WIXLIB

IntroductionIn one of Gone with the Wind’s (1939) most spectacular cinematic sequences, thecamera follows Scarlett O’Hara as she makes her way through the crowded anddecimated Atlanta streets following General Sherman’s attack on the city. Once theobviously distressed Scarlett reaches her destination, the camera slowly ascends to revealthe Atlanta rail yard littered with the dead and wounded bodies of Confederate soldiers.As the camera continues to pan, the immense size and scope of the rail yard is revealed tothe viewer as Scarlett becomes indistinguishable from the scores of soldiers and medicsbelow. For the audience viewing this lengthy sequence, Scarlett’s character is lost amidthe horrifying outcome of the battle; she and the fallen soldiers are revealed to be at thewhim of forces and historical events greater than themselves. The camera pans to atattered Confederate flag flying high above the city.1This sequence is an example of what film historian Tom Brown calls a“spectacular vista,” a cinematic technique that is excessive in scale and in action (forexample, a battle scene shot from a point of view high in the air). The spectacular vista,Brown contends, is the type of cinematic spectacle most associated with the narrativehistories and stunning visuals that are important to epic films and the fantasy worlds theydepict. In Gone with the Wind, it is the reveal of the Confederate flag that most resonateswhite viewers who most sympathize with the romanticism of the antebellum South, itshistory, and the losses incurred by white southerners during the Civil War.2 For whiteviewers who see the Confederate flag as a symbol of their ancestors, Gone with the Wind12Tom Brown, “Spectacle / Gender / History: The Case of Gone with the Wind. Screen 49 (2008): 172.Ibid.1

revisits grand historical events that they did not experience and therefore could notpossibly remember. Viewers use the visual production of those historical experiences asmemories that inform their national identity in the present and their relationship with thepast, giving them a sense of belonging and purpose.The emotional responses of numerous white American viewers to Gone with theWind’s epic version of American history raise questions about collective memory of theAmerican South in the age of mass culture, especially since Gone with the Wind is astatement of an older collective memory, the mythology of the Lost Cause. How has theLost Cause, through Gone with the Wind, shaped the identity of white Americans andtheir memory of the South from 1936 through the twentieth century? How have productsof mass culture associated with Gone with the Wind functioned as mediators of memoryand history, constructing knowledge about the South that shapes twenty-first centurywhite southern identity?Few scholars have attempted an analysis of the latter question while many othershave instead relied on assumptions about Gone with the Wind’s enduring popularity toposit broadly that it perpetuated historical myths about the Civil War and Old South inthe popular American consciousness, sometimes calling for other scholars to take up thetask of verification.Literature Review: The Lost Cause and Gone with the WindInforming Gone with the Wind’s epic tale of hardship during the Civil War is thelongstanding mythic interpretation of history that dates to the moment that GeneralRobert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox courthouse in 1865 and2

that is rooted in the Confederacy’s humiliation, damaged self-image, and loss of honorsuffered in defeat.3 As W.J. Cash writes in his highly influential The Mind of the South,“it was the conflict with the Yankee which really created the concept of the South assomething more than a matter of geography, as an object of patriotism, in the minds ofSoutherners.”4 This anguish then coupled with the psychological effects of a devastatedpost-war economy to create a “rising loyalty to the new-conceived and greater entity” ofthe South through the Lost Cause: a social movement that defined the South followingthe war.5“The ‘cause,’” writes Eric Bain-Selbo, “was the defense of the Confederacy.”6 Itwas the romantic interpretation of the Old South as a geographically and culturallysuperior region that was once populated by chivalrous cavaliers and “happy darkies.”This region, the Lost Cause claims, was ultimately destroyed in the “War of NorthernAggression” that was prompted by a Constitutional debate over state’s rights and theundermining of the Southern state’s sovereignty by the Federal government.Additionally, with the state’s rights interpretation of the historical roots of the Civil Warin place, the severity of institutional slavery in the South was sanitized and downplayed.Slavery, to post-bellum Southerners, was not considered central to the Civil War and was3Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture(New York, Knopf, 1991), 115; Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941; NewYork: Vintage Books, 1991), 65.4Ibid.5Ibid., 66. In the years immediately following the conclusion of the war, the Lost Cause was mostprevalent among the Virginia elite because they were most able to maintain their social status. Gaines M.Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1987), 35.6Eric Bain-Selbo, “From the Lost Cause to Third and Long,” in Game Day and God: Football, Faith, andPolitics in the American South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009), 86.3

