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Hollywood's Reconstruction and the Persistence of Historical Mythmaking
Ron Briley
Sandia Preparatory School, New Mexico
| RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY portrays the Reconstruction governments of the South between 1865 and 1876 as agents of progressive change for black Americans, who played a leading role in their social transformation. If the era is tragic at all, it is because Reconstruction was prematurely ended and change did not go for enough, especially in regard to Southern land reform. The seminal work of this so-called revisionist school is Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Foner asserts that Reconstruction is an essential narrative in America's continuing struggle for freedom. Of Reconstruction, Foner writes, "Over a century ago, prodded by the demands of four million men and women just emerging from slavery, Americans made their first attempt to live up to the noble professions of their political creed—something few societies have ever done. The effort produced a sweeping redefinition of the nation's public life and a violent reaction that ultimately destroyed much, but by no means all, of what had been accomplished. From the enforcement of the rights of citizens to the stubborn problems of economic and racial justice, the issues central to Reconstruction are as old as the American republic, and as contemporary as the inequalities that still afflict our society."1 |
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Due to the efforts of such scholars as Foner, the revisionist interpretation of Reconstruction is now the staple of history textbooks. Nonetheless, the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction in the South remains an era shrouded in myth and misconception. Not even the influence of the civil rights movement, which forced a reconsideration of slavery's influence upon the United States, has completely altered the perception of Reconstruction as characterized by a Radical Republican coalition of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and free blacks intent upon exploiting a prostrated South. The revisionist interpretation of the post-Civil War South as shaped by a biracial political coalition attempting to forge progressive and social change, while opposed by terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, has not resonated as well in the popular mind. |
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Initially introduced as part of the Southern ideology of the Lost Cause, the traditional interpretation of Reconstruction was fostered on the national level by the William Dunning school of historiography at Columbia University in the early twentieth century, as well as in best sellers of the 1930s such as Claude Bowers's The Tragic Era. Despite revisionist scholarship led by Foner, the myth of Reconstruction continues to exercise a strong hold on American popular culture. In explaining the persistence of this mythology, it is important to examine the role played by Hollywood in the formation of the nation's historical consciousness. As Robert Brent Toplin suggested, most Americans, for better or worse, tend to learn their history through popular film rather than historical scholarship. Toplin asserted that what he calls cinematic history "is too important to shove aside as simply fiction, entertainment, or commentary about current events. The messages filmmakers communicate, directly and subtly, resonate with audiences in powerful ways, often shaping their ideas about the past's influence on the present."2 |
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Between 1915 and World War II, such seminal films as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939) played a crucial role in formulating popular perceptions and misperceptions of Reconstruction. In Media-Made Dixie, Jack Temple Kirby argued that D. W. Griffith's racist epic The Birth of a Nation reflected the historiography of the day as contained in the works of Woodrow Wilson, Walter L. Fleming, and William Dunning.3 |
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Griffith's defenders insist that the film director was not a bigot, blaming the film's more racist second half on the influence of Griffith's collaborator Thomas W. Dixon and author of the novel The Clansman upon which the film was based. Griffith was supposedly shocked by the negative reaction to the film within the African-American community. However, as Thomas W. Cripps well documented, the art, technology, advertising, and racism exhibited in The Birth of a Nation amounted to a "malicious conspiracy." Lacking the resources to make a propaganda film in response to the Griffith-Dixon reading of American history, the African-American community attempted to have the film banned for its adverse impact upon race relations in the country. Nevertheless, this effort was generally unsuccessful until the need for racial unity during wartime convinced state governments that the film should be banned. Thus, in June 1918, Governor James Cox asked the film's producer to withdraw The Birth of a Nation from Ohio, where it had been playing for three years, as it was "dangerous during war." That same year, the Executive State Council of Defense in West Virginia placed a ban on the exhibition of Griffith's film in response to a petition of "colored" citizens, who argued that The Birth of a Nation was "calculated to arouse hatred and prejudice between white and Negro races of the state, and likely to hinder and retard the proper co-operation between the races in promoting the greatest efficiency in war work of all kinds."4 |
