The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells

by Sarah Churchwell

The history America never wanted you to read. 'The narrative took my breath away' Philippe Sands 'An extraordinarily and shockingly powerful read' Peter Frankopan 'One of the must-reads of the year' Suzannah Lipscomb 'Brilliant and provocative' Gavin EslerSarah Churchwell examines one of the most enduringly popular stories of all time, Gone with the Wind, to help explain the divisions ripping the United States apart today. Separating fact from fiction, she shows how histories of mythmaking have informed America's racial and gender politics, the controversies over Confederate statues, the resurgence of white nationalism, the Black Lives Matter movement, the enduring power of the American Dream, and the violence of Trumpism.Gone with the Wind was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1936; its film version became the most successful Hollywood film of all time. Today the story's racism is again a subject of controversy, but it was just as controversial in the 1930s, foreshadowing today's debates over race and American fascism. In The Wrath to Come, Sarah Churchwell charts an extraordinary journey through 160 years of American denialism. From the Lost Cause to the romances behind the Ku Klux Klan, from the invention of the 'ideal' slave plantation to the erasure of interwar fascism, Churchwell shows what happens when we do violence to history, as collective denial turns fictions into lies, and lies into a vicious reality.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, Civil War, Literary Criticism, Race

486 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written with whitehot outrage that flashes forth on every page, this book is brilliant and exhausting.

Gone With The Wind, the book and the film, is the beloved sunkissed window through which Sarah Churchwell directs our gaze – backwards to the Civil War and forwards to the attempted fascist putsch of 6 January 2021. All the dots are joined.

SC says that GWTW is the most popular American story of all time. Wikipedia confirms it’s the highest grossing film ever, adjusted for inflation. The book still sells 300,000 copies a year. And it is all about people who hate the USA. In GWTW Abraham Lincoln is a villain.

I never read the book – it’s not necessary. But I think you do need to have seen the film, to experience the power of the gorgeous blazing design, direction, cinematography, the dashing and extraordinary characters, and the narrative power. Altogether a sumptuous production, an angel cake injected with poison.

I did feel that I needed a better grasp on the history of the postwar period (Reconstruction) – exactly what did the victorious North do or not do in the defeated South; exactly why did they, having fought a horrible war to free the slaves, then supinely or connivingly allow the Southern states to re-erect a new form of slavery-in-all-but-name, which goes under the name Jim Crow.

This is a book about the fight to speak the truth about history. Sarah Churchwell pulls no punches in accusing the USA of wilful blindness about its past, of revelling in myths collected together under the name “Lost Cause”, for which GWTW is a brightly-lit shop window.

I’ll give one longish example of how racist GWTW is and how the author deals with it :

Like the rest of her circle, Scarlett is highly indignant at the Yankees for cracking down on the Ku Klux Klan, furious at the prospect of summary justice for members of an organisation created to inflict summary justice. “Suspected complicity in the Ku Klux Klan, or complaint by a negro that a white man had been uppity to him were enough to land a citizen in jail. Proof and evidence were not needed. The accusation was sufficient.” In reality, this is the exact system that pertained first to the enslaved, and then to the free Black people in the Jim Crow South. This grievance appears within pages of Rhett Butler’s admitting he murdered a Black man for being “uppity”, at which no one bats an eye… Instead, Scarlett believes that murdering Black men for being what white people consider uppity is generally the right thing to do: “Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a negro for being ‘uppity to a lady’”. Whatever defenses of Gone with the Wind one may entertain, the fact is that it regards murdering a Black man as evidence of Rhett’s residual morality. Rhett is redeemed by his willingness to act as judge, jury, and hangman, whereas the idea of anyone being imprisoned for lynching is an outrage to all the novel’s protagonists.

So GWTW sells the idea that the war wasn’t about slavery, that the slaves were cheerful workers being tended lovingly by their careful masters who looked after them from cradle to grave, that the South was a gracious land of magnolia and cotton until the War of Northern Aggression and those nasty Yankees torched it all out of pure spite, vindictiveness and mercenary greed.

SC is not so blinkered as to fail to notice the feminist aspects of GWTW, or the rueful humour strewn throughout, or the pace of the story, but these all pale before its successful attempt to whitewash Southern history. I would say that at just under 400 pages of dense text I might think it’s around 100 pages too long, but I would not be able to figure out which pages could be deleted. It’s one of those books – it has to be this intense and this wrathful.

When the South Korean film Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture, President Donald Trump asked a rally in Colorado : ‘What the hell was that all about? Can we get like Gone with the Wind back please?’

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely five stars. A welcome and long overdue reappraisal of GWTW and it’s effects on American society and history. I can only hope that this book gets an American publisher. The best book on racial politics in the US that I’ve read recently. Highly recommended

[Traci Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re into or out on GONE WITH THE WIND this is an incredibly well researched and detailed take down of the book and movie. It’s art criticism with a historical lens. It’s a bit redundant and long but overall really good.

[Boyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently read "The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells" by Sarah Churchwell and was thoroughly impressed by the depth and insight of the book. Churchwell, a professor of American literature and cultural history, offers a nuanced and provocative analysis of "Gone with the Wind" and its enduring appeal in American culture. She examines how the novel and its film adaptation have shaped and reflected America's ideas about race, gender, and history, and how they have perpetuated harmful myths and lies about the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.

One of the strengths of "The Wrath to Come" is Churchwell's writing, which is clear and engaging, making the book accessible to a wide audience. She presents a well-researched and thought-provoking analysis of the novel and its cultural significance, drawing on a range of sources and perspectives. The book is particularly relevant in today's political climate, as debates about race and history continue to be at the forefront of the national conversation. Overall, "The Wrath to Come" is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature and cultural history, and for anyone looking to better understand the enduring appeal and impact of "Gone with the Wind".

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Gone with the Wind and saw the film in my late teens, and of course remember the famous lines about "Tara" and frankly not giving a damn. Sarah Churchwell's excoriating critique of the book, and its glorification of slavery, the South's Lost Cause, and the Ku Klux Klan, would be enough on its own to make me wonder how I could have read it without feeling appalled and disturbed. But her chief aim is to show how the myths perpetuated by the story - the nobility of the Southern gentleman, the charm of the plantation life and the undeserving nature of the enslaved etc have lived on in American politics through to the present day, and in particular now exist in the followers of Donald Trump and above all in his rejection of the 2020 election result. It's a fascinating and depressing read.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am somewhat staggered by the praise heaped on this book - it is not badly written nor is the jist about the falsity of the storyline about post civil war reconstruction etc. propagated both in schools, universities and popular culture wrong - it just isn't very new - I was educated in Ireland and the UK and American history didn't get a look in but I like almost any thinking person in Ireland, UK (yes they are no synonymous) or Europe knew, if they spent five minutes thinking about it, that the Civil War might have ended slavery but didn't bring freedom for black Americans - in fact most European thinkers found America's post WWII claims to represent the 'free' world ridiculously compromised by its segregated state. American racists made European racists feel liberal and open minded.

