Is "Gone With the Wind" Just Another Confederate Statue to Be Razed?"

Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh’s) Famous Last Line in GWTW

It’s just one tragedy after another; one distraction turning yesterday’s front-page horror into today’s forgotten, beneath-the-fold trivia. Where once the daily stats about how many were infected and passed away from Covid-19 on a daily or weekly basis was what captured our attention, it was then replaced by unemployment figures and the precipitous drop in the Dow Jones. Now, that headline has been replaced by the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota and the nationwide protests which that craven act of racist violence has brought to the fore. And, as a result of this latest headline-chomping act, much of the nation has responded with calls to “Defund the Police” (whatever in the Hell that means), topple statues of Confederate military figures like Robert E. Lee and Civil War generals like John Bell Hood, Henry Benning and Braxton Bragg, and rethink the importance of classic novels and movies like Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation. Suddenly, rewriting American history is being seen as a redemptive cure to that which ails us.

Oh really?

Personally, I’ve never been all that enthralled by Gone With the Wind. I’ve read the novel (I actually have a pristine copy of the 1st edition in my library), seen the film and know more than most about what went on behind the screen. I mean, did you know that one of the biggest arguments the film’s producer, David O. Selznick, had with the Hays Office (the censorship board) was not over anything dealing with gross historic inaccuracies or racism, but rather with Clark Gable (Rhett Butler’s) last line? As written in the novel, when Rhett is about to take his final leave from Scarlett O’Hara, she plaintively asks him “But what am I going to do?” Rhett’s answer? “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn!” The censors gave a unanimous thumbs down on that one; it was simply too salacious. Back and forth they went (Selznick and the Hays Office). Among suggested last lines were:

“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a straw,”
“Frankly my dear, my indifference is boundless,”
“Frankly my dear, it makes my gorge rise,” and
“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a whoop!”

But the Hays Office met its match in Selznick, and the then-37 year old producer got his way. Admittedly, these were different times. The Production Code forbade the use of such “suggestive” words, expressions and acts as:

“Nuts!
“Raspberries!”
“In your hat!”
Married couples sleeping in the same bed;
Onscreen kisses that lasted longer than 3 seconds;
Miscegenation;
Suggestive dances;
Ridiculing religion.
Men dancing with men or women dancing with women.

Gone With the Wind would be nominated for 14 Oscars and won an amazing 8 competitive awards including the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Hattie McDaniel, thereby becoming the first African-American to be nominated . . . and win . . . the coveted prize. Nonetheless, when the film debuted in Atlanta, Georgia, she wasn’t allowed to stay in the same hotel as the rest of the cast and crew; she had to go to a blacks-only hostelry. Times were different in so many ways . . . at least overtly and legally so. And while there was quite a hue and cry coming from the black press, the only “mainstream” newspaper decrying the film was the Communist Daily Worker, which called it “. . .an insidious glorification of the slave market.” The New York Times covered the Daily Worker story as straight news on December 24, 1939 (“Red Paper Condemns ‘Gone With the Wind’”); nowhere did they offer an opinion.

During the 1920’s, 30’s and even early (pre WWII) 40’s, white actors appearing in “black face” wasn’t a “shocker”. For such renowned stars as Al Jolson, Eddy Cantor and Jack Benny (all of whom were Jewish), Buster Keaton, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Betty Grable, Fred Astaire, Myrna Loy and even John Wayne, putting on greasepaint was just part of the job. And for the movie-going public, it rarely - if ever - brought about a critical comment; it was something they were used to. Not even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) raised much of a stink about Gone With the Wind. It had been part of the public consciousness for several years even before it hit the screen: first the bestselling novel, and then a step-by-step, nation-wide hunt for who was going to play Scarlett. (Among the Hollywood stars frequently mentioned - and actually auditioned - were Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard [Mrs. Clark Gable], Joan Crawford [Gable’s longtime squeeze], Paulette Goddard [Charlie Chaplin’s wife], Lana Turner, Lucille Ball, and Bette Davis.)

