In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation: Racism, Reception and Resistance 3031047362, 9783031047367

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In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation Racism, Reception and Resistance Edited by Melvyn Stokes Paul McEwan

In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation

Melvyn Stokes · Paul McEwan Editors

In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation Racism, Reception and Resistance

Editors Melvyn Stokes History Department University College London London, UK

Paul McEwan Media & Communication and Film Studies Muhlenberg College Allentown, PA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-04736-7 ISBN 978-3-031-04737-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to our much-missed colleague Cedric J. Robinson (1940–2016), who did so much to create a radical Black history. Cedric gave an inspiring lecture on the pernicious roots and consequences of Griffith’s film at our 2015 London conference.

Acknowledgments

The idea from this book came from the Commonwealth Fund Conference on American history that took place at University College London, UK, in June 2015. Its title was “In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation” and it aimed to examine the origins and tainted legacy of David W. Griffith’s notorious film of a century earlier. The conference took place while a short season of Griffith films, including The Birth of a Nation, was being shown at the National Film Theatre run by the British Film Institute in London. Keynote speakers from the conference formed a “round table” to discuss it critically with the audience before one of these screenings. The help of Helen DeWitt, Geoff Andrew and David Somerset of the BFI is gratefully acknowledged. Melvyn Stokes would like to thank the Commonwealth Fund of UCL for helping to fund the conference itself, together with the UCL Institute of the Americas, the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, the Equiano Centre at UCL and the international film organization SERCIA. He is particularly grateful to his conference partner Professor Iwan Morgan of the Institute of the Americas and Professor Stephen Conway, then chair of the UCL History department, Clare Morley, Departmental Manager and Samantha Pickett, then responsible for departmental publicity. He would like to give particular thanks to all five keynote speakers at the conference: Cedric J. Robinson, to whom this book is dedicated, Jane M. Gaines, Robert Lang, Paul McEwan (subsequently the much-appreciated co-editor of this book) and Linda Williams.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In personal terms, he is as ever grateful to his wife Nahed and daughter Sarah. Paul McEwan is grateful to Melvyn Stokes for organizing the centenary conference that gave rise to this book, and to the international contributors who have made it possible. He would like to acknowledge the research support provided by Muhlenberg College, and his colleagues in the Media & Communication department and the Film Studies program. He is deeply appreciative of the endless encouragement received from his family, including his wife Eileen and his children Grace and Max. Both editors would like to thank Camille Davies and Jack Heeney of Palgrave Macmillan, Kumaravel Senbagaraj of Springer Nature and Leigh Priest, who produced the new form of “embedded” index with her usual skill and aplomb.

Contents

1

Introduction Paul McEwan and Melvyn Stokes

1

Part I Creating a Racial Imaginary 2

3

4

5

The Architects of The Birth of a Nation: Thomas Dixon, Jr. and David Wark Griffith Charlene Regester

17

Blackface, Disguise and Invisibility in the Reception of The Birth of a Nation Richard Maltby

35

The Birth of a Nation’s “Melodrama of Pathos and Action”: A Tale of “National Rebirth”? Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris

63

The Battle of Petersburg: Griffith’s “Big Scenes” David Mayer

85

Part II Missing Texts 6

The Birth of a Nation Footage We Do Not Want to Find Jane M. Gaines

99

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7

CONTENTS

Fixing The Birth of a Nation?: Hampton Institute and The New Era Allyson Nadia Field

121

Part III Resistance and Protest 8

“A Most Serious Loss in Business”: Race, Citizenship and Protest in New Haven, Connecticut Nicholas Forster

145 161

9

Resisting The Birth of a Nation in Virginia Van Dora Williams

10

“At This Time in This City”: Black Atlanta and the Première of The Birth of a Nation Matthew H. Bernstein

175

The Meaning of Emancipation: African American Memory as a Challenge to The Birth of a Nation Jenny Woodley

191

11

Part IV Reception Abroad 12

13

14

15

Transatlantic “Structural Amnesia”: The Birth of a Nation in Britain 1915–16 Michael Hammond “Black Horror on the Rhine”: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and the French-occupied Rhineland after World War I Melvyn Stokes

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The Influence of The Birth of a Nation on South Africa: Film Culture and Race Jacqueline Maingard

237

“Should It Not Therefore Be Banned?”: Screening and Broadcasting The Birth of a Nation in Britain Jenny Barrett

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CONTENTS

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Part V Epilogue 16

“Still a North and a South”: The Birth of a Nation and National Trauma Robert Lang

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Jenny Barrett is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Edge Hill University in the northwest of England and is the author of Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity (2009). She has published on the Western film genre, cultural representations of the American Civil War, African Americans in genre films, gender representations and racialized performance. She was the co-founder of the research network, “Art, Culture & Ethics in Black and White: Over 100 Years of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.” Matthew H. Bernstein is Goodrich C. White Professor of Film and Media Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author and editor of six books of film history and criticism, including Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent (2000) and Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and TV (2009). He is currently co-writing a history of film culture in segregation-era Atlanta and a comprehensive history of Columbia Pictures. Allyson Nadia Field is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film & the Possibility of Black Modernity (2015). She is also co-editor with Marsha Gordon of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (2019) and co-editor with JanChristopher Horak and Jacqueline Stewart of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (2015).

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Nicholas Forster is a Lecturer in African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at Yale University. His research focuses on the relationship between race, creative social networks, media and performance. He has published essays in liquid blackness, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Film Quarterly and Black Camera, where he co-edited, with Michele Prettyman, a special Close-Up section on Black independent New York filmmakers. He is currently writing a biography of the Black actor-director-writer Bill Gunn. Jane M. Gaines is a Professor of Film at Columbia University. In 2018 she received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Distinguished Career Award. She is the author of three award-winning books: Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice and the Law (1991), Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (2001) and Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (2018). She has published articles on intellectual property and piracies, documentary theory and radicalism, feminism and film, early cinema and critical race theory. Dr. Michael Hammond is an Emeritus Fellow in Film History at the University of Southampton, UK. He has written extensively about cinema and World War One. He is the author of The Big Show: British Cinema Culture and The Great War (2006). His book The Great War in Hollywood Memory 1919–1939 was published in 2019. He is presently researching African American cinema culture in the silent period. Robert Lang is a Professor of Cinema at the University of Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli (1989), other books on film including New Tunisian Cinema; Allegories of Resistance (2014) and editor of “The Birth of a Nation”: D. W. Griffith, Director (1994). He is currently at work on a book project, “Divided States: Essays on American Cinema in the New Millennium.” Jacqueline Maingard is an Associate Professor in Film at the University of Bristol and Honorary Research Associate in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town. She is the author of South African National Cinema (2007) and has published on film and history in various volumes and journals, including Journal of Southern African Studies, Memory Studies and Screen. She is currently completing a monograph on black cinema audiences in South Africa from the 1920s to the 1960s.

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Richard Maltby is the Matthew Flinders Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Screen Studies at Flinders University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has co-edited eight books on the history of cinema audiences, exhibition and reception, including Explorations in New Cinema History (2011), and The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (2019). His other books include Hollywood Cinema (2003) and Decoding the Movies: Hollywood in the 1930s (2021), and he is the series editor of Exeter Studies in Film History. David Mayer is an Emeritus Professor of Drama and Research Professor, University of Manchester, UK. He studies British and American popular entertainment of the nineteenth & early-twentieth century. Recent writings explore links between the Victorian stage and early motion pictures. A contributing member to The Griffith Project, his books include Playing Out the Empire: Ben-Hur and other Toga-Plays and Films (1994), Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W. Griffith and the American Theatre (2009) and Bandits! or The Collapsing Bridge: An Early Film and a LateVictorian Stage (2015). Paul McEwan is a Professor of Media & Communication and Film Studies at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the BFI Film Classic on The Birth of Nation (2015) and Cinema’s Original Sin: D. W. Griffith, American Racism, and the Rise of Film Culture (2022), as well as essays on Canadian cinema, film pedagogy and D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris is a Professor of Film and TV Series Studies and (African) American Literature at the University of Paris Nanterre in France. Her books and articles focus on contemporary American Cinema and screen adaptations as well as on English-speaking TV Series. She co-edited the collective volumes Combining Aesthetic and Psychological Approaches to TV Series Addiction (2018), Vérités et mensonges dans le cinéma et les séries hollywoodiens (Truths and Lies in Hollywood Cinema and Series ) (2021) and Dark Recesses in the House of Hammer (2022). Charlene Regester is an Associate Professor in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies and Affiliate Faculty with the Global Cinema Minor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her essays have appeared in: Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited (2021); Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity

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(2020), African American Cinema Through Black Lives Consciousness (2019), Hollywood Renaissance (2018), Early Race Filmmaking (2017) and New Approaches to “Gone with the Wind” (2015). Melvyn Stokes is a Professor of Film History at University College London. His book D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” was published in 2007. He has also written articles on the film and its reception in Cinema Journal and Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His other books include Gilda (2010) and American History Through Hollywood Film (2013). He has co-edited five books on audiences and reception. Van Dora Williams is a multiple Emmy award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. Her documentaries include Noble Desire (2001), on the Republic of Benin’s reconciliation efforts concerning the TransAtlantic Slave Trade, and Banished (2008), dealing with the repeated expulsions of African Americans from their homes in the early 20th century. She gained her Ph.D. in Communication from Regent University, Virginia, in 2017 and is currently Associate Professor and Assistant Dean of Administration for the Division of Communication and Creative Media at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. Jenny Woodley is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her monograph, Art for Equality, was published in 2014. She works on race and memory in the US. She has written on subjects such as racial violence, the Bethune Memorial and Confederate monuments. Her current research project, supported by a British Academy grant, considers the ways in which Black victims of lynching have been remembered and mourned.

List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 4.9 Fig. 4.10 Fig. 5.1

Elsie parades with the Klansmen Gus pursues Flora Cameron Lydia eavesdrops on Austin Stoneman Gus hides in the gin mill Elsie goes to see Silas Lynch Elsie alerts ‘White Spies’ Lydia tears her own clothes Elsie and her emblematic white cat at the Stoneman Pennsylvania country house, a model of moral purity Elsie gagged by Silas Lynch Broken Blossoms (1919): Lucy’s silenced voice and tortured body Broken Blossoms: Pervasive fear of the racial Other Broken Blossoms: Paroxystic pathos but no real action—Lucy’s death Stoneman’s Wig: The true nature of the “Freak” Lynch manhandling his former mentor The black soldier framed as an integral part of the wilderness when stalking Flora Cameron The visual trope of the dying maiden: The southern family/nation struck once again Lynch secreting away his unconscious prey Play poster for Cap’t Herne U.S.A. (Private Collection USA)

24 26 29 37 39 41 44 66 68 69 70 71 75 76 77 78 79 89

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 8.1

Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2

Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 16.1 Fig. 16.2

The Birth of a Nation posters. Majestic Theatre, Peoria, Illinois, January 9, 1916 premiere Gus captured by Ku Klux Klan Joseph Carl Breil at piano. ca. 1915–1920 (Courtesy U.S. Library of Congress. George Grantham Bain Collection) Abolitionist and enslaved boy Protest on Boston Common (The Crisis, June 1915, 88) T. S. Bronson, Schoolboys at entrance to Hyperion waiting to see Birth of a Nation, 1915 (T. S. Bronson Collection, The New Haven Museum. Published with the kind permission of the New Haven Museum Photo Archive) Reverend Henry Hugh Proctor of the First Congregational Church. ©Thomas E. Askew. Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress Article in Benjamin W. Davis’s self-published Atlanta Independent celebrates Davis’s leadership in building the Oddfellows Building, November 20, 1915 Emancipation Day, Richmond, Virginia c.1905 (courtesy of the Library of Congress) Lynch tries to convince a formerly enslaved man to stop working Ad for The Birth of a Nation at the Grand Theatre, Southampton, October 25, 1916 Marriage and the shining city on the hill Conquer We Must

102 105 109 126 128

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187 195 202 212 268 275

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Paul McEwan and Melvyn Stokes

When David W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, it was half a century after the end of the American Civil War. The war itself still loomed large in the consciousness of many Americans. Nowhere was this truer than in the eleven states of the defeated Confederacy. Those who had experienced the war first-hand passed on their stories and memories to children and grandchildren. For most white Southerners, those stories reflected the trauma of having a racist social structure upended by war and the attempted social and political Reconstruction that followed. During these years, they had been confronted with an attempt to put into practice the claim in the Declaration of Independence that all men (the Declaration made no mention of anyone else) were created equal. But by

P. McEwan (B) Media & Communication and Film Studies, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. Stokes History Department, University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_1

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1915, the white South had successfully thwarted the promise of Reconstruction and reinstated its racist social structure under the fig-leaf of the “separate but equal” doctrine enunciated by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).1 That The Birth of a Nation also buttressed the idea of a racially segregated and profoundly unequal American society became apparent from the arguments and debates surrounding the film’s first screenings. African Americans and their white liberal allies quickly realised the threat posed by the film, as a well-crafted narrative wrapped in the new mass art of film that had had the power both to shape “historical” memory of the Civil War era and influence how Black people were perceived in contemporary society. They launched an immediate and sustained campaign of protests against the screening of the film in a succession of locations. In response, defenders of the movie advanced a range of arguments. Griffith himself maintained that to ban Birth of a Nation would be an infringement of the First Amendment right to free speech (though the Supreme Court in its Mutual decision of February 1915 specifically refused to extend such a right to movies).2 Griffith was also eager to defend his film as a work of art, since this would elevate his own claim to be an artist and make opponents of Birth into enemies of the newest art. More commonly, however, the movie was defended with the argument that—despite the fact that much of it was based on a popular novel and stage play—it represented a real if unfortunate historical truth. The film’s assertion that it was historical itself embodied two highly dubious yet complementary assumptions: that the events it depicted had actually happened (even though, especially in the second half dealing with Reconstruction, they manifestly had not) and that they were in any case safely in the past and distant from the more enlightened attitudes of 1915 (in reality, the America of 1915 was highly racist as well as moving towards ending the long tradition of open immigration). A century later, the United States found itself at a similar decisive historical moment. In 2015, the tumult of the Civil Rights era was fifty years or so in the past. For many Americans, there was a sense that— while a range of social and racial issues remained to be addressed—the major battles of the Civil Rights era were over. Martin Luther King, Jr., once regarded as a radical figure, had been sanitized as a heroic figure who could be widely commemorated. The White House itself was occupied by Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president. Yet there was also a good deal of evidence that racial issues had not gone away. The

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acquittal in July 2013 of George Zimmerman, who killed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012, prompted three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, to launch a campaign under the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. That campaign grew, and increasingly came to focus on the deaths of many African Americans—including Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014— at the hands of white police officers. It also became increasingly clear that much of the criticism and vitriol directed against President Obama— including the claim that he had been born outside the United States and was consequently not qualified to be president—was grounded in deep and persistent racism. 2015 was also, of course, the centenary of the first release of The Birth of a Nation. It seemed an appropriate moment to organize a conference of film scholars to critically re-examine the film and its legacy. The conference was held at University College London in the UK on June 25–27, bringing together scholars from the US and other areas of the world. Yet what had been planned as a rearward-looking gathering—looking back on the film and the issues associated with it in the past—seemed from the start to be insufficient, since the racism of the film found immediate echoes in what had just happened in the United States. Eight days before the conference began, white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine Black members of a bible study group at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Many conference attendees were still in shock over this mass shooting, at the oldest AME church in the South. As more details of Roof himself and his beliefs emerged, it had become increasingly clear that his views in many ways followed a similar track to those articulated by Griffith in Birth of a Nation. One other event, while it did not provoke much discussion at the conference, occurred in the days before it opened. On June 16, the day before the Charleston massacre, property billionaire and TV reality star Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president in 2016. Trump had been a leading member of the “birther” campaign, designed to “prove” that President Obama could not have been born in the United States. That the claim was ridiculous on its face mattered little. It was more important that the lie be repeated endlessly, creating a “debate” about something that was not actually debatable. As the successful “Lost Cause” version of Confederate history amply demonstrates, the historical narratives that people want to believe can easily overpower the ones that are actually true.3 For many of

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those at the conference, Trump’s announcement was disconcerting, but American political history is full of fringe candidates, and there was little reason at that early stage to believe that Trump would be able to capture his party’s nomination, let alone the presidency. While Trump had little impact at the conference, his election in November 2016 as 45th President of the United States and subsequent term of office provided the immediate backcloth to our work on this book. Both as candidate and as President, Trump was an active participant in the “culture wars” of the time. Many of these revolved around the issue of race. The racial massacre carried out by Dylann Roof in Charleston and images that emerged after the shooting of him posing with a Confederate flag prompted a struggle in South Carolina over whether it should remove a similar flag that had flown for years over the state capitol. In the end, the state decided to take down the flag. In subsequent years, citizens of many other states questioned the continuing local presence of other placenames and symbols, particularly statues and monuments, associated with the Confederacy. What fueled this movement was the conviction that the Confederacy had been an attempt to preserve slavery as an institution, and with it the idea of white supremacy. Yet, to many white Americans, the campaign to remove Confederate symbols seemed like an effort to challenge their own history and culture.4 Plans in August 2017 to remove the statue of Confederate commander-in-chief General Robert E. Lee from a city park in Charlottesville, Virginia, provoked a demonstration by right-wing nationalists, which turned violent when one of the demonstrators drove his car into a female counter-demonstrator, who was fatally injured. In response, President Trump, while expressing sympathy for the young woman involved and her family, critiqued such efforts at removal: “So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” He then went on, controversially, to remark that “you had some very bad people in that group [the right-wing demonstrators], but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”5 Trump’s remark seemed to establish a moral equivalence between extreme rightwingers, one of who turned violent, and peaceful advocates of removal.6 Even more controversially, when the Black Lives Matter campaign over the death of Black people at the hands of white police officers culminated in widespread demonstrations after the killing of African American George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, President Trump—then

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in the process of running for re-election—attempted, in the words of Susan B. Glasser writing in the New Yorker, “to consistently misrepresent what is was happening as an outbreak of lawless anarchy that he is heroically cleaning up, as part of his newly rebranded ‘“LAW & ORDER”’ campaign.”7 Glasser was not the only one to think Trump was “refighting the Civil War–on the losing side.” A month later, the president explained to Catherine Herridge of CBS that he strongly supported the continuing use of the Confederate flag because “with me … it’s freedom of speech.”8 The Birth of a Nation, and the world it represented of more than 150 years ago, has turned out to have more relevance to today’s world than we ever thought. The first section of the book that follows is “Creating a Racist Imaginary” and the essays included explore various facets of the construction of The Birth of a Nation. For many years, responses to The Birth of Nation would try to separate its various formal and thematic elements, so that the cinematography might be considered separately from its use of blackface, or its narrative structure might be evaluated independently from the political goals of that narrative structure. This type of separation was particularly appealing in the middle of the last century, when New Criticism and various types of formalism encouraged critics to consider the internal constructions of a text. This cleaving of the film’s elements into manageable categories also permitted its racism to be “set aside,” which allowed it to find a place in university curricula that it might not have otherwise obtained, especially after the 1960s. In recent years, the folly of that separation has become clearer, and not just because it allowed the racism to be downplayed. To understand The Birth of a Nation as a film, one must understand it in its totality. The film was designed to be an overwhelming emotional experience, and all of its formal elements and narrative structures were integrated into that goal. The use of blackface was obviously important to the furthering of the film’s message, but so too were the landscape shots and the battle scenes, which immersed audiences in an emotional milieu where their intellects could give way to their passions. We must remember of course that even though we were twenty years into the cinematic era at this point, audiences had seen very few films with the scope or sensory overload of The Birth of a Nation. It is impossible for us to imagine ourselves as 1915 viewers, but any approximation begins with a consideration of the full extent of the film’s effects and affects. To that end, we have assembled a group of essays that looks with fresh eyes at the range of the film’s elements, both formal and thematic.

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Charlene Regester revisits the question of Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s influence on The Birth of a Nation, and analyzes the complex interplay of racist themes and images that appear in the film. Dixon was the author of the novels and stage play upon which the film was based, and one bizarre defense of Griffith over the years was that he had “toned down” the racism of Dixon’s work and thus was not as bad in comparison. We might note that Griffith’s successful integration of the racism into a compelling narrative is what allowed the message to travel as far as it did. Regester carefully traces the construction of individual characters and the various racial paradoxes they represent. Richard Maltby then discusses similar complications in the appearance of blackface characters in the film, some of whom are supposed to be black while others are presented as white characters in disguise. Maltby’s essay explores the challenge of figuring out how audiences might have read this blackface in 1915. One of his key observations is that the initial reception of The Birth of a Nation featured little sign of the ironic distancing that had often been a feature of blackface minstrelsy. From there, Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris turns to questions of gender and melodrama, expanding the scope of the discussion to include the reception of melodrama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a critical context for our understanding of reception in the 1910s and ’20s. She points, for example, to the inter-relation of racial and natural imagery, as when the white southerners search for Gus and he is “fused” with the surrounding vegetation. Calling this one of “Griffith’s signature techniques to amplify emotion,” she notes that it is “by melting into the dark and wild surroundings, [that] Gus emblematizes Evil and becomes an unsettling, diffuse and threatening presence.” Continuing this analysis of the film’s spectacle in his chapter on Griffith’s “big scenes,” David Mayer writes that the visual scope of The Birth of a Nation was as important as its characters and politics, and he points out the ways in which Griffith and his audiences would have been drawing on a variety of theatrical effects and traditions. Mayer is nearly singlehandedly responsible for our understanding of the relevance of Griffith’s theatrical career to his film work,9 and here he carefully documents many of the filmic and theatrical antecedents of some of The Birth of a Nation’s best-known scenes, including the Battle of Petersburg and the ride of the Klansmen, demonstrating that they “do not emerge from a vacuum or in a sudden stroke of lightning but from established theatrical precedent and continuing theater and film practice.”

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The second section of the book deals with “missing texts” and their role in The Birth of a Nation story. Griffith actually shot 150,000 feet of film for his production—a staggering amount that had to be edited down to around 12,000 feet to make a 3-hour movie.10 He continued to edit and make changes, even after the première at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles on February 8, 1915. In the weeks and months that followed, moreover, censorship boards and local political authorities required that a range of scenes they regarded as unacceptable be removed for the film to be screened in their locality. In her chapter, Jane Gaines analyzes the evidence for various pieces of lost footage, including the “Lincoln’s solution” scenes (sending Black people back to Liberia) and, even more incendiary, a purported scene of Gus’s castration at the hands of the Klan. While the evidence of this last scene is weaker than the Lincoln’s solution footage, Gaines considers the moral and historical complexity of all of these missing pieces that we may not ever want to find. The question of missing text in relation to The Birth of a Nation also arises in a different way. During the run of the movie at Boston’s Tremont Theater in April 1915, another film was screened together with Birth. Made at the Black Hampton Institute in Virginia, this film no longer exists. As Allyson Field explains in her chapter, the footage called The New Era attempted to show the progress that African Americans had made since the days of Reconstruction, but its showing with Griffith’s movie was complicated for audiences and for the Hampton Institute itself. A short documentary epilogue could not undo the damage that The Birth of a Nation had created, and the cover that it provided for Griffith drew criticism from Black critics and civic groups, who correctly surmised that the film would be harder to fight with these images appended to it. One of the lazier defenses of The Birth of a Nation for many years was simply that it was of its time, and that we could not or should not judge it with “modern” eyes, whether those eyes were in the 1970s or 2020s. Yet this view does not stand up to even the mildest scrutiny. Many people in 1915, both Black and white, understood exactly what this film was and what it would do, and expressed their perspectives in words not very different from ones we would use now. The more time one spends reading responses to The Birth of a Nation from the first part of the twentieth century, the more one is struck by the breadth and thoughtfulness of the opposition to it. The third section of this book focuses on how African Americans resisted the narrative of Griffith’s film.

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At first glance, it may appear that the campaign against The Birth of a Nation launched by the NAACP and its allies at the time of the film’s release was a failure. “Only in Ohio and Kansas,” according to Melvyn Stokes, “had the film been banned for any length of time; elsewhere, attempts on the part of local authorities to suppress the film were usually rapidly circumvented by the courts.”11 While local efforts to cut sequences from the film had more success, it is unclear whether successes of this kind justified the time and effort involved. Three chapters of this book analyze local attempts to stop the film and the reasons for their failure. Nicholas Forster examines the campaign against the film in New Haven, Connecticut, where the principal attempt to have the film banned involved an effort on the part of local Black business and professional men to argue that allowing Birth to be screened would cause them to lose white patronage. Local judge James Henry Webb, though he personally disliked a film he regarded as “pernicious,” dismissed the suit since he considered it legally impossible to estimate or identify such losses. With the local (white) press firmly rooting for the film, the NAACP and its local allies succeeded only in gaining a series of cuts made to the film before screening. Both the other two chapters on local campaigns deal with the South where, for historical reasons, it was even more difficult to resist the film. Nonetheless, as Van Dora Williams notes, Black residents of Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, together with some white allies, fought to have the film banned. In Norfolk, where The Birth of a Nation’s Southern première was planned for September 28, 1915, the City Council did indeed pass an ordinance to ban it on September 18, but the city’s mayor refused to enforce it. The Board of Aldermen subsequently voted to shelve the issue while surprising the film’s opponents with the explanation that they had done so because the “Hampton Epilogue” (as discussed by Allyson Field in Chapter 7 7) was going to be shown at the end of Griffith’s movie. In Richmond, a group of Black leaders made a similar attempt to petition Mayor George Ainslie to ban the film, but Ainslie also refused. As with the Hampton Epilogue, the struggle against The Birth of a Nation illuminated divisions amongst the Black community. In Atlanta, Georgia, as Matthew Bernstein shows, there was no real organized attempt—unlike in Norfolk and Richmond and elsewhere in the South—to protest Griffith’s film. In part, this was a result of the legacy of the Atlanta race riot of September 1906, when 50 African Americans had been killed and many more injured. The riot had been followed by

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moves to bring about greater cooperation between the races, but Black people involved in such initiatives—such as the Reverend Hugh Henry Proctor—did not appreciate that, on the white side, they were essentially intended to preserve the racial status quo in a city where around 40% of the population was Black. Procter nonetheless managed to persuade three white Christian ministers in Atlanta to propose delaying the showing of Birth of a Nation in Atlanta and to lobby the mayor to ban the film as prejudicial to race relations. There were many reasons why the campaigns to ban The Birth of a Nation were largely unsuccessful on the film’s first release. The NAACP, the main organization involved, had only 5000 members at the beginning of 1915 and patchy coverage across the United States as a whole with almost no representation in the South (as Matthew Bernstein points out, there was no chapter in Atlanta until 1917).12 Most white-dominated censor boards saw little wrong with the film. Predictions that the film would provoke racial violence only proved accurate in a small number of cases. When political authorities did ban the film, the courts usually quickly overturned the ban on the grounds that it threatened the property rights of the film’s distributors and exhibitors. Yet, in the 1920s, the tide seemingly began to turn. The film was banned in Boston and Minneapolis in 1921 and, later in the decade, in many other places. With the re-release of Birth in 1930 in a sound version, the NAACP redoubled its efforts against the movie and it was suppressed in a number of cities and states. By the 1940s, the threat of inevitable demonstrations and protests was sufficient to discourage most exhibitors from attempting to screen it. In historical terms, the campaign of Black people and their allies against Griffith’s film began the tradition of activism that would subsequently lead to the civil rights movement. As Cara Caddoo has observed: “By the end of World War I, the fight against The Birth of Nation had transformed into the first Black protest movement of the twentieth century.”13 Black resistance to the film was not confined to the political sphere, however. African Americans also engaged in a cultural war that was intended to counteract Griffith’s construction of Black history. Van Dora Williams refers to the exposition offering an alternative view of Black history in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. W. E. B. Du Bois, having already organized a pageant to celebrate Black history in New York in 1913, commemorating 50 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, revived it for large audiences in Washington, D.C. (October 1915) and Philadelphia (May 1916), this time as a conscious

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answer to The Birth of a Nation. Jenny Woodley, in her chapter, examines the ways in which emancipation celebrations in general foregrounded African Americans views of their own history. Although such celebrations, of course, began well before 1915, they were consciously used later to contest the memories of slavery and Civil War that Griffith offered. Unlike The Birth of a Nation, such celebrations emphasized that slavery had been a brutal system of human exploitation and foregrounded Lincoln as an emancipator, while at the same time making clear that Black people had worked and fought hard for their own freedom. Former slaves often spoke at emancipation celebrations, recounting their own experiences. Such celebrations of their own history helped African Americans see themselves as capable of “agency, patriotism and progress.” At the same time, however, they helped create a sense of community and shared history that sustained them through decades of discrimination and segregation. The Birth of a Nation was the first major American film (as opposed to shorter films such as Charlie Chaplin one-reelers) to circulate widely outside the United States. In the fourth section of the book, four scholars investigate how the film was received abroad. Michael Hammond explores the arrival of the movie in Britain, where its reception was heavily conditioned by the First World War. Largely ignoring the film’s racist content, critics and advertisers interpreted it (particularly the story of the Ku Klux Klan) as a tale of “Anglo-Celt” achievement—an attempt to suggest that white Britons and Americans shared a similar genealogy in opposition to German “Saxons”—and linked the rebirth of the white South with hopes for England’s postwar “regeneration.” Melvyn Stokes analyzes the reasons for the banning of the film in the French-occupied zone of Germany after the First World War. The background to this decision was the attempt by German nationalists to exploit the presence of Black soldiers, particularly Senegalese troops, in the French army in the Rhineland, through false accusations of sexual violence against white German women. This fictitious “Black Shame on the Rhine” became an international campaign aimed at discrediting the occupation itself and sowing dissent amongst the victorious Allies. As Jacqueline Maingard points out, The Birth of a Nation—which was not actually screened there until 1931—had strangely contradictory effects on South Africa. It prompted Black writer and activist Sol T. Plattje to protest the film in London and the United States, and helped inspire his interest in film exhibition as a means of promoting Black African modernity. In contrast, the commercial success of Griffith’s

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film in the US and Britain persuaded American-born South African businessman Isidore W. Schlesinger to finance an equally racist “historical” movie De Voortrekkers (1916) which would become an enduring part of the white supremacist culture of Afrikaner nationalism. Jenny Barrett’s chapter begins with a discussion of the controversies surrounding Griffith’s film in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. In critical responses to screenings between 1952 and 1989, she identifies three reasons advanced by critics for suppressing the film: it was offensive as a racist film; it might influence prejudiced or ill-informed members of the public; and it could provoke racial disturbance. By the 1990s, the idea of banning the film in Britain had been replaced by contextualizations: a broadcast of a new restoration of the film on Channel 4 in 1993 was preceded by a documentary that—among other things— showed Black responses to the film at the time of its first release and, in 1994, the British Board of Film Classification insisted that a new video issue of the film be accompanied by a disclaimer. In the final section of her chapter, Barrett moves on to discussing the film’s current status at a time of heightened consciousness of racism in Britain, the US and across the world. She concludes, together with film director Spike Lee, that banning or censoring Griffith’s movie would diminish our ability to understand the nature of racism itself. Robert Lang’s epilogue for this collection “‘Still a North and a South’: The Birth of a Nation and National Trauma” reconnects the past with the present to consider the ways in which so many of America’s political battles are essentially its oldest ones. Lang’s essay, the first draft of which was written in the pre-Trump era, now seems prescient rather than rearward-looking, especially in the way that he centers the denial of fact as a crucial element of our political moment. We can hear the echoes of Griffith’s dare to find a single historical error in his film (despite it being fiction) in Donald Trump’s delusional assertions that everyone is lying all the time except him. In his assessment of the rage and denial that marks contemporary conservative politics, Lang traces a long and disturbing line of white anger through the Lost Cause, secessionism, and the history of melodrama. Neither his essay, nor this collection, can tie a bow on this long history and relegate it to the past, but both can point to the unfortunate relevance of this history to our current lives.

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Notes 1. See https://guides.loc.gov/plessy-ferguson, accessed July 18, 2021. 2. For Griffith’s own views on the movies and free speech, see his pamphlet “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America” (Los Angeles, 1916). On the Mutual decision of 1915, see https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ussupreme-court/236/230.html, accessed July 18, 2021. 3. On the “Lost Cause,” see Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 4. German Lopez, “The Battle Over Confederate Statues, Explained,” Vox, August 23, 2017, accessed July 21, 2021. 5. Angie Drobnic Holan, “In Context: Donald Trump’s ‘Very Fine People on Both Sides’ Remarks (Transcript),” https://www.politifact.com/ article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-rem arks/, accessed July 21, 2021. 6. It was Trump’s “fine people on both sides” that reportedly played a major role in persuaded Joseph R. Biden to challenge him for the Presidency in 2020. “What motivated John Biden to run for president,” April 26, 2019, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-motivated-joebiden-to-run-for-president, accessed July 21, 2021. 7. Susan B. Glasser, “Refighting the Civil War—On the Losing Side?”, The New Yorker, June 11, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/letterfrom-trumps-washington/trump-hates-losers-so-why-is-he-refighting-thecivil-war-on-the-losing-side, accessed July 21, 2021. 8. Mark DeCambre, “President Trump Says George Floyd’s Death was ‘Terrible’ But Says ‘More White People,’ Die at Hands of Police Than Blacks in U.S.,” July 15, 2020, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/presid ent-trump-says-george-floyds-death-was-terrible-but-says-more-white-peo ple-die-at-hands-of-police-than-blacks-in-us-2020-07-14, accessed July 21, 2021. 9. See David Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D.W. Griffith and the American Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009). 10. For the figure of 150,000, see Epoch Producing Corporation, Accounts dated March 13, 1915, D. W. Griffith Papers-Microfilm edition. 11. Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 168. 12. On the membership of the NAACP, see Minutes of the Meeting of the NAACP Board of Directors, January 5, 1915, Box A-8, National

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Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Library of Congress. 13. Cara Caddoo, “The Birth of a Nation, Police Brutality, and Black Protest,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, no. 14 (2015), 608. Also see Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Movement: How “The Birth of a Nation” Ignited the Battle for Civil Rights (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017).

PART I

Creating a Racial Imaginary

CHAPTER 2

The Architects of The Birth of a Nation: Thomas Dixon, Jr. and David Wark Griffith Charlene Regester

Re-igniting the debate regarding who was most responsible for The Birth of a Nation’s racially incendiary material, Michael Rogin (among others) has argued that D. W. Griffith’s conscious and unconscious views related to his relationship with his father, racial and sexual anxieties, gendered view of politics, and personal insecurities manifest in the film.1 But what is less well known is what Thomas Dixon, Jr. (author of The Clansman, 1905) specifically contributed to the production. For example, both Anthony Slide (Dixon’s biographer) and Rogin contend that Griffith was responsible for much of the racially inflammatory material included in The Birth of a Nation. Yet, Slide counters there is much speculation as to whether Griffith used Dixon’s novel The Clansman and similarly-titled play as source material, in conjunction with Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots

C. Regester (B) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_2

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(an earlier novel of 1902), for his screen adaptation. Slide’s own conclusion is that, while Dixon provided the basic storyline extracted from both the play and novel(s), he contributed “nothing more.”2 However, African American historian John Hope Franklin and film scholar Russell Merritt have challenged the notion that Griffith was primarily responsible for the film’s content and insist that much of the material was Dixon’s fabrication. Franklin argued that for those who claim “the film was more Griffith than Dixon. This patently is not the case … Even a casual comparison with the texts of The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman with the film itself will convince one that Birth of a Nation is pure Dixon, all Dixon!”3 Merritt offered another perspective, insisting that, “the first part of The Birth of a Nation was largely Griffith’s own,” while maintaining that, for the second part, “Dixon as much as Griffith became the man behind” the film’s scurrilous racial politics.4 Contributing to the debate, Jeffrey Martin suggests that Griffith adapted much of Dixon’s play The Clansman for the film’s second half, while Rogin insists that, “Critics who want to rescue Birth’s greatness by excising Part Two of the film fail to see the dependence of each part on the other.”5 Whether or not the film’s first half can redeem its second half is beside the point, for it is the film’s second half that became the major point of contention for Franklin, who challenged Dixon’s depiction of the postwar period in South Carolina, declaring that “There is not a shred of evidence to support the film’s depiction of blacks [during the Reconstruction period] as impudent, vengeful, or malicious in their conduct toward whites.”6 According to Franklin, Dixon’s faith in the “truth” of his own fabrication of history was so strong that he publicly “offered a reward of one thousand dollars to anyone who could prove one historical inaccuracy in the story.”7 Annoyed by Dixon’s gross distortion of history, Franklin comments that “The supreme tragedy is that in The Clansman and in Birth of a Nation … Dixon succeeded in using a powerful and wonderful new instrument of communication to perpetuate a cruel hoax on the American people that has come distressingly close to being permanent.”8 To try to make amends for the damage done by The Birth of a Nation, a reel referred to as “The New Era” epilogue featuring the accomplishments of Hampton Institute’s black students was “appended” to Birth when it was indiscriminately shown in some theaters (including in Boston, Baltimore, and New York).9 The fruit of a collaboration between the Hampton Institute, the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures,

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and some of those from Griffith’s “camp” who sought to reverse the film’s offensive black representations, even this collaborative effort could not overturn the irreparable harm the film caused.10 Franklin believes that “The diabolical genius of Dixon lay in his embracing the new medium … to persuade and even to convince millions of white Americans … that his case against Negro Americans was valid and irrefutable.”11 In support of Franklin, Merritt claims, “the initial and determining impulse behind this film was not historic truth, but the dramatization of a familiar legend” and this alteration of truth invited racial resentment.12 Equally opposed to the film’s historical pretensions and distortions, Lawrence J. Oliver and Terri L. Walker point out that African American James Weldon Johnson, contributor to the Black newspaper the New York Age, published articles typifying Black reaction to the picture. Johnson himself warned that the “pernicious stereotypes” present in the film were designed to “‘color, influence, and constitute [a] large … part of national thinking.’”13 It was not just historical distortions that many found insulting but the picture’s entire fabricated racial history: the very social body and being of Blackness was at stake. Moreover, Johnson himself “saw little distinction between Griffith’s and Dixon’s racial ideologies; to him, both men were members in good standing of the ‘Southern oligarchy.’”14 This essay seeks to determine how Dixon’s novel The Clansman contributed to and participated in establishing much of the raciallycharged material transformed onscreen. It does so as part of an ongoing debate between historians on who was primarily responsible for the film’s racist content. Rogin maintains that Griffith visualized the film’s dangerous racial politics; Franklin contends that Dixon was primarily responsible for the film’s overt “racial message,”15 and Melvyn Stokes suggests that both Dixon and Griffith in the end were responsible for the film’s racial propaganda.16 Rogin himself thought that both author and filmmaker were linked ideologically in the belief that “the liberty blacks” desired “was sexual,” a belief that implicated Black males as sexual predators of white women and justified their subsequent lynching for this crime.17 Observing that both Dixon and Griffith were fascinated by the idea of lynching, Michele Wallace argues that such fascination may have evolved from a schizoid view. Lynchings of Black men for alleged crimes against white women in the South were often public events, contrasting with the private (and implied rather than shown) lynching of Gus (Walter Long) for his attack on Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh) in Birth. According to Wallace, “Griffith, and perhaps even Dixon, might have seen such

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public lynchings as wanton, savage events, unlike the ‘good’ lynching meted out to Gus in Birth”—a film that presented lynching as a justifiable punishment to avenge for the (fictional) sexual exploitation of white women by Black men.18 While it is not easy to determine who or what source wielded the greatest influence in shaping the film’s racial politics, Dixon’s novel introduces lynching—a theme that haunts much of Dixon’s text—and reverberated onscreen, making it a principal focus of the present examination. This chapter further explores The Clansman’s characters—Elsie Stoneman, the white romantic idol (Lillian Gish), Augustus Caesar (Gus, a black male rapist), and Lydia Brown (Mary Alden), a threatening mulatto, to argue that Dixon, like Griffith, engaged in contradictions and transposed identities to both form and de-form the white image, the Black image, and the mixed-race image through his characterizations. While this essay employs similar approaches to those pursued by other scholars— Chris Ruiz-Velasco and Scott Romine examine how Dixon undermines the stability of whiteness19 ; Rogin interrogates Griffith’s use of white actors who perform in both Black- and white-face20 ; and Linda Williams analyzes how Dixon reverses stereotypes through the construction of the anti-Tom21 —it seeks to expand this ongoing conversation. The chapter that follows examines Dixon’s contradictions in order to unveil his racial insecurities, exemplifies how whiteness itself is destabilized, and exposes racial fissures in the novel to unveil his racially demented views. Most notable, perhaps, is that Dixon’s literary style and exaggerated language seem to promote racially incendiary views and impart to the reader a sense of immediacy and urgency that threatening Blacks “allegedly” posed during Reconstruction after the Civil War. It is in this historical moment, Dixon believes, that the white South was symbolically raped through a threatening black presence. Equating the white South with femininity evolved as an idea from W. J. Cash’s “Southern rape complex.”22 Cash wrote: To get at the ultimate secret of the Southern rape complex, we need to turn back and recall the central status that the Southern woman had long ago … [which is an] identification with the very notion of the South itself. For, with this in view, it is obvious that the South would be felt as, in some true sense, an assault on her also, and that the South would inevitably translate its whole battle into terms of her defense. … In their concern for the taboo on the white woman, there was a final concern for the right of

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their sons in the legitimate line, through all the generations to come, to be born to the great heritage of white men; and the record is complete. Such … was the ultimate content of the Southerners’ rape complex.23

Elsie Stoneman in The Clansman---Contradictory Marking as White and Black In The Clansman, Elsie Stoneman, the daughter to radical Republican politician Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis), a reconfiguration of Vermontborn Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens, is constructed as an object of desire to white Confederate soldier Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall), who reminisces that “Never in all his life had he seen anything so delicately beautiful as the ripe rose color of her cheeks, and all the tints of autumn’s glory seemed to melt into the gold of her hair.”24 These descriptions both signify her beauty and hint at her whiteness; they mark her as both desirable and symbolic of white womanhood. As Chris Ruiz-Velasco argues, in Dixon’s construction of whiteness he attempts “to solidify a fragmented white identity.”25 Although Ruiz-Velasco specifically explores The Leopard’s Spots , his critique is equally applicable to The Clansman when he asserts that, “Despite Dixon’s purposeful delineation between white and black (and despite his continual repetitive depictions of the goodness of whiteness and the badness of blackness), the novel [The Leopard’s Spots ] can neither contain nor alleviate the anxiety over racial impurity.”26 The Clansman, like The Leopard’s Spots, similarly provides a contradictory representation of whiteness through its configuration of Elsie wherein Dixon constructs her as white, but then challenges this very construction. Initially, Dixon depicts Elsie as a sympathetic and self-sacrificial character, dedicated to wounded soldiers, and one who shares in their suffering when she admits, “I’ll never forget his cries that night … I’ve heard many a cry of pain, but in all my life nothing so heartbreaking as that boy in fevered delirium …”27 That Elsie becomes the conduit for white male suffering marks her as weak, less strong, and vulnerable to attack—in part because of her gender and in part because of her vulnerability—a vulnerability she shares with soldiers in need of protection. But when Elsie attempts to relieve their pain and suffering, Dixon describes her as “the fair girl—[who plays] a banjo and [sings] to the wounded soldiers;”28 Elsie refers to herself as the “Banjo Maid.”29 Therefore, while Elsie is constructed as sympathetic, at the same time, she is associated

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with Blackness when she plays the banjo—an instrument of African origin. Furthermore, when the incapacitated Ben requests that she play, “O Jonny Booker Help dis Nigger,”30 Dixon’s strategic song selection exemplifies how he uses a racial epithet to mark Elsie’s inner Blackness even though she is white: Elsie transgresses whiteness to engage in Blackness as she sings in dialect and appropriates Black music. In this instance, Dixon contradicts the very whiteness Elsie seemingly represents through her appropriation of Blackness, and consequently he taints the white racial purity that she embodies. Arguably, although Elsie engages in performing Blackness, at the same time she becomes a personification of whiteness through the power she possesses over Black people in that she can willingly exploit their culture. It is through her whiteness that she reclaims the power white men denied to white women. Further indicative of Elsie’s ambivalent white construction, as the daughter of a “corrupt” white abolitionist (with a mulatto mistress), her father, referred to as “‘Old Austin Stoneman, the Great Commoner’”31 marks her tainted whiteness: his immorality (engaging in race-mixing) signifies Elsie’s “darkness.” That Stoneman establishes an intimate relationship with a mulatto (Lydia) exemplifies how he crosses the racial line to engage in Blackness and, because he is Elsie’s father then by extension, his immoral behavior or engagement with Blackness transfers onto his daughter. Dixon’s Stoneman, despite his political stature, is depicted as a traitor to the South, as evident in his admission, “I hate the South because I hate the Satanic Institution of Slavery with consuming fury.”32 But when Dixon describes Stoneman in a most despicable manner, his distaste for Stoneman’s ideological views becomes conflated with his character—a characterization marred by Blackness—and considering that Elise is his daughter, she cannot escape the Blackness associated with her father. Dixon deliberately darkens Stoneman and reduces him just to a body when he implies that his damaged body becomes an extension of his “distorted” mental capacity: He was lame in both feet and one of them was deformed. The left leg ended in a mere bunch of flesh, resembling more closely an elephant’s hoof than the foot of a man. He was absolutely bald, and wore a heavy brown wig that seemed too small to reach the edge of his enormous forehead. … He was the … unscrupulous leader of leaders ….33

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Dixon, therefore, gives Stoneman a hideous body because he believes him to be a hideous man which is further reified in his name—Stone man, a stubborn man, and a man deaf to the cries of the wounded South.34 Affirming Dixon’s deformed depiction, Kim Magowan suggests, Dixon’s white males are associated with animal imagery and the white male “seepage onto the two sides, his animalism and feminization, convey more than just the failure of Dixon’s stereotypes to hold up … [but they] threaten to merge, just as the white man threatens to merge into each of them.”35 If Magowan’s assertion has validity, then it is through Stoneman that Elsie is marked as “dark” (or impure) and it is her uncertain whiteness that undermines Dixon’s appropriation of white supremacy. Even so, Elsie’s white racial marking coupled with her sexuality make her vulnerable to sexual assault—particularly when Dixon insinuates that the greatest threats white women face are Black male attackers. Dixon then positions the white female as vulnerable to attack but he does not make Elsie a rape victim (even though the mulatto Silas Lynch pursues her). Instead, he makes Marion (renamed as Flora in Griffith’s Birth) the victim of Black male assault rather than Elsie. As for Elsie, Dixon avoids punishing her for transgressing her whiteness; he makes her (along with Ben) into saviors of the white South. The sexual assault seemingly considered for Elsie is transferred onto Marion, to reveal Dixon’s racial insecurity and belief that interracial attacks will lead to the destruction of white civilization. When these sexual violations occur, “The black [man] must be castrated and lynched, the white [woman] killed, by the ‘black beast,’ by herself, or symbolically executed in the imagination of her father …”36 Therefore, although Elsie is not victimized, she is connected to lynching through her association to Marion’s sexual violation, and, since rape is equated with violence, the rape becomes synonymous with the notion of lynching which haunts Dixon’s text. Marion’s rape then implies that the white South is also raped/lynched. Complicating Elsie’s construction, Magowan proposes that “white [male] supremacist protagonists end up marrying” white heroines as Ben (a southerner) does, when he unites with Elsie (a northerner). White women in this instance “comply with the rules of patriarchal law.”37 That Elsie marries someone in direct contradiction to her own politics (considering that she has been indoctrinated into her father’s politics) and that Ben is a member of the Ku Klux Klan, the anti-Black group her father adamantly opposes, suggests how she reaffirms her whiteness through identification with a male white supremacist despite her tainted

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Fig. 2.1 Elsie parades with the Klansmen

white racial purity (Fig. 2.1). Elsie, who is vulnerable to attack from a threatening Black male presence because of her race and gender, not only receives Klan protection but she joins the organization with Ben: “in full clansman disguise … Ben stood at the gate with Elsie.”38 For Ben, his rescue of Elsie and subsequent marriage to her symbolizes the rescue of white womanhood and, of course, the victimized white South. This unification demonstrates how, through her alignment with a white male supremacist, she extricates herself from flirtation with “Blackness” and reinstates her whiteness when she conforms to the “white patriarchal order.”

Gus in The Clansman---Contradictory Marking as Human and Inhuman Dixon paints Black people through marking them as different and distinct from whites. He implies there is something inherently despicable about

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Black power, terms Black people as inferior, and reduces them to their physical attributes which are perceived as unattractive and undesirable. Furthermore, he terms Black people as barbaric and describes them as unskilled, lacking motivation, animalistic, cannibalistic, etc. Disparagingly, he also insists in The Clansman novel that “there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will forever forbid their living together on terms of political and social equality.”39 Dixon believes that to “destroy African slavery [would] establish white slavery under [N]egro masters! That would be progress with a vengeance,” implying that nothing could be more offensive than Black empowerment.40 To reflect his fears, Dixon resorts to reducing Black people simply to their bodies, referring to Reconstruction era African Americans, as “A new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odour, [who] became the symbol of American Democracy.”41 Transferring these distorted impressions of Blackness onto the Black male figure, Gus, Dixon refers to him as the “young scamp we used to own” and characterizes him as a “vicious scoundrel,” even though Gus is a newly-appointed member of a Black militia.42 Dixon deliberately minimizes Gus to remind him of his former slave status and accuses him of parading in uniform to frighten with his threatening Black presence. However, Gus resists these denigrations when he is reminded of his power: he is instructed to tell whites, “your name is Augustus, not ‘Gus’.…”43 Deliberately perhaps, Dixon gives Gus the full name of Augustus Caesar, a warrior who may have been murdered, rather than Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Dixon’s intentional denunciations reflect the contradictions Gus embodies: he is a soldier but being a soldier—normally a position that invites utmost respect—is reserved for whites, and Gus due to his Blackness represents the antithesis of this. Dixon, resentful of Gus’s military status and authority, animalizes him when he observes, “The full-dress officer’s uniform … only accentuated the coarse bestiality of Gus.”44 In this instance, he humanizes Gus on the basis of his uniform but then dehumanizes the person inside as a “beast.” Unquestionably, Dixon marks Gus out as an embodiment of both humanity and inhumanity—and then reduces him to bestiality, particularly when Gus commits rape (Fig. 2.2). Already coded a stalker and predator, when Gus in the novel The Clansman invades the Lenoir home (where Marion lives with her mother) to execute rape, Dixon, intensifying his racial hatred, writes: “The door flew open with a crash, and four black brutes leaped into the room, Gus

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Fig. 2.2 Gus pursues Flora Cameron

in the lead, with a revolver in his hand, his yellow teeth grinning through his thick lips.”45 While Mrs. Lenoir pleaded for her daughter’s safety, “Marion staggered against the wall, her face white, her delicate lips trembling with the chill of a fear colder than death.”46 Despite Marion’s fear, “Gus stepped closer, with an ugly leer, his flat nose dilated, his sinister bead eyes wide apart, gleaming apelike. … The girl uttered a cry, long, tremulous, heart-rending, piteous. A single tiger spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat and she was still.”47 Gus’s assault marks him as animal-like, beastly, and sinister. When he commits rape, this act becomes synonymous with lynching because the physical body is violated and, more importantly, this violation demonstrates how lynching is subtly embedded in Dixon’s text. But determined to reverse the “black stain” that has been projected onto white womanhood, both women decide that, “‘No one must ever know. … They will think we strolled to Lover’s Leap and fell over the cliff, and my name will always be sweet and clean …’”48 Prior to leaping to their

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deaths, Marion removes her tattered clothes and wears a “spotless white” dress49 —designed to sanitize and restore her virginity and racial purity. She vows, “‘This shame I can never forget, nor will the world forget. Death is the only way.’”50 Following their deaths, Dr. Cameron (a Klan member) determines Gus is the perpetrator—a detection made from Gus’s footprints and the mother’s (Mrs. Lenoir) eyes. Magowan affirms, “sure enough, engraved on [the eyeball] surface is Gus’s leering face. For Gus to be punished, someone has to see, to testify. Mrs. Lenoir becomes a literal eye witness … She convicts Gus of the rape.”51 Imprinting the “‘black beast’ on the mother’s eyeball, instead of her assaulted daughter,” allows the mother to sacrifice “her eye for her daughter’s eye [to] … symbolically protect her daughter’s [both moral and racial] purity …”52 Following the crime, the Klan launch a “hunt for the animal” and, when Gus is captured, he is taken to a cave where he is castrated—Gus’s “thick lips were drawn upward in an ugly leer and his sinister bead eyes gleamed like a gorilla’s.”53 Since castration54 and lynching (implied in the novel but not visible in the film) are linked, as both involve destruction to or of the body, this further demonstrates how lynching is subtly interwoven into Dixon’s text. Regarding the novel’s castration, Romine claims this represents Dixon’s “primal scene: black masculinity violated white womanhood; white manhood revenges itself upon the black body” and, when whites engage in such violence, this reduces them to being not so different from the “black male attacker.”55 Implementing such a brutal form of punishment, to avenge the crime committed, Rogin postulates that “The nation was born, in Gus’s castration, from the wound that signified the white man’s power to stop the black seed.”56

Lydia Brown---The Clansman---Contradictory Racial and Moral Markings Indicative of Dixon’s race-mixing fear(s), he constructs Lydia Brown (the mulatto) as a corrupting and destructive impediment to Anglo-Saxon purity because of her mixed-race ancestry. As the mistress to Austin Stoneman, a man deemed threatening to the white South’s character because of his pro-Black sentiment and support for black suffrage, Lydia marks Stoneman’s “dark” politics as much as with her own “dark” body, as she symbolizes their mixed-race relationship. Dixon describes Lydia as a “vicious woman” and “‘yellow vampire’ … who dragged Stoneman down to her level of ‘animalism’ through her sexual domination of him. … ‘No

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more curious or sinister figure ever cast a shadow across the history of a great nation than did this mulatto woman in the most corrupt hour of American life.’”57 Complicating her characterization, Dixon animalizes Lydia as “a woman of extraordinary animal beauty” who exhibits “the fiery temper of a leopardess”—descriptors that emphasize her treacherousness through her association with animals.58 Further reducing Lydia to animalism, Dixon writes, she “wore the mask of a sphinx”—the sphinx possesses the body of a lion and the head of a person, and is widely known for its ferocity and cunningness—only to reveal her more human side when he sarcastically characterizes her as the “the first lady of the land.”59 While Dixon reduces Lydia primarily to the body and equates her with animalism, he marks her as dangerous since she wields power over Stoneman. Lydia, the “Negress,” not only serves as Stoneman’s gatekeeper, according to Dixon, but demands to be viewed as a “social equal” who “was always particular to pose as the superior of all who bowed the knee to the old man …”60 Although Lydia possesses power that Dixon resents, he defuses her power when he attacks her morality with the insinuation that “All sorts of gossip could be heard in Washington about this woman … and her domination of the old Commoner …”61 (Fig. 2.3). Executing onscreen what Dixon implied offscreen, Griffith visualized this distorted construction of Lydia and portrayed her as sexually desirable, repulsive, and “hysterical.” According to Tom Gunning, in the film: Lydia’s play-acting of the great lady is scorned and she is immediately transformed into its abject opposite, reduced to writhing on the floor, tearing her clothes, spitting and licking herself. … Indeed, the fury of Lydia’s actions, her violence against herself and the pronounced regressive orality of her behavior indicates not simply savagery, but hysteria. … Lydia haunts this film as the abject, that which must be denied in order for normality to be established.62

When Lydia inflicts self-mutilation through the destruction of the body, she then symbolizes Dixon’s desire to rid the white South of those who are the products of race-mixing. Not only is the mixed-race body internally torn but Tara Bynum suggests that it is “the body of ‘this mulatto,’ … that undermines [Dixon’s] historic romance.”63 Dixon then is contradictory because although he professes white racial purity, his construction of the mulatto figure challenges the very racial purity

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Fig. 2.3 Lydia eavesdrops on Austin Stoneman

he desires. Furthermore, if we consider that the mulatto, a mixed-race woman, descends from race-mixing and then consider how the white male objectifies the Black female body, this destabilizes whiteness since her “black seed” (or Black progeny) threatens to darken future generations. Lydia’s mixed-race body further symbolizes the possibility for rape, as rape becomes synonymous with lynching which is interwoven into the text. Certainly, it is not exclusively Lydia’s mixed-race body that becomes a threat, but if Lydia becomes the “mirror-image” of Stoneman (a white male who has abandoned the white South), then it is her association to Stoneman that marks her as sinister and makes her even more despised.64 Lydia symbolizes Dixon’s disenchantment with Stoneman, particularly Stoneman’s political views which are utterly antithetical to Dixon’s white supremacist convictions. Demonizing Lydia, who descends from the dilution and pollution of whiteness, is necessary, at least from Dixon’s perspective, because she reminds his readers that blackness is a threat to white racial purity. But

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more than this, the mulatto absolves whites of being responsible for miscegenation since, as James Kinney contends, it allows sexually aggressive mulattoes to be blamed for miscegenation rather than white male perpetrators.65 While most white males are absolved of their involvement in miscegenation, Dixon, however, does not forgive Stoneman and further blames Lydia, the object of his continuous resentment since she becomes the target of Dixon’s most flagrant anti-Black, racially virulent, and white supremacist views.

Conclusion While many scholars have debated whether Dixon or Griffith wielded the greatest influence on the production of The Birth of a Nation, what becomes glaringly apparent is that this debate may never be resolved. As illuminated in this discussion, the views of both white and Black scholars suggest that a variety of opinions prevail surrounding this debate particularly considering that Black scholars, who have frequently exposed the vociferous racial offenses the film committed and whose voices are often excluded from these debates, seldom have their voices heard in these discussions. But, more specifically, this essay explored how Dixon’s novel The Clansman problematized three of its protagonists to demonstrate how these characters not only inform the film but affirm Birth’s racist sentiment. Elsie Stoneman is examined to demonstrate how even though she is a white female, she is contradictorily marked as a white who appropriates Blackness—a duplicity that undermines Dixon’s white supremacist views. Gus (Augustus) is explored to demonstrate how Dixon reduces the black male to being both human and inhuman as a way to mark the Black character as menacing and destabilizing to the white South. Finally, Lydia is critiqued to exemplify how her racial and “immoral” character marks her as a mulatto woman who is intimately connected to the white abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens—a strident opponent of the white South. Consequently, she symbolizes the threat he poses to the South as well as representing the destabilization of whiteness due to her mixedrace ancestry. It is these characters among others who are transferred from the novel (and play) The Clansman to the screen in Birth, who participate in making the picture one of the most potent forces (withstanding the test of time) created to vocalize Dixon and Griffith’s racially incendiary views. Although the film became a vehicle for symbolizing Dixon’s overwhelming fear that the symbolic rape of the white South

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led to its dissolution, when he joined forces with Griffith, they produced a toxic representation of Blackness leading one scholar to conclude, “Stepin Fetchit is Mammy’s son by Gus.”66 These Black caricatures reproduced in Birth provided a scathing critique of Blackness that has been solidified in the public imaginary—a film whose unabated hatred, unrelenting power, and unequivocal racially divisive politics has not diminished. Instead the film continues to disturb, inflame, and excite contemporary sensibilities.

Notes 1. Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Representations, 9 (Winter 1985), 150–95. 2. Anthony Slide, American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 80. 3. John Hope Franklin, “‘Birth of a Nation’: Propaganda as History,” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 20, no. 3 (Autumn 1979), 421–22. 4. Russell Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” Cinema Journal, vol. 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1972), 31 & 35. 5. Jeffrey Martin, “Film Out of Theatre: D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation and the Melodrama The Clansman,” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2 (1990), 1; Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,’” 170. 6. Franklin, “‘Birth of a Nation’: Propaganda as History,” 427. 7. Franklin, “‘Birth of a Nation’: Propaganda as History,” 426. 8. Franklin, “‘Birth of a Nation’: Propaganda as History,” 430. 9. Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 162, 168–78. 10. Nickie Fleener, “Answering Film with Film: The Hampton Epilogue, A Positive Alternative to the Negative Black Stereotype Presented in The Birth of a Nation,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 7, no. 4 (January 1, 1980), 400–25 and Field, Uplift Cinema, 152, 161–81. 11. Franklin, “‘Birth of a Nation’: Propaganda as History,” 431. 12. Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” 29. Merritt altered his argument in a later essay. 13. Lawrence J. Oliver and Terri L. Walker, “James Weldon Johnson’s ‘New York Age’ Essays on ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and the ‘Southern Oligarchy,’” South Central Review, vol. 10, no. 4 (Winter 1993), 1. 14. Oliver and Walker, “James Weldon Johnson’s ‘New York Age,’” 8. 15. Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,’” 150. 16. Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 194, 211.

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17. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,’” 175. 18. Michele Faith Wallace, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation: Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim Crow,” Cinema Journal, vol. 43, no. 1 (Autumn 2003), 94. 19. Chris Ruiz-Velasco, “Order Out of Chaos: Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Thomas Dixon, Jr.,” College Literature, vol. 34, no. 4 (Fall 2007), 148–65; Scott Romine, “Thomas Dixon and the Literary Production of Whiteness,” in Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of a Modern America, eds. Michele K. Gillespie and Randal L. Hall (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 124–50. 20. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” 181. Rogin admits that the Klansmen chase “their own negative identities, their own shadow sides.” 21. Linda Williams, “The Birth of a Nation, Melodramas of Black and White, and Early Race Filmmaking,” in Early Race Filmmaking, ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack (New York: Routledge, 2016), 35–52. 22. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1941), 115. This source is referenced in James Kinney, “The Rhetoric of Racism: Thomas Dixon and the ‘Damned Black Beast,’” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910, vol. 15, no. 2 (Autumn 1982), 148. 23. Cash, The Mind of the South, 115–17. 24. Thomas Dixon, The Clansman (Garden City, New York: The Country Life Press, 1905), 62. 25. Ruiz-Velasco, “Order out of the Chaos: Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Thomas Dixon, Jr.,” 149. 26. Ruiz-Velasco, “Order out of the Chaos: Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Thomas Dixon, Jr.,” 149. 27. Dixon, The Clansman, 5. 28. Dixon, The Clansman, 3. 29. Dixon, The Clansman, 10. 30. Dixon, The Clansman, 7. 31. Dixon, The Clansman, 10. 32. Dixon, The Clansman, 28. 33. Dixon, The Clansman, 21. 34. In choosing the name “Stoneman,” Dixon may also have been critiquing Union General George Stoneman who devastated the western part of Dixon’s home state of North Carolina in the final stages of the Civil War. See Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 29. 35. Kim Magowan, “Coming Between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin: The Pressures of Liminality in Thomas Dixon,” American Fiction, vol. 27, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 80. 36. Magowan, “Coming Between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin,” 78.

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37. Magowan, “Coming Between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin,” 97. 38. Dixon, The Clansman, 184. 39. Dixon, The Clansman, 23. 40. Dixon, The Clansman, 24. 41. Dixon, The Clansman, 78. 42. Dixon, The Clansman, 95, 144. 43. Dixon, The Clansman, 102. 44. Dixon, The Clansman, 146. 45. Dixon, The Clansman, 150. 46. Dixon, The Clansman, 151. 47. Dixon, The Clansman, 151. 48. Dixon, The Clansman, 151. 49. Dixon, The Clansman, 151. 50. Dixon, The Clansman, 152. 51. Magowan, “Coming Between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin,” 84. 52. Magowan, “Coming Between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin,” 84–85. 53. Dixon, The Clansman, 153, 160. 54. See Jane Gaines, “The Birth of a Nation Footage We Do Not Want to Find,” in this volume. 55. Romine, “Thomas Dixon and the Literary Production of Whiteness,” 126. 56. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” 176. 57. Kinney, “The Rhetoric of Racism: Thomas Dixon and the ‘Damned Black Beast,’” 150 and Dixon, The Clansman, 48. 58. Dixon, The Clansman, 30. 59. Dixon, The Clansman, 51, 46. 60. Dixon, The Clansman, 46, 47. 61. Dixon, The Clansman, 30. 62. Tom Gunning, “A Little Light on a Dark Subject,” Critical Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 4 (2003), 58–59. 63. Tara Bynum, “‘One Important Witness’: Remembering Lydia Brown in Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 52, no. 3 (Fall 2010), 249. 64. Bynum, “‘One Important Witness,’” 249. 65. Kinney, “The Rhetoric of Racism: Thomas Dixon and the ‘Damned Black Beast,’” 151. 66. Brian Gallagher, “Racist Ideology and Black Abnormality in The Birth of a Nation,” Phylon, vol. 43, no. 1 (1st Qtr., 1982), 76.

