'The Fall Of The House Of Dixie' Built A New U.S.

March 28, 2014

Guest: Bruce Levine

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross. Our guest, Bruce Levine, is the author of "The Fall of the House of Dixie" about how the Civil War ended the institution of slavery in the South, destroyed the world of the slaveholding elite and transformed the South, as well as American, politics.

Levine writes about one out of every three people in the South suddenly emerged from bondage into freedom, a change of such enormous significance and full of so many implications as almost to defy description. Levine's book also is the story of how Lincoln changed course during the war. He went to war to compel the slave states to return to the Union but did not see the war as a means to free the slaves.

But then as the war dragged on, he decided to weaken the South by stripping it of its slave labor. Bruce Levine is a professor of African-American studies and the J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois. "The Fall of the House of Dixie" is Levine's fourth book relating to the Civil War. It comes out in paperback next week. The hardback edition was published not long after the film "Lincoln," starring Daniel Day-Lewis, was in theaters. When Terry interviewed Bruce Levine last year, she asked what he thought about the film.

BRUCE LEVINE: I had very mixed feelings about the film. On the one hand, it's a Civil War movie that very properly places slavery and the Republican Party's and Abraham Lincoln's determination to see slavery die at the center of the story, and that makes this an unusual Civil War film and a valuable Civil War film. And there are many things about the film that are very good and very strong and very commendable.

But on the other hand, I think it gives too little context about the story in which this tale actually unfolds. It leaves out key facts that explain the meaning of what we're seeing on the screen and how it is that these events took place: the prior course of the war; the important role especially that slaves and free blacks played in advancing the Union cause; the important role that they played in already breaking down slavery significantly long before the question of the 13th Amendment arose; and the growth of anti-slavery sentiment in the Union; and finally who initiated the idea of the 13th Amendment, which wasn't Abraham Lincoln.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Who was it?

LEVINE: It was free blacks and the radical wing of the Republican Party, captured in the film by Tommy Lee Jones playing Thaddeus Stevens. These were the folks who, in 1863, and abolitionists, began to push very hard for amending the Constitution. And Lincoln was not on board until the summer of 1864.

GROSS: Well, you point out that when the Civil War started, President Lincoln had no intention of freeing the slaves. What did he want?

LEVINE: Lincoln wanted to bring the seceded states back into the Union as quickly and as peacefully as possible because he and his party had a plan to eventually, gradually, peacefully do away with slavery by legislative means. It was that intention, of course, that had led slave states to begin to secede, but neither Lincoln nor his party saw the resulting war as the instrument of abolition.

So what they hoped to do is find a way quickly to bring those states back in and then get on with the business of peacefully, gradually setting the stage for slavery's eventual extinction.

GROSS: Lincoln's view of slavery evolved. What did he believe when he took office?

LEVINE: Well, Lincoln said he had believed since childhood, and I see no reason to doubt him, that this was an immoral institution, as well as a politically backward and economically stunting institution so that on all fronts it was objectionable. Lincoln believed, however, that previous constitutional provisions limited what either the people like him, people who opposed slavery, and the federal government as a whole could do about eliminating slavery within the states where it already existed.

They all, however, believed that slavery was a system that needed to expand in order to survive the way they say a shark needs to keep moving in order to breathe. So Lincoln and his party concluded in the mid-1850s that the way to eventually kill slavery constitutionally was to prevent it from spreading any further, and so his party placed at the center of its platform the pledge to outlaw slavery in all the then-extensive federal territories.

GROSS: There was a period when he thought that slavery should end, but the slaves should, like, leave after they were freed because there was no way that America would work with slaves freed and then trying to be equal in the United States. What did he think was not going to work about that? What were his doubts?

LEVINE: Well, Lincoln believed that whites would not tolerate the existence of free blacks in such substantial numbers in their midst. That was his fundamental - at least that was the view that he specifically articulated, that these people moreover were too different. Lincoln did not look upon Africans as legitimate members at that point of American society.

