D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  In its original sense, however, the idea of an Aryan race grew out of the work of pioneering philologists such as Sir William Jones, who suggested in a 1786 paper that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek all developed from the same original language, and that old Persian, Gothic (German), and Celtic belonged to the same linguistic family. Jones’s paper had a major impact, especially in Germany (Hegel hailed it as the discovery of a new world). It inspired further research into language systems, research that rapidly became inextricably intertwined with two other ideas: that the human race had originated in an Asiatic homeland and that, as population migrated westward, a vigorous Germanic people had arrived in Europe to revivify the declining Roman Empire. The second of these ideas, based on a fallacious identification of race with language, was particularly associated with the work of Friedrich von Schlegel and August F. Pott. By the 1840s, it had become widely accepted among German scholars. Initially, the languages spoken by the migratory population were referred to as “Indo-European” or “Indo-Germanic,” but by the second half of the nineteenth century, as the notion of Europe being peopled by former Asians migrating west came to be propagated outside Germany, the term “Aryan” or “Arian” began to be used more frequently as a way of denoting both the languages and those who used them. In 1851, for example, the Edinburgh Review noted that “the Arian nations … carried the germs of civilisation from a common centre.” Later, the expression “Aryan” was publicized in the work of Max Müller, a German-born Oxford philologist and orientalist.166

  The second half of the nineteenth century saw further refinements in the usage of the term “Aryan.” A Frenchman, Count Joseph de Gobineau, who had been heavily influenced by the work of German philologists (including Pott and Schlegel) published a four-volume Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–55) in which he fixed the Aryan at the top of a hierarchy of races. According to Gobineau, the white race was destined to conquer the other two races (the yellow and the black) because it displayed more forcefulness and intelligence. Although the white race also included Celts and Slavs, Aryans made up the “cream.” Gobineau clearly identified who he thought Aryans were (“the German race”). He also for the first time described them in terms of physical appearance: Aryans were “blond, blue-eyed giants of great muscular force and physical beauty.” His work, as Richard Hofstadter would later remark, was “a landmark in the history of Aryanism.”167 Another approach to Aryanism in this period focused on the attempt by British and American scholars to discern threads of unity in Aryan political institutions or to identify the unique capacity of Aryans in matters of political organization.168

  Despite the spread of Aryan ideas to America, Aryanism would never be so pervasive an influence as another cluster of ideas it overlapped with during the nineteenth century: what came to be known as “Anglo-Saxonism.” It is possible, even probable, that Griffith’s reference to Aryanism in the intertitle was a mistake: what he may have had in mind was an Anglo-Saxon heritage. Anglo-Saxonism had its roots in England where, in the sixteenth century, religious reformers created a myth of a pure Anglo-Saxon church, and in the seventeenth century, parliamentarians cited the supposed liberties of pre-Conquest times in their struggles with the king. Anglo-Saxonism was consequently associated from the beginning with notions of religious and political liberty. In the eighteenth century, it was used by American colonists, Jefferson in particular, to argue for a return to the rights and freedoms they saw as characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon period.169 Also during the eighteenth century, colonists, like Englishmen before them, came increasingly to view the Anglo-Saxons as a branch of the wider race of freedom-loving Germans or “Teutons.” The origins of this idea go back as far as the History of the Germanic People by Tacitus. Montesquieu, in De l’esprit des lois (1748), used Tacitus as the basis for his argument that the British political system had its roots in German forests. Montesquieu’s writings were well received in the American colonies, along with works by French and British authors contending that liberty and parliamentary government had moved from Germany to England as a result of the Anglo-Saxon migration.170

