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It’s no secret that Hollywood over the past three decades has not been kind to the South or to the Confederacy. The last major films that have in any way been fair or which attempted to be objective about the Confederacy were, probably, “Gettysburg” (in 1993) and “Gods and Generals” (in 2003). But despite general audience approval, the negative reaction to these block-busters by supposedly sophisticated “critics,” and the evaporation of funding for a third film (no doubt affected by the changing cultural climate), Hollywood in recent years has considered the South, and in particular, the Confederacy, toxic, racist, and a cesspool of “white supremacy.”
But it was not always that way. Indeed, during the mid-twentieth century Hollywood directors and producers released literally dozens of films which reflected the continuation of a cultural trend that began a few decades after Appomattox. That trend was one of national unity—unification—of recognizing the nobility, sacrifices and honor of those hundreds of thousands of men who wore the gray, and welcoming them back into the union. Certainly, slavery was condemned, but as most historians and political leaders of the period recognized, that issue was in the past. Indeed, former Confederate officers of higher rank served in the Spanish-American War, under the Stars and Stripes, including notably “Fightin’ Joe” Wheeler, Fitzhugh Lee, Matthew Butler, and Thomas Rosser.
This emphasis on unification and the recognition that Confederate veterans were honorable and deserving of respect produced the widespread movement in the early twentieth century to erect monuments in their memory all through the Southland, most notably and impressively the Arlington Monument, sculpted by the internationally-famous sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, and strongly supported by four American presidents.
Likewise, in the relatively young cinema industry, centered by the 1920s in Hollywood, California, the unification theme and the nobility of the Confederate soldier appeared on the big screen, with such films as “So Red the Rose” (1935), starring North Carolinian Randolph Scott and based on a novel by Southern Agrarian Stark Young. But in was later in the ‘30s and 1940s that the Confederate theme became a dominant emphasis in films coming out of Hollywood. And, indeed, not just movies about the Confederacy and the Confederate soldier and his experiences, but the production of a number of superb productions which were frankly quite favorable to the South, its history and its culture.
Most filmgoers are familiar with “Gone With the Wind” (1939), still considered one of the greatest films ever produced, despite the contemporary swirling controversy over its “racist” and “white supremacist” elements. Anyone who tunes into the Encore Westerns Channel is liable to catch such major productions as “Jesse James” (1939, with Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, and Randolph Scott) and “The Return of Frank James (1940, with Fonda). And there are others, which I reviewed in June 2014, March 2021, and February 2022.
In particular, it is the period between 1938 and 1946 that I would consider “the golden age” of positive, Southern-themed movies. Not only films about the war, especially the “border war” out in Missouri and Kansas, but also very sympathetic portrayals of traditional Southern domestic life and concerns drew thousands to the box office.
I’d like to consider five such films, each one excellent and worthy of viewing, yet mostly unknown to Southerners. And these are in addition to the earlier films I discussed, which mainly deal with the War and its aftermath.
First, and the earliest of the group is “The Toy Wife” (1938), set in antebellum Cajun Louisiana and lavishly produced by MGM. The film heralded the studio’s newest starlet, German actress Luise Rainer, who had already won two Oscars for her work in “The Great Ziegfeld” (1936) and “The Good Earth” (1937). In some ways it was MGM’s answer to Warner Brothers’ hit, “Jezebel” (1938), starring Bette Davis.
Rainer is the lead female character, Gilberte “Frou Frou” Brigard, who has returned from strict convent school in France to her father’s immense plantation in Louisiana. Just as in “Gone with the Wind,” released a year later, Frou Frou is flighty and has a “devil may care” attitude towards practical things, including a possible future husband. While infatuated with the debonair and undisciplined Andre Vallaire (Robert Young, best remembered for the long-running TV sitcom “Father Knows Best”), she ends up in a loveless marriage with the far more practical and worldly George Sartoris (Melvyn Douglas). Her downfall occurs as she and Vallaire escape to New York, only to suffer from a fatal case of pneumonia. Her sister, Louise (played by Barbara O’Neill), finally persuades George to allow a repentant Frou Frou to return home to see her young son and to die.
Parallels with “Gone with the Wind” abound. Indeed, Rainer was considered for the role of Scarlet O’Hara, a role which eventually went to Vivien Leigh. Both films concern the domestic lives of large Southern Catholic planters—the O’Haras in Georgia, the Brigards and Vallaires in Louisiana. Both feature large casts of black actors who live and work on the respective plantations. And in both households the extended families are called together for regular evening prayers.
In “The Toy Wife” the relationships between the Brigard slaves and Frou Frou are close and familial. When she first arrives back from France, Frou Frou is introduced to all the house servants. As she asks their names, she spies a young woman partially hiding under the circular stairway. She asks: “And what is your name?” The young slave responds: “Ma’am, I ain’t got no name.” Frou Frou responds tenderly, “I will call you ‘Pick,’ because you are the smallest pickaninny on the plantation, and you will be with me from now on!”
“The Toy Wife” is available in an inexpensive, three-DVD set in the Warner Archive Collection, including two other Rainer films, “The Emperor’s Candlesticks” (with William Powell) and “Big City” (with Spencer Tracy). It’s in black and white, but in every way a stand-out production and a fascinating window on antebellum life in Cajun Louisiana.
The remaining films in my review are all set in the first third or so of the twentieth century, and each in its own manner offers an endearing account of the survival of Southern traditions and heritage, and how diverse families meet challenges confronting them.
The film “Maryland” was a big budget Twentieth Century-Fox color production, released in 1940, with deluxe casting of Walter Brennan, John Payne, Fay Bainter, Charlie Ruggles, and Hattie McDaniel, who had already established herself as a major player in “Gone with the Wind” (for which she was to win an Academy Award).
In contemporary America we are too apt to think of Maryland as one big suburb of Washington, DC. But Maryland was traditionally a Southern state, and this film reflects the long and honorable Southern tradition of fox hunting and racing champion horses. Charlotte Danfield (Bainter), the owner of a large estate, once the center of aristocratic horse breeding, has gotten rid of her stables because her husband was killed in a fall during a hunt. And she has forbidden her son Lee (John Payne) from riding in an upcoming competition. Unknown to her, her former horse trainer William Stewart (three-time Academy Award winner Walter Brennan) has continued to train horses, including the offspring of the horse that Charlotte’s ill-fated husband had ridden the day of his death. The film has an exciting and heart-warming conclusion.
The character of the gambling-prone servant Shadrach (played by Ben Carter) serves as the film’s comedic centerpiece. As Hattie McDaniel’s husband, Shadrach can’t resist wagering away any money confided to him. Finally, he is persuaded to attend a revival where he “gets religion.” The scene must be viewed, as it is one of the funniest on film (I am surprised that Fox released this commercially, given the climate we live in).
On DVD it is available on Twentieth Century-Fox Cinema Archives Collection.
Next is MGM’s black and white “The Vanishing Virginian,” released in 1942, directed by Frank Borzage, and starring Frank Morgan (remember him as the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz”), Spring Byington, and North Carolinian Kathryn Grayson, whose exquisite soprano voice in heard during the movie. The story is based on the memoirs of Rebecca Yancey Williams and is an affectionate chronicling of the life of the Yancey family of Lynchburg, Virginia. Beginning in pre-World War I times, “The Vanishing Virginian” traces the history of the Yancey family and its head, Robert, who was prominent in Virginia politics for several decades. But it is also the recounting of how Southern and Virginia traditions survived and met the headwinds of the twentieth century, including women’s suffrage. In the film’s prologue, the voice-over announces: “This is the story of a vanishing era when simple men so loved their country, their families and their friends that America became a better place in which to live. Such a man was Cap’n Bob Yancey.” The proud heritage of the “Old Dominion State” is never far from center stage in this heartwarming production.
