As politically incorrect as it is to admit this, and as odd as it may be for a Lincoln-loving Yankee, I've always cherished the book and movie classic of the Depression-era, "Gone With the Wind." To me it provides both a horrifying and instructive look at the failures and mistakes of Reconstruction caused by both racist conservative Southerners and greedy liberal Northerners.
As in this presidential election we take stock of and try to recover from the mistakes America has made in the economy and foreign policy since John F. Kennedy's death and as we try to look back and figure out what brought us back to a Depression-like economic crisis, I can't help but feel like quite a lot of American history has repeated itself the last forty years as America has suffered because of so much war and waste under the politics of the Southern Strategy following the civil rights era just as America suffered in our continuing bitter politics following Civil War Reconstruction.
I have to wonder if we continue down this hateful, greedy path holding our nation's poor and the rest of the world in economic slavery will our American civilization soon be gone with the wind?
Unlike the typical characterization of Gone With The Wind being a wistful look back at life under slavery in the antebellum South or a melodramatic romance, I see GWTW as a very harsh critique of the realities of that world and the Reconstruction era that followed it through the critical voice of the shrewd selfish war-profiteering realist anti-hero of Rhett Butler and through the celebration of the compassionate graceful generous idealist heroine of Melanie Wilkes. Gone With The Wind lays bare the phony sanctimony and hypocrisy of the Confederacy "cause" and rigid and intolerant Southern societal norms, is critical of both the arrogance of the war-hungry Southerners and the vengefulness of the greedy Northerners, offers a brutally vivid characterization of the horrors of war and offers a fascinating catalog of the failures and mistakes of Southern Reconstruction.
Yes, it is true that blacks, especially in the movie, are portrayed in a demeaning and patronizing light in the characters of people like Uncle Peter and Prissy however there are white folk who turn out to be quite silly and weak too (Aunt Pittypat, I'm looking at you) and the character of the black Big Sam does turn out to be a hero and the character of black Mammy turns out to be the wisest, most soft-hearted soul there is. While the Klan does surface at a point to "defend Scarlett's honor," the Klan is not celebrated in GWTW as anti-hero Rhett Butler is NOT a member, Klan members are embarrassed by having to use as an alibi that they were actually at a bordello when questioned about their actions by Yankee police and we see Scarlett's husband Frank die as a consequence of his involvement in the Klan.
In a way, I see many of its themes resonate still today with our North and South hopelessly divided by the culture wars whether it's Vietnam and Iraq, religion, abortion and gays or the rest. And it's apparent that these wars are and have been for too long devastating our country.
Oh that we Americans were less arrogant and stupid that we weren't in such a rush to run headlong into traps set for us by those that would seek to destroy us.
Brent Tarleton: What do we care if we were expelled from college, Scarlett? The war is gonna start any day now, so we'd have left college anyhow.
Stuart Tarleton: Oh, isn't it exciting, Scarlett? You know those fool Yanks may actually want a war?
Brent Tarleton: We'll show 'em!
Scarlett: Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war; this war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides... there isn't going to be any war.
Brent Tarleton: Not going to be any war?
Stuart Tarleton: Why, honey, of course there's gonna be a war.
Scarlett: If either of you boys says "war" just once again, I'll go in the house and slam the door.
Brent Tarleton: But Scarlett, honey -
Stuart Tarleton: Don't you want us to have a war?
[She gets up and walks to the door, to their protestations]
Scarlett: [relenting] Well... but remember, I warned you.
Oh that Rhett Butler were real and alive before the Iraq War to mock the war hawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld who lied to us about us being greeted as liberators.
I think it's hard winning a war with words, gentlemen... I'm saying very plainly that the Yankees are better equipped than we... All we've got is cotton and slaves, and arrogance... I seem to be spoiling everybody's brandy and cigars and dreams of victory.
Oh that people like Colin Powell and Chuck Hagel who know what a mistake this Iraq War was had the courage of their convictions to speak out more forcefully rather than staying silent and soldier on for the cause the same way as the weak and cowardly Ashley Wilkes who knew what a mistake the Civil War was yet still fought.
Most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars. And, when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about.
Just as much of America was never really able to fully recover and prosper post-Civil War until coming together under FDR in the New Deal Coalition formed in the Great Depression that got folks to really challenge the robber barons and take their country back and get folks out of the divisive scapegoat politics to come together as a community to solve problems, I think the key to peace and prosperity exists in a cease fire on the cultural issues that divide us so we can face each other on common ground to unite on solutions to our economic problems to get this country moving again and restore the hard work of our Greatest Generation.
We need to stop the Scarlett O'Hara approach to life and politics that says we are willing to "lie, cheat, steal or kill" just to get ahead.
Sure it may lead to wealth and economic security if you fight hard enough, but as GWTW shows it also leads to pride and despair that leaves one empty and alone in the end.
If we stay bitterly divided, if we refuse to change and confront the reality of the changing world in front of us I fear we'll fail just as the Confederacy did.
