The Rest Is History - 204. Gone with the Wind

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

"There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South". Tom and Dominic are joined by Sarah Churchwell to discuss the 'Lost Cause' myth that has pervaded American culture for 150 years, its embodiment in both the novel and film version of Gone with the Wind, and what insight it gives into post-Civil War America. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of knights and their ladies fair, of master and of slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a civilization gone with the wind. So that, Tom Holland, is the opening text of the single most

successful motion picture ever made. Gone with the Wind, released in December 1939, premiered in Atlanta, Georgia, and went on to sell so many admissions tickets that I think one in every two people in the United States and Canada saw it, and pretty much one in every two people in Britain when it ran during the Blitz a year later. So are you a big Gone With The Wind fan, Tom? I've only seen it once, I'm going to be honest. And that was a long time ago. And all I really remember is Scarlett O'Hara going, fiddle-de-dee.

It's pretty much the limit. You didn't model yourself on Rhett Butler? I see you as very Rhett Butler. No, I was kind of much more an Ashley, kind of faintly wet, but sinister. Foppish. Foppish, but sinister. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean,

I think it's, Gone with the Wind is obviously, I suppose, with Uncle Tom's Cabin, they're kind of two great literary bookends that surround the history of the Civil War in America and its aftermath. And we've done four episodes so far

on the Civil War. And in the last episode, we looked at how it's seen today. So all the kind of enormous contemporary resonances and ramifications that it has. But essentially, we left a big gap. So what happened, basically, from when the Civil War ended up to the present day? And in a way, Gone with the Wind is the kind of the perfect way into looking at that question i think uh and dominic do you know i'm not the only person who thinks that no you're not so someone else who thinks that uh there was suspended book um which is has has just come out i think by the

time we record we this is released that's right isn't it tom that is right and when we put um when so when we advertised on twitter asking for for questions we got a reply from count gabriel thursday is this related to sarah churchill's new book actually he said sarah churchill's new book but sarah churchill's new book the wrath to come and do you know dominic it is it is we've got sarah with us hello sarah welcome welcome to the rest is history so your new book, The Wrath to Come, Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells. I mean, the subtitle is giving a few clues as to your perspective on this. I decided not to pull any punches. So before we get into the lies that America tells, could we just talk about Gone with the Wind itself? Because I mentioned to Katie, my daughter, who will actually be coming on our next episode to talk

about Love Island, which is very, very different, very different field of study. And I asked her, had she heard of Gone with the Wind? And she hadn't really. It meant very, very little to her. She'd never seen the film, certainly never read the book. So for people who may not be familiar with it, could you just give us a sense of how colossal a publishing and then a cinematic phenomenon it was is? Yeah, absolutely. And I'll say that that size of its impact is in a sense still registered by the fact that even though your daughter has never seen it or read it, she still has faintly heard of it. So we can flip it on its head and say, it's still out there. People are aware of it, even if only, you know, indirectly and ambiently, but, and that is still the outward reverberations of a century of, as you say, colossal impact. So when it, the novel was published in 1936 and it became an instant word of mouth phenomenon. It didn't have a massive

publicity campaign behind it in some of the ways that we're now accustomed to. It was a genuine popular hit and it instantly became the book that everybody was reading and everybody was talking about in the United States. So it was written by a woman called Margaret Mitchell. And you said Gone with the Wind is a good way into bridging the gap, but so is Margaret Mitchell, because Margaret Mitchell was born in 1900, and she died in 1949. So her life perfectly spans the first half of the 20th century, and she helps us also cover some of these key milestones in American history that bridge the Civil War until now. She was born in Atlanta, and the famous character of Scarlett O'Hara, if anybody has heard of Gone with the Wind,

they've probably heard of Scarlett O'Hara, the novel's heroine. And Margaret Mitchell based Scarlett O'Hara on her own grandmother, who was born into a slaveholding plantation just outside of Atlanta and bitterly resented the loss of her power, her property, including her human property,

for the rest of her life, and raised her granddaughter with these stories of the grandeur of the old South of life before the Yankees came and ruined everything for the white slaveholders. And Margaret Mitchell grew up on these legends, and Gone with the Wind is, in one sense, a kind of compendium of these legends. But it's also important to say that from Margaret Mitchell's point of view, she thought she was doing something more realistic. And I'm sure we'll get into that at various points. So in her mind, she was telling a more realistic account of the Civil War years in a popular novel. The novel became a massive bestseller in the United States, and then it exported very, very quickly. And it went across Europe as fascism was on the rise.

And in fact, not only was it loved by people who were starting to see incursions by Hitler and Mussolini, but it was also loved reportedly by, and indeed documentedly, by many Nazis as well. Eventually the Nazis banned it. So I mean, it was popular everywhere is my point as it started to spread. And then the rights to the novel were instantly acquired by the legendary producer, David Selznick, who understood publicity very, very well. And he began a campaign to find the perfect Scarlett O'Hara. It was called The Search for Scarlett. This became a massive publicity campaign that filled papers and film magazines and the equivalent of social media at the time. And everybody wanted to be Scarlett. And so the idea was that millions could try out

across the country and maybe he would find an unknown. And so, you know, you could be an amateur actress and still try to be Scarlett O'Hara. And he told all of these publicity stories about how he was going to cast the story and who would be the perfect stars of this, you know, incredibly popular novel. So that by the time the film was released at the end of 1939, it was backed by this three-year relentless publicity campaign. And it became an absolutely smash hit phenomenon. They said it was the greatest motion picture ever made, the greatest Hollywood movie. And it should be said, 1939 remains the classic year of Hollywood cinema, a year of greats like The Wizard of Oz and many other classic movies. But Gone with the