It was another Civil War movie, 1915’s The Birth Of a Nation, which did “raise high the roof beam carpenters.” Based on the 1905 novel The Clansman: a Romance of the K.K.K. by Thomas Dixon and directed by the legendary D.W. Griffith, Birth was one of the first feature length American films, as most previous films had been less than one hour long. The Birth of a Nation changed the industry’s standard in a way still influential today, but aroused an incredible amount of controversy due to its depiction of the KKK as the saviors of the white south. The film led not only to a resurgence of the K.K.K. (which had been more or less moribund for a couple of generations), but to the creation of the N.A.A.C.P. as a means of fighting the reemergence of overt racism in the United States. The Birth of a Nation, like Gone With the Wind, was a blockbuster; it made fortunes for many aspiring producers including a young Bostonian named Louis B. Mayer, who managed to buy up the rights to the film in New England.

Griffith, a Kentucky-born son of a Confederate Colonel (“Roaring Jake Griffith”), was so shaken by the negative response to his romanticized retelling of the war and Reconstruction, sought atonement through his next film: the even more massive Intolerance (1916), a cinematic triptych in which he explored man’s inhumanity to man throughout history. It wound up bankrupting him. And although he continued making first-class films for the next several years, he would have to sell his studio, started drinking heavily and went downhill. Ironically, his last film, made in 1931, was about a man who’s life is destroyed by alcoholism. He called it The Struggle. By the time he died in 1948 he had been long forgotten; his funeral was paid for by Lillian Gish, who was one of the stars of The Birth of a Nation.

Just the other day, HBO Max, which is owned by A.T.&T. announced that it had removed from its catalog Gone With the Wind. In announcing this move, a company spokesperson said, “GWTW is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society . . . . These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”

The day before HBO Max’s announcement, John Ridley, the screenwriter of “12 Years a Slave,” (for which he won the 2014 Oscar for “Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay”) wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times calling for GWTW’s removal. Mr. Ridley said he understood that films were snapshots of their moment in history, but that “Gone With the Wind” was still used to “give cover to those who falsely claim that clinging to the iconography of the plantation era is a matter of ‘heritage, not hate.’” “It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color,” he wrote.

Let’s understand: HBO Max is not expunging GWTW from its catalog for all time. What they are doing is putting it on the shelf until such time as they can figure out how to turn any future showing into a learning situation . . . perhaps by creating a pre-screening documentary on the facts and issues of slavery, the Civil War, and what American society was like when the novel and film were released in the mid-to-late 1930’s. This is something which Turner Classic Movies does rather well . . . through documentaries and pre-screening discussions. It is certainly understandable that a majority of the American public is terribly shaken by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of white cops, at the brutalization of peaceable protesters across the country, as well as violence perpetrated by none-too-peaceful protesters across the country. People are up in arms (both literally and figuratively) over a whole host of devastating events coming one after another. The wheels have all but come off that vehicle we call civil society.

While rewriting history is disingenuous at best, reinventing it is both unconscionable and fraught with danger. There are calls across the country for the removal of statues honoring Confederate heroes at the same time as those protesting the wearing of anti-Covid-19 masks and the imposition of self-isolation are frequently decked out with “Stars and Bars” flags, automatic weapons and Nazi regalia. There is so much to be learned, relearned and unlearned about so many things.

One of the most historically productive responses to the post-Birth of a Nation rise in overt racism was the rise of the N.A.A.C.P. which was founded by a small group of distinguished men and women, both black and white, Christian and Jewish. What bound them together was an insatiable thirst for the spreading of justice, learning and humanity.

I for one hope that all our current trials, travails and tribulations - this “new normal” which is as yet in its earliest prenatal stage - will one day lead us to view yesterday’s "snapshots” with the understanding that all our yesterdays are gone with the wind.

142 days until the next election.

Keep ‘a going