The Issue of Miscegenation
In the early twentieth century, white Americans tried to shore up the ascendancy of their race by introducing immigration restrictions, first on Oriental entry to the United States, later on the supposedly inferior “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. They also endeavored to preserve the purity of their own race by passing laws against miscegenation:203 between 1887 and 1930 at least forty-one attempts were made to ban interracial marriage in Mid-Atlantic and East North Central states.204 In the South, laws of this type were mainly designed to prevent marriage between blacks and whites. In some Western states, however, they were much more complex, at times banning marriage between whites and Orientals, Indians, and Mexicans.205
The idea of a pure white race can be traced back at least as far as Tacitus. “In the peoples of Germany,” maintained the Roman historian, “there has been given to the world a race untainted by intermarriage with other races … pure, like no one but themselves.”206 Gobineau had also declared his opposition to racial mixing to protect the purity of the “Aryan” race. In the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, as previously noted, those who regarded themselves as pure-bred Anglo-Saxons had a tendency to look down on Mexicans, whom they regarded as a “mongrel” race through intermarriage with Indians and blacks.207 Yet in the final decades of the century, the confidence of those who regarded themselves as “Anglo-Saxons” was such that for most of the time they could view with equanimity the arrival of European immigrants from a wide variety of national and ethnic origins. So vague was the concept of an Anglo-Saxon race and so confident in its powers of assimilation were those who regarded themselves as members that they regarded the “Melting Pot” as principally a means of producing future Anglo-Saxon citizens. Moreover, so great was their faith in the reproductive powers of the white Anglo-Saxons that some were prepared to argue that relationships between white men and black women would succeed in “white-washing” their descendants and finally erasing all trace of the black race.208
Confidence such as this had been replaced, by the early years of the twentieth century, with feelings of anxiety and trepidation. The Birth of a Nation both shaped and reflected contemporary concerns over racial intermingling. Of the three irredeemably evil characters in The Birth of a Nation, two, as mulattoes, symbolized the dangers of racial mixing: Lydia, the “housekeeper” of Austin Stoneman, whose passion for her is suggested to be the basis for his attempt to impose racial equality on the defeated South; and Silas Lynch, the black lieutenant-governor who attempts to create a black empire of his own and arrange a “forced marriage” with Stoneman’s daughter, Elsie (shots 133–34, 1322, 1346).209 The third villain is Gus, a black, who first tells the white Flora Cameron that he would like to marry her and then, when she runs away, chases her until, panicking, she jumps to her death to escape him (shots 1024–82).
The issue of sexual relationships across racial lines, of course, was a particularly salient issue at the time of the film’s release, as a result of the efforts of many states to pass laws forbidding intermarriage. The NAACP fought hard against such legislation, for the most part successfully.210 It also managed to fight off the attempts of Southern Democrats, using to the hilt their party’s majority in the final weeks of the 63rd Congress, to pass a bill forbidding racial intermarriage in the District of Columbia.211 That The Birth of a Nation foregrounded the whole intermarriage issue so emphatically—blacks are seen with placards demanding “equal marriage”; the South Carolina legislature is pictured passing a bill acceding to this demand; and both Lynch and the other black villain, Gus, want to marry their white female victims (shots 732, 866, 1026, 1309)—had very little to do with what actually happened during Reconstruction days and everything to do with the sexual obsessions of Thomas Dixon, reinforced by contemporary racial concerns at the time the film was made.
