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 ...
He was evil.
He was menacing
He was the father that was never there......
He was stereotypical black.
"The virtue that classical republicanism encouraged was public virtue. Private virtues such as prudence, frugality, and industry were important but, said Hume, they only made men 'servicable to themselves, and enable them to promote their own interests'; they were not 'such as make them perform their part in society.' Public virtue was the sacrifice of private desires and interests for the public interest. It was devotion to the commonweal. ...."Republicanism thus put an enormous burden on individuals. They were expected to suppress their private wants and interests and develop disinterestedness--the term the eighteenth century most often used as a synonym for civic virtue: it better conveyed the increasing threats from interests that virtue now faced....
"Precisely because republics required civic virtue and disinterestedness among their citizens, they were very fragile polities, extremely liable to corruption. Republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their subjects. In monarchies each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by fear or force, by patronage or honor. In republics, however, each man must somehow be persuaded to sacrifice his personal desires, his luxuries, for the sake of the public good." [Emphasis supplied.]
Notice how he regrets the lack of social or other controls over the citizen. Somehow I don't think Wood is a republican, or much of a democrat; what I smell here is a Hamiltonian pragmatist. Well, let's see what he has to say about Jefferson -- that should help:
"Even Jefferson, sanguine and optimistic as he had always been, was reduced to despair in his last years and to what seems to us today to be an embarrassing fire-eating defense of his South and states' rights. He hated the new democratic world he saw emerging in America--a world of speculation, banks, paper money, and evangelical Christianity that he thought he had laid to rest. ....More than any of the revolutionary leaders, he had relied on the future to take care of itself. Progress, he thought, was on the march, and science and enlightenment were everywhere pushing back the forces of ignorance, superstition and darkness. The people in a liberal democratic society would be capable of solving every problem, if not in his lifetime, then surely in the coming years."But Jefferson lived too long, and the future and the coming generation were not what he had expected. Jefferson was frightened by the popularity of Andrew Jackson, regarding him as a man of violent passions and unfit for the presidency. He felt overwhelmed by the new paper-money business culture sweeping through the country and never appreciated how much his democratic and egalitarian principles had contributed to its raise. Ordinary people, in whom Jefferson had placed so much confidence, more than his friend Madison, were not becoming more enlightened after all." [Emphasis supplied.]
Ah, now it becomes clear. Jefferson disappointed.....Jefferson disillusioned....Jefferson old, sad, and irrelevant......no, I don't need this fellow to jump up from his seat to shout out, "But Hamilton was right!!" to know where he's coming from now.
This man's as thoroughgoing an oligarch as any interviewed by Socrates. Which explains a lot about why you're quoting him to us.
While running down the republican Antifederalists, however, Wood fails to notice something on the other side of the scales which brings us very precisely to the point of the argument between Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism. An exact contemporary of and participant in the great debate (as "A Columbian Patriot"), Mrs. Mercy Warren wrote to a friend, Mrs. Catherine Macauley in August, 1787, while the Convention was meeting, "every man of sense is convinced a strong efficient government is necessary," but while "old patriots wish to see a form established on the pure principles of republicanism," others favored aristocracy [oligarchy, as I was saying] or a monarchy and called for a standing army precisely to suppress the few patriots who still esteemed revolutionary liberty. Thus a member of the numerous, politically active, and pro-Federalist Warren family, talking about the kind of dry-eyed pragmatists who gathered around Hamilton and the Federalist cause in 1787.*
The Federalists had argued that "too precise an enumeration of the people's rights was dangerous, 'because it would be implying, in the strongest manner, that every right not included in the exception might be impaired by the Government without usurpation.'"
Yup. Channeling Hamilton.
*Quoted in The Antifederalists, Jackson Turner Main, 1961.
Indeed, the KKK did form to drive out the northern carpetbaggers. They, at this point, were actually on the side of good and were not involved in anything race related. They disbanded and subsiquently, another group of people took up a new racisit cause and an old KKK name and became the KKK that we know today.
Justice Curtis, I agree. Per SC rules, he could not publish his opinion until finalized and delivered to the Court Reporter.
The Congress was trying to keep for being arrested by the military.
Bravo Sierra. Under the rules of the court, NO decision is final until PUBLISHED by the Reporter.
Look real close at a copy of the Constitution, and then tell me which branch of government is delegated the power to susspend the writ. Is it enumerated in the powers of the Executive? NO. Is it enumerated in the powers of the Judiciary? NO.
No surprise there. That statement applies to states while they belong to the Union or the Confederate States, not after they have withdrawn. It is a restriction imposed on states as long as they agree to be a part of that particular union.
Once a state had withdrawn from the United States of America, it was free to make whatever treaty, alliance, or confederation it wished.
