Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  The Berne Convention, so named because it convened in Berne, Switzerland, was a worldwide agreement among some forty nations to improve the legal protection of copyrights in the literary and artistic fields. At the time of the convention, the United States was still a young country with no well-defined body of literature, and thus it saw no need to enter the agreement.

  In fact, United States publishers depended largely upon reprinting—pirating—newly published novels from abroad, particularly from France, Germany, and England. Because there was a national copyright law, American publishers had to pay royalties to American authors, so American publishers actually preferred publishing British and foreign titles and fought against proposals for the United States government to enter into an international agreement even though writers and artists urged their government to do so. Because America was so closely tied to Britain and shared a common language, American publishers relied heavily on reprinting British literature, and authors such as Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott were angry with American publishers for “pirating” their works without paying royalties.64

  Thus, up to the late nineteenth century, the United States was more a consumer than a producer of copyrightable materials and was more concerned with acquiring free access to foreign works than it was with protecting American authors’ overseas rights. But as the advocates of the new nationalism accelerated their movement and created a demand for a distinctively American literature, American authors—Mark Twain was one of the most outspoken—clamored for their rights. And, so, the United States worked out treaties with a few individual foreign countries in 1891. But it had no multilateral ties. The treaties it did have were generally unsatisfactory and complex because laws in foreign countries were continually changing. American authors had to count more on the foreign publishers’ honesty and integrity than on treaties. Although the Marshes did not know it at the time, that was the reason Marion Saunders saw little need in getting foreign contracts in writing, as Stephens Mitchell and the Marshes wanted her to do. Many foreign publishers ignored contracts, written or verbal ones, and published what they pleased, most often with impunity. For example, John and Peggy received clippings from Italian newspapers in 1937 stating that Gone With the Wind was to be published soon; yet the publishers in Italy had never returned the contract that had been sent several months earlier, nor had they sent advance royalty payment.

  For the Marshes, problems like this one with publishers began to run rampant all over the world in 1937. In a long letter that John drafted in his own handwriting for Peggy and that was sent to the secretary of state in Washington, D.C., in January 1939, he expressed the shock he and Peggy felt:

  I did not know that book-pirates in foreign countries were waiting to pounce on and steal the books of American authors if they were left unprotected for a minute. I did not know that these pirates could thumb their noses at the American government while they were making away with our books, and that our government was helpless to do anything about it. And I did not even suspect that the ordinary moral standards relating to stealing do not apply to the stealing of books away from their authors. . . . My observation is that the foreign pirates would rather steal American books than those of any other country because they think we are both fools and knaves—fools because we leave the door wide open to them, knaves because they think our government deliberately remains outside the Berne Convention so as not to interfere with pirates in this country who steal the books of foreign authors.65

  The Marshes were shocked to learn that American authors had the responsibility of protecting their own copyrights if they wanted them protected at all—that American publishers could not and did not undertake that time-consuming, complicated, and expensive task for authors. That was the reason George Brett returned Peggy’s foreign copyrights to her in June 1936, although the truth is, as Stephens Mitchell later pointed out, the foreign rights were hers all along, and Brett had nothing to give. When John and Peggy realized that the federal government had in no way protected its authors, they felt it was imperative that the United States enter into some kind of agreement with other countries so that American writers would not have to do what they were doing: use their own time, energy, and money to protect their rights. Inexperienced as they were in legislative matters and foreign copyrights, they were not about to let foreign publishers disregard her rights to Gone With the Wind. They decided to make Peggy’s foreign copyright problems public in order to create public awareness of and interest in America’s lack of international copyright laws.

  With that united decision, the Marshes and Stephens Mitchell entered a labyrinthian legal suit on December 8, 1937. Headlines in newspapers all over the United States on that date read “U.S. Aid Enlisted in Protection of ‘Gone With the Wind.’” For her, there was no hanging back from publicity now. Boldy issuing her public statement to reporters everywhere, Peggy said: “I intend to fight for my rights with every means at my command. I wouldn’t mind losing the royalties on the Dutch edition—they are not what matters. The important thing is the many years of hard labor I put into the writing of my book. I can never forget them. . . . I would be a pretty poor sort if I permitted my book to be published, without my permission and in complete disregard of my rights, in Holland or any place else, without putting up a fight to protect it.”66

  At last, the rebel had a legitimate cause to fight for. As she wrote to Willie Snow Ethridge, who had just completed her own novel, “If I lose my case in Holland it will not only affect me personally and cost me thousands of dollars for legal fees, but it will affect every American author.”67

  With their obstinate independence and united insistence on defending principles they held dear, the Marshes made several appeals to the State Department. In August, they filed a lawsuit in Holland against the prominent publishing house of Zuid-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij Boek-en Handelsdrukkerij—better known as Z.H.U.M. On November 13, Stephens went to Washington, D.C., to discuss the foreign copyright problems with Dr. Wallace McClure, assistant chief of the treaty division in the U.S. State Department. With sympathetic understanding, McClure listened and said that until the United States changed its position on the Berne Convention, he was afraid that what had happened in the Netherlands would repeat itself in Japan and perhaps in a number of other countries. He explained that the United States had virtually given its authors’ work away when it entered into an agreement in 1905 with Japan. As incredible as it seems now, this 1905 treaty actually allowed Japanese publishers to publish American authors’ books without securing the author’s consent and without paying for the author’s rights. Supposedly, the pay-off was that the United States could also publish the works of Japanese authors; how- ever, there was no demand for Japanese works in the United States. Thus, the publication of Gone With the Wind in Japan could not be considered a piracy case.

