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 ...
Apparently his "Ph.D." is not in spelling.
Hamilton was an uber Capitalist whose program was entirely directed at building national strength and economic self-sufficency. Should you have called him an advocate of the proletariat you would have been facing him looking down the barrel of his pistol.
Presumably you would make the equally ridiculous claim that George Washington, Hamilton's greatest advocate, was a corporofacist.
After years of therapy you will likely find that your mother yelled "abelinolnabelincolnabelincoln" as she pinched you. Surely nothing else could explain these hysterical attacks upon one of history's greatest men.
Or is it Tourette's Syndrome?
Appealing to the People was only constitutional when done through the amendment process. Madison told you that the Union was once and for all.
Please I would never expose one of our dear freepers to the dangerous areas of my fair city. He'd probably be like my pore mama when she came to visit and I drove her down Michigan Avenue while she peered dubiously at the skyscrapers with a sickly look on her face. But I'd make sure the boy had a good guide. My Navy Nuke boy could do the honors.
Life was declared to be nasty, brutish and short by a famed philosopher and the 19th and 20th centuries are filled with examples of all of them. Some forces were working to move to different ways of dealing with them. Some were working against changing them. All may have been trapped in a tragedy not entirely of their making. Some had far-reaching modes of dealing with their eras some did not. I see the Slaver class as one of the most egregious in resisting the necessary changes in their societies to accompany the rest of the nation into the future. Had its plan succeeded there is no doubt in my mind that we would all be far worse off today than we are with our national power reduced immensely.
Christ avoided political comment but his admonition of the difficulty of the rich man getting into heaven is more true of the Slaver than even Frick since the latter's wealth was almost entirely in other humans.
As bad as Frickian insinuation was it was not worse than slavery.
So leaving your wife doesn't constitute destroying your union? I'm sure she wouldn't agree.
Nor was the Constitution like an Islamic marriage capable of unilateral abrogation. Madison said it was entered into irrevocably.
Why Defenders of Slaverocracy of course. Surely you wouldn't think of anything else now would you?
Any man would was treated as inhumanely as the slave in Haiti of whatever color or by whatever color has the right of self-defense and I respect that right.
Where is there any divine ordinance that allows the slaver so beat to death the slave and expect not to reap what he sows. Seems very karmic doesn't it.
If you are killing a man do you seriously expect him to lay down like a dog and let you kill him?
Rather than working to remove the curse of slavery the South's leaders worked to spread it, justify it and maintain it. Had the Founders had their way it would have never assumed a prestige it did after the founding forcing the war. They almost universally wanted it ended.
Yes but his idea of the Masters feeding the slaves bon-bons was just too much.
If you want a flame war, it can get unfriendly all over again in here.
You might want to stop using that particular form of abuse.
It's unsupported by anything I've posted, it's illiterate, and it's a slur.
Irrelevant and fallacious. Marriage has only two parties. The Union had 30+.
Oh, did he really? Irrevocably? Where did he say that? If he said it, it was wrong. But show me anyway.
So the question arises, why did you want the Southerners killed? Is that the best you can do to justify mass murder?
Remember, a) most slave-owners did not treat their slaves in the manner you are again, fallaciously, having been corrected already on this point, insinuating that they did, and b) your premise being false, your prescription is unjust, involving as it does, mass murder.
Stop drooling.
Seems very karmic doesn't it.
Like I said, you're talking about revenge. Stop drooling, it's unseemly. You weren't even there.
Foul, and blatant abuse. Don't bring my mother into this again, dipstick.
And after I just accepted your apology.
What do you call an election?
As for the People leaving the Union, that's where your education in the sovereignty pecking order begins.
The People don't have to follow the Constitution all the time. They can unmake it if they want to -- all they have to do is call a convention.
That's what the Southern Peoples did, when they withdrew from the Union.
The People make and unmake compacts and constitutions like you and I make our beds. Their actions are sovereign and above the Constitution. If they were not, arguendo, then how would they have the power to amend?
The People own the Constitution and are its Master -- not the other way around.
Lincoln just said what he did, to put something, anything, above the People so he could champion it (whatever it was) against the People's cause and justify himself in opposing the People in arms and in making himself the People's master by force of arms. He couldn't do it in his own name, so he had to have some excuse for calling out the Army to crush the People, which he did.
That's the dictionary definition of tyranny, by the way.
Of course they did. It was their bread and butter. Ever look at the statistics for cotton exports from about 1820 on? They skyrocketed, and the national wealth with them. The cotton planters brought a lot of serious money into the Union, which Yankee bankers banked while complaining piously about slavery -- but for other reasons than morality. I refer, of course, to their frustration at not being able to enact more of their corporate-welfare infrastructure schemes (built in the North with taxes paid in the South, of course). So their interest in the slavery issue was grand-tactical rather than sincere and principled. Like planter liberalism, so to speak.
