Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Friday
Yesterday I recommended the Sustack blog The Editorial Board for political scientist John Stoehr’s counterintuitive insights into the psychology of the Trump faithful. Monetary self-interest will not push voters towards the Democrats, Stoehr argues, and the figure of Barbara Kingsolver’s Nick Tavoularis in Unsettled helps us understand why. Stoehr has a similar take on wealthy Trump supporters who are being hurt by his financial shenanigans. They too, he says, will continue to hang with Trump and the GOP because they get something more important than money from the alliance. They get power.
Stoehr calls this “Plantation mentality,” which sends me to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Stoehr learned about the concept when he worked as a Georgia arts reporter:
My source recalled for me his experience arbitrating contract negotiations between a local orchestra’s musicians and management. He gave up, he told me, because there was no reasoning with the orchestra’s aristocratic donors. They expected the musicians to work for pennies. When they used their lawful rights to demand more, donors saw the move as tantamount to armed robbery. Years later, they [the donors] shut the whole organization down as punishment for the injustice.
Stoehr tells us that the wealthy particularly resent
the constraints that are placed on that power by democratic politics and the rule of law. When you are born believing the ability to control the minds and bodies of others is a God-given right, the law becomes a crime. Reducing lesser mortals to the level of serfdom is an act of liberation.
In Gone with the Wind, we see the sense of entitlement that comes with owning a literal plantation. As Mitchell frames her story, the villains in the novel are the federal troops that destroy the Tara plantation, the federal government that taxes it, and the African Americans who refuse to keep working for it.
From the very first pages we see this sense of entitlement in Scarlett’s three brothers:
Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books….[R]aising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one’s liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.
From the funeral oration honoring founder Gerald O’Hara, we are given the sense that he built Tara all by himself. There’s no mention of the slave labor required–which is to say, Mitchell is no Faulkner and Gone with the Wind is no Absalom, Absolom!:
He warn’t scared of the English government when they wanted to hang him. He just lit out and left home. And when he come to this country and was pore, that didn’t scare him a mite neither. He went to work and he made his money. And he warn’t scared to tackle this section when it was part wild and the Injuns had just been run out of it. He made a big plantation out of a wilderness. And when the war come on and his money begun to go, he warn’t scared to be pore again. And when the Yankees come through Tara and might of burnt him out or killed him, he warn’t fazed a bit and he warn’t licked neither. He just planted his front feet and stood his ground. That’s why I say he had our good points. There ain’t nothin’ FROM THE OUTSIDE can lick any of us.
For her part, Scarlett cannot imagine herself living in anything less than her former plantation splendor. She’d rather die than go back to scratching a living from the land like the pioneers of old, she says. “Tara isn’t going to be like that,” she says defiantly. “Not even if I have to plow myself.” But of course, she isn’t going to plow it herself. As she acknowledges at a more rational moment,
Without the darkies, it will be all we can do to keep body and soul together. Nobody can run a big plantation without the darkies, and lots of the fields won’t be cultivated at all and the woods will take over the fields again. Nobody can plant much cotton, and what will we do then?
Her problem is that the “darkies” she needs won’t work for slave wages. Mitchell weighs in here, accusing African Americans of being shiftless for not coming to Scarlett’s aid. Note how the author characterizes the former slaveowners as “kind-hearted” in this imagined scenario:
The old darkies went back to the plantations gladly, making a heavier burden than ever on the poverty-stricken planters who had not the heart to turn them out, but the young ones remained in Atlanta. They did not want to be workers of any kind, anywhere. Why work when the belly is full?
Today they would be called welfare cheats reliant on government handouts. Trump-supporting CEOs, affronted by workers who want a living wage and pro-union legislation, would rather have Trump burn down the world economy than pay their fair share of taxes and abide by workplace regulations. I’m not sure who feels more aggrieved, the MAGA rich or the MAGA poor.
Plantation mentality is real. They must have their Taras and damn the consequences.
Additional note: When I was a grad student at Emory University in Atlanta, our Professor of Southern Literature–Floyd Watson–created a minor controversy when he penned an editorial for The Atlanta Constitution where he dismissed Gone with the Wind as popular literature and not very deep. If great literature depicts people in their full humanity, one can set Mitchell’s handling of African American characters against works like Light in August and Intruder in the Dust, by her contemporary Faulkner, to see that Watkins was absolutely correct.
