 My name is Polly Russell. I'm the head of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. The Eccles Centre supports scholarship and learning about the Americas using the British Library's fantastic collections. One of the main programmes that we run in collaboration with Hay Festivals is the Eccles Hay Writers Award. This funds two writers every year for an unpublished book focused on some aspect of the Americas which could use research in the British Library. Over the years we have welcomed some fantastic writers, but none more fantastic than Sarah Churchwell and Philip Clark, who were the winners in 2015 and 2022. So I am just thrilled that they're in conversation together. They're going to be talking together for about an hour and then we're going to open up to the audience. So please save your burning questions about Trump, about what is happening with the Supreme Court, what the hell is happening in America for Sarah who will be all ready to answer. So we'll also be signing books afterwards. I don't know how many of you here have read the book or have the book. So some of you can all attest to how it is absolutely riveting. It really is an essential read for anyone interested in contemporary culture and America. It's wonderful. So it's in paper back now. I think it's £10.99 due by a copy. So Phil is going to introduce Sarah, but I want to say a few words about Phil. I've now known Phil for just over a year and it has been a total delight getting to know him. He's got the most infectious, insatiable curiosity which he puts to tremendous use rooting around in the British Library's collections to inform the book that he won the Writers Award for, The Sound of the City, an exploration of what New York sounds like. So I'm so desperate for this book to be written. I was tempted to not let him do this tonight because this is taking time away from him finishing that book. He has written for more magazines than I can possibly list and he's the author of a critically acclaimed and highly original biography of the jazz musician David Brubeck, which explores Brubeck's creativity as both the product of individual genius and also the cultural context of the United States. So he is therefore the absolutely perfect person to be in conversation with Sarah about American politics, culture and life. Over to you. Thank you. I'm a music writer and this gig is slightly outside of my normal area. But I have to say I'm now into my second book dealing with an American subject and your books are foundational text as I explore the issues. You can't write about a music in America and not deal with the issues that your books do. But I think, I mean, I've always been aware of Sarah's work, but I think the thing that has sort of clinched your sort of role in my life was when you knee-capped Piers Morgan on a Twitter after he was incredibly rude about you. My proudest moment now. And hello, Piers, if you're watching the live stream. So that was the other moment. I thought, right, I have to take this lady seriously. And you've written a biography of Marilyn Monroe. There's a fine book about F. Scott Fitzgerald and the whole ramifications of the great Gatsby. And some jazz in that. And some jazz in that, indeed. I defer to you, but there's a little jazz in that. There is a little jazz in that, as there would be in a book about F. Scott. Better be. And then there is, the book after that is A Behold America, which begins with one Fred, a Trump, up to no good in the far right. I mean, you know where that ends. And then this current book, I mean, I wouldn't like to say, well, I wouldn't presume to say it's a sequel to A Behold America, but it's certainly I would say a companion volume. Would that be fair? Yeah, absolutely. A follow-up or even a sibling. Yes, a sibling. And it seems to me, you know. Nearly a well-stepped brother. I mean, reading the book, it seems to me it would have been more trouble for you not to have written, that a book is written with such, you know, it sort of takes no prisoners, it sort of punches them from the gut. Oh. And I wonder if you could explain it, you know, a little bit about how this idea of, you know, sort of hopscotching around history. I use him sort of gone with the wind as a kind of two-way mirror into the past, into the present, and perhaps even taken a punt on the future. I mean, if you could explain how that sort of clarified itself in your mind. Thank you. Yeah, I've never thought of it as a two-way mirror, but that's a really nice image. I wish I'd thought of it, and I would have put it in the book. It's yours. No, it's exactly right. Exactly right. And it has been a hard thing to kind of try to describe what I thought gone with the wind could do. So the way it came about really was that, and actually Polly kind of alluded to it in her kind introduction, that people, and I say this at the beginning of the book because it's literally true, people kept saying to me what the hell is going on in America. And they still do, like every day, like what's happening and what's going to happen and what do you think about the elections and what's going to happen. But particularly when Trump got elected, everybody was just so thrown. And obviously I say that as a generalisation and people will say well I wasn't thrown or I knew or I was reading the right things or whatever. But the fact of the matter is, is that no matter how many people predicted accurately in that moment that Trump was going to win and certainly some people did, it's still overthrew a lot of certainties, supposed certainties about what we thought the direction of travel that we thought the United States was on. And so yeah, I've written basically these two books. As you say, they do work together to try to understand that myself, to try to explain it to other people if I could, to try to take what I know and to see if I could contribute to some project of rebuilding what I see as a, I mean I don't want to get grandiose to start with, I feel like I should build up to that. But what I see as a democratic project, certainly under threat, if not imploding in various parts of the world. And so I think that for everybody who feels that way, we had to figure out kind of what our contribution could be. And not everybody can run for public office and not everybody, I mean I would be dreadful in elected office. But I know how to write books. And so it was like I know how to research and I know stuff about America and I understand certain things about this. And I intuitively understood some stuff and I knew other stuff from studying it. And I've been teaching Gone With the Wind for years, years and years and years, teaching it as part of a course on the history of American popular fiction. And some of you will be fans of Backlisted, I'm going to do a shout out to Backlisted, the podcast for those of you who aren't, you should be. Absolutely wonderful podcast about kind of neglected books and bringing them back up. And I just did a special episode last week and I brought up the first American bestseller, which is from 1791 called Charlotte Temple. And people don't know it and it's really interesting and there's a whole story there to be told about American popular culture and American popular stories. So I always understood Gone With the Wind in that context and when you teach a story, teach a book, you learn it from the inside out in different ways. So it was always kind of in my head and I loved it as a kid so it was in my head for those reasons. So it was always there as a reference point and then all of this stuff started happening around statues and with Trump in 2017, around taking down the protest in August of that year about taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee and then Heather Haier was killed and that of course was the famous incident where In Charlottesville where Trump said that there were very fine people on both sides even though one side was entirely white supremacist. And I was having conversations with people then about the lost cause and about the history of the Civil War and just gradually realizing that Gone With the Wind was always the reference point. It was always the touch point when you had this whole complicated history that you had to try to tell and then you would say well it's basically you know the world of Gone With the Wind. And even Trump at one, I mean he raised it as a film which you know America and the filmmakers must aspire to make again. Exactly and it was specifically when Parasite won Best Picture when North Korean, it was not a North Korean film obviously, sorry, that would have been interesting. But it was a South Korean film and obviously the first one to win Best Picture so what happens when he has a foreign language Asian film win Best Picture and what film does he say that he wished would win but Gone With the Wind, right? It was the last of the birth of the nation, it was sort of double edged. And so and it was that same, it was well within a year anyway that when the Black Lives Matter protest erupted around the murder of George Floyd and HBO Max announced that it would remove Gone With the Wind from streaming service temporarily just to contextualize it. And in my view cynically and disingenuously, the right wing press went mad saying that it was censorship and it wasn't censorship, they were just adding stuff to it. It's not censorship, that's annotation, it's an old scholarly practice you know. And so it kept being this lightning rod and then the more I thought about it, the more I thought it's not just a lightning rod, it's being used in this very gestural way but the more you delve into it, the more you think about it, the more it actually reveals. But it may be interesting to know how many people have seen at the film, how many people have seen? Almost everybody. Almost everyone. And how many people have read at the book? I mean the Gone With the Wind book. Yeah, not my book. I've gone with the wind. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Can I ask one other question? Out of those of you who have neither seen it nor read it, how many of you have never heard of it? Right? Cos it remains this touch point. So it's still in our culture and so it's incredibly influential and it shapes people's thinking whether they're aware of it or not and that was part of what I wanted to get. I mean I only saw the film, I had to confess after I read your book. It's not a confession. Or I consciously saw the film after I read your book. But actually when I sat down and watched it, I realised I sort of knew it anyway. And perhaps I did see it as a kid or my mum's a lap or whatever. But just the images and the phraseology, I played around with the music when I was a kid and brass bands and stuff. Exactly, exactly. It's our lingua franca, right? Yeah, it's impossible. But you grew up in Chicago, right? In Chicago, yeah. In the 1970s, 80s? 80s, thank you. Well I was live in the 70s, let's be honest. Yeah. But I mean is it a part, I mean obviously I'm not American. But I mean is it a part of every American... Of my generation I would say so, yeah. So it first came to free television in America in 77. Right. And up until that point I've been in revival in cinemas and that sort of thing. Right. But from 77 it was on every year on TV, a bit like the British Great Escape at Christmas. That's a Christmas special. It wasn't at Christmas but it was on every year and you could... So it was this kind of spectacle that you would gather round and everybody at least... With the families. My generation would watch with the families, yeah. And I absorbed a lot of information about the Civil War from that story first. It was because I was seven or eight or whatever. And so that was when I first remember thinking about... I knew there was this thing in the Civil War but I hadn't even studied it in school yet. I mean even at the level that you do it at year eight or whatever. You don't... You don't... Or whatever it is. I can never do the translations either. What we call third grade when you're eight is what I'm talking about. And so even at that age you're not yet studying the Civil War. So I absorbed a lot of Gone With the Wind and the way that Gone With the Wind presents itself is that you think it's a story about fictional characters obviously but that it's against a realistic background. So you think the stuff around the war is realistic and then it's the characters who are fictionalized. But actually the stuff around the war is totally not realistic. But so many Americans have absorbed that is basically accurate. And I guess when you're eight and nine it's very seductive. The costumes and the... Sure was for me and the hoop skirts and oh my God I loved the dress. What are hoop skirts? Hoop skirts are the big crinolins that the women were. I was obsessed with them. Oh yeah. And I would dress my Barbie dolls like Scarlett. I had a bit about this in the prologue that I cut. But it keeps coming up in talks. I probably should have just left it in the book. But this is true. When I was around nine or ten I was obsessed with Gone With the Wind. And I would lay awake every night replaying Rhett leaving Scarlett in my head and work out stories of reconciliation. So I was a child of divorce and it did occur to me later that possibly I was triggered by the man walking out of the house and maybe that has something to do with it. But I really was like every night it did something to me. And I identified incredibly strongly with Scarlett. But it's extraordinary that we're talking sort of at 15 years after 1968 and the civil rights movement and yet the sort of dark sort of underbelly of that film hadn't sort of permeated it. My experience of growing up in the suburbs of Chicago in a very affluent white part of America was that I went to high school with 4,000 students. In my graduating class there were 1,000 students. And I literally think it is true to say that there were about half a dozen African American students. And we were streamed because it was so big so you know when they would separate you by level. And literally in my classes there were two African American students. One of whom went on to become a professor at Stanford and to advise Obama. And looks a lot like Obama actually and we've stayed good friends. And so there were some really, really outstanding spectacular people and I've talked to him a lot about what it was like to be literally like the only black person in that school. But I was oblivious to it because I was totally insulated from it. Chicago was one of the most segregated cities in terms of putting a dividing line during the population to keep the black part of the city away from obviously the sort of city that you knew. And it's something I talk about in the book right is that one of the after effects of slavery is that so what I'm trying to do in the book really is to go back to origins. You can never get back to real origins obviously what's the starting point. But to try to understand some of the origins of where we are and the ways in which gone with the wind can encapsulate some of that. And segregation is a really good example right? So you grow up in America you grow up with the reality of segregation that comes out of the Jim Crow laws. But in the north you think well that doesn't really apply to us. But it did because there were Jim Crow laws in the north as you well know as a student of jazz all over. The color bar was defining the cotton club and I mean a lot of people don't know this right but just give one example which you'll be extremely familiar with. But the famous cotton club in Harlem a lot of people don't realize was a segregated club and it only catered to white customers. And it had black entertainers and it had black staff but black customers could not come to the cotton club. So this kind of fantasy that we have about the cotton club is this mixed race. You know it's just nonsense. And those black entertainers included geniuses like Joe Gallington. Exactly but could not have paid to have a table at the cotton club right? They would not have served him at the cotton club. And of course this comes into the story of Gone with the Wind when when Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy in the film of Gone with the Wind and almost wasn't able to attend the ceremony in Los Angeles because it was at a segregated venue in the early 1940s and David Selznick the producer had to pull strings to get her into the club and then the club owner insisted that she sit at a table separately from the white cast. So it was set in LA right in 1940. So when I was growing up there was this reality of there was that kind of political what I might describe now as political racial segregation but there was also this reality of socioeconomic segregation and we turned an absolute blind eye to that and that was what I grew up in. I grew up in this very affluent area and black people didn't live there because they couldn't afford it. So I as a child in particular kind of unthinkingly saw that as I mean I wouldn't have ever described as meritocratic but I just kind of assumed that you know the people who had done well had done well and the people who hadn't done well hadn't done well and I didn't think about causes and I didn't think about structure. Certainly didn't think about inequality in any of those. And this was during the sort of Carter era I guess. Reagan. Early Reagan. Early Reagan. Early Reagan. No no I mean that in terms of the politics of it. I'm not going to be particularly about my age there but no but that's a very Reagan-esque Reaganite kind of way of looking at America. And then so part of what I'm trying to do in the book is actually to look back at the ways in which all of that actually has these root causes in slavery. So what happened, I think this is something Americans don't talk about at least in my experience we don't talk about it. But certainly not in general you know again not something I learned in school. So we learned that Lincoln emancipated the slaves in 1863. We learned that the you know the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865. We learned that stuff. What we don't learn is that after four million slaves were emancipated all of the white United States washed their hands of the freed people and said great our job is done. Like we've done our bit. And so there was absolutely no effort to there was a little bit of effort but I mean no concerted federal effort. There were patchy efforts that gradually imploded to create educational opportunities to create any kind of employment opportunities to give land. There were promises to give land that were reneged on the famous promise of 40 acres in a mule which was completely reneged on by the government. So basically what you do is you emancipate four million people who have literally no skills who have been kept without skills for generations. Deliberately so. You don't give them any money. You don't give them any land. You don't give them any education. You don't give them any job opportunities. You don't give them clothes or food. And then you say right. You're on your own. And where do they end up? They end up in slums. They end up in shantytowns. They end up in shantytowns that white landowners leased to them or sold to them, leased to them. In the bottoms that they didn't want to live on when the white landowners were living on high land which then became known as like black bottom. And then they would say things like oh well black people like to live in the bottoms in the flood plains and whatever. And gone with the wind has whole sections about this about the dirty black vagrants who are living in these terrible shantytowns. Well that's all the land they could get. So in fact they were enslaved again. And those areas turned into the segregated areas in Atlanta today, eventually in Chicago today as they moved north. The areas that they were allowed to live in then became redlined. Then it became legalized. And by the time you get to Nixon and to Reagan it's all been built in. And the root causes have sort of been there's a collective amnesia about it. Precisely. Can we talk a little bit about Margaret Mitchell? Must we? She does feature. She did write the book. It's sort of her fault we're hearing. Absolutely. She seems quite an extraordinary figure in all sorts of ways and not all of them are good. The fact that she was a woman, what role did that play in the book as it appeared? Because after the Civil War there's this thing that women, the only thing they could own in the vertical commas were people. And that was taken away after the Civil War. What impact did that have on her mindset as she was writing the book? Well I'm really glad you asked that because it was one of the things that I didn't understand properly when I started researching the book. And I was really interested in the relationship between white feminism in America historically and anti-black racism and how that all played out in reality. And not in the stories that we tell but actually as much as we can try to understand documentary history, how can we see this? And there's this really, to me, very under, I was going to say under understood which I really shouldn't say. Because it's not misunderstood, it's not even neglected, it's just kind of not out there. Part of the story around the way in which the debates about whether women would get the vote which is in the United States is the 19th Amendment. So this is after the Civil War? After the Civil War. So the debates about the 19th Amendment about whether all women would get the vote