CHAPTER 3

Blackface, Disguise and Invisibility in the Reception of The Birth of a Nation Richard Maltby

What might American film, and Griffith within it, look like with the centuries-old problem of racism acknowledged and privileged rather than denied and repressed? Robert Jackson1 Why does academic discussion of this film remain so endlessly important and yet so hopelessly inadequate to the task of ameliorating the textual racism this discussion seeks to diagnose? Michele Faith Wallace2

This chapter seeks to explore a question of audience perception: what can we know about what audiences saw when they viewed The Birth of Nation in 1915, and what they understood themselves to be seeing? Like most investigations of historical audiences, this question is difficult to answer because we lack direct evidence, and it is often hard even to

R. Maltby (B) Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_3

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imagine what such direct evidence would look like or what, in its absence, would adequately substitute for it. The issues this raises point to an evident divergence in the construction of cinema history, between histories of films as texts and relations among texts on the one hand and social histories of cinema as cultural institution and as experience on the other. There are few instances in the history of cinema where this separation is clearer than The Birth of a Nation. The following observations would seem to be incontrovertible: that The Birth of a Nation owes its central place in film history to its enormous popularity on initial release; that its popularity was inextricably connected to its racist narrative; that Thomas Dixon’s explicit ideological project, “to revolutionize Northern sentiments by a presentation of history that would transform every man in the audience into a good Democrat,” was at least to some extent successful; and that the narrative enacted in the film, of the reunification of North and South at the expense of Black representation (in terms both of screen presence and voting rights), was embedded in popular understandings of the Civil War and Reconstruction.3 Moreover, while the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) developed a national organization out of the protest against the film, other organizations were casualties of the film and the campaign to suppress it, notably the National Board of Censorship (NBC) and with it the development of a Progressive aesthetic and social discourse on the possibilities of American cinema.4 For most of the twentieth century, however, this social history of The Birth of a Nation was obscured, evaded and occasionally denied by the dominant critical tradition in which it was placed. Somewhat curiously, the mechanism by which film criticism protected its interest in a film valorised for its unification of multiple narratives was to bifurcate it—either as Jay Leyda did, into its two chronological halves, or more commonly into a divorce between form and content.5 With that distinction, the film conventionally held to be the first fully mature work of the first great author of the American cinema and the earliest proof of the possibility of authorial creation in its industrial system, was commonly given two authors. As Vachel Lindsay put it, “Wherever the scenario shows traces of The Clansman, the original book, by Thomas Dixon, it is bad. Wherever it is unadulterated Griffith … it is good.”6 Since Michael Rogin’s 1985 essay, this bifurcation has become much more difficult to sustain.7 Rogin sought to explain the film as a text through a psychoanalytic investigation that referred back to Griffith as

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Fig. 3.1 Gus hides in the gin mill

its author and “the fantasies he imposed on blacks.”8 Extrapolating from Rogin, Clyde Taylor described Griffith as constructing “a … psychic drama in which the identifiability of Whiteness beneath the surface bestiality of Blackness was a libidinal requirement” that allowed for the playing out of his “hidden desires.”9 In these accounts, the problem of the film’s racism was located and resolved as a biographical matter of the purity of Griffith’s conscious intent or the condition of his unconscious. As Thomas Elsaesser suggested in a different context, not only popular culture but also its criticism has, through the imposition of an auteurist framework, “resolutely refused to understand social change in other than private contexts and emotional terms.”10 We can, however, be sure that whatever capabilities contemporary audiences had at their disposal in 1915, a psychoanalytic interpretation of Griffith was not part of them (Fig. 3.1). At the centre of The Birth of a Nation’s racist discourse is the disguise of blackface. The leading Black characters are played by white actors,

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and to modern viewers, this is, as John Strausbaugh puts it, “ludicrously obvious … They are transparently White men in blackface. They’re not even trying to look or act like Black people. It’s as though they’re intentionally not acting Black; as though the last thing they want the viewer to think is that they’re real Black people. … The man playing Gus [Walter Long] looks and moves like a heavyset White man who has somehow gotten himself very sooty.”11 To the viewer who has read Rogin, the unconscious significance of the disguise is as evident as the disguise itself, revealing what Francis Hackett in 1915 called the “malignity” of the representation.12 Both defenders and critics of the film—or of Griffith—have sometimes argued for the transparency of the disguise. Griffith’s biographer, Richard Schickel, who considers Griffith’s motives to have been “quite pure,” argues that “if a white man was playing a black man there was no way to disguise that fact, no way to prevent the audience from being aware of this duplicity every moment he was on screen.”13 In a 1974 defence of stereotyping, Maurice Yacowar suggested that the “transparent whiteness” of the “slavering blackface whites in the major Negro roles … is a reminder that we see not the black man per se but a white man’s projection of a black man, an artist’s deployment of an image in a poetic fiction.”14 Much more complexly, Jacqueline Stewart has argued that “the motivation for casting whites involves a more complicated process of ‘identification,’” a suspension of disbelief by which “viewers were supposed to recognize white actors behind the makeup,” allowing them to enjoy “the perverse pleasure of watching whites perform Black transgressive acts” while understanding that “the prohibition against staging sexualized, physical contact between Black male and white female actors” remained inviolate.15 She cites a number of examples of films from 1906 to 1912 in which the interactions of two blackfaced white actors, one playing a character who is “really” white, and one who is supposed to be “really” Black … demonstrate an overwhelming confidence in the preclassical film viewer’s ability to read crucial racial distinctions across multiple modes of Black representation. (Fig. 3.2)16

Both Stewart and Linda Williams suggest that this confidence continued into Griffith’s films of the 1910s, where it functioned to reassure white audiences, especially in the South, that “transgressive Black roles” such as Gus or Silas Lynch (George Siegmann) were “safely within

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Fig. 3.2 Elsie goes to see Silas Lynch

the protective custody of white actors,” and that “segregation was as much in effect within the film as it was in life.”17 These representations, Stewart argues, drew on what Eric Lott has called the “unsteady but structured fluctuation … between sympathetic belief in the authenticity of blackface and ironic distance from its counterfeit representations.”18 Williams’ acknowledgement that, in their transparent disguises, these counterfeit villains undercut the “realism” of the threat they represented, brings me to my question: who saw what, in or through the disguise of blackface in The Birth of a Nation?19 In asking this, I am not disputing the critical interpretation, post-Rogin, of the film text, that the imposition of white disguise renders visible the “real” that is being represented: the phantasm of the white male psyche, disguising itself as Other to do that which it may not admit to doing, simultaneously escaping consequences by the donning and shedding of disguise, justifying white supremacy and discarding white guilt for racial oppression.20 I am, however, asking whether we have evidence that such an interpretation was available to

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or accessible by the film’s contemporary audiences, and particularly its dominant, white contemporary audiences, whose reception of the film was “overwhelmingly positive in almost every corner of America.”21 Although Anna Everett has suggested that “Griffith’s northern audiences” were principally composed of “the poorly educated white working masses” and “immigrant newcomers” unfamiliar with American history, Birth did not play at “popular prices” until 1921, and the film’s exhibition policy concentrated its attention on middle-class customers, just as William Simmons did in his recruitment of the second Ku Klux Klan. 22 Seymour Stern asserted that the majority of its middle and uppermiddle class spectators “were openly or tacitly … contemptuous of the Negro and sympathetic toward the ideology of the Klan,” and that “the predominantly white, church-ridden, middle-class audience of once revolutionary New England was as contemptuously anti-Negro, as patriotically anti-liberal, as the middle-class white audience everywhere else in the country.”23 The Boston Evening Transcript reviewer, for example, saw the film’s final conflict between the Klan and Piedmont’s Black citizenry as simply “the usual movie conflict between the powers of good and evil.”24 There is one occasion in The Birth of a Nation in which the ironic distance of blackface appears as both a plot device and a disguise (Figs. 3.3a−d). Approaching the film’s climax, as Elsie Stoneman (Lilian Gish) is recovering from Silas Lynch’s forcing his attentions on her, two Klansmen in blackface enter Piedmont. Before we see them, an intertitle identifies them as “White spies disguised.”25 The blackface Klansmen look indistinguishable from the other blackface characters, and the need to advise the audience of the disguise through a prior intertitle presumes the equal invisibility of the disguise to them, as well as signalling the narrative and interpretative precedence of the title. Only Elsie, looking through the window and triggering the appearance of the intertitle, sees through the “disguise” and signals her plight, so that the disguised Klansmen can ride off to summon Ben Cameron (Henry Walthall) and the Klan to the rescue. The complexities of interpretation involved here are considerable: one character, Elsie, is empowered with perception shared—after the intertitle—with the audience, but not with any of the other characters. This is the one occasion in the film in which a white actor playing a character who is “really” white appears in blackface, the one occasion in which the audience, along with a character within the diegesis, is required to see through appearance in order to motivate the plot’s progression. It is a

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Fig. 3.3 Elsie alerts ‘White Spies’

moment of rupture, but one that seems to have attracted no comment at all at the time and has remained relatively unremarked upon in later criticism.26 In some ways the unremarked condition of this moment also renders it the more surprising, because it undoes the picture’s premise that blackface provides an unqualified representation of the categorical differentiation of white and Black characters. As Paul McEwan observes, the scene normalises the use of blackface by inferring that there is no difference between makeup and an actual black face … There is no way to reconcile this scene with the ideology of the rest of the film, because … the contradictions of blackface cannot be avoided.27

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Ruth Johnston describes Blackness in the film as “a costume which is worn or removed at will by whites,” and regards the rioters’ failure to recognize the spies as presenting them “as dupes of white performance,” offering the white audience an opportunity to register their own superiority.28 Exploring what Ellen Scott has called African American “representability,” Susan Gubar argues that because complexion in itself is “neither an infallible nor a stable index of race,” blackface provided audiences with the certainty that racial difference was always visibly encoded.29 Mary Ann Doane amplifies this proposal in her examination of the film’s “curious ordering of the relations between visibility, knowledge, and power”: through the film’s use of blackface, “skin – which would seem to be the most stable guarantor of racial difference and the ground of its instant recognizability – is transformed from immediacy to sign.” Extrapolating from Griffith’s comment on the film’s casting that “on careful weighing of every detail concerned, the decision was to have no black blood among the principals,” Doane notes that under the antimiscegenation laws, the legal criterion for racial identity was a matter of blood rather than skin, so that “genealogy, a potentially invisible history,” was “the determinant of racial identity.”30 In her history of anti-miscegenation laws, Peggy Pascoe argues that they “acted as a kind of legal factory” for the production and reproduction of the racial categories of the state, particularly through their definition of race by descent or blood quantum.31 The laws gave expression to the white terror of the spectre of “hidden” or “invisible blackness” that drove the “one-drop” rule of Black racial identity and constituted the obverse of blackface.32 The 1915 Fox film The New Governor, in which William Farnum played the newly-elected governor of a Southern state blackmailed by a political opponent who has discovered his Black ancestry, enacted this spectre, and met calls for censorship on the same grounds as Birth of a Nation.33 It is possible to bring the disruptive moment of the white spies within the interpretive frame provided by Rogin, Taylor or Stewart, either by asserting the formally dominant narrative and interpretative presence of the intertitles in positioning characters for the audience’s understanding or by perceiving Elsie, the embodiment of “white purity, white culture, whiteness itself,” as enabled by the symbolic power of her whiteness to identify “blood whiteness” through blackface disguise, when other black(faced) characters cannot.34 But an audience is under no obligation to construct such an interpretation. The scene lasts about 20 seconds

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and carries a required plot function. It reduces to: “Elsie manages to signal her plight to Klansmen disguised as blacks, and they ride to tell the Klan,” and we are then off to the next exchange. Audiences can pass this moment by, simply incorporating it into their understanding of the plot, unperturbed by its rupture of a convention in the representation of visibility and knowledge. David Mayer observes that one of the pleasures of melodrama is that it indulges logical inconsistencies, allowing spectators to experience and to hold in suspension moral, emotional, and ideological irreconcilables. The swift action and rapidity of incident of most melodramas distract the spectator from the awareness that she or he may hold conflicting opinions … Melodrama does not force hard choices but, rather, allows its audiences all options and does not penalize them for failure to choose.35

As part of the publicity for the film, in May 1915 the Los Angeles Times carried an interview with Mary Alden, who played Lydia Brown, in which Miss Alden tells of an amusing little experience at a performance of The Clansman recently. She sat next to two ladies, who, judging from their accent, were from New England. When Miss Alden appeared as the mulatto in the film play, one of the ladies turned to the other and said: “I’ll wager they had a hard time training [her] for the screen. I know what a job it is to train them even for house servants, much less actors”. (Fig. 3.4)36

According to Seymour Stern, “Epoch received many ‘fan’ letters, attacking Gus and expressing the hope he had been jailed after the film was completed, as white women would not be safe with him ‘at large.’”37 Both of these anecdotes may be pieces of publicity licence, and one other more widely cited story, reported by May Childs Nerney, NAACP national secretary, of a young Southern white man emerging from a screening of Birth and declaring that he would like to “kill every [black person] I know,” may be apocryphal, or they may describe a commonplace reaction.38 There certainly were reports of the film’s exhibition triggering racial violence, including at least one shooting, and Black press coverage of the campaign against the film found frequent occasion to juxtapose it with stories of white racial violence.39 More suggestive of the literal way in which the movie may have been understood than such anecdotal evidence is the paucity, at the time of its

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Fig. 3.4 Lydia tears her own clothes

release, of any liberal critical commentary drawing attention to the distortion of racial representation so visible to later audiences. The commonly cited accounts of the film’s initial reception offer no hint of the ironic distancing that Lott finds in blackface minstrelsy. The New York Sun reported that it moved its première audience “to cheers, hisses, laughter and tears … they clapped when the masked riders took vengeance on Negroes, and they clapped when the hero refused to shake the hand of a mulatto who had risen by political intrigue to become lieutenant governor.” The same review also recorded a remark made by “a typical New Yorker” summarizing the audience’s sentiment: “that show certainly does make you hate those blacks. And if it gets that effect on me, when I don’t care anything about it, imagine what it would be in the South, with a man whose family was mixed up in it. It makes you feel as if you’d do the same thing.”40 Other reviews commented on the film’s exceptional capacity to evince a powerful affective response that overcame the conventional emotional

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reserve of audiences who could afford to pay $2 a seat.41 Richard Schickel suggests that “literally millions of people first experienced the full, and really quite magical, transporting powers of motion pictures,” and found themselves “swept along on a flood of imagery and melody,” to what journalist Dorothy Dix called “a perfect frenzy.”42 Less euphemistically, David Kidd argues that in its conclusion the film “summoned its audience to its feet, for all intents and purposes interpellating the audience as a lynch mob,” and Amy Louise Wood maintains that “Birth transformed audiences into lynching spectators and made their spectatorship of violence respectable, even righteous.”43 Linda Williams’ proposition that the film helped to forge “a new national feeling of racial antipathy” through its account of white southerners as victims of Black “misrule” also leaves little room for an ironically detached audience response.44 Janet Staiger’s analysis of reviews and articles attacking the film identifies a number of recurring concerns: its falsification and perversion of history; its glorification of lynching; its incitement to racial hatred, its threat to public order, its doctrine that Black people should be removed from the United States, and its misrepresentation of people of color “both as individual people and as a race.”45 But in the terms in which the film was protested, there is an absence of any explicit mention of the representational convention. In editorials in The New York Age, James Weldon Johnson declared that A big, degraded looking Negro is shown chasing a little golden-haired white girl for the purpose of outraging her … many hundreds of colored people are used in this production for the purpose of representing the Negro as a race, and they are pictured as the perpetrators of every kind of indignity, crime and barbarity, from shoving white folks off the sidewalk, to committing robbery, murder and rape.46

Jane Addams echoed Moorfield Storey’s description of the film as as a “pernicious caricature of the Negro race,” but framed this comment by suggesting that Griffith had “followed the principle of gathering the most vicious and grotesque individuals he could find among colored people and showing them as representative of the truth about the entire race.” As Thomas Cripps observes, Addams had “mistaken verisimilitude for reality.” Her critique did not question the narrative or performative realism of these caricatures.47 “The same method,” Addams observed,

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could be followed to smirch the reputation of any race. For instance, it would be easy enough to go about the slums of a city and bring together some of the criminals and degenerates and take pictures of them purporting to show the character of the white race. It would no more be the truth about the white race than this is about the black.48

Addams’ comparison to the potential misuse of documentary photography suggests that she did not question the “realism” of the image. The language in which the representation was denounced – the recurrent terminology of distortion, “malicious misrepresentation,” “caricature,” “overcharacterization,” of vilification, defamation, insult, humiliation, calumny, outrage, “slander,” and “libel,” which Cara Caddoo suggests “referenced the language of state and municipal defamation laws”—can certainly be understood as an indirect reference to what Cedric Robinson calls “minstrelsy’s sovereignty over blackness.”49 They can, however, also be interpreted as perversely suturing the rupture created by blackface’s interruption of its realism by what they do not explicitly say about how the defamatory misrepresentation had been constructed. Discussing the blackface minstrel films of early cinema, Robinson asks: “is it credible that some seventy years into the American minstrel phenomenon that even newcomers weren’t aware that these performers were not actually Black? … [that] the constancy of the disguise, its repetition in film after film” rendered the convention unremarkable, not only to the majority of the white audience who accepted the film’s claims to historical accuracy and found its racism unexceptional, but also to those who denounced it.50 Was the process by which characters were “marked” by intertitles directing the audience’s interpretation of the action sufficient to sweep the racist conventions up into the “stronger compulsions” of narrative, romance and revenge?51 For many viewers in 1915, as well as for a significant number of the film’s subsequent critics, that may have been the case. Wood suggests that, by contrast with earlier films depicting black criminals, Griffith may have consciously avoided using “the caricatured blackface of minstrelsy” among his villains in order to make it believable they were actually Black and heighten “the emotional power and terror” of the sexual threat they posed.52 Alternatively, Richard Dyer has suggested that the film’s choices to use an actual Black performer, a white performer in “darkened down” makeup, or a white performer in minstrel blackface—are “extraordinarily

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inconsistent.”53 He suggests that the “haphazard quality” of the representation of Black people “is a sign of the confidence with which they could be known – it was enough to nominate them as black for them to be black, regardless of how that blackness was figured.” The film consistently signifies Blackness by one of several visual means, but only to identify the character’s race, not to present “a naturalistically coherent representation.”54 Whatever its level of coherence, the film text cannot answer the question of its interpretation, and the less coherent—the more melodramatic—it is, the more mutually incompatible interpretations it will encourage. For the modern viewer, it is remarkable that the most obvious and obviously unspeakable feature of the text went unremarked—and appeared unremarkable—at the time of the film’s release. Audiences were—and are—not seeing the same thing. Some viewers in 1915 may have consciously or unconsciously ignored, looked through and looked past the conventions of representation. Others may have recognized the convention as imposed for the kinds of pragmatic rationalizations that critics and historians have produced about the use of Black actors and the reasons for it.55 Others, such as African American actor William Walker, who watched the film in a segregated Black movie house in 1916, experienced the film as an act of eradication: You had the worst feeling in the world. You just felt like you were not counted. You were out of existence … I wished somebody could not see me so I could kill them. I just felt like killing all the white people in the world.56

Although he did not explain how the film accomplished his sense of eradication, Walker was evidently seeing something radically different from the white audience members who left feeling like killing Black people.57 He was, perhaps, reacting to a form of the “double consciousness” that W. E. B. DuBois described as the sense “of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”; on this occasion looking at the “erasure of black identity” that blackface performed by evicting “black people from their own skin and … allow[ing] pretenders to take up residency there.”58 The Birth of a Nation provides an example of the distance between our viewing of the film and that available to its contemporary audiences, a distance that may be in some sense unbridgeable but is also more

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common than is often recognized. The many examples of white performances of orientalism, or Charles Bronson’s, Sal Mineo’s and Woody Strode’s Polish, Latino and black Native Americans in the 1950, offer comparable conventions in representation, but a more striking parallel is with Shirley Temple.59 Like Birth’s deployment of blackface, Temple poses a problem in the recovery and reconstruction of the historical reception of movies and their representations. Over the past thirty years, her films have become ever stranger and more difficult to watch without addressing the extreme discomfort of the sexuality of her representation, as the interpretive framework within which we view them has been forced to give more credence to the literally unspeakable interpretation that Graham Greene published and was sued for in 1937—that “her appeal is more secret and more adult … [concealed] because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between [her admirers’] intelligence and their desire.”60 The similarity with The Birth of a Nation lies in the distance between an unavoidable interpretation now and an unimaginable—or unremarkable—interpretation then. That is a discussion for a different occasion, although as it happens, Shirley’s pairing with Bill Robinson was originally suggested in 1935 by D. W. Griffith, who pointed out that “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, calculated to raise the goose flesh on the back of an audience more than that of a white girl in relation to Negroes.”61 Considering the apparent gap in perception between audiences in 1915 and subsequent audiences, we can at one level ask empirical questions about where the invisibility of blackface resided: how likely is it, given the discourses that surrounded the film, that blackface portrayal was indeed so obvious that no-one thought it worthy of comment? Did audiences exist in such segregated environments that white audiences could, indeed, have not recognized blackface performance?62 Was there a discursive convention in play in blackface—even this non-minstrel, un-comic “realist” form of blackface—or in the nominating power of intertitles, that rendered the blackface convention invisible? As with the case of Shirley Temple, satisfactory answers to these questions cannot be found solely and entirely within the film text. Just as Temple’s repeated seductions of a potential father figure in order to construct a viable family spoke to both the instability of family structures in the Depression and the denial by medical, psychological and legal practitioners of the existence of father-daughter incest among white middle-class families, Griffith’s project “to traumatize and

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incite white audiences against blacks” addressed existing racist attitudes from which only a small minority of the white population demurred.63 What Moving Picture World’s reviewer W. Stephen Bush called the film’s “undisguised appeal to race prejudices” was in itself unexceptional in a society which asserted racial difference as an absolute marker of identity and in which “the figure of the depraved black criminal assumed a prominence in newspapers, fiction, plays, songs, and early films far out of proportion to his actual numbers.”64 Racial caricature pervaded middle-class white culture, from its advertising and its food packaging to its comics, drug store postcards and children’s books, toys and games. “Everywhere”, notes Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,“[Americans] saw a black image, that image would be negative.”65 Propelled by the racial sciences of Social Darwinism and eugenics, segregation was “etched into the landscape of virtually every American town or city,” and embedded in President Wilson’s 1913 resegregation of multiple federal government agencies and in state legislation segregating urban housing and facilities in factories.66 Robert Jackson’s analysis of the Civil War films that preceded Birth leads him to conclude that film makers were hardly immune to the same racism that pervaded American society and had little reason to feel any need to apologize for producing racist images for the screen … What is most distressing … is not that the racism of these and many other films constitutes the central and defining content of the early American cinema, but that it could so seamlessly merge into the broad matrix of early filmmaking practices and that filmmakers, distributors, and viewers could so easily appropriate and celebrate the derivative racial codes—violent as well as comic—of the era.67

The figure of the “dangerous black male” was no more an invention of Griffith than it was of Dixon.68 It circulated freely in the culture: most destructively in the justifications of lynching as the honourable actions of “‘respectable citizens’ carrying out their masculine duty to protect their women” from the figure of the predatory, bestial black rapist; and most publicly in the figure of Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion and the braggadocio prototype of “the independent black who accepted no bar to his conduct.”69 Popular Black enthusiasm for Johnson’s frequently contemptuous defeats of one “white hope” after another between 1908 and 1915, which one Black newspaper hailed as

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giving “more genuine satisfaction to the colored people of this country” than any event in the previous forty years, provoked violent racist reactions: the white riots that followed Johnson’s defeat of Jim Jeffries in 1910 resulted in the deaths of at least eighteen Black men.70 In 1913, his serial marriages to white women Etta Duryea and Lucille Cameron occasioned not only his prosecution under the Mann Act but also a spate of attempts to pass anti-miscegenation laws in half the states then free of them and a proposal to amend the US Constitution to prohibit “intermarriage between negroes or persons of color and Caucasians.”71 Representative Seaborn A. Roddenberry of Georgia, who proposed the amendment, repeatedly named Johnson as the target of his proposal and of the previous year’s Sims Act introducing federal censorship of films by prohibiting “interstate commerce of moving-picture films of prize fights.”72 A racist work exhibited in a racist culture, Birth of a Nation thus displayed little originality either in expressing a dominant representation of Black masculinity or in its proposal that mulattos constituted an intolerable threat to white civilization.73 As Variety’s reviewer observed, Griffith “knew just what kind of a picture would please all white classes.”74 The conundrum of who saw what in blackface, however, remains unresolved. It may be that the familiarity of such representations, invoked particularly by the insurgent image of Johnson, permitted the film’s white middle-class audiences their own perverse form of double consciousness, allowing them to experience the film’s blackface characters as simultaneously both Black and white and then ignore whichever racial attribution proved inconvenient to the immediate circumstance. Tara McPherson has provided a redolent optical metaphor for this “racial economy of visibility” in the lenticular lens used in printing interlaced images on postcards, so that a shift in viewing angle changes one image into another, while it is nearly impossible to see both images simultaneously. McPherson cites the example of a postcard showing “an antebellum mansion … complete with a hoopskirted young lady in the foreground” that changes into “a stereotypical image of a grinning, portly mammy.” As she explains, the card’s “lenticular logic … makes joining the two images within one view difficult if not impossible, even as it conjoins them at a structural level.”75 For some of its viewers, Birth’s blackface may have operated in such a manner. On June 5, 1915, this viewing and interpretative behavior received legal sanction, when Judge William Fenimore Cooper of the Cook

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County Superior Court entered an injunction restraining the mayor, the chief of police, and the city of Chicago from stopping the film’s exhibition film under the city’s 1907 ordinance prohibiting any film that portrays depravity, criminality or lack of virtue of a class of citizens of any race, color, creed or religion and exposes them to contempt, derision or obloquy, or tends to produce a breach of the peace or riots, or purports to represent any hanging, lynching or burning of a human being.76

In dismissing the city’s contention that “the photoplay, if presented, will engender race animosity against the negro citizens of our community,” he observed that: This court is satisfied from the evidence that in this photoplay the good black man and the bad white man are equally prominent figures in the play … Every night in every theater there is produced the debased type of the white race of different nationalities, and if representative groups of the various nationalities so presented became acutely sensitive that such individual portrayal would cause them to suffer race hatred of their race, and all of the plays in which a villain had played were stopped on that account, the theater as an educator and entertainer of the people, would become a memory of the past, and there would be nothing to fill its place for the education and enjoyment of our people. No one race or nationality has greater right under the law than any other has. Any race or nationality so offended can best give the lie to the bad characters so presented by continuing to conduct themselves as law abiding citizens who do not expect greater rights from the law than it allows all other men or nationalities. If white men appeal to the courts to restrain the production of a play because one of its characters portrayed that of a dissolute white man whose acting would bring race hatred against the nation which his stage character assumed, their plea would be denied for want of law to support the same, and the law should be and is the same for black and white alike.77

That night, Birth of a Nation opened at the Illinois Theatre and in the intermission Griffith addressed the audience. Endorsing Judge Cooper’s dramatic analysis, he commented, “we must have villains of some sort, and if every nationality becomes so sensitive soon we will be able to have none but American villains.” The audience, “the best of Chicago’s

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social life,” laughed loudly at Griffith’s observation, but whether either he or they recognized the ironic distance in his exclusionary definition of “American” is, like audiences’ recognition of the film’s deployment of blackface, not recorded.78

Notes 1. Robert Jackson, “The Celluloid War Before The Birth: Race and History in Early American Film,” in American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, eds. Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn McKee (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 45. 2. Michele Faith Wallace, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation: Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim Crow,” Cinema Journal, vol. 43, no. 1 (2003), 86. 3. Thomas Dixon to Joseph Tumulty, May 1, 1915, quoted in Thomas Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture The Birth of a Nation,” in Focus on The Birth of a Nation, ed. Fred Silva (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 115. 4. Against the majority of accounts, Arthur Lennig and Stephen Weinberger maintain that the NAACP campaign against the film was not merely a failure, but counterproductive, providing Griffith with free publicity, positioning the NAACP as promoting censorship, and diverting the organization’s resources away from more tangible expressions of racism. Arthur Lennig, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of The Birth of a Nation,” Film History, vol. 16, no. 2 (2004), 117–41; Stephen Weinberger, “The Birth of a Nation and the Making of the NAACP,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 45, no. 1 (2011), 79. Cara Caddoo, however, emphasizes the extent to which the NAACP campaign “engaged hundreds of organizations across the country, involved tens of thousands of black protestors … generated organizational strategies, networks of communication, alliances, and critiques that informed the abilities—and limitations—of subsequent mass black mobilizations in the twentieth century,” consequences not measured by the outcome of specific attempts to prevent the film’s screening. Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 140, 142. Jay Steinmetz notes that Birth stoked the calls for censorship “at nearly every stop of its roadshow tour,” and that as well as Boston and Chicago, mayors or censor boards in Oakland, Gary, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Springfield, Massachusetts, all banned the film’s exhibition, only to have their decisions overturned by the courts. As Steinmetz comments, Birth “turned

3

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

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liberals into censors and racists into civil libertarians.” Jay Douglas Steinmetz, Beyond Free Speech and Propaganda: The Political Development of Hollywood, 1907–1927 (Lanhan, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 76–77, 80. Jay Leyda, “The Art and Death of D.W. Griffith,” Sewanee Review, 57 (April 1949), 350–56. Such claims are abundant. See, for instance, Paul O’Dell, Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood. (London: Zwemmer, 1970), 11. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liveright, 1970; orig. pub. 1915), 74. This distinction persists in accounts which differentiate Dixon’s virulent racism from descriptions of Griffith as “a rather conventional Southern Democrat.” Wallace, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation,” 86. Robert Jackson, however, argues that “film history, like so many other areas in American life, continues to show a reluctance to accept the embeddedness of race in its very being. In doing so, it still views The Watermelon Patch and its genre as marginal rather than normative and looks to D. W. Griffith as a major innovator of the medium who just happened to be a certain kind of racist southerner, whose racism and southernness could be neatly divorced, or perhaps just politely and paternalistically segregated, from his greatness as a filmmaker.” Jackson, “The Celluloid War before The Birth,” 45. Michael Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision”: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” in Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 182. Clyde Taylor, “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 26. Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” Monogram, 4 (1972), 4. John Strausbaugh, Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007), 212. Assistant cameraman Karl Brown would later recall that Long “made no effort to look like a real Negro. He put on the regular minstrel-man blackface makeup, so there could be no mistake about who and what he was.” Karl Brown, Adventures with D.W. Griffith, ed. Kevin Brownlow (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), 62. Melvyn Stokes concurs that Mary Alden, George Siegmann, and Walter Long must have known that “especially in close-up, there was no chance of being mistaken for the real thing.” He also observes that blackface allowed these characters to “behave more histrionically” ensuring that the film’s three blackface villains “were also the only characters in the film

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12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

to show anything in the way of real passion.” Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 87–88. Francis Hackett, “Brotherly Love,” The New Republic, March 20, 1915, reprinted in Silva, Focus on The Birth of a Nation, 86. Richard Schickel, D.W. Griffith and the Birth of Film: A Biography (London: Pavilion Books/Michael Joseph, 1984), 213, 233. Maurice Yacowar, “Aspects of the Familiar: A Defense of Minority Group Stereotyping in the Popular Film,” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 2 (1974), 133. The argument that having Gus played by a white actor in makeup somehow diminishes the racial character of his pursuit of Flora is dismissed by Scott Simmon, who notes that “audiences today usually find the blackface casting intensifying, not mitigating, the sequence’s racism.” Scott Simmon, The Films of D.W. Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 107. Robert Jackson refers to “the bizarre and tortured logic utilized by sophisticated critics to defend Griffith against charges of racism.” Jackson, “The Celluloid War before The Birth,” 47, n. 2. Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 57–58, 87, 88. Ibid., pp. 63–64. Ibid., pp. 64, 87; Linda Williams, “Surprised by Blackface: D. W. Griffith and One Exciting Night,” in Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Stephen Johnson (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 134–35. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 88; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124. Williams, “Surprised by Blackface,” 136. As Richard Dyer among others observes, while Birth’s principal villains have their faces darkened by makeup, many of the minor characters are made up in a manner much closer to the conventions of blackface minstrelsy. The first handbook of makeup for the screen, published in 1927, included a section on “Negro,” entirely occupied with distinguishing the “Negro” from the “minstrel” and avoiding the errors that would lead to a “minstrel effect.” Cecil Holland, The Art of Make-Up for Stage and Screen (Hollywood, CA: Cinematex, 1927), 98, quoted in Alice Maurice, The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 138. Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 56; Grace Elizabeth Hale,

3

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

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Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1998), 19. Steinmetz, Beyond Free Speech, 81. Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 92; Kelly J. Baker, The Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’S Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 9; Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 52–74; Robert Goldberg, Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 46. It should, however, be recognized that while Simmons’ launch of the second Klan took opportunistic advantage of Birth’s Atlanta première, the “Invisible Empire” was “just another indolent southern fraternal group” confined to Georgia and Alabama with major financial difficulties and a membership of no more than 2,000, until its effective relaunch in 1920. Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 7–8. Seymour Stern and Ira H. Gallen, D.W. Griffith’s 100th Anniversary The Birth of a Nation: A History of “the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (Victoria, BC: Friesen Press, 2014) Kindle Edition, Locations 6130, 6150. Boston Evening Transcript, 10 April 1915, quoted in Lennig, “Myth and Fact,” 127. The two riders appear, briefly and unidentified, at the end of a shot of Black people parading in celebration through the town some three-and-ahalf minutes earlier. Scott Simmon mentions it in a footnote, which Richard Dyer picks up on in his essay. Simmon, The Films of D. W. Griffith, 107 fn.; Richard Dyer, “Into the Light: The Whiteness of the South in the Birth of a Nation,” in The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London: Routledge, 1993), 161. Rogin (181) mentions it, only to observe that “the Negroes who bind and gag Elsie when she screams for help are also whites in blackface. … blackface enabled whites to ‘impersonate’ (Griffith’s word for playing a role) both sides … Masks transform some white bodies into a white host and other white bodies into a black mob … Sometimes they were the same white actors.” Susan Courtney comments on the “virtually miraculous” and “masterful” gaze of the “white spies” themselves in their inadvertent sighting of Elsie. Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 321, n. 96. McEwan suggests that audiences “would probably not have been troubled by the contradictions,” because the familiarity of blackface, together with

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28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

“the much broader theatrical tradition of disguised characters who are obvious to the audience in the theatre but who are able to fool the other characters in the play” would have made it unremarkable. Paul McEwan, The Birth of a Nation (London: Palgrave, 2015), 66. Ruth D. Johnston, “The Construction of Whiteness in The Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 28, no. 5 (2011), 383. Ellen C. Scott, Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 4; Gubar, Racechanges, 63. As Doane observes, “blacks are allowed to represent blacks only in their most marginal roles, as elements of a crowd or background.” Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 228, 230. Black performers appeared as extras in at least eleven scenes in the film, frequently intermingled with white actors in blackface. The most comprehensive list of these appearances is in Stern and Gallen, D.W. Griffith’s 100th Anniversary, Location 1148. Griffith, quoted by Henry Stephen Gordon, “D.W. Griffith Recalls the Making of The Birth of a Nation,” Photoplay, October 1916, reprinted in Harry M. Geduld, ed., Focus on D.W . Griffith (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 58. African Americans also appeared in the “Hampton Epilogue” showing “the wonderful advances made by the exslaves in their 40 years’ progress since reconstruction times,” added to the version of Birth screened in Boston under the title The New Era. “‘Birth of a Nation’ at the Tremont,” Boston Daily Globe, June 8, 1915, quoted in Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 171. As Field notes (172), outside Boston, the epilogue was not consistently included in screenings of the film. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9. Peter Wallenstein, “Reconstruction, Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865–1900,” American Nineteenth Century History, vol. 6, no. 1 (2005), 68; Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), 98, 103. The New Governor was based on a 1909 play by Edward Brewster Sheldon called “The Nigger,” and was initially released under that title. The NBC required a number of changes, including to the title and to scenes in which a black man assaults a young white girl and is subsequently lynched. In a strikingly condemnatory editorial, Moving Picture World described the film as “repulsive, harmful and void of any moral lesson worth pointing … It is a production that never should have been made. It presents the

3

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

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worst sores in American civilization without any decency or restraint and without suggesting a remedy … it is a brutal appeal to the most dangerous of human passions and prejudices.” “A Picture to Be Suppressed,” Moving Picture World, March 27, 1915, 1914b. Doane, Femmes Fatales, 230. David Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D.W. Griffith and the American Theatre (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 127. Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1915, quoted in Seymour Stern, “Griffith: I. The Birth of a Nation, Film Culture,” 36 (1965), 43. Stern, “Griffith,” 41. Mary White Ovington, a New York settlement worker, reported similar comments from audience members at the hearings seeking to ban the film in Boston. “Could Not Interfere,” Moving Picture World, April 24, 1915, 602. An almost identical story had appeared in a newspaper reports condemning the play of The Clansman in 1906. Everett, Returning the Gaze, 61. In Fighting a Vicious Film, J. Mott Hallowell cited a similar occurrence: “A young man who saw the film in New York remarked on coming out of the show house ‘I’d like to kill every nigger in the country.’ He was an average young man. It was a natural remark. If the negro race is as represented in this performance I should feel as he does. If this film is allowed to be produced, there are thousands of others who will be taught to feel as he does.” J. Mott Hallowell, “The Assassination of a Race,” in Fighting a Vicious Film: Protest Against “The Birth of a Nation” (Pamphlet produced by Boston Branch of the NAACP, 1915), 26. For examples, see Everett, Returning the Gaze, 103. The Crisis highlighted the case of Henry Brocj, originally from Kentucky. Five weeks after arriving in Lafayette, Indiana, Brocj went to a performance of The Birth of a Nation. On leaving the movie house and apparently without any provocation or prior knowledge of his victim, he “fired three bullets into the body of Edward Manson, a Negro high school student, fifteen years old.” When the boy died, Brocj was charged with murder. Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 250. New York Sun, March 5, 1915, quoted in Stern and Gallen, D.W. Griffith’s 100th Anniversary, Location 6376. James Shelley Hamilton, “Putting a New Move in the Movies,” Everybody’s Magazine, 32:6 (June 1915), 680, quoted in Stern, “Griffith,” 135; Ned McIntosh, The Atlanta Constitution December 7, 1915, quoted in Silva, Focus on The Birth of a Nation, 34–35. Schickel, D. W. Griffith, 247, 279; Dix, New York Journal, March 5, 1915, quoted in Schickel, D. W. Griffith, 279. David M. Kidd, “History Written with Lightning”: Religion, White Supremacy, and the Rise and Fall of Thomas Dixon, Jr. (PhD thesis, College of William and Mary, 2013), 349; Amy Louise Wood, Lynching

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44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 148–50. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 99, 111. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 144. In Illinois, the commander of the state branch of the Grand Army of the Republic also protested against Birth’s exhibition because it contained “slanderous representations as to the soldiers who fought to preserve the Union.” “Trying to Get G.A.R. Up over Birth of a Nation,” Moving Picture World, August 28, 1915, 1510. James Weldon Johnson, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Clansman,” New York Age, March 4, 1915, and “Perverted History,” New York Age, 22 April 1915, quoted in Lawrence J. Oliver with Terri L. Walker, “James Weldon Johnson’s New York Age Essays on The Birth of a Nation and the ‘Southern Oligarchy,’” South Central Review, vol. 10, no. 4 (1993), 4, 11. It is unlikely that Johnson had seen the film when he wrote the first of these editorials since its New York première was held on March 3, but he would have had opportunity to see it before he published “Perverted History.” Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900– 1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 56. “Birth of a Nation Arouses Ire of Miss Jane Addams,” Chicago Defender, March 20, 2015, quoted in Everett, Returning the Gaze, 77. Addams saw the film as a member of the NAACP on March 10, 1915. “Fighting Race Calumny,” The Crisis, 10 (May–June 1915), 40, reproduced in Silva, Focus on The Birth of a Nation, 67. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 62; Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom, 163; Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War 2 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 189. The legal argument, shared by some white ethnic minority advocates, proposed that performances that depended on exaggeration or burlesque constituted a libel or slander against the whole race. M. Alison Kibler, Censoring Racial Ridicule: Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 116–70. Writing about stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 1850s, Linda Williams observes that “It is entirely likely that a black actor playing the role of Topsy or Tom without racial caricature would have been unrecognizable to white and black audiences alike.” Williams, Playing the Race Card, 83.

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50. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 189; Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 285. Jane Gaines suggests that “For every mayor who banned the film out of respect for local blacks and desire to keep the peace, there would be another who did so out of opposition to the representation of interracial sex … there is the distinct possibility that the film was banned in many towns not because of its ideological message but because of general white distaste for and paranoia about anything black.” Jane Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 224, 235. 51. James Snead, White Screen, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, 1994), 38. Examples of such introductory intertitles include: Lydia Brown: “The mulatto aroused from ambitious dreamings by Sumner’s curt orders”; “Stoneman’s protege, Silas Lynch, mulatto leader of the blacks”; “Gus, the renegade, a product of the vicious doctrines spread by the carpetbaggers.” McEwan, The Birth of a Nation, 19. 52. As an example, Wood cites the 1904 Paley and Steiner film Avenging a Crime; or, Burned at the Stake which explicitly portrayed a racialized lynching. Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 137–38, 158. 53. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies,” 63; Dyer, “Into the Light,” 160. 54. Ibid., 161. 55. Early cinema largely inherited the exclusivity of its white performance from the stage, where African American, Chinese and ethnic roles were conventionally performed by white actors. Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker, 18. As instances of what Thomas Cripps called the “normal intellectual baggage” of “vestigial racism” in Hollywood, most studios’ discriminatory hiring practices resulted in their not regularly employing Black actors during the 1910s. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 96; Stewart, “Migrating to the Movies,” 57. 56. William Walker, interviewed in Kevin Brownlow, David Gill, Susan Lacy, Ian Martin, and Lindsay Anderson, D.W. Griffith Father of Film (New York, NY: Kino International, 2008), quoted in Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 223. 57. Linda Williams attributes Walker’s response more to “the visceral experience of the logic of black disappearance than specific instances of white-on-black violence.” Williams, Playing the Race Card, 128. “What was also being counted out of existence was the future of African American representation in any but the roles of ‘faithful souls’ for the next fifty years of mainstream film.” Linda Williams, “Serial Melodramas of Black and White,” in The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 152. 58. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Modern Library, 2003, orig. pub. 1903), 4; Stephanie Dunson, “Black Misrepresentation

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59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

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in Nineteenth-Century Sheet Music Illustration,” in Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 45, 47. In Run of the Arrow (Universal, 1957), Tonka (Disney, 1958) and Two Rode Together (Columbia, 1962) respectively. Graham Greene, review of Wee Willie Winkie, Night and Day, October 28, 1937, reprinted in Christopher Hawtree, ed., Night and Day (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985), 204. This pairing, featuring Hollywood’s first musical performances between a white female and black male, first occurred in The Littlest Rebel (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1935), in which Temple also appeared in blackface. Shirley Temple Black, Child Star: An Autobiography (London: Headline, 1989), 90. I provide a fuller discussion of the Temple case in “Sex and Shirley Temple,” Chapter 6 of Decoding the Movies: Hollywood in the 1930s (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2021), 153–200. John Strausbaugh notes that nineteenth-century minstrels reported that “when they toured the boondocks, the local Whites often mistook them for actual Black people … Of course, there were plenty of frontier towns where White people may never have seen a Negro, or at least were not in any way familiar with Negroes. I suppose it’s possible that some White moviegoers were similarly unaware that they were watching blackfaced Whites in Griffith’s evil-Negro roles, but they also must have been out in the boonies.” Strausbaugh, Black Like You, 213. Lynn Sacco, Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 2, 41, 119, 213; Rachel Devlin, Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 41; Michael T. Martin, “Introduction,” in Martin, The Birth of a Nation, 7. W. Stephen Bush, “The Birth of a Nation,” Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915, 1586; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Working in the ‘Kingdom of Culture,’” in Brundage, Beyond Blackface, 2. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black Author(s),” Representations, 24 (1988), 149–50; also see Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 189. Grace Elizabeth Hale provides a plethora of examples of advertising caricatures in Chapter 4 of Making Whiteness. Brundage, “Working,” 26; Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 214.

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67. Jackson, “The Celluloid War before The Birth,” 29, 32. For extensive examples, see also Gerald R. Butters, Jr., Black Manhood on the Silent Screen (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002) and Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (New York: Vintage, 2002). 68. Ben Urwand, “The Black Image on the White Screen: Representations of African Americans from the Origins of Cinema to The Birth of a Nation,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 1 (2018), 58. 69. Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 9; Riché Richardson and Jon Smith, Black Masculinity and the U. S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 36; Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: Free Press, 1983), 111. 70. Richmond Planet, February 9, 1909, quoted in Dan Streible, Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 204, 222. Streible (p. 208) also cites two instances of white mobs destroying black movie theatres in 1911 and 1914. 71. By 1915, 41 states and colonies prohibited interracial marriage. Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History, vol. 83, no. 1 (1996), 50; Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 87; Chang Moon Sohn, “Principle and Expediency in Judicial Review: Miscegenation Cases in the Supreme Court,” PhD Thesis, Columbia University, 1970, 16; Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation, 56; Al-Tony Gilmore, “Jack Johnson and White Women: The National Impact,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 58, no.1 (1973), 33. 72. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Congressional Record, July 19, 1912, 9305, quoted in Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation, 53. The Johnson-Jeffries fight had also provoked a wave of racist state and municipal laws prohibiting prizefight films and others “likely to create disorder, or excite racial prejudice.” Ellen C. Scott, “Black ‘Censor,’ White Liberties: Civil Rights and Illinois’s 1917 Film Law,” American Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 2 (2012), 221–22. In calling for Birth to be banned in New York, James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois cited the legal precedent established by the censorship of the 1910 Johnson-Jeffries fight pictures on the grounds that they would create “racial antagonism.” Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom, 144. 73. McEwan, The Birth of a Nation, 10. Cedric Robinson argues that the cycle of films featuring mulatto villains between 1915 and 1918 represented a campaign to degrade an increasingly assertive Black middle class: “their vocal opposition to lynching threatened an effective protection of the virtue of white women; their physical being threw into confusion the natural markings of racial difference; their professional achievements and

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74. 75.

76.

77.

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education contradicted the lore of white supremacy and the authority of the white upper class; and now their civil activism disrupted governance and the rules of social etiquette. [In] the mulatto genre … the Black elite became signified by the lustful, unstable mulatto.” Cedric J. Robinson, “The Black Middle Class and the Mulatto Motion Picture,” Race & Class, vol. 47, no. 1 (2005), 24–25. Mark Vance, “The Birth of a Nation,” Variety, March 12, 1915, 23. Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 26. McPherson borrowed the phrase “economy of visibility” from Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 3. Cited in Block v. Chicago (1909) 239 Ill. 251, 87 N.E. 101, quoted in Garth S. Jowett, “Moral Responsibility and Commercial Entertainment: Social Control in the United States Film Industry, 1907–1968,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 10, no. 1 (1990), 4. See also Kibler, Censoring Racial Ridicule, 116–46. “Chicago Courts Epoch-Making Decision,” Motography, June 19, 1915, 993. Nickieann Fleener-Marzec cites three other cases, in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Wichita, in which judges rejected attempts to censor the film on the grounds that it incited racial prejudice through its hostile stereotyping of Black people. Nickieann Fleener-Marzec, “D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: Controversy, Suppression and the First Amendment as It Applies to Filmic Expression, 1915-1973,” PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1977, 109-18. Kitty Kelly, “Emotion Rocked Crowd Watches Birth of Nation,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1915, quoted in Harris Ross, “D. W. Griffith v. City Hall: Politics, Ethnicity, and Chicago Film Censorship,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 100, no. 1 (2007), 27.

CHAPTER 4

The Birth of a Nation’s “Melodrama of Pathos and Action”: A Tale of “National Rebirth”? Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris

D. W. Griffith has often been credited as the father of “American Narrative Film” and, as Tom Gunning specifies, he was “instrumental in a transformation of how films told stories.”1 Rather than new techniques, Griffith brought about novel ways of organizing filmic narratives mostly told from a melodramatic perspective. He fashioned the main devices he used like parallel editing or close-ups into a specific grammar exclusively devoted to the heightened melodramatization of conflicts, thwarted love protagonists and threatening situations.

Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 99. A.-M. Paquet-Deyris (B) University of Paris Nanterre, Nanterre, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_4

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In his 1915 monumental melodrama The Birth of a Nation, Griffith was especially intent on re-orchestrating melodrama’s most efficient nineteenth-century tropes to foreground a new interpretation of national identity and unity. Thanks to what Peter Brooks calls the melodramatic imagination, he revitalized a genre—or possibly a mode—to reshape the history of the new nation while still ensuring a certain visibility of race. According to Linda Williams, melodrama operates as the nation’s vernacular discourse, “a major force of moral reasoning in American mass culture.”2 In fact, the very pliability of this widely-inclusive “mode”—for lack of a better term for “the amorphousness of melodrama”3 —allowed Griffith to reshape one of melodrama’s fundamental tropes, Black suffering in the “Tom” scenario.4 While turning upside down the threatened Black slave topos which originated in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), he kept relying heavily on the suffering white woman as central icon. Griffith’s staging of pathos hinges not so much on the Stowe motif of victimized Black people as on the central narrativization of the trials of several pairs of star-crossed white lovers. His form of pathos and reconstruction of the history of America is an utterly personal one for which he innovated almost as much as he recycled ancient forms of performance such as tableaux vivants. How then did Griffith stage the staple drama of victimization and vilification in the rich context of the Civil War to finally inscribe on screen the revisionist contours of a reunified (white) nation?

“Moving” Pictures In The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks defines melodrama as the locus where “characters [are placed] at the point of intersection of primal ethical forces” and where “intense, excessive representations of life […] strip the façade of manners to reveal the essential conflicts at work – moments of symbolic confrontation which fully articulate the terms of the drama.”5 In The Birth of a Nation, the intersections of love and politics and the polarization of belief systems and situations provide the very basis for dramatic choices. Even before the intertitles spell out Griffith’s white supremacist vision of history, the close-ups of the characters’ faces, their exaggerated poses or gestures and facial expressions or the intercutting

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between two or more parallel narrative arcs are no longer merely expository. They are meant to enhance raw emotion and to be strategies of engagement literally pulling the spectator into the action. In other words, to borrow from Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation, the showing mode (used in plays and films) and the participatory mode (in videogames) seem almost to combine into a series of highly emotional images aiming at eventually replacing history.6 The film’s numerous visual vignettes function more as pure moral abstractions than as insights into individualized characters’ motivations. Somehow the emotional register seems to take precedence over any other in the film. Even when the type of pathos attached to death on the Civil War battlefields is foregrounded, it is mediated through the viewpoint of one of the Stoneman or Cameron sons only to highlight the inhumanity of “pitting brothers against brothers” as Griffith underlines in an intertitle. The first vignettes of Elsie Stoneman, played by Lillian Gish, operate at first sight as simple static portrait shots already foreshadowing the way in which her defiant love for southerner Ben Cameron will collide with patriarchal authority. They prefigure what Marc Vernet calls the figure of “the forbidding father” obsessed with his own progressive political agenda, who is blind to the true needs and trials of his own relatives.7 Griffith capitalizes on the familiarity of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century spectator with tableaux vivants. Mary Chapman insightfully describes this celebrated nineteenth-century art form as employing “a visual discourse dependent on observation and interpretation of gestures, especially those of women” and whose “aesthetic and technical codes, like those of the cinema, reflect and constitute an ideology” and “are collectively rather than individually produced and shown.”8 While seizing as well on a single moment, the tableaux shots Griffith revels in similarly imply a whole narrative. He forcefully inscribes highly recognizable and codified (stereo)types on screen, the better to displace and distort them. His treatment of the central motif of the persecuted maiden is a good example of such manipulation. Elsie Stoneman, upon whom the power-hungry mulatto Silas Lynch (George Siegmann) will force his attentions, may not be a Southern woman, but the most striking parts of her story closely follow the Southern “endangered [white] woman” pattern. Most of the shots featuring her are meant to demonstrate innocence and inscribe virtue on screen thanks to a highly sentimental aesthetic. From the start, Lillian Gish is associated with gestures of devotion (she

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takes care of her sick father and later on of Ben Cameron when he is wounded in the war) and signs of purity (she plays with a white cat when at her Pennsylvania country house). In a simple system of correspondences, Griffith displays prominently the major qualities and characteristics of his characters by using animals as in armorial bearings. They demonstrate, for example, paternal benevolence for Dr. Cameron when he tickles two puppies at the beginning before a kitten is dropped into and starts disrupting the placid scene, thus allegorizing the notion that Black people and whites got along fine together until Northerners started meddling (Fig. 4.1). Most women in tableaux vivants, however, were constructed as silent and immobile. But Elsie Stoneman and Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh), the “Little Sister” from the Southern Cameron family, are inscribed as vibrantly alive and voicing opinions which are partly conveyed by the close shots and occasional intertitles. At this stage, pathos comes second

Fig. 4.1 Elsie and her emblematic white cat at the Stoneman Pennsylvania country house, a model of moral purity

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to action. While playing with “the Cult of True Womanhood fantasy”9 and controlling the spectacle of women captured in prescribed feminine roles, Griffith both foregrounds the male gaze observing and framing women and features the latter expressing themselves and becoming fundamental forces in the narrative. In this sense, the framing of white women in Birth of a Nation challenges the tableau vivant ’s sacralizing aesthetic and thwarts its process of turning women into mere allegorical figures. However, in a perverse way—because it never truly challenges the trope of True Womanhood—such a representation resists stasis. White women’s very resistance thus prevents them from becoming mere erotic emblems subjugated to the lust of the mulatto Silas Lynch and the Black soldier Gus (Walter Long), but it still has them fit into the pattern of “the exaggerated suffering of the white woman at the hands of the hypersexual black man.”10 The camera focuses on young Flora being assaulted by Gus in the forest and shouting defiantly before choosing to leap to her death and on Elsie gagged by a drunk and “delusional” Silas Lynch before she can escape. The respective framing of the two heroines illustrates the perfect “moving” scene. Martin Meisel calls it a “‘telling scene’—a narrative effect focusing on emotional and moral conjunctures and situations less through dramatic logic than through pictorial dramaturgy or composition” (Fig. 4.2).11 Twelve years before the advent of sound with The Jazz Singer in 1927, these shots foreground women fighting back and the shift from screaming in fright to shouting in defiance. Just like music, what these scenes convey “beyond the power of words,”12 is a slightly different status for white women who stop being mere victims as they literally and vocally express themselves, even if it means embracing death for Flora. In this instance, the “fundamentally expressionistic genre” derived from nineteenth-century pantomime is partly revisited.13 Beyond the mere insertion of pictorial effects as in the tableau, the shots bring to the fore a certain amount of female agency which still retains a quasi-universal significance. Having partly taken action into their own hands, the endangered white females are respectively avenged post-mortem in Flora’s case and rescued by the Ku Klux Klan in Elsie’s.

Engineering New Equations Griffith’s treatment of melodramatic configurations seems to fluctuate and paradoxically revert back to some earlier modes as time goes by. In

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Fig. 4.2 Elsie gagged by Silas Lynch

Broken Blossoms (1919) , whose other title is The Yellow Man and the Girl, Griffith also stages a young girl, Lucy, and her resistance to brutal male treatment. Four years after Birth of a Nation, the director paradoxically has not abandoned the “mode of high emotionalism” and the system of hyperbolic signs Peter Brooks sees as defining parameters in The Melodramatic Imagination.14 Lucy (Lillian Gish)’s tortured body does remain the locus of the non-verbal inscription of the drama of everyday life’s squalor (Fig. 4.3). In Broken Blossoms, Griffith once again recycles the female bondagerescue pattern to twist it even further and eventually discard it. Every action and gesture are literally made in excess of expression, and go beyond the inherited theatrical melodramatic pattern to—in the end— oddly signify nothing. The conventional triumph of virtue coming immediately after the moment of sudden awareness and Aristotelian anagnorisis (the point in Greek tragedy where the protagonist discovers the nature of his own predicament) of the central character no longer registers on

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Fig. 4.3 Broken Blossoms (1919): Lucy’s silenced voice and tortured body

screen in Griffith’s film of 1919. The concept of Darwinian survival of the fittest only applies to Lucy’s boxer father (Donald Crisp) as she herself ends up dying from exposure to his blows. In some further exaggeration of the melodramatic signs, her entire body, and not only her face, has become a way of inscribing in the flesh innocence’s fight against villainy. Griffith’s bold and direct manner of exposing the young girl’s frail and beaten-up body goes against the period’s more toned-down naturalist representational modes. Even nine years after The Birth of a Nation in Greed (1924), adapted from Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague, Erich Von Stroheim only briefly frames the bruised fingers of the heroine Trina as her husband McTeague tortures her. In Broken Blossoms, the twist is that the villain is now part of the family circle while the rescuer happens to be the foreigner, the Yellow Man (Richard Barthelmess). The main motif of the melodramatic narrative, virtue and innocence being threatened by outside forces, is turned

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upside down. Even so, the specter of miscegenation and fear of the Other still loom and rule out any potential development of a parallel love story between the Girl and the Yellow Man. However, despite the threat coming from within, the same mannerisms and close-ups of scared virgins coming in contact with the racial other as in The Birth of a Nation resurface in Broken Blossoms (Fig. 4.4). Contrary to Flora’s in the 1915 film, Lucy’s life and fight seem to amount to nothing, and neither does her Chinese rescuer’s. In this sense, Broken Blossoms is literally a silent drama impeding any illustration of Lucy’s voice and agency (Fig. 4.5). Its hyperbolic inscription of death curiously reverts back to the original intent of the tableau vivant which was to arrange in a compositional way a figure which consequently becomes an allegory. The point is to determine the nature of the allegory as in this highly unrealistic and pathetic tale, in which the relatively muted inscription of Virtue’s ultimate triumph in The

Fig. 4.4 Broken Blossoms: Pervasive fear of the racial Other

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Fig. 4.5 Broken Blossoms: Paroxystic pathos but no real action—Lucy’s death

Birth of a Nation is nowhere to be found. It seems that in Broken Blossoms Griffith’s own perspective is at its most ambiguous. The masculine rescue trope Linda Williams refers to in her illuminating chapter “AntiTom and The Birth of a Nation” doesn’t work here. The Asian savior ends up not saving the “Gish-like heroine in need of masculine rescue” whose independent voice could only be partly heard.15 Conversely, in the filmic narrative of Birth of a Nation, the director relies on the long tradition of the old search-and-rescue pattern exemplified by the first American bestselling captivity narrative, The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, published in 1682. This founding story focuses on the “restoration” to the Massachusetts Bay Colony of an English immigrant who was captured by Native Americans in 1675 and lived to tell the tale. But whereas Mary eventually gets close to understanding her abductors’ motivations and finds herself enjoying the Indians’ food and behaving like them so that the

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line between savagery and civilization becomes blurred, Griffith’s heroines are part of fundamentally different configurations. Griffith’s “truth” is of a somewhat imagistic nature, mainly in the sense that, as Michael Rogin convincingly explains in his article “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” he means to replace history by image.16 Melodrama’s forceful, often shocking image becomes highly serviceable, in the same way as the Africanist presence was “serviceable” in American literature, as Toni Morrison highlights in her seminal essay Playing in the Dark.17 The filmmaker’s dark figure—whether Black, Chinese or other—is being turned into an operative concept at the expense of the Black world and proves to be literally of service to the divided white community in the filmic narrative. Griffith’s Black characters and mulattoes embody the fears and desires of the white North and South, but their full inscription on screen highlights a new spatial-temporal distribution which reimagines a different America. As Michael Rogin suggests in his article, this imagined postCivil War and Reconstruction America is a new community in which the original rescue pattern still applies. In Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation, fragments of what Griffith used to call “runs-to-the-rescue […] to save a nation” allow him to focus more specifically on the plight of the white woman rather than on the fate of the Black woman and deliberately to shift sympathy from the suffering Black people to threatened whites in general. His treatment of the Black body on screen or of characters in Blackface interpreting Black or mulatto protagonists is also geared at generating empathy as a core element of the melodramatic system. For the sense of reunion and rebirth to reemerge, a transfer of compassion from one community to another had to take place along with a reconfiguration of the “white community” as coming together when confronted by the Black threat. The lyrical-epic dimension of the racialist movie mostly stems from the conviction that what Griffith calls “the real nation” actually started with the resurgence of the Klan. Encouraged by Southern-born President Woodrow Wilson who had by then published his own version of A History of the American People (1903), Griffith inscribed on screen new founding fathers as well as a new (cinematic) origin story. As related by a journalist from the New York American on February 28, 1915: Asked why he called his movie The Birth of a Nation Griffith replied,

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“Because it is … The Civil War was fought fifty years ago. But the real nation has only existed in the last fifteen or twenty years. … The birth of a nation began … with the Ku Klux Klan, and we have shown that.”18

Commenting on this statement, Michael Rogin observed that Griffith appeared to be following Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Dixon and claiming that the Klan reunited America. But the Klan of Wilson’s History and of Griffith’s movie flourished and died in the late 1860s. Griffith’s “real nation,” as he labeled it in 1915, “only existed in the last fifteen or twenty years.” Dixon traced a line from the Klan to twentieth-century progressivism and Griffith may seem to be endorsing that view. But the floating “it” of Griffith’s response made claims beyond those of Wilson and Dixon. “It” located the birth of the nation not in political events but in the movie. The “it” that gave birth to the nation, in Griffiths’ syntax, was The Birth of a Nation itself. Let us understand, in turn, each of these three linked attributions of national paternity to the historic Klan, to progressivism and to the moving picture.19

The Ku Klux Klan brought to the fore a novel conception of the national community and unity, and the film itself became the prime vehicle, almost in the sense of an archival manifesto, of this new national compact. The notions of composition and compositional arrangement hence forcefully resurface in the second part of the movie. In order for this fictive historical and aesthetic rearrangement and realignment to happen, Griffith needed not only to visually incarnate the Black threat in the villain’s Black body, but also to extend such a threat to the landscape and the domestic sphere alike. Most of the second part of the movie hinges round the dual visual and formal inscription of the all-pervasive evil Black intruder disrupting the young white heroes’ love stories.

Theatrical Reunions Referring to Michael Rogin’s analysis, Linda Williams interprets the lifesaving Klan ride at the end “as the effect of a new spatial-temporal organization made possible by the dynamization of cinematic editing” which reverses the devastating impact of the war on the South.20 In the film, the need for a pharmakos (the sacrifice of someone who was already often condemned to death in Ancient Greece as a symbolic atonement for a city or other community) is the first step in the general rite of

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white communal purification. For most white characters, however, it is to be understood less as an “atonement” than in the sense of the radical and systematic purging of unwanted elements. For the melodramatic grid to be fully efficient and to implement some form of reconciliation between the (white) North and South, Griffith needed visually to isolate and alternate shots of the serviceable figure of the Black scapegoats with photograms of the virtuous whites. Above all, his scenes and intercut sequences needed to be accepted as historical vignettes presenting a strictly authentic a fundamentally revisionist history of America. Paradoxically, the individuals’ harrowing everyday Reconstruction experiences in the second part of the filmic narrative do not take center stage in the melodramatic grid. What does is the staging of Flora’s attempted rape and subsequent death and Elsie’s abduction. So how do Griffith’s visual style and filmic grammar further generalize the use of the sacrificial antagonist through a system of highly legible signs the better to erase him or her from the frame? One of the first devices he uses is the allegorical treatment of the chromatic range which literalizes Evil and the Black man’s incursion into white territory. In the line of the “Southern grotesque” aesthetic, the camera forcefully inscribes the physical and/or moral deformity of the “villains” involved. Because of his physical impediment, the progressive Northern politician Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) is also captured on screen as a dysfunctional element in the white community. As he tries to impose equal treatment in the South, he is visually associated with the greedy biracial politician Silas Lynch, his mulatta housekeeper and lover Lydia (Mary Alden), and eventually with the Black soldier Gus, who lusts for a white woman. All are literal and figurative illustrations that “[t]he bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion” as the film’s first intertitle underlines. While all three are framed as emblematic antagonists whose devouring passions quickly resurface and impair any form of moral judgment, the politician is captured as the fallen idealist whose redemption becomes possible because of his strong love for his daughter and country. In the best melodramatic tradition, his physical impairment singles him out as different and Griffith emblematizes his baldness and clubfoot early on to signal his flawed dimension as a white heroic political figure. Stoneman is somehow guilty by association and the director intercuts the filmic narrative with shots of Lydia’s rage as she is spurned by Senator Charles Sumner (Sam de Grasse), one of Stoneman’s colleagues, and starts tearing at her own clothes (Fig. 4.6).