He sympathized with them. He was sorry that they had been dragged here, and their ancestors had been dragged here from Africa. He sympathized with their plight, but he did not believe the country could exist with substantial numbers of free blacks, whether citizens and equal or not, alongside whites. And so he until the middle of the war kept attempting to convince free blacks and newly freed blacks to voluntarily emigrate.

GROSS: To where?

LEVINE: Well, there were various ideas about where to do that, in parts of Central America, perhaps South America, the Caribbean, perhaps Africa. There was, as you probably know, already a state in Africa, Liberia, created earlier in the century by emancipated blacks, and that was another possible site.

GROSS: So what changed Lincoln's mind and led him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863?

LEVINE: Well, his fundamental plan about what to do about slavery changed in the same way that those of the rest of his party changed, and that was the discovery that bringing the slave states back into the Union was not going to be nearly as easy nor nearly as quick a proposition as they had initially hoped. The white South was much too united in support of the Confederacy, and they were far more effective militarily than, again, Lincoln and others had apparently anticipated.

GROSS: So by the middle of 1862, it has become clear to Lincoln that this essential source of support to the Confederacy - and that's what the four million slaves were, they had been the chief labor force in peacetime, they were now an important source of military strength to the Confederacy in wartime in all sorts of ways, though not as soldiers, as some people have claimed - that this source of Confederate strength had to be removed and in fact turned to the service of the Union, and emancipation was the way to do that.

So what were the limits, geographically, of the Emancipation Proclamation? Who did it cover? Who did it not extend to?

LEVINE: It extended solely to those slaves living in parts of the Confederacy not yet then occupied by Union forces, which meant that it excluded sections of Louisiana. According to another agreement that Lincoln struck, it excluded Tennessee as a whole. But with those exceptions and one or two other places on the Atlantic Coast that Union forces had managed to control by then, it applied to the entirety of the Confederacy still in existence.

It did not apply to the slaves living in the four slave states that then remained within the Union.

GROSS: Why didn't it apply to the slave states that remained in the Union or to the areas where Union forces had already taken over?

LEVINE: Well, this was a war measure. It was a measure based upon what Lincoln thought of as his special powers as a commander of Union military forces during the war and therefore only could apply in active theaters of war. So places already pulled behind Union lines he considered no longer to be subject to an edict like that, and that was the advice he had been given.

He had also reached an agreement with forces in Tennessee, which was half-occupied by that point, not to apply the Emancipation Proclamation there for political reasons, to encourage the return of the rest of the state to Union control.

GROSS: So the emancipation was very bold. It was also a bit of a compromise.

LEVINE: Well, it was - I wouldn't say so much that it was a compromise but that it was not global, which is one of the things that eventually brought Lincoln to embrace the idea of the 13th Amendment that would abolish slavery throughout the United States.

BIANCULLI: Bruce Levine, speaking with Terry Gross. Levine's book "The Fall of the House of Dixie" will be out in paperback next week. We'll hear more of his interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Our guest is historian Bruce Levine, the author of "The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Destroyed the South."

GROSS: So you were saying that President Lincoln didn't issue the Emancipation Proclamation until he was convinced that that was really going to help the war effort. Did it?

LEVINE: It certainly did. By the end of the Civil War, nearly 200,000 black men had served in either the Union Army or the Union Navy, and that alone was an enormous military assistance to the Union at a time when volunteering had fallen drastically and when there was a great deal of hostility to the draft.

So these 200,000 men significantly contributed to giving the Union armies the volume, the bulk, the size that they needed to cope with their Confederate opponents, and that gave the Union the power ultimately to overwhelm the opposition.

GROSS: And these - were these African-American men from the North or the South or both?

LEVINE: About 80 percent of them were from the South. Now yes, of course that leaves 20 percent from the North, and the well-known film "Glory" is about a unit primarily composed, in fact the 54th Massachusetts, of Northern free blacks. But 80 percent of Union black soldiers had been slaves very shortly before being inducted into the war. So they're almost literally going straight from the fields into uniform.

