Sunday, January 17, 2010

GWTW, The Irish, Blacks, and the 2nd Reconstruction


Gone With the Wind premiered 70 years ago this past December at Atlanta’s Loews Grand Cinema. Attending the show was Margaret Mitchell—who based her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller on tales handed down by her Southern Irish ancestors—and a 10-year-old African-American preacher’s son, there with his church choir: Martin Luther King Jr.

Stop to think about that for a second: in the same audience sat members of two of America’s most marginalized groups, each of whom would win worldwide fame through their command of the written and spoken word—and each unlikely, by custom, law and history, to know each other.

Gone With the Wind is so massive a subject that it would take volumes to encompass it in all its cinematic and historical complexity. A blog post can only deal with its colorful, contentious history in fragments, I think, as in an earlier post of mine on how Clark Gable was cast as Rhett Butler.
One of my college professors once defined a classic as a work in which you could find something new in it no matter how many times you read it. So it was for me last month, as I settled down to watch GWTW again.

Oh, I knew the major scenes well enough. But others struck me in a way they never had before.

Two Uprooted Communities at Cross Purposes

I was especially struck by GWTW as a film rife with a central irony: two of America’s prototypical uprooted communities standing in close proximity—and absolute cross purposes—to each other.

Slaves, survivors of the deadly “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic from their African homelands, are the most obviously uprooted of the two. But the Irish have their own searing heritage, signaled by the name of the O’Hara plantation, Tara.

Seat of the High Kings of Ireland, Tara is located in County Meath, where the Battle of the Boyne—Gaelic Ireland’s Waterloo, fought on the side of the loser, King James II of Britain—occurred. Noel O’Hara makes an excellent point in “A Long Way From Tipperary: Irish Survival and Gone With the Wind”, in the Winter 1991 issue of The Recorder: A Journal of the American Irish Society: i.e., the film “is finally about the individual survival of the devastations of violent republicanism.”

In the documentary The Making of a Legend: “Gone With the Wind”, narrator Christopher Plummer observes that the film resulted from “chaos and confusion, blind faith, and great good luck.” In other words, for all the care that was taken to get its smallest technical details right, it remains inevitably a happy accident, a compromised product.

Take out the word “happy” from that last sentence and you have, in a nutshell, a history of race relations in America. But you’d never know it from GWTW.

African-Americans Viewpoint Absent

The first shot of human beings across the magnificent landscape of Tara shows blacks silently picking cotton. Yes, this does occur in the opening credits, but by foreshadowing a movie that rarely assumes the point of view of African-Americans, it’s an apropos image of a deeply problematic aspect of a great American film.

No wonder the slaves are silent: 17 screenwriters (including F. Scott Fitzgerald) worked on the screenplay at one time or another, but not a single one was African-American.

Understandably, later African-Americans would regard the novel and movie far less favorably than white audiences of the time, including Alice Randall, whose 2001 parody, The Wind Done Gone, brought a copyright infringement lawsuit from the Margaret Mitchell estate. Irking the estate even further than its alleged misappropriation of elements from the book was Randall’s irreverent depiction of the underside of Tara (e.g., Gerald O’Hara and Mammy are lovers, and Melanie is nicknamed “Mealy Mouth”).

Typical of movies of the Thirties and Forties, the film portrays African-Americans as nothing more than domestics. Significantly, no slave ever rejoices at the prospect of release from bondage. In fact, during the fall of Atlanta, Scarlett encounters slaves going out to fight the Union army.

One might never know from these scenes that a slave exodus off the plantation and into the Union forces was a much more likely prospect, and one that struck at the heart of the Southern economy.

Contrary to the unblemished portrait offered by Hollywood in general and GWTW in particular, slavery invaded even the most intimate areas of black lives. It devastated the black family, with owners breaking up between one-third to one-fifth to one-third of slave marriages by selling one or both spouses. Slaveholders sexually exploited their chattel, then perpetrated the myth of the black rapist to hide their own responsibility for children of mixed color.

Since neither the civil rights movement nor the revisionist history it bred had occurred by the release of GWTW, it is possible to think of the movie’s failure to discuss such tragic emotional matters as sins of omission. Yet a number of critics, both at the time and since, have seen GWTW as mildly paternalistic at best and downright racist at worst.

The character lending the most powerful credence to the latter charge is Prissy—in Rhett’s words, “a simple-minded darky” who, after claiming that she knows “everything” about assisting at pregnancies, is forced to admit to Scarlett that she “don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies.” (Even Butterfly McQueen, the actress who played Prissy, regarded her as a demeaning stereotype.)

A Limited Advance for Its Time

To see GWTW as unremittingly racist, however, means to disregard both the era in which it was produced and the content of the movie itself.

In a time in which blacks had not yet gained voting rights, economic opportunity, or even security from lynching, the film’s total elimination of the word “nigger” (used countless times in the novel) and infrequent use of “darkey” represented a victory of sorts. So, too, was the use of blacks in major roles in a blockbuster. (In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt arranged a screen test for her cook.)