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Fig. 4.6 Stoneman’s Wig: The true nature of the “Freak”

The visual inscription of this collection of misfits echoes Flannery O’Connor’s later comment on the freak’s special status in “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”: “In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”21 The statement could apply to Griffith’s filmic treatment of Stoneman as a misplaced member of the white community. The short scene in which Silas Lynch manhandles Austin Stoneman, who tries to prevent him from marrying his daughter, materializes the film’s major moment of anagnorisis. Stoneman is finally disabused of his illusions and made to face his mulatto protégé’s essentialist violence (Fig. 4.7). What this shot captures is indeed the white politician’s dis- or rather mis-placement. It heralds as well his violent reintegration into his “rightful” community and the Klan’s intervention. The shot is one of the last materializing such dangerous physical proximity between Black and white bodies in the film. As Rogin also insightfully demonstrates, it announces

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Fig. 4.7 Lynch manhandling his former mentor

at the wider level of the overall narrative the final restoration of the integrity of the entire white community to a unified state: [In] the first shot after the intermission, the title “The agony which the South endured that a nation might be born,” was taken not from [Woodrow] Wilson’s History but from Dixon’s fiction. … Griffith’s Klan gave birth to a united nation. … When the southern race problem became national, the national problem was displaced back onto the South in a way that made the South not a defeated part of the American past but a prophecy of its future. Dixon, Wilson, and Griffith thereby reclaimed southern loyalties they had left behind in their quests for new personal, national identities. … Wilson saw that regenerate national identity in Griffith’s Klan. Its visionary brotherhood melded diverse individuals into a purposeful union.22

From this point of view, the Klan’s final ride literally operates as a journey of recovery, a process of restoration which erases from the frame

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any trace of the antagonistic forces causing havoc in the civilized ranks of white society. Griffith consistently features his fantasized Black figures on colliding courses with white characters to demonstrate their very incompatibility. The perfect example of such incompatibility is probably his treatment of the Black soldier Gus. To highlight the Southerners’ search for Gus after Flora’s death, he uses parallel editing at its most melodramatically effective. During the infamous failed search–and-rescue sequence, he literally frames his character as an integral part of the Wilderness (Fig. 4.8). Such interweaving of textured images—the Black body fusing with the surrounding vegetable kingdom—becomes one of Griffith’s signature techniques to amplify emotion. By melting into the dark and wild surroundings, Gus emblematizes Evil and becomes an unsettling, diffuse and threatening presence (Fig. 4.9). The only way to get rid of the Black peril, Griffith’s film suggests, is to reformat the system of representation of the Black body on screen so

Fig. 4.8 The black soldier framed as an integral part of the wilderness when stalking Flora Cameron

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Fig. 4.9 The visual trope of the dying maiden: The southern family/nation struck once again

that the viewer may come to wish for its suppression and that it can be fully and safely removed from the frame. The visual trope of the dying maiden affecting the southern family/nation can only be erased by the total obliteration of the perpetrator’s Black body. Griffith uses the cinematic matrix of the attempted rape to emphasize the necessity of such a removal. Bypassing the literally unspeakable horror of lynching, the inscription of Gus’s dead body at the end of the sequence comes to justify torture by mediating it through melodramatic distance and stylization, hence rendering it more operational. Gus is literally expendable, a discarded worthless body delivered to Lynch’s doorstep as a signal that the paradoxically Invisible Empire is gathering power. With The Birth of a Nation, the cliché of the Black rapist is instrumentalized in such a way that it becomes one of the most serviceable and recurring vignettes of the race melodrama. But the insidious threat runs rampant. Within the boundaries of the filmic narrative, virtually the

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same story starts unfolding again toward the end, exposing a slightly different kind of Black body. Lynch the mulatto chases Elsie Stoneman not outdoors but indoors. He penetrates the white domestic sphere with the surreptitious intent of enacting once again the greatest taboo in the history of American race relations. He therefore also has to be forcefully removed for both incarnating and threatening to reproduce miscegenation (Fig. 4.10). In this last instance, the search-and-rescue is depicted as widely successful. Elsie partly frees herself from her restraining devices but is also for the most part rescued and reclaimed by the sweeping army of Klan riders which eventually purges the Black presence from the screen. Staging the white-sheeted figures as the arch-rescuers according to melodrama’s codes effects the final hyperbolic reunion Griffith was so keen on capturing. The domestic space and consequently its white women as well are reclaimed by the hooded warriors. These paradoxical “freedom riders” eventually come to represent the entire white community breaking

Fig. 4.10 Lynch secreting away his unconscious prey

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free from the abusive Black rule in some idealized and highly fictional America. The final ride-to-the-rescue and tableau shots of the happy married couples and of the “City of Peace” fully allegorize the (cinematic) birth of a new stronger, purer, more harmonious (white) nation. The ride-and-rescue pattern will later become a staple of the western movie, another quintessentially American genre which also tells of the construction of the American nation. Already present in Griffith’s melodramatic structures, such a pattern boldly reimagines and charts the possibility of a different America. It brings to a powerful conclusion this highly fantasmatic and revisionist exploration of sexual politics and racial and social justice as the white girl is finally saved, and so is the new white unified nation turned in its entirety into “a locus of virtue.”23 The structure Griffith adapted for the screen resurfaces time and time again in other tales of nation-building. In these movies, however, national identity is forged from within but also imposed on the racial “Other,” represented as having been assimilated with varying success. John Ford’s early western The Iron Horse (1924), for instance, while recycling quite a few melodramatic tropes such as the child’s distress when witnessing his father being scalped by a band of Indians, tells a tale of violent rejection and submission of the Other which is in keeping with Griffith’s earlier representational strategies. Even if it inscribes on screen the actual birth rather than the rebirth of a nation, it inherits Griffith’s melodramatic treatment of the fight for a predominantly white, unified identity. To a certain extent then, it seems that D. W. Griffith’s melodramatic framework has paved the way for the classic western’s articulation of such an unequivocal national identity in westerns like Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) or They Died with Their Boots On (Raoul Walsh, 1941). That framework also heralds the heyday of American melodramas in the 1950s—films which focus precisely on new arrangements within the patriarchal society’s ideal order. In contrast, an opposing movement to Griffith’s use of melodrama, the one-reelers of the American branch of the French Film studio Pathé, which fiercely resisted this assimilationist framework, proved short-lived. These films left room for different representational modes of another racial group to register on screen, as in the two movies contemporaneous with Griffith’s own shorter films: The Arrow of Defiance by Native American director James Young Deer (1912) and When the Blood Calls directed by Frank Montgomery (1913). In the first of these, the inhabitants of the Indian camp and their customs are widely documented. In the

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second, the predicament of an orphaned boy torn between his Caucasian origins and his upbringing in a loving Indian family is carefully chronicled in the most effective melodramatic way as he cannot let a white girl be tortured. Hence two parallel perspectives on the nation-building process were competing and shaping the grand national narrative in the 1910s and early 1920s until the second, more inclusive and documentary-like trend started dying out, making room for the long-lasting racialist stereotypes of the savage, unruly Other of the classic western or melodrama itself until the early 1950s. Consequently, the melodramatic codes and conventions of Griffith’s tale of national rebirth were to remain vividly imprinted in the American imagination for decades. His iconoclastic approach to both inventive cinematic narrative techniques and a highly revisionist, fantasized view of American history fostered a new melodramatic film language which was to remodel the prevalent inscription of national cohesion and supersede other contending stories for decades to come. His use of melodrama’s discourse on morality and social order somehow eclipsed the underlying, more troubling issue of race in his movies, first and foremost in The Birth of a Nation. By narrativizing the supposed suffering of white women, men and pairs of lovers, he simply inverted and erased the trope of suffering Black people first initiated by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Pathos then became synonymous with the white woman under siege rather than the suffering Black slave. It characterized the white body in distress rather than the threatened racial Other’s, so that the director’s forceful melodramatic topoï would inform the filmic narratives of many American movies until the relative change of paradigm of the 1950s with films like Broken Arrow (Delmer Daves, 1950) or Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959).

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Notes 1. Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 6. 2. Williams, Playing the Race Card, xv. 3. Christine Gledhill in Dominique Nasta et al., eds., Le Mélodrame filmique revisité/Revisiting Film Melodrama (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014), 19. 4. See Leslie Fiedler, The Inadvertent Epic (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979) and What Was Literature: Class Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 5. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), ix, 3. 6. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006). 7. Marc Vernet in Nasta et al., eds., Le Mélodrame filmique revisité/Revisiting Film Melodrama, 80: “the image of the forbidding, overly strict father who neglects blood ties and the feelings they generate” (my translation). 8. Mary Chapman, “Living Pictures: Women and Tableaux Vivants in Nineteenth–century American Fiction and Culture,” Wide Angle, vol. 18, no. 3 (1996), 26. 9. Ibid., 30. 10. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 111. 11. Martin Meisel quoted by Tom Paulus in “The Melodramatic Moment as Allegory in Griffith’s Biograph Films,” in Le Mélodrame filmique revisité/Revisiting Film Melodrama, eds. Nasta et al., 114. 12. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 76. 13. Paulus in Nasta et al., eds., Le Mélodrame filmique revisité/Revisiting Film Melodrama, 115. 14. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 12. 15. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 134. 16. Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Representations, no. 9 (Winter 1985), 150–95. 17. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 18. Harry M. Geduld, Focus on D. W. Griffith (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 28. 19. Michael Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” 151–52.

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20. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 113. 21. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 45. 22. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” 152–54. 23. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 117.

CHAPTER 5

The Battle of Petersburg: Griffith’s “Big Scenes” David Mayer

In the autumn of 2014, the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies called a conference seeking responses from current scholars to the approaching centenary of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.1 There Dr. Michael Hammond, in a keynote address, reported the awed hyperbolic response of the British press to the film’s battle episodes, most specifically the film’s rendering of the Battle of Petersburg on April 2, 1865. That battle is, undeniably, a grand spectacle and visibly a mammoth undertaking for any filmmaker with its overhead views which enact and illustrate the scale of fighting and the maneuvering strategies of both opponents, then cutting back and forth to on-the-ground shots of close fighting, casualties, and acts of bravery. Achieving this breadth, many of these shots draw upon a cast of both recognizable actors and several hundred anonymous supernumeraries, the latter in the role of Union and Confederate soldiers involved in the conflict.

D. Mayer (B) University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_5

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My purpose here is not to contradict Dr. Hammond nor the British press but to insist that this spectacular battle was not as novel as film critics assumed: Griffith had already encountered large-scale events whilst witnessing other dramatists’ previous stage spectacles and, by 1914, had already proven that he possessed the ambition and capacity to introduce comparable spectacle into his own films. His awareness may have begun as early as his childhood, but most certainly constituted a significant part of his introduction to the live stage as an adolescent theater-goer in Louisville, Kentucky. He repeatedly encountered large spectacle scenes on the American touring stage when—between 1896 and 1906—he had been a journeyman actor. And, again, big scenes are prominent in each of the two plays he wrote in the period immediately before he entered the film business, and yet again from his own efforts as a filmmaker at Biograph where, between 1909 and 1912, he directed a full dozen films set against or within the American Civil War, as well as his proto- “Western” The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913) and the Deuterocanonical epic Judith of Bethulia (1914). Thus, in terms of Griffith’s many experiences of theatrical spectacle and in terms of his prior film work, the battle of Petersburg is neither that remarkable nor unique. What I am arguing here is that Griffith was reared in a theatrical culture in which large-scale productions—mammoth casts with well-rehearsed supernumeraries or “extras”, extravagant stage settings, and sensational stage effects—were the norm, not in any sense anomalies. He was to respond throughout his 45-year professional career as actor and film-maker with more of the same. Griffith’s deft handling of big scenes draws upon an earlier event which had a significant impact on theatrical practice, leading in particular to the skilled management of large theatrical and, in time, larger film casts.2 Although the event and its outcomes are known to theater historians, film scholars are less aware, so it may be useful to repeat some of the salient outcomes. Griffith’s confidence in staging scenes with numerous supernumeraries emerged from a single event at which he was not present. In the summer of 1881, London’s Drury Lane Theatre was occupied by the private theatrical company of George, the Duke of Saxe Meiningen. The company’s reception was mixed, but what entranced audiences was Meiningen’s skilled handling of crowd scenes. Meiningen’s supers reacted on what appeared to be their own initiative to the actions they were witnessing. Their responses appeared unique to each super, their facial expressions and gestures neither alike nor apparently rehearsed.

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Prior to Meiningen’s productions, any stage manager needing extras for a crowd scene visited the nearest public house or saloon, recruiting those sober enough to walk on stage, hastily clothed them in some coarse approximation of the costumes required and, with only minimal rehearsal, put them onstage. For their brief moments on stage such “supers” received a shilling or a quarter-dollar. Costumes did little to disguise the supers’ unfitness for the stage. Whether outfitted as courtiers or aristocrats, soldiers or townspeople, supers were readily identified by their dirty fingernails, their bewilderment, their tendency to gaze out into the audience, and their uniform gestures in response to a leading actor’s rhetoric. The Duke’s principles, explained through interpreters, appear simple and logical and altogether in keeping with increasing demands for pictorial realism. Meiningen explained: the super was never to become a fully-fledged dramatic character but an anonymous individual who, for one reason or another, was caught up in the dramatic action. Wellcostumed supers individually responded to events onstage. In groups or in crowds, supers moved in a lifelike, individualistic manner. Nor did they all move at once, but moved about the stage—again, apparently individually or fluidly—in small groups, adding to the narrative by forming and renewing striking stage patterns.3 Saxe Meiningen offered an explanation of the principles and practices he employed in working with supers, all of which emphasize his expectation that the super was to be treated both as a functional element of design and as a living element whose participation in public scenes added excitement and verisimilitude to the narrative. Meiningen absolutely forbade supers gathering in straight lines. His aesthetic and pragmatic practices included preventing supers from lining-up parallel to the stage front (in cinema the frame line), instead maintaining irregular diagonals. He broke his supers into small groups, the supers differentiated from one another by height and appearance, each stage group covertly led by an experienced actor—a full-time member of the Meiningen Players— who guided the supers in his or her group and who made his or her responses to the principal actors (if that was called for) and who elicited and controlled responses from the supers under his or her supervision. Always seeking individual difference, Meiningen was at pains to forestall postural congruence—no two supers taking the same pose. Meiningen’s London performances were seen by numerous theater people, notably actor-managers who drew immediate lessons from what they had

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observed. The most immediate effect on the profession was to create in English and American theater companies a theatrical position that became known as the “Super Master” or “Groupings Manager,” in effect a stage manager whose job was to organize and—apart and aside from the main company—rehearse the supers, or, if the company toured, to arrive at a tour venue a full week (or more) ahead of the main company and there recruit, costume and rehearse the supers for the company’s arrival.4 Wilson Barrett’s staging of George R. Sims’ The Lights o’ London at the Princess’s Theatre in September 1881 offered two post-Meiningen— and Griffith-related—instances of skillful use of supers. One of these was a scene set in the “Boro[ough]’” [of Southwark] near the “New Cut,” just beyond the Old Vic Theatre, where, on a lively Saturday night, dozens of hawkers and passers-by created a carnival-like environment for the pursuit and apprehension of the play’s criminal villain. The second was set outside a London workhouse, as the fugitive hero and heroine face a decision about whether to seek shelter. There was little in the way of setting. The workhouse was indicated by a shadowy wall and doorway, and—following Sims’ instructions—supers and a few actors queued up to realize Sir Luke Fildes’ painting Applicants to a Casual Ward. As a footnote to The Lights o’ London, D. W. Griffith, in his unsuccessful career as an actor, briefly toured in this play in 1898 and had appeared in the Boro and workhouse scenes, as “Philosopher Jack,” arguing with the workhouse warden and, later, selling baked potatoes and ice creams from a pushcart. Then, in 1909, in his Biograph film A Corner in Wheat , Griffith parodied Fildes’ Applicants to a Casual Ward, retaining the grouping and again using extras, but making the applicants a frozen queue of starving people (supers) waiting in a bakery for the chance to buy a loaf of bread. Griffith’s experience of stage spectacles featuring large casts began in his childhood. Although it is altogether unlikely that, as an eleven year-old newly arrived in Louisville, he witnessed Imre Kiralfy and John Rettig’s The Fall of Babylon staged in Cincinnati, the whole of the Ohio River Valley, Louisville included, was plastered with giant posters advertising this event, and these posters, it appears, left enough of a memory for him to use Babylon’s ramparts, first for the walls of Bethulia and, later, in Intolerance (1916) for Babylon itself. Six or seven years later, as Griffith, grown to an adolescent playgoer, began his experience of Louisville theaters, it is probable that he watched pyrodramas—fireworks plays—staged in the summer months in Louisville’s Cherokee Park by James Pain’s firework company. The

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Fig. 5.1 Play poster for Cap’t Herne U.S.A. (Private Collection USA)

pyrodrama was a major, enduring form of Victorian live entertainment performed on a large outdoor stage separated from audiences by a lagoon which reflected the spectacle whilst keeping smoke from hundreds of exploded fireworks from reaching the spectators. There, in Cherokee Park, such dramas as The Last Days of Pompeii, The Fall of Sevastopol and The Siege of Moscow were performed by small travelling casts—a handful of principal actors—supplemented by anywhere between 100 and 300 supers cast locally. Louisville supers were schooled in fleeing from volcanic lava flows, fire, collapsing buildings, and cannon fire (Fig. 5.1). However, more germane to Griffith’s later staging of battle scenes in Biograph’s Civil War film The Battle (1911) and The Battle at Elderbush Gulch was a melodrama, Captain Herne U.S.A., that played for a full week at Louisville’s Amphitheatre Auditorium between October 3 and 8, 1892. Griffith, at the height of his Louisville theater-going, was 17 at the time. Few critics had a good word to say about Margaret Barrett Smith’s play. Typical was the New York Times, which described Captain Herne as a “bald and unblushing melodrama … the dramatic laws of sequence and coherency guilelessly ignored. The personages are puppets, without

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reason or conscience.”5 But Smith’s bald unblushing Civil War melodrama successfully toured the American states from 1892 until 1904, and, significantly for Griffith, depicted a southern planter who fought on the Union side and led the winning troops at the Battle of Vicksburg. It is Herne, rather than General Ulysses Grant, who storms the fortifications and takes the city. Indeed, it was the staging of this battle with a cast that regularly picked up a minimum of 75 supers as it toured that may have been instrumental in demonstrating to Griffith that stage battles could be choreographed, appear true to life and to history, and make drama out of the chaos of war.6 In the late spring of 1898, Griffith, now in the early years of his career as a professional actor, was in Chicago. Along with several other members of Louisville’s Meffert Players he had been recruited by the actor-manager Oscar Eagle to a branch of the James Neill Stock Company for a three-week engagement at the Alhambra Theatre. Located in Chicago’s South Loop district, the Alhambra was a venue known for hosting transient companies who sometimes performed for a single night. The Neill Company fared somewhat better. Whilst at the Alhambra, the company performed a three-play repertoire, one of which was Eugene Corman and Adolphe D’Ennery’s The Two Orphans , most likely in the Kate-Claxton adaptation, a drama which invariably requires a large cast of spoken roles and either much doubling or the employment of perhaps two-dozen supers.7 Performing most nights, the visit gave Griffith the daytime hours to take in the city’s other theatrical events. Eagle had an ulterior motive for his Chicago venture. Concurrent with his work with the Neill Company, he was preparing to direct a production of Lincoln Carter’s Civil War drama Chattanooga (in which he also had an acting role) at the Columbia Theater located at the junction of Dearborn and Monroe Streets. Chattanooga, calling on a cast of seven speaking roles and 100 supers, is remembered for a “hybrid” effect in its climactic episode as Union raiders seize the South’s railway supply line, capture the South’s locomotive, and fight off attackers whilst aboard a speeding engine. The stage locomotive, viewed from the rear, appeared to race through a filmed moving landscape projected on screens at either side of the receding engine.8 Whilst it is likely that Griffith was fully aware of Eagle’s intentions, the play rehearsed and opened after the Neill Company disbanded. What theatrical productions Griffith witnessed when not acting nor attending Eagle’s rehearsals is conjectural, but Shenandoah, a spectacular

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restaging of Bronson Howard’s 1889 melodrama, was virtually impossible to overlook and offered matinee performances. A mere block away at the McVickers Theater, on Madison, just west of State Street, was Jacob Litt’s overwhelmingly enriched production of Howard’s Civil War drama which had arrived in mid-May. Initially a failure when first staged, Charles Frohman revived the play in 1894 and began the process of transforming Howard’s drama, with its brief skirmishes and a single actclosing episode of combat, into a major spectacle. Six years later, with the Spanish-American War making audiences ready to witness a war drama, impresario Litt acquired the rights from Frohman and, billing his new enlarged production as The Greater Shenandoah, began a national tour that, with occasional gaps, was to last into the twentieth century. Reviews indicate the transformation of Howard’s drama, with its brief skirmishes and a single act-closing episode of combat, into a major spectacle: The new “Shenandoah” has forty horses and over three hundred soldiers in its war incidents. The Academy of Music has a vast stage and every nook and corner of it is utilized in this big production. Bronson Howard’s charming love story remains unchanged, but its background of tumultuous scenes in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley, culminating with the arrival of General Sheridan from Winchester in time to rally his retreating army and lead them back to victory has been clothed with the magnitude, vividness and thrilling realism of the original historic events. The retreat and rally are exciting pictures. Four horse teams dash across the stage dragging cannon, a troop of cavalry gallop at the heels of Sheridan, heavy guns belch fire from the hills, all the troops mingle in a furious assault, and the terrible realities of war are so faithfully presented that the audience is wrought up to the wildest heights of enthusiasm. It is highly probable that this Sheridan’s ride scene represents all that it is possible to do in the way of tremendous stage effects.9 Certainly realism can go no further. "Shenandoah" has created a positive furor.10

By the time The Greater Shenandoah, now with Otis Skinner and Mary Hampton in the leading romantic roles, reached Chicago to occupy the somewhat less commodious McVickers stage, Litt was advertising a mere “200 People and 50 Horses” but promising the spectacles of “ARTILLERY, INFANTRY, CAVALRY”, the latter augmented by “25 ROOSEVELT ROUGH RIDERS, heroes of El Caney and San Juan.” Further publicizing the play, the theater’s ushers were costumed as Union and Confederate soldiers, and a brass cannon with its cannoneer crews and

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armed sentinels stood on the pavement outside the theater entrance.11 As further testimony to the spectacle within, Litt’s ads carried warm endorsements from Civil War generals/heroes William Tecumseh Sherman and Nelson Miles, both men testifying to the drama’s authenticity. From this point Griffith began a full-time association with the American theater that was to last for nine years. In that period he appeared as an actor in a considerable number of legitimate theater and vaudeville dramas. His role in The Lights o’ London was only one such instance. But not only did he appear in numerous plays, the companies in which he acted also crossed touring routes with other theater companies and, as was customary for touring actors to be recognized as a fellow-professional by the smears of makeup on the collar, Griffith was admitted to adjacent theaters and viewed their plays from the back of the stalls. We do not know all the dramas that Griffith watched during those years, but we do know that he twice crossed paths with the Sir Henry Irving-Lyceum Company’s 1899–1900 North American tour and is likely to have viewed Irving’s Robespierre. I cite Robespierre because there is ample evidence that Irving’s company made use of large numbers of supers along its route, although the actual number of supers used in any performance is unclear. Visual evidence of numerous extras in a single scene exists in a photograph made by Joseph Byron to be placed on easels outside the theaters where Irving’s Lyceum Company performed.12 It shows Irving in the drama’s final moments as Robespierre appears before the accusatory revolutionary tribunal. Visible in the foreground are Ellen Terry and Henry Irving and three other identifiable actors, whilst further upstage, arranged in tiers, are 73 anonymous extras strenuously gesticulating. Dr. Jean Chothia, citing Ellen Terry’s personal diary of the North American tour, offers evidence that Griffith might have seen still more supers elsewhere deployed in Robespierre’s spectacle-scenes: Terry, who hated her underwritten, maternal role, wrote succinctly, “He’s afloat again. It is a bad play but a wonderfully showy one. Much variety in scene, no development of character. A one-man piece. Henry and 250 supers.” … Reviews make it clear that more than sympathy [for the recent loss by fire of the Lyceum Theater’s scenic stores] powered the success. Those “250 supers” or supernumerary performers, their “lifelike deportment” and the “absolutely perfect” management of them were germane. The magnificent Act II pageant of the Fete of the Supreme Being, complete with huge Statue of Liberty and golden incense burning

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tripod, was much praised, but it was the final scene, V, ii, … in which Robespierre faced a riotously hostile Convention which made the real impact.13

It was not only Irving. The 1890s and the years up to about 1918 were a period for large-scale stage productions. In 1889, Charles and Daniel Frohman began importing to New York what were known as “autumn dramas,” up-market big-cast melodramas from London’s Drury Lane Theatre. These autumn dramas, conspicuously successful, toured America’s larger cities and were famous for their “sensation scenes,” i.e. “big scenes” which, with highly elaborate mechanical and scenic ingenuity, featured train wrecks, the collision and sinking of ships, an undersea battle between divers seeking treasure from a wrecked yacht, balloon and airship flights and hijackings, naval reviews, durbars, earthquakes, exploding ships, avalanches, fox hunts, boxing in a packed stadium, and numerous horse races—and all of these spectacles peopled by numerous appropriately costumed and well-rehearsed supers. Aware that moving pictures had developed to the point that they might reproduce autumn dramas, Broadway producers Lee, Jacob, and Sam Shubert formed Paragon Pictures and engaged Maurice Tourneur to direct them. Paragon produced Sporting Life, The White Heather, The Whip, and— later—The Two Orphans , Tourneur’s take on Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm. Those familiar with Tourneur’s The Whip, with its fox hunt, society ball, train wreck, and culminating horse race at Saratoga have had a brief taste of these imports translated into film. Griffith, of course, was aware of these plays. The first sign that Griffith had been influenced by these large cast, big scenic effect dramas is visible in A Fool and a Girl , the play he wrote in 1906–7 and that the normally penny-pinching management Klaw and Erlanger staged without blanching at his demands.14 A Fool and a Girl is ambitious in its call for elaborate stage settings and excessive in its cast requirements. At its core, it is the tale of a naïve and sexually innocent southern youth who attracts the predations of a group of con-artists and floozies and is roundly fleeced before he denounces them but then loses the girl he has grown to love despite her calculating ways. But, mindful that size mattered, Griffith decorated his script with a full saloon jazz band and singers and, some acts later, as the innocent and the girl go hop-picking on California’s Russian River, the pickers are entertained by singing Mexicans, guitars, and a second chorus of Digger Indians. It was

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not a cheap cast but was tolerated until the deficiencies of Griffith’s drama became evident to the very small audiences who paid their admissions, but then fled the theater, repelled by the coarseness of Griffith’s slangy dialogue. Undaunted by failure and drawing on a 20-minute vaudeville sketch that he had written four years earlier, Griffith wrote a second stage play, War, which was never performed but for the first time reveals Griffith’s sense of epic scale.15 Set in the years preceding, during, and following the American War of Independence, War chronicles the military and romantic adventures of an indentured British bondman who has hoped to work off his debt and begin afresh in the New England colonies. Zelig or Forrest Gump-like in his ability to be present at major events and crises of the Revolution (Griffith drawing for his episodes and scenic detail on classic-but-kitch American paintings), the unnamed bondman serves as a courier in the Continental army, a role which enables him to appear, first, at the secession of the colonies from Great Britain, later suffering with Washington and soldiers of the Continental Congress the harsh winter at Valley Forge, then accompanying George Washington leading his forces across the Delaware River, followed by his Christmas attack on Trenton (which interrupts a musical pantomime satirizing the American forces) and, finally, the celebrations of American independence. Griffith specifies more than 30 named male roles and about a half dozen female parts and requires several dozen supers to represent both Continental and British troops and colonists of all persuasions. Late in his silent career Griffith was to take elements from this play and recycle them in his 1924 film America. So, this is the back-story, and we have seen the consequences emerging in the dozen Biograph Civil War films that ramp up production costs in hired weaponry, uniforms,16 and extras, notably the two His Trust films (1910) that rely on numerous black supers seen celebrating the Colonel’s departure for war, The Battle (1911) and Swords and Hearts (1911) with extras playing soldiers and guerilla marauders, Home Sweet Home (1914) with its obvious expenditure on horses and riders, The Battle at Elderbush Gulch already taxing Biograph’s patience as Griffith repeatedly strained his allocated production budgets, and Judith of Bethulia with its vast armies in pitched battles the final straw. So The Birth of a Nation’ s Battle of Petersburg and ride of the Klansmen do not emerge from a vacuum or in a sudden stroke of lightning but from established theatrical precedent and continuing theater and

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film practice. And we should also accept that Griffith’s big scenes do not end here. Ahead lie Intolerance and Orphans of the Storm (1921) which, if Griffith’s promotional leaflets can be believed, used 1,200 extras in the episode in which Lillian Gish, as Henriette, is rescued from the guillotine. Nothing I have said detracts from my admiration and downright awe at The Birth of a Nation’s Battle of Petersburg, an astounding unbroken sequence of 130 separate shots and intertitles, shots of close combat, high-angle views that reveal tactics, intimate depictions of loss and death. To achieve this sequence, Griffith will have called on his great talent and accumulated technique. But he also would have drawn upon approximately four decades of theater practice that gave him permission and encouragement to aim for and to achieve his big, big scenes.

Notes 1. “Art, Culture and Ethics in Black and White: 100 Years of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” November 28, 2014. 2. David Mayer, “Supernumeraries: Decorating the Late-Victorian Stage with Lots (& Lots & Lots) of Live Bodies,” in Ruskin, the Theatre, and Victorian Visual Culture, eds. Anselm Heinrich, Katre Newey, Jeffrey Richards (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 154–68. 3. George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, “The Actor in the Ensemble,” trans. Helen Burlin in Actors on Acting: Theories, Techniques, and Practices of the World’s Great Actors, Told in Their Own Words, eds. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (New York: Crown Publishers, 1949), 264–67. 4. It became customary that plays requiring numerous supers were performed at the beginning of a touring company’s engagement so that the Supermaster and the supers’ costumes could then depart for the next theatre on the company’s schedule, the Supermaster to work with his new supers, and the supers’ costumes to be cleaned (almost unimaginable!) and mended. 5. New York Times, January 10, 1893. 6. An illustrated advertisement depicting the storming of Vicksburg published in the Amusements section of the Los Angeles Herald, June 2, 1895, states “100 people on the stage.” 7. New York Dramatic Mirror, May 21, 1898. 8. Gwendolyn Waltz, “‘Half Real-Half Reel’ Alternation Format Stage and Screen Hybrids,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, eds. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac and Santiago Hidalgo (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012), 364–65. 9. The sort of battlefield realism Griffith encountered is indicated by this description, published a year earlier, of a stage effect:

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BATTLE SCENES

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

Battle scenes are particularly effective upon the stage when they are well produced, and in the midst of a desperate battle a shell is seen to fall and burst, carrying death and destruction in its wake. Our engraving shows the method of obtaining this result. A papier maché shell is formed of separate pieces glued together. This contains the quantity of powder sufficient to separate the pieces and produce the bursting. In the powder there is an electric primer which is ignited by a current. The primer is connected by wires which go back of the scene. At one of the sides of the stage, out of sight of the spectator, there is a charge which is also ignited by electricity at the same time as the bomb is exploded. At the proper moment a man throws the shell and touches the button, the bomb bursts, and the spectators, hearing the loud report of the cannon at the same instant, imagine that the harmless paper bomb is the cause of the formidable explosion. Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (London: Sampson, Low and Co., 1897), 308. Sacramento Daily Union, September 29, 1894. McVickers—“Shenandoah” has caught the town, and manager Jacob Litt has given it an elaborate production, with a strong cast, decorated the theatre with red, white and blue, put a brass cannon and other relics out in front, with uniformed and armed men to stand sentinels over them, and then been obliged to call in extra police to keep the crowd in line at the box office … there is not a really weak spot in the cast. The run is indefinite. New York Clipper, May 28, 1898. Reproduced in Laurence Irving, Henry Irving, the Actor and His World (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), opposite 641. Jean Chothia, “‘Henry and 250 Supers’: Irving, Robespierre and the Staging of the Revolutionary Crowd,” in Henry Irving: A ReEvaluation of the Pre-Eminent Victorian Actor-Manager, ed. Richard Foulkes (London: Routledge, 2016), 122. The full script of this play is published in Paolo Cherchi-Usai, ed., The Griffith Project/Selected Writings of D.W. Griffith, vol. 11 (London and Pordenone: British Film Institute and Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2007), 1–70. Ibid., 71–136. David Mayer, “Francis Bannerman Sons Archive,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, vol. 42, no. 2 (2015), 164–73.

PART II

Missing Texts

CHAPTER 6

The Birth of a Nation Footage We Do Not Want to Find Jane M. Gaines

What knowledge do we dare to circulate? I ask this, suspecting that academic discoveries have implications for what Hayden White terms the “practical past,” that shared memory within which stories about the racial offenses of Griffith’s film have been kept alive for a century.1 The Birth of a Nation continues to polarize. In 2019, despite a Hollywood campaign, Bowling Green State University in Ohio removed the Gish name from the auditorium Griffith’s actress endowed on behalf of herself and her sister Dorothy, both native Ohioans.2 Yes, every screening of The Birth of a Nation is a re-telling of a nowrejected narrative, a storied defense of slavery and the post-Civil War treatment of newly-freed African Americans. But there is more. Cedric Robinson argues that what was “birthed” in 1915 was a “new, virile American whiteness.” What was needed before World War I, he says, was a national story “unencumbered by the historical memory of slavery, or

J. M. Gaines (B) Columbia University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_6

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being enslaved …”3 Worse, portraying Reconstruction as misrule by Black freedman justified disenfranchisement and race discrimination well into the next century after the formal end to Reconstruction in 1877. Recall here Eric Foner’s 1988 replacement of the old Reconstruction story with the new narrative in which freedmen were guaranteed the vote and elected to office. Yet even after his research rebuked the Southern version of Reconstruction circulated by Griffith, Foner believes that his should not be the final word. “Historical understanding, he argues,” requires that “history” should be “regularly rewritten.”4 To be sure, every generation of film scholars updates the challenge to Griffith’s mythology, which has come to seem increasingly preposterous. What, however, do historical accounts based on new evidence achieve?5 It is not enough to just tell another story. Is it? The following is a critique and an advocacy circling around one term—restoration—taken in two directions. One direction is an irreverent argument for a political legacy—the restoration of contention—a return to the anti-racist protest against exhibiting The Birth of a Nation. The other direction is a challenge to professional tradition—what I call the restoration theory of history—in which a lost fragment “discovered” is “restored” to the whole, the corollary to which is that the part is also necessary to the whole when we come to rely on it in our attempt to re-constitute a totality. But, as I maintain, there is no restoring; the events of the past are irretrievable; objects, if they survive, testify to what we most need them to have been. Consider this as well. There’s a microcosm of the professional historian’s method in the restoration of the archival motion picture print—every reconstructive choice measured against an ideal of fidelity to or correspondence with an original. In the end, however, given the impossibilities of complete historical reclamation, the archivist will also inevitably “restore” the film print to something unlike what it had once been. And yet. Much like the archivist, the historical researcher returning to The Birth of a Nation seeks to restore the much-maligned motion photographic object as well as the controversies surrounding it, to return it to something that both the object and its time may never have been before. So, yes, I’m pressing an analogy between the film archivist’s work and that of the professional historian, thinking of the original motion picture film and historical events in their time. Here, then, is the question given the almost unavoidable restoration approach to historical work: for our own historical time, what should this film be “restored” to? Some will say that it

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should be restored to the dustbin or toppled like the Confederate statues that fell in 2020. Indeed, the comparison between an extant print of The Birth of a Nation and the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia, is apt, both having stood for the glorification of an abomination.6 But I propose something else, something that risks somewhat more scandal as I ask not only what constitutes historical evidence but “what if” new evidence opens old wounds. Today we may no longer face the danger that The Birth of a Nation will recruit followers as was the worry not only in 1915 but in the 1921 rerelease as well as screenings into the 1940s.7 Justification for studying it, however, still needs to acknowledge its legacy as an incendiary text. What, then, are the implications of using it as a theoretical object lesson, a test of the tradition of professional historical research dating from the eighteenth century? That tradition creeps back in whenever we defer to the original event or object as the final arbiter in debates about “what happened.” But the very case of The Birth of a Nation as a motion picture text exemplifies the impossibility of finally knowing “what happened” to Griffith’s film. Why? Multiple regional disputes erupted over what censorial cuts should be made to the film. Consequently, because it was cut so many times, restoration to an “original” whole erases the fact of contention around it. Think of it another way: in a century of motion pictures, there is likely no text that has been so riven and cut up, testimony to fears of the power of moving images. Contradictorily, however, the cuts in The Birth of a Nation also testify to something we need again today—the power of antiracist activism. This is what I mean, then, by the restoration of contention which has its flip side in resistance to restoration as completion. In contemporary screenings, we hold films championing the Southern cause accountable for their times, but with Birth of a Nation, to speak of its times is also to commemorate the contentious conditions of its historical reception. To return to this film is to reignite the controversy surrounding it as precursor to civil rights protest, even if we stir up dissension as in the Bowling Green University dispute over Lillian Gish’s name on a campus auditorium. By the restoration of contention, then, I mean restoration as in “resuming” rather than completing, a return to honoring the activists who opposed Griffith and to recall their alignment with Black leaders of the early twentieth century anti-lynching campaign. Now we could begin with a provocation by saying that the facts pertaining to the events of the U.S. reception of Birth of a Nation are well established. Except that they are not and never will be, especially if we’re

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Fig. 6.1 The Birth of a Nation posters. Majestic Theatre, Peoria, Illinois, January 9, 1916 premiere

squeamish about finding “skeletons” in this historical “closet.” It then might be argued that the disputes around the film belong to another time, remembering the first tally of over three hundred and fifty local actions and one hundred and twenty controversies over censorship.8 Except that they do not. That these historical animosities haven’t remained in the past is confirmed by the recent passions stirred up in Bowling Green, Ohio. So what I propose is to restore the contentiousness but also to contest the existing evidence by way of opening up new evidentiary possibilities, seeing research as never-ending and this story as ever-changing (Fig. 6.1). Also we need to reframe our academic approach to this film. If for years censorship questions dominated discussions of The Birth of a Nation, today the First Amendment issue must give way to the legacy of campaigns for equal justice.9 This new narrative facilitates closer ties between protests against The Birth of a Nation and, as I am arguing, the

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anti-lynching campaign, especially if we recall how Black crusader Ida B. Wells compared the failure of the NAACP Chicago efforts against the film with the successful strategy in Philadelphia, where a peaceful protest around the theatre pressured the mayor to ban the film.10 Thus, every historical juncture reconfigures earlier times, conjoining today’s historical moment with the Birth of a Nation protests beginning in Boston on April 17, 1915.11 Recent research rediscovers the strategic activism of Black editor William Monroe Trotter in that city.12 Here, Boston and the ensuing NAACP national campaign against the film, seen from today’s vantage, is our political legacy of protest.13 That anti-racist legacy is in turn indebted to the “practical past”: as Elizabeth Alexander has observed, recollection of Emmett Till and Rodney King helped sustain the surge of support in 2020 for the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the video of the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.14 But to return to my title in reference to the political legacy of protest I should say that it remains to be seen whether the “footage that we do not want to find” is more important for the “practical” or the professional, the community of potential protesters or the community of scholars.15 If the latter, it is because it is they who build but also dispute the shared archive. Foucault, critiquing the professional historian’s practice, maintains that what we say has always been decided for us in advance: “The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.”16 It would appear to follow from this that if a statement is not in the archive, if a document wasn’t saved, then what it “says” can’t be “said.” But, of course, we push against this by lamenting the “lost” and holding out for the missing. Allyson Field demonstrates this in her argument for the value of the nonextant object, making a case for the importance of the missing Hampton Institute epilogue shot in response to Griffith’s film and screened after some Birth of a Nation performances.17 However, The New Era, the Hampton Institute epilogue that modified the Birth of a Nation message, is film footage that we do want to find, perhaps indeed most want to find.18 In contrast, I ask about the footage we don’t want to find and the implications this has for the larger sense of the “Birth of a Nation archive,” a space constituted by every publication, screening, and conference, a source from which scholars draw in an effort to contest what was “said to have been” or to test what can now be “said.” Thus we have been as interested in which materials from the original moment of exhibition

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elude us as much as which have been archived; or, which once-censored “cuts” are missing as well as which have been archivally “restored.” Another candidate for footage we do not want to find has been referred to as the deportation epilogue. Russell Merritt early referenced the missing “final tableaux,” sometimes known as “Lincoln’s Solution,” or the return to Africa.19 Merritt describes the sequence based on files in the Museum of Modern Art and the recollections of several people who said they saw the scene.20 Robert Lang, however, found no concrete evidence that the film contained this particular footage yet points to the intertitle “Back to Liberia!”21 While Merritt’s original focus has not, to my knowledge, spurred any special effort to locate this footage, contemporary references to the deportation epilogue suggest that its existence is not in dispute.22 However, the very question of the existence of yet another sequence—the footage we do not want to find—is not only not a current controversy in the field but has seldom been referred to in recent years.23 And why? This footage may threaten more cultural trouble than the representation of a return to Africa. So while there has been enthusiasm for finding the Hampton Institute epilogue and interest in discussing (but not in finding) the “Lincoln’s Solution” footage, there has been an aversion, I believe, to referencing, not to mention finding, this other sequence, one that neither figures in the discussions of censorship nor appears on the lists of local excisions that scholars have been excavating, with perhaps one exception, as we will see. I refer to the footage from Act II that would have appeared near the head of reel 10. This is the footage that would have elongated the representation of Gus’s trial, conviction, and execution and which has become known as the “Gus castration” scene.24 Extant versions still contain imagery representing the capture, mock trial, and murder of Gus, one frame of which illustrates what today would be called a “lynching.” But if this footage is a vestige of a longer sequence, why did the NAACP not focus on it in their protests?25 (Fig. 6.2). Here is the empirical problem: We would need to trace the references to the earliest cuts based on Griffith admirer Seymour Stern’s assertion that a complete uncut 15-reel version played at the Liberty Theatre from March to April 1915, before New York Mayor John Purroy Mitchel ordered cuts.26 Later reports of the cuts required by Mayor Mitchel emphasize his concern with public decency (read: sexuality), a concern used to explain why he agreed to two cuts—the same two Griffith biographer Richard Schickel singles out—the “attempted rape scene” and the

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Fig. 6.2 Gus captured by Ku Klux Klan

“forced marriage.”27 However, a longer list of New York changes appears in an April 1915 article in The Survey, a journal for social workers: “a substantial reduction in the details of the chase of the white girl by the renegade Negro, which in the original is said to have been the most dreadful portrayal of rape ever offered for public view; the insertion of various soothing captions such as, ‘I won’t hurt you, little Missy’; the entire excision of a lynching [my italics]; and a toning down of the scene in which the mulatto all but marries a white girl by force.”28 So two cuts or three? If three, it’s curious as to why the NAACP would continue to single out only two objectionable sequences—Schickel’s same two—the “Gus chase after Flora” and “Lynch’s attempt to marry Elsie.” One wonders why the literature circulated to NAACP chapters did not mention a lynching sequence.29 Such a sequence may have no longer been there after New York. Or it never existed. This particular lacunae came to my attention while researching an article co-written with musicologist Neil Lerner, work that entailed

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studying the Joseph Carl Breil music, both from the extant piano conductor score and the recorded performance version by the New Zealand Symphony orchestra.30 The Breil score was not itself the original score, but was readied after the Los Angeles screening on February 8, 1915, for the March 3 première at the Liberty Theatre in New York City.31 Following tracks left by Martin Marks, Lerner and I came to Seymour Stern’s 1965 article.32 Most important here, the article contains a description of a scene that Stern claims to have seen in a rare uncensored complete version that was accompanied by the Breil score. On the basis of Stern’s memory, Michael Rogin later took up the question of the deletion of the so-called “Gus castration,” the scene that 1915 commentators did not mention and contemporary scholars have largely left untouched. Michelle Wallace still stands alone as the one scholar to put Gus’s execution in the context of African American history.33 One can only speculate that the silence of so many, even after Rogin’s intervention, is either a political queasiness about the content or a reticence based on the thinness of the evidence that such a scene was part of the original motion picture screened with the Breil score orchestration performed live on March 3, 1915, in New York. It may be understandable, however, why later scholars have been reluctant to take Seymour Stern’s description as sufficient evidence of the existence of such a scene. The chief objection to his recollection relates to his status as apologist for Griffith.34 Yet if only because historian Michael Rogin took Stern at his word, effectively putting his account into contemporary circulation, we need to revisit the article that has met with such suspicion. There Stern recalls a 1933 benefit screening at the Filmarte Theatre in Hollywood where he viewed what he believed to be an uncensored print with the original Breil score performed by organ with piano. He writes that the print had been loaned for this one-night screening by a former star actress.35 Until now, his memory of that screening has stood alone as the recollection that American culture does not want to have. Here, however, I hesitate, arriving at the juncture between the kind of empirical investigation that supports the restoration theory of history and my critique of the mindset of restoration. For admittedly I have gotten caught up in the very search for origins that I decry. Still, I remain dubious of the narrative history tradition within which Michael Rogin is working, a mode of telling that can neither allow for uncertainty nor accommodate second thoughts. Worse, within this tradition, the only hope I have of winning over my readers is to contest

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Rogin’s sources—as follows. He writes, for instance, of censors: “And they cut out Gus’s castration.” But he offers as proof only Stern’s memory.36 Further, Rogin’s assertion—“That footage is now lost or unavailable”—is not supported by evidence that he has undertaken an archival search.37 So to contest is not enough. The historical researcher is obliged to prove. To repeat: I am skeptical of challenges to the validity of a historical story based on recourse to the corrective of what “actually happened,” a commitment to using inaccessible historical events themselves as the final arbiter. And yet one steps right into this tradition in asking for proof. What is the alternative? Further, in reference to my title—if we don’t “want to find” then it follows that we would not “look to find.” Right? But here’s the rub—even a recalcitrant “not wanting to find” can’t get anyone off the empirical hook once the question has been asked. How contradictory is this? To “look to find” is in itself a commitment to empirical proof as well as to resolved debates; “to look to find” holds out an expectation of certain outcomes that would foreclose doubt. What should be on the line, then, is not just the question of evidence to support another storied account of “what was shot and later screened.” No, what should be on the line are all historical re-tellings, from those that rectify wrongs to those that overstate the case to those that alter the vantage when public sympathies shift. And that cautionary should deter us. Except that it doesn’t. The question haunts us. What if Griffith had shot a longer lynching sequence? Then, what if new evidentiary possibilities arise after some decades? On the one hand it is difficult to ignore the empirical lure of a new clue; on the other hand, that clue represents the possibility of a discovery which one might hesitate to divulge—a horrific historical object, which, if discovered, reveals the imagery that so many Southern towns buried, imagery that furthermore threatens an infamy no researcher seeks. Given the notorious lifelikeness of motion photography, even in depicting fictions, such realist representation could prove more disturbing than the still photographs of Black victims surrounded by white men, women, and children featured in recent exhibitions.38 But to add to the mimetic effect of motion photography, there is yet another possibility from which we will likely recoil—that Gus’s “mutilation” was musically and rhythmically enhanced. For Stern writes that Griffith, in his moving image depiction of Gus’s emasculation, timed the blows to the beats of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, movement IV (Allegro).39 Here then is our quandary: while we might hope

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to prove that no such sequence was shot and cut in this manner, when we consider musical composition, the evidentiary possibilities multiply and along with them new mysteries of musicological signification. Shifting from the question of Stern’s reliability as well as the horrible imagery that we don’t want to find to Breil’s musical score, we enter other realms of evidentiary possibility. There is the piano conductor score, the performances of that score, the extant prints, the record of cuts in the première print after the first release in 1915, and contemporary recollections of filmgoers having seen and heard the motion picture with full orchestral accompaniment. But first to note what is unusual although not unprecedented in this approach to silent era motion picture research. The question is this: can the musical score constitute evidence of the existence of the images for which the score was composed? While there is no evidence of existing footage that conforms to Sterne’s description, the piano conductor score is extant.40 Thus our hypothesis: in the absence of a sequence of archival photochemical image material, the musical composition to which these images were synchronized could constitute evidence of both how they were cut as well as that they were part of Griffith’s original motion picture exhibition.41 At issue, as I said, is the question of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony movement IV (Allegro), also known as the “Storm and Tempest,” the music that Stern describes as having heard in 1933. First, to clarify, in Breil’s composite score (that mix of music that defined the silent era feature film score), roughly half is Breil’s original composition and the other half is comprised of “borrowed tunes” and symphonic music in the nineteenth century Romantic tradition. That is, Beethoven and Wagner have been adapted and cut to the requirements of key scenes42 (Fig. 6.3). Now it is remarkably easy to confirm Breil’s use of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony Op. 68, IV (Allegro) by means of extant documents since in all archival materials it is listed at measure 17 in Act II.43 Then, just listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral, we can imagine how the cadences of the “Storm” movement, a pattern of irregular strikes, beat and off-beat, simulating the tempest, might have been matched to key action sequences. Especially given the knowledge that Beethoven’s Pastoral was part of Breil’s score, one might become convinced, just listening to it, that it functioned as Stern describes.44 But there is a problem with this reasoning, and that is this: the same composition also works in conjunction with a completely different set of images in Walt Disney’s animated Fantasia (1940).45 In Disney’s “Storm” scene we hear the irregular pattern and see a searing

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Fig. 6.3 Joseph Carl Breil at piano. ca. 1915–1920 (Courtesy U.S. Library of Congress. George Grantham Bain Collection)

thunder bolt cut to the timpani crash reinforced by a full orchestra. There are four of these timed, targeted plunges in the “Storm” segment, stopping before the 5th , and producing explosive audio plus visual effects. God Zeus throws down lightning bolts forged by Thor, harassing the god Bacchus and flooding the earth below with wine. “Storm and Tempest” is a musicological match for the visual giganticism associated with the gods and the heavens. But for us, this apparently perfect merger of image and sound exemplifies something else—a theory in which the effect of audiovisual combination in motion pictures is sound/image “redundancy.” In Michel Chion’s theory, so effective is the merger of sound and image that the spectator doesn’t attend to the sound. For the audioviewer, sound just seems to “emanate” from the image.46 The use of Beethoven’s “Storm” in Fantasia further exemplifies the mutuality of sound influencing what we see and image what we hear. Only by artificially separating the image from the musical composition by an effort to “decompose the audiovisual mixing,” can we become aware

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of the process.47 And our question as to whether the Breil rendition of Beethoven’s “Storm” constitutes evidence of the imagery for which it was orchestrated requires such an exercise in artificial separation.48 What, then, can such an exercise tell us about sound-image mutuality and “redundancy”? To review the shots in the existing sequence from the most complete versions: “The Trial” title is followed by a tableau of white-sheeted klansmen and Gus brought to the foreground, comprising the nowfamiliar image. This shot is followed by an iris in on the vigil around Flora’s funeral bier, the title “Guilty,” a long fade to black and a return to Gus thrown head first onto a horse in front of one klansman then dumped onto the Lieutenant-Governor’s steps, cutting to a close up of Gus with a paper etched with skull and cross-bones and KKK pinned to his shirt, followed by a long shot of klansmen riding down the street and Gus’s leg in the frame hanging off the porch steps. Indeed, we would need to admit that this version already contains imagery representing these story events: following Flora Cameron’s death, as a consequence of Gus’s threat, the klan executes Gus after a mock trial that finds him “Guilty.” But what is not on the recent DVD is as important as what is on it—there is no onscreen depiction signifying Gus’s execution. There is no “Gus castration scene.” In contrast with these images in the most complete DVD versions, Stern in 1965 describes an execution rhythmically cut to Beethoven’s “Storm”: Beethoven’s music now cuts on the movement of the Klansman’s steppingforward, which instantly follows the “Guilty” subtitle … It is upon the split-second cut of the first Beethoven outcrash that the Klansman’s hand plunges the first time—and comes quickly up. As the white-sleeved arm again poises for a split second, the second crash of Beethoven’s thunder is heard, and the avenging hand again swiftly plunges—and as swiftly pulls up in the same ritualistic and totemic gesture. There is an instantaneous cut on the sound of the string-instruments to the face of Gus, in close-up, the mouth flowing blood, the eyes rolling white in agony, and head falling back. The strings suddenly are dimmed by a third, terrifying, unexpected outcrash, in the split-second needed to bring it in, roaring, like a final judgment over the dying Negro’s face. In flash-cuts, the Klansman’s hand now plunges and rises, plunges and rises, again, again, and still again, on each down-beat of the timpani, all within a

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few frames of film. On the final thunder-crash of the series, there is a final flash of the castrated Negro’s pain-racked face and body. Gus is dead.49

Just as precisely, Stern describes “thunderous percussions” heard between the crashes, “moaning strings” and “agonized woodwinds.”50 Really? There’s a problem here—in the same article in which he describes having heard Breil’s score performed by a full orchestra that included woodwinds, strings, and a percussion section, Stern also recalls that the same 1933 screening featured the Breil score performed by organ with piano.51 So which was it? Stern’s description is so evocative, however, that Michael Rogin, for one, passed it on as standing in for the “footage” that no motion picture historian has located. We might then ask whose memory is the false one—Stern’s or Rogin’s?52 Now, to return to my restoration theory of history. Yes, the above discussion of cuts and musicological references suggests that I am espousing contradictory approaches. While critiquing the historicist emphasis on empirical proof as well as the narrative that creates the illusion of correspondence to events, I am offering possible evidence for the reader’s consideration. Admittedly, this is a gesture to the likelihood that my critique will have more impact if an empirical standard of evidence is met. But I offer this evidence less toward the completion of a picture of “what really happened” or toward the reconstitution of a lost object than as a critique of the stories we dare or don’t dare to tell, depending on the exigencies of our time. Stern’s claim, while it may fail too many empirical tests, yet represents a double problem—a prohibition of a prohibition, or censorship of a censorship if you prefer. We must ask why the “Gus chase” sequence has been for so long the focus in analyses of this film and not the “racial terror lynching,” the inevitable historical consequence of the Black man’s approach to a white woman.53 Today we recall that one of the bases for founding the NAACP in 1909 was an effort to oppose lynching.54 But it was African American reformer Ida B. Wells who first dared not only to report but to agitate as early as the turn of the last century. As a journalist, she described in her 1892 pamphlet “Southern Horrors” how “collected reports confirm that lynch mobs decapitated bodies, took parts as trophies, invented obscene tortures, burned victims after hanging them,” and “women and children were not sheltered but participated …”55 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall later reminded Second Wave feminists of the legacy of Ida B. Wells who exposed not only the sadism of vigilante justice but the Reconstruction

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strategy for terrorizing Black communities—to disenfranchise as well as to bankrupt them.56 No, in the extant footage, Gus’s trial and execution is not visualized as a hanging.57 And while the association with burning is there in the fiery cross seen behind Gus in the extant sequence, an intact body, not a charred corpse, is dumped on Stoneman’s doorstep with the image of a skull and crossbones stuck onto his chest. Yet from the vantage of today, Griffith’s fiction repeats the very scenario Ida B. Wells called to the world’s attention. This is because the connection between Gus’s chase after Flora and her terrified death leap followed by Gus’s capture, KKK mock trial, and execution, can be read as the very scenario Wells dared to expose. To remind us: any association with a white woman gave white men the trumped up excuse to torture and murder a Black man. Now as to the footage that we do not want to find, let’s consider this: if the footage is not found, what it “says” cannot really be “said.” Except that to remember Ida B. Wells’s campaign is to “say” what so many communities, local scenes of “racial terror lynchings,” do not want to have “said” again about their towns.58 And to this end we are pulled in two directions—between the more contingent “what if” as opposed to the certainty of “it was.” Although we can never exactly say “what happened,” we must always ask. And in the spirit of interrogating all the while protesting the white supremacy this motion picture trumpets, a step towards the restoration of contention, I offer an epilogue.

Epilogue Shortly before the June 2015 Birth of a Nation conference at University College London, in Lisbon, Portugal, at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, the Orquestra Sinefónica Portuguesa performed the Joseph Carl Breil score conducted by silent film musicologist Gillian Anderson.59 Here was a rare live orchestra performance accompanying the projection of the 35 mm print from the Museum of Modern Art collection. At the end of the London conference, Martin Marks and I rushed to a local pub to watch on his computer the uploaded video of that performance. But on the video, Anderson started the Beethoven Pastoral significantly earlier than Stern describes it as starting.60 She starts it at the scene in which Gus, escaping on a horse, rides around a fence. Comparing this to the original score, this is the very shot cue “D. As horse shows on screen,” occurring just before measure 17 in the conductor score.

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Then consider the performance from 17 in the piano score, attending first to the patterning rain that opens the “Storm” to the structure of Beethoven’s movement. Here, as performed by the Lisbon orchestra, the music operates on a basic principle of the natural storm—its power deriving from the uncertainty as to when “thunder and lightning” will occur. The irregular spacing of the lightning flash and thunder stroke effects a disturbance. The listener is caught in anticipation between the time of the pianissimo and the fortissimo, an alternation between the sforzando on the beat, pianissimo then off-beat sforzando again: beat, off-beat, beat, off-beat.61 Here is a “jagged” pattern in the musical language–the “threat” of the storm, then unpredictable “outbursts,” a subsiding, an “outburst” again, and an “apex” followed by the final “subsiding” of the storm. But in the Lisbon performance, the sforzando “outbursts” accompany and are synchronized with the struggle to capture Gus—a chase and apprehension before the “Trial” intertitle. The Little Colonel and townsmen shoot at Gus who is attempting to escape on horseback, filling the screen with smoke as Gus is shot off the horse and grabbed on the ground. The beat, off-beat, beat, off-beat is here timed to this struggle. The storm “subsiding” accompanies the action that tapers off with Flora’s funeral tableau, the “Guilty” intertitle, Gus’s body flung over the horse and thrown on Sylas Lynch’s doorstep as the klan rides off. If Seymour Stern saw these images with Breil’s score synchronized to them, he remembered wrong. Yes, the Lisbon orchestra performance can stand as proof. But then–of what? Only that Stern neither saw nor heard this version. What this performance cannot answer, however, is much more perplexing: Why is there record of so little objection to this particular scene—or even the remnants of it?

Notes 1. Hayden White, The Practical Past (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 42. 2. B. Ruby Rich, “Be Like Water: Film, Politics, Legacy,” Film Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 1 (Fall 2019). Thanks to Anne Farley Gaines for her work in support of keeping the Gish name on the Film Theater at Bowling Green State University. 3. Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theatre and Film Before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 100, 108.

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4. Eric Foner, Who Owns the Past?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), xvii; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014). 5. See Dave Tell, Remembering Emmett Till (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 6. Bonnie Berkowitz and Adrian Blanco, “Confederate Monuments Are Falling, But Hundreds Still Stand. Here’s Where,” Washington Post, July 2, 2020: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/ confederate-monuments/, accessed August 15, 2020. 7. See Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 230–33. 8. Nickieann Fleener-Marzec, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: Controversy, Suppression, and the First Amendment as It Applies to Filmic Expression, 1915–1973 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 38. 9. Evidence of the censorship emphasis is standard in educational materials, for example, the set of 1921 documents included as DVD extras on the 2011 Kino release of the film. In addition to the 1921 New York State hearings, the Kino DVD contains both footage required cut by Commissioner Joseph Levenson and these scenes restored. 10. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020, orig. pub. 1970), 292– 94. Michelle Faith Wallace, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation: Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim Crow,” Cinema Journal, vol. 43, no. 1 (Fall 2003), 94, also notes the significance of Wells’s antilynching campaign to reconstructing the Birth of a Nation moment. She goes further to critique the approach taken in the field: “why does academic discussion of this film remain so endlessly important and yet so hopelessly inadequate to the task of ameliorating the textual racism this discussion seeks to diagnose?” Ibid., 86. 11. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Came Near Causing a Riot in a Boston Play House,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 24, 1915, 1. 12. For a recent study of Harvard-educated Trotter, see Dick Lehr, The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War (New York: Public Affairs, 2014), 214– 23. Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 193, quotes the African American editor of The Guardian as saying that the objectionable scenes would “make white women afraid of Negroes and … have white men stirred up on their account.” 13. Sarah Binney, July 13, 2020, “How Photos Shape Protest and Public Perception—Then and Now,” quotes historian of photography Deborah

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16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

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Willis, for example, as saying that NAACP demonstrations against lynchings were some of the earliest protest photographs. https://www.nyu. edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/july/the-photos-that-definea-movement-.html, accessed September 1, 2020. Salamish Tillett, “Endless Grief Over ‘Black Bodies in Pain,’” interview with Elizabeth Alexander, New York Times, June 23, 2020, C1, C4. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Montgomery, AL, 3rd ed., 2017): https://eji.org/rep orts/lynching-in-america/, accessed August 15, 2020. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 29. Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), chap. 4, especially 23–31. See ibid., 22–24 for a manifesto for studying “lost” film. The NAACP, Russell Merritt says, “managed to have censored the entire sequence from all existing film prints, and the out-takes were never preserved.” Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith and the Southern Legend,” Cinema Journal, vol. 12, no. 1 (Autumn1972), 42. The only person mentioned by name is Seymour Stern. Merritt describes the sequence he has never seen: “With a title describing it as ‘Lincoln’s solution,’ Griffith and Dixon proceed to envision the mass deportation of Negroes ‘back to Africa.’ One by one, the Negroes are loaded onto ships, and as the sequence ends, the country’s ten million Negroes leave for the jungle, never to return.” Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith and the Southern Legend,” 42. John Cuniberti, “The Birth of a Nation”: A Formal Shotby-Shot Analysis Together with Microfiche Cinema Editions on Microfiche (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1979), 167, refers to spectator accounts of having seen the sequence. Seymour Stern, “The Birth of a Nation,” Cinemages, no. 1 (1955), 9, says the epilogue included: “first, Lincoln’s forgotten letter to Staunton, wherein Lincoln affirms that he does not believe in the equality of the black race with the white; and second, full-scale images of the deportation of masses of Negroes from New York harbor to the (filmed) jungles of Liberia as a ‘peaceable’ solution for America and the Negroes….” Robert Lang, “History, Ideology, Narrative Form,” in Lang, ed., The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 11. One 1915 review, however, refers to this scene and others that have not survived. See W. Stephen Bush, “The Birth of a Nation,” Motion Picture World, March 13, 1915, 1586–87. Field, Uplift Cinema, 168, suggests that the Hampton epilogue was shown after the mass deportation scene.

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23. Michael Rogin, ‘“The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Representations, vol. 9 (Winter 1985), 174–78; Gaines, Fire and Desire, 236. 24. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 131–32, says Stern “maintains that original prints depicted Gus’s punishment by castration,” describing “flash-cuts” rhythmically timed to Beethoven’s storm music. Cuniberti, disagreeing with Stern’s claim that this was one of New York Mayor Mitchel’s cuts, asserts that Mitchel’s cutting list did not include a lynching scene. 25. Melvyn Stokes, D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 130, citing Los Angeles NAACP records (February 2, 1915), lists five grounds on which they objected in their city council appeal, none of which referred to “lynching.” 26. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” 175, notes “reports of early viewings” referring to “mutilation,” referencing Stern. 27. Richard Schickel, D.W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 286. On the New York cuts, see Arthur Lenning, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of The Birth of a Nation,” Film History, vol. 16, no. 2 (2004), 123–26. Note # 81, 140, lists changes in intertitles rewritten or cut. Variety (March 26, 1915) refers to two other cuts— the scene between Stoneman and his “octoroon housekeeper” and a fight between a black and a white man. 28. “Films and Births and Censorship,” The Survey, April 3, 1915, 4. 29. The NAACP national office advised local chapters to take legal action and, if they did not succeed, “try to have the worst scenes eliminated,” mentioning only the scenes in which Lynch tries to force marriage on Elsie Stoneman and Gus’s pursuit of Flora. Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 214. 30. Jane Gaines and Neil Lerner, “The Orchestration of Affect: The Motif of Barbarism in Breil’s The Birth of a Nation Score,” in The Sounds of Early Cinema, eds. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (Bloomingon, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 252–68. 31. Breil was repelled by the imagery in The Birth of a Nation when he first viewed it. He later wrote that Act II, from Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman,” was so full of “lust, brutality, morbidity, debauchery, rapine and murder” that it would likely fail. Breil as quoted in Martin Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 136. 32. Seymour Stern, “Griffith: The Birth of a Nation Part I,” Film Culture, vol. 36 (Spring–Summer 1965), 1–21. On dubiousness about Stern, see Merritt, “Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend,” 26–45 and Marks, Music and Silent Film, 279–80.

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33. Wallace, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation,” 94. 34. Ira H. Gallen, “Introduction One,” Seymour Stern, D.W. Griffith’s 100th Anniversary The Birth of a Nation, ed. Ira H. Gallen (Victoria, BC: Friesen Press, 2014), 16, states that Griffith authorized Stern as his biographer in 1948. 35. Stern, “The Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 122–23. 36. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” 174. Just as problematic is Rogin’s statement: “The castration scene clarifies Griffith’s intentions, which is why the censors took it out” (178). The citation note # 63, 194, is to Stern, “Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 66, 123, 164. 37. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” 175, writes: “Reports of early viewings of Gus’s punishment also referred to his ‘mutilation’.” His only source is Stern, “The Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 123: Gus’s “trial and death by castration” was referred to as “mutilation” by “priggish newspapers.” Prints of The Birth of a Nation in the 35 mm format are held in 30 FIAF Archives worldwide—Cinémathèque Française (Paris), Gosfilmofond (Moscow), National Film and Television Archive (London), and Filmoteca Española (Madrid), as well as Bulgarska Nacionalna Filmoteka (Sofia, Bulgaria), Cinemateca Nacional de Angola (Luanda, Angola) and the Arhiva Nationala de Filme (Bucuresti, Romania). Paul Spehr, former Head of the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Sound Recording Division, wrote to me that “Trying to compare all the surviving copies would be a daunting task,” but led me to Peter Williamson in the Museum of Modern Art (e-mail December 18, 2014). Williamson stated that the Museum of Modern Art footage was “reasonably complete” and that it was unlikely that 10 min were missing (phone conversation, February 23, 2015). 38. “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” from 1879— Twin Palms Press traveling exhibition: https://withoutsanctuary.org/. James Allen, ed. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 1999). See also Wallace, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation,” 94, for the relevance of the photos in this exhibition to Birth of a Nation, a reminder of the 1915 crowds who witnessed such public hangings, among which were children and women. 39. Stern, “The Birth of a Nation, Part I,” 123–24. The question is furthermore one of length. If we consider the written musical notation starting at number 17 on the MOMA-LC piano conductor score with its 84 measures or 4 ¼ pages of music, we would need to ask whether Breil’s adaptation of the “Storm and Tempest” is longer or shorter by innumerable measures than what the lynching sequence in the most complete available versions would require. These are the British Film Institute 2015

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42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

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restoration available on Blu-ray and the MVD Visual DVD, both of which use the Breil score. U.S. Library of Congress, Music Division; George Eastman House Museum, Rochester, New York. See Marks, note # 14, 274–75. See Stern, D.W. Griffith’s 100 Year Anniversary, 1, according to which the original release length was 13 reels or 13,058 feet. After the New York first week’s required cuts reduced the length to 12,500 feet or 558 feet were cut, and the running time from three hours to two hours and fortyfive minutes. Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 103, shifts our attention to scenes in arguing that the question of number of cuts is unresolved, citing Cuniberti, “The Birth of a Nation,” 22, and Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 43–156. Marks, Music and Silent Film, 143–44, 148, 208–9. The Birth of a Nation files at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) contain “Film Music for The Birth of a Nation,” a three-page typed list of music by score numbers, with Act II listing by number 17: “Storm from Pastorale Symphony (Beethoven).” David Wyn Jones, Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 73, 75–76. Thanks to Neil Lerner for this example. Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 152–53. Ibid., 152. Such sound-image mutuality explains why Breil score expert Gillian B. Anderson refers to Breil’s orchestration relative to the imagery as the “missing 50%”. See Gillian B. Anderson, “The Missing 50%: The Orchestration for The Birth of a Nation,” Journal of Film Preservation, vol. 93 (October 2015), 71–77. Stern, “Griffith: The Birth of a Nation Part I,” 123–24. Stern, “Griffith: The Birth of a Nation Part I,” 123. See Note # 33. Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 141, is also dubious about the “rape of Flora”: “Stern’s most controversial assertion, however—that Griffith had filmed the actual rape of Flora by Gus on the rock—has no evidence whatever to back it up.” Cuniberti, “The Birth of a Nation,” 132, says of the “Gus castration” scene that in an April 10, 1975 letter Karl Brown, assistant to cinematographer Billy Bitzer, notes that the scene Stern described was “never part of the picture, either as filmed or released.” The term is from Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Montgomery, AL, 3rd ed., 2017): https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/, accessed August 15, 2020.