  An immediate adherence to the Berne Convention was the best possible safeguard for the future, and McClure said that he and Senator Walter F. George (Democrat-Georgia) were doing all that they could toward furthering that end in the Senate. McClure was correct in thinking that Japan would repeat Holland’s action, for in only a few weeks, word came that the Japanese were indeed publishing Gone With the Wind. A few days after their meeting, McClure wrote Stephens that the matter was of large financial interest not only to his sister but also to her publishers. He suggested that Stephens get the president of Macmillan to use his influence on the two senators from New York to urge their immediate action upon the treaty. McClure added:

  Should you be able to bring about the approval of this treaty, you will be doing your country a real service. Patriotic citizens from Mark Twain to the present day, over a period of many years, have sought to bring about this result. If your sister can achieve it, I suggest that she may be doing a service to her fellows that is at least somewhat comparable to that of producing a masterpiece like Gone With the Wind.68

  On at least three occasions, probably more, John and Peggy we
nt to Washington to appear before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. On their first trip in November 1937, she and John met privately with Wallace McClure and other members of the Senate, urging them to ratify the Berne Convention treaty. Despite her, John’s, and Stephens’s efforts, the Senate did not vote to do so.

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  The long, complex case between the Marshes and the Z.H.U.M. hinged on two factors: one was what the Dutch publishers called Margaret Mitchell’s attempt to use a “loophole” in the Berne Convention; and the other, upon which the Dutch pounced with a vengeance, was the fact that U.S. publishers were great pirates themselves. The Dutch were furious that Peggy had inconvenienced them by halting their publication of her book. In a fiery telegram to the U.S. secretary of state, the Dutch blasted Peggy with such statements as the following:

  Mrs. Mitchell, in addition to her great artistic talents also seems to show some likeness to the principal character in her book, the calculating and money grabbing Scarlett. She thought it very marvelous that the Dutch people were anxious to read her book, but she did not like the idea of not securing any monetary profit from it. Therefore she had the whole edition confiscated, as she claimed that the publishing of it was in violation of her author’s rights.

  The Dutch also pointed out how the United States had chosen to remain outside the international agreement that protected the rights of authors. “Therefore they can steal the artistic treasures of all other countries, but in turn their own can be stolen from them. . . . They now try to escape . . . through a loophole in the Convention.”

  The “loophole” referred to here was an article in the Berne Convention that stated that authors who were citizens of countries that were not part of the Convention could nevertheless be protected by it if they had their work published simultaneously in a country that was a member of the Convention, as well as in their own country. Canada was a member of the Convention, and the U.S. Macmillan had taken advantage of this “loophole” by contracting with Macmillan of Toronto, a separate entity and not a branch of the New York firm, to publish Gone With the Wind in Canada.

  However, in May 1936, Macmillan had printed ten thousand copies of Gone With the Wind, and the copies bore an imprint indicating that publication date. After the initial printing, Macmillan learned that the Book-of-the-Month Club had chosen Gone With the Wind for its July 1936 selection. At the club’s request, Macmillan delayed the official release until June 30, when publication for trade release and copyright simultaneously took place in New York and Toronto. The ten thousand copies with the May imprint were distributed as review copies and were released, along with additional June printings, to the nation’s bookstores. By all precedence, Gone With the Wind was protected by the Berne Convention although it took years for the courts to decide that. The crux of the lawsuit pivoted on the fact that the Dutch had gotten a copy of the novel with a May imprint and used it as evidence of their right to publish the book, calling Macmillan’s claim that the book had been simultaneously published in Canada and in New York in June 1936 “a trick.”

  Thus, it was in 1937 that John began his long, complicated correspondence with Brett, the U.S. State Department, and foreign publishers, lawyers, accountants, and agents all over the world. His voluminous letters and paperwork, spanning the decade of the Dutch piracy case, are an eye-opening and mind-boggling file. Hundreds of his letters demonstrate the close attention he paid to the book’s business. He was unwilling to leave any problems in Stephens’s or any other lawyer’s hands, much less Marion Saunders’s, and he even went so far as to counsel Peggy’s lawyers as to how to conduct her case.