Under the US Constitution, states retained the power to secede from the Union. Consider, for example, Jefferson Davis' argument before the Senate Jan 10, 1861:
...the tenth amendment of the Constitution declared that all which had not been delegated was reserved to the States or to the people. Now, I ask where among the delegated grants to the Federal Government do you find any power to coerce a state; where among the provisions of the Constitution do you find any prohibition on the part of a State to withdraw; and if you find neither one nor the other, must not this power be in that great depository, the reserved rights of the States? How was it ever taken out of that source of all power to the Federal Government? It was not delegated to the Federal Government; it was not prohibited to the States; it necessarily remains, then, among the reserved powers of the States.
It would have been more telling for your argument if the Confederates had not included a Tenth Amendment-like statement in their Constitution. But they did. Article VI, Section VI of the Confederate Constitution:
The powers not delegated to the Confederate States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people thereof.
That power is also in the Confederate Consitution.
And the Confederate Congress authorized Jefferson Davis to suspend the writ for specific limited periods of time. Davis didn't suspend the writ on his own like Lincoln did.
If Lincoln had the power to suspend the writ (or privilege of the writ) all by himself without Congressional authorization, why did Congress later authorize Lincoln to suspend it?
free dixie,sw
like the ones in which he suggests that EVERY Indian be exterminated or driven out of the country???
free dixie,sw
he is becoming my "sort of human" spell-checker, as he seems INcapable of thought.
i'd guess he has nothing much else to do in his life.
free dixie,sw
he is becoming my "sort of human" spell-checker, as he seems INcapable of thought.
i'd guess he has nothing much else to do in his life.
free dixie,sw
Those who go out of their way to defend the Slavers' insurrection will be called that by me when I feel inclined to do so.
I think stand is man enough to stand on his own.
Quote the rule you cite.
With regard to Rule #25, of that era, Justice Curtis had given the text of his opinion to the clerk, as per the rule. It was ready to publish. However, Justice Taney held up the game for more than a month.
Are you aware that McLean also circulated his dissenting opinion? And I am sure you are aware that Justice Curtis was sickened by Taney's behavior and resigned from the Court - making your comment laughable.
He wrote a letter to Hamilton during the NY state ratification convention encouraging Alex to hold out for non-conditional ratification. Alex had fought overwhelming anti forces to a draw and was about ready to allow ratification on the condition that the state could revoke it should things not go as it wished. Madison said no way this is something that cannot be revoked. Look in Madison's letters for 1788 its there.
Islamic marriage can be with five people. The analogy is proper.
Please look at the definition of observation and compare to justification. I wish death upon very few and particularly not wholesale against women and children. So describing the actual conditions the slaves faced is now justifying the massacres? Are you about to defend the Domingian slavers now too?
Slavery itself was mass murder. Thus, I will not choose between mass murderers and pretend that the prepetrators of the initial mass murder should escape the penalty for their crimes.
Slavery was brutal in the American South as well and nothing you have shown me contradicts that reality. Why would the Slavers have organized their entire society to prevent slave revolts if it were not brutality in its essential core?
Get real I would never insult anyone's mother and haven't.
Your mother is probably as saintly as mine.
An election is a regularly scheduled rotation of office holders (at least theoretically) and not an appeal to the people.
No a convention in one or eleven states does not have the authority to dissolve the Union. Under the framework of the constitution states have no power to pass acts which affect the Union as a whole unless it is done through the prescribed constitutional methodology. Our Constitution is out of the control of one or several states only "...on the application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a Convention..." can it be changed or through 2/3s of both Houses of Congress. Neither of these were done in 1860-1 since conventions in states is NOT the Convention referenced above. Even if every state had held a convention that still would not have met the required conditions for amending.
And No the People do NOT "make and unmake compacts and constitutions like we make our beds" making such a comment shows you incomprehension of just what the constitution is.
It is a fundamental law designed to remain substantially the same for long periods changed only by the methodology described therein. It is NOT the product of the whim of the moment.
It is the creation of the Permanent Interest of the People not its day to day vacillations.
Nor do you understand the concept of Tyranny in its origin or its actions. Blindess to the tyranny of the Slaves prevents you from seeing many things.
Been there, done that. You'd just ignore it again.
With regard to Rule #25, of that era, Justice Curtis had given the text of his opinion to the clerk, as per the rule. It was ready to publish. However, Justice Taney held up the game for more than a month.
Per the SC rules of the time, and of today, the decisions go through several versions/renditions/edits until it it approved for publication. It was not the official opinion until published by the Court Reporter.
Are you aware that McLean also circulated his dissenting opinion? And I am sure you are aware that Justice Curtis was sickened by Taney's behavior and resigned from the Court - making your comment laughable.
Justice Curtis resigned from the court. However, he expressed great admiration for Taney nonetheless.
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