Sarah Churchwell - The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells

THE WRATH

TO COME

Behold America: A History of America First
and the American Dream

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem
and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe

SARAH CHURCHWELL

THE WRATH

TO COME

GONE WITH THE WIND AND

THE LIES AMERICA TELLS

www.headofzeus.com

First published in the UK in 2022 by Head of Zeus Ltd,
part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright Sarah Churchwell, 2022

The moral right of Sarah Churchwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781789542981
ISBN (E): 9781789542974

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To WJA _________________

It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction. I think black people have always felt this about America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come.

James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

On 6 January 2021, as the rancorous presidency of Donald Trump came to an anarchic end, the Confederate Battle Flag flew in the United States Capitol for the first time in American history.

It was also the first time an American election loss was greeted with utter pandemonium. Many of those watching would have expected a cold day in hell to come first, but it was just a cold day in 2021.

A mob of around 9,000 people had journeyed to Washington, DC from around the country to support Trump as he repeated the lie that he had won the 2020 election. As they gathered to defy Trumps defeat (confirmed by multiple state and federal courts, state legislatures, and independent election watchers), they shouted, Stop the Steal. Inflamed by speeches telling them what they already believed, they charged the Capitol building, where lawmakers had gathered to certify the fact that Trump had lost.

What appeared at the time to be Trumps last-ditch effort (until he dug further ditches) to stop Bidens election came at a Save America rally, held as Congress was voting to certify Bidens win on 6 January 2021. Describing his loss as a comprehensive assault on our democracy, Trump told the crowd: We fight. We fight like hell and if you dont fight like hell youre not going to have a country anymore. He also informed his overwhelmingly white crowd, You are allowed to go by very different rules.

Inflamed by his lies, exceptionalism, and thinly veiled white nationalism, they charged the Capitol. Waving flags with Trumps name, they chanted Hang Mike Pence! and demanded that the Capitol police reveal Speaker Nancy Pelosis whereabouts. Execute the traitors! one man shouted through a megaphone, I want to see executions! They built makeshift gallows with a dangling noose on the Mall.

Rioters swarmed up the sides of the Capitol building, dangling from balustrades and windowsills as if it were a medieval siege, rather than electoral politics in one of the worlds most developed democracies. They attacked police officers who tried to preserve order, some of whom later died, one of whom demanded to know what the fuck they thought they were doing. They used flagpoles wrapped in the stars and stripes as weapons to bash through windows and doors, shouting violent bullhorned threats against American politicians. They smashed and grabbed, screaming their intention to seize the government by force. There were reports that they smeared the hallways of the Capitol with shit.

One of them, wearing a cowboy hat and holding aloft a Confederate flag, clambered onto the memorial to Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Union forces during the American Civil War before becoming the nations eighteenth president. Grants army defeated the white supremacist slavocracy that was the Confederate States of America, holding the nation together by sheer force as it moved painfully, with great reluctance, toward the eradication of the slave economy. On 6 January, the insurrectionist perched astride a bronze charger, grinning, as he waved the Southern Cross. It was a windy day, and videos caught the sound of the Confederate flag whipping hard over the head of the great Union general, an eerie, dark portent of battle, as if the moral victory Grant had won was suddenly, shockingly, obliterated.

Many who fly the Confederate flag today insist it has been rehabilitated, having shrugged off its unfortunate origins as the actual standard for human enslavement, and has evolved into an inoffensive symbol of Southern heritage and culture. But symbols are not changed so easily. The Southern Cross was created to signal offence: it was the battle flag Confederates flew as they charged into war, ready to die to preserve what they called African slavery; eventually it was adopted as the favourite flag of Confederate memory. A good clue that the Southern Cross hasnt become innocent is that it keeps emerging in the context of violent white nationalism.

When it was created in 1861, the flags originators dreamed of its red-backed, white-starred diagonal blue cross inspiring white supremacists until it flew from the nations Capitol. They never achieved that dream.

The South had seceded from the United States in armed revolt against the idea that the federal government might (someday) unilaterally outlaw slavery in the so-called land of the free. The North fought for five bloody years to hold the Union together, to create a country that was not, as Abraham Lincoln famously said, half-slave and half-free. An estimated 600,000 Americans and more died on the battlefields of that war, from the green farmlands of Pennsylvania to the red clay of Georgia. Abraham Lincoln had his head blown off by John Wilkes Booth, a white supremacist actor who shouted sic semper tyrannis as he fired thus always to tyrants, calling Lincoln a tyrant for ending the legal entitlements of some people to enslave other people. It was not the last time an American president would be accused of tyranny for thwarting American citizens in the exercise of their will to power.

Booth and his co-conspirators were executed for their crimes. Confederate leaders were jailed (briefly), barred (temporarily) from holding further political office, and gradually died off, believing they had failed. They were fighting to preserve human bondage: they should have failed.

But exactly 160 years after it was created, the Southern Cross was paraded through the corridors of American government. It was unfurled over the marble steps of the Capitol and hung from the balcony. It bobbed amid a sea of other flags in the Rotunda; a man in combat fatigues and a red Trump hat shouldered it as he stood on a balustrade. But the most widely circulated image was of an insurrectionist who casually strolled with the Southern Cross outside the Senate Chamber, beneath the nose of the fierce abolitionist Charles Sumner, who adamantly opposed slavery and was nearly beaten to death on the floor of the Senate by a South Carolina slavocrat.

To anyone who knows the history the real history of what that flag meant, who these people were and what they fought for, it was a terrible, sickening sight. But as America has spent the last century and a half trying to obliterate that real history, only a tiny minority fully grasped the reckoning at hand.