The Birth of a Nation (1915)

 

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Part one:

This is often referred to as the most racist film in American history, and this may be true, but there’s a problem with the label, and the truer that label proves to be, the more problematic it becomes. As Richard Brody wrote, “The worst thing about ‘Birth of a Nation’ is how good it is...Griffith’s art offers humanly profound moments, whether graceful and delicate or grand and rhetorical, that detach themselves from their context to probe nearly universal circumstances...”

This film fills a difficult nitch, it is an undeniable masterpiece too sick to be comfortably embraced. It’s not alone in that place, it sits side-by-side with Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” with its breathe-taking misogyny and “Merchant of Venice’s” which wallows in a stunning anti-Semitism where all frauds committed against Jews are defensible, while Jewishness itself is a not (both plays were written in the 1590s); Leni Riefenstahl's film “The Triumph of Will” (1935) which deified Hitler; Margaret Mitchell's novel “Gone With the Wind” (1936) which is filled with slavery and Klux Klux Klan apologetics; Ezra Pound's poems (1930s & 1940s) that were even more anti-Semitic than Shakespeare even though you’d have hoped a 20th c. man would be more evolved than a 16th c. one.

Moreover, this proved to be the most dangerous of the above mentioned (well, except for the Hitler propaganda film). It rewrote the most painful chapter in American history to please the sensitivities of the aggressors, elevated the role of scoundrels, justified the systematic abuses of the defenseless, and turned murderous terrorists into heroes. Oh, yeah, it also inspired real-world murders.

Before one addresses the sickness of this film, one has to address it other inescapable fact--it is the foundation on which all American cinema, and to some extent world cinema, stands. It doubled the expected running time of conventional moving pictures without losing the audiences interest, establishing the “feature-length” categorical short-hand we still use today. Beyond that, director D.W. Griffith filled this singular film (he also co-wrote, with Frank E. Woods and co-produced with Harry Aitken) with such a cornucopia of innovations that the fundamental vocabulary of the media was forever altered. All films that followed owe it a debt, and no film that followed so boldly increased our visual vocabulary more than this one.

Watching it today, it is hard to fully appreciate how ground-breaking it was, like Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” it is a point defining of the before & after in the historical development of techniques. True, some of the movie’s “firsts” have been shown to actually be “near-firsts,” created by other, lesser-known directors getting there just barely ahead of Griffith; or had been developed by Griffith himself in earlier works; but those films were not as widely shown, and the various advances were scattered through them far and wide, while “The Birth of a Nation” was nearly universally seen, serving as one-stop shopping for those who wanted to understand the potentials of the new art-form. No filmmaker could watch it and not say to himself, “Oh, that’s how it’s done.” As Roger Ebert wrote, “He did not create the language of cinema so much as codify and demonstrate it, so that after him it became conventional for directors to tell a scene by cutting between wide (or 'establishing') shots and various medium shots, closeups, and inserts of details. The first closeup must have come as an alarming surprise for its audiences; Griffith made them and other kinds of shots indispensable for telling a story.”

James Agee, the man Ebert considered the greatest of all film critics, went even farther, “He achieved what no other known man has achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man.”

The list of what was new in this film, and now taken for granted today, is truly extraordinary:

· panoramic long shots

· high-angle shots

· the iris effects

· still-shots

· night photography (using magnesium flares)

· panning camera shots

· dramatizing documented history alongside fiction (though as you’ll see later, some of that documented history was of dubious accuracy)

· staged battle sequence wherein hundreds of extras are made to look like thousands

· the hiring of technical advisors outside the industry to heighten the realism (Griffith used West Point engineers for military insights and they provided him with the artillery used in the film)

· composing shots to mimic historical references the audience would be familiar with (Griffith referenced Mathew Brady's Civil War photographs)

· color tinting for dramatic purposes

· techniques of building toward a dramatic climax–the most important being cross-cutting in between simultaneous actions

· total-screen close-ups

· an original orchestral score

· ornate title cards

· special use of subtitles graphically verbalizing imagery

· scenes filmed from multiple angles

· fade-outs

· cameo-profiles (a medium closeup in front of a blurry background)

· lap dissolves to blend or switch from one image to another

I’m probably missing some stuff.

