Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

I first read Gone with the Wind soon after I turned 15, and it was the first "important book" that I ever picked up.

Mitchell's prose was beautiful, and it quickly expanded my own vocabulary and capacity of expression. But beyond that, it was the first book that demonstrated, with civilizational consequence, the importance of standing by one's own estimation of reality—even if one was alone against a crowd. (I wouldn't encounter such a potent form of that message until a few years later when I would read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.)

This demonstration was achieved early on through a speech delivered by the character Rhett Butler. During a BBQ, among the Southern elite and plantation owners, he explains that the South is doomed to lose the Civil War. He lays out the North's industrial, numerical, and cultural superiority in plain language, and he convinces absolutely no one.

Now, you can understand why "you are right and have knowledge the world doesn't" might appeal to a 15-year-old boy, but my emotional response to the book wasn't an immature joy at validation of instinctual contrarianism. I felt as though I had met someone deeply worthy of being known. Someone who demonstrated something vitally important about how to live in the world. I didn't recognize the emotion as such at the time, but I felt admiration. Because, although Rhett was no saint, he was courageous and determined. He had a moral code of his own, and did not bow to the backward honor culture that surrounded him. Through him, I got my first potent, proto-adult sense of how to let courage give animating strength to knowledge and character.

Here is his "Arsenal of the North" speech:

“Why, we could lick them in a month! Gentlemen always fight better than rabble. A month—why, one battle—”

“Gentlemen,” said Rhett Butler, in a flat drawl that bespoke his Charleston birth, not moving from his position against the tree or taking his hands from his pockets, “may I say a word?”

There was contempt in his manner as in his eyes, contempt overlaid with an air of courtesy that somehow burlesqued their own manners. The group turned toward him and accorded him the politeness always due an outsider.

“Has any one of you gentlemen ever thought that there's not a cannon factory south of the Mason-Dixon Line? Or how few iron foundries there are in the South? Or woolen mills or cotton factories or tanneries? Have you thought that we would not have a single warship and that the Yankee fleet could bottle up our harbors in a week, so that we could not sell our cotton abroad? But—of course—you gentlemen have thought of these things.”

“Why, he means the boys are a passel of fools!” thought Scarlett indignantly, the hot blood coming to her cheeks.

Evidently, she was not the only one to whom this idea occurred, for several of the boys were beginning to stick out their chins. John Wilkes casually but swiftly came back to his place beside the speaker, as if to impress on all present that this man was his guest and that, moreover, there were ladies present.

“The trouble with most of us Southerners,” continued Rhett Butler, “is that we either don't travel enough or we don't profit enough by our travels. Now, of course, all you gentlemen are well traveled. But what have you seen? Europe and New York and Philadelphia and, of course, the ladies have been to Saratoga” (he bowed slightly to the group under the arbor).

“You've seen the hotels and the museums and the balls and the gambling houses. And you've come home believing that there's no place like the South. As for me, I was Charleston born, but I have spent the last few years in the North.” His white teeth showed in a grin, as though he realized that everyone present knew just why he no longer lived in Charleston, and cared not at all if they did know. “I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who'd be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—all the things we haven't got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They'd lick us in a month.”