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Griffith was angered with what he perceived as censorship. The film director considered himself a progressive (offering additional evidence of progressivism's failure to address racial issues) and did not believe that the film slandered African Americans. He also maintained that film censorship would harm the laboring man for whom cinema functioned as an educational source. Griffith proclaimed, "We have no wish to offend with indecencies or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong; that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue—the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word—that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare."5 |
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In addition to defending himself as an artist, Griffith asserted that he was simply presenting the historical truth. Or in more modern terms, he was a cinematic historian, although the shades of gray involved in historical interpretation were lost upon Griffith. The director was a Kentuckian whose father raised him on stories of the lost Noble Cause which "had been absorbed into the very fiber" of his being. Reading Dixon's novel reminded him of the glorious tales told about the Ku Klux Klan by members of his family. Speaking about the heroic Klan in the Reconstruction South, Griffith insisted, "Few others like it in subject and power can be found for it had all the deep incisive emotionalism of the highest patriotic sentiment." Ironically, both Griffith and Dixon were critical of the rejuvenated Klan of the 1920s to whose growth The Birth of a Nation contributed.6 |
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While Griffith extolled the virtues of the historic Klan, he argued that he was not a racist. Responding to an editorial in the New York Globe that The Birth of a Nation was fostering racial hatred, Griffith maintained that slavery was an "economic mistake" and that his film's depiction of "Negroes" during Reconstruction was a balanced one. Griffith wrote, "We show many phases of the question and we do pay particular attention to those faithful Negroes who stayed with their former masters and were ready to give up their lives to protect their white friends. No characters in the story are applauded with greater fervor that the good Negroes whose devotion is so clearly shown." Later in his letter to the Globe, however, Griffith made his racial agenda most apparent. He discounted opposition to his film from the NAACP and its newspaper The Crisis because they publicly proclaimed victories in blocking "anti-intermarriage legislation," which according to the film director meant, "that they successfully opposed bills which were framed to prohibit the marriage of Negroes to whites."7 |
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Thus, at the heart of Griffith's film were his fears of miscegenation and black sexuality. But Griffith continued to assert that he was not a bigot, and he made the film Intolerance (1916) to silence his critics. In this epic film about the threat of intolerance to civilization, Griffith focused upon four separate but interwoven stories: the fall of Babylon to the Persian conqueror Cyrus the Great, the life and crucifixion of Jesus, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of French Huguenots in 1572 Paris, and a contemporary tale dealing with the execution of an innocent man. The theme of the film is, indeed, the dangers of prejudice; however, Griffith failed to address the topic of race which was at the center of the controversy regarding The Birth of a Nation.8 |
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Griffith, of course, argued that national reconciliation and not race was the subject for The Birth of a Nation. Race and the manipulation of blacks by unscrupulous whites was simply a threat to the more important theme of national union. The Birth of a Nation tells the story of the Southern Cameron and Northern Stoneman families. Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) is a Radical Republican Congressman, a character supposedly based upon Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania whose support of Congressional Reconstruction was an anathema to many white Southerners.9 Austin has three children: Elsie (Lillian Gish), Phil (Elmer Clifton), and Tod (Robert Harron). The Southern Cameron family is represented by the parents and their children Ben (Henry B. Walthall), Wade (George Beranger), Duke (Maxfield Stanley), Flora (Mae Marsh), and Margaret (Miriam Cooper). The children become friends when the Stonemans visit Piedmont, South Carolina, and romance is kindled between Elsie Stoneman and Ben Cameron, as well as Margaret Cameron and Phil Stoneman. But the Civil War intervenes, leading to the deaths of Tod Stoneman along with Wade and Duke Cameron. After the war, the romances are rekindled and there seems hope for the families and nation under the wise tutelage of Abraham Lincoln. An assassin's bullet, however, removes the benevolent Lincoln, whom the film refers to as the "Great Heart." |
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Without the strong leadership of the great Lincoln, Radical Republicans in Congress, such as Stoneman, are able to have their way with the defeated South; the region becomes dominated by unscrupulous Northern carpetbaggers while the former slaves who lack education are easily dominated by their white allies. Black Reconstruction in South Carolina is depicted by black legislators gambling and eating watermelon during a legislative session. As a carpetbagger, Stoneman moves his family to Piedmont, where he champions the political career of mulatto Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), who becomes the state's lieutenant governor. |