Silas Lynch attempts to trap Elsie Stoneman into a “forced marriage.” (Epoch/The Kobal Collection)
What happens to Gus after Flora’s death also sheds considerable light on the tangled relationship between race, sexuality, and alcohol that existed in American culture in 1914–15. As the Klan organizes, the whites of Piedmont go looking for Gus. One such searcher is the town’s blacksmith (played by Wallace Reid), a large and powerful white man. When he arrives at the saloon, he meets another, equally powerful black man (played by Eugene Pallette wearing makeup). The two confront one another. A fight breaks out and the blacksmith defeats his opponent. He then fights (and beats) another six or seven black men who are present in the saloon, throwing some of them out of the window (shots 1100–29). At its simplest, this is a racist depiction of how a single strong white (Aryan) man can take on, in a reasonably fair fight, a crowd of perhaps eight black men. The blacksmith is beaten only when he is shot in the back by one of the few blacks remaining in the saloon and then finally killed by Gus, using the same gun (shots 1130–33).212
Analysis of this single scene must start from the effort to contextualize it. Many popular assumptions of the time were embodied in the scene and may have accounted for the way it was interpreted by contemporary viewers. The scene reflects the racial attitudes of Thomas Dixon Jr. and perhaps those of much of the white South (including Griffith).213 The idea of the black man as threatening rapist haunted the imagination of the white South in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. It was used to justify the extreme prevalence of lynching, perceived as a necessary means of “keeping the black man in his place.”214 Accompanying this was the image of blacks as innately weak, childlike, and cowardly creatures fostered by a vast array of Southern writers, together with historians (usually Northerners) of the Dunningite school. The two images, of course, were inconsistent. The weak, cowardly black male was turned into a brutal, sex-crazed rapist, so this interpretation ran, by either sudden opportunity (the availability of unprotected white females) or alcohol (encouraging the black man to slough off his veneer of civilization and return to his bestial origins), or both.
It seems no accident, therefore, that Gus, after Flora has killed herself, takes refuge in “White-arm Joe’s gin-mill” (shots 1101–1103), or that Silas Lynch, the black lieutenant-governor, gives instructions to his henchmen to prepare for his “forced marriage” to Elsie Stoneman while “drunk with wine and power” (shot 1346). The Birth of a Nation appeared while the movement to prohibit alcohol was gaining strength. A period of reverses in which eight states had voted to reject statewide prohibition came to an end in November 1913 when the Anti-Saloon League committed itself to pushing for nationwide prohibition.215 The crusade for prohibition was something that appealed to Griffith, who came from a Methodist background and had already made at least three films—A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909), What Drink Did (1909), and Drink’s Lure (1912)—emphasizing the threat of alcohol. The Birth of a Nation, a film made by a Southerner about the South, tied alcohol irretrievably to the issue of race. In part, this simply reflected the outlook of the time. White Southern progressives often linked black crime to the effects of alcohol; reformer Alexander J. McKelway, for instance, argued that “if drunkenness caused three-fourths of the crime ascribed to it, whiskey must be taken out of the Negro’s hands.”216 Yet by establishing a link between black men desiring white women and alcohol, it also helped justify the more repugnant methods (including lynching) often employed by Southern whites to discipline black males.
The fight in the saloon had a number of other cultural referents, however. One of the first types of film to emerge in the 1890s was the so-called fight film, depicting either a real or, more commonly, reproduced prizefight. Many commentators at the time noted that a large proportion of the audience for such boxing films was made up of women. According to one estimate, women constituted 60 percent of the Chicago audience for the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight of 1897.217 On the one hand, women were taking possession of a new public sphere, the cinema, and in so doing asserting their own indep
endence. On the other hand, they were outflanking established conventions of what women were able to do in terms of sexual propriety. Few of the women in these audiences were likely to have seen a man naked before—apart from, if married, their husbands. Now they were being introduced to the erotic possibilities inherent in the sight of semi-naked, large, fit men on film.
