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Causes Won, Lost & Forgotten:
How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War
by Gary W. Gallagher
University of North Carolina Press
Hardcover, $28.00
284 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8078-3206-6
Book Review by Kam Williams
“Films undeniably teach Americans about the past – to a
lamentable degree in the minds of many academic historians. More people
have formed perceptions about the Civil War from watching Gone with the
Wind than from reading all the books written by historians since
[producer David O.] Selznick’s blockbuster debuted in 1939. Even
moderately successful movies attract a far larger audience than the most
widely read non-fiction books dealing with the conflict.”
-- Excerpted from the Introduction (page 10)
To what extent are your beliefs about the Civil War based upon false
myths spun by movies as opposed to the truth? If you think that of the
ante bellum South as a place populated by “cheerfully loyal slaves and
genteel white people,” then your beliefs have probably been
substantially shaped more by Hollywood nostalgia for an idyllic utopia
that never existed than by fact.
This is the contention of Gary Gallagher, Professor of History at
the University of Virginia. As the author of dozens of highly-regarded
books on the subject, he is ostensibly frustrated that his and his
colleagues painstakingly-researched texts tend to take a back seat to
cinematic characterizations of the conflict.
Acknowledging that he’s not a film critic, Gallagher explains that the
purpose of this opus is not to assess the artistic merits of Civil War
movies. Nonetheless, he does dissect the genre in terms of historical
accuracy. Among the classics thus assessed are such so-called classics
as Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation (1915),
though he also focuses on a host of relatively-modern offerings,
including flicks like Cold Mountain (2003), Glory (1989),
Dances with Wolves (1990) and Gettysburg (1993).
We learn that D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was
originally titled “The Clansmen” because it was based on an
unapologetically-racist novel of the same name. Between its depiction of
freed blacks as depraved and their former owners as paternalistic and
kindly, the film painted a sympathetic picture of the Confederacy.
Similarly, Gone with the Wind blamed invading Union soldiers and
carpetbaggers for upsetting the peace of the longstanding slave-master
relationship typified by Old Sam’s assuring Miss Scarlett, “Don’t worry,
we’ll stop them Yankees.” In general, these epics present rabid rebels
like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis as beloved heroes while slave
revolt leader John Brown and Union General Sherman are treated as cruel
for having dedicated themselves to eradicating a benign institution. In
the upside-down world created by Cold Mountain, “Virtually all white
southern women… are either indifferent or deeply opposed to the war.”
The book also discusses the War between the States from an
African-American perspective during a discussion of The Confederate
States of America (2004), a feature film directed by Kevin Willmott,
a black director. Overall, Causes Won, Lost & Forgotten is an
excellent read, likely to leave you rethinking long-held attitudes about
the Civil War and wondering how much you might have been manipulated by
movies in forming those opinions.
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Lloyd Kam Williams
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 Lloyd
Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who
writes for 100+ publications around the U.S. and Canada. He is a member of
the African-American Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics
Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee, and Rotten Tomatoes. In
addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from
Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam
lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.
IMDiversity.com is committed to presenting diverse points of view.
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