This Day in History

 

 Proclaiming it was one thing, ensuring it something else. The North had to win the war first!

On June 19, 1865, that war finally having been won in the North's favor, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, took command of 2,000 federal troops in Texas, the last place in the former Confederate States of America where slavery still was practiced, and informed the people in that state that the practice was now over: 

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

Idleness? Jeez, stereotypes start early, don't they? If they're as lazy as all that, what was the point in making them slaves in the first place? However, let's end this on an audaciously hopeful note with a quote by a man who was anything but idle:

Juneteenth has never been a celebration of victory or an acceptance of the way things are. It’s a celebration of progress. It’s an affirmation that despite the most painful parts of our history, change is possible—and there is still so much work to do.

--Barack Obama

In Memoriam: Olivia de Havilland 1916-2020

Kicked out of the house by her strict stepfather for appearing in high school plays (and here I bet you thought that kind of thing only happened to teenage boys), young Olivia de Havilland nevertheless saw teaching English as her calling, and was in fact offered a scholarship to do just that. Which didn't mean she couldn't still act for fun at the community theater in her more-or-less hometown of Saratoga, California (the daughter of British expatriates, she had spent her first few years in Japan.)  The play was Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream, and Olivia set the whole plot in motion as a mischievous pixie named Puck. Now it just so happened that the highly acclaimed Austrian stage director Max Reinhardt was in California scouring the state for actors to appear in the same play at the Hollywood Bowl. One of Reinhardt's assistants caught Olivia on stage and asked that she be second understudy for not Puck, slated to played by a young Mickey Rooney (it's obviously a role subject to interpretation) but the leading female part of Hermia. Leading female part or not, there was little chance as second understudy that Olivia would find herself actually performing in front of that Hollywood audience. But little chance is not the same as no chance (or else you wouldn't even need a second understudy, would you?), and for whatever reasons the two actresses ahead of her bailed out of the production two weeks before the premiere. Olivia must have proved a very able substitute, for when Warner Brothers asked Reinhardt to directed the movie version, he then asked her if she would appear in it. She at first hesitated--she after all had just got a scholarship--but eventually relented and signed a five-year contract with Warner's.

Though it's highly regarded today, A Midsummer's Night Dream upon its initial release got mixed reviews and tanked at the box office, but nobody blamed de Havilland for that. She was cast as the love interest in a few comedies, then Warner's decided to take a chance on a genre the studio hadn't really been known for up to that point: the costume drama. Since it was a swashbuckler, the studio had hoped to secure the services of British actor Robert Donat, who a year earlier had wielded a sword in The Count of Monte Cristo, a box office hit. But Donat suffered from asthma, and feared another swashbuckler would kill him. Warner's then took another chance. A screentest with an unknown Australian actor the studio had under contract had proven quite favorable, and so Errol Flynn was cast as the indentured physician-turned-buccaneer title character in 1935's Captain Blood, directed by Michael Curtiz. de Havilland is the plantation owner's niece who buys Dr. Blood at an auction, decides at first she doesn't like him, but finds she just can't resist his roguish charm and falls madly in love with him. Captain Blood was a box office hit, in no small part due to the onscreen chemistry between the film's attractive leads. Flynn and de Havilland would go on to make seven more movies together.

Their third collaboration, 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, again directed by Curtiz, wound up being their biggest hit as a duo, and eventually considered a Hollywood classic, one of the greatest adventure films ever made, that even today can hold its own against the latest Avengers offering. de Havilland plays the legendary Maid Marian, referred here as Lady Marian and a member of King Richard the Lionheart's court. She initially spurns the advances of Flynn's Robin (here a slumming aristocrat whose robbing of the rich and giving to the poor is part of a larger agenda having to do with Norman/Saxon factional politics) but finds she just can't resist his roguish charm and falls madly in love with him (as you may have ascertained, in costume dramas it helps to have roguish charm when looking to score with chicks.) They take turns rescuing each other from prison, help restore Richard to his rightful place on the throne, get engaged, and have so much cash on hand at film's end that Robin may have to rob himself if he wants to keep giving to the poor.

Instead of a swashbuckler, Flynn's and de Havilland's fifth movie together was a Western, 1938's Dodge City. Olivia is a young pioneer woman who this time has a very good reason for spurning trailblazer Flynn's advances: he killed her brother. However, it was in self-defense, and, as you might expect, roguish charm works as well in the bar-brawling Old West as it does in those parts of the world where people brandish swords instead of six-shooters, and so the two fall in love. Flynn also becomes the sheriff of Dodge, an odd job to give to somebody with roguish charm, but as James Arness was still in high school when this picture was made, there may have been no other takers. Flynn cleans up this particular part of the West and he and de Havilland move on to Virginia City, which, in the absence of Lorne Greene (still in Canada doing radio), was in complete disarray. de Havilland was beginning to feel like a bit of disarray herself. She enjoyed working with Flynn, but felt she was too good an actress always simply just to stand on the sidelines and look on admiringly while he proved that Roguish Charm always triumphs over Evil.

Independent producer David O. Selznick saw something more in de Havilland. Having secured the film rights to Margaret Mitchell's massive Civil War novel Gone with the Wind soon after it was published, and then see it become a Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, he set about selecting a cast to bring the book's characters to life. This resulted in the famous nationwide search for the right actress to play main character Scarlett O'Hara, and that had every starlet in Hollywood lobbying for the part. In fact the whole search was a publicity stunt and delaying tactic, as Selznick himself had to lobby his father-in-law, MGM head Louis B. Mayer, to loan out Clark Gable to play the equally important role of Rhett Butler, which led to a distribution deal with the studio that took some time to come to fruition. Eventually, a British actress not all that well-known on this side of the pond, Vivien Leigh, got the part of Mitchell's Southern belle. As for Olivia De Havilland, she may have been the one female star in Hollywood who didn't try out for Scarlett. She had read Mitchell's novel, and had taken an interest in a another character, Melanie Wilkes, Scarlett's bookish sister-in-law, friend, and (though Melanie doesn't consider herself as such) romantic rival. Jack L. Warner agreed to loan de Havilland out, and Selznick, perhaps surprised that a glamorous movie star would even want to play such a non-glamorous character, happily welcomed her aboard.