This is basically two films, one set before and during the Civil War, the second during the Reconstruction era and ending with the “triumphant” rise of Jim Crow. One of the more bizarre aspects of the film is that the two halves are seriously at odds with each other. Some critics go as far as to say that the first half is not racist…

Well, no, you can’t go that far. It might not be as hate-filled, but it's pretty racist.

 

The first half of the film showed the Blacks, not put forward far enough to be called “characters,” as childish in comparison to Whites and in other ways treating them in an extremely patronizing fashion. The darkest passages of the first half remain unseen by most viewers, as they were censored by Griffith himself shortly after the film’s original premier, and not restored in all prints later. Some of the notable often-missing scenes concern mulatto Lydia Brown (Mary Alden), servant of abolitionist Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis), who, according to the inter-titles, "is aroused from ambitious dreamings by Stoneman's curt orders" and seen lustfully pulling at her clothes when Austin leaves the room. Austin will take her as a mistress, "the great leader's weakness that is to blight a nation." Austin’s desire for a darker cherry made him a lesser man than President Lincoln (Joseph Henabery) who is so deified in this film one could imagine Reitenstahl was influenced by it. Later, when things get truly nasty, every act of injustice and sin committed by any character has at its root the demonic desire to have sex outside one’s own race. 

(It should be pointed out that Austin Stoneman is intended as a particularly vicious bit of character assassination of the great Thaddeus Stevens; and by 1967 there were still 17 American states has anti-miscegenation laws.)

 

On the other hand, contradicting these rarely seen scenes, the first half of the film has several themes that challenged what the rest of the movie would prove to be about, even going as far as to challenge some of the most important racist myths of the day. Though it joyously idealized what antebellum Southern way of life, the film still had a potent anti-slavery message, describing the bondage of Blacks as a cancer that threatened the Nation from even before its inception – surprisingly, this is not inconsistent with the source material, two very popular novels by Thomas Dixon, Jr, “The Leopard's Spots.” (1902) and “The Clansman” (1905). It was also explicit that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War, which put Griffith at odds with the rising influence of what many now call the Wilsonian historians–named after then-President Woodrow Wilson even though he actually didn't abide by one of the central Wilsonian conceits, the claim that the deadliest war in this nation’s history was primarily driven -- not by the issue of slavery -- but by negotiable (and constantly being negotiated) issues like States Rights and unfair tariffs. Those academic scoundrels would shape American History textbooks for decades to come and serve as the authority buttressing the myth of the “War of Northern Aggression.” To his credit, Griffith was having none of that. The fact that the Confederacy was based on a rejection of the fundamentals of a representational Democracy was spelled out in a single newspaper headline, “If the North Carries the Election, the South will Secede.”

 

Also, even while romanticizing the Confederate fighting man -- clearly influenced by the fact that Griffith was a Southerner and his father had been a Confederate officer -- he still chose to challenge the long-term efficacy of the Southern cause. One of the film’s themes was that the American Republic wasn’t a truly viable, long-term proposition, until the stronger, post-Civil War Republic was forged. This put him close to the thinking of President Wilson, but seemingly at odds with novelist Dixon. 

Dixon, also a Southerner and son of a major slaveholder, not only a racist and KKK fan-boy, but also (and inevitably) a hard-core State’s Righter. But in its first half at least, this film sold another story, best demonstrated in Griffith’s decision to change the original title of the film from “The Clansman,” to “The Birth of a Nation” shortly after the first screenings (some prints still have to original title). 

In this first half, the soon-to-be-martyred President Lincoln’s First Call for 75,000 Union volunteers is referred to as a call, "to enforce the rule of the coming nation over the individual states." In that intertitle the word “coming” is all important because in most versions of the film, the very last intertitle reads, “Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever!”

 

Though this film will prove to be shockingly pro-racist, in other works Griffith took a stand against religious bigotries, and as an artist he was naturally anti-censorship. These facts are important in a historical context:

In 1915 the 15th Amendment of the US Constitution, the one that guaranteed Blacks right to vote, had been rendered essentially meaningless by a now much condemned Supreme Court decisions. The 15th was passed in 1870, but it took only to 1875 for USA v Reese to render it toothless for most of the century to come. Griffith was explicit, he was appalled that Blacks ever had the right to vote in the USA, and that in some parts of the USA in 1915, they still did. 

