When I think of how the Civil War was remembered in the 1930s, the movie Gone With the Wind inevitably springs to mind. In fact, the movie held such a large place in my parents’ recollections of their memory of the times they grew up in, that it seemed to overshadow all else.
In reading Nina Silber’s new book on Civil War memory in the 1930s and 1940s, I was struck by how much of that “memory” we have now forgotten. The 1930s were a time of finacial depression, personal suffering, and social ferment. Issues of the enslavement of whole peoples in Europe by the rising fascist tide and the possibilities of violent revolts in the United States made it an era of fear. The 1940s called for national unity and individual sacrifice in a war that would claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The memory of the Civil War in this New Deal Era was never all “Midnight and Magnolias,” as one might imagine from the dominance of Gone With the Wind. Sure, there were reactionary uses of the Civil War to call for white Southern unity against Black demands for inclusion, but there was also a growing recourse to the example of Lincoln as Emancipator by progressives to call for Federal government leadership in righting the economy and eliminating de jure racial discrimination. Heck, when the Communist-led American battalion went to fight Franco in Spain, they were called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
The image of Lincoln, himself became fluid. Long the sole possession of the increasingly pro-business Republican Party, he was now claimed by Northern Democrats as a champion of the common man and by Blacks and radicals as the partner of Frederick Douglass in the civil rights struggle.
1936-1940 was the 75th Anniversary of the Civil War, and the commemoration was the first major milestone of the war celebrated without the veterans playing a major part in it. But the parks and historic sites would not be the main battlegrounds for refighting the war. It would be on screen, in books and magazines, and in the popular theater that the conflict would be sharpest.
One of the developments of the 1930s commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the war, as against the 50th, was that African Americans insisted that their memory be heard. It was not often listened to, but at least their dissenting views registered with the public. Silber’s book makes sure to include this too often overlooked set of voices. Silber writes:
If white northerners wavered on their Unionist principles, African Americans remained the nation’s most steadfast defenders of the Union cause and vigilant critics of the Confederate legacy. The Chicago Defender, for example, took particular pleasure in chastising Confederates who claimed to be patriotic Americans yet insisted that southern schoolchildren should not be forced to pay tribute to Lincoln. They also cheered on the Grand Army men, white and black, who refused to hold joint ceremonies with their Confederate counterparts. In 1931 they reminded their readers of this crucial distinction: that the Grand Army of the Republic “meets to commemorate union and liberty” while “the Confederate Veterans meet to commemorate slavery and treason. Think of what this country would be, what you would be, if Lee and not Grant had won the War of the Rebellion.” Not surprisingly, the Defender also gave prominent attention to the historic struggle for emancipation and kept its readers apprised of various Emancipation Day celebrations.
The American white people had inherited a reconciliationist narrative from their parents who came of age in the 1890s and early 1900s. As the U.S. emerged on the international stage, it needed a way to reconcile the influential men of the sections as well as the democratic masses. Silber writes:
The basic elements of that narrative went something like this: the Civil War had been a tragic break in the American family, a moment of division that resulted from a vague mix of constitutional and cultural differences. Slavery had played a part, but certainly not a decisive one, since both sections had contributed to the emergence and growth of that institution. The slaves themselves weren’t truly members of the family, only its stepchildren, or distant relatives. In the war itself, both Union and Confederate soldiers fought bravely and with distinction, although most accounts tended to see a bit more bravery and distinction on the part of Confederates, who, after all, had to battle against some pretty tough odds. In the end, all could agree that the war brought about the happy consolidation of a stronger United States, along with slave emancipation. There was, of course, the unfortunate aftermath of the war, when extremists in Lincoln’s Republican Party pushed a vengeful and punishing agenda—which in no way conformed to what Lincoln himself would have done—but once southern whites were allowed to return to “home rule,” bringing with them an unquestioned victory for “white supremacy,” national reunion was complete. (p. 20).