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54. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 105, sees lynching as “The most dramatic and terrifying instrument in the repression of Blacks …” He credits Ida B. Wells for taking the initiative against lynching while the NAACP, operating more slowly, finally ended up institutional leader in the fight (109). According to the Equal Justice Initiative website, the NAACP campaign against lynching changed the course of public opinion even in the South after 1930. See also on the 1919 formation of the Committee on Interracial Cooperation and its launch of the Association of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching (ASWPL) in 1930, originally white Initiatives: https://eji.org/reports/ lynching-in-america/, accessed August 15, 2020. 55. Ida B. Wells, On Lynching: Southern Horrors: A Red Record; Mob Rule in New Orleans (1892–1900) (New York: Arno Press, reprint, 1969). 56. Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 130–33. 57. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory, 178–79, argues that Griffith’s depiction of “lynching” drew on the 1913 Leo Frank case. See also Ray Stannard Baker, “Gathering Clouds Along the Color Line,” World’s Work, vol. 32, no. 1 (1915), 232–36. 58. Campbell Robertson, “History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names,” New York Times, February 10, 2015, reports the resistance of city and state governments to placing Equal Justice Initiative markers. 59. Anderson, “The Missing 50%.” 60. Stern describes Beethoven’s “Storm” as beginning after the title “Guilty,” around half way into the sequence as performed by the Lisbon orchestra. See Stern, “Griffith: The Birth of a Nation Part I,” 123. 61. Jones, Beethoven, 75–76.

CHAPTER 7

Fixing The Birth of a Nation?: Hampton Institute and The New Era Allyson Nadia Field

In his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington recalls that around 1877, while he was teaching in Malden, West Virginia, the Ku Klux Klan “was in the height of its activity” during a period that was “the darkest part of the Reconstruction days.” He concludes this lone mention of vigilante violence against African Americans in the book by contextualizing it in the now-forgotten past: “I have referred to this unpleasant part of the history of the South simply for the purpose of calling attention to the great change that has taken place since the days of the ‘Ku Klux.’ To-day there are no such organizations in the South, and

This essay is excerpted and adapted from Chapter 4 of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). See the complete chapter for a fuller discussion of the African American responses to The Birth of a Nation. A. N. Field (B) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_7

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the fact that such ever existed is almost forgotten by both races. There are few places in the South now where public sentiment would permit such organizations to exist.”1 Fourteen years later, the release of The Birth of a Nation would belie Washington’s strategic idealism. In fact, one of the last major issues that he dealt with before his death on November 14, 1915, was orchestrating Tuskegee’s responses to the film. Though he would not live to see the rebirth of the Klan on Thanksgiving of that year, following the Leo Frank lynching in Atlanta on August 16, Washington was well aware of the divisive potential of the film.2 At least a year prior to The Birth of a Nation, Washington had been in various stages of negotiation over the possibility of a film adaptation of Up from Slavery. His efforts proved moot, as the planned adaptation was overshadowed by controversy surrounding Hampton Institute’s response to The Birth of a Nation, when the institute cooperated with the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures, the industry’s self-regulatory body, and the Griffith camp in furnishing moving pictures to be appended to The Birth of a Nation as an epilogue under the title The New Era. The New Era was Hampton’s answer to the nefarious representation of African Americans in The Birth of a Nation. Believing in the persuasive evidence inherent in their films of African American uplift, the institute provided footage taken from one of their fundraising campaign films, Making Negro Lives Count , to append to Griffith’s epic. Contemporary and subsequent criticism has generally described this association as a straightforward mistake, yet Hampton was responding to complex sets of problems and demands. For Black leaders across the political spectrum— from Washington to W. E. B. Du Bois to William Monroe Trotter—the popularity of The Birth of a Nation demanded a response, which ranged from letters to legislators, newspapers, and Black leaders through rotten eggs thrown at the screen to full-blown riots. The struggle over censorship of The Birth of a Nation has been well documented and marks a significant moment in the history of institutions such as the NAACP.3 As Thomas Cripps has shown, responses to the film by Tuskegee representatives, the NAACP, and the Black press were overwhelming, but they also presented African American leaders with a dilemma. He sums up the possibilities: “They could ignore the film and its hateful portrayal, knowing not what damage it might do. They could urge censorship. Or, and least likely, they could finance and make their own films propagandizing favorably the role of Negroes in American life.”4 In the months following the release of The Birth of a Nation, Carl Laemmle and two

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employees of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, Rose Janowitz and Elaine Sterne, began working on a response to Griffith’s film (eventually titled Lincoln’s Dream) with the support of the NAACP and, a little later on, the Tuskegeeans.5 Indeed, Black filmmakers (such as the Johnson brothers and Oscar Micheaux) would work throughout the following years to counter the damage perpetrated by the film with films of their own. However, overshadowed by attention to the censorship battles and by the subsequent work of African American filmmakers was the immediate attempt to improve the film—in effect, to fix it—by incorporating an African American uplift film into screenings of the controversial epic. The New Era was one strategic response to the problem of prolific filmic racism. Along with debates about the need for Black filmmaking, this “least likely” solution was interwoven with the immediate outcry against the filmic version of Thomas Dixon’s novel and stage play The Clansman.6 The idea of “answering film with film” to appease censors, calm protestors, and promote positive images of Black progress was an immediate reaction to The Birth of a Nation.7

The Birth of a Nation in Boston Following the Boston première of The Birth of a Nation at the Tremont Theatre on April 10, 1915, Booker T. Washington encouraged a fight against what he considered the Griffith camp’s probable legal preparedness against efforts toward censorship, writing in a telegram, “From all can hear is vicious and hurtful play. If it cannot be stopped it ought to be modified or changed materially.”8 Although this effort would eventually coalesce around The New Era, curiously it was not the first addition to the film. The Birth of a Nation had undergone various—and varied—edits to appease protestors, but there was also a major attempt to improve it with the addition of educational slides at the suggestion of Charles Fleischer, a prominent Boston rabbi. Fleischer proposed to the Tremont Theatre managers that they incorporate in the screening “the vital facts of the negro’s real progress since emancipation,” believing the suppression of the film to be “undemocratic and un-American.” Fleischer positioned The Birth of a Nation as an educational opportunity, arguing that it could be used to allow the whole nation to see the advancement of African Americans and their demonstrated progress from slavery to the contemporary moment. Fleischer’s optimism hinged on the broad exhibition of

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The Birth of a Nation, far beyond the limited reach of champions of the “Negro cause.”9 Fleischer’s proposal was submitted to Griffith, who was reportedly “so interested” that he began planning for such an addition.10 On April 16, “title material” was added to screenings of the film to chronicle “the record of advancement” of African Americans. The material included the names of key figures like Frederick Douglass “in statesmanship,” Booker T. Washington “in education,” W. E. B. Du Bois “in oratory and philosophy,” Henry O. Tanner “in art,” and Paul Lawrence Dunbar “in poetry.”11 It is unclear if this “screen record” was comprised of simple text intertitles or if it also included photographs, but it certainly did not include moving pictures.12 According to the Boston Globe, the addition was made “a permanent part of the picture” and “completed the story from the time the negro as shown in the first part of the picture was brought in chains from Africa up to the present, when he has developed extraordinary resource and skill in the arts, professions, crafts and agriculture.” The inserts demonstrating “the marvelous record” were reportedly “heartily applauded” by Boston audiences.13 The newspaper reported that the titles were added at the suggestion of Fleischer and other “friends of the play,” who “felt that while the tale of carpetbagger and negro excesses during Reconstruction as pictured by Mr. Griffith was true to history, yet in fairness the wonderful advances made since Reconstruction should also be presented.”14 These “advances” were conveyed through the additional titles that interrupted rather than altered the course of the narrative. They were inserted “naturally” following the reported “series of historical events” in the film’s opening scenes on the introduction of slavery to America, extending through the Civil War and “the troubles between the Southern whites and the carpetbaggers and negroes after the war.”15 Thus, the added titles would have followed the disunion caused by the introduction of slavery and the agitation of abolitionists demanding emancipation but come before the introduction of the principal characters. These efforts did not satisfy the film’s critics. On the one hand, the “screen record” would have lent veracity to the preceding scenes; on the other hand, the length of the ensuing drama would have overwhelmed the brief interlude of facts and figures. Although Mayor Curley had requested the removal of the intertitle “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion,” that was the only cut made to the opening.16 This is an important point. There is a significant shot, missing in surviving prints of The Birth of a Nation, that was one of the most

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contested parts of the film in 1915. In the abolitionist meeting in the film’s opening sequence, the shot of the abolitionist preacher taking the young Black boy through the congregation is intercut with a shot of “a motherly looking old lady” who, according to a review in the Moving Picture World, “stretches out her arms in sympathy toward the child, but immediately repulses him with every manifestation of disgust caused by the odor which we must assume the boy carries around with him.”17 This shot was removed from some screenings, but there is no evidence to suggest that it was cut in Boston when the “screen record” was added.18 If the abolitionists’ empathy for the child is undercut by the gestures of the repulsed woman, the progress stated by the added intertitles could not have addressed the visceral distaste for proximity to African Americans that the woman represents. The “screen record” might deal with the intellectual claims about history, but not with the deep-seated emotional impulses and commitments that allowed these claims to flourish—and that The Birth of a Nation advanced. With or without this lost shot, the insertion of the “screen record” intertitles at this particular juncture in The Birth of a Nation raises many questions. The opening sequence sets the historical precedent for the unfolding drama to come, yet the inserted titles speak to the contemporary audience of the demonstrated “progress” of the vilified African Americans—a confusing gesture when set between the abolitionist meeting and the Civil War and Reconstruction. The ambiguity of this sequencing indicates the ineffectiveness of the “screen record.” This example also points to the semantic instability of The Birth of a Nation itself. In the abolitionist meeting scene, a hollow-eyed preacher leads a Black child through the meeting toward the camera.19 However brief, this is a haunting image, in which the man displays the child for the camera while the child confronts the spectator with a direct gaze. If this is the last scene before the insertion of the “screen record,” how would it change with that addition? How is the reading of this image of the child affected by the adjacency of statistics on “negro progress”? Is the implication that the child grows up to be a post-Reconstruction hero? Does he go from being an abolitionist poster boy (Frederick Douglass) to the early twentieth-century liberal patron’s accommodating ally (Booker T. Washington)? Without the insertion of the possible alternative destinies for the child, is he implicitly cast by Griffith as a proto-Gus? Or a protoprimitive legislator? And what of the abolitionist? Is he presented as being responsible for the crimes that will unfold in the drama? Is he offering up

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the child to the camera and, by extension, to the spectator? Or is he challenging the spectator to, in effect, deal with this “problem”? Is the film articulating the moment of transition from the assertion of the “Negro as person” to the “Negro as problem”?20 (Fig. 7.1). Of course, how a spectator might understand the opening depends on his or her own subject position. Regardless, the ambiguity created by the insertion of the “screen record” undermines its own claims to historical truth. If the “screen record” purports to demonstrate how the problem has been solved, or at least signals that progress has been made, this is undone by the way the semantic power and instability of Griffith’s film renders those claims problematic. As the drama unfolds, the progress rolls back and belies the veracity of the inserts.21 With three hours of narrative drama to go, the “screen record” would likely be a distant memory—if even that—by the film’s conclusion. Although The Birth of a Nation was protested and fought from its initial appearance in Boston, it was not until after the addition of the

Fig. 7.1 Abolitionist and enslaved boy

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“screen record” of “negro advancement” that protests reached a critical mass. The managing editor of the African American newspaper the Boston Guardian, William Monroe Trotter—a prominent figure connected to the NAACP but considered too radical to be a central member of the organization—led the protest against the film, reportedly objecting to the apparent ignoring of Mayor Curley’s negotiated deal with the producers to edit out the most offensive scenes, claiming that the parts “had been enlarged rather than reduced.”22 Although the edits were not made consistently or with precision, the only certain addition to the film at this point was the “screen record,” so Trotter’s objection might very well have included the material added to show this image of Black progress. It is not clear that anyone thought the “screen record” worked well. An editorial in the Fitchburg Daily Sentinel called the added statistics of progress “a miserable apology,” stating that “tables of statistics do not appeal to the imaginative like moving pictures.”23 The paper called for “some representation of negro valor, fidelity and patriotism, of which there are ample illustrations.”24 The protests intensified on April 19, when nearly 2,000 people gathered on the Boston Common in front of the State House as Trotter and his associates met with Governor David I. Walsh.25 For several days, Walsh had been negotiating with the moderate politician and lawyer William H. Lewis, who had served as the nation’s first Black assistant attorney general and was an ally of Washington and Butler R. Wilson, a member of the NAACP. Lewis had decided both to pursue legal action against The Birth of a Nation and to push for a new state censorship law.26 Given hopeful signs from the statehouse, further protests were delayed (Fig. 7.2). All evidence suggests that the inserted “screen record” was never imagined as anything other than a temporary solution until moving pictures could be furnished to supplement further showings of The Birth of a Nation at the Tremont Theatre. In the midst of the protests, the Boston Globe announced on April 18 that the theater “expected to add to the play this week the supplemental film being prepared by Mr. Griffith, showing the progress of the negro race since reconstruction and thus rounding out the great cycle of historical events from slavery until now.”27 The titles demonstrating “negro progress,” according to Rabbi Fleischer, asserted that The Birth of a Nation would “fairly force Americans to face the negro problem and to work toward its wise and just solution.”28 But Lewis objected to Fleischer’s logic, asking: “Why should I

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Fig. 7.2 Protest on Boston Common (The Crisis, June 1915, 88)

be a problem to any man? I am a problem only to the man who seeks to take away my rights as a human being, and to such a man the negro must be a problem.”29 Members of The Birth of a Nation camp did not see the “screen record” as salt poured into the wounds caused by the film’s more offensive scenes; rather, they sought to, in effect, double down: to expand on the counterbalancing “progress” material with supplemental motion pictures and hence do away with objections once and for all. To this end, in addition to the “screen record” demonstrating the progress of Black citizens, on April 21 the Tremont Theatre premièred what the Boston Journal reported to be “pictorial scenes further illustrating their progress.”30 These new images were added as a coda to the film under the title The New Era.

The Hampton Epilogue: The New Era Despite widespread reports, the epilogue was not in fact filmed by Griffith but was furnished by Hampton Institute from its publicity arsenal. The sheer fact of Hampton’s role in this enterprise is intriguing and curious. Yet, however perplexing, the actions of Hampton’s representatives were entirely consistent with the logic of uplift media that they employed and embraced. Uplift media presumed the persuasiveness of

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the image as evidence of the guided progress of the race and the ability for individual and collective transformation. Hampton’s media arsenal (containing texts, photographs, moving images, and songs) was designed to counter negative representations and prejudicial impressions of African Americans with demonstrations of the impact of uplift education. That logic would prove to be greatly flawed—indeed, The New Era publicly revealed these flaws—and Hampton officials faced a tremendous backlash to their efforts to improve the misrepresentation of African Americans in Griffith’s epic through an uplift film appended to it. On April 10, the same day that The Birth of a Nation opened in Boston, Hampton faculty members discussed a telegram from Boston asking for moving pictures of Hampton that would show “the progress of the Negro race and the work being done at Hampton and Tuskegee so as to offset the unfortunate effects so far as the Negro is concerned, of the moving picture play entitled ‘Birth of a Nation.’”31 Plans were quickly put in place. Hollis B. Frissell and Leigh Richmond Miner, both in New York at the time, met with the censorship board. Frissell expressed his “strong disapprobation” of The Birth of a Nation but was told, as he later recounted, that “it would be impossible to discontinue it and that no court would take action against it.”32 In his annual principal’s report (published in May 1915 and probably written around the time he was deliberating about adding the Hampton pictures), Frissell wrote: “Thousands of people in New York City are now attending a moving-picture show called ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ which presents an utterly false and abhorrent picture of Negro life. The papers of the country dwell upon the crimes of the Negro race, but not upon its progress. It seems incumbent upon schools like Hampton to help people realize that under proper conditions the Negro can be fitted for Christian citizenship.”33 Frissell consulted with several Hampton trustees and sent Miner to Boston to work with the censorship board on the materials. On behalf of the board, William D. McGuire Jr. requested 1,800 feet—two reels—and Miner worked with him to furnish the material.34 On April 20, the faculty voted to approve the use of Hampton’s motion pictures in conjunction with The Birth of a Nation.35 However, the faculty approval was either a formality or a gesture revealing the misguided presumption of their authority, as it came just one day before the first showing of The New Era in Boston on April 21 at the Tremont Theatre. This timeline indicates that plans were already well under way to include the Hampton footage as a supplement to the “screen record.” At best, the Hampton epilogue

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was a rushed attempt to address the protests, calls for censorship, and legal challenges to The Birth of a Nation in Boston, carried out with little deliberation or discussion. The New Era was pieced together from the last section of Making Negro Lives Count , a sequence depicting Hampton’s departments and the community improvements made by its graduates. Aside from its length, we do not know how much of the final section of Making Negro Lives Count was actually used, but given the speed with which it was brought to Boston and exhibited, it is doubtful that major edits were made. The before, during, and after segments appeared to give Making Negro Lives Count a modular structure, allowing for the easy reappropriation of the last section. However, the pieces of the before-and-after structure of Making Negro Lives Count were necessarily linear and relied on the other segments and exhibition context for their meaning.36 As a campaign film, Making Negro Lives Count conveyed its message in a controlled and carefully planned context, with clarifying speeches, illustrative songs, and a receptive audience. In contrast, The New Era was expected to speak for itself and to serve as a counterargument for the preceding three-hour motion picture epic. In effect, the epilogue tried to make The Birth of a Nation as a whole into an uplift film, subsuming it in the greater logic of uplift: Griffith was to be the before to Hampton’s after. The position of The New Era as an “after” is generated by its image of a farming family, an image that emphasizes the uplift ideal of self-help. How might the end of The New Era, with its final scene of “happy home life,” have functioned as a coda to The Birth of a Nation?37 Although the “screen record” intertitles from the prologue of the film might be forgotten by the end, the image of a Black farmer father and his family in Making Negro Lives Count would now serve as the final word to the epic, an emblem of sorts—or a tableau. If this scene was in fact included in The New Era, it would represent a remarkable parallel with the conclusion of The Birth of a Nation. On the surface the echoed ending seems to propose an African American equivalent to the white domestic ideal that concludes Griffith’s film. However, there is a deep asymmetry: the double honeymoon scene in Griffith’s film comes only after a rapid sequence of events following the climax of the film—the ride of the Klan—a context that troubles any reading of parallelism. After the parade of the Klansmen, a title announces “The next election,” and a brief scene follows in which African Americans emerge from their homes on voting day, only to be met by a wall of mounted and armed Klansmen who intimidate them

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into retreating back into their homes. The next title, “The Aftermath. At the sea’s edge, the double honeymoon,” announces the unions of Margaret and Phil and Ben and Elsie. This is followed by superimposed shots of “bestial War” being defeated by “the gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace,” intercut with Ben and Elsie, before the final intertitle “Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever!” If there was a parallel in the form of the endings of The New Era and The Birth of a Nation, then, the same was not true of the content provided. The last shots including African Americans in surviving prints of The Birth of a Nation appear in the sequence of voter intimidation. Thus, The New Era in effect appears not as a mirror of domestic bliss but as an implied consequence of the voter intimidation. It shows African Americans back on the farm and contained in a domestic frame: after three hours of the threat of miscegenation, Hampton’s domestic scene suggests not a parallel force but a neutralized Black threat. Instead of contradicting Griffith’s presentation of history, The New Era legitimizes its thesis—however unwittingly—by positing the uplift project as a logical extension of, rather than a challenge to, the white supremacy advocated by the film. There is still another aspect to the epilogue at work here. The ambitions of The New Era are further complicated by its adjacency to another part of the conclusion of The Birth of a Nation, a deportation scene that does not exist in surviving prints. Reportedly, following the intertitle “Lincoln’s Solution,” there were shots of the mass deportation of African Americans to Liberia.38 This scene was cut out of the 1921 rerelease but apparently left intact in most prints in 1915, and it is unclear if it was shown in Boston.39 If the deportation scene was there, it poses an interesting possibility for The New Era—allowing Hampton to refute (or at the very least replace) The Birth of a Nation’s proposed solution of the mass deportation of African Americans. In this case, the Hampton footage would argue not just that African Americans were useful citizens, but—more fundamentally—that they were viable Americans. Members of the Griffith camp duly absorbed The New Era into their repertoire of counterarguments against critics. In response to a letter from A. E. Pillsbury of Boston that denounced The Birth of a Nation in the Boston Journal, publicist for the movie Joseph J. McCarthy wrote a detailed rebuttal that was published alongside Pillsbury’s complaint. Without indicating its independence from The Birth of

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a Nation, McCarthy points to the Hampton epilogue as evidence of the film’s commitment to “national unity”: The producers of “The Birth of a Nation” are not trying for a repeal of the 14th and 15th Amendments. They are not insidiously attempting to bring back slavery (the very thought provokes a smile), and they are not actuated by political motives. They do not share Mr. Dixon’s radical view of a future Liberia for American negroes; over against the imaginative scene of the great Liberia once dreamed of by Lincoln is displayed the happy recount of negro progress and prosperity since the war. And any schoolboy could have told Mr. Pillsbury that the depiction of the antics and excesses of recently freed negroes, as shown in the play during Reconstruction times, does not in any manner indict or malign the negro of today.40

This logic was pervasive, and it did not just come from those in the Griffith camp. Unwittingly echoing this line of argument in his call for censoring the film, Washington stated: “The play is fundamentally wrong in that it attempts to deal with the development of America since the abolition of slavery by ignoring the substantial progress of the Negro race and emphasizing the cruel misunderstandings of the readjustment period, in which unfortunate individuals of both races figured.”41 According to this logic, the Hampton epilogue would mitigate the damage perpetrated by the film’s account of history because it provided that crucial after demanded by narrative logic: without The New Era, offense; with it, uplift. Furthermore, the publicity garnered from the wide distribution of The Birth of a Nation and the film’s tremendous popularity with audiences catapulted Hampton into a far wider arena than that of its typical audience. Hampton authorities considered both the uplift logic and the widespread publicity to be irrefutable justifications for their involvement with an otherwise deplorable popular spectacle. They welcomed the opportunity to, in effect, correct the preceding misrepresentation even if in so doing they (inadvertently) reinforced rather than refuted it.

African American Responses to The New Era No matter how the censors or judicial authorities assessed the film, many spectators—particularly African Americans—felt strongly that the inclusion of seemingly positive imagery was not enough to counter the offense of the film’s negative representation of African Americans. Although the epilogue was appended as a corrective coda to The Birth of a Nation

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with the best intentions of the Tuskegee and Hampton trustees who suggested it, Black civic groups quickly protested its association with Griffith’s film. One group in Atlantic City challenged the institutes’ “miscreant leaders,” stating that “the manifest object in showing Hampton Institute in connection with the play is to divert the mind of the colored people from the racial hatred which the play engenders” and that the leaders who “consented and recommended” that pictures of Hampton be shown with The Birth of a Nation should be “condemned as traitors of the Negro race.”42 May Childs Nerney, secretary of the NAACP, said quite plainly that it was “really adding insult to injury.”43 To the dismay of the Hampton authorities, it proved naïve to assume that the mere inclusion of relatively brief images of uplift could not counteract the epic film’s harmful misrepresentation of African Americans. As John P. Turner, a prominent Black Philadelphian, told the African American newspaper the Philadelphia Tribune in response to an article in which he was mistakenly represented as approving of The Birth of a Nation, “while the last five or six minutes of Hampton School scenes, and statement of the colored man’s progress, is inspiring, this to my mind cannot heal the terrible indignities heaped upon us for the two hours preceding. It appeals to the passions of race hatred, and to my mind, can do the colored people of this country none other than harm.”44 The Black women’s club movement, whose members were politically engaged, facilitated a large-scale coordinated campaign against The Birth of a Nation and Hampton’s perceived complicity with its racist vision. The Northeastern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, whose president at the time was Margaret James Murray (Mrs. Booker T. Washington), organized letter-writing campaigns to protest Hampton’s association with The Birth of a Nation.45 Letters were also sent from other clubs and from unaffiliated individuals. One letter from the Frances E. W. Harper Club of Ansonia, Connecticut, is representative: “We do not approve of having pictures of young men and young women who are striving to raise the standard of manhood and womanhood shown at the end of this film to offset nefarious pictures shown in the beginning.”46 The New York Age reported that one Jersey City club sent resolutions to Frissell requesting that he “withdraw from that infamous play, ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ the scenes of Hampton Institute.”47 These campaigns had an effect. The Pennsylvania Armstrong Association, a branch of an organization of philanthropists dedicated to raising funds for Hampton, fielded questions throughout the fall 1915 and

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turned to Frissell for guidance on how to answer such inquiries. Educators at other schools and institutes wrote to people associated with Hampton to express concern. For example, Leslie Pinckney Hill, the principal of the Cheyney Training School for Teachers in Cheyney, Pennsylvania (the oldest institution of higher learning for African Americans, founded in 1837), wrote to the Pennsylvania Armstrong Association asking that organization to intercede with Hampton to have the pictures removed. In her letter, Hill assumed Hampton was motivated by “advertisement” but stated that it is “inconceivable” that they should “tolerate advertisement of this sort.” She concluded: “There may be a scintilla of good connected with this show, but nobody thinks of this when one considers the world of evil which it brings upon us all.”48 Letters also came in from Hampton alumni, asking how such an alliance could have occurred. All of the letters Hampton received regarding The New Era implored the institute’s authorities to withdraw their pictures from screenings of The Birth of a Nation. The Black press, campaigning against The Birth of a Nation, closely followed the various efforts to challenge the film and criticized perceived missteps in the struggle. James Weldon Johnson—a prolific writer and critic and a contributing editor to the New York Age—denounced the potential association of Hampton with Griffith’s film in a column that appeared several weeks after the first screening of The New Era. Titled “A Trap,” the belated publication of the column suggests that his cautionary tone carried a strong undercurrent of irony. Johnson refers to the Hampton pictures appearing early in The Birth of a Nation rather than at its conclusion, possibly conflating the “screen record” intertitles and The New Era (though following its appearance at the Tremont Theatre, the positioning of the Hampton scenes would have been at the discretion of exhibitors). Johnson’s critique is worth quoting in its entirety: Word comes to us indirectly that the producers of “The Birth of a Nation” are showing their kindly feelings toward the Negro by offering to introduce into the first part of the picture some views of Hampton Institute. If this is true, the Dixon-Griffith combination is laying a trap in which, we are quite sure, the Hampton people will be too wise to walk. If there was ever a case for the application of the old saw, “Beware of the Greeks bearing gifts,” this is one. No good will toward the Negro need be expected or hoped for from Tom Dixon and his associates. There

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is absolutely nothing in their hearts but blind hatred for the race; and any protestation to the contrary is based on some hidden motive. This “The Birth of a Nation” gang is evidently feeling the attacks made on their hell-inspired production; but it is not for Hampton to save them. If the picture can be killed, let it die, from first scene to last; for there isn’t enough good in it to merit saving any part. The whole representation was conceived only in hatred for the North and contempt for the Negro; so let it die! Kill it! The final effect of introducing views of Hampton Institute into the first part of the “Birth of a Nation” would be to have spectators feel at the end of the play that education for Negroes is a failure. In doing this the producers would obtain the powerful endorsement of Hampton and thereby disarm criticism and repel attack, and still not change the main lessons taught by the play. It is inconceivable that the Dixon-Griffith people after spending thousands of dollars to produce a picture whose sole purpose is to convince the North that it made a mistake in fighting to free the slaves, and to convince the nation that it must “keep the nigger down,” it is inconceivable, we say, that these people would consider introducing into their picture views from a colored school in such a manner and to such an extent as to change the whole play into a propaganda of glorious uplift for the Negro. No such change of heart can be expected. The offer to introduce these views, if it has been made, is nothing more than a trap. A trap, as we said, into which Dr. Frissell and the Hampton authorities will be too wise to walk.49

Johnson’s column highlights several significant aspects of the debate over The New Era. First, the suggestion of a potential “hidden motive” in the defense of Dixon and Griffith suggests the possibility of nonaltruistic motivation on the part of Frissell and Hampton, an insinuation that reveals Johnson’s mistrust. Johnson’s ironic and condescending tone is surprising for the pages of the New York Age, a paper financed by Washington and considered a conservative mouthpiece for Tuskegeean ideals. In effect, Johnson says what Tuskegee representatives could not state publicly due to Tuskegee’s close association with Hampton. Second, Johnson suggests that the association of Hampton with a film that presents Negro degeneracy as history would result in an unwitting “endorsement” from Hampton. The Hampton film, then, would not counter the negative portrayal of African Americans in The Birth of a Nation but rather would be complicit in its racist agenda. Third, Johnson’s warning that the proposal to add the Hampton footage constitutes

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“a trap,” and his recognition of the potential of motion pictures for propagandistic purposes, suggests that an association with another film can alter a film’s significance. He speaks to the power of context: by juxtaposing representations, alternative meanings could result. Clearly, The New Era did not have its intended effect. But there are other, broader implications to the issues raised by this episode. Critics saw the adjacency of the Hampton images with the racist portrayal of African Americans in The Birth of a Nation as undermining the very logic of uplift media itself. The entire publicity project of Hampton was predicated on a tenuous balance of referential imagery: the line between positive representation and the perpetuation of stereotypical iconography was a nonexistent boundary—or at least a line to be finessed—in Hampton publicity. Like Washington at Tuskegee, Frissell aimed to appeal to white benefactors without making his institute, or agricultural and industrial education for African Americans in general, appear threatening to white power. The tone of condescension in Johnson’s critique answers the benevolent condescension of Hampton publicity, in which Black uplift is facilitated by white paternal guidance and reported by authoritative white witnesses. Throughout the winter and into the new year, Frissell faced ongoing pressures concerning his approval of the addition of the Hampton epilogue. A pamphlet written by the prominent Black Presbyterian minister Francis J. Grimké excoriating The Birth of a Nation and Hampton’s involvement with it got Frissell’s attention. Hurt yet resolute, Frissell responded to Grimké, “I wonder if it occurred to you to give a little more charitable interpretation to my action concerning the Hampton pictures.” He went on to explain how the association came about and offered his rationale for it: “I wonder if you have not felt that if you can not alter unfortunate conditions it is wise to attempt to improve them. It seemed to me that here was a chance to show to many thousands of people another side of the colored race than that set forth by this play which is so unfair not only to the Negro but to the white man as well, and I embraced this opportunity with the best of motives. I appreciate how strongly you feel but I want you to see the other side of the affair.”50 Grimké responded that although he appreciated Frissell’s motive, he maintained that it was a “mistake” to provide “this little annex,” pictures which were “tagged on in such a way as to make them of no value in counteracting the bad impression already made against the race.” Grimké

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pithily explained to Frissell that Hampton’s efforts to improve “unfortunate conditions which cannot be changed” resulted in a dangerous endorsement: “In our attempt to improve such conditions we ought to be very careful that what we do is not construed into an endorsement of the very conditions which we are seeking to improve.” Grimké urged Frissell to withdraw The New Era, concluding: “Your name, as a known friend of the Negro, and Hampton Institute, ought not to be used to popularize on, to break down the opposition to this deliberate attempt to destroy the good name of a race. And one of the things that surprised me was that you did not see that such would be the effect.”51 Grimké’s view was shared by many other prominent Black citizens. Monroe N. Work retrospectively recounted the campaigns, protests, and riots against The Birth of a Nation, noting: “To meet the objections of the Negroes, and it was said to show that no ill feeling towards the Negro was intended, an additional reel to show the progress of the Negro was added. The general opinion of the Negroes with reference to this addition was that it was clearly out of place.”52 Throughout the controversy, Frissell remained silent in public, addressing his response to individuals rather than engaging in open debate about the suitability of Hampton’s involvement with The Birth of a Nation. In Frissell’s opinion, The Birth of a Nation could be improved through Hampton’s skill at transforming the raw materials of southern racist oppression into a modern, useful product. The naïve faith in the power of a positive image to challenge a negative one betrayed a fundamental weakness of the program of uplift in general. Far from being a corrective to a false racist history, the Hampton epilogue underscored the potential dangers of uplift rhetoric as a counteractive strategy.

Notes 1. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 39–40. 2. Thomas F. Dixon Jr., author of a trilogy of Reconstruction-era novels celebrating the Ku Klux Klan—The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905, which became the source of The Birth of a Nation), and The Traitor (1907)—had once praised Washington, thinking that industrial education trained Black people for subordination (Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 431). Dixon then changed his mind and wanted to debate Washington, promising “not to refer to my play,” referring to the stage adaptation of The Clansman, but Washington refused (ibid., 432).

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3. For discussions of the Black response to Birth of a Nation, see Thomas Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture Birth of a Nation,” The Historian, vol. 25, no. 3 (May 1964), 344–62 and Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 4. Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro,” 345. 5. For a thorough discussion of Lincoln’s Dream and other attempts at countering The Birth of a Nation with film, see Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 162–68. 6. This outcry was certainly related to the response to Dixon’s play, The Clansman, whose stage appearance sparked much controversy in 1905– 1906. 7. See Nickie Fleener, “‘Answering Film with Film’: The Hampton Epilogue, A Positive Alternative to the Negative Black Stereotypes Presented in The Birth of a Nation,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, no. 4 (1980), 400–25. This article is the most comprehensive discussion of the Hampton epilogue to date and represents the consideration of significant archival sources. However, Fleener does not appear to be aware of the extent of Hampton’s filmmaking project or the provenance of The New Era. 8. Washington letter to Samuel Edward Courtney, April 23, 1915, Booker T. Washington Papers, eds. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972–1989), vol. 13, 277. 9. “Confers on Cuts in Photo Play Films,” Boston Daily Globe, April 13, 1915. 10. “Confers on Cuts in Photo Play Films,” Boston Daily Globe, April 13, 1915. 11. “Court to Rule Today on ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Boston Journal, April 21, 1915; “New Film Shows Negro’s Progress,” Boston Journal, April 17, 1915; “New Film Added,” Boston Daily Globe, April 17, 1915. The Crisis reported: “A new feature is added to the film in Boston ‘portraying the advance of Negro life.’ A prominent New York lawyer informs us that this was done at the suggestion of Mr. Booker T. Washington,” “Fighting Race Calumny,” June 1915, 86. 12. The press referred to the inserts as “title material,” suggesting intertitles and perhaps still images. See “Court to Rule Today on ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Boston Journal, April 21, 1915. 13. “New Film Added,” Boston Daily Globe, April 17, 1915. 14. “New Film Added,” Boston Daily Globe, April 17, 1915. 15. “New Film Shows Negro’s Progress,” Boston Journal, April 17, 1915.

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16. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Approved by Mayor,” Boston Daily Globe, April 11, 1915. Curley requested edits to the Gus chase scene, scenes with Austin Stoneman and his mulatto housekeeper, Silas Lynch’s attempted “forced marriage” of Elsie Stoneman, and the South Carolina House of Representatives scene. Curley added these cuts in addition to the changes made in the original film in New York. All evidence suggests that the cuts in New York were no more than “minor, cosmetic changes to the film,” with the offensive scenes left intact although the Gus chase scene was shortened (Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 139). The Dramatic News reported that “the cuts were all trivial and will not hurt the engagement [in Boston] which looks good at present,” April 17, 1915, Microfilm reel 2, Griffith Papers. 17. W. Stephen Bush, “The Birth of a Nation,” Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915, 1586. In surviving prints, you can see the woman fanning herself as the child returns to the front of the congregation. The woman is played by Jennie Lee, who also plays Mammy later in the film. John Cuniberti, “The Birth of a Nation”: A Formal Shot-by-Shot Analysis Together with Microfiche (Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1979), 38. 18. Stokes notes that the mayor of New York insisted on the removal of the smell incident (D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 104). However, the review by W. Stephen Bush in the Moving Picture World includes it (“The Birth of a Nation,” March 13, 1915, 1586). Bush states he saw the film at a private screening in New York. There is no indication the shot was removed from the New York print apart from John Cuniberti’s reference to the record of the hearing on April 1 in New York (The Birth of a Nation, 38). 19. Although today’s surviving prints are derived from the 1921 reissue of the film, there is no reason to assume that the opening sequence of the original film differed significantly from the surviving versions, beyond the edits discussed here. See J. B. Kaufman, “Non-Archival Sources,” in The Griffith Project, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: British Film Institute, 2004), vol. 8, 107–12. 20. See: W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folk, eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 9; Booker T. Washington, ed., The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day (New York: James Pott and Company, 1903). 21. For discussions of the use of intertitles in The Birth of a Nation as a means to claim historical accuracy for a fictional film, see Mimi White, “‘The Birth of a Nation’: History as Pretext,” in “The Birth of a Nation”: D.W. Griffith, Director, ed. Robert Lang (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 214–24; Stokes, “The Use of Intertitles in D.W.

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22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

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Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” in Le cinéma en toutes lettres: jeux d’écritures à l’écran, ed. Nicole Cloarec (Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2007), 15–26. Quoted “‘Birth of Nation’ Causes Near-Riot,” Boston Daily Globe, April 18, 1915. “The Birth of a Nation,” Fitchburg Daily Sentinel, May 4, 1915. “The Birth of a Nation,” Fitchburg Daily Sentinel, May 4, 1915. Fox, The Guardian of Boston, 192–93; Stokes, D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 145–46; “Gov Walsh and O’Meara Will Appeal to Courts on ‘Nation’ Film,” Boston Evening Globe, April 19, 1915. Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 146. “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Pictures at the Tremont,” Boston Daily Globe, April 18, 1915. Quoted in “Confers on Cuts in Photo Play Films,” Boston Daily Globe, April 13, 1915. Quoted in “Blames Governor for Photo-Play Agitation,” Boston Journal, April 28, 1915. For more on Fleischer’s position, see “500 in Room Meant for 200,” Boston Evening Globe, April 26, 1915. “Court to Rule Today on ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Boston Journal, April 21, 1915. Hampton Institute Faculty Meeting Minutes, April 10, 1915, Hampton University Archives, Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia (hereafter Hampton Archives). Hollis B. Frissell to Francis J. Grimké, November 6, 1915, in Francis J. Grimké, The Works of Francis J. Grimké, ed. Carter G. Woodson, Vol 4: Letters (Washington: Associated, 1942), 153. Hollis B. Frissell, “Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Principal,” Hampton Bulletin, May 1915, 36. Hampton Institute Faculty Meeting Minutes, April 14, 1915, Hampton Archives. Hampton Institute Faculty Meeting Minutes, April 20, 1915, Hampton Archives. The reuse of footage is a common practice in industrial filmmaking, where films are adapted to best suit various exhibition contexts, becoming what Yvonne Zimmermann has called “provisional assemblages of working material to be (re)used in new combinations” depending on the desired functions of the footage. Yvonne Zimmermann, “‘What Hollywood Is to America, the Corporate Film Is to Switzerland,’” in Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, eds. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 111. “Entertainments,” Southern Workman, March 1915, 185. Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 166–67; Francis Hackett, “Brotherly Love,” in Focus on The Birth of a Nation, ed. Fred Silva (Englewood

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40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), 86; Motography, March 20, 1915, 432. It is unclear if the deportation was conveyed through the intertitle alone or included a scene as well, though there are spectators’ accounts of such scenes (Cuniberti, The Birth of a Nation, 167). Griffith publicist Joseph J. McCarthy referred to the Hampton material fitting “over against the imaginative scene of the great Liberia once dreamed of by Lincoln” in a letter to the Boston Journal (“Journal Mail Bag,” Boston Journal, May 5, 1915). Ibid. Booker T. Washington, “Time to Fight Bad Movies Is Before They Are Shown,” Chicago Defender, May 22, 1915. Quoted in “Atlantic City Men Denounce Photo Play,” New York Age, August 12, 1915. See also “Colored People to Storm State House,” Boston Daily Globe, April 19, 1915. May Childs Nerney letter to R. Granville Curry, September 21, 1915, frame 54, microfilm reel 33, NAACP Records, 1842–1999, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. John P. Turner, “Does Not Approve Birth of a Nation,” Philadelphia Tribune, July 31, 1915. See also “Dr. Turner Writes,” New York Age, August 5, 1915. It is not clear to what extent Mrs. Washington was involved in the letterwriting campaign, but it is striking given Tuskegee’s encouragement of the addition. Ida Anderson letter to Hollis B. Frissell, January 14, 1916, Hampton Archives. “Out of Town Correspondence,” New York Age, February 3, 1916. Leslie Pinckney Hill letter to Mr. Emlen, Pennsylvania Armstrong Association, September 23, 1915, Hampton Archives. James W. Johnson, “A Trap,” New York Age, May 6, 1915. Hollis B. Frissell letter to Francis J. Grimké, November 6, 1915, in Grimké, The Works of Francis J. Grimké, 4, 153. Francis J. Grimké letter to Hollis B. Frissell, November 8, 1915, in Grimké, The Works of Francis J. Grimké, 4, 154. Monroe N. Work, Negro Year Book: An Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro 1916–1917 (Tuskegee, AL: Negro Year Book, Tuskegee Institute, 1916), 46.

PART III

Resistance and Protest

CHAPTER 8

“A Most Serious Loss in Business”: Race, Citizenship and Protest in New Haven, Connecticut Nicholas Forster

Whatever else it was, everyone in New Haven seemed to agree that The Birth of a Nation would offer an education. For its advocates, D. W. Griffith was a teacher mobilizing a new medium to reflect the true founding of the United States of America. For countless others, the motion picture represented a mangled racist vision that was not only untrue but fundamentally detrimental to the future of that nation. In 1915, between October 25 and November 12, New Haven’s four daily newspapers published endorsements, challenges, and reports that tracked the local fight, led by a group of Black citizens, to prevent the film’s exhibition.1 That fight would not be entirely successful, but it set the stage for printed disagreements between clergy, the government, and one of the

N. Forster (B) Department of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies Program, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_8

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city’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, theater magnate S. Z. Poli, who planned to exhibit the film at his historic theater, The Hyperion. For local media, seeing Birth became a patriotic duty to revitalize one’s citizenship; it was something that had “great educational appeal … [and] should be viewed by every man, woman and child in the city,” since it was a work of “the most tremendous scale that was ever undertaken by a dramatist in the world’s history.”2 Scale became the basis for white viewers to be wrapped in a sentimentalized cloak of national identity and belonging. If Birth would later become lauded for its supposed technical brilliance, as distinct from its white supremacist—often insufficiently described as “controversial”—politics, local papers framed the première not only as historic but as a presentation of history. This rhetoric echoed Griffith’s faith in cinema as a unique technology where one could actually see the facts: “[t]here will be no opinions expressed. You will merely be present at the making of history.”3 Whether on set, where he carried “pamphlets, maps, and books” with him, or in publicity statements during the film’s promotion, Griffith wielded the symbolic weight of “history” and a bibliography of sources to establish Birth, and movies more generally, as authentic gateways to an earlier time.4 Whatever was projected on screen was not merely a representation of the past; it conjured a reality beyond what any book could offer. Of course, this was just one of the mythologies use to authenticate the film and establish its supposedly historic value and technical achievement. These myths became part of the contested ground in New Haven. The braiding of education and history is emblematized in a photograph from the last day of Birth’s initial run in New Haven: Schoolboys at Entrance to Hyperion Waiting to See Birth of a Nation. Taken by amateur photographer T. S. Bronson, the blurred faces of children define the foreground of the image as a number of them hold baker boy caps in the air5 (Fig. 8.1). The mass of faded black suits merges into the white raised hands reaching towards banners proclaiming the screening of Birth of a Nation, “AS BEING PLAYED IN BOSTON NEW YORK AND CHICAGO.” Arms flail. Heads spin and turn. The hallway of the Hyperion would look endless if it were not for the seven pairs of flags hanging where the ceiling meets the wall, pushing deep into the background. Amidst the boys stands one adult: John C. Collins, a minister and leader of the Friends of Boys, an organization that grew out of the New Haven Boys Club and had “as its basic principle the uplift of the boy.”6 Friends of Boys was started in 1906 after Collins witnessed youths

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Fig. 8.1 T. S. Bronson, Schoolboys at entrance to Hyperion waiting to see Birth of a Nation, 1915 (T. S. Bronson Collection, The New Haven Museum. Published with the kind permission of the New Haven Museum Photo Archive)

arrested and harassed by the police. Its goal was to turn the working class into a middle class, to teach urban children how to be urbane.What better place than the movies? Hands folded at his waist, with the slightest upturn of his lip, Collins appears proud. He had fought for the screening in New Haven and, now, a new generation had come to see the Birth of a Nation. This image captures a perverse kind of festivity where the thrill of going to a moving picture was plaited with a celebration of America. Only a few months earlier, Bronson had photographed the city’s famous green, where there was a massive celebratory demonstration on Flag Day. The holiday itself had a long history in Connecticut and, in 1908, the Governor marked June 14 as an occasion for citizens to celebrate being a “united people appreciative of the benefits of political liberty and awake to its duties.”7 Bronson’s photograph, with its many flags framing the Friends of Boys, ties cinema to that duty of upholding liberty.

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Still, Birth’s screening was no foregone conclusion. Throughout the year, protests and fights were waged across the country and, despite the Hyperion banner’s claim that the film was “being played” as it had been in Chicago, Boston, and New York, there were substantial changes in New Haven. This essay tracks the logistical battle surrounding Birth in Connecticut’s largest city, demonstrating how a confluence of contemporaneous events collided in debates about the screening which played out in the city’s newspapers. Day after day, in the month following the unprecedented re-election of Mayor Frank J. Rice to a fourth term, the conflict over Birth of a Nation appeared on the front pages of the New Haven Register, New Haven Journal-Courier, New Haven TimesLeader, and the New Haven Union. Each paper registered and reckoned with protests from Black citizens, who made up less than 3% of the city’s population. This micro-history focuses on the fluctuating ambivalence and hostility of government officials while foregrounding Black New Haveners unique political tactics, which went beyond the common appeals over the film’s “threat to public safety.”8 In other words, understanding the complex story of Birth’s 1915 exhibition in New Haven complicates broader understandings of the relationship between cinema, civic belonging, municipal censorship, and race. Throughout the United States, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a small but fast-growing organization, coordinated national and local fights against the screening of Birth. Before any papers in New Haven caught wind that the film would face a challenge, George W. Crawford, a Black local resident who was also a graduate of Yale Law school and one of the NAACP’s board of directors, phoned the organization’s headquarters in New York. It was August 1915 and Crawford was eager to learn of successful strategies used to contest the film, since he was meeting with city officials and the mayor, who was in the midst of a political campaign.9 The following month he wrote to Mary Childs Nerney, the NAACP’s executive secretary, that “we have succeeded in getting the Mayor and Chief of Police to refuse license [for] an exhibition.”10 The NAACP had heard this kind of news before. This was no definite win: Griffith and others had frequently turned to the courts to challenge and upend mayoral rulings preventing exhibition. Nevertheless, Crawford’s note was marked by hope. The following month New Haven’s dailies celebrated the arrival of Birth as the “picture of a lifetime.”11 Where local media drummed up

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excitement, The Crisis , the official journal of the NAACP, noted Crawford’s success in its “Social Uplift” section, claiming that New Haven’s mayor and chief of police had “refused to permit” the film to be shown.12 Something was awry. The front page of the October 25 New Haven Register read “Injunction Over ‘Birth of a Nation.’”13 The brief article printed the details of an injunction filed against S. Z. Poli, the theater-owner who had amassed an empire across New England.14 A successful Italian immigrant in a city where nearly a tenth of the population had been born in Italy, Poli was a powerful icon and a “local cultural luminary.”15 Whereas injunctions had often been filed by theater owners and producers to overturn decisions made by civil servants, here the case against Poli was an appeal to a Superior Court as a case of equity rather than criminality or legality. Crawford and two other attorneys, Harrison Hewitt and David E. Fitzgerald (who would later go on to become mayor of New Haven), brought the case before Judge James Henry Webb, on behalf of four Black New Haveners, challenging Birth’s exhibition on financial grounds. Crawford stressed a six-point plan that emphasized that his clients were tax-paying citizens. More importantly, the suit provided an opportunity to define the contested status of Black citizenship and establish some precedent since, as Crawford argued, Black citizens “have not been in a situation where they can stand up and invoke the protection of the law when they are threatened. Hence this case is a rarity.”16 As Crawford explained, not only was Birth a “lascivious, sacrilegious, indecent” work that painted Black people as “murderous … moral perverts” and was likely to be “provocative of serious public disorder,” it would also“be viewed by [so] many white persons” that it would create “a feeling of great hostility” along racial lines.17 This hostility would lead to “a most serious loss in business and trades and professions and prevent [Black workers] from earning a livelihood.”18 In other words, Birth was “another case of commercializing immorality” that would hurt the commercial prospects of Black business owners. The problem of Birth was a problem of money, morality, and inequity. If dealt with as a problem of fairness, a question of what might happen rather than some explicit law or contract, it could establish a foundation that later legal challenges could build on. Next to Crawford’s plea for racial justice on the front page of the Register was an image of Booker T. Washington with the caption “Negro Educator Here Tonight.” Washington was in New Haven to deliver what

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would become his last major public address. The following day, the Register printed the entirety of Washington’s speech addressing the American Missionary Association and delegates from the National Council of Congregational Churches at Yale’s Woolsey Hall. Decrying the ghosts of slavery that haunted the country, Washington attacked the lack of funding for Black education, tracing the “transformation [that] has been wrought … since the landing of the first slaves at Jamestown and the landing of the last slaves at Mobile.”19 The parallelism and temporal marking of “landing” was an oratorical flourish and it carried especially pronounced significance in Connecticut. The Amistad, the illegal slave trading ship that was commandeered by captives who murdered most of the ship’s traders, was brought by the US Coast Guard to New London in 1839.20 It was in New Haven that the former captives had been jailed and awaited trial. Spoken at a site of memory, Washington’s invocation reflected the significance of earlier history as well as contemporary fights for equality, made clear in his calls for an educational revolution where “it will be necessary to increase the little more than $4,000,000 now being expended annually for Negro higher and secondary education to $10,000,000 or more.”21 Freighted with quantitative proposals and statistics, Washington’s demand for a surge of funding was couched within a broader uplift rhetoric of “self-support, securing of property, moral[ity] and religion.”22 As Crawford saw it, the screening of Birth would prevent exactly that. Though Washington gave few statements publicly condemning Birth, his speech in New Haven and the specifics of his financial proposals presented the newspapers with a constellation of local and global events, including concern about World War I, a Yale student accidentally shooting himself while cleaning a gun, major real estate changes in New Haven, tensions between church organizations and industrial companies, and the injunction proceedings, to reckon with capitalism and white America’s refusal to acknowledge anti-Black racism’s structural presence.23 Despite the questionable status of any screening, on Wednesday, October 27, the “Amusements” column of the Register announced that Birth would be coming to The Hyperion, Poli’s recently renovated “Home for Drama.” With a long history in vaudeville, Poli knew how to advertise and the Register’s column, almost certainly a reprint of material put out by Griffith’s publicists Theodore Mitchell and J. R. McCarthy, was an overbearing statistical mass that celebrated the “18,000 people visualizing a story of intense human interest” and the “3,000 horses

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ridden by some of the most reckless and daring riders in the world.”24 Where Washington numerically laid out the economic plan for the future of Black education in America, here numbers became the foundation of a mis-educational sculpting of the past where one could “SEE WAR AS IT ACTUALLY IS.”25 Ads ran daily in all four New Haven papers and the Journal-Courier printed a letter by John C. Collins, leader of the Friends of Boys, that celebrated Griffith’s film as a history lesson on how “we came to be a nation … there was no other way out … except the way that was taken through the Ku-Klux.”26 Aware of the ongoing injunction, Collins claimed that “None of us should stand for a moment for a play that humiliated or tended to degrade or hold up to scorn any class, colored or white … [Birth of a Nation] will have a great educational effect in showing the price which has been paid to make us the great nation today.”27 In other words, Poli’s “Home for Drama” was also to be a schoolroom. Two days after Collins’ letter was published, Judge Webb declared that he would need to see the film to make any final ruling. Hundreds attended the hearing and details began to come out: the Black men who brought the case forward were primary witnesses and they explained the possible pecuniary problems that would result from the screening, given that each worked with mostly white customers. Isaac N. Porter, a doctor whose practice served more than 98% whites, was concerned that he would lose most of his business. Other witnesses like Moses T. Rice, a real estate developer, John Hagen, a carpenter, and William L. Howard, an insurance broker, echoed Porter, pointing to the ways that the film’s depiction would fundamentally alter their livelihoods. Porter, Rice, Hagen and Howard were major figures in Black New Haven, with nearly all of them going on to be celebrated in William H. Ferris 1924 essay “These Colored United States: Connecticut-The Nutmeg State.”28 Other witnesses included Boston clergyman Samuel A. Brown and Reverend Clair F. Luther, who detailed problematic scenes like the “smell incident,” the “so-called ‘Stoneman’ incident,” and the “Gus incident.”29 What was most troubling for Luther was that audiences appeared “greatly pleased and applauded when the colored race was shown in distress or when the negro is worsted.”30 For Crawford’s team, this applause was evidence of the damage being done to interracial patronage for Black businesses. Nevertheless, Poli’s lawyer, Benjamin Slade, tried to discredited these testimonies, pointing out that Luther had seen the film in Boston and there was no definite link between Boston’s exhibition and New Haven’s.

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Only with a private screening with Webb in attendance could a judicial decision be made.31 As the four major dailies printed updates from the case, Crawford continued to insist that he had been originally promised by the mayor and chief of police that no permit would be granted. His earlier statements to the NAACP suggest that there was likely a deal in play: after all, throughout August and September, Mayor Rice was campaigning not only for his own historic re-election but also for a Republican presence in various branches of local government. Black voters would be critical for a wide-ranging victory. By the end of October, having secured a number of wins, congratulations, and “many messages from outside of the city,” it seemed that whatever promises Rice had made to Black voters could be broken.32 Politics could be a game of deceit, and Crawford met that head on. Newspaper coverage of the injunction was accompanied by an outpouring of positive publicity for the film, seemingly meant to counteract fears that it would not be shown. The Journal Courier published an editorial dismissing the injunction, claiming that in screenings in nearby cities like Hartford and Waterbury people “thoroughly enjoy[ed] the production … without a protest of any kind.”33 Like Collins, the paper claimed a position of moral righteousness, condescendingly asserting that “personally we have no fear of our colored citizens suffering in public estimation from the exhibition of the famous film. We know them too well.”34 There was also a growing sense of unease that the case itself was merely a publicity stunt, with the Journal Courier suggesting that there was a feeling in the city that “has become widespread that there is an advertising side to the enterprise of resistance.”35 In fact, Poli responded to this accusation in a letter to the Union, stating that “the injunction proceedings were not instigated or connived by me … but were taken in good faith.”36 Other papers, like the Times Leader, fawned over Griffith as an artist who had reached the limits of human creativity, asking “Is it any wonder that the press agent bows humbly to D.W. Griffith [?]” before claiming that Birth had “everything the brain of man could conceive.”37 There was a recurrent theme in the papers that, through its magisterial scale, the film presented the history of the country for all to recognize. On the eve of Halloween, Judge Webb’s ruling flashed across the city’s newspapers: there was no basis to prevent Birth of a Nation from being screened in New Haven. The problem, ultimately, was that no financial damages could adequately be predicted and proved. Dedicating an entire

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page to the story, the Times Leader printed final arguments, including the contention of Poli’s lawyer, Slade, that it was “ridiculous for Mr. Rice to come here and say that because some hare-brained [sic] white person has said something that he is damaged … if some foolish white person refuses to do five dollars’ worth of business with a colored carpenter, that does not damage the carpenter as a colored man.”38 He continued, absolving himself of making any judgment while all the while making one, that “I am not here to comment on the sensitiveness of the colored people, but if they were not oversensitive they would not be here and say that they might be damaged.”39 Like Collins and the Journal Courier editorial, Slade disavowed any explicit racial antagonism while at the same time offering an implicit denunciation of Black New Haveners. Judge Webb seemed to agree. Ruling in favor of Poli, he was “unable to find upon the evidence that there is anything more here than … a rather remote possibility that Dr. Porter [and the other plaintiffs] … will lose patronage and lose income” as a result of the film’s exhibition.40 Nevertheless, Webb decried the film as: pernicious; [in] that it tends to an evil direction. It is of course a wonderful exhibition of the genius and ingenuity of this modern method of exhibition by film pictures, but the whole underlying motif of the exhibition is one of emphasizing and perhaps exaggerating the vices and brutal characteristics alleged to affect and characterize the colored race generally.41

Predicting the ambivalent ways in future that critics and scholars would often hold their nose at Birth’s racism but still insist on its aesthetic marvels, Webb condemned the film while allowing it to be screened. His ruling, he made clear, was dictated not by his personal feelings but his judicial position: “were [I] sitting as a public censor,” he declared, “… I should be very strongly disposed to withhold any permit.”42 Webb concluded by offering assistance to Crawford, noting he would “cooperate to the best of [his] ability … [if] there are some latent powers in a court of equity not yet fully discovered” that might prevent the screenings.43 Once it had published transcripts from the courtroom, the Times Leader shifted from a rhetoric of unbiased reportage to one of praiseful prose, championing Birth as “one of the greatest and most educating plays ever given before this country. Its moral is clean.”44 Here was the paradox of film-as-history-lesson: Birth could offer an education that was to be celebrated, but that same education was not subject to any kind of

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interpretation that would understand it as harmful to Black taxpayers, since the financial outfall or harm to those taxpayers was not directly specifiable. Following Webb’s ruling, Poli, the chief of police, and the mayor agreed to view the film on October 30 and meet with Crawford to discuss certain cuts that could be made. One day after that screening, the Register published two letters by Rev. Oscar Maurer, the pastor of New Haven’s Center Church and a progressive advocate for immigrant and labor rights. Maurer’s first letter was addressed to Chief of Police Smith. Turning again to the language of history, he criticized Smith for failing to acknowledge that “impressionable college boys on the one hand and immigrants who know nothing about this history of the Civil War on the other, will be given an idea of the American Negro not only false but vicious.”45 For Maurer, the arrival of Birth was an example of economics defeating ethics. That Booker T. Washington had recently visited the city was not lost on the reverend either, as he castigated city officials: “one-week New Haven turns out to hear … Washington and the next … [it] permits a scurrilous picture to be shown, holding up to scorn and ridicule the conditions out of which Booker Washington and his people have risen and for which they are not responsible.”46 Maurer’s second letter was aimed at Poli. Appealing to the businessman’s sensibilities as a Roman Catholic, Maurer compared the production of Birth of a Nation to a film about the Spanish Inquisition in which Christians were brutally portrayed, before reminding Poli that “there is a very ancient commandment which you and I as Christian men have been taught from youth up and that is the commandment, ‘thou shalt not bear false witness against thy brother.’”47 For Maurer, to provide a space for Birth to be shown amounted to heresy. To view the film was to be a witness, not to the past as it was, but to the power of persuasion with which this new technology created a false past. Further, Maurer believed that if the film was withdrawn it “would be the best advertisement Poli’s has had. It … would be national in scope.” However, if Poli, who had “found America a land of opportunity,” did not withdraw the film, Maurer was left “wonder[ing] whether you appreciate the depth of feeling which exists in our city.”48 Like the projected harm to Black businesses, however, the depth of that feeling was something that could never be tallied, counted, quantified and turned into some kind of mathematical sum.

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The Register was the only daily to publish Maurer’s letters. However, three papers carried Poli’s response, suggesting who really wielded power over media discourse. Like those before him, the impresario elaborated on the educational purposes of the film stating that Birth of a Nation “is far more complimentary than injurious to the colored race … I am offering an attraction that is quite as instructive as it is entertaining.”49 Further, Poli excoriated Maurer for not understanding his financial obligations and the business of entertainment management: “I reserved the right of cancellation after the first week’s showing … I had no reason to expect that in New Haven, beyond all other places, I would be hauled into court.”50 Poli claimed to appreciate Maurer’s position but he believed that the education that Birth offered was necessary, noting that the film was “harmful to nobody and is really conducive to enlighten all who may be interested in studying the development of America’s national life.”51 Birth, to Poli, provided not only an experience of art but also a lesson on history and life. As Halloween came and went and the Elm City’s trees lost their leaves, it became clearer and clearer that Birth of a Nation would be shown in the grandeur of Poli’s Hyperion. With the beginning of November came a deluge of stories: “Mayor and Chief ‘Cut’ Bad Spots” declared the Register on its front page; “‘Birth of a Nation’ Passed Board of Local Censors” reported the Times Leader; “Suggestions by Mayor on ‘Birth of a Nation’” announced the Union.52 To the NAACP, the cuts appeared to demonstrate that the New Haven campaign had been a success, with the screening there being “almost unintelligible.” Crawford himself explained that the film “was cut more than it has been anywhere” before giving a number of examples, including most scenes involving Gus, sequences depicting Black people in the state legislature and “the entire scene depicting the attempt of Lynch to force Stoneman’s daughter into marriage.”53 Nevertheless, the phrase “YOU MUST SEE IT!” became a refrain in the New Haven newspapers. Notices described Griffith’s film as a work with such “clearness and lack of flickering [that it] almost makes the spectator forget it is not living, throbbing life that is being viewed.”54 That supposed clarity was used to paint Birth as a work of history. As The Union asked: “why are so many facts kept from the students in the schools of the north and why should the people of the south be given a different version … why shouldn’t there be one history for the entire country[?]”55 The chief of police himself proclaimed Birth was “the greatest thing I ever

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saw,” while advertisements twisted Webb’s ruling into a kind of endorsement, extracting a three-word phrase from his decision (“A Wonderful Exhibition”) and using it as publicity.56 For one paper, to pay a visit to the Hyperion was to see yourself as a real American: according to the Union, “New Haveners are loud in their appreciation … and affirmation … every patriotic American, every single soul who is interested in the history, the life and the welfare of his own United States should make the best of the presented opportunity and see this grand spectacle.”57 Revealingly, local reviewers cared less about factual inaccuracies on screen than some disjunctures in the accompanying music and light show. Noting the talent of the 20-person orchestra at the Hyperion, the Register criticized how the “clatter of horses hoofs on stone pavements [sounded] when the considerate beasts were, as a matter of fact, pattering quietly over sand roads.”58 To offer the sound of concrete when the sound of sand was needed was too much; for this reviewer the “history” depicted on screen was a priori correct—the sounds of that history were not. At the end of the first week, the Hyperion had sold nearly 24,000 tickets in a city with a population of about 150,000. One of the last articles in New Haven’s dailies was a story about John C. Collins. Collins, who had previously written the letter advocating that Birth should be shown, was given hundreds of tickets for a special matinee on November 14, the film’s last day at the Hyperion. The screening would be for the Friends of Boys who, the Times Leader reported, “will have a fine chance to learn interesting facts concerning one of the most important epochs in the history of the country.”59 This visit was photographed by T. S. Bronson. On this day, the Hyperion was the destination for a field trip where the young and impressionable would make a visit to what—despite the cuts made after the campaign led by George Crawford—remained a white supremacist motion picture. They would be welcomed by dozens of American flags. On the same day Collins brought hundreds of boys to the Hyperion, the Times Leader reported that the previous evening New Haven public schools had filed a motion to purchase projectors to screen film in school assembly halls.60 The movies were everywhere, “history” was being made. Thousands of miles away that day was another historic moment: in Tuskegee, Alabama, Booker T. Washington died. For decades, scholars have sought to balance the supposed technical achievements of Birth of a Nation with the film’s white supremacist

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ideology. Local histories of the movie’s exhibition offer not only a material account which refracts our understanding of what the film actually was, they also invite considerations of the cultural and political machinations behind moviegoing. To examine the injunction against Poli and Birth of a Nation is not merely to determine if political and judicial action succeeded or failed—it is to probe the very ways that cinematic depictions of “history” could be constituted and contested within, around, and against governmental officials and city leaders. Crawford, Porter, Rice, Hagen and Howard were defined not by their case against Birth, but by a dedication to rethinking the terms of America’s racial order. Cinema was just one battleground for that work.

