Posted on 02/18/2002 1:01:50 PM PST by Magician
It is no surprise when yet another Hollywood film demonizes the South as nothing but a den of ignorance, poverty and bigotry.
For the most part, Hollywood persists in promoting the fiction that the states of the former Confederacy are stuck in a time warp, somewhere between 1865 and 1968. How many films produced in the last 20 years and set in the South can you name that don’t have race relations at their core? Even a brilliant film like Joel and Ethan Coen’s "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" can’t avoid dredging up the Klan, although, refreshingly, the Coen brothers link the Klan to Progressive Era "reformers."
However, it is a surprise to see a mainstream newspaper take note of Hollywood’s anti-Southern myopia.
In the Friday, Feb. 8, edition of USA Today, writer Scott Bowles takes on the issue with surprising directness.
Bowles quotes Marc Smirnoff, editor of Oxford American magazine, who correctly recognizes that the South is the last remaining target for vicious stereotyping. You can insult Southerners with impunity, while everyone else is off limits.
"If studios portrayed ethnic groups this way," Smirnoff tells Bowles, "they’d burn down the Hollywood sign."
I guess Hollywood should just be happy that we Southerners have learned some restraint since the days of the Fire-Eaters and the Sumner-Brooks Debate.
Independent filmmaker Gary Hawkins goes further, telling Bowles that Hollywood sees the South as "a foreign, frightening, funny place" that is "easy to demonize... for dramatic purposes."
The latest offender is the Oscar-nominated film "Monster’s Ball," starring Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton.
Central to the film is an interracial love story. That is something that could be controversial anywhere in America (see, for instance, Spike Lee’s film "Jungle Fever"). In this case, however, it is an excuse for trotting out the usual Southern bigots, straight from central casting.
Peter Boyle, as the Thornton character’s father, plays the embodiment of the stereotypical redneck racist.
All of this goes against history. Since the 1960s, race relations in the South have been far better than in the North. Even during the worst of the Civil Rights Era, the South never had riots to match those of Los Angeles, Detroit or Chicago, as historian Richard Lawson tells Bowles. (But Southerners already knew that.)
When so-called Civil Rights organizations have nothing better to do than attack Confederate monuments and drive barbecue baron Maurice Bessinger to the brink of bankruptcy, you know there are no real race problems left in the South.
But that doesn’t matter in Hollywood.
Sometimes, even when a film isn’t set in the South, the bad guys are Southerners. This includes a couple of films that are favorites of mine, in spite of their reflexive use of Southerners as villains.
The Bruce Willis sci-fi epic "The Fifth Element" is set in the far future, as removed from the Old South as you can get. But the villain, played by Gary Oldman, has a drawl that would put Fannie Flagg to shame.
Then there is Quentin Tarantino’s crime film, "Pulp Fiction," set in California.
Like any good crime story, "Pulp Fiction" is full of unsavory characters. But when Tarantino needs someone truly reprehensible to contrast to his protagonists, he turns to a bunch of Southern rednecks.
To drive the point home, the rednecks run a gun shop where they proudly display a Confederate battle flag. And to think that I was unaware that Los Angeles was home to so many flag-waving gun dealers from Dixie.
When a filmmaker does get the South right, he often has to apologize for it.
Ang Lee’s "Ride With the Devil" is a masterful tale of Civil War brutality. It plays fair with both sides and includes a wonderful speech in which a Southerner explains why the South cannot win the war. (It boils down to the North’s puritanical impulse to "improve" the world, never mind what those to be improved may think. Against that, the South’s desire merely to be left alone is no match.)
In interviews after the film’s release, Lee had to defend himself against the charge of romanticizing the South.
I should note that it took a Taiwanese-born director to do the South justice. Perhaps Lee sees some symmetry between the Confederacy’s struggle against the North and his country’s relationship with mainland China. Or maybe it just helps not to have been subjected to American public schools.
Bowles quotes actor Robert Duvall: "If you want to make a movie about the real South, I wouldn’t hire a director north of the Mason-Dixon line."
Amen.
I'm also aware of the time line of secession. That is why Davis started the war in the first place, to get the remaining slave states off the fence and into the confederacy. He probably could have had his seven state confederacy peacefully but knew that in order to survive and flourish he needed the other 8 slave states as well and was sure that the confederacy could defeat the Union with them. In the end he got half the remaining slave states to join but lost the rebellion, the country, everything.
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.
TRANSLATED: It was about slavery.
From Texas Declaration of the Causes of Secession
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
TRANSLATION: It was about slavery.
From the Georgia Declaration of the Causes of Secession
Because by their declared principles and policy they have outlawed $3,000,000,000 of our property in the common territories of the Union; put it under the ban of the Republic in the States where it exists and out of the protection of Federal law everywhere; because they give sanctuary to thieves and incendiaries who assail it to the whole extent of their power, in spite of their most solemn obligations and covenants; because their avowed purpose is to subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides. To avoid these evils we resume the powers which our fathers delegated to the Government of the United States, and henceforth will seek new safeguards for our liberty, equality, security, and tranquillity.
