[annyokie]

Here we go.....

[squarebarb]

Oh Lord here we go.

[tuffydoodle]

I wonder if "Star Wars" played fast and loose with the truth, too?!

I'm totally bummed. Like, totally.

[what's up]

Does the article mention that the slave-owners in the South were all Democrats?

Didn't think so.

[sam_paine]

GWTW was a precursor to the modern liberal recycling fad. Most new dresses on sale in SoHo these days are actually made out of recycled curtains.

[groanup]

This guy is imminently more qualified to describe the pre-war South than Margaret Mithchell whose parents actually lived in it.

[CAluvdubya]

As far as I'm concerned, "The Wind Done Gone!"

[squarebarb]

The novel should be considered as a novel not as a pro or con propaganda piece.

I've never heard of GWTW being taught as a novel; its construction, especially. It is well done. Anyway, maybe with the passing of time...

[Artemis Webb]

This has been weighing heavily on my mind for some time now. Perhaps we can remake Gone With The Wind and set it in Iraq...With Michael Moore as Rhett and Cher as Scarlett!!

Ooooooooohhhhhhhh...how I quiver!!

[montag813]

this piece is only 65 years late

[D Rider]

It was also filmed when the last remaining civil war veterans were still alive. It romanticized a period that was still fresh, with many whose parents and grandparents fought in that great conflict.

To rip it for all its faults now, besides being stupid, misses the point off the civil war's impact on who we are as Americans. And its romantic portrayal of how we Americans felt about ourselves during the period of its filming.

For example, take any major modern movie and compare it to our current culture. Try to take a viewpoint from 60 years in the future, and see what it says about us.

[nmh]

"Gone With the Wind" is fiction, to be sure, and while both Mitchell and Selznick maintained that the book and movie aimed for historical accuracy, it doesn't purport to be a history of the American South in the mid-19th century.

But, as a phenomenally successful pop culture artifact, the movie has made an incalculable contribution to racism in America.

FOLKS, it's JUST A MOVIE!

[kipita]

I'll say it a million times, but one must compare the life of the slave before the civil in the north and the south. The cause-effect relationship afterwards always cast the south as the bad entity. But that's the past, the two brothers have fought with each other and the family moves on, hand-in-hand together.

[Cicero]

Apart from the moral issue of whether it's right for one person to own another, which is of course basic, slavery can be either dreadful or pretty decent, depending on the character of the masters and mistresses.

Two of the most admirable characters in The Odyssey are Telemachus's nurse, a slave, and Euthyphro, the pig herder who belongs to Odysseus. Both are loyal to the extreme, both love their masters, and both are treated basically as family. Perhaps there is no character in the poem whom Homer treats with greater affection than Euthyphro.

I've never witnessed slavery directly, but I have witnessed several instances of the old-fashioned "upstairs/downstairs" institution of life-long household servants. In the cases that I am familiar with, these people were treated as part of the family and were assured of lifetime security. They had a kind of love and respect and an ease of relationship that you seldom or never see in the households of super-rich yuppies today.

I wouldn't want to be a slave or a servant, but--strange as it may seem to a free American--there are genuine possibilities of love and affection and deep loyalty on both sides in such an institution. And of course there are also horrible possibilities of rape, abuse, and cruelty. Such is human nature.

[Veto!]

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.

Yes, this is true. Before history texts were revised by victimology revisionists, they did portray slavery as less awful than we think of it today. And backed it up with facts and figures. I purchased a terrific old textbook at eBay and this is what it said:

A History of the South
Fourth Edition, Alfred A. Knopf 1947, 1953, 1963, 1972
by Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland
P. 125-126

BEGIN QUOTE: Abolitionist assertions that the bondsmen were frequently inadequately clothed, underfed, and driven to death are economically unreasonable. Masters wished to preserve the health and life of their slaves because a sick Negro was a liability and a dead Negro was worth nothing. A rough plenty prevailed on the average plantation. “The best preventive of theft is plenty of pork,” was the advice of a Virginian.

Slaves probably fared as well in the enjoyment of the necessities of life as did most of the free laborers of the country. One of the most respected of all Northern critics of slavery, Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote that the Southern bondsmen lived in quarters quite as adequate as those of most mill or mine workers elsewhere, and that the slaves were perhaps the best fed “proletarian class” in the world. He also testified that they worked less than did free laborers.

Incomplete statistics reveal that the slaves averaged somewhat higher sickness and death rates per thousand than did Southern whites as a whole. But the slaves were from all indications as healthy and long-lived as white common laborers in the United States before the Civil War. It was general knowledge at the time in Louisiana that the slaves were better off in these respects than were the thousands of Irish immigrant laborers engaged in clearing land and digging drainage canals on the sugar plantations. The planters were reluctant to commit their expensive chattels to this dangerous work, but preferred to hire free laborers, whose loss by death, sickness, or injury cost nothing. A careful study of the figures on a group of 875 plantation slaves whose records are preserved indicates their average life expectancy at the time of birth to have been longer than that of the general population of such cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia during the same period. An authority on urban slavery concludes that the medical care, health, and welfare of slaves in Southern cities were superior to the care, health, and welfare of the free Negroes; and the outstanding work on the life of Negroes in the North at this time shows that they fared no better in such matters than did free blacks in the land of slavery. END QUOTE

Well, we can't have that kind of information circulating now, can we?

[wimpycat]

GWTW, in modern money terms, is still the most successful film of all time. It was successful because it is a story that people all over the world could identify with, and it just happened to be set in the South. A young woman from a privileged background is forced to face the destruction of the only world she knows and learn how to live in the new world left in its place. Lots of people, who lived through WWI and were in the midst of WWII, could identify with the theme of the movie, and with the various characters.

Nobody can take that away from the novel or the film, no matter how hard they try.

[Casloy]

I have absolutely nothing to say.

[goldfinch]

Margaret Mitchell said that 'Gone With The Wind' was just a bunch of stories she heard while she was growing up and strung together to make a novel. With that in mind, I reread the book a couple of years ago, staying detached from the plot, and just soaking up the individual incidents. Read that way, the book is more like oral history. History is not only what happened, it is what people thought and how they reacted to what happened. IMO, GWTW gives a picture of how upper class Southerners remembered the Civil War and the years immediately following it. It is not surprising to me that they saw themselves as the oppressed instead of as the oppressors. Slave owners, as a general rule, believed they behaved in a novelty manner. They did not see themselves as evil nor slavery as an evil institution. They were wrong about the latter.

When criticized about some of the historical details of the Little House books, the author, Laura Inglis Wilder, said she didn't know she was writing history. She thought she was just writing stories. I dare say Margaret Mitchell would say the same...

[digger48]

And if you would just talk to "Mammy", who was a lesbian.........

[stevem]

But, racial issues aside, I've always found the story to be too contrived: Seriously, would any woman, let alone Scarlett, ever choose Leslie Howard's Ashley Wilkes over Gable's Rhett Butler?

This is humor. I always looked at it from the other angle. Would a figure with the charismantic power of Rhett Butler ever have wasted six tenths of a second on such a solipsist as Scarlett O'Hara?