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At this point, the sexual politics of Griffith and his collaborator Dixon begin to dominate the film, preying upon the fears of Southern whites regarding black masculinity and power. Reconstruction becomes the rape of the South by blacks encouraged by their white carpetbagger compatriots—the purity of the South, symbolized by white women, must be preserved by Southern white manhood as exemplified by the Ku Klux Klan. Gus (Walter Long), a black Union soldier, attempts to force himself upon the innocent young Flora Cameron, who flings herself off a cliff rather than submit to violation by a black man. Her brother Ben, who has observed white children frightening black youngsters by pretending to be ghosts, assembles the Klan and avenges his sister. Meanwhile, Phil Stoneman and the Cameron family are pursued by black troops seeking to arrest anyone associated with the Klan. They seek refuge with two Union veterans and the little daughter belonging to one of the men in a small cabin that is soon besieged. |
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Back in town, Lynch makes clear his lust for Elsie. She resists his advances, and is then gagged and bound: a helpless white woman at the mercy of a black man. Initially, Austin Stoneman has no problem when Lynch informs him that he wants to marry a white woman, but the father is distraught when he realizes that it is his own daughter upon whom Lynch has designs. This scene makes clear that there are no limits to black sexuality and miscegenation, and it is also reminiscent of white Southerners who resisted the post-World War II civil rights movement and black equality by proclaiming, "How would you like one to marry your sister?" |
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Lynch's evil designs on Elsie are thwarted when Ben and the Klan sweep into town and subdue blacks who have been tarring and feathering whites sympathetic to the Klan. In a scene that equates black sexuality with bestiality, Lynch attempts to flee with Elsie under his arms as if she is in the hands of some large animal. This imagery is later revisited in film with the blond Fay Wray in the clutches of the giant gorilla King Kong. Griffith built suspense in this sequence by crosscutting to shots of the helpless Elsie, the Cameron family and Phil Stoneman under siege, and the Klan riding to the rescue in outfits reminiscent of the romantic Knights of the Round Table and Sir Walter Scott's cavalier legends. Elsie's virginity is assured when she is rescued by the Klan and embraces Ben. Lynch is captured, and considering the name of this character, viewers may assume his fate in a film which seems to encourage violence and lynching as a means of social control for African Americans. |
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The Klan then rides forth to save the whites besieged in the countryside. Again, sexuality is a major theme. As the black troops attempt to enter the cabin, they are literally tearing the clothing off Margaret Cameron. The situation seems dire, and the men in the cabin prepare to kill the women rather than let them be violated by the black men, evidently a fate worse than death. But again the Klan arrives in the nick of time, and Southern womanhood and civilization is preserved. In a triumphant return to the town of Piedmont. Elsie and Margaret are safe, riding horseback, and surrounded by Klansmen guarding them. White women are restored to their pedestal as the white crowd cheers and blacks cringe in fear. The film then shows blacks attempting to vote in the next election and being turned away by armed Klansmen. Black sexuality and political power are contained. |
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It is interesting to note that President Woodrow Wilson had a White House screening of the film arranged by his friend Dixon and apparently had no problem with depictions of gross violations of the Fifteenth Amendment. Wilson's praise for the film well demonstrates the limitations of progressive reform for African Americans.10 However, the film indicates that an even higher power than Woodrow Wilson supposedly endorsed Griffith's vision of a racially pure and restored America. The tranquility of double honeymoons for Ben and Elsie and Margaret and Phil are portrayed as demonstrating the reconciliation of the North and South, which had been threatened by black power and agency. On screen, a title reads, "Dare we dream of a golden age when the bestial War shall rule no more. But instead—the gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace."11 Then an image of the God of War is replaced by the figure of Jesus Christ holding out his hands and blessing a heavenly throng. The final shot of the film is a happy Ben and Elsie looking at the sea with a gentle breeze blowing in their faces. This white reconciliation of the nation free from the taint of miscegenation seemingly has the blessing of Jesus over the creation of a white Christian nation. Griffith's equating of whiteness with civilization was evident in his casting of whites to play Lynch, Gus, and Lydia Brown (Mary Alden), Stoneman's mulatto housekeeper whom the film hints may also serve as the politician's mistress. Even in his nightmare fantasies of interracial sexual relations, Griffith could not allow black intimacy with whites. The director insisted, "The decision was to have no black blood among the principals; it was only the legislative scene that Negroes were even used, and then only as 'extra people.'"12 |