This book was written as a response to the 2021 Capital invasion and such current events lead polemic while selling books doesn't make for last or substantial argument - Gone With the Wind - are we to really elevate the book into a place of such prominence as cause of the USA's failures to identify and deal with its past? Rather overstated - compared to the novel 'The Klansman' and the film D.W. Griffith's made of it 'The Birth of a Nation' (ably promoted by the impeccably liberal, but horrendously bigoted, US president Wilson) which gave a massive boost to the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920's - 'Gone with the Wind' did absolutely nothing. It was simply one of countless films which incorporated a fictitious history of post civil war America - as late as 1969 the Rock Hudson, John Wayne vehicle 'The Undefeated' was purveying the same cliches and stereotypes.

I will acknowledge the author has read 'Gone With the Wind' - something that most of those who claim to have read the book haven't done - if you want to test the reality of anyone's claims to reading the book ask them how many children Scarlett O'Hara had (the answer is three) - but the reality is that GWtW has had an impact because of the film made of it. Even those who watch film, or read the book, fail to understand the central point of Margaret Mitchell - she wasn't writing a paean of praise to Scarlet as a Southern belle - Scarlet was everything a Southern belle shouldn't be. The real Southern belle was Melanie Hamilton. She was a lady Scarlet was not - but then neither Margaret Mitchell she was reporter, one of the few female news reporters in the South, she was independent, liberated - Scarlet is as much about Mitchell as any historical story.

If the book opens peoples eyes to the myths, lies and distortions in America's history (please don't think I am unaware of similar failings in the telling of UK history) then the book is to be congratulated but I honestly amazed that those praising this book aren't encouraging readers to turn to authors like Eric Fromer and many, many others to learn their history. GWtW is neither a great novel nor a great film. That it retained such a hold for so long has more to do with the film of GWtW being only available in cinema release until the late 1970's and for long after its broadcast was a rare and special occasion. To try and suggest that GWtW was a significant means of forming myths is ridiculous - Margaret Mitchell took a great deal from 'academic' historians who propagated the southern legends. She may have broadcast them further, louder and longer but she didn't invent them, didn't even know she was promoting legends.

All in all not a bad book but a mediocre one and worst of all a lazy one. Fixating on GWtW is a way of avoiding the greater lies and failures in facing the truths of Americas problematic history.

[Books · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author’s information contained missing pieces about the Gone With the Wind angle, and it compromised what the reader took away from the history around the phenomenon. This is a problem, when her intent is to present a well-rounded take on historical accuracy or its impact on modern opinions.

One instance was when she discussed an Atlanta race riot in 1906 and Mitchell’s childhood reaction. She failed to mention that the father of Gone With the Wind’s author, Margaret Mitchell, wrote Mitchell’s mother about their city’s racial violence that year and that he was not fully supportive of what was happening to black citizens. This situation would have added more information to what Mitchell may have experienced. In fact, what her father wrote was actually mentioned in another work about Mitchell.

Churchwell also insinuated criticism of the American actress, Ona Munson (Belle Watling), shedding a tear at African Americans singing at a ball on the night before the film’s premiere. Surprisingly, Churchwell didn’t mention that it was also reported that the movie’s lead actress, Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O’Hara), was choked up during the singing. This is a glaring omission since her book debuted in the United Kingdom, Leigh played the lead film character, and Leigh was British. Although Leigh wasn’t American, in a book about America, she was a major part of the film’s impact on American audiences.

Churchwell’s research on Gone With the Wind also mentioned parts of the novel, but, lazily, had a habit of not referencing exactly where. It was ridiculous that readers were given a website, to search the book, to verify what she said or to obtain more information for themselves.

The problems weren’t a surprise due to a mistake Churchwell made in an interview. She couldn’t remember the actual time span of the Gone With the Wind story when she gave the wrong length of years. In addition, her book was recommended in an article, in December 2022, which Churchwell shared on Twitter. This sharing was surprising given an article error that said a pageant, the night before the premiere, was held at a plantation, when it was actually held at an auditorium with a plantation theme as part of the ball.

Because Churchwell’s professional background includes American literature, the sloppy approach to Gone With the Wind is glaring. In fact, her use of it comes across as a tool she can tie to her supposed American fiction expertise, when what she really wanted to do was use the book’s popularity to gain an audience to influence how readers should view current events and why it should affect their vote. The use of Gone With the Wind fails due to limited facts and unpreparedness about its full history on the part of the author.

If you are considering the Churchwell book for Gone With the Wind, don’t read it due to the issues. You won’t get what you think you are.

[Holly Cruise]

It's funny that just the same week as I picked up this book to read it, some friends were completely seriously talking about how historians are neutral about things. Oh no, I had to interject, no they are not at all. Some might pretend they are, but all historians bring biases and agendas. Some conceal and some are up front.

And then there's Sarah Churchwell, who is so incredibly ANGRY about the way America has lied and deluded itself about the reality of the Civil War and the enslaving of millions of people, and how its most successful book/movie, Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell, does the same. I have never read a history book so angry. This is a massive compliment.

Churchwell is not messing around. She is not going to let anyone off the hook. She tells the story of how Gone With The Wind was made, a book and film set in the mid-c19th which is also very much about the time of its own writing and publication (1920s-30s), and about modern America, 6th January 2021 coup attempt and all. Churchwell takes a huge sweep of sources and uses them to expose the lies America tells to distract itself from the way it failed to reckon with the Confederacy. Her level of detail is astonishing, and her determination to not let Americans in 1865, 1939 or 2021 off the hook is laser-focused. She wants to tell stories which people don't want to tell.