omitted from their historical accounts about the war itself, despite the widely heldantebellum belief that white supremacy was the “cornerstone” of Southern society.7 Thisinterpretation of history then resulted in the pride, racism, and paternalism that hasdepicted slaves as ignorant and faithful servants to a benign institution and benevolentmasters and has created the “unshakable conviction that there is something grander aboutthe South and being a southerner.”8The architects of the Lost Cause were not monolithic. The movement actuallybegan with a period of memorialization—spearheaded by Southern women—that at firstconsisted of simple decorations and monuments on the graves of fallen confederates inlocal cemeteries.9 Alongside Southern women’s eventual success at creating multipleladies’ memorial associations throughout the South, their efforts coincided with thewriting of prominent Southern white men who were authoring the first histories of theCivil War form the Southern perspective. These histories textually defined the LostCause, and thus the South, and served as a clarion call that united white Southerners andemergent historical and memorial associations under a renewed struggle against the7Kenneth Stampp, ed., The Causes of the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 153.8Bain-Selbo, “From the Lost Cause to Third and Long,” 86.9Catherine W. Bishir, “’A Strong Force of Ladies:’ Women, Politics, and Confederate MemorialAssociations in Nineteenth-Century Raleigh,” North Carolina Historical Review 77 (2000): 456; W.Fitzhugh Brundage, “’Woman’s Hands and Heart and Deathless Love:’ White Women and theCommemorative Impulse in the New South,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and theLandscapes of Southern Memory, by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, eds. (Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 2003), 64-78; Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies’ MemorialAssociations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 39-40; Lloyd A.Hunter, “The Immortal Confederacy: Another Look at the Lost Cause Religion,” in Gallagher and Nolan,The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, 190. It has been argued that the memorializationmovement began in northern Virginia, however, Hunter illuminates that the women of Columbus, Georgia,began to care for the graves of soldiers following the battle that resulted in a Confederate surrender toGeneral William T. Sherman on April 26, 1865. These women, who compared themselves to MaryMagdalene and the other Mary following the crucifixion, recommended that an annual observance beestablished for decoration of the fallen soldier’s graves.4

North.10 As historian Gary Gallagher asserts, “[Southerners] collectively sought to justifytheir own actions and allowed themselves and other former Confederates to findsomething positive in all-encompassing failure. They also [provided] future generationsof white Southerners with a ‘correct’ narrative of the war.”11But despite the role of women in founding and perpetuating the confederatememorial movement, the Lost Cause social movement at large was a paternal creation ata time when Southern masculinity had been damaged in defeat. In other words, the LostCause appealed to a society that was searching for a way to recreate the masculinity ofwarfare and that was already “defensive about [its] public image and more than a littleanxious for reassurance.”12 Thus, Southern whites turned to the memorialization of“heroic soldiers, martyrs, and battlefield glories” to fill the void.13 The grand exploits ofthe Confederacy’s manly heroes became a coping mechanism to assuage thepsychological burden of humiliation in defeat and ushered in the most notable era inAmerican history for erecting monuments and collective memory.14 Additionally,Southern whites fostered a desire to return to the paternalistic and racial social hierarchies10Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the Myth,” in Gallagher and Nolan, The Myth of the Lost Cause, 13;The most notable example of male authors of the Southern perspective was Edward A. Pollard, the editor ofthe Richmond Examiner. His book, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of theConfederates (New York: E.B. Treat & Co., 1866), marks the first official usage of the term “Lost Cause”in relation to the Confederacy after the Civil War.11Gary Gallagher, “Introduction,” in Gallagher and Nolan, The Myth of the Lost Cause, 1.12Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 115.13Ibid.14Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 35. John J. Winberry argues that most Confederate monuments wereerected between 1889 and 1920. Until 1889 most monuments were constructed in cemeteries; however,after 1890, monument construction primarily took place in Southern town centers. By 1900, the courthousesquare was the most popular public space for monument construction while, in 1910, the most Southernmonuments were erected in a single year. John J. Winberry, “’Lest We Forget’: The ConfederateMonument and the Southern Townscape,” Southeastern Geographer 23 (1983): 111.5

of the antebellum era—especially as the Populist and labor movements of the latetwentieth century promoted increased solidarity among white and black laborers—andsought to solidify white identity. Furthermore, Cash and subsequent historians haveclaimed that this was more than a sense of racist nostalgia. Instead, they called it the“Savage Ideal”: “an assortment of half-digested truths” that, during Reconstruction,saturated Southern memory with notions of intense individualism, puritanism, andromanticism and were centered on the firm belief in antebellum hierarchical values of the“Southern Way of Life.”15 So deeply ingrained were these beliefs, Cash argued, that“dissent and variety [were] completely suppressed, and [white Southern] men became, inall their attitudes, professions and actions, virtual replicas of one another.”16 TheSoutherner was thus an identity that was long affected by the legacy of the Civil War andthat was seeking and upholding masculine, white power. This, as historian Jackson Learshas argued, was a national identity of “rebirth.”17Southern rebirth also took place in the political and cultural realms duringReconstruction. In the political realm, Redeemer Democrats actively sought to oust theRepublican coalition that was attempting to grant political and civil rights to AfricanAmericans. But, as historian James Cobb argues, the perceived Confederate destiny to“rise again” then combined with the “mystique of prideful ‘difference’ and15Cash, The Mind of the South, 327; Quote from Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal: Intolerance andIntellectual Leadership in the South, 1890-1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 2.16Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South, 90.17TJ Jackson Lears, “The Long Shadow of Appomattox,” Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of ModernAmerica, 1877-1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 12-50.6

