Django Unchanged: So conventional its controversial

While waiting for my car to get an oil change, I walked over to the nearby Big Lots and found a DVD of Django Unchanged in the discount rack. I hadn't seen the movie since it was making the rounds of the theaters, and I did hanker to take another look. Having enjoyed seeing it again, I did a few google searches, and found, first of all, that there have been other Django movies before, except, this is the first one where Django was a gunslinger of African descent. Some of the others were a lot bloodier.

After reading a little, I realized that Django Unchained is no more, and no less than a well-done spaghetti western, just one more of the genre. The plot is quite as improbable as all the other spaghetti westerns, but do any of us take those seriously? Django Unchained happens to be a spaghetti western where some of the action happens in The South, and it happens a little before the Civil War, instead of a decade or two afterward. There was truly western settlement going on before 1860, and a good deal of commerce and migration from the southern states to the western territories, and back again.

Django Unchained also happens to assign a lead gunslinger role to a character, and therefore an actor, of known and visible African descent. Adding to all the fantasies and fables that make up the American Western, and of course the spaghetti western, what such a character might have been like, and done, is simply a bit of good clean fun. A bit bloody, but aren't they all? So this time some "white" bad guys get killed by a "black" good guy. About time.

Django Unchained is NOT a movie of great social and political importance. It doesn't pretend to be. It is not forgotten and suppressed history brought at last to the silver screen. That is its significance. We've come far enough down the road that we can now have black characters routinely included in such movies without having to have great social and political importance.

One can certainly quibble with some historical anachronisms. There weren't night riders out in masks or other regalia in 1858 or 1859. It wasn't necessary to have secret organizations inflicting that kind of covert terror. Slavery was legal. Most of the African-descended population was enslaved, and the "free colored" population was moderately prosperous, socially conservative, dependent upon "white" patronage. If the local gentry had wanted to go after Dr. Schulz and Django, they would have done so openly, or not at all. But the scene was good entertainment.

Further, Candie Land would NOT have been around for seventy years. More like twenty, maybe thirty at the most. Mississippi was still a wild frontier in 1835. Half the land in the state was only purchased from the Choctaw nation in 1830. In 1817, Mississippi had a constitution similar to South Carolina, requiring state representatives to own 150 acres of land, and state senators 300 acres. But that was thrown out in 1832 when small family farmers in the eastern part of the state revolted against the elites along the Mississippi River and Gulf coast, what was called the "whole hogs" rebellion.

The 1832 constitution prohibited importation of any new slaves into Mississippi for sale. But by 1840 the politics of the state changed again, as cotton became the dominant crop and large plantations again dominated. So people like Calvin Candie, with pretensions to French culture, but no French, were an upstart nouveau riche elite, having a history of perhaps 18-25 years in their garish imitation of gracious plantation living. If old Ben (whose skull Candie displayed) shaved Calvin Candie's father and grandfather with a straight razor, he did that back in Virginia or South Carolina. Seventy years before 1858 was 1788, and the federal constitution was only a year old. There were still only 13 states.

This is one reason that secession was such an infantile notion, when the Civil War finally broke out. Most of the people who identified so mightily in their independent rights as citizens of the sovereign state of Mississippi had been born somewhere else. Jefferson Davis, for instance, like Abraham Lincoln, had been born in Kentucky. Neither the state nor its residents had any significant history as a distinct people. It was a creation of the United States of America.

Finally, I've never found a significant reference to any universal rule against a person of African descent riding a horse. There were dark skinned overseers who rode horses, among others. Out west, the rather small number of free black settlers rode whatever they pleased.

That said, it was really fun to see the Brittle Brothers get their comeuppance. The careful acting and camera work of the enslaved Jody's expressions as she twisted around to see the overseer about to bullwhip her get a bullet through the heart fired by a tall black man in a bright blue suit was priceless. And the blood splashing across the cotton bolls in the field as the last dead Brittle fell off his horse... exquisite. It was the same kind of thrill as watching Hopalong Cassidy step inside a mining cabin and drill bullets through ten cattle rustlers before they could draw... only with a new twist.

One spelling error recurs in several of the commentaries already available on the internet about this movie: It seems that nobody knows how to spell Brunhilda. Everyone writes it Broomhilda, which is the name of a mid-20th century American cartoon character, a funny incompetent little witch on the comics pages. The legend Schultz related to Django, the good German name that some lady named von Schaft gave to her young slave, was Brunhilda, heroine of one of the finest Teutonic epics. Keep that straight people.

Emory President is right about "three-fifths compromise" ... for what it's worth

James W. Wagner, the president of Emory University, has stirred up a storm by referring to the "three-fifths compromise," in drafting the federal constitution in 1787, as an example of how polarized people could find common ground. Students have marched on campus denouncing racism and calling for Wagner's resignation. Wagner himself has called it a clumsy and regrettable mistake.