retroactively in the South were always debates about whether the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the vote after the Civil War, but had been ignored for willfully and not just ignored, had been kind of denied and suppressed for 50 years. There was this whole debate where white Southern political leaders, all men by definition, because women couldn't vote or hold office at that point, said if you give women the vote, it will retroactively undo our suppression of the 15th Amendment which gave black men the vote because we have successfully suppressed them from voting. And they said this explicitly. They said this in so many words, very easy to find. And they said it over and over again. They said it in speeches. And what they said was, so they had this whole debate about whether women should get the vote around the question of what that would do to white supremacism. And would women getting the vote, and I say women because it was a universal vote, black and white women, so they would have these numerical trade-offs and they would say, well, if do the number of black women outweigh the number of white women and then can we like be sure that white supremacism will be upheld if we, and it's their phrase white supremacism, right? And they're quite open about it. Very conscious and explicit. That's what it was about. And that story is not well known enough, as I say. But it follows on, to your question, it follows on from another misunderstanding about the way American slavery worked so that we talk about 19th century white women. And this is certainly how I learned the kind of history of slavery, even as a graduate student in the 90s, was that in the slave system there was this kind of clear hierarchy in which black women were at the bottom of the hierarchy, black men were marginally higher because of patriarchy. Then white women were the next step up and white men had all the power, right? And I think it's a pretty common place for you. But it's not right. And it is recent women, historians of color, who have brought this to light. And this is all in the last five, six years. A couple of really remarkable books showing that actually white women in the south were able to hold, they couldn't hold any property in the same way that women in 19th century Britain couldn't hold property, couldn't hold land, couldn't have bank accounts, had no legal rights, all under the system of what was called coverture. Same thing in the US, except when it came to chattel slavery and white women could hold chattel slaves. And they could bequeath chattel slaves and they could sell chattel slaves and they could trade them and they could control them. It was the one kind of property that they could own. It was the great exception. And presumably that was because that got the men off the hook having to deal with the slaves. No, I think that it doubled their ability to own slaves. So it just embedded white power across the system. So men were basically willing to relinquish total control to make sure that they were willing to relinquish a little bit of gender control to ensure that they had total racial control. So it just embedded white supremacy that much further, right? So you say, OK, this is the one exception we'll make women can control black people in this way. And so that meant that in real terms, at the end of the Civil War, white women in the south were in many ways more aggrieved and more bitter. They had more to lose. Because they couldn't reclaim their property in other ways. Whereas white men could lose their human property but then reclaim land money in other ways. And women couldn't. And that's very much the story of Gone with the Wind. It's very much the story of how Scarlet O'Hara is going to rebuild her fortune after it has been unfairly ripped away from her by the Yankees. And Margaret Mitchell, to answer this very roundabout way of answering the question, but I think it's important. So Margaret Mitchell based Scarlet O'Hara on her own grandmother and on her experiences of the Civil War. And so Margaret Mitchell grew up listening to a Scarlet O'Hara type character tell these stories of a grieved loss about this wonderful life that she had lived and how it had all been stolen from her by the Yankees. And now she was determined to get it back. And she had this great avarice for land, which was remarked upon even more or less at the time. And one of Mitchell's biographers talks about the fact that the Mitchell family, which was a wealthy family, she came from an elite background. And that they had rebuilt their wealth after the war. And then he says, most of their money was from property. And I'm like, well, I mean, you might want to stop and comment upon the fact that that was actually how the white elite in the south hung on to their power after the war because they didn't lose their land. And really that's what Gone with the Wind, as I say, is about. It purports to be a romance between Scarlet and Rhett or between Scarlet and Ashley. But it's really a romance between Scarlet and the land. It's about land and property, essentially. Love of land and property. Absolutely. And therefore money. Money, yeah. How would you rate Mitchell, if you take all the sort of politics out of it just for a second, how would you rate her as a writer, as a sort of craft? Is it well-written? Do you admire that aspect of it? I think there are a lot of things to admire about Gone with the Wind if you can put the racial politics to one side as you say. I mean, just for a second. Absolutely. And, you know, what I've learned to say about it and the way I used to teach it was I did do that thing of saying, well, it's racist butt. And now I think we have to say, well, it's racist and. Yeah. But there are other things about it in addition to its racism. And she was certainly a craftsperson, right? I mean, she trained as a journalist. She knew how to write. She was a stringer for what the local newspaper. Atlantic Journal, yeah, for many years. And she knew how to write. And so in terms of its craftsmanship, I will defer to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who worked on the film version and read the novel and wrote a couple of letters about the novel and said he was surprised at how well put together it was. He said he felt nothing but a kind of pity for people who thought it was the greatest literary art that humankind could produce. But that, he said, but for what it is, it's very well put together. And he actually admired it more than he expected it to. And I think that's a fair assessment of it. The thing for me that I always think that people who haven't read it don't expect to find in it and that I find it's kind of saving grace is that it's funny. And it's deliberately funny. She's very acidic. She has a really, really acidic sense of humor and she's very cynical. It's a very cynical love story. It ends in a very adult and kind of mordant way. It's about love wearing out. I mean, it's not a childish story. And it's not sentimental in those ways at all. And she's also very, very good on the white cast system. She just has these enormous blinkers on about race. But within the world she understands and is willing to think about, she's extremely good on white politics and the intricacies of the white cast system in the differences between a kind of yeoman farmer and an elite slave planter. She's very good on all of that stuff. So there are things there to admire. There are saving graces. There are, in my view. And the feminism I've talked about. Scarlett is really interesting. Scarlett is the first American every woman. She's very much a Becky Sharp character for those who don't know the novel. And Michelle modeled her on Becky Sharp to a great extent. And she wanted it to be a kind of, you know, Thakarayan, or, you know, Balzacian kind of comedy o men. I mean, that's going to ask what sort of literary, I mean, sort of, I mean, Dickens? No, it's more, it is more like Balzac, but definitely Thakarayan. I mean, I think she saw it as a kind of, as certainly an epic or even war and peace. Right? So it's an epic across war about these individuals struggling against war and then with this kind of sharp satirical aspect. And she's, and I think she's very interested in women's power and very interesting within limits on women's power. Her mother was a white suffragist in this, a white, obviously, sorry, she was a, what I meant was she was a suffragist for white women in the south. And Michelle always said that one of her earliest memories was sitting on stage, you know, with the votes for women's sash on her, blowing kisses at the men in the audience. And so she grew up within an explicitly feminist framework within their understanding of what feminism meant in the south at that point, which as I say was a white supremacist framework. But so for her it's a feminist book. She's set out to write what we would describe as a feminist book. And Scarlett is an anti-heroine. She's riven with faults. And the novel is very clear about what those faults are. And that was... That would be sort of selfishness and self-obsession. Yeah, and her immorality, I mean her ruthlessness. So she's a survivalist and that's what people like about her and what they identify with, right? For those of you who remember the movie, you know, as God is my witness I'll never be hungry again. And she says, if I have to lie, cheat, steal or kill, as God is my witness I'll never be hungry again. And she does have to lie, cheat, steal and kill. And she does all of those things. And she saves herself and her family, but at great cost to herself. And she loses the only things that she actually wants. And did Mitchell see herself, I mean was that Scarlett, you know, sort of like Mitchell, you know, sort of Mitchell's sort of alter ego or... Yeah, alter ego, yeah. I mean, as I say, she was based on her grandmother. So I think that she had a certain kind of clarity about Scarlett but certainly some of her own traits I'm sure crept in. And she was obsessed with Erotica, Margaret Mitchell and what she called Dirty Books, is that it? Yeah, she had a little porn fetish, which is always a little surprising. And it seemed to have a sadistic, sadistic SNM thing by all accounts. I haven't actually read the porn, but that's what the biographer said. What is it about these American people on the right? Well, let's not generalize. Oh, it's on the right. I'll accept that generalization. