Southern comfort Hollywood remakes the War Between the States Archived article from Nov 2, 2001 By Douglas Frank   Hollywood has a penchant for reworking history to conform to artistry, and few periods in American history have been as "romanticized, eulogized and hopelessly distorted through film as the Civil War," a new book by Bruce Chadwick contends. Chadwick, who lectures at Rutgers on the history of film, has written a highly readable, annotated study of how Hollywood has altered the reality of the confrontation between the Union and the Confederacy, idealized the South, whitewashed slavery and vilified African-Americans. Bruce chadwick reviewed hundreds of fims about the Civil War Photo by Roy Groething/Jersey Pictures, Inc. The book, "The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film" (Alfred A. Knopf), traces the origins of these Southern stereotypes from their beginnings in the 1830s through the 20th century. First novelists, then the theater and, later, the fledgling movie industry presented a picture of the South as "moonlight and magnolias ... trees dripping with Spanish moss, gentlemen drinking mint juleps on the veranda, women prettifying themselves for the ball and countless soldiers becoming instant heroes," writes Chadwick, who also teaches journalism at New Jersey City University. More movies have been produced about the Civil War than any other aspect of American history, the author points out. From "Uncle Tom's Cabin" through "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone with the Wind" to later films such as "Glory," film studios have released more than 800 silent and sound pictures about the conflict. More than 600 of these date from the silent era, roughly 1908 to 1916, the years surrounding the 50th anniversary of the war. Most are one- or two-reel films with the major exception of "Birth of a Nation," which has been regarded as both the greatest silent picture ever made and the most infamous. The book asserts that most of these films contain distortions, all from the moonlight and magnolias school, that came to be accepted as fact by later filmmakers: Confederate soldiers are always heroic underdogs; abolitionists are to blame for the war; slaves are helpful Mammies, joyful cotton pickers or tap-dancing entertainers; and Southerners are all wealthy plantation owners. Furthermore, these movies always end with both sides reconciling and returning to a united country, even though "the war caused political and cultural strife that lasted for generations and led to the rise of the Klu Klux Klan, a crippled Southern economy, Jim Crow laws and strident segregation," says Chadwick, who earned his doctorate in history from Rutgers in 1999. "This cultural cleansing and revising seemed necessary to many in order to unite a nation fractured by a four-year conflict that saw the deaths of more than 620,000 American soldiers," the author writes. The war had to be seen in the "rearview mirror of history" as a conflict not started by anyone and having no winners or losers -- just a tragic struggle in which both sides fought gallantly. Chadwick presumes that most filmmakers believed they were telling the truth and offering honest characterizations. "Certainly, everything in their schools, politics and culture in the second half of the 19th century was telling them these stereotypes were the truth." Hollywood producers and directors deliberately forgot about slavery's darker side -- the abuse and murder of African-Americans, the sale of family members -- and contended that slaves were content with their lot. This blatant misrepresentation in film, the most powerful medium of all, "made any true understanding of real history nearly impossible and was one of the causes of the racial strife that exists in America to this day," Chadwick maintains. The most offensive film, according to Chadwick, was "Birth of a Nation," a 12-reel, three-hour feature, based on a Civil War novel, "The Clansman," by Thomas Dixon. Chadwick describes "Birth of a Nation" as "the best and worst silent movie of all time, a film that would, indeed, live forever -- in ignominy." D. W. Griffith's film "used and improved on every device of the Civil War silent film genre designed to reunify North and South and forge a new America," notes Chadwick. But it also "egregiously slandered American blacks and helped to create a racial divide that would last for generations." The film, like the novel on which it is based, depicts blacks during the war and in Reconstruction as rapists, thugs and murderers, and, at the same time, glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. Chadwick says the reporters of the day who wrote about the film "thought it was the greatest film ever made and said so, believing Griffith's version of Reconstruction because everything that preceded it in literature, history and theater had programmed them to accept that view of the Old South." Chadwick discusses this landmark film at length and also analyzes other cinematic treatments in chapters devoted to "Gone with the Wind," Abe Lincoln in Hollywood, African-Americans from Sambo to Mammy, and the Civil War in Western movies. It was not until the post-civil rights era of the 1970s that there occurred a radical departure from the deeply entrenched myths concerning the American 19th century, Chadwick points out. He discusses such latter-day films as "Roots" (1977), the TV miniseries that "became the foundation for numerous fresh analyses of slavery, the war and the war's major figures," and "Glory" (1989), an account of the heroism of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment that serves as a "constant reminder that black people died for their country, too." But these more accurate portrayals did not emerge "until seven long decades after the very first silent Civil War films," Chadwick says. Until then, the screen's version of the war "was founded soundly upon myth, the myth of another land and another people, but the kind of people Americans wanted themselves to be."

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