Then there is “Colonel Effingham’s Raid” (1946), another Twentieth Century-Fox production, a relatively short, black and white film, of 70 minutes, but a true gem just the same. It stars Charles Coburn as Colonel Will Seaborn Effingham, who returns home to Fredericksville, Georgia, after years in the US Army, there to be received by his young second cousin Albert Marbury (William Eythe) and by his older cousin Emma (the versatile actress Elizabeth Patterson). Effingham is full of spit-and-polish and begins to write a column for the local newspaper. Suddenly he stumbles upon the plans of the town fathers, who are mostly Yankee transplants only concerned about the almighty dollar. They intend to tear down the historic courthouse which dates from the antebellum period and perhaps remove the giant Confederate monument commemorating Fredericksville’s honored dead. Effingham launches his final “raid,” organizing the citizens and the UDC in a campaign to save the historic courthouse. He even demands that thirteen live oaks be planted around the Confederate war memorial to honor the thirteen states of the Confederacy.
Effingham finally convinces the town officials that the courthouse should remain and be appropriately repaired, not torn down. In the final scene, we see Effingham in his military uniform reviewing members of the Georgia National Guard as they march off to muster (the film is set in 1940). As they pass in review, the band strikes up the sound of “Dixie” to an enthusiastic crowd.
“Colonel Effingham’s Raid” is also available on DVD in the Twentieth Century-Fox Cinema Archives collection.
The final film under review is perhaps the best, and certainly the most openly pro-Southern. It is “Virginia” (1941), a lavishly-produced, Technicolor Paramount feature, in a sense that studio’s answer to the major films from Fox and MGM celebrating the South. And what a film! Starring a young Fred MacMurray (yes, he of “My Three Sons” and several Disney outings), Madeleine Carroll, Sterling Hayden, and Louise Beavers, the movie recounts the return of Charlotte Dunterry (Carroll), heiress to the old Dunterry family plantation in northern Virginia. The plantation house, reportedly designed by Thomas Jefferson, has fallen into disrepair, and Charlotte who has spent much of her life in New York, intends to sell. MacMurray, whose name in the film is Stonewall after the great general, is a neighbor and fierce defender of Southern heritage and tradition. He tries to convince Charlotte to stay on, not to sell. The return of an ancient black retainer, Ezechiel, home to Dunterry house to die persuades Charlotte that she, too, should stay faithful to her family and her traditions. And she orders that the giant portrait of her Confederate officer grandfather be hung once again in the central hall.
One rewarding scene occurs when Charlotte suggests that Southerners should just get over the war which was, she asserts, about slavery. Stonewall, or Stony as his friends call him, quickly corrects her and explains that Yankee overreach and aggression were responsible for the war, and, indeed, for much of the resulting poverty that has afflicted the Southland.
Of all these films, the most difficult to find on DVD in decent quality has been “Viriginia.” The reason may be obvious: it is avowedly pro-Southern and pro-Confederate heritage, and Yankees come in for a cinematic drubbing. After sampling several releases, all of them in horrid quality, I finally discovered a copy available via eCrater, sold privately by the seller filmfan502. Despite being most likely a third generation copy of a VHS tape, the somewhat faded color film is watchable without distortions and reasonably priced. No, it’s not state-of-the-art Technicolor, but it’s acceptable until our culture changes and some enterprising company issues a superior reproduction. “Virginia” is worth searching out and is recommended to any Southerner interested in a favorable view of our traditions and heritage.
Interestingly, each of these five films boasts actors who were staunch conservatives and traditionalists. Charles Coburn, with his distinguishable monocle, was from Georgia and never forgot his roots; John Payne was from Arkansas. Both men were involved in conservative causes. Frank Morgan and Walter Brennan were also noted for their very conservative politics, as was Fred MacMurray. Brennan was a strong traditionalist Catholic, stating in 1964, “I’m too old not to be a religious fella…. It appears we are losing something a lot of people made a lot of sacrifices for.” And in 1968 he endorsed George Wallace for president.
In those days it was not a sin to be a conservative and traditionalist in Hollywood, and the South and its history were seen as excellent subjects for positive moviemaking. The result was a number of superior films which should be better known. Moreover, given the present vicious anti-Southern and anti-Confederate bias vomited out of Southern California, serious Southerners could do well to acquire these films. They will guarantee hours of grand entertainment, but also tell engrossing stories on screen about our ancestors and their history.
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Another outstanding film that treats the South (and the ‘Rebels’) very respectfully (and gives it to the carpetbaggers) is ‘The Outlaw Josie Wales’. This film stars Clint Eastwood and was also directed (!) by Eastwood.
This excellent, modern Western rivals the so-called Spaghetti Westerns in tone and spirit and is one of Eastwood’s very best. Highly recommended.
The multi-season TV series “Hell on Wheels” (2011-2016) struck me as unusual given the portrayal of the protagonist Cullen Bohannon. This fictional character is a former slave-holder and Confederate officer who, shortly after the end of the war, is tracking down the former Union soldiers who had murdered his wife and son during the war. Bohannon is portrayed sympathetically and emerges as a flawed, tragic, but ultimately heroic figure. The previously fought war is portrayed as having left many former soldiers on both sides with deep and abiding psychological scars that are reflected in their behavior in the series’ various sub-plots.
Yes there is increasingly noticeable PC nonsense during the series (especially the final season), but it’s hard to imagine the same script and TV series ever getting approved and financed today. The TV series was not that well-received by the critics, but judging from the reviews on Amazon, viewers were much more positive. You can watch it for free on Tubi:
https://tubitv.com/series/300000081/hell-on-wheels
Good article – thank you! One can agree with Lincoln and still appreciate the South’s many charms. As Americans did until about a decade ago.
Agree with Lincoln? Anyone who would admire that sick bastard would undoubtedly love all of our past and present genocidal Presidents, most recently George W. Bush. By the way, it was Lincoln and his cutthroats that destroyed what you call “the South’s many charms”. Wise up Jimbo!
The United States was a free and voluntary federation and the individual states had every right to separate themselves whenever they saw fit. Or so they thought.
Northern mercantile interests were using immigration (!) as a way of controlling the House of Representatives and often the Senate, leading to the progressive economic strangulation of the South. Tariffs in particular primarily affected the South while the proceeds were used to develop the North.
Another film told from the Southern point of view was. “Ride With the Devil”, an adaption of Daniel Woodrell’s excellent novel “Woe To Live On”. The film was suppressed at the behest of the NAACP, proving once again that the only thing leftists are good at is erasing history.
Excellent article. From a guy that was “born an American, Southerner by the grace of God.”
It’s claimed that the war wasn’t a Civil War because the South didn’t want to take over the government; they just wanted out of the present system and to have their own government. It would probably have been better had they wanted to take over the government, for they had an excellent opportunity when putting the Union Army on the run at the battles of Bull Run.
Seeing how things are now, one wonders how those Southerners would presently govern us had they taken over the Yanky Government so long ago. Given the time that has passed, they, too, would have probably been corrupted.
Another southern state in Florida has just felt mother natures fury, she has made a statement about Ron DeSantis tilt at the top job…since she has no thumbs then its next best thing, trees down!
Good film, a little bit “Josey Wales”, a little bit “Cold Mountain”, but better. Director Ang Lee hasn’t been known as a Southern propagandist, before or since.
“Copperhead” about the trials of the northern peace party isn’t bad. Better and more moving is “Field of Lost Shoes” with its narrow focus on VMI cadets and their charge at New Market.
Thanks for the reminder. “Ride With the Devil” is buried on the shelves, due for another turn.
the development and spread of railroads drove this change, which evil agents used to unleash that war – of brother against brother.
There was another one I thought was very good, but I can’t remember the name of it. The movie was about a couple of Southern war widows who were trying desperately to avoid the depredations of some marauding Union soldiers, and ended up killing one of them and hiding the body. Ring any bells?
The South is such a deadly boring subject that I looked at this article in case whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. You know, see if I could take it. It’s good to be open-minded, right?
OK, Confederate Generals wiped out Malay wogs for America, that’s a fun fact. Southern goobers continued to be military cannon fodder for bullshit US wars when they lost their own. Stumpy arms and legs and rubber balls and Nam flashbacks and divin’ under the bed whenever a Harley goes by, that’s the South we know and love! It’s fun to to sneak up behind them and yell, Incoming!
But then I tried to read about those movies and my blood just clotted up all at once like I got 10 polyvalent m-RNA Flu/COVID/RSV/The-vapas shots and I barely got out of the paragraph alive. Holy fuck the South is fuckin boring.
Mercy!
Sounds familiar but I have no idea. I’m going to work on it though. What era? How recent?