The bit which really hit me was a short section which begins with the description of Margaret Mitchell refusing to be part of a class at college because there was a Black woman in there. Churchwell says the story comes from a previous biography, but the biographer made no effort to find out who the Black woman was. Instead it has fallen to Churchwell herself to identify two possible candidates: Catherine Grigsby Mayo or Eunice Hunton Carter. Carter later became the DA who brought down gangster Lucky Luciano after tugging at a lead (suspicious patterns in the non prosecution of prostitution) which other DAs had ignored. That Churchwell goes down these paths and finds these stories is exceptional History.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book! Sarah Churchwell sets out to demolish the myth of the antebellum South as a noble and civilised society in which contented slaves are treated benevolently by their overlords, their civil war defeat of 1865 ushering in a period of unjust exploitation by Northern 'carpetbaggers' and a vengeful 'Yankee' government. She does this by way of a deeply analytical study of 'Gone with the wind', both Margaret Mitchell's original novel and David O Selznick's 1939 film adaptation, which enables her to reveal the hypocrisy of the Confederacy and the deliberate rewriting of the history of the Civil War and , in particular, the Reconstruction Era. Churchwell also clearly demonstrates the links between this delusional 'Lost Cause' myth and the the damaging MAGA Cult which currently has the USA in its grips.
The title indirectly warns of the risks to the union posed by Trumpism by drawing parallels between the January 6th coup attempt, the Ku Klux Klan (who Mitchell showed in a more than noble and sympathetic light) and the rise of Jim Crow and the travesty that was the 'Seperate but equal' doctrine.
To add to this mix, Churchwell also focuses on the contemporaneous rise of Fascism in Europe and the desperate attempts by Mitchell and her apologists to refute the uncomfortable possibility that American Fascism did (and does) in fact already exist.
The book contains a wealth of supporting detail, from distressing descriptions of the reality of Lynching during the era of Jim Crow, to the opposition of leading civil rights campaigners to both Mitchell's novel and the 1939 film adaptation.
This was an engrossing and uncomfortable read and is highly recommended to anyone with an interest in US history and current affairs.

[Andrew Pratley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book which examines the mythology which dominated both the book & film "Gone With The Wind". This mythology is still at work today. It is inhabiting & influencing American Politics in a quite pernicious way. There is the "lost cause myth". Then the sense of victim hood still ever present among sections of White America. Donald Trump plays on it quite deliberately in order to gain power & literally profit from it. Some of book takes a strong stomach to read since some of the incidents recalled are simply horrifying. These passages are there to illustrate the true awfulness of some the American history since The Civil War. Understanding that cataclysm is central to understanding American History & much about America today including its politics. Highly recommended.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating if sometimes depressing (even alarming) account of the lasting influence of the “Lost Cause” on the American psyche.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5-I felt like I was listening to the author’s dissertation so I lost steam with this one. 😆

[Ashley (Red-Haired Ash Reads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Wrath to Come shows how one of the most popular stories of all time, Gone With the Wind, can be used to explain the current division in the United States. Churchwell explains how the history of mythmaking has influenced America’s politics and how Gone with the Wind influenced that mythmaking.

“The United States is, one might argue, especially prone to cognitive dissonance as a society, because the brutal realities of American life are so perpetually in conflict with its exalted ideals. Its very name suggests cognitive dissonance: any country that calls itself the United States is protesting too much.”

When I saw the title and premise of this book, I knew I needed to read it because I remember watching Gone with the Wind as a child and was led to believe then that it was accurate to history. I did grow up in a household that believed the Lost Cause myth, even though I was from a northern state. As I got older and learned the truth about American history I realized how wrong Scarlett’s views on the war were but I never realized how this movie influenced the world.

Churchwell takes this famous work and uses it to show how America has spent 160 years in denial to hide the truth. With the help of the Lost Cause myth America learned to deny the truth of the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacism, racism, slavery, and fascism, which had long lasting impacts that we are still seeing today. Churchwell breaks down all these issues and shows how this movie and book influenced the acceptance of these values and incited further violence then and now. She even discusses how the author’s personal views in the belief of Lost Cause history influence her writing of this story.

“White supremacism is a politics of collective narcissism, justified by racism, enabling its adherents to believe they are the moral police while engaging in the most brutally selfish acts.”

From the very beginning, Churchwell does a great job at showing the similarities of the past and present and how the Lost Cause is still influencing politics. She compares our past to our current climate by discussing Trump's rise to power and his influence of the January 6th riot, and how those rioters felt justified in what they did. It was very interesting seeing how the influence of Lost Cause has affected American politics and continues to be a huge influence for Republicans and their followers.

I am going to be thinking about this book for a long time because there is just so much information here that helps explain how we got to his pont. By the time I finished reading this book I had almost 300 highlights. I will definitely be rereading this book in the future, because I know I didn’t retain everything because there was just so much new information for me to think about. Overall, I highly recommend this book if you are curious about how Gone With the Wind and the Lost Cause myth has influenced our current environment.

TW: white supremacy, racism and racist language, slavery, lynching, death, rape

[Austin Robertson · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Wrath to Come” is a book of depth and insight to what really happened during the war and why the beloved epic, “Gone With The Wind” romanticizes the imperfections of white America. Additionally, it compares “Gone With The Wind” to the unforgettable events of January 6, 2021.

The wrath that comes stems from the minds of those who are in favor of resurrecting the ideology of white supremacy through efforts to suppress those who are not only void of white pigmentation, but those who are of different backgrounds.

My thinking on “Gone With The Wind” has been changed through this book. While it still holds a place in my mind, I will never forget the exposed truths found within its core from “The Wrath to Come.”

[HadenXCharm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Threads the needle between the civil war, the failures of reconstruction, the rise of the Klan, the second rise of the Klan in the 20s, to the corresponding rise of fascism in Europe and WWII, to the rise of the neo-nazi in modern America, and the capital riot on January 6. Point after point after point, this book is meticulous.

Coming off the heels of reading Gone With the Wind for the first time, I was surprised not to find much literature responding to it; essays, books, analysis, etc, especially considering the humungous cultural impact that book and movie had. It is still the highest grossing film of all time. This book is an extremely poignant and timely analysis to GWTW, and explained why all of it felt so familiar, echoing through the centuries. 1860s to the 1930s, to the 2020s.

Bluntly put, GWTW is a great story with a terrible political ideology. It's a valuable document worth enjoying, analyzing, and pulling apart for criticism. I'm glad that Churchwell didn't come at this with a 'we should ''cancel'' GWTW' attitude. It is a playbook and a peek into an ideology of hate and self-victimization that echoes itself to this day, through both what it talks about and what it tries to hide by not talking about. There's a reason this book became so incredibly popular and that it still has staying power. It confirmed a white victimhood narrative about a mythologized past of imagined greatness that was stolen by racial minorities, it offered a grievance southerners who felt robbed, and it most importantly allowed white America to alleviate its guilt. It's full of cognitive dissonance, contradiction, projection, and outright lies, and it's the root of those protests not to take down Confederate monuments that have been flaring up in the past few years, and it's the root of the Jan 6 insurrection. After all, Scarlett never recanted her seditionist beliefs. The book ends with her still hating the Union, i.e., America, yet claiming herself a patriot. Precisely like the insurrectionists and neo-confederates who to this day insist they are more patriotic than everyone else.

GWTW is the equivalent of a story about an unrepentant Nazi who never admits defeat, but who struggles on, and we end up admiring their spirit, while ignoring that they never recanted their fascism. Scarlett and the confederacy are defeated, but none of them ever recant their slavocratic and seditionist views. They just bide their time, waiting for the conditions to be right for the Klan to 'ride again.' In this way, they get the benefits of being forgiven by larger society without ever having to actually repent or apologize. The insurrectionist Confederates get to reconcile with the government they just tried to overthrow without ever having to concede defeat, eerily similar to the way the politicians who collaborated with the Jan 6 insurrectionists were let to skate on consequences and remained assimilated with the federal government they tried to overthrow.

