D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation
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Although the origin of the idea is unclear, sometime in spring 1915 Carl Laemmle’s Universal Film Manufacturing Company began to consider making a movie to contradict the unflattering stereotypes of blacks that had apparently reached an apogee with Birth. Two days after Griffith’s film opened in New York, Laemmle and much of his staff boarded a train at Grand Central Station to begin the long journey that would move the company’s headquarters from New York to its new studio at Universal City in the San Fernando Valley, California. As Richard Koszarski notes, Laemmle may or may not have seen The Birth of a Nation before he left, but he could hardly have missed the reviews “which suggested a revolution in motion-picture content and style.”189 While Universal was still committed to producing the short films on which its prosperity was based, Laemmle, shrewd showman that he was, may well have speculated about producing a film that would simultaneously challenge Birth and profit from the publicity that was beginning to surround its exhibition. By mid-April, Rose Janowitz, head of Universal’s Educational Department, and writer Elaine Sterne were working on a scenario dealing with the same themes as Birth of a Nation (slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction) but aiming to “show the important and often heroic part that the Negro played during these difficult times.”190
Universal may have been “cash-poor” at this time because of acquiring the large amount of real estate making up Universal City, and to produce a film to rival Birth was so far outside the studio’s experience that Laemmle seems to have decided to approach the NAACP in search of financial angels. May Nerney reported that Universal was proposing to make a four-reel picture which, she commented, would “probably be lost in obscurity.” If, however, the NAACP could raise $50,000, the studio would undertake to raise a further $150,000 and make a picture on a scale similar to that of The Birth of a Nation. It also offered to publicize the NAACP in the film.191 The Universal offer created a major dilemma for the NAACP leadership. They could see the advantages of such an imaginative riposte to Griffith’s film and also of the publicity it would create for their own organization. On the other hand, they were aware that the NAACP did not have the resources to finance such a project and were doubtful of the propriety of recommending it to others as a speculative investment venture. May Nerney, in particular, had a clear-eyed view of the motivation of the studio people. They were, she wrote, “hard-headed business men” who “care only for money and have no sentiment about the race question.” The NAACP also worried that it was perhaps being too naive in its relations with Universal. “It has occurred to us,” Nerney declared, “that in asking us to raise $50,000 this moving picture company may intend to use that sum and advance nothing themselves. Dramatic people are proverbially unreliable in matters of this kind.”192
Whatever the suspicions of the NAACP leadership, they seem to have recognized that this was an opportunity that was simply too good to ignore. “No one knows better than yourself the effect of this play [The Birth of a Nation] on the public,” Nerney wrote to Frederic C. Howe, former chairman of the National Board of Censorship. “If it goes unchallenged it will take years to overcome the harm it is doing. The entire country will acquiesce in the Southern program of segregation, disfranchisement and lynching. If we do challenge it it must be done in some telling way, that is, by a spectacular photo-play.”193 Nerney wrote to Howe after weeks of negotiation with Universal Pictures, who revised their proposition several times. Their final proposal (a scaled-down version of the first) was that if the NAACP could raise $10,000, the studio would agree to commit sufficient resources “to insure the production of a twelve-reel film on a scale as large as ‘The Birth of a Nation.’” Universal also clarified what it was prepared to offer in terms of publicity: it would permit the NAACP to assist in writing the intertitles, which would include a reference to the organization as approving the film, together with “a brief statement of the program of the Association” and the names of some of its most prominent members, such as social worker and progressive reformer Jane Addams.194 Most seductive of all, from the point of view of the NAACP, the studio (or at least Jane Janowitz and Elaine Sterne) gave the leadership of the association the impression that they would have an active role in shaping the scenario for the film and, consequently, the nature of the film itself.
