Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox. (Epoch/The Kobal Collection)
There were several reasons that Griffith and his publicists went to such lengths to convince audiences that they were watching “history.” First, it would help attract the wider, middle-class audience for motion pictures that Griffith hoped to reach. It was part of the same strategy that called for Birth to be shown in “first-class” theaters at the same prices as “live” productions. Second, it would legitimate the film for both spectators and critics. There was very little direct point in having the actors in the assassination scene reading the play that Lincoln was actually watching at the time of his murder—or in timing the assassination at just the right moment in the play26—since, as Birth was a silent film, audiences would never hear the lines spoken. But there was an indirect point: spectators informed by newspaper reviews of the accuracy with which the film had been made would have been more inclined to accept its historical authenticity. Third, if Birth of a Nation could be established as “history” through the re-creation of historical incidents in the first part, the credibility of the second part, largely based on Dixon’s extravagant fiction, would be greatly enhanced.
Rather than being a historical film, Birth of a Nation, as some of its shrewdest observers noted, was essentially a romance set against a historical back-cloth. “These historical scenes,” declared the Muncie Post “are all shown in a way that links history to romance.” “The story,” corroborated the Evansville Courier, “is one of romance and adventure linked to the most vital periods of American history.”27 Birth consequently echoed the very popular genre of live plays based on the Civil War. It even borrowed many of the conventions associated with such stage melodramas: the intersectional love affair, with its subjects initially separated by their regional loyalties but reconciled once the war was over, and the outcast motivated “simply by the desire to do evil.”28 According to Linda Williams, “what this film does is what melodrama does: it stages a recognition of virtue through the visible suffering of the endangered white woman.” It also offers a “uniquely American yoking of melodramatic form to a dialectic of racial pathos and antipathy.”29 Part of the second part of the film, indeed, echoed an even older cultural form: Gus’s chase of “Little Sister,” evoking the idea of the Beast in the Forest, is quite close to a fairy tale. Partly because of his Southern background and partly because of the criticisms made of himself and his film, Griffith could never accept that Birth of a Nation was primarily fiction. He had to insist it was true. In reality, however, his fiction was built on—and also helped nurture—a series of historical myths that had grown up around the Civil War and its after-effects: the myth of the “Lost Cause”; of a saintly, compassionate Abraham Lincoln; of a “Tragic era” of “Black Reconstruction”; and of the Ku Klux Klan as the chivalrous saviors of white civilization. Each of these myths deserves examination in its own right.
The “Lost Cause”
The Birth of a Nation, released in the semicentennial of the ending of the American Civil War, would become a major factor in the political struggle taking place over the control of American memory relating to the war itself. That struggle began almost as soon as the war ended. On April 9, 1865, the principal Southern military commander, Robert E. Lee, surrendered the main confederate army to Union commander Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. For four years, the North had prosecuted a war and had now achieved what in the twentieth century would be referred to as total victory. Or had it? In the years after the war, politicians, especially Southern politicians, began to blur the issues surrounding why the war had been fought and what its consequences had been. By the 1880s, former Confederate general—now Georgia senator—John B. Gordon was habitually introduced (and vociferously applauded) at political rallies as “the hero of Appomattox.”30 In the topsy-turvy world of the postwar South, it was beginning to seem as if the Confederates had won a battle in the place where they had actually surrendered.31 Symbolically, perhaps, they had. For the end of military conflict between North and South was followed by a political and cultural struggle that lasted for many decades. And if the North had won decisively on the battlefield, the South would emerge equally triumphant from this later conflict.
