The Klan attacks the black militia in Piedmont. (Epoch/The Kobal Collection)
Unlikely, moreover, as the pitched battles between the Klan and the black militia shown in the film appear, they came close to happening on several occasions in Reconstruction-era South Carolina. The state legislature in 1869 passed a law permitting the organization of a militia and radical governor Robert K. Scott, to prevent his Republican regime from being defeated by white force and intimidation during the elections of 1870, organized and armed fourteen regiments of black militiamen. Although most violence and intimidation continued to come from anti-radical whites, including Klansmen, armed black militiamen drilled, moved in groups around towns, and may in some places have pushed white people out of their way. There were a number of incidents, including the so-called “Laurens riot” on the day after the 1870 election. Armed blacks confronted around 2,500 whites, mainly Klansmen, in the town of Laurens. The blacks were finally disarmed by the sheriff and a white posse of around a hundred men, though only after several of the militiamen had been killed.129 In Unionville, where black militia shot and killed a one-armed Confederate veteran, the Klan mounted two successive raids on the town jail to seize and execute the men thought responsible.130 Moreover, in an incident that could have provoked a violent confrontation, the Klan in Yorkville attempted to fight incendiarism by issuing a proclamation that it would execute ten leading blacks if there were any further arson attacks. With black militia patrolling the town, there were more fires on the night of January 25, 1871. Many armed Klansmen arrived in the town and conflict was averted only when the black militia withdrew from the streets.131 In each of these cases, as in The Birth of a Nation, Klansmen were summoned by courier from neighboring counties.132 In each case, however, the black militia, when confronted with the possibility of the kind of armed conflict shown in the film, preferred to back down instead of continuing the kind of organized resistance shown in Birth. Finally, the sequence (later removed) in the earliest versions of The Birth of a Nation titled “Lincoln’s Solution” and showing blacks ready to be sent back to Africa had a small basis in fact. Led by Elias Hill, a crippled black minister who had been harassed by the Klan, 136 blacks left South Carolina in 1872 to settle in Liberia.133
The Debate over “History”
To many of those who saw it in 1915, The Birth of a Nation was quite simply a history lesson. “The great historical value of this picture,” commented the Baltimore Sun, “is shown by the large number of school classes that have been attending the performances in a body.” Children, C. F. Zittel of the Evening Journal insisted, “must be sent to see this masterpiece. Any parent who neglects this advice is committing an educational offense, for no film has ever produced more educational points than Griffith’s latest achievement.” Dorothy Dix was just as certain of the film’s merits, regarding it as “history vitalized.” “Go and see it,” she urged her readers, “for it will make a better American of you.”134 Some of the film’s supporters in its struggle against censorship insisted on the accuracy of its representation of the past. The Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, a leading New York clergyman and progressive reformer, commented that it was “exactly true to history.” “A boy can learn more true history and get more of the atmosphere of the period,” Parkhurst added, “by sitting down for three hours before the film which Mr. Griffith has produced with such artistic skill than by weeks or months of study in the classroom.”135 Griffith, confident in the reconstructions of actual events he had included in the film as well as the numerous references to historical works in the credits, had offered $10,000 if anyone could point to some incident in the film that was not true.
As previously shown, there were, in reality, many historical errors in The Birth of a Nation. The intertitle (shot 232) asserting that “The first Negro regiments of the war were raised in South Carolina” was wrong.136 Other scenes created false impressions. As Robert Lang points out, the shot of a minister praying over manacled slaves and the preceding title (“The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion” [shots 7–8]) suggests that “an America without Africans was a harmonious Eden.” In reality, the first blacks arrived in America soon after the earliest white settlers.137 Dr. Cameron, who had not served the Confederacy directly, would almost certainly not have been prevented from voting in the South Carolina election of 1868. There was no period of corrupt black rule or black terror in South Carolina or anywhere else.138 The Klan, which was formally disbanded in 1869 and practically dead by 1871, played no role in the final overthrow of the radical regime in South Carolina. The character of Austin Stoneman was really a caricature of Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican politician from Pennsylvania.139 As already noted, Stoneman—like the real Stevens—had a club foot and a mulatto housekeeper called Lydia.140 The Birth of a Nation faithfully reproduced Thomas Dixon’s almost obsessive dislike of Stevens.141 It maintained, wrongly, that Stevens’s harsh attitude toward the defeated South was simply a product of his sexual infatuation with Lydia (“The great leader’s weakness that is to blight a nation,” shots 133–34). There are many other distortions. John Hope Franklin points out that the real Stevens “never went to South Carolina and had, indeed, died [in 1868] … several years before the high drama of South Carolina Reconstruction actually began.”142 In suggesting, moreover, that Stoneman favored full equality for blacks until Lynch expressed the wish to marry his daughter (the real Stevens had no children), and consequently that his racial beliefs were insincere, Birth was deeply unfair to Stevens who insisted on being buried in a cemetery that did not discriminate against colored occupants and left the bulk of his estate to endow an orphanage open to the children of all races.143