Jan 6 was the first time the Confederate flag of the traitors was ever flown inside the capital. Even during the actual civil war, the capital, right next to Confederate Virginia, by the way, the confederates never succeeded in flying that flag in our capital; and these mouth-breathing neo-nazi MAGA fucks have brought us that low, 155 years later. They climbed onto the plinth of General Grant's statue; and this is how you know they're lying when people claim that the Confederate Flag has been 'rehabilitated' and that it no longer symbolizes slavery and sedition, because they conveniently remember what it means when they show up to a racist rally and wave it above statues of General Grant and Calhoun and in front of portraits of Charles Sumner, a senator who was beaten in the Senate Chamber by a slave-owning politician. They know exactly what the flag means. Symbols matter.

Churchwell analyzes the Jan 6 protests and how they echo the rise of the Klan during the nadir of race relations and its echos of reconstruction and the civil war from multiple angles, including class and gender. She goes into the reasons why poor whites continued to side with slavocrats and now the billionaire class along racial lines, rather than siding with racial minorities along class lines. She goes into why white women overwhelmingly side with their conservative husbands politically rather than with other oppressed minorities, preferring to benefit from the scraps of power they're given at the expense of others, rather than rise up and ask for equality for all. W.E.B Du Bois called this 'compensatory whiteness', the "zero-sum promise that even poor white people (and white women) were superior to black people. Allowing blacks to advance socio-economically takes that psychological comfort away from poor whites." From a gender-analysis angle, southern white women's femininity was portrayed as fragile and delicate in order to justify the racial violence of white men. Sexual insecurity is the root of all racism; it goes back to humanity's birth. Tribalism is rooted in men trying to stop other groups of men from having sex with/raping 'their' women. To justify this anxiety, to justify white men's sexual insecurity, black men must be portrayed as animalistic rapists to justify the violence against them.

Churchwell compares Klan violence and slavocrat ideology to that of Nazis and the rise of fascism, from the 'big lie', to crude denial, inversions of guilt, to the 'we disavow' meme, to projection and blatant DARVO, where the role of victim and offender is completely reversed, to the way they lie to downplay their racist violence and go 'can you blame them' in the same breath, condoning and participating in it. In 2019, an Alabama newspaper editor said that it's "Time for the Klan to ride again", and when questioned said, 'well they only killed a few people anyway.', i.e., "they weren't that bad." But he doesn't believe that, does he. Why else did he say the Klan needed to night-ride again. Night-ride to do what exactly, if not kill and terrorize. This is why conservatives project so much onto their political opponents, from accusing them of mob violence, extrajudicial killings and sham trials, tampering with polls; all of this was done by the klan to black people, not the other way around. Every accusation is a confession. GWTW constantly denies that black people were ever whipped on plantations, the old 'slavery wasn't that bad' lie, but then keeps slipping up and having Scarlett fervently wishing she could 'have them all whipped until the blood ran down their backs' and that 'a good whipping would do some of them a lot of good.'

There are screeds in GWTW about Scarlett being afraid of being raped and killed and that 'nothing would be done about it, and anyone who avenged her would be killed by the court extrajudicially, a sham trial.' In reality, the opposite was true. This is what the KKK did to black people, in plain view of courthouses. Judges, sheriffs, doctors, dentists, the grand jury organizer, all these men were IN the Klan in the 1870s and in the 1920s. Lynchings were done in public, with the perpetrators boldly looking into the camera, posing around the body, so confident were they that there would be no consequences. Less than eight tenths of one percent of lynchers were ever prosecuted -- and GWTW flips this violence on its head, and makes white southern slavocrats the victims. As Churchwell puts it "The projection is so specific that it is difficult to see it as unintentional. Its repetition suggests the compulsive entrapment of an anxiety dream." Plainly, it is fear of reprisal. It's DARVO, the politics of narcissism.

"Gone with the Wind actively helped white Americans pretend that the barbaric torture of public lynchings was exaggerated, that white Southerners were forced into it somehow against their better nature, that it was a quiet, occasional, regrettable, tragic necessity rather than a constant hysterical blood sport enjoyed by literally thousands upon thousands of white Americans less than a century ago." They simultaneously deny that it's happening, but then tacitly murmur that if it IS happening, who can blame them, i.e., endorsing it. Mitchell grew up during one of the biggest race massacres ever to happen in Georgia. She grew up during these lynching carnivals. Thousands of whites attended these picnic lynchings and took how souvenirs, even ate some of the body parts. She describes the fanaticism with which 1920s southerners ripped up the body, cooked it and ate it, paid for body parts from each other. These 'relics' are likely still in the attics of a lot of southerners. Some so-called 'heritage.' Mitchell lived her life insisting that she was not racist and that her book was a faithful and fair adaptation of reconstruction and did not portray minstrel-caricatures as black slaves; despite being known for being penpals with Thomas Dixon, and for throwing a violent screaming fit in her college when she discovered a black woman was a fellow student. She didn't just uphold a racist worldview in her book, she was individually racist in her personal life, to the point that her college roommate said she had a poster of General E. Lee and saw him as a boyband celebrity. She was fully devoted to upholding a totem of mythologized plantations that vindicated the racist family members she grew up with. She was too psychologically weak to reconcile her love for her father and grandparents with the fact that the violence they perpetrated was evil. To do so, the violence has to be justified in some ways, and the victims have to somehow be twisted into villains.

This is the way that lynchings are turned into scapegoating, the violence is somehow redemptive, and the victims are portrayed as the savages who are getting what they deserve. The violence is so widespread that the participants are compelled to justify what they are doing, to avoid the psychological discomfort of guilt, and in the case of women, to enable them to keep loving their violently racist family members. The violence is so universal, in the GWTW book (every white man in the entire book is a murderer, from the main characters to the smallest side characters. Not just war killings either, but racially motivated killings committed during reconstruction; Scarlett is a murderer too) and in real life, that it somehow tries to claim that since everyone's guilty, guilt ceases to matter, so we can 'euthanize the nation's conscience.' If the violence is that widespread and normalizes, the guilt disperses and can't be pinned on any individual.

This isn't true. It doesn't mean no one is guilty, but that guilt is everywhere, loudly protesting its innocence because everyone else did it too.