The "three-fifths compromise" was an agreement that in figuring out how many seats a state was entitled to in the federal congress, the whole number of free persons and three fifths of the whole number of "all other Persons," an embarrassed euphemism for people of African descent - by and large enslaved, would be counted. Whatever else this may have been, it was in fact an example of how polarized people could find common ground.

What they were polarized about was not the humanity of people from Africa. They weren't even thinking about that. Contrary to common myth, the Framers of our federal constitution did not agree that Americans of African descent were 3/5 of a human being each, or that a person of African descent was 3/5 the value of a "white man."

The "three-fifths compromise" was strictly a power play between states, over which states would carry how much weight in the federal legislature. Everyone was agreed that the House of Representatives would be based on population. It would be a mistake to even say that "universal manhood suffrage" or "free white males" was the basis of representation.

Who would have the right to vote in congressional elections? Those in each state who "shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature." In most states, that involved some minimum value of property ownership. Not everyone could vote, but the entire "free" population was counted in figuring how many representatives a state could elect.

Large numbers of non-voting free people who didn't own much property would nonetheless be counted in the census and add to the number of representatives in a state's delegation. Since enslaved persons were legally chattel property, could they be counted? Northern delegates said, if you count your slaves, then we should be able to count our mules, horses, and cattle. Are they men? If so, let them vote.

(That would have been a hollow bit of humanitarian sentiment, since even as men, or women, they would own enough property to vote. But the sentiment was not humanitarian, it was about power, distributed among states, governed by a minority of even the "free white male" inhabitants.)

Essentially, the northern delegates said slaves should count for zero, and southern delegates said slaves should count one hundred percent. Did the northern delegates thus set the value of Africans lower than the southern delegates did? Nope, they were all just trying to increase their own balance of power, at the expense of the rest.

So, taking the compromise as what it really was, settling a dispute about which property owning free white men should have how much power in the new government, it was indeed a pragmatic half-victory that "kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together."

Leslie Harris, a professor of history at the school, responded, "The three-fifths compromise is one of the greatest failed compromises in U.S. history.” She elucidated that “Its goal was to keep the union together, but the Civil War broke out anyway."

Indeed it did. But it would be quite accurate to say that it was the three-fifths compromise that made possible the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.

If no compromise had been reached, the southern states would have gone their own way, two, perhaps three confederacies would have formed along the Atlantic seaboard. New York and Rhode Island might have stayed out of any confederation. Virginia would have retained its claims to the entire northwest. There probably would have been no Northwest Ordinance, keeping slavery out of the states north of the Ohio River.

But, because the three-fifths compromise allowed the formation of one nation, it was possible four score and seven years later to insist that it remain one nation. When a band of men who had a large chunk of their capital invested in enslaved human beings tried to lead their states into secession from the union, there were others (south as well as north) who said, no, you can't do that. The end result, intended by almost nobody, was the end of slavery.

Which brings the gentle reader back to Wagner's original point: there are men and women in congress today who declare an unshakable commitment to be guided only by the language of the United States Constitution, and never to compromise their ideals. These men and women are ignorant of the process by which the constitution was written and ratified. These men and women are speaking out of both sides of their mouths, because the constitution was in fact the product of compromising principles.

Compromise almost always means compromising principles, because the people on the other side of the table also have principles, which is why there are differences to be compromised.

There are other good examples to draw on. Joe Slovo, a leader of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress, was asked why the ANC's complete program (which included nationalization of all mines and natural resources) had not been implemented after Nelson Mandela was elected president. He replied, because we didn't win. The compromise between F.W. De Klerk and Nelson Mandela recognized that neither side had the power to vanquish the other. They could continue a low-level conflict for decades, or compromise. The compromise has indeed been messy and disappointing to just about everyone.

Likewise, when William F. Buckley, Jr. and S.I. Hayakawa were discussing the Panama Canal, Hayakawa said you don't negotiate from a position of weakness. Buckely astutely responded, of course you do. If you have the upper hand, and can have it all your way, you have no reason to negotiate. You only negotiate when you cannot get everything your own way.

Wagner's explanation to readers who found fault with his original column therefore remains quite appropriate to consider:

"We see these truths in hindsight. In retrospect we can fairly ask ourselves, would we have voted for the Constitution—for a new nation, for “a more perfect union”—if it meant including the three fifths compromise? Or would we have voted no—that is, voted not to undertake what I hope we see as a noble experiment, however flawed and imperfect it has been? Would the alternative have been a fractured continent, a portion of which might have continued far longer as an economy built on the enslavement of human beings? We don’t know; nor could our founders know.

"The ends do not in themselves justify any means necessary to achieve them. My essay did not suggest that. But without a struggle to find a way through to our higher purpose, we may be left with far more damaging circumstances than what our light calls us toward. Inevitably, our existence as human beings is a compromised existence, never pure. Unless we recognize that with humility and mutual charity, we will always remain polarized."