But what was this thing she was boarding? Nine years ago on this blog I wrote a critique of Mitchell's novel,  in which I said the author (the Irish-American 1920s flapper daughter of a Southern suffragette)  offered some real insight into human behavior that to me almost made her work profound, but that profundity was undercut by a simplistic view of African-Americans that a reasonable person may interpret as "racist". Well, that more or less describes the movie, too, and as with Confederate flags and confederate statues, there's recently been renewed calls to remove the film from public view. That may very well happen, but before it does I should remind you that whatever its racial politics, both the novel and movie mostly concerns itself with the interpersonal relations of four Caucasians during a rather trying time in history, and may be summed up this way: Rhett loves Scarlett, Scarlett loves Ashley, Ashley loves...well, who does Ashley love? As portrayed by Leslie Howard, the Southern Gentleman has his head so far up his ass (per Mitchell's novel) that it hard to tell if he prefers Scarlett or the woman he ends up marrying, Melanie, and that what makes de Havilland's performance important to the film's (um...nonracially) artistic success.

The very first sentence of the novel states that Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, so of course when it came time to make the movie David O. Selznick goes out and hires a beautiful actress to play her. Well, that's really no biggie. The novel further states that what Scarlett lacks in looks she easily makes up for in flirtatious charm, so guys just end up thinking she's beautiful. But what of nerdish Melanie, who never attracts the menfolk, and whom Scarlett hardly considers (at least not initially) serious competition? Selznick then goes out and hires another beautiful actress. Well, that's Hollywood, folks. If the Scarlett of the novel fakes beauty, then Olivia de Havilland's challenge is to fake plainness. To that end, she wears very little makeup, dresses somewhat dowdily, has a kind but nonsexual smile, and never, unless she's giving birth or otherwise wracked with illness, lets her hair down. Does it work? When I was in high school I took an elective course called The Novel, and the very first one we read was Gone with the Wind, and got to watch the movie as well. A subsequent classroom discussion turned toward Melanie's/de Havilland's looks, and the consensus among both the guys and the girls was that "she's all right." Had they seen any of the movies de Havilland made prior to GWTW, or the many glamorous Warner's publicity photos of her, my classmates might have rated her a couple notches above "all right". But even such a top-down approach goes to Mitchell's central point that on an equal playing field (or with equal attention paid to from the wardrobe and makeup departments), there's no particular reason to believe Scarlett is prettier than Melanie.

Why does any of this matter? Because film is a visual art form, and, among other things, the actress has to look the part, even if the part is a bit ambiguous. The Scarlett/Melanie rivalry (one-sided as it is) and eventual friendship (I love the way they bond over a dead Yankee deserter) is one of the most important elements in Gone with the Wind, at least as important as the movie poster-erotic Scarlett/Rhett relationship (not that that's not interesting, too.) But where the book can go inside a person's head, the movie can't.  Her character's high self-regard has Vivien Leigh smirking quite a bit throughout the film, unnecessary in the book where we can just read her thoughts. As for Melanie, she's seen mostly through Scarlett's eyes in the novel, whereas in the movie we get to see her through our eyes. We don't necessarily have to dismiss Melanie as a wimp when she first shows up, but we also can't be surprised when Scarlett does so. That not only calls for more acting on Vivien Leigh's part, but also on de Havilland's. In fact, it becomes kind of tricky for the latter. The first impression she makes has to be convincingly cloying for both Scarlett and the audience, while knowing that the second, third, and forth impression will demand reinterpretation, but at the same time she has to stay in character, or at least not wander too outside of it. Drab Melanie would seem to be totally clueless as to what a girl has to due to secure a fellow. Except she secures the fellow anyway, and it's up to actress de Havilland to exhibit some wider appeal beyond the drab cluelessness. Because Scarlett flouts Old South conventions to such an extent that she eventually becomes a successful Reconstruction businesswoman, she's often seen as a protofeminist. It's the proto that can be excruciating. Lacking a certain self-awareness that manifests itself as a highly selective form of procrastination ("I'll think about it tomorrow"), all of Scarlett's emancipatory behavior threatens to become  merely a means to a retrograde end, that she'll someday again be that Southern belle surrounded by admiring beaux, chief among them Ashley. Melanie may not seem like much of a feminist, but she cares far less than Scarlett about being the object of male desire, and it galls the latter that she gets the guy anyway.  After her first husband (whom she married just to spite Ashley) dies of war-related measles, Scarlett moves to Atlanta and, at her invitation, in with sister-in-law Melanie. It's reasonable to believe that Scarlett has an ulterior motive, so that she can steal Ashley back, but to do that, she first has to figure out, what does he see in Melanie? Well, the marriage is to some extent arranged (it's downplayed in the movie, but Ashley and illness-prone Melanie are first cousins, and come from a long line of wedded first cousins, the multi-ethnic Mitchell's jab at Southern homogeneity.) It would be great if that's all it was, but it's not. When Scarlett joins Melanie as a volunteer nurse at the local army hospital where amputations are not an uncommon occurrence, she sees her Pollyannaish sister-in-law has her own reservoir of strength. And Melanie may be a goody-two shoes, but as Scarlett discovers, she can decide for herself what constitutes good than have society decide it for her, such as when she accepts a charitable donation from the town hooker. The two women end up depending on each other quite a bit throughout this saga.. Scarlett gets Melanie through some dire straits--there's few straits more dire than going into labor as a city burns around you, and Melanie repays Scarlett by bailing her out from one social faux pas after another (including one involving her own husband Ashely!) Melanie can be too good to be true at times, the fate of a secondary character who primarily exists to provide a springboard for the main character's personal growth, though Mitchell does make a late-in-the-novel stab at making her more relatable. I don't have the novel in front of me, but I believe the only time the book goes outside of Scarlett's head, it is when it goes inside of Melanie's. After Scarlett has her miscarriage, Rhett breaks down crying in front of Melanie, who for once is dumbfounded, though in the end she comforts him. The film skips the dumbfounded part and goes straight to the comforting (perhaps because Clark Gable didn't relish crying on camera, wasn't particularly convincing at it, and everyone concerned  just needed to get through that scene as quickly as possible.) But Olivia de Havilland gets another chance at humanizing Melanie, and here she scores. Scarlett's and Rhett's daughter Bonnie Blue is killed in an accident involving an underachieving Shetland pony, Mammy relates to Melanie the turmoil in the Butler household of the past few days. Here Melanie really does seem overwhelmed by a tearful Mammy's story of an out-of-control Rhett, and for a moment denies there anything she can do to help. For such a sainted character as Melanie that moment is significant, though Mammy convinces her that she can help, and in fact she does help (though God-knows-how since it's played off-screen.) Finally, de Havilland gets her own deathbed scene, through there it's Vivien Leigh's character who is humanized. These two actresses knew how to play off each other.

