How would you interpret the first passage? “Maybe Scarlett O’Hara will come out and stump for Strom Thurmond,” I suggested. “And Rhett Butler, whistling Dixiecrat to call out the segregationists.” Tom

Wu Ting

How would you interpret the first passage? “Maybe Scarlett O’Hara will come out and stump for Strom Thurmond,” I suggested. “And Rhett Butler, whistling Dixiecrat to call out the segregationists.” Tom looked up, eyes wide. “Now that is a campaign image. You’ve got the gift! And on the other team, Henry Wallace as the Pied Piper, with the liberals skipping off behind him.” “Poor Truman, he’s got nobody left. I read he’s asked a dozen men to run as his vice president, and they all turned him down. Do you think that’s true?” “He can’t get reelected, why should they waste the time?” How would you interpret the first passage? I guess Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler are characters in the movie “Gone with the wind” produced in 1939. Do you know the connection between these characters and Strom Thurmond? PS: They were talking about the presidential election of 1948. Thanks! And this excerpt is taken from The Lacuna by Kingsolver.I looked it up and found Strom Thurmond was a segregationist. And in the movie, Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler were slaveholders. So I guess that’s why the man said so, right? By the way, how would you interpret “call out the segregationist” here? Does it mean to shout out the names of segregationists?

May 24, 2015 3:47 AM

Answers · 5

"I guess Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler are characters in the movie “Gone with the wind” produced in 1939." Yes. It was also a huge best-selling novel, published in 1936. "Gone with the Wind" is set in a mythologized South--the southern part of the United States, the slaveholding states in the Civil War. In this fantasy world: slaveholding Southerners were aristocrats, admirable, with noble virtues. The South before the Civil War was a lost golden age. Slaveholding was acceptable, slaves were well-treated, slaves were loyal and loving toward their owners, voluntarily accepting their condition. The slaveowners are taking care of inferior creatures who need paternalistic oversight. Being slaves is better for them than freedom. Slaves understand that. Northerners just don't understand. The speaker is saying that Strom Thurmond lives in and believes in this fantasy world of "Gone with the Wind." Strom Thurmond, of course, was a segregationist. The U.S. political system has a complicated balance of power between the states and the Federal government. Thurmond supposed "states rights," a euphemistic way of saying the Southern states had a right to practice various forms of discrimination against African-Americans.

May 24, 2015