GWTW is a mirror's reflection of conservative ideology: the politics of narcissism and victimhood. Scarlett is portrayed as a little lady who is always alone, despite being surrounded by a sea of suffering people. That overwhelming and mass-scale suffering is denied and inverted, and turned into her individual suffering and victimhood. They simultaneously see themselves as self-made individuals, but that self-reliance is a myth. It's always been propped up by other white people and by the slave labor. They believe they're the moral police while engaging in the violence. Mitchell criticizes Scarlett's individual narcissism, but replicates collective narcissism in the narrative portions of GWTW. Scarlett, like white racists today, when she goes through the suffering of poverty and violence, it doesn't teach her empathy for other people or for racial minorities; it makes her double-down on racism.

White women falling in line with their racist husbands, fathers, and brothers, was probably the most disheartening revelation this book had to offer, particularly when Churchwell pointed out the twinning of mythology with Mammy's devotion to her enslavers mirrored in Ellen being the idealized mythical plantation mistress who is devoted to her slaves. Both are falsehoods. The reality is that white women were not incidental victims of their husband's race-based cruelty. Slaves were one of the few things that white women in the south could own in their own name. White women couldn't own land, buildings, or other property, couldn't vote or participate in politics, but they could own, sell, and inherit slaves. Slavery was one of the only forms of power that women held in 19th century America. This is a brutal reminder of the way marginalized groups brutalize other marginalized groups rather than turning on their mutual oppressors in solidarity. It's a "At least I have it better than YOU" attitude that claws out marginal power in a violent system at the expense of the group that has it just a little bit worse than them. White women were being treated like dogshit by men, but at least they got to feel like "queens ruling over an African village" on the plantation, as Mitchell's slave-holding grandmother put it. Slave-trading was women's only economic independence. "The women of the former Confederacy resented their loss of political and economic agency no less personally, and perhaps even more bitterly, than the men, as they had no other means of reclaiming it." This didn't stop, by the way, it was carried through the women's suffrage movement, which got its start by claiming that allowing women's votes would help white men beat the black man's vote, as white women vote with their husbands. They did, and they still do to this day. That part disgusted me the most.

I'm going to check academic journals for more analyses of GWTW. The book is so long that there's so much meat to bite into.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I began to read The Wrath to Come, I was prepared to approach it as something of a lengthy book report, or scholarly review. It soon became apparent that the book is much more than that. I only wish my parents were still living. I would so love them to read it, especially Dad, so that I could discuss it with him.


They were among the readers of whom Sarah Churchwell writes, Americans into whose eager hands the book fell upon publication in 1936. Already avid readers, Mom was 13 that year, and Dad 17.


They were both Northerners, both of them had had great-grandfathers who had fought for the Union during the Civil War. Mom was a Connecticut working class Yankee and Dad a Pennsylvania farm boy, but that made no difference. Margaret Mitchell's book, and the movie that followed three years later, shaped their impression, favorably, of slavery and of the antebellum South for the rest of their lives.


They thought they were learning history.


I confess, I thought much the same when I, as a teenager myself some thirty-odd years later, first read the book and saw the movie. Our response, my mother's and my father's and mine, to Mitchell's myth of the "Lost Cause," a 400 page apology for slavery, racism, and murder, was correlated to our own personal lived experience.


We were young and ignorant and white, emphasis on white. How Black Americans would perceive Gone With the Wind and the whole-hearted enthusiasm with which white Americans embraced Mitchell's book and the movie that followed was a question that did not even enter our blind, closed minds.


Today there is the myth and the lie and the cult of Donald Trump. In 1936 and still today there is the myth and the lie and the cult of Gone With the Wind. The latter, it can be argued, has led, with the occasional detour, to the former. It is this disturbing enthusiasm of Americans for southern fascism in Gone With the Wind, and the embrace today by Americans of the fascist policies which Donald Trump extolls, which Sarah Churchwell explores in The Wrath to Come.


Gone With the Wind inflicted a harm on this country from which we continue to suffer. Better that Margaret Mitchell had left her manuscript hidden away, unread. As a piece of writing it is hard to match. As a piece of tragically dangerous false history, it is equally hard to match.


Dad was 20 and had his own car by the time, with great fanfare, the movie was released. Tickets had to be purchased in advance. He and his friends saw Gone With the Wind at the Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barre. I still live on the farm where Dad grew up and even with better roads and automobiles, it is an hour's drive to Wilkes-Barre. I don't know how much time the drive required in 1939.


I so wish my parents could read Churchwell's book. Having experienced the excitement upon the release of Gone With the Wind, book and movie, that Churchwell describes, having had their "knowledge" of the South and its supposed history shaped by Margaret Mitchell's imagination, how would they have received The Wrath to Come?




p. 154 One of the ways that white governance has historically maintained its grip on power is by circulating false claims of rampant multiple voting, while working furiously to suppress the legitimate vote. This is what white nationalists did during Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and it was what they did under Donald Trump, as they whipped up fears that the 2020 election had allowed unparalleled voter fraud among non-white voters (which is the only kind of fraud they recognize). According to a December 2020 survey, more than 75 per cent of Republican voters were convinced that voting machines in the 2020 election were rigged, and that millions of fraudulent ballots were cast, including thousands of votes in the names of dead people--much as Margaret Mitchell believed that the Klan had stopped Black people from voting multiple times at every election. In reality, the only systematic fraud in the 2020 election was perpetrated by the Republicans.


p. 231 The New Deal...consistently sold out Black laborers to the white South (so that, for example, agricultural and domestic workers, a sizable majority of whom at the time were Black, were specifically exempted from New Deal benefits). Advancing the cause of civil rights would be left not to the New Yorker Roosevelt, but to his Southern successor, Harry Truman, whose support of civil rights broke up the "Solid South" and incited the 1948 Dixiecrat rebellion that changed the political map of America for the next century.


p. 352 Fascism depends on political fantasies, replacing the historical past with a mythical past, actively destroying the difference between the two. Reclaiming the mythical past justifies violence in making the myth come true in the present, imposing its ideology on reality. Mythical histories lay the groundwork for fascist politics.... By the time the Second World War was over, the country had convinced itself that fascism was a uniquely European pathology, an alien disease against which American democracy was inoculated.


pp. 368-369 American fascism was never exorcised, but merely obscured beneath romantic mythmaking that displaced a reckoning with vicious aspects of the nation's past. To conclude that American interwar fascist groups were always on the "lunatic fringe," and could never have consolidated power, is to decide that what did not happen could not happen, replacing the contingency of history with the certainty of retrospection. It is to deny the possibility that they were just biding their time.


p. 369 Insisting that European fascism was categorically distinct from American white supremacism turned American racism into another exception that has exempted America from the same historical reckonings as other countries and helped white supremacism flourish even as fascism was discredited domestically after the war: because American white supremacism was just good old-fashioned thick-headed American prejudice.