Such instances of bias could be multiplied almost indefinitely. The Birth of a Nation was not an objective presentation of history. Even those who praised the film as spectacular entertainment often conceded this. “Nothing on record has ever been produced in history, novel or play,” declared one reviewer, “that could begin to tell the South’s side of the Civil War so clearly as this photo-drama.”144 Griffith, in an explanatory “talkie” issued with the new synchronized version of Birth in 1930, admitted “that the film is a little one-sided in its approach to historical truth.”145 Birth, of course, was more than “a little one-sided.” In its account of the Civil War and Reconstruction period, it was thoroughly biased in favor of the South. The problem for critics of the film who recognized this was that most of the academic and popular history of the day could be seen to endorse the “history” recounted in the film. The perception of slavery as a benign institution was supported in the contemporary work of Ulrich B. Phillips.146 Presenting Reconstruction as a tragic mistake—with Southern blacks and Northern “radical” politicians as the villains of the piece—was at the core of the dominant “Dunningite” school of history. But whereas Dunningite history reached only a comparatively small audience, The Birth of a Nation disseminated critical views of Reconstruction to a popular audience made up of millions of Americans. In an essay published as late as 1979, black scholar John Hope Franklin assessed its influence “on the current view of Reconstruction” as “greater than any other single force.”147
A counter-tradition to the Dunningites had started to emerge and could be traced back to the work of Tourgée in the late 1870s. In 1910, W. E. B. Du Bois published an article defending Reconstruction in the prestigious American Historical Review.148 Three years later, black former U.S. senator John R. Lynch published a book emphasizing Reconstruction’s achievements.149 But these were only the very beginnings of the attempt to revise the “Dunningite” view of history, a revisionism that would become truly successful only from the 1950s and 1960s onward. If one thing more than any other underscored the fact that Griffith could afford to ignore contemporary critics of his film about Reconstruction, it was the fact that he was able—with almost no protest—to appropriate Lynch’s name for Birth’s principal villain.150
The Appeal of B
irth to Contemporary Audiences
One crucial reason for the appeal of Griffith’s film to audiences of 1915 was that it raised issues and took positions that were of relevance to such audiences. While allegedly a film about the past, The Birth of a Nation spoke to contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. At an early screening in New York of The Clansman, Thomas W. Dixon, author of the melodramatic novels and play on which the second part of the film was based, was allegedly so impressed by the audience’s enthusiasm for the film that he proposed changing the title to something more in keeping with what he perceived to be the film’s significance: The Birth of a Nation. The story is appealing but, as film scholars have demonstrated, probably apochrypal. The new name had already appeared in the film’s pre-release publicity as a secondary or alternative title.151 As it happened, The Birth of a Nation did prove an excellent title, though for reasons largely irrelevant to Dixon’s and Griffith’s thinking: it emphasized the salience of issues of nationality and nationhood in the United States in 1915.
In essence, Birth told the story of how North and South had moved beyond their differences of the Civil War era to unite together in a new nation. In reality, there was little evidence of such general reconciliation at the end of the Reconstruction era. Nor, despite the smattering of North–South commemorations and ceremonies that began to take place, can it truly be said to have happened until the second half of the 1890s. Interviewed by the press in 1915, Griffith maintained that no such national unity could exist “without sympathy and oneness of sentiment,” something that he thought had “only existed [in] the last fifteen or twenty years.”152 If Griffith’s chronology is correct (and it seems to have been), it is possible to delimit the progress of sectional reconciliation through a series of particular events. The Spanish-American War of May–June 1898 was one of the first and most significant of these. It was a commonplace for newspapers at the time to observe that “the blue and the gray” were marching together for the first time in decades against a common foe.153 In subsequent years, more evidence of sectional unity appeared. In 1909, President William Howard Taft visited (and was filmed addressing) a joint encampment of Northern and Southern veterans at Petersburg, Virginia.154 In 1912, Woodrow Wilson became the first president originating in the South to be elected since Zachary Taylor in 1848. Perhaps most crucial of all, the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Civil War loomed as Griffith began preparations to shoot his movie. In making that film, of course, he would displace the growing sectional amity of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries onto the much earlier period of Reconstruction.
The circumstances in which Birth of a Nation was released, moreover, gave its foregrounding of national unity and harmony special appeal. One of the consequences of the outbreak of the First World War was to underline the ethnic diversity of the United States. President Wilson’s appeal, in August 1914, for Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in deed” was unlikely to have much effect since so many residents of the United States retained residual loyalties (or antipathies) to the nation from which they or their ancestors had originated. One-third of all U.S. residents were either immigrants or the children of immigrants.155 Consequently, long before actual American involvement in the conflict in April 1917, the war had made Americans only too conscious of their own disunity. The fact that there were so many “hyphenated” Americans—for example, German-Americans, Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans—would lead later in the war to demands for “100 per cent Americanization.”156 To concerned American audiences of 1915, The Birth of a Nation offered a reassuring vision of national unity. By depicting Lincoln as a symbol of reconciliation and unity, the film provided a fragmented and increasingly insecure society with an iconic hero.
