Gone, As If with the Wind
That history is told by the victors is an axiom few would deny. Indeed, who else can tell the story. With the vanquished no longer present, history is left to the living, and self-preservation dictates that justification serve their interests alone. American history has mostly followed that well accepted norm with one conspicuous exception. When Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army to Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox Virginia in 1865, one would have expected the following century to have excoriated the unabashed capitalism and social constructs that created the inhumanity of slavery. Any effort to rehabilitate slavery or ignore the continued machinations of bringing antebellum southern values into the present, should have met with executive, legislative, judicial, journalistic, and artistic resistance. History should not have succumbed to mitigation, obfuscation, and denial. But it did. By the turn of the twentieth century, southerners rewrote history mindful to put a digestible spin with a savory aftertaste on what was southern values. D.W. Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation was released in New York City by a prominent Hollywood producer, quite far from the heart of southern influence, yet northern complicity was evident in its production and debut. This film depicted Blacks as a slovenly, crude, and backward people, inclined toward raping white women that only the Ku Klux Klan could defend against. That President Woodrow Wilson, a former Governor of New Jersey and President of Princeton, could comment "It's like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true," is evidence that even the most educated northerners were very much inclined to keep the southern mythology of life before 1865 alive and well. Birth of a Nation is an adaptation of a 1905 publication of The Clansman, copies of which are still available for purchase, despite its intended propaganda and ill-will towards humanity. The double edge of capitalism lives on.
By 1939 we get Hollywood’s version of Gone with the Wind, originally published in 1936 by MacMillan. The dynamic duo of New York City and Hollywood team up again to alter the facts of American history. Margaret Mitchell’s only authorship was more subtle than Birth of a Nation in the telling of a national lie, and therein may lie its greater threat. It is more palatable, laced with love and war and loss. The racism implied in the book needed dilution for the screen, but all involved thought the work deserved telling—disinformation be damned.
That there are remnants today of how the South recorded and tabulated their way of life, listing names and places and holdings of livestock—including people—along with races recorded as White, Black or Mulatto, admitting the scourge of approved rape, reveals the hubris that existed in the late nineteenth century. No one thought to scrub the record books of local census documents, to burn down the buildings holding aging files of plantation life. The South was proud of who they were and did not fear cultural backlash. The North would play along. Today’s genealogists can now easily go back to archives of census data, sales records of slave auctions and newspaper articles revealing obtuse inhuman values that seem relegated to another millennium but are barely a century old.
Eudora Welty, a daughter of the South, and author and critic extraordinaire, says in The Eye of the Story that all books have an expiration date. There comes a time when time and place and circumstances depicted in a novel no longer find traction among current day readerships. If an author narrows their scope of place, character, and plot such that it only applies to one era, that book will remain shelved and become irrelevant with time. Thus, we see today that Gone with the Wind needs footnotes and annotations to find acceptance with today’s distributors, an obligation to explain what did not belong in the epic movie. Margaret Mitchell was not apologetic for her depictions. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, on the other hand, depicts courage, family values and civic leadership, and will likely live on for centuries. Two southern authors; two vastly different values.
© Eric Clark 04/20/2021
Photo by: The New York Public Library @nypl