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. No, except to be fair to her, she was never anti-sex in that way. I mean, she actually wasn't. So there's no squeamishness about sex in the novel. And of course she didn't do a lot of other writing so we can't compare her. She was killed before she was 50 in a car accident. She was run over by a drunk driver. Yeah, 49. So to be fair to her, she didn't do that reactionary thing of trying to be... She wasn't puritanical about sex. Certainly not about other people's sexual lives. And if anything, she certainly saw herself as a flapper in the 20s and she shocked, scandalized Atlanta by dancing LaPache. So I think that she's not quite as bad as the... She was reactionary as hell, but not about sex. And she's a more nuanced figure than perhaps we think. Perhaps we would imagine. She's a more complex figure. I mean, most people who are smart enough to write a book that has literally influenced people for almost a century and that grabs people's imagination to the extent that it does. Yes, she was greatly helped by the film. She did a great job of bringing that film to life. And so did the cast. So she certainly had an amplification from that. But I always fall back on the... I don't believe that people trip and write masterpieces. I don't think I'll win this masterpiece. But I always say that in regard to The Great Gatsby, for example. I mentioned Fitzgerald. And people do talk about Fitzgerald as this inspired amateur who accidentally wrote The Great Gatsby. You can't accidentally write The Great Gatsby. And I also don't think you can accidentally write a thousand page novel that grips millions and millions and millions of people around the world for almost a century. So I think we have to give her the credit for what she was good at. It's just that we also have to call out the problems in it because they've been so influential. Can we talk about the distinction between the novel and the film? And it seems interesting to bring it back to Trump that Trump is, I considered, to be the showbiz, a president who ascended out of the presidency through no political skill whatsoever, no political experience. He was a sort of TV reality... He was a reality TV host who sort of used that as leverage to become a president. And also, we're gone with the wind. It's essentially not to be sort of a don't know ask about it, but it's the entertainment industry. Essentially, they're trying to do other civil war and realizing, ouch, it's a bit sort of awkward. There are certain things that we can't mention. So in the film, in the book, the clan is mentioned, but in the film it becomes a kind of social club as if they're playing chess and a ping pong or whatever. And the book is sort of written with the n-word. And again, there was this big debate as the film was being produced about exactly how to do that. And it's a sort of American thing of everything, well, not everything, but things that have been refracted through the entertainment industry. And they don't always at work. They can't always deal with a kind of serious heavy issue like the civil war and their racism. It's a really good question, I think. And there are lots of aspects to that that I'd like to touch on. I mean, I think that the degree to which America wants to turn everything into entertainment is certainly a major issue right now. And, you know, as you say historically, but we're really seeing it with Trump-y-in politics and not having to limit it to Trump. He taught, I think, a lot of this generation of politics how to do that, politicians, how to do that. But, you know, if we look at the Dominion case right now, I mean, many people following the Fox News lawsuit, and Fox News' defense up until now has always been that the Sean Hannity's and the Tucker Carlson's could lie through their teeth because they weren't news but they were entertainment. Now that they're being sued for defamation, they've stopped using that excuse. And now they're saying that it was newsworthy so that they could cover lies and they're saying that they were covering them. To me, part of what's interesting in this is that nobody that I've seen yet has actually talked about that shift because until Dominion sued them, their defense was always, everybody knows this is just the entertainment part of Fox News, it's not the news part of Fox News, right? And Tucker Carlson would say things like nobody sane would believe the things that I say. And then people would vote, you know, according to the things that he said. And then Trump hijacked that attitude and realized that he could turn politics into a carnival and get free airtime and that's really how he did it. And hence all the kind of Disney sort of rallies and all the kind of the stupid act. Because you have to pay for political airtime in America. That's why it's so expensive. You have to raise money to get television airtime. And then to do that, you have to get eyeballs, you add the equivalent of clicks. You have to do something controversial to get people to watch you. And Hillary Clinton standing up being reasonable was not interesting television. And Trump standing up and saying, that shit crazy stuff was interesting television. And so you have Les Moonves at CBS saying he's very bad for America but he's damn good for CBS. That's what he said. It's good for ratings. It's good for ratings, right? And that's literally a quote, right? That's what he said. So I think that the question about gone with the wind in the film is a slightly different one because it was a little bit less cynical. The people making the film, I think their intentions were better than that. It's not a little bit less cynical. It's a lot less cynical. They certainly weren't trying to hijack the White House. And David Selznick is a biotomobile I figure in many ways. He is. And he was trying to get it right. He just didn't get it right. But I mean he was trying to. And so, yeah. So he of course was Jewish himself and he was a first generation Jew. His parents had immigrated from what is now Lithuania. And one of the context in my book and it's one of the things that people haven't talked about with gone with the wind that I thought was so important to bring back into the story is the fact that it's always been, it's always talked about as a book against the context of the Great Depression in the 1930s but not against the rise of fascism. And that was another big thing that was happening in the 1930s. And in fact when it emerged it was understood within those debates and I show that in the book that way in which it was actually talked about in relation to the rise of European fascism and the rise of American fascism. And perhaps we should explain that the book was published in 1936 and the film I came out in... At the end of 1939 they finished filming literally days before war was declared. So they finished filming at the end of August 1939. And then the film came out in December 1939. So during the phony war and then it started making its way across the United States and then into the rest of the world across 1940. So it was literally emerging in this context of the rise of fascism and the point is that it was debated in those terms. So it's not just me saying look there was this backdrop we should pay attention to that. It's that there were people reading it saying this is making me think about fascism in your upper right. I mean and there were... So having these conversations. I mean I debated by whom are we talking sort of general population or... Well some. I mean there were columnists who did it. I mean there were people who reminded of European fascism. But in particular it was African-Americans who were making the argument at the same time that what the United States was doing to African-Americans was fascism by another name. And they had been very prominent writers like Langston Hughes. A couple of terrific writers now less well remembered but one called Joel Augustus Rogers who was a Jamaican-American. A terrific writer. Really really interesting. And Schuyler, George Schuyler who I also bring into the book who's really really interesting writer. And so there were these very prominent African-Americans who were standing up and saying hello, this looks a lot like fascism. And they were... Since the novel came out in 36 they were fighting to stop it being filmed and then if it was filmed to stop it being reolently racist as the novel was. And they said, you mentioned birth of a nation earlier and birth of a nation had unleashed racial violence and they were in 1915 and they were very worried 20 years later that the same thing might happen with good reason. And so it's important to understand that in 1936 when the novel came out lynching was still happening in the United States. Public lynching was still happening in the Southern States, in the United States. And when I say public lynching I mean that they would advertise the fact that they were going to torture a human being in 1936 under the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and they would let you know days in advance that this was going to happen so you could buy a train ticket and you could go watch a human being be burned alive in 1936. So when I say public lynching I mean acts of atrocity and barbarism in 1936. And when Gone with the Wind came out it was as you mentioned earlier it has built into it this apologia for clan racist violence and the hero hashley is the head of the clan. He is the head of the Atlanta clan. He's the hero and he's the head of the clan. And people remember the scene from the film where it's an incredibly iconic scene where Scarlett makes a dress out of her mother's green velvet curtains and she goes to visit Rhett in jail. But in my experience people often forget or misremember why Rhett is in jail and think that he's there as a prisoner of war of the Yankees but he's not. He's there because he lynched a black man and he says that. In the novel he's very straight forward about it in the film it's slightly euphemised but in fact in the film he says that the Yankees are just trumping up charges and he says anything will do. In the novel he says it's true I did lynch him he was uppity and he uses the N word to describe it and he says he was uppity to the lady. Upity is a very loaded word. He was uppity to a lady what else could a southern gentleman do because of course a southern gentleman is white by definition. Selznick is presented with this problem of what to do with this and he's very conscious and he said this he was very conscious as a Jewish as a son of immigrants that the comparisons between anti-black racism in America and anti-Jewish fascism in Europe that the parallels were very strong and he had this dilemma and they ended up deciding that the way to do it was just to kind of whitewash everything and as you said to take the clan but turn it into a social club because he didn't want references to the clan to be inflammatory but the problem was that then it just ends up making it seem like it's all okay and nothing very bad was happening and so what they end up doing is just kind of watering it all down so that you