p. 375 No one seems to have noticed during the noise and chaos of war that Gone With the Wind is on the side of the fascists.... If the inevitable conflict between North and South over slavery mirrored the inevitable conflict between democracy and fascism, then the South was against democracy, unless the New York Times in 1941 was putting Lincoln on the side of fascism. Gone With the Wind casts the white South as the oppressed, when they were just oppressors enraged at their loss of total power. But white Americans, whether from the North or South, simply couldn't let themselves draw this obvious conclusion. Crowther had to ignore the implications of his own analogy or be left admitting that Gone With the Wind is, by his own logic, comparable to a story that glorifies the "tragic collapse of a civilization" fanatically devoted to Nazism.


p 378 Imagine a Gone With the Wind in which Scarlett's journey was not toward restoring white oligarchy, in which the object of her quest was not learning which patriarchal slavocrat she should desire. Imagine a Gone With the Wind that began with a slaveholding white woman, followed her shattering passage through Civil War and Reconstruction, and ended with her coming to apprehend the injustice of slavery. Imagine a Scarlett O'Hara who went on a moral journey like Huck Finn's.


p. 381 Mark Milley, one of Trump's former joint chiefs of staff, was quoted as saying the military would not support him (Trump) in a coup attempt--a statement never before required in over two centuries of the peaceful transfer of US power--and that he feared the insurrection on 6 January 2021 would be Trump's Reichstag moment.


pp. 386-387 The insurrection, they now say, was defending "election integrity" and the "purity of the ballot box." But in the same Gone With the Wind's notions of justice are simply incompatible with Black governance, so does Trumpism maintain that election integrity can only elect Trump, because there is no other legitimate outcome. Hence the ultimate projection, "Stop the Steal," as the name given to the violent effort to steal the election from Biden.


p. 387 What distinguishes fascist lies (wrote Hannah Arendt) is that they are intended to negate reality, making "that 'true' which until then could only be stated as a lie." Fascists don't lie to deceive; they lie to change reality.` ¶The lies about the Lost Cause did just that, using fiction to displace a reality until the fiction had become a reality.... Mythology replaced history as the arbiter of American truth.


p. 388 In his first inaugural address in 1861...Lincoln explained (that)..."(t)he rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left." ¶ ...Now much of white governance across the country is equally prepared to entrench itself as minority rule. Republicans no longer oppose Democrats politically: they are opposing them existentially, as an enemy within. This, too, is part of the Lost Cause, the absolute rejection of the opposing viewpoint, and it is consistent with fascism.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

You don't need to have read the book or seen the movie to get something out of this book. As it happens I have seen the movie several times and read the book once, although neither activity has been recent. This is a book about America and, as the subtitle says, the Lies America Tells. I would say the lies we primarily tell ourselves, but also the rest of the world. Anyone with any interest in America, and the past that informs our present, can get something from this story.

A quibble and a trigger warning. There are several references to modern day American turmoil, including the Jan 6 insurrection and the murder of George Floyd. The murder of George Floyd is mentioned as having happened after a routine traffic stop. That is not actually what happened (the police were called because of a suspected counterfeit bill) and given how recently this man's face and story were on the news, it seems like an error the author or at least the editor should have caught.

The trigger warning is for several very graphic descriptions of lynchings. I get it--pull the blinders off and make us witness what really happened. But for anyone with a personal connection to the subject or a high sensitivity to violence, it is brutal to read these stories.

[Alenka of Bohemia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely frikkin fantastic and important!

I read Gone with the Wind when I was 19 and liked it, but I also really cared for the "love" story between the characters and pretty much viewed the rest as a backdrop I could gloss over. (for context I am a white European from a country that never had any colonies, never participated in the slave trade, and our own ancestors who were serfs were liberated in the 1780s. Moreover, the American civil war was more or less a footnote in our history classes.). I have seen the movie more than once though (again focused on Scarlett and Rhett rather than anything else) and liked it a lot. I began to realize the whole thing was problematic later, but I had no idea just how problematic and downright awful it really was until reading this book.

AS Chrchwell herself says, we should not scratch the book out of our minds nor ever screen the movie again, but we should be mindful of the realities it shows (of the past and the present) and view it as evidence of delusion and mindset. That way Gone with the Wind can be redefined from the great American novel to a learning experience and a warning. Will we learn though? Our ancestors did not.

[Avery · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I liked this one, but I didn't love it. Churchwell has one major structural issue with her argument - the movie is the better/more popular version of Gone with the Wind, but all of the Lost Cause propaganda and slavery apologia baked into the movie begins with its foundational source material. That means that she must talk about the movie in passing, but the better evidence for her argument comes from the book. It gets repetitive, and some of the passages about the movie relate only loosely with its core message.

She also repeats herself, A LOT. I really think this should either have been shorter by 100 pages or so, but could even have been condensed into a magazine essay. Part 1 drags on for sure, but the later parts just repeat part one with more detail. They could've been smashed together with the same effect.

Overall, this is a good read if you're a huge fan of Gone with the Wind but are interested in breaking down its flaws as well. But for the layman this is too much on the topic.

[Claire Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this at first. Enjoyed the way she traced the Lost Cause propaganda from GWTW to Jan 6, as well as putting both the story and the book and film in full historical context. Having only seen the movie and not read the book was also a bit surprised how overtly and horrifically racist the book is. I took a star off because I thought it was perhaps 100 pages too long and at that stage some of her arguments got a bit repetitive or in a couple of cases a bit tenuous and academic.

[Monique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional read. A sophisticated, well researched and articulate argument that I found carried a lot of weight. Really enjoyed the tone and style of the writing. Highly recommended if you’re off a similar persuasion.

[Chuck_Les · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific work of political literary criticism that is also a page turner for anyone interested in American cultural history. Churchwell does a fine job of situating Gone With The Wind within the broader currents of America’s historical (mis)understanding of the civil war and reconstruction. For anyone familiar with civil war historiography much of this will be well-trod ground— the growth of lost cause mythology with its memory-holing of slavery’s central role in the conflict, the Dunning school’s propagation of the story of Reconstruction as a tragic injustice inflicted upon the white south, the popularization of that historical understanding by Birth of a Nation and the subsequent rise of the Second Klan. Churchwell does a good job contextualizing Mitchell’s art and attitudes without falling into the moral relativism in which “historical contextualization” serves as cover for hand waving away injustice.

In keeping with this, Churchwell also is admirably even handed in her analysis of the book and movie’s artistic qualities. It’s easy to dismiss GWTW as repugnant and morally hideous propaganda on behalf of monstrous injustice (because, ya know, it is) but to leave it at that is to fail to understand the root of its power as propaganda. From the fascinatingly contradictory and original central portrait of Scarlett to the epic sweep, pathos and humor of its story to the lush technicolor of the movie’s cinematography, Churchwell displays how GWTW triumphed as propaganda because (but of course not solely because) it triumphed as narrative.