TRANSLATION: It was about slavery.
From the South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession
These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
TRANSLATION: It was about slavery.
From a Speech from Alexander Stephens , vice president of the confederacy:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
TRANSLATION: It was about...well, you know what it was about.
When did Lincoln say that?
You don't have to post every single word Lincoln ever said, that being the alternative to cutting and pasting, but just post where Lincoln said blacks were inferior.
Of course the record is clear that he told Frederick Douglass in a loud voice so that all around could hear, that there was no man in the country whose opinion he valued more:
"After the interview was over, Douglass left the White House with a growing respect for Lincoln. He was "the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely," Douglass said later, "who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color."
--"With Malice Towards None, p. 357 by Stephen Oates.
"Lincoln had Douglass shown in at once. "Here is my friend Douglass," the President announced when Douglass entered the room. "I am glad to see you," Lincoln told him. "I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my address." He added, "there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know hat you think of it." Douglass said he was impressed: he thought it "a sacred effort." "I am glad you liked it." Lincoln said, and he watched as Douglass passed down the [receiving] line. It was the first inaugural reception in the history of the Republic in which an American President had greeted a free black man and solicited his opinion."
Ibid., p. 412
Now, YOU post a quote from Lincoln that he EVER called blacks inferior.
Walt
This comment is straight from "1984".
Walt
Who has done that?
Walt
Seems like they wanted Robert Duvall back in '93 for "Gettysburg". Martin Sheen was brought in at the last minute. I like Sheen's acting; I thought he did an okay job as Lee. The actor who soft-pedaled it was Tom Berringer as Longstreet. I've read accounts that indicate that Longstreet was very visibly upset with the order to attack the Union center on July 3. Berringer didn't show that.
Walt
Paul Newman did a great southern accent. Ever see "Cool Hand Luke?" Also Strother Martin in the same movie had a very convincing southern accent. Both of those actors were originally from Ohio (although southern accents are common in the south part of that state.)
Lincoln did support various compensated emancipation and colonization schemes during 1862. After black soldiers were enlisted to fight for the Union, he didn't mention that again. He definitely proposed voting rights for blacks in his last speech on April 11, 1865.
"When you give the Negro these rights," he [Lincoln] said, "when you put a gun in his hands, it prophesies something more: it foretells that he is to have the full enjoyment of his liberty and his manhood...By the close of the war, Lincoln was reccomending commissioning black officers in the regiments, and one actually rose to become a major before it was over. At the end of 1863, more than a hundred thousand had enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, and in his message to Congress the president reported, "So far as tested, it is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any."
When some suggested in August 1864 that the Union ought to offer to help return runaway slaves to their masters as a condition for the South's laying down its arms, Lincoln refused even to consider the question.
"Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?" he retorted."Drive back to the support of the rebellion the physical force which the colored people now give, and promise us, and neither the present, or any incoming administration can save the Union." To others he said it even more emphatically. "This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force which may be measured and estimated. Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it."
...For the newly freed and the newly enlisted black men who served in the Union army--in the end more than 179,000 of them---perhaps the greatest moment was when they they too, shared the experience of paying their respects, of marching past their presidents in their new uniforms, looking as smart and martial as any. On April 23, 1864, and again two days later, newly mustered black regiments in a division attached to the IX corps passed through Washington on their way to the Virginia front. They marched proudly down Pennsylvania Avenue, past Willard's Hotel, where Lincoln and their commander, Burnside stood on a balcony watching. When the six black regiments came in sight of the president they went wild, singing, cheering, dancing in the street while marching. As each unit passed they saluted, and he took off his hat in return, the same modest yet meaningful acknowledgement he gave his white soldiers. He looked old and worn to the men in the street, but they could not see the cheer in his breast as he witnessed the culmination of their long journey from slavery, and pondered, perhaps, what it had cost him to be part of it. Even when rain began to fall and Burnside suggested they step inside while the parade continued, Lincoln decided to stay outdoors. "If they can stand it," he said, "I guess I can."
--"Lincoln's Men" pp 163-64 by William C. Davis
Also: "You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you then, exclusively to save the Union...
negroes, like other people act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive--even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept....
Peace does not appear as distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to worth the keeping in all future time. It will have then been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. There will then be some black men who can say that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consumation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, have strove to hinder it. Still let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us dilligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result."
8/23/63
"it is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers."
April 11, 1865
Walt
Actually, I thought Tom Berenger did a pretty good job. His beard looked pretty fake, though. At the part when Pickett was asking for permission to begin the charge, Longstreet could only nod, he couldn't bring himself to say anything. I thought that showed how upset he was.
Actually, I thought Tom Berenger did a pretty good job. His beard looked pretty fake, though. At the part when Pickett was asking for permission to begin the charge, Longstreet could only nod, he couldn't bring himself to say anything. I thought that showed how upset he was.
True enough. I thought Berrenger was okay, there was just this one incident. In the one book I read, one of the people present said something like, "It looked to me as if the only person General Longstreet wanted to fight was General Lee."
Walt
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.