end up watching this film thinking that it's all not really that bad and it's a pleasant fantasy of sort of black people who actually enjoy living. Yeah exactly. She uses this phrase Mitchell uses this phrase throughout the book that I think really sums up the book's attitude which is this phrase willing slave she keeps saying they were willing slaves what is a willing slave? Like then that's what I mean Again we were talking earlier about what it was like growing up with this story and even in the Reaganite 80s people would talk about this oh it's the story of the ideal slave plantation The what? I mean I remember unthinkingly using that phrase and people unthinkingly using that phrase an ideal slave plantation and I say in the book and I absolutely believe this and some people say it's a frivolous comparison and I do not think it is and I will go to my grave insisting that this is a legitimate comparison that is like saying an ideal concentration camp it is what are you talking about what are you talking about to say this person is a willing slave and those kind of contortions that the story has to go through all of the time to try to square an impossible create an alternate universe and for me it's one of the ways that I'm trying to make sense of how we got where we are in American politics now and one of the key ways for me is to understand that is that when Trump came into power so many people said and I said it like how did he convince Americans of this alternate reality so fast like within a year he had a couple of months he had Americans parroting whatever lie he chose to say and then you look back and all of this stuff and it's my god we've been living an alternate reality for 160 years this is nothing new and you've got a situation where you have a you have a Jewish film director making a film of a novel with racist undertones which people are compreng at a fascism and if he was in Europe still he would be under the caution of the Nazis and he was very conscious of that he was very conscious of that and so as I say he was trying to do the right thing he sent Memo saying things like he wanted to be sure that black people came out on the right side of the ledger in the film and he did the problem was that he was determined to be faithful to the novel and the novel is racist and you can't be both you can't be both right so what he ended up doing was he would try to he would do things like so we talked about Hattie McDaniel winning the Oscar and Mammy is a totally forgettable character on the page she barely exists in the novel she has nothing like the stature Hattie McDaniel gives the character and so what did he do he hired a really great actress he gave her the scope to play the part but he also gave her a lot more screen time he gave her actual time to make Mammy a character and Hattie McDaniel negotiated with him and encouraged Butterfly McQueen as well who played Prissy to lobby against using the N word because he did want to use the N word he was convinced that it wouldn't do any harm he was convinced that it was just historical verisimilitude and that it would just lend accuracy and all of the black people around him were telling him that that was wrong because it would incite violence does the N word is it? because it incites violence and they said if you use this word we know you have this theory about it and we're telling you experientially your theory is wrong that word incites violence so don't use it Hattie McDaniel negotiated with him and she got the rest of the black cast to kind of persuade him other people did as well but she was quite active in that and basically it was a trade off and she said she'd play the part as written in this minstrel caricature as long as they didn't use that word and Butterfly McQueen said she told them that she would do everything they wanted her to do but she wouldn't eat watermelon she wouldn't use that word and she wouldn't let them hit her so it was a great decision in the book you talk about the launch a party of the I certainly do because it is an extraordinary story people have credited me with finding it and I should say I did not discover the story I wish I had but it is out there to the extent that I don't know who found it or I would have credited them but it's not well known enough so that's why I included it in the book so the night before the launch at the end of 1939 the launch was in Atlanta segregated at that point of course and so the night before they did this pageant this whole gala and they invited all the Atlanta great and the good which at that time by definition because it was segregated were all white and they put on a show and they had this backdrop on the stage that was a painted plantation that was this idealized slave plantation and then they had all the cast and the crew and I say the Atlanta VIPs were all sitting there and they brought out a choir of young black boys from a local church to sing slave spirituals and they dressed them up as slaves they dressed them up as Piccininis in the word that they used and they were there singing these slave spirituals and it brought a tear to the eye of the actress who played Belle the prostitute with the heart of gold and the church choir was the I'm going to get the name wrong so I won't try to do it because I don't want to mangle it but the pastor of the church it's the church that Raphael Warnock is now the pastor of who's the sitting senator from Georgia it was the pastor was a man named Martin Luther King Sr and one of the boys singing in the choir was Martin Luther King Jr at ten years old and when you read about that you think that's the kind of thing that might turn you into a civil rights activist he would have been in no illusions of what the film was even at the age of ten and the singing slave spirituals for the entertainment of a white crowd so that they can munch peanuts and think about how nice it would have been if they too could own slaves I mean wouldn't it turn you into a civil rights activist? I think it would we've got about 10 minutes left before we open it up to questions but just to afford wind into the present and we've talked a lot about the tensions in the book and how it sort of knocks on tastery I mean we said earlier that everyone asks you the question what the hell is going on with America what the hell is going on with America I mean America has got itself in this extraordinary situation now where I was in New York two weeks ago on the day the day of the indictment a midtown was completely clogged and there was a real tension in the air we had this extraordinary situation where Trump has been hauled in and where does America go from here is it that now America is always on the brink of someone even if it's not Trump some kind of Trump like a person who will try a derail a democracy I mean what I mean where does America go I think that's the answer to that I shouldn't be facetious about saying I was jealous about him getting indicted because I always let a joke get the better of me but the reality is that it's a very sad I think it's terrible state of affairs for my country that we're at a place where we had to happen but it did have to happen and therefore I am glad that it happened whichever way it goes it's kind of a problem isn't it there's no good outcome but that's in my view that's really been true from the moment that he got elected that was very clear there were not going to be any good outcomes and that's just gotten truer and truer as the time has passed look I think that I can see I think there are a couple of things that need to happen one is it is going to be interesting to see what kinds of legal limits Fox and other participants in this breakdown of democracy what kinds of penalties they start to face I'm thinking of Alex Jones and the way that his loss in that civil lawsuit may seems to be unraveling his empire the fact that Trump is not only being indicted for you know obviously these financial crimes which have not been linked with campaign crimes by Alvin Bragg but also he started the civil case that Eugene Carroll has brought against him for rape in some ways because the bar is lower for civil cases in some ways the civil cases can be more can hold powerful people to account better in the US then criminal cases might be able to because the threshold for evidence is so very high it is interesting to see in this terrible case I'm going to blank on his name but everybody will know it the black boy who just got shot on the doorstep for ringing the doorbell yes I saw the picture of holding the bass and the man who shot him has been they haven't brought attempted homicide against him they've brought assault with a deadly weapon and I was horrified when I first read that and I was like oh my god you know typical same stuff keeps happening but then I was reading some legal commentary about it and the lawyers were saying that actually there's because the guy is quite old who shot this poor child who apparently is going to survive which is the good news and they were saying that the state probably brought assault with a deadly weapon because it's easier to prove than attempted homicide with mens rea but it still brings a a sentence of 25 to life and he's old so they figure they'll get the same outcome but they've got a lower threshold so we're seeing that with a lot of these civil cases and it's going to be interesting to see basically how the capillary action of the law maybe can start to to hold people to account I think that I look at somebody like George Santos for example and look again these are just reports nobody knows for sure but I read a report and I thought it was really convincing somebody said well he told somebody so this is all unconfirmed but it's a persuasive account that he said well you know if you serve a full term in congress you get pension and medical insurance for life it's all you need you're set up for life and I'd never thought about it before and I was like oh so to your point about has it shown con artists and criminals how they can just get a foot into government absolutely it has but the trouble is even if Trump even if he goes down if he keeled over tomorrow what he's actually unleashed is that very difficult to call back this idea that you can't put the genie back in the bottle no you can believe what the hell you want about anything this is the toxicity of his how do you deal with that one thing is that I think that we have to take a couple of views on first of all it wasn't Trump who unleashed it in my view it was George W. Bush and Carl Rove and there are discussions of the fact that the Carl Rove line is about the reality based community and how you didn't have to listen to the reality based community which is implicitly in conflict with the faith based community but then