I mean, let's get real, the Civil War wasn't really about state's rights and it wasn't even necessarily about black people. It was about MONEY and POWER. (Just as I'd argue our Iraq adventures in the end were just about oil --- i.e. MONEY and POWER)
It was about this country's rich Southern aristocracy refusing to change its miserly ways and relinquish its grip on political power because it was too stuck in the agrarian past to catch up to the realities of the industrial world and in fighting those changes it bankrupted itself in the process. Now in the case of the Civil War it was the North that ultimately prevailed and so our union endured, but with Southern policies and Southern ways of thinking having a hold on our entire country for so long now I fear our entire union could go under if we don't find a way to change.
As we take a look at Civil War banking history ask yourself if any of this sounds familiar to our current economic crisis brought to us by unregulated, unlimited free trade, out of control spending with too little taxation and an out-of-control unregulated banking system:
The antebellum south enjoyed one of the lightest tax burdens of all contemporary civilized societies. Local or state governments assessed all obligations. By contrast, the hastily assembled Confederate government lacked the bureaucratic infrastructure to levy or collect internal taxes. Its citizens possessed neither a tradition of compliance nor a means to remit payment. Land and slaves comprised the bulk of southern capital; liquid forms of wealth like specie or paper currency were hard to come by in a predominantly agrarian region.
And after the war, the South was economically devastated allowing the carpetbaggers and scalawags to come in and profit off the misery of average Southerners as is depicted when Scarlett doesn't have the money to pay back taxes on Tara, in my view sort of like the ridiculous foreclosures we have thanks to the subprime mortgage mess.
The out of control inflation and all these credit default swaps, pieces of paper that don't mean anything, causing troubles in our current economy also remind me of all the Confederate currency that Scarlett's Pa had after the war that wasn't worth anything the same way out-of-control inflation in this country is making our dollars worth nothing and we are called to bail out the financial system because of all these overpriced securities.
In contrast, the North took a much more active, protectionist and progressive approach to its finances to guard against inflation from the mounting war costs. It set up a very strong, centralized banking system but ensured it was regulated. It instituted the steep Morill Tariff to give America some trade protection. It passed a progressive income tax that expected the wealthiest to contribute the most to the effort and developed a sophisticated system of getting more money from the public through war bonds that gave the North another way to control costs and inflation.
There was also the matter of the establishment of land grant universities that turned our farmers into educated people and the free soil movement that gave immigrants land to settle the Great Plains and allowed for the establishment of the family farms that made our country great and it's why it matters that the family farm no longer exists but instead all our land is in the hands of the agribusiness corporations and locked in trusts. As Katie Scarlett O'Hara's proud Irish Pa points out, land is the only thing that matters because it's the only thing that lasts. It's also the key to being free from economic slavery.
On taxes specifically:
The first income tax was moderately progressive and ungraduated, imposing a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800 that exempted most wage earners. These taxes were not even collected until 1862, making alternative financing schemes like the Legal Tender Act critical in the interim. The Internal Revenue Act of 1862 expanded the progressive nature of the earlier act while adding graduations: It exempted the first $600, imposed a 3 percent rate on incomes between $600 and $10,000, and a 5 percent rate on those over $10,000. The act exempted businesses worth less than $600 from value added and receipts taxes. Taxes were withheld from the salaries of government employees as well as from dividends paid to corporations (the same method of collection later employed during World War II). In addition, the "sin" excise taxes imposed in the 1862 act were designed to fall most heavily on products purchased by the affluent. Thaddeus Stevens lauded the progressivity of the tax system:
"While the rich and the thrifty will be obliged to contribute largely from the abundance of their means . . . no burdens have been imposed on the industrious laborer and mechanic . . . The food of the poor is untaxed; and no one will be affected by the provisions of this bill whose living depends solely on his manual labor."
These are the sort of types of reforms we will need in concert with Teddy Roosevelt-style trust busting and New Deal jobs programs to get our country back on track again, I believe.
I have to say I worry if we as a nation may have made the same mistakes the Confederates did as a nation in fighting technological and social changes so much to hold on to some long-gone industrial age and compounded the problem even worse with the creation of some phony tech bubble/shadow banking system age and outsourcing all our old manufacturing jobs so that the new information/technological age will pass us by.
I hope not. Because I'd hate to see our American civilization gone with the wind. Maybe it's not too late to fix it and get back to what our Founding Fathers intended.
Maybe I'm naive and maybe I'm just grasping at straws, but as a person who believes in God and America and that everything that happens does so for a reason, I have to believe there was a reason that God allowed those horrible terrorists to take down the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon yet enabled Americans on Flight 93 to take the plane down before they could destroy the people's house of government as well.
I have to believe that Hurricane Katrina happened for a reason -- perhaps to remove the scales from our eyes regarding the deep-rooted systemic poverty in many black communities to get us to rethink the way we look at America and race and our economic situation the same way that a trip to New Orleans by Abraham Lincoln on a flatboat as a young man allowed him to see a slave auction up close and opened up his eyes to the harshest evils of slavery.
I have to believe it's not too late for us to turn this thing around before the day we walk to our creditors to ask for more money to fix the mess we've made of our finances and they tell us "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" the same way Rhett finally put his foot down with Scarlett (The South) at just the time she finally realized what was really important.
Despite the fact our country has erred so much in its ill-conceived Iraq War, failed trickle-down economics policy and despite how much we have strayed from the ideals of the Framers and Lincoln and the Roosevelts and the Kennedys, I have to believe it's not too late.
After all... tomorrow is another day!