  The publication of Sharon Turner’s four-volume History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799–1805) signaled a growing interest in the Anglo-Saxon idea. It would receive a major boost through the romantic medievalism of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819). Throughout the nineteenth century, it was publicized by British historians such as John M. Kemble (The Saxons in England, 1849) and Edward A. Freeman (History of the Norman Conquest, 1867–76). In these decades, some members of the American elite began to regard themselves not only as sharing the same descent from Anglo-Saxon roots as the English but also as members of the same Anglo-Saxon race, whose virtues they apotheosized. Such views were reflected in the works of American historians William H. Prescott, George Bancroft, John Lothrop Motley, and Francis Parkman.171 They reached their peak in many ways with the appointment of historian Herbert Baxter Adams to Johns Hopkins University in 1881. Adams believed that people of “Anglo-Saxon” descent had a particular genius for self-government and that the roots of American democracy could be traced back to the primitive collectivism of Teutonic tribes during the early Middle Ages.172 A German-trained scholar, Adams established his famous historical seminar at Johns Hopkins “with the official blessing of Freeman.”173 Members of the seminar over the years included Woodrow Wilson, whose History of the American People had frequent references to ideas of Anglo-Saxonism and Teutonic origins, and—more briefly—Thomas Dixon Jr., who also sprinkled Anglo-Saxon ideas liberally throughout his work.174

  Both Dixon’s Clansman and Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation reflected a febrile fear that the ascendancy of the white Anglo-Saxon race was under threat: its political dominance was in question and its racial purity at stake. While the threat was couched in historical terms and displaced onto the Reconstruction period several decades earlier, what strikes the historian is the resonance such ideas had in the social world of early twentieth-century America. How did the confident belief in an Anglo-Saxon racial superiority give way to insecurities of this kind? Part of the answer lies in intellectual changes brought by the nineteenth century. In the first decades of the century, comparative studies of race established “scientific” reasons why some were superior and others inferior. By 1850, supporters of the Anglo-Saxon myth on both sides of the Atlantic were depicting Anglo-Saxons as forming a distinct elite within a Caucasian race that was itself superior and justifying that elitism in terms of inherited blood.175 In what was increasingly perceived as a hierarchy of races, blacks and Indians were at the bottom, joined there during the 1830s and 1840s by Mexicans, a “mongrel race” allegedly weakened by interbreeding with Indians.176 This hierarchy clearly was not going to change: even antislavery writers such as Theodore Parker accepted that blacks and Indians were unlikely to improve their position.177 The emergence of Darwinian ideas of “natural selection” and the “survival of the fittest” did not at first affect this notion. It was assumed that inferior races would be outbred by the superior Anglo-Saxons and disappear. More and more, proponents of the Anglo-Saxon point of view believed it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race to take over much of the world. The degree to which this had already been achieved in the second half of the nineteenth century, according to Richard Hofstadter, appeared to prove the Anglo-Saxon the “fittest” of all races, and it seemed likely that the movement toward Anglo-Saxon supremacy was destined to continue. A number of Republican politicians (including Theodore Roosevelt, Henry C. Lodge, John Hay, and Albert J. Beveridge) defended the war with Spain in 1898 and the annexation of the Philippines, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico which followed as part of such a movement.178

  In retrospect, the expansionism of 1898–99 marked the peak of confidence in the notion of Anglo-Saxonism. Some “Anglo-Saxons” did not approve of expansionism: many Southern politicians, with a racial problem on their own doorstep, opposed the idea of acquiring overseas colonies with unassimilable populations drawn from differ
ent races.179 The idealism of the war with Spain was rapidly succeeded by the realities of a brutal colonial revolt, as Filipinos resisted having the blessings of American democracy forced upon them.180 (It was ironic that the other main branch of the Anglo-Saxon “race,” the British, was simultaneously fighting to suppress a similar revolt in South Africa.) At home, moreover, the confident Anglo-Saxonism of the last years of the nineteenth century rapidly gave way to a gloomier sense that the continuing domination of the world by Anglo-Saxon stock was not assured. In a world ruled by the principles of Social Darwinism, dominant races could also decline. In a few short years, indeed, the conviction of effortless “Anglo-Saxon” racial superiority gave place to pronounced feelings of anxiety in America that “Anglo-Saxons” might lose their pole position on the evolutionary scale. Already, in 1894, conscious of the consequences of the economic depression for the world of Western whites, Henry Adams had written of his belief “that the dark races are gaining on us.”181 By the final years of the century, other Americans had begun to share his concern.