Trump brought that into the mainstream George W. Bush was pretty mainstream I mean he was president too but that's my point is that it was unleashed then but after Bush though we managed to have Obama and then you have a massive backlash against it with Trump so I think for me one of the real problems is about the ways that a very large democracy can incorporate a very large evangelical community that believes some things that are quite that are very much in tension with an evidence based secular scientific understanding of the world and that's not about Trump Trump just weaponized that and in many ways Trump was their weapon rather than the other way around you know absolutely 100% certainly that was true for McConnell McConnell's goal was to get right wing judges on the court and Trump helped him do that and that's what he wanted to do and he didn't give a damn about Trump still doesn't to this day he got what he wanted and the right wing supreme court justices are getting exactly what they want so look it's a there's a deep poison in the well of American democracy there's no question we were talking in the green room about the ways in which capitalism and democracy are increasingly coming into direct conflict and I don't pretend to know what the answer to that is I think that in terms of the ways in which we can try to think about coming back together as a society it seems to me that and one of the reasons for writing a book like this is that somebody asked me at one of these talks do I believe that truth will set you free and I don't believe that truth will set you free because there's a lot of truth around us and freedom is a ways away but I do believe that truth is a precondition of freedom I don't think we can have freedom without truth and I also think it's a precondition of reconciliation I don't think that we can come across over our divides unless we have some shared sense of truths can be plural they almost certainly have to be multiple there will not be a single monolithic truth but we have to recognize that the stories that were once adequate for for the United States and I would dare to say the same might be said of Britain as well these kinds of ostensibly unifying national narratives that actually excluded so many people and that some people remain wedded to because they worked for them they gave them a national identity that they could understand and it didn't matter to them that so many people were excluded but if you can create a national story that actually does include most everybody if not literally everybody that will have to have multiple truths in it it will have to be more flexible and elastic it will have to recognize it can't have this childish version of history in which we're all the good guys and other people are all the bad guys have a more mature version of it in which people did bad things but we have a story about looking all of that in the eye like a truth and reconciliation sort of I mean I'm not a big fan of that as a process if I'm honest but I just think it's I don't know what that seems to be that systematic but yes I think you have to I do think you have to reckon with it and that's really what my book is about I mean that's where the title comes from that's what the Wrath to Come is about is about a reckoning and I think that there is a reckoning at hand and I do think that you could reconcile if you could create a story capacious enough and that is not beyond the wit of man it's just that there's not a lot of willingness right now to do that and because because Trump has has made it so atoxic it's very difficult for any other narrative to well as I say I see him as symptomatic rather than a cause but he's a really he's a big ugly symptom he's like a big boil that definitely needs to be lanced but but I mean another way I talk about this in the book is that I think that because a couple of people said to me like are you saying that gone with the wind caused Donald Trump obviously I'm not saying gone with the wind caused Donald Trump I mean but what I'm saying is that they both grew on the same family tree and they have very strong family resemblances as a result of that do you think, sorry we'll open up to questions in just one minute but just one final thought I mean how aware do you think Trump is of all this sort of history of I mean when he you know books are gone with the wind I mean how much is he conscious of what it actually stands for or whether it's just very little I mean I think he is a man of thundering ignorance I mean just absolutely I mean really he is he isn't burdened by nuance no he's not or by fact but that is not to underestimate him either he is clearly extremely intelligent and shrewd as hell scheming I mean obviously so it's not to say I underestimate him as an opponent but the gathering of knowledge and wisdom and historical fact was obviously not high on his list of priorities no he was accumulating other things but that wasn't among them so no I don't think he knows a damn thing about civil war but he doesn't care it doesn't get him where he needs to be he's not a student of history no he's a student of human moves some people might say shall we open up to questions yeah and the white jumper oh sorry Polly how long do we have ever questions I feel we just got started hi small story big question I was on a tour of the capital in DC in November pretty much as soon as it reopened again thanks to Covid and small matter of an insurrection and the tour guide was around and said at one point I'm not meant to talk about January the 6th but if you look over there that's Officer Eugene Goodman the one who famously led them away from the senate chamber and that really sat with me that I thought why aren't we talking about it because this republic if you happen to keep it the person who does your job in 100 years will absolutely talk about what happened that day in the same way that we talk about the civil war now it happened you've got witnesses to that event still working in here and before we've even seen justice and I mean real justice for the lawmakers, the legislators the president for their part in that I don't count the QAnon shaman sitting in prison as justice frankly we're already don't talk about it and I thought is that why from the civil war and the great lion and glamorising it in Gone with the Wind through to Wilmington in 1898 in the insurrection there which insurrection the first time I heard that was January the 6th didn't know there was one in Wilmington 1921 Tulsa race riots literally burning down like journalist offices newsrooms so that people didn't know about it then still alright so just count the whole 60s Emmett Till all we do a flare up in America every couple of decades because I say we like I'm an American but we as a human race are talking about it when you compare it to somewhere like Germany who is so engaged with their most horrendous and embarrassing acts that they haven't had something happen again but in America as a collective it's don't talk about it and don't embarrass the people that did it and put it under the carpet and moving on so I'm really glad you asked that question and I'm really glad that you framed it in that way it's actually how I open the book and I literally open it with the instruction and with saying that I absolutely believe that what you implied in your question is the case that this process of sweeping things under the carpet began with the Civil War and it's something that I in fact it didn't even begin with Civil War it really began with the American Revolution because that was a Civil War that was a war of brother against brother and father against daughter and we didn't talk about that as a Civil War but it was a Civil War and so I think that the United States has always been riven by Civil War and as you suggest over time that became more and more magnetised around the question of race for various reasons but it's not the only thing that divides America and that makes that kind of violence flare up but it is a kind of prime mover all of the time so but particularly after Civil War the problem was the thing about Germany is I used the example so Germany was a defeated nation that had to look within you can have another version where how does Britain understand its role in the war but it had defeated in its view it had defeated an external nation Civil Wars what do you do to bring the country back together again you've got the defeated nation within and you want them to be part of the country and in particular in this case the Civil War was over the fact that half of the country wanted to leave the country and you force them to remain which is an unusual version of Civil War even in that it's to say no we're going to keep you whether you like it or not well they didn't like it and like it one little bit so you have this forced unification and then the question is how do you create a semblance of unity and then Lincoln was assassinated and in my view that was an absolute there's a question what a turning point that was in the moral history of the United States and for all kinds of reasons but basically the United States had a choice about whether it was going to move toward justice or whether it was going to move toward unity and it chose unity the semblance of unity over the reality of justice and it's still trying to do that and it did exactly the same thing with the insurrection as you say and so the problem is that you can't demand the kind of scrutiny that Germany was forced to give itself as a defeated nation from incorporating part of this country and saying no no we're all back in this together so now, so what happened in the United States and I go this is really what the book is about I go into great length about this in the book is that what the United States did was reunify over white supremacy white people came together and said well we're the United States black people are free so they've got what they need and we wash our hands of them and then they reunited over these stories that romanticized the south which is why the north became invested in that because it saved face for everybody and then black people were literally the collateral damage of that and what it did was shore up and sustain white power so that was fine firstly thank you that's been really interesting this evening and just a couple of observations I wanted to make and then ask you what you thought of them firstly one of the things that massively worries me about America is people talk about Trump and how horrific he is but people like George H. Bush Reagan who's widely revered Nixon all used massive racial dog whistles not away with it and even Clinton arguably did a lot of racial dog whistles so that really worries me in terms of how people remember them and how people