The new generation of writers and artists openly challenged the conventions of the American past. The old narrative would be challenged, even if not quite overthrown. Push-back was inevitable, and the guiding light of the counterrevolution was the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
In 1931, the UDC moved forward with its effort to distract Americans from the Black freedom struggle by pushing for a monument to Heyward Shepherd, a black man killed by John Brown’s raiders. The monument was erected in response to the growing appreciation of Brown in the African American community.
When the monument was dedicated in Harpers Ferry, the UDC president gave a speech on the loyalty of blacks to white dominance. At the end, the audience was shocked when the black music director of the town’s black college, pearl Tatten, stood up and announced:
“I am the daughter of a Connecticut volunteer,” said Tatten, “who wore the blue and fought for the freedom of my people, for which John Brown struck the first blow. Today we are … pushing forward to a larger freedom, not in the spirit of the black mammy but in the spirit of freedom and rising youth.” Awkward silence followed.
When thinking of the 1930s version of the Civil War, one factor that needs to be recalled is that it was not just viewed through the Lost Cause, Reconciliationist, or Black Emancipation paradigms of David Blight, strong though these remained among their adherents. It was also framed by the experiences of men who fought in World War I. They had seen war up close in its unpretty form. They often felt manipulated by patriotic calls to arms for a war of uncertain aims that seemed to prop up the British Empire and the international banking system. They wondered if the “war to end all wars” and the “war for democracy” was a mirror image of a cynical “war for the Union” and “war to end slavery.” For some of these men, all wars were cynical dodges by con men who stayed off the front lines. Patriotic gore was sold to the suckers who were processed by the machinery of death into human pot roasts for convenient mass burial.
Sickened by war, this segment of society asked if the really brave people of the 1860s were those who tried to avoid war and who offered compromises rather than conflict. As millions of Americans soon hoped to appease Hitler to avoid a bloodbath, some wondered if cooler minds could have prevailed against the war-mongering of abolitionists and secessionists. Few African Americans fell into this camp, as you would expect, but many white Americans seemed to adopt a “peace at any price” attitude towards the Civil War.
Having given us an overview of different attitudes towards the Civil War in the 1930s, Silber looks at the cultural artifacts from that decade that helped mold the consciousness of the American public. Of course, the biggest impact came from the movie Gone With the Wind, but it was neither the only, nor even the first, film of the decade on the war.
So Red the Rose, the story of members of the Southern planter elite, began life as a bestselling novel and was made into a movie in 1935. The King Vidor film portrayed a Lost Cause version of the Antebellum South filled with beautiful clothes on white people, enviable mansions for slave owners, and happy singing slaves.
Vidor decided the path to success was to make a film that even the UDC could love. He did. It failed.
Reviewers panned the movie for its anti-emancipationist sympathy for the dispossessed Southern aristocracy. It was widely seen as a propaganda film and failed at the box office accordingly.
Hollywood saw the failure of the blatantly white supremacist message, but sought other ways to appeal to to a Southern white audience while not alienating theater-goers outside that region. A small corps of “professional Southerners” advised production teams on how to make movies “authentically Southern.” Susan Myrick, a journalist from Macon Georgia, was particularly prized for her lack of sentimentality. She made sure that accents and clothing met Southern expectations.
Margaret Mitchell would insist that Myrick advise on Gone With the Wind, a film rich in Lost Cause mythology, although with central characters who defied Lost Cause stereotypes. Although Myrick insisted that not all plantation houses were grand and not all planters were gentlemen, the greatest of the Southern themed movies would be filled with both.
The Civil War, or at least the post-war, was the setting for lesser known films like John Ford’s Judge Priest starring Will Roger’s. Since it is a humorous look at Confederate veterans getting on in years, it pokes fun at the UDC as a group more concerned with Confederate purity than with the well-being of aging veterans. The Yankees are long gone, so the real enemy is the propriety and prejudice of the children of the Confederate elite. Blacks appear as childlike men and mammies whose greatest pleasure is to accommodate white folks.
