D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  Little specific evidence is available on how what became known as the “Hampton Epilogue” came to be in the possession of the producers of Birth. Nicki Fleener observes that the relationship may have had its origins in a suggestion made by members of the National Board of Censorship to Hollis B. Frissell, principal of the Hampton Institute, that showing a more hopeful picture about black progress would help counter the impression left by Birth of a Nation. One of the Hampton trustees, William J. Schieffelin, also seems to have advocated the idea.85 The film appears to have been made by Hampton itself; it may already have been traveling around with a Hampton singing quartet in early 1915. Although it no longer exists, contemporary reports indicate that it lasted about five or six minutes and included both scenes of students of Hampton at work and statistics on black economic progress in the previous half-century. Clearly, Griffith and his colleagues jumped at the idea of trying to undermine African American protest over Birth by adding the epilogue. Frissell, by contrast, was attempting to weaken the film’s racism through more positive images of blacks and also to publicize the work of his school to the new mass audience created by Birth.86 One important by-product of the screening of the Hampton Epilogue was that it altered the trajectory of Birth: instead of concluding with the shot of blacks awaiting transport back to Africa (as Dixon and Griffith had originally planned), the film program now ended with a brief suggestion that the race problem would be solved as blacks made progress within American society. Whatever impact the showing of the epilogue had, however, was probably diminished by its brevity and the fact that it was not screened in many places. As a correspondent of Booker T. Washington observed, “the film people do not regularly show the Hampton picture, but only … when the spirit moves.”87

  On April 17, one week after Birth’s official première in Boston, May Childs Nerney confessed to an NAACP colleague that “I never believed myself that this thing could be shown in Abolition Boston. When I heard that it was to be shown there without any demonstration whatsoever against it, I lay down like Jack Johnson. I do not know whether I want to get up again or not.”88 Later that same day, a “demonstration” finally did occur in Boston. It was led, however, not by the NAACP but by William Monroe Trotter. Before the evening performance, Trotter and a group of blacks entered the lobby of the Tremont Theater and attempted to buy tickets. They were refused (though a white man was allowed to buy tickets). The theater management had been expecting trouble that evening—there were rumors of an African American plan to pack the house and perhaps destroy the film—and many plainclothes police were inside the theater with other uniformed police outside. When Trotter and his friends were ordered out of the lobby and refused to obey (protesting that they were being discriminated against), the police moved in, clearing the lobby with their clubs. Trotter, who had been struck by a policeman, and ten others were arrested. Inside the theater (where, despite security, some blacks had managed to gain admittance) there were occasional jeers. At the point when Flora was about to leap to her death to escape the pursuing Gus, one African American threw a well-aimed egg at the center of the screen. Shortly afterward, stink bombs were set off. After the performance ended at eleven, the audience went out into the streets where there were more arguments, fistfights, and arrests. “It was,” according to Trotter’s biographer, “the most ominous racial incident in Boston in anyone’s memory, probably the most ominous since the Civil War era.”89

  On the afternoon of the next day, Sunday April 18, a mass meeting took place at Faneuil Hall. While the great majority of those who attended were black, most speakers, including eighty-five-year-old veteran abolitionist Frank B. Sanborn who presided, were white. They included Michael J. Jordan of the United Irish League and Rolfe Cobleigh, assistant editor of The Congregationalist. But the audience saved its warmest applause for Trotter, one of three African Americans who spoke. Charged the previous evening with disturbing the peace and then released on bail, Trotter criticized Curley for refusing to ban the film.90 Then, encouraged by the decision of the state police to prevent The Birth of a Nation from being shown anywhere in Massachusetts on Sundays,91 the meeting endorsed a new strategy: to appeal to the state government to stop the film, effectively by-passing Curley and the city authorities. It was decided that all those present at the meeting should march to the State House on Monday morning to lobby Governor David I. Walsh in the hope that he would suppress the film. Walsh, a Democrat, facing a critical reelection campaign, probably saw the issue raised by Birth as a means of seducing the black voters of Massachusetts away from their traditional Republican allegiance. As early as April 14, he had met with Boston Police Commissioner Stephen O’Meara to see if there was any legal way of suppressing the film.92 Yet he had no desire to be seen as acting solely at the behest of militants led by Trotter. Instead, he consulted with William H. Lewis, once a black football star and sometime assistant attorney-general of the United States, and white lawyer Butler R. Wilson. Lewis had close links to Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee machine; Wilson was a member of the NAACP. Together with these moderates and a small number of their colleagues, Walsh worked out a way of defusing the situation. He would instruct the attorney-general of Massachusetts to prosecute the management of the Tremont Theater under a law of 1910 that banned performances that were “lewd, obscene, indecent, immoral or impure” or even merely suggestive of such things. He would also seek from the legislature a new state censorship law.93