see them so there is that and I think Trump is part of that long tradition of being able to do that and it works and that's obvious that that has worked for significant numbers of politicians in America the second thing is how much is Trump a failure of the democratic party to actually build coalitions based around economic justice so for example white working class people significant numbers of who voted for Trump not all but significant numbers and African Americans based around economic justice has led to people like Trump okay thank you so a couple of complicated questions so briefly what I would say is that it's very difficult to separate partly for the reasons I was talking about earlier around the history of segregation and what happened to black people after emancipation it's very difficult to separate racism and economic equality in America they're very very intertwined as there are many other parts of the world but it's really really salient in the US the degree to which racism as you say as a dog whistle is works successfully politically to rally certain portions of the electorate is just a fact in American life and I don't say that to throw up my hands about it but it's just to say that it's observable in the ways that you describe and the obvious remedies for that are education and the kinds of reconciliation that we're talking about and trying to find ways to bring people together and to not stoke division and all of that kind of obvious stuff the question of whether Trump represents a failure of the Democrats well no Trump represents a failure of the Republicans and I feel very strongly about that they had every opportunity to stand up and to say this shall not pass and they still let it pass but that is not to say that Democrats have not failed in important ways I just will not blame them for Trump the Republicans need to own Trump but certainly the Democrats have have we could name chapter and verse all kinds of things we'd all like I'm sure to be seeing them do differently for me the fundamental problem that Democrats are working right now is whether to for me we can talk about it in terms of economic justice and clearly we all believe in that and I've been talking about that implicitly I hope is clear through this discussion but I think the two ways in which electorally the Democrats are not working very well right now is and boy we're seeing it with Feinstein at this very moment is that it's a gerontocracy and they're not creating any kind of succession which would lead to some of the conversations around economic justice that you would like them to be having so for me it's a generational thing that would enable those conversations the Republicans however much I may load this current iteration of Republicans and I should say I don't hate Republicans like on principle I've come from a family of Republicans but none of them support these people I do loathe this particular iteration of Republicans but the one thing I have to give them is that they are bringing their young radical wing in and they recognize that they win votes and that Lauren Bebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene who I deplore are winning votes and it is remarkable to me that the Democrats are refusing to do that with AOC and they're trying to fight people like AOC instead of bringing her in and she would lead to those conversations around economic justice because that's what she's going to frickin' talk about so there's that and then there's the fact that as somebody once put it I think brilliantly I think it was Republican operative but I can't remember which one the Democrats the Democrats keep bringing pillows to a knife fight and that's right it's absolutely right and the Republicans they've been playing dirty my whole life and the Democrats keep playing nice but it's a problem because you don't want to sink to their level it's also that thing about the Great Lyndon Johnson line about you know don't whatever it is about don't get into a fight with a pig because you'll get muddy and the pig will love it and you just end up you just end up as low as they are so it's a real problem about how do you fight and they know that how do you fight people who don't have scruples and you're using your own scruples but I do think that the Democrats need to be more ruthless as I said the Feinstein thing right now some of you will be following this story but Feinstein is very very old she's a California senator she's 89, she hasn't shown up for weeks now she's being covered for by staffers it's very clear that she can't do the job and the Democrats won't replace her and she needs to be replaced she can't do the job and she needs to be replaced in Biden's last year and a half which we absolutely have to do to try to counter all the stuff that McConnell did and the Democrats are going oh well we can't be mean to Feinstein we yeah we can and we're you know I respect the woman but put her to one side say thank you for everything you've done and we need to get judges we gotta get judges on the bench off you go there was a man back there I think first I think he's had a sound up for a while thank you very much it's a pleasure to be here I wanted to say first thing is that when Lincoln was assassinated was that Andrew Johnson he was hated beyond the pale and I think we have to be clear about the words we use here because Lincoln talked about you know reconstruction when Johnson came in I mean this man was going to be impeached he talked about yeah one boat important one he talked about restructuring that's an important distinction we have to be very clear about and when you talk about sweeping things underneath the carpet you know if you're a black man in the south and you cannot recite you know the first amendment you're in trouble you can't vote those are the things they put in deliberately in your way a white person, white man wouldn't get and there's all kinds of shenanigans like that that's not talked about I'm really glad you brought that up and it's something I go into in detail in the book because it's incredibly important the history of voter suppression in America that electoral out of giving black men the vote yeah and the thing about Andrew Johnson is you say when I said earlier that the assassination of Lincoln was a crossroads in America that's what I was referring to so long story about what happened with Johnson as you know but for those who don't just very briefly so Johnson who was Lincoln's vice president became president when Lincoln was assassinated by act of law and he was he was a white he was a white southerner who Lincoln had included on his ticket to try to get the white southern democrat vote that he needed and the or the split off vote I mean the republicans but you know the split vote there and that he but the thing about Johnson was that he represented a particular stratum that we've lost sight of which you see a lot in reconstruction and it comes up in gone with the wind and it's in context as well which is that Johnson was opposed to slavery but he was a white supremacist and the reason that he was opposed to slavery was because he was a poor white and he was opposed to slavery because of the economic inequality that created for poor whites so he didn't give a damn about black people's rights that wasn't why he was opposed to slavery so he thought that slavery should be abolished but white people should be in charge and so when he became president he instituted sweeping pardons he forgave everybody in the south for the insurrection and he gave them back their land they got everything given back to them except their human property and all of the status quo was restored and that's how that reunification that I was talking about was enabled as you know but for those in the in the room who didn't know and the consequences of that are absolutely enormous and for a lot of people that is the single thing that makes him the worst US president in history without doubt and it means that he still beats Trump to that dubious honour without a doubt, the ramifications of him will be linked with us still now and then we'll talk about Trump democracy is throw out people like Trump let's face it let's not get away from that back to the Romans you gather democracy every now and again they will throw up somebody like that we've had plenty of bad presidents plenty, so that's we have to understand that in a pluralist society and the way we have to learn to try to mend that together that's something that America has to do look within I agree, thank you very much seriously examine themselves thank you very much you've probably got time for one more, two more sorry the lady in the front there three more questions three more questions, three minutes three, okay sorry thank you as a young girl I loved watching Gone with the wind the film because of the strong female characters and they really resonated with me as a young person and I've always remembered the film because of those characters even Melly who you might think is the traditional female but actually I think she's very strong and I just wondered how in terms of feminism at the time of the film and how that was portrayed any impact that that had in 1939 slash 40 and women's rights at that time what impact the film had on feminism slash women's rights I would say that it's sort of the other way around which is that I don't know how how many other American films from the 30s that you've seen but it was an era of very strong women on film right so it's the era of Betty Davis and Joan Crawford and Catherine Hepburn and of course it was Vivian Lees first I mean she played she was in Fire Over England with Olivia but it was her first breakout role in her first big story role if anything I would say that those women had paved the way for a screen culture where a strong woman could kind of come into her own and so there there had been it was really a kind of golden era in my view of women on film we've never seen anything like it again certainly no parts written for women like that anymore and I have a whole other thing that we could talk about about women of a certain age who are all pretending to be teenagers on film whereas you know Betty Davis and Joan Crawford were in their 30s and Barbara Stanwyck you know these are women who never ever would think of giggling right I mean Barbara Stanwyck never giggled in her effing life right and then I mean I love Meryl Streep but she giggles across all the roles I'm like c'mon have some you know so I think that Vivian Lees benefited from that that sense that reality that what was called a woman's picture could open box office as we would say today and that these women stars were driving audiences and of course women were going to the cinema and so they were identifying with them and there