Notes 1. No Black newspapers based in New Haven or any surrounding city from this era are known to be extant. 2. See “The Birth of a Nation,” New Haven Journal-Courier, October 25, 1915, 6 and “Birth of a Nation,” New Haven Journal-Courier, October 28, 1915, 14. 3. Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in EarlyTwentieth-Century America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 195. 4. D. W. Griffith’s investment in factual accuracy is perhaps most clearly articulated in his famous offer of $10,000 to anyone that could find historical falsities in Birth. See Melvyn Stokes, “Griffith’s View of History,” in D. W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 171–225. 5. Bronson was a doctor and primarily used his camera as a collector of culture, documenting events in the city. The New Haven Museum holds more than 25,000 “glass plate negatives” from the early 1900s. See: https://www.newhavenmuseum.org/museum-collections/ online-exhibitions/t-s-bronson/. 6. Everett G. Hill, A Modern History of New Haven and Eastern New Haven County, Vol. II (New York: S. J. Clarke Publishing, 1918), 814. 7. Connecticut Governor Rollin S. Woodruff, State of Connecticut. Rollin S. Woodruff Governor. A Proclamation… https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe. 01201300/. 8. See David Rylance, “Breech Birth: The Receptions to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Australasian Journal of American Studies, vol. 24, no. 2 (December 2005), 1–20; Stokes, “Fighting a Vicious Film,” in D.W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 129–70.

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9. Memorandum, August 13, 1915, Papers of the NAACP, Part 4, Part 11: Special Subject Files, 1912–1939, Series A, accessed via ProQuest History Vault (henceforth NAACP Papers). 10. George W. Crawford to Mary Childs Nerney, September 11, 1915, NAACP Papers. 11. “Entertainment: ‘Birth of a Nation,’” New Haven Journal-Courier, October 25, 1915, 6. 12. “Social Uplift,” Crisis, vol. 10, no. 6 (October 1915), 268, Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=dVoEAAAAMBAJ, accessed March 20, 2021. 13. “Injunction Over ‘Birth of a Nation,’” New Haven Register, October 25, 1915, 1. 14. For more information on Poli as a “luminary” see Kathryn J. Oberdeck, “Contested Cultures of American Refinement: Theatrical Manager Sylvester Poli, His Audiences, and the Vaudeville Industry, 1890–1920,” Radical History Review, vol. 66 (Fall 1996), 41–91. 15. In 1916, Poli’s assets carried the sixth highest valuation in New Haven, behind major companies like the Winchester Repeating Arms and New Haven Water. See Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 204. 16. “Judge Webb Decides ‘Birth of a Nation’ May Be Presented,” Times Leader, October 30, 1915, 9. 17. “Injunction Over ‘Birth of a Nation,’” New Haven Register, October 25, 1915, 1. 18. Ibid. 19. “Booker Washington Says Too Much Is Expected of the Negro,” New Haven Register, October 26, 1915, 1, 13. 20. See Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Penguin Books, 2013); Benjamin Nicholas Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 21. See “Booker Washington Says,” New Haven Register, October 26, 1915, 1, 13 and “Education of Negro in 50 Years Shown by Booker Washington,” New Haven Journal-Courier, October 29, 1915, 9. 22. Ibid. 23. In a wire sent to the Boston Transcript, Washington claimed “if it cannot be stopped it ought to be modified or changed materially.” See Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 433. 24. “Amusements: ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Coming to Hyperion,” New Haven Register, October 27, 1915, 11. 25. See advertisement in New Haven Journal-Courier, October 30, 1915, 7.

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26. John C. Collins, “‘The People’s Forum’: The Birth of a Nation,” New Haven Journal-Courier, October 26, 1915, 6. 27. Ibid. 28. William H. Ferris, “These ‘Colored’ United States: Connecticut: The Nutmeg State,” Messenger, vol. 6 (January 1924), 24–25. 29. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Protest Is Heard By Judge Webb Today,” Times Leader, October 28, 1915, 10. 30. Ibid. 31. See “Judge Webb to View ‘Birth of a Nation’ Then Give Decision,” New Haven Union, October 28, 1915, 1; “Judge and Counsel See PhotoPlay,” New Haven Journal-Courier, October 29, 1915, 16. 32. “Mayor Rice Congratulated,” New Haven Register, October 10, 1915, 1. 33. “Entertainment: The Birth of a Nation,” New Haven Journal-Courier, October 29, 1915, 8. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. S. Z. Poli, “Mr. Poli Discusses ‘Birth of a Nation,’” The New Haven Union, October 31, 1915, 21. 37. “Amusements: Hyperion,” Times Leader, October 29, 1915, 6. 38. “Judge Webb Decides ‘Birth of a Nation’ May Be Presented,” Times Leader, October 30, 1915, 9. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Oscar E. Maurer, “Dr. Maurer Hits ‘Birth of a Nation,’” New Haven Register, October 31, 1915, 1, 9. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. S. Z. Poli, “Poli Explains Stand on ‘Birth of a Nation,’” The New Haven Union, November 1, 1915, 10. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. “Mayor and Chief ‘Cut’ Bad Spots,” New Haven Register, November 1, 1915, 1; “‘Birth of a Nation’ Passed Board of Local Censors,” Times Leader, November 1, 1915, 1; “Suggestions by Mayor on ‘Birth of a Nation,’” The New Haven Union, November 1, 1915, 1. 53. See Mary Childs Nerney to Joseph J. Attwell, November 11, 1915, NAACP Papers and Dictated to R.R. by Mr. Crawford for December Crisis (1915), NAACP Papers.

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54. For variations on this response see “Amusements: Hyperion,” Times Leader, November 1, 1915, 6; “Entertainment: Hyperion,” New Haven Journal-Courier, November 1, 1915, 5. 55. “Amusements: Hyperion,” The New Haven Union, November 4, 1915, 6. 56. See “Mayor and Chief ‘Cut’ Bad Spots,” New Haven Register, November 1, 1915, 1; New Haven Journal-Courier, October 30, 1915, 7. 57. “Amusements: Hyperion,” The New Haven Union, November 5, 1915, 6. 58. “‘Birth of a Nation’ Proves Marvelous,” New Haven Register, November 2, 1915, 5. 59. “Manager Poli Will Give Special Mat. for Many Local Boys,” Times Leader, November 11, 1915, 5. 60. “Public to Get Movie Shows in Public Schools,” Times Leader, November 13, 1915, 3.

CHAPTER 9

Resisting The Birth of a Nation in Virginia Van Dora Williams

Film scholars have explored Birth of a Nation through various critical lenses that range through propaganda, censorship and racism.1 Arthur Lennig provided a comprehensive review of the protest in Boston. He suggested that the historical reports of the public response to the film were exaggerated.2 Noted Black scholar John Hope Franklin strongly suggested that the exaggerated storyline of the film was designed as propaganda that appealed to the ideals of a white America.3 Franklin provided an analysis of Dixon’s novel, The Clansman, and the film, The Birth of a Nation. He argued that Dixon’s version of history was inaccurate, and that inaccuracy became a major influence on America’s perception of Reconstruction and Black people. Melvyn Stokes provided a comprehensive look at the origins, production, reception and continuing history of this aesthetically ground-breaking and yet highly controversial movie.4 The chapter that follows will analyze the response to the film in the state of Virginia. While there has been research on Hampton Institute’s role in the response, not much has been written about the cities of

V. D. Williams (B) Champlain College, Burlington, VT, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_9

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Norfolk and Richmond, two major areas important to the southern entertainment circuits of the early twentieth century. Hampton Institute itself, moreover, was the birthplace of the attempt to counter or “fix” The Birth of a Nation by screening a film on the progress made by African Americans since the Civil War after the showing of Birth. Made at Hampton Institute, the film would come to be known as the “Hampton Epilogue” and the strategy behind it a source of some considerable controversy. The majority of the Black communities in Hampton, Norfolk and Richmond responded negatively to Birth of a Nation and to the Hampton Epilogue. While Black and white citizens that opposed the film could not stop it, they were by no means silent or passive. Norfolk and Richmond residents attempted to ban the film. A pantomime show was created to respond to the film. And leaders of the Hampton Institute decided to “fix” the film. This chapter will examine the private and public discourse of these various communities as they sought to resist the harmful narrative of Griffith’s film.

Norfolk and Richmond In 1915, the burgeoning entertainment industry in the Tidewater area of Virginia was a major entry point for traveling stage plays, musicians and silent films. Norfolk was the first southern city chosen to show The Birth of a Nation. It and its surrounding area had a cosmopolitan character reminiscent of Northern cities with not only white residents but also Chinese, Greek and Jewish communities and a large Black population. According to Terry Lindvall, the Wells Brothers, based in Norfolk, owned and maintained the largest theater circuit in the South and controlled the regional distribution of stage plays throughout the first decades of the twentieth century.5 They also ensured that the Tidewater region was a proving ground for the new entertainment form of silent film. If Jake and Otto Wells could secure a successful première in Norfolk, it would bode well for the movie’s success in other regional southern theaters. The southern première of Griffith’s film was scheduled for September 28, 1915 at the brothers’ Colonial Theater in Norfolk. When Norfolk’s city council voted to censor the film on September 18, it surprised the Wells brothers and pleased the Black and white citizens who had wanted to ban it. Norfolk councilman J. J. Pitt introduced an ordinance to ban Birth of a Nation because of its potential to “incite race hatred or bad feeling between the white and colored people.”6 The

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council voted seven to four in favor of his proposal. The supporters of the film initially requested a special session to discuss the ban further. But a direct appeal to the mayor, William Mayo, instead proved more successful. After listening to a three-hour debate, he refused to honor the ordinance, citing lack of legal jurisdiction.7 It was now up to the Board of Aldermen to pass the ordinance in a special session held on September 22. P. B. Young, the African American publisher of The Journal and Guide, petitioned the board to uphold the ordinance to ban the film. Young was highly respected within the city of Norfolk as a civil rights leader who continuously fought for fair and equal access to city services, education and justice.8 As the designated spokesman for the local group of residents, he argued that the “colored people of the city were afraid of the bad feeling that would be produced by its production in the minds and hearts of the white people against the colored people.” Young emphasized that the delicate balance of race relations that currently existed in the city would be harmed if the board allowed the film to be shown. The Wells Brothers argued before the Board of Aldermen that the fears of the colored population were unwarranted and that the proposed ordinance would “be an injustice to the theatrical people.”9 The Board further discussed the film’s impact and announced that a film reel from the Black Hampton Institute would be shown at the end of the film. It was this addition (subsequently to become known as the “Hampton Epilogue”), the Board explained, that had persuaded its members not to uphold the ban on the film. Apparently, this took the residents who were hostile to the film by surprise, as Dr. G. Jarvis Bowens indicated in a letter to Dr. Hollis B. Frissell, the Principal of Hampton Institute. Bowens asked Frissell to confirm that he had allowed Hampton pictures to be added to the end of Griffith’s film.10 In the meantime, the Board of Aldermen voted to send the ordinance back to committee for further discussion, which essentially rendered the original ban unenforceable. This political move allowed The Birth of a Nation to make its southern première in Norfolk on September 28. After the city council had approved the initial ordinance to ban the film, the local newspapers provided a space in which white local citizens could voice their opinions about the film. The community responded to the controversy with a flood of letters to the two largest papers in Norfolk, the Virginian-Pilot Landmark and the Ledger-Dispatch. For example, a September 24, 1915 letter from “W.L. McL” stated that:

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I saw the first two presentations of [the play] “The Clansman” here in Norfolk some years ago, and I wish to assure those who are so concerned about race prejudice that I left those performances without the least desire to harm my colored fellow citizens or to even look at them askance on account of seeing the scenes depicted in that play.11

The next day the newspaper printed a response to this letter. “C.C.D.” commented on W. L. McL’s remarks: He says that he saw several years ago the presentation of the “Clansman,” which did not arouse in him any racial antipathy. He makes the mistake of putting everybody in a class with himself. Those who oppose this show do not anticiuate [sic] an outbreak between the better elements of the two races, but from the unthoughtful and vicious.12

The Portsmouth Star nonetheless tried to allay the concerns of the Black community with an article that promoted the coming exhibition of The Birth of a Nation: The criticism that it exhibits the negro in an unfortunate light and that it is calculated to engender racial animosity is fully met by the consideration that it represents the negro, not as he is now at all, but as he was in the days when he had the chains broken from him, and when he was rioting in the deliciousness of a liberty, so new and untried, that he had not yet learned to understand it … It is in this respect exactly true to history and if it reflects upon the negro as he was then it is a compliment to the black man of today.13

The article did not offer any evidence for this assumption of the Black community’s inappropriate behavior during Reconstruction. These discussions show common misperceptions of Black people among the white community. The Black community itself was given no space in the paper to refute this assessment of how the film had treated its history over the past fifty years. The Birth of a Nation opened to sell-out crowds at Norfolk’s Colonial Theater for the entire week and received high praise from all the local white newspapers. After its successful run in Norfolk, the Wells Brothers scheduled the film to show in Richmond in October. Before it opened, the Richmond Virginian printed a portion of a letter from the Norfolk chapter president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy praising

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the film’s treatment of history. “There is much”, she wrote, “that makes one’s heart ache: much that brings pleasure and happiness; tears and sunshine are well coupled. ‘The Birth of a Nation’ is a revelation and history carried out.”14 By contrast, a group of Richmond Black leaders tried a similar attempt to the one made in Norfolk to ban the film on October 20. Virginia Union University Professor William Colson and his associates petitioned Mayor George Ainslie to ban the film from being shown in the city. A letter of protest was also presented to the Mayor by a group of Virginia Union University students. Ainslie consulted with other southern mayors where the film had already been screened, including Norfolk’s mayor. According to the Richmond Planet, Mayor Ainslie received glowing reports from all of them and decided to deny the petition.15 Colson, a 1908 graduate of Hampton Institute, subsequently wrote a highly critical letter to Hampton Institute principal Dr. Frissell informing him that the screening of the Hampton Epilogue had helped thwart his group’s efforts to ban the film from the city.16 In reality, those efforts had probably always been doomed. And, according to the review of the film by Douglas Gordon in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Hampton Epilogue only proved “an anticlimactic educational film” that made very little impact on the audience.17 It is not hard to see why a film produced by a Black college devoted to summarizing the achievements of African Americans over the previous half-century seemed anti-climactic after watching The Birth of a Nation. Gordon also pointed out how the music and visuals of the film combined together to produce an impact that was almost overpowering, engaging the attention of the (white) audience on a deep emotional level: The lawless lawfulness of the Ku Klux Klan is displayed with a prodigality and artistry that grip the spectator by the throat, so that he can hardly cheer. And that is what they did last night. As the hundreds of men of the Klan raced into sight again and again, bound on some errand of primitive and necessary justice and retribution, with the cross of Scotland blazing on their breasts, the house raced with them.18

The film depicted that so-called “historical” story in a way that “amplified, elaborated and intensified almost beyond the point of endurance.”19 This emotional and psychological impact was, indeed, what the Black population in Norfolk and Richmond feared the most. They believed it normalized the Ku Klux Klan’s extreme views and activities. Their fears

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were realized as the KKK used the film as a successful recruitment tool for the organization. But even before the film arrived in the South, the Black community in Richmond had attempted to counter the film’s racist propaganda by providing a response to it in cultural rather than political form by means of the 1915 Negro Exposition. Under the auspices of The Negro Historical and Industrial Association, Giles B. Jackson organized the exposition, held for three weeks in July 1915, to celebrate the progress the Black race had made since emancipation. As it opened, the Virginian-Pilot and Norfolk Landmark claimed it to be the “most elaborate entertainment ever undertaken by the Negro race.”20 Jackson himself, however, was a controversial figure within the Black community in Richmond. He was an avid supporter of Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of accommodation and consequently aligned himself with the white, liberal elites who controlled the government and the media. The fact that he was recognized by the white, Richmond elites as a leader and spokesperson for the Black community was a source of much consternation amongst other Black leaders in Virginia.21 Jackson planned a visual response to Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. While few historical references to this particular response exist, it must be worth emphasizing that this initiative—using an exposition as a public response to the film in the former capital of the Old Confederacy—was unique in the South as a whole. July 15 was designated as Virginia Day and the evening program was dedicated to the Black response to Griffith’s film. It was advertised in the Richmond News Leader as “An Answer to Birth of a Nation.”22 A Black woman, Loretta Harris, produced a pantomime show and the cast was made up of a reported “250 Sunday School Children.” The program contained short film reels, live actors and speakers. This type of entertainment would not have been novel, as traveling shows that incorporated lectures, films and live entertainment were popular within the Black community at the time.23 The organization of the pantomime pageant was quite similar to social events at Black churches throughout the South and West.24 The show as a whole chronicled the progress of the Negro race from Africa, through slavery up to 1915. It was commended by the Richmond Times-Dispatch for its dignified, visual representation of Black people throughout the entirety of the time period reflected in the show: Opening with the landing of a skiff bringing the first slaves to this country, then moving on to the period when the plantation life of the South was

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at its height, showing a real cotton plantation, made thoroughly realistic with the old negro songs; then giving a glimpse of the negro life of to-day, and ending with the negro entering the door of opportunity, it was really a wonderful pageant …25

Only the white press reported on this historical aspect of the exposition and the coverage was favorable. It is the only type of pageant reported in the Virginia press using this kind of public venue as a direct response to Birth of a Nation. Battling the visual misrepresentation of Black people in American media has always been an uphill battle. Black people and their institutions during this time began to recognize the power of a public image to shape race relations. Many found it crucial to try to take control over public representations, a charge particularly enhanced by the surging popularity of the “Lost Cause,” a movement to honor the Confederacy and a mythical “Old South.”26 Consequently, providing tangible expressions of proof of Black intelligence and cultural progress was a major goal for Jackson and the Negro Historical and Industrial Association. It was also the goal of the Hampton Institute, the well-respected institution dedicated to educating Black people. Hampton had international repute and was proud to call 1875 graduate Booker T. Washington its favorite son. This concern over the negative visual representation of Black people was the impetus for the idea of the Hampton Epilogue to be added to Birth of a Nation—though that idea would become a public relations nightmare for Hollis B. Frissell, Hampton’s Principal.

The Tuskegee Defense/The Hampton Fix Long before the failed attempts to ban the film in Norfolk and Richmond unfolded, Frissell was already involved in February 1915 in trying to “fix” The Birth of a Nation. Working with D.W. Griffith’s company, Epoch, and the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (NBRMP) , Frissell allowed a promotional film from the Hampton Institute to be screened after the end of the film. By April 19, 1915, the NBRMP had been informed that this short film would be added as a response to the negative depictions of Black people in Griffith’s film.27 When the Hampton Epilogue did show in Norfolk and Richmond, the “Hampton fix” came as an uncomfortable surprise to some within the Black community. Their reaction revealed a disconnect between the Hampton Institute

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and the local community it served as well as a disconnect between Black local leaders and national organizations. The Birth of a Nation, together with the Hampton epilogue, was shown in New York City and Boston in March. The emerging civil rights organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was aware that the Hampton film had been added to the program and Francis J. Grimké, one of the founders of the NAACP, severely criticized Frissell for allowing the images to be used in this way.28 John Hope Franklin and Nickie Fleener have emphasized the massive letter-writing campaign launched by the NAACP.29 Joan Marie Johnson and Stephanie J. Shaw have also demonstrated how one very active group of Black women in the South took up this letter-writing campaign.30 Members of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs had been active since the 1880s and were uniquely positioned to make their voices heard.31 As the protests against the use of the Hampton Epilogue in this way intensified, many club women in the north-east wrote Frissell throughout 1915 and 1916. Margaret Fleetwood, for example, wrote: “Now this picture is a detriment to the negro race and the producers think by putting in the pictures of the institution it will keep the people of our race content. We as club women of this country representing so many colored people feel that it should be stopped …”32 M. L. Stone reproached Frissell in similar terms: “Surely you must realize that having the pictures of our young men and women, who are striving to attain the highest standards of citizenship, under your able training cannot but be injured by being portrayed in connection with such a nefarious picture as “The Birth of a Nation.”33 The clubwomen’s letters are significant as they may represent the first time that African American women provided sharp criticism about the action of an institution dedicated to the “uplift” of the race. In effect, they challenged the paternalism represented in the decision to “fix” the film using Black imagery without their consent. Frissell expended a lot of energy answering their letters. He frequently pointed to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute as being part of the decision-making process on how the Hampton Epilogue had been used. The following excerpts from Frissell’s response reveal Frissell’s “Tuskegee Defense.” He used it repeatedly to deflect some of the responsibility for deciding to allow the Hampton Epilogue to be added to Birth. As Frissell recounted it, “when Mr. Wilcox [sic], a trustee of Tuskegee Institute, asked me, since we could not stop the play, if it would not be wise to do what we could to counteract its harmful influence, I went with him to

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the censors to see what could be done.”34 Since censorship appeared to offer no means of countering or stopping The Birth of a Nation, Frissell continued, at the suggestion and with the approval of some of the trustees of Tuskegee and Hampton, I felt that since it was impossible to suppress the play, it might be possible to add something to it which would give the thousands of people witnessing the production daily a different idea of the intelligence and progress of the Negro race …35

Frissell perhaps believed that using Tuskegee Institute in his response to the national and local critics would ease the pressure Hampton was under to have the epilogue removed. In a letter to Julius Rosenwald, a benefactor to the Tuskegee Institute, Trustee William G. Willcox broadened the range of those involved in this discussion, claiming that fellow trustee Dr. Schieffelin and he were the two people who suggested the Hampton epilogue be added to the film. “In response to our suggestion,” Willcox declared, “the Hampton films were added to the show, under the title of ‘The New Era.’ We both felt that the effect was very good indeed and went far to counteract the unfortunate impression of the preceding films.”36 Yet, on the same day as Willcox wrote his letter, Robert Moton, commandant of cadets at Hampton Institute, also wrote a letter to Tuskegee, in this case to Booker T. Washington himself. In his letter (in which he reminded Washington that they would see Birth on a planned trip to New York City), Moton noted that “some of our people who have seen them feel that it is very well done and that the race does not suffer in the present presentation.” At the same time, however, Moton foresaw some of the controversy to come within the Black community by adding a note of caution: “I suspect Hampton will be severely criticized for allowing its reels for going into the ‘Birth of The Nation.’”37 While Frissell was correct in allying himself to Tuskegee in his response to the criticism, he was at least equally responsible for the screening of the Hampton Epilogue. The opportunity of getting Hampton’s name out to thousands of people who were not aware of the institution was a major factor in his decision, as evidenced in his 1916 annual report to the board of trustees.38 Frissell grossly underestimated the critical and sustained response of the Black community to his actions.

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Conclusion After its initial showing in 1915, The Birth of a Nation returned to Virginia eight more times between 1915 and 1925. While it provided a boon for the Ku Klux Klan in terms of helping recruit membership and popularized white supremacy more broadly in film, this chapter has argued that in Virginia it also stimulated a robust attack on the visual and historical misrepresentation of the Black community by means of attempts to ban the film and a public pantomime show during the 1915 Negro Exposition. The attempted bans were undermined by Hampton Institute’s decision to allow its own film to be added as an epilogue. The targeted letter-writing campaign from the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs to the Hampton Institute was not successful in getting the Hampton Epilogue removed. Even with the intense criticism directed at Frissell, he continued to try and “fix” the film by using his influence and the institute’s reputation to raise funds for a further film responding to Birth of a Nation. That film, Birth of a Race,39 was deemed a failure by the critics in 1919. The Colored Soldiers’ Comfort Committee, a national organization dedicated to assisting World War I Black veterans, similarly produced a film of its own in direct response to Birth of a Nation titled Loyalty of a Race.40 The well-known Within Our Gates 41 film by Oscar Micheaux was another response to Griffith’s film. Historian Linda Steiner has argued that, after Griffith’s film, all films are either made in specific response to it or are created in “the variously acknowledged light of a body of racist popular culture, and critical and popular responses to those artifacts.”42 One such response, indeed, could be the growth of theaters built in Black communities in the early twentieth century to provide a space for Black people to create their own cultural products in response to the racist themes seen in Birth of a Nation.

Notes 1. Thomas R. Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture Birth Of a Nation,” Historian, vol. 25, no. 3 (May 1963), 344–62; Everett Carter, “Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of the Birth of a Nation,” American Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 3 (October 1, 1960), 347–57; Richard Dyer, “Into the Light: The Whiteness of the South in the Birth of a Nation,” in Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures, Richard H. King and Helen Taylor, eds. (New York:

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6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

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New York University Press, 1996), 165–76; Lawrence J. Oliver and Terri L. Walker, “James Weldon Johnson’s ‘New York Age’ Essays on ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and the ‘Southern Oligarchy,’” South Central Review, vol. 10, no. 4 (December, 1993), 1–17; Jane Rhodes, “The Visibility of Race and Media History,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Responses to the Birth of a Nation, vol. 10, no. 2 (1993), 184–90; Paul McEwan, “Racist Film: Teaching The Birth of a Nation,” Cinema Journal, vol. 47, no. 1 (2007), 98–101; Greg Marquis, “A War Within a War: Canadian Reactions to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Histoire Sociale/Social History, vol. 47, no. 94 (2014), 421–42. Arthur Lennig, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Film History, vol. 16, no. 2 (January, 2004), 117–41. John Hope Franklin, “‘Birth of a Nation’: Propaganda as History,” The Massachusetts Review, vol, 20, no. 3 (Autumn 1979), 417–34. Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s the Birth of a Nation: A History of "The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Terry Lindvall, “Cinema Virtue, Cinema Vice: Race, Religion, and Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1908–1922,” in Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing, ed. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 91–106. “Mayor Will Not Stop Showing of Big Film,” Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, Afternoon edition, News Section, September 21, 1915, Sargent Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library. Ibid., 1. Issues of The Journal and Guide were not available for research as a 1960s era warehouse fire destroyed the paper’s archive. No editions before 1916 are available. However, P. B. Young was a strong critic of Birth of a Nation. His editorials on the film were published in national black newspapers like The New York Age and the Amsterdam News. It is in these published editorials that his strong opinions are documented. Steed, 397–98. Norfolk Common Council Special Session, September 18, 1915. G. Jarvis Bowens, “To Rev. H.B. Frissell,” Letter, September 29, 1915, Birth of a Nation Box, I. Reviews of the Birth of a Nation, Hampton University Archives. W.L. McL., “The Coming Show,” Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, Letters to the Editor Section, September 24, 1915, Sargent Memorial Archives Collection, Norfolk Public Library. C.C.D., “Suggests Uncle Tom’s Cabin with Birth of A Nation,” Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, Letters to the Editor Section, September 25, 1915, Sargent Memorial Archives Collection, Norfolk Public Library.

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13. “Birth of a Nation Here Next Week,” Portsmouth Star, Amusement Section, September 21, 1915, Sargent Memorial Archives Collection, Norfolk Public Library. 14. “‘Birth Of Nation’ World’s Greatest,” Richmond Virginian, News Section, October 26, 1915, Newspaper Microfilm, Library of Virginia. 15. John Mitchell, “Birth of A Nation,” Richmond Planet, News Section, October 30, 1915, 1, Newspaper Microfilm, Library of Virginia. 16. William N. Colson, “To Dr. Frissell, Principal,” Letter, October 27, 1915, Birth of a Nation Box, I. Reviews of the Birth of a Nation, Hampton University Archives. 17. Douglas Gordon, “Wonderful Photodrama is History of a Period,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Amusements Section, October 26, 1915, 9. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. “Negro Exposition Will Open Today,” The Virginian-Pilot and the Norfolk Landmark, July 5, 1915, 4, Sargent Memorial Archives Collection, Norfolk Public Library. 21. Van Dora Williams, “The Growing Resistance: Virginia’s Response to The Birth of a Nation, 1915–1925” (Dissertation, Ann Arbor, Regent University, 2017), chapter 3, ProQuest Central. 22. “This Is Virginia Day at Negro Exposition: Pageant, ‘Birth of a Nation’ Will Be Presented by Two Hundred and Fifty Children,” The Richmond Virginian, July 15, 1915, sec. news, Library of Virginia. 23. Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 153. 24. Cara Caddoo, “‘Put Together to Please a Colored Audience’: Black Churches, Motion Pictures, and Migration at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of American History, vol. 101, no. 3 (December 2014), 787. 25. “Virginia Day at Negro Historical Exposition,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 16, 1915, sec. News, Library of Virginia. 26. Joan Marie Johnson, “‘Ye Gave Them a Stone’: African American Women’s Clubs, the Frederick Douglass Home, and the Black Mammy Monument,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 17, no. 1 (2005), 63. 27. “NBRMP April 19, 1915 min” (People’s Institute, New York, NY: National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, April 19, 1915), Box 118, Executive Committee Papers, NBRMP Archive. 28. H.B. Frissell, “My Dear Mr. Villard,” Response, December 9, 1916, HB Frissell Letters Book, October 19, 1916-March 5, 1917, Pg. 334–35, Hampton University Archives; Francis J Grimké, “The Birth of a Nation,” Public Letter, October 30, 1915, Birth of a Nation Collection, Howard University Archives.

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29. Franklin, “ Birth of a Nation,” 426–27; Nickie Fleener, “Answering Film with Film: The Hampton Epilogue, a Positive Alternative to the Negative Black Stereotypes Presented in the Birth of a Nation,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 7, no. 4 (1980), 400–25. 30. Stephanie J. Shaw, “Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women,” Journal of Women’s History, 3, no. 2 (1991), 11–25. 31. Johnson, “Ye Gave Them a Stone.” 32. Margaret Fleetwood to H. B. Frissell, January 11, 1916, Reviews of Birth of A Nation Box, Hampton University Archives. 33. M. L. Stone to H.B. Frissell, November 29, 1915, Reviews of Birth of A Nation Box, Hampton University Archives. 34. H.B. Frissell, “Response to Mrs. Kountze,” Letter, December 29, 1915, H.B. Frissell Letters, August 16, 1915–January 6, 1916, Hampton University Archives. 35. H.B. Frissell, “Response to Mrs. Freeman,” February 2, 1916, Frissell Letters, January 6, 1916–April 18, 1916 Book, Hampton University Archives. 36. William G. Willcox, “To Julius Rosenwald,” Letter, May 12, 1915, 2, Booker T Washington Collection, Box 107, 1915 Folder, Tuskegee University Archives. 37. Robert R. Moton to Booker T. Washington, May 12, 1915, Booker T. Washington Collection, Tuskegee University Archives. 38. H.B. Frissell, “48th Annual Report of the Principal” (Hampton, VA: Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, 1916), 38, Annual Reports 1914–1920, Hampton University Archives. 39. John Noble, Birth of a Race, Film, Drama (Birth of a Race Photoplay Corporation, 1918). 40. “‘Loyalty of a Race’ Is Given a Private Showing,” The Cleveland Advocate, April 27, 1918, Library, Ohio Historical Center Archives, http://dbs.ohi ohistory.org/africanam/html/page208e-2.html?ID=7070. 41. Oscar Micheaux, Within Our Gates, Film, Drama (Micheaux Film Corporation, 1920). 42. Linda Steiner, ed., “Race and Cultural Production: Responses to Birth of a Nation,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 10, no. 2 (June 1993), 179.

CHAPTER 10

“At This Time in This City”: Black Atlanta and the Première of The Birth of a Nation Matthew H. Bernstein

We have long known, thanks to the groundbreaking work of Thomas Cripps in the late 1970s, that sizeable protests greeted D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation upon its premiere in various major locales. The most prominent of these took place in New York City in March, in Boston in April and in Philadelphia in September.1 More recent scholarship informs us that lesser-known efforts to protest or ban the film also occurred in the South and the West in the fall and winter of 1915 into early 1916, with or without the presence of local NAACP chapters. These included attempts to suppress the film in Norfolk, Virginia, where the film began its southern tour; Dallas, Texas; Bluefield, West Virginia; Asheville, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; and in February 1916, both in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and during the Negro Business Men’s League meeting in Montgomery, Alabama. Only in one Southern locale was the exhibition of the film successfully blocked: Charleston, West Virginia in December

M. H. Bernstein (B) Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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1915, the same month as Atlanta’s premiere.2 More broadly, however, Cara Caddoo has argued, these efforts demonstrate “an evolving process of black racial formation that was always messy and fraught with contradictions” even as they created new communities of activism in pursuit of civil rights.3 Curiously, Atlanta, the self-proclaimed Gate City to the South, saw no widespread, concerted public effort to ban Griffith’s epic either before or during its infamous white-only debut on December 6, 1915, though there were, as in some other locales, behind-the-door pleas not to show it or at least postpone its exhibition. The question is why, in a major southern city with well-established, socially active Black churches, and Black institutions of higher learning, as well as a growing African American middle class, and even a few white allies, was the response so relatively cautious and measured? Obviously, every locale has its own contextual history in the reception of a particular film or group of films. In Atlanta’s case, the Black community had a distinctive and definite reason to view a violent white backlash against public protests as a real and immediate threat. Over the decade preceding Birth ‘s premiere, widescale white lawlessness had become an indelible part of Black Atlantans’ very experience—starting with the infamous 1906 widespread attack on Black people in the central city and the frequent lynchings around the state. Four months prior to the premiere, Jewish northerner Leo Frank had been lynched in the town of Marietta north of the city. In-town white residents threatened another violent attack on Black residents just two months before the film’s debut. Moreover, the Black community in Atlanta was large and diverse enough to field competing responses or non-responses to the film’s showing, which in turn reveal important conflicts or divisions within it.

The Birth of a Nation ’s White Atlanta Premiere Melvyn Stokes provides an overarching analysis of two circumstances that made successful protest against the film difficult in the South. First was the fierce enthusiasm for the Griffith’s epic among white moviegoers in the region. Per the Epoch Producing Corporation’s policy, the film was shown in a roadshow format in a predominantly legitimate stage house, with live orchestral accompaniment and reserved seats priced at anywhere from 25 cents in the balcony for a matinee at 2:30 and $2.00 for an evening show at 8 p.m. Designed to attract a higher class of patron, it in

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fact brought in a white but still heterogeneous audience in terms of age, gender and class. The film broke attendance, box-office and length of run (three weeks) records in the city.4 Built up by extensive publicity sent by Epoch to local newspapers in advance, Birth further had the intended effect of revealing the power and popularity of the motion picture as an art form to the Atlanta audience.5 The overwhelming enthusiasm of white Atlantans for Griffith’s historical melodrama meant little could be done to halt the screenings once they began. There was no direct action in the streets, no eggs thrown at the screen and no stones thrown at the Atlanta Theater, as happened elsewhere. Crucially, it was much the same with efforts to prevent the showing of the film prior to December 6. There were no protests, no legal briefs filed by Black lawyers and no petitions circulated by church leaders, as happened, for example, in the coastal Georgia city of Savannah. The film struck the same chords as many other powerful discourses of white supremacy and the myth of the Lost Cause widely circulated at the time. As historian Amy Wood put it, “Southern [white] audiences felt the response to Birth with added intensity because the film’s melodrama was so closely tied to their own sense of history and loss, as well as to their very deep fears about Black enfranchisement, criminality, and sexuality.”6 Audience reaction was strongest in the South, as she notes, because “The images that the film projected of Black sexual assault against white women and the Klan’s vengeance for those assaults imported immediate and familiar meanings for viewers already well acquainted with and deeply invested in pro-lynching rhetoric and images,” that is via photographs, postcards and short films.7 For Atlantans, however, dramatic instances of white “vengeance” were not limited to these mass communication forms or to the homeand-school-taught mythologies of southern grievance. There had been recent, and sensational, instances in which this militant dimension of the South’s white dominance had been performed in the city’s very streets. Most dramatically, the August 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, several miles northwest of central Atlanta, was undertaken by a group of whites outraged at Georgia Governor John Slaton’s commutation of Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. Frank had been convicted in a manifestly unfair trial for the 1913 rape and murder of a nearly 14-year-old Georgia girl, Mary Phagan, who had worked at the factory Frank supervised. Black factory sweeper Jim Conley, himself an early suspect, provided the key eye-witness testimony that sealed the

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trial’s verdict. The social, economic and historical factors that shaped this incident were complex. Still, in the minds of most Georgians, Leo Frank provided an analogy to the generic Black rapist who desired young southern white flesh. Moreover, as Tom Rice points, out Atlanta viewers could see Mary Phagan’s mortal struggle against Frank’s alleged advances as analogous to Little Sister Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh)’s leap to her death to avoid the dishonor of potential rape by the Black “renegade” Gus (Walter Long).8 After the Governor’s commutation, Tom Watson, a former Populist leader and the party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1896, had called for Georgians to take mob action. Two weeks later, the lynchers, calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan, committed their atrocity to the approval of most Georgians. Frank’s lynching was the kind of vigilante justice that continued the work of the original Ku Klux Klan (KKK) of the Reconstruction era. Watson shortly thereafter called for “another Ku Klux Klan … to restore home rule”.9 As is well-known, the Frank lynching further inspired William Joseph Simmons, an often-unemployed itinerant preacher, farmer and fraternal order organizer, to inaugurate the twentieth century rebirth of the KKK with a flag, a bible and a burning cross at a meeting in Klan regalia on Thanksgiving night 1915 at the top of Stone Mountain, a granite outcropping 1700 feet high and 10 miles northeast of Atlanta. Simmons had contemplated doing so for years, but the Frank lynching galvanized him into action. He and his associates had applied for a state charter for the group in October, which they received the very day The Birth of a Nation premiered. The timing was not a coincidence: Simmons saw Griffith’s epic as a massive marketing opportunity to announce his reconstituted Klan and, indeed, several Klan members marched on horseback in white-hooded regalia in front of the Atlanta Theater at the film’s debut. The Klan’s membership grew by 92 men by the end of the run and, of course, the film would become a major recruitment tool for decades.10 Even cultural performances of white supremacy—and attempts by African Americans to express their disapproval of them—could have dire real-world ramifications. This was apparent from the October 1905 Atlanta performance of Thomas Dixon’s dramatization of the The Clansman. The play, and Dixon’s post-show lectures, had been well (if not unanimously enthusiastically) received by white audiences throughout the South. The opening night performance at Atlanta’s Grand Theater stirred up both white audiences and the Black audiences seated in the segregated balcony. One account (an article in the evening paper Atlanta

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Daily News, republished in the Black Atlanta Independent ), described how the “Negro gallery gods” gave “whoops and yells” every time an actor in a “colored part” appeared on the stage; whites hissed back in response. When Gus was captured and taken before the Klan, white audience members yelled “Lynch him!” while Black audience members hissed back. Police ordered the lights kept on, and eventually entered the balcony, arresting one “Negro boy” on charges of disorderly conduct.”11 Dixon remained dismissive of the notion that the racial hatred informing his play would spill into violence outside the theater.12 It is undeniable, however, that the novel and play, like the film Griffith would make based on it, expressed racial hatred and hysterical fear over the possibility of interracial marriage and sex, the same wellspring of animosity from which the so-called Atlanta Race Riot would explode 11 months later. Beginning on the night of September 23, 1906, gangs of armed men and boys roamed the streets of central Atlanta for three days, provoked by repeated newspaper reports in recent weeks of false yet specificallydescribed alleged sexual assaults by Black men against white women. The gangs attacked any Black citizen they encountered in any circumstance— on street corners, on street cars, in places of business—and bludgeoned or shot or stabbed them. All told, 50 Black Atlantans were killed and scores more were injured.13 White authorities let it happen. The state militia imposed order only after three days; on the fourth, the Atlanta police attacked a meeting of armed Black residents near Clark College. These kinds of assaults on Black citizens would continue throughout the country, most famously with the Tulsa, Oklahoma, massacre of 1921. The wellsprings of the Atlanta massacre of Black citizens were varied: overcrowding in the city due to the arrival of poor rural Black and white people looking for work in recent decades, and the inability of city services to keep pace with such growth, provided fertile ground for seething racial resentments. According to the 1900 census, Black people accounted for 39.7% of the city’s roughly 90,000 residents. Moreover, for several months in summer 1906, the Atlanta press continued to hype a racebaiting gubernatorial battle for the Democratic nomination for governor, one in which both candidates in the Democratic primary, Hoke Smith and Tom Watson, promised Black political and social dis-enfranchisement. Still, in the eyes of many Black and several white observers, The Clansman had helped foment the attack. It was, in a sense, a white working-class reenactment of the Klan’s clearing of Piedmont, South

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Carolina’s armed Black people in Dixon’s play and, nine years later, in Griffith’s film. In my view, the memory of the events of 1906 and the possibility of another such attack played a signal role in shaping how Black leaders approached the screening of Griffith’s film. The Atlanta Quiet Among its many other repercussions, the assault resulted in a more deeply segregated city and even greater denial of rights to Black Atlantans. This, Melvyn Stokes suggests, was the second decisive factor limiting effective protest against the film in the South. “Although the Black population in many southern cities was far higher than in centers of the North and West,” he states, “it was almost completely disenfranchised and could consequently cause little difficulty for politicians.”14 More than 120 lynchings had occurred in the years between the showing of Dixon’s play and the screening of Griffith’s film. By the late fall of 1915, the city had no network of religious institutions, businesses or political organizations, Black or white, forceful enough to speak out against the forthcoming premiere. For example, although future NAACP leader Walter White himself grew up in Atlanta, the city’s chapter would not open until 1917. The 1906 assaults also altered the city’s geography. The Black neighborhoods of Atlanta resolved further into what W.E.B. DuBois had described two months before the massacre as “a great dumbbell across the city, with one great center in the east, and a smaller one in the west, connected by a narrow belt.”15 The great center of the East (marked by its location relative to the main north–south thoroughfare, Peachtree Street) was the Fourth Ward, home to Spelman College’s original campus and Auburn Avenue, the locus of Atlanta’s flourishing Black middle-class business, the famed Ebeneezer Baptist Church and the residential area where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. grew up. What DuBois called the “smaller” center in the West hosted the growing campus of what would become the future home of the Atlanta University Center where DuBois founded the sociology department and taught. The attack of 1906 would enlarge these areas as Black residents fled the center of the city. Others fled the city entirely. White city leaders, including Mayor James G. Woodward, recognized that, however justified in their white supremacist view, the mob attack on and killing of Black citizens was bad for the city’s business and its growing national reputation. It would discourage investment, 11 years

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after the city had hosted the 1895 Cotton States Exposition, declaring the South, and particularly Atlanta, open for business. In response, for the first time in Atlanta’s history, city officials and civic leaders made paternalistic overtures to Black leaders, promising to ensure a racial détente that would feature greater recognition of the rights of Black citizenship. One product of such discussions was the creation of an interracial Law and Order movement and the Interracial Committee of Atlanta, twenty white and twenty Black Atlantans seeking cooperation across the color line. In practice, this was recognition in name only. Actual enforcement, it was believed, might provoke more racially motivated attacks.16 Historian David Alan Godshalk has noted that the Black elite leaders who entered into these conversations could not realize in Fall 1906 that these negotiations, while preventing another race massacre in the city, were predetermined to maintain the status quo ante in Atlanta race relations. Had they been able to foresee this, they might not have agreed to forswear stronger protest activities against the city’s inequitable policies and practices and stop calling for federal intervention. They also, in Godshalk’s words, “[forsook] their newly discovered bonds with workingclass and socially marginalized African Americans …”17 As a result, internal divisions within Atlanta’s Black community further hampered their efforts to achieve any meaningful measure of social equity. On the other hand, perhaps nothing and no-one could have changed this dynamic. The leading Black representative who fully entered into this agreement for interracial cooperation—and even created the Committee with a white leader of the Chamber of Commerce—was the deep-voiced, 6 foot 4 inches Reverend Hugh Henry Proctor of the First Congregational Church. By 1915, Proctor was a major figure in both Black and white Atlanta, as shown by the regular publication of his sermons in the Atlanta Constitution. His optimism about Atlanta was boundless: he proclaimed that Atlanta was to the South what Paris was to France and London to England.18 (Fig. 10.1). Proctor came by his fondness for the city by temperament and achievement. He oversaw the 1908 construction in the Fourth Ward of a new church building, funded with donations from both white and Black donors. He took great pride in Atlanta’s multiple institutions of higher learning and initiated countless programs for Black education and general welfare, while also supporting the city’s Black YMCA. He hosted in his home Booker T. Washington, who often helped him fundraise,,\ when Tuskegee’s leader came to town. Meanwhile, W.E.B. DuBois attended

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Fig. 10.1 Reverend Henry Hugh Proctor of the First Congregational Church. ©Thomas E. Askew. Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress

Proctor’s church during his time at Atlanta University. This was a tribute to Proctor’s ability to maintain good relations with people of fiercely opposed views on how Black people should improve their standing in the country.19 Yet another prominent member of Proctor’s congregation was Alonzo Herndon, the former slave, turned barber to white Atlantans, turned real estate mogul, turned founder of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, one of the earliest and largest Black-owned insurance companies. Race filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was so impressed by Proctor that he included a character inspired by him in his 1915 novel, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races. Fictional minister Henry Hugh Hodder, in Micheaux’s words, had “gathered to his church a majority of Attalia’s best Black people.”20

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Proctor was also, according to available historical documents, the first religious luminary in Atlanta who quietly but definitively expressed concern about the exhibition of The Birth of a Nation. As he put it his memoir, all of his life’s work was to “promote cooperation” between the two races in the South as well as the North. He believed the basis for such cooperation lay in the religiosity of both southern whites and Black people.21 His prominence in the modest efforts at reform afterward gave his church greater visibility in Atlanta and nationally. He was visited by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Taft. He could speak directly to Atlanta’s all-white City Council. Some of his views, unfortunately, mirrored some of those harbored within the dominant white community. Intensely class-conscious, he publicly condemned the impoverished criminal Black people that whites so feared, and he lobbied for the closing of what he called “dives,” where working-class Black people congregated. As Godshalk has noted, Proctor’s prominence came with his disengagement from other less visible Black church leaders and other groups working for social improvement in the city and to better the lives of Black Atlantans. After participating in discussions with Atlanta’s white leadership on ways to prevent another assault from occurring, Proctor shifted his prescriptions to his congregation and to Black Atlanta: according to Godshalk, “he had largely abandoned his public backing of protest and federal intervention in southern affairs and instead advocated local inter-racial dialogue.”22 The Birth of a Nation put Proctor’s notions of white-Black cooperation to the test. Atlanta Theater manager Homer T. George first announced his booking of Griffith’s film in mid-August.23 Sometime in early October 1915, Proctor raised his concerns about the film in terms the NAACP had advocated. As Wood explains, the organization “sought to restrict exhibition of the film on the grounds that its misrepresentations of Reconstruction and of the black race posed not only a hindrance to black advancement but a real and present threat to black safety.”24 A white Episcopalian minister, Dr. C. B. Wilmer, speaking at the October 4 meeting of the Men and Religion Forward Movement, a multi-denominational group of white Christian Atlanta ministers focused on issues of social welfare in the city, paraphrased Proctor on the need to postpone the showing of the film “at this time in our city.” Another religious leader, Dr. Dunbar Ogden, and industrialist John J. Eagan of the social justice-minded Central Presbyterian Church, joined Wilmer in

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an effort “to interview the editors of the local papers asking their cooperation in the proposed intervention.”25 One week later, they reported back that they had been able to confer with the newspapers, and that they were given “assurance … that consideration would be given the matter and an opinion formed and action taken.”26 However, judging from the articles subsequently published about Birth, it is clear that the “opinion formed” dismissed their and Proctor’s concerns out of hand. As the premiere date of December 6 approached, the Atlanta Constitution published several individual white testimonies, from within and outside of Georgia, attesting that the film was great and inoffensive. On October 24, the paper reported that “the picture has been shown in a number of southern cities already and will be seen in others before coming here. According to the newspapers and authorities in all these cities no disturbance of any character has marred the performances.” In particular, the mayor of Norfolk—the locale for Birth’s first southern playdate—as well as that city’s chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, “attested to the safety surrounding its screenings.”27 Proctor was fortunate to have any white allies in his endeavor, let alone conscientious ones. Not content just to talk with newspaper editors, Dr. Wilmer’s trio took their case directly to Mayor James Woodward, arguing, in the Constitution ‘s words, that “the picture should not be exhibited in Atlanta on the ground that it might cause race prejudice.” In reply, Woodward promised to “investigate the picture before he reaches a decision.”28 The Mayor and Atlanta’s City Council authorized the censor board, created in 1913 and consisting of three white men, to accompany Atlanta Theater manager Homer T. George on a trip to Macon, Georgia, 84 miles south of Atlanta, where the film was playing. The censor board itself had received some letters protesting the film. Proctor wrote one of them, dated October 19, evidence of his continuing efforts to have Birth’s premiere postponed if not cancelled. He wrote: “We have just passed over a very dangerous bridge in the 4th Ward and the feelings of the common people of my race are not the best in the world … We want peace in Atlanta and an ounce of active endeavor will be worth much to all the people—white and black.”29 Given Proctor’s plea to Wilmer earlier in the month that the film not be exhibited “at this time in our city,” it becomes clear that more recent developments in Atlanta weighed on Proctor’s mind. The 4th Ward encompassed a Black neighborhood which grew after the 1906 attack and included Proctor’s church and the campus of Morris

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Brown College. But it was also a mixed race residential area and, in early October 1915, the white residents became panicked over a so called “black tide”—new residents who were in the Atlanta Constitution’s white supremacist words, “crowding white people out of their homes, forcing the sale of property at greatly reduced prices,” while Morris Brown was planning to build a new nursing school.30 Outraged that Georgia’s state supreme court had rejected a segregation ordinance preventing Black people from moving into white neighborhoods, 200 white residents attended an October 5 meeting to plot strategy. Four Black families had already been warned that they needed to leave their newly-purchased homes. The gathering, in the Constitution’s words, “was devised for the purpose of devising peaceable means, if possible” to force the new arrivals out and have them “fully understand the consequences provided they did not move.” One pastor informed the group “that the time had now come to take action, and to take whatever action might be necessary to protect the ideals and happiness of their community.” A city councilman “regretted that such vigorous action, as I believe will be necessary, has to be taken to maintain the superiority of our race in this community.” The group delineated the borders of the white neighborhoods and designated a vigilance committee of residents to make sure their blocks remained pure white. The ominous language of the speakers alluded to future violence being contemplated. This crisis was defused when “a committee of representative white and negro citizens” agreed to maintain strict segregation between predominantly Black and predominantly white sections of the ward and denounce real estate agents who misled new Black homeowners into buying houses in white neighborhoods. Proctor was not among the delegation of Black representatives who negotiated this truce, but he followed these developments closely and likely advised those chosen to represent Black residents.31 Proctor knew The Birth of a Nation and its critics: the racial tensions in his backyard were symptomatic of brewing antagonisms that the film could provoke into destructive action. The concluding negotiations were the “dangerous bridge” he alluded to in his plea to the censor. When he wrote “the feelings of the common people of my race are not the best in the world,” he was hinting at Black discontent he might not be able to control. His conclusion that “We want peace in Atlanta and an ounce of

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active endeavor will be worth much to all the people – white and black” – harkened back to the interracial cooperation promised by white elites but not remotely fulfilled. Yet, the December 6 premiere date remained firm. Proctor was surely not alone in his effort, as other prominent Black people in the city were members of the NAACP and aware of the Birth controversies. Yet the quiet campaign received no support in the Black Atlanta newspaper of the day, the weekly Atlanta Independent. In fact, this paper referenced The Birth of a Nation only once in the period in the fall of 1915, and this concerned an inaccurate assessment of Black resistance to the film in Philadelphia.32 The Independent was edited and published by Benjamin Davis, who founded it in 1904 as the official organ of Georgia’s United Order of the Odd Fellows, an important Black fraternal group. (Fig. 10.2) He too had participated in the postmassacre conversations with white leaders, but disagreed with Proctor on how best to improve social conditions for Black people in Atlanta. Where Proctor subscribed to W.E.B. DuBois’ concept of the talented tenth, a highly educated Black elite such as existed among whites, Davis believed in the future of a hardworking, self-made middle class along the lines of Booker T. Washington’s emphasis on industrial and technical training.33 Davis proudly watched as Washington spoke at the cornerstone laying of the Odd Fellows building on Auburn Avenue in 1913, a structure that housed fraternal offices, the Independent ’s offices, retail spaces on the ground floor, and an auditorium that would later become the finest first-run Black movie theater in the city. Davis bristled when Proctor publicly denounced bars frequented by poor Black people. Davis also turned up the heat when Proctor, the temperance leader who also believed social dancing was linked to drinking and should be prohibited, testified in October 1915 that the Oddfellows Building’s newly opened Roof Garden should be closed. He constantly criticized Proctor for in his view crowding out other Black voices that might communicate with whites and for practicing a kind of colorism marked by the light-skinned appearance of so many of his parishioners. Davis was, arguably, too focused on his battles within the city, and especially with Proctor, to consider the threat that The Birth of a Nation represented or to run the keen denunciations of it seen in other Black papers around the country and rally his readers to protest it. In short, disagreements, both personal and ideological, eroded what might have been a firmer foundation on which to build collective opposition to the showing of the film. Coupled with the sustained and highly visible threat

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Fig. 10.2 Article in Benjamin W. Davis’s self-published Atlanta Independent celebrates Davis’s leadership in building the Oddfellows Building, November 20, 1915

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of extralegal white violence—the Frank lynching, the deep scars of 1906 still visible even in the new communities that came into being after that cataclysm—this lack of cohesion goes a long way towards helping understand why those wary of the film’s potential impact felt compelled to tread so lightly, even in a city with such a large and dynamic Black presence. In his final sermon before leaving Atlanta for a Brooklyn pulpit in 1919, Proctor described how the city “has passed through stages of racial riot to be the safest place in the country from race troubles.”34 His assessment was premature and misread the underlying paternalism and white supremacist attitudes among white city, religious and civic leaders. These would hold sway for decades to come, while debates continued within Black circles about how to respond to ongoing racism and discrimination, until Dr. King’s non-violent movement made its mark aided by the kind of white allies that Proctor had hoped for. In this regard, it is striking that the same hesitant response to The Birth of a Nation would inform Black Atlanta’s response to the 1946 Atlanta premiere of Walt Disney’s reactionary The Song of the South shortly after the last mass lynching in the state.35 White attitudes and white threats defined the limits of what was possible for decades after 1915.

Notes 1. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 41–69. 2. See Melvyn Stokes, D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” : A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 12-170 (Stokes discusses southern campaigns specifically on 160–62); and Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 139–71. 3. Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom, 141. 4. See Steve Goodson, Highbrows, Hillbillies and Hellfire: Public Entertainment in Atlanta, 1880–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 104; A. M. Beatty, “Good Business With Nation Film,” Moving Picture World, January 15, 1916, 458; and Tom Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 20. 5. Goodson, Highbrows, Hillbillies and Hellfire, 103. 6. Amy Louis Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 165. 7. Ibid., 150.

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8. Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens, 14–15. Rice provides the most detailed account of the Atlanta premiere, the inauguration of the Klan and the ways in which Birth connected meaningfully with white Atlantans’ understandings of the falsely alleged and portrayed threat of Black citizens. 9. See Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 144; Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 12. See also Maclean’s “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism,” Journal of American History, vol. 78, no. 3 (December 1991), 917–48. Steve Oney offers the most comprehensive account of the Frank case in And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). 10. Wade, The Fiery Cross, 147, cited in Rice, White Robes, Silver Screens, 22. 11. Goodson summarizes these reports in Highbrows, Hillbillies and Hellfire, 148–49. 12. “Tom Dixon Talks of The Clansman; The Author Discusses His Critics and His Friends,” Atlanta Constitution [hereafter AC ], October 29, 1905, 2C. 13. For a detailed narrative account of the Atlanta race riot, see Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001). David Fort Godshalk provides an insightful analysis of the riot and Atlanta’s interracial response to it in Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 14. Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 161. 15. Quoted in John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 12. 16. Godshalk, Veiled Visions, 138, 185. 17. Ibid., 136. 18. Henry Hugh Proctor, Between Black and White: Autobiographical Sketches (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1971, orig. pub. 1925), 91. 19. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 126. 20. Oscar Micheaux, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races, illustrated by C.W. Heller (Lincoln, Nebraska: Western Book Supply Company, 1915 & 1916), 73–74. 21. Proctor, Between Black and White, vii. 22. Ibid., 95–96; Godshalk, Veiled Visions, 188–89. Proctor was well aware of this critique and wrote of being misunderstood by others in the Black community. See Proctor, Between Black and White, 97. 23. “Pretty Women Who Will be Seen This Season at Atlanta Theater in New York Successes,” AC, August 15, 1915, B3.

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24. Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 167. See also Stokes’s discussion of NAACP Secretary May Nerney’s advice to Black citizens and activists around the country to stress the possibility of race riots. Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 161. 25. October 4, 1915 Executive Committee Minutes, Men and Religion Forward Movement, MSS 686, Box 7, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center. 26. October 11, 1915 Executive Committee Minutes, ibid. 27. “The Birth of a Nation,” AC, October 24, 1915, C3. See also “Indorses [sic] ‘Birth of a Nation,’” AC, October 18, 1915, 4. This last individual endorsement of the film may have been a response to Atlanta Theater manager Homer T. George’s published request to hear from anyone in Atlanta who had seen “the masterpiece” and felt there were scenes that should be cut from the New York print. 28. “City Hall Gossip: Mayor is Asked to Prohibit ‘Birth of a Nation’ in Atlanta,” AC, October 7, 1915, 9. 29. Although Proctor’s letter does not survive, Mrs. Christine Gilliam, Motion Picture Reviewer (and formerly censor), quotes from it in her October 1962 Report, Author’s Collection. 30. “Agreement Reached in the Fourth Ward: Committees of Whites and Blacks Will Try to Enforce Segregation,” AC, October 9, 1915, 4. 31. “Fourth Ward Citizens Hold Meeting Tonight,” October 5, 1915, AC, 6. 32. See Atlanta Independent, October 16, 1915. 33. See Godshalk, Veiled Visions, 222–27, for a detailed discussion of Davis’s constant criticism of Proctor, which informs this paragraph. 34. “Rev. H. H. Proctor Preaches Farewell Sermon in Atlanta,” AC, December 29, 1919, 10. 35. See Matthew Bernstein, “Nostalgia, Ambivalence, Irony: Song of the South and Race Relations in 1946 Atlanta,” Film History, vol. 8, no. 2 (1996), 219–36.