In late April, Janowitz and Sterne attended a meeting in Nerney’s office at which a number of suggestions were made for improving the draft scenario that Sterne had prepared. Among other things, the proposed changes related to an African scene, a slave ship, a slave auction, cotton picking, Frederick Douglass, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the possibility of footage from black educational institutions such as Hampton and Tuskegee. Nerney also provided Sterne, as she had requested, with the address of John R. Lynch, who had written an eye-witness account of Reconstruction from a black perspective.195 A little more than two weeks later, the NAACP Board of Directors voted to establish a small committee to hear the scenario and recommend whether the association should collaborate further with the project. This “Scenario Committee” consisted of Mary White Ovington, then a vice-president of the NAACP; William English Walling, one of the directors; and playwright John G. Under-hill (who replaced the original choice, Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois, when Du Bois refused to serve).196 It met on the evening of May 14 and approved the scenario. This was not the end of the story, however. When Nerney reported the decision of the committee to Joseph P. Loud, requesting his assistance in identifying potential investors, Loud advised them to submit the scenario also to a committee in Boston “before we can interest people financially in it.” Sterne, who had already made numerous changes to her scenario at the request of the NAACP, must have been dismayed by the thought of further revisions. Nevertheless, she agreed to travel to Boston to read the scenario to “a small group of people,” though she requested that Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard be present at the meeting to give his advice on historical facts and interpretations.197
Despite’s Sterne’s efforts to please the NAACP, she became increasingly frustrated at the inability of the NAACP to raise money—or identify any convincing sources of money—for the project. Some NAACP leaders were opposed to the idea from the beginning. Charles E. Bentley of Chicago expressed himself “doubtful as to its being a paying investment.” Even among those who supported the scheme, there was sometimes little sense of urgency. “I fear it will be very difficult to get anyone interested financially just at this crisis,” Mary Hallowell Loud wrote on May 19, twelve days after the sinking of the Lusitania provoked a crisis in German-American relations and anxieties over possible American involvement in the war. “I think myself it would be better to wait until we see how things are going in our foreign relations—and wait a year or so before putting a ‘rival’ [to Birth of a Nation] on the stage.” National secretary May Nerney sharply disagreed. “It must be pushed through immediately or dropped,” she declared on May 17. Very conscious that a good deal of the publicity from the NAACP fight against Birth had actually helped the movie, she believed that the best chance of countering it was to produce an opposing film immediately “so as to get the full benefit of all this publicity and strife.”198 But even Nerney, despite her enthusiasm for the project, was aware that Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee machine had a far better existing network of philanthropic supporters than the NAACP. “I suppose,” she remarked, “[Sears, Roebuck president Julius] Rosenwald would be hopeless because of the B.T.W. influence.” Moreover, Nerney did not want to approach people who would put money into the film project rather than contribute to the NAACP itself. “My idea,” she wrote, “would be to interest people who have not contributed much to us and would never be interested except in a venture of this kind.”199
By mid-June, however, the NAACP’s “Scenario Committee” had failed to persuade anyone to invest in the proposed film.200 Feeling she had no alternative in the circumstances, Sterne now adopted a two-track strategy: while she took care to maintain good relations with Nerney (who was s
tarting to refer to her as “my friend”), she also opened negotiations through Rose Janowitz and Booker T. Washington’s secretary, Emmett J. Scott, with the Tuskegeeans.201 Washington and Scott in turn made overtures to producer-director Thomas H. Ince, to see if he would be interested in a filmed response to Birth of a Nation. Once Ince declined (he was already at work on his pacifist epic, Civilization, and in July 1915 joined Griffith and Mack Sennett in the Harry Aitken-designed Triangle distribution company), the Tuskegeeans turned back to Universal. In late September, Harry C. Oppenheimer, acting as their agent, had a meeting with Joe Brandt, general manager of Universal. When Brandt informed him that Sterne’s script had “been accepted in a more or less indefinite manner” and was currently “undergoing certain changes before being produced,” Oppenheimer argued that the crucial thing to Tuskegee was countering Griffith’s depiction of the Reconstruction period, either by demonstrating that whites were as much responsible for the “Scally Wag” legislation of the time as blacks or by “showing the activities at the present time, of some of the Colored Race.” He finally reached a tentative deal with Brandt: the Sterne scenario would now be submitted to Washington and Scott for their approval and assuming that approval was forthcoming, the scenario would be remodeled to include scenes of the Tuskegee Institute. (At the same time, Oppenheimer muddied the waters by suggesting to Brandt that since the Sterne picture was not yet in production, Universal might instead like to consider making a movie based on Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery.)202
