THE BIRTH OF A NATION: 1915 193mins. Director: D.W. Griffith Cast: Lillian Gish (Elsie Stoneman), Mae Marsh (Flora Cameron), Henry B. Walthall (Col. Ben Cameron), Miriam Cooper (Margaret Cameron), Mary Alden (Lydia Brown)
The Birth of a
Nation
has by now entered a class of its own. After Leonard Maltin and the late Leslie
Halliwell, few critics bother rating it in the traditional sense. Systems such
as stars or letter grades are misguided measurements in this case. Instead, The
Birth of a Nation should be approached as a point of discussion, reflection,
and even as a window into the heart of a son of the Confederacy.
The film is talked about more
than it is seen. Here lies what prevents channeling the
troubling legacy of The Birth of a Nation
into a productive, if difficult, experience. Conversations of the film have
consequently fallen into a standard assessment going something like this: the
film is a landmark in the development of an art form. D.W. Griffith mastered the art
of cross-cutting for mounting tension, close-ups (first tackled in Griffith’s
1911 Biograph short The Lonedale Operator)
and epic storytelling, though one could argue that Giovanni Pastrone beat him
to that the year before with Cabiria.
All of this is tarnished, however, by the film’s unapologetically racist
depiction of Black Americans and hero worship of the Ku Klux Klan.
In his essay on the film for The A List, Dave Kehr took a different
angle, examining the film’s treatment of women against men (and a study of
Griffith’s complicated treatment of women in his films is long overdue) but few
historians or academics have ventured beyond the film's treatment of race and history. Certainly the
film’s structure enables this somewhat simplistic evaluation. The first half is
a relatively straightforward depiction of the outset of the Civil War and its devastating effect on families and friendships. In the second half, set during the Reconstruction, things get ugly.
The trouble with treating The Birth of a Nation simply as an
ethical conundrum, however, is that such a categorization has become so
standardized that few feel the need to explore the film and its implications
further. There are still more disturbing questions about human nature in The Birth of a
Nation besides the ethics of evaluating a breakthrough boasting about its own inhumanity. The film's innovations and the horror it advocates are obvious. What is not obvious are the probing questions for those who can safely stand apart from the sort of violent racism depicted in the film and yet cannot see their own human fallibility. One critic who dug a
little deeper was Roger Ebert when he included the film in his Great Movies list and found that
the so-called radical Republican from the North, Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) is in his own way as much villain to modern viewers though not in a way Griffith intended, namely, for granting blacks equality. Rather, Stoneman represents an early incarnation of the contemporary virtue-signaling hypocrite. He publicly supports and promises interracial marriage until his own associate asks him for his daughter’s hand in marriage.
Such penetrating examinations are seldom addressed, however. This misfortune is due in large part to the film's blunt, often didactic, preaching which cancels or at least pushes all other points aside. Griffith tells us what to think and we are the historically challenged dopes for not having been swayed by his revisionist narrative, as far as he is concerned. But what are the roots behind the beliefs of men like D.W. Griffith and why have they refused to die?
Horrifying as it is, Griffith’s interpretation of the Civil War, its causes and effects, should not be surprising. He was born in 1875 to Mary Perkins and Jacob Griffith, a colonel in the Confederate Army in Kentucky’s Oldham County, a small farming community where resentment from the War still lingered. Like many young boys of his hometown, Griffith was raised on tales of bravado and the tragic loss of the Old South. Indeed, the film’s depiction of Piedmont just before the outbreak of war as a sleepy harmonious valley is a materialization of the myth that took on a life of its own in the minds of Griffith and his generation of Southerners. Although born after the war, Griffith easily absorbed his homeland’s approved narrative of the war if only because it was the only version available to him, that of Northern aggression and the plight of the plantation owners. We are constantly reminded by the movie about the War resulting in the loss of state sovereignty.
Setting Griffith apart from his ilk was his artistic genius. Early on he showed a sophisticated understanding of the arts and culture beyond his upbringing. By 1907 he had made it to New York where his first failure came with a silver lining. A treatment he had written based on Puccini’s Tosca was rejected by Edwin S. Porter, then the head of Edison Pictures. Porter did, however, find a role for Griffith in his short Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest and less than six months later Griffith made his directorial debut for Biograph, The Adventures of Dollie.