CHAPTER 11

The Meaning of Emancipation: African American Memory as a Challenge to The Birth of a Nation Jenny Woodley

The release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915 was met with horror by African Americans. The film’s racist caricatures, troubling racial plotlines, and offensive depictions in blackface reflected a deeply anti-black American society. The many ways in which Black people and organizations challenged D.W. Griffith’s astoundingly popular film, through protests, bans, and cuts, have been documented by scholars. These campaigns were efforts to disrupt distribution, to limit who would see the film, and to alter what audiences would see on the screen.1 But resistance to the film took other forms, including a battle over memory. Birth presented a very clear and, to the minds of Black people and their allies, very dangerous, vision of history.2 The film provided a powerful showcase for the “Lost

J. Woodley (B) Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, England, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_11

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Cause” mythology, in which slavery was a benign, even benevolent, institution, and the Civil War was a just fight for states’ rights. Emancipation was a mistake and led to the nadir of Reconstruction, in which the social order was turned on its head, power was abused, and Black people and their white supporters wreaked vengeance on the South. The film also provides a sprinkling of reconciliationist memory, with North and South both fighting bravely and the re-forming of the Union through marriage and the violent imposition of white supremacy.3 Black people had a very different understanding of these pivotal events in American history and of their role within them. They had created and sustained their own memories of slavery, the Civil War and emancipation.4 This memory work was performed in a number of contexts in the early twentieth century but some of the most important were emancipation celebrations, annual events held throughout the year and across the country, which commemorated Black peoples’ freedom from slavery. Proceedings ranged from church services to parades to dances and barbeque, but they shared common characteristics, and all demonstrated that emancipation was an event with deep political and communal significance.5 The collective memory upheld by these commemorations challenged dominant white constructions, such as that in Birth. Through parades, speeches, music and pageantry, African Americans placed slavery and race at the center of Civil War memory. Black people remembered emancipation not as a catastrophe but as the just end to an inhumane practice. They emphasized the agency, patriotism and progress of the race and, in so doing, challenged the harmful and offensive racial stereotypes so prevalent in both the film and the wider culture. Clearly, emancipation celebrations were not a direct response to Birth of a Nation; after all, they preceded the release of the film by decades. But they should be understood as one of the myriad of ways that African Americans resisted the story of America which was told in the years after the Civil War and which was witnessed by the millions who went to watch Griffith’s movie. This chapter will examine the ways in which Black commemorative practices, by contesting the memory and therefore the meaning of emancipation, could be understood as a challenge to The Birth of Nation. Emancipation celebrations were held on different days throughout the year. The most common were January 1, to mark Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and September 22, for the preliminary proclamation, but there were also days with local significance such as June 19, or Juneteenth,

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in east Texas. The events to mark emancipation were both public (sometimes integrated) and private (usually segregated) affairs. Parades through city streets were usually followed by “exercises,” most commonly in Black churches. This part of the day included speeches, readings, sermons, and singing. The music which commonly featured at these events reflected the multiple messages of Emancipation Celebrations. Hymns, spirituals and classical music spoke of the religious, cultural and uplifting elements of the day. Songs such as “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” demonstrated Black patriotism and loyalty. The so-called “Negro national anthem,” “Lift Every Voice,” reflected Black pride and a shared identity. As well as singing and speeches, there were aspects of emancipation celebrations which, on the surface at least, had more to do with Black people enjoying themselves and socializing than with any political message. Most events included some time, if not the whole day, given over to eating, drinking, dancing and playing sports. Depending on the time of year, picnics and barbeques would be held, followed by games of baseball or football and then evenings of music and dancing. Such events were a chance to bring the community together and for family and friends to socialize. Those who had moved away would often travel back home for these annual events. In bringing local Black people together, emancipation celebrations helped to forge a sense of Black community, one which was so crucial in this era of discrimination and segregation. William Wiggins also explains that the practices of dancing and games and eating and drinking (sometimes to excess)—the “good times,” as he calls them—were borrowed from a variety of slave holiday celebrations.6 These twentieth-century practices were a link to the slave past and were another way of remembering how the race survived its bondage. Celebratory events were an opportunity for the Black community to nurture a collective memory of slavery and freedom. Emancipation celebrations provided the chance to explicitly critique and challenge Birth of a Nation. In Ohio, a state in which the NAACP had some success in its attempt to ban the film, Birth’s attack on African Americans was put in the context of a history of racial progress.7 In January 1916, Ohio Governor Frank B. Willis, speaking before a crowd of 2,500 at Cincinnati’s Emancipation Day, announced that the decision by the State Board of Censors to ban Griffith’s film would be upheld. Willis, who had been persuaded by the NAACP to exert pressure on the censors, linked the commemoration of freedom with the movie: “In spite of all the great achievements of your race in the last 50 years, there are yet

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those in our midst who are willing to see the whole race insulted so that a motion picture may make a few paltry dollars.” He offered an alternative representation of the Black race to the one in the film, describing African Americans as patriotic and loyal. He also presented a memory of the Civil War that directly contradicted that of the film, calling it “a conflict for human rights.”8 Willis made a similar speech at the celebrations in Cleveland in August, when he was introduced as “the champion of all humanity because he barred The Birth of a Nation from Ohio motion picture theaters.” He told the crowd that “A race that produced Blanch K. Bruce, Frederick Douglass and Paul Lawrence Dunbar … is too great, too patriotic and too dignified to be insulted by a cheap picture show.” Willis justified the censorship of the film in his state by disputing its claims about Black history and character. Well aware he was speaking at an emancipation celebration, the governor—no doubt making a shrewd political move, since it was not unusual for politicians courting Black voters to appear at these occasions—asserted that Griffith’s historical memory was incompatible with the one being celebrated at such an event.9 When Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, African Americans had spent the previous two years or more planning and holding events to observe the semi-centennial of freedom. The film, and its rapturous reception by white America, undermined much of what they had been honoring. The meaning and importance of emancipation had been celebrated in local Black communities across the country, as well as with national events, including a series of expositions. The most famous and ambitious of these was the “National Emancipation Exposition” in New York in October 1913. This is where W.E.B. Du Bois’s pageant, The Star of Ethiopia, was premièred. He had written it in 1911 but had anticipated the tone and message of Birth because the film fit within a broader historical narrative. In his academic career he had already begun work dismantling the prevailing historiographical interpretation of Reconstruction.10 When Griffith’s film was released, Du Bois had his artistic answer at hand and productions in Washington in 1915 and Philadelphia a year later must have been staged with The Birth of a Nation very much in mind. The Star of Ethiopia covered 10,000 years of history, telling the story of early Africans, the horrors of slavery, a Civil War fought to end bondage, and the progress of the emancipated people. Du Bois’s pageant was created and performed as an explicit contribution to the nation’s

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Fig. 11.1 Emancipation Day, Richmond, Virginia c.1905 (courtesy of the Library of Congress)

historical memory. He reminded his audience that slavery and race were at the heart of the Civil War and of American history.11 A number of other expositions were held around this time. In 1914 a group of African Americans in Richmond, Virginia requested funding from Congress to hold an exposition in the former Confederate capital.12 (Fig. 11.1) They were successful, and white newspaper reports praised the accommodationist tone of the exposition, which ran for three weeks in July 1915. President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation stating that “The action of congress in this matter indicates very happily the desires of the nation as well as of the people of Virginia to encourage the negro in his efforts to solve his industrial problem.”13 White Americans such as Wilson saw the event as an opportunity to emphasize what Black people could do for themselves to advance economically, without calling for equality or rights. In this way, the event echoed the white

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conservative or reconciliationist vision of the past which had dominated the War’s semi-centennial. And yet, a highlight of the exposition was a “pantomimic pageant” titled “The Answer to the Birth of a Nation.” As a local newspaper reported, the pageant, featuring 300 school children, “will represent the progress of the race since its emancipation.” One of the scenes “will show [the] skiff landing the first slaves in this country.” Another would be “a cotton plantation scene with appropriate songs,” as well as “an illustration of the negro life of today, closing with the negro entering the door of opportunity.”14 Unfortunately, we do not know much more about the production. However, the title suggests the pageant explicitly set out to challenge the presentation of American history in Griffith’s film. It centered slavery and the experience of enslaved people, when Birth had attempted to marginalize and ridicule them. In The Birth of a Nation, slavery is remembered, and forgotten, in important ways. As reflects the Lost Cause ideology of the film, the Cameron plantation is shown as idyllic and their slaves as contented. The enslaved people have a “two-hour interval for dinner” and happily dance for the visiting Stonemans. They remain loyal after the war, as represented by the Camerons’ faithful servants and epitomized by the most common image of that servility, the headscarf-wearing Mammy. The loyal slave, notes Micki McElya, was “the ultimate expression of southern paternalism, which held that the relationship of the master to the slave was removed from market forces and economic exigency and functioned more like a familial relationship between father and child.”15 The “Plantation Myth” contended that Black southerners were so comfortable under slavery that they remained with their masters rather than choosing freedom. Furthermore, the Lost Cause—and Birth of a Nation—deliberately omitted slavery as the cause of the conflict. Slavery and emancipation’s place in historical memory was forgotten. Black communities, however, refused to forget slavery. Emancipation celebrations deliberately and overtly remembered the experience of enslavement. The formerly enslaved frequently featured in Emancipation Day programs. In Greenville, Texas, in 1916, “Short talks were made by a number of the ex-slaves which stirred the patriotism and race pride of all who heard them. Father Shepherd, who is in his 95th year, told very touchingly how the slaves were treated by their masters. This touched the hearts of all who heard it, and brought tears from many.”16 As late as 1951, the Emancipation Day in Fordyce, Arkansas included “remarks on the experiences of Slavery” by the “ex-slave,” Mrs. Alice Hooper.17 A

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parade in Kansas City included “a bunch of slaves, followed by a living picture of an incident in their lives – the fierce and dreadful bloodhound.” This re-enactment was followed by a “number of men who were actually subjects of the proclamation, and who became free by it.”18 During a Georgia Emancipation Day, “a liberal collection was taken up for the ex-slaves present.”19 Glymph explains that “Former slaves stepped forward to articulate and remember the violence at the heart of slavery. They became the foremost narrators of a memory of the Civil War in which the destruction of slavery was the core point of reference.”20 These Emancipation Days honored the memory of the formerly enslaved and their plight; they did not want to forget slavery or to brush over the horror of their bondage. By including those who had been enslaved in their celebrations, Black people challenged the white historical memory exemplified in Birth and constructed an alternative, which placed slavery and race at the center of the Civil War memory, and therefore at the center of the nation’s past. When commemorating freedom, African Americans often dwelt on the moment of emancipation. They asked who freed the slaves and the answer tells us much about the memory work being performed at such events. D.W. Griffith’s Lincoln apparently does not free the slaves; he is not shown singing the Emancipation Proclamation.21 This omission is necessary if the Lost Cause mythology of the film is to be upheld. For Griffith, the Civil War could not be about the end of slavery. His film reflected the dominant white memory of Lincoln: by the time Lincoln’s memorial in Washington D.C. was dedicated in 1922, his status as a national hero was assured but his role in securing rights for Black Americans was more contentious. For most white Americans, he was not a symbol of racial unity or equality. As Kirk Savage has shown, the monument erected in his honor was “structured to side-step the question of what he stood for,” with a main inscription that remembered him as savior of the Union but which omitted any mention of slavery.22 African Americans, in contrast, often celebrated Lincoln as Emancipator. Pictures of Lincoln were held aloft in parades, his actions were praised in speeches, and the Emancipation Proclamation was read aloud at almost every Emancipation Day. In remembering Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, Black people were remembering a War which was fought over slavery and a benevolent statesman who freed them from an unjust bondage. However, Black memories of Lincoln were more complicated than unquestioning hero-worship. Blight argues that “For many

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Blacks, Lincoln’s place in emancipation stood as a symbol of necessary and humane statecraft, an official declaration of their belonging in the land of their birth, secured by blood in war and sanctioned by the highest authority of the nation.”23 Many saw the utility in commemorating an emancipationist president, particularly as they increasingly looked to federal authority to secure real freedom. However, plenty were sceptical about Lincoln’s intentions, arguing his Emancipation Proclamation was a war-measure forced by circumstance. The African American historian Carter G. Woodson wrote: “Lincoln should be lauded by the Negro, but he has been often overrated as the savior of the race. At best Lincoln was a gradual emancipationist and colonizationist.”24 Black peoples’ ambivalent memories of Lincoln shaped Black commemorative events. A central place was often accorded to the formerly enslaved themselves and to their contribution to winning their own freedom. Emancipation was something that Black people fought and died for, as much as—if not more than—it was a presidential proclamation. The president of Missouri’s Lincoln Institute, for example, speaking in Savannah, Georgia, in 1915 said: “In our grateful admiration … for Lincoln, do not let us forget the important part the Negro himself played in the struggle for his own freedom.” A speech in the 1920s was titled “The Negro Soldier as [a] Leading Factor in Emancipation.”25 As Glymph explains, for African Americans “freedom wasn’t a gift from Lincoln; rather it was bought by those who died in slavery and those who fought during the war.”26 A newspaper, reporting on the parade in Kansas City which included the formerly enslaved, told readers that these men “entered the war to save the Union, and make their freedom secure.”27 For many African Americans, the Civil War was not simply the war to save the Union but was also remembered as the war in which they won their freedom. This memory of self-emancipation was embodied by the appearance of Black Civil War veterans in some parades. These former soldiers were a reminder that they had fought for their own freedom and for their nation’s security. Such figures provided a contrast to Black soldiers in Birth of a Nation, who are shown looting, forcing whites from the sidewalk and acting aggressively. In one of the most controversial plot lines, Gus (Walter Long), a Black soldier, chases Flora (Mae Marsh), the youngest daughter of the white Cameron family, declaring his desire to “marry.” When Flora jumps to her death rather than submit to his advances, Gus is caught by the newly-formed Ku Klux Klan and lynched,

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his body left as a warning to others. Griffith makes a direct link between Black political equality and Black rape of white women. He cuts from scenes of the Black-controlled South Carolina House of Representatives to a scene in which mulatto leader Silas Lynch (George Siegmann) “admires” Elsie Cameron and to the first shots of Gus, lurking in the shadows, with the intertitle, “Later. The grim reaping begins.” Gus is a “black brute,” a warning of the supposed savage nature of Black men. Black commemorations challenged these representations of Black manhood. For example, it was common for African American Civil War veterans to march alongside serving Black soldiers. A parade in Kansas in 1919 was an emancipation celebration combined with a homecoming for Black soldiers returning from fighting in the First World War. Headed by the regimental band, the parade “moved slowly and majestically down the street … a virtual pageant of Negro art and achievement.” In the parade were Civil War veterans and soldiers recently returned from Europe, cars representing organizations like the NAACP and local businesses, floats with little girls dressed in white, and boys marching, “all with colors flying, flags waving and banners gay, [they] combined to make a very delightful and impressive spectacle.”28 The appearance of Black men in uniform projected a strong message of African American patriotism (one which was reinforced with the carrying of the American flag and the singing of patriotic songs). These veterans were very different to the would-be-rapists of Birth. The portrayal of Black women in Birth of a Nation was just as damaging as its representation of Black men. The two main Black female characters are the “mulatta,” Lydia, and “Mammy.” Thus Black women are shown as either lascivious and promiscuous, threatening white morals and decency, or comically docile and loyal. Just as emancipation celebrations allowed a different public image of Black men, so they provided some opportunity for Black women to challenge white assumptions about their character. Black women took important roles in planning and organizing Emancipation Days, though their work was often confined to traditional women’s roles such as catering and decorating. However, they also took on public roles during the festivities. The Emancipation Proclamation was almost always read by a woman. Black women contributed not only musical entertainment and poetry but gave speeches and addresses. The content of these speeches was often a refutation of the attacks made against them by white America. For example, at the Emancipation Day

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in Harlem, “Dr. Julia Coleman-Robinson … discussed the progress of colored women since the emancipation.”29 A different aspect of Black life was represented by the crowning of Black beauty queens during emancipation celebrations. The 1916 winner of the Hannibal, Missouri, “Goddess of Liberty” competition appeared in the parade “perched upon a beautiful white throne, herself dressed in white, she looked like a real queen – all the more so because the beautiful white float was drawn by two large white steeds.”30 A report on emancipation celebrations in Fort Riley, Kansas, described how “sixteen-year-old Gertrude Thomas … whose young curves filled a light red, one-piece bathing suit, won the title of ‘Miss Emancipation Day’ over a field of a dozen bathing beauties at the municipal pool.”31 Reports of Black beauty contests had appeared in the African American press from around the 1890s. They were part of a separate Black culture which helped to create and reinforce a Black identity. They challenged racial stereotypes and fostered pride in Black beauty. What is particularly interesting was holding beauty pageants in the context of emancipation celebrations. Kachun argues that, by the twentieth century, while the popular amusements of Black freedom festivals (such as beauty contests) did continue, “these types of affairs had been divorced from any commemorative, educational or political meanings.”32 However, this was not necessarily the case. The titles of these beauty queens—“Goddess of Liberty,” “Miss Emancipation Day”—indicate that they were symbols of freedom. In the context of Birth’s attack on African Americans’ place in the nation’s history, the commemorative and political significance of Black Goddesses of Liberty is seen even more clearly. By using national symbols such as Liberty, which deliberately echoed the American Revolution, these pageants could be read as a tactic to claim emancipation as a national—“American”—event. The inclusion of beauty pageants in emancipation days, however, was also problematic: Maxine Craig has discussed the ways in which Black beauty competitions raise difficult questions about class and about white standards of beauty.33 Furthermore, by implicitly comparing the emancipation beauty queens to enslaved women, there was a danger of reinforcing the view of Black women as sexual objects, to be used for the sexual pleasure of white men. On the other hand, these events could be seen as a way of reclaiming Black women’s sexuality. As Leslie Schwalm writes, “When African American women dressed themselves and their daughters as goddesses and queens to be carried by horses and wagons, they claimed for themselves and their daughters a privileged

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womanhood that whites actively sought to deny them.”34 Black beauty queens were a refutation of the grotesque sexuality of Griffith’s imagination, transforming Black women’s beauty into something wholesome and respectable. Black men and women used emancipation celebrations to demonstrate to the nation, and to themselves, their strength and beauty. They came together to remember what they had suffered and what they had achieved. Their collective memories sustained the meaning of emancipation. It was a meaning which was directly contradicted by Griffith’s movie; to him, emancipation meant chaos and disruption. In Birth of a Nation, it is not Lincoln (Joseph Henabery) but Silas Lynch, the real villain of the film, who “frees” the slaves. Lynch and his carpetbaggers are shown forcing a group of enslaved people to stop working in the fields and telling others that they are free to join the rest of their race, who are busy celebrating (the only way they know how, according to Griffith) by dancing. Lynch represents the vengeful North, forcing its will on the South, even on the African Americans (who do not know about or want their freedom) (Fig. 11.2). As a mulatto, Lynch also represents white fears about the worst consequence of this new order: miscegenation. According to Griffith, it is the freeing of the slaves which brings the disorder and violence that characterizes Reconstruction: as the intertitle reads, “Starting the ferment … Inducing the negroes to quit work.” Birth followed the Dunning School interpretation of Reconstruction, which characterized the period as a disaster. Dunning complained that African Americans “exercised an influence in political affairs out of all relation to their intelligence or property.”35 Griffith peppered the second act of his film with scenes which demonstrated such inadequacies. Black people are shown as not understanding the franchise—“Ef I doan’ get ‘nuf franchise to fill mah bucket, I doan’ want it nohow”—and as cheating at the ballot box. The supposed “historical facsimile” of the South Carolina House of Representative shows Black legislators drinking alcohol, eating chicken and taking off their shoes, while passing “intermarriage” bills. African Americans are shown as untrustworthy, stupid and, ultimately, dangerous. They have been unleashed from bondage and are intent on destroying the Old South. It is only the imposition of white supremacy, according to Griffith, that saves the region and its (white) people from disaster. For freed Black people, and for their descendants, emancipation meant something very different. It was the opportunity to become full citizens

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Fig. 11.2 Lynch tries to convince a formerly enslaved man to stop working

of the United States. They decried the fact that this promise of equality remained unfulfilled and they condemned the obstacles placed in their way, but the steps they had made towards citizenship were celebrated. Emancipation days emphasized the progress made by African Americans since freedom. This can be seen in the speeches and parades. A bishop in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1927 spoke of the “moral, intellectual and spiritual development” of the race. He said the examples of this progress “furnish the inspiration for and constitute the ground upon which we are prosecuting our fight for equal justice and equal opportunity.”36 Progress meant different things to different people, for example, educational improvements (Black schools and colleges had floats) or financial and commercial success (local Black businesses acted as sponsors). But the message was clear: Black people, once freed from the shackles of slavery, had proved themselves to be worthy contributors to the nation. Alongside this was an emphasis on respectability: the events were designed to show the “best” of Black life. There were anxieties about how the public

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appearance of African Americans was being judged by whites.37 The hope was that “well-ordered spectacles” would counteract the harmful depiction, by filmmakers such as Griffith and novelists like Dixon, of Black people as savage, foolish or ignorant. Contests over how the past is remembered are not simple skirmishes over a story; these conflicts have contemporary political and social consequences. Griffith and Dixon could protest that their film was merely a comment on Black people in the last century—Dixon argued that “I am not attacking the Negro of today. I am recording faithfully the history of fifty years ago”—but viewers knew that it reflected on African Americans in 1915.38 The Birth of a Nation was part of a white historical and cultural consensus. In the narrative which dominated the national memory, slaves were content with their position in the South; the Civil War was fought over states’ rights; Reconstruction was a grave mistake that allowed corrupt northerners to exact revenge on the South and gave Black people power, which they abused in a wanton display of brutishness and destruction until national order was restored by the triumph of white supremacy. African Americans refused to accept this narrative. They used commemorations to construct their own collective memory of this defining period of their race’s and their country’s history. During emancipation celebrations, Black people remembered their enslavement as a time of suffering and pain, whilst not forgetting their resilience. They recalled the Civil War as the conflict to end slavery and they celebrated Emancipation as correcting a moral wrong and setting the race on the path to progress and full citizenship. This was important not just because it told a different story about America, but because of its significance for the present-day struggles of the race. Fitzhugh Brundage argues that “rituals of black memory represented a form of cultural resistance.”39 African Americans knew that Griffith and Dixon were using the past to attack the race in the present. They would not let this assault go unchallenged: in resisting The Birth of a Nation’s vision of the past, in constructing and reinforcing their own collective memory, Black people were opening another front in the long battle for equality.

Notes 1. The most comprehensive account of the campaign against Birth is provided by Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”:

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 129–70. On Birth of a Nation’s use of historical memory and claims for historical accuracy, as well as the NAACP’s objections to this, see, for example, Jenny Woodley, Art for Equality: The NAACP’s Cultural Campaign for Civil Rights (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 27–29. For reading on the Lost Cause and other memories of the Civil War see, for example, Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); W. Fitzhugh Brundage: The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2005); Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); William Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Adam H. Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020). Glymph argues we should not use the term counter-memory, as it presumes a white memory as the norm. As she explains, white southerners contested Black memories of slavery rather than it just being the other way round. Thavolia Glymph, “‘Liberty Dearly Bought’: The Making of Civil War Memory in Afro-American Communities in the South,” in Charles M. Payne and Adam Green, eds., Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850–1950 (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 111–39. On emancipation celebrations, see William H. Wiggins, O Freedom!: AfroAmerican Emancipation Celebrations (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Kathleen Ann Clark, Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808–1915 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); and Glymph, “Liberty Dearly Bought”; Blair, Cities of the Dead; Brundage, The Southern Past. For a personal history of emancipation celebrations in Texas, see Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth (London: Liveright, 2021). Wiggins, O Freedom!, Chapter 2. Stokes, D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 155–57. “Loving-Cup for Governor Willis,” Cleveland Gazette, January 22, 1916. “Willis Declares for Race Justice” Chicago Defender, August 12, 1916.

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10. See, for example, his 1910 article outlining the contributions of Black voters and legislators. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” American Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 4 (July 1910), 781–99. 11. On Du Bois’s pageant see Woodley, Art for Equality, 20. 12. Blight, Race and Reunion, 372. See also Blair, Cities of the Dead, 196. 13. “Wilson’s Proclamation in Behalf of Exposition,” The Watchman and Southron (Sumter, S.C.), July 7, 1915. 14. “Pantomime to Show Progress of Negro,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 14, 1915. 15. Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in TwentiethCentury America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5. 16. “Emancipation Day Observed,” Freeman (Indianapolis), January 8, 1916. 17. “Fordyce,” Arkansas State Press, January 12, 1951. 18. “Emancipation a Glowing Success,” Advocate (Kansas City), September 28, 1923. 19. “Emancipation Day at Ocilla, GA,” Savannah Tribune, January 15, 1916. 20. Glymph, “Liberty Dearly Bought,” 132. See also Schwalm, who calls the formerly enslaved “historians of their own past.” Leslie Schwalm, “‘Agonizing Groans of Mothers’ and ‘Slave-Scarred Veterans’: The Commemoration of Slavery and Emancipation,” American Nineteenth-Century History, vol. 9, no. 3 (2008), 293. 21. Melvyn Stokes, American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 59–61. 22. Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 140. 23. Blight, Race and Reunion, 369. 24. Woodson, quoted in Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 42. 25. “Dr Allen Visits the Southland,” Topeka Plaindealer, January 19, 1915; “Emancipation Program Inspiring,” Negro Star (Wichita, Kansas), January 4, 1929. 26. Glymph, “Liberty Dearly Bought,” 120. 27. “Emancipation a Glowing Success,” Advocate (Kansas City), September 28, 1923. 28. “Atchison Colored Citizens Honor Returned Soldiers,” Topeka Plaindealer, October 3, 1919. 29. “Observe Emancipation Day Anniversary,” Chicago Defender, January 12, 1935. 30. “Big Emancipation Parade,” Chicago Defender, September 30, 1916.

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31. “Emancipation Day Program Sets Record,” Chicago Defender, August 14, 1937. 32. Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 243. 33. Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 34. Schwalm, “Agonizing Groans,” 294. 35. William A. Dunning, “The Undoing of Reconstruction,” Atlantic Monthly Oct. 1901, at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1901/ 10/the-undoing-of-reconstruction/429219/, accessed April 6, 2021. 36. “Bishops Flays White Sham and Hypocrisy in Speech,” Chicago Defender, February 5, 1927. 37. Brundage, Southern Past, 78–79. 38. Thomas Dixon, “Reply to the New York Globe,” April 10, 1915 in The Birth of a Nation, ed. Robert Lang (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 166–67. 39. Brundage, Southern Past, 10.

PART IV

Reception Abroad

CHAPTER 12

Transatlantic “Structural Amnesia”: The Birth of a Nation in Britain 1915–16 Michael Hammond

“I think I should not be far wrong if I said that most Englishmen, if asked for their impression of the struggle between North and South, would answer that it was about slavery, which the North attacked and the South defended, and then ended with the emancipation of the slaves. Short as this summary is every phrase of it contains an error.” 1 These words, written by Cecil Chesterton in “An Explanation” in the Scala film theatre program, accompanied the London première of The Birth of A Nation on September 27, 1915. After attending a special screening of the film that afternoon, the critic for the Pall Mall Gazette wrote: “most people would define the cause of the American Civil War as a struggle for the abolition of slavery. The conception is, however, inaccurate and misleading, and the drama at the Scala throws a new light upon this darkest chapter of American history.2

M. Hammond (B) University of Southampton, Southampton, England, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_12

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These remarks initiate a set of interpretations that were offered as a guide for British audiences as they encountered Griffith’s spectacle. Chesterton points to the need for such guidance in the first paragraph of his “explanation” of the “second phase” of the war (i.e. Reconstruction) that it “is at once one of the most romantic and one of the most instructive episodes in history, [with which] very few Englishmen are at all familiar.” He acknowledges the “misapprehensions” of his assumed audience and initiates a process of redirecting meanings that characterized the film’s initial run during the years 1915–16 in Britain. Such reshaping of interpretations was engaged in most forcefully by the critical press and in the advertising strategies for the regional distribution of the film. What follows is an attempt to outline some of the implications of these re-interpretations for a British audience at the time of the Great War. Not surprisingly, these redirections of historical understanding do not differ substantially from the dominant discourse that characterized the reception of the film in the United States. This interpretation of the history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction was one which W.E.B. Du Bois had characterised as “a structural amnesia.”3 What does seem to mark out the popular reception of Birth of a Nation in Britain as different, what is indeed largely missing, is a dissenting voice, a counterargument.4 Criticisms of the film lay mainly in the nature of the kind the critic of the theatrical trade journal The Era expressed: The second Act is perhaps marred by the mass of horribly realistic details, showing how the negroes [sic] vilely misused their newly given freedom. One or two of the scenes left one cold with horror and unless those pieces of realism help to bring about the day of the human brotherhood that Mr. Griffith represents in a rather poor epilogue, we cannot see that they serve any purpose ... and think some of the scenes might well be deleted.5

Here, rather than questioning Griffith’s representation of history, the criticism is based on “sensibility and propriety,” an objection to the realistic portrayal of the rape and forced marriage scenes. The criticism of the religious epilogue provides a glimmer of suspicion of American homiletics at a time when utopian visions were beginning to ring hollow. Only the critic from the left-wing Reynolds Newspaper offered any direct questioning of the film’s historical accuracy: “Mr. Cecil Chesterton’s historical sketch of the period helps to an understanding of the pictures. I fancy it is a wee bit one-sided and the Ku Klux Klan is idealised.”6

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The reception of the film during the Great War in Britain suggests that the interpretations encouraged by the advertising and the critics’ comments attempted to highlight aspects of the film which deemphasized or ignored the film’s racist message in favor of those which coincided with the concerns of the British public at a time of national crisis. Here I examine the release history of its first run, 1915–1916, in terms of the discourses utilized by the advertisers, the critics, the exhibitors and the trade press. I want to explore why the film did not apparently “outrage individuals” and was accepted by the British cinema culture at the time through a number of different interpretive strategies: as an advance in the cinematic art, as a portrayal of the personal and familial consequences of war, as educational spectacle, and as evidence of a shared Anglo-American historical trajectory. Each of these worked towards strengthening the national industry’s argument for cinema’s aesthetic and cultural legitimacy. The Birth of a Nation was released in September 1915 in London, where it played at the Scala and then the Drury Lane Theatre until the spring of 1916. The film then toured the major cities throughout Britain. The significance of 1916 cannot be understated. By October 1916, British casualties had greatly increased and the effects of the disasters on the Somme were literally coming home.7 This provides a background for considering the range of probable meanings available to reviewers and audiences at the time. A film which has as its main theme war and its effect on the home and family screened during this particular year raises a number of questions: how can the combination of the intentions and address of producers, critics and exhibitors be brought to bear on a film which is made for a US audience, dealing with issues of nationalism and historical memory? How were British audiences encouraged to interpret, or make sense of this film? What would they have recognized? In what way did the exhibitors, news media and the advertisers treat, if at all, the controversial nature of the film? Tom G. Davies and the Western Import Company Ltd. imported the film for an exclusive run at Drury Lane in London.8 “Sol Exclusives,” a distribution company owned and run by Sol Levy of Birmingham, handled its release in the regions. Levy bought the UK rights to the film and had in his employ two young men: Victor Saville and Michael Balcon. Saville stated in 1977:

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Fig. 12.1 Ad for The Birth of a Nation at the Grand Theatre, Southampton, October 25, 1916

Instead of hiring it out to the trade in the usual way, he [Levy] decided to exploit it himself, renting halls around the country which had been closed or temporarily abandoned during the war. Later I had the job of selling the epic around the cinemas. It cost Levy £10,000 and he grossed £100,000 out of it. A fabulous figure in those days.9

The film’s release in theatres with symphony orchestra accompaniment rather than in purpose-built cinemas followed the exhibition practice of “super-films” such as Quo Vadis and Cabiria. This type of “roadshowing” differentiated the film, marking it out as a special event. Saville’s job of selling the film as a “second run” in cinemas occurred in the early part of 1917. The Southampton and District Pictorial, dated October 25, 1916, advertised the film as having “A Soul Stirring Appeal to Every Briton” (Fig. 12.1). The advertisement was drawn from the national advertising campaign for the film and was distinguished from the standard way The Grand Theatre advertised its coming attractions by being a quarter-page

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in size as opposed to the usual brief mention given to dramatic productions in the Theatrical and Entertainment Announcements page. The standard black ball logo that accompanied the film’s advertising in the US was also used in the UK for these first screenings. The logo appeared on one side and on the other, under the “soul stirring appeal,” lay the following exhortations: . See the Marvellous Battle Scenes . See the Regeneration of a nation, as England will be reborn when the War is over. . See the Development of a New Art—an Epoch in Dramatic History . A Vivid, Graphic Story of Anglo-Celt achievement which will make every Englishman, Woman and Child glow with pride, gasp with astonishment and thrill with marvellous realism! The pronouncements above offer a way of addressing questions surrounding the reception of this film and can illuminate the negotiation between the intended meanings of Griffith (by “Griffith” I mean the production team represented by the name above the title), the meanings directed by the advertising campaign and the attendant assumptions about the attractions of the film to an English audience. Although the following discussion deals in detail only with the last three exhortations, the question of the “battle scenes” will also be referenced.

See the Development of a New Art---An Epoch in Dramatic History The Birth of a Nation was an “authored” film with Griffith’s “name above the title.” It provided spectacle on a grand scale, utilizing a specially arranged and composed score played by a forty-piece orchestra. The theatrical trade journal The Era stated that “It leaves no doubt as to the genius of Mr. Griffiths [sic], and the mere hugeness of this successful undertaking is almost stupefying.”10 The Bioscope gave the presentation of the film two pages in which the writer, on a second viewing, praised the use of music that provided the vast spectacle with “emotional power.” The article concluded: “It is seldom if ever that the screening of a picture has been undertaken with such skill, care and intelligence, and the production as a whole constitutes a valuable object lesson on the ‘art

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of presentation.’”11 Griffith as authorizing element is a signifier of individual agency and artistic vision that influenced exhibition and advertising practices generally and was a successful attempt, in this case, to expand the constituency of cinema audiences. Virtually all of the accounts and reviews I researched foreground the artistic achievement of the film. The review in The Times after the première at the Scala connected the artistic merit of the film with the debate in the House of Commons over the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s proposed duty on imported cinematograph films. The reviewer reported that Sir Alfred Maud “caused some merriment in the House” when he asked, during question time, “whether a committee of the cabinet was to assess the comparative values of last night’s Scala production with those of a Charlie Chaplin film.” The reviewer also noted that “it will be of some interest to the film industry to note the degree of popularity which may be obtained by a serious work, such as this of Mr. Griffith’s, unrelieved by anything lighter than a love interest.”12 By drawing attention to the “serious” nature of the film, a reproval of the vulgarity of cinema generally is apparent in the distinction he draws between the Scala production and the Chaplin film. In the context of the debate on import duties, Maud’s “sarcastic suggestion” equates cultural value with economic worth and contrasts the exclusivity of a forty-piece orchestra in a large hall with the insignificant mass reproduction of a Chaplin comedy at the local “bughouse.” The national advertisement’s inclusion of Griffith ‘s pledge to present this film “in only the highest class theatres and at prices charged for the best theatrical attractions” was an attempt to control the meaning not only of the film text but to present the produced film object as a rare commodity, a cultural event. The promotion of the film as an epoch in the development of a new art also provides a solution, in part, to the new industry’s dilemma of trying to attract a “better class” of clientele while not alienating their already existing audience. The advertisement articulates different appeals to different class groupings through an overriding attempt to underscore the national appeal. What is signalled by its attempt to redirect the meaning of the film is the connection between the transformation of cinema as an art form with the rebirth of England as a nation. Moreover, it hints at the renewal of social life necessary after the war.

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The Bristol Western Daily Press praised the film “as a work of great fascination for it depicts, in a series of remarkable pictures, the development of the United States from the days of slavery and the great war of the North v. the South.” It went on to summarize the narrative of the film in these words: “Two families, one in Pennsylvania and the other in Piedmont, S.C., between whose young folk great friendships had sprung up, now fight on the opposing sides, and it is surprising how well the thread of the story is maintained through that great conflict.”13 By emphasizing the techniques as “staging,” these accounts work from an aesthetic which marks out the boundaries of personal and epic as separate. This historical form of visual engagement foregrounds the mise-en-scène over the editing. The Reynolds Newspaper was more specific in connecting the personal dimensions of the story with the spectacle of epic: “On the technical side the photography is admirable, and there is a fairly interesting melodramatic story to give that personal touch of drama which big historical events must have on the stage or the screen.”14 It is not surprising, however, that a theatrical trade journal, The Era, would be the most able to articulate the complexities of Griffith’s narrative style: To stage a war of the magnitude of the Civil War of America and to bring home the horrible pathos of the affair by the dramatic possibilities of the mingling of two families throughout awful scenes of carnage and destruction is what Griffith has attempted.15

The spectacle of battle was familiar to British audiences from the Military spectacles and the Nautical plays that were popular in the late nineteenth century. These “blood and thunder” melodramas appearing in music halls depicted heroic battle sequences, with identifiable “Great Commanders” and “Great Common Men” fighting against a usually unspecified evil, an enemy of the Empire. By 1915, the cinema-going public was familiar with the depiction of battle sequences which worked to position the viewer through an omniscient narrator. Through Griffith’s narrative style, mise-en-scène and through editing between the personal stories of the two families and the “god’s eye view” of the battlefield, it became increasingly possible to identify with one or more participants in the battle, to see what they saw and through them experience the struggle. For most British reviewers the distinctive quality of the battle sequences which marked out The Birth of a Nation was their scale. As

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part of an argument for the film’s educational properties, The Coventry Herald cited the “broad sweeps of landscape” and “the fortunes of battle swinging as a pendulum” as evidence of its realistic rendering of the ordeal of war.16 Equating scale with realism, the article points to qualities which square with what Daniel Pick has noted as an “enduring theme across … nineteenth-century war literature … that war constitutes a transcendence of all petty calculations and self-serving motives.”17 In this case The Coventry Herald activates an interpretive framework which highlights a selfless absorption into the struggle as the film’s instructive educational quality.18

See the Regeneration of a Nation, as England Will be Reborn When the War is Over The force of The Birth of A Nation’s regeneration narrative becomes apparent in the second half of the film. While the first half combines stirring spectacles of the war with the personal stories of anguish and sacrifice, this is a prelude to the dissolution of the Old South and a regeneration of the “Aryan” nation through the “rise from the dead” of the spectres of the Ku Klux Klan. Here the narrative shifts into a register where the conflicts are apparently bound up with specifically American issues which might have seemed opaque to a British audience. Cecil Chesterton, in his “Explanation” in the Scala programme, devotes half a page to the “tyranny which went by the ironical name of ‘Reconstruction.’” He characterizes the policies of Radical Republican politician Thaddeus Stevens as similar to those of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, but with the “additional horror that the instruments of his revenge were not even to be people of his own colour.” Chesterton makes an explicit connection with fears of miscegenation in the imperial imagination: ... the South defeated, disheartened and ruined, might have borne the yoke if they had been spared “the inexpiable wrong, the unutterable shame” of Macaulay’s poem. But not only the greed but the more awful animal passions of the negro were let loose on them and their women folk. It was this last horror that produced the Ku Klux Klan [my italics].19

Filtered through racist, imperial discourse, Chesterton’s “explanation” inscribes onto a British national narrative a regeneration trope which hinges on the construction and containment of a brutal other. Black

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sexuality as a marker of threat and dissipation is the key term in the return of the “unjustly” oppressed and victimized white civilization for which parallels with the nation’s involvement in the war in Europe are drawn which feature similar characterizations of a brutal enemy, the Germans. The “rebirth” of the white South is explicitly joined with the regeneration of England in the terms of “womanly sacrifice” and a righteous, crusading secret “Invisible Empire of the South,”20 The “second war” which Chesterton refers to, then, is the one against a villainous “other” which bears the hallmarks of the Manichean structures of popular, propagandistic war rhetoric. Chesterton’s rhetorical devices are echoed in other interpretations which attempt to link the film with “English” concerns. The sensitivity of two types of scenes was highlighted by The Bioscope’s main review of the film prior to its release in Britain: ... aspects of war are presented with equal power and vividness—the heart broken mother seeking for her son amid the human wreckage of a field hospital; the dreadful tension of searching the casualty lists for familiar names; the chaotic desolation of “War’s Peace.” (... it should be pointed out that some of the more poignant and terrible of these scenes are to be deleted before the film is exhibited to the public – a wise precaution in view of the many painful parallels for such episodes to be found just now in our own lives. Certain incidents dealing with the bestiality of the emancipated negroes are also to be modified. Their inclusion was thoroughly justified artistically, but they are doubtless unsuitable for general exhibition.)21

Both The Bioscope and Chesterton situate the threat of degeneration within racial terms which justify the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. The Bioscope’s identification of the family trauma and sacrifice and the sensitivity to the depiction of the bestiality of black “oppressors” towards white women refers to grounds for censorship cited by the 1915 report of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) . Among these were “the exploitation of tragic incidents of the war” and “the actual perpetration of criminal assaults on women.” The board’s report a year earlier had referred to scenes which depicted outrages on women and themes relative to “race suicide.” In spite of this, the film had already been passed “without cuts” for exhibition by the BBFC with a “U” [Universal] certificate on August 5, 1915, a month before The Bioscope article was published.22 (Whether the film was actually cut for British release remains something a mystery. The version that Griffith cut after the protests in the

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U.S. may have been the version shown at the Scala. However, films were often tailored for release in Britain during the war and therefore the possibility that it was cut in the way that the Bioscope indicates cannot be ruled out.) Couched in the terms of education and associated with the “uplift” of art, The Bioscope provides a clue as to the terms on which the film’s exhibition in Britain was allowed. In any case, the “sensitivity” of the film was the propriety of the depictions of tragedy and the moral question of depicting sexual violence. Newspaper accounts suggest the moments in the film which feature the Ku Klux Klan are “weird,” yet there is no indication that the reviewers saw these scenes as confusing or disturbing. The account found in The Southampton and District Pictorial on November 1, 1916 stated: Probably the most thrilling scenes, however, are those in which the ghostly garbed ghouls of the Ku Klux Klan ride madly to the rescue of the women and children of the South. As the sorrows of the South, under the baneful Reconstruction Acts, began to be unbearable, the fiery cross of the Scottish Highlanders was again used as a call to arms. At first the Ku Klux Klan devoted their efforts to putting down disorder among the bad negroes. Generally all that was necessary was to play upon the credulity and superstition of that race. They would ride up to a negro’s cabin in the dead of night, and one of the riders would call for a bucket of water, which he would drain to the bottom using a concealed leather bag. He would then say that was the first drink he had had since he was killed at the Battle of Shiloh. This is very effectively shown in Birth of a Nation.23

In this review, the rebirth of the “ghostly garbed” Ku Klux Klan was related for an English audience with both the rise of the war dead as heroes and the connection with the Scottish clan ritual (itself largely a product of the fictional imagination of Sir Walter Scott). The ultimate regeneration comes with the last utopian scene of the film which invokes a white, Christian heavenly hereafter. The “weird” is not a reference to the racist, vigilante activity of the Klan, but to their other-worldly appearance.

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A Vivid, Graphic Story of Anglo-Celt Achievement Which Will Make Every Englishman, Woman and Child Glow with Pride, Gasp with Astonishment and Thrill with Marvellous Realism! The advertisement’s focus on an “Anglo-Celt achievement” is an attempt to make connections not only between Britain and America through the war but also to imagine a parallel existence between the two nations and in the process imply distinctions between British and German. By making connections with the “Celtic,” which has replaced the Germanic “Saxon,” a distinction is inferred, a preferred reading is announced. Referring to the “Spirit of the Play,” The Coventry Herald’s review stated: Beneath a surface of good acting and clever staging flows the spirit of liberty, pride of race, unselfish devotion to a cause. Those things gave the production a peculiar interest for an English audience in war-time, for many of the ideals which inspired the action of the play were, at bottom, the ideals for which we are fighting now.24

The equating of the film’s subject matter with the audience’s wartime experience raises questions as to the intelligibility of the film in its representation of African Americans. The “redirections” pointed to by Chesterton, the publicity, and the majority of the press response utilize an imperial imagination to draw parallels with the ideological project of the film. The depictions of Blackness in the film centre around three representational traditions: the melodramatic villain, the devoted servant and the blackface minstrel. The trajectory of the representation of “native” inhabitants of the Empire in English popular culture in the nineteenth century shifts from the freedom for all who are touched by the Union Jack to a more beleaguered, defensive Empire where “Black natives were enemies to be coerced under the authority of the Great White Mother.”25 By imagining a parallel relationship between subjects of the empire and emancipated slaves, the black soldiers threatening the cabin at the end of the film take on added, or at least reconfigured, resonances for a British audience. Moreover, British propaganda in newspapers, posters and cartoons had depicted the Germans as beastly “huns.” As mentioned previously, the brutish behavior, lasciviousness and bad manners of Silas

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Lynch and Gus were reprised in the behavior of the German soldiers in D. W. Griffith’s subsequent Hearts of the World (1918). The threat to white virtue and innocence which forces “The Little Sister” to make the “ultimate sacrifice,” and the Ku Klux Klan to rescue Elsie Stoneman, lay at the heart of the popular imagery of “little Belgium” and the German invasion of that country that had brought Britain into the war.

Conclusion The advertising and critical reception of The Birth of a Nation have provided some keys into the preferred reading of the film in Britain. This demonstrates that the reception of non-British films at this period was an interaction between the film text, an industry’s sophisticated ability to redirect the address of the film for a British audience, and the sociohistorical context, which in this case was a significant period during the First World War. I have tried to pose some questions which may help illuminate the dynamics of critical and audience reception through the examination of intention and address in the advertising and exhibition practices at the time. In this way we can recognize that the authorship (and authorization) of even a “super-film” such as The Birth of a Nation, where the auteur (Griffith et al.) had exercised great effort to standardize its reception, is dependent upon a complex set of interactions between the film and, in this case, a “differently intended” audience. At the same time these redirections demonstrate the ease with which the white supremacist discourse of Griffith’s and Dixon’s film was mapped onto, and paralleled, white-supremacist imperial projections of progress and nationhood and discourses of race and gender.

Notes 1. Cecil Chesterton, “An Explanation” in the Scala Theatre Programme for the Première in London, September 27, 1915. 2. “An Explanation,” Scala Film Theatre Programme, September 27, 1915, Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1915, 8. 3. David W. Blight, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, eds. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 45–71. 4. This is not to say that there was no criticism of The Birth of a Nation on its arrival in Britain. Brian Willan has discovered that Army Private Geo. S.

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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Best wrote to the British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society (ASAAPS) arguing that it should not be screened in the UK. Best, who claimed to have protested against the film as a student in the US during the previous year, argued that the film was “a distortion (villainous in all its aspects) of the history of the American Civil War.” ASAAPS member Georgiana Solomon protested loudly against the film at a screening at the Scala Theatre in London, supported by fellow member Mrs. Cobden Unwin. Black South African writer/activist Sol T. Plaatje, then in London, later claimed to have written to the Home Secretary asking “why a foreign film … was permitted to libel the black race in England, at a time when black races by the thousands were dying in defence of England and the British Empire.” Willan also calls attention to the 1923 recollection of the London correspondent of the Manchester Guardian “that public protests were made against it during the exhibition in London because of the Ku Klux Klan scenes.” His use of the words “protests” suggests that the Solomon/Unwin demonstration was not unique. Brian Willan, “‘Cinematographic Calamity’ or ‘Soul-Stirring Appeal to Every Briton’: Birth of a Nation in England and South Africa, 1915–1931,” Journal of South African Studies, vol. 39, no. 3 (2013), 628–631, 633. “The Birth of a Nation,” The Era, September 29, 1915, 7. “Stageland and Thereabouts,” Reynold’s Newspaper, October 3, 1915, 8. Public Record Office WO95/1495. Southampton, in Hampshire, was the main port used for the transportation of wounded and the 1st Hampshire Regiment had suffered officer casualties of almost 100%. J.M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan, 1985), 81. Winter has shown that war-related male mortality figures for the year 1915 were 68,000. The figure for the year 1916 was 123,000. Although the increase from 1914 to 1915 was from 27,000 to 68,000, the 1915–1916 figures show the largest increase in numbers of war-related deaths throughout the war. “Magnificent Presentation of a Great Picture. The Birth of a Nation at the Scala,” The Bioscope, September 30, 1915, 1515–16. Zoe Josephs, ed., Birmingham Jewry, Volume II (Birmingham: The Birmingham Jewish History Research Group, 1984), 106. “The Birth of a Nation,” The Era, September 29, 1915, p. 7. “Magnificent Presentation of a Picture. The Birth of a Nation at the Scala,” The Bioscope, September 30, 1915, 1515–16. The Times, September 28, 1915, 5b. “‘The Birth of a Nation’ Remarkable Production at Colston Hall,” Western Daily Press, Bristol, October 3, 1916, 7. Reynold’s Newspaper, Sunday edition, October 3, 1915, 3. The Era, September 29, 1915, 7.

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16. “History by Cinema. The Possibilites of a new Educational Force. ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Exhibited at Coventry,” The Coventry Herald, June 23 and 24, 1916, 6. 17. Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 15. 18. “History by Cinema,” The Coventry Herald, June 23 and 24, 1916, 6. 19. Cecil Chesterton, “An Explanation” in the Scala Theatre Programme for the Première in London, September 27, 1915. 20. Ibid. 21. “‘The Birth of a Nation’ An American Odyssey,” The Bioscope, September 9, 1915. 22. James C. Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain, 1896-1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 11. What is striking is that The Bioscope believed that the film would gain a release in the cinemas. This suggests that Sol Levy had yet to make the deal for the rights to the film at the time the article went to press. 23. “The Birth of a Nation,” The Southampton and District Pictorial, November 1, 1916. Three things arise from this review. First, that the use of the Ku Klux Klan seemed to generate, in the local and national press, no overtly negative reactions. Second that the authorial presence is recognized in terms of the effective presentation of the story. Most intriguing, however, is the fact that in the copy that I have been working with, which is the Kevin Brownlow restored version, this scene appears but there is no title to explain it. (It may be that the journalist concerned was drawing on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman or a version of the play and was simply elucidating the scene for readers. It could also point to the existence of footage or a title that is now missing. In any case this points to the value of connecting the traces of spectatorship through the use of local reviews with the restoration imperatives of the archive. 24. “History By Cinema,” Coventry Herald, June 13–24, 1916. 25. Penny Sommerfield, “Patriotism and Empire”, in John MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 34.

CHAPTER 13

“Black Horror on the Rhine”: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and the French-occupied Rhineland after World War I Melvyn Stokes

A few years ago, one of my graduate students, Arlene Hui, showed me a photocopy of a New York Times article about the banning of The Birth of a Nation in France in August 1923. She suggested I might be interested. I was, but at that point I’d almost finished writing a book about Birth of a Nation. It was already well over the word-limit set by Oxford University Press and there was no way I could have included extra material on the film’s foreign reception. So I set aside the story of the suppression of The Birth of a Nation in France until the book was out. I then spent some time researching in Paris for what turned out to be the fascinating story of how the film was first banned in 1916, because the French authorities

M. Stokes (B) Department of History, University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_13

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feared it would undermine the commitment of colored soldiers from the French colonies fighting for France in the First World War, and again in 1923, when the film’s arrival coincided with a rising tide of attacks by American tourists on Frenchmen of color. If you are interested in this story, it can be found in Cinema Journal for the fall of 2010.1 While I was researching this essay, I found a tantalizing hint that the official French reaction to The Birth of a Nation was even more complicated. Film historian George Sadoul, writing in a volume of his magisterial Histoire Générale du Cinéma, noted that In France, the film was forbidden by the censorship. ... It remained forbidden in the French-occupied zones of Germany, where the nationalists waged a lively campaign against the presence of Senegalese troops in the Rhine.2

What Sadoul was referring to was the German campaign against what became known as “The Black Horror on the Rhine.” Leading up to and during the First World War, France recruited around 190,000 African soldiers (la force noire).3 When the war was over, it used some of these troops in the French occupied zone of the Rhineland. There were probably a number of reasons for this but, according to scholars Keith Nelson and Pascal Grosse, one was the psychological effect it was intended to have on the German population: subjecting whites who regarded themselves as educated and civilized Europeans to Africans they constructed as ill-educated and primitive barbarians. During the peace negotiations at Versailles in April 1919, indeed, the German delegation had been ordered to insist that “colored troops” not be included in the army of occupation. The decision of the French government to use Black troops in the French occupation of the Rhineland, as Tina Campt points out, “represented the first large-scale Black presence in Germany.”4 From the German perspective, argue Dick van Galen Last and Ralf Futselaar, being occupied by Africans was a double humiliation: first the occupation of their soil and then an occupation by soldiers whom the Germans had depicted as “savages” in previous years. … It looked suspiciously like a reversed colonial situation: the Germans who until recently had been an occupying force in Africa were now subjected to an occupation by African soldiers.5

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German resentment against this “Black shame” was given a specific focus in the spring of 1920. On April 6, with law-and-order breaking down in the Ruhr area, French and Belgian army units occupied Darmstadt and a number of other cities. The next day French Moroccan soldiers, believing themselves under threat in Frankfurt, opened fire on a growing crowd of Germans, killing four. German politicians and journalists in the nationalist press made no distinction between French troops from North Africa and those from Senegal: both were constructed as “Black,” and—in the days and weeks after the Frankfurt incident—the German government launched a major campaign against what it framed as the “schwarze Schmach am Rhein” [Black shame on the Rhine].6 From the beginning, this campaign was intended to foment discord between the Allies and, by focusing on the issue of race in particular, to drive a wedge between France on the one hand and Britain and the U.S. on the other.7 Those who launched the campaign in Germany were particularly grateful for the early involvement of British journalist Edmund D. Morel, a left-winger who had campaigned for many years against the exploitation of Black Africans, particularly in the Belgian Congo. Even before the Frankfurt incident, in a letter to the Nation magazine published on March 27, 1920, Morel had already criticized French actions in the Rhineland, complaining that they had “thrust barbarians—barbarians belonging to a race inspired by Nature … with tremendous sexual instincts—into the heart of Europe.”8 Morel would play a crucial role both in internationalizing the “Black shame” campaign and in focusing attention on the supposed sexual misconduct of Black French troops in Germany. His first article on the subject, published on April 10 in the left-leaning Daily Herald newspaper in Britain, was entitled “Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine.”9 He followed this with other, similar articles and a longer pamphlet, The Horror on the Rhine, published in August 1920.10 The controversy inspired by Morel’s critique was a gift to German opponents of the French occupation. Two days after Morel’s first article appeared in the Daily Herald, German chancellor Hermann Müller made a speech in parliament deploring the fact that “Senegalese negroes occupy the University of Frankfurt and guard the Goethe House!”11 The German government appears to have encouraged newspapers to publicize what they saw as the depredations of Black French soldiers and governmental agencies organized various kind of public protests, especially by women’s groups. These attacks, together with the work of E. D. Morel and

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others outside Germany, were widely disseminated and became an international cause célèbre. 50,000 Swedish women, for example, signed a statement supporting Morel’s views.12 Within Germany and outside it a number of common tropes emerged associated with this campaign. Black French soldiers were represented as beasts, incapable of controlling their strong sexual desires; as rapists and assaulters of the virtues of white German women; as major threats to the purity of the white race; and as disseminators of sexual diseases.13 There was, of course, a political agenda behind much of the German “Black shame” campaign. It was intended generally to undermine the Treaty of Versailles and specifically, as Iris Wigger notes, “to discredit France internationally, to put political pressure on the French government and to get rid of the French colonial troops as soon as possible.”14 The campaign set out to create a totally false impression of the number of soldiers from the French colonies present in Germany: the size of the Black force at its peak was no more than 14% of the total French occupying forces.15 The accusations of rapes and assaults by Black soldiers on white German women, moreover, were wildly exaggerated. Representatives of the French government insisted that, far from being a mass phenomenon, there were only “exceptional isolated cases” and an investigation by the High Inter-Allied Rhineland Commission substantiated this claim.16 Outside Germany, the campaign was driven by different imperatives. In the case of E. D. Morel in Britain, writes Peter Campbell, it was driven by “a ghost, and the ghost was Morel’s obsession with black male sexuality.”17 Like Thomas Dixon, Jr., the North Carolina writer on whose books the second half of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was based, Morel feared the Black man as a sexual predator whose pursuit of white women would ultimately lead to the mongrelization (and hence downfall) of the entire white race.18 The Birth of a Nation itself has been mentioned by writers other than Georges Sadoul in connection with the “Black horror on the Rhine” campaign. The most disturbing reference was in a book by director D. W. Griffith’s self-acclaimed “biographer” Seymour Stern, edited by cinematographer Ira H. Gallen and apparently initially written to commemorate the centenary of Griffith’s birth in 1975.19 The Birth of a Nation had been banned, noted Stern, “because the French government feared its effects on French Senegalese troops stationed in the Saar and the Rhineland.”20 These words have two possible meanings. The

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first is that, watching The Birth of a Nation, Senegalese soldiers might have been tempted to overlord it over whites as members of the Black militia are shown doing in the latter half of Griffith’s film. The second, even more racist than the first, is that, according to Stern, the French authorities acted as they did not because the Germans were making great political play with the issue of Black soldiers’ alleged tendency to assault and rape white women, but because they believed the film’s exhibition might indeed provoke Black troops to do such things. Erika Kuhlman, in her book on Reconstructing Patriarchy After the Great War, commented on what she saw as the profound similarities between Griffith’s film and German tactics of the early 1920s. “The Rhineland horror campaign,” she wrote duplicated many of the themes of Birth of a Nation, such as the presumed inability of nonwhites to govern themselves (part of imperialism’s paradigmatic civilized versus uncivilized supposition), the presumed natural desire on the part of black men for white women, and, of course, the myth of the black rapist. This extraordinarily popular movie … reminded Americans and Europeans of what could happen if white men lost control of their society.21

Kuhlman’s comments on the impact of Birth of a Nation in both the United States and Europe are thoughtful and interesting. She adds that “the popularity of D. W. Griffith’s epic film … helps explain the resonance of white supremacy in the 1910s and 1920s and the choice by the Rhineland Horror campaign to direct its propaganda across the Atlantic.”22 This suggestion that The Birth of a Nation, which had so far not been publicly screened either in Germany or France, nevertheless helped shape the Rhineland horror campaign of the early 1920s is a fascinating one. There is no paper trail, so far as I am aware, to prove that the suggestion is true. But an early pioneer of the “Black shame” campaign in the Rhineland was conservative American journalist and actress Ray Beveridge, who had spent part of the war living and writing in Germany. A former employee of the German Embassy in Washington, Beveridge gave a series of speeches in Hamburg and Munich in February and March 1920—speeches in which she attacked the presence of Black troops in the Rhineland and warned of the threat posed by mulatto children “to the

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purity of the German race.” She would later write of the “brutal cravings” of “savage blacks” for “white women” and call upon German men to follow the example of Southern white men in the US and lynch Blacks when they insulted German women.23 In June, she spoke on “the black shame” [die schwartze Schmach] at the University of Berlin and subsequently in 25 further German cities. Her tour ended with a mass rally of 50,000 people in Hamburg in spring 1921.24 Beveridge, born into a German-American family (her grandfather was governor of Illinois in 1873–77), began in 1915 to return to the United States as a propagandist for the German cause. She made speaking tours of the Midwest and Northeast and, given the racial attitudes she would later espouse during the “black horror” campaign, it seems possible—even very probable—that she saw The Birth of a Nation in the course of one of these trips.25 From the beginning, moreover, the Black Horror campaign was shaped by the German government to appeal to Allied populations, particularly that of the United States. Since the war had discredited official German propaganda abroad, the government relied upon false-front organizations claiming to be the result of local civic initiatives. These involved, for example, the Rhenish Women’s League [Rheinische Frauenliga], founded in May 1920 within the German Ministry of the Interior.26 In 1920, the League distributed a pamphlet (in English and several other languages) with the title Coloured Frenchmen on the Rhine: German Women’s Cry for Help.27 More crucially in terms of the United States, the Germans tried to work through the network of German sympathizers in America. In October 1920, for example, the New Yorker Staats Zeitung began publishing Morel’s August pamphlet “The Horror on the Rhine” in installments. In early 1921, probably intent on influencing the new Warren Harding Administration in Washington, this German-American campaign against the “Black Horror” took off again through the German hyphenate press, the Steuben Society, and other organizations. Thousands of pamphlets were distributed and the campaign climaxed with a large protest rally in Madison Square Garden on February 28, 1921.28 The “Black Horror” campaign was consequently transatlantic in scope. Considerable interaction took place between the unofficial agencies of the German government and pro-German organizations and individuals in the United States.29 This becomes even more significant in terms of the cultural products produced by the campaign. These included a host of newspaper articles and several novels, such as The Black Pest (1921), Black Disgrace (1921) and Black Beasts in the Country (1923).30 There

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were also songs, poems, cartoons, posters, medallions, and plays, together with at least one film. Die schwarze Schmach [The Black Shame], released in April 1921 with an explicit poster of a brutal Black man tearing off the clothes of a young German girl who is crying for mercy, was—in the words of French historian Jean-Yves La Naour—“a work entirely dedicated to the sexual bestiality of colonials, laid out in all its detailed aspects.”31 The film begins with a hospital sequence. A woman arrives there looking for her daughter, Elsa. Since Elsa has not returned home at the usual time, the mother has guessed that she has fallen into the hands of Black men and that she is probably being cared for in hospital following their attacks. At the very moment when the doctor receives the mother, four women are carried in on stretchers. “There are already 40,000 victims such as these,” the doctor claims. But Elsa is not there: she has been kidnapped by black tirailleurs [skirmishers] and locked up in a house of prostitution where Black soldiers fight for the privilege of being the first to enter. The poor mother begs the French officers to release her daughter but they refuse to interfere in what they see as a private matter since, according to them, Elsa has voluntarily chosen to become a prostitute.32 The sequences of Black victimization of whites in the film multiply. A woman is shown being attacked by a dozen Black men but saved at the last moment by the arrival of a platoon of white French soldiers who threaten to shoot the men. A white officer confesses to the unfortunate victim that “our negroes are savages. They have lived for five years deprived of women. Every day we have thousands of complaints.” A similar scene subsequently takes place in front of a barracks where a young German girl has been dragged by force. Finally, an engaged couple walking through a wood are assaulted by a group of Black soldiers who rape the woman while her fiancé is held down by four men.33 This girl contracts syphilis from one of the rapists and is condemned thereafter never to be married: her life is finished. The film ends with a profession of faith by an American nurse who can no longer put up with this terrifying spectacle and decides to go and stimulate the conscience of Americans with the aid of her German fiancé: “We hope that our appeal in favor of the German children and young girls who are victims of the Sudanese [sic] Blacks, will be heard in the United States. It is our last hope.”34 According to Jean-Yves Le Naour, Die schwarze Schmach was shown in Munich, Stuttgart, and Berlin in April 1921, in Danzig and Nuremberg in May, and Bremen and Breslau in June.35 It was praised by the

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German right-wing and nationalist press and some center-left newspapers but unanimously condemned by communist publications.36 Originally given a visa for exhibition to adults only by the German censorship in March 1921, it was subjected to considerable diplomatic pressure from France, resubmitted to the German censorship in August, and finally had its visa for exhibition revoked.37 Some parts of the narrative of Die schwarze Schmach were closely connected with the specifics of the anti-Black campaign in the Rhineland. “Propagandists,” observes Erika Kuhlman, “invented allegations that German women were forced to prostitute themselves” in brothels established for the use of French Black soldiers, and they coupled such accusations with “dire warnings of the spread of venereal disease.”38 But—given the close connections between the proponents of the “Black Horror” campaign in Germany and its supporters in the U.S.—it is highly possible that Die schwarze Schmach was also influenced by Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. The German film has a major female character called Elsa; in The Birth of a Nation, she is Elsie. Both films emphasize the supposedly insatiable desire of Black men for white women. Both mythologize the idea of the Black rapist. Both see a white-dominated society as the only means of preserving natural order. Both represent white men defending white women from the lascivious desires of Black soldiers. In Die schwarze Schmach, it is the white French soldiers who do this; in The Birth of a Nation, it is the white-robed Klansmen. It is not simply that both movies demonize Black people. They also portray Black bodies in strange, disorienting ways. Gus (Walter Long), in The Birth of a Nation, moves in some respects like an animal when he pursues Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh) to her death. In the case of Die schwarze Schmach, suggests Jean-Yves Le Naour, Black men “seem not at all to belong to the human race; hidden behind great trees from where they appear suddenly like wildcats, they run with sideways steps, bandy-legged with shoulders dangling. On the face of it, they are large monkeys.”39 The threat supposedly posed to white women by sexually aggressive Black soldiers featured in two films produced on opposite sides of the Atlantic during the period 1914–1921. The first, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, provoked huge controversy in the United States on its first release in 1915. On the other hand, it was seen by a vast and often highly appreciative audience: The Columbus Dispatch estimated that it was seen by one in every nine American adults.40 It appears very likely

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that the film was viewed by many members of the German-American community in the U.S. and—given the strong links during and after the war between that community and Germany itself—it is probable (though direct evidence on the point is so far lacking) that it influenced the second film, Die schwarze Schmach, released in Germany in 1921. The German “Black Horror” campaign had multiple roots—including Allied wartime propaganda dealing with German atrocities and wartime German criticism of atrocities committed by colonial Allied troops.41 But it was also aimed, quite consciously, at inflaming German nationalist sentiment at home while influencing public opinion outside Germany against France. The film Die schwarze Schmach was almost certainly conceived as part of this process. It was screened in Germany between April and August 1921. It was also shown in Vienna (Austria), Amsterdam (the Netherlands), and Buenos Aires (Argentina).42 The sequence at the end of the film, with the American-born nurse planning to return to the United States to publicize the sexual persecution of white German women by Black French soldiers, suggests that the makers of the movie intended to use it to publicize the “Black Horror” campaign to American audiences. Yet it was never shown in the United States.43 One possible reason for this may have been what was happening in 1921 to the film that had first foregrounded the theme of Black men pursuing white women in the aftermath of an earlier war: Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. In 1921, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) resumed its earlier struggle against The Birth of a Nation using different tactics. Protests against a new screening of the film from May 1, at New York’s Capitol Theater, the largest picture palace in the country, included a peaceful demonstration outside the theater. Around thirty Black servicemen in uniform (some wearing their foreign decorations) distributed leaflets linking the Reconstruction-era Klan shown in Griffith’s picture to the new Klan born in late 1915. They were accompanied by three Black women in Y.W.C.A. uniforms carrying placards reading “We Represented America in France. Why Should ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Misrepresent Us Here?”. Although the protestors failed on this occasion to stop the showing of the film at the Capitol, the new strategy of foregrounding the wartime service of Black people, emphasizing that women (since 1920) had had the vote, and—perhaps above all—drawing attention to the relationship between The Birth of a Nation and the revived Klan would quickly produce results. The leaflet handed out by the Capitol demonstrators

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had pointed out that the new Klan was “not only anti-Negro but antiJewish and anti-Catholic.” Two weeks later, on May 15, the new strategy seemed to pay off when the three-man Board of Censors in highly Catholic Boston, Massachusetts, effectively banned the film from being shown there. The Boston decision opened the door to bans in other cities, including Minneapolis in August 1921. One month earlier, William Clune, who co-owned the film’s exhibition rights for California, agreed to withdraw it from his theater in Los Angeles (where it had premièred in 1915). In the case of California, however, the deciding factor in this decision seems to have been less Birth of a Nation’s linkage to the Klan than the controversy its screening might cause at a time when, even in the home state of the film industry, there were increasing demands for movie censorship.44 While no proof on this point seems to have survived, it seems likely that the increasingly successful campaign against The Birth of a Nation and growing general clamor for censorship of the movies in the U.S. reinforced the relative failure of the “Black Horror” campaign there to prevent Die schwarze Schmach from being exhibited to American audiences.

Coda There was a curious, ironic coda to these events. In 1923, British army Major Geoffrey Cecil Gilbert McNeil-Moss published—under the name Geoffrey Moss—a book of six short stories entitled Defeat. All the stories were based on Moss’s experience of Germany after the First World War and were heavily critical of the implications of the Allies’ post-war policy towards their former enemy.45 No-one knows precisely how, but D. W. Griffith came across and was impressed by the book. Griffith may have been suffering from some guilt concerning his treatment of Germans as brutal and villainous thugs in Hearts of the World (1918), the propaganda film on behalf of the Allies he had shot six years earlier. The issues arising from the Allied occupation had been highlighted in January 1923, when French and Belgian forces occupied the Ruhr valley, the industrial heartland of Germany, in response to the German failure to pay reparations for damages caused during the war. To Griffith, by 1923, the Allied occupation of Germany, with the injustice and violence it caused, was clearly coming to be associated with what he saw as the Northern occupation of the South after the American Civil War.46 In July 1924, he began to

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shoot, in Germany, a movie based on the second-to-last of Moss’s stories: Isn’t Life Wonderful! Griffith and his assistants carefully researched what had happening and was happening in Germany. Many newspaper reports and a 26-page pamphlet produced by the Weimar government documenting French abuses were “methodically stored in Griffith’s studio files.”47 In the end, though, Griffith bowdlerized Moss’s story. There was no reference to the French occupation. The German victims were transformed into Polish refugees. There was, of course, no racial dimension to the story told on screen. But it told of the battle to survive in Germany of the early 1920s: the constant struggle to find work, food, and accommodation, the collapse of the currency (a particularly vivid sequence saw a character queuing outside a butcher’s shop while prices were continually shooting up48 ) and bands of unemployed marauders. Partly shot on location in Germany and released in December 1924, Isn’t Life Wonderful! – according to Griffith biographer Richard Schickel—was a stark, highly realistic monochrome about ordinary, middle-class people coping with the effects of the postwar inflation and depression in Germany, small in scope, sober in intent, entirely lacking in glamorous appeal.49

In the United States, the film was a critical success but a majorleague box-office failure. It failed completely, moreover, to find a foreign audience. In Europe, it opened only in London, where it was attacked as a propaganda piece for Germany.50 If Isn’t Life Wonderful! had been commercially successful, it might have saved the Griffith studio at Mamaroneck, New York. As it was, it proved Griffith’s last film as an independent director. It is more than a little ironic that a man whose film about the American Civil War era, if shown in the Rhineland at the beginning of the 1920s, might have greatly encouraged the German “Black Horror” on the Rhine campaign, was finally forced to relinquish control over his studio in the wake of a film he made about the plight of occupied postwar Germany.

Notes 1. Melvyn Stokes, “Race, Politics, and Censorship: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in France, 1916–1923,” Cinema Journal, vol. 50, no. 1 (Fall 2010), 19–38.