GROSS: And joining the military for people who had been slaves was a step toward freedom, I mean literally. There was an act that was passed before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued that basically guaranteed slaves who ran away and entered the Union Army freedom.

LEVINE: That's right. There are two acts that the Republican-controlled Congress passed, in 1861 and then in 1862. They became known as the Confiscation Acts. And the first one in fact, the second one in law, declared that any runaway slave reaching Union lines would become free.

GROSS: You write: Nothing would more radically subvert the Confederacy's slave economy than sending black soldiers into slave country. Why?

LEVINE: Well, the black population of the South had been raised, quite literally raised, on the notion that among other things black men could not, of course, be soldiers, that black men were not courageous, black men were not disciplined, black men could not act in response in large numbers to military commands, black men would flee at the first opportunity when faced with battle.

And the idea that black men in uniform could exist and could then come down and offer them the opportunity to disprove these notions, and again, more importantly, actively struggle to do away with slavery was unbelievably attractive to huge numbers of black people. Here was a chance, in other words, not only to obtain freedom but to participate in the fight for freedom and prove themselves in the process.

GROSS: What were the roles within the military that black men were and were not given?

LEVINE: Well, let's start with the not end. Black men were almost never permitted to become officers, and those few who by the end of the war did become officers were chaplains, not unit commanders. There were sergeants but no higher than sergeants, I believe, in even the black units raised in the Union Army.

Furthermore, at the beginning of the period of black enlistment, the black soldiers were pretty largely relegated to labor tasks rather than active combat tasks and frequently simply to maintaining control of already conquered territory and Union installations while white soldiers were the ones placed at the front of battle, testifying to the fact that most whites in the North continued to believe that black men were incapable of being good soldiers in a combat situation. Black men had to prove that notion radically false before that policy could change.

GROSS: So what were the ways in which black soldiers were most able to disprove the myths of their inabilities?

LEVINE: Well, when you assign black soldiers the role, quote, simply, end-quote, of holding down supply depots or even garrisons, you by no means guarantee that they won't find themselves nonetheless in a combat situation, and so it proved. In a number of cases, garrisons and depots like that were attacked by Confederate soldiers, and black Union soldiers responded and responded with a great deal of success and great courage and great obstinacy.

And word of those engagements spread through the ranks, and white officers frequently filed reports that said: contrary to my expectations, these soldiers have fought better and more courageously than most white soldiers under my command have previously.

Even Confederate officers filed reports like that to their superiors, saying that in such-and-such an engagement, the white soldiers fled, but the black Yankees stood their ground. So the word was getting not only back to the rest of the Union population but even to those sections of the Confederate population who were willing to take off their blinkers and face reality.

GROSS: So we've been talking about how the Union Army used black soldiers. And you write about how the South once considered conscripting slaves into the Confederate Army. What did they want the slaves to do in the army?

LEVINE: Well, first of all, they didn't want them in the army at all. That was a serious mistake made very early on the Confederate side. There were many, many more adult male whites living in the Union than living in the Confederacy and that meant, of course, that they would therefore be much larger armies on the Union side.

One way of dealing with that for the Confederacy might have been to do what had been done many other times in history, to offer freedom to slaves if they would agree to join one's army. Although some Confederate officers and civilians persistently suggested that from the beginning of the war, the Confederacy flatly refused to even consider the proposition for racist reasons and because they were fighting for slavery, and they considered this to be a preposterous way to fight a war in defense, specifically, of slavery.

But as Confederate fortunes waned, this idea came to the fore more and more persistently. And finally, basically within the last six months of the Confederacy's life, Jefferson Davis reverses course and begins to embrace the idea that this is the only way in which the Confederacy stands any chance of surviving. So this is the last-ditch act of desperation on the Confederacy's part.

GROSS: Why would Confederate leaders think that men who they had enslaved would be willing to fight and die to preserve their own enslavement?