While films like Judge Priest hardly gave realistic presentations of black life, in one respect they were more realistic than earlier films. The movies of the 1930s no longer used white people in blackface to portray African Americans. This meant that productions on the Civil War Era were no longer Negro-Free Zones. The growth of a professional black acting corps during the 1930s would slowly help to wean Hollywood from its deeply racist portrayals of black people.
Silber writes of the immediate problem in the 1930s:
white producers, directors, actors, and audiences now had to deal with real-life black men and women, people far removed from a slave past…
These black actors could push back on the demands of their roles.
In 1939, the movie Gone With the Wind premiered in Atlanta. The many black actors who played roles in the film were barred from attending the opening night because of the city’s Jim Crow laws. The production team sought the blessings of the UDC, but avoided catering to the censorious organization.
The book jumps away from Gone With the Wind (temporarily) to raise a theme that will be repeated several times. According to Silber, “slavery” became a Civil War Era trope that was to dominate public consciousness in the 1930s. The slavery discussed was the enslavement of whites.
Of course, the labor movement had long denounced “wage slavery.” With the Depression deepening, millions of Americans felt enslaved. White slavery was said to be worse than “negro slavery” because blacks were used to it!
White working class Southerners claimed that they had been enslaved after the Civil War by rapacious Northern capitalists who had destroyed the agrarian way of life and forced them into the exploitative system of industrial capitalism. They had been enslaved following Emancipation.
Silber quotes the head of the Mississippi State Planning Commission who said that “The North set our slaves free but the North made the whole South slave.” (p. 69) Black slavery was replaced by the enslavement of a region.
As more and more white people complained of enslavement, the grandchildren of actual slaves pointed out that under Jim Crow black people lived closest to real contemporary slavery. The argument was helped along by the development by people like Carter Woodson and W.E.B. DuBois of a class of professional black academics and intellectuals. They fought against the collective white memory that saw slavery as quaint and benign.
New Dealers, with their reliance on organized labor, embraced the idea that modern workers, regardless of color, were enslaved. Unwilling to challenge Southern segregationists in Congress, they used a deracialized version of the slavery story. Roosevelt denounced modern slavery while allowing his administrators in the South to discriminate against blacks seeking aid. Roosevelt took on the emancipatory mantle of Lincoln without challenging racial exclusion.
The image of the white man reduced to slavery appeared in movies like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and The Prisoner of Shark Island, about Dr. Sam Mudd. Even Will Rogers comedic Judge Priest shows a chain gang of Southern white men. While blacks were disproportionately jailed in America, and chain gangs were filled with African Americans returned to a sort of temporary penal slavery, the images of imprisonment and forced labor Hollywood offered were of white men breaking stones.
Slavery was in the movies and it was bad, but its victims were white.
Chapter 4 of the book looks at the changing view of Lincoln during the 1930s. Until then, Lincoln had been a partisan figure, embraced by Republicans and largely disregarded by Northern Democrats. Democrats had been the party of a small Federal government and states’ rights. FDR’s New Deal made it the Big Government Party par excellence. Democrats would try to claim Lincoln’s mantle. Getting right with Mr. Lincoln became a commonplace in New Deal speeches.
Silber writes:
starting in the early 1930s and extending through the years of the Second World War, the sixteenth president underwent a series of remarkable transformations: no longer a bland symbol of reconciliation, he emerged as a figure more firmly associated with federal power and racial justice, although the racial message was often tempered by an appreciation of Lincoln’s racially neutral “humanitarianism.” By the end of the 1930s, the Lincoln image changed again, with Honest Abe transformed into a singular representative of Americans’ rebuke to global dictatorship. In this regard, Lincoln did not simply mirror cultural and political trends. Rather, he occupied a fiercely contested space and, for some Americans, offered an imaginative repository—a kind of cultural testing ground—allowing them to explore more hopeful responses to the social and economic crises of the 1930s. (p. 100)
According to Silber:
Democrats increasingly challenged Republican claims to the sixteenth president as they worked to associate Lincoln with New Deal efforts. Indeed, for every Republican who summoned Lincoln as the “great defender of freedom,” there was at least one Democrat honoring him as the New Dealer of the 1850s and ’60s. Lincoln likewise took a starring role in several New Deal plays, including Howard Koch’s Lonely Man, which placed him at the forefront of contemporary workers’ struggles, imagining him as a reincarnated college professor who visits a Kentucky campus and expresses sympathy for striking coal miners. (p. 100)
There was a flowering of popular books, plays, radio programs, and movies with Lincoln as a character. Of course, this was the period in which Carl Sandburg, son of immigrants, published his own works on Lincoln. Sandburg’s Lincoln would stay popular for the next three decades.