I’ll take Civil War films for $50, Alex,
….. Civil War film, widow buries Yankee soldier,
What is “Pharoah’s Army”?
(I’ve never actually watched Jeopardy, hope I’ve got the format right…. and the answer.)
A brief but interesting article at the Turner Classic Movies website gives some useful and occasionally amusing background anent Virginia and its cast.
In some ways, the next-to-last sentence, which reports the critical reaction to the film by the New York Times, is the most interesting thing on the TCM page, in that it shows that, when it comes to the Sulzberger family and its open contempt for everything white and Christian, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose is the order of the day, whether the year is 1941 or 2023.
COLD MOUNTAIN and RIDE WITH THE DEVIL are okay.
Fox Hunting is not honorable. All those big men on big horses with all those dogs chasing after poor foxes to tear them apart. Ugly.
There’s a reason very little innovation comes out of the Southeastern USA (Texas is a little different in that regard). Here’s the reason:
… that and the dedicated Bible thumping = minimal creativity and innovation.
Yes, Hell on Wheels was largely a very well made, sympathetic to the South and the Confederacy’s struggle for independence – but, notice how the jews who produced it had to shove black male, white female race mixing into it. They just cannot resist their hate driven urges to rub the White man’s nose in the racial defilement of his females. And, in the end, Cullen Bohannon succumbs to ‘Yellow Fever’ and hops on a ship heading to China to chase after the Chinese girl he had been playing hide the salami with after two unsuccessful relationships with two White women, one of whom was killed by the Big Swede for no discernible reason. This character was played by Dominique McElligott, an incredibly beautiful and talented actress and I read that she asked to be written out of the series because of the hardships she had to endure for weeks and months on end, filming on location; she was apparently a city-girl and not accustomed to the harsh natural elements at the filming locations. I was sorry to see her character killed off.
I was really impressed by the performance of Anson Mount in the role of Cullen Bohannon. I expected him to appear in many more high caliber movies after he finished Hell on Wheels, but I’ve only seen him cast in small and relatively minor roles since. I think he would excel as a Western character, a.k.a., with Clint Eastwood no longer a viable Western star due to age and poor health, Anson Mount has a niche just begging to be filled.
Some time ago, I read a book called “The Superhistorians,” by Canadian academic historian John Barker. Not everyone on his list was a professional historian. Walter Scott, the Scottish novelist was on his list for example.
I contacted a colleague of Barker’s and suggested that maybe Clint Eastwood belonged on the list of superhistorians for his cinematic treatment of historic themes over a long body work in which he was variously actor, producer, director and writer. Barker himself was still alive at that time but no longer contactable as a faculty member.
“The Outlaw Josie Wales” was the first contemporary work of cinematic Civil War revisionism. War figured large in Eastwood’s body of work.
The South is evil and I hope trannies groom your kids in schools as punishment for owning slaves.
According to Victor Davis Hanson, at the time of the Civil War, seven percent (7%) of U.S. households owned slaves. Of course many of these households were in the North, so the households-with-slaves percent in the South was even lower. One would never divine that the households-prevalence was 7% from Hollywood’s depiction.
And a giant by the way. You don’t harvest 750,000 (the new, high-tech superior figure) lives to end a practice afflicting 7% of households. A practice that was fast ending in the western world anyway. You fix the 7% problem in the other obvious ways. But no, our worst president opted for the harvest-750,000-lives method. Of course, severe resentments linger to this day.
Whenever it’s break time at the daily Mossad circle-jerk, Supply and Demand graces this site with a display of his (her? its?) limited vocabulary and degenerate mind-set.
Smelling the intellectual and moral stench of this Jew serves as a reminder to the rest of us of how much there is to be grateful to our Maker for—starting with not being him/her/it.
There’s a scene in GWTW that features just such an event, where Melanie and Scarlett off a Union marauder and bury him in the garden.
The time is coming to close the Hollywood business and let a true cinematographic art nurture and develop. Much of the blame for the tragedy that the world experienced came from there.
The grand daddy of all pro-Southern films is ‘Birf of a Nation’ which even President Wilson praised. This film casts the KKK as saviours, robin hoods, and liberators. I remember viewing the film in the 1990s and thinking how similar the Reconstruction state house scenes were to the current Detroit City Council meetings.
Numerous anti Southern films of the ‘Tobacco Road’ variety came out during the Hollywood period.
Nothing remains of the antebellum South. The entire Confederacy is now a ruin like Angkor Wat completely covered with Negroes and kudzu. What few whites remain are as fat as Elvis from eating Mississippi mud pies and fried pickles; these types know nothing of fox hunts, mint juleps, and hoop skirts.
He plays Captain Pike in Strange New Worlds.
Btw, the only new Star Trek Paramount has gotten right. (Aside from the ST musical – ok, the singing Klingons were hilarious, but what were they thinking?)
If you, or another true Southerner on this thread would express an opinion on Cold Mountain, the novel more than the film, it would be of interest.
I see that Priss rates the film quite highly, I did not like it much. Asked Mr. Cathey before, but he never replies here.
The scene in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly where Leone treats a battle in the war of Northern aggression as a kind of background prop always impresses me as cinematic art.
Having read Gangs of New York, if the C.S.A. had connected with the anti-draft rioters, they may have won. It was a civil war in itself. However, the Southern officer class would never have considered that.
Would have been far more effective than a tiny raid into Vermont.
Many of Mr. Cathey’s listed films sound interesting, so copying the links.
Other than blacks, homos, along with their fellow Jews, what group has Hollywood been kind toward?
Recently watched Chinatown. In ’74 there was less overt propaganda, especially in a film set in the late ’30s, but a scene where upscale whites are called out for not wanting to live around Jews. Typical slur–rich white man screws his 15 year old daughter; hidden at the time, movie goers had no idea how the Jewish director got off on drugging and raping 12 year old white girls. That would come out later.
Thunder Road is a pretty decent low-budget drive-in style Southern oriented film, although Robert Mitchum was really too old to play his more youthful part. Anyone who has driven backroads through Asheville, Kingston Pike in Knoxville, through Bearden, and up to Memphis can easily tell that those rumrunning ‘ways and days’ are gone, and short of catastrophe, they’re not coming back.
You can’t piss in only one side of a pool. Take a look at all the homeless crackheads defecating on the street in California,New York, and Portland.
That’s because you chose to keep prosecuting a war against the South that has been over for more than a hundred years through cultural poisoning.
There isn’t a bomber who isn’t missing fingers from his own devices blowing up on him.
There isn’t a poisoner without traces of his own poison in his system.
Likewise,the tools of your terrorism are killing you as well. I hope it is worth repeatedly “winning” your war against ghosts of a fiction that was largely created in your own mind. I hope it is worth it to you to not be able to walk down your own streets without watching a mentally ill drug addict masturbating in a tent.
I hope that when your last moments on this Earth come,as they must come to us all, that you believe killing dead men and revelling in the glories of others,also long dead, instead of pursuing glories of your own and standing up for what is right today rather than relitigating the issue of slavery which has been illegal since before your grandfather was born was a life spent well.
I would guess you don’t have chickens.
TCM had to put up a warning recently when it showed “Gone With the Wind” in case some viewers got a case of the vapors from something or other in the movie. A famous line a an old Humphrey Bogart movie is where he tells another fellow, “That’s mighty White of you.” One of my favorite lines, they removed it. Oh well, the New England Puritans won, what are you going to do? This must be how the Irish felt when Cromwell was running the show over there.
Lol why did you put an exclamation mark next to directing? Eastwood is primarily known as a director.
Agreed with the comment…brilliant film. But my favorite Eastwood film is the highly underrated supernatural western High Plains Drifter.
If early Hollywood favored southern themes it was because they had something to gain, namely, their increasing stranglehold on the industry, similarly, now they are going in the opposite direction, again, because Jews gain from it. Save a few romantic ones Jews don’t have loyalty to the South any more than to the Yankees. In the end, all roads lead to Jerusalem!
Serious question: Are you older people(above 65) happy that soon you’ll be gone from this cesspool of a rock(Earth) which is deteriorating at unimaginable pace?