LEVINE: Well, that's a really good question. And Frederick Douglass, after the war, calls it a species of madness. And there is, of course, something to that. Partly I think it is simply a reflection of the state of desperation. Anything is better than what we face because what we certainly face is defeat, so how much worse might this be? At least we can try it, I think is one strand of Confederate thinking.

But another factor is the drumbeat of self-hypnosis that the Confederacy has been keeping up during the entirety of the war. A message contained in that self-hypnosis is the slaves are loyal. The slaves embrace slavery. The slaves are contented in slavery. The slaves know that black people are inferior and need white people to oversee their lives. Black people, therefore, are grateful for our care of them. Black people will defend the South that has been so good to them.

There are, of course, by now very many white Southerners who know this is by no means true, but enough of them do believe it so that they're willing to give this a chance.

BIANCULLI: Bruce Levine, speaking with Terry Gross last year. We'll continue their conversation in the second half of the show. Levine's book, "The Fall of the House of Dixie," will be out in paperback next week. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

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BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, sitting in for Terry Gross. Let's get back to Terry's interview with Bruce Levine, author of the book, "The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South." Levine's book comes out in paperback next week.

GROSS: You write one of the paradoxes of the Civil War is that the war actually ended slavery sooner than it would've ended had the Confederate states stayed in the Union.

LEVINE: Absolutely. There was a general assumption, North and South, that slavery would survive for a very long time, in 1860 there was that opinion. And absent of war, it very likely would have lasted - I think - another half century or more. So there very well might have been slavery still in the 20th century. Even the propositions that were on the table, in most cases, for the peaceful gradual end of slavery would still have maintained some people in slavery again, into the 20th century. So that in taking what they assumed to be a defensive position in support of slavery, the leaders of the Confederacy radically hastened its eradication.

GROSS: So what was it about the war that hastened the end of slavery?

LEVINE: Well, it's a number of factors. One is what Lincoln calls the friction and abrasion of war. Wherever Union armies went slaves took the opportunity to escape to their lines. Wherever Union armies approached, that is to say didn't quite reach a given plantation but slaves there heard that they were at least within running distance, slaves could use that fact to embolden themselves to resist the orders of their owners and even to begin stating conditions under which they would continue to labor on those plantations. And so Confederate plantation owners in those circumstances, whether they wished to or not, often found themselves having for the first time openly to bargain with people whom in law they legally controlled.

Something else that's happening is that large numbers of Northern whites, who may previously have had no sympathy for blacks, are by virtue of moving into ever more deeply the land of slavery, are being confronted with the brutalities of slavery and being confronted with the fact that much pro-slavery propaganda that they have been hearing for decades by Northern allies of the slave owners are lies and that this system is pretty horrible. And many of them start writing in letters home to their relatives that, contrary to their original assumptions, they have now become in effect abolitionists and they would never tolerate slavery again. And the Northern population, of course, is watching its relatives dying on battlefields trying to protect the Union against dissolution at the hands of slave owners and their rage at slavery is growing. And that includes people who in the North are as racist as they ever may have been but their fury at the rebels is leading them to support proposals that lead to emancipation.

And finally, there's the understanding that comes to grip an overwhelming proportion, I think, of the Union population that doing away with slavery now is, as I said earlier, the only way to win this war and to reconstitute the Union.

GROSS: So I'm going to ask a really stupid question that probably anybody who ever took an American history course, as I have, should not need to ask. But tell me more about why it was so important to the North to maintain the Union. If the South was doing something that the North was so horrified at - the institution of slavery - and the South wanted to pull away but there was still a lot of racism in the North, why did the North care so much about having the Southern states within the Union?

LEVINE: Well, I wouldn't exaggerate the extent to which people know the answer to this question. And I don't think it's a bad question at all, therefore.

GROSS: I'm so relieved to hear you say that.