In the early fall of 1915, the NAACP and the Tuskegee Machine—neither apparently aware of the other’s role—were both involved in the effort to bring Sterne’s scenario, now known as Lincoln’s Dream, to the screen.203 The NAACP Scenario Committee continued to report on its attempts to persuade the studio to put the film into production. Its chair, Mary White Ovington, became concerned at rumors that Universal was cutting “parts favorable to the Negro” from the now much-revised scenario as a consequence of “the prejudice of the Southern members” of the company. Yet by this point, there was little the NAACP could do. They had failed to persuade anyone to invest in the film, and finally, with no outside funding in prospect, Universal shelved the whole project.204 The NAACP appears to have accepted this decision; Tuskegee, however, continued trying to fight film with film. Emmett Scott wrote to Edwin L. Barker of the Chicago-based Advance Motion Picture Company reviving the idea of a filmed version of Washington’s Up from Slavery. As well as the rights to the autobiography, Scott offered both the support of the National Negro Business League and his own services as screenwriter-consultant to ensure that the proposed film would embody “that indefatigable something which I shall call the colored man’s viewpoint.”205 Unfortunately for the proposed film, Washington died in November 1915, and although Scott persisted with his efforts, the film that was eventually released three years later under the title The Birth of a Race could not realistically be seen as any kind of answer to Griffith’s movie. The original notion of a film celebrating black progress had been jettisoned (along with Scott) in favor of a mishmash that apparently included (most of the film was later lost) scenes of the Jews fleeing from Ancient Egypt, the preaching of Jesus, Columbus’s discovery of the New World, Paul Revere’s ride, the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787, Lincoln freeing the slaves, modern armies marching, and a German-American family battling with its divided loyalties during World War I.206
The fate of Lincoln’s Dream and The Birth of a Race underscored the problematic nature of trying to make favorable films about blacks within a system of movie production that was dominated by whites.207 Years earlier, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois had written of the difficulties facing the black man confronting “a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” It was, Du Bois insisted, “a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”208 Du Bois had been writing in general terms of American culture, but his words applied with particular aptness to cinema. Very few blacks had so far tried, like Will Foster or Hunter C. Haynes, to challenge the dominance of the condescending and derogatory depictions of African Americans offered by white moviemakers.209 It may have been Du Bois’s own consciousness of just how hard it would be to escape the manner in which the hegemonic white cinematic culture constructed blackness that prompted him to turn down membership on the NAACP Scenario Committee. Writing to whites Joel Spingarn and May Nerney, however, he diplomatically preferred to explain that he was mainly “interested in a pageant of Negro history and some plays of my own and in moving pictures based upon them.”210
Although the plays and films did not materialize, Du Bois was responsible for producing a pageant, The Star of Ethiopia, that offered a broader, alternative view of African American history to the one offered in The Birth of a Nation. Originally written in 1911, the pageant had already been seen by 30,000 spectators in 1913 as part of New York’s commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. To Du Bois, who had grown increasingly doubtful of the value of political protest in connection with Birth, The Star of Ethiopia was essentially a cultural weapon. It advanced an alternative historical and aesthetic tradition emphasizing the roots of American blacks in an African civilization that—at least until the initial contacts with whites—had been as “advanced morally and intellectually” as most Europeans. Du Bois’s much-expanded pageant was performed with considerable success to large audiences in Washington, D.C., in October 1915 and Philadelphia in May 1916.211
Assessing the Fight
At the beginning of January 1916, May Nerney summarized the efforts of the NAACP’s New York headquarters in the campaign against The Birth of a Nation:
in addition to its sixty-three branches and locals, to which several hundred letters were sent, the Association reached twenty-four towns and sent out over 200 individual letters and 12,000 pieces of literature. A conservative estimate of the time the National Office devoted to the fight against this play is at least two months. This included work with the National Board of Censorship, the effort to influence individual members of the Board, an attempt to persuade film corporations to boycott the play, hearings in the Police Court and before the Mayor, time consumed in bringing legal proceedings, securing witnesses, and in our effort to have a scenario produced in reply.
