GONE WITH THE WIND IS ABOUT THE END OF A CULTURE
By ART CHANCE
The latest thing to “trigger” fake news talking heads and other crazy leftists is President Donald Trump’s approval of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and the movie that somewhat resembles it.
Unlike the lefties carrying on about it, I’ve actually read the book, seen some or all of the movie dozens of times, know the names of all the characters, and recite from memory a lot of the lines.
More importantly, my family lived it and I heard about it at my great-grandmother’s knee.
I have many of my great-great-grandfather’s letters home, and I have the letter from the captain of Company H, 48th Georgia Volunteer Infantry, Wright’s Brigade, Hill’s Corps, Lee’s Army informing my great-great-grandmother of her husband’s death in Mahone’s Counterattack at the Battle of the Crater.
Three years later, she had gone from a relatively well-off wife of a small planter and teacher to the “Indigent Soldiers’ Widows and Orphans” relief list for Emanuel County, Georgia.
I think I have a bit of expertise on the subject.
I like Mitchell’s book well enough. The movie is very good movie-making for the era, with superb acting, although middle Georgia doesn’t look much like California, where most of it was filmed.
Ashley Wilkes’ house in the movie is real in a small town just outside Atlanta and was for sale a few months back for a paltry million and a half. I looked covetously at it for a moment and then remembered that everything in it that I had to repair or replace would have to be custom made.
A serious disease in The South is what I call “The Tara Syndrome.” Tara is the O’Hara Plantation House in Gone With the Wind. The South suffers from the disease of, “if it weren’t for the Yankees, we’d still live at Tara.”
The problem is that in Georgia, maybe a hundred families lived on anything resembling Tara. There were only a few hundred slaveholders in The South that had more than 20 slaves, and the family owned and occupied plantation was not the face of King Cotton and the slave-holding South.
King Cotton reigned in the Mississippi Delta and the Mississippi River valleys, where joint stock companies set up cotton farms using slave labor and Yankee money to engage in corporate farming; that’s the reason big Northern banks and insurance companies get really nervous whenever anyone starts to talk about reparations for slavery; they owned a lot of slaves.
Further, 85 percent of the men serving in the Confederacy’s armies did not own slaves; they fought because they had been invaded.
Unlike what some pig-ignorant, talking head says, Gone With the Wind isn’t a “slave movie.” It is a movie about the end of a culture and the end of slavery. It is also a movie about the relationships between people regardless of race or social status. There was genuine concern and affection between the O’Hara’s and their slaves.
It is also a story about Scarlett O’Hara’s transition from a spoiled, flighty, and manipulative debutant into a wife and mother and ultimately back into a totally self-interested and manipulative capitalist. Scarlett meant it when she had the drapes at Tara sewn into a fashionable dress and swore, “I’ll never be poor again.” Scarlett O’Hara became the face of 19th Century American capitalism that made us a world power.
Gone With the Wind is a populist if not outright Marxist attack on the antebellum culture of The South. Rhett Butler is a dashing handsome rogue and scoundrel who hangs out in an Atlanta whorehouse and runs the blockade to bring luxury goods to those in The South who can still afford them. Belle Starr is the archetypal whore with a heart. Both redeem themselves as the story resolves. Scarlett endures the tragedy of their daughter’s death and then her break with Rhett. Those of us who have lived a little know what it is like to have someone that you love but cannot live with.
“If you weren’t there, you can’t understand it” isn’t enough of a summary. But Gone With the Wind isn’t a celebration of slavery or the slave-holding South; it is a condemnation of it. The protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara was the face of the elite of the slaveholding South who transformed into the ruthless capitalist of modern America.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
