THE BIRTH OF A NATION

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 much talked about; more than it is actually seen in fact. 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 film. 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 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 venture outside the summation above. Certainly the film’s structure enables this somewhat simplistic evaluation. The first half is a surprisingly straightforward recounting of the Civil War and the way it tore friendships on both sides of the Mason-Dixie line. When the setting moves to the Reconstruction years, 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 is more to The Birth of a Nation than a racist movie made well. Roger Ebert, for instance, dug a little deeper when he included the film in his Great Movies list and found that the so-called radical Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) is indeed something of a villain but not, as Griffith thinks, for granting blacks equality but instead for his hypocrisy. Stoneman publicly supports interracial marriage until a black man asks him for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

            Most such talking points go overlooked, though. Modern scholars are missing a chance of truly understanding not only D.W. Griffith but the culture raised on the adventure tales of the Confederate Army.

            Those who watch The Birth of a Nation for the first time after all the scholarly preparation are likely to be surprised by two things. First, they will be shocked by how truly great a production it is. Words such as “innovative” and “landmark” do no justice to Griffith’s stunning vistas of the battlefields, striking shots of body heaps, and detailed recreation of the war years.

            Griffith had been building up for such an epic since at least 1908 but his ambitions were always cut short at Biograph Studios. 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 Biograph bosses for the excessive budget, Griffith realized he had grown too big for his britches there and took off.

            This proven a sound decision, at least in the short-term, allowing Griffith the opportunity to build his own production company. Luckily for Griffith, much of the Biograph stock company followed him, saving him the trouble of assembling a new crew. Of all Griffith’s followers, none clung more tightly to the man than Lillian Gish.

            The most notable consistency in Griffith’s Biograph days was his fascination with the Civil War, revisiting it more than any other setting. Not surprisingly this is where he returned for his first independent work. This time, however, it would be a take on the war as he saw it and as he thought it should be told.

            Here lies the second surprise. Just as The Birth of a Nation is a far more beautiful film than words could describe, Griffith’s attitudes on race, the aftermath of the war, and the ideology that drove the North are far worse than anything that has been said. It’s a full-fledged assault on blacks, their rights, and their integrity. His hostility toward white abolitionists, radicals, and carpetbaggers is also blunt.

            To be sure, Griffith’s early work could not be interpreted as anything other than sympathetic to the South. Union officers were shown as doing little more besides raiding towns, attacking the families of Confederate soldiers, and looting their homes. Still, there was little to prepare for such a volatile attack on what the Union stood for.

            Similarly, 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 useful in explaining Birth of a Nation. George (played by Wilfred Lucas in blackface) is seen as heroic 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 war. 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 Griffith’s exemplary black. His only purpose in life is his devotion to his white masters.

            One should note that Griffith’s early films are rife with didactic moralization and his disapproval for slaves who turn on their masters may be rooted in his religious upbringing. The last shot in The Birth of a Nation is that of a superimposed Christ overlooking the valley into which Biblical order has been restored. 

            Horrifying as it is, Griffith’s interpretation of the Civil War, its causes and effects should not be surprising. David Wark Griffith 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 Civil War was not uncommon. 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, South Carolina just before the outbreak of war as a sleepy harmonious valley is a materialization of the myth of the idyllic South that took on a life of its own in the minds of Griffith’s generation. Griffith was, after all, a personification of the recovering white Southerner. Although born after the war, Griffith easily absorbed his home’s approved narrative of the war if only because it was the only version available to him. To Griffith, like many other white Southerners, the Civil War was an act of Northern aggression. The South was only trying to preserve the sovereignty of individual states.

            Such a view is not unheard of among mainstream conservatives to this day and yet, Griffith showed, early in his career, showed a sophisticated understanding of the arts and culture beyond his rural 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 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 Civil War. It wasn’t until he left Biograph on December of 1913, however, that 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.

            Dixon’s novel was not subtle in its themes. Reconstruction was doomed to fail thanks to misguided Republicans because 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. At some profound level this material must have spoken to Griffith and in 1914 he began shooting his three hour epic.

            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.”