The main centerpiece of the second war was the attempt to control the public memory of the Civil War through what would come to be known as the myth of the “Lost Cause.”32 That myth, as Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows have pointed out, can be divided into two distinct parts. The first, the inner Lost Cause, was initially constructed by the Confederate generation that had fought and lost the Civil War. Led by men such as former president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis and southern military leaders, such as General Jubal Early, it published partisan memoirs and favorable accounts of the Confederacy, organized veterans’ associations, built monuments, turned Robert E. Lee into a romantic folk hero, and generally, in the words of David W. Blight, “sought justification for their cause and explanations for their defeat.”33 One explanation, of course, was that the Confederacy never had been defeated: it had simply been overwhelmed by the larger population and industrial capacity of the North. Later, the defense of the Confederacy was taken up by larger and more powerful organizations of Southern veterans and their supporters (the 1890s, for example, would see the emergence of the United Confederate Veterans, the magazine entitled Confederate Veteran, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy).34
The national Lost Cause emerged in the 1880s and ’90s, encouraged by mass-circulation magazines and their primarily Northern readership. It was for the most part a creation of Southern literature. Writers such as John Esten Cooke, William Alexander Carruthers, Mary Johnston, John Pendleton Kennedy, Sara Pryor and—above all—Thomas Nelson Page wrote at one remove from the experiences of the Civil War. For the most part, they ignored the subjects of the Confederacy and Southern defeat. Instead, they opted to create a nostalgic portrait of the antebellum South, the “Old South” of legend. In this artificially constructed world, dominated by the great plantations, romance and chivalry ruled. White society was gracious and cultivated. It was willingly served by black slaves who, as Bruce Chadwick notes, “were typically shown as helpful mammies, obliging butlers, smiling carriage-drivers, joyful cotton-pickers and tap-dancing entertainers.”35 Slavery in these stories was usually associated with “laughter, music, and contentment.”36 The “Old South” myth, rooted in an imaginative, stable preindustrial world, appealed to many Northerners in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as they became more and more conscious of the impact of urbanization, industrialization, labor unrest, and immigration on their own fast-changing society.
Northern readers, when they read about the “Old South,” were not being asked to sympathize with the Confederacy. All that was being requested of them, as David Blight remarks, was “to recognize the South’s place in national heritage and to enjoy sentimental journeys into a nostalgic past of happy race relations, often narrated in the dialect of a faithful slave.”37 But paralleling the increasing acceptance of a largely mythical view of the South’s antebellum past was the growing trend toward intersectional reconciliation, apparent in both the North and the South, during the 1880s and ’90s. The end of Reconstruction in 1877, when Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the South as the price of his accession to the presidency, established the political ground for this rapprochement, which can be traced in the increasing number of veterans’ reunions that brought former Union and Confederate soldiers together. The first tentative signs of such reconciliation came in 1875, when Confederate veterans marched in a commemorative parade in Boston. Massachusetts veterans accepted a similar offer to march in New Orleans in 1881. In 1882, the Grand Army of the Republic marched together with thousands of Confederate veterans in a commemorative parade. When Union commander (and former president) Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885, several Confederate generals acted as his pallbearers. One of them was Joseph E. Johns
ton, who also performed the same service for William T. Sherman in 1891, with sad consequences for Johnston himself: bare-headed on a bitterly cold day, he caught pneumonia and died shortly afterward.38 In 1888, there were intersectional celebrations for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. Another sign of intersectional reconciliation was the growing observance of Memorial Day, first officially introduced in 1868. By 1891, most states were celebrating it, honoring in the process both sides in the conflict. In the Spanish-American War of 1898 President William McKinley was careful to ensure that two of the four American commanders against the Spanish were ex-Confederates.39
The reunion of the sections by the end of the nineteenth century was based on a reinterpretation of the Civil War that celebrated the valor and sacrifice of the men on both sides (who were, of course, in this view invariably white). The war became a focus of mutual respect between Union and Confederate veterans in which its ideological attributes—particularly slavery, secession, and emancipation—were set aside and forgotten. If the white North and South were to be members of the same metaphorical family, neither could be blamed for the Civil War. Both had fought with equal heroism on behalf of their section. In historical terms, slavery was thoroughly sidelined as a basic cause of the war. Blacks were presented as happy and content under the benign system of slavery. African Americans, indeed, were the main victims of this rewriting of history and the wider sectional reconciliation it expressed. Instead of being regarded as actors in the drama of the struggle for their own freedom, they were largely ignored or, on screen, reduced to a passive stereotype—what Thomas Cripps refers to as the “loyal slave, the sacrificial goat in the ritual of the reunion of the sections.”40