(LAUGHTER)

LEVINE: We have to remember that the mid-19th century is a time when in the transatlantic world the norm is not republican, small R, government - that is living in a republic. The norm is still monarchies and aristocracies and societies in which non-aristocrats have relatively few rights and particularly little control over their government. So this is still an unusual, a very unusual place. Despite the existence of this horrible oppressive system of slavery, for white people, this is a remarkable outpost of freedom and, of course, especially for white men, since white women have considerably fewer rights than men. But for white men then, this is the cutting edge of progress. They believe that what protects the rights that they have is the strength and unity of the country. And they fear that as sections of the country begin to withdraw from the Union, the country will continue to fragment, that this will only be the beginning of the fracturing of the Union.

And, by the way, there's some reason to think in retrospect that they were right. There are, for example, individuals - including the mayor in New York City - who begin to talk actively about pulling New York out of the Union, because New York in that era has powerful economic ties to the slave South and making it a so-called free city on the model of such things in Europe. Sections of the lower Midwest display sympathy for the South. Sections of Midwestern states heavily populated by white migrants out of the South. And so instead of there being one powerful, more or less powerful country in North America, south of Canada that is, and north of Mexico, there might be two and maybe three and maybe four and so on, and that in turn might very well lead to the end of republican government in North America. And again, we're talking about an era in which much of the world still thinks that republican - non-monarchical, non-aristocratic - government is doomed. And that had been the opinion in Europe for many, many centuries based on looking at what had happened to ancient Greece and ancient Rome and various city-states thereafter.

So the idea that republics are stable is not very widespread. And indeed, large numbers of forces in monarchical Europe are rubbing their hands in positive anticipation of seeing this dangerous, provocative idea - large republic sustaining - itself finally crumbling.

GROSS: So, but how much of preserving the Union, as far as the North was concerned, was economic because it needed access to the South's cotton?

LEVINE: Well, that's a factor. Textile manufacturers in New England want that cotton and want easy access to cotton. Furthermore, farmers in the Midwest want easy and continuous access to the Mississippi River in order to sell things to Southerners and to export through the Port of New Orleans. But I think it's too easy to exaggerate the degree to which economic motives are driving the North. I think more powerful a motive is the desire to preserve the Union in order to preserve republican liberty.

GROSS: Are you shocked when you still see people flying the Confederate flag or when you see statehouses flying the Confederate flag?

LEVINE: Well, I'm no longer shocked because I've been exposed to it for so long and been arguing against it for so long. But I'm still deeply offended by its appearance, because it seems evident from history both distant and near, that more than nine times out of 10 those who are flying that flag are not doing it simply out of regional loyalty or some sort of misty nostalgia, but as a statement of political intent. Political intent that leaves no room for genuine racial equality.

GROSS: We started this interview talking about the movie "Lincoln." I just want to get back to that for a moment. One of the characters in the movie is Thaddeus Stevens, who's portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones, who's one of the radical Republicans who seeks the abolition of slavery.

How does the Tommy Lee Jones portrayal compare to what you know of the actual Thaddeus Stevens?

LEVINE: Well, that's an interesting question. One of the aspects of the portrayal is that he, in fact, has a black mistress, his housekeeper.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

LEVINE: In fact, we don't really know that that's true. There were all sorts of allegations at the time made by members of the opposition party for whom having sexual relations with a black woman proved you immoral on the face of it. So those accusations were bandied about all the time.

GROSS: You think it might've been more of an attempt to smear him than anything else.

LEVINE: Exactly. Exactly. Which is not how Stevens would have viewed it, because Stevens was a genuine racial egalitarian. And that part of the depiction is true. So whether or not this particular aspect of his life accorded with the cinematic version, it certainly is true that he was remarkably egalitarian in racial terms. He was the foremost fighter against slavery and for racial equality in the Congress.

He was the most important single figure, I would say. It's also true, and I think undersold in the film, that Stevens and the radicals were way ahead of Lincoln throughout the war on these questions, pointed the way forward for Lincoln, and without their pressure and without their agitation and without their constant demands, it's not at all clear Lincoln would have eventually moved in the same direction.

They, and Stevens as an individual, are a very important part of the story of how slavery comes to an end.

GROSS: Well, Bruce Levine, thank you so much for talking with us.