From 1908 to 1913 Griffith made around four-hundred and fifty shorts for the Biograph Company ranging in style from a comedy (Those Awful Hats), to a Medieval fable (The Sealed Room) to cautionary tales (A Corner in Wheat and For His Son), to the first gangster movie (The Musketeers of Pig Alley). But he kept coming back to the love of his childhood, the Civil War.
Griffith had been building up for an epic since at least 1908 but his ambitions were always cut short at Biograph. To be sure, there were signs of his grand vision in such films as Swords and Hearts, but when he tried extending his reach with Judith of Bethulia and was lambasted by the studio bosses for the excessive budget, Griffith realized he had grown too big for his britches there and took off.
After leaving Biograph in December of 1913, Griffith bought the rights to The Clansman, a reactionary novel by Thomas Dixon Jr., for $10,000. Griffith followed associate Harry E. Aitken and brought the idea to Mutual Film Company. This partnership soon fizzled, however, when Mutual became alarmed at the proposed budget and Aitken’s relationship with the studio soured. Now Griffith was alone with his dream project; a story about his identity the way he felt it should be told.
Luckily for Griffith, much of the Biograph stock company followed him, saving him the trouble of assembling a new crew. Of all of Griffith’s followers, none clung more tightly to the man than Lillian Gish. With Birth of a Nation Gish established her fledgling career at 21 as Elsie, the reformer's daughter.
Those approaching The Birth of a Nation for the first time will be surprised how little the film's reputation prepares not only for the degree of its racism but the unapologetic manner with which it approaches it. Just
as The Birth of a Nation is a far
more beautiful film than technical talks about technique lead on, its attitude on race,
the aftermath of the war, and the ideology that drove the North are far worse
than anything imaginable without seeing the film. The film is an assault on the very idea of Blacks as equals, the evils of slavery and the brutality of the Klan.
To be sure, Griffith’s early work
could not be interpreted as anything other than sympathetic to the Lost Cause. Union
officers were often shown doing little more besides raiding towns, attacking the
families of the boys in gray and looting their homes. Still, there was
little to prepare for such a volatile attack on what the Union stood for.
There were hints, too, about his attitude on slavery earlier on. His treatment of an
elderly slave in his 1911 His Trust
and its sequel His Trust Fulfilled is
almost benign by comparison. Nonetheless, the two short films are more revealing than Griffith himself probably realized. In those films, George, an elderly enslaved man played by Wilfred Lucas in blackface, is depicted in virtue precisely because he
doesn’t contest his life as a slave but promises to look after his master’s
wife and daughter when he rides off to battle. When Colonel Frazier is killed,
George protects his family from marauding Yankees and gives up his humble shack
for them after the enemy burns their home to the ground. This is the model Black as defined by Griffith. His value is defined by his devotion to his White masters. Similarly, the only Blacks treated kindly in Birth of a Nation are the Cameron families slaves who grieve hardest of all for their master and devise his rescue when he is arrested by Yankees.
This is not to say that Dixon’s novel left much room for interpretation even had Griffith been so inclined. But it was the novel's very lack of subtlety, after all, that won Griffith's Southern heart in the first place. On an abstract, The Birth of a Nation is a visual transcript of its source's message: Reconstruction was doomed to fail thanks to conniving radicals who could not see that Blacks could never be integrated into society.
Civilization collapsed when former slaves were given the right to vote. From
these ashes the Ku Klux Klan arose just in time to restore order. This was the story, long uncontested for Griffith, that he had always wanted to tell.
Dave Lehr, author of The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary
Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War, observed, “Griffith
thought he was, in a way, reporting history about the Civil War and
Reconstruction, and it was widely accepted at the time, which has been completely
debunked since, that Reconstruction was a disaster ... and that former slaves
were some kind of lower form of life. That was the embedded, bigoted, racist
state of mind of the time.”
Curiously, and perhaps due to the extended runtime, in Birth of a Nation Griffith did elaborate his stance on Northerners and offered them a more sympathetic eye. Austin Stoneman is a fusty old troublemaker but
his sons maintain a friendship with the Cameron family of South Carolina. Ben, the oldest Cameron boy, will take charge at the call of war and later become a
founder of the Ku Klux Klan. There is no question that Griffith thinks Stoneman’s policies are to blame but still laments that it had to come to war for both families.