Someone told me(born in 42), he was so glad he got to have the best of western culture in his younger years….70s,80s and even the 90s. Because with each passing year the quality declines. Today’s teens and 20s had nowhere the amount of fun, happiness or joy that the older generations had and its so obvious to see. Looking at anything from cars to movies to music and one can see how the quality has degraded.
So….where was “Song of the South” and Uncle Remus? I mean, it established the “punching the tar-baby ” metaphor which has become the base-line political tool in DC, since shortly after AIPAC was cleared to operate w/o having to register as a Foreign Agent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Foxes_(film)
How did “The Little Foxes” not make the list? This is one great film.
Thomas D Lorenzo wrote a book titled ; The Real Lincoln. Other than Lord Acton’s writings. ; our libraries are full of books praising Lincoln for “Saving the Union”. Our ” saved” Union is a dilly. As the ancient philosophers said ‘ Conventional Wisdom is usually wrong. Our Government’s current support for the Ukraine is a recentexample.
1) Like many TV sitcom dads, Fred MacMurray is a terribly underrated actor, due to his bland later roles.
2) Another fine film in a sympathetic southern vein — the 20-minute adaptation of Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge. The Ambrose Bierce short story has a well dressed southern dude miraculously escape a Union Army hanging and make a break for home, as his loyal wife hopefully awaits. The highly acclaimed French short from about 1960 was even shown as a Twilight Zone episode, and is worth tracking down online
I’m in no rush to “be gone,” but yes, culture — movies, TV, music and even literature — were more fun 40, 50 and 60 years ago and people seemed more happy, or at least less angry. As science fiction always warns, the internet and social media did not come without some unintended consequences.
I watched this film, I think in the 1970’s and the “Black Flag” was not used. It was a Confederate flag which sometime after it was blotted out and replaced with a “Black Flag”. This always pissed me off.
Slavery could not have survived as a source of cheap labor after the Industrial Revolution. The employees of the Northeastern mills were much cheaper. The employer didn’t have to provide housing or food, though I understand that some of them did.
I was thinking about how TV portrays the South (and rural areas in general) and of course it’s not good. But CBS way back when used to be the most sympathetic of the networks to small-town folk. I’m personally not familiar with the series but Dukes of Hazzard was a big hit for CBS, so I’m assuming southern viewers found it acceptable
I am very familiar with The Wild Wild West, and it’s interesting that their standout episode — surprisingly serious rather than the usual tongue-in-cheek spy fun — centered around a Union atrocity against a Confederate colonel and his household. A mysterious ghost rider arrives for retribution in The Night of the Returning Dead, which aired on CBS around 1965
Interesting how neo-confederate retards never talk about the Rothschild money that backed them or Judah Benjamin leading the charge to war or the poor jew slave traders and jew capital they died defending. We never hear about jews owning 80% of the land in South Carolina at the time or Charleston establishing the oldest synagogue in North America.
Lincoln refused banker money. Lincoln intended to ship the niggers back. Lincoln nationalized money printing, out of grubby jewish hands. Lincoln understood the power of one strong nation. For this, the jews killed him.
Go read your torah and worship to rabbi yeshua, Dixie faggots.
Those sympathetic Southern films that were produced between 1938 and 1946 were released during a period of total war with Germany. The US government was very concerned about the loyalty of Southerners…or at least their enthusiasm for war with a nation (Germany) that espoused a doctrine of special treatment for Europeans. These films were designed to instill a sense of unity among Southerners by flattering them. Naturally, when the North and their sycophants had gotten what they wanted, the film industry turned on Southerners. We see the results since the 1950s. After all, with Germany subdued, who would champion the rights of white Southerners? Certainly not Hollywood.
I’m from Wisconsin and live in Dalian, China. Democrat cities are ruined by Southern reverse-carpetbaggers who get addicted to fentanyl. They are weak losers, just like their ancestors were.
The quip that Lincoln saved the Union at the expense of the Republic seems about right to me.
What survived after Appomattox is not the same as what had existed prior to Ft. Sumter, any more than what survived under Augustus was the Roman Republic. In each case the new entity mimicked some of the formal aspects of the old, but both were clearly different from what preceded them.
You gonna pull them pistols or whistle dixie
Supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do. Look down the road at what Putin intends to do when he’s finished with Ukraine. Fortunately, he’s not going to get his dream.
Video Link
Not just some unintended consequences, the internet is the reason there is so much chaos in the world. Everyone is agitated, on the edge, waiting for their comments to get a like or response to get their quick dopamine hit. Even as recent as the late 90-early 00s things were fine. Then with fast instant broadband, social media and instant streaming all went south. The internet will be the reason all humanity will collapse. I believe this.
I’d love to have grown in 70s, 80s or 90s America that I saw in those movies. Everything was sunny and good..
Do we bury them, Josie?
Buzzard’s got to eat, same as the worm.
I remember a time when nobody had a computer in their home, much less in their pocket
For that matter, nobody had a phone in their pocket either
Things were pretty ok, though I am still mulling over the apparent persistent undertones of dissatisfaction present in suburban America during the 1960s & 1970s
Compared to today, that was paradise
Will we someday look upon current times with a similar sense of longing?
I certainly hope not, but I wonder…
Does the old southern aristocratic snobbish culture have anything in common with southern white trash culture? I dislike both.
I very much enjoyed this article. Another movie about the South that I recall from the past is the movie “Dark Command.” Below is the Wikipedia review of it. The movie Starred, Claire Trevor, John Wayne, Walter Pidgeon, and Roy Rogers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Command
I was born in 1950, and I was fortunate to enjoy a pretty nice time in America as a child growing up. The movies were great, and I never missed watching Roy Rogers and Dale Evans on Saturday mornings. The Western movies always entertained and usually promoted good values.
The quality of life certainly has changed, and one only needs to look at old photos going back 100 years or more to see that homo sapiens is a regressing species. The quality of life has definitely degraded and continues to go lower.
I wish the internet was around for the disasters caused by the snivel rights act and immigration act, courtesy of jews
Putin is a proximate danger to the Jewish goal of total world domination. What he intends to do after the Jews decide that losing Ukraine is better than further exposing themselves as the prime movers of all international conspiracies is to work out a way to sell oil to Germany so that the Jewish plan to complete the destruction of that nation begun in World War II won’t happen in this generation. Deal with it, troll.
After Indian woman leaves:
Josie Wales: Where’s the woman?
Chief Dan George: She was lonely. She went back to her people.
Josie Wales: Too bad. Just when I get to likin’ somebody, they ain’t around much longer.
Chief Dan George: I notice when you don’t like somebody they ain’t around much longer neither.
The Outlaw Josie Wales and Chisum. The two best Westerns for me.
Before Thomas DiLorenzo’s THE REAL LINCOLN there was Charles C. Minor’s…. THE REAL LINCOLN, published in 1904. Minor was a veteran and so was an eye-witness; if nothing else he can’t be accused of revisionism. It has been reprinted a number of times and is probably easy to find.
Minor’s THE REAL LINCOLN is, of course, similar in point of view to DiLorenzo’s THE REAL LINCOLN.
“Deliverance” is another good one too.
I’m only half-joking, it’s a good movie, and in some ways close to the grotesque characters of Southern Gothic (Faulkner, O’Connor, etc).
Weak losers don’t elicit the need to continuously kick a dead horse. That’s what you do to something that you’re seriously afraid will get up and beat your ass.
You don’t beat a 95 pound woman down and then keep kicking her in the head for 36 hours straight and then go, “Well,I’m doing this because she’s a weak loser”.
You don’t empty a clip on a baby kitten and then go back and reload and then dump 15 more mags in it,because it’s so weak, unless there’s something seriously wrong with your head.
I mean,you could just be a complete psychopath I guess if that’s what you want to run with.
I was going to just say you were a pussy having a hysterical hissy fit. That’s something that people can understand and maybe forgive but maybe you are so psychotic that you want to spend around 200 years waging war on a group of people who never did anything to you who aren’t even fighting you back just because you feel like they’re an easy target to vent whatever feelings of sexual inadequacy you have on because you’re not in touch with reality and aren’t capable of feeling remorse or compassion like a normal human being.
The General is an amazing film due to the acrobatic hijinks and comedic timing of Buster Keaton. That being said, the best soundtrack is performed by The Alloy Orchestra. It is the finishing touch to a nearly flawless film. Keaton would’ve loved it.