Even the Communists took on Lincoln as an avatar. Their unit in the anti-Franco army in Spain was the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. (Full disclosure: An in-law I never met was in that brigade).
In pop culture, Lincoln was hailed as a humorist, a humanitarian, a peacemaker. He was a genius, a “typical” common man, a liberal, a socialist, a racial egalitarian. He was a staunch defender of the American republic willing to use violence to preserve it against its enemies.
Even a Lost Causey bit of piffle like Shirley Temple’s The Littlest Rebel drafted Abe Lincoln in as a benign national patriarch. Silber says that it was not unusual for younger Southerners to say that their personal heroes were Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. Lincoln inspired people with his perseverance in spite of adversity. He seemed to be the man of the hour, made for a country facing economic collapse and foreign war. His election had bet off the worst civil war of its time, but now he was a post-death unifier.
From the ridiculous to the sublime; the composer Aaron Copland honored the president with his Lincoln Portrait in 1942. Copland said he was most impressed by Lincoln’s “gentleness and simplicity of spirit.” Carl Sandburg, whose Lincoln The Prairie Years was published before the Depression bagan, became the primary expounder of the evolving Lincoln legend in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1939 he published The War Years just as the world was plunging into World War II and Americans were looking for a leader of Lincolnian proportions.
Lincoln came to occupy a special place in the hearts of the nation’s immigrants. Silber says that:
Lincoln’s life story, especially tales of his rise from obscurity and his persistent battles with detractors, also made him a sympathetic figure for American immigrants. “Even foreigners who have little grasp of the English language,” wrote the reviewer of one Lincoln play, “love the story of the man Lincoln.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the most successful Lincoln writer in these years was the son of Swedish immigrant parents; he likely interpreted the former president’s saga through his own understanding of what American immigrants endured and experienced. Sandburg and other Lincoln delineators no doubt saw a parallel between Lincoln and immigrants, both having to make their own way in new and sometimes hostile surroundings.
While African American intellectuals were reassessing Lincoln’s achievements in the area of racial equality, the black masses continued to be committed to him. Lincoln’s enemies made him dearer to them. The Chicago Defender said that “The same voices that raise the cry against the memory of Abraham Lincoln go about preaching the theory of white supremacy.” By his enemies, most rank and filers knew Lincoln had to be on their side. Because of Lincoln’s increasing popularity with the white public, civil rights leaders mobilized Lincoln for their cause.
In the 1930s, African American speakers coupled Lincoln with Frederick Douglass. The black press took an expansive view of Lincoln’s civil rights record, inventing some modern poses that the 16th president might not have recognized. By the late 1930s Lincoln was no longer just anti-slavery, he was also anti-racism. When the Daughters of the American Revolution barred Marian Anderson from signing in DAR Hall, the NAACP pushed for her to sing at the Lincoln Memorial instead.
Placing Lincoln squarely on the side of civil rights, black activists challenged the notion that Lincoln was simply a conciliator. Their Lincoln fought for what he believed in and died for his commitment to ending slavery. Hollywood hinted at this, although in a backhanded way. In the movie Young Mr. Lincoln, the future president confronts a lynch mob to stop the hanging of three accused brothers. This must have resonated with movie audiences familiar with the frequent lynchings of blacks in the South. Of course, in the movie Lincoln is protecting three white men, but the message against mob violence was clear.