  Such anxieties and insecurities reached their height in the decade and a half before Birth was released. Many native-born, upper-class Americans of the early twentieth century became convinced that their own, superior white race was in danger of being displaced by “inferior” races. In 1901, sociologist Edward A. Ross coined the term “race suicide” to denote what was happening: the “best” American stock—people of north European origin—were simply not breeding as fast as their immigrant counterparts from Asia. President Theodore Roosevelt appropriated Ross’s term and gave it greater publicity in a speech of 1903, arguing that white Anglo-Saxons in the United States were (partly through using birth control) simply not keeping up in terms of fertility with immigrants and minorities. In 1909, Homer Lea published a book warning of the danger posed by an emergent Japan to Anglo-Saxon ambitions and arguing that the current pattern of European immigration, by undermining the strength and unity of Anglo-Saxons, was aiding Japanese ambitions. In 1914, another West Coast writer, Jack London, argued that Anglo-Saxons in the United States were being swamped by southern and eastern European “half-castes” and “mongrel-bloods.”182 Later, in 1916, Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, a book in which he similarly underscored the danger posed to the traditionally dominant “Nordic” strain in the American population by blacks and nontraditional immigrants.183

  Among them, Ross, Roosevelt, Lea, London, and Grant identified “threats” from three particular social groups to the dominant position of white Anglo-Saxons. The oldest in historical terms was represented by American blacks. Slavery had in reality been a vicious system of economic and sexual exploitation. If full-scale revolts against it, such as Denmark Vesey’s in South Carolina in 1822 or Nat Turner’s in Virginia in 1831, had been very rare, slaveholders were often anxious that violence might break out. Indeed, as John Blassingame has noted, “the white man’s fear of the slave was so deep and pervasive that it was sometimes pathological.”184 The abolition of slavery and the myth of the “Old South” that developed in subsequent decades changed the perspective of Southern whites. Anxieties about slavery and possible slave violence were forgotten. In the rosy glow of hindsight, slavery seemed a benign institution. It had worked as a system because the whites had been in control and because it precisely defined the nature of the relationship between both races. In the generation or more after the ending of the Civil War, white fears of black slaves were displaced onto freed blacks. The Birth of a Nation faithfully reflected this shift. “In Griffith’s film,” observes Natalie Zemon Davis, “black people were laughing and happy when slaves, trusting and supportive of their masters; once freed, they were violent, deceptive, and sexually predatory.”185 The film supported the view of many members of the Southern white elite that after the ending of slavery, the Reconstruction experiment, and the attempt of “poor white” Southern Populists in the 1890s to construct a coalition between the disadvantaged of both races, it was time to put in place new controls over blacks to replace those of slavery.186

  This process actually began in 1887, when the first segregationist or Jim Crow law was passed in Alabama requiring separate accommodations for whites and blacks on trains. Other states followed the Alabama lead and in 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the principle of legal segregation in relation to transportation provided (at least in theory) that the facilities provided for both races were equal. By 1907, what Joel Williamson perceives as two waves of segregationist legislation had been enacted to separate the races in restaurants, hotels, and streetcars as well as trains.187 While laws were being passed rendering blacks socially invisible, action was also taken to remove them totally from politics. Starting in 1890 but gathering pace with the collapse of the Populist movement after the débâcle of the 1896 election, Southern states had excluded blacks from voting by a series of legal stratagems: “grandfather” clauses, poll taxes, and literacy tests.188 A third, extralegal device for keeping blacks under control was lynching: in the early years of the twentieth century, around sixty blacks were lynched each year.189

  Given the social and legal subordination of Southern blacks by 1915, the manner in which The Birth of a Nation depicted aggressive, lascivious African Americans during the Reconstruction period might seem unduly hysterical. Pierre Sorlin argues that there was no domestic crisis apparent when Birth was being made, making the film’s “alarmist tone … somewhat surprising.”190 Yet segregation and disfranchisement had not enabled the white South completely to overcome its insecurities. Many whites continued to believe that blacks were dangerous. It was an unusual Southern newspaper, as Edward Ayers has pointed out, that did not include some stories of black wrongdoing.191 Segregation had failed to identify the exact space African Americans should occupy. Segregated streetcars, for example, were usually supposed to have whites at the front and coloreds at the back, but there was no distinct line of demarcation. To progressive journalist Ray Stannard Baker in 1908, this uncertainty seemed symbolic: the existence of a color line which neither race was able precisely to define provided “a fertile source of friction and bitterness.”192 Additional problems arose from the growing tendency of Southern blacks to leave the land in search of jobs in towns and cities. This migration increased the potential for racial conflict in such communities and led to a further wave of legislation between 1913 and 1915 that segregated facilities in factories and attempted to impose segregation in urban housing.193 But African Americans not only migrated within the South; the growing movement of blacks to Northern industrial cities meant that these communities were faced with racial problems for the first time. It was a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in August 1908 that provided the catalyst for the organization, a year later, of the NAACP.194