Video Link
I have not read Cold Mountain. The movie doesn’t do much for me; I’m not a critic – it’s okay. The opening scene at the Crater is pretty great but it’s like a scene from a different movie. Otherwise, the only thing at all ethnic about it is Renee Zellweger’s character and it’s most interesting when the story revolves around her.
It must be hard to make a film about the homefront and have it remain about a War between the armies of two countries. The best description of war on the homefront I’ve seen is a book by William Gilmore Simms which describes the treachery among neighbors in South Carolina during the Revolutionary War, allegiances at times changing from morning to afternoon.
You’re probably right about the Gangs of New York and anti-draft and -war sentiments. The fatal problem of the South was largely of its own making, failure to realize the resolve of the war powers in the north. Civil authorities, including the Commander in Chief, share responsibility. General Lee warned of it at the beginning and correctly, I believe, designed to turn public opinion against the War by crushing the Union army. The strategy of defending every crossroads failed from the beginning, as did the forlorn hope of foreign assistance with the Emancipation Proclamation.
This may be more – or less – than you hoped for.
The “space Western” Serenity (2005) – a spin-off from the TV series Firefly – has the lead characters reeling after being on the losing side of a civil war. Writer/director Joss Whedon’s sympathies clearly lie with the “Confederate hold-outs” so if sci-fi appeals you might enjoy spotting some of the parallels with the American Civil War.
As much great dialogue as there is in JOSEY WALES, the scene that get’s me every time is one not driven by dialogue – the last one, in the saloon, Josey dripping blood after dispatching Redlegs, one-time co-rider turned reluctant antagonist Fletcher, acknowledging the fight is over and letting Josey ride off to Texas.
A great piece of film, I think.
Virginia is called “The Old Dominion” not “The Old Dominion State”. While undoubtedly a state, it is technically called a Commonwealth, like Pennsylvania and at least one other. As someone born in Maryland fox hunting can suck my balls. And it really should be called “fox chasing” or “fox bothering”. Or “fox murdering”.
#22 @ SafeNow:
Biden’s old but he’s not that old. It bears remembering that his (adopted) state, Delaware, was a slave state after the War of Northern Agression, as was supergay fox hunting Maryland.
#42 @ Emslander:
It’s like you don’t understand what employees do with their wages.
#39 @ Known Fact :
He was the highest paid actor of his day, so… no.
Ten Bears in “Josie Wales” was played by Will Sampson, who also played “Chief” in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”; great acting in both cases. I don’t know if he received any awards for those roles but he should have.
A raid into Vermont is still a good idea!
What is he going to do? They told us over fifty years ago that after North Vietnam took South Vietnam they were going to roll into Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. We all know how many Amercian lives that bullshit story cost. If you want to help Ukraine grab your rifle and go, no one is stopping you.
Because it’s a chick flick.
For the past 10yrs+ , it has been mandatory Every Thanksgiving to watch Gone with the Wind, my daughters choice and The Godfather my personal choice. I must confess that my favorite film about the antbellum South is JEZEBEL..I remember the young Henry Fonda recently return (married) from NYCity, much to the chagrin of Jezebel. The best and key scene for me is when Fonda addresses the local WHITE elite, boasting about war wit the North. Fonda tells them of the fuming/humming huge factories running constantly. He tells them of paved roads, bridges, SEWAGE system while the South still suffering form massive deaths from Malaria, and no military weapons output, no banking financial sophistication. Fonda warned them about the futility of War with the North..a fight that the South will surely lose. But the Southern “gentry” deepen in Souther values will not hear. It is curious but there is no iconic Southern Film Festival..celebrating the arts/culture/film/music of the Southern Historical Legacy..specially the culture born along the Mississippi Delta., where the Anglo/Afro/French/Spanish/ tributaries produce Jazz/Blues/Faulkner/etc. The South shall rise AGAIN..
Catherine mentions large southern plantation owners by name…. is that historically accurate?
Is this sarcasm? I lived in those days and can testify that not everything was “sunny and good.” At no place and time in history was everything benevolent. Movies select what to show about any era, depending on plot needs and the film’s writers, directors, and producers.
An interesting sidelight: most thinking young people (not entirely an oxymoron) seem to idealize a period about one generation back, that is, when their parents were young. I went through that stage and have since noticed it frequently in others. Something in the human psyche craves nostalgia, even for imaginary times. The folklore of many societies studied by anthropologists includes the belief in a Golden Age.
As for the setting of approximately one generation earlier, there’s enough in that frame that is comfortingly familiar; it’s not so different as to be disconcertingly alien. But it’s always possible to cherry pick aspects of the present that a young person dislikes, that were absent 20 or 25 years earlier.
It’s an odd feeling to have lived through a time that others have not experienced themselves and want to believe was so much better. This happens more often when growing old.
Is The Outlaw Josey Wales the film where Clint Eastwood punctuates every line he speaks by spitting at an insect or something? That takes real acting talent.
You’re right, he was a big star and amply rewarded at the time. I’m talking about people who only know him from stuff like My Three Sons and his Disney movies, and not his classic films from the 40s and 50s
Outstanding, Mr. Cathey — and thank you so much as always, Mr. Unz. This longtime Southern rights activist has researched your subject for years. (Hooray, things are looking up for the Arlington monument.) Believe it or not, I had a great-aunt Charlotte who lived in a “plantation house, reportedly designed by Thomas Jefferson” — ‘Brandon’ in Halifax County, Va. The timing of 1941’s “Virginia” oddly fits.
A marvelous obscure film in our genre that I’ve seen is John Ford’s “Judge Priest” with Will Rogers and Hattie McDaniel. I maintain that 1957’s “Tammy and the Bachelor”, set in Louisiana, is great Southern celluloid. It’s too long (notably her speech in period costume) but funny, touching and romantic. Flicks I mean to investigate include DeMille’s “The Warrens Of Virginia” (1915).
Perhaps you’d like to give us an encore performance on pro-South TV programming through the decades. There’s more to the Beverly Hillbillies than meets the eye. May I warmly recommend the late 1950s “Gray Ghost” series celebrating the War Between The States exploits of Maj. John Singleton Mosby? It’s absolutely superb despite some drawbacks: the star is an ugly New Yorker with horrible nose job. The music track constantly pounds ‘the Yellow Rose of Texas’ (a hymn to miscegenation), almost never featuring ‘Dixie’.
Well we do speak our minds freely around here — don’t we? ;]
One of my favorite movies is Inherit the Wind, with towering performances by Spencer Tracy, Fredric March and Gene Kelly (as the wiseass reporter). The Scopes courtoom battle is brilliantly written — but also terribly loaded against the 1920s Tennessee townspeople
This is “New South” rather than “Old South,” but how could I almost forget the popular CBS sitcom Designing Women? And the more recent video series Sh*t Southern Women Say. They are at least a little kinder to the South than the usual depiction of bigoted hayseeds.
Notice he hits his mark every time.
I wondered about that comment too, because the movies of the 70s were excellent but often quite dark, not sunny. But while Vietnam did cause a lot of political strife, once that was settled fewer people were as political and polarized as you see now. Politics to most people was boring stuff that boring old guys took care of. The 70s and 80s — even with serious economic ups and downs — was “sunnier” than today in many ways. Even Watergate was just kind of a soap opera, it did not divide the country like the current goings-on
LOL, think I know what you mean, having read of several Noo Yawk transplants, not that I’ve ever been near there.
The old raid sounds like bad failure to follow orders given what Sherman and others did at the time or very little later.
I used to want to visit the U.S.A. at some time, but most of it sounds far too dangerous now.
If you still read books, Cold Mountain is a better novel than film, but many points in it are hard to believe.
Most of interest are not in the film.
Given the movies you mention you may have seen The Return of Frank James, Henry Fonda as James and the great Henry Hull as his lawyer in a barn-burner of a courtroom scene as he defends Frank and the South.
Also Follow That Dream with Elvis Presley: A vagabond family traveling through undeveloped Florida decides to homestead by the shore. It’s all matter-of-factly Southern without any heavy-handed message. The bonus is Elvis in one of his most clever, affecting roles. He was a very talented guy.
