I don't know how many of you noticed, but there's a new article on our Gone with the Wind Goodies page touching on a less known aspect of Margaret Mitchell's activity: her role as a benefactor of Morehouse College. Starting with 1942, Mitchell secretly funded the medical education of Morehouse graduates, through an agreement with the president of the college, Dr. Benjamin Mays. It really is an inspiring story, and the way she conducted this philanthropic act speaks well of her discretion and generosity.
A documentary on this theme was very recently released, and if you live anywhere near St. Augustine, Florida you might be lucky enough to attend a free screening. Part of the Andrew Young Presents series, the film is called A Change in the Wind and tells the story of the interaction between Margaret Mitchell and Benjamin Mays. We missed the chance to let you know about its official premiere, which was in Atlanta, on August 24, but here's the next best thing. The film will be screened on September 3 at the Flagler College in St. Augustine Florida. Here are all the details, on the Flagler College's page:
I read about this screening on the lovely Facebook page GWTW...But Not Forgotten. If you're not fans already, why don't you drop by to say hello, raise a thumb, that sort of thing?
Oh, and if you do attend the screening, or were lucky enough to have attended the premiere, drop us a line and let us know how it was!
Editors' Note: Earlier this month, we featured a guest post by Shaninalux called Margaret Mitchell, Her Biographers and the Conclusion to Gone with the Wind that addressed issues of (mis)representation by MM's biographers surrounding Mitchell's preference for an open-ended conclusion to GWTW. Featured prominently in that post was a reference to the Everett Report--the critique of the rough draft of GWTW that Professor Charles W. Everett of Columbia University submitted to Harold Latham of Macmillan Publishers at the latter's request.
While the full Everett Report has been lost to the sands of time, there was interest in the comments about cobbling together what could be found of it from various sources, and Shaninalux kindly offered to compile it for us here, at How We Do Run On. Her compilation is below. We've also added the Everett Report as a page on the side bar for future reference. Many thanks again to Shaninalux for her help! --iso and Bugsie
The Everett Report
From “Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta” by Finis Farr (1965):
There really are surprisingly few loose ends, and the number of times the emotions are stirred one way or the other is surprising. I am sure that it is not only a good book, but a best seller. It’s much better than Stark Young. And the literary device of using an unsympathetic character to arouse sympathetic emotions seems to me admirable.
This is the story of the formation of a woman's character. In the peace and quiet of plantation life before the war, in the crisis of the Civil War, and in the privation of the reconstruction period. Pansy O'Hara inherits an aristocratic tradition and charm from the mother, Eleanor D'Antignac of Charleston. From her father, Gerald O'Hara, who has left Ireland as the result of a shooting, she inherits most of her qualities--aggressiveness, courage, unscrupulousness, obstinacy, and charm. By the time she is born, O'Hara has won a stake in the new world of Georgia and he's accepted by his neighbors for his courage and generosity. Pansy has lived her seventeen years in luxury without even knowing that it was luxury. Her greatest problems have been those having to do with clothes and flirtation.
Aww, we got a Sweet Friends blog award from Kendra at Days in Mayfair. And it has cupcakes too! (Doing our best not to go aww again and/or break into a rendition of Julie Andrews singing "My Favorite Things," after reading Kendra's title. Failing of course.) Thanks, Kendra, we heart you!
The rules:
1. Post who gave you this award.
2. State ten things you like.
3. Give this award to 10 other bloggers and notify them with a comment.
Now, we would be happy to give this award to 10 bloggers but the thing is, we're new around here and only had time to discover a handful of blogs. They're all very cool blogs, though, and we'll tag them at the end.
As you know, ours is a collective blog, so instead of having two separate lists, we've decided to go for a list of things we like together and post it under The Old Guard account. Here goes:
1. Gone with the Wind
She needs kissing badly
This one is pretty obvious. After all, you're here reading a Gone with the Wind blog by us, aren't you? Besides, this obsession passion deserved to go first, simply because without it we would have never met, so naturally we wouldn't have had any common list of favorite things to share with you.
2. White wine
This row? Endless. Cheers!
Second on our list comes...booze? Naturally, considering the fact one of us voted to reduce the list to "books and booze" and be over with (name withheld to protect the guilty drunk). Common decency and our need to ramble on to ten topics won, so instead we're just giving white wine a nod. White wine is the stuff we both like and of which we could drink endlessly.
3. Old books
Photo from here.Starry eyes from Bugsie's AW collection.
And the taste of victory, Bugsie adds. You see, her enthusiasm for musty old books is only surpassed by her enthusiasm for finding bargains on musty old books. She has a small collection of 19th century books and devoutly hopes this potentially expensive hobby will never get out of control. Iso, on the other hand, started by being unimpressed, but was gradually won over by the beauty of old books (and the persistent nagging of her co-blogger), and nowadays she'll go "whee!" just as loudly at the sight of some scanned online treasure.