The next chapter may be considered the book’s centerpiece. It looks at the cultural and political impact of the Depression Era’s most enduring artifact, the film Gone With the Wind. The novel and film were so important to many Southern whites self-conception that Douglas Southall Freeman wrote in 1939 that if Southerners had lost the war, the novel’s author Margaret Mitchell had “won the peace.”
Scarlett O’Hara had a special appeal to Depression Era women. She struggled every day after the Fall of Atlanta to feed and protect herself and her family. Like many dispossessed women of the 1930s, she broke out of traditional female roles to ensure survival. She might accept the demise of the Confederacy, an institution she viewed cynically anyway, but she would not accept her own defeat. While the movie had many Lost Cause elements, its two central characters could see through the Patriotic Gore of Confederate memory.
A woman did not have to come from Dixie to appreciate the redhead.
The novel had been a blockbuster, and even before filming started there was tremendous buzz about the movie Gone With the Wind. The national hunt for actresses to play in the film was a subject of conversation far and wide. While Silber’s book does not offer an analysis of the film, it is presented as a central reinforcement of the Lost Cause point of view, even if it was disruptive of traditional gender roles and notions of sexual propriety.
Other films also dealt with Civil War Era themes. These included the unaptly named Santa Fe Trail, which focused on John Brown. Brown was presented as a totalitarian fanatic who might be at home in a Brownshirt unit or the Communist Party. George Armstong Custer and J.E.B. Stuart team up to fight against fanaticism. The 1940 film, Silber writes, contains the theme that Americans North and South must unite against violent ideologies. A second film, Virginia City, sees Union and Confederate veterans unite to fight bandits.
Another white reconciliationist film was Tennessee Johnson, a hagiography of Andrew Johnson. Johnson was depicted as having the courage to stand up against the radicals in the Republican Party who demanded equal rights for blacks.
After 1941, the Civil War and Lincoln were used as unifying symbols. Americans could endure war. We could choose a leader to harness the power of a massive democracy. Wartime sacrifice need not be feared because once the war ended, the peacetime republic could be restored.
The Popular Front Marxist critique of this Civil War memory was in decline by the 1940s. The support of many communists for the Hitler-Stalin Pact discredited Popular Front intellectuals. After the Japanese surrender, increasing repression against the Communist Party eliminated this point of view from the public square.
If Lincoln had been lifted up by the Depression and the war, there were still many elements of Old South thinking reflected in the movies. One of the most racist children’s films ever made in the United States, Disney’s Song of the South came out in the 1940s. This film was so racially charged that Disney never released it on home video. In spite of several catchy songs, the film’s depiction of black life during the plantation era was beyond redemption and it was recognized as such not long after its original popular run. The terminal nature of Song of the South also showed the new power of black consumer boycotts.
While modern Neo-Confederate revisionism may deny Lincoln love, a 1945 NORC survey found that when asked to name the five greatest Americans:
Outside the South, Lincoln was the clear winner, selected by 61 percent. Even among white southerners, Lincoln was chosen by 44 percent of respondents, coming second behind FDR, but slightly ahead of George Washington. (p. 177).
Robert Penn Warren, once a “Southern Agrarian,” wrote later that after World War II LIncoln replaced Washington and Jefferson as the premier figure of the American past. The Civil War, with all of its frightening modernity, have replaced the Revolution as the historical event uppermost in peoples’ minds.
Conclusion:
For all of the contested ground of the battle over Civil War memory, Silber reminds us that as the US built bases for its expanding military in the 1940s, some were named after Confederate generals but none was named after an African American.
I found the first quarter of this book a little slow going. There are interesting facts and analysis in this volume, but some readers will go off the tracks before they get to it. It is well worth reading.
This is a period of Civil War Memory Studies that is less written about than the Jim Crow Era, the 50th Anniversary, or the Centennial. Silber’s book fills a big gap in Civil War Memory Studies.
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