Wind beat them all. And it was the movie that everybody wanted to see. And again, it exported very quickly through Europe, through war-torn Europe. And as Dominic mentioned, at the top was incredibly popular during the Blitz, for example. People were queuing up in Leicester Square as bombs burned from the overnight bombings, or fires burned, I mean. So one of the iconic scenes in the film

is when Atlanta gets burnt by General Sherman. Yeah, we talked about that in that Civil War narrative, didn't we? Sherman's march to the sea and the scorched earth policy. And I learned from your book that Margaret Mitchell's grandmother had lived through the burning of Atlanta. So presumably that is something that is on the minds of people in the blitz they're kind of they're going in and they're seeing uh atlanta burn and then they're coming out and they're seeing you know london the london skyline lit up with fire and one of the kind of the great theme in gone with the wind is i mean scarlet ahara is a is a i mean she's a piece of work in a way isn't she i mean she's what you would call heroin she's what you would call a baggage yeah she's

indeed a baggage she's very 18th century baggage. But her kind of great life's mission is to get back her family plantation, which is called Tara, which was this kind of, it's where the land of cavaliers and cotton fields and all that kind of stuff with which it opens. And then it gets destroyed in the Civil War. And her life's mission is to get it back and get her life back on an even keel. So presumably, this is the message that people during war-torn Europe are picking up on. It's this idea that things will get back to normal. I just have to dig deep and I will be able to get it back. It's a story about resilience. And it's a story about survivalism, fundamentally on its most

emotional level. And that's what people respond to. And it's worth, before we skip to war-torn Europe, remembering that it hits America in the middle of the Great Depression. So Americans who are struggling, people on drought-stricken farms who are struggling themselves with famine, Scarlet has to overcome hunger. She has to, yeah, and she overcomes the blight of her farm. And so first you have the blight of the Great Depression, and then you have the blight of the Great Depression, and then you have the blight of the Second World War. And in both of these two historical cataclysms, this story about human endurance and survival and sheer defiance, determination, Scarlet is determined no matter what. And as you said, what makes her a baggage is that she's

totally unscrupulous, it. And she will literally do anything. So, you know, at one point she considers becoming Rhett Butler's mistress. If that's what it's going to take, that's what she'll, that's what she'll do. She, she will sell herself in marriage. She does sell herself in marriage. She's perfectly happy, not happy, but she's prepared to do whatever it takes. And that's what people have always responded to with Scarlett O'Hara. And the other thing I think that's important to say at the top in terms of its popularity, Scarlett O'Hara, and I talk about this at some length in the book, is really the first American every woman, the first popular character who everybody identifies with, but who's female.

And that's for women, that's incredibly important. And so for a lot of women, she became this very interesting feminist figure because she's powerful. And as we said, she's defiant, but she's also deeply problematic. And she's a horrible person in a lot of ways. But that makes her human. And that again, makes her relatable.

And so she's an important landmark in popular culture for women as well. So we had a comment from Sarah Jones who says, I think it's an important film, because it's a rare film from the female gaze. It's a war film with not a single battle scene. It's a woman's experience of war. And that's actually pretty rare. So yeah, it's true. And again, this was a way that the again, the story was received first the novel and then the film very strongly in the among the first readers. Its early reception was that it was an anti-war novel. And that was really important in that what you see is the cost of war for civilians. It's that you

don't see, it's a civil war novel with no battles. You don't see any battles. Nobody goes to the battle. You just see the casualties. You see the casualties. It's kind of famous shot, isn't it, which is actually on the cover of your book. Yeah. Where is it, Scarlett has gone to try and get someone to help with with a pregnancy with a birth with a labor yeah exactly labor and the camera pulls back and you see this kind of vast field full of of carnage so she goes to the train depot to try to find the doctor and the doctor is tending the war wounded and dying and and scarlet is being very selfish and saying that she has to help her friend melanie her sister-in-law um give birth and the doctor is being very selfish and saying that she has to help her friend, Melanie, her sister-in-law, give birth.

And the doctor is like, what are you talking about? I've got thousands of dying soldiers. You're going to have to handle the pregnancy on your own. And then, as you say, the camera pans back to these scores and scores and scores of wounded and dying soldiers to give a sense of the scale of the carnage. And Sarah, just one last thing.

You mentioned Rhett Butler Butler played by Clark Gable in the film probably the most famous line maybe in the whole of of Hollywood frankly my dear I don't give a damn with which which it ends it's still the most it's still on on you know things like the American Film Institute's list of most famous movie quotes that is still the most famous movie quote to this day frankly my dear I don't give a damn. So just before we move on from what Gone with the Wind and the plot and everything, could you just tell us briefly about Scarlett O'Hara and men and what her, because that's also, I mean, the key part of the plot, isn't it? And there are two in particular, there's the guy who she thinks she's in love with, and then there's the guy who she discovers actually all

along she was in love with. Yeah. So Scarlett is a kind of heroine chasing the wrong hero for most of the story. So she thinks that she loves Ashley. Every reader of the novel and the audience of the film can see instantly that Ashley is not the right man for her. And that Rhett Butler, who is her twin in kind of every way, they're complete kindred spirits. They're both rogues and renegades and they're scoundrels, but they're sort of lovable rogues and, and they're, they're made for each other. And, and Rhett knows that he's older and wiser and very sexy. And so he's the kind of masterful man and Scarlet is beautiful, but she doesn't, but she doesn't have any emotional self-knowledge and, and to say the least. And so the, the story is, you know, it spans, I think I should know this, but it spans 13 years. And she, and as I

say, at one point in my book, you know, she literally learns nothing except that she loved the wrong man. And it takes her over a decade to figure that out. So Ashley, as you said at the beginning, Tom is this kind of, he's, you called him wet. He is, he's nostalgic. He represents the old South and he represents this old way of life. And he's idealistic and a bit naive and he reads books and he's ineffective, but he's handsome. And so Scarlet kind of falls for him as a young girl