4. Chocolate
This pile? They said it was endless. We proved them wrong
Self-explanatory. How can you not like chocolate? [Bugsie understands if you just pick out the dark ones though. White chocolate is not real chocolate.]
5. Regina Spektor
We actually have pretty similar tastes in music in general, but Regina Spektor scores high on both our lists, so she was the obvious choice here. We love her voice. And her lyrics. And her sense of humor. And her playfulness. You might as well call us fangirls.
6. Procrastination
Well, Scarlett is our role model. After all, tomorrow is another day.... Oh, and by the way, this post? was due yesterday.
7. Cats
One of Bugsie's cats, now in white
If she doesn't end up living under a bridge after she sold her house to pay for old books (which let's face it, is likely to happen at some point), Bugsie will grow old to be your typical crazy cat lady. She started off young, given the fact she already owns three (fat lazy adorable) cats, two of which are black. Iso is a big cat fan too, though for the moment she's content with admiring her parents' cats from afar.
8. The Victorian Age
Fierce
We like history in general, but the Victorian age deserved a nod, since it's more or less the focus of our blog. We first discovered it in connection to Gone with the Wind, but the more we read about it, the more fascinating we find it in itself.
9. England
Keeps the sun out.
Bugsie: okay, we're down to two
iso: how about England then?
Bugsie: England?
iso: I lived there, you like it, you have the UK flag serving as a curtain [very long story, vaguely related to the World Cup.]
Bugsie: oh yeah, England it is then
iso: but wait...didn't we sort of cover it with the victorian age and all?
Bugsie: haven't been outside much in the last century, have you?
10. Words
No, not just words in general, because that would be just weird, wouldn't it? But if you read our blog, you know we love long sentences and lame jokes, and words are instrumental to both, so there you have it: we love words. And just so you know it, we very much prefer the term "word-lovers" to "wordy."
"Best of all things in New Orleans was the food. Remembering the bitter hungry days at Tara and her more recent penury, Scarlett felt that she could never eat enough of these rich dishes. Gumboes and shrimp Creole, doves in wine and oysters in crumbly patties full of creamy sauce, mushrooms and sweetbreads and turkey livers, fish baked cunningly in oiled paper and limes. Her appetite never dulled, for whenever she remembered the everlasting goobers and dried peas and sweet potatoes at Tara, she felt an urge to gorge herself anew of Creole dishes."
--Gone with the Wind, Chapter XLVIII
It's time for another edition of Southern Cookin' and this time, we are bidding the aristocraticcuisine of Charleston adieu and moving on to that "strange, glamorous place" of New Orleans and its rich Creole dishes. As you've surely all guessed, the recipes we've prepared for you come from the quote above, taken from probably my favorite chapter in GWTW- the honeymoon chapter. Sigh, such happy times!
Some quick info on our recipes, which you'll find after the jump: They come from The Picayune's Creole Cook Book, first published in 1901 by The New Orleans Times-Picayune. While the cookbook's publication date marks the first year of the 20th century, many of its recipes are in fact older, as it was partially published to preserve Creole culinary tradition out of fear that the Civil War generation was now dying and, with them, the legacy of old Creole cooking. The Picayune's Creole Cook Book is still in publication today, last published in 1987 with slight modifications to aid the modern cook, and our recipes are excerpted from this version for your convenience, should you like to play Nola chef.
I was able to round up recipes (or close approximations) for all the dishes referenced in the quote above, with the exception of doves in wine and turkey livers. But, honestly, I can't imagine that you'll feel the loss of those two recipes too terribly. At least I hope not because I'm sure you have much business eating doves these days, anyway.
But I shan't run on any more, for our New Orleans honeymoon banquet is all set and prepared for you after the jump. Bon appetit!
Our Margaret Mitchell selection for today actually isn't something written by MM at all. Of course, it discusses her and we think you'll enjoy reading it. It's a 1936 review of Gone with with Wind from the North American Review. A largely positive one, the only faults the author finds with the novel are "its over-embellishment, and the somewhat mechanical quality of its irony." Does the last one call for a defense post? My co-blogger is tempted.
With this we also inaugurate a new page in our sidebar: a collection of links to Gone with the Wind books and articles. We will add articles as we go, so keep an eye on that page.
This post is part of our series A Week in August: The Margaret Mitchell Tribute. Be sure to check out the other posts (here, here, here and here) and leave your comments either here or on the Margaret Mitchell thread.
