from Edward D.C. CAMPBELL, THE CELLULOID SOUTH: Hollywood and the Southern Myth (Knoxville, 1981)

This infatuation by both North and South alike with the romantic aspects of prewar life was significant, for the reality was of course quite different and has yet to be appreciated fully in even the most recent films. Actually, the vast majority of homes were of ordinary size; furnishings were more simple than ornate. Massive holdings of slaves were few. Landowners more often than not worked the land themselves, for a life of genteel ease was as rare as in any society. Few women could live as leisured hostesses; men generally were not cultured gentlemen. It was a society of diverse classes and occupations in which the average person was a farmer and a non-slaveholder.

In 1860, almost three-fourths of the population owned no slaves. Of a million and a half white families, a tiny portion could claim membership in the planter aristocracy of wealth, education, and power built upon the labor of others. Only three thousand families could support at least a hundred slaves; fully ninety percent of the "planters" possessed fewer than twenty blacks. But throughout most of their history, the movies presented the mythology of a culture of economic and social units of at least a hundred blacks, an overseer, grand surroundings, and a life of ease.

The South was a section more oriented to dirt farming and land clearing with the help of only the immediate family. The impact of a film mythology accepted by several generations which so completely alters that fact has been enormous. Produced for entertainment, the make-believe became believed. And as the familiar plots were repeated, the common reference point grew ever wider, forming part of the audiences' education. Together, the films were a collection of beliefs which influenced views concerning not just the antebellum South but the economic, cultural, and racial problems of the nation as well. [27-28]