Gone with the Wind

Gone With the Wind is best known now as  the famous movie from 1939, but before being made into a movie, it was a very popular novel  by Margaret Mitchell. I picked the book up a few days ago after not having read it since I was in junior high.  Then, as well as I remember, I paid attention mainly to the colorful story of the two main characters. This time I noticed some of the ideas and opinions.

The book was published in 1936. Appomattox was nearer in time to that year than the end of World War II is to today.  Strong feelings and even passion about the events of the Civil War and reconstruction were common among people in the south. The author was a southerner, a Georgian, and she peppered  the book with propaganda and apologetics  for the old south and its “glorious cause”.

Some of it is plausible or accurate. The life of some plantation owners was elegant and genteel. There probably were some dashing cavaliers and charming ladies. Some of the northerners who came south during reconstruction were shifty crooks on the make.  Some freed slaves did become criminals.

However much of it is false and/or wrong and  often offensively so.  There is the old claim  that the southern states left the union over states’ rights. Andersonville is excused and even blamed on President Lincoln for ending the practice of exchanging prisoners of war in 1863 without mentioning that  the Union army  stopped exchanging prisoners because the confederates would not exchange black Union soldiers – seeing them as slave property rather than prisoners of war.  Slaves are almost uniformly presented as well treated, content,  and devoted to their owners, and the  liberated  black people during  reconstruction usually  presented as lost, shiftless, alienated, often dangerous, and generally worse off and less happy than when they were in bondage.  The author justifies the Ku Klux Klan as a beneficial force for law and decency, necessary to protect southerners and especially southern women from the depredations of black ex-slaves, carpetbaggers,  and Union soldiers.  The Georgia legislature’s refusal to ratify the 15^th Amendment is hailed as a gallant and bold  though futile act honorable defiance.  She bemoans the fact than many ex-confederate officers were not allowed to vote during reconstruction, ignoring that  these men were traitors and as such were handled leniently by victors who refrained from hanging or imprisoning them.  She treats the planters’ post war loss of wealth as sad and almost tragic rather than a  consequence of the war the confederates started and a natural  result of freeing the human beings who produced and made up much of that wealth.  

The author seems fine with the institution of slavery and definitely nostalgic for a society based on it.  The book was a bestseller (and won both the national book award and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction), and the ideas and opinions  it displays were  held by many people, both at the time of its publication and later. The story is  colorful, and Rhett and Scarlett are interesting  characters, but the pleading and propaganda do get in the way.  All in all it can make a person even more appreciative of William Tecumseh Sherman.

Reparations

The principle that a person should never accept undeserved guilt is immensely important.   We should accept responsibility (and blame or guilt if appropriate) for our actual failures and wrongdoing, but for nothing more.  Inducing  undeserved feelings of guilt in people  is one the most effective and commonly attempted ways to gain control over them.  Religions, governments, social movements, and other power seekers have used and still use it successfully. Guilt ridden people usually are easier led and dominated than  the self-confident.

Some leftists have attempted to blame all (or at least all non-leftist) white Americans for slavery and Jim Crow. These claims are invalid. There is no American alive who owned a slave, saw anyone held as a slave, or did anything to further or tolerate the institution of slavery in this country, and so no one alive is to blame.   Jim Crow segregation laws were repealed in 1964.  The last election electing the (Democratic Party) politicians who supported and perpetuated Jim Crow was in 1962.  The voting age then was twenty one.  So no one born after 1941 could have contributed even by voting to the continuation of Jim Crow, much less by holding political office. White  Americans born after that time and white Americans of any age who never supported the segregationists are  not responsible for  the wrongs of the Jim Crow laws and should reject any claims that they are.   

Leftists have also floated the idea of seizing wealth from white Americans and giving it to black Americans as reparations for slavery.  Forced reparations can be justified only as punishment for crimes or as a means of restitution.  The people who committed the crimes of slavery are long dead. Present day white people had nothing to do with it and should resist and reject any attempt to blame or punish them for crimes they did not commit, just as rational and liberally minded people should reject other notions of vicarious guilt, original sin, or moral taint from the sins of ancestors. 

That leaves restitution. Restitution is the returning  by a criminal to his victim of the property stolen from him.  Restitution from a  criminal to his victim is always appropriate.  Restitution from an  innocent heir of a criminal to a victim or an heir of a victim can be appropriate but only if an identifiable  amount of stolen property or gain from disposing  the stolen property exists to be returned.  For example  if person A’s mother cheated person B’s father out of thirty acres of land in 1996, and the fraud can be proved, and person A still holds the property as her mother’s heir, B might have a valid  claim to it.  However if one of A’s remote ancestors cheated one of B’s out of a tenth interest in a whaling vessel  in Boston in 1694, it probably would be impossible for  B to have a claim on A that could be justified or quantified.  The ship would be long gone, and multiple events in the intervening three hundred years would have influenced the present conditions of both A and B  (and numerous other descendants of the crook and the victim) to a point where nothing A had could be identified  as stolen property.  In the case of slavery it would almost always be impossible to attribute anything held by a particular  present day white person to the labor stolen by an ancestor of his from an ancestor of a particular black person, and so restitution would not be applicable.  The exceptions would be very and probably vanishingly infrequent. 

Any widespread payment of reparations  to black people of today from white Americans for slavery  is both very unlikely and incapable of justification. The notion  is no more sound  than demands for reparations  to present day Englishmen from Italians for the Roman occupation and enslavement of Britannia would be.  It is a reasonable  guess that at least some  of those floating the idea know this and are cynically bringing it up  to increase   feelings of resentment in some people  and of  guilt in others for political reasons.