Hell on Wheels was excellent and despite all that was listed because ‘current year,’ it still was even-handed in its treatment of the civil war.
It was filmed near me (Calgary), careful viewers will note that 1895 “Omaha” looks a lot like Heritage Park.
It’s a sad series ultimately as basically all characters die or suffer. Bohannan has nine lives and goes through total ruin. He does run to China but after that much heartache it’s understandable.
The South is fascinating and will remain so all the way up to civil war 2.0.
And wow, Colm Meaney!
Lincoln’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase summed it up when he said, “States Rights died at Appomattox”.
A veteran of the conflict concisely predicted future consequences, noting in a letter, “The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.”.
Thank you! I’ve never heard of either and will seek them out. Elvis is a Southern traitor but we won’t go into that. So glad to see others offering up titles here.
I’m a Danville native with Richmond passions. You?
CHRISTIAN PERSEVERANCE AND SOUTHERN VICTORY AFTER APPOMATTOX
By Winston McCuen – South Carolina
Outsiders travelling through the South often remark on the large number of churches here compared with other parts of America. Billboards with Christian messaging about sin and repentance and Jesus and salvation greet passers-through on major interstates, cheering some and vexing others — attracting or repelling thereby — according to the viewer’s spiritual condition.
While the modern, more industrial and commercial, 21st-Century South is certainly far more lax in its faith, and far less Southern, than in former times, its comparative faithfulness, as a region among regions, is beyond dispute.
The South’s persisting power to cheer and attract, and to vex and repel, is evidence of its persisting cultural life and identity, rooted in older and truer Christian practice. And this persisting power raises two questions for the Providentially minded.
Why is the South more Christian than other parts of America? And what role will the South play in America’s future?
The short answer to the first question points to ultimate causation: Because God, in His good pleasure, dispensed grace thus, for some deep and unfathomable but perfect reason(s). That is why Southerners, to this day, and especially in Confederate circles, both proudly and humbly self-identify as “American by birth, but Southern by the grace of God.”
The longer answer to the “why more Christian” question is a complex historical web of proximate or intermediate causes. Since colonial times, many factors have formed and eroded and reformed Southern identity and the Southern mind and outlook.
Before the War for Southern Independence, an agrarian South, grown up from colonial and frontier struggles, inclined to deep dependence on the Lord for His favor in sustaining that way of life. In the years leading up to what Southerners call “the War”, the agrarian South, drawing from the experience of its revolutionary and secessionist struggles against Crown and Parliament, responded to aggressions on multiple fronts by an increasingly commercial and industrial and philistine and Godless North.
These Yankee aggressions included: legislative warfare by unconstitutional tariffs aimed at systematically defrauding and plundering the Southern people; vitriolic and false-philosophical moralistic agitation over slavery aimed at subverting the South’s wise and stable social system of ordered liberty; and tyrannical political machinations aimed at reducing the Southern states from voluntary co-equals and partners within the Union to conquered provinces.
In the period from 1815 to 1860, Southern intellectual victory over the North — both inside and outside the halls of the federal government, and on the full range of policy issues of the times –preceded Southern military defeat in the War. Southern champions including John Randolph of Roanoke, John C. Calhoun, and James Henley Thornwell — by true philosophy and true theology rooted in Scripture — crushed by refutation all forensic opposition from the North.
Specifically, in the period from 1830 to 1860, by the mysterious operations of an All-Wise Providence, the work of defending slavery by Scripture rendered the South, as a people, more Christian than ever before. Searching the Scriptures for proof texts, Southern apologists found ample and overwhelming confirmation of their position in both Testaments of the Bible. Indeed, the whole exercise of defending the peculiar institution against Yankee abolitionist attack — by immersing Southerners more deeply in the Word — rendered the Southern people more Scriptural and orthodox in their Christian faith. For the Southerner, sound faith and well-run society were linked, as were unbelief and anarcho-tyranny.
Meanwhile, the corresponding inability of the North to defend abolition or emancipation by Scripture moved the North to abandon Scripture and to deny its Divine authorship. This disgraceful abandonment and denial were preferable, in the eyes of proud Yankeedom, to admitting error before God (and the South) and to repenting for officious intermeddling in and subversive agitation against social arrangements with Divine authorship and sanction. It was in fact this disgraceful abandonment and denial — like another Fall of man — that set the North and its people on the path of total metaphysical rebellion against God and His hierarchically ordered creation, a rebellion now known as Yankee-Marxist “progressivism.”
So, this Southern intellectual and forensic victory in debate over the North — combined with the North’s profoundly sinful reaction to that defeat — explains in part how the old-time Calvinist faith of the pilgrim fathers in New England withered and was finally totally subverted in favor of secular, atheist, and materialist French “Enlightenment”, Emersonian Transcendentalism.
But these glorious and truly Ciceronian and Pauline forensic victories by the South over the North during the antebellum period, while confirming the faith of the Southern mind, fueled bitter Northern hatred that would prove vengeful. And so, after the war of words came the shooting war.
And the War, of course, further developed Southern identity and stamped the Southern mind in profound and indelible ways. Four years of heroic, bloody, self-sacrificial struggle for hearth and home and political independence — against a hateful and heathen foreign invader bent on total war and total domination and the total spiritual destruction of a Christian people — could hardly do otherwise. But the military conflict, following hard on decades of heated debate, galvanized the mind of Southerners as nothing else could against all things Yankee.
Overwhelmed in the end by superior numbers and materiel, an ever-defiant Southern people resolved — after a thoroughly exhausting war that left their physical world in ruins — to persist spiritually in being Christian and Southern.
Defying all “reconstructive” efforts to wipe out Southern identity and to assimilate the conquered people as pliable and faithless subjects into the Yankee empire, the people of the South persevered under a Yankee military occupation that stretched in South Carolina until 1877 — over a decade after Appomattox. From 1865 until the 1890s, the Southern states were either under direct military occupation or under the threat of re-invasion and re-occupation.
Throughout this period and up to the present, Southern patriot redeemers, bent on redeeming the militarily conquered South from evil Yankee influences, have asserted themselves in their Christian-Southern principles whenever and wherever possible, opposing, reversing, and ever acting as a conservative brake on the lunatic and demonic policies of atheistic Yankee egalitarianism.
These redemptive assertions by Southerners since 1865 have been by recourse to the Christian classical republican principles of constitutionalism, ordered liberty, and race realism that had characterized the Old South. And this now brings us to answering, at last, our second question: What role will the South play in America’s future?
Today, in 2023, the “one and indivisible” United States — the old nemesis of the Christian South — is rapidly spiraling downward and falling apart socially, morally, economically, politically, and spiritually. Since Appomattox, the Yankee United States empire, as General Lee predicted, has become “aggressive abroad and despotic at home.”
Under Biden the Usurper, an atheistic United States now wages war against Christian Russia on the other side of the world, while deliberately holding its own border wide open to Third World invasion, for anti-white and thoroughly corrupt partisan political reasons. Under Yankee atheism and forced political centralization, America has murdered over 63 million infants by abortion since 1973, putting all atrocities attributed to the Nazis, for example, in the shade.
Since Appomattox, Yankee imperialism and globalism, aimed at world domination, have made the United States the most hated and despised country in the world, and put us all at risk of nuclear annihilation. And with a “federal” government now dominated by carnal or anti-Christian Jewry, all manner of homo-trans perversions are being forced on Americans just as America, ruled by corrupt oligarchs, leads the world in child sex-trafficking.
But against the wicked Yankee empire, the Christian South still stands as principal bulwark and brake and rallying point and beacon of hope. Her long tradition of resistance to tyranny; the inspiring examples of her great heroes; the powerful and striking and unequivocal Christian symbolism of her quintessentially American Confederate battle flag; and the simple and strong and enduring and persevering conservative Christian faith of so many of her people today –these together render the South the natural and inevitable leader of future, free America. And sure signs of this leadership are the heavy blue-to-red-state migration now underway, along with regular states’ rights pushback by Southern governments against wokeness and DC.
Southern strength and Southern perseverance, now as yesterday, are rooted in the Christian faith of her people. And the core of Christian faith is the love of truth. And this Holy love, implanted by the Lord in the elect when born again, is what sets believers apart from unbelievers.
