One of the Strangest Movies Regularly Shown on TCM:

[dulcinea]

SANTA FE TRAIL.
You all know a certain piece of cinematic trash that presents the KKK as heroic and the black race as unworthy of the freedom that it gained in the 1861-65 War.
Another equally suspect movie is this 1940 production directed by Curtiz, and which, unlike Griffith's agitprop piece, is regularly shown on TCM. What is one to make of a movie that accuses John Brown and the abolitionist movement of bringing on the war all by themselves alone, and which pretty much says--as the DWGGarbage clearly says--that the whites of the North and the South should unite against their common enemy: the black race and its rascally defenders?

[jbuck919]

Didn't know about that movie. I would have avoided it in the listings on the assumption that it was a western, which I can't stand.

[dulcinea]

In the beginning, JEB Stuart=Errol Flynn makes reference to a law that was supposedly being considered in the legislature of one of the Southern states to abolish slavery in due time.
Is this law project a figment of the screenwriter's imagination? None of the many books about the 1861-65 War that I have read mention anything about such a project; instead they all emphasize that, by the time of the Pierce administration, when the movie starts, all the Southern states had hardened into an unshakable position of either slavery be allowed into the Western territories or else leave the Union.

[dulcinea]

Is it true that, in the time of Griffith, who was from Kentucky, the South was so mentally and culturally isolated from the rest of the world and the rest of the USA that it was totally ignorant of how the KKK and Jim Crow were regarded out of the narrow confines of Southern society?

[jbuck919]

Is it true that, in the time of Griffith, who was from Kentucky, the South was so mentally and culturally isolated from the rest of the world and the rest of the USA that it was totally ignorant of how the KKK and Jim Crow were regarded out of the narrow confines of Southern society?

Not isolated enough.

[david johnson]

hmmm...Indiana had more KKK members than most southern states. I'm not convinced the thrust of this thread reveals accurate interpretation of history. The movie is fine, if you enjoy that style.

[dulcinea]

hmmm...Indiana had more KKK members than most southern states. I'm not convinced the thrust of this thread reveals accurate interpretation of history. The movie is fine, if you enjoy that style.

Is the movie in question accurate at all? Certainly, if we judge a person by the result of his actions, then John Brown deserves to be admired, rather than condemned.

[jbuck919]

hmmm...Indiana had more KKK members than most southern states. I'm not convinced the thrust of this thread reveals accurate interpretation of history. The movie is fine, if you enjoy that style.

Is the movie in question accurate at all? Certainly, if we judge a person by the result of his actions, then John Brown deserves to be admired, rather than condemned.

It's times like these that I most regret that Ralph does not post anymore. Our great debunker of history, as I recall, had a decidedly negative opinion of John Brown, and of course Ralph always defends his opinions with great rigor. Anyway, it was Barry Goldwater who said "Extremism in the cause of liberty is no vice," but it was John Brown who embodied the principle. Now Barry Goldwater insisted to his dying day that he would have dropped the bomb on North Vietnam. Hmmmm.....

[dulcinea]

hmmm...Indiana had more KKK members than most southern states. I'm not convinced the thrust of this thread reveals accurate interpretation of history. The movie is fine, if you enjoy that style.

Is the movie in question accurate at all? Certainly, if we judge a person by the result of his actions, then John Brown deserves to be admired, rather than condemned.

It's times like these that I most regret that Ralph does not post anymore. Our great debunker of history, as I recall, had a decidedly negative opinion of John Brown, and of course Ralph always defends his opinions with great rigor. Anyway, it was Barry Goldwater who said "Extremism in the cause of liberty is no vice," but it was John Brown who embodied the principle. Now Barry Goldwater insisted to his dying day that he would have dropped the bomb on North Vietnam. Hmmmm.....

William Lloyd Garrison said of people like Pdt Buchanan that they abhored slavery in the abstract, but that they denied the right of anyone to devise its overthrowing, and that they prayed that the poor slave might be elevated, while at the same time they stood on his chest to keep him down.
Unquestionable fact: history went the way of Brown and Garrison, not of Buchanan and J Davis.

[dulcinea]

Did Brown have an axe to grind in the issue of abolition? Would he have benefitted in some way from the abolition of slavery? No; what he did was done simply because it was the right and righteous thing to do.
When I prayed for four decades for the end of communism in Europe, did I expect some benefit from that? No; I did it because, as the quotation from which the novel FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS takes its name puts it, if other people are not free, then I myself am not free. I can only be truly free if everybody else in the world is free.

[jbuck919]

When I prayed for four decades for the end of communism in Europe, did I expect some benefit from that? No; I did it because, as the quotation from which the novel FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS takes its name puts it, if other people are not free, then I myself am not free. I can only be truly free if everybody else in the world is free.

Without a doubt communism would have fallen much sooner had the Catholic Church not abandoned the Leonine prayers after Mass following Vatican II.

[dulcinea]

When I prayed for four decades for the end of communism in Europe, did I expect some benefit from that? No; I did it because, as the quotation from which the novel FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS takes its name puts it, if other people are not free, then I myself am not free. I can only be truly free if everybody else in the world is free.

Without a doubt communism would have fallen much sooner had the Catholic Church not abandoned the Leonine prayers after Mass following Vatican II.

I certainly didn't abandon mine.