Modern Language Review

In 2018 Sarah Churchwell, an American academic working in London, published Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream (London: Bloomsbury). The Wrath to Come can be regarded as its sequel. The theme of Behold, America is that those two phrases, central to US ideology, have changed over time. The American Dream initially was shorthand for ‘liberty, justice and equality’ (p. 24). This meaning was revived in the famous 1963 speech by Martin Luther King, but by 2016, the time of Donald Trump’s election as President, it ‘had shrivelled into mere materialism’ (p. 305). ‘America First’ was popularized by Woodrow Wilson in 1915 to signify neutrality, but after the First World War [End Page 265] the phrase became a euphemism for xenophobia. A letter published in 1936 is just one example illustrating the extent of American fascism: ‘Christian Nordic white America will, in the spirit of Hitler, keep the Jews and Negroes in their place of Jim Crow inferiority’ (quoted p. 214). Trump followed his father in practising a Jim Crow (segregation) housing policy, even after it became illegal (p. 289). During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump claimed that he was the embodiment of ‘America First’ (p. 291).

The ideologies discussed in Behold, America are exemplified by Churchwell’s analysis of Gone with the Wind in The Wrath to Come. Her thesis is that Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel ‘emerged into a debate about American fascism that had been building for fifteen years, and by 1936 was active and urgent’ (p. 358). The Prologue begins with the violent close of Trump’s presidency, with the Confederate flag flying in the US Capitol during the insurrection of 6 January 2021 (p. 1), and aims to explain the connections between that episode and the myth of the ‘Lost Cause’, of the Southern States dependent on the paternalistic treatment of slaves, but ruined by the refusal of the Northern States to allow them to secede and continue a genteel, agrarian way of life. According to the ‘Lost Cause’, the North used slavery as a pretext for imposing Reconstruction on the South, including extending the franchise to freed slaves (pp. 8, 114–16). The consequence was hatred of the federal government, represented by Washington DC. Churchwell suggests that, while there is no ‘direct line of descent’ between the ‘Lost Cause’ and ‘twenty-first century Trumpian politics’ (p. 15), Gone with the Wind—both the novel and the 1939 film— occupies the pivotal position of ‘a cultural breakdown, the point where mythology triumphed over history’ (p. 17), creating an environment for the lies and distortions uttered by Trump and the considerable constituency that he represents.

Churchwell structures her text as thirty-nine short essays in nine thematic sections, intermixing frequent quotations from Gone with the Wind with the ‘historical actuality’ (p. 14) of the American Civil War and its aftermath, frequently taken from contemporary newspapers. One contrast will indicate the gravity of Churchwell’s argument. Scarlett O’Hara, the anti-heroine of Gone with the Wind, complains in one of her frequent diatribes against Reconstruction: ‘Only the negroes had rights or redress these days. The Yankees had the South prostrate and they intended to keep it so’ (quoted p. 181). A report in an 1899 Georgia newspaper, the Macon Telegraph, presents an alternative and far more horrific picture of arbitrary power. A Black man accused of raping a white woman was burnt at the stake before an invited audience of two thousand. His body was dismembered and ‘disposed as souvenirs’. Bones were marketed to the highest bidder, while some edible parts were barbecued (pp. 165–66).

Churchwell displays the links between American and Nazi fascism, with the continuing popularity of Gone with the Wind suggesting that, unlike Germany, the US has been successful in erasing its past (p. 10). The urgency of her argument means inevitably...