For her work on Gone with the Wind, Olivia de Havilland was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, but lost to a woman who had played Mammy in the same film, Hattie McDaniel. There's no record of any resentment on de Havilland's part, no should there be. After spending an entire movie cleaning up after a bunch of dysfunctional white folk, McDaniel deserved some kind of compensation.

After Gone with the Wind, de Havilland was back at Warner Brothers, where the studio brass didn't particularly care that she just had a major role in what was already one of the most famous motion pictures of all time. She was again cast in a movie with Errol Flynn, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, but she didn't get to play Queen Elizabeth, Essex/Flynn's true love interest. That went to Bette Davis. Instead she played the fictional Lady Penelope Gray, and got third billing behinds Flynn and Davis. Several more so-so film roles followed, then some so-so roles that failed to follow because De Havilland refused to do them, resulting in a studio suspension. After the suspension was lifted, there was another movie with Flynn, a Civil War-themed Western titled Santa Fe Trail (which, if anything, presents an even more backwards take on slavery than GWTW.) An attack of appendicitis gave de Havilland an excuse to turn down a few more pictures, which gave an unsympathetic Jack L. Warner an excuse to put her back on suspension. After that she did get a meaty role in Hold Back the Dawn, as a small town teacher who finds herself in a romance with a scheming, but in the end redemptive, Charles Boyer. it led to another Academy Award nomination, but no win. There was one final movie with Errol Flynn. In Santa Fe Trail, Flynn had played future Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart, who competes with George Armstrong Custer, played by Ronald Reagan in his salad days, for the affections of de Havilland (guess who comes out on top there.) Well, in They Died with Their Boots On, Flynn himself gets to play Custer. Whether that's a step up or a step down I'm not sure, but it's nice to see him and de Havilland together one last time.

The seven-year contract de Havilland had signed with Warner's was set to expire in 1943, except the studio added another six months to make up for the two suspensions. Feeling that was akin to slavery, de Havilland filed suit. The California Superior Court ruled that the California Labor Code forbid a employer from enforcing a contract for long than seven years, and, a year later, the California Court of Appeal for the Second District (where I guess Hollywood must be located) agreed. Olivia de Havilland was a free woman. Unfortunately, her hard-won freedom didn't sit well with any of the other movie studios in Tinseltown, which not surprisingly had sided with Warner's, and it was almost two years before she worked again. Meanwhile, World War II was still going strong, and de Havilland made good use of her free time by joining a USO tour of military hospitals in the South Pacific (due to a bout of viral pneumonia, she spent time in an island hospital herself.)

Paramount Pictures eventually signed de Havilland to a two-picture deal. The first of these pictures was  the 1946 child-born-out-of-wedlock drama To Each His Own. Charles Brackett's witty (if not entirely credible) script had de Havilland as the unwed mother who gives up her son to avoid scandal, and then is surprised to learn that she can't easily adopt him back, not even when she becomes quite wealthy running the London branch of a major cosmetics company. The real treat in this film is watching de Havilland convincingly age some thirty years from World War I to World War II. Actually, since the story is told in flashbacks, the aging is kind of in reverse. She starts out in her fifties, then film-dissolves into her 20s, with the incremental disappearance of youth in-between. It's no much that de Havilland looks older--you may as well credit the makeup artist who adds all the lines to her face--but she gets the voice right, which gets deeper as she gets older and develops a more regal bearing. Olivia was again nominated and this time won her first Best Actress Oscar.

Olivia's greatest performance, in my opinion, came in 1948 when she played mental patient Virginia Cunningham in The Snake Pit. Like a lot of well-meaning "problem pictures" of the 1940s, this film can seem somewhat exploitative by our standards, as if it were an R-rated women-in-prison film with the swear words and lesbian scenes cut out. Except it's not a prison but a state mental institution. And the screenplay by Frank Partos, Millen Brand, and an uncredited Arthur Laurents isn't afraid to inject moments of comedy bordering on satire into the lurid proceedings. More important, actress de Havilland isn't afraid to inject humanity into a portrait of derangement. Actually, it's an open question as to just how deranged Virginia really is. Certainly, her problems are real enough, but the film seems to make the case that in a mental institution, mental illness itself may be relative. I say that because there really is no other character in the film for the audience to identify with as Virginia comes across as, if not saner, than at least more sympathetic (and more good-humored) than not merely the other inmates but most of the nurses and doctors as well. I mean, how sane is it to wave a cigar in a mental patient's face, as one jackass shrink does? The psychiatrist who treats Virginia, played by Leo Genn, is rational enough, but even that doctor-patient relationship is threatened by a jealous bitch of a nurse played by Helen Craig. Then there's the famous scene where Virginia finds herself in the worst part of the asylum, where the patients everyone has given up on are housed, the snake pit of the title, and has de Havilland philosophically narrating her hallucinatory response to roomful of women in a hallucinatory state. Like I said, relative. A film made in the 1950s, Home Before Dark starring Jean Simmons, is probably a more realistic, more saner version of mental illness, and Simmons is very good in it. But whatever the excesses of The Snake Pit, de Havilland's canny performance offers an existential aspect to madness that Simmons and every other thespian who's ever played a mentally ill person lacks, and that I for one find hard to resist. She once again was nominated for an Oscar, but sadly (well, I consider it sad) did not win.