  In July 1939, just two months before Hitler invaded Poland, a Japanese translator sent Peggy a paperbound set of his translation of Gone With the Wind and requested that she send him an autographed United States edition. He reported, in excellent English, of the popularity of the book in his country, saying that approximately 150,000 copies had been sold. It had outsold Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and he said that only one book, Katsunori Tami’s Wheat and Soldiers, had sold more copies than Gone With the Wind. Without mentioning the fact that she had not authorized a Japanese edition, Peggy wrote him a friendly letter. Then she sent his letter and a copy of her own to Marion Saunders, who wrote to the Japanese publisher suggesting a contract. The publisher replied politely and indicated his willingness to enter a contract with Peggy, but now that Japan was engaged in war, he said it would be difficult for him to export money from his country. The Marshes were more interested in having the legal contract than they were in having the money if they could not have both. Saunders told them that she had learned that Pearl Buck had also been sent such pleasant letters by the publishers of her book, but no money.

  Around this time, they learned that the Chinese also had pirated the novel, but because of the unstable political events in the Orient, the U.S. State Department officials did not think they could take any specific action against either China or Japan. “This is a maddening state of affairs to say the least,” Peggy wrote McClure, for all she had received from the Japanese publishers was a “very pretty silk kimono . . . and a Japanese doll nearly three feet high in a red lacquer and glass case about four feet high. If there ever was a white elephant this doll and its case is the elephant.” While she was wondering why they had sent it, she received a letter again, this time from the translator, who requested that she have her picture taken standing next to the doll case. They wanted to use her photograph for publicity purposes. “A nation with so much gall certainly should go far,” Peggy noted in relating this incident to McClure.70

  Writing about the decade the Marshes struggled with their overseas problems would require another book as long as Gone With the Wind, but such a book deserves to be written because the Marshes made publishing history. Their problems were not resolved until after the end of World War II. Over a period of ten years, they devoted large amounts of their time, energy, and money to protecting their rights in this matter, in the process ensuring protection for all American authors. As fate would have it, however, neither John nor Peggy would live to see the results of their efforts to get the United States to protect its authors’ foreign rights. In 1954, after both John’s and Peggy’s deaths, Stephens Mitchell continued their struggle and submitted to the State Department a detailed narrative of his sister’s foreign copyright problems as proof of America’s need to enter into an agreement with other nations. The following year, the United States entered such an agreement.71

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  While John tackled the perplexing foreign copyright problems, Peggy continued to answer letters and deal with petty kinds of annoying news that the Marshes heard daily. She still had battles over the autograph stories, for some people were selling her autographed books at marked-up prices. She would get furious thinking about how long it had taken her to autograph all those books and about how many of them she had had to mail back to their owners at her own expense. To learn now that some people were making as much as twenty dollars on her signature alone infuriated her. Then there were the incredible stories of women popping up in different parts of the country, pretending to be Margaret Mitchell. “They have signed autographs, given lectures, gotten drunk, picked up gents and done other things not salutary to mention on paper. To date I have been unable to catch a one of them, which is a source of great regret to me.”72

  In 1938, one imposter swindled an American Indian, an interesting, elderly man who had traveled all over the world and had written his memoirs going all the way back to frontier fighting days. Peggy wrote: “I think I now have a chance to nail one of these imposters, and by doing so scare off the others. Indians are government wards and I am hoping the government will take a hand in this case.” She had called and also written the State Department about the matter. “If I could just get one of these women behind bars it might make a few others think twice before they said they were me and picked up gentlemen on trains.”73

  One day, she received a newspaper clippi
ng stating that an Italian professor on a lecture tour in the States met “a great editor in New York who introduced him to Margaret Mitchell, a quiet, inconspicuous little woman” who had written Gone With the Wind. None of the Macmillan editors had any idea of how the story originated, and Peggy never discovered who the imposter was.74 Another clipping from Dublin, Ireland, reported that she spent Christmas in County Meath, where a party was held for her at a Dublin hotel. Peggy wrote: “Ireland is one country I wouldn’t mind seeing. So, it was nice of this lady to see it for me.”75

  One swindler masquerading as Margaret Mitchell insisted that a high-fashion Los Angeles department store present her a private fashion showing after the store closed in the evening and walked away afterwards with seventeen hundred dollars worth of clothes charged to Margaret Mitchell. Many other imposters autographed copies of Gone With the Wind in bookstores across the country. When Kenneth Roberts, author of Northwest Passage, read about these Mitchell frauds autographing books, he wrote Peggy telling her not to worry, that the same thing had happened to him and it only sold more books. But unlike Roberts, Peggy was unable to shrug this kind of thing off. These imposters became so numerous and the idea of them bothered Peggy so much that John hired the Pinkerton detective service to find them. He retained the service for years.

  Peggy also became upset about the reports that several families in the Jonesboro section were passing off their plantation homes as the real Tara. These families were making money off the northern tourists who desired to visit the places mentioned in the novel. She would get into her automobile and drive around for hours, “in cognito” as she put it, trying to locate these “liars of the first water.”76

  Instead of ignoring the stories that came to her by the grapevine, Peggy seemed compelled to collect them. The truth is she enjoyed gossip, as she once revealed in a letter to Stark Young, also a southerner: “Northerners always wonder how Southerners manage to know so much about other Southerners whom they have never met and probably never will meet. For my part, I pity Northerners. Evidently, the grapevine does not work in the North, and I think people above the Mason and Dixon line miss many choice bits because they must depend on such crude devices as the radio and the newspapers for their information.”77