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2. Georges Sadoul, Histoire Générale du Cinéma, Tome III: Le Cinéma devient un art (1909–1920), Deuxième volume: La Première Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Denoël, 1952), 17. [My translation] 3. Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 31. 4. Ibid., 32–35. Jean-Yves Le Naour emphasizes the role played by Blaise Diagne, the Black deputy from Senegal [who would play a major part in banning The Birth of a Nation from exhibition in France in 1923], and Charles Mangin, the principal defender of the idea of la force noire in the French army, in making the decision to use Black troops in the occupation of the Rhineland. Jean-Yves Le Naour, La honte noire: L’Allemagne et les troupes coloniales françaises, 1914–1945 (Saint-Amand-Montrond: Hachette, 2003), 101–102. On the general background to the recruitment of Black soldiers for the French army, also see Dick van Galen Last with Ralf Futselaar, Black Shame: African Soldiers in Europe, 1914–1922, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 1–2, 19–23, 36–41, 55–65, 73–83. 5. Last with Futselaar, Black Shame, 143. 6. Ibid., 145–46. 7. Diplomats at the British Foreign Office, according to Keith Nelson, “became and remained convinced that the propaganda was aimed primarily at Americans,” since—as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Cecil Harmsworth commented—their “sense of the colour-line is so strong.” Keith L. Nelson, Victors Divided: America and the Allies in Germany, 1918–1923 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 333, n. 15. 8. E[dmund] D[ene] Morel, “The Employment of Black Troops in Europe,” Nation [London], March 27, 1920, 893. 9. Edmund Dene Morel, “Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine,” Daily Herald [London], April 10, 1920. 10. Edmund Dene Morel, “The Horror on the Rhine” (London, 1920). 11. Verhandlungen des deutschen Reichstags, Stenographische Berichte, April 12, 1920, 5048–53, quoted in Keith L. Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 1970), 616. 12. Ibid., 615–16. 13. See Dick van Galen Last, “Black Shame,” History Today (October 2006), 188; Last with Futselaar, Black Shame, 139, 145, 149–50, 157; Nelson, Victors Divided, 17; Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” 619; Peter Campbell, “‘Black Horror in the Rhine’: Idealism, Pacifism, and Racism in Feminism and the Left in the Aftermath of the First World

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

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War,” Histoire sociale/Social history, vol. 47, no. 94 (June 2014), 472, 477; Le Naour, La honte noire, 84, 87–88, 90. Iris Wigger, “‘Against the laws of civilisation’: Race, Gender and Nation in the International Racist Campaign Against the ‘Black Shame,’” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 46, Race and Ethnicity in a Global Context (2002), 114–15. Campbell, “‘Black Horror in the Rhine,’” 472. Wigger, “‘Against the laws of civilisation,’” 124. Campbell, “‘Black Horror in the Rhine,’” 476. On this aspect of Dixon’s outlook, see Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s "The Birth of a Nation”: A History of "The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39–40. Stern himself died in January 1978. Seymour Stern, “D. W. Griffith’s 100th Anniversary: ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” ed. Ira H. Gallen (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada: Friesen Press, 2014, first pub. in 1975), 201. Erika Kuhlman, Reconstructing Patriarchy after the First World War: Women, Gender, and Postwar Reconciliation between Nations (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 59. Ibid. Campbell, “‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” 474; Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” 615; Iris Wigger, “‘Against the laws of civilisation’: Race, Gender and Nation in the International Racist Campaign Against the ‘Black Shame,’” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 46, Race and Ethnicity: in a global context (2002), 120. Campbell, “Black Horror on the Rhine,” 474. Her speech in Berlin was published by Ferdinand Hansen’s Overseas Publishing Company (and may consequently have circulated in the U.S.) Ibid. Also see Jared Poley, Decolonization in Germany: Western Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 188–89. Poley, Decolonization in Germany, 188. Julia Roos, “Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda in Early Weimar Germany: Contradictions in the Campaign Against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” German History, vol. 30, no 1 (January 2012), 50–51. Roos, “Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda,” 54. Nelson, “Black Horror on the Rhine,” 617, 620. See, for example, Last with Futselaar, Black Shame, 182–84. The campaign itself appears in some respects to have backfired in terms of American responses. See Kuhlman, Reconstructing Patriarchy after the First World War, 59–61; Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” 620–22. The French High Commission in the Rhineland felt itself obliged to ban a series of books, tracts, and pamphlets with titles such as La peste noire en Europe [The black plague in Europe], La terreur sur le Rhin [The Terror on

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38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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the Rhine] and Les esclaves de Marianne [Marianne’s Slaves ]. Paul Tirard, La France sur le Rhin – Douze Années d’Occupation Rhénane (Paris: Plon, 1930), 204. Le Naour, La honte noire, 133 [my translation]. On other cultural expressions of the “Black Horror” campaign, see Wigger, “‘Against the laws of civilisation,’” 116–17, 122–23. Le Naour, La honte noire, 133–34; Julia Roos, “‘Huns’ and other ‘Barbarians’: A Movie Ban and the Dilemmas of 1920s German Propaganda against French Colonial Troops,” Historical Reflections, vol. 40, no. 1 (Spring 2014), 72–73. As Jean-Yves Le Naour points out, this idea of a man aware of the rape of his partner by black soldiers but unable to do anything to prevent it was a common trope of “black horror” stories, underlining “the powerlessness of Germans under the heel of the occupying French.” Le Naour, La honte noire, 86 [my translation]. Le Naour, La honte noire, 134; Julia Roos, “‘Huns’ and other ‘Barbarians,’” 73. Le Naour, La honte noire, 135. Ibid., 135–36. For a more extended discussion of the complexities of the film’s reception by the German press, see Roos, “‘Huns’ and other ‘Barbarians,’” 74–77. Le Naour, La honte noire, 136–37; Roos, “‘Huns’ and other ‘Barbarians,’” 80–82. For the decision of the German censorship, see https://www.filmportal.de/sites/default/files/Die%20schwarze%20S chmach_O.B.81.21_1921.pdf, accessed April 18, 2019. Kuhlman, Reconstructing Patriarchy after the First World War, 57. Le Naour, La honte noire, 135 [my translation]. Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 125. Roos, “‘Huns’ and other ‘Barbarians,’” 69–72. Le Naour, La honte noire, 137–38. Ibid., 137. Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 235–39. Russell Merritt, “Isn’t Life Wonderful!,” The Griffith Project, vol. 10, films produced 1919–1946, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai (London: British Film Institute/Le Gionate del Cinema Muto, 2006), 169. Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith and the Birth of Film (London: Pavilion, 1984), 499. Merritt, “Isn’t Life Wonderful!,” 169. Kristin Thompson, “Isn’t Life Wonderful!,” The Griffith Project, vol. 10, 173. Schickel, D. W. Griffith and the Birth of Film, 499. Merritt, “Isn’t Life Wonderful!,” 171–72.

CHAPTER 14

The Influence of The Birth of a Nation on South Africa: Film Culture and Race Jacqueline Maingard

D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was screened for the first time in South Africa in 1931, for a very limited run of four nights only in the Johannesburg Town Hall.1 This was some sixteen years after its first release in the United States. Yet, in spite of this gap, it will be argued in this chapter that The Birth of a Nation had major consequences in South Africa of two contrasting kinds. It played an important part in the life and work of black South African intellectual, writer, linguist and political activist Sol T. Plaatje, who first saw the film in London in September 1915 and subsequently campaigned against it in the United States. In this sense, The Birth of a Nation played a part in the growth of both black nationalism in South Africa and black internationalism. Yet at the same time, however, Griffith’s film also influenced the development of white nationalism. The commercial success of The Birth of a Nation encouraged the entrepreneur Isidore W. Schlesinger, an American citizen who first

J. Maingard (B) Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_14

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traveled to South Africa in 1894, to invite American film director Harold Shaw to make De Voortrekkers (1915), an epic film focusing on the “Great Trek” of the Boers [descendants of the original Dutch settlers of southern Africa] in the late 1830s. Described as “The Birth of a Nation’s South African equivalent,”2 it was a favourite of white nationalist Afrikaners and would enjoy a long career in South Africa during the twentieth century. The Birth of a Nation itself consequently worked both sides of the racial divide in South Africa, encouraging both black nationalism and white supremacy.

Sol T. Plaatje and Film Turning first to Plaatje’s recognition of the power of film, and the political use he made of it, it is worth considering pertinent biographical details that provide an important backdrop to his interests in film and the role that The Birth of a Nation played. Plaatje was born in 1876 at an outstation of the Berlin Mission Society. A few years later his parents moved to the main mission station at Pniel, near Barkly West, where they had previously been located. It was here that Plaatje first went to school. This was later supplemented by instruction at the Church of England’s All Saints’ mission school in Beaconsfield, part of Kimberley, and additional lessons from Elizabeth Westphal, the wife of Ernst Westphal, who ran the mission school. Plaatje became a pupil-teacher at the Pniel mission school, a practice that helped fill the lack of properly trained teachers, and allowed him to continue his own schooling at the same time. But he never went on to secondary school and in 1894 he took up a post as messenger and lettercarrier at the Kimberley Post Office. Plaatje’s family and forebears, Brian Willan explains, had already acquired a depth of experience in reconciling African and Christian traditions,3 which undoubtedly played a significant role in Plaatje’s later political sensibilities. In Kimberley, Plaatje joined the community of other mission-educated men and women. His friendship with Isaiah Bud-M’Belle, a respected interpreter for the High Court, with whom he shared quarters in the Malay Camp, led to his participation in the South Africans Improvement Society, aimed in part at improving the English of members. He also studied privately and, when he applied for a transfer to the Mafeking magistrate’s court as court interpreter and clerk, his letter of application confirmed his “knowledge and ability in the English, Dutch, German,

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Kaffir [Xhosa], Sesuto and Sechuana languages.”4 He had acquired part of this knowledge in school but the remainder through his own studies. Plaatje worked in the Cape Civil Service for four years, at which point (1902) he left to take up the editorship of the weekly African newspaper Koranta ea Becoana [Bechuana Gazette] that included articles in both English and Setswana. He subsequently developed extensive exchange agreements with newspapers in other parts of Africa, Britain, Europe and the United States, demonstrating at an early stage his development of an internationalist perspective. In particular, he pioneered exchanges with African American newspapers in the United States, giving prominence, according to Willan, to “reports upon the doings of leading black spokespersons and thinkers like Booker T. Washington,” who was principal of the famous Tuskegee Institute in Alabama that sought to “uplift” African Americans through education.5 Later, in the early 1920s, Plaatje would visit Tuskegee and be highly impressed with the Institute’s use of educational films, which he began to emulate with his own touring cinema exhibitions in South Africa. The editorship of Koranta ea Becoana would also give him a platform from which he could influence opinion and represent the interests not only of the Tswana-speaking Barolong people, his parents being Barolong, but also of the wider African community. Following the collapse of the newspaper in 1909, Plaatje left Mafeking and returned to Kimberley where he established a new newspaper, Tsala ea Becoana [The Friend of the Becoana] that ran for a short period of three years and subsequently acquired his own printing press and established another newspaper Tsala ea Batho [The Friend of the People]. In 1909, South Africa became at least nominally independent from Britain and a year later the Union of South Africa was born, bringing together the old colonies of the Cape, Natal and Transvaal and the Orange Free State and effectively uniting Boer and Briton. In 1912, the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) was formed to represent the interests of black South Africans and Plaatje was selected as its first general secretary. He consequently led the first major campaign of the SANNC against the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. This was a measure that drastically curtailed the rights of Africans in the Union of South Africa to own or occupy land. It allotted only a very small portion (around 7.3 percent) of the country’s land to the African population. These areas were identified as “scheduled native areas” and Africans were prevented from purchasing land outside them. The Act also legislated against sharecropping, a practice in which African tenants of white-owned farms would

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typically give half their crops to the farmer in exchange for tenancy. The new Act required that for Africans to be considered “bona fide employed” they would have to provide at least 90 days service to the farmer on whose farm they resided within each year.6 This had the effect of turning share-croppers into farm labourers. Initially the SANNC tried to lobby the white-dominated government of South Africa to repeal the Act but, encountering no sympathy for its grievances, decided in 1914 to send a deputation including Plaatje to London to mount an appeal to the Crown against the Act. The mission was unsuccessful and all the members except Plaatje returned to South Africa after World War I broke out. Plaatje himself decided to stay behind after the departure of the rest of the deputation and he remained in Britain until February 1917. He had begun to draft his book Native Life in South Africa on the sea passage to England, principally as a means of supporting the SANNC’s political campaign back home. It would take him two years to find a British publisher for the work.7 This extended period was to prove important in relation to his interests in film, as while he was there D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation opened at the Scala Theatre in Charlotte Street in London, where Plaatje would have seen it.8 The film strongly influenced his views on cinematic representations of race. The history of attempts to ban The Birth of a Nation in Britain is, as yet, almost certainly far from complete. Willan has discovered that Army private Geo S. Best, who claimed to have already protested the film as a student in Boston, Massachusetts, apparently wrote to both the British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society (ASAPS) and the Lord Mayor of London in 1915 to complain about the film’s racism.9 ASAPS member Georgiana Solomon, a “militant suffragette,” and the widow of the liberal politician Saul Solomon, a former member of parliament in the Cape Colony, stood up and denounced the film during a screening at the Scala Theatre.10 Plaatje, a friend of Georgiana, also launched his own effort to have the film banned in Britain. Sixteen years later, in 1931, when he criticized the screening of The Birth of the Nation at that time in South Africa, he would recall having written to the British Home Secretary (in 1915), pointing out the negative effects of allowing a “foreign film” to insult “the black race in England, at a time when black races by the thousands were dying in defence of England and the British empire.” Yet despite these various protests no official attempt to suppress the film in Britain was made.11

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A side-effect of the campaign against the film in England, however, was its banning in South Africa. Stimulated by the letter he received from Best, Travers Buxton, secretary of the ASAPS, also wrote to William P. Schreiner, then the South African High Commissioner in London, in October 1915, to ask if he could prevent it being shown in South Africa, where the “colour question” was “acute.” Schreiner saw the film in November 1915, after which he wrote to Buxton confirming that the film would “do harm there” and that he had “taken certain unofficial steps” that he hoped would “prevent the film from going to South Africa,” which they did.12 While Plaatje was in Britain, Israel Gollancz, the editor of A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916) celebrating the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, invited Plaatje to contribute a chapter. In “A South African’s Homage,” Plaatje drew a comparison between Shakespeare’s dramas and “the veracity of the cinema.“ So far as the cinema was concerned, he argued, he had become “suspicious” and had “acquired a scepticism.” As illustration, Plaatje analyzed two films. In the first example, he contrasted the representation of the traitor Judas Iscariot in an unnamed film, “a cinematograph showing of the Crucifixion,” to Shakespeare’s dramas. Shakespeare’s dramas, Plaatje maintained, “show that nobility and valour, like depravity and cowardice, are not the monopoly of any colour.” In the film he was discussing, however, Judas Iscariot was “according to the pictures the only black man in the mob.” This film may have been From the Manger to the Cross (1912), in which an Italian-born actor, Robert C. Vignola, played Judas. Vignola’s appearance was indeed dark by contrast with the other actors.13 The second example in Plaatje’s chapter for Gollancz’s volume compared D.W. Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation, with Shakespeare. He described The Birth of a Nation as “a gorgeous one [film]” that does not “diminish” his growing scepticism, and “which shows side by side with the nobility of the white race, a highly coloured exaggeration of the depravity of the blacks.”14 Plaatje was deeply concerned about the impact on audiences of racialized, binary framings of white and black, “noble” and “depraved”, and how these would undermine the values he and his peers were pursuing, and their resistance to the enactment of racially unjust laws, such as the Natives’ Land Act, in the new Union of South Africa. In December 1918, the SANNC held a special meeting and agreed to send a second delegation to England. Plaatje was elected to lead it. With World War I having ended, it was perceived to be a good moment to pick

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up the threads of the earlier campaign, to elicit the support of the imperial government against the Natives’ Land Act, and to revive the supportive network Plaatje had developed on his first visit. Plaatje’s departure for England was delayed while he raised funds for the SANNC campaign and his passage to England. He finally departed in June 1919. This time the SANNC delegation was granted an interview with the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and met with him in November 1919. Plaatje impressed him, and he subsequently wrote to the South African Prime Minister, General Jan Smuts, both officially and privately, but the matter never went any further. Once more Plaatje remained behind in the UK after the rest of the delegation had returned home and, intent on travelling to the United States, applied for a passport, which was refused. Plaatje subsequently travelled to Canada, where entry was not dependent on a passport and once there was able to gain a passport for travel to the United States, where he arrived at the beginning of February 1921. In May 1921, Plaatje attended the “Victory Meeting” of the Equal Rights League in Boston, the purpose of which was to “signalize [sic] the victory in race protection by stopping ‘The Birth of a Nation.’”15 He would recall, a decade later, that Griffith’ s The Birth of a Nation “tried to sneak into Boston… while I was there” and “a public meeting of protest was called on the day of the show. Booking must have been heavy for huge crowds attended in the evening only to read printed notices at the doors, requesting them to call at the ticket office for their money as the Schubert Theatre had been “closed by order of the Mayor.”16 Plaatje reportedly participated in the protest, and “prayed” as a contribution to the proceedings that included the choir singing as well as various talks.17 Similar to his British tour, most of Plaatje’s time in the United States was occupied with speeches at public events, including for example the annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] . He also succeeded in publishing an American edition of Native Life in South Africa through W.E.B. Du Bois’s journal The Crisis . Early in 1922 Plaatje stayed with the head of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Rev. J.A. Johnson, who gave him a DeVry portable film projector for 35mm films “as used in the theatres.”18 Not long after his visit with Johnson, in May 1922, Plaatje travelled south to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Tuskegee was established in

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1881, modelled on the Hampton Institute in Virginia, which the American Mission Association had established in 1868 for the provision of education for freed slaves. Tuskegee’s first director, Booker T. Washington, about whom Plaatje had written in Koranta ea Becoana, was born in slavery in 1856, and completed his education at Hampton before taking up the post of director at Tuskegee. At the time of Plaatje’s visit in 1922, Tuskegee’s director was Robert Moton, who had succeeded Washington after his death in November 1915. The ethos of both Hampton and Tuskegee was focused on “uplifting” Black people, through lessons in personal health and hygiene, domestic training, and skills education for employment. The one major difference between the two was that Hampton was overseen by a white board of directors, while Tuskegee’s board was composed of African Americans. By the time Plaatje arrived at Tuskegee, the Institute had experimented with making and using film for more than a decade, with the production of its first film, A Trip to Tuskegee (1909) and, a few years later, A Day at Tuskegee (1913). Histories of what is termed “uplift” film are a relatively recent addition to film studies, most notably through the pioneering work of Allyson Nadia Field in Uplift Cinema (2015).19 Field’s category of “uplift” film includes the early films of Hampton and Tuskegee. Indeed, she asserts, “moving pictures were integral parts of the uplift campaigns of the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes.”20 The films made, and the uses to which they were put, are crucially significant in terms of Plaatje’s own use of film for educational purposes in South Africa. In Tuskegee, Plaatje recalls, Moton made a “generous offer to provide several reels of Tuskegee [productions], including one of the unveiling of the statue of Booker T. Washington in April 1922.”21 Hampton Institute had already made a similar promise.22 On seeing Hampton’s and Tuskegee’s “uplift” films, Plaatje undoubtedly perceived their educational potential for African audiences and thus pursued the acquisition of his own copies to screen on his return to South Africa. He finally arrived in South Africa the following year, in September 1923, passing again through Canada, and returning first to Britain where he spent another year, before departing for South Africa. On these wider travels, beyond the SANNC’s primary purpose in electing Plaatje to lead its second delegation to convey its political message to the British government, Plaatje had encountered the use of films as a means of “uplifting” African Americans, which he now sought to emulate in South Africa.

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The history of Plaatje’s own touring cinema exhibition remains relatively patchy but some important aspects have been established. The tours he accomplished were primarily across the eastern Cape, although he also travelled to Johannesburg, Pretoria and beyond as far as Botswana. Plaatje had collected a variety of films on his travels, or at least promises of films that were ultimately made good. His repertoire of films included not only films from Hampton and Tuskegee, but also educational films from Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company, topicals and newsreels filmed for British Pathé and the War Office Cinematograph Committee, and films from the De Beers mining company in South Africa. De Beers had also given Plaatje a portable generator allowing him to power his projector.23 His cinema exhibitions included travelogues and news features advertised as “First-Class Animated Pictures of England, Japan, Coloured People in Brazil, America and the West India Islands” as well as “Fresh Features” such as “H.R.H. The Duke of York’s Wedding at Westminster Abbey, King George’s First Daughter-in-Law; The Late Chief Khama and his Bamangoato People at Serowe; Cricket and other Sports.”24 Moreover, Plaatje’s screenings were “events” in that there were not only films screened but also talks, music, and games for the children. Plaatje’s touring cinema exhibition was but one arm of his wider political project, geared as he was to promoting African modernity. He was a founder of the New African Movement,25 conversant in several languages both vernacular and European, motivated in part by Christian ideals, a reformer, preacher, lecturer, political commentator, writer, activist, and a political and community leader. The coinciding of these roles put him in a unique position to touch the hearts and minds of those who attended the events he organized. Plaatje had witnessed the success story of Tuskegee, and its attempts to “shape” African American modernity,26 a process he believed in and with which he could identify. The extraordinary lengths he went to in order to gain access to the films that could make a similar educational experience possible for Africans back home testify to the significance of the insights he gained on his travels to Britain and the USA. Plaatje understood the power of cinema – whether reflected in Griffith’s racist The Birth of a Nation or the uplift films produced by Black educational institutions in the American South. He had seen and reflected on the interrelationship of race and representation. His was a project to reshape that relationship through the films he projected and in turn through the responses of audiences, not just to the films themselves but also to

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the questions they raised. At heart, he was intent on advancing African modernity in order to ensure equality for Africans in South Africa. There is a footnote to the history of Plaatje and The Birth of a Nation. On the occasion of the film’s screening for the first time in South Africa in 1931, Plaatje commented in the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu on what he termed a “cinematographic calamity,” describing the film’s “[u]gly black peril scenes [that] are shown until the emotions of white people are worked up to fever heat.”27 What followed, he wrote, was “masked night-riders who are vigorously applauded by the audience as they set out on the trail of Negroes.” The core thrust of his article was the relationship between cinematic representation and race. The “bitter antipathy against colour now causing so much concern in England,” he argued, “manifested itself soon after this Ku Klux Klan film was turned loose among British cinema houses.” Citing the film’s banning in “most of the American States” and the fact that it had been suppressed in Paris, France,28 Plaatje argued that England remained the film’s “happy hunting ground” and that “the race friction and misunderstanding” in Britain is “the result.” His concerns with the relationship between “race hatred” and the film are especially apparent in his proposition that “anyone desirous of upsetting the present plan of race-cooperation in South Africa cannot do it more effectively than by releasing the film in our dorps [towns].” Plaatje clearly feared not only that the film was on show in Johannesburg but also that it would be screened in the countryside (“dorps”). As it turned out, however, the film was screened for four nights only in the Johannesburg Town Hall.29

De Voortrekkers and Visions of a White South Africa Although The Birth of a Nation was not screened in South Africa in 1915, nor for a further sixteen years, its success elsewhere seems to have had a great influence on Isidore W. Schlesinger, who – according to Neil Parsons—was determined to “match” it.30 Schlesinger had dominated the film and theatre entertainment worlds in South Africa from 1913 and his company held a hegemonic grip on the industry up to 1959, when, following his death in 1949, the film-related assets were sold to Twentieth-Century Fox. His entry into the entertainment industry in 1913 had come about when he was “persuaded” to rescue the flailing “bio-vaudeville” industry,31 and he had established the African

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Theatres Trust, combining exhibition circuits and theatre companies, having claimed that “I won’t buy any theatres unless I can control the whole theatrical business in South Africa, and put it on a decent business basis.”32 There are two key things to note here in relation to Schlesinger’s interest in The Birth of a Nation’s success: first, that “success” in his view plainly meant an opportunity for considerable international profits. This would be a major influence on the fact that two versions were produced of De Voortrekkers and that the English title, Winning a Continent , was particularly aimed at a wider British imperial audience. Second, the view of history it offered was consciously designed to appeal to the widest possible white audience in South Africa and elsewhere. It had much less to do with the 1838 Zulu war it represented than with the cementing in 1910 of a white political alliance to the exclusion of Africans in the formation of the Union of South Africa. By focusing attention on the earlier Zulu wars in which both the Boers and later the British were involved, the film diverted attention from the more recent “Anglo-Boer War” (the South African War, 1899 to 1902). In a parallel way to The Birth of a Nation’ s focus on the post-Civil War reuniting of whites against Black people, De Voortrekkers re-affirmed the white alliance between Boer and Briton following the enmity that had led to the South African War. In 1894, during his early days in South Africa, Schlesinger had joined white Afrikaner commandos fighting against the Basutho as secretary to General Lukas Meyer.33 In the South African War beginning in 1899 he had, however, decided not to fight against Britain in case he ever lost his American citizenship. Instead, he had begun to sell insurance for the USowned Equitable Insurance Company, travelling through rural areas. He was very well connected in Afrikaans circles not only through this early period of his life in South Africa but he also courted favour with successive governments following the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.34 In 1915, Schlesinger established African Film Productions. After deciding to produce De Voortrekkers, he recruited as director Harold Shaw, who had seen the film in London, and whom Schlesinger saw as “South Africa’s answer to D.W. Griffith.”35 Shaw was born into “an old Kentucky family,”36 sharing his home state with Griffith. His work in film began as an actor for Edison in the United States, where he appeared in many films from 1909 to 1912, after which he turned to directing. He later crossed the Atlantic where he worked for the London Film

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Company, directing numerous films, before being recruited to African Film Productions.37 De Voortrekkers was based on the 1838 war between Afrikaner trekboers and the amaZulu, led by their chief, Dingane, that culminated in the Battle of “Blood River” (Ncome River), in which thousands of Zulu soldiers were killed. Its scenario originated with the writings of Gustav Preller, a key figure in “popularizing” images and history that promoted Afrikaner nationalist mythologies. These historical aspects of the film related to the experience of the Great Trek, the migration during the later 1830s and early 1840s of several thousand Boers from the British-ruled Cape Colony into interior lands already inhabited by African peoples and societies. The film incorporated “visual” interpretations that envisioned Afrikaner cultural icons. These would subsequently come to be adopted as accurate representations of Afrikaner identity, even though – as Isabel Hofmeyr notes – “there were few visual precedents on which [Preller] could draw.”38 In contrast, some Afrikaans commentators would dismiss the costumes depicted in the film as “ludicrous” and the paraphernalia shown as “ridiculous.”39 African Film Productions marketed the film as “South Africa’s National Film,” claiming it to represent an all-encompassing “national” identity.40 While the film did indeed play to the agenda of Afrikaner ideologues at the time through the adoption of Preller’s scenario, Shaw’s adaptation stripped it of anti-British sentiment thus simultaneously reproducing a “union” of Boer and Briton. This creates a binary positioning of black and white identities, with Dingane himself being represented as excessively cruel and “primitive” (killing his own child, for instance). The Boers, with the help of the British, on the other hand, are the saviors of their imagined “nation.” Having created a covenant with God, that should they win their battle against the Zulu they will build a church and commemorate the day in perpetuity, the film ends with a sequence in which we see the white couple who are the film’s love interest seated in a church with a child on their lap, the white nuclear family thus reproducing and securing a white future.41 There is an obvious parallel with the ending of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, with the two re-united white couples setting out on their own road to a future in which Black people will play no active part. Whereas The Birth of a Nation provoked so much racial controversy that no mainstream film on similar lines would ever be produced again in the United States, De Voortrekkers was followed by at least one other South African film. The Symbol of Sacrifice (dir. Dick Cruickshanks, 1918)

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was based on the 1879 war between the British and the amaZulu, who defeated the British at Isandhlwana and were subsequently defeated themselves at Rorke’s Drift.42 The Symbol of Sacrifice celebrated the “triumph” of British imperialism by replicating the events of that war, while simultaneously constructing a white South African “national” identity by means of a plot that also depends upon Afrikaner and British co-operation. Like De Voortrekkers, it relegates black/African identity to the position of either “savage” to be defeated, or servant to be appropriated. The centennials of The Birth of a Nation and of the historical epics in South Africa that it spawned have provided an opportunity to reassess, not only the films themselves, but more importantly the historical, political and wider contexts that gave rise to them. Schlesinger certainly managed to “match” The Birth of a Nation with De Voortrekkers, but also pulled off a remarkable ideological feat in that the production had clearly got the right measure of the Boers’ – and more broadly whites’ – imaginary of a South African nation. This is evidenced in the film’s distribution to Afrikaner communities on 16mm film for many decades and the annual screenings on December 16 that continued to commemorate the defeat of Dingane and the Zulu “nation” on that date in 1838. The continued repression of Africans through the decades leading up to and after the white National Party “apartheid” government coming to power in 1948, formed the backdrop to the enduring popularity of De Voortrekkers. Ironically, Schlesinger’s film, De Voortrekkers, continued to be screened to audiences in South Africa long after Griffith’s movie, The Birth of a Nation, that had inspired it, had been marginalized by constant demonstrations and protests. This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Bhekizizwe Peterson (1961–2021).

Notes 1. Thelma Gutsche, The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, 1895–1940 (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1972), 231; Brian Willan, “‘Cinematographic Calamity’ or ‘Soul-Stirring Appeal to Every Briton’: Birth of a Nation in England and South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 39, no. 3 (2013), 637. 2. Jane Gaines, “Birthing Nations,” in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 298.

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3. Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist, 1876–1932 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 26. 4. Willan, Sol Plaatje, 55. 5. Willan, Sol Plaatje, 110. 6. Sol Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982 [1916]), 69. 7. It was first published in 1916 by P. S. King & Son Ltd. in London. 8. Brian Willan, “Cinematographic Calamity,” 625. 9. Willan, “Cinematographic Calamity,” 628; Geo. S. Best to W. E. B. Du Bois, September 4, 1915, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Library of Congress. 10. Willan, “Cinematographic Calamity,” 630. 11. Sol T. Plaatje, “An Inflammatory Bioscope Film,” Umteteli wa Bantu, July 18, 1931, 3; Willan, “Cinematographic Calamity,” 633. 12. Willan, “Cinematographic Calamity,” 636. 13. Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996), 212. 14. Ibid. 15. The Guardian [Boston], May 28, 1921. 16. Sol T. Plaatje, “An Inflammatory Bioscope Film,” Umteteli wa Bantu, July 18, 1931, 3; Willan, “Cinematographic Calamity,” 637. 17. Cited in Willan, ibid. The report on the Equal Rights League Meeting (The “Victory Meeting”) in The Guardian [Boston], May 28, 1921, and reproduced in Frederick G. Detweiler, The Negro Press in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 95, provides the detail of Plaatje’s involvement. 18. Letter from Plaatje to Mr Holsey, May 26, 1922; email communication, Willan to author, November 28, 2016; Willan, Sol Plaatje, 275; Jacqueline Maingard, “Projecting Modernity: Sol Plaatje’s Touring Cinema Exhibition in 1920s South Africa,” in Daniela Treveri Gennari, Danielle Hipkins, and Catherine O’Rawe, eds., Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 190. 19. Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 20. Ibid., 13. 21. Willan, Sol Plaatje, 279. 22. Ibid., 419, n. 66. 23. Maingard, “Projecting Modernity,” 191. 24. Willan, Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings, 332. 25. Ntongela Masilela, “The New African Movement and the Beginnings of Film Culture in South Africa,” in Isabel Balseiro and Ntongela Masilela,

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26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

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eds., To Change Reels: Film and Film Culture in South Africa (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003) 15. Field, Uplift Cinema, xvii. Umteteli wa Bantu, July 18, 1931, 3; Willan, “Cinematographic Calamity.” Umteteli wa Bantu [“Mouthpiece of the People”] was a newspaper owned by the Native Recruiting Corporation of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines that took a liberal political stance. Plaatje was named as one of two editors in the first edition in May 1920, but was in fact in England then, and declined the position. John Dube, another important political figure was editor for the first four months. Plaatje and other African leaders and writers nevertheless used the newspaper as a forum for comment and opinion on political matters of the day. While only three states (Ohio, Kansas and West Virginia) banned the film for any length of time, by 1931 (when Plaatje was writing) it had effectively been suppressed in particular localities in many states. Melvyn Stokes points out that the French ban, imposed in August 1923, actually only lasted a few weeks. Stokes, “Race, Politics, and Censorship: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in France, 1916–1923,” Cinema Journal, vol. 50, no. 1 (2010), 38, n. 111. Willan, “Cinematographic Calamity,” 637. Neil Parsons, Black and White Bioscope: Making Movies in Africa 1899 to 1925 (Bristol: Intellect, 2018), 74. Gutsche, History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, caption to the photograph facing page 118. Barclays Bank had set the ball rolling by offering him the “ailing Empire Theatre in Johannesburg in 1912 for £60,000.” See Mendel Kaplan, Jewish Roots in the South African Economy (Cape Town: C. Struik Publishers, 1986), 144. For a summary of the Schlesinger Organisation’s history, see Kaplan, Jewish Roots, 133–49. See also, Neil Parsons, “Investigating the Origins of The Rose of Rhodesia, Part I: African Film Productions,” Screening the Past, 25 (2009), http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screening thepast/25/rose-of-rhodesia/parsons-1.html; and Neil Parsons, “NationBuilding Movies made in South Africa (1916–18): I.W. Schlesinger, Harold Shaw, and the Lingering Ambiguities of South African Union,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 39, no. 3 (2013), 641–59. Stage and Cinema, July 8, 1916, 2. Arthur Barlow, Almost in Confidence (Cape Town and Johannesburg: Juta and Company, 1952), 91. Emma Sandon, “African Mirror: The Life and Times of the South African Newsreel from 1910 to 1948,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 39, no. 3 (2013), 674; Parsons, “Nation-building Movies,” 644. Neil Parsons, “Nation-building Movies,” 659. Edison Kinetogram, May 15, 1912, 16.

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37. Jacqueline Maingard, South African National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2007), 24. 38. Isabel Hofmeyr, “Popularizing History: The Case of Gustav Preller,” Journal of African History, vol. 29 (1988), 522. 39. Thelma Gutsche, The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, 1895–1940 (Cape Town: Howard Timms, 1972), 314. 40. Maingard, South African National Cinema, 17. 41. The form of this ending, which also follows that of The Birth of a Nation, is repeated in The Symbol of Sacrifice, and also in The Rose of Rhodesia, a film later directed by Shaw after he had left the services of African Film Productions. 42. See also Cy Endfield’s later film Zulu (1964), starring Michael Caine, that represented the same war.

CHAPTER 15

“Should It Not Therefore Be Banned?”: Screening and Broadcasting The Birth of a Nation in Britain Jenny Barrett

In 1952, the London County Council permitted a screening of The Birth of a Nation at the Marble Arch Pavilion, running at just one and a half hours, almost two hours shorter than the original theatrical film. Having excised much of the Civil War section of the film, the effect was to allow it even more fully to concentrate on the conflict between the white heroes and director D.W. Griffith’s misguided, disloyal freed slaves. A reviewer writing in New Statesman, the left-wing British political magazine, described the LCC’s choice to allow a screening of the film as “a piece of gross insensitiveness” albeit for a film that was by then nearly forty years old.1 The reviewer wrote: “at the present moment, with [South African prime minister D. F.] Malan prohibiting free assemblage,

J. Barrett (B) Department of English and Creative Arts, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_15

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and Kenya in danger of guerrilla warfare, the showing of such a film must engender hostility. Should it not therefore be banned?”.2 The question is an interesting one, given that the reviewer goes on to imply an aversion to censorship and suggests that the ban be only temporary. A link is being made between the content of Griffith’s film and the potential for civil unrest that could be averted through banning it from screenings. The author refers to two contemporaneous international situations that, it is inferred, could have some bearing on the behavior of viewers attending the screening: the actions of Malan in his defence of apartheid in South Africa, and growing anti-colonial violence in Kenya – the so-called “Mau Mau Uprising” against British exploitation. In both cases, Black resistance to white rule was leading to formalized backlashes through either legal means or military force to safeguard white privilege. The New Statesman, it seems, is expressing a fear that Griffith’s film could provoke racial discord in London by claiming that it “must engender hostility.” There is no further qualification in the article as to exactly who might instigate such hostility, but given the mention of those specific current events, one could speculate that the fear was that racism and resentment could build and lead to violent consequences. This 1952 article is representative of other published responses in Britain to The Birth of a Nation in the years after its initial exhibition, following its establishment as one of the most celebrated and controversial of early American films. Informed, politically-aware columnists, alongside activist groups, have continued since 1915 to call for the banning of this film from public exhibition in the UK, often with reference to its racist content together with mention of current events that are deemed to exacerbate any potentially harmful consequences. This chapter considers the discourse on the suitability and relevance of this controversial film in the twenty-first century, particularly for the British public, initially by looking back at earlier responses to screenings and broadcasts of the film. The discourse reveals certain dangers that were / are perceived in continuing to make Birth available. There are three main contexts in which Birth has been made public in Britain, those being theatrical screenings, video availability and television broadcast. There are also three main factors that appear to influence anxious responses: the apparent intended or assumed audience, current affairs that could influence public reaction, and the means of delivery (the medium) with its perceived effect on the viewer. If the advice of the New Statesman reviewer of 1952 had been heeded, a

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series of temporary bans would have been necessary with surprising regularity, given the state of current affairs worldwide that, to later reviewers, made the film more risky to screen. The Time and Tide reviewer of Birth’s 1961 screening at the Hampstead Everyman theatre in London asks questions that point to certain predispositions that are common in the discourse on Birth’s exhibition and on censorship generally. The author acknowledges that the Hampstead audience is likely to be conscious of the controversial aspects of the film and writes that “the Everyman has an educated and probably liberal audience who will not fall victim to old, illiberal propaganda.”3 The article then poses the question: “Would you allow Birth of a Nation a showing in ordinary circuit cinemas in Britain? Should it be shown in Notting Hill?”4 The reviewer is dividing the film’s potential audiences into two camps, but only describes one overtly: the educated, “liberal” audience in Hampstead. The other camp, hailing from Notting Hill, is given no description, allowing the reader to understand, by implication, that this audience is not educated and not liberal. One audience, by dint of an assumed education and broad-minded intelligence, is safe to watch the film. By the 1960s Hampstead, in the London Borough of Camden, had already established its long-term reputation for expensive property, a predominantly British white demographic, liberalism and enthusiasm for the Arts and “high” culture. In contrast, the Notting Hill of the early sixties, known for its poor housing conditions, was recovering from violent hostility between white working-class residents and West Indian migrants, culminating in the race riots of 1958. It could be assumed that the choice to contrast Hampstead with Notting Hill infers one audience to be predominantly white middleto upper-class, the other to be chiefly working-class Black and white in an uneasy civil tension. In this understanding of the comment, the author deems it to be inappropriate to screen Birth in an ordinary cinema in Notting Hill because of the potential offense or conflict that could be caused. Because the author draws attention to the contrast between these two London areas, it cannot be ignored that the distinction between the two was grounded on class and education as well as race. Although the author was, no doubt, acknowledging that the ongoing racial tension could be easily be re-ignited, s/he clearly looked down on the Notting Hill audience, implicitly regarded it as parochial and ill-educated, and thus susceptible to the film’s narrative that endorses white violence against Black enfranchisement. There is a logic within the article that Birth has

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the potential to offend or corrupt and thus instigate racial conflict, and for that reason is not appropriate for a general release in cinemas. The fact that the film is highly racist and that hostile responses against the film are entirely justified is not explored further, and as a result there is an implication that Black responses to it would be violent. Some years later, a cinematic exhibition of Birth in Sheffield in the North of England in 1989 demonstrated a different apprehension when Sheffield City Council backed a local group’s protests about a screening for fear of racist repercussions, in this case reflecting the suspicion that the film might fuel white racism. However, the manager of the Sheffield cinema planning to screen the film was quoted as saying: ‘[i]t’s so old, adults won’t take it seriously.’5 These examples from London and Sheffield, spanning nearly forty years, use vague terms and expressions to credit certain groups of people with a critical faculty that enables them to dismiss The Birth of a Nation as nonsense or an anachronistic irrelevance, such groups being either adults, generally, or an educated elite. They infer that either white racist viewers or offended viewers, most likely Black, could react with violence. In fairness, it is not overtly stated who might actually cause any “hostility” or who would “take it seriously,” and so I have made assumptions about this based on the language used. I have speculated that the Notting Hill demographic, for example, has been regarded as poorly educated or juvenile. Although the “racist repercussions” feared by Sheffield City Council in 1989 are not associated with a particular social group, the cinema manager’s reference to “adults” is indicative of a widespread attitude towards the dangers of media content for young people at that time. The division of audiences found in the examples I have given, essentially according to age, education, and class, is often a common characteristic of censorship debates. Julian Petley paraphrases the implicit conviction in much censorial activity in Britain as “the film is fine for us middle-class intellectuals who will judge it on ‘aesthetic’ grounds, but it can’t be shown to the plebs in case it gets them worked up.”6 I see the core issues of the examples I have given—Marble Arch in 1952, Hampstead in 1961 and Sheffield in 1989—as being a threefold concern, namely the potential for offense over a racist film, the fear of that film being welcomed by a prejudiced or ill-informed public, and the consequent racial disturbance that the film or these responses could cause. This is exacerbated, as in the case of the 1952 article, by events both domestic and worldwide in which racial prejudice or oppression have become newsworthy.

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A different pattern can be found in reactions to Birth’s video availability. In 1994 the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) made a move that Variety critic Steve Clarke believed to be unprecedented when they insisted on Connoisseur Video adding a disclaimer to the opening of their new video issue of the film.7 Written by the historians involved in the restoration of the film, David Gill and Kevin Brownlow, the disclaimer advised viewers that the film might cause offense because of its racist content. James Ferman, BBFC director, speaking to Variety, reminded readers that context dramatically affected the perception of propriety in the broadcasting or availability of The Birth of a Nation. On this occasion it was not fear of racist repercussions, rather it was sensitivity about a different issue. Ferman is quoted as saying: “This is a moment when the video industry has to be seen to be publicly responsible.”8 He stops short of stating overtly that the disclaimer was inspired by the debate over screen violence and its effects on young people that was raging at the time. However, it seems from this comment that Ferman was specifically motivated by a need to assure the public that the BBFC was a conscientious body. One can speculate that the BBFC feared its reputation would suffer if complaints were made that a film like Birth had been approved without some kind of warning. The worry seems to have been that, without a disclaimer of some sort, some members of the public could have assumed that the BBFC were in favour of Griffith’s racist ideology found in the film. Possibly aware of the danger of this assumption, Connoisseur’s production manager, Robin Holloway, stated to The Observer newspaper: “I accept that the film is racist, but there was no need for a disclaimer. […] We are not marketing this to the British National Party.”9 In his defence of Connoisseur’s decision to issue the film on video, Holloway returns us to the tendency to divide the public into those who are suitable to watch the film and those who are not. A far-right political party, the British National Party (BNP) , was not the intended audience so, given that Connoisseur was an arthouse distributor, it is likely that the video was aimed at a middle-class, cinephile elite based on an assumption that it and BNP members were mutually exclusive demographics. This hypothetical corner of the viewing public Connoisseur was aiming at with the re-issue was assumed to have the critical capacity of the Hampstead audience discussed earlier and was similarly perceived to be made up of individuals well able to recognize the stature of the film as both a classic and ideologically reprehensible at the same time.

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As well as concerns about the apparent intended audience and prominent current affairs, anxiety about the exhibition of Birth has also been affected by perceptions of a medium’s inherent “power” over or impact on the viewer. In September 1993, the film was scheduled for broadcast on Channel 4, and this encouraged a flurry of articles in the British press about the film’s appropriateness for transmission. Brownlow and Gill’s restoration of the 1921 version of Griffith’s film was funded by Channel 4 and the National Film Archive and was accompanied by a new recording of the film’s original score. Although effort and resources had gone into bringing the restored version to British television screens, when Brownlow was asked how he felt Channel 4 viewers would react, he replied: Films just don’t have the tremendous impact today that they used to have. People will probably channel hop until halfway through, then tape the rest and go to bed and maybe look at it later. It takes a lot of effort for a modern audience to connect to it. I expect the National Front will be asleep by the time the halfway point comes and the Klan arrives.10

Given that the film was broadcast at 10.30 pm, Brownlow’s prediction of the impact on modern audiences sounds canny.11 His comment that films now have less impact should be seen in terms of the means of exhibition. He is referring to broadcasting film on television, not a theatrical exhibition. As media scholar Shaun Moores described latetwentieth century media differences: “Whereas film constructs the spectacular, television is typically mundane and ‘underwhelming.’”12 From this perspective, films broadcast on television, instead of exhibition in a cinema, are also subject to a loss of spectacle. Brownlow’s comment proposes that, regardless of the means of exhibition, films just do not have the same impact on viewers that they used to have, suggesting that at some point in our history they became as familiar and ordinary as TV. The implication is that, despite the spectacular and controversial nature of Griffith’s film according to some quarters, its broadcast on television is not an “event” and, further, it is not aided by its age and obvious contrasts with contemporary popular entertainment. Understandably, it was argued that a spectacular cinema theatre event with The Birth of a Nation as its subject would be unfitting. Philip French’s Observer article before the broadcast quoted Brownlow’s fellowrestorer David Gill stating that a theatrical screening with a live orchestra,

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akin to Birth’s initial Los Angeles screening in 1915, would be out of the question. Gill noted that “It’s difficult to see how we could do that with The Birth of a Nation in the situation we have in Britain at the moment.”13 The Channel 4 broadcast took place just five months after the racially-motivated murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence in Eltham, London. Charges against two of the suspects in the case had been dropped two months previously, and an internal review in the Metropolitan Police had begun in August. Although Gill did not specifically refer to this event, it is certainly the context of his comment. If we extricate the key points made by Brownlow and Gill, we can see that television is being regarded as underwhelming in comparison to the cinematic, theatrical experience. Implicit within this assumption, I believe, is a fear that any attempt to exhibit the film publicly with an orchestra would be construed as endorsing Griffith’s racist view of history, particularly at a time when racist violence had been headline news in Britain for several months. Two days before the broadcast, Channel 4 shrewdly screened the first of a three-part documentary, D.W. Griffith: Father of Film, at 9 pm.14 This first episode contextualized Griffith’s film in relation to the director’s upbringing and politics, and included some touching spoken perspectives of Black people seeing the film in the months and years after its initial release. Evidently the channel saw that a TV broadcast of Birth required a critical context, similar to the BBFC’s insistence on the Connoisseur disclaimer. As French’s column put it: “To see The Birth of a Nation after the introductory programme is to understand the society from which it sprung and the conditions in which it was made.”15 It did not excuse the ideological nature of the film, but equally did not resist awarding Birth a central place in the history of early cinema. This central place in film history that Birth seems to occupy has been acknowledged in various quarters over the century since the film’s release, often with reference to the educational functions that it offers. Writing in 1957 after one of several revivals of Birth at the Hampstead Everyman, the celebrated Sunday Times critic Dilys Powell wrote that “I don’t see how one can hope without seeing it, at any rate once, to understand the American cinema.”16 Although Powell was principally referring to the film’s technical achievements and epic scale, perhaps her comment is more poignant than she intended. To my mind, to watch The Birth of a Nation is to understand American cinema, observing its genesis as an institution that has historically and consistently subjugated people of colour. When

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the film was honoured by inclusion in the US National Registry of Film in 1992, board member and Black filmmaker John Singleton claimed that he “put it on the list because America at its heart is racist” and expressed hope that the film could incite positive action.17 In The Rise and Fall of Free Speech (1916), the pamphlet that he wrote as the furore over his film was still gathering pace, D. W. Griffith himself asserted that: “If people muzzle the movies they will defeat the educational purpose of this graphic art.”18 Griffith’s words can themselves, of course, be employed for a different purpose and one closer to what Singleton had hoped. To “muzzle” Birth would be to defeat the educational function that the film now has – not to tell his abhorrent version of American history, but at the very least to expose Griffith’s and Hollywood’s disenfranchisement of Black people and other ethnic communities. Instead of diverting the masses as a form of entertainment, the film can bring enlightenment about a racist industry. This changes the social function of Birth indelibly. Public screenings, broadcasts and digital distributions of the film continued to cause a stir throughout the twentieth century, which suggests that there is a persistent unease about the influence and offense that it is believed to cause. Often concerns were raised when a screening or broadcast happened to correspond with a period of racial unrest or a socially sensitive moment, such as the murder of Steven Lawrence in 1993. Such tensions have not gone away; in the US, the UK and globally, ethnic or racialised violence continues to be headline news. The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan in North London in August 2011 was one incident that preceded the riots that began in Tottenham and spread to other British cities over that summer. Unrest following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an African American teenager, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, is now so well-known it is often referred to simply as “Ferguson.” The gesture of raising hands and the slogan “Hands up, Don’t shoot,” was adopted after Ferguson on several public occasions, including sports and music events. Each of these events and more were capable of generating the kind of unease that the New Statesman warned against in 1952. More recently, the Black Lives Matter activist movement, initially established in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman following his fatal shooting of Black teenager Trayvon Martin, became internationally known and supported. Over the months following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter demonstrations were reported across

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the US (and worldwide), making it, according to one article, possibly the largest movement in US history.19 Into this context, The Birth of a Nation emerged again. On June 9, 2020, the television network HBO announced that it was to remove the 1939 Civil War classic, Gone With the Wind, from its streaming service.20 The action was in response to a Los Angeles Times opinion piece from the screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave (dir. Steve McQueen, 2013), John Ridley, following George Floyd’s murder.21 With its racist portrayal of African Americans, HBO acknowledged that Gone With the Wind was now considered offensive and outdated. Two weeks later, it returned to HBO but this time with a disclaimer from film scholar Jacqueline Stewart providing historical and cultural context, the same approach taken twenty-six years previously by Connoisseur Video.22 A matter of days after HBO withdrew Gone With the Wind, Black director Spike Lee was interviewed on Fox’s daytime show “The View,” on the occasion of his new film release Da 5 Bloods (2020), where he stated that both Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation should be seen.23 Lee commented: “I think that one of the most racist films ever, D.W. Griffith’s ‘Birth of a Nation’ should be seen. I show that film in my class. I’m a tenured professor at NYU … I show ‘Birth of a Nation.’” More than once Lee has embedded extracts from the film into his features. The three-minute montage of Black representations towards the end of Bamboozled (2000) contained two short extracts from Birth: the all-Black delegation in the state legislature, eating chicken and kicking off their shoes before voting for the right to intermarry between Blacks and whites, and the chase of pure, young, white Flora to her death by the threatening Black Gus. The same extracts and several more are part of the projected images during a Klansman’s speech on the dangers of miscegenation in BlacKkKlansman (2018). Later in the film Klan members attend a private screening of The Birth of a Nation. Just over thirty minutes into Da 5 Bloods , Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” accompanies the key characters’ journey by boat into the Vietnam jungle, citing both The Birth of a Nation’s Klan ride-to-the-rescue and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) which notoriously used this same music to underline the inhumanity of an American aerial attack on a Vietnamese village. Lee’s insertion of extracts from Griffith’s film into films of his own not only operates as a cinematic “quotation,” it encourages curiosity in the viewer. It ultimately draws attention to racism in Hollywood cinema and, more broadly, in society itself, to unsettling effect. It explicitly states

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that Birth is the abiding context for Lee’s cinematic output and functions to raise awareness not only of the film but of what it represents: racism towards Black people. Far from withdrawing Birth from viewers, Lee works actively to confront viewers with it but in the context of his own creative output – not as a disclaimer but a cinematic address. During his time in the White House, President Barack Obama regularly responded to incidents and debates of the time. The White House confirmed his comment that the Confederate flag “belongs in a museum” shortly after the shooting and killing of nine African Americans by Dylann Roof in Charleston.24 In an interview on June 22, 2015, with radio comedian Marc Maron, Obama stated: Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say “nigger” in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened two hundred to three hundred years prior.25

It is not just a matter of erasing a film that was released more than one hundred years ago, either. Such an erasure would correspond to the “muzzling” of both the film and all it could represent for those who seek to expose institutionalised and systemic racism. In short, to ban or censor the film erases the educational functions that the film now has, in Britain as much as anywhere else. If we forget or suppress a film such as The Birth of a Nation for fear of violent response or unrest when racial tensions in many places run high, its lessons may never be learned.

Notes 1. Anon., “The Birth of a Nation at Marble Arch Pavilion,” New Statesman, December 5, 1952. The author may have been Janet Adam-Smith, the magazine’s literary editor, 1952–60. 2. Ibid. 3. Anon., “What Would Happen at Notting Hill?,” Time and Tide, June 22, 1961. 4. Ibid. 5. Anon., “KKK Film Sparks Row,” The Voice, June 27, 1989, 2. 6. Julian Petley, “Us and Them,” in Ill Effects: The Media Violence Debate, eds. Martin Barker and Julian Petley (London & New York: Routledge, 2nd ed., 2001), 173.

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7. Steve Clarke, “U.K. Violence Regs Put Video ‘Birth’ on Hold,” Variety, May 23–29, 1994, 27–29. 8. Clarke, “U.K. Violence Regs,” 29. 9. Richard Brooks, “Signs of the Times,” Observer, May 29, 1994, 7. 10. Kevin Brownlow in Matt Mueller, “Birth of an Industry,” Empire, 51 (September 1993), 67. 11. Channel 4’s broadcast took place on September 9, 1993, at 10.30 pm. It was the first ever British TV broadcast of the film. 12. Shaun Moores, Media/Theory: Thinking About Media and Communications (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 24. 13. Philip French, “Black and White Movie Turns Grey,” Observer, September 5, 1993, 47. 14. PBS, David Gill prod., Kevin Brownlow & David Gill dirs., first broadcast in the US on March 24, 1993. 15. French, “Black and White Movie Turns Grey,” Observer, September 5, 1993, 47. 16. Dilys Powell, “The Birth of a Nation,” Sunday Times, April 21, 1957, n.p. 17. Peter McDonald, “Birth of a Nation Award ‘is Racist’,” Evening Standard, December 9, 1992, 20. 18. David Wark Griffith, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech, 1916, pages not numbered. 19. Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in US History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/ george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. 20. Abid Rahman, “HBO Removes Civil War Epic ‘Gone With the Wind,’” Hollywood Reporter, June 9, 2020 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ news/hbo-max-removes-gone-wind-1297806. 21. John Ridley, “Op-Ed: Hey, HBO, ‘Gone With the Wind’ Romanticizes the Horrors of Slavery. Take It Off Your Platform For Now,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-0608/hbo-max-racism-gone-with-the-wind-movie. 22. Todd Spangler, “HBO Max Restores ‘Gone With the Wind’ With Disclaimer Saying Film ‘Denies the Horrors of Slavery’,” Variety, June 24, 2020, https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/gone-with-the-windhbo-max-disclaimer-horrors-slavery-1234648726/. 23. Sam Dorman, “Spike Lee Says ‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘Birth of a Nation’ ‘should be seen,’” Foxnews.com, June 12, 2020, https://www.fox news.com/media/spike-lee-gone-wind-birth-nation. 24. Anon., “Confederate Flag ‘Belongs in a Museum’, Obama Says,” BBC News, June 20, 2015, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada33205363.

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25. “President Barack Obama,” WTF with Marc Maron, Episode 613, June 22, 2015, http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_613_-_ president_barack_obama.

PART V

Epilogue

CHAPTER 16

“Still a North and a South”: The Birth of a Nation and National Trauma Robert Lang

In President Obama’s 2015 State of The Union Address, he said: “I commit to every Republican here tonight that I will not only seek out your ideas, I will seek to work with you to make this country stronger. Because I want this chamber, this city, to reflect the truth—that for all our blind spots and shortcomings, we are a people with the strength and generosity of spirit to bridge divides, to unite in common effort, and help our neighbors, whether down the street or on the other side of the world. … I want [future generations] to grow up in a country that shows the world what we still know to be true: that we are still more than a collection of red states and blue states; that we are the United States of America.”1 Even by the hyperreal standards of contemporary American political rhetoric, we know Obama’s hopes were unrealistic. In spite of the conclusion a century earlier of The Birth of a Nation—in which we see “the double honeymoon” (shot 1600) of the Stoneman and Cameron

R. Lang (B) University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4_16

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Fig. 16.1 Marriage and the shining city on the hill

children (the film’s representatives of North and South), implying a happy and united future for the nation—we have indeed become a dysfunctional collection of red states and blue states.2 In the film, the ideological differences between the red states of the South and the blue states of the North are “resolved” in a tacked-on “happy ending. ” Griffith opted for a closing device he used frequently during this period: a fantasy of apocalypse and utopia. The Birth of a Nation’s struggle to come to a close—what Griffith describes in an intertitle as “The aftermath” (shot 1600)—included a series of disparate shots of intersectional marriages (Margaret Cameron and Phil Stoneman; Ben Cameron and Elsie Stoneman); evocations of war and peace; and images of Jesus and a celestial city; all leading up to the last title, “Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever!” All this, as I have argued in an earlier essay, is “nothing less than a tremendous, hysterical effort to assert that, though a great deal has been lost, something even greater has been gained.”3 (Fig. 16.1).

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“Why the Dogmatism? Why the Rage?” One striking feature of contemporary American politics is a partisan, wholehearted and persistent denial of fact. As Paul Krugman has noted on more than one occasion: “The fact is … we’re living in a political era in which facts don’t matter.”4 Two days before Obama’s 2015 State of the Union Address, Krugman commented on American politicians and the subject of climate change: “Evidence doesn’t matter for the ‘debate’ over climate policy,” he wrote, “because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense.” And it’s not just with reference to climate change that the facts are ignored: “At this point,” writes Krugman, “it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.”5 As I reflect on what The Birth of a Nation, made over a hundred years ago, has to tell us about our nation today, I find myself echoing Krugman’s question. He writes: On issues that range from monetary policy to the control of infectious disease, a big chunk of America’s body politic holds views that are completely at odds with, and completely unmovable by, actual experience. And no matter the issue, it’s the same chunk. If you’ve gotten involved in any of these debates, you know that these people aren’t happy warriors; they’re red-faced angry, with special rage directed at know-it-alls who snootily point out that the facts don’t support their position.6

The ideological contradictions of our society continue to run deep, and the checks and balances of power among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our government, designed to safeguard our freedoms by preventing any single branch from becoming too powerful, frequently malfunction.7 Our Supreme Court, moreover, is “political”— too often ruling according to the ideological leanings of the justices.8 Since 1976, when Congress adopted the modern budgetary process, the U.S. government has shut down 21 times, with the longest standoff between President Donald J. Trump and Congress (2018–19) lasting five weeks.9 Whether or not we can call ourselves “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,”10 we cannot deny that our national divisions are sometimes reflected in our inability to govern ourselves. When red-state politicians hold blue-state politicians hostage, to the point of shutting down the government itself, we have to go back

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to Krugman’s question and ask: Why? “Why the dogmatism? Why the rage? And why do these issues go together, with the set of people insisting that climate change is a hoax pretty much the same as the set of people insisting that any attempt at providing universal health insurance must lead to disaster and tyranny?” Krugman concludes that, “the immovable position in each of these cases is bound up with rejecting any role for government that serves the public interest.”11 I shall come back to these questions in a moment—“Why the dogmatism? Why the rage?”—as perhaps only answerable, ultimately, by psychoanalysis, or psychoanalysis and history together. What Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style in American politics”—epitomized in the 1960s and 1970s by Alabama Governor George Wallace’s “politics of rage”12 — has gone mainstream in today’s Republican Party. And as I think about Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel,13 or Krugman’s observation that it is always the same set of “red-faced angry” people in American society who are “completely at odds with, and completely unmovable by, actual experience,” I have to wonder if trauma is not playing a role in these examples of an apparently stubborn will to confrontation, denial and destruction. In 1961, Robert Penn Warren wrote that “the Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history,” and that “without too much wrenching, it may, in fact, be said to be American history.”14 Sixty years on, Warren’s formulation of the Civil War as in some sense offering a mirror that tells us who we are as Americans would seem to be more true than ever. As with mirrors generally, however— especially if it has been some time since we last looked in one closely—the image reflecting back at us will often seem the same as it ever was, but also a little different. Today (if I am not mixing my metaphors), when I look in that mirror through the prism of The Birth of a Nation’s obsession with miscegenation, and I am reminded of our beleaguered, Black president’s direct address to the Republican members of Congress during his State of the Union speech in 2015, I am also struck by the role ressentiment plays in the slow burn of what appears to be the ongoing resistance of the South and the red states to the values of the North and the blue states.

Ressentiment and the Lost Cause Ressentiment—the sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration—had begun to fester in the South at

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least three decades before the start of the Civil War. In South Carolina during the nullification crisis of the early 1830s, throughout the South as it came under assault from Northern abolitionists between 1831 and 1861, and in the polarization of Congress in the 1850s over what Horace Greeley called “Bleeding Kansas” (the series of violent confrontations between anti-slavery Free-Staters in Kansas and pro-slavery “Border Ruffians” from the neighboring towns of Missouri), we can see some of the earliest origins of the red-state ressentiment of today. In Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s very illuminating book, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, he describes ressentiment as a pattern of behavior serving the traumatized ego that is incapable of either countering the injury or accepting the loss.15 The Confederate States of America, unable fully to accept that they had been defeated, created the myth of the “Lost Cause,” which few films, if any, have rendered with such power and poetry as The Birth of a Nation. It is a myth that emphasizes what Southerners saw as fine and noble about their South. Such myths, Schivelbusch explains, are “not merely neurotic fictions of the imagination but also healthful protective shields or buffer zones—emotional fortresses—against a reality unbearable to the psyche.”16 But some lost wars also unleash the impulse toward revanche/revenge. In The Birth of a Nation, this impulse is displaced into the strand of the narrative that recounts the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. But in the American body politic today—a hundred years after the movie, and a hundred and fifty years after the Civil War—we are seeing a form of revanche playing out among the so-called red states: acts of retaliation (according to the common definition of the term), “by a nation or group to regain lost territory or standing.” The revenge of the South was perhaps inevitable. Indeed, it was predicted in a book published in New York in 1867, A Defence of Virginia and, through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests against the Sectional Party, in which Robert Lewis Dabney wrote: “[Southerners] well know that in due time, they, although powerless themselves, will be avenged through the same disorganizing heresies under which they now suffer, and through the anarchy and woes which they will bring upon the North.”17 In our own time, Republican opposition to Barack Obama often appeared fanatical, with then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowing in 2010 that: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”18

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The “disorganizing heresies” Dabney alluded to in 1867, the “anarchy and woes” the defeated Southerners dreamed of one day visiting upon the North, still pervade the American political scene. The dream of the Republicans—their vow—to make President Obama a one-term president, would not be realized. But during the later stages of his presidency, with majorities in both the House and the Senate, they devoted considerable energy to frustrating and thwarting him at every turn.

“Disorganizing Heresies” and Secessionist Fantasies My object here is not to criticize Republican tactics but rather to offer some context for my suggestion that a humiliated people—in this case, all those red states that voted for George W. Bush and later Donald J. Trump—in seeking ways to organize their distress into a coherent response, may find in the Lost Cause not only a ready-made trauma narrative that speaks to their sense of grievance but also a model of how to deal with—or not deal with, as the case may be—the modern world, in which (for example) the prerogatives of the heterosexual, patriarchal, white man no longer obtain universally as they did during the Civil War era, or even in D. W. Griffith’s time fifty years later. Chief among Dabney’s “disorganizing heresies” the South believed the North had inflicted upon them was the North’s challenge to the South’s notion of “states’ rights”—which, for the Camerons of Piedmont, South Carolina (if they had been real people, and not characters in Griffith’s film), would have been most humiliatingly expressed thirty years earlier, in President Andrew Jackson’s Nullification Proclamation of 1832 against South Carolina.19 In response to protective tariffs passed by the Congress of the United States in 1828 and 1832—designed to protect industry in the northern United States and perceived to be disadvantageous to the agricultural concerns of the South (where the Tariff of 1828 was known as the “Tariff of Abominations”)—the Camerons’ state had passed the Ordinance of Nullification on November 24, 1832 declaring the tariffs null and void within the state borders of South Carolina. President Andrew Jackson sent a naval flotilla and threatened to send government ground troops to enforce the federal tariffs—and South Carolina repealed the ordinance. In his review of The Birth of a Nation published on March 13, 1915 in The Moving Picture World, Stephen Bush wrote: “Much is...

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said in [the film’s] titles about ‘state sovereignty’ and we are reminded of what we read in school of Southern statesmen like [John C.] Calhoun and [Robert] Toombs and Northern statesmen like [Clement] Vallandigham.”20 For the Camerons of Cameron Hall, the illustrious South Carolina statesman and political theorist John C. Calhoun would have loomed large in their imagination as the chief architect of their Southern “national” ideology and of their identity as slaveholders. Calhoun, who died in 1850, was a representative of the Southern tradition of agrarian republicanism, and for most of his political career was concerned with protecting the interests of the Southern States, which he largely identified with the interests of their slaveholding elites. It was he who had argued that the federal government only existed at the will of the states and that, if a state found a federal law unconstitutional and detrimental to its sovereign interests, it would, therefore, have the right to “nullify” that law within its borders. Finally and most memorably, it was Calhoun who authored what became known as the “Calhoun Doctrine,” which pronounced that Congress could never outlaw slavery in the new western territories. During the last decade—just as they were during the Nullification Crisis and throughout the Civil War era—“states’ rights” have been central to the red states’ argument over why they should not have to listen to a blue-state president, whether Barack Obama or Joseph R. Biden. Even the Confederate States’ formal secession from the Union in 1860– 61 (with South Carolina leading the way on December 20, 1860) has found modern imitations. On October 9, 2013, in a short article in The New York Review of Books entitled “Back Door Secession,” Garry Wills reported the following: On Monday, The New York Times reported that eleven counties in Colorado are promoting efforts to secede from their state government. Of course, men like Governor Rick Perry of Texas have gone further and threatened secession from the federal government. It is not much noticed that parts of the country act as if they had already seceded from the union. They do not recognize laws and Supreme Court decisions, or constitutional guarantees of free speech. For instance seventeen states have violated the First Amendment by preventing or hindering the work of “navigators”— organizations and businesses funded by the federal government to educate people on ways to follow the rules of the Affordable Care Act. Some groups routinely attempt to block health centers from advising women on the legal right to contraception. Eight state legislatures this year have

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passed voter restrictions that may violate the Fourteenth Amendment, and similar measures are pending in other states.21

As Wills points out: even before they formally seceded from the Union in 1860–1861, the Confederate States ran a parallel government, in which the laws of the national government were blatantly disregarded: They denied the right of abolitionists to voice their arguments, killing or riding out of town over three hundred of them in the years before the Civil War. They confiscated or destroyed abolitionist tracts sent to Southern states by United States mail. In the United States Congress, they instituted “gag rules” that automatically tabled (excluded from discussion) anti-slavery petitions, in flagrant abuse of the First Amendment’s right of petition.22

Now, rather than recount the many ways in which the spirit of neo-secessionism plagued Obama’s presidency, or describe the myriad instances of the flouting of the laws of the national government by Republicans—such as Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore’s stand for state’s rights on February 8, 2015, when he ordered the state’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, despite a federal court’s ruling striking down the state’s ban on samesex marriages23 —I return to The Birth of a Nation for my answer to Krugman’s questions: “Why the dogmatism? Why the rage?,” for it is becoming increasingly clear to me that there are links among dogmatism, rage and trauma.24 In tracing a genealogy of rage, we find that many of the “red-faced angry” people in the Republican Party look to some version of the Lost Cause to identify and name their grievances: rage finds an original cause in an already-narrativized national trauma.