Victory by perseverance in Jesus the Truth and in all His truths is the grand and unstoppable strategy of the Christian South. Jesus’ central political truths include: constitutionalism, with its clear recognition of sin nature and the need to constrain it; ordered liberty, by which quanta of freedom are allowed to each individual according to his fitness to exercise it responsibly; and race realism, the recognition that Divine distribution of common grace gifts of intelligence and character, according to His All-Wise plan, differ between both individuals and the races of man.
The Almighty determines, according to His perfect wisdom, the times when good enterprises succeed in this earthly life, and when they do not. The duty of man in every era is to strive for the Good.
In the 1860s, on every issue, the South was right and the North was wrong. Though defeated militarily, the South won by being drawn closer to God. Though winning militarily, the North lost by being further alienated from the Lord, like the reprobate man given over to his all-consuming sin.
In the grand scheme of human history, the War for Southern Independence was but a single battle, and the conflict between Christian goodness and atheistic evil rages on over the earth until Judgment. And as the wheel of Providential history slowly turns, by Christian perseverance, by God’s grace, the South is now, in the 21st Century, achieving victory after Appomattox over the wicked and atheist Yankee United States.
————————-
Winston McCuen is a metaphysician and political philosopher and Christian apologist. He is a Reformed believer, native South Carolinian, proud son of the Confederacy, and outspoken Southern patriot. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in philosophy from Emory University, is a John C. Calhoun scholar, and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University in history and philosophy. Formerly a welding instructor, philosophy instructor and Latin teacher, he holds multiple welding certifications and is a senior certified nuclear metallurgical welding engineer.
“Pharoah’s Army” is a superb 1995 movie about all this featuring Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson with a stolid Kris Kristofferson in a minor role. Call it indy or low budget, I’m not sure which it is, but it airs the issues vividly and organically in dialogue.
Its greatness is showing afresh the North as bestial and the South as its rape victim. Something tells me this message is unintended — you get the feeling a moral equivalency was the narrative goal. (The sickening mess that ruined “Gods And Generals”.) Everything’s tolerance tolerance tolerance nowadays, and when Mama Anders tells Boy “Get that dead yankee out of our yard” I think they want you to hate her for it.
Glad you asked 🙂
I’ve got centuries-old roots in Richmond, worked there and around it for decades, would never have lived there but always enjoyed claiming it at a distance and appreciated it’s charms. I’ll never again breathe it’s fumes except under legal summons. I live a little too close to it but Richmond is all yours.
I love Virginia, even if it’s just a state of mind. I think the same of NoVA as Richmond. I’ve lived in different areas in central Va. but was raised and live in South Side. I like the pace and the little bit hardscrabble nature of the region versus others. I felt it when the FBI agent texted his girlfriend, “Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could smell the Trump support”.
I’m familiar with Danville, S. Boston, the 58/360 corridor, etc., living somewhat between it and Richmond.
I’ve written down “Pharoah’s Army” and a few others from this thread. I’m going to look for it on Roku when I get a chance.
Boy, I agree about “God’s and Generals”. What a mess. It’s still one of my favorite movies as long as I’m armed with fast forward. I think Steven Lang is great as Gen’l Jackson, Duval very good as Lee. I think the Chancellorsville attack scene is great and inspiring and the culmination of Jackson’s mortal wounding as he road past his lines seems as dramatic and deflating as when I read classic written narratives; the lighting of the scene really enhances it, I think.
There are other things I like about it – the events in Lexington at the beginning are pretty good and Kali Rocha as Mary Anna Jackson, also. I think maybe if they’d left out the winter camp and the people at the plantation would’ve helped. Also Jeff Daniels.
You seen the director’s cut version with John Wilkes Booth? It’s different but sort of interesting.
LOL, is the pollution unusually bad in Richmond? My passions are for the city of childhood vacations 60+ years ago — realize it’s radically changed since then. Last time I was there every stranger I talked to was a yankee. (N.b. no prejudice — I grew up in NJ and NY.)
No surprise if it’s politically more like NoVa now, e.g. hellish liberal. I honestly believe the Commonwealth to be an extra-extra-special place, a country all its own of unusually nice wholesome people — below the Fredericksburg level at least. Alas Virginia is as bowdlerized politically as my present homeland, South Carolina.
Wish I could agree about G&G. From the wishy-washy (if beautiful) opening song to the dull, incomprehensible closing one by Bob Dylan it’s clearly aimed at making both sides look equal in nobleness and Good Intentions.
Sure, it was funded by trouble liberal Ted Turner and might not have otherwise gotten made, but I’m left wondering if that’s why he put up the money — to yank its message leftward. Maybe it’s the same in the book.
G&G’s an impressive production — I’d like to see it again sometime. All I’ll say.
Born in the Deep South, raised in Yankee land and now back home in the Deep South for good. Great food, climate, terrain and a pride for our neck of the woods that I never felt or witnessed up north. Take THAT, Cultural Marxism!
actually “get that damn yankee out of our yard”
but it works both ways
great movie
underscores the hate in war
nicely put
thanks
(Sigh…). So little time, so many books. Reading is what I do – for as long as I can stay awake… and stay off the computer. Movies are for when I know I’ll fall asleep.
I’ve already found reviews of Cold Mountain. At least the author is a native. There’s always the question of when the book will be read, being always dozens behind. They still keep me company from the shelf with maybe a short conversation by opening it to random pages for a few passages. I confess to having read exactly two historical novels, Killer Angels, and Traveller (sort of the memoirs of Lee’s warhorse). Memoirs and biographies seem of more interest.
I also read Gone For Texas after seeing The Outlaw Josie Wales countless times so maybe Cold Mountain will find a turn. I’ve got a list and it’s inexpensive in used condition so I’ll take a flyer.
That veteran, if I recall correctly, was Robert E. Lee, writing to Lord Acton.
He was prophetic.
I believe if the movie had limited focus to the soldiers and the battlefield it would have been a fine work. If it had begun with Jackson’s and his wife’s goodbyes in Lexington, skipped the civilian elements and the enemy’s moralizing, and ended with the triumphant attack at Chancellorsville and his wife by his deathbed it would have been a great story of Stonewall and his and his country’s calamitous fate. Fog of war, limiting narrative to what the principals know, is a strategy that served Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers well.
Stephen Lang captured Jackson and was the strength of the film, I think Duval played Lee with accurate reserve and resolve. The book wasn’t just the story of Jackson and what I’ve described certainly doesn’t follow the narrative of the book. As you allude to, the film probably wasn’t going to be made any other way.
Notwithstanding strong elements, I’m talking about a movie that doesn’t exist. I should find someone to edit my own Gods and Generals.
It’s not the car exhaust, it’s the people. They hate me and I hate them. It’s best to just stay away. I’m not interested in being a good sport. Lee was a gentleman, I’m not.
You should guess it’s the statues. It’s not the removal – my father, a native, told his sister 50 years ago the statues would one day come down. If it had been a measured legislative action I would’ve accepted it. It’s their city. As it happened, by the authorities essentially recruiting a mob to deface them, followed by public dismantling with saws and torches, removal and ultimate disposal and melting them down, I’ll make no attempt at good will. There are people that would’ve fought to receive the monuments after removal.
I’m fine with it. The thing that interest’s me most is what’s in my mind. I don’t need them.
According to other sources, about one-quarter of all households in the slave states held slaves. The same sources say, in the North, there were very few to no slaves whatsoever. Maybe, given the greater population of the North, the seven percent figure for the total percentage of all U.S. households holding slaves is not wildly inaccurate however.
The real problem with your argument though is that it ignores another fact about slavery. A while back, I did my usual speed research and determined that about one-third of all slaves lived in units where there were only a few slaves, one third lived on what could properly be called farms, and one third lived on classic plantations.
Obviously, the plantation owners represented the numerically smallest class of slaveholder, but they were the most important class. They constituted the aristocracy and upper class and held all of the high and even not so high offices in the political system. These were the people who did have something large to lose, or at least believed that they did. These people represented a group who were not easy to deal with. Many of them of them were astute people and they understood very well that any attempt to confine and limit the institution of chattel slavery in the end meant the end of the institution and the end of their way of life. Of course the arc of world history and the arc of world economics were against them. That made them only more determined to resist. I don’t think any in that era had a clear idea of what was up ahead. The industrialization of the North that occurred after the Civil War would have occurred if secession had succeeded and would have occurred the same if there had been no Civil War and no secession. But, in 1861, who knew it?