Several times in the film, white characters act toward blacks with conspicuous kindness. Gerald O’Hara criticizes Scarlett for mercilessly driving her slaves at war-ravaged Tara. Yet even the frequently thoughtless Scarlett values the loyalty of her charges, for she gives away her deceased father’s watch to his freed valet Pork, even though the ex-slave protests that she needs the money to pay extra taxes on the plantation.

Though the film’s treatment of the flighty Prissy is deplorable, it also includes the more responsible slave Mammy.

As played by Hattie McDaniel, in a remarkable performance that justifiably merited the first Best Supporting Actress Oscar ever won by an African-American, Mammy is a tower of strength during chaos. She has enough moral authority to get away with something unusual for films of this era: standing up to her white boss. She tells Scarlett early that she is acting “like a spider” in setting her sights on Ashley, and when that spiritually wounded idealist returns from the war, it’s Mammy who prevents Scarlett from running to this married man.

In fact, Mammy becomes the moral center of the film. Think about it. Melanie is too saintly for the audience to identify with. Mammy, on the other hand, is recognizably human: earthy, funny, justifiably proud of her cooking, and capable of flaring into righteous anger—all in all, someone imbued with fierce love.

Significantly, the two people whose respect Rhett values the most are Melanie’s and Mammy’s, and the latter’s tearful sympathy when Rhett loses his daughter helps him win the audience’s support just before his final confrontation with Scarlett.

A Blighted Southern Vision of Reconstruction

The film’s complicated, deeply humane treatment of Mammy makes all the more lamentable its blindness to the impulses of freedmen in the war’s aftermath: their desire to lead a life of autonomy, to improve themselves, even to own a stake of land they could call their own. This insensitivity, though hardly unusual for a white Southerner of the Thirties, would impair the film’s effectiveness in relating the story of Reconstruction.

On the whole, GWTW avoided the controversy that dogged The Birth of a Nation by totally avoiding the miscegenation issue and by downplaying Mitchell’s most pointed criticisms of Reconstruction “abuses” in favor of the Scarlett-Rhett romance. Yet its seeming inoffensiveness helped to make its dubious beliefs about Reconstruction much more palatable to a mass audience than those of obviously propagandistic filmmakers such as D.W. Griffith.

Largely to avoid offending both black leaders still stung by The Birth of a Nation and the Production Code Administration that functioned as Hollywood’s censorship board, the movie adaptation toned down or eliminated many of Mitchell’s details about Georgia during Reconstruction. Thus:

* Rhett Butler is not charged with murdering a black;


* the financial misdeeds of Frank Kennedy, whose grocery business begins with the sale of goods left over by the Confederates, are not shown;


* neither racial animosities nor the words “Ku Klux Klan” are ever mentioned; and


* the murder of Jonas Wilkerson, the Yankee overseer who covets Tara, is not discussed.

A word or two more on Wilkinson, who personifies Northern villainy in the film. Vengeance as well as greed motivates his desire for Tara: the O’Haras had dismissed him at the start of the war for his affair with a “poor white trash” woman. Like other carpetbaggers, he uses ignorant freedmen as pawns to achieve his nefarious ends. One African-American rides in his carriage singing the anthem of Sherman’s army, “Marching Through Georgia”—a deliberate insult to wounded Confederate pride.

In one of the most striking departures from the novel, Wilkerson even indirectly causes Gerald O’Hara’s death when the senile old man, overhearing his ex-employee’s threat to take over Tara, chases the Yankee off his property and dies in a fall from his horse. (In the novel, Scarlett’s sister Suellen inspires her father’s fatal ride by suggesting that he take the Iron Clad Oath to the Union.)

The Irish Famine Ethos in a Different Context

Focus on that word “Yankee”—the type of person Gerald O’Hara would have encountered had he chosen to settle in the North rather than the South. It’s the very same type of person—a grasping agent of a landlord—who would have made his life hell in Ireland.

Wilkerson’s villainy allows the filmmakers to deflect Southern responsibility for the corrosion of postwar race relations. In Ireland, however, where the movie was a huge success, the sequence of events and emotions—Wilkerson’s brazen land-grab, Gerald’s tragic death, and Scarlett’s sorrow-fueled rage—would have struck a different chord.

It comes, of course, in the scene that concludes the first half of the film. Scarlett, digging for a radish in Tara’s vegetable garden, vomits, then vows as she shakes her fists at the sky: “As God is my witness, they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again.”

That is the core of the Great Famine survival ethic. Nearly a century after it cut through Ireland like a scythe, the Famine still had enough potency to make Irish audiences understand all too well what Scarlett was going through. They would have understood perfectly the choices facing the Wilkes, Butlers and O’Haras: conventional piety, poetic despair, taking the law into their own hands—and out-conniving the oppressor.