Olivia did win another Oscar for 1949's The Heiress. Based on a play that was in turn based on Henry James 1880 novel Washington Square, it's the story of an unattractive rich girl whose widowed father has never shown her any affection and so becomes the willing recipient of the affection shown to her by a handsome young man played by Montgomery Clift, though he may just be a cad out for her money. To play the unattractive rich girl, de Havilland wears no makeup (or only enough so her face can be seen on camera underneath all the lights), her hair up like a melted skull-fitting manhole cover, and has downcast eyes and a frown that threaten to crash into the Earth's surface. She's actually prettier wearing a straitjacket in The Snake Pit. As for Clift, in order to play a handsome young man he merely had to make sure he had a designated driver. Clift does turn out to be a cad, as her father warned, and de Havilland, who looks improve as she grows increasingly bitter, she manages to get back at the both of them. In this film, Olivia is Scarlett and Melanie rolled into one, with a touch of that bitch nurse played by Helen Craig. And here you never wanted to read James because you thought he was too stuffy.

Olivia's film appearances became more sporadic throughout the 1950s as she resumed her stage career to a degree, and, upon meeting a Frenchman, moved to Paris. One of her more interesting later movies is 1962's Light in the Piazza. She was about 45 when she made it, and still fairly attractive, though I imagine most straight males in the audience were paying more attention to Yvette Mimieux, who played de Havilland's beautiful brain-damaged daughter. Olivia and Yvette are both on vacation in Italy, when the latter captures the eye of a handsome, suntanned young Italian played by George Hamilton. Though actor Hamilton grew up in Arkansas, he does a credible job portraying a Florentine whose grasp of English is so poor he never realizes the girl of his dreams has the mind of a child and instead dismisses such acts as eating rice thrown at a wedding as an American eccentricity. It all seems to work out in the end, possibly because he never learns the truth, thanks to de Havilland's character, who sees this as her daughter's best chance at happiness. One wonders if there's also another chance awaiting the mother, whose marriage is strained (thanks to Yvette's problems), as she finds herself in a flirting relationship with Rossano Brazzi, who plays Hamilton's dad.

In 1964, de Havilland starred in a couple of psychological thrillers. In Lady in a Cage, she's a rich woman with a broken hip whose private elevator breaks down with her inside it. This leads to a home invasion (one of the intruders is a young James Caan), and quite a bit of violence. It's a nasty film, but that doesn't necessarily mean I wouldn't recommend it. Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte was director Robert Aldrich's follow-up to his surprise hit of a year earlier, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Again it was supposed to star Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, but the latter had to leave the project due to illness (given how the two stars reportedly felt about each other, maybe Crawford was sick of Davis), and so de Havilland stepped in. Davis is a wealthy Southern spinster slowly losing her mind while trying to hang on to her mansion, which stands in the way of a proposed highway. Olivia is her conniving cousin out for her money in a plot that involves murders both past and present. Another nasty film that I wouldn't necessarily not recommend.

Olivia de Havilland's final movie appearance was a cameo in 1979's The Fifth Musketeer. (I haven't seen this film or even heard of it until now, but my curiosity is piqued as I see Alan Hale Jr, the Skipper on Gilligan's Island, plays one of the Three Musketeers. I reminded that Hale's lookalike father, Alan Hale Sr, appeared in even more Errol Flynn pictures than did de Havilland!) She did a lot of television in the 1970s and 80s,  including the miniseries Roots: the Next Generation, and a TV version of Anastasia, in which she played the Dowager Empress, and won a Golden Globe for her efforts. De Havilland retired from acting in 1989. She made news a few years ago when she filed a defamation suit against the FX network and the producers of the miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan in which she was played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. It bounced around this California court and that California court, the final judgement being that she was a public figure and that the producers had a First Amendment right to portray her as long as there was no slander involve. Many outside observers were amused that a 100-year-old woman should care about such a thing, while others cheered her on because she was 100.

Well, that's about all you need to know about Olivia de Havilland. Lessee, did I forget anything? Oh, yeah, that's right.

 
Olivia had a sister. But to explain that relationship would take another eighteen paragraphs, and I've used up enough of your time already.

 

Above Our Poor Power to Add or Detract

 Charleston, S.C., circa 1903

At a cemetery somewhere in Charleston, several young women examine the graves of Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War, which had been over for quite some time, almost 40 years, when this picture was taken. By then every former rebel state was back in the Union, and Woodrow Wilson, who spent his childhood in Confederate Virginia, was a mere decade away from assuming the presidency. Yet as you can see from the above photo, the war was far from forgotten. At least not by these three women. The one kneeling on the left may be crying, but it's hard to tell. Indeed, maybe I shouldn't have used the word young to describe these three. The one on the right looks a bit older. Taller, anyway. Possibly she's the mother of the two on the left.

Now, I find the cause that the men buried in this cemetery gave their lives for to be morally repugnant. The Confederacy was about nothing more than the perpetuation of slavery. States rights, you say? I'm sorry but human rights trump states rights. Yet I don't begrudge the three women visiting, possibly grieving, over this place. All the men buried here had either wives, fiances, children, parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, friends, and possibly more than friends that they dare not talk about. The three women look too young to have been wives. The one on the left could have been a daughter. Or they could have been complete strangers. The number of Confederate dead is said to have been around 258,000. The loss of so many young men may have still resonated 40 years later.