was a very clear sense that this was a money making proposition so I don't have any evidence that Scarlett O'Hara as a character or Vivian Lees' performance of Scarlett O'Hara necessarily advanced feminism in any very explicit or direct ways she as a character was certainly received as part of that conversation around modern strong women and you know she's certainly characterized in the film as a modern strong women I mean there's that bit where she's packing a pistol and Clark Gables even says like what a woman you know or something like that and it's such a 30's you know kind of compliment and so I think that she takes her place in that cavalcade of incredibly strong women who changed a conversation about role models and ideas around femininity definitely and in some ways is the culmination of that but I don't see her as necessarily having caused any changes that I'm aware of although I would be very interested to see anybody show me instances where that happened and I it certainly could have and it would be great to see a fabulous character it's just a shame about the story you know but she's an amazing character Hi I was just going to ask a little bit about the films well about Bridges attitude to the Civil War and then the reception of the film later on firstly I was just going to mention that obviously in the late 19th century we have Uncle Tom's Cabin was perhaps the most popular book one of the first best albums and also working here I've catalogued a lot of plays that mention the Civil War from I mean as early as they're sort of quite into themes of the KKK the first iteration of the KKK being represented in Britain in the 1870s so I'm just going to ask what you thought about how the British fetishised the Civil War from the Victorian times onwards and later how the film was received in Britain in particular in relation to that fetishisation but also in light that they were currently fighting the Nazis so you've got this strange combination of the attitudes going on It is strange and thank you for that question and again it's something I go into in the book because I'm really interested in that too obviously it's an American living here and that cross-cultural and one of the things that I'm interested in is actually taking it back even a step further and looking at how the clan actually derives from some of the degraded and vulgarised versions of Walter Scott so Walter Scott leads to some of the imagery the basic medievalism but also really Ivanhoe which is completely fetishised in the early 19th century in the south actually give and the lady of the lake gives the image of the clan and the clan burning of fiery cross comes directly from Walter Scott and of course Hail to the Chief the song of the American president comes directly from Walter Scott in fact it comes from a stage adaptation of the lady of the lake so there's this iteration from story to stage to film and back again that's happening all the way through this so then as you say so the clan gets its imagery and its language from Walter Scott as you say the first version of the clan was an immediate aftermath of the civil war so it starts in 1866 was abolished in 1871 by the federal government by the 1870s partly because of the outlandish name but because it also made the news it had definitely travelled and there are as you know there are British London reports and the London Gazette there are stories about this thing, the clan Conan Doyle picked it up and it's in one of his earlier stories I'm blacking on the name, it's in the book I can't remember which one it is but it's in one of his earlier stories the clan or the bad guys in Conan Doyle but more because they're like culty than about the race as such but because they're this esoteric like the way that he goes after Mormons there's Mormons and there's the clan and but he can see that they're like the bad guys but then in America it starts to get rehabilitated so the clan starts to get rehabilitated at the same time it's very weird but at the same time Uncle Tom's Cabin Uncle Tom's Cabin is published in 1851 and the most popular novel ever until it was surpassed by Gone with the Wind which is its polar opposite politically and racially but it was also it becomes this incredibly successful stage adaptation at the same time that Thomas Dixon's novels about the clan were becoming incredibly successful stage adaptations so you have these two stories that are really diametrically opposed and they're incredibly popular at the same time audiences could literally go from seeing Uncle Tom's Cabin one night which is anti-slavery to seeing the clansmen the next night which is white suprem assistance says that black people should never have been emancipated and nobody would reconcile that cognitive dissonance and then both of those things make their way into popular culture and then those clansmen stories become the basis of birth of a nation in 1915 and all of that stuff starts to export over here the end game of it all as far as I'm concerned is like the black and white minstrel show and is how that stuff makes its way over here and that history that it gets derasinated and I use that word advisably from its original context and what does that look like when it comes from Scott all the way to the black and white minstrel show and where do you end up and that's why they're called minstrels right it's from Scott because again it's that medievalist imagery is that we would call it a minstrel so you kind of come full circle there as for how Gone with the Wind was received in Britain everybody loved it because here's the thing is people didn't at the time particularly it was a huge hit in underground France a resistance France it was also a huge hit in Nazi Germany which the Nazis deplored because it was American Kitsch but some of them liked the fact that it was a big hit because it was on the right side of racial history right the thing about Gone with the Wind is that depending on how you look at it it does have kind of something for everybody but it lets you identify with this idea that you're the victim and that you're the survivor and then you can kind of erase the politics so it's a book in which Abraham Lincoln is the bad guy and so you would think that you would stop and think about the politics of that in the Second World War maybe for just a second but nobody did and so it's just about surviving an occupying army or surviving war and so everybody would identify emotionally with that and then not stop and think about the way that the politics don't play out and actually this is a story that is sympathizing with the Nazis and it is one more one more yep a lady there hey my mum gave me a copy of Gone with the Wind the Christmas I was 13 and I missed my dinner because I was so riveted by it and I'm quite staggered now to think all the things I missed which speaks to what you were just saying Sarah but I have a 13 year old daughter now and it didn't occur to me to give her this book for Christmas partly because of the rich YA fiction that we have access to now but also I'm wondering now whether I should give it to her because I think the lens with which she would read it would be fascinating and I just wanted to ask you whether you think that would be a good thing to do and also more generally what you think the future of the book is moving forward thanks for that it's a book that uses the N word over a hundred times and on problematic ways so the film I haven't taught the book now for a little while I've taught the film more recently and the film young people are in my experience anyway this is obviously anecdotal but are just kind of bewildered and put off by it and are not moved by it and don't find Scarlett particularly identifiable and just find the racial politics so repellent that they can't get beyond that and don't wish to get beyond that and are just find it rebarbative so I don't know if there's what kind of benefit there is to that it still can be an important way to confront history and to think through those issues but the follow up to that is as you rightly say about what is its future and and I'm really glad you framed the question that way because often people ask me if I want to censor the book or do I think that it needs to be cancelled or that kind of thing and as I always say I'm a professor of literature so I'm not in the business of cancelling books but also you know it's one of the most popular books ever written as we've just said so that ship has sailed I could try to cancel it but I'm not going to succeed but I don't want to and I think that all works of art have to stand or fall on I mean relevance is too narrow word but it as a shorthand on whether they continue to speak to new audiences that's what they have to do people have to find something in them that they respond to I think that it would surprise me if the next generation right now of young readers in English found that Gone with the Wind was the text they wanted to return to and that they were finding worth spending a thousand pages on but I don't think it's going to disappear and I don't think that it should disappear I think that it's for me it takes the place of it's the same way that I don't I don't agree with the decision to change the language of Roald Dahl and I don't agree with the decision to add sensitivity language into Gone with the Wind as I said I have no problem with annotating around it but I don't believe that you should alter the thing itself and it has to say it has to stand or fail on its own merits or lack thereof but to me it's a bigger point which goes back to the Selznick thing about whitewashing is that if we eliminate it then we just pretend it never happened and we can't do that either so the same way I don't believe that Huck Finn should replace the N word with the word slave White Southerners were polite to black people I don't think we should say that Gone with the Wind didn't happen because Gone with the Wind did happen and it helps explain a lot about where we are but that doesn't mean that 13 year olds necessarily will enjoy reading it but if you do give it to her I would very much be interested in what she thought of it and you can recommend another book that she could read perhaps well I could that's true mine has some pretty brutal stuff in it for 13 year olds but no I was going to say I would recommend that she read some Baldwin there's a wonderful book by Ann Petrie that nobody knows called The Street which is really really interesting which is about women the anyway and the other one if she hasn't read it is Zora Neale Hurston's There Are As We're Watching God yeah that one yeah go with those instead of Mitchell thank you I think we have to leave it there and you're going to sign some books outside of it thank you thank you very much