"His late career - these six weeks, I mean - has been meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing more miraculous in all history."
Brown, who had been a radical abolitionist, by the mid-1850s saw no other way to bring about an end to slavery except through violence. On the night of October 16, 1859, with a handful of men Brown staged a raid on Harper's Ferry federal armory in Virginia. He was planning to use the weapons he seized to arm slaves and incite a slave rebellion in the Appalachian region. The raid was a catastrophe and Brown was captured by Union marines, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee. On the 2nd of December, Brown, found guilty of "Treason against the state of Virginia; murder; conspiracy" was hanged. His trial and execution was one of the catalysts that brought about the secession of slave-owning states the following year and the start of the Civil War. A popular song sung by Union soldiers in the war was "John Brown's Body":
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
His soul's marching on!
I have often wondered why no one has made a film about John Brown. Thoreau himself pointed out "No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the Manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child between his prison and the gallows?"
Since the end of the war, Brown's legacy has suffered huge swings of interpretation. As James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, a critical survey of the misrepresentation of American history in public school history textbooks, wrote: "The treatment of Brown, like the treatment of slavery and Reconstruction, has changed in American history textbooks. From 1890 to about 1970, John Brown was insane. Before 1890 he was perfectly sane, and after 1970 he regained his sanity. Since Brown himself did not change after his death, his sanity provides an inadvertent index of the level of white racism in our society."
Brown's last words to the tribunal that condemned him are rational, succinct, and noble. Hardly the words of a lunatic who knows he is condemned to die:
This Court acknowledges too, as I suppose, the validity of the LAW OF GOD. I saw a book kissed, which I suppose to be the BIBLE, or at least the NEW TESTAMENT, which teaches me that, "All things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them." It teaches me further, to "Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that GOD is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of his despised poor, I have done no wrong, but RIGHT. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life, for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and MINGLE MY BLOOD FURTHER WITH THE BLOOD OF MY CHILDREN, and with the blood of millions in this Slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, – I say; LET IT BE DONE.
Given the schizophrenic representation of John Brown in the popular imagination that James Loewen describes, it's no wonder that, on the few occasions that American film depicted Brown, he was either an obvious madman or a blundering fool, from Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), Santa Fe Trail (1940), to Seven Angry Men (1955). All three films have Raymond Massey in common, playing Lincoln in the first and Brown in the other two.(1) I want to concentrate on Santa Fe Trail, which follows John Brown's career from Kansas to Virginia, interpolated with an invented and preposterous subplot involving Ronald Reagan as George Armstrong Custer. The film puts Custer at Harper's Ferry, which is fanciful history - Custer was 19 at the time and still at West Point.
Where do I start to attack this film? Evidently Robert Buckner, who wrote the script, saw the dramatic potential of John Brown's fateful final years. But then Warner Brothers told him that it needed more scenes of Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn) and, just for the hell of it, George Custer, together at West Point in 1854, two years later in a competition to win the hand of a Kansas belle who never existed named "Kit Carson" Holliday (Olivia De Havilland, who just celebrated - if that is the word - her 103rd birthday), and participating in the military response to the Harper's Ferry raid. Along the way, Stuart battles Brown in Kansas and, at the film's climax, in Virginia. Tasmanian Errol Flynn is more wooden than the scaffold on which they hanged John Brown. Ronald Reagan, who was still a New Deal Democrat and had married Jane Wyman earlier in 1940, is miscast as Custer, but he is not nearly as out of place as Olivia De Havilland. After one of Brown's sons informs on him (another fabrication), De Havilland has this exchange with Flynn:
Kit: Oh, Jeb. I'm frightened. That boy is crippled for life. And that man on the train. He died for a principle. And a man killed him for a principle. One of them is wrong, but which one?
Stuart: Who knows the answer to that, Kit? Everybody in America is trying to decide.
Kit: Yes, by words in the East and by guns in the West. But one day the words will turn into guns. Oh, Jeb. Can't it be stopped now? Can't the slaves be freed before it's too late?
Stuart: It will be stopped when we hang John Brown. Then the South can settle our own problem without loss of pride by being forced into it by a bunch of fanatics.
Kit: Oh, Jeb. What does pride have to do with human lives?
Stuart: Kit, the two things kind of come together down South. Can't pry them apart, not even with guns.
Made the year following the sensational release of Gone With the Wind, a film whose distortions of history make it unwatchable today, Santa Fe Trail throws the deadly serious history of Brown's erratic but purposeful opposition to slavery under the wagon with the useless distraction of the subplot. Brown himself, played by Raymond Massey, is represented as a dangerous fanatic, and his cause, which resulted in a 4-year war, killing more than 600,000 Americans, is shown to have been tragically unnecessary. This horrible misreading of history was intended, we are assured, to dismiss the "hard feelings" between the North and the South when, in 1940, the nation was sitting out the war against fascism in Europe, knowing they would eventually be drawn into it. You see? We Americans can unite against a common cause if we can just overcome our differences.
If nothing else, Santa Fe Trail is a reminder of what a horrific place the United States was in in 1859, when the subject of slavery was one that politicians had to tiptoe around so as not to offend or alarm the slave states. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the Republican Party, ran on a platform that was not overtly abolitionist, but that sought to limit the ownership of slaves to the South and prevent it from being established in the new territories in the West awaiting statehood. As conciliatory as Lincoln's position was, for he knew that he could not win the presidency if he alienated voters in the southern states, within a month of his inauguration in March 1861 South Carolina seceded from the Union, the outpost on the garrison of Fort Sumter was besieged, and the Civil War commenced.
As disgraceful as it is to distort the past (the Civil War was only dimly remembered in 1940), trying to subvert the lessons of the past is contemptible. Americans have never taken the Civil War seriously, so how can we be expected to learn anything from it? If George Santayana's famous warning about repeating the past were to come true, stupid and meretricious Hollywood movies like Santa Fe Trail can be used as evidence against us. Gone With the Wind remains one of the highest-grossing films of all time, so it's no surprise that Santa Fe Trail was one of Warner Bros. biggest hits of 1940.
The film omits Brown's speech at his trial, and instead inserts an absurd speech on the gallows in which he strikes a Messianic pose. Stuart sees Kit wiping a tear from her eye. "Don't, Kit," he tells her. "He was born for this." And Kit replies, "I'm not crying for him, Jeb. I see something else up there - something much more terrible than just one man." Sparing us the moment of Brown falling through the trap door, we see instead Robert E. Lee, who says, "So perish all such enemies of the Union, all such foes of the human race." But Lee was another such enemy of the Union, and he wasn't hanged.
(1) The director of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, John Cromwell, played John Brown.
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