defensiveness” that had become integral to white Southern identity.18 However, by theend of Reconstruction, “[t]he cultural dream had replaced the political dream,” and thecultural Lost Cause had become a civil religion throughout the South.19 This was not adistinct form of Southern Protestantism, argues historian Charles Raegan Wilson, whowas building on sociologist Robert Bellah’s popular connotation of the term “civilreligion.”20 Instead, the Lost Cause transformed into a belief system that centered on “thereligious implications of a nation” and that justified the South’s loss in the Civil War as a“redemption from past sins, an atonement, and a sanctification for the future.”21 As Cobbargues, the Southern cause that “survived” defeat was perceived to be sanctified in thebloodbath of war and Southern whites believed that “the war had actually played out asGod had planned all along.”22 Thus, the cultural Lost Cause was not merely backwardlooking, or nostalgic, it was a “transcendental value,” a reality; it was the justification forthe future of the South to proceed in the image of the old, perceptually real, “SouthernWay of Life.”2318James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press,2005), 64.19Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, 1.20Sociologist Robert Bellah popularized the tern “civil religion” in his groundbreaking essay “CivilReligion in America.” Bellah argues that “the civil religion at its best is a genuine apprehension ofuniversal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through theexperience of the American people.” The civil religion, for Bellah was thus the combination of the civilwith the sacred (e.g. the American Flag). Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in American CivilReligion, by Russell E. Richey and Donald D. Jones, eds. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 33.21Ibid., 13, 5.22Cobb, Away Down South, 63.23Lloyd A. Hunter, “The Immortal Confederacy: Another Look at the Lost Cause Religion.” In The Mythof the Lost Cause and Civil War History, Gary Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., 186.7

In order to understand the civil religion of the Lost Cause, one only needs to lookto the Civil War itself. During the war, Southerners began viewing the war as a “holywar” that demanded sacrifices, the ultimate sacrifice being the life of one of the countlesscommon soldiers who laid it down selflessly, and blamelessly, for the homeland.24 And,according to Historian Kurt Berends, those sacrifices were laid down by patriots fightingfor the noble cause of self-rule and liberty for the Protestant Confederate nation. Thus,“southern identity, with its emphasis on honor, became fused with Christian identity, and,for many southerners, saving the Confederacy became tantamount to savingChristianity.”25 But for Berend and Wilson, this merging of the nation and the religiouswas necessary for the establishment of a civil religion. In other words, the Lost Causefused the social and political ambitions of the Redeemer Democrats with the sacred ideasof the Southern nation. It is no accident that simple prayers at Confederate graves turnedinto eulogies, or that figures such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were affordedChrist-like personalities.26 According to Lloyd A. Hunter, sacralization, an existentialprocess, was the means Southerners used to “make sense out of meaningless24Kurt Berends, “Confederate Sacrifice and the ‘Redemption’ of the South,” in Religion in the AmericanSouth: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews,eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 106.25Ibid., 105.26Upon his death, Robert E. Lee became the model of masculinity and morality for white men of the South.Conversely, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America, was not deified upon hisdeath, like Lee. Instead, Davis was first blamed the defeat of the Confederacy but received sympathy fromSoutherners during his lengthy imprisonment after the war at Fort Monroe. After the rise of the New South,Jefferson became a political ideal, a dutiful politician, and champion of the Lot Cause’s states’ rights beforethe war. He became the embodiment of the political history of the South and suffered the consequencesafter being victimized by the North and Lincoln that overthrew the Constitution. This “was Davis the Christfigure.” Interestingly, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was likened to Moses. He didn’t live to see hisanointed people’s enter the promise land for which they were destined. Hunter, “The ImmortalConfederacy,” 197-199.8

suffering in both its societal and individual forms.”27 The deaths of a number ofSoutherners who “sacrificed” their lives during the war (notably Sam Davis, executed byUnion soldiers) were likened to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and slavery was taught asif it were divinely sanctioned by God and the Bible in order to civilize the inferior, nonChristian peoples of the world.28 Slavery, in other words, was white Southerner’sreligious duty, and to accuse them of going to war to maintain or extend a malevolentinstitution was sacrilege. The Confederacy, they maintained, had the constitutional rightto secede and best exhibited the principles of American liberty before the war. The South,to these Southerners, was not seen as rebellious and the idea of the Civil

1 Introduction In one of Gone with the Wind's (1939) most spectacular cinematic sequences, the camera follows Scarlett O'Hara as she makes her way through the crowded and decimated Atlanta streets following General Sherman's attack on the city.