Like Dixon, Griffith was also charitable (if misguidedly so) to Lincoln, reminding audiences of the president’s forgiveness of the South and
commitment to rebuilding it. Had it not been
for the fateful night of April 14, 1865 (recreated in the film with commendable
detail), Lincoln may have reconciled the nation faster than would prove to be the case. This is not an unreasonable hypothesis as the unwillingness to lend the South a hand was the leading cause of Andrew Johnson’s disastrous
presidency.
Griffith conceding to
understand Northern sentiment, however, comes form a sinister place. As the second half of
the movie makes clear, despite what happened in the war, Whites from across the
country must unite against the newly freed slaves and their political friends. It is not
hard to surmise this much even before the climax which finds the Camerons, in
escaping a Black mob, taking refuge in the remote cabin of two former Union
soldiers.
“The former enemies of North and
South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright,” a title card
reads.
The Birth of a Nation sealed Griffith's reputation in more ways than he wishes and yet, looking at his body of work, he remains an enigmatic figure. Compassion for the downtrodden (the
elderly and even, misplaced as it was, toward Blacks) abounds in his early
work. In 1909 he directed The Red Man’s
View a look into the tragic plight of Native Americans in which the Whites
were the brutes. Intolerance, his
next feature after Birth of a Nation, often miscited as an attempt at apology is in fact more a product of
Griffith’s complicated and sometimes contradictory ideologies.
Be that as it may, there could not have been a coming back from his depiction of Blacks in Birth of a Nation. Take Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), the abolitionist who follows
Stoneman from the North with political ambitions for the South, who is marked as a
villain from the start simply for who he is, an offspring of
miscegenation. His transformation into a demon is completed by his lust for
Elsie (Gish) and his dreams of building a “Black empire” in Piedmont. Silas embodies the ugly core sentiment of Birth of a Nation; you can give a black man a suit and an education
but you can never take out the savage in him.
“He portrayed the emancipated slaves
as heathens, as unworthy of being free, as uncivilized, as primarily concerned
with passing laws so they could marry white women and prey on them,” Lehr said.
The Black extras (a lot of them played by Black actors) fare no better in Griffith's hands. They are allowed no
motivation besides looting, savagery, and wasting the pulpit. If Silas Lynch is Griffith and Dixon's political chagrin, Gus (Walter
Long), the freed slave with an eye for the youngest Cameron daughter (Mae
Marsh), is their nightmare. Gus encounters the girl during one of her walks
in the forest and the frightened girl flees. Love-struck, Gus pursues her atop a cliff
from which she jumps in terror. This was one of the power climaxes of the
film, but its impact is lessened by the implication. We are supposed to be
commending her suicide as the honorable alternative to letting a Black man put
his hands on her.
As vindication for his sister’s death Ben is inspired to create the Klan. The gang’s first target is Gus. Two
subsequent scenes expose Griffith’s anger and are the most difficult to watch. Gus is lynched and his body dumped on the doorstep of Silas Lynch as a warning. For that gruesome shot the violence and horror loses any abstraction it may have had and the film becomes an inadvertent reminder not only of the violence of the Klan but the celebratory nature with which it was sometimes received. In its own way, the epilogue set after the Klan has ridden the town of
the scalawags and Black militants is just as revolting. A title card reads, “The next election”.
Hopeful Black voters make their way to the polls only to find them barricaded
by an army of Klansmen on horseback. This is Griffith (and Dixon’s) idea of order and justice restored.
Griffith was out of touch but he
had to have known he had an explosive project in his hands. For the last
six years the NAACP had built a presence in various cities and a number of
presidents were starting to appoint Blacks to different positions following the
Great Migration.
Griffith’s caution is evident within the
film. The introduction to the second half informs audiences that while its
depictions were true to the Reconstruction years they are not meant as a
reflection of any race of the day. Not surprisingly, the NAACP didn’t see it that way and
launched a campaign to boycott the film in such cities as Boston and
Philadelphia. Boston Governor David Walsh would meet with local Black leaders who
wanted the film run out of town. The result was the Sullivan Bill, a tool
intended to facilitate the blockage of offensive material. The bill passed but The Birth of a Nation was deemed inoffensive in the category described by the bill.
