Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,394

This is the grave of Susan Myrick.

Born in 1893 in Baldwin County, Georgia, Myrick grew up rich. Her parents owned a big plantation. I assume they had lots of sharecroppers on it, but am not completely sure. Anyway, she went to the Georgia Normal and Industrial College in Milledgeville and then became a teacher. Her specialty was physical education, which at this time was a progressive subject in women’s education. This is the period where women’s sports were really rising and those sports were often associated with a new woman being trained for a new world. No PE in the Gilded Age! Myrick taught in Georgia for a bit and then went to Michigan to teach. Then she was off to Nebraska and then back to Georgia. Myrick got a job with the Georgia Department of Education in 1918, worked there for four years, and then ran the PE side of a private girls school until 1928.

While the subject of physical education for girls is not unimportant in the bigger scheme of things, this is not why I am discussing Myrick. It’s that she became a key person in the Georgia literary scene. She got her start writing an advice column for girls in the Macon Telegraph. This did pretty well and in 1928, she quit her job and became a full time writer for the newspaper, which included features as well as her bread-and-butter advice column. This led her to get to know a lot of writers living in Georgia, including Sherwood Anderson, who was down there at that time. She also became friends with Margaret Mitchell, author of the tremendously popular racist dreck Gone with the Wind. They became super close.

So when David O. Selznick decided to turn the novel into the blockbuster movie that it became in 1939, Mitchell had him hire Myrick as an advisor. Specifically, she was a voice coach on the film, working with the actors to perfect their accents. I am not sure what made Myrick an expert in teaching this rather specific thing. She was a teacher, yes, and she probably had a hell of an accent herself, but teaching accents does not seem a lot like teaching PE to me. The way she put it–and boy howdy is there a lot to process in this quote–I “went out there [to Hollywood] fully prepared to argue and to quote authority to them that the Southern people do not talk like Negroes, but the Negroes like Southerners” So what I gather here is that Hollywood thought all people from the South talked like their already embedded stereotype of the Black voice, but Myrick went there to tell them that sure the darkies talk like that but we whites don’t! Good lord, the levels of racism in American society. And of course nothing did more in these years to embed American racism in not only American but global culture than the success of Gone with the Wind. For example, there’s the scene in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows when the French resistance leaders are in London and one of the things they do is see Gone with the Wind and then talk about how sad it is that the French people won’t be able to see this movie til the war is over. And there’s nothing ironic about Melville putting that in the film either, even though it was a 1969 release.

Among Myrick’s other “contributions” to Gone with the Wind was vociferously opposing the casting of Hattie McDaniel as the maid, saying she didn’t have the dignity to play the part. Obviously being the first Black person to win an Academy Award is an important first, but for that role…..ugh. Not sure what Myrick wanted here. Somewhat to her credit, she also interfered with ridiculous production decisions that every southerner would have rolled their eyes at, such as a scene where cotton was supposed to be chopped in April and another where Scarlett O’Hara walks around carrying a dish of her plantation-grown olives, which of course were not grown by plantations in Georgia. The stupidity of the nation toward basic facts in the South in these years really was quite remarkable. In the aftermath of the film, Myrick became Mitchell’s proxy in promoting it and became a sort of official memory of the production, to the point that when NBC aired it on network TV for the first time, in 1976, Myrick was the feature person in an hour long documentary about making it that aired before the film.

Myrick certainly had no compunctions about using her newfound relative fame for her own purposes. She became known as the “Emily Post of the South” as her advice columns received increasingly large circulation. She then became a leading national voice for conservation in agriculture. Among her many jobs with the Telegraph over the years was as its farm editor, and in an era where small town newspapers still mattered, she could get her material published nationally. She really did become an expert on these issues, doing a lot of work to promote certain crops such as blue lupine to prevent erosion. She wrote a children’s book to promote conservation in 1950 titled Our Daily Bread that became a frequent book assigned to students throughout the South. She eventually retired from the Telegraph in 1967 but she wrote two columns a week almost until the very end. She died in 1978, at the age of 85.

Susan Myrick is buried in Memory Hill Cemetery, Milledgeville, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with that horrible movie, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Clark Gable is in Glendale, California and Hattie McDaniel is in Los Angeles. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.