The other night The Santa Fe Trail was on tv again, and once again I fell asleep halfway through it. I understand that this is an important film because eof the way it treats race, at least considering it was made in 1940. It was supposed to be ahead of its time, and was a movie that was boycotted in the South, apparently, because of it.
The part I saw began with JEB Stuart (Errol Flynn) and George Custer (Ronald Reagan) as West Point cadets together. At the beginning of the film, abolitionists are portrayed bad people, trying to humiliate the nice Southerners who will take care of slavery in their own way. An abolitionist at West Point tells Stuart that his “family tree is watered with the sweat of slaves.” This is one of the bad guys talking (He’s portrayed as a bad guy here and later in the movie).
Later, Stuart and Custer are assigned to Ft Leavenworth, in 1854, in the middle of the Kansas Civil War. Their job is to try to keep the peace between the Abolitionists and Slavery Supporters. During this time several people point out to Stuart that slavery is bad. He responds with some silliness about Southern Pride, an assertion that the south is going to emancipate the slaves, and finally tells Custer, “It’s not my job, or yours, to decide the future of slavery.” Custer agrees.
Through all of the film that I saw, the people committing atrocities in Kansas are always followers of John Brown (Raymond Massey), including the abolitionist cadet from West Point. Time and again, characters comment that Kansas will always be Bleeding Kansas as long as John Brown is there. The only sympathy for the abolitionists comes from the fact that Raymond Massey could act the rest of the cast under the table. His performance towers over the rest of them.
So my question is, from the point where Custer and Stuart take a troop (along with a little comic relief) out into the wilderness to find Brown, does the movies stance on race change at all? If not, why exactly was this controversial? I’m not counting the fact that a movie made by the winners portrays the losers as being in the right.