Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949)

Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949)

    While reading some short biographies of authors, I decided to not skip the one for Margaret Mitchell, about whom I knew little, other than she wrote Gone With the Wind. In 1949, just 10 years after the film of the book premiered, she was hit by a car while crossing the street in Atlanta, the city in which she had always lived. Struck by that fact, I decided to see how the incident was covered by the press at the time.

She was with her husband on the way to a local theatre to see a movie (apparently the British film, “A Canterbury Tale”). Hugh Gravett, the 28 year old driver, who was drunk  and speeding and on the wrong side of the street, claimed he would have missed her if she had not jumped the wrong way to get out of the way. Mr. Gravett was probably pretty good at explaining such matters since he had the opportunity to do so on 22 prior occasions.

The accident happened on August 11 and the story was picked up by UP and spread quickly and  widely. Initially similar headlines and details appeared, but over the days before she died on Aug. 16, there were discrepancies over her condition which was clearly a serious one. In some headlines  she was in a coma (she was, by the way, also in an ‘oxygen tent’), in others she was conscious and speaking and on the day before she died the New York Times stated that “Miss Mitchell is Gaining”. The next day the simple headline in the Christian Science Monitor was “Margaret Mitchell Marsh” and it was above her death notice. (The married name of the ‘Miss Mitchell’ in the NYT).

The headline writer’s award in this instance goes to the Washington Post for “Gone With the Wind? Author Reported as Near Death”.

The focus of the headlines after her death switched to Mr. Gravett and one of them related to the fact the he was in another accident the day after his conviction (“Auto Killed Author, Driver Crashes Again,” NYT). And convicted he was. After deliberating one hour, the jury found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter and recommended that he be rather lightly punished. The headline in the Globe and Mail for Nov. 24 reads “Margaret Mitchell Slayer Gets Year” (he could have gotten three). The convicted claimed he “was being made a goat” and was unduly persecuted by the prosecution because of the fame of the author.

Attention next turned to the general subject of the licensing of drivers and suggestions that perhaps there should be more stringent requirements to get a license and more attention paid to a licensed driver’s driving record. At the time, one could walk into a drug store in Missouri and purchase a permit for 25 cents and then take off on a tour to Atlanta. If you lived in South Dakota you could save the quarter for the trip since a license to drive was not required at all. If one did continually get into accidents and receive citations, it did not matter and the real problem was the indifference of the general public (“Apathy Held Killer of Miss Mitchell,” NYT, Aug.20).

The article noted above had as its subject an editorial that had been posted in the magazine Public Safety. The author noted that: “The driver who struck and killed Miss Mitchell had  a record of twenty-two previous traffic violations - many of them serious. Yet he was still driving a car on the streets of Atlanta.” His remedy was to treat such drivers as if they were typhoid carriers. “It’s time we quarantined  traffic killers just as we quarantine disease carriers.”

The passing of Labor Day stirred interest again in the subject of traffic accidents and the well-known syndicated columnist, Dorothy Thompson writes: “This September, in celebration of the dignity of labor, 550 people lost their lives, 410 of them from auto accidents - an all-time record.” She continues by noting the case of Miss Mitchell: “Recently, a much beloved American, Miss Margaret Mitchell was killed by an intoxicated driver who had previously been up for traffic violations for more than twenty times. How many times must a person endanger the public safety to be deprived of a license for life? (this article was even picked up by the Globe and Mail - see “Dorothy Thompson On the Record: The Labor Day Massacres,” Sep. 14).

From our perspective what is interesting is that the subject of the editorial outrage and the question posed by Miss Thompson is the number of Mr. Gravett’s citations, not the level of his intoxication. Although all of the articles mentioned the fact that he was apparently drunk, none thought this to be a factor much worth discussing.