Book Discussion: The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and Lies America Tells, by Sarah Churchwell
Introduction
“American fascism has always been broadly coterminous with fascism, but American exceptionalism continues to keep us from seeing it.”
The Wrath to Come is a rare type of book. I was furious reading it most of the time, and yet I cannot recommend it highly enough. The Wrath to Come is an exceptionally well researched, and extremely captivating and engaging book. What makes this book infuriating is not the quality of the writing, but the subject matter.
The book begins by discussing the insurrection on January 6th, 2021 in Washington DC. Many Americans were shocked and found the idea of an authoritarian coup attempt, and images of people carrying Confederate battle flags in the seat of US legislative power to be completely inexplicable. The guiding thesis of The Wrath to Come is to highlight the fact that January 6th is not only explicable, it’s almost inevitable.
If I had to explain American society as succinctly as possible, I would say that America is hypocritical to its core, but it denies its hypocrisy so strongly that it transforms its own past and present into fantasy. National myth-making isn’t unique to America, but American myth-making certainly has its particular idiosyncrasies. There are a lot of aspects of the American character that white Americans are especially quick to deny to soothe their consciences, the two that The Wrath to Come focuses on are white supremacism, and American fascism. Churchwell uses Gone with the Wind, one of the most popular books in American history, as a vehicle to explore these uncomfortable, and often infuriating parts of the American past.
Gone with the Wind, or as I like to Call it: America the Book
I have never read Gone with the Wind or watched the film, but it remained popular enough even into my early life to always be a part of the cultural background noise. I didn’t realize until reading The Wrath to Come how perfectly it encapsulates so many of the worst characteristics of American society. After reading Churchwell’s analysis of Gone with the Wind and reading passages quoted from the book it’s actually stunning just how perfect an avatar Gone with the Wind is of American so-called “exceptionalism.”
Gone with the Wind is a shockingly racist book filled to the gills with racist characters, while at the same time the author and the characters themselves repeatedly and vehemently deny that they are racist. The book is little more than apologist propaganda for plantation owning white southerners that the entire country embraced for decades. The book that was a cultural icon well into the 21st century contains a torrential downpour of white victim-hood. Criminals endlessly projecting their crimes onto the people they victimized in a fantasy so deranged it can only be sustained with extreme violence. That violence has been ongoing for centuries, and continues right up to the moment I am writing this sentence, and will likely continue for long after, so long the US continues to sustain the fantasy.
“Guilt is the great leveller in American life – violence justified by dint of its sheer ordinariness. If everyone is guilty, then guilt ceases to matter; it shifts the burden of guilt onto the victim, or disperses it into the social ether, where it can euthanize the nation’s conscience.”
Along with the constant racism, and the constant denial of that constant racism, America has also constantly denied our homegrown authoritarianism and fascism. People who want to see January 6th 2021 as an aberration are missing three crucial points. The first is that democracies are always under threat, they are never safe from authoritarians of some variety wanting to destroy or co-opt them. The second is that America has never been that democratic. This was a country founded by land-owning white men (many of them enslavers), deciding that they were the only ones who could vote. With every expansion of the franchise there have always been people who not only opposed the increased number of voters, they often spent their adult lives trying to roll back that progress, often with great success. The third point is that authoritarians have always existed in the United States, all the propaganda and national myth making about freedom and liberty have done little to curb that fact. Americans of the early 21st century especially underestimated how popular and widespread fascism was in the 1930s before the start of the second world war. When this was being written in the early 2020s there was also a rise once again of global fascism. People in the United States thought fascism rising in America was anathema to American values, but that idea in itself is another symptom of denial and myth-making.
“American fascism was never exorcised, but merely obscured beneath romantic myth-making that displaced a reckoning with various 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.”
“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.”
While the United States seems pathologically committed to ignoring its history of racism and fascism, there have also always been people who saw the threat these views posed and tried to warn people. That could be a reason to hope, or a reason for further despair depending on how you look at it. It’s good that there are always insightful societal doctors, who can accurately diagnose symptoms and causes and recommend treatment. It’s also depressing that no one ever seems to listen to these societal doctors, because the same causes with the same symptoms continually reappear. I’m going to quote a passage from The Wrath to Come, which itself quotes a 19th century publication. The quoted publication is from the late 19th century, after the US civil war, and it is criticizing a particular political strategy, and I encourage the reader to think about politics in their own lifetime to see if it sounds familiar to them.
“Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown. The Republic concluded that the problem was with a politics that had no strategy except to ‘arouse race-hatred and fan into renewed flames the fires of sectional strife…It knows nothing but the dead past. It can only hinder, and then cry aloud in scorn at the troubles which itself has largely fomented. Its chief strategy is to raise false issues… “They raise the whirlwind” and reap, but cannot control, the storm.’”