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So much for Griffith's assertions that his film could not be construed as racist, for the film director was playing upon white fears of black power and sexuality dating back to slavery, but which became of utmost concern with black freedom. Historian Michael Rogin wrote, "Griffith displays sexuality from white men to women to blacks, in order, by the subjugation and dismemberment of blacks, to re-empower white men."13 In the antebellum South, the categories of slavery and freedom helped maintain the region's racial hierarchy, but after emancipation, the categories of black and white were instead used to uphold the social order. One way to sustain racial categories was to make sure that people of European and African ancestry did not have children together. To enforce this code, the Klan was created. In her study of Southern black and white sexual relations in the nineteenth century, Martha Hodes argued, "The early years of Reconstruction marked the beginning of an era of terrorism in the American South. Those vanquished patriarchs and their sympathizers replaced slavery with lethal violence in an effort to maintain control over the political, economic, and social activities of freedpeople, including control over the sexual agency of black men and women. At the same time, following the social upheaval of wartime, they sought to reassert control over white women." As lynching increased in the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accusations of black men raping white women were often the justification for violence employed by white men. Hodes concluded, "Lynching deterred black men and white women from forming sexual liaisons in a world without racial slavery. To whites, such liaisons put black men and white men on a too-equal footing, illuminated the fact that white men could not always control white women, and blurred the lines of racial categories that were so crucial to maintaining the racial hierarchy previously sustained by slavery."14 |
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Thus, Griffith's fear of miscegenation reflected continuing concerns about the empowerment of black men during the progressive era and Great Migration as Southern blacks asserted their independence by moving to Northern cities. White violence against black males who challenged social mores continued throughout the twentieth century, resulting in the beating death of young Emmett Till for allegedly "whistling" at a white woman. In her study of how the South was portrayed by the media during the early years of the civil rights movement, Allison Graham observed that the myth of the South and Southern white women under assault from the ravages of black men and the industrialized North was alive and well during the 1950s. Graham wrote, "The inviolable white woman took center stage in the post-war Southern drama. A rebuke to the masculinized women of American industrialism, she had long been an emblem of the femininity that bloomed unbidden in agrarian simplicity. To the defenders of racial segregation in the 1950s, she symbolized a threatened and embattled way of life, a way of life that, ironically, had existed primarily as a legend for over one hundred years."15 While D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation played an important role in fostering this mythology, in 1939, an even more influential figure emerged in Vivien Leigh's portrayal of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind heroine Scarlett O'Hara. |
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While much of the historical scholarship regarding Gone With the Wind tends to focus upon how the epic depicts slavery and the Civil War, the film's embracing of Griffith's sexual Reconstruction politics reinforced the image of the post Civil War South as the victim of a savage conspiracy. When Scarlett is attacked by poor whites and blacks living in a shanty town, she becomes a symbol of the South which was "raped" by free blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags. But in this scenario, the South is more than a victim. For like the determined Scarlett, the South will rise again and the social/racial hierarchy will be reasserted. |
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Jack Kirby argues that "Gone With the Wind was another generation's Birth of a Nation" and was influenced by the best-selling The Tragic Era (1929) by Claude Bowers. According to Bowers, while the North may have been right about the Civil War, the South was certainly accurate in its depiction of Reconstruction as a disgraceful attempt by Radical Republicans to foist citizenship upon illiterate freedmen. On the other hand, by the mid-1930s, an alternative vision of Reconstruction was available in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 by W. E. B. DuBois. Anticipating the arguments later made by Foner and other revisionist scholars of Reconstruction, DuBois maintained that the post-Civil War state governments established under Congressional Reconstruction were progressive entities in which black Americans played a leading and positive role.16 Nonetheless, Claude Bowers, Margaret Mitchell, most white Southerners, and film producer David Selznick paid scant attention to the counter interpretation offered by DuBois. |
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Millions of Americans were thrilled by the literary and cinematic escapades of the irrepressible Scarlett O'Hara. The film garnered 10 Academy Awards, and by the end of 1940, it was seen by over 25 million people in the United States, grossing over $14 million. Gone With the Wind was also critically acclaimed. Frank Nugent in The New York Times gushed, "The greatest motion picture mural we have seen and the most ambitious filmmaking adventure in Hollywood's history."17 Most of the credit for this spectacular film was bestowed upon producer David Selznick, who fired director George Cukor and replaced him with Victor Fleming. Selznick, in conjunction with screen writer Sidney Howard, took credit for removing Mitchell's positive references to the Klan as well as her use of the word "nigger." In reality, many of Selznick's "liberal" changes were due to pressure from African Americans and organizations such as the NAACP. On 25 December 1939, Time placed Selznick and his film on the magazine's cover, proclaiming that the producer "had two great pictures—a sure-fire Rebel-rouser for the South, a sure-fire love story for the rest of the country."18 |
