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.
Art, you’re a treasure to read. If you authored your memoirs, firsthand or via another author, I’d totally buy it for what I know would be an enjoyable fireside/wine/scotch read.
Thanks for your contributions.
Thank you for the kind words! Maybe I’ll live so long as to write them.
In many ways Scarlett O’Hara was a early feminist fighting keep her home and take care of her family. She does evolve from the pampered prima dona to the shrew business woman. She fights against the rules of behavior of wealthy women.
Scarlett is the archetypal “Steel Magnolia;” I grew up with them, so I know. The Southern men who survived The War came home shattered. Many were addicted to morphine or laudanum. For most of the 19th Century the greatest expenses of Southern states were either prostheses or pensions for Confederate veterans.
I grew up with formidable women; they had to be. I heard the stories at my g/grandmother’s knee of being a girl of eight cowering behind her mother as Sherman’s troops rummaged her home a few months after she learned of her father’s death in battle; it leaves a mark.
The “Dixie Darling” is a complex being. On the one hand, she is the creature who took over from her wounded or psychologically wounded man and kept hearth and home together; on the other, she is a sultry seductress. She did what she had do. My grandmother was perhaps the greatest influence in my life; she taught me that if I couldn’t read, write, and speak Latin and at least read Greek, I’d always be a barbarian; she was right.
Thank you Art, An excellent article that provides a perspective and historical perspective that is invaluable in this day and age. May I suggest an article for your future consideration, “The pulling down of statues and monuments of confederate leaders in the south”. I just finished reading Tom Clancy’s novel “Executive Orders” in which the US Army director of the desert warfare training center ( mechanized armor) refers to the civil war as “The War of Northern Agression” In friendly bantering with the commander of an No Carolina NG armored cavalry unit at the NTC for trading. Your article gives a new meaning to their friendly competition. In the novel they they and their respective units and although outnumbered 4 to 1 are partnered with the Saudis and Kuwaitis and absolutely smash the Iraqi/Iranian forces in a massive tank battle by virtue of their superior equipment and greatly superior tactics and training.
I have a hardback 1st Edition of “Executive Orders” in a box in the garage. When I quit the Executive Branch in disgust in 1996, I took a bunch of literature classes at UAS because I realized I hadn’t read anything in a decade other than Tom Clancy novels and labor law and arbitration hornbooks.
In my youth there were still people around who would turn their back when “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was sung or played; they knew whose vineyards the Yankees were bragging about trampling. All of my lineal military-age ancestors served in the Army of Northern Virginia, though only a few were true volunteers. Most enlisted at the 4 Mar 1862 militia muster and “volunteered” rather than submit to the draft. The gg/grandfather I referred to in the piece was a very reluctant soldier and, well-off and well-connected, did everything in his power to avoid CS service, but when he couldn’t get a billet in the Georgia Army, referred to at the time as Gov. Joe Brown’s Pets, or another exemption reported to the muster and “volunteered.” He was in the ranks in The Seven Days battles and either got wounded or sick, which brought him into contact with CS hospital administrators. Since he was well-educated, he spent much of the war detailed to various military hospitals as a clerk. I have a copy of a voucher for pay and subsistence for a wounded soldier on leave that he signed that I got from a guy I met while doing research; my gg/grandfather had paid his gg/grandfather. He was back in the ranks in the spring of ’63 and I have his letter home after Chancellorsville, in which the 48th Georgia was a part of the hinge on which Jackson’s Flank Attack was swung and was among the units that drove union troops from the Chancellor house and away from the area. He was again detailed to administrative duties and was relatively close to home at Tallahassee, Fl. for the rest of ’63.
I have several of his letters home in the winter of ’63 – ’64 in which he is discussing buying a substitute with my gg/grandmother. I don’t have her letters, letters from home to a soldier are very rare, but it is clear that she is having none of the notion of her man “lying abed” while others are still fighting; she paid a high price for that. By that time the Confederacy was robbing both the cradle and the grave to get men in the ranks and he reported that spring and fought in all the Overland Campaign battles.
After the investment in the Richmond -Petersburg works, the ANV rotated units in and out of the vile conditions in the trenches as much as it could. By July ’64 the war had settled into stasis much like WWI became; it was a war of raids through the lines, sniping, and occasional artillery barrages; the old saw of long periods of boredom in the heat and filth punctuated by periods of stark terror. On July 30 when the Yankees exploded the mine and attacked, the 48th GVIR had been relieved and was in the rear. Bg. Gen. Mahone, brevetted either Mj. or Lt. Gen. after Longstreet was wounded at The Wilderness, hastily organized troops in the rear and counterattacked where the line had been breached by the explosion. The Yankees, most of them USCT, and many drunk, attacked screaming “No Quarter,” and the Confederates happily obliged. My gg/grandfather was KIA in the counterattack. There is no record of the nature of his wounds or of his burial place, but it was likely from friendly artillery and there probably wasn’t much to bury as nearby CS artillery was pouring canister shot into the melee at The Crater. I stomped around Richmond and Petersburg for a few days trying to verify an old family story that some relatives had found his gravesite in the 1930s, but there is no record at any of the CS cemeteries in the area and no official record of his cause of death. My best surmise is that he is buried with others thought to be Georgia soldiers in the mass grave at Blanford Church near the battle field. A neighbor came home on leave some time after the battle and brought some of his personal effects to my gg/Grandmother. I still have his bloodstained Testament that was in his jacket pocket when he was killed and we still have his quilt that he used as a bedroll, but among the old family quilts we don’t know which one it is.
Thank you Art for sharing a bit of history. I think most Americans today have zero connection to the Old South. Save for my Great Grand Mother all my relatives were slaves , ( serfs) on the Hapsburg Plantation back in the Old World. They came to America after Black Slavery ended. Can you explain to me how I am responsible for reparations?
I just wish my ancestors had picked their own damned cotton.
Beautifully written, Art. Makes me want to visit Georgia and the Deep South.
Comments are closed.