The Confederate soldiers for the most part weren't slaveholders. Indeed, poor whites may have been at something of a disadvantage in the Old South. How does one find a decent job when the blacks are doing all the work (albeit unwillingly) for free? So, then, why did so many poor whites fight and die to preserve slavery? They probably thought they were fighting for some other reason, like the aforementioned states rights. The politicians and the plantation owners propping them up told--warned!--all those poor whites that the damn Yankees wanted to come in and change their whole way of life. Given their destitution, you'd think they'd welcome such a change. But the damned that you know is better than the damned that you don't. The term wouldn't come into vogue until the 21st century, but these poor whites may have seen the Union army as an "existential threat."

Speaking of that Union army, though I find them to be on the acceptable side of the conflict, all the soldiers didn't necessarily find slavery to be morally repugnant. Historians will tell that Northerners were in fact divided about the issue. And even the ones against it were divided as whether to end it immediately (by force, I guess) or just keep it confined to the South, a kind of 19th century version of containment. Though he personally found slavery to be morally repugnant, Abraham Lincoln initially favored the latter. When he finally did issue the Emancipation Proclamation, it was as a tactical move, hoping that it would deprive the South of any international support it may have gotten by driving home the message the war was indeed about slavery (even if he previously had claimed it wasn't.)

So, if the Union soldiers weren't all fighting to end slavery, what else could have been motivating them? Well, the South was rebelling. That was treason. And they had attacked Fort Sumter, a artificial island run by the U.S. Army in Charleston Harbor, the same Charleston as in the above photo, though that was taken inland. In a way, you could say that the North was acting in self-defense. For different reasons you could say that about the South, too. Two sides fighting in self-defense. What a war.

It's also quite possible that the soldiers in the North and the South  had no idea what they were fighting for or had any strong feelings about it. That's more common than you might think, as wars are fought on the ground by people unaware of how history will categorize them, pigeonhole them, at some future date. But if the soldiers had no strong feelings about it, why were they even there? Well, they could have gotten in trouble if they weren't. Both the North and the South had a draft (I myself probably would enlist in a war fought over bubble gum if I thought jail was the only alternative.) 

Beyond that, however, I think the soldiers on both sides figured their respective leaders had their reasons. Good reasons, or they wouldn't have let such a terrible thing happen in the first place, right? We Americans like to bitch about government, yet nevertheless are quite willing to suspend our judgement, our skepticism, to give our politicians the benefit of a doubt, in matters of war and peace. We need to believe that they know what they're doing. If they don't, then that in itself could constitute an existential threat.

At any rate, until someone can convince me otherwise, I think the North was on the right side of that particular conflict, even if at the time everybody from Lincoln on down didn't always seem so sure themselves. 

What about the various other wars the United States has gotten itself into? Were they worth it?

World War II. Worth it. Though it wasn't the precise reason the United States got involved, and the G.I.s doing the fighting didn't know about it until very late in the game, all it takes is a few minutes of film shot at Dachau to convince me of the rightness of that cause.

The Revolutionary War. True, King George III wasn't exactly Adolf Hitler, and modern-day Britain is more alike the United States than it is different (I'm told they even speak the same language as us) I still have to think it was worth it. Chalk it up to my dislike of royalty. The whole concept of royalty. I strongly feel that Arthur person should have run for office instead of pulling some stupid sword out of a stone. It also irks me when my fellow Americans show too much interest in royal affairs. Especially royal weddings. The fascination people here in the States showed for the nuptials of Charles and Diane, and then, a generation X later, William and Kate, makes me wonder if Benedict Arnold shouldn't replace George Washington on the dollar bill.

Besides, it's kind of hard to be against the Revolutionary War when I was born and raised in the very nation-state that resulted from it. To not give the Continental Congress the benefit of a doubt might yet invite another existential threat.

(A while back, I read about people who refuse to fill out 1040 tax forms on the grounds that the United States is an illegal country and that they're in fact citizens of Great Britain. If that's true, I think the U.K. equivalent of the IRS should get after them. They owe them some money.)

How about the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I and II, and Afghanistan? Look, I don't want to start any arguments here, especially not with those of you who seem to believe there's an invisible ray emanating from the U.S. Constitution that magically prevents our leaders from ever going to war unless it's absolutely necessary. Can we at least agree that the soldiers and sailors fighting those wars assumed some good would come out of them, whether it actually did or not?

This Memorial Day weekend, let's once again remember all those who gave their lives to ensure that the rest of us remain free.

But let's also remember those who gave their lives for less exalted reasons. Who gave their lives for no good reason at all.

If you think about it, they may have made an even bigger sacrifice.

I Got You, Abe

(This Tuesday marks the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Someone else lived there before that. No, no, just kidding. Of course, I'm talking about Abraham Lincoln's famous speech. Wishing to mark the anniversary myself, albeit a few days early, I'm re-running this post from September, 27, 2008. I've added a few pictures this time around--KJ)

This coming February 12 is the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. As absurd as it may sound, that actually makes me feel kind of old. When I was a kid, the Civil War was just about 100 years in the past. Now, to find out that war's central figure is having a bicentennial! And where exactly does that leave George Washington? All the way back to where the Pilgrims used to be?!

Wondering if I could connect at all with this almost prehistoric figure, I decided to take a look at something Lincoln wrote: the Gettysburg Address. I did this with some trepidation. I was afraid it might read like The Canterbury Tales, or something by Shakespeare: in English, yet you still need a translator. Turns out I didn't. The speech's first, and most famous, sentence is a bit daunting (I wasn't sure what he meant by "score". Was there a game going on? Or had a band played?), but after that it's smooth sailing. It could have been written yesterday (Thank God the Civil War wasn't yesterday. Our military's stretched thin enough as it is.)

