Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,443

This is the grave of Margaret Mitchell.

This very sucky person was born in 1900 in Atlanta. The family was super wealthy and so had no reason to question the glories of white supremacy. They weren’t completely right wing. Her mother Maybelle was a prominent southern suffragist, but then for lots of suffragists, fighting for women voting was a way to reinforce white supremacy and they often articulated it in that way. Maybelle was also a devout Catholic and very involved in reform movements within the church. Interesting figure worthy of her own post someday. In any case, her daughter still sucked. Mitchell’s parents came from elite slaveholding families and then made money on railroads and urban development in Atlanta. So by 1900, this was a very rich family.

While there are stories about Mitchell being forced to dress as a boy after her dress caught on fire when she was 3, her siblings countered these legends so who knows. But what we do know is that she grew up very much in the world of Confederate nostalgia. She was taken for horse rides with a veteran friend of the family who would regale the girl with stories of the romance of the war, bullshit as this was. Of course this was everywhere in her youth, not only at home, but with the building of the giant Confederate monuments and the filming of Birth of a Nation in 1915, which made a huge impression on her. In fact, one of her first stage roles as she became interested in acting and the arts was dramatizing a different Thomas Dixon racist Civil War romance.

Mitchell went to college at Smith, fell in a love with a man who many suspected of being a homosexual, and then he died in World War I. She considered him the love of her life even though she even said herself that there was no physical passion there. She married another man in 1922. It was a disaster. He was a drunk and beat her; that they were living at her parents’ house did not help and meant her parents saw the abuse. They were divorced in 1924. She then married his best friend, who was the best man at their wedding anyway, John Marsh. Interestingly, Marsh and her not only had a very stable marriage, but they were extremely into open sexual expression and developed a huge collection of erotica. Mitchell became a great reader of pornographic novels. Unusual for the time and place.

Mitchell started writing during her terrible first marriage. She had no experience in journalism, but was rich so what other qualification was necessary. She wrote a lot of profiles of famous Georgia women, especially those involved in the Civil War and rise of Jim Crow, which her readers loved. She moved to romantic fiction, set in both the present and past. Interestingly, in the 20s, she wrote a short piece of fiction about a white girl falling in love with a mixed race man. It did not get published. It was her 1936 novel Gone with the Wind that made her famous. I hardly need to explain this piece of grotesque Confederate nostalgia and the film it spawned to bring the politics of Birth of a Nation into the 1930s–a bit less openly violent, but just as romantic. Yuck, gross, I hate everything about this so much. And people loved it. She won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Let’s be clear, Americans really wanted to hear these stories. I mean, hell, FDR appointed his favorite Confederate nostalgia writer ambassador to Spain based on this alone! Oh look at those happy slaves! Why can’t they be like that today? Puke.

Now super famous, Mitchell was an important player in government homefront efforts in World War II. She led campaigns to write to the soldiers and to sew them hospital gowns and personal clothing. She also personally sponsored a couple of ships, one of which had to be destroyed after heavy damage at Guadalcanal.

In 1948, Mitchell and her husband was walking to the movies to see the Powell and Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale. She stepped out into the street a bit too early and was plastered by a drunk driver. She never regained consciousness and died five days later. She was 48 years old.

Margaret Mitchell is buried in Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.

I could probably say more, but I get so disgusted thinking about Gone with the Wind that I just don’t want to.

If you would like this series to visit other Confederate nostalgiamongers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. D.W. Griffith is buried in Crestwood, Kentucky and Custis Lee is in Lexington, Virginia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.