Margaret Mitchell and the Architecture of the Lost Cause

Margaret Mitchell grew up in Atlanta hearing the Civil War from people who had survived it. Confederate veterans and women who had watched Sherman's army burn the city in eighteen sixty-four were still alive and talking when Mitchell was a child in the first decade of the twentieth century. She absorbed their version of events the way children absorb the stories of their elders, as the truth of what had happened, and she spent a decade writing it down.

Gone with the Wind was published in nineteen thirty-six from a Crescent Avenue apartment Mitchell called the Dump. It won the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen thirty-seven. It sold more than thirty million copies. It presented the antebellum plantation South as a civilization of grace and order, its destruction by Northern armies and Reconstruction politics as a tragedy, and its enslaved Black residents as loyal, simple, essentially content. Mammy, Prissy, and Pork are caricatures of faithful servitude drawn with no interiority the narrative acknowledges.

This was not ignorance on Mitchell's part. She was a journalist by training and a careful researcher. The plantation world she rendered was the version her sources wanted preserved, and she chose to render it faithfully.

The film premiere in December of nineteen thirty-nine was held at the Loew's Grand Theatre in Atlanta. It was a segregated event. Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in the film and became the first African American to win an Academy Award for the role, was not permitted to attend the premiere in the city where the story was set. She had been contractually barred from the celebration of a performance that would define her career.

The novel did not create the Lost Cause mythology. It gave the mythology its most durable popular form, the one that taught generations of readers what the Confederacy had been fighting for and what the people it held in bondage had felt about that.