LEVINE: Thank you very much for giving me the chance to be on your show.

BIANCULLI: Bruce Levin is the author of the book "The Fall of the House of Dixie," which comes out in paperback next week. You can read an excerpt on our website, freshair.npr.org.

Coming up, I take a TV critic and TV historian look at last week's surprise episode of the CBS series, "The Good Wife. " This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Last Sunday, on the CBS drama series "The Good Wife," something major and unexpected happened. If you don't yet know what occurred, and don't wish to, now is the time to stop listening for a few minutes. For the past few years, whenever I've been challenged to name a series on broadcast TV that's the equal of shows produced for cable or streaming networks, my instant go-to example has been "The Good Wife" on CBS. And boy, did series creators Robert and Michelle King prove that this past weekend.

Major unexpected plot twists have been a hallmark of this series from the beginning. Juliana Margulies, as attorney Alicia Florrick, has made sudden surprise changes in her life over the show's five seasons. Change never has been as pronounced as this season, though, when Alicia quit her job to start a rival law firm, putting her in an adversarial relationship with her former bosses and mentors, Diane Lockhart, and Will Gardner. Gardner, played by Josh Charles, had been her lover as well. But for most of this season, they've been cold and hostile to one another - yet, that coldness was beginning to thaw.

Two weeks ago, an episode heavy on flashbacks showed how Will ended up hiring Alicia. And in the most recent episode, Will and Alicia had a quick and sweet moment at the Cook County courthouse where she pulls him aside after watching him defend an accused murderer in court.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE GOOD WIFE")

JOSH CHARLES: (as Will Gardner) What's going on?

JULIANNA MARGULIES: (as Angela Florrick) The Grants called me for a second opinion on your trial.

CHARLES: (as Will Gardner) You're kidding me.

MARGULIES: (as Angela Florrick) No. I told him no.

CHARLES: (as Will Gardner) Then why are you here?

MARGULIES: (as Angela Florrick) I decided to warn you. I was thinking if I was in your shoes and I had a client calling behind my back, I would want to know.

CHARLES: (as Will Gardner) Alicia, thanks.

MARGULIES: (as Angela Florrick) Hey, we might have our differences but you're the better lawyer.

(LAUGHTER)

CHARLES: (as Will Gardner) I am, aren't I?

(LAUGHTER)

MARGULIES: (as Angela Florrick) And the more humble.

BIANCULLI: That ended up being their last moment together. Alicia ran off to a luncheon where she was a guest of honor and Will resumed defense of his client. At one point, Will was called to the bench for a sidebar with the judge and the opposing lawyer. The scene shifted to the defendant's point of view as he got more and more agitated. Voices muffled. Menacing music began to build on the soundtrack, and the defendant looked frantically around the courtroom to the lawyers and the judge, to his parents, to the closed courtroom door. And finally, to the guards unclipped holster with its revolver within reach. It was an intensely and impressively constructed scene, made even more intense by a sudden shift of locales to the courtroom next door, where Diane Lockhart, played by Christine Baranski, was arguing an unrelated case. She hears and reacts to the sound of gunfire. Then, so does her firm's chief investigator, Kalinda, played by Archie Panjabi, who instantly phones 911.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE GOOD WIFE")

ARCHIE PANJABI: (as Kalinda Sharma) Shots fired at Cook County Courthouse. Everyone stay put.

(SOUNDBITE OF RUNNING AND SCREAMING)

(SOUNDBITE OF DISPATCH)

CHRISTINE BARANSKI: (as Diane Lockhart) Was is it? What's going on?

PANJABI: (as Kalinda Sharma) I don't know.

BARANSKI: (as Diane Lockhart) Will's court?

PANJABI: (as Kalinda Sharma) I know. Look, stay here.

(SOUNDBITE OF SCREAMING AND CRYING)

(SOUNDBITE OF SHOTS FIRED)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (as Character) Orders to lock us down. Come in,

BIANCULLI: Kalinda goes running through the chaos to the adjacent courtroom and soon learns - along with the viewing audience - that Will has been seriously wounded.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE GOOD WIFE")

PANJABI: (as Kalinda Sharma) Will?