1915 was also an era of a new wave of activism emerging in the Federal Courts, slowly expanding the Constitutional authority of the Establishment Clause (ie: freedom of both religion and speech) over the legislative decisions State authorities, something Griffith seemed to approve of without real seeing the contradiction.

 

However contradictory the virtuous ideas of the first half seem, all pales before corrupt ideas that followed, and Dixon clearly understood that. He bragged, "The real purpose of my film was to revolutionize Northern audiences that would transform every man into a Southern partisan for life.” Note his use of the word “my”; because of the financial challenges, Griffith was eventually forced to cede some of the film’s ownership to Dixon in exchange for the rights to his books. Griffith painting himself into that corner was no surprise, he was a notorious spend-thrift of his films, his financial incompetence usually, but not always, was covered by the huge profit margins his films ultimately earned.

 

Irony upon ironies, though the film is most famous for its vile second half, virtually all its historically important technical and artistic merits exist more notably, sometimes exclusively, in the first half. Especially important are the battle scenes, still pretty impressive nearly a century on. James Agee wrote of these sequences, "The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie is the battle charge in 'The Birth of a Nation.' I have heard it praised for its realism, but it is also far beyond realism. It seems to me to be a realization of a collective dream of what the Civil War was like..."

 

In this first half there is much that is warm, humanistic. It tells the story of two friendly families becoming adversaries in “Brother Against Brother War.” It had moments both the sweetly humorous and sincerely heart-rending -- Truly, some of the best filmmaking of the silent era. And you’ll forgive me if I leap-frog over all that and get on to more important issues.

 

Part two:

 

I read about this film before I saw it. I try to imagine someone in a first audience in 1915, with no preconceptions except those shaped by the America around him, where the end of racial segregation is unthinkable. One step further, I imagine an educated Black man in the audience, fully aware of the difficult lot of his race and expecting it to get worse under the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Wilson had initially enjoyed Black support but quickly betrayed it with a purge of Blacks from the ranks of the Federal Civil Service). And as this Black man watched the film he’d see that Griffith didn’t really understand Black people, but he would also see Griffith was on the Negroes side against a rising tide of all-too-easy Wilsonian historical lies. He’d probably be thinking that this unique triumph of politics-as-art would surely be like a torch to hold back the encroaching darkness, and perhaps even dispel some to the present darkness.

 

Then comes the intermission. When the curtains rise again...well, OMG, that Black guy is about to be unhappy.

 

The second half shows the two families who were the heroes in the first half, now wounded by losses in the hellacious war, starting the process of rebuilding and reconciliation. One is the famous Northern abolitionist Stonemans, led by the fore-mentioned Congressman Austin Stoneman and included his surviving son Phil (Elmer Clifton) and his daughter Elsie (Lillian Gish). The other is the formerly slave-owning Southern family the Camerons, including two daughters, Margaret (Miriam Cooper) and Flora (Mae Marsh) and the surviving son Ben (Henry B. Walthall).

 

Love flowers between these families, both Phil and Margaret and Ben and Elise are drawn to each other, and this seems the clearest path to a brighter future. But the political realm is fraught with vengeful resentments, as Austin and his allies among the radical Republicans and Carpetbaggers treat the Southern Whites cruelly and give the freed Blacks more power than they are ready for.

 

The second half established its “historical” authority with series of intertitles that quote then-President Wilson’s book, “A History of the American People” (1902). These quotes specifically argue that rise of the KKK was a good thing, saving the South from the ravages of Negro and Carpetbagger rule. Wilson, perhaps the most explicitly White-Supremacist President of the 20th c remains notorious for his KKK apologetics, but these selective quotes make him out to be an even bigger fanboy of the KKK than he actually was.

 

Worse still is a scene presenting the argument that allowing the blacks full rights of citizenship was destroying America. It cruelly mocked Black men elected to, and for a short time dominating, the South Carolina legislature in the late 1860s. This scene is introduced with an intertitle that states that the images to follow were drawn from “historic incidents.” The Blacks were shown engaging in grotesque antics: snoring in chairs during debates, walking around chambers in their bare feet, cutting their toenails at their desks, eating fried chicken, drinking whiskey, and lasciviously leering at White women in the visitors’ gallery.