So here it is, along with a few of my comments (which Honest Abe may or may not agree with.)

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation...

Less than a hundred years separate George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I'm not sure if that should make me feel old or not.

...conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

White men, anyway. Lincoln fails to mention his own Emancipation Proclamation, which was significantly more dedicated to that proposition. Of course, as long as the war raged, the emancipation existed only on paper, so maybe that accounts for his modesty.

Now, we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

The Confederate flag was a campaign issue as recently as 2000.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field...

According to some historians, the organizers of this event weren't even going to invite Lincoln. But then they thought, well, he IS president.

...as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

3,155 Federal soldiers were killed in action, with 5,365 missing. 2,136 of the 14,529 wounded died. All together, a mortality rate of nearly 15%. As far as the Confederacy goes, estimates range from 2,934 to 5,750 killed or missing.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

Sounds here like ol' Abe is just giving lip service.

But, in a larger sense...

Oh, wait. He's got something up his sleeve.

...we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground.

According to a recent news story, some developer wants to build a casino near the battlefield.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated, far above our poor power to add or detract.

Edward Everett spoke first. His speech contained 13,607 words, and lasted two hours. Lincoln's speech contained 186 words, and lasted a measly two minutes.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here...

Edward who?


...but it can never forget what they did here.

Not to take anything away from what they did there, but one reason Gettysburg is more well known than, say, Antietam (where there was an even greater loss of life) is because of what one tall, lanky guy with a beard and stove top hat said there.

It is for us the living, rather...

I knew there was a catch.

...to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom...

Did those who died at Gettysburg, or on Omaha Beach, or on Iwo Jima, really die for freedom or democracy, or did they actually die for a country that at the time just happened to be free and democratic? After all, people who have lived in dictatorships, or slave-based societies, have fought just as hard, and have died in as many numbers as we Americans. Freedom and democracy should be something more than mere synonyms for sovereignty and the homeland. Those high ideals can also be fought and lived for. How exactly do we do that? What are our weapons? Let's see, there's the ballot box, the soap box, the picket sign, the petition, and the letter to the editor. Maybe even blogs.

...and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Despite the best efforts of the all too many fools and scoundrels since Lincoln, it somehow hasn't perished yet.

Didn't Give A Damn

When I was a junior in high school I took an elective called "The Novel". Among the novels we read were For Whom the Bells Toll, All Quiet on the Western Front, Siddhartha, Catcher in the Rye and Gone With the Wind. Of all those novels, the one the teacher seemed the most embarrassed, the most apologetic, about teaching was Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Why? The rural-like Cleveland suburb where I went to high school was a tad conservative, so you might think she'd have qualms about teaching Catcher in the Rye, with its cuss words, or Siddhartha, with its emphases on non-Christian religions, or For Whom the Bells Toll, with its communist guerrillas. No, the teacher wasn't worried about community values so much as academic ones. Gone with the Wind was no classic, she warned us, and had an "old-fashioned narrative." At the time, I didn't know what she was talking about. Both Siddhartha and All Quiet on the Western Front were written before Wind, so why weren't they old-fashioned? Many years and how-to-write-fiction books later, I finally realized that the teacher meant that Wind lacked such modernist literary techniques as stream-of-consciousness:

ashley put his arms around me to comfort me oh no the busybodies see us spread gossip we're having an affair I come home rhett is drunk and all pissed off picks me up walks up stairs into bedroom maybe rapes me no because i'm not resisting maybe this will smooth things over between us no it doesn't he takes the kids somewhere i don't see him for months he's back asks me why i'm pale i tell him i'm pregnant he tells me to cheer up maybe i'll have a miscarriage i'm pissed off he said that i start hitting him oh no i lost my balance i'm tumbling down the stairs i have a miscarriage after all i hope rhett is satisfied i recuperate little bonnie blue tries to jump horse over fence breaks her neck oh how tragic melanie wilkes dies me and ashley can finally marry oh he loved melanie after all guess that means i really love rhett too bad he's leaving me i ask him what will become of me he says i don't give a damn oh what will i do now i can't think about it now i'll go back to tara mammy pack my bags tomorrow is another day

Whatever its literary merit, I was more eager to read Gone With the Wind than any other book on the list. I know, I was a teenager, a neurotic teenager at that, and should have been more eager to read Catcher in the Rye, about a neurotic teenager, but I had never heard of book before taking the class (good thing I didn't drop out of school before reaching the 11th grade, as I had often fantasized; I would have gone through life believing cuss words hadn't been invented until the late 1960s.) I was anxious to read Wind because a few years earlier the movie version, starring Vivian Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, and (still alive as of this writing) Olivia de Havilland, had premiered on TV with much fanfare, and, for a change, something lived up to the fanfare. I enjoyed the film. It wasn't just me with my peculiar tastes (though, God knows, I had enough back then), my classmates liked it as well. If it seems odd that teenagers in the 1970s should like a movie from the 1930s, remember that, while there was certainly such a thing as teen culture back then, it didn't extend to television too much. There was no such thing as MTV to cater to our every liking, so, other than something like Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, we watched the same shows our parents watched, and generally liked them. I suspect the movie's popularity is one reason my school added Wind to the list. The thinking may have been, as long as they're reading something. I also enjoyed the book the movie was based on. In fact, I found Margaret Mitchell's tome such a rich reading experience that it made the movie seem a bit superficial by comparison (though I would still recommend it.) Of all the books we had to read in that class, only Wind and Catcher in the Rye has stayed with me over the years. Unfortunately, when I cast an objective eye on Gone with the Wind, I have to conclude the teacher was right: it is old-fashioned, though for reasons having nothing to do with prose style or narrative structure. Too bad, as so much of the book is new-fashioned.