            Ironically, as fierce as Griffith’s attack was this time around, the early scenes of Birth of a Nation show an unprecedented sense of sympathy toward Northerners. Austin Stoneman is a fusty old troublemaker from Pennsylvania, but his sons maintain a strong friendship with the Cameron family in South Carolina and his daughter Elsie (Lillian Gish) is the betrothed of the Cameron family’s prized son Ben, who will take charge at the call of war and then become the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith thinks Stoneman’s policies destructive, but is honest enough to recognize that the war will tear the two families apart and both will suffer.

            Like Dixon, Griffith is charitable to Lincoln, reminding audiences of the president’s forgiveness of the South and commitment to rebuilding it. Griffith is not entirely wrong and 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 it eventually did. An unwillingness to do so was the leading cause of Andrew Johnson’s disastrous presidency.

            Sadly, Griffith’s willingness to play fair with the North is rooted in an uglier truth. 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 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 film’s bigotry is self-evident and it says a lot about Griffith that this became his passion project. Still, D.W. Griffith remains an enigmatic figure. Compassion for the downtrodden (the elderly and even, misguided 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 may have been an attempt at apology but it could just as easily be a product of Griffith’s complicated and sometimes contradictory ideology.

            Be that as it may, the depiction of black Americans in Birth of a Nation is of an ugliness seldom seen. Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), who follows Stoneman from the North with political ambitions for the South, is marked as a villain from the start simply for who he is, the product of the sin of miscegenation. His transformation into a demon is completed by his lust for Elsie and his dreams of building a “black empire” in Piedmont. Silas is the personification of Birth of a Nation and the novel it was based on; 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 blacks (most of them played by black actors) in the background get no better treatment, and are allowed no motivation besides looting, savagery, and wasting the pulpit. Gus (Walter Long), the freed slave with a love for the youngest Cameron daughter (Mae Marsh). Intent on marrying her, Gus encounters the girl during one of her walks in the forest and, when the frightened girl flees, pursues her atop a cliff from which she ultimately jumps. This was one of the power climaxes of the film, but the force 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.

            Ben is inspired to create the Klan as vindication for his sister’s death. The gang’s first target is Gus. Two scenes in the film expose Griffith’s anger and are the most difficult to watch. The lynching of Gus, not only because of the physical act but the celebratory nature of the scene and the epilogue set after the Klan has ridden the town of the scalawags and black militants. A title card read, “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) perfect world.

            As out of touch as Griffith was, he had to have known his pet project was bound to stir up trouble. 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 in 1915. Obviously, 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 met with local black leaders who wanted the film run out of the city, 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 not offensive 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.”

 The push was only a partial success, the NAACP convincing twelve city mayors 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 successful 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, 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, in 1913 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”.

President Woodrow Wilson, himself a white southerner and, in relation to his time, the nation’s most regressive leader in terms of racial justice, was said to have described the film as, “It is like writing history with lighting. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

There is some dispute as to the truth behind that quote, which could have just as easily come from Thomas Dixon as a publicity stunt. Nonetheless, the film includes a few inflammatory quotes from Wilson’s 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.”

Indeed, if philosophically Birth of a Nation was fifty years behind its time, Wilson was a throwback to the same era. Today, then, Birth of a Nation can be seen as a relic of the Wilson presidency. Tellingly, though, the Wilson administration had to publicly disdain the film when the heat from opposition became too intense.

Despite everything, 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.”

It’s hard to guess exactly what D.W. Griffith thought of the negative reaction. He could not have been too surprised even if the scale of the backlash took him off guard. He contested calls to ban the film and defended the film’s interpretation of the Reconstruction years. 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 a changing world. Griffith was, after all, a complicated man and fittingly 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.

The most astonishing aspect of Birth of a Nation is the most overlooked. While the principle black characters are mostly played by whites in blackface, a large number of black actors appear in the background. Regardless of the actor’s race, most of the black characters are degraded. Only two blacks are treated sympathetically; the Camerons's faithful maid and butler who refuse to leave the family’s side and scorn the liberated blacks of the North. Those roles could only have been played by white actors.