One week before filming began on The Birth of a Nation, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in Sarajevo, setting in motion the train of events that would lead to the outbreak of the First World War. Shortly after Griffith started reconstructing the Civil War in California, real battles were being fought in east Prussia (Tannenberg, August 26–29) and France (the Marne, September 5–8). The European war, therefore, formed an inescapable backdrop to the making of Birth. “I desired the peace idea to be uppermost,” Griffith told an interviewer; “I feel that is what the world needs just now.”157 Griffith’s film, indeed, was a pioneering war film, and, as Norman Kagan noted, “like almost all war films” it “professed anti-war sentiments.”158 Birth foregrounds the illusions with which most wars begin. The Camerons are shown self-consciously wearing their new uniforms, the captured battle flag from Bull Run is proudly displayed, young people dance the night away before the young men set off for war, and the population celebrates as Piedmont’s regiment marches out the next day. Yet there are also signs of sadness and anxiety, as women wait, and the war—it is quickly shown—touches everybody. Many of the scenes of war actually shot by Griffith, especially the guerrilla raid on Piedmont and the burning of Atlanta, offer no purposeful, victorious view of the war. Even the climactic charge led by the Little Colonel against the Union emplacements at Petersburg, according to Michael Rogin, “is mock-heroic and fails.”159
Griffith certainly meant to demonstrate the futility of the Civil War. He may also, however, have been intent on driving home a different message, cautioning Americans against the dangers of involvement in the First World War. The antiwar tone of his film becomes particularly evident in the intertitles, which Griffith had written and rewritten to make them say just what he wanted. At the very beginning of the film, immediately after the title and credits, an intertitle observes, “If in this work we have conveyed to the mind the ravages of war to the end that war may be held in abhorrence, this effort will not have been in vain” (shot 6). A fight between a dog and a cat, introduced by a one-word intertitle, “Hostilities,” also suggests that “war is a mindless, accidental business men should outgrow” (shots 53–54).160 The shot in which the two “chums,” Duke Cameron and Tod Stoneman, meet again on the battlefield, only to die in each other’s arms, is preceded by an intertitle claiming that “War claims its bitter, useless sacrifice” (shot 296). Elsie and Austin Stoneman, learning of the death of Tod, are introduced as reading “war’s sad page” (shot 311). The effects of war on the civilian population are emphasized by a printed comment on an unidentified General Sherman: “While the women and children weep, a great conqueror marches to the sea” (shot 317). Young Flora Cameron, reading of the death of her second brother and the injury to the “Little Colonel,” is shown clenching her fists and holding out her arms in despair after a caption reading “War, the breeder of hate” (shot 450). But perhaps the most savagely antiwar of all Griffith’s intertitles was the appearance of the ironic words “War’s peace” before a shot of bodies lying chaotically in a trench (shot 440). The film moves toward its end with an intertitle referring to “a golden day when the bestial War shall rule no more,” followed by a metaphorical scene in which Christ (“the gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace”) supplants the God of War (shots 1603–1605). This philosophizing about peace is both preceded and followed by shots of romantic, intersectional couples. Intersectional romances, representing what Tara McPherson calls “a regained familial nationalism,” were a staple of the early Civil War movie genre. The unusual thing about Birth is how long it took for such romances to come to fruition, and then only under the stress of the black “threat.”161 Finally, Ben Cameron and Elsie Stoneman are shown looking at the vision of a celestial city (“the City of Peace”) and the link between peace and American nationhood is driven home by the words of Daniel Webster: “Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever!” (shots 1608–1609).
Nations, of course, as Benedict Anderson has argued, are “imagined communities.”162 Nationhood itself resists closure. It is always being formed. It is constantly open for contestation, development, and debate. The crucial point about the “nation” constr
ucted in Birth is that it was founded on exclusion: a white North joined together with a white South at the expense of African Americans.163 The Birth of a Nation thus inflected—and contributed to—contemporary debates on the nature of American citizenship by couching them in terms of whiteness. As David Roediger, Alexander Saxton, and others have shown, whiteness is a constructed category. Some groups are born white; others have to acquire whiteness. The Irish immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century, for example, were not initially constructed as white.164 Paradoxically, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, defined Hispanics as white.165
The whiteness constructed in The Birth of a Nation was not simply based on region, however. It also had its roots in contemporary theories dealing with race and the origins of American democracy. When most of the surviving Cameron family (and Phil Stoneman) attempt to escape the pursuing black militia, they are given refuge by two Union veterans in their cabin. An intertitle asserts that “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright (shot 1287).” That title still has the power to shock a modern audience, since nowadays the word “Aryan” is most closely associated with the belief in German racial superiority advanced by Hitler.
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