 

What Griffith’s source for this? According to researchers, he essentially lifted them straight from racist cartoons in the Reconstruction era's White press. The power of the realism of his depiction of the Civil War was in part achieved by referencing Mathew Brady's photographs -- he did the same here, but the source wasn’t just not a factual one, the film just pretended it was.

 

I just happen to have an eye-witness account of the same legislature that was published in the New York Times in 1868:

 

“The colored men in the Convention possess by long odds the largest share of mental calibre. They are all the best debaters; some of them are peculiarly apt in raising and sustaining points of order; there is a homely but strong grasp of common sense in what they say, and although the mistakes made are frequent and ludicrous, the South Carolinians are not slow to acknowledge that their destinies really appear to be safer in the hands of these unlettered Ethiopians than they would be if confided to the more unscrupulous care of the white men in the body.”

 

One of their main goals to rewrite the State Constitution, and they succeeded in that. Among the reforms these presumably sub-human apes were responsible for:

· established a balanced, tripartite form of government for the first time in South Carolina's history

· established comprehensive local governments, replacing the patchwork of specialized commissions which handled everything from roads to welfare

· created a detailed Declaration of Rights which mandated political equality regardless of race

· mandated state-wide public education for the first time

· established a welfare program for the poor, aged, and disabled that was channeled through county governments

· removed the requirement of owning property in order to vote.

 

Yeah, sounds really terrible to me.

 

In that scene, the Black politicians were played by Black actors, that’s not true for any of the major Black roles in the film. Soon comes the notorious scene where the Negro Gus, in a Union army uniform (White actor Walter Long in black-face) chases the White virgin Flora Cameron through the woods with the intent of rape and forced matrimony (in this film rape and inter-racial marriage are indistinguishable). Rather than let the beast touch her, Flora jumps off a cliff.

 

In another scene, her brother, White-hero Ben, had witnessed a group of White children donning white bedsheets, inadvertently scaring several Black children playing nearby. Now, with cause to take matters into his own hands, he uses this as inspiration for the KKK’s infamous outfits (I should note here, the presented history of the evolution of the KKK isn’t even remotely related to the historical record). The first heroic act of the hooded Night Riders is the lynching of Gus.

 

Before this, violence was always chivalry, tragedy, and catastrophe. Now, Griffith displays a real bloodthirstiness. At the moment of their inception, the KKK’s terror tactics are already fully evolved as they dump Gus’ body at the door of the film’s main villain Silas Lynch (another actor in black-face, George Siegmann). Silas is a mulatto whom Austin Stoneman naively has chosen as a protégé and Lieutenant Governor. The murder of Gus wasn't an act of violent revenge and vigilante justice, it was a learning experience, a tutorial for the film's later premeditated terrorism. And Silas, as a product of promiscuity that crossed racial lines, isn’t just inferior, he’s deeply evil, and unable to learn from the justice of the White message.

 

Why use White's the black-face at all? Well, Griffith explained to his most beloved lead-actress Lillian Gish, "There were scarcely any Negro actors on the Coast." 

I find this highly unlikely. I’d prefer to believe that no Black would demean themselves to be part of this if they really knew what it was about (which would’ve been truer in the larger rolls than the smaller ones) but that’s probably too optimistic. 

A reason Gish provided is more likely, “Mr. Griffith was accustomed to working with actors he had trained." This suggests that Griffith's claim that there were no “Negro actors” really meant no “Negros Griffith could see.” It is obvious that Black people were not in Griffith’s line-of-sight in any substantive manner. This is best demonstrated by the fact that he was somehow surprised when Blacks found the movie offensive (more about that later).