“The Spirit of the South” and Melodrama When Sergei Eisenstein wrote that the problem with Griffith’s way of telling a story—his way of addressing the problem of class struggle—was that all it could do was reflect “the structure of bourgeois society” as “an intricate race between two parallel lines,” he put his finger on something about melodrama that has implications for our democracy.25 In the time-honored tradition of melodrama, the core issue of the film—i.e., two worldviews at odds with one another—is rendered as a Manichean

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conflict, and we are given to understand that it can only be “resolved” by the conquest of one side by the other. There can be no compromise or consensus—or “agreeing to disagree” (whatever that means)—but rather, as “the spirit of the South” (shot 196) would have it, which we see embroidered as a motto on the South Carolina state flag, the South is committed to an all-or-nothing outcome: “CONQUER WE MUST— VICTORY OR DEATH—FOR OUR CAUSE IS JUST” (shot 198) (Fig. 16.2). But the South does not achieve this unequivocal “VICTORY.” Knowing the historical outcome in advance, Griffith will arrange for his clash of civilizations to be displaced into another set of symmetries: on the one hand, a race to save Elsie from a “forced marriage” to Silas Lynch, whose elevation to the office of Lieutenant-Governor of the state, we are told, has made him “drunk with … power” (shot 1346), and on the other, a race to save the Southern family, which has sought refuge in the besieged cabin of the two Union veterans, where the “former enemies of North

Fig. 16.2 Conquer We Must

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and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright” (shot 1287). Nevertheless, the historical defeat of the South by the North would indeed be experienced by the South as (national) “DEATH,” regardless of the justness of the “cause” for which the Southerners liked to believe they were fighting. Griffith describes Reconstruction as: “The agony which the South endured that a nation might be born” (shot 620), and he quotes (rather inexactly) from Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People, to emphasize how “… 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’” (shot 623).26 After the war, we also see Ben, “In agony of soul over the degradation and ruin of his people” (shot 913). The “death” of the South—the end of what Griffith at the beginning of the film calls “the Southland,” a place where “life runs in a quaintly way that is to be no more” (shot 33)—is thus the originating trauma in the South’s narrative about itself, giving rise to the “Lost Cause” interpretation of the events of the Civil War era and also shaping national discourse down through history to our present day. In Griffith’s phenomenally successful narrativization of the Civil War era as a national trauma primarily for the South—what Griffith called his “picturisation of history”27 —the problem of the South’s humiliation and rage is in effect swept under the carpet, when the film suggests that romantic love will conquer all. Maureen Turim has shown in her study of cinematic flashbacks that the defeat of the South in The Birth of a Nation is subjectivized so that history becomes saturated with emotional identification and symbolism: The theme of collective memory as determinant of history and individuals as exemplars of collective memories in their most personalized and subjective form is developed in The Birth of a Nation (1915) through the use of one of Griffith’s melodramatic strategies, the interweaving of personal tragedy and love stories with epic narrations of major historical events. The film portrays the conviction that the South will not forget either its past way of life or the indignities it suffered in defeat.28

Turim observes that the flashback sequence showing the budding romance between Margaret Cameron and Phil Stoneman, introduced by the title, “Bitter memories will not allow the poor bruised heart of the South to forget” (shot 758), is pessimistic about the future

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prospects of the romance; and she notes that when contrasted with the parallel romance developing between Elsie Stoneman and the “little Colonel,” Ben Cameron—in which we see that the tensions of North– South romance are hinged on the reluctance of the women—“only the Southern woman’s grief and loyalty to her past are illustrated in flashback.” Turim argues: “If Elsie is troubled, her doubts are not graphically clarified—and this is crucial to the ideological project of the film.”29 Later, when she discovers that Ben is a Klan leader, Elsie becomes upset; but Ben is soon able to comfort her with an embrace that implies she has been won over to his cause. When we see her riding in the victorious Klan parade at the end of the film, Elsie “is denied any historical memory of slavery or the abolitionist cause for which her other brother gave his life,” while Margaret Cameron’s flashback, “slicing as it does between the double romances,” structurally makes the point that memory is the province of the South.30 Margaret is shown sitting forlornly in a garden with a basket of flowers in her lap, rose petals falling through her fingers (shot 759). Phil, on the other side of the fence and surrounded by bushes, is looking at her (shot 760). When he leans over the fence and speaks to her, offering to hold the basket, she draws back, looks at him scornfully, and walks off proudly to the left. In shot 767 (as in shot 334), we see Margaret’s brother Wade lying dead in a comrade’s arms, followed by a shot of Margaret staring ahead, her breast heaving. Phil straightens up and withdraws his hand, and Margaret turns to leave. The shot fades out and is followed by the title: “Still a North and A South.”31 Throughout The Birth of a Nation, Turim shows, flashbacks are used in a way that encourages the viewer to identify with “the film’s racism and its nostalgia for Aryan privilege and domination” and to read sequences in which they appear “in the most prejudicial manner possible,” i.e., as highly subjective images from the point of view of a character in the fiction. Flashbacks, thus, are skillfully deployed for ideological argumentation: “as flashbacks, they allow the narrative to marshal a representation of history that is quite slanted to its own purposes and to pass that history off as a visually ‘documented’ truth.” The closer we come to the film’s conclusion, the fewer the flashbacks. “Once the [Northern] participants in the romances conform to the Southern perspective,” Turim argues, “the film can end with a double honeymoon without the troublesome flashbacks to disturb the closure in love and peace.”32 What happened historically, however, is the opposite of what we see allegorically rendered at the end of Griffith’s film. Rather than the North

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conforming to the Southern perspective, the South has been required to conform to the Northern perspective—with mixed results. The “great divide”33 in the United States between North and South has not necessarily narrowed with time but has in many ways grown wider and deeper, one of the symptoms of which—like “troublesome flashbacks” to past traumas—has been that our contemporary body politic must endure irruptions of rage from “red-faced angry” people who become especially exercised, as Krugman observes, whenever it is pointed out that “the facts don’t support their position.” In The Birth of a Nation, we know that Griffith chose the melodramatic form to organize the bloody, traumatic reality of the Civil War and Reconstruction into a narrative that Southerners and Northerners alike could make sense of. And it is this polarizing tradition of melodrama, which transforms complex realities into manageable binarisms, that persists in American cultural life and politics today. As in Griffith’s “Southland,” where “life runs in a quaintly way that is to be no more,” we can identify a “lost cause” narrative in today’s Republican Party in the nostalgic appeal of former president Donald J. Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” We can even identify a contemporary “War Between the States” (a term, incidentally, which was rarely used during the Civil War but became prevalent afterward in the South, as part of an effort to perpetuate its interpretation of the war). At stake in the 1861–1865 War Between the States, in Morris Berman’s phrase, “was nothing less than the definition of what a meaningful life was finally about.” In his book, Why America Failed, Berman insists that, “if there is one event in American history that cannot be understood in simple black-and-white terms (literally or metaphorically), it is the War Between the States.”34 He nonetheless appears to agree with historians who see the war “as a struggle between two conflicting economies, the watershed division between the agricultural era and the industrial era in American history,”35 and he is not incorrect when he suggests that the most obvious result of the war was “the ascendancy of Northern capitalism and the emergence of a plutocracy in the United States.”36 John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, identifying his fear as the “triumph of business enterprise,” predicted that it would be disastrous for the South if those forces gained control of the federal government.37 Griffith’s image of “the Southland,” then, is central to the film’s meanings and central to the red-state notion today of what it is we have lost since General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Lieutenant-General Ulysses

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S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865 (shots 505, 506 and 508). Berman may decry the way in which the War Between the States is too often represented and understood in simple, black-and-white terms, but there is something to be said for melodrama’s binary vision: it focuses the issues. Griffith may begin his film with a tableau of a minister praying over manacled slaves to be auctioned in a town square (shot 8), introduced by the title: “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion” (shot 7)—which implies that he understood the issue of slavery to be the root cause of the Civil War—but it is his idealized portrait of life in Piedmont, South Carolina, contrasted with his patchy portrait of the Northern family, that reveals what really divides North and South, both then and now. Slavery, certainly, was a divisive issue, but less as a moral issue than as a crucial factor in the economic argument, for it was the basis of the Southern economy. As several historians have noted: “By 1860, slavery had become a symbol or metaphor, a carrier for sectional conflicts; and … as far as the issue of the extension of slavery into the territories went [as a cause of the Civil War], it was really part of a more comprehensive ideological struggle.”38

Red States and Blue States The salient features of Griffith’s image of the South—the defining characteristics of the “quaintly” life “that is to be no more”—are the same ones defended by red-state politicians and their supporters today: the world of the Camerons is one in which white, racist, ostensibly “Christian,” socalled “family values” uphold an anti-Enlightenment social and economic order that is oppressive and discriminatory toward women, people of color, non-Christians and, more generally, poor people. And just as Griffith’s “Southern” point of view is animated by the fear that the certainties of the Camerons’ world will be shattered, and its white, Christian, classconscious and patriarchal denizens will know degradation and ruin, so too is the red-state politician and voter of today animated by these fears. While the fear of the loss of a cherished “Southern” identity may have been strong during the Civil War era or in Griffith’s day (an identity suggested by the filmmaker’s image of “the Southland”), the Southerners’ greatest fear, no doubt, which informed all the others, was the fear of economic insecurity. What was rooted in each ideology, both the Northern and the Southern, in Eric Foner’s words “was the conviction that its own social

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system must expand, not only to insure its own survival but to prevent the expansion of all the evils the other represented.” In the North, they believed that “free society, with its promise of social mobility for the laborer, required territorial expansion,” a belief that was fueled by “a messianic desire to spread the benefits of free society to other areas and peoples.”39 Southerners, for their part, also emphasized expansionism. As one contemporary Southern commentator put it, they had “a magnificent dream of empire.” It was, however, one in which slavery was not only the symbol but also the real basis of sectional conflict—for, in Eric Foner’s summary, it was: “the foundation of the South’s economy, social structure, aspirations, and ideology.”40 For my purposes, I want to emphasize the way in which historically the conflict between North and South became as Manichean as its representation in Griffith’s film. If the motto we see on the South Carolina state flag seems impossibly melodramatic (“CONQUER WE MUST—VICTORY OR DEATH—FOR OUR CAUSE IS JUST”), we must appreciate, as Foner has pointed out, that to have remained in the Union after Lincoln’s election, “the South would have had to accept the verdict of ‘ultimate extinction’” that Lincoln and his party had agreed on with regard to the institution of slavery.41 And we might quote Albert Memmi, who, when writing about the Western European empires of recent memory, asks: “When have the privileged ever given up their privileges except under the threat of losing them?”42 When Southerners today call the American Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression,” as some still do, or when Governor Rick Perry of Texas threatens secession from the federal government, they are in effect echoing Griffith’s notion in The Birth of a Nation that the conflict arose because the North interfered with the states’ rights of the South. For political conservatives, the government in Washington, then as now, is the ostensible enemy. (Cf. intertitles 107, 146, and 507.) The conservative movement in America today remains strongly anti-government—or rather, observes Sam Tanenhaus, “its leading figures, in office and in the media, continue to espouse an antigovernment ideology that in reality attracts very few voters, even on the right. More accurately, today’s selfidentified conservatives embrace movement rhetoric but not movement ideology.” In a review essay about the extreme wing of the Republican Party calling itself the Tea Party, Tanenhaus notes that “the impracticality of this war against government, which in fact offers no serious plan to scale government back, suggests that the conservative populism of our

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moment is rooted not in a coherent worldview so much as in a ‘mood’ or atmosphere of generalized, undifferentiated protest.”43 There is no mistaking “the idiom of grievance” in the rhetoric of modern right-wing passions. Tanenhaus notes that Richard Hofstadter identified it over sixty years ago in Joseph R. McCarthy, who “gave the Republican Party its first contemporary flavor of insurgent populism.” Then as now, this “dynamic of dissent,” as Hofstadter called it, was nourished by an “undercurrent of provincial resentments, popular and ‘democratic’ rebelliousness and suspiciousness, and nativism.”44 “North” and “South”—if we understand these terms as broadly equivalent to the “blue”- and “red”-state designations of our own day—are as starkly polarized as they were during the Civil War era. In their empirical study, “Is Polarization a Myth?,” using data from the American National Election Studies and national exit polls, Alan Abramowitz and Kyle Saunders tested the assertion by Morris Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope in their popular and influential book, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (2005) , that ideological polarization in the American public is a myth.45 Fiorina et al. had argued that twenty-first-century Americans “are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold many of their views very strongly, and are not ideological.”46 But Abramowitz and Saunders’ evidence actually reveals a very different story. Since the 1970s, ideological polarization has increased dramatically among the mass public in the United States as well as among political elites. Abramowitz and Saunders conclude that: “There are now large differences in outlook between Democrats and Republicans, between redstate voters and blue-state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of activists— they involve a large segment of the public and the deepest divisions are found among the most interested, informed, and active citizens.”47 Conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, who they observe were common in American politics during the 1950s and 1960s, “are now extremely rare.” Indeed, at the elite level, they argue: “ideological differences between the parties are probably greater now than at any time in the past half century.” Moreover, states have become much more sharply divided along party lines since the 1960s: “red states have been getting redder,” they write, “while blue states have been getting bluer.”48 For those unfamiliar with the red-state-blue-state terminology and the large differences between the social characteristics and political attitudes

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of red-state voters and blue-state voters, Abramowitz and Saunders offer some guidelines derived from the 2004 National Exit Poll: Compared with blue state voters, red state voters were much more likely to be Protestants, to consider themselves born-again or evangelical Christians, and to attend religious services at least once per week. They were also much more likely to have a gun owner in their household and much less likely to have a union member in their household. Red state voters were much more likely to take a pro-life position on abortion, to oppose marriage or civil unions for gay couples, to support the war in Iraq, to approve of George Bush’s job performance, to describe themselves as conservative, to identify with the Republican Party and, of course, to vote for George Bush for president.49

These guidelines are all right, but they do not tell us very much. On the internet, one can find many sites dedicated to enumerating the differences between Democrats and Republicans—differences organized around party “Philosophy,” “Economic Ideas,” “Social and human ideas,” “Stance on Military issues,” “Stance on Gay Marriage,” “Stance on Abortion,” “Stance on Death Penalty,” “Stance on Taxes,” “Stance on Government Regulation,” “Healthcare Policy,” and so on. It is also easy to find lists of “traditionally strong” Democratic states and “traditionally strong” Republican states. There are many excellent sites outlining how Democrats and Republicans come down on “controversial issues,” such as gun-control laws, the minimum wage, and voter ID laws. A brief consultation of nearly any one of these sites reveals a pattern of differences that is not unlike the “series of antinomies” that Jim Kitses identified in 1969 in Horizons West, his landmark book about the film Western: antinomies which he described as, “a philosophical dialectic, an ambiguous cluster of meanings and attitudes that provide the traditional thematic structure of the genre.”50 Rather than attempt here to use Kitses’ list as an architectonic for a list of differences between North and South during the Civil War era, or between Democrats and Republicans in our own time, I shall begin with candidate Obama’s famous remarks in a risky moment of candor during a speech he gave at a Democratic Party fundraiser on April 6, 2008 in San Francisco, remarks that, while they revealed he understood some of the key differences between red states and blue states, could have cost him the presidency. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s

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replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations [my italics].”51 Obama’s remarks suggest that he understood—or wished to be understood as understanding—that the polarization problem in the United States (people who “cling to guns or religion,” versus those who do not, for example), originates in economic hardship. Where there has been unemployment for 25 years, there you will find “frustration.” He is not wrong, of course: common sense tells us, as Memmi noted of poverty in 2004: “From the evidence, [it] leads to and helps prolong ignorance and superstition, stagnant forms of social behavior, the absence of democracy, poor hygiene, sickness, and death.”52 If ideological polarization has increased dramatically during the past 40 years among the mass public in the United States as well as among political elites, this trend is not unrelated to the fact that in the United States today, where social protection is limited and income inequality has become dramatic, the fear of a plunge into poverty is now widespread among Republicans and Democrats alike—more widespread than one might expect in one of the richest nations in the world. Democrats who have taken a turn toward the right are instructive in this regard. Former Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, in his autobiography, Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to SameSex Marriage (2015), suggested that when working-class Democrats start voting “against government”—which is to say, against their own interests—it is because they are attempting to defend themselves economically: “White working-class and middle-class men [sic] have not lost faith in government in general; they have lost faith in the willingness of Democrats to use the power of government to protect them from hurtful economic trends.”53 But this is not the whole story. Not all Democrats who have lost faith in their party become Republicans. Nor, of course, do all Republicans hold conservative views because they are unemployed or live in poverty. Indeed, most supporters of the Republican Party’s wing calling themselves the “Tea Party,” we have learned, are wealthier and bettereducated than the general public.54 In The Tea Party and the Remaking of

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Republican Conservatism, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson report that: Tea Party members [we interviewed] rarely stressed economic concerns to us—and they never blamed business or the superrich for America’s troubles. The nightmare of societal decline is usually painted in cultural hues, and the villains in the picture are freeloading social groups, liberal politicians, bossy professionals, big government, and the mainstream media.55

Like Griffith, who fears for his characters’ “Southland” as a place where “life runs in a quaintly way that is to be no more,” Tea Party supporters imagine their society to be in decline. The question is why this fear should be experienced as a “nightmare.”

Keeping Faith with Trauma Dominick LaCapra, in his book Writing History, Writing Trauma, observes that symptoms characteristically manifested in individuals who have been through a trauma can also befall societies, as ghosts of the traumatic past return to haunt them: “In acting out, tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past reliving the traumatic scene.” In post-traumatic acting out, “one is haunted or possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes—scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalistically caught up in a melancholic feedback loop.”56 Trauma can be “worked through,” however. “Working through,” LaCapra writes, “is an articulatory practice: to the extent one works through trauma … one is able to distinguish between past and present and to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future.” In these two forms of collective coping with trauma, we see that “acting out”—the repetition compulsion of trauma— does not lead to transformation, whereas “working through” can lead to the successful resolution of trauma. LaCapra notes that the processes of working through, which include “mourning and modes of critical thought and practice,” must, in order to succeed, be “recognized as problematic” but still function as limits and resistances against “confusion and the obliteration or blurring of all distinctions.”57

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So why the dogmatism of red-state politicians and their supporters? Why the rage? Can we really say that they have never gotten over the Civil War? Are they still traumatized by their defeat 150 years ago? On the face of it, this seems unlikely, at least not literally. LaCapra explains: “Those traumatized by extreme events, as well as those empathizing with them, may resist working through because of what might almost be termed fidelity to trauma, a feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it.”58 Southern red states keep faith with their defeat in the Civil War in the same way perhaps official France today remembers the French Revolution: it is the defining moment in their construction of a national identity— except that the American South was the loser in the upheaval that was the Civil War, whereas the secular French Republic of today is heir to the winners of the Revolution of 1789. The Civil War is what LaCapra would call a “founding trauma,” one of those traumas “that paradoxically become the valorized or intensely cathected basis of identity for an individual or a group rather than events that pose the problematic question of identity.”59 The Old South, and those empathizing with its values, lives on in a range of attitudes and beliefs across today’s Republican Party. In Trauma: A Social Theory, Jeffrey Alexander’s 2012 book about the cultural construction of collective trauma, Alexander makes a sharp distinction between individual and collective trauma: “Individual victims react to traumatic injury with repression and denial, gaining relief when these psychological defenses are overcome, bringing pain into consciousness so they are able to mourn. For collectivities, it is different. Rather than denial, repression, and ‘working through,’ it is a matter of symbolic construction and framing, of creating stories and characters, and moving along from there.”60 Individual traumas that become collective “can become so if they are conceived as wounds to social identity. … They must be imagined into being. The pivotal question becomes not who did this to me, but what group did this to us? Intellectuals, political leaders, and symbol creators of all kinds make competing claims. They identify protagonists and antagonists and weave them into accusatory narratives projected to audiences of third parties. Which narrative wins out is a matter of performative power.”61 As a “trauma story” about the South, The Birth of a Nation, we know, was exceptionally powerful. Never before had a storyteller been able to command such an effective platform to reach so many people. But what, in the end, are Griffith’s conclusions? There is no doubt that the film is

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an artifact of cultural trauma, an accusatory narrative that tries to identify the causes of the Civil War and (from the Southern point of view) show its unhappy outcome. The film signals that a cultural trauma has occurred, which, as Alexander explains, happens “when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.”62 Many of those in the red states today believe their identity—grounded in the America they want and believe they once had—is under threat. Griffith’s “Southland,” where “life runs in a quaintly way that is to be no more,” is very much the America that a broad swathe of Republicans and probably most supporters of the Tea Party wish they could get back. In the Republicans’ “nightmare of societal decline”—populated and controlled by “freeloading social groups, liberal politicians, bossy professionals, big government, and the mainstream media”—the “villains in the picture” have their identifiable counterparts in the Civil War era depicted by Griffith: “liberal politicians” today are as frightening to them as Austin Stoneman is in the film; and of course “big government” is always the Federal Government—the one in Washington, the one that proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves in 1863. We can suggest a few of the ways in which Griffith’s “Southland” is still with us. As Edward Ball put it on the 150th anniversary of the day his South Carolina slaveholding family’s slaves were set free: If by some method of time travel the former slaves and slaveholders of Limerick plantation could be brought face to face with us, they would not find our world entirely alien. In place of the rural incarceration of four million black people, we have the mass incarceration of one million black men. In place of laws that prohibited black literacy throughout the South, we have campaigns by Tea Party and anti-tax fanatics to defund public schools within certain ZIP codes. And we have stop-and-search policing, and frequently much worse, in place of the slave patrols.63

Ball describes how, on the first Sunday of March 1865, a company of black Union soldiers from the 35th United States Colored Troops regiment rode up the oak allée of Limerick, one of his family’s rice plantations north of Charleston, where 250 of their slaves lived and worked. At the head of the column was a white colonel named James Beecher,

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a brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Ball’s great-great grandfather William Ball opened his front door to admit Colonel Beecher, who demanded to see all the people on the plantation immediately, in front of the house. When they had assembled— all 250 of them—Beecher yelled: “You are free as birds, you don’t have to work for these people anymore!”64 On the morning his slaves were set free, Ball’s great-great-grandfather William sat in the dining room of his South Carolina plantation house, reading from the biblical Book of Lamentations. “With the Civil War rushing to its end,” Ball writes, “they must have found it an apt choice: The passage recounted the miserable fate of Jerusalem condemned by God for its sins: ‘She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces … she weepeth sore in the night … for the Lord hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions.’”65 Griffith, too, at the end of his film, “dreams” about regaining the celestial city that has been lost—but like the Republicans President Obama addressed in his 2015 State of The Union, he cannot admit to any “sins” or “transgressions” which would explain why “God” should have “condemned” it to the miserable fate of the South we see represented in the film. We may “dare [to] dream of a golden day when the bestial War shall rule no more” (shot 1603); but we remain a nation at odds with one another about whom or what to identify as the enemy; and the battleground has been defined by the two major forms of collective coping with trauma: “acting out”—the repetition compulsion of trauma—which does not lead to transformation; and “working through,” which can lead to the successful resolution of trauma. As we have noted, Griffith offers a vision of a city on a hill at the end of his film. That city remains out of reach. Not only do the events in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and subsequently elsewhere (including Minneapolis in 2020) involving the deaths of unarmed Black men at the hands of the police suggest a similarity to “antebellum slave patrols, which routinely killed young black men, and faced no punishment for doing so,” but they also suggest, as Ball writes, that “lying behind such recent events is a mentality that originates during the slave period, and provides police action with an unconscious foundation. A mentality that might be called part of the legacy of slavery.”66

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Notes 1. Obama, “Transcript: President Obama’s State of the Union Address, 2015,” http://www.npr.org/2015/01/20/378680818/transcript-presid ent-obamas-state-of-the-union-address. 2. The numbering of shots follows the continuity script of the film in Robert Lang, ed., The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 155. 3. Lang, “The Birth of a Nation: History, Ideology, Narrative Form,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 24. 4. Krugman, “Hating Good Government,” The New York Times, January 18, 2015. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. See The Editorial Board, “Republican Idiocy on Iran,” The New York Times, March 11, 2015. 8. Erwin Chemerinsky, The Case Against the Supreme Court (New York: Viking, 2014). 9. “How the government shutdown compared to every other since 1976,” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/every-government-shu tdown-from-1976-to-now. 10. “The Pledge of Allegiance,” UShistory.org. (Philadelphia: Independence Hall Association, 2015), http://www.ushistory.org/documents/pledge. htm 11. Krugman, “Hating Good Government.” By “red-state politicians” I mean Republicans, and by “blue-state politicians” I mean Democrats, although, obviously, Republican politicians can be found in “blue” states and Democratic politicians in “red” states. 12. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics And Other Essays (New York: Random House, 2008, orig. pub. 1965), 3–40; Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2nd ed., 2000). 13. See, for example: Heather, “Jon Stewart Asks When Fox is Going to Hold Themselves Accountable for Their Anger and Divisiveness,” Crooks and Liars, March 19, 2015. 14. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (New York: Random House, 1961), 1. 15. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2003), 26. 16. Ibid.

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17. Robert Lewis Dabney, A Defence of Virginia and, through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests against the Sectional Party (New York: E. J. Hale, 1867), as quoted in Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, 309, n. 60. 18. Glen Kessler, “When did McConnell say he wanted to make Obama a ‘one-term president’?,” The Washington Post, September 25, 2012. 19. “Ordinance of Nullification.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinance_ of_Nullification. 20. W. Stephen Bush, “The Birth of a Nation,” Moving Picture World, March 13, 1915, reprinted in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 176. 21. Garry Wills, “Back Door Secession,” The New York Review of Books: NYR Blog: Roving thoughts and provocations, October 9, 2013. Colorado, of course, is geographically a Western, not a Southern state, but for my purpose here—drawing a parallel between the South-North conflict of the Civil War era and the ideological divide between “red” and “blue” states today—Colorado becomes a Southern state. 22. Ibid. 23. Alan Blinder, “Alabama Judge Defies Gay Marriage Law,” The New York Times, February 8, 2015. 24. See Bill Moyers, “When America behaved like ISIS: Jesse Washington and the Bible Belt’s dark history of public lynchings,” Salon, February 10, 2015. 25. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today,” Film Form: Essays in Film Theory ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 195–255. 26. Both ellipses and underlining in original. For a comparison of Griffith’s intertitles with Wilson’s text, see Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 199. 27. D. W. Griffith, quoted in Lang, “The Birth of a Nation: History, Ideology, Narrative Form,” 3. 28. Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989), 40–41. 29. Ibid., 41. 30. Ibid., 42. 31. The title (shot 771) is in two parts: Still a North and a South. Pride battles with love for the heart’s conquest. The trauma of defeat, thus, is inseparable from the humiliation experienced by the South, figured as an unbearable hurt to Margaret’s pride. Margaret, who is first introduced to the viewer as “a daughter of the South, trained in the manners of the old school” (shot 41), is a member of the slave-owning class that feels it has lost everything —what Eric Foner terms “the foundation of [its] economy,

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32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

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social structure, aspirations, and ideology.” To echo Jeffrey C. Alexander, “it has also experienced a cultural trauma, which occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.” Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, orig. pub. 1970), 311; Jeffrey C. Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 6. Turim, Flashbacks in Film, 42. The allusion is to a series published by The New York Times in its Opinion Pages for a year and a half—from January 30, 2013 to June 27, 2014— called “The Great Divide” and devoted to the existence and implications of inequality around the world. Morris Berman, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, 2012), 118–19. Ibid., 121. Ibid. Berman is paraphrasing the Marxist historian Charles Beard (in Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, New York, Macmillan, 1927). John Calhoun, cited by Berman, Why America Failed, 121. Berman, Why America Failed, 125–25. Berman is paraphrasing Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, who in turn cites historian Avery O. Craven. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 312. Ibid., 311–12. Ibid., 316. Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 4. Sam Tanenhaus, “Will the Tea Get Cold?”, The New York Review of Books, March 8, 2012. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage, 1955), 4–5, quoted in Tanenhaus, “Will the Tea Get Cold?.” Alan I. Abramowitz and Kyle L. Saunders, “Is Polarization a Myth?”, The Journal of Politics vol. 70, no. 2 (April 2008), 542–55. Morris P. Fiorina, with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006, orig. pub. 2005), 19. Abramowitz and Saunders, “Is Polarization a Myth?,” 542. Ibid., 542, 548. Ibid., 549. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship Within the Western (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 11.

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51. Mayhill Fowler, “Obama: No Surprise That Hard-Pressed Pennsylvanians Turn Bitter,” The Huffington Post, November 17, 2008. 52. Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized, 5. 53. Barney Frank, Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 186. 54. Kate Zernike and Megan Thee-Brenan, “Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated,” The New York Times, April 14, 2010. 55. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), quoted by Tanenhaus, “Will the Tea Get Cold?.” 56. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 21. 57. Ibid., 22. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 23. 60. Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory, 3. 61. Ibid., 2. 62. Ibid., 6. 63. Edward Ball, “Slavery’s Enduring Resonance,” The New York Times, March 14, 2015. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid.; The Bible, “Lamentations,” chapter 1, verse 1. 66. Ball, “Slavery’s Enduring Resonance.”

Index

A "Abraham Lincoln" (acted by Joseph Henabery), 197, 201 Abramowitz, Alan “Is Polarization a Myth?” (with Saunders), 281–282 Abrams, Samuel J. Culture War? (with Fiorina and Pope), 281 Addams, Jane, 45 African Americans. See also blackface; Civil Rights movement; emancipation; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) accommodation and, 166 beauty pagents, 200 as Civil War soldiers, 198 deaths by police, 287 deportation calls, 45, 131, 132 Dixon’s marking of, 24–27 double consciousness, 47 education and, 150 fear of film’s effects, 151

Fleiscsher’s slide project, 123–128 Griffith inverts Stowe, 81 intermarriage and, 27–30 “Lift Every Voice” as anthem, 193 offensive representations of, 18–19 patriotism, 199 police deaths and, 3 the power of public image, 167 resisting Lost Cause myth, 7–10, 191–192, 203 respond to New Era, 132–137 seen as sexual threat, 19–21 Southern fears and beliefs, 177 the "talented tenth", 186 uplift films, 122–123 voting rights, 130–131, 179 why a problem?, 128 African Film Productions, 246, 247 Ainslie, George, 165 Alden, Mary, 43 Alexander, Elizabeth, 103 Alexander, Jeffrey Trauma: A Social Theory, 285 America (film), 94

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Stokes and P. McEwan (eds.), In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04737-4

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INDEX

Amistad (ship), 150 Anderson, Gillian, 112 “An Answer to The Birth of a Nation” exposition, 166–167, 195–196 Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society, 240 Apocalypse Now (film), 261 Applicants to a Casual Ward (Fildes), 88 The Arrow of Defiance (film), 80 Atlanta, Georgia 4th ward segregation, 185 The Clansman and violence, 178–180 film screenings in, 176, 177 lynchings frequent in, 177–179, 180 race riot of 1906, 188 reaction to film, 8–9 seeking racial peace, 180–188 Atlanta University Center, 180 audiences assumed sophistication of, 256–258 Britain, 210 early motion picture experience, 45 first perceptions of film, 35 interpreting blackface, 38–40 judging the servants, 43 later views of, 47–49 Northern, 40 power of films, 258 reaction to Clansman play, 178–180 social class and, 40 Southern fears and beliefs, 177 “Austin Stoneman” (acted by Ralph Lewis) based on Thaddeus Stevens, 21, 30 disabused of illusions, 75 as dysfunctional, 22–23, 65, 74 relationship with mulatto, 22

B Balcon, Michael, 211 Ball, Edward, 286–287 Ball, William, 287 Bamboozled (film), 261 Barrett, Jenny, 11 Barrett, Wilson The Lights o’ London, 88 The Battle (film), 89, 94 The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (film), 86, 89, 94 Beecher, Colonel James, 286–287 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 107–111 “Ben Cameron” (acted by Henry B. Walthall) Elsie and, 65, 130–131, 277 Klan and, 277 Lost Cause trauma and, 276 patriarchical male, 23 Berman, Morris Why America Failed, 278–279 Best, George S., 240 Beveridge, Ray, 227–228 Biden, Joseph R., 273 The Birth of a Nation (film). See also individual locations; individual character names; Dixon Jr, Thomas; Griffith, D.W. advertising, 155–156, 211–213, 220 animal-like behavior, 230 Battle of Petersburg scene, 85, 94 bifurcated views of, 36 The Black Shame and, 231 Black women and, 199 boost for KKK, 178–180 Boston and, 123–128, 242 Britain, 240–241, 253–255 centenary context of, 3–5 Chicago injunction overturned, 50–52

INDEX

creation of New Era epilogue, 122–123 cuts and additions Breil score and cut scenes, 106–112 Hampton/New Era epilogue, 18 lost footage, 103–105, 125 varied cuts of, 101 deportation scene, 131 as educational, 145–147, 151, 155 first audiences, 35 Fleischer’s educational slides, 123–128 “happy ending”, 268 historical distortion, 2, 45, 99–100, 124–125 as a legacy event, 101 as a lesson, 261–262 Lincoln and emancipation, 197, 201 local protests, 175 Lost Cause myth and, 191–192, 196, 271 middle-class customers, 40 “national unity”, 132 no dissent in Britain, 210–211 Ohio ban, 193–194 opens in Virginia, 164–167 original photographic object of, 100–101 Plaatje and, 241, 245 polarized society, 279 popularity of, 36 in Portugual, 112–113 power of cinema, 244 protests against, 103–105 racist fan letters, 43 re-emerges in racial tension, 260–261 releases of, 101 1915 context of, 1

295

television, 258–259 video, 11, 257 return to Africa footage, 104 South Africa ban, 241 spectacle of, 215–216 “Spirit of the South” melodrama, 274–279 “states’ rights” ideology, 272–273 subjectivized history, 276–279 success of, 230 technical achievements of, 156, 213–216, 259–260 as a trauma story, 285–287 visual vignettes/tableaux vivants , 64–67 Der Voortrekkers and, 247 voter intimidation, 130–131 Birth of a Race (Hampton Institute film), 170 blackface inconsistent use of, 40–41, 47 minstrelsy, 46–47 orientalism, 48 protecting white actresses, 38 racist reactions and, 43–45 as representation, 38–43, 45, 48–49 spying white Klansmen, 40–41, 42–43 “Black Horror on the Rhine” effect in the US, 227–229 French occupation in Germany, 223–226 racist culture products and, 228 BlacKkKlansman (film), 261 Black Lives Matter movement, 3, 103, 260 The Black Shame/Die schwarze Schmach (film), 229–231, 232 Blight, David W., 197 A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (Gollancz), 241 Boston, Massachusetts

296

INDEX

bans film, 232, 242 campaign against film, 175 film about “good and evil”, 40 New Era footage, 7 Bowens, Dr G. Jarvis, 163 Bowling Green State University, Gishes and, 99, 101 Breil, Joseph Carl, 106–112 Britain advertising for film, 211–213, 220 African colonial affairs, 253 Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society, 240 Chesterton’s “Explanation”, 209 cinema screenings, 253–256 effect of film, 245 fiery Scottish crosses, 218 Plaatje and educational films, 243 racial tensions in, 255–256, 260–261 racism in film and, 216–218 reception of film, 11 SANNC delegation, 241 television screening, 254, 258–259 video release, 254, 257 World War I perspective on film, 216–218 British Board of Film Classification, 217, 257 British National Party, 257 Broken Arrow (film), 81 Broken Blossoms (film), 68–71 Bronson, T.S. photo of school boys, 146, 156 Brooks, Peter The Melodramatic Imagination, 64, 68 Brownlow, Kevin, 257, 258–259, 259 Brown, Michael, 260 Brown, Samuel A., 151 Bruce, Blanch K., 194 Brundage, Fitzhugh, 203

Bud-M’Belle, Isaiah, 238 Bush, George W., 272, 282 Bush, W. Stephen, 49, 272 Bynum, Tara, 28 Byron, Joseph, 92

C Caddoo, Cara communities of activism, 176 on malicious representation, 46 Calhoun, John C., 272–273, 278 “Dr Cameron” (acted by Spottiswoode Aitken), 66 Cameron, Lucille, 50 Campbell, Peter, 226 Campt, Tina, 224 Captain Herne, U.S.A. (Smith), 89 Carter, Lincoln Chattanooga, 90 Cash, W.J., 20 censorship audience sophistication, 256–258 increasing demand for, 232 various cuts, 102 Chaplin, Charlie, 214 Chapman, Mary, 65 “Charles Sumner” (acted by Sam De Grasse), 74 Charleston, West Virginia, 175 Chattanooga (Carter), 90 Chesterton, Cecil “Explanation” to British, 209, 210, 216–217 redirection, 219 Chion, Michel, 109 Chothia, Dr Jean, 92 Civil Rights movement. See also Black Lives Matter movement; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) beginnings of activism, 9

INDEX

protests against film, 101 unresovled issues, 2–5 The Clansman (Dixon), 123 contributes to film, 18 Elsie’s contradictions, 21–24 Franklin’s analysis of, 161 human/inhuman Gus, 24–27 justifcation for lynching, 19–20 mixed race and morals, 27–30 opposing views of, 164 violence after Atlanta performances, 178–180 class Black social conservativism, 183, 186 Clune, William H., 232 Coleman-Robinson, Dr. Julia, 200 Collins, John C. film as history, 151 Friends of Boys and, 146–147, 156 colonialism, Black French soldiers and, 225–226 Colored Soldiers’ Comfort Committee Loyalty of a Race film, 170 Coloured Frenchmen on the Rhine: German Women’s Cry for Help (Rhenish Women’s League), 228 Colson, William, 165 Conley, Jim, 177 Connoisseur Video, disclaimer and, 257, 259 Cooper, Judge William Fenimore, 50–52 Coppola, Francis Ford Apocalypse Now, 261 Corman, Eugene The Two Orphans (with D’Ennery), 90 A Corner in Wheat (film), 88 Craig, Maxine, 200 Crawford, George W. cuts to film, 154–156

297

NAACP and, 148 New Haven campaign, 148–154, 157 Cripps, Thomas, 45, 122, 175 The Crisis newspaper, 149, 242 Cromwell, Oliver, 216 Cruickshanks, Dick The Symbol of Sacrifice, 247 Cullors, Patrisse, 3 The Culture of Defeat (Schivelbusch), 271 Culture War? (Fiorina, Abrams and Pope), 281 Curley, James M., 124, 127

D Da 5 Bloods (film), 261 Dabney, Robert Lewis, 272 A Defence of Virginia, 271–272 Daves, Delmer Broken Arrow, 81 Davies, Tom G., 211 Davis, Benjamin, 186 A Day at Tuskegee (film), 243 De Beers educational films, 244 Defeat stories (Moss), 232–233 A Defence of Virginia (Dabney), 271–272 D’Ennery, Adolphe The Two Orphans (with Corman), 90 Dingane, Chief, 247, 248 Disney (Walt) Corporation The Song of the South, 188 Dix, Dorothy, 45 Dixon Jr, Thomas. See also The Clansman (Dixon) aim to change North’s perceptions, 36 contribution to film, 17 denies attack, 203

298

INDEX

distorts Reconstruction, 18 Franklin on, 161 good/Griffith and bad/Dixon, 36 input in the film, 30–31 Klan as uniting, 73 The Leopard’s Spots , 17 reverses stereotypes, 20 sees Klan as unifying, 76 Doane, Mary Ann, 42 Douglass, Frederick, 124, 125, 194 Drury Lane Theatre, 86–88 Du Bois, W.E.B. Atlanta riot, 180 The Crisis , 242 double consciousness, 47 Fleischer’s proposal and, 124 need to respond to film, 122 The Star of Ethiopia, 194–195 structural amnesia, 210 talented tenth, 186 Duggan, Mark, 260 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 124, 194 Dunning, William A., 201 Dureya, Etta, 50 D.W. Griffith, Father of Film (documentary), 259 Dyer, Richard, 46 E Eagan, John J., 183–184 Eagle, Oscar, 90–91 Eisenstein, Sergei, 274 Elsaesser, Thomas, 37 “Elsie Stoneman” (acted by Lillian Gish) abduction of, 74 as Belgium, 220 blackface white spies and, 40–41, 42 defiant love for Ben, 65 forced marriage like Reconstruction, 275–276

reluctance of, 277 symbol of femininity, 21–24, 65–67 wedding of, 130–131 white and black, 21–22, 30 emancipation activities of celebrations, 192–199 Lincoln and, 197 meaningfulness, 201–203 remembering enslavement, 196–197 resisting Lost Cause myth, 192 self-emancipation, 198 as trauma, 286–287 women and, 199–201 Epoch Producing Corporation, 167, 176, 177 Erlanger, Abraham Lincoln stages A Fool and a Girl , 93 Everett, Anna, 40

F The Fall of Babylon (Kiralfy and Rettig), 88 Farnum, William in The New Governor, 42 Ferman, James, 257 Ferris, William H. “These Colored United States”, 151 Field, Allyson Nadia, 103 New Era/Hampton epilogue, 8 Uplift Cinema, 243 Fildes, Sir Luke Applicants to a Casual Ward, 88 film-making big spectacle scenes, 94–95 disenfranchisement of minorities, 260 freedom of speech and, 2 Griffith’s enduring influence, 80–82 power of films, 258 racism of Civil War films, 49

INDEX

ride-and-rescue pattern, 80 uplift, 122–123 uplifting films, 243 Westerns, 80 Fiorina, Morris Culture War? (with Abrams and Pope), 281 Fitzgerald, David E., 149 Fleener, Nickie, 168 Fleetwood, Margaret, 168 Fleischer, Rabbi Carl, 123–127 on “problem”, 127 “Flora/Marion Cameron” (acted by Mae Marsh) in Bamboozled, 261 death of, 66, 67, 74, 110, 112 Gus’s attack, 25, 198 True Womanhood, 67 Floyd, George, 103, 261 Foner, Eric rewriting history, 100 Southern ideology, 279 A Fool and a Girl (Griffiths), 93 Ford, Henry, educational films of, 244 Ford, John The Iron Horse, 80 Stagecoach, 80 The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races (Micheaux), 182 Foucault, Michel, 103 Fox News Channel, 270 France bans film, 223, 226 “Black Horror on the Rhine”, 224–226 Frank, Barney Frank, 283 Frank, Leo, 122 lynching of, 176, 188 Franklin, John Hope, 161 Dixon’s input, 18 NAACP campaign, 168

299

freedom of speech discussion of film, 102–103 Griffith’s pamphlet on, 260 French, Philip, 258–259 Friends of Boys, 146–147, 156 Frissell, Dr Hollis B. criticism of New Era, 134–137 “fixing” the film, 163 helps to lift ban, 165 motives of, 136–137 New Era epilogue, 129–130 public relations nightmare, 167 “Tuskegee Defense”, 168–169 Frohman, Charles sensation scenes, 93 Shenandoah, 91 Frohman, Daniel sensation scenes, 93 From the Manger to the Cross (film), 241 Futselaar, Ralf, 224

G Garza, Alicia, 3 Gates Jr, Henry Louis, 49 Georg II, Duke of Saxe Meiningen, 86–88 George, Homer T., 183, 184 Germany Black French soldiers in, 224–226 Britian and, 219 echoes of Reconstruction, 232–233 effect of “Black Horror” campaign, 227–229 racist cultural products, 228 war atrocities, 231 Gill, David disclaimer for video, 257 restoration for video, 258–259 television experience, 258–259 Gish, Dorothy, 99

300

INDEX

Gish, Lillian in Orphans of the Storm, 95 university deletes honor, 99, 101 Glymph, Thavolia on remembering slavery, 197 on winning freedom, 198 Godshalk, Alan, 181, 183 Gollancz, Israel A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, 241 Gone With the Wind (film), 261 Gordon, Douglas, 165 Greed (film), 69 Greeley, Horace, 271 Greene, Graham, 48 Griffith, David W. See also The Birth of a Nation (film) addresses Chicago audience, 51 as an actor, 88, 90–91, 92 British admire artistry of, 213–216 Broken Blossoms , 68–71 Channel 4 documentary on, 259 directs big battle scenes, 85–86 Dixon’s input, 30–31 Eisenstein on, 274 enduring influence on films, 80–82 experience in spectacles, 86–95 good/Griffith and bad/Dixon, 36 interested in Fleischer’s proposal, 124 Klan as birth of the nation, 73 melodramatic narrative, 63–64 New Era epilogue, 128 other films America, 94 The Battle, 89, 94 The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, 86, 89, 94 A Corner in Wheat , 88 Hearts of the World, 220, 232–233 His Trust , 94

Intolerance, 95 Judith of Bethulia, 86, 94 Orphans of the Storm, 93, 95 Swords and Hearts , 94 pairs Temple and Robinson, 48 “picturization of history”, 276 playwriting A Fool and a Girl , 93–94 War, 94 praise in New Haven, 152 project to incite, 48 psychology of, 17 replacing history by image, 72 The Rise and Fall of Free Speech (pamphlet), 260 sees Klan as unifying, 76 sexual fears, 226 theatre-going, 88, 90–91 Grimké, Francis J. criticizes Frissell, 168 on New Era epilogue, 136–137 Grosse, Pascal, 224 Gubar, Susan, 42 Gunning, Tom on Griffith’s narrative, 63 on Lydia’s hysteria, 28 “Gus/Augustus Caesar” (acted by Walter Long) attacks Flora, 25, 178 in Bamboozled, 261 blackface and, 38 capture and punishment of, 19, 27, 78 human and inhuman, 25–27, 30, 230 hypersexual black man, 67 lost footage, 105–112 as part of Wilderness, 77–78 scenes cut, 155 as soldier, 198

INDEX

H Hackett, Francis, 38 Hagen, John, 151, 157 Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, 111 Hammond, Dr Michael on Battle of Petersburg scene, 85 Hampton Institute Birth of a Race film, 170 Making Negro Lives Count (film), 122 public relations and, 167 uplift films, 244 Hampton, Mary, 91 Hampton New Era epilogue, 18 African American responses, 133–137 contents and effects of, 128–132 criticism for New Era, 133–137 “fixing” the film, 161–162, 163 as response to film, 122–128 Harding, Warren, 228 Harris, Loretta “An Answer to Birth of a Nation”, 166–167 Hearts of the World (film), 220 Herndon, Alonzo, 182 Hewitt, Harrison, 149 Hill, Leslie Pinkney, 134 history archivist vs historian, 100–101 British accept film, 210–211 distortion of slavery, 99 emancipation and, 201 Fleischer’s slide project, 123–128 restoration theory of, 100, 111 theory of restoration, 106 His Trust (film), 94 A History of the American People (Wilson), 72, 276 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 247 Hofstadter, Richard insurgent populism, 281

301

paranoid US politics, 270 Holloway, Robin, 257 Home Sweet Home (film), 94 Hooper, Alice, 196 Horizons West (Kitses), 282 The Horror on the Rhine (Morel), 225 Howard, Bronson Shenandoah, 91 Howard, William L., 151, 157 Hui, Arlene, 223 Hutcheon, Linda A Theory of Adaptation, 65 I Imitation of Life (film), 81 Intolerance (film) big scenes, 95 The Fall of Babylon and, 88 The Iron Horse (film), 80 Irving, Sir Henry Robespierre, 92–93 Isn’t Life Wonderful! (film), 233 “Is Polarization a Myth?” (Abramowiz and Saunders), 281–282 J Jackson, Andrew, Nullification Crisis and, 272 Jackson, Giles B. “An Answer to Birth of a Nation”, 166–167 Jackson, Robert, 35 Janowitz, Rose Lincoln’s Dream, 123 Jeffries, Jim, 50 Johnson, Jack, 48–49 Johnson, James Weldon on African-American characters, 45 African-American reactions, 19 on New Era epilogue, 134–135 Johnson, Joan Marie, 168

302

INDEX

Johnson, Rev. J.A., 242 Johnston, Ruth, 42 Judas Iscariot, as only black, 241 Judith of Bethulia (film), 86, 94

K Kachun, Mitch, 200 Kenya, Mau Mau uprising in, 254 Kidd, David, 45 King Jr, Dr Martin Luther Atlanta and, 180 non-violent movement, 188 King, Rodney, 103 Kinney, James, 30 Kiralfy, Imre The Fall of Babylon (with Rettig), 88 Kitses, Jim Horizons West , 282 Klaw, Marc, 93 Krugman, Paul sees dogmatism and rage, 269, 270, 274, 278 Kuhlman, Erika, 230 Reconstructing Patriarchy After the Great War, 227 Ku Klux Klan aims for middle class, 40 Ben’s membership of, 23, 277 Booker T. Washington on, 121 boosted by film, 151, 170, 178–179 British view of, 210, 217–218 enacts Lost Cause myth, 271 engagement in film, 165–166 fiery Scottish crosses, 218 Frank lynching and, 178 Jews and Catholics and, 232 post World War I, 232 purge Black presence in film, 77–78 resurgence of, 72–73

“reverse” the impact of the war, 73 as "unifying", 73

L LaCapra, Dominick Writing History, Writing Trauma, 284–285 Laemmle, Carl Lincoln’s Dream, 122 Lang, Robert, 11, 104 Last, Dick van Galen, 224 Lawrence, Stephen, 259, 260 Lennig, Arthur, 161 The Leopard’s Spots (Dixon), 17, 21 Lerner, Neil, 105 Levy, Sol, 211 Lewis, William H., 127 Leyda, Jay, 36 Liberia, 7 The Lights o’ London (Sims), 88, 92 Lincoln, Abraham as Emancipator, 201 portrayal in film, 197, 201 Southern reaction to, 280 Lincoln Institute “The Negro Soldier”, 198 Lindsay, Vachel, 36 Lindvall, Terry, 162 Litt, Jacob Shenandoah, 91 Lloyd George, David, 242 Lost Cause ideology, 11 beliefs of, 192, 196, 203, 271 Lincoln and emancipation, 197 neo-secessionism, 272–274 surging popularity of, 167, 177 Lott, Eric, 39, 44 Loyalty of a Race (film), 170 Luther, Revd Clair F., 151 “Lydia Brown” (acted by Mary Alden), 199

INDEX

as dysfunctional, 74 mixed race and morals, 27–30 relationship with Stoneman, 22 lynching audience incitement, 44, 45 existence of scene, 105–112 frequency in Georgia, 176, 177, 180 glorification of, 45 justification for, 19–21 Leo Frank, 122, 176 NAACP opposition to, 111 Wells campaigns against, 103, 111–112

M McCarthy, Joseph J. (publicist), 131, 150 McCarthy, Joseph R. (senator), 281 McConnell, Mitch, 271 McElya, Micki, 196 McEwan, Paul, 41 McGuire, William, 129 McPherson, Tara, 50 McTeague (Norris), 69 Magowan, Kim, 23–24, 27 Making Negro Lives Count (film), 122, 130 Malan, D.F.J., 253 Mann Act, 50 “Margaret Cameron” (acted by Miriam Cooper), 131, 276 Marks, Martin, 106, 112–113 Maron, Marc, 262 marriage, same-sex, 274 marriages, mixed anti-miscegenation laws, 42, 50 Martin, Jeffrey, 18 Martin, Trayvon, 3, 260 Maud, Sir Alfred, 214 Maurer, Revd Oscar, 154–155

303

Mayer, David melodrama and inconsistencies, 43 Mayo, William, 163 McQueen, Steve (director), 261 Meffert Players, 90 Meisel, Martin, 67 melodrama bondage and rescue of women, 68–72 Griffith’s enduring influence, 80–82 Griffith’s use of, 63–64 spectacle scenes, 89 subjectivized history, 276–279 tableaux vivants , 64–67, 70 The Melodramatic Imagination (Brooks), 64 Memmi, Albert, 280, 283 Merritt, Russell, 18, 19, 104 Micheaux, Oscar, 123 The Forged Note, 182 Within Our Gates , 170 Miles, Nelson, 92 Miner, Leigh Richmond, 129–130 Mitchel, John Purroy orders cuts, 104 Mitchell, Theodore, 150 Montgomery, Frank When the Blood Calls , 80 Moore, Justice Roy, 274 Moores, Shaun, 258 Morel, Edmund D., 226, 228 The Horror on the Rhine, 225–226 Moroccan soldiers, 225 Morris Brown College, Atlanta, 185 Morrison, Toni “Playing in the Dark”, 72 Moss, Geoffrey Defeat stories, 232–233 Moton, Robert Hampton New Era epilogue, 169 uplift and, 243 Müller, Hermann, 225

304

INDEX

Murdoch, Rupert, 270 Murray, Margaret James, 133 music, banjos and blackness, 22 N La Naour, Jean-Yves, 229 The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson, 71 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 103 in Atlanta, 186 in Boston, 127 censorship struggle, 122 contested scenes, 104, 105 national growth of, 36 in New Haven, 148 in Ohio, 193–194 opposition to lynching, 111 Plaatje and, 242 pleased by cuts, 155 post-war campaign, 231 protest Hampton New Era epilogue, 167–170 resistance of, 8 National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 168, 170 National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (NBRMP) New Era epilogue, 122 New Era/Hampton epilogue, 167 protest campaign and, 36 work to reverse offensive representations, 18 National Emancipation Exposition, 194–195 Native Americans, Western films and, 80–81 Native Life in South Africa (Plaatje), 240, 242 Negro Business Men’s League, 175

Negro Historical and Industrial Association, 166, 167 “The Negro Soldier as a Leading Factor in Emancipation” (Lincoln Insitutution), 198 Neill (James) Stock Company, 90–91 Nelson, Keith, 224 Nerney, (Mary) May Childs on New Era epilogue, 133 New Haven campaign, 148 racist impact of film, 43 New African Movement, 244 New Era epilogue. See under Hampton New Era epilogue The New Governor (film), 42 New Haven, Connecticut, 8, 148–157 The New York Age newspaper, 19, 45 New York City protests, 175 Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia “An Answer to Birth of a Nation” exposition, 166–167 campaign against film, 162–165, 175 Emancipation celebrations, 195–196 film showings in, 164–167, 170 Norris, Frank McTeague and Greed, 69

O Obama, Barack becomes president, 2 fanatical opposition to, 271 hopes for harmony, 267, 270, 287 neo-secessionists and, 273, 274 no “erasing” the past, 262 racism against, 3 on small towns, 283 O’Connor, Flannery, 75 Ogden, Dr Dunbar, 183–184 Ohio, NAACP success in, 193–194

INDEX

Oliver, Lawrence J., 19 orientalism, 48 Orphans of the Storm (film), 93, 95

P Paquet-Deyris, Anne-Marie, 6 Paragon Pictures, 93 Parsons, Neil, 245 Pascoe, Peggy, 42 Pathé Studio, 80, 244 Perry, Rick, 273, 280 Petley, Julian, 256 Phagan, Mary, 177–178 “Phil Stoneman” (acted by Elmer Clifton), 276 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, campaign against film, 175 Pick, Daniel, 216 Pillsbury, A.E., 131 Pitt, J.J., 162 Plaatje, Sol T. against film screening, 237, 245 life and career of, 238–240 Native Life in South Africa, 240, 242 returns to S. Africa, 243 “A South African’s Homage”, 241 travels in US, 239, 242–243 uplift films, 242–243 “Playing in the Dark” (Morrison), 72 Poli, S.Z. “Home for Drama”, 151 Maurer’s letter and, 154–155 New Haven injunction, 146, 149, 152–154 Pope, Jeremy C. Culture War? (with Fiorina and Abrams), 281 Porter, Dr Isaac N., 151, 153, 157 Powell, Dilys, 259 Preller, Gustav, 247

305

Proctor, Revd Hugh Henry, 181–188

R racism. See also Ku Klux Klan; Lost Cause ideology; sexual anxiety and/or violence; white supremacy anti-racism, 101, 103 anti-Tom scenario, 64 anxiety about purity, 21–24 Atlanta Race Riot, 178–179 blood/skin identity, 42 Britain and, 216–218, 240, 255–256 Germans and Black people, 219 Griffith and, 36–37, 48 at heart of Civil War, 195 human/non-human, 28 imagery of, 66 “incompatibility”, 77–78 lawlessness in Atlanta, 177–180 mixed race and, 27–30 post-Reconstruction structures, 1 “return to Africa”, 104 segregation, 185 “separate but equal”, 2 structural, 150, 157 supposed savage nature, 199 triggered by film, 44–45 white fears and, 201 white riots over Jackson, 49 Reconstructing Patriarchy After the Great War (Kuhlman), 227 Republican Party/Tea Party, 280, 283–284, 286 restoration of contention, 100, 101 theory of history, 106, 111 Rettig, John The Fall of Babylon (with Kiralfy), 88 Rhenish Women’s League

306

INDEX

Coloured Frenchmen on the Rhine, 228 Rice, Frank J., 148, 152 Rice, Moses T., 151, 153, 157 Rice, Tim, 178 Ridley, John, 261 The Rise and Fall of Free Speech (Griffith), 260 Robespierre (Irving), 92–93 Robinson, Bill, 48 Robinson, Cedric J., 46–47, 99 Roddenberry, Seaborn A., 50 Rogin, Michael, 111 deleted castration scene, 106–107 Dixon’s views, 19 Griffith’s views and, 17, 19, 36–37, 72 on restoration of white community, 76 on Wilson and Klan, 73 Romine, Scott, 20, 27 Roof, Dylann Storm, 262 Rowlandson, Mary, 71 Ruiz-Velasco, Chris, 20, 21

S Sadoul, Georges, 224, 226 Saunders, Kyle “Is Polarization a Myth?” (with Abramowitz), 281–282 Savage, Kirk, 197 Saville, Victor, 211 Schickel, Richard, 38, 45, 233 Schieffelin, Dr., 169 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang The Culture of Defeat , 271 Schlesinger, Dr Isidore W., 248 De Voortrekkers and, 11, 237, 245–247 Schreiner, William P., 241 Schwalm, Leslie, 200

Scott, Ellen, 42 Scott, Sir Walter, 218 Senegalese soldiers in Germany, 225–226 sexual anxiety and/or violence, 21–24, 177. See also racism; women Black beauty queens, 200–201 “Black Horror” campaign, 10, 227, 229–231 blackface and white actresses, 38 Black rapist theme, 23, 111 British audiences, 210 forced marriage scene cut, 105 Gus and, 26–27 miscegenation, 201 Mitchel’s objections and, 104–105 Phagan case in Atlanta, 177–178 rape scene cut, 104–105 Shirley Temple and, 48–49 vulnerable women, 23 white revenge, 19–21, 27 Shaw, Harold De Voortrekkers , 238, 246, 247 Shaw, Stephanie J., 168 Shenandoah (Bronson) The Greater Shenandoah, 91–92 Shenandoah (Howard), 90–91 Shepherd, Father, 196 Sherman, William Tecumseh endorses The Greater Shenandoah, 92 Shubert, Jacob, 93 Shubert, Lee, 93 Shubert, Sam, 93 “Silas Lynch” (acted by George Siegmann) as emancipator, 201 endangers white women, 65 forces marriage, 275–276 hypersexual black man, 67 savage nature of, 199

INDEX

scenes cut, 155 Stoneman’s association with, 75 Simmons, William Joseph, 40, 178 Sims Act, 50 Singleton, John, 260 Sirk, Douglas Imitation of Life, 81 Skinner, Otis, 91 Skocpol, Theda The Tea Party (with Williamson), 284 Slade, Benjamin, 151, 153 Slaton, John, 177 slavery. See also emancipation; racism Calhoun doctrine and, 273 distorted history of, 124 echoes of, 287 at heart of Civil War, 195 historical distortion of, 99 legacy of, 286–287 the loyal slave myth, 196 memories of, 191–192 remembering, 196–197 reversal of, 25 Slide, Anthony, 17 Smith, Hoke, 179 Smith, Margaret Barrett Captain Herne, U.S.A., 89 Smith, Police Chief, 148, 154 Smuts, General Jan, 242 social class aim at middle class, 40 audiences, 40 judging the servants, 43 Solomon, Georgiana, 240 The Song of the South (film), 188 South Africa defends apartheid, 254 film banned in, 241 independence from Britain, 239 Natives’ Land Act, 239, 241 New African Movement, 244

307

Plaatje and “uplift” films, 243–245 portrayal of Zulus, 247–248 reception of film in, 10–11 screenings of film, 237 De Voortrekkers , 238, 245–248 South African Improvement Society, 238 South African Native National Congress (SANNC), 239, 241 “A South African’s Homage” (Plaatje), 241 South Carolina Nullification Crisis, 272 state flag of, 275, 280 “Southern Horrors” (Wells), 111–112 Spike, Lee Birth of a Nation as a lesson, 261–262 Stagecoach (film), 80 Staiger, Janet, 45 The Star of Ethiopia (Du Bois), 194–195 Steiner, Linda, 170 stereotypes Dixon reverses, 20 True Womanhood, 65–67 Sterne, Elaine Lincoln’s Dream, 123 Stern, Seymour on “Black Horror on the Rhine”, 226 cut castration scene, 106–107 describes Gus’s death, 110–111, 112–113 on racist fan letters, 43 reliability of, 106, 108 on uncut version, 104 Stevens, Thaddeus, 21, 30, 216 Stewart, Jacqueline, 38, 261 Stokes, Melvyn difficulties of protest, 176–177 disenfranchised Black Atlantans, 180

308

INDEX

history of the film, 161 Stone, M.L., 168 Storey, Moorfield, 45 Stowe, Harriet Beecher Griffith inverts, 81 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 64, 287 Strausbaugh, John, 38 Stroheim, Erich von in Greed, 69 Swords and Hearts (film), 94 The Symbol of Sacrifice (film), 248

T Tanenhaus, Sam, 280 Tanner, Henry O., 124 Taylor, Clyde, 37 The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservativism (Skocpol and Williamson), 284 Temple, Shirley, 48–49 Terry, Ellen, 92 theatre big spectacle scenes, 86–95 “Groupings Manager”, 88 pyrodramas, 88 “supers”/extras, 86–88 “These Colored United State” (Ferris), 151 They Died With Their Boots On (film), 80 Thomas, Gertrude, 200 Till, Emmett, 103 Tometi, Opal, 3 Toombs, Robert, 273 Tourneur, Maurice, 93 Trauma: A Social Theory (Alexander), 285 Trip to Tuskegee (film), 243 Trotter, William Monroe, 103, 122, 127 Trump, Donald J., 11, 269, 272, 278

Tulsa, Oklahoma, massacre, 179 Turim, Maureen, 276–277 Turner, John P., 133 Tuskegee University Hampton New Era epilogue, 168–169 New Era epilogue, 135 Plaatje and, 239, 243 response to film, 122 12 Years a Slave (film), 261 The Two Orphans (Corman and D’Ennery), 90, 93

U Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 64, 287 United States. See also African-Americans; Civil Rights movement; Lost Cause ideology; slavery anti-government ideology, 280 Calhoun’s ideology and, 272–273 Chicago judge overturns ban, 51–52 Civil War as mirror, 270 Dixon distorts Reconstruction, 18 effect of “Black Horror” in Germany, 227–229 Emancipation and Lincoln, 197–198 Jack Johnson’s career and, 48–49 Lee surrenders to Grant, 278–279 Nullification Crisis, 272 Plaatje’s visit to, 242–243 polarization of, 279–284 post-Civil War society, 1 Reconstruction as forced marriage, 275–276 ressentiment in South, 270–272 resurgence of Klan, 72–73 slavery and Civil War, 195 small communities, 282

INDEX

“Spirit of the South” melodrama, 274–279 “states’ rights” notion, 272 structural amnesia, 210 trauma of Civil War, 272, 285–287 unshakable dogma, 269–270 Up From Slavery (Washington), 121 Uplift Cinema (Field), 243 V Vallandigham, Clement, 273 Variety, on Griffith’s intentions, 50 Vernet, Marc, 65 Vignola, Robert C., 241 Virginia Union University, 165 De Voortrekkers (film) portrayal of Zulus, 247–248 Schlesinger and, 238, 246–247 W “Wade Cameron” (acted by George Berenger), 277 Walker, Terri J., 19 Walker, William, 47 Wallace, George, 270 Wallace, Michele Faith, 19–20, 35, 106 Walsh, David I., 126–127 Walsh, Raoul They Died With Their Boots On, 80 War (Griffith), 94 War Office Cinematograph Committee, 244 Warren, Robert Penn, 270 Washington, Booker T. accommodation philosophy, 166 argues for censorship, 132 Atlanta and, 181, 186 death of, 156 Fleischer’s proposal and, 125 in New Haven, 149–150, 154

309

Plaatje and, 239 response to film, 122, 123 Tuskegee and, 243 Up From Slavery, 121 Watson, Tom, 179 Webb, Judge James Henry, 149, 151, 152–154, 156 Wells, Ida B., 103 “Southern Horrors”, 111–112 Wells, Jake and Otto, 162–164 Westphal, Elizabeth, 238 Westphal, Ernst, 238 When the Blood Calls (film), 80 The Whip (film), 93 White, Hayden, 99 White nationalism. See also Ku Klux Klan; Lost Cause ideology; racism birthed by film, 99 definition of “American”, 52 Dixon’s patriarchal males, 23–24 fragmented whiteness, 21 riots over Johnson-Jeffries bout, 50 in S. Africa, 238 White, Walter, 180 Wigger, Iris, 226 Wiggins, William, 193 Willan, Brian, 238, 239 Willcox, William G., 169 Williams, Linda anti-Tom, 71 Dixon reverses stereotypes, 20 on life-saving Klan, 73 melodrama and moral reasoning, 64 on protective blackface, 38 Williamson, Vanessa The Tea Party (with Skocpol), 283–284 Willis, Frank B., 193 Wills, Garry “Back Door Secession”, 273–274 Wilmer, Dr C.B., 183–184 Wilson, Butler R., 127

310

INDEX

Wilson, Woodrow, 195 A History of the American People, 72, 276 resegregation under, 49 sees Klan as unifying, 76 Winning a Continent (film). See Der Voortrekkers (film) Within Our Gates (film), 170 women. See also sexual anxiety and/or violence Black, 72 bondage and rescue of, 68–72 Emancipation celebrations, 199 visuals of True Womanhood, 65–67 white community and, 72 Wood, Amy Louise, 46, 177, 183 Woodson, Carter G., 198 Woodward, James G., 180, 184 Work, Monroe N., 137 World War I

Black US servicemen, 231 British perspective and, 211–213, 216–218 France occupies Germany, 224–226, 232–233 Writing History, Writing Trauma (LaCapra), 284–285

Y Yacowar, Maurice, 38 The Yellow Man and the Girl (film).. See Broken Blossoms (film) Young Deer, James The Arrow of Defiance, 80 Young, P.B., 163

Z Zimmerman, George, 3, 260