and then never changes her mind until the very end. Rhett is this dashing, as I say, he's this rogue who comes in and he's the black sheep of his old aristocratic family. And he recognizes that Scarlet is a kindred spirit, but she's too pig-headed to see it. And so he spends most of the story trying to convince her that he's right for her, but he won't. He's too proud, of course, to let his real feelings show. And one of the things that's so famous about Gone with the Wind as a story is that as a romance, it's a very rare thing in that it's not star-crossed. They don't die, but they don't

reconcile either. Rhett walks out on her. And that's when he says, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. It's the answer to her question. If you leave me, where shall I go? What shall I do? And he says, I don't care. And walks out the door. And that's the end of the story. And so it's a very famous ending for romance. So the hero walks out and says, up yours. So, Sarah, the subtitle of your book is The Lies America Tells. And one way to maybe start getting towards that part of the story is to talk about the film's premiere. So it premieres in Atlanta, Georgia.

There are 300,000 people, I think, on the streets at this huge procession. People dress up, don't they, in costume from the Civil War era. It's a state holiday. It's a huge moment for the city of Atlanta, which is this kind of booming New South City, for Georgia, for the old Confederacy. And it seems like you could say a lovely moment of reconciliation

between North and South. But obviously there are all kinds of shadows. A great example of that is the fact that one of the stars, Hattie McDaniel, is not welcome at the premiere. None of the black cast was welcome at the premiere. So she's playing Mammy, who is the maid at Tara. So the housekeeper and Scarlett's nurse and the most important black character in the film.

Hattie McDaniel would, of course, go on to become the first African-American actor to win an Academy Award for her performance in Gone with the Wind. And exactly. So people need to remember that when the movie came out, segregation was still in force in Atlanta. The black cast was not invited to the premiere. So you have pictures of this all white audience.

And when, you know, Dominic, you say that they were dressing up in Civil War costume. Well, it was cosplay, but it was cosplay as slave owners. So they weren't dressing up as slaves. They were dressing up as slave holders. And they were white women and dressing up as Southern bells in the big hoop skirts and men dressed up in 19th century clothing. But that was so that you could role play that the fantasy was that you still owned a plantation with hundreds of African-American slaves. And so just beyond those happy photographs of white Hollywood stars and white audiences are black picket lines,

African-Americans picketing this because it was segregated, because they said this, rightly, they said this is romanticizing slavery. This is romanticizing racial violence. And it's glorifying what still exists as racial inequality and segregation at the time. And so what you have is a Black cast and a white culture that's insisting and a story that says that slavery wasn't bad for America. That's basically the insistence here is that it's all

over. It's all fine. We can move on and we can just tell this happy story about what slavery was like. And so Black people are literally being told that slavery inflicted no costs on American culture at the same moment that Black people are being excluded from attending a film in which they feature and in which some, as I say, some of these actors um you know uh were going to give award winning performances and when had him and it's important to say this wasn't just in the south so when hattie mcdaniel um won that award she did so at a segregated um ceremony um oscar ceremony from which she had originally been barred from attending that as well and david selznick the

producer had to pull strings to get her invited to the Coconut Grove where the ceremony was held, because it was segregated too, and that was in Los Angeles. A really naive question. I thought segregation happened in the South. No, it was across the United States. So it was known as the color bar, and exactly, and people think it was only in the South. It was at its worst in the South, but it happened across the country. I always give the example of the famous Cotton Club in Harlem in the 1920s, which many people will have heard of. And people think of it as this mixed race speakeasy. It was whites only customers in Harlem in the 1920s. You had black entertainers and black serving people, you know, staff, but the customers were white only. And that was true across the United States. So the color bar, it wasn't as rigid in the North.

And it was much more, you know, location by location. And so you didn't necessarily have white water fountains and black water fountains the way that you did in the South. But you definitely had whites-only restaurants, whites-only. And across the Midwest, for example, whites- only, you know, diners and things like that. So it went on through the civil rights era. And that's why the civil rights wasn't just a phenomenon in the South. It was a phenomenon across the country for exactly that reason. So here's a question, Sarah. You can see why white Southerners, you know, you don't have to

be a genius to work out why white Southerners like Gone with the Wind. It's a romantic, nostalgic evocation of what they see as their areas, their regions past. And we can go into- And their birthright. Right. And I'm sure we'll go into dissecting all the issues with that. The question is why people in the North, we've done four episodes on the Civil War.

We've talked about the massive casualty rates, the horrendous treatment of prisoners, all of these things um this is within living memory you know you can still be old enough to remember the civil war in the late 1930s i think just about so why is it that people in i don't know in boston in new york in chicago wherever are flocking to this film in a in an, in, in, in apparently, um, you know, a sort of guilt-free, shame-free, non-critical way, lapping up the Southern bells, loving Vivian Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, loving Clark Gable, or am I wrong? And are, do people have issues with it?

No, um, you're not wrong. And the, the main people who had issues with it were, as I've already said, African-Americans, they were very outspoken at the time in their resistance to the film. There were a handful of white critics in the North and the South who pointed out what absolute garbage it was historically, how inaccurate it was, but also that it was deeply problematic. But for the most part, white people were very happy to go watch it. And the answer to that, I can put it very briefly as an assertion, but people may or may not believe me, but part of what my book is about is making the case for what I'm now going to assert, which is that the reason they were okay with it was

because the country reunited after the Civil War around white supremacism. Because the key thing here to remember is that, first of all, it's not even true that the war was fought by the North to end slavery. They didn't begin the war, as I'm sure you've covered in your podcast, which have not yet gone out yet, which is why I don't know. I will, of course, be avidly listening. But that, you know, the North didn't enter the war to abolish slavery. It entered the war to hold the union together. And the fight, the conflict was over the question of slavery, absolutely. But they didn't enter it to create abolition, to affect abolition. As I say in the book, that's why they were the Union Army and not