The “Lost Cause” legend flourished against this background of sectional reconciliation. As Alan T. Nolan has observed, it incorporated many different elements. According to the “Lost Cause,” slavery was not the primary cause of the war; that dubious honor went to the actions of trouble-making abolitionists. Slaves were content with their status (although, rather paradoxically, the South would ultimately have given up slavery). Southern plantation society (which really meant white society) was marked by superior grace and gentility. It had descended from the Norman cavaliers who had once conquered the Anglo-Saxon tribes (predictably, perhaps, Northerners were seen as having “Anglo-Saxon” origins). In the end, Southerners were compelled to exercise their lawful right to secede from the Union to protect their liberty, independence, and states’ rights. Led by remarkable, saintly figures such as Robert E. Lee, Confederate soldiers had proved themselves gallant and heroic. Confronted with a North superior in both material and manpower, it was inevitable that the South would lose in the end, and after four years of courageous resistance, it was finally overwhelmed.41
By the first decade of the twentieth century, therefore, when feature films telling (however poorly) a story became the characteristic product of the American movie industry, there was already a culturally dominant view of the Civil War based on a rereading of the era that was deeply sympathetic to the South. However, since most of the early feature films produced by companies such as Biograph were made in the North for primarily Northern and Western audiences, when they began to deal with the Civil War as a theme, they did so at first from a Northern perspective. An exhibitor in Charleston, South Carolina, indeed, wrote to the Moving Picture World in 1910 in complaint: “Why do all civil war pictures have the Northern army come out ahead? … Everyone knows the South won some battles … and a picture [like that] would simply set ’em up down here.” The exhibitor had obviously not heard of the The Old Soldier’s Story, made by the Kalem Company in its new Florida studio and released in the previous year, when it had been hailed by the Moving Picture World as the “first [film] ever made that represents the Southern side.” Also in 1909, Kalem inaugurated its series devoted to the exploits of Nan, the Southern “girl spy,” and Biograph released Griffith’s In Old Kentucky, with Henry Walthall in the part of the Southern hero. Producers, indeed, quickly discovered that what Eileen Bowser calls “the more romantic, noble, and heroic ideals to be found in the defeated South” appealed to moviegoers in the North as well as in the South. In consequence, from 1911 onward, films reflecting the Southern point of view became twice as numerous as films with a Northern bias.42
The fact that Lost Cause ideas and assumptions began to disseminate themselves through film was of major importance in terms of their general impact on American popular culture. The Civil War movie, according to Bowser, was almost as popular as the Western or the Indian film at this time. According to copyright records (which may not present a complete picture), at least twelve Civil War pictures had been made in 1908, twenty-three in 1909, thirty-two in 1910, seventy-four in 1911, fifty-eight in 1912, ninety-eight in 1913, and twenty-nine in 1914. The peaks of production (1911 and 1913) probably had a good deal to do with moviemakers’ awareness of the major anniversary celebrations held in those years.43 Many of these early films were produced either by Thomas H. Ince, a Northern-born Civil War buff, or by D. W. Griffith. It was only natural, therefore, when he set out to adapt Thomas Dixon’s novel and play The Clansman into a film, that Griffith would extend Dixon’s story backward in chronological terms to include the Civil War years. And in The Clansman (soon to acquire the more grandiose title The Birth of a Nation), Griffith would give the Lost Cause myth probably its most popular and influential expression.
While The Birth of a Nation does cover many aspects of the Lost Cause myth, however, it does not cover them all. There is no character like Ashley Wilkes, in Gone With the Wind, to claim that the South would have freed its slaves if the Civil War had not freed them already. Eventually, the cultural/nationalist division between North and South becomes rather confused; in the second part of the film, an intertitle speaks of white Northern and Southern veterans coming together against African Americans “in common defense of their Ayran birthright” (shot 1287). Moreover, given the general atmosphere of sectional reconciliation by 1915, while the Confederate officer, Ben Cameron, is shown to be brave and gallant, so too is Phil Stoneman, his Union adversary. Equally, neither the Confederate nor the Union Army is shown unfavorably. In the one wartime action that might seem discreditable—the attack on private homes in Piedmont by Northern soldiers who seem eager only to loot, destroy, and burn (and possibly rape?)—it is emphasized that the men involved are not part of the proper Union Army. They are, in fact, variously described as either “an irregular force of guerillas [sic]” (shot 232) or a “negro militia” heavily influenced by a white “scalawag” captain (shot 249).
