On July 10th The Margaret Mitchell House Museum in Atlanta reopened after four years, honoring the place where Mitchell in 1925-1931 wrote the critical and commercial success, Gone with the Wind (published in 1936, three years before the blockbuster movie). According to Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of Atlanta History Center, as quoted in The New York Times on July 13, 2024 ” in a piece called “Pride and Pain Under One Roof,” the exhibit, “Telling Stories: Gone With the Wind and American Memory,” is intended as neither praise nor indictment, but as “complicated history” that shows how Mitchell and the book “were the product of a certain time and place. The exhibit includes not just Mitchell and book memorabilia, but Black-perspective commentary and references to later films and books that emphasize the extensive horrors of slavery – additions that the organizers feel can serve as “historical corrective.” The occasion of the exhibit does, however, invite re-appraisal of the book, which, in spite of its shortcoming in not acknowledging the profound misery of The Traffick and Plantation life, remains a compelling piece of literature. It won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and is clearly an eye-opening look at the culture and society of “The Chivalry,” the upper-class pro-slavery world in which Scarlett O’Hara moves.
One of the significant inferences drawn from Mitchell’s historical 19th–century saga is that The War Between the States, as The Civil War was typically –and accurately - referred to, was fought essentially because America was never united as an indivisible nation. Regions ruled, particularly the agrarian South, with its profitable cotton industry based on the forced labor of millions. The North, from a Southern point of view, was an indistinct alliance of abolitionist radicals, carpet baggers, compromising politicians, including Lincoln, and a hotbed of immoral and foreign influence. The South, from a Unionist point of view, was divisive and evil, advocating slavery as a political and moral good.
The Chivalry in Mitchell’s 1,037-page novel is worth noting because the legacy of The Lost Cause haunts current events. Some Confederate flag-carrying belligerents seem to believe that what was gone with the wind might yet be reclaimed if only the old hierarchal racial, religious, and patriarchal priorities were to waft their way back into state law.
The Chivalry, an aristocratic organization of plantation owners and their political allies, dominated the antebellum and post-war South with sentimental visions that harkened to the days of Medieval Christian knights on horseback fighting infidels, one branch of which became the KKK. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, borrowing iconography from medieval British lore, was a favorite. Whites were increasingly fearful of uprisings and revenge from emancipated slaves and free Blacks. The end of the war only exacerbated those fears.
As Mitchell shows, Scarlett O’Hara’s South was unique: a region hardly, if ever, democratic, that turned on restrictive codes, customs, and class. Many pro-slavers cited Genesis where Noah curses the sons of his own son, Ham, dooming them and generations ever after to slavery. But it was the financial success of The Traffick and the slave auctions that drove The Peculiar Institution and determined standing in Southern society. In Gone With the Wind people know each other and their place, including White Trash. One could be poor but not lost, isolated but not alone. Black and White, rich or poor, subscribed to class distinctions. Mitchel’s character, “Mammy”, calls Tara “home,” and for her, it is. Mammy is from the class of slavery known as House Blacks, domestic servants who provided with shelter and food, even with occasional patronizing affection, had Identity.
Gone with the Wind though restrictive in its focus is not a racist book, championing racial superiority. Thomas Dixon Jr’s The Clansman: A Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) most certainly is. This is the novel that furnished text and argument for the notoriously popular silent film “The Birth of a Nation” (1915). The movie, shown at the Woodrow Wilson White House and highlighting what it called Negro ignorance and mob rule, evoked this remark from the President: “So true.” (Wilson, born in Virginia, grew up in Georgia during Reconstruction.)
It’s significant that the movie, Gone With The Wind left out Mitchell’s peg leg Confederate soldier Will Benteen, who looks after Tara for Scarlett, when she’s in South Carolina. He’s a likely emblem of a New South if she and The Chivalry were able to imagine how an uneducated but industrious member of the working class might build back the region. It’s also important to note that the film makes no mention of Ashley Wilkes belonging to the KKK, which Mitchell, of course, makes clear. Nor did Harper Lee glide over a disturbing, autobiographical fact in the first version of To Kill A Mockingbird (1960). Go Set A Watchman (set in the 1950s, published in 2015), follows a grown-up Jean-Louise (“Scout”), living in New York, who goes home to her small Alabama town to see her father Atticus Finch, and discovers to her horror, that he subscribes to KKK material and attends Council meetings. That fact disturbed a lot of Mockingbird devotees, not to mention fans of Gregory Peck.
More than a region, as Gone with the Wind brilliantly shows, The South is history and myth, its powerful leaders no heirs of the Deist and Enlightenment philosophers who guided the American and French Revolutions. Rhett Butler, scheming, cynical, realistic, finally joins The Lost Cause though he knows the gesture is futile. A West Point dropout, and a gentleman of dubious morality, a probable atheist, he still belongs to The Chivalry, a Shakespeare-quoting son of Charleston’s first families.
In The Demon of Unrest, an engaging, well-researched study of the antebellum South, now number one on the best-seller list, historian Erik Larson tellingly quotes James Henry Hammond, a wealthy planter, a former South Carolina Governor and Senator, ardent pro-slaver, and the person who coined the phrase “cotton is king.” In a letter to a friend in New York, Hammond writes: “we are here two races –white and black- now both equally American, holding each other in the closest embrace and utterly unable to extricate ourselves from it. A problem so difficult, so complicated and so momentous never was placed in charge of any portion of Mankind. And on its solution rest our all” The statement could suffice today.
The Lost Cause lives on in the hoisting of Confederate flags at rallies, the popularity of Confederate paraphernalia at historical-site gift shops, and the obvious gerrymandering of those who fear Blacks winning at the ballot box. Those who interpret MAGA as an attempt to set back the clock have ethnic numbers against them. And literary history. Loss of identity is the theme of so much award-winning American literature in the 20th century, and the South owns that literature, with fiction, poetry, dramas, and letters that explore the search for belonging when community or sense of self is gone. The tragedy of Gone With the Wind, as Margaret Mitchell well knew, is that the War between the States was no tragedy. No heroic figures emerged, no ambiguous, but edifying vision, little understanding, and even less action, that might modify the sense of superiority, class divide, and loss of a sense of belonging. Of course, “tomorrow” will always be “another day, “ but it still is for too many, and not just in The South, based on yesterday. You can’t go home again.
