Red-Haired Ash Reads

The Wrath to Come shows how one of the most popular stories of all time, Gone With the Wind, can be used to explain the current division in the United States. Churchwell explains how the history of mythmaking has influenced America’s politics and how Gone with the Wind influenced that mythmaking. 

“The United States is, one might argue, especially prone to cognitive dissonance as a society, because the brutal realities of American life are so perpetually in conflict with its exalted ideals. Its very name suggests cognitive dissonance: any country that calls itself the United States is protesting too much.”

When I saw the title and premise of this book, I knew I needed to read it because I remember watching Gone with the Wind as a child and was led to believe then that it was accurate to history. I did grow up in a household that believed the Lost Cause myth, even though I was from a northern state. As I got older and learned the truth about American history I realized how wrong Scarlett’s views on the war were but I never realized how this movie influenced the world. 

Churchwell takes this famous work and uses it to show how America has spent 160 years in denial to hide the truth. With the help of the Lost Cause myth America learned to deny the truth of the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacism, racism, slavery, and fascism, which had long lasting impacts that we are still seeing today. Churchwell breaks down all these issues and shows how this movie and book influenced the acceptance of these values and incited further violence then and now. She even discusses how the author’s personal views in the belief of Lost Cause history influence her writing of this story. 

“White supremacism is a politics of collective narcissism, justified by racism, enabling its adherents to believe they are the moral police while engaging in the most brutally selfish acts.”

From the very beginning, Churchwell does a great job at showing the similarities of the past and present and how the Lost Cause is still influencing politics. She compares our past to our current climate by discussing Trump’s rise to power and his influence of the January 6th riot, and how those rioters felt justified in what they did.  It was very interesting seeing how the influence of Lost Cause has affected American politics and continues to be a huge influence for Republicans and their followers. 

I am going to be thinking about this book for a long time because there is just so much information here that helps explain how we got to his pont. By the time I finished reading this book I had almost 300 highlights. I will definitely be rereading this book in the future, because I know I didn’t retain everything because there was just so much new information for me to think about. Overall, I highly recommend this book if you are curious about how Gone With the Wind and the Lost Cause myth has influenced our current environment. 

TW: white supremacy, racism and racist language, slavery, lynching, death, rape

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