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Critical acclaim for the film was overwhelming, but there were voices of dissent, notably from the political left. In journals such as the New Masses, Gone With the Wind was depicted as "a primary symbol of capitalist, Anglo-Saxon racism and of the influence of the reactionary South on American life and letters."19 Thomas Cripps, however, argued that the more "liberal" approach of Selznick, who actually maintained a production folder entitled "The Negro Problem," resulted in a split between the black community and its allies on the political left. Black Americans failed to rally against the film in the same fashion they had protested its predecessor, The Birth of a Nation. Many black newspapers, however, did attack the film, with the Chicago Defender terming Selznick's production as "a weapon of terror against black Americans." On the other hand, Lillian Johnson in the Baltimore Afro-American found little to censure in Gone With the Wind, concluding that the film was "magnificently done." Thomas Cripps argued that this mixed reaction within the black community was in part due to the fact that Selznick was employing black performers and extras during difficult economic times. The faith placed in the production seemed rewarded when Hattie McDaniel in her role as Mammy became the first African American to win an Academy Award (Best Supporting Actress). Cripps, thus, concluded "the film also encouraged the liberal expectation that individual blacks might also find their place alongside whites in the American dream of success and self-fulfillment."20 |
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But certainly not all black Americans agreed with this assessment. The major black characters in the Selznick production are stereotypical in many ways. The male slaves are not well developed. Pork (Oscar Polk) is a loyal slave who stays with his former white owners after emancipation and is even reluctant to accept Scarlett's gift of her father's watch for his dedication. Big Sam (Everett Brown) saves Scarlett from her assailants at the shanty town, and Uncle Peter (Eddie Anderson) is a "comic," shuffling slave who works for Aunt Pittypat. It is the female black characters who draw the attention of audiences with McDaniel as Mammy and Butterfly McQueen as Prissy. It is McQueen's performance which draws the ire of many black Americans. In his autobiography, Malcolm X described going to see the film as a young man in Mason, Michigan: "I was the only Negro in the theater, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug." In a similar vein, Alice Walker expressed disdain for the way Scarlett treated Prissy after she told the white woman that she "didn't know nothing about birthing babies." Walker asserts, "My trouble with Scarlett was always the forced buffoonery of Prissy, whose strained, slavish voice, as Miz Scarlett pushed her so masterfully up the stairs, I could never get out of my head."21 With her high-pitched voice and general incompetence, Prissy often comes off as the stereotypical pickinanny. |
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Yet some critics suggest a different reading for Prissy. In Scarlett's Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans, Helen Taylor maintained that in her clumsiness and apparent ineptitude, Prissy demonstrates "a kind of resistance to white domination and is, thus, potentially a threatening figure," much like the sabotage engaged in by enslaved peoples who were "puttin' on ole' massa" with their shucking and jiving. In his influential study Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films, Donald Bogle also defended McQueen's performance, arguing that Prissy "seemed to ask for protection and was a unique combination of the comic and pathetic."22 |
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Bogle, however, reserved most of his praise for the work of McDaniel, who in her role as Mammy refused to accept the sense of inferiority which slavery attempted to impose upon enslaved peoples. She is a surrogate mother for Scarlett and is unafraid to criticize the young white woman. Bogle wrote, "It is Mammy who knows—and keeps secret—Scarlett's every plot. It is she who criticizes or defends, but always understands." The power Mammy exercises over Scarlett has even encouraged some scholars to perceive Scarlett as a biracial character.23 |
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There is, indeed, much to praise in McDaniel's characterization, but it is difficult to argue with the assertion of Helen Taylor that in the final analysis, the Selznick production of the Mitchell novel perpetuated white Southern representation of moonlight, magnolias, Mammy, and miscegenation. Taylor wondered, "Finally, how can a civil war which led to Emancipation and eventually to the legal recognition of Blacks as American citizens be regarded as a terrible and tragic event?"24 |
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But how do we account for the continuing popularity of Gone With the Wind beyond the narrow confines of time and region? Seeking to explain why Gone With the Wind's was selected by the American Film Institute as the "greatest American movie," Trisha Curran argued that the film's appeal lies in its sense of tragedy. Scarlett not only "survives poverty, hunger, destitution and death, but triumphs over despair." For, indeed, "Tomorrow is another day."25 The resilient spirit of Scarlett also worked well for Americans in 1939, who had survived the worst ravages of the Great Depression and looked for better days ahead. |