 

Actor George Siegmann is largely forgotten today -- his Wikipage is but a stub, and there’s very little other appreciation of him anywhere on the internet -- but was a major player in his day, starring in over 100 films, some still classic. He was a strong presence with enormous physical bulk, but was not obese, and his features were both strikingly blunt and ethnically ambiguous, which this encouraged the studios to cast him as villains. Still, his second most famous role (after this one) was heroic, playing Porthos opposite Douglas Fairbanks’ D'Artagnan in the 1921 version of “Three Musketeers.” Though the standard of the acting was quite fine in the first half of this film, it is notably wooden in the second. The only really good performances come from the still legendary Lillian Gish (and let’s face it, she was better elsewhere) and Siegmann as the monster, who is marvelous.

 

This is always an issue for fans of genre film who have a conscience, because the monster is all, but the most potent monsters often appeal to our worst prejudices. We desperately want to over-look that when it comes to the inherent racism inherent in Boris Karhoff’s or Christopher Lee’s Foo Man Choos because they are just so goddamned cool; but at least there we have the cover that racism being high camp. But here? This film is deadly serious hate-propaganda.

 

Silas Lynch is a sexual psychopath with designs on Elsie Stoneman. Her father Autin is unaware of this when he tells Silas "You are the equal of any man here."

 

Silas answers, "I want to marry a White woman."

 

Austin, himself a sexual deviant because of his involvement with Mulatto Lydia, pats him shoulder. But when Austin learns that Silas had Elsie in mind, he becomes enraged – because all the White liberal talk of equality is all hypocrisy, and all those Northerners want nothing but manipulate the freed slaves for their own gain.

 

In the quite famous is the three-thread climax: evil Silas corners virginal Elise in a room to rape and then marry her; outside, on the streets, the arrogance of the Federal troops, all Black, has provoked riot among the honest White masses; farther away, the KKK heroes are rounding up their forces to launch an organized revolt and take back their town from the wicked forces of miscegenation. The sequences conception is a fusion of its hate propaganda and dynamic filmmaking. Despite the film's reputation regarding its filmmaking, in this famous scene I was under-whelmed. We have the threads of action unfolding simultaneously — except they can’t. 

Silas’ cornering of Elise should take only seconds, the riot the better part of an hour, the gathering of the KKK troops hours plural. Simply put, it made no narrative sense, and was not nearly as well thought out as when the cross-cutting technique was used in the film's first half.

 

But other critics look at it differently, and perhaps they have imagined the perception of the 1915 audience better than I have. Roger Ebert wrote:

 

“[A]udiences in 1915 were witnessing the invention of intercutting in a chase scene. Nothing like it had ever been seen before: Parallel action building to a suspense climax. Do you think they were thinking about blackface? They were thrilled out of their minds.”

 

The film is not merely satisfied with the suppression of the Black mob by a White mob, rescue of Elise, and punishment of Silas; it is way too explicitly ideological for that. In the post-climax scenes, the KKK establishes itself as the lawful authority, supplanting the nigger-loving Federal representatives, and secure their authority to overturn all the corrupt laws permitting Blacks and Whites to have sex with each other through the creation of Jim Crow system. Particularly blunt was the scene where the hooded Klansmen point rifles at unarmed blacks who merely seek to vote. This constitutes the film’s happy ending, Jesus himself appears in a vision blessing the newly re-established order.

 

Part three:

 

In the midst of this, there are a few positive Black characters, but their “positiveness” is expressed solely through their submission and servitude. They are not inconsistent with the kinder, but patronizing, view of the first half of the film, and in Griffith’s earlier shorts like “His Trust” and “His Trust Fulfilled” (both released in 1910). But the venomous hate propaganda of the second half is a contradiction, as well was as praise of the KKK. One of Griffith’s earlier films, “The Rose of Kentucky” (1911), apparently had an anti-KKK theme (this is stated in various sources, though I can’t find any source that specifically states they’ve actually seen it). 

Unlike most other filmmakers of overtly political movies, Griffith didn’t follow through his on message with activism, meaning he never publicly lobbied for segregation or black disenfranchisement. Dixon wrote the original novels, much of the screenplay, and bankrolled part of the film. He had more agenda, Griffith had artistic delusions. I think Dixon had more control of the second half than the first and dictated many specifics in how the political message there. I also suspect that the heavy reliance of quotes from President Wilson’s writings was also a decision of Dixon’s; you see Dixon and Wilson were friends from school. Still, it was Griffith who had chosen this novel to adapt, so he must’ve supported most of its contentions.