BARANSKI: (as Diane Lockhart) Dammit, Kalinda, back off.

PANJABI: (as Kalinda Sharma) My boss is in there.

BIANCULLI: A few scenes later, we get surprised again, as Kalinda and Diane go to the hospital and eventually discover Will on a gurney, covered with a sheet, already pronounced dead.

This was a main character killed unexpectedly and with absolutely no leakage from the press or elsewhere on the Internet, and it was a stunner. The next night, Josh Charles, who played Will, even showed up on "Late Show with David Letterman," with a suitably stunned introduction from his host.

(LAUGHTER)

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DAVID LETTERMAN: Our next guest stars on the very popular CBS television series, "The Good Wife," and guess what? Last night he was killed off the show.

PAUL SHAFFER: What?

LETTERMAN: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

LETTERMAN: Lady and gentlemen, here's the alive Josh Charles, everybody.

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BIANCULLI: More and more, primary TV characters are getting killed all the time these days. "The Walking Dead" gets rid of more cast members each week than "American Idol." And even shows as different as "Downton Abbey" and "Justified" will build up major characters only to unexpectedly mow them down. But usually, word leaks out beforehand about the plot or in actor's contract dispute, so pulling off a total surprise as "The Good Wife" just did is a big deal. And for fans of quality television, it's a very good deal.

In the earliest days of TV, when drama anthology shows were produced live and were like weekly little movies, characters and stories changed each week, so it was easy to put the main characters in genuine jeopardy. But once television evolved to weekly drama series, for the first few decades, the heroes almost lived and returned and one episode was pretty much interchangeable with another.

One exception early was on ABC's "Naked City" in the late 1960's, when the leading character of that cop show, played by John McIntyre, was killed in a fiery car crash. And the closest early precedent to what happened to Will Gardner on "The Good Wife" occurred on the CBS series "The White Shadow." That was a drama series produced by Bruce Paltrow before he did "St. Elsewhere," starring Ken Howard as the basketball coach of a squad of inner-city high school kids.

In one 1980 episode, one of the high school players went to a bigger store to score some booze for his friends and got caught in the middle of a robbery and killed by a stray bullet. That happened almost 35 years ago and I still remember it vividly because on TV in those days, that sort of random and fatal violence just didn't happen in a drama series. A third of a century later, TV - when it's in the right hands and handled just the right way - can still shock us like that. Taking our TV characters away can really register and be worth talking about as part of the national conversation, but only if they're written and performed well enough in the first place. Will Gardner, thanks to Josh Charles and his collaborators on "The Good Wife," certainly was. I miss Will already, but I have a feeling the remaining shows this season are going to be amazing.

Coming up...

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(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "NOAH")

RUSSELL CROWE: (as Noah) It begins.

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is used to reviewing movies that features a major story arc. But this time the ark is the story. He reviews the new biblical epic "Noah" starring Russell Crowe. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: Darren Aronofsky had a surprise hit in 2010 with "Black Swan," which won an Oscar for its star, Natalie Portman. His latest film, "Noah," is a big budget Bible epic based on the story of Noah's Ark. Russell Crowe plays the title character, and the movie also features Jennifer Connelly and Emma Watson.

Film critic David Edelstein has this review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN: Darren Aronofsky's biblical flood epic "Noah," generated controversy before anyone had laid eyes on the film. The word was that "Noah" had become an environmentalist wacko. After seeing it, I don't get the outrage. It's true that Noah reveres animals and thinks the world's worst enemies are human. But that is - not to put too fine a point on it - the reason in the Bible for the flood, no? Aaron is Aronofsky's embellishments are significant but they don't cast doubt on Noah's mission, or the idea of an all-seeing deity with the inclination to wipe out humanity as a punishment for its wickedness. Whatever else, the film has been made by an artist who believes in the authenticity of religious visions.