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From a more feminist perspective, there is also much to admire, from both the novel and film, in the character of Scarlett O'Hara. With the men around her seemingly helpless, it is Scarlett who has the courage and strength to save her beloved Tara. She is not above working in the fields and defends herself and Tara from Union soldiers. In her vow to do whatever it takes to never be hungry again, Scarlett symbolizes the New South, which does rise from the ashes of the Civil War. Nevertheless, an older South which was destroyed by the war is much romanticized in the first half of the film. To save Tara and provide an economic foundation for the future, Scarlett engages in unscrupulous actions such as marrying businessman Frank Kennedy, whom she does not love and stole from her sister Sue Ellen. But it is important within the ideology of the film to examine what drove Scarlett to these extremes. It is the actions of the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and free blacks who leave the New South and Scarlett no choice but to use any means necessary to regain control over their future.26 |
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A pivotal scene from the film is an attempted rape of Scarlett, symbolizing the South, by poor white trash and freed blacks. The carpetbaggers are not directly reflected in this scene, but, as with August Stoneman in The Birth of a Nation, they are assumed to be behind the scenes manipulating the easily-led freedmen. At this point in the film, Scarlett is a strong businesswoman, who has pushed the mercantile firm of Kennedy & Wilkes to success. She is alone driving her buggy near a shanty town when she is accosted by two men. While the black man holds the horses, the white man struggles with Scarlett, who eventually faints (In the novel, the assailant is black.). Before the man is able to ravage her, Scarlett is saved by a former slave, Big Sam (Everett Brown), who returns the white woman to her family. The loyal former slave is thanked for his efforts, and Sam pledges that he has had "enough of them carpetbaggers." Scarlett's husband Frank Kennedy (Carroll Nye) then leaves his wife in the capable hands of Melanie Wilkes (Olivia de Havilland), announcing that he will be attending a "political meeting." In case the viewer misses the verbal cue that Kennedy is heading for a Klan meeting to deal with this assault upon Southern womanhood, the camera pans in for a close up of Kennedy placing a loaded pistol in his holster. |
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Later that evening when the men are away at the political gathering, the women anxiously await their return. Scarlett, however, does not seem to understand the real nature of the alleged "political meeting." The other women finally reveal that their men have gone to clean out the shanty town where Scarlett was attacked. Captain Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) endeavors to save the Southern men from a Yankee ambush, but he is unsuccessful—Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) is wounded and Frank Kennedy is killed. In this scene, viewers identify with the Klan (although the terrorist organization's name was exorcised from the film script), while the Union troops appear to serve at the behest of the carpetbaggers to protect the unruly blacks and poor Southern whites who are a clear and present danger to Southern womanhood and civilization. This scenario is essentially the "rape" of the South myth extolled by D. W. Griffith and the historiography of the Dunning school.27 |
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In The Celluloid South, Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr., argued that The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind were seminal films in shaping the nation's perception of Reconstruction from a white Southern perspective. Campbell lamented that the popularity of Gone With the Wind "revealed the persistence of a legend which decreed that an opulent South and its beliefs were being enjoyed at the expense of progress nationally in race relations and in a more accurate perception of the South's past and present problems." In a similar vein, Jim Cullen maintained that the mythology popularized by the cinematic historian Griffith was present in Selznick's 1939 film, but Gone With the Wind was somewhat gentler in its racial assumptions. While Selznick downplayed the Klan and the more overt racism of the novel, the film, nonetheless, captured Mitchell's interpretation that made "slaveholding whites the true victims of the Civil War." In the Dunning, Griffith, Bowers, Mitchell, and Selznick rendition of Reconstruction, Cullen wrote, "The South was hounded by fanatics, cornered into defending a way of life, overrun by alien invaders, and forced to endure a harsh (and ridiculous) occupation. Some strong individuals did survive these outrages, occasionally relying on less-than-genteel means to achieve their ends. If African Americans were not exactly the cause of war, and if some really meant well, they nevertheless aggravated the problems facing people such as the O'Haras—and, one infers, their heirs."28 Thus, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s would have the burden of challenging this popular myth during what many white Southerners referred to as the Second Reconstruction. |