 

How can the first and second half be so at odds with each other? I suspect the answer lies in the very first image, establishing the film’s anti-slavery theme; and the film’s original choice of a very last image, cut from most (perhaps all) existent prints so few audiences have ever seen it.

In the beginning of the film, we are shown the pitiable sight of abused slaves in bondage on a colonial auction block, but the exact phrasing of the intertitles is darkly suggestive, “The bringing a the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.” It does not say, “The enslavement of the African to create the profit for the American slave-owner planted the first seed of disunion.”

 

And in the original version of the end, the Blacks are now being loaded on ships and sent back to Africa. Though this now seems a wholly bizarre idea, it had been subject of serious discussion in this country even before the Civil War. This film refers to it in the intertitles as “Lincoln’s Solution” which was not entirely untrue, he’d toyed with it, as had other luminaries such as Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson before him. Hell, it had even been attempted in the real world, when in 1820 a group of American Blacks, all former slaves, founded the nation of Liberia with financing obtained, in part, from altruistic White donors including slave owners.

 

Novelist Dixon’s friendship with President Wilson led to “Birth’s” single greatest marketing coupe – a screening at the White House on March 21, 1915; this is very likely the first motion picture ever screened there. What Griffith got from that event was pure marketing gold, a review of the film by the President himself, which appears in the beginning of most prints of the movie, "It is like writing history with Lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

 

Or maybe not -- After the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) became enraged by the film, they contacted the White House and cried foul. The President’s secretary, J. M. Tumulty, responded, "...the President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it."

 

So where did that glowing quote come from? 

Likely Griffith or Dixon invented it. 

And what did Wilson actually think of the film? 

There’s no record of that. Still, I suspected that Wilson didn’t dislike the movie, it specifically played to his ego, reflected many aspects of his world view, and he shared an important kinship with Griffith and Dixon that would’ve bonded them even if they’d all been strangers–all three were Southerners from “better” families, proud of what had been built before the disastrous war, proud of the heroism of their fathers and uncles in the during the conflict, raised in the shadow of its wreckage and in the middle of the difficulties and humiliations of the Reconstruction, full aware that as the North became an economic powerhouse while much of the South still wallowed in recession – in fact some regions would not see the first hint of economic recovery for more than eighty-years after the end of the conflict, meaning that all three of these men were already dead before it happened.

 

That’s important to keep in mind to understand what came next.

 

The NAACP clearly understood the corrosive power of the film and started organizing nationwide protests against it. There efforts were impressive, but their organizational influence was limited to a handful of major cities at a time when most of the US population was rural. The NAACP was overwhelmed.

 

In New York City there was tremendous advance ticket sales and special trains to transport White movie patrons to and from Connecticut and New Jersey, assuring a huge audience regardless of protest. Huge Times Square billboards featured KKK Nightriders, and live horsemen dressed in KKK regalia galloped through the streets with advertising banners. Despite daily picket lines outside the Liberty Theater, The Birth of a Nation became the most successful film ever shown in New York City during the silent film era.

 

Griffith challenged all assaults on the historical accuracy of his utter fantasy vigorously, releasing an annotated guide to the film that drew heavily on the work of then-contemporary academic historians like Columbia University’s William Dunning, after whom the “Dunning School” (or “Dunningite”) is named. The Dunning School was related to, or perhaps indistinguishable from, the Wilsonians, and they dominated America’s historical views of the Reconstruction era from about 1900 to the 1950s. Adam Fairclough summarizes their views this way:

 

“All agreed that black suffrage had been a political blunder and that the Republican state governments in the South that rested upon black votes had been corrupt, extravagant, unrepresentative, and oppressive. The sympathies of the ‘Dunningite’ historians lay with the white Southerners who resisted Congressional Reconstruction: whites who, organizing under the banner of the Conservative or Democratic Party, used legal opposition and extralegal violence to oust the Republicans from state power. Although ‘Dunningite’ historians did not necessarily endorse those extra legal methods, they did tend to palliate them. From start to finish, they argued, Congressional Reconstruction—often dubbed ‘Radical Reconstruction’—lacked political wisdom and legitimacy.”