In four main areas, however, the film followed—and helped publicize—central tenets of the “Lost Cause” point of view. In the “Lost Cause” interpretation of the Civil War era, the war had been brought about primarily by abolitionists. The Birth of a Nation broadly followed this pathway. The intertitle introducing the first real scene of the film—a minister praying over manacled slaves about to be auctioned—observed that “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion” (shots 7–8).44 The second scene, also introduced by an intertitle, was of a meeting of nineteenth-century abolitionists demanding an end to slavery (shots 9–15). There is evidence that this short scene focusing on abolitionists was originally longer and more critical. At least two sections seem to have been cut from the version of the film that comes down to us: both underlined the insincerity of the abolitionists. One blamed the rise of the abolitionist movement on the hypocrisy of descendants of Northern slave traders who had “no further use of the slaves.”45 The other, already mentioned above, showed an old lady at the abolitionist meeting holding out her arms toward a black boy, but then recoiling from him because of the child’s bodily odor.46
The Birth of a Nation also endorsed “Lost Cause” notions concerning the superiority of Southern white society and the benign, even uncontroversial, nature of slavery. It is evident from their first appearance in the film that the
Camerons belong to the planter class. We see their white-painted house with columns. Clearly, they typify the Old South: an intertitle describes their home as a place “where life runs in a quaintly way that is to be no more.” They seem genteel (their daughter, Margaret, is introduced as “a daughter of the South, trained in the manners of the old school.”) Above all, perhaps, they are benevolent: Dr. Cameron, described as “the kindly master of Cameron Hall,” sits reading a newspaper surrounded by pets (shots 33–34, 41, 47–50). How could such a man, the film appears to suggest, be unkind to his slaves?
The main sequence involving slavery occurs when Phil Stoneman, and Ben, Margaret and Flora Cameron, and a small boy set off to visit the slave quarters. Black workers are shown picking cotton in the background, but the main emphasis of the film at this point is on the burgeoning romance between Phil and Margaret, and on Ben’s falling in love with a portrait of Elsie Stoneman carried by Phil (shots 78–96). This pastoral idyll is followed by a shot of the space in front of the slaves’ cabins (located geographically by means of an intertitle). The following title makes it plain that the visitors (who by now also include Tod Stoneman and Duke Cameron) have arrived at midday and that the slaves are well treated. It speaks of “the two-hour interval given for dinner, out of their working day from six till six.” While the title does not say how many days a week the slaves work, the general impression is that the allotted time for the main meal of the day is generous and that the working day is not excessively long. So little tired, indeed, are the slaves by their work that they put on an impromptu dance to entertain the Camerons and their guests. One reviewer later praised the film for showing “the fun and frolic of plantation days.”47 Finally, as the visitors begin to leave, two old slaves approach Ben: he shakes hands with one, and rests his other hand on the second man’s shoulder. As he leaves to follow the rest of the party, the two slaves nod approvingly in his direction. Clearly, the slaves are well treated by white “massa” (or his son) and respond with affection to such care (shots 100–106).48 Later, they will demonstrate in support of Ben Cameron’s regiment as it goes off to fight for the Confederacy (shots 200, 207, 209, 215). The enthusiasm of the whole Southern community, including slaves, for the war effort demonstrates an acceptance of the existing state of society, including slavery. Not only is slavery not a repressive system of labor, but it is far from being a major bone of contention between Northerners and Southerners: there is no sign during their visit to the slave quarters that Phil and Tod Stoneman, despite being the sons of a radical Northern politician, are in any meaningful sense offended by their exposure to the slave system.
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