We Need More Wind

On August 11, 1949 Margaret Mitchell stepped off the curb on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, a street known by millions of people because of her. She was suddenly hit by a passing car, her husband watching just behind her, and died five days later at age 48. 

She had a minor career as a journalist while in her 20s, but she gained extraordinary fame and literary “immortality” for the only book she ever wrote as an adult, Gone with the Wind. Published in 1936, this first book by an unpublished and unknown author sold for $3 a copy (probably due to its 1037 pages), the equivalent of $56 today. It sold a million copies in the first six months…during the depression. 

It has been and is considered one of the greatest works in American Literature.  Polls as recently as 2008 and 2014, have the American public rating it as their second favorite book of all time...after the Bible. Mitchell was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award. The epic film from her book was completed only 3 years later, and, more often than not, listed in the top five of greatest American films to this day. 

The book appears to be somewhat autobiographical, in the sense that Mitchell used her experience growing up in Georgia in a relatively wealthy family and had close relationships with her grandparents who had firsthand experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction years in Georgia. Once published it appears she lived off her fame with her husband, John Marsh, giving interviews, christening warships, and such, till her untimely death. 

There is no equivalent publication story in American literary history, even though were it written today…it would never be published.  We’ve come too far. 

As a child I saw the movie actually in a movie theater, for the film was periodically re-circulated to theaters until the early 1960s. I thought it was incredible. It was a major reason I grew up (in New York) with a sense of empathy for the plight of the scrappy Southerners during and after the Civil War. It remains one of the finest examples of “educating” the general population about history in the form of entertainment. As with most movies that center on wars, entertainment trumps history every time, and ignores the insidious themes that flow beneath. 

Decades later, incarcerated in a pandemic, with time to spare, and in search of another book to read; I thought Gone with the Wind …why not? Now having read it and, at nearly the same time, watching real history being made, such as the mob assault on our Capital Building, I am taken aback how this beloved novel found its way into the darkest regions of America’s beating heart. 

Movie goers would give casual description of Gone with the Wind as an epic love story, which is understandable from the marquee posters to the last words of Rhett Butler as he walks out into the fog. Certainly the novel devolves into a well conceived romantic melodrama in the last 200 pages or so. 

The movie makers knew what they were doing. It takes reading the book to understand the underlying message which laments stolen heritage and the wicked destruction of rigid social classes. 

I write this not as a review of the novel. It is, in fact, beautifully written, really quite extraordinary for a first time author. The characters are rich with character and the story is complex and complete. I am writing this because both story and characters define the essence of what reactionary Americans, who count themselves as Christian Conservatives, have become in the 21^st century. 

I could almost see the tinsel insurrectionists screaming through the halls of Congress with a Bible in one hand and a copy of Gone with the Wind in the other, just as those sympathetic with their motivations might imagine it so, but with endorsement. 

Nearly countless signs, flags, masks, hats, and politician rhetoric on January 6^th at the Capital sported the phrase: Stop the Steal. Those signs, et al, echoed Trump’s endless drumbeat, begun even before the election and daily thereafter, to perpetuate the “Big Lie”. Still, in the light of virtually no evidence to justify The Lie, why have so many Americans so emotionally embraced it to the point of debasement. 

I believe the “steal” they feel so heinous is not simply about an election outcome. You can find it in the pages of Margaret Mitchell’s book. They have been fed the illusion that the lives they envision for themselves and their children are in the process of being stolen.  Her novel begins with goodness surrounding a class of landed, white aristocracy, seeking only God given freewill, Nature’s manna from heaven, and self determination. This honorable goodness is ripped away by a criminal Federal government, “scallywags”, and “free issue N-----s”. 

Today's Trump supporting Christian Conservatives want a life back that they never had; that they were told had been theirs. Trump and those like him have fed that anxiety for 155 years. As a candidate and then President, Trump used his honed persona and seemingly endless lies and conspiracies to rally and incite white Christian Conservatives to believe that a “Great” America was something to be reclaimed. 

Trump did it primarily for his own enjoyment and aggrandizement; even to the point when lost he and his confederates engineered perhaps the most ludicrous attempt to overthrowing a major government in modern world history. I wouldn’t have been surprised had the mob been armed for the final attack with MyPillows. Humor and tragedy are so often different sides of the same coin. 

It is sad for me to think someone as gifted as Margaret Mitchell might have supported the assault on the Capital last month, but it’s hard to see it any other way, after all…she wrote the book. If Republican Senators had any sense at all, they would take that book and throw it directly at Donald Trump.