In Chicago the push was but little more successful,
despite NAACP secretary Mary Childs Nerney’s passionate letter to the
organization’s executive committee, claiming, “I am utterly disgusted with the
situation in regard to The Birth of a
Nation. As you will read in the next number of the Crisis, we have fought
it at every possible point. In spite of the promise of the Mayor to cut out the
two objectionable scenes in the second part, which show a white girl committing
suicide to escape from a Negro pursuer, and a mulatto politician trying to
force marriage upon the daughter of his white benefactor, these two scenes still
form the motif of the really unimportant incidents, of which I enclose a list. When
we took the thing before the Police Magistrate he told us that he could do
nothing about it unless it lead to a breach of the peace. Some kind of
demonstration began in the Liberty Theatre Wednesday night but the colored
people took absolutely no part in it, and the only man arrested was a white
man. This, of course, is exactly what Littleton, counsel for the producer,
Griffith, held in the Magistrates' Court when we have our hearing and claimed
that it might lead to a breach of the peace.
Frankly, I do not think you can do one
single thing. It has been to me a most liberal education and I purposely am
through. The harm it is doing the colored people cannot be estimated. I hear
echoes of it wherever I go and have no doubt that this was in the mind of the
people who are producing it. Their profits here are something like $14,000 a
day and their expenses about $400. I have ceased to worry about it, and if I
seem disinterested, kindly remember that we have put six weeks of constant
effort of this thing and have gotten nowhere.”
In all, the NAACP successfully convinced the mayors of twelve cities to ban
the film, but did little to hinder the film’s popularity. It certainly had
little impact in New England where Louis B. Mayer, then just a theater chain owner, paid Griffith $25,000 for exclusive rights to distribute
the film in the area.
Griffith did have some supporters, then
and later. The Klan felt so invigorated by both the film and the conviction of
Leo Frank in 1913, which would become the basis for Oscar Micheaux’s now lost The Gunsaulus Mystery in 1921, one of
the many race films made in response to Birth
of a Nation, that it remerged after a forty year slumber. Forty
years later critic James Agee wrote in defense of Griffith attacking his
critics as being full of “vicious nonsense”. Woodrow Wilson, up to that point in time the most regressive president in terms of racial justice, upon viewing the film at the White House, was famously said to have described the experience as, “It
is like writing history with lighting. And my only regret is that it is all so
terribly true.”
Doubt has been thrown into Wilson's attribution to the quote, which can likely be traced back to Dixon as an idea for a publicity stunt. Nonetheless, the film implicates Wilson with some verifiable passages from his History of the American People
such as “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation…until
at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable
empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
Wilson's legacy has recently come into question for his backward views on race but it was a sign of the changing times that he had to distance himself from the film when the outrage could no longer be ignored.
Nevertheless, and maybe because of the notoriety it brewed , The Birth of a Nation was a tremendous financial success. As James
Monaco explained in How to Read a Film,
“Ironically, D.W. Griffith, the filmmaker who had done most to ensure the
success of Biograph, the most important of the trust components, was also the
first American, after his break with Biograph, to explore the potential of the
feature film form. The unprecedented success of The Birth of a Nation ensured the future of the new form. It also
set the pattern for the “blockbuster”, the film project in which huge sums of
money are invested in epic productions with the hope of even huger returns. The Birth of a Nation, costing an
unprecedented and, many believed, thoroughly foolhardy $110,000, eventually
returned $20 million and more. The actual figure is hard to calculate because
the film was distributed on a "states' rights" basis in which
licenses to show the film were sold outright. The actual cash generated by The Birth of a Nation may have been as
much as $50 million to $100 million, an almost inconceivable amount for such an
early film.”
Griffith could not have been too surprised at the blowback even if its scale caught him off guard. He contested calls to ban
the film and defended the film’s interpretation of Reconstruction. It
remains difficult, however, to judge just how much his later films like Broken Blossoms (one of cinema’s first
interracial love stories) are evidence of his coming to terms with the winds of change. He was, after all, a man stuck in a world that had long vanished. Fittingly, The Birth of a Nation, his magnum opus,
parallels his duality. The first half of the film is a grand cinematic
breakthrough of stunning vistas and riveting action. The latter half, the one
that really mattered to Griffith, is a disgrace.
