HISTORY TWISTED INTO LUDICROUS SHAPES
Hesseltine, William B.
History Twisted Into Ludicrous Shapes ' FREEDOM ROAD, by Howard Fast. Duell, Sloan and Pearce. $2.75. Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine AS A FORM of literature the historical novel falls into a...
...Ex-slaves and poor whites should have cooperated...
...They could have cooperated...
...the historical situation was factually accurate...
...The carpetbaggers, the army officers, the Union League, and the Freedmen's Bureau marched those Negroes to the polls...
...The P'Hara girl and her Irish Daddy were authentic figures...
...This is the yarn of Gideon Jackson,—"a combination of several Negro statesmen of the time"—a runaway slave who fought in the Union armies, served in South Carolina's "Black and Tan" Constitutional Convention, and went to the State Senate and to Congress...
...The story is told of interracial cooperation on this Carwell plantation—of which, the author alleges, there were "a thousand...
...he advocated education...
...and he died leading his fellows in a valiant defense of their homes against the bestial hordes of the Ku Klux Klan...
...It was a situation which the fact-bound pen of the historian can never adequately ^describe...
...It has been tried...
...By every rule of Marxian economics they should have cooperated...
...It is neither a historical monograph, leaded with footnoted facts, nor a pure work of fiction wherein factual information is subordinated to plot structure and character development...
...And now, Freedom Road essays once again to tell the Reconstruction story...
...It is an answer to the Rev...
...Dixon's works—telling in reverse colors the same story as The Clansman...
...he organized poor whites and Negroes to buy their land...
...Freedom Road is a biased, partisan book...
...They voted freely, in this book, with never a thought for the instructions they received from the Freedmen's Bureau and the Union League...
...THE theme of the book is that poor white and poor Negro could and did work together—that, in eight years, they "created a fine, a just, and a truly democratic civilization...
...The carpetbaggers selected the Gideon Jacksons to be elected, and the carpetbaggers controlled the Constitutional Convention—not the Gideon Jacksons and their poor white friends...
...Even if there had been "a thousand" Carwells—and the partisan, biased, Ku Klux Investigation Reports which the author uses are not a credible source—they were still not typical...
...The major influence of its long list of atrocity stories might well be the encouragement of racial hatred—this time, of blacks against whites...
...The Negroes never had a chance to practice democracy...
...The facts of history—the plain basic facts to which a historical novel must conform—are twisted here into ludicrous shapes...
...This is a hopeful, and thoroughly naive, thesis...
...Not only are the characters and situations in this book unique, singular, and peculiar, but the whole situation appears in a partisan, even sectarian, ideology...
...The Negroes of the Carwell plantation, for example, all went down to "the voting" and elected Gideon Jackson to the Constitutional Convention...
...a situation which needs the treatment a historical novelist might give...
...the black codes were made to drive the Negro "straight back to slavery...
...Rhett Butler a fairly drawn character...
...This story, says the author, has not been told before because "powerful forces did not hold it to be a good thing for the American people to know that . . . the experiment had worked...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine AS A FORM of literature the historical novel falls into a distinct category...
...I The Kluxers down in Georgia should have hanged Miss Mitchell for telling the truth, but her publishers saved her from that fate by advertising the book as a romantic, lavender-and-old-lace production with fine ©Id Southern families cluttering up the Old Plantation, suh...
...a "New England owned" company with New England money (!) built a railroad in South Carolina...
...Its history is inaccurate, and its characters are atypical...
...The war destroyed an economic system, rearranged social classes, and released elemental forces in human nature from the fetters of convention and custom...
...And gullible reviewers followed their lead—with never a voice being raised to say that "GWTW" had told God's honest truth about Reconstruction...
...the minor characters were recognizable in every community...
...One is led to wonder what "powerful forces" might be operating at this time to revive these inaccurate "memories...
...the South Carolina Convention operated under "the power given to them by Congress...
...The list is endless, demonstrating a complete ignorance of the elementary facts...
...Unless it is a mere "costume" novel—with an antique setting used to bolster a motheaten p 1 o t—the historical novel must be true to history, its characters must be historical personages correctly portrayed or authentic types, and its plot development must depend upon the unfolding of historical events...
...Thomas Dixon tried it in Leopard Spots and The Clansman, telling the story of proud whites terrorized by black savages until they organized the Ku Klux Klan to snatch the remnants of their civilization from the bestial hordes...
...But the plain fact is that they did nothing of the kind...
...Gone With the Wind was an honest book—an amazingly honest work which was ballyhooed into fame on dishonest grounds...
...These were biased, partisan books, glorifying violence, teaching a lusty hate for Southern Negroes...
...THE unfortunate fact is that that is not a true picture of South Carolina in Reconstruction...
...Made into a movie, The Birth of a Nation, Dixon's version of Reconstruction is credited with the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and with the spread of race hatred throughout the nation, i Margaret Mitchell tried her hand at the Civil War and Reconstruction story and produced one of the Strangest books in literary annals...
...The planters, in this book, "used" Andrew Johnson...
...he sent his son to medical school in Scotland...
...When the eight years of "Negro and white freedom and cooperation in the South was destroyed . . . the very memory was expunged...
...There were plenty of instances of Negro and white cooperation in the South during Reconstruction—but it was not the "poor white" who cooperated with the Negroes, and there was nothing typical in the isolated instances...
...The period of Reconstruction after the Civil War is an inviting field for a historical novel...
...universal compulsory education was the "basis for the whole new state constitution...
...He grew from an illiterate field hand into a cultured statesman...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 39