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By the Second World War, the myth of Reconstruction, as developed in the historiography of William Dunning and Claude Bowers and perpetuated in popular culture by the cinematic history of The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, was firmly entrenched in the national consciousness. It has proven difficult to dislodge the Southern myth of Reconstruction, which to some extent has withstood the best shots of the civil rights movement, a popular television series such as Roots (1977) which was probably more successful in challenging misconceptions regarding slavery rather than Reconstruction, and the revisionist historiography of scholars such as Eric Foner. |
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Historiography is often overlooked as a fascinating subject by most contemporary students, whether in the secondary history classroom or undergraduate course. Some sense of the changing historical interpretation of a topic such as Reconstruction may be provided through contrasting passages from a modern history text with earlier editions of books printed before the intellectual impact of the civil rights movement. Such an exercise makes its point, but from the student's perspective it is also somewhat sterile. For, as many teachers lament, students tend to get their history from the silver screen rather than the printed page. In support of this observation, history teachers might incorporate Hollywood's Reconstruction into the classroom by contrasting contemporary historical scholarship with the powerful images offered by film texts such as The Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind, both of which are readily available in VHS or DVD format for classroom use. |
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While complete screenings of these primary film sources is recommended, teachers concerned with issues of the films taking up too much classroom time might use film clips ranging from fifteen to twenty minutes in duration. For example, the final twenty minutes of The Birth of a Nation may be employed to demonstrate how Griffith demonizes black men, while extolling the Klan and the symbol of Southern womanhood to justify the emasculation of the Fifteenth Amendment. For the film's conclusion to make any sense to students, the teacher must carefully introduce the major characters and set the stage for the scenes which the students will be screening. It is also important to prepare students for the blatant racism exhibited in The Birth of a Nation. |
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Gone With the Wind may not generate the intense reaction of viewing Klansmen as heroic figures, but a prescreening discussion of black stereotypes presented in the film is advisable. Although Gone With the Wind is a relatively well known film text, teachers should not assume that all students are familiar with the major characters and plot line. The similarities and differences between The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind may be best illustrated through screening the scene of the attempted shanty town rape of Scarlett O'Hara and the reaction of the white Southern "gentlemen" to the assault. While the Klan is not mentioned by name, the connection will be obvious to most students. And if students have any doubts regarding the continuing impact of these cinematic depictions of Reconstruction, a teacher might carefully present students with evidence downloaded from one of the many Klan internet homepages which use the myth of Reconstruction to justify their political ideology and defense of white civilization. |
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Introducing the historiography of Reconstruction through cinematic primary sources such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind should encourage historical thinking in the classroom and meet such history standards as examining continuity and change, understanding multiple points of view, interpreting historical perspectives and evidence, and evaluating historical narratives. The spring 1995 edition of the OAH Magazine of History emphasized the centrality of critically judging narratives to historical education, stating:
Reading such narratives thoughtfully requires that students analyze the assumptions—stated and unstated—from which the narrative was constructed and assess the strength of the evidence presented. It requires that students consider the significance of what the author included as well as chose to omit—the absence, for example, of the voices and experiences of other men and women who were also an important part of the history of their time. And, it requires that students examine the interpretative nature of history, comparing, for example, alternative historical narratives written by historians who have given different weight to the political, economic, social, and/or technological causes of events, and who have developed competing interpretations of the significance of those events.29
Studying film narratives and bringing the cinematic historiography of The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind into the contemporary classroom would certainly appear to fulfill the type of critical evaluative process encouraged by the history standards, not to mention make students more wary consumers of the visual media. And perhaps through this critical analysis of film's mythmaking power, teachers can bring the study of Reconstruction a little more into line with contemporary scholarship and the world according to Foner, not Hollywood. |
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Notes
1. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), xvii.
2. Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); and Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 7.
3. Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 16–17; and William A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political & Economic, 1865–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1907).