What better time to shout "Down with Popery!" than in the week we bragged about that most pious set of Gone with the Wind fans, the Catholic nuns? You see, we're all about denominational impartiality here, at How We Do Run On. So, as you probably already guessed, our (somewhat belated) Rhett quote for the week is this:
"Sometimes the rallying cry is 'Save the Tomb of Christ from the
Heathen!' Sometimes it's 'Down with Popery!' and sometimes
'Liberty!' and sometimes 'Cotton, Slavery and States' Rights!'" --Gone with the Wind, Chapter XII
It
is this line, uttered at Mrs. Elsing's silver musicale, that signs
Rhett's exclusion from Atlanta's society. His stand in the entire speech is
that of the perfect cynic, and as such is both hard to dismantle and
extremely insulting for his idealistic countrymen. The current war is
not sacred, Rhett says, simply because no war is sacred. All wars are fought
for money. All other reasons men go to war are just false reasons,
pretexts and empty words fed to them by stay at home orators.
For years I
believed this theory to be true. I think I know better now. I
will try to explain, though, why this was such an appealing world view for me at one time, and why I now consider it to be flawed.
What
Rhett is basically saying is what progressive historians say:
economy precedes and dictates ideology. But then Rhett Butler (or should I say Margaret
Mitchell?) makes this significantly more appealing than any historian
could. I don't know which one you'd rather be, the dashing cynical
captain that harbors no illusions, or one of his compatriots that
MM portraits as naive at best, but for me the choice was simple. *cue
music* Enter Bugsie, the jaded 7-year-old (and yes, my parents were
insane, but hey, MM's nephew had it read to him at age 5!).
For
a long time my view of history was colored by this stance. With the exception of WW2, I pretty much thought any war a "money squabble." It's not
the worst way to be introduced to history either, I hasten to add.
There are indeed economical patterns in history. Let's take Rhett's quote for
example. First, admire its sneakiness, since the first rallying cries
he chose are both from religious conflicts. And if one tried to find an ideological driving force for a war, religion would be the most obvious choice, so Rhett's mining the main counterargument to his theory right from the beginning. Let's see what events he's alluding to, and what economic causes lie beneath each of them.
Catholics against the world - 'Save the Tomb of Christ from the
Heathen!': First we have the famous Crusades,
the campaigns Western Europe waged to recapture the territories
occupied by the Muslims. Did the Crusades have an underlying economic
reason? More than one. Perhaps control over the Tomb of Christ was the
first thing the Christians wanted to extract from the Muslims, but
control over the sea ports at the Mediterranean definitely ranked a
comfortable second. Not to mention the fact that a crusade was a fine
way to occupy some of the warriors the medieval society was so good at
producing and so bad at employing in a constructive fashion.
The world against Catholics - 'Down with Popery!': This a trickier one, since there are few things the world has enjoyed shouting more from the times of Henry VIII forth. One could link a multitude of violent conflicts to this cry, partially the English Civil War and definitely the Gordon Riots of 1780. Its echoes were still very much alive in the 19th century, even across the ocean. Economic reasons? Aplenty, from the larger scale ones related to the monarchs ascertaining political and implicitly economic control over their territories by rejecting the meddling of the Catholic Church, to the particular set of conditions that led to the Gordon Riots and that were only marginally related to the Catholics receiving rights (hint: poverty, low wages, inflation, unemployment. That sort of thing).
The world against Catholics & friends - 'Liberty': Again a pretty general cry, but I am going to assume it refers to thatmost celebrated of revolutionary mottoes(Liberté, égalité, fraternité), especially since Rhett will later compare the Southern aristocrats to the French ones, unaware of the fate lying before them before they climbed into the tumbrils. Again, one can trace multiple economic reasons for the French Revolution, like the financial crisis that preceded it, or simply see it all as passing the power and money from one group of people to another. The same idea applies if he's talking about the American Revolution.
So all three of these events can be (and have been) explained as "money squabbles." But here's the trick: while the economic cause is undeniably at work, it is not the only driving force behind these conflicts. It is very comfortable to reduce everything to money. But it is also terribly simplistic. Just as simplistic as reducing everything to some other cause, be it religion, wish for freedom etc. Took me a while to get it but a) history is complicated, b) cynic is not the definition of "right" and c) cynic is not the definition of "cool." (Okay, the jury is still out on that last one. ) In any case, enter Bugsie, less jaded twenty-something.
Rhett's position effaces some lines that I would like to keep and, in this particular case, serves as a subtle defense of a system I don't want to see either rationalized or defended. If everything is about economy, and nothing about ideology, then there are no moral issues to discuss about in a war. There is no right and wrong. And while that might hold true for some wars, I can't bring myself to say it holds true for all of them.
In any case, I think Rhett employs some dose of bravado when he exposes his views here, just like when he tells Scarlett at the bazaar that money can buy everything. And we know from him enlisting in the Confederate army and failing quite spectacularly in buying his wife's affection that both these stands were quite inaccurate.