A brief summary, assuming a 423,575-word book can be summarized briefly. At the outset of the Civil War, 16-year old Scarlett O'Hara lives with her family and her slave Mammy on the cotton plantation Tara, not far from Atlanta. A flirtatious "southern belle", Scarlett is popular with the boys, but has her heart set on Ashley Wilkes. At a barbecue at Twelve Oaks, Ashley's father's plantation, Scarlett learns he going to marry his cousin, Melanie Hamilton. Upset at the news, Scarlett lashes out at Ashely. Another guest at the barbecue, Rhett Butler, a man with a roguish reputation, overhears this not-quite-lovers quarrel, and later tells Scarlett he admires her spirit. Too upset to take a compliment, and probably too socialized in ways of bellehood to even recognize it as a compliment, she spurns Rhett. Meanwhile, she decides to get back at Ashley, who has admitted he does have feelings for her, by marrying Melanie's brother Charles. This union produces a son, Wade. Charles is shipped off to war, and soon dies from the measles. Now a widow and single mother, Scarlett moves to Atlanta, where she lives with Melanie (now her sister-in-law) and her aunt. She keeps busy with hospital work, and renews her acquaintance with Rhett, who's getting rich by running supplies through the naval blockade the North has on the South. A friendship gradually develops between Scarlett and Rhett (something that's not always clear in the movie). Ashley returns home on leave, and asks Scarlett to watch over Melanie, who's now pregnant. Ashley returns to the war, which has turned decidedly bad for the South. General Sherman siege of Atlanta comes to a head, and the fleeing Confederates set the city on fire. Melanie has the bad timing to give birth that very night. Rhett helps Scarlett, Melanie, her newborn son, and a slave, Prissy, escape from Atlanta. Later, Rhett abandons them on the road to Tara, and joins the Confederate army. Scarlett returns home to find her mother dead, her father crazy, her sisters ill, the field slaves all gone, and the plantation burned. The war ends, and the victorious Yankees levy a particularly harsh tax on Tara. To keep from losing Tara, Scarlett first attempts to ask Rhett for the money, only to find he's now in jail. She then runs into Frank Kennedy, who's always been sweet on her sister Suellen. Frank tells her he's now a prosperous grocer. Hearing that, Scarlet seduces Frank into marrying her and paying off the taxes on Tara. Afterwards, she finds out he may not have ready cash on hand as a lot of people owe him money. Scarlett takes over the store herself, and then, with a loan from a friend, buys a sawmill, and proves herself a good businesswoman. She also finds time to give birth to a daughter, Ellie. Scarlett is soon back on the job. While riding home from the mill one night, she's accosted by a couple of thieves. A former Tara slave comes to her rescue. Afterwards, her husband Frank, Ashley, and several others of a vigilante bent, attack the shantytown the thieves hailed from. Frank is killed in the ensuing melee. A widow and single mother once again, Scarlet agrees to marry the now extremely wealthy Rhett Butler, who builds a fantastic mansion for them to live. Neither spouse particularly trusts the other, hardly a good foundation for a successful marriage. Still, the union produces a daughter, Bonnie Blue. By now, Ashley is running the mill for Scarlett. Still carrying a torch for him, she visits him in the office, and they reminisce about the good times before the war. The memories move Scarlett to tears, and Ashley takes her in his arms to comfort her. His sister walks in at that point and gets the wrong idea. Scandal ensues, though Melanie refuses to believe it. Rhett does believe it, and drunkenly confronts Scarlett. They argue and, arguably, have sex. The next morning Rhett takes Bonnie Blue and leaves town for a couple months. The child misses her mother, so Rhett returns. When she finds out he wants to leave again without his daughter, Scarlett informs Rhett she's pregnant. Rhett jokes that maybe she'll have a miscarriage. Angry, Scarlett lunges at Rhett, but loses her balance and falls down a flight of stairs. She does have a miscarriage, as well as breaking a couple of ribs. Scarlett goes to Tara to recover. Later, she returns to Atlanta, and an uneasy truce with Rhett. Meanwhile Rhett buys Bonnie Blue a Shetland pony. He should have got her a hamster instead. Bonnie tries to jump the horse over a hedge, and is killed. Both Scarlett and Rhett are heartbroken, though Scarlett, in the long run, handles it better. Melanie soon dies. Scarlett realizes that Melanie, not she, was the love of Ashley's life. She also realizes that Rhett, not Ashley, is the love of her life. But too late. Rhett leaves her. Finis.

Whew!

OK, so what did I find so new-fashioned about this novel? Even today, a southern belle might strike at least some young women as a rather pleasant thing to be. Margaret Mitchell, the daughter of a suffragette, knew better. Amid all the fan fluttering and flirting with dashing, young beaus and sipping iced sweet tea daintily on a hot Georgian day, bellehood was just another way for a patriarchal Southern hierarchy to keep its women in their place. In fact, the novel occasionally reads like a feminist tract. As changing times reveals just how unprepared women with such an upbringing were to a sudden reversal of fortune, Scarlett rebels against the role plantation society (which, through the course of the novel, seems to survive the plantations themselves) stubbornly insists she play:

"I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I'm tired of acting like I don't eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I'm tired of saying, 'How wonderful you are!' to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it."

--Gone with the Wind, chapter five

Scarlett's first husband dies, and then, as now, she's expected to wear black. Then, as not now, she's expected to wear black for the rest of her life. She's also forbidden to smile, or show any indication that she's nothing less than miserable. Suppressing the indication does indeed make her nothing less than miserable. Who knows? Maybe that was the whole idea behind the rule. Scarlett finally ends her period of mourning by accepting a dance at a wartime charity ball, scandalizing all of Atlanta as a result. The scandalizing doesn't stop there.

Scarlett is pregnant three times in the novel, something that she's not expected to acknowledge, to the point of staying indoors with the windows drawn at the first hint that she no longer has the thinnest waist in three counties. Nevertheless, by the time she's expecting her second child, she's a successful businesswoman, and has to go out in public, thus shattering any belief that same public might have had in the stork. Of course, that Scarlett is a successful businesswoman, that Scarlett's any type of businesswoman, is most scandalous of all. Businesswomen were exceedingly rare back then. The only other successful businesswoman in the whole novel is Belle Watling, and she keeps a red lantern out in front of her establishment.