The plantation owners and their families were the one percent of Southern society. They were about one percent of all the whites, literally.
There we are — a movie that doesn’t exist. I thought both Lang (a jew no less) and Duval were pitiful and highlighted the producers’ total lack of Southern understanding. UGH that scene where Stonewall discusses clavery with his slave — UGH. Is that the one where he prays privately too? UGH on that bit o’ business. The expressionless Duval looked about 84 years old 😉
Yes, an especially hateful day in the never-ending thug war against history. They should call it Monumentless Avenue, or maybe Ashe-Heap. I’m sure the enthralling tennis hero’s image remains.
Gen’l Lee was, indeed, prophetic.
Smart, too. He summed up what was to come 150 years later in less than 50 words. The Victor Davis Hanson’s of the world wax interminably in column after column, book after book – for a fee – trying to explain to us what we’re seeing.
I’ll say I’ve spoken with historians, re-enactors and family over the years and without exception there is approval of Lang’s portrayal of Jackson. I know Lee – and the Lees – well. They miss the mark with evident age of Duval but Lee largely kept his own counsel and was undemonstrative by habit. We can disagree.
I am at the wrong place for defending Jews but let me introduce you to Moses Ezekiel. Born in Richmond, he enrolled at VMI after Ft. Sumter. While there he was part of the Honor Guard in the interment of Gen’l Jackson and was part of the cadet corps called up in the Valley to defeat the Yankees at New Market, May, 1864. Wounded in the battle, he received aide at a nearby farm, while there comforting his friend and fellow corps member who lay dying, Thomas Garland Jefferson. Near the end Jefferson asked his friend to read from the New Testament, John, Chapter Fourteen. Ezekiel objected, “But I am a Jew”, Jefferson assuring him, “That doesn’t matter’.
Ezekiel ended the War in the defenses of Richmond and returned to VMI to graduate in 1866. Becoming a renowned sculptor in later years, while living in Rome he kept a Confederate battle flag prominently displayed in his studio. He retained interest in the Cause, being commissioned for “Virginia Mourning Her Dead” at VMI, under which some of the KIA of New Market are buried.
More notable is his sculpture at Arlington, the Reconciliation Monument, the status of which hangs in the balance at the moment. I believe Ezekiel is buried there, having died in Rome.
Does Ezekiel being a Jew diminish his service to his country or the country itself? Interesting conversation either way.
They should have stuck with the Articles of Confederation, instead they overthrew that government, and replaced it with Federal overreach from the Whisky Rebellion onward, an unconstitutional tax on a domestic product [Where the real story is that the locals were using whiskey as currency in local trade, cutting out buying scrip from bankers on the East Coast.], to the current Federal mess.
USA could have been Confederation America, and like Switzerland, both the States [Swiss Cantons] and the People have a vote on National referendums.
Hence the South referred to itself as The Confederate States of America.
It’s interesting that when Hollywood was at its most Jewish, it was the most sympathetic to the South.
Is it possible to look or act more stereotypically Jewish than Selznick??? And yet he was a Republican who gave us the most famous (and sympathetic) depiction of antebellum Southern life on film.
That this should be passed over on this site is a wonder.
I read in a Newsweek article (which I can no longer find) long ago that there were over 10,000 political bombings in the U.S. in the 1970s, almost all by far leftists, of course. And that decade is almost universally agreed upon by celluloid buffs as the grimmest ever for movies. Most of its iconic / cult films – e.g. Apocalypse Now, Westworld, A Clockwork Orange, Alien, Halloween, The Exorcist, Straw Dogs, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Taxi Driver, Coma, The Godfather I & II, Suspiria, Walkabout, Eraserhead, The Andromeda Strain, Carrie, Don’t Look Now, The Black Hole, The Radical a.k.a. Katherine (based on the Weather Underground, who committed many of the bombings mentioned earlier), Capricorn One (which revealed that NASA fakes its landings), Marathon Man, Mad Max, Solaris, Dog Day Afternoon, The Boys From Brazil (which revealed that Hitler successfully fled to Argentina), One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Vanishing Point, Watership Down, The Stepford Wives, The Man Who Fell To Earth, Dark Star, Superdome, Picnic At Hanging Rock, Sorcerer, Midnight Express, Zabriskie Point, Flowers In The Attic, Burnt Offerings, Logan’s Run, Chinatown, The Day Of The Locust, Airport 1975, The Driver – are known for being dark and unsettling, with The Shining, Altered States, The Fog, & other nerve-wracking classics following in ‘80. (Admittedly some of those weren’t set in or made in the U.S., but they were all from the suddenly-anxious Western world.) So I’m not exactly sure what you’re referring to. I’m not trying to make you look bad; I was gonna name about 5 flicks, but got on a dark roll & decided to go with the flow.
In exchange for the “Allies” killing millions of Europe’s fittest young men to help create Israel, the Juice gave Americans two decades of near-paradise from the mid-‘40s to the mid-‘60s. Then they began to tighten the screws (Civil Rights Act / desegregation, Hart-Celler, flower power, “modern art,” Nam, MK Ultra, etc.) We know they were successful because today the screws could not possibly get much tighter, as we live in an endless cold civil war with our money nearly worthless & the kids all wanting to be non-binary. This is how Juice reward those who help them. If you watch those (([films])) from the ‘70s-‘90s more closely, the predictive programming will reveal itself. The films of the ‘70s were the ramping-up of the psychological war against Westerners, since every major filmmaker over the last century has been a Freemason or owned by the military-industrial complex.
The Swiss had their own civil war, the Sonderbundskrieg.
Much less fratricidal furor and a more equitable aftermath, however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War
Amen.
I have long seen a virtual parallel here with the hundreds of independent German duchies and principalities that were effectively destroyed by Napoleon and left resourceless and defenseless to Bismarck’s scheming.
Despite what the mainstream victor’s history says to the contrary, the thirteen independent states (= nations) that agreed to a fraternal confederation founded upon their largely common past and related travails and their racial and religious ties were near-ideal environments for people whose goal was the maximizing of their own freedom. The moneyed and propertied classes, as usual, had other ideas.
Your major premise is faulty. Hollywood is even more Jewish now than it ever was before. Moreover, thanks to their having played their cards with care for the century-plus of Hollywood’s existence, its masters have contributed mightily to the creation of an audience that swallows whole everything put on its plate.
Lol, the fucker is a half-Hungarian-migrant with a stick up his ass, and one who follows the absolute gayest-tier globalist form Catholicism out of personal convenience and spite, the kind that will see Bantus flooding China.
You reek of the kind of later, bitchier White migrants. What was your Mom’s bloodline, anyway? Ironic of course, as a lot of the later Catholic and Orthodox white migrants tended to be the most based, being on the receiving end of the “urban planning” fuckery of Northern industrialists and Evangelicals who wanted to “break the papist and white backs” by dumping BNs on them.
A good litmus test for historical awareness is to ask people what nation D.W. Griffith is referring to in “Birth of a Nation.”
Nothing remains of the antebellum South.
Indeed. And their successors still haven’t learned their lesson. Fairfax County has MS-13 gang activity, Metro Atlanta is a hellscape.
Is there any example from history where importing a cheaper, browner helot class actually worked out okay?
“A good litmus test for historical awareness is to ask people what nation D.W. Griffith is referring to in “Birth of a Nation.”
A southern elite who brainwashed their brethren into fighting for their interests.
Foxtrot Oscar Kilo India Kilo Echo.
This guy must be a helluva lotta fun at parties. Talk about a turd in the punchbowl …
A film worthy of this list but left out so far as I could tell is “Santa Fe Trail” starring Errol Flynn as Jeb Stuart and Ronald Reagan as George Custer. It depicts “Bloody Kansas” and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry,Virginia and depicts John Brown, played excellently by Raymond Massey, as the psychopath he was in real life.
Answer: yes. I just assume the way I’ll die is getting my head kicked in or being set on fire by a group of jigs or jig wannabes. But don’t know how you could list cars as something better pre-2000.