  The second oldest threat to the position of white Anglo-Saxons was associated with Oriental immigrants. The boom conditions of the 1840s—the California “Gold Rush” of 1849 in particular—brought thousands of immigrants from China. Later, gangs of Chinese laborers played a major role in building the western section of the Union Pacific railroad. But anti-Chinese feeling in California had led, in 1882, to the passage of the first of a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts that effectively brought Chinese immigration to an end. By the early twentieth century, the Japanese had replaced the Chinese as the main group of oriental immigrants to the West Coast. The influx of around 100,000 Japanese into California prompted hysterical talk of a “yellow peril” and demands for Japanese exclusion. In October 1906, the San Francisco school board inflamed American relations with Japan by ordering that Japanese children attend the already segregated Chinese school. Fearing the expression of this kind of prejudice might drag the United States into a war with Japan, President Theodore Roosevelt persuaded the board to rescind the segregation order in return for a promise to cut Japanese immigration. This was achieved through the “Gentleman’s Agreement,” an exchange of diplomatic notes in 1907 and 1908 in which the Japanese
government agreed not to issue passports in future to workers wishing to emigrate to the United States. The Gentleman’s Agreement, however, did nothing to end prejudice or discrimination against California’s existing Japanese population. In 1913, the state legislature tried to ban Japanese residents from acquiring the ownership of any more land.195

  The third and most recent “threat” came from a shift in the pattern of immigration from Europe. Until the 1880s, most immigrants came from northern and western Europe. Thereafter, an increasing proportion (85 percent by 1914) originated in southern and eastern Europe.196 The largest streams among what came to be known as this “new” immigration (to distinguish it from the “old”) were composed of Italians and Polish or Russian Jews. From the point of view of many native-born, white Americans, the new immigrants were very much inferior to the old: they were less literate, less skilled, and poorer than their predecessors. Rather than being easy to Americanize, they persisted with the habits of the countries from which they had come, including religion (the growing influx of Catholics and Jews appeared to threaten traditional American Protestantism) and sometimes dress. They had little or no experience of democracy or representative government. In 1911, the forty-one-volume report of the Dillingham Commission confirmed that through the rising tide of “new” immigration the Anglo-Saxon element in the American population was in danger of being marginalized.

  The years leading up to the First World War had effectively witnessed a nationalization of insecurities arising from the threat to white Anglo-Saxons posed by “other” races and ethnicities. The sections of the country drew together in their estimate of the danger posed by blacks, Orientals, and Jews. “Mr. White American,” cautioned a pamphlet published in San Francisco in 1914, “if you have any race pride or patriotism, you will organize for the protection of your race.” Propaganda of this kind, as John Higham pointed out, had hitherto been mainly aimed at Orientals in California. In this case, it was directed primarily against African Americans and Jews.197 “In every section,” Higham noted, “the Negro, the Oriental, and the southern European appeared more and more in a common light.”198 In the period before the outbreak of the war, while the South slowly became converted to the notion of restricting immigration, in part at least because “new” immigrants (particularly Italians) appeared too ready to fraternize with blacks,199 parts of the North, facing an influx of black migrants, began to demonstrate growing sympathy for the racial outlook of the South. With all sections united on the need to reduce the “new” immigration, bills calling for all immigrants to take a literacy test passed Congress in 1913 and 1915.200 During the debate on the second of these bills, a strong but ultimately unsuccessful attempt was made to insert a clause that would have brought together the campaigns against “new” immigrants and blacks by specifically banning those of African descent from entry into the United States.201 Whiteness seemed very much under threat in the United States in 1915, and this perception created the perfect environment for the successful release of The Birth of a Nation. Looking back on Birth, Cedric J. Robinson perceptively notes that “what Griffith had inadvertently served as midwife for was the birth of a new, virile American whiteness.”202