the abolitionists, right? So the fight originally was to hold the country together. And abolition became a necessary thing to do in order for that to happen. And certainly the fight was over the expansion of slavery and whether slavery should continue in the United States. That was absolutely the core of the battle. But the key is that you can think that slavery is wrong and be okay with racism. And that's the key, is that you can think that Black people are inherently inferior and just think that slavery is a moral abomination. So you may think that Black people have a right to not be enslaved, but not that they are your equal and not that they have a right to all of the same entitlements and prerogatives that you have. And that was the preponderant feeling among a great many white people at the time in North

and South. And so over several decades between, and we should give people the anchor dates again, right? So the Civil War ends in 1865, Gone with the Winds comes out in 1936. So in that 70 year period, as you say, maybe a few people were still alive. Most of them were dead, but what white people had inherited instead was a story in order for the country to come back together again, it had to, well, it didn't have to, but it did decide to convince itself that slavery hadn't really been that bad anyway. And because America is, you know, a lovely place anyway. And so everybody came together believing that actually, was slavery such a big deal? No, I'm not sure it was. And so in that mindset, you can go watch Gone with the Wind and enjoy it. So Sarah, in your book, you sum it up by saying

slavery was abolished by the war, but white supremacy was not. Yeah, exactly. So what mirror does Gone With the Wind hold up to that process? What happened in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War? And then what does that, the fact that Margaret Mitchell is holding this mirror up, what does that say about attitudes in the 30s? So first of all, what has gone with the wind revealing that is accurate about what happened in the aftermath? That'll be a short answer, Sarah. Yeah, exactly.

Of the Civil War. But you're saying, you know, you're using the book to show that all these kinds of attitudes that were there in the aftermath of the Civil War is still prevalent in the 1930s. Yeah. So I know and I can answer this. So the answer I would say is that what it told that was was truthful was it showed the mindset of white Southerners. And that's what we had. We must still, I believe, understand. So Scarlett sees herself as the victim of the Civil War. And the key thing that I want to do to reframe this is to keep reminding my reader that this was a war that Scarlet's society started in order to defend an indefensible way of life, which was to maintain Black slavery. Scarlet and her friends and family

very much see themselves as the victims. They are the ones who were victimized by this whole process. And Tom, you said at the beginning of our discussion that she wants to get her life back on an even keel. That's her point of view. But my point of view is that she wants to reclaim her power. She lost all of her power and she wants it back. She wants to be rich again. She wants to have slaves again. And she can't have slaves legally. But what the story shows is, and I kind of give lots of examples of this, is that Scarlet's fantasies of power are never just getting her money and her house back. They're always entangled with fantasies of having black people working the land again. And she says that in so many words over and over and over again.

She says she would never feel like a lady again until black hands, not white, were picking cotton at Tara. So there is a race-based order that she is determined to restore. And the mindset that it captures is this moment when white people in America began to see themselves as the victims of racial equality, of the victims of any movement towards civil rights. And of course, black people do not have the power in the post-Civil War American South. And so one of the things that I'm doing in the book is kind of fact versus fiction is really the setup of it. So I show what Mitchell claims

and then go into documentary history to say what the record shows. And black people are very, so in Scarlett's mind, black people are suddenly running the South. Black people weren't running the South. So what they refer to, and they did refer to historically, as quote unquote Negro rule, so white people under the thumb of African Americans, what they refer to as Negro rule and saw as completely unacceptable was one Black legislator or two Black legislators. It was having any black

people in a supposedly representative multiracial democracy at all. And they saw that as a completely unacceptable state of affairs. And that is the society that they are rejecting. And she and her friends are determined to recreate the privileges of antebellum white slaveholding South in as many ways as they can. And that is indeed what the white South did in the aftermath of the Civil War. And you said, you know, you wanted to catch us up on the history. So I think we probably have to go into that is what happened then. The white South set about recreating as many of the structures of the racial hierarchies of slavery as they could, except without slavery. So the problem that is faced by the slave owners, the plantocracy,

once they've lost power, once they've been defeated in the Civil War, from their point of view, is that people who were formerly their slaves have not only been freed, but been given the vote. Yeah, and power, therefore power in a representative democracy. And so if you want to kind of have to recreate a society that approximates as closely as possible to the society that existed before the Civil War, therefore you have to intimidate, restructure fundamental political rights and so on, so that an entire section of that society is unable to access them well that starts so quickly though i mean the clan the most famous example of that is founded in the end of 1865 i mean they don't even wait yeah but yeah exactly one year yeah so exactly and so that's

it and this is really really crucial for people to understand is that the the clan and and this gets really complicated because there have been different iterations of the clan, but the original clan, and this is one of the things I show at great length in the book because I think it's so important and it's been lost to most people's understanding of the first clan. It was set up with the explicit intent to disenfranchise black Americans. It was there to remove their ability to vote. That's what it was for. And that's what they did. So Sarah, could we take a break now? But when we come back, could we follow this story through?

So the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, all that kind of stuff, how it was that a kind of simulacrum of slavery was reconstructed in the aftermath of the Civil War and take us through that story up to Gone with the Wind. So thanks very much for listening. We'll see you after the break. slavery was reconstructed in the aftermath of the Civil War and take us through that story up to up to this up to Gone With The Wind so thanks very much for listening we'll see you after the break I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're talking about Gone With The Wind, the lost cause of the Confederacy and memories of the American Civil War.

So Sarah Churchwell, Gone With The Wind takes about 17 hours to explore what happens in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the defeat, effectively, of Reconstruction. The defeat of the attempt to give people who had formerly been slaves full political and particularly voting rights in what had been the Confederacy. So Gone with the Wind sort of goes into that, but it tells it from a very, very particular point of view. So, I mean, my take on this would be that the attempt to reconstruct was always doomed to fail because the North was never prepared to put in enough troops to make it work. And we talked about this in our last Civil War episode.

