THE DAY HITLER DECLARED HIS LOVE FOR SCARLETT O’HARA
The Führer was so enraptured by Gone With The Wind, he made it essential viewing for top Nazis – but there was a sinister reason why it appealed so much
SOCIAL HISTORY The Wrath To Come Sarah Churchwell
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★★★★★
The 1939 film Gone With The Wind was one of Adolf Hitler’s favourites. In 1941, while on a visit to Paris, he reportedly insisted on watching it, and he screened the almost fourhour production a total of three times for the benefit of the Nazi leadership. After one such evening he remarked to Joseph Goebbels, ‘Now that, that is something our own people should also be able to do.’
Though it is doubtful they were heeding Adolf’s recommendation, millions of Americans agreed. Gone With The Wind is still the highest-grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation, and understanding how one of the 20th Century’s great romances can have simultaneously appealed to Hitler and the American public is the goal of Sarah Churchwell’s new book.
The Wrath To Come blends cultural history, film criticism and literary analysis to unpack the epic drama and its source material, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Margaret Mitchell. Churchwell understands the story as an expression of, and propaganda for, the darkest secrets of American history: slavery, paramilitary violence and white supremacy.
The superficial plot of Gone With The Wind is a thrilling romance. The headstrong and vain Scarlett O’Hara cannot decide who she loves, the gentlemanly Ashley Wilkes or the roguish Rhett Butler. But its setting is the American Civil War of 1861-65 and its aftermath. This bloody conflict began when 11 of the country’s Southern states left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, fighting to retain the slave economy that was their social and political foundation. Led by
Abraham Lincoln, the Union won the war and abolished legal slavery. But it failed to properly eradicate the Confederacy’s racist society, and little changed for black people in the South until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
Churchwell views the book and its film as an apology for this fascistic past, part of America’s broader historical amnesia about racism. As she writes in her introduction, Gone With The Wind is ‘about enslavers busily pretending that slavery doesn’t matter – which is pretty much the story of American history’. The slavery practised by Scarlett’s family before the war is presented as a benign institution, under which black people were treated with kindness by their owners. The horror and brutality of the American South (accurately depicted in recent films such as 12 Years A Slave) is whitewashed.
The tone is captured in the film’s title card, which reads: ‘There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave.’ This is how the South regarded its past. Not as a system of white supremacy and human property, but as a romantic, lost Utopia.
Not unique to Gone With The Wind, this is a false history known as the ‘Lost Cause’ myth. After the Civil War, Southern writers sought to present their side as essentially heroic, downplaying the evil of slavery and blaming black people for the failure to establish full equality after the war. This thinking helped to justify the segregation that continued for decades, and a version of it extends into the present. While for anti-racism activists in the 2020s statues of Confederate generals symbolise racial apartheid, for many in the South they are gallant relics from a noble past.
Churchwell’s analysis of Gone With The Wind is not brand new – as she notes, the African-American writer James Baldwin previously wrote about the ‘myth of the happy d ***** and Gone With The Wind’. But her account is definitive. She has a deep scholarly understanding of America’s literature and history, and her writing is smart and
crisp, creating a narrative that is as gripping as it is enlightening.
She is also that rare thing: a historian writing directly for the present. Churchwell’s last book, Behold, America, analysed the fascist history of Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ slogan. And The Wrath To Come opens with the flying of Confederate flags during the Capitol insurrection last year, which Churchwell reads as an extension of the arguments of the Civil War into 2021. Here perhaps her argument becomes more political and unstable. She seems to assert near-complete continuity between the thugs of America’s 19th and 21st Centuries and has a profound pessimism about America’s future.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the Black Lives Matter movement that followed, this narrative has become very popular. But it is useful to compare the prejudices of Gone With The Wind with Mark Twain’s 1884 book The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn. This work (imperfectly) displays much of the moral intelligence about slavery that Churchwell finds absent from Gone With The Wind and demonstrates that a white Southerner such as Twain could register the cruelty of his society even if Margaret
Mitchell could not. Churchwell is right that a depressing amount of America’s history and present involves self-delusion about racism. But for the benefit of the future, it is worth knowing there was another America who could be aware of it.