Melanie Wilkes embodies the first choice: her husband Ashley, the second. The third choice, one often taken by the Scotch-Irish in the Deep South, involved such matters as the dueling code and lynching. Scarlett and, to a lesser extent, Rhett, symbolize the last choice.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Non-Essential Role in an Essential Film

One figure in Irish-American literature, just a few years older than Margaret Mitchell, wrote often about those who chose despair and those who chose conniving: F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby author was one of the army of forlorn scribes who worked on the GWTW script. Biographers agree that Fitzgerald’s contribution to the final script was minimal—a shame, in a way, since the novelist might have understood, through his own family’s background, the impulses of several characters better than anyone else Selznick corralled into the project.

The novelist’s father, Edward Fitzgerald, can be viewed as a kind of Ashley Wilkes gone wrong—a dreamer born below the Mason-Dixon Line, in Maryland, with all kinds of tales about the antebellum south (he was a cousin by marriage to alleged Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt)—not to mention no head for business and a growing thirst for alcohol. Yet the Scarlett side—the grasping survival figure—was present in Scott's maternal grandfather, Philip McQuillan, who made a fortune as a wholesale grocer in the Twin Cities.

On the other hand, there was one overwhelming instinct in Mitchell’s Irish-American characters that Fitzgerald didn’t understand: land. His characters burn so powerfully for something more—wealth, a woman—that, though his work is rich in local atmosphere, his characters never feel rooted—perhaps because Fitzgerald, who moved constantly in his adult life, seldom was.

Contrast this with the advice given by Gerald O’Hara early on to Scarlett: “To anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them - why, the land they live on is like their mother. Oh, but there, there. Now, you're just a child. It'll come to you, this love of the land. There's no getting away from it if you're Irish.”

The Irish and the Second American Reconstruction

At its publication, Mitchell’s novel was hailed for its painstaking accuracy by such historians as Henry Steele Commager. When it was adapted to the screen, much of this depth was inevitably lost.

In one way, this telescoping of history may have helped to ensure the film’s longevity. David O. Selznick’s production focused attention on the fact that GWTW was the most highly personal of historical fiction—not a story about events, but about how these events changed a quartet of people forever.

Scarlett, Rhett, Ashley, and Melanie have passed into that select pantheon of immortal American characters. Even though some key attitudes in Mitchell’s novel are questionable in the light of revisionist history, the film itself has never inspired the fierce reaction sparked by Griffith’s silent epic. GWTW’s characters are too fully and honestly drawn to fall victim to the changing tides of historical or popular fancy.

My father told me years ago how popular GWTW had been in Ireland when he was a young man. Aside from the Irish-American characters, the Irish of that time would find familiar a number of aspects of this tale set nearly a century before they viewed it: a rural environment, a people devastated by a nearby power that they regarded as a foreign invader, and a rich storytelling legacy shaped overwhelmingly by a sense of grievance.

None of this means that this vividly intimate movie can be watched uncritically. For a film about the archetypal American conflict, GWTW is strangely silent on our deepest aspirations for freedom, equality and justice.

What many Confederates could not perceive was that their adversaries had suffered heartbreaking losses themselves, or that the war had been caused by their own oppression of the most marginal and vulnerable members of their societies. If all Gone With the Wind teaches is that a suffering people have the right to inflict misery on others, then that is a history lesson Americans can do without.

On the other hand, as a reminder of the war with more fateful consequences than any other in our history, Gone With the Wind leaves viewers with much more to think about than whether Scarlett wins back Rhett. It demonstrates that war wrecks lives far beyond the battlefield; that, in a time of catastrophe, ordinary people will resort to extraordinary, even desperate, measures to survive; and that such fierce survival tactics may cost us our values and even loved ones.

As Irish-Catholics, the O’Haras occupy a decidedly anomalous place in Southern society. It wasn’t simply that their group was more likely to locate in the Northeast than in the South, but that, even in the South, the majority of Irish Catholics tended to settle in cities and small factories, not on rural plantations. Yet this unrepresentative fictional family now functions as the major stand-in for a whole vanished sector of American society on film.

Maybe in the end, there’s a form of poetic justice to this. Just as Gerald O’Hara learned to make his way in an alien environment, so did John F. Kennedy, descendant of Famine-era emigrants, in a cross-country Presidential campaign—the kind that, only 32 years behind, had consumed co-religionist Alfred E. Smith in one of the most divisive races this nation had ever witnessed.

In a further irony, the Irish-American Jack Kennedy—who, as an ironic former sailor, aristocrat’s son and rakish ladies’ man, resembles Rhett Butler more than any other character in the film—became, along with his brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, the prime mover for the Second American Reconstruction, the decisive application of federal power that finally helped secure rights of African-Americans in the 1960s.

A century after America’s most divisive conflict, the ancestor of the uprooted group at the center of the nation’s most beloved film had—at last—helped the members of an even more alienated minority find the place in this society that their labor should have entitled them to years before.

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