Gone With the Wind

Originally published in the Premiere Issue of The History Channel Magazine

Gone With the Wind

Reconstructing the Reconstruction

by Kathy Monahan

Movies make money because they entertain, not because they educate. When filmmakers turn to a historical subject, their first obligation is to the movie rather than to the history. But many an audience has been awakened to the fascination of history through a particularly compelling film, leaving the film's creator with an obligation to provide at least part of the truth.

When producer David O. Selznick set out to dramatize Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, he knew that the entire American South would be watching for historical and cultural accuracy. With that in mind, he took almost unprecedented pains with the movie's verisimilitude, and in the 63 years since its release, Gone With the Wind has defined the Civil War for generations of Americans.

Selznick threw his resources behind Gone With the Wind in the belief that it had something for everyone: for the male audience, the Civil War, with its romance of honor and bravery; for the female audience, an epic love story. Audiences of both sexes did indeed flock to see the movie, but Gone With the Wind's dirty little secret is that it's a war picture in historical context only.

The Civil War and Reconstruction might be the backdrop of the movie, but they are played out on the domestic stage. Tactics and battle scenes don't enter into the film's scenes; even Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's destroying army does all its work offscreen. What we see of the great battles is their aftermath -- and their impact on the individual and the home.

Contemporary sources bear out Selznick's version of events; letters and diaries from the 1860s are full of the horrors of war. The situation in Atlanta was especially acute. The Union blockade had cut off the South from access to anesthetics, and by 1864 surgeons were performing grisly amputations -- such as the one that became the last straw for Scarlett O'Hara -- dozens of times a day.

Sherman's destructive tactics aroused particular bitterness in the hearts of Southerners. Sherman later justified himself by noting that it "hastened what we all fought for, the end of the war"; however, his reduction of productive farmland to dust rankled Southerners for generations.

Margaret Mitchell grew up on stories about the "War of Northern Aggression," and she conceived her novel in part as a way of providing the Southern version of events. When Selznick began work on the film, Mitchell lobbied hard for him to hire as consultants two friends of hers from Georgia. With Macon journalist Susan Myrick as an expert on Southern customs and etiquette, and Atlanta architect Wilbur G. Kurtz as historian, Mitchell was confident that the Southern conscience would have its say in the film.

Kurtz and Myrick ruled on questions of accuracy ranging from the enormous (the reconstruction of Atlanta's railway yard from the 1853 original plans) to the infinitesimal (the text of the check with which Scarlett pays the taxes on her plantation, Tara). Every vehicle, every animal, and every piece of equipment down to the buckets came under scrutiny. Even the lettering on ambulances and wagons represented real regiments.

Selznick, though, reserved the right to over-rule his consultants in the interests of presentation and had no problem setting aside historical probability when he felt it interfered with a good picture. Scarlett, for example, remained in a bonnet and veil for the bazaar dance even though Margaret Mitchell herself railed against the decision ("I cannot imagine even Scarlett showing such poor taste," Mitchell wrote to Myrick). Tara, too, conformed more to the Hollywood archetype of a grand Southern plantation than to the rough-and-tumble reality of a North Georgia farmhouse.

The one aspect of Gone With the Wind that has continued to draw criticism since its release is its treatment of race. The late 1930s was a turning point for black characters in film; the servant-slave stereotype was dying out. (Stepin Fetchit, the actor most associated with that stereotype, lost his contract in 1936.) The black community was beginning to influence filmmakers toward more complex and dignified black characters, and Gone With the Wind provided an opportunity to showcase quality black actors.

Selznick was well aware of his responsibility toward his black audience, and if the line between his conscience and the reality of slavery proved impossible to walk, it's hard to imagine how he could have tried any harder to walk it. All of the novel's references to the Ku Klux Klan were excised from the screenplay, as was the word nigger, which was used freely in the Reconstruction South (the completed film used the word darky exclusively -- hardly an improvement by today's standards).

Selznick's stated intention was to "be awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger." To that end, he watered down any of Mitchell's points about race that he deemed to be potentially offensive: A black man who tries to rape Scarlett in the book becomes a white man in the movie, and Mitchell's rude and rapacious freedmen are nowhere to be seen on screen.

The result is a film in which slaves are taken as much for granted as furniture, and race is relegated to a B plot in the great conflict of the Civil War. The slaves who escaped or attempted to escape servitude, who deserted their masters' plantations to join Union regiments, and who were eager to assert their postwar independence at the ballot box have no voice here. The contentment of Gone With the Wind's black characters with their status is presented as the norm -- a stereotype that the black community has resisted for decades.

In the last analysis, Gone With the Wind is a lovingly thorough portrayal of an elite culture "that only wants to be graceful and beautiful," as Melanie Hamilton says at the beginning of the film, and the tragedy of its humiliating defeat. It may be a narrow viewpoint, but the evidence of the film's accuracy -- for that viewpoint at least -- was given at its Atlanta premiere on Dec. 15, 1939.

In the audience that night were four elderly Confederate veterans, and as the film ended and they got to their feet, one of them waved his cane at the screen. "That's what I've been trying to tell 'em," he said. "That's what I've been trying to tell 'em all along."