What's your take? Do you think this is something that could have worked or do you think it was doomed to fail? I think it probably was doomed to fail, but I love the audacity of it. And I'd like to give a little bit more credit to that. Because what we have as a country, and what an experiment, right, to try to go from race based slavery, to full multiracial democracy, in the space of a couple of years, like, there's a part of me is I'm quite proud of that as an American, you know, like, well, good on us, you know, I mean, you got to give them credit for trying. But for me, it was doomed to failure, not only because the North wouldn't make sufficient

investment, and you're absolutely right, that was crucial. But because the, you know, the problems of reunifying the country after the Civil War went beyond that, you can't just have an occupying force in your own country indefinitely. So what was that supposed to look like? And of course, that doesn't look like peace, whatever else it looks like, if there is an occupying force from the North, it doesn't look like peace. And you're trying to create peace and to reunify, to genuinely reunify. And what does that look like? But for me, the other reason why it was doomed to failure is that these are people who went to war to defend race-based slavery. And then you tell them to become effectively 21st century multiracial, you know, we would say Democrats, but I mean, small d Democrats. Of course,

they weren't going to do that. I mean, it's such an idealized idea that they would do that in the first place. But the thing for us to bear in mind as we understand what happened to Black people in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, is that the franchise was not removed from them simply by hook or by crook, although the plantocracy did everything that they could think of, the slavocracy, any way that they could. But murder was fine, too. Right. And so we need to remember that they were killing black legislators in broad daylight, just shooting them down. When you say they, do you mean the Ku Klux Klan?

Well, no, I mean white supremacists. So they may or may not have been members of the Klan. The Klan was just one of many white supremacist groups. There are lots of paramilitary groups, aren't there? So the Klan is just one of many white supremacist paramilitary groups that emerged at the time. It's just the most famous and the most mythologized, partly thanks to stories like Gone with the Wind. Because Ashley is a member of it, right? Ashley is the leader of the Atlantic, of the Georgia clan.

And that's really, really important. And in the novel, that's completely explicit. In the film, it's euphemized. But in the novel, it's totally explicit. He and Scarlett's second husband, Frank Kennedy, are members of the clan. Rhett Butler is not a member of the clan, but he sympathizes with its aims and desires. He's just not, he's not a group joiner, you know. He shoots a black person for being uppity.

We don't know that he shoots them, but he lynches a black man for being, quote, uppity to a lady. So we know that he murdered a black man and he admits to it, but we don't know how he killed him. He may have hanged him. He may have shot him, whatever. He may have tortured him. We don't know. The story doesn't say. But there were many other paramilitary groups, and it's important to understand this. There was the Knights of the White Camellia, there was the White League, there were the Red Shirts, there were many others. And many of those groups were reinvented in the interwar years, in the years of American fascism, which is part of another story of American history that has been suppressed and one that I do bring into the book because I think it's so important

here in bridging these eras. And so the people who were murdering Black legislators in broad daylight may or may not have been members of particular paramilitary groups. They didn't self-identify, but they could also have just been white supremacists who just walked up and shot them in cold blood in the name of the old South, in the name of restoring their own power. And then all of the white, you know, plantocracy, they all, you know, self, you know, protected each other. And so what is, I mean, what are the police doing? I mean, this is a really naive question, I suppose. Are there no frameworks of law and order? Oh, totally break down. The police are white supremacists too, right? So-

But that goes right on right into the 60s, Tom. Yeah, I know. I know, but I just- It goes on now. It goes on now. So exactly. But so no, this is crucial, right? So what we would think of as law and order in the South totally breaks down. When the North moves in, I mean, putting my hands up, I know nothing about this period at all. So Reconstruction is basically the attempt to bring in frameworks of law and order that would enable Black people to exercise their civic rights. And the failure of reconstruction is that basically people in the North just wash their hands of it and give up because it's too complicated. But it's not just that, Tom.

I would say, Sarah may disagree, I would say a successful reconstruction would rely on the support of Southern elites. I mean, as any form of occupation does, as any empire or any military occupation, you need to co-opt the powerful people in that community or a degree of support in that community to make it work so you don't have to do it as it were at the point of a bayonet yeah and surely the issue in the south is exactly what sarah says that there are just far i mean as people given that they've already fought a war to defend this institution they're not going to say within six months oh yeah you're actually right fine i forget what i've previously my best friend yeah you know exactly and so that's and this institution, they're not going to say within six months, oh yeah, you're actually right. Fine.

I forget what I've previously been. Be my best friend. Yeah. You know, exactly. And so that's, and absolutely, I completely agree with Dominic. And the problem is that the civil war keeps being fought at this point, but just through proxy battles, through skirmishes. There was an enormous amount of violence, some of it more organized than others. There were riots around most of the elections, the subsequent elections after the Civil War. There were massacres of Black people at the time. I mean, they were massacred when they attempted to exercise the vote. So it isn't just a question of what could the North have been doing, but you've got to remember that the police are local

forces in the United States. And they were also- And they're elected by the United States, they're kind of sheriffs. Well, yeah, and it's all set up differently in different places. There are different rules for it, but exactly. And so they were white supremacists too. I mean, I tell the story, it's a terrible story, but one of the stories I tell is in the book is of a black man who was taken out to be lynched. He was ultimately not killed, but he was tortured and maimed.