Yet, for all of her scandalizing, Scarlett's not even the most modern thinker in the novel. That would be Rhett Butler. While hardly a sensitive male (especially not after a few drinks), it is he who dances with the widowed Scarlet at the charity ball. "Until you lose your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is," he tells her. At another point in the story, Rhett acknowledges Scarlett's pregnancy: "You are a child if you thought I didn't know, for all your smothering yourself under that hot lap robe." And it's Rhett who lends her the money to buy the sawmill. All throughout the novel, Rhett encourages Scarlett to defy convention, and applauds her when she succeeds: "Now you are beginning to think for yourself instead of letting others think for you. That’s the beginning of wisdom."

So why, if Scarlett and Rhett were so likeminded, did their marriage go south (if you'll pardon the pun)? Well, neither one was ever sure the other one loved them. Rhett only tells Scarlett when he's drunk and about to commit what a century later might be considered spousal rape. Scarlett only tells Rhett when he's ready to leave her. It doesn't help matters any that Ashley tells Scarlett at several points in the book that he loves her. It should occur to the reader long before it occurs to Scarlett that he's talking about familial, rather than romantic, love (after all, they are in-laws.) Why can't Scarlett figure that out? I suspect Ashley represents a little bit of the past, as restrictive as it was, that Scarlett wants to hold on to. When she finally lets it go, she doesn't even mind. By that time, of course, Rhett has had enough. I imagine most people regard Gone with the Wind as having an unhappy ending, but Scarlett's situation is far from hopeless. At the novel's conclusion, she's only 28, and can now go forth in life with a better understanding of herself and the world around her.

OK, that's the new-fashioned part of the novel. What's old-fashioned? Margaret Mitchell's seemed to have blinders on when it came to blacks, or, as Scarlett O'Hara affectionately refers to them, "darkies". As restrictive as the Old South must have been for white women, their rights were downright unalienable compared to the 3/4th of a people that were picking their cotton. Scarlett muses: "Negroes were provoking sometimes and stupid and lazy, but there was loyalty in them that money couldn't buy, a feeling of oneness with their white folks..." No, you couldn't buy their loyalty, just their bodies. The idea that the Civil War is being fought over slavery is scoffed at by Rhett Butler. Upon Emancipation, the former slaves act "as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild--either from perverse pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance." More ignorant than smothering oneself in a hot lap robe to hide a pregnancy? Why was Mitchell so attuned to the problems of women but not blacks in such a backward society? Well, she was a woman. Females were relatively more emancipated by 1937, when Gone with the Wind was published (of course, there was more emancipation to come.) In doing research for the novel, Mitchell must have taken a good, hard look at the etiquette of 1861, and decided it wasn't her glass of mint julep. Unfortunately, the daughter of a suffragette also, in the 1920s, lived down the street from the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. Speaking of the Klan, that was the vigilante group that Ashley Wilkes and Scarlett's doomed second husband both belonged to. You can argue that Mitchell was the product of her times, but other Southern writers such as William Faulkner, Harper Lee, and Mark Twain were able to look at black-white relations with a critical eye. Speaking of Twain, who died when Margaret Mitchell was ten and actually lived through the Civil War, he comes periodically under fire for the number of times the word "nigger" appears in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 216 times in Finn, compared to 104 times in Gone with the Wind, a much longer book. Mitchell is selective about her wording, often using "darkie" to describe good blacks like Mammy, and the n-word to describe bad blacks like the one that tries to rob Scarlett. Twain, having grown up in a slave state, and whose father occasionally owned slaves, uses the n-word no matter if the black in question is good, bad, or in-between. But don't condemn Twain for his accurate use of the era's vernacular. After all, his book is about a boy's moral growth as he helps a slave escape to freedom. Scarlett grows, too, but her racial attitudes stay the same. Some will argue that Gone with the Wind isn't even about slavery. It's about the Civil War. So what was it fought over, hoop skirts?

I suppose Mitchell isn't unique in identifying with her own group. When California passed Proposition 8 banning gay marriages, it was said to have been overwhelmingly supported by black voters. Every minority for himself. Meanwhile, political strategists for years have been trying to form a coalition among poor whites and poor blacks, to no avail. Too many poor whites blame poor blacks for all their troubles, as if welfare caused the collapse of manufacturing in this country (incidentally, there are more whites than blacks on welfare.) There's been a rift in recent years among blacks and Jews, but the still-extant Klan refuses to take sides. Women complain about being kept out of private clubs that cater to wealthy businessmen. We demand equal-opportunity elitism!

So who's to blame? The whites? Some of them are women. The males? Some of them are poor. The rich? Some of them are gay. The evangelicals? Some of them are black. The reactionaries? Some of them are Jewish. The Gentiles? Some of them are secular humanists.

I sound like a conservative decrying identity politics. No, I'm a liberal asking for a more expansive view of identity. I want everybody to identify with homo sapien.

There's a subplot in Gone with the Wind that I left out. Will Benteen is a one-legged Confederate soldier retuning from war who wanders onto Tara. He's made a foreman, and eventually marries Suellen, Scarlett's sister. Such a thing would have been unthinkable before the war. You see, Will is a cracker, a poor white. But post-war, Scarlett happily, and the rest of the local aristocracy begrudgingly, give their blessings to the union. The Yankee carpetbaggers are at the top of the socialeconomic pyramid now, and southerners of all stripes have to stick together. Really, any group at any time can find themselves at the top of such a pyramid. But it's always temporary. Met any Yankee carpetbaggers lately?

As our economy burns down faster than Atlanta, we all soon may find ourselves at the bottom. Climbing back up might be easier if we all recognize our common humanity. Do so, and tomorrow might be a better day.