  On Monday morning, a large crowd of up to 2,000 people marched along Beacon Street to the State House, where they saw Trotter and sixty of his closest supporters admitted to meet with the governor. Inside, Trotter and his group were presented with the deal Walsh had worked out with the moderates. Though this was effectively a fait accompli, Trotter was permitted to save face by announcing the governor’s plans to the waiting crowd. The crowd subsequently dispersed in an orderly fashion; so promising did these developments seem that a further demonstration at the theater was called off.94 Up to this point, the Boston campaign against the film seemed far more successful than that in New York. The black community had become increasingly involved and the protests more numerous and organized. “It is said,” Samuel Edward Courtney wrote to Booker T. Washington from Boston on April 19, “[that] not since Civil War times have such demonstrations been seen here in Boston.”95 In retrospect, however, April 19 marked the peak of the struggle against Birth. Afterward, it was mostly downhill. The hope of successful legal action proved chimerical. While Judge Thomas H. Dowd of the Municipal Court refused the request of lawyers for the Tremont Theater and Griffith that the case be delayed, in his judgement (delivered on April 21) he made it clear that the law of 1910 under which the suit had been brought did not apply to the arousal of racial prejudice but only to expressions of immorality. Dowd accordingly demanded that the scene in which Gus spies on Little Sister and then chases her be cut out, and the theater management announced that it would comply with this demand. As Richard Schickel points out, this was in itself an odd decision since Dowd, in focusing exclusively on Gus, ignored “the much more erotic forced marriage sequence.” Moreover, as Joseph Loud noted, though the actual chase sequence was eliminated, audiences were still free to draw the inference of rape. But with Dowd’s decision, the attempt to have the judicial system ban Birth in Boston ground to a halt.96

  Opponents of the film were now left with but a single option: to take up Governor Walsh’s suggestion of passing a new censorship law. On Tuesday, April 20, Representative Lewis J. Sullivan of Boston had filed a bill that would extend the provisions of the 1910 law to include a ban on “any show or entertainment which tends to excite racial or religious prejudice or tends to a breach of the public peace.” Supported by the governor and Lieutenant-Governor Grafton D. Cushing, hearings on the proposed new law were scheduled for the end of the same week. Black and pro-black groups launched a vigorous campaign to secure acceptance of the new law.97 Even during the first few days, however, it became clear that the
struggle over censorship would be complex and difficult. Representative Bates offered an alternative to the Sullivan bill that sought to tighten up the regulation of movies by transferring responsibility for it from the state police to the Massachusetts board of labor and industries.98 Several other bills would be proposed over the next few weeks, confusing the issue yet further.99 On principle, censorship was opposed by many newspapers as an undesirable restriction on freedom of expression. The Boston Herald conceded that the Sullivan bill had been framed “to secure an end [the banning of Birth of a Nation] for which just now there is much popular demand” but cautioned that its enactment would represent a major threat to “the freedom of the individual, of the theatre, and of the church and the press.” The Transcript pointed out that banning any show or entertainment that threatened the public peace would encourage violence since, if two men engaged in a fight in the lobby of a theater, the authorities might find themselves obliged to step in and stop the show concerned.100 Thomas Dixon, seeing the proposed bill as the work of “a few negro agitators,” attacked it in a letter to the Journal as a means of suppressing “two-thirds of all the serious drama at present running.”101

  While Dixon, Griffith, and their supporters in the press continued to protest at the threat to freedom represented by the potential new law, it seemed as if the current was running against them. The NAACP, applying itself seriously for the first time to Massachusetts politics, helped put together a bipartisan coalition: the censorship bill was supported by Governor Walsh (a Democrat) and the two leading contenders for the Republican gubernatorial nomination: Lieutenant-Governor Cushing and Samuel W. McCall.102 A steady drumbeat of meetings and protests emphasized the engagement of Boston’s black community with the attempt to ban The Birth of a Nation under a new censorship regime. Two mass meetings were held in churches on Sunday, April 25, one (addressed by Charles W. Eliot, former president of Harvard University) in Cambridge and the other predominantly of black women (but attended by Trotter) in Roxbury. The following day, April 26, a lively, largely black crowd of 500 attended the hearings on the new censorship bill.103

  At the end of the week, the joint committee on the judiciary of the Massachusetts legislature reported favorably on a revised version of the Sullivan bill. In essence, it proposed a new censorship board for Boston made up of the mayor, the chief justice of the Municipal Court, and the chief of police. Since there was no provision for any appeal against a decision by the board to revoke the license of an offending theater, this was unpopular both with theater managers and the Birth of a Nation forces (who would organize a special showing of the film to all members of the legislature on Monday, May 3).104 At the same time, it was unsatisfactory to the NAACP because it required unanimity among the censors. Over the next few days, the organization tried to have the bill amended to allow decisions by majority vote. As Joseph Loud pointed out, this would increase the chance of suppressing The Birth of a Nation since both the mayor and the chief of police had already asserted that “the film should be stopped if the law made it possible.” Although the NAACP did not abandon the strategy of public meetings—it organized a big one at Tremont Temple on Sunday, May 2—it threw most of its effort now into lobbying members of the legislature in support of its proposal for majority voting on the new board.105 Although the House rejected this on May 10 and the Senate on May 13, the Senate reversed itself on May 17 and the censorship bill signed into law by Governor Walsh on May 21 included the NAACP amendment.106 So far as Boston was concerned, The Birth of a Nation now seemed doomed.