I don't know how strong stomach your listeners have, but you can edit this out if you don't want me to say, but he was castrated. And he was stripped naked in the cold. And then, you know, they sent him off into the woods. And he walked two miles to find the nearest doctor. And the doctor wasn't at home because the doctor had been one of the members of the Klan who attacked him. Right? This is the kind of entrenched violence and white supremacism that you're talking about. You go to the courthouse and you'll find that the police are the guys who just attacked you in the woods. Yeah. Okay. So, and Jim Crow. So what exactly, who exactly is Jim Crow? I've always wondered, I mean, I know you tell us in the book, which is why one of the

many things that I learned from the book, I'd always wondered that. But many of the listeners may not know who or what Jim Crow is. So yeah, so Jim Crow is an African American trickster figure like Brer Rabbit. So he's a folklore figure that any any represents a kind of a fusion of West African folklore with the slave experience. And so these African American legends and stories get developed. And one of the things that's wonderful about that history that many, many scholars have worked on over now many decades is that for the way that that entertainment worked was that white people saw it as, oh, look, the slaves are just entertaining themselves with these stories that they're telling.

But the stories had deeply coded messages about Black power and about freedom and about liberty and about how you outwit your captor. These are often stories about outwitting captors. And so slavery, the experience of being enslaved, embeds itself into these stories. And these trickster figures are the ones who can get away from the powerful, and they're the ones who can evade the structures of power. So Jim Crow was a folklore figure. And in the 19th century in America, there was an

enormously popular kind of entertainment, became known as minstrelsy. British listeners may remember the Black and White Minstrel Show from the 70s. Same thing, blackface entertainments, but it came from antebellum America. And Jim Crow was the name that was given to those minstrel entertainments. It just came through, again, through kind of popular culture. It just became the usage and people started using it to describe them. There was one, I go into this in the book, it's probably not important for our purposes now, but there was one particularly famous blackface white entertainer who adopted the persona of Jim Crow and became very famous. And there was a popular song and a popular dance. And then as

the structures of racial hierarchies were reimposed in the white South after the Civil War, they began, again, just kind of colloquially, people started using the phrase Jim Crow to describe these. And we've been talking a little bit loosely about Reconstruction, but again, it might be helpful to give people some dates, right? So that we've got a kind of some anchor points in the conversation. So the ways that we would normally talk about it is Reconstruction lasts from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the compromise of 1877. And what happened in 1877 was there was a contested election. That should sound familiar to listeners today. 2020 was by no means the first contested election, nor was 2000 for that matter. 1876 was a contested

election. And the truth is, is that the Democrats, which were, we should also pause and say this, it's very complicated, but it's important for, and I'm sure you went through this in your Civil War episodes, but it's important for listeners to always understand that in 19th century America, the two parties have a reversed position around civil rights and racial equality. So the Southern Democrats were the party of the agrarian South of the slavocracy of white supremacism, and the Republicans were the party of Lincoln and the party of abolition and civil rights.

And so what happens in the contested election of 1876 is that the Southern Democrats probably won. The white supremacists probably won, but it was contested and the elections were dodgy and nobody trusted the outcomes of these local elections. And so what happened was Congress had to come up with a solution on the federal level. And they came up with what's known as the Compromise of 1877,

where the Southern Democrats agreed that they would let the Republican candidate become president. and that was Rutherford B. Hayes. But they did so in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the Deep South. And at that point, Reconstruction was over. There was no longer any federal attempt to enforce the Civil War amendments, and particularly the Civil Rights. They were the first Civil Rights amendments, giving Black people the vote and protecting them in various other ways. So the white North withdraws at that point and basically leaves the white South to itself, to its own devices. Do your own thing. Go wild. And absolutely abandons Black people, abandons African-Americans to the intransigent white supremacist deep South. And at that point, what we know is Jim Crow begins to really get built.

So they, although they started early, they started as fast as they could at this point, it starts to get legalized and, and, and the structures are created that would become the, the, the society, the racially segregated society of the early decades of the 20th century that, that we know. So that's complete by about 1900 or so. And that's obviously the period at which you get the building decades of the 20th century that we know. So that's complete by about 1900 or so.

And that's obviously the period at which you get the building of all the Confederate statues. Exactly. You get the sort of creation, the entrenching of the lost cause myth, which Gone with the Wind basically incarnates, doesn't it? Exactly. And you get one key decision

that many of your listeners will know comes in this period, which is the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that says that separate can be equal. And that's what legalized segregation. And at that point, racial segregation from 1896 is legal until it's reversed by the Civil Rights Acts of 1965. So between 1896 and 1965, racial segregation is legal in the United States. And that's why to the earlier point about why wasn't it only in the South? Because the Supreme Court legalized it in 1896. So Sarah, the lost cause myth.

I mean, I started this by reading that stuff about, you know, Cavaliers and all this sort of Cod Walter Scott, Ivanhoe. Yeah, it is Cod Walter Scott. And we talked about that a little bit in our Civil War episodes, Yeah, it is called Walter Scott. So here's a question. And so Tom McTague, who's one of our listeners who writes for The Atlantic, he asked about myths as cover for shame. Is this a good example of a national myth that's a cover for shame? because I don't know whether people in the white southerners do feel ashamed about this. I mean, let's say in 1900 or 1930 or 1940, do they feel ashamed? Do they feel guilty about slavery and about the civil war? Or do they think that was a great institution and that was a noble cause and it's a shame we lost, but you know, we just have to kind of crack on. What do you think? Do you

think they feel guilty? No, I think you're absolutely right. I think that they feel self-justified and what they did was they doubled down in their own personal psychological self-justification and rationalization of what they had done. But they did that to ward off shame. They did it to ward off guilt. So we could talk about how individuals may have felt about it. But they did that to ward off shame. They did it to ward off guilt. So, you know, we could talk about how individuals may have felt about it. But what I would talk about, rather than individual guilt or shame, is a collective project of saving face. And shame, in that sense, very much so. So you've lost the war, you're disgraced. You've lost the fight and you've lost the proposition that you fought to uphold. And so at that point, the cognitive investment in doubling down becomes, if anything,

increased. And you have to go that much further to prove that everything that you did was right and everything you did was fabulous. The shame is about military defeat. It's not about facts. There's no sense- No, they don't think they were wrong. They don't think they were wrong. Exactly. No, no, no, no. They shame is about military defeat. It's not about that. There's no sense. They don't think they were wrong. They don't think they were wrong. Exactly. No, no, no, no. They're white supremacists.