And triumphs still. Admittedly, I’ve only seen the movie (to paraphrase my own attitude toward Atlas Shrugged: “I don’t have time for 1000 pages of that shit”) but GWTW is particularly troublesome because it retains its power to entrance. The obvious analogy to GWTW is Birth of a Nation. But Birth of a Nation (while probably even more historically influential and despicable) is far too obvious in its viciousness to be persuasive to anyone not already very on board with white supremacy, and even if one could somehow put aside the politics, it would still remain alongside other early stylistic cinematic breakthroughs like Battleship Potemkin a film more to be studied than enjoyed. Gone With the Wind is another matter. The cinematography is still ravishing, the set pieces epic. Gable and Leigh’s performances remain among the greats of classic Hollywood. And the racism and propaganda of the story exists as the backdrop for the central romantic melodrama, and thus is more easily looked past.

Against the notion that “it was a different time; stop bringing your 21st century wokeism to it”, Churchwell establishes clearly that perceptive critics (especially black critics) saw it for what it was at the time of its release. More surprising is how even liberal figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and mainstream critics like Bosley Crowther were so taken it by its charms as to praise not just its aesthetic and narrative qualities but it’s messaging as well. She is particularly perceptive in her analysis of its global appeal (eg as a story of resistance to occupation in France during the war or in postwar Japan as a portrait of a people picking up the pieces after the devestation of a lost war)


Where the book excels most in my opinion is in its contextualization of GWTW within the domestic politics of the 1930s. As Caroline Fraser did in her book on Laura Ingles Wilder’s Little House books, Churchwell situates the myth-making of a ruggedly individualistic, noble, pre industrial 19th century America as, in part, a product of its authors reactionary anti-new deal conservatism. As the author makes clear, the story’s secondary antagonist (after the threat of black equality) is the rapacious taxation of the federal government. Also she does a good job analyzing Scarlett and Mitchell within the framework of hyper capitalist white feminism. In taking control of Tara after the war, Scarlett sat up so that one day Sheryl could lean in.

Of course it’s impossible to write about the mythology of white supremacy and white grievance in the 2020s without talking about Trump and the ongoing movement to overthrow American democracy in the name of white rule. Churchwell does not shy away from this historical continuity or it’s relevance to the present. It is centered throughout the book, as it should be. The fact that faulkner’s adage about the past being neither dead nor past has become a cliche doesn’t stop it from being true. And, as Churchwell makes clear, if we are to understand current anti democratic white supremacy it is crucial that we understand its deep historical roots.

[Frumenty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never read Gone with the Wind, but when I was in high school I was taken, rather unwillingly, to see the film. Gone with the Wind, mostly the film, has continued to be discussed in the media so that, as if by osmosis, I’ve absorbed the general outline of it and it remains a familiar cultural icon to this day. And despite my limited first-hand knowledge of Gone with the Wind, there was never a point while reading this book where I felt I was missing something important for want of familiarity with the text. The second confession I have to make is that I’ve never been to America. US hegemony over various media, particularly film and television, is such that I’ve never really felt the need. Why go over there when everything about US culture is exported anyway? And I watch US politics, and have done so since the Nixon era, with no less (often more) interest than I follow local (Australian, state and national) politics, on the general principle that Canberra politics is of far less consequence globally than politics in Washington. Ditto Brussels, which is a more recent interest, by some decades since the EU only came into being in 1992, but an abiding interest. On the scale from myopia to hyperopia in politics, I lean toward the hyperopic.

This is an excellent book. Sarah Churchwell is a historian of American culture. Her thesis is that white supremacy in America has a long history, particularly in the Deep South where Mitchell’s novel is set, and it’s alive and well today. Her thesis is actually a lot more than that, but I’m keeping it simple. The book’s point of departure is the invasion of the US Senate by a MAGA mob on January 6th, 2021. I don’t propose to summarise all her evidence and arguments. You can read the book yourself. What I will say is that she argues a very good case and what she writes is compelling - well, compelling if you’re in the same head-space. Here was my difficulty. While her evidence was mostly new to me (and there is no paucity of good evidence), her conclusions were entirely familiar. With me, she is preaching to the choir. I’m already convinced. It worries me that I might be stuck in some controlling discourse, à la Michel Foucault, and can’t see my way out of it. When I hear apparently very intelligent people (I listen to lots of political podcasts) whose political outlook, nay their very political reality, is so diametrically different from my own, it rattles me. We can’t both be right, this pundit and I. Is there bad faith? I prefer to think not, but if so there’s an awful lot of that about! Maybe most of our political convictions are formed by a sort of groupthink process so, well-founded or not, at least our convictions are sincerely held. But if so, there is no reason not to believe that my own convictions are not groupthink too - years and years of confirmation-biased cherrypicking of political facts. It’s doing my head in.

I’m giving this book 5 stars. It’s very well argued, based on good evidence and plenty of it. But as sure as “eggs is eggs” (can one even be sure of that any more?) it will be dismissed in many quarters as elite, critical race theory, politically correct, BLM, George-Soros-funded, anti-American, cultural-Marxist, “woke” propaganda.

And by the way, there is a cracking good novel about the Deep South which squarely condemns racism, instead of defending it as a cherished tradition from an antebellum idyll of Southern ladies and gentlemen and contented slaves: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. You should have it on hand to clear your palate, if you’re thinking of reading Gone with the Wind.

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Gone with the Wind provides a kind of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself.’

I was intrigued. It’s been a long, long time since I read 'Gone with the Wind’, and even longer since I first saw the movie. How can a movie about a fictional antebellum South hold any key to America? I read on; I learned why Black is now capitalised:

‘The dehumanization of the enslaved included the stripping of African tribal, ethnic or national identities that people with European heritage can claim, identities that are customarily capitalized. This is one reason for arguing that Black should be capitalized whereas white should not (as it can be differentiated with capitalized national and ethnic identities).

I learned also that a ten-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr, was amongst the group of children of the black Ebenezer Baptists Church choir who sang for an all-white audience at a ball at a plantation the night before the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind in 1939. I kept following the redefinition of slavery as harmless and the slaves as grateful. In some regards, the movie is different from the book, but neither makes for a comfortable look at the past.

And, just as I was settling into using Gone with the Wind as a key, the events of January 2021 brought my thoughts from fiction, the past and into the uncomfortable near present.

Ms Churchwell takes themes from Gone with the Wind to examine aspects of American culture. It is an uncomfortable read: I may not be American, but several of the themes apply here in Australia and elsewhere. Consider the plight of native peoples, the taking of their land, their subjugation and near genocide.

‘Slavery was abolished by the war, but white supremacism was not. The problem was that white Americans could abhor slavery, and fight a war to end it, and also abhor Black people.’

I kept reading. Ms Churchwell includes confronting information (including photographs) about lynch mobs, the Ku Klux Klan, the double standards applied. This is not a comfortable read. It is thought-provoking, a reminder that uncomfortable history is often ignored or rewritten to make it more ‘comfortable’. Yes, history should be revised as new facts are discovered but exclusion is not revision.