Alas, it's also been made by an artist in thrall to an all-seeing studio with a lot of money on the line, which means there's a big dose of conventional melodrama. The bad guys are identified as descendants of Cain, the original fratricidal sinner, and they've been busy wiping out the spawn of the brother that came after Abel, Seth. Pretty much all that's left of Seth's progeny are Russell Crowe's Noah, his wife, Naameh, played by Jennifer Connelly; their kids Ham, Shem and Japheth and a rescued orphan who grows up to be Emma Watson and goes by the name Ila. While the Cainites kill and despoil the natural world, the Sethites hide amid rocks, eating veggies and hoping for a miracle.

And then it comes. Noah dreams that God - here referred, as Creator - will give the Earth what we'd nowadays call a reboot. He has similar vision after his hermit grandfather, played by Anthony Hopkins - him again - gives Noah a drink laced with the biblical equivalent of acid. Noah and his family get busy building a great ark, much to the displeasure of a man named Tubal-cain, played by Ray Winstone, who killed Noah's father and doesn't care much for Noah, either.

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RAY WINSTONE: (as Tubal-cain) When I heard talk of miracles, I dismissed them. But then I saw the birds with my own eyes and I had to come.

RUSSELL CROWE: (as Noah) There isn't anything for you here.

WINSTONE: (as Tubal-cain) No. This all belongs to me. This land, this forest. That stronghold of yours, did you really think you could protect yourself from me in that?

CROWE: (as Noah) It's not protection from you.

WINSTONE: (as Tubal-cain) Then what is it?

CROWE: (as Noah) An ark to hold the innocent when the creator sends his deluge to wipe out the wicked from this world. Return to your cities of Cain. Now we have all been judged.

WINSTONE: (as Tubal-cain) I have men at my back, and you stand alone and defy me?

CROWE: (as Noah) I'm not alone.

EDELSTEIN: Winstone's snarling Tubal-cain is much more fun than Russell Crowe's priggish Noah, but Tubal-cain is chiefly there so the film can build to an action climax - like when as President Harrison Ford kicking terrorist Gary Oldman off Air Force One with the line: Get off my plane. This is: Get off my ark. Other family-friendly additions are the angels who've fallen to Earth and become boulders, which every now and then assemble themselves like primordial Transformers into giant rock creatures that trash-talk Noah and throw things at the Cainites. One of the rocks has the voice of Nick Nolte. How's that for gravelly?

Aronofsky's chief invention is to make Noah pull a sort of Abraham. That is, he comes to believe the Creator wishes him to save the animals, as innocent now, he says, as they were in the Garden of Eden, but sacrifice humans, including his own children. So near the end, Noah spends a lot of time chasing people around the ark like it's a slasher movie while his wife and kids plead for mercy. This is what upset the Bible literalists. But it's important to say, it's not movie's sentiment that humans should die. Indeed, Noah has to learn to get off his high horse and forgive humankind.

I liked the film well enough, but I don't think Aronofsky is in his element in a big square Bible picture. His other films are mind-bendingly subjective. The mathematical fever dream "Pi," the druggie, "Requiem for a Dream," "The Wrestler" and "Black Swan," with their masochistic protagonists high on self-flagellation. Like "Noah," those characters seek a sense of connection with a higher spirit. But Aronofsky is better when he works from inside his protagonist's heads.

I get the feeling he prefers Noah's dreams and druggie visions to mere spectacle. But a big part of the Noah story is spectacle, and this one is a feast of computer-generated imagery. None of the animals are real, which has won the appreciation of animal rights activists. But none of them are particularly well characterized either. I didn't expect Dr. Doolittle amid the Apocalypse, but would a few bahs and moos, and a friendly giraffe have really killed the mood?

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for New York magazine.

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BIANCULLI: You can download podcasts of our show at freshair.npr.org, and follow us on Twitter, @nprfreshair and on Tumblr, @nprfreshair.tumblr.com. For Terry Gross, I 'm David Bianculli.

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