 

The NAACP’s attempts to suppress the film were mostly unsuccessful; though banned in Chicago, Ohio, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Minneapolis, this had virtually no impact on the film’s overwhelming popularity. The profitability of the film was never properly documented and most estimates are assumed to have been exaggerated, but it’s still understood that not only was it the most financially successful film in history up to that point, but it would retain that title until 1939, supplanted finally by “Gone with the Wind,” another melodrama ripe with slavery and KKK apologetics.

 

The NAACP’s primary obstacle is that they were trying to create the controversy; but despite the film’s rare bluntness, its ideas were not controversial at the time. There probably could be no better yardstick to measure the chasm of 1915 America’s racial divide than this film, because while Black audiences openly wept at the film's malicious portrayal of them while White audiences cheered. Another indicator of that chasm is the apparent sincerity of Griffith’s seemingly impossible surprise that Blacks were offended. Logically, he not only should he have expected it, but he also shouldn’t have cared what Blacks thought. Still, he kept impossibly insisting that the film wasn’t racist.

 

How could he sustain such a self-delusion?

Miss Gish probably reveals the answer, and in doing so, probably reveals more than she thinks she does. She says that Griffith told her, "To say that [I was anti-Negro] is like saying I am against children, as they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all of our lives."

 

The film didn’t just propagandize an agenda, it reflected a normality that America was not yet prepared to challenge. Ebert again, “The film represents how racist a white American could be in 1915 without realizing he was racist at all. That is worth knowing.

 

“Blacks already knew that, had known it for a long time, witnessed it painfully again every day, but ‘The Birth of a Nation’ demonstrated it in clear view, and the importance of the film includes the clarity of its demonstration. That it is a mirror of its time is, sadly, one of its values.

 

“‘The Birth of a Nation’ is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s ‘The Triumph of the Will,’ it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.”

 

And, of course, Ebert is right. The evidence of this is how the film, so un-camouflaged in its hate, swept the nation. It inspired White-on-Black riots in Boston, Philadelphia, and other places. Perhaps the single most shocking act of violence inspired by this film was when a White man in Lafayette, Indiana, killed a black teenager after seeing the movie.

 

Moreover, the KKK had been almost extinct in 1915; they had long become an embarrassment to their allies in the Democratic Party and also obsolete because all their Jim Crow agendas were now long and comfortably in place. Directly as a result of this film, the KKK enjoyed a massive revival. Before the year was through, William J. Simmons, pulling directly from the film and Dixon’s books as source material for rituals and symbols, re-founded the KKK at a public event held at Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta. This revitalized KKK would swell to more than 40,000 and play an influential role in the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution (the national prohibition of alcohol), passing punitive anti-immigration laws, and committing approximate 1,500 murders before they again went into decline again after 1925.

 

Thomas Dixon reveled in the triumph, but Griffith was apparently started having second thoughts. More than on critic observed that Griffith’s later films seemed to be trying to make amends for this one. He apparently wanted nothing to do with “Birth’s” sequel “The Fall of a Nation” (1916) a future-war SF film that was an attack on inter-war pacifist politics (it was a financial flop and now considered a lost film). 

Instead, Griffith's next film, "Intolerance" (1916), was anthology of stories condemning various forms of, well, intolerance. But its popularity did not match that of “Birth,” and because of an over-indulgent production and cost over-runs it had no chance of returning on its investment no matter how popular it was. "Intolerance" became a financial flop legendary proportion. Three years later came a more restrained production, but a bolder story, “Broken Blossoms” (1919), which is believed to be cinema’s the first inter-racial love story between a Chinese man (a White actor in yellow-face) and a White woman.

 

Other films tried to challenge the message of “The Birth of a Nation.” 

"The Birth of a Race” (1918) was made by a group of Black filmmakers to elevate the perception of Blacks in America, but unfortunately it was largely ignored. 

Easily the most important Black filmmaker of the silent era, Oscar Micheaux challenged Griffith’s pro-lynching message in his second feature film, “Within Our Gates” (1919) which was more impactful, but also faced more successful suppression than Griffith did. An interesting thing about “Within…” is that Micheaux, a capable enough filmmaker by pre-“Birth” standards (but barely competent by post-“Birth” standards) created what may be his best film criticizing the greater master. Not only is it filled inflamed-but-wholly justified, white-hot indignation, but he borrowed the staging techniques of some scenes directly from Griffith’s film. The techniques help, because in the end, Griffith created more vocabulary than he did propaganda, and a vocabulary is adaptable to any intent. After all, Einstein spoke the same German as Hitler.