Anyone who has read the book (and most who have watched the movie) will know that Scarlett is not a nice person. Anyone who knows their history will appreciate Ms Churchwell’s distinctions between fiction and fact even if they question some of her conclusions.

Well worth reading.

‘In the end, Scarlett goes home to Tara. Because her deepest romance is with power, neither Ashley nor Rhett can ultimately supply it. Power comes from Tara, the plantation she is always fighting to save, the supposed survival of which justifies everything she does. But survival is a euphemism for ownership.’

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[Marilyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. One reviewer describes the author as “ hot with rage on every page.” That’s how she comes across to me and it’s not a tone that’s easy to stick with. Moreover,
Her constant use of Assertion without supporting evidence is not persuasive discourse. I was forced to go on a fact finding hunt in the novel Gone With the Wind for supporting evidence- it wasn’t always there.
Coupled with the author’s factual misstatements about some of the content in Gone With The Wind makes this less than a credible presentation. I don’t get the impression Ms. Churchwell read GWTW closely.
The author is legitimately upset about white supremacy coming to the forefront of our current national politics and Using Mitchell’s novel as a backdrop of history is a creative strategy to do that. Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t come through. A big problem is GWTW is fiction. Too many Americans learned their Civil War history and Reconstruction era history by reading GWTW- which is more of an indictment of our school systems than it is of Mitchell’s novel.
Yes, Margaret Mitchell does paint the antebellum south and Confederate south from a southerner’s point of view, with rose colored and racist glasses on, but this book of fiction doesn’t get at the root causes of the white supremacy movement. That’s because it’s more a triangular romance than it is history. The novel’s also written from a southerner’s perspective of history as it was passed down to her by her grandmother. Mitchell shows that Southerners romanticized their lifestyle and downplayed the harsh realities of it.
Heather Cox Richardson’s podcasts, books, and essays on the history of how we got here from the time of the pre- Civil War through post Civil War era are much more illuminating and constructive on the subject. And Richardson’s tone is calm and reasonable. I recommend her work instead of this to anyone who wants to uncover how we got to this current unhappy, regressive place in time.

[Ian B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listen closely to what a culture keeps telling itself, and you’ll know not only what’s on its mind, but what it needs to hear. Gone with the Wind told Americans that they could survive anything, especially if they ignored it. Avoidance is Scarlett O’Hara’s speciality, ‘I won’t think of that now – I’ll think of it tomorrow,’ her perpetual charm to ward off repercussions. Scarlett’s wilful blindness gives voice to the denialism of American culture, in its refusal to face facts, to recognize that what it tells itself simply isn’t true.

I’ve read all of Sarah Churchwell’s books, and I’m certain that this is her best so far. If I find a better non-fiction work this year, I’ll be amazed. I was fascinated from start to end, and came away with a transformed understanding of American culture and society. The Wrath to Come helped pinpoint many new aspects of the uneasiness I felt over the rise and incomprehensible popularity of Donald Trump.

The author’s conclusions are absolutely devastating, and made me question how the book was received in her homeland. I imagine those who would most benefit from exposure to it would be horrified by its claims, and reject them out of hand. I was also left wondering what were the things that other Western countries who like to see themselves as innocent and enviable choose to look away from. The obvious answer for the UK would be Empire and colonialism. But what about, as an alternative, the idea that the class system is really no big deal and altogether charming and quaint and its archaeology an attraction to tourists, and not actually a blight on the potential of millions of people born into the wrong caste and a boost to others with Bertie Wooster levels of brainpower (if not charm) whom the stork simply happened to drop down the right chimney?

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sarah Churchwell deconstructs the myths surrounding both the book and film versions of "Gone with the Wind," illuminating the distortions that were perpetuated almost immediately after the Civil War, when it was labeled "The Lost Cause" (for state's rights and Southern tradition), and when during this Reconstruction period, chivalrous knights rode in bands to rectify the wrongs of North aggression. Further such glamorizations of the South's defeat were turned into historical "fact" and fiction and became the reality of DW Griffith's incendiary film, "Birth of a Nation."

In similar fashion, despite Margaret Mitchell's claim to having written a historically accurate anti-romance, "Gone With the Wind" draws from the same well of hushed-up racism and grievance. While the premise of the book is simple, the ramifications are many, and Churchwell makes clear at every juncture just how the mechanisms of grievance and self-justification worked and continue to work to hide the latent racism that underlies the ethics and politics of white supremacism. Further, as her title indicates, she makes clear that this seething resentment continues today, and we are all to suffer the narcissistic wrath of those whose wrongs will not be admitted.

While it's become a trope in the past year, Churchwell's was the first instance I'd seen of the formulation that the aggrieved one's accusations are actually confessions. Reconstruction politics are no different than Trumpian politics. Never apologize and turn the accusation of malfeasance against the real victim.

Very solid, very compelling!

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book. There have been many books written about Donald Trump and the January 6, 2021 insurrection. This one has a different angle. It traces the Donald Trump movement back to the old days of slavery in the South via the novel and movie "Gone with the Wind". It likens the January 6 insurrectionists to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1800s and the 1920s. They were both fascists longing for the good old days before the Federal Government wrecked everything and can be compared to the Nazi storm troopers of the 1920s. Lots of issues from the American Civil War have never been resolved and can explode again at any moment into violence and possibly another civil war.

The book needs a glossary to explain terms such as Dunning School which are not known to readers not already familiar with the history of slavery in the USA.

[kuzieboo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting and important read on how Gone With The Wind accurately reflects the myth making and romanticization of the Civil War, and how this directly lead to the January 6 Insurrection. Being a Northerner, I was taught the South fought for slavery and that they lost, but through this book, I realized that the way I was taught cast the South in a much more appealing and chivalric light than it had any right to be: they overthrew the government to keep humans in bondage and their pocketbooks fat. It was not a war over rights, it was a war over the very few wanting all rights and privileges for themselves, and the right to subjugate anyone who stood in their way.

On the whole, this book has a clear thesis and lots of evidence. I would say it’s a bit too long, as a criticism, however, it was still quite good.

[John Sinclair · Rating 4 out of 5]

BOOK REVIEW ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I’m surprised this book didn’t burst into flames while reading it. It is a nuanced, thorough, literary, and historical indictment of GWTW and the culture that produced it, and the racist myth-making culture it spawned…down to the very day a southern governor and presidential candidate could outrageously claim that slaves benefited from slavery (or words to that effect.) if you understand what the book is about, you quickly come to know that these kinds of remarks (the lies in the subtitle) are baked into the culture and they’re cemented into place with every defense of traitors statues and flags. Read it. It’s scorching. Searing. Napalm. You get it.
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2023 Reviewed 📚 32