James Baquet

    Recent events have caused Americans to once again discuss the legacy of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Even the classic movie “Gone With the Wind” has been brought into the debate.

    The 1939 film stars Clark Gable as the devilish Rhett Butler, and Vivien Leigh as the fiery Scarlett O’Hara, in many ways the antithesis of the demure “Southern Belle.”

    The movie was based on the only novel published in the lifetime of author Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949), for which she won the Prize for Fiction in 1937. She was a well-to-do society girl born in Atlanta, Georgia, in the same year as Charles Richter and one year before Walt Disney.

    Even the briefest of biographies of Mitchell reveals the source of the novel in her own life. Her grandmother was an eyewitness of the Civil War. Likewise, as Mitchell wrote, “the older generation of [my] relatives, those who had been active in the 1860s” — that is, during the war — often told stories during the family’s Sunday afternoon visits. She even stayed on the old family plantation during summer holidays with her mother’s two aunts, who had been 13 and 21 years old when the war began.

    All of this led not only to information but to a point of view about the “glorious South” and what was lost — a situation that has led to something called the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy.”

    Supporters of the Lost Cause claim that the system of slavery in the ante-bellum South had a positive effect on society — that slavery was not evil, but a positive institution which benefited the black people, treating them as family. Furthermore, they consider the ending of slavery as an unfair interference by the forces of the North.

    It is easy to see how those who believe in the Lost Cause could find support in Mitchell’s book, in the film based on it, and in her own life. This is the concern which has been raised in the current debate over race issues in the American South.

    Mitchell did not live into the civil rights era. She was killed by a drunk driver while crossing a street in 1949. Growing up as she did, she might be very surprised by all this talk.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. the nation made up of the southern states in the American Civil War

    2. wicked but attractive

    3. opposite

    4. lasting influence

    5. before the war

    6. the model of a southern “lady”

    7. wealthy

    8. shy and reserved

    9. passionate

    10. one who has seen or experienced something directly