The fight had been carried on in spite of continuous political battles taking place among the organization’s directors (Spingarn and Villard had submitted their resignations in December 1915 after losing a power struggle with Du Bois, though both were subsequently persuaded to reconsider; Nerney surprised everybody by resigning as secretary a few weeks later).212 It had been waged in the face of widespread indifference on the part of some blacks (especially in New York) who could not see what all the fuss was about and deep-seated opposition to censorship on the part of many white liberals, both in New York and across the country.
All the statistics of letters written and literature distributed, indeed, could not disguise an uncomfortable fact: the NAACP’s campaign against The Birth of a Nation had essentially failed. Beginning as an attempt to have the film suppressed, it had rapidly evolved into a damage-limitation exercise focusing on having the most controversial scenes cut. Only in Ohio and Kansas 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. Mayors and censorship boards were on firmer ground when it came to ordering cuts; scenes that were favorite candidates for censorship included the so-called “smell” incident when a female abolitionist recoils in disgust from an African American boy, the scene between Stoneman and Lydia after she has torn her clothing, the brutality of the guerrilla attack on Piedmont, the unflattering shots of the black-dominated South
Carolina legislature, Gus’s pursuit of Flora, the struggle between Lynch and Elsie Stoneman, and scenes of black men grabbing white women before the arrival of the Klan.213 Most cuts were made, however, in a way that did not destroy the narrative trajectory of the film: Boston was exceptional, for example, in requiring the complete elimination of the Gus chase sequence.214 From the NAACP’s point of view, the record of delayed showings and cut scenes did little to justify the time and effort involved in fighting the film. If anything, some leaders of the NAACP came to wonder whether their campaign had actually contributed to Birth’s success: Du Bois himself noted that the struggle had “probably succeeded in advertising it even beyond its admittedly notable merits.”215 Corroboration that controversy was widely regarded as being good for the film’s prospects came from exhibitors in Oakland, California (who paid one group of blacks to create publicity by boycotting it), and a trade journal, the Motion Picture News, which blamed the low box office in Seattle, Washington, on the absence of protest there.216
The campaign launched by the NAACP against Birth may actually have helped the film become a success. Many must have gone to see the film because of the controversy surrounding it or because they were curious to see what had incited the protests against it. Conversely, argues Jane Gaines, the NAACP focus on Birth of a Nation came “at the expense of focus on films produced by African Americans themselves.”217 But the NAACP benefited from the campaign as well. When the fight began, it was a small organization, not very well known and highly dependent on the initiative of its uneven network of local branches. The campaign against Birth of a Nation gave it much-needed publicity: as one member wrote, it would “help to place the name of the Association before a great many persons who did not know that there is such an organization at work for the good of the race.”218 The struggle also encouraged the NAACP to think in national rather than local terms. Moreover, despite the personal disputes and rivalries that often characterized it, to outsiders the NAACP appeared united and with a clear identity: it was the one organization that consistently attacked Griffith’s movie. Even those who were not members found themselves looking to it for advice and leadership.219 The fight against Birth helped the NAACP to double in size. At the beginning of 1915, it had a total membership of 5,000. By early May, this had grown to over 7,000; almost 700 new members joined in April alone, probably as a result of the organization’s greatly increased visibility resulting from its battles against Birth in New York and Boston. In early November, membership was 8,500 and by December, it had reached “nearly 10,000.”220 Thomas Cripps sees a major transformation taking place in the African American community during the early twentieth century: “leadership passed from that of Booker T. Washington’s sort of rural self-help to an urban activism.”221 Two events of 1915—Washington’s death (in November) and the NAACP’s fight against Griffith’s film—marked crucial tipping points in this change.