 

(Bizarrely, Micheaux tried to make the case that the film wasn’t a response to Griffth, perhaps he didn’t like the observations about the scenes he most directly referenced. He also had a few strange racial theories of his own, and in time would also run afoul with the NAACP because of his repeated stories indicating that pure-blood blacks were inferior to mixed-race ones.)

 

The NAACP’s fight against “Birth ...” was hampered because black America saw a controversy where white America did not, so the charges of controversy could find no traction. But the NAACP didn’t relent, renewing their campaign with each of the film’s re-releases 1924, 1931, and 1938. Finally, the tide began to turn, as the newly revitalized KKK self-immolated. Their terrorism shocked the nation and sparked a huge Black migration to the Northern states, just as the earlier KKK reign of terror had, and this had a negative economic impact on the South that soured the way many of more respectable racists viewed them, just as it did after the successful passage of the Jim Crow Laws in the 1890s.

 

It was in 1925 that the KKK’s most politically influential member, Grand Dragon of Indiana D. C. Stephenson, destroyed the revitalized KKK. He was convicted of the kidnap, rape, and murder of a young and popular White school teacher, the whole nation turned against them. 

By 1939, when the film version of the novel “Gone with the Wind” was released, the KKK apologetics had to be done on the sly, much toning down the Margret Mitchell novel it was based on. 

The power demonstrated in the 1915 - 1925 KKK revival was awesome. When their next revival came in the later-1959s, a reaction to the Civil Rights movement. Despite their impact on the public consciousness, they were again smaller and weaker. Even so, this film remained a KKK recruiting tool at least until the 1970s (that is how I first heard of the movie, it came up on a TV news program I saw in my young teens).

 

Though no filmmaker has added as much to the vocabulary of cinema as Griffith, it is not as if others have not added something. One of the great innovators of my lifetime is the often-irascible Spike Lee. As a very political Black man, it’s not surprising that he has something to say about “Birth...” He first saw the film while a student at NYU Film School. Lee told an interviewer that his professors put too much emphasis on Griffith's artistry and not enough on the film's racist message. "They taught that DW Griffith is the father of cinema. They talk about all the 'innovations' - which he did. But they never really talked about the implications of Birth of a Nation, never really talked about how that film was used as a recruiting tool for the KKK." 

Lee’s reaction to this was in one of his first-year projects, 20-minute film called “The Answer,” about an out-of-work African-American screenwriter who agrees to write a remake of “Birth of a Nation.” The screenwriter ultimately decides that he cannot go through with the project and is attacked by KKK members, who burn a cross in front of his house. (There’s no reason to look up this work, it is unavailable, and Lee admits, it was a pretty poor exercise.) 

Even decades later Lee was expressing resentment regarding “Birth’s” singular place in film history. He’s complained that critics don’t attack ''Birth'' or its creator, but they attacked Lee and the anti-Semitic stereotyping in his 1990 film ''Mo' Better Blues.''

 

Where Lee saw a double standard, I saw an evolution. I, for one, can’t find a single contemporary or near-contemporary critic not appalled by the White Supremacism of "Birth..." and none who praise it fall into the trap of apologetics. As for Lee, I’m not familiar with a single major critic, even those hostile to him, that don’t recognize his talent or contribution.

 

Lee would eventually apologize for his Jewish stereotyping in his film, a response that may be akin to Griffith’s shifting artistic choices following “Birth ...” though it must be said, “Birth” inspired murder and terrorism, while “Mo...” inflicted no more harm than annoyance; also “Birth” was critically and commercially triumphant, while “Mo” was Lee’s first significant critical and commercial failure.

 

In 1992, two years after that Spike Lee interview, the United States Library of Congress deemed “The Birth of a Nation” to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Then in 1998, it was voted #44 on the "Top 100 American Films" by the American Film Institute.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9UPOkIpR0A