Had the Founders had their way it would have never assumed a prestige it did after the founding forcing the war. They almost universally wanted it ended.
They couldn't see the arrival of the cotton gin and its leveraging effect on agricultural investment -- which included slaves, unfortunately.
What I see is two large economic interests colliding over competing agenda, all the agenda items being driven by the very real motivating power of nearby profits.
I can see you need another lesson in history. Maybe, in the future, you won't make such an a-hole out of yourself.
Professor Gordon S. Wood is arguably the living authority on the American Revolutionary period. Here is how Wood describes the period, with reference to the constitutions being written by the colonies. This is excerpted from The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787.
"As the royal governments disintegrated after fighting broke out in the spring of 1775, the need for some sort of new government in several of the colonies became pressing, and radical-minded men made the best of necessity. 'You have no government, no finances, no troops,' wrote on Virginian in the summer of 1775. 'Turn then you thoughts, I beseech you, to the formation of a constitution.'....[I]n May 1775 Massachusetts applied to the Continental Congress for the 'most explicit advice, respecting the taking up and exercising the powers of civil government.' This was ticklish business and the Congress moved cautiously - too cautiously for some like John Adams.... [I]n the fall of 1775 New Hampshire and South Carolina both sought the sanction of the Congress to form governments. By the end of the year the Congress had recommended to both soliciting colonies and to Virginia ... that each call a full and free representation of the people to form whatever government it thought necessary, 'during the Continuance of the present dispute between Great Britain and the Colonies.'
"Even though the revolutionary-minded were hardly satisfied with the wording of these resolutions, they realized that Congress's action was 'a Tryumph and a most important Point gained' in the movement toward independence.... Throughout the fall of 1775 and the winter of 1776 discussion of the necessity and advisability 'of revolutionizing all the Governments' grew more and more frequent, both within the walls of Congress and even out-of-doors. By April the colonists not only had heard of Paine's call for independence but also were reading John Adams Thoughts on Government, which now proved , said Richard henry lee, 'the business of framing government not to be so difficult as most people imagine.' Early in may independence seemed clearly to be just a matter of time and manner.... [W]ithin two weeks Virginia began work on a new government and ordered delegates in congress to introduce a resolution for independence. At the same time the radicals intensified their pressure on the Congress, as the best - perhaps the only - means of moving the balky proprietary colonies and of bringing about a continental independence.... For, as John Adams told his wife, 'No colony, which shall assume a Government under the People, will give it up.'
"the fruit of their efforts was the congressional resolution of may 10, 1776, advising colonies to adopt new governments 'where no government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs have been hitherto established.' This was capped on May 15 by a preamble declaring 'that the exercise of every kind of authority under the ... Crown should be totally suppressed,' and calling for the exertion of 'all the powers of government ... under the authority of the people of the colonies.' A momentous step - and many Americans realized it....
"[O]nce the path was opened by the Continental Congress, the formation of new government was remarkably rapid.... Framers in Virginia were likewise already at work on a new government when the general resolutions of May 10 and 15 gave them a new and broader sanction for their constitution adopted on June 29. And with the May resolves, and the Declaration of Independence, the other states followed successively."
I don't expect a loud-mouth intellectual pipsqueak like yourself to understand Gordon Wood, but let me point out a couple of the salient points:
(1) Prior to the Declaration of Independence, the political entities were called, and called themselves "colonies." Colonies are never independent and sovereign. None of the American colonies were "states" prior to the Declaration.
(2) Forming an autonomous government is not, in itself, a declaration of independence. For instance, from the 1840s to the 1860s, Canada was a self-governing colony of the United Kingdom, before forming the Dominion.
(3) You might have noticed, if you read the passage, the colonials turned to the Continental Congress for sanction to form colonial governments and write constitutions. That is not the action of a independent and sovereign state either.
Your comprehension of historical reality is weak, and your documentation is nonexistent. You can keep your slurs to yourself, because you are demonstrably wrong on this point.
Using modern terminology, Hamilton was an uber-mercantilist or "neo-mercantilist" as he and Friedrich List are often called. He was not a capitalist in the modern sense of the term, which is synonymous with an anti-interventionist laissez-faire attitude (although some 18th century users of the term "capitalist" employed it to refer to an interventionist who uses the power of the state to redirect wealth to himself or his allies, in which case it probably would apply to Hamilton).
I mean the original intent of the great majority of the Framers. And keep in mind that many of the Framers were also members of the Congresses of the Confederation which crafted the Northwest Ordinances.
There was very little dispute concerning the Territory Clause until Taney manipulated it.
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