4. Raymond A. Cook, "The Man Behind The Birth of a Nation," North Carolina Historical Review 39 (Autumn 1962): 519–540; and Thomas W. Cripps, "The Reaction of the Negro to Motion Picture Birth of a Nation," The Historian 26 (November 1963): 344–362; and Cleveland Advocate, 29 June 1918, 1.
5. D. W. Griffith, "The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America," (1916) as cited in Harry M. Geduld, ed., Focus on D. W. Griffith (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), 43–45. For additional background information on Griffith, see Robert M. Henderson, D. W. Griffith and the Years at Biograph (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970); and Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).
6. D. W. Griffith, "How I Made The Birth of a Nation," (1916) as cited in Geduld, ed., Focus on D. W. Griffith, 39–42.
7. D. W. Griffith, "Reply to the New York Globe," (10 April 1915), as cited in Fred Silva, ed., Focus on The Birth of a Nation (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), 77–79.
8. Edward Wagenknecht and Anthony Slide, The Films of D. W. Griffith (New York: Crown Publishers, 1975), 62–88.
9. For a copy of the screenplay for The Birth of a Nation, see Robert Lang, ed., The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
10. For Woodrow Wilson and The Birth of a Nation, see Everett Coster, "Culture History Written with Lightening: The Significance of The Birth of a Nation (1915)," in Peter C. Rollins, ed., Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 9–19.
11. Lang, ed., The Birth of a Nation, 155.
12. Griffith, "How I Made The Birth of a Nation," in Geduld, ed., Focus on Griffith, 41.
13. Michael Rogin, "The Sword Becomes a Flashing Vision: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation," in Lang, ed., Birth of a Nation, 273.
14. Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1997), 148 and 202.
15. Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race During the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 18.
16. Kirby, Media-Made Dixie, 72; Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1929); and W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1935).
17. Roland Flamini, Scarlett, Rhett and a Cast of Thousands: The Filming of Gone With the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 332; and Frank Nugent, "Gone With the Wind," The New York Times, 20 December 1939, 31.
18. "Gone With the Wind," Time, 34 (25 December 1939), 30–32; Frank Daniel, "Cinderella City: Atlanta Sees Gone With the Wind," The Saturday Review 21 (23 December 1939), 10–12; Alan David Vertrees, Selznick's Vision: Gone With the Wind and Hollywood Filmmaking (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); and Leonard J. Leff, "David Selznick's Gone With the Wind: 'The Negro Problem,'" Georgia Review 38 (1984): 156.
19. Darden Asbury Pyron, ed., Recasting Gone With the Wind in American Culture (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida), 206.
20. John D. Stevens, "The Black Reaction to Gone With the Wind," Journal of Popular Fiction 2 (1973): 367; and Thomas Cripps, "Winds of Change: Gone With the Wind and Racism as a National Issue," in Pyron, ed., Recasting Gone With the Wind, 137–149.
21. Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Penguin, 1965), 113; and Alice Walker, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (New York: The Women's Press, 1982), 118.
22. Helen Taylor, Scarlett's Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 179; and Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Film (New York: Continuum, 2001), 90.
23. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 89; Jill Watts, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood (New York: Amistad, 2005); and Jennifer Smythe, "Classical Hollywood and the Filmic Writing of Interracial History, 1931–1939," a paper presented for the International Association for Media in History meeting, "Projections of Race and Ethnicity: National Identities and Global Networks," Cincinnati, Ohio, July, 2005.
24. Taylor, Scarlett's Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans, 192.
25. Trisha Curran, "Gone With the Wind: An American Tragedy," in Warren French, ed., The South and Film (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), 47–57.
26. Anne Edwards, The Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New Haven, Connecticut: Ticknor & Fields, 1983); Darden Asbury, Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Helen Taylor, Scarlett's Women: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans; and Darden Asbury Pyron, ed., Recasting Gone With the Wind in American Culture.
27. Herb Bridges and Terryl C. Boodman, eds., Gone With the Wind: The Screenplay (New York: Delta, 1989); and Gone With the Wind, Dir. Victor Fleming (Hollywood: MGM/UA Home Video, 1967), videocassette.
28. Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr., The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 140; and Jim Curran, The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 80–83.
29. Organization of American Historians, "National History Standards in Historical Thinking," OAH Magazine of History (Spring 1995) <http://www.oah.org/pubs/mazazine/standards/nhsl.html> (July 15, 2007).
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