Brant Sanderlin/AP Photo/Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The racial stereotypes enshrined in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ which set box office records, could still be found onscreen decades later.
It wasn’t long after Reconstruction’s end that the white Southern distortion of that epoch, the Civil War, and American history generally began to take hold. As the 19th century drew to a close, and Southern states started to enact Jim Crow laws, violently suppress the last outbursts of black voting, and erect monuments to the Confederate dead, a group of historians, led by Columbia University’s William Dunning, began to document a Reconstruction that never was. In their telling, the period of 1865-1877 was one in which blacks terrorized whites and violated white women, aided and abetted by pro-Northern soldiers and swindling Northern businessmen, until this reign of terror was ended by enlightened white Southerners, who were sometimes compelled to employ violent means in order to restore white supremacy, aka civilization.
The tales of the Dunning school were given credence not just in the South; they quickly became the nation’s mis-history of Reconstruction, in part, surely, because they provided an ostensibly verifiable justification for white racism. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation is the Dunning school as epic melodrama, while Gone With the Wind, produced a quarter-century later, is a toned-down version of the same mis-history, employing the same baseless stereotypes: gallant white Southern aristocrats, brutal Northern soldiers, swindling Northern businessmen, and, when it came to African Americans, either deranged and dangerous men, happy-with-their-lot underlings, or brainless Butterfly McQueens.
The best that can be said of most Hollywood films on the antebellum South, the Civil War, or Reconstruction is that there are relatively few of them. As Variety noted with its famous headline “Sticks Nix Hick Pix,” by the mid-1930s, films on rural America—including the South—weren’t drawing many patrons to the theaters, even in rural areas. Still, The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind—which both set box office records—were both big and influential enough that the tropes and memes those films established or renewed could still be found decades later. It wasn’t until 1989, with Edward Zwick’s film Glory, that the role that black soldiers played in assuring the Confederacy’s defeat reached the screen.
But if there weren’t that many films on Reconstruction per se during Hollywood’s heyday, there were countless films based on Dunning school falsifications that the studios turned out during those years. They just weren’t set in the South. They were Westerns.
I’m not referring here to Westerns’ treatment of Native Americans, which, while varying widely, were problematic enough. I’m referring to a plotline common to so many B and occasional A Westerns, in which the hero is a former Confederate soldier, or vengeful Confederate civilian. Often, he or his family was done wrong by Union soldiers during the War or Reconstruction, and his resolution of this conflict, whether through violence or reconciliation on his terms, is the substance of the picture. Beginning with the prototypical hero of the first major Western talking picture—1929’s The Virginian, which gave Gary Cooper his first starring role—Western heroes were depicted as having distinctly Southern male virtues: an overdeveloped sense of honor and an acceptance, however reluctant, of violent means. Those were well-established characteristics of Western heroes long before 1929, of course; they were the stuff of the turn-of-the-century dime novels. But Westerns gave them new life.
Crucial to this depiction was the hero’s sanitization. By moving the Southerner out west, the studios could dispense with the problematic aspect of the hero’s Southern-ness: his fear and loathing of blacks, who are nowhere to be found in most Westerns (Blazing Saddles excepted). The Western hero who benefited most from this particular sanitization was Jesse James, whose exploits as a bandit in real life were almost entirely a continuation of the racist violence he’d committed as a pro-Southern Missouri guerrilla during the Civil War. (His crazy raid on a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, many hundreds of miles from his normal stomping grounds, was undertaken because that bank’s leading stockholder, Adelbert Ames, had been the Radical Republican governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, and had worked to break up the Ku Klux Klan.) In numerous films, however, James is depicted as a proto-populist, hounded by railroads and banks and occasional Northern soldiers. He has never yet been depicted as what he actually was: an unreconstructed Confederate out for black and Radical Republican blood.
The best that can be said of most Hollywood films on the antebellum South, the Civil War, or Reconstruction is that there are relatively few of them.
All these memes are present in Clint Eastwood’s otherwise lovely 1976 Western The Outlaw Josey Wales, Eastwood’s first truly accomplished picture as a director. In it, Eastwood plays a onetime Confederate who by the picture’s end has formed a kind of extended family with an aging Native American and a host of oddball, distinctly non-Southern whites. But throughout, he is pursued by vengeful Northern soldiers who during the war killed his wife and children. Variants of this character can be found in a host of Westerns nowhere so enchanting as this one: in the television Westerns of the 1950s and ’60s; in Audie Murphy B Westerns; in occasional John Wayne A Westerns; in so many Westerns where the hero is a Southerner adrift after the war, whose backstory, if the picture delves into it, involves the depredations of the North during the war or Reconstruction.
Ironically, the one classic filmmaker most identified with the Western, John Ford, didn’t follow this script. In Ford’s The Searchers, which is still the greatest film in the genre, John Wayne plays the ultimate unreconstructed Confederate, who won’t even take an oath to be sworn in as a Texas Ranger because, three years after the Civil War ended, he still feels bound by the oath he took to the Confederacy. But Ford depicts Wayne’s character as a pathological racist, that racism redirected in the picture’s story toward Native Americans. And the film establishes a clear, if tacit, link between the various racial hatreds that drive the character on.
Ford notwithstanding, the Dunning school of Southern and American history is alive and well in the heroes of many classic and sub-classic Westerns. I’m not for a moment saying that such films should never be shown. (HBO isn’t dropping Gone With the Wind entirely, either, but rather plans to run it alongside a film that will place it in its historical context, which I think is very much the right decision.) I am saying that behind many of these Western characters’ heroics, we should keep an eye out for the lies of the white South.
