Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation

The similarities between the two films are so tangible, however, that Gone With the Wind could and should be considered a close progeny of the earlier one. In addition to reviving the plantation myth and using inter-titles to provide a historical narrative that helps to authenticate their fictional portrayal of the antebellum South and Reconstruction, both films were based on best selling novels, both films were praised for their cinematic mastery, and both films were rated the most profitable movies of their time. . . .

. . . . although almost twenty-five years separate the two, The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind appear at similar moments in American history, periods in which the United States is struggling with a depressed economy, massive migration and/or immigration, a resurgent women’s movement, and an ominous world war abroad—crises, in short, which call into question the legitimacy of white patriarchy and open the door to scapegoating. Who better to take the blame than black men and black women who because of color are such easy targets? What better time to recall than the pre-Civil War South when family values and peace and prosperity flourished, as men headed households and women, children, and blacks knew their place—or so the myth goes?

Like The Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind portrays the Civil War and Reconstruction from a Southern perspective and insists on telescoping such public historical events through their catastrophic effects on two particular families. Both films, which begin on the eve of the Civil War, look back nostalgically to an idealized antebellum South in which blacks as slaves and whites as masters live together harmoniously; both films also make a point of showing that there were good Negroes, faithful souls who chose to remain with their masters even after slavery had ended. Last, but not least, both films equate the South’s defeat with the decline of civilization and, as a result, in The Birth of a Nation overtly and in Gone With the Wind covertly, present members of the Ku Klux Klan as honorable men who put their lives on the line in such desperate times to protect white womanhood and to restore white (need I say male?) supremacy.

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It should come as no surprise to learn that Thomas Dixon, author of The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), the novels and melodramatic play from which Griffith adapted The Birth of a Nation, quickly recognized a kinship with Gone With the Wind’s (1936) author Margaret Mitchell and wrote to let her know “not only had she written the greatest story of the South ever put down on paper, you have given the world THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL” (Wood 123). . . . . Mitchell was particularly pleased to hear from Dixon, and to know that he admired her work since, as she acknowledged in her response to his letter of praise, “I was practically raised on your books and love them very much” (Mitchell, Letters 52).

From Ruth Elizabeth Burks, “Gone With the Wind: Black and White in Technicolor,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 21:53–73, 2004.