They're intransigent white supremacists. So Margaret Mitchell, for example, if Margaret Mitchell was on this podcast, she would say that slavery wasn't wrong. Would she? Or how would she say? By the 1930s, within 70 years, do they think slavery is wrong?

They try really hard not to think about it. They recognize that maybe some slavery was bad, but they try to do it on a case-by-case basis. And they try to say, well, some slave owners were mean, I guess, but there were others who were lovely and there were slaves who were happy. And so one of the key things that I try to say in the book is all of that works to gloss over the fact that enslavement itself is the ultimate mistreatment. And the question of whether some enslavers were kinder than others is moot if you're enslaved to a great degree, right? So, I mean, one of the things that really struck me reading the book was the way in which

the use of convicts and chain gangs basically reintroduces a form of slavery. And I assume that if you're a white supremacist, the justification for this is you're saying that black people are inferior. Therefore, they are likely to be criminal. And therefore, the safest thing for all concerned is to just lock them up in chains and make them work in cotton fields again uh i mean is that basically what's happening with that because it is i mean incredible statistics that there are chain gangs in which kind of the entire prison population only four people are white or something i mean amazing figures yeah no it's it is amazing and a couple of things to to remember here it goes back to the franchise so what they so yes you're right tom in terms of

the attitudes like well they're better better off in chain gangs anyway. They're better off- Because that's what they're saying about slavery, isn't it? They're better off being slaves. Yeah, they should be enslaved because they're savages, right? That's where the racism comes in. That's how the white supremacism works

is that they can't, they're not fit to be let loose or their children, right? So you've got the benign paternalistic version, which is their children and they need white paternalistic care. Which is the one you get in Gone with the Wind and Mammy. Exactly. Or you get that they're savages who can't be trusted and they have and they deserve to be enslaved and they need to be kept from civilized people.

Right. So if the franchise is really important here. Right. here, right? So what happened was, the 14th Amendment says, is a civil rights amendment that says that people cannot be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. They stipulate those three things, but they don't stipulate thousands of other reasons why you could in fact discriminate against people and why you could therefore remove the franchise from them. And so one of the first things that they did was pass felon disenfranchisement laws. So they said, if you're a felon, you can't vote. And of course, many of those laws still exist and are still very controversial across the deep South in particular, but not only, again, not only in the deep South. And then what you do, you create pretext to lock Black people up so that you can make

them felons. So they're either back in chains where you like them, or if they get released, then they can't vote anyway, and you've effectively disempowered them, right? And the other key thing to remember about the chain gangs is not just that the Black prison population was so overwhelmingly Black then as it is again to this day. And again, those are connections that I draw in the book because I think they're incredibly important. But that many of the federal prisons that were built at this time in the Deep South

were built physically on old slave plantations. So they were literally putting Black people back on the same farms to pick the same cotton for the same people, only now it's a federal prison. And to this day, the state penitentiaries in Florida, in Mississippi, in Louisiana are still known by their old slave plantation names locally. So Parchman is the Mississippi state penitentiary because it was the old Parchman plantation. And Angola in Louisiana, which is the federal penitentiary there,

which is notorious because it's a death row prison, it's known locally just as the farm. You've been sent down to the farm, right? So, and they, because it's built on an old plantation. So they didn't just replicate it in theory, they replicated it in practice. Let me ask you about the plantations, because obviously Gone with the Wind is not just a film about a woman.

It's a film about a place. She's obsessed with getting back to Tara. She's obsessed with rebuilding it. I think Tom and I have both been to Southern Plantations. Have you been to Southern Plantations? Yeah, I went to one outside Beaufort. Yeah, I went to one in South buford yeah i went to one in um south carolina called boone hall very famous for other purposes doing a different podcast a couple years ago i downloaded

their wedding brochure and was and was thinking about what it would be like to get married on the site of this plantation where thousands of people lived and died as slaves so what's your take on the sort of do you think gone with i think Gone with the Wind clearly enshrines the plantation as this place of kind of vanished beauty, this civilization, you know, lost in the wind of time. Do you think that era has died and that now most Americans have a very different view of plantations? Or do you think that myth is too deeply entrenched ever to be sort of dislodged? Well, I think it can be dislodged, but I don't think it has been yet. And I think that what we see is this kind of extraordinary cognitive dissonance where people can hold these two completely contradictory ideas in their head at the same time and not think about them. And so they can say very easily, yes, slavery was wrong. Slavery was bad.

And put themselves in hoop skirts and go get married at Boone Hall and imagine that that was all lovely, right? And as you say, but for a certain type of imagination, we would be thinking about the historical realities of that place. And to me, and I say this, and I know people don't always take kindly to these comparisons, I think they completely hold up in this case. To me, it's like getting married at Dachau. I mean, it is literally like romanticizing a concentration camp. But the mythology allows for there to be these two separate versions where people talk about slavery as if it happened in a way that was distinct from this. And one of the things that I tried to think about a lot in writing this is kind of how does that work and how does that happen? And, and, and it seems to me that, that one of the things that happens is that, is that we use these cliched ideas, cliched language or cliched images that stop us from thinking about

it. So you can talk about an ideal slave plantation, and that's a phrase that people use all the time, an ideal slave plantation. And again, to estrange people from that, I try to, I put concentration camp there and go, what would happen if you talked about an ideal concentration camp? It's insane. It's morally deranged. And yet people will still talk about an ideal slave plantation and they'll be like, well, it was bad for African-Americans. Yeah, I grant that. Okay, maybe. And it's like, no, you've got a complete, this mythology was there to insist that it really wasn't that bad after all. So once you've gone down that road, what do you then do with Gone with the Wind?