  While the struggle to ban the film in Boston was taking place, its producers’ strategy of defending Birth of a Nation against critics by citing the prominent officeholders and other public figures who approved it effectively collapsed. Edward D. White, chief justice of the Supreme Court, led the way by threatening to denounce Birth if Dixon continued to claim that he had endorsed it.107 President Wilson was obviously embarrassed to be associated with it. When Margaret Blaine Damrosch, the wife of the conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra, wrote in late March to Wilson’s secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, to discover whether the president really did see “nothing objectionable” in the film, Wilson denied expressing any opinion over it. As the Boston fight developed, pressure on Wilson intensified. Former Massachusetts Democratic congressman Thomas C. Thacher wrote to Tumulty on April 17, enclosing reports of the hearing before Mayor Curley on April 7 at which the film’s producers claimed that Wilson had approved the film. Another correspondent sent Tumulty a press clipping describing the same meeting. Tumulty suggested that Wilson write “some sort of letter” indicating “that he did not approve of the ‘Birth of a Nation,’” and the president agreed in principle, though he did not wish to be seen as responding to pressure from the agitation against the film, especially since one of the agitators was “that unspeakable fellow [Trotter].” Finally, on April 28, Tumulty replied to Thacher (in words drafted by Wilson himself) acknowledging that Birth had been screened at the White House as “a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance,” but insisting that the president had been “entirely unaware of the character of the play” beforehand and had “at no time expressed his approbation of it.”108 In the last days of April, under pressure from the NAACP, other well-known figures cited by McCarthy and the film’s publicity machine as having approved it—philanthropist George Peabody, Washington senator Wesley L. Jones, and writer Walter P. Eaton—either qualified or distanced themselves from their earlier comments.109

  With the passage of the new censorship law, the campaign against Birth of a Nation in Boston now entered its final phase. On the same day that the governor signed the censorship bill, Trotter demanded that Curley and his new board act immediately to ban the film. Next day, the Boston NAACP petitioned the board for a hearing. This was clearly not to be a united struggle: Joseph Loud warned NAACP national secretary May Nerney that the “chief danger” was now “the possibly hasty and ill advised action of our friends but not associates—Trotter and his crowd.” Trotter, however, for the moment seemed relatively conciliatory: at a meeting on May 23, he tried to stop one of the black speakers attacking Curley, insisting that the mayor be given time to feel himself into his new job as a censor.110 Curley had so far shown himself willing to make encouraging noises about banning the film but had taken refuge behind the (debatable) insistence that as mayor he had no power to do so. Clearly, he was interested in including as many blacks as possible in his coalition of supporters. Yet he can hardly have been unaware that by the end of May, 100,000 or so white Bostonians had watched (and often expressed enthusiasm for) the movie and that African Americans still made up only a small percentage of the total population of the city. Most newspapers had favored the film (and attacked the idea of censorship). From his first involvement with the film, at the hearing on April 7, Curley had emphasized that his real concern with it related to matters of sexual morality. He had suggested the removal of the sequence in which Gus chased “Little Sister” even before this had been demanded by Judge Dowd.111 The mayor and the other two members of the censorship board went, at differing times, to see The Birth of a Nation. Then, on June 2, they held public hearings on the film. The case against it was put by two blacks, William L. Lewis and Butler R. Wilson, and one white, J. Mott Hallowell. Trotter was not permitted to appear. The case for the film was argued, as at the first hearing on April 7, by John F. Cusick. At the end of the hearing, the censors met together briefly and announced that they had decided not to revoke the license of the Tremont Theater.112

  With this announcement, the Boston struggle to suppress the film really ended. A small number of protests occurred—including one outside the Tremont Theater on the night of June 7 that resulted in eight arrests. But The Birth of a Nation itself, observed Steven R. Fox, was now “impregnable.” After changing theaters in September, it would continue its record-breaking Boston run until late October, when it finally closed after 360 performances.113 Locally, the NAACP criticized th
e “enormous capital” invested in the film, the lavish advertising in newspapers that had declined to become involved in the controversy, and the “extraordinary” police measures that had prevented demonstrations at the theater. It drew attention to the increased interest in “human rights” that had been generated by the campaign. Nationally, it insisted that the removal of the Gus chase sequence and the other cuts made had so mutilated the film that it had become “almost unintelligible.”114 Certainly, Bostonian whites and blacks had collaborated together in the fight against Birth in a way that had not happened since the era of the Civil War. The campaign against the film, however, had been weakened by personality conflicts. “The movement,” complained Albert E. Pillsbury (a nephew of abolitionist Parker Pillsbury), “has suffered severely from too much Trotter.”115 Most impressive of all, in retrospect, was the engagement of a considerable proportion of the African American population of Boston in the struggle. Whereas the campaign against Birth in New York had been conducted primarily by whites with comparatively little black support, the opposite was true in Boston.116 The willingness of black Bostonians to organize, lobby, attend mass meetings (at least eighteen of these were held), and sign petitions suggests that the Birth of a Nation controversy had a major impact locally in terms of the promotion of racial solidarity.