Scarlet O’Hara: America the Character
Before talking about the main character of Gone with the Wind I’ll give a bite sized overview of the book and plot for those who are fortunate enough to have avoided learning any details about the book or film to this point. The book is a work of historical fiction that begins just before the US civil war and ends right around the end of the reconstruction period after the civil war in the last quarter of the 19th century. The main character is Scarlet O’Hara, a young white woman born into the wealthy Georgia slavocracy. Gone with the Wind follows Scarlet as she tries to maintain both her position in the elite of white Georgia society, and her mistakes and misadventures to find love. As long-time readers might guess, I’m not even remotely interested in Scarlet’s love life in Gone with the Wind, and as Churchwell continually points out in The Wrath to Come, Scarlet’s true love isn’t for a person anyway, it’s for wealth and land. Scarlet is beyond obsessed with keeping both her family plantation, and maintaining her social stature in her society. That obsession with land and status absolutely includes forcing Black Americans to labor on Scarlet’s behalf, even after the end of the Civil War.
With that bit of background laid out, let’s take a look at Scarlet O’Hara. I feel like this should be obvious, but Scarlet is supremely racist. She’s also greedy, superficial, stubborn to a fault, and not that intelligent. “Selfish” isn’t nearly descriptive or powerful enough to describe Scarlet’s single minded self interest. In the book she appears almost incapable of recognizing or empathizing with other people’s suffering, especially of the people she enslaves.
There is another important part of Scarlet’s character that’s admirable to a point, but exists to such a degree in Scarlet that it becomes foolhardy. Scarlet refuses to give up or admit defeat. Which, as I said, could be admirable. However, this is also paired with Scarlet’s constant refrain that she’ll think about or deal with this or that problem tomorrow.
Just to be clear, I’m not trying to imply that characters in fiction can’t or shouldn’t be flawed. Imperfect characters make them more relatable and more human. What I do want to point out is that for decades white readers of Gone with the Wind either didn’t recognize or refused to grapple with Scarlet’s racism. In addition, her stubbornness and refusal to accept reality, and instead attempting to force reality to match her wishes and desires is a flaw, but it wasn’t seen that way by many readers.
That attitude of “I refuse to accept reality and I’ll deal with all my problems tomorrow,” is about the most American thing I’ve ever heard. The United States is a country of delay, deny, obfuscate, deny some more, until a problem blows up in our faces in the most avoidable way possible. If Gone with the Wind was written as self aware satire, with the goal of ridiculing and highlighting all the flaws and hypocrisies of American culture, then I would be hailing it as one of the greatest and most insightful books ever written. The fact that the book was written without a hint of self-awareness makes it even more authentically American, yet another example of the glaringly obvious truths that America labors to ignore.
This is getting off the topic of The Wrath to Come, but Scarlet’s attitude of trying to get the universe to conform to her fantasies combined with her procrastination remind me the most of the United States’ response to climate change in the early 21st century. I’m simplifying here, because obviously there were millions of people who recognized and worked to mitigate the effects of climate change, and bring about real societal transformation that would see the United States become more sustainable. If, however, I had to describe the US as an individual, I would describe it as a person refusing to truly change their destructive behaviors, and instead plunge headlong into destruction while it dragged the rest of the planet along with them.
One final point before concluding. When I titled the sections of this piece, “America the Book, and America the Character,” that was not a compliment. Those were in fact damning condemnations. The reader might be saying to themselves, “Well duh, at what point would anyone construe everything you just wrote as complimentary, was it even necessary to write that? Who could miss what is so readily apparent?” Who indeed.
Conclusion
The subject matter of The Wrath to Come is as infuriating as it is depressing. A history of violence, impunity, and injustice all in service to a notion of racial superiority so hollow it collapses under the weight of the lightest scrutiny. While the material of the book is disturbing, the quality and consistency of the writing is something I aspire to as an author. I included several quotes in the book that corresponded to the topics I wanted to highlight in this piece, but if I wanted to quote every passage of the book I liked I would simply copy and paste the entire book. I strongly suggest the reader pick up a copy of The Wrath to Come for themselves. Not only will they enjoy the quality of the writing, but the history the book elucidates needs to be understood, no matter how uncomfortable it may become.
Just as important as understanding this uncomfortable history is what to do about it. This process of denial and myth-making can’t be undone by voting for a few different elected officials, that isn’t nearly enough. The only way this changes is that we once and for all confront the real history of this country, our denial and our fantasies. The longer we delay, the longer we refuse to deal with this issue, the more difficult it will be to fix, and the more damage it will do.
Link For The Wrath to Come: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-wrath-to-come-sarah-churchwell/1141267113?ean=9781789542998