Because, you know, here you've got a film that embeds that idea that turns Scarlett O'Hara into a victim and her family are their victims. It's hard to watch Gone with the Wind now, I would say, without wincing. I mean, you can be the most unwoke person imaginable and you will still watch that film and find bits that will make you wince and cringe and just think, oh my God. And it's a lot less racist than the novel. Could I just quote Martin Darlington?

Martin Darlington on Twitter. I didn't like the pretty blatant nostalgia for A Bike on Age. Why is it still a regular in best film ever made lists? It's Confederate propaganda. It is Confederate propaganda. 100% right. So implicit in that question, you know, it is still... It's a triumph of classic Hollywood filmmaking. It's a triumph of classic Hollywood filmmaking. I mean, because Sarah said it's part of... Well,

it's kind of bred of that yearning of fantasy isn't it that the the great depression you know so the wizard of odd and all that kind of stuff i mean it's not as great a film as as an arguably an even more racist film birth of a nation which is a colossal technical achievement yes so so these are these are totemic films in in the history of hollywood and therefore of world. Kind of, what do you do with them? Well, that's the question, isn't it? Well, that's the question, right? So, and some people will say what we have to do is stop watching them and stop reading

them and stop talking about them. And there are people who've made that case very forcefully and would disagree with my bringing it back into the conversation and saying, this is something that I think we need to think about. I mean, you know, it's an ongoing question of how do we handle these problematic stories from our own histories and what do we do about them? My view is I'd rather confront them, dismantle them and think about what they're there for. And because if we just try to put them to one side, then what we've discovered is that people still just take what

they want from them, unless you actually think that we should censor them, which I don't believe. And I don't think anybody, you know, in this conversation believes. So because I, one of the examples that I use fairly early on in the book is that there were some people present at the insurrection in 2021, saying that Gone with the Wind was their favorite book, right? So you've got people who are still going to read this story and encounter it. And if you do it without any kind of pushback, again, unless you're going to try to destroy it, which good luck with that, right? That's not going to happen. So given that it's out there and that people are encountering it, I think that the best thing that we can do is try to problematize it as much as we can and to make sure that people are educated about what it means and what it's

saying. But also for me, it's to recognize that it captures all kinds of important truths about how we got where we are. And if we deny it in the sense of saying, well, it's actually a very scarlet thing to do is, I'll think about that tomorrow. I don't want to think about that right now. It's a troublesome thought. Well, it is a troublesome thought, but the problem is that it captures a historical reality. The myth is itself a historical reality, right? The mythology happened and it changed political reality in all kinds of ways in the United States. And that has consequences now, regardless of whether we know about it or understand it. And so for me, understanding this mythology helps things like the storming of the Capitol in 2021 make sense.

And that's kind of one of the key arguments I make in the book is that if you understand this stuff, then at least you can understand where we are and it starts to become intelligible. And so I do it on the basis of know your enemy. I mean, we have to know what it is that we're combating in order to combat it, it seems to me. And this is a kind of, although Gone with the in your view that has had such a bail I mean you clearly think it's had a really baleful effect on American culture politics I mean is it the worst in your view because it was so successful and because it's so deeply enshrined the idea of the lost cause um I should say I was two things in answer that one is that because I haven't said this yet and it's important and since Tom said know, you barely saw it and barely remember it. I,

I need to say for listeners that, you know, I grew up watching this movie and reading this book and I loved the movie. I mean, I loved it. So I'm very much an apostate here. And it's important to understand that because I also understand the feelings of those who love it, but I have come to believe that it had a baleful influence on my society.

Absolutely. The baleful influence is because you love it. I mean, that's it's because I mean, it's because it's- It's because it's effective. Yeah, it's effective and powerful. And Scott Carr is an amazing character and it's great, yeah. And so, but then it, yeah,

and it convinces you to think all kinds of things that on second thought, I don't think I want to think. And that's the process of what I'm trying to take people through with the book. But to answer Dom's question directly, no, I think Birth of a Nation was probably worse. And the reason I say that is because it directly inspired the rebirth of the Klan in 1915. And we know that. There's all kinds of ways in which that's documented. And so it led directly to the torture and murder of thousands of African Americans in the early decades of the 20th

century. It's not clear to me that the Gone with the Wind has documented the same direct murderous outcome that Birth of a Nation had. And, you know, Birth of a Nation affected politics in a more, and I'm going to use this word, unreconstructed kind of a way where Gone with the Wind was challenged from the moment that it came out, partly because of Birth of a Nation. So African Americans were pushing back against Gone with the Wind from the second that it emerged. So it never had such an unproblematic effect on the culture as Birth of a Nation was allowed to have for several decades when it enjoyed this kind of sway over white culture. So I think that was even worse.

But that's a race to the bottom, as we might say. And certainly not to excuse Gone with the Wind. Well, Sarah, thanks so much. That was a brilliant exposition. And I hope you have all enjoyed what's five episodes now we've done on the American Civil War, incredibly complex and important. The question is whether this podcast will send people rushing to watch Gone With the Wind

and what Sarah would think about that. I guess you wouldn't be unhappy, would you, if people were watching Gone With the Wind on the back of this podcast? I mean, I'll be honest with you and say I'd rather they were reading my book. Or unless, I mean, all facetiousness aside, if they are, I would hope that they would read my book too and to understand the way that they're in dialogue.

Okay. So Sarah's book, The Wrath to Come, Gone with the Wind and The Lies America Tells. Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you all for listening. We will see you soon. Tomorrow's another day. Goodbye. Tomorrow is another day.

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