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Saturday, August 1, 2020

Watching The Birth of a Nation Today



for the memory of Daniel Krogh who taught me about film sixty years ago


Now, when so many Americans are looking at American racism and rising in righteous protest, it is useful seek to understand the history of white supremacy in this country and why it has been so persistent in spite of its false and destructive nature. Viewing D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation provides a view of the centrality of racism in the United States and the shell-game dodges by which some ordinary people may be convinced of its lies.

There is no doubt that D. W. Griffith is a master of film, not only for his fundamental contribution to the visual vocabulary of the medium, but for his creative shaping of the norms of popular culture in his narratives and characters. The vicious racism of The Birth of a Nation is so undisguised as to be likewise undebatable.

The film dazzled viewers when it came out in 1915 to great fanfare and a series of special premieres in various cities with substantial ticket prices, a thirteen-page program, and a storeful of other souvenirs. It was over three hours long not counting the intermission, with a grand orchestral score and no end of hype. It remained the highest-grossing film well into the sound era, until another fable of Southern history -- Gone with the Wind -- was released in 1939.

The publicity prominently featured the apparent endorsement of the federal government. President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner elected president since 1848, the man who resegregated federal agencies, is quoted in the film’s titles in praise of “a great Ku Klux Klan . . . to protect the Southern country.” [1] Wilson invited Griffith and Thomas Dixon, Jr. who had written The Clansman, the popular novel and play from which the film was made, to show the movie in the White House. It was then exhibited to the Supreme Court where Chief Justice Edward Douglas White proudly recalled his own Klan membership. This showing was also attended by cabinet ministers, almost a hundred members of Congress, and other high government officials.

The propaganda value of Griffith’s version of history was evident. Dixon bragged to the president, “This play is transforming the entire population of the North and the West into sympathetic Southern voters. There will never be an issue of your segregation policy.” [2] The pernicious effect of The Birth of a Nation led to the formation of the Lost Cause defense of the Confederacy, most obvious in the rebirth of the Klan itself which had become moribund but which surged after William Joseph Simmons viewed the film and decided to reorganize the terrorist group, designating himself as Imperial Wizard. In this new incarnation the Klan became hugely successful, gaining many members in the Midwest and the North and committing acts of violence and vigilantism while presenting itself as a benevolent patriotic fraternal organization.

Griffith, the son of a Confederate colonel, was doubtless pleased at his reactionary role. Yet there are significant signs that he felt uneasy about the hatred he was inspiring. The film anticipates controversy, opening with “a plea for the art of the motion picture” against censorship and associating the new art form with literature, the Bible and Shakespeare. Another title card states disingenuously that the story is purely historical and not meant to characterize any race or group in contemporary American society.

He strove as well to displace the true theme by claiming in another title that the work’s theme is not race but actually “the ravages of war.” At the end grand allegorical scenes depict a suffering humanity below a mounted war deity succeeded by Christ presiding over a peaceful utopia, “a golden day when bestial war shall rule no more.”

Griffith took pains to insist that the skewed fantasy of his film was nothing but the historical facts. A number of titles note his research into history books and photographs to make his scenes completely authentic, and in interviews he justified one incident after another by pointing to what he claimed to be their factual basis. Nor was he singular in his depiction of the period. A similar view of Reconstruction was advanced by many academic historians, perhaps the most influential of whom was William Archibald Dunning at Columbia.

The film emphasizes the peculiar fascination with sexuality that lies at the root of American racial attitudes. Gus, the wicked “renegade” pursues Flora, the sweet little sister who plunges over a cliff to her death rather than submit to his embraces, and then the “mulatto” Silas Lynch tries to force himself on Elsie Stoneman. One cannot avoid thinking of the trumped-up rape accusations that often were the excuse for lynching, and the sexual mutilation of victims. Even a rumor or hint of forward behavior might trigger violence as the case of Emmet Till.

At the end of the film the Klansmen ride triumphantly into town with the young Cameron and Stoneman women at the head of the column. Griffith defended his movie as "an influence against the intermarriage of blacks and whites"; indeed, he claimed in a letter to the New York Times that he had made the movie "for one reason only—because it opposes the marriage of blacks to whites and whites.” He ridiculed the NAACP as "the Negro Intermarriage Society." [4] This irrational obsession with racial purity (in spite of the mixing through rape and sexual coercion) was so psychologically powerful that in 1967 when the Supreme Court ended the miscegenation laws sixteen states still outlawed interracial marriage.

Thus, a racist system that aims in fact at maintaining power and economic advantage of one group over another masquerades as a moral crusade. The Ku Klux Klan reinforced this identity by supporting the cause of Prohibition and sometimes directing vigilante action against those thought to be immoral: loose women, unfaithful husbands, gamblers, and wife-beaters, some of them white. Tyranny and reaction has always tried to claim the moral high ground. One may think of Nixon’s attempt to characterize protesters as drug-users or common reactions to early AIDS activists. The continuing success of such tactics is evident in the strong evangelical support for right wing policies that in fact violate Christian principles.

The Birth of a Nation is quaint in many ways. Quite a few of Griffith’s Klansmen seem to be wearing toilet plungers on their heads instead of the better-known pointy dunce cap hoods. Though real African-Americans appear in crowd scenes, Griffith used white actors in crude makeup to play leading Black roles, causing the faithful Cameron servants to appear as grotesquely ridiculous as his villain Gus. Whereas in minstrelsy blackface was associated with comedy and light-hearted good times, here it seems explicitly ugly and sinister. The broad and artificial language of gesture of pre-cinematic stage actors is as dated as the stylized melodramatic plot line.

Like Leni Riefenstahl’s work, Griffith’s film will always be studied by students of cinema, but it deserves attention as well from those who despise its hateful theme but wish to investigate the foundations and the supporting myths of American racism. As always the artist is the one who records attitudes with the most precise detail and the strongest passion. In writing Sexual Politics, Kate Millet examined not feminist authors but D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, knowing that their works contained the clearest statement of the codes that enable patriarchy.

The viewer can appreciate the epic grandeur of the crowd scenes and applaud Griffith’s exploitation of the medium in new ways, pioneering close-ups, fade-outs, tracking shots, parallel action sequences, crosscutting and a host of other innovations. (The iris shots and tinting of certain sequences will please fewer today.) Yet one cannot forget for a moment the sinister deceitful message the great director meant to bring to America, a mission in which he succeeded all too well. The current demonstrations indicate what little progress has occurred in the last century.



1. Other quotations from Wilson’s The History of the American People included in the film are these. “The Policy of the congressional leaders wrought…a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South.…in their determination to "put the white South under the heel of the black South.” "Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile, and use the Negroes.…In the villages the Negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.”

Griffith did not use all Wilson’s racist comments by any means. This, for example, is in the book but not the film: “The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.”

2. Letter quoted in John Hope Franklin, Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989, 20-21.

3. How odd that he should have been given that name.

4. These quotations are available by looking no further than the Wikipedia article on The Birth of a Nation. Original citations are available there.

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