobody ever admitted or was assigned responsibility for that obviously assignable disaster), the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and the Homestake Strike. Two names common to the flood and the strike were Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. (When I was 18, I was initiated into the secret collegiate lore, of the definition of a "frick". If interested, I'll FReepmail you -- it's gross -- but the etymology, or rather the eponymy, is pretty obvious.)

Then there's the history of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and its predecessors.

And let's not forget the waste and welfarism -- that the Navy Department, e.g., had a factory somewhere still turning out marline for the Navy under a profitable contract in the 1970's, about 80 years after the Navy had ceased to need quantities of it for splicing their rigging aloft.

Thus, even if the evil were equal in Rome and Richmond the latter would be worse since its inhabitants should know better from being Christianized.

Well, Honorius stopped the gladiatorial games out of Christian piety, but the fact of Christianity's establishment here or there doesn't touch on slavery, since its practitioners could claim Biblical sanction (or at least several mentions without condemnation) for their vocation, just as medieval churchmen could, for their own purposes in quarreling with the poverty-loving orders, point to Jesus's possession of a privy purse. (It was probably a communal one, but medieval scholars had lost sight of the Essenes.)

Nowhere in the New Testament does the Nazarene say what Rev. Beecher needed him to say, to-wit, that salvation required the emancipation of slaves, as well as the disposal of worldly goods and their rendering as alms for the poor.

[lentulusgracchus]

With the war over he planned to order them down to Panama as part of a "military" activity, where they would start the colony and, presumably, their families would follow them there voluntarily.

That's a fresh one on me......like Pompey or Caesar settling their legionaries, only instead of getting arable land in Campagna or the Po Valley (Torino, Italy was founded as Augusta Taurinorum -- Augustus's "city of the Taurini", a legion that he settled there on disbandment), they get the door -- a bum's rush down to Panama, followed by muster-out, some tools, some back pay, and their hats. "Been nice working with you, guys, have a nice life!"

Could be that John Wilkes Booth was heaven-sent to rescue Lincoln's rep, what do you think?

[lentulusgracchus]

Come to think of it, this was also about 40 years before anyone got a handle on yellowjack, too.

[lentulusgracchus]

They deny the founding principles espoused by Jefferson and others, and they deny the nationalist "Union" principles from the Framers of the Constitution, such as Madison, Hamilton, Washington, and Pinckney.

Well, the Federalists weren't the only ones invited to the party, remember. The Antifederalists insisted on the BoR, and those Amendments seriously altered the nature of the compact, and of the federal union -- thus Elaine Scarry in the article I linked to, on the Second Amendment and the nature of consent and the distributed power to grant it in the U.S. Constitution.

The interposition of the inviolability of the Militia, of the jury-box, and of regular elections of the House directly by the People all guaranteed that the power to consent would not be a threshold exercise, used only once, but a perpetual or continuing exercise in consent. Likewise, the Tenth Amendment explicitly reserved all powers not granted in the Cosntitution to the People and the States (same thing) -- which, until Lincoln and, later on, the Commerce Clause prostitutes, seriously crimped the amount of practical power the federal Executive and Congress could take into their hands.

This was a huge change -- and it was the without which not that sealed the deal. Which the Federalists promptly tried to go back on, and eventually, with Lincoln, succeeded, using the instruments of war.

[GOPcapitalist]

We have here the old GOPcrapulist shuffle. At no point in the Virginia constitution do we have a declaration of independence.

Really? It sure looks like one to me:

Whereas George the third, King of Great Britain and Ireland, and elector of Hanover, heretofore intrusted with the exercise of the kingly office in this government, hath endeavoured to prevent, the same into a detestable and insupportable tyranny, by putting his negative on laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good...

..By which several acts of misrule, the government of this country, as formerly exercised under the crown of Great Britain, is TOTALLY DISSOLVED.

followed by

"We therefore, the delegates and representatives of the good people of Virginia, having maturely considered the premises, and viewing with great concern the deplorable conditions to which this once happy country must be reduced, unless some regular, adequate mode of civil polity is speedily adopted, and in compliance with a recommendation of the general Congress, do ordain and declare the future form of government of Virginia to be as followeth:

I. The legislative, executive, and judiciary department, shall be separate and distinct, so that neither exercise the powers properly belonging to the other: nor shall any person exercise the powers of rmorc than one of them, at the same time; except that the Justices of the County (courts shall be eligible to either House of Assembly...

In other words, (1) King George has become a tyrant by doing despotic acts X, Y, and Z, (2) because of these acts our government ties to England are hereby disolved, and (3) in their place we are instituting our own government, consisting of an assembly, senate and so forth.

In fact, the key phase in the whole document is, "By which several acts of misrule, the government of this country, as formerly exercised under the crown of Great Britain, is TOTALLY DISSOLVED." This, although rebellious, is not an act declaring independence.

They gave a reason for independence, declared their independence, and set up an independent government. To suggest that an act "totally dissolv[ing]" Virginia's ties to Britain and establishing a new government over the "Commonwealth of Virginia" in place of Britain is not an act of independence is both slothful and absurd. Put another way, capitan, you made an ingnorant and arrogant proclamation. I corrected that act of ignorance by citing an irrefutable historical truth and yet you arrogantly persist in asserting your previous falsehood's validity at all cost and beyond. Why is that, capitan? Is it stubbornness? Stupidity? An inabilty to admit one's own error? An obsessive need to save face? Whatever the case, you've accomplished nothing beyond displaying your own intellectual deficiencies and your own inability to conduct yourself in a reasonable and truthful manner as you attempt to engage in conversations about historical matters of fact.

[GOPcapitalist]

Could be that John Wilkes Booth was heaven-sent to rescue Lincoln's rep, what do you think?

Though it was no doubt unintended on Booth's part, in those regards he did indeed put a halt to Lincoln's colonization schemes. The colonization office over in the interior department was shut down in a 180 degree policy reversal a few months after Lincoln died (and quite literally at that - a dispute was waging over whether the office had been funded to continue by Congress with several of Lincoln's top advisors and his old AG Bates arguing for him that it should be kept open. After Lincoln died the new AG Speed reversed course and it shut down).

Sickles returned home shortly after getting a letter about the assassination and nothing more came of his trip.