To this assault on conventions of gender would soon be added an even more combustible element: race. In 1908, black prize-fighter Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion of the world after defeating a white opponent in Australia. He successfully defended his title against white fighters Stanley Ketchum (October 16, 1909) and Jim Jeffreys (July 4, 1910). Films of the fights were widely shown in the United States, though they were also banned in some states, especially in the South.218 What these films did was not only to allow white women the possibility of watching a half-naked black sportsman in action, but also to undermine established perceptions of racial hierarchy by having a black man defeat an opponent who was white. As retired boxer Jim Corbett wrote to the Chicago Tribune emphasizing this point, “the white man has succumbed to a type which in the past was conceded to be his inferior in physical and mental prowess.”219 The white male response to the Johnson phenomenon was perhaps inevitable. In July 1912, hastened by Johnson’s defeat earlier that month of Jim Flynn, yet another “Great White Hope,” Congress passed the Sims Act forbidding the transport of fight films across state lines.220
The irony of this law, of course, was that when Johnson finally was beaten by a white boxer, Jess Willard, in a fight staged in Cuba in April 1915, the film of his defeat could not be shown anywhere in the United States. The only white man fighting African Americans with his fists to be depicted in a major film in 1915 was the blacksmith in The Birth of a Nation, and it is probable that many contemporary spectators viewed this sequence in the context of the popular, press-inspired search for a “Great White Hope.”221
More than any other single factor, Johnson was responsible for making miscegenation an issue in the United States in the early 1910s. His role must be seen against the context of the time. A combination of sensational journalistic investigations, inaugurated by three major magazine articles by George Kibbe Turner222 and public anxieties over the fate of young girls arriving in the city, had prompted a “white slave” panic in the United States; many people apparently believed that crime rings were abducting young girls, either from Europe or the American countryside, and forcing them to become urban prostitutes.223 In 1910, Congress, which had earlier tried to limit the migration of prostitutes from abroad by tightening the immigration laws, passed the Mann Act, which sought to undercut the supposed “white slave trade” by prohibiting the transportation of women across state lines for “immoral purposes.” The difficulty was that the notion of white slavery, while it exempted the women concerned from blame (and may also have made it possible for rural and small-town America to avoid confronting the reality of rebellious and runaway daughters), perpetuated the myth that women were usually forced into prostitution. The actual administration of the Mann Act weakened the credibility of that myth: as David J. Langum has pointed out, the vast majority of prosecutions under the act would always involve the transportation of “adult, willing prostitutes.”224
Perhaps the most famous case brought under the Mann Act during the first years of its existence was that involving Jack Johnson. The main agency involved in the enforcement of the Mann Act was the Bureau of Investigation (later to become the Federal Bureau of Investigation) formed within the Department of Justice in 1908.225 In October 1912, Johnson was arrested and charged with abducting Lucille Cameron, a white girl and former prostitute in Minneapolis, who had had a sexual relationship with Johnson after she came to Chicago. The accusation of abduction was originally made by Cameron’s mother. But though Lucille admitted she had been a prostitute, she adamantly refused to implicate Johnson in her move to Chicago. While Johnson was still being tried for abduction, on November 7 he was charged by agents of the Bureau of Investigation with breaking the Mann Act. The “white slave” in this case was Belle Schreiber, a prostitute who had traveled around the United States with Johnson on an intermittent basis for a year and a half. On November 20, Johnson was acquitted of abducting Lucille Cameron and two weeks later, on December 4, he and Lucille were married.226 In his private life, Johnson appeared to be mounting a direct attack on the contemporary white prejudice against miscegenation. The result was almost preordained. In May 1913, Johnson was found guilty of transporting Schreiber across state lines for the purposes of prostitution and sentenced to a year and a day in jail (the federal prosecutor later ill-advisedly told the press that Johnson “as an individual” had “perhaps” been unjustly “persecuted” but that it had been “his misfortune to be the foremost example of the evil in permitting the intermarriage of whites and blacks.”)227 The publicity accorded Johnson’s marriage to a white girl and the Johnson case itself appears to have given a powerful fillip to the contemporary movement to ban miscegenation by legal means. In 1913, in the wake of Johnson’s marriage and trial, “[anti-]miscegenation bills were introduced in half of the twenty states that [still] permitted interracial marriages.” In Congress, in the aftermath of the Johnson case, at least twenty-one miscegenation bills were introduced, though none was finally passed.228
Legislation prohibiting miscegenation was designed to contain a possible threat from non-white men and to protect white women. The representation of white women in The Birth of a Nation underlined the need for such protection. The film’s white women are weak and fluttery creatures who need to be rescued from or defended against the threat from colored men (as shown by Flora’s fate and Elsie’s imprisonment by Lynch). The final act of such male protectionism is to save them from the “fate worse than death”: in the climactic scene in the log cabin, when the black militiamen are on the point of breaking in, both Dr. Cameron and one of the Union veterans—all bullets spent—prepare to beat their daughters to death with guns rather than see them fall into the hands of the victorious African Americans (shots 1558, 1561–63, 1565). White women in Birth of a Nation represent an ideal type of womanhood: Ben Cameron, according to an intertitle, “finds the ideal of his dreams in the picture of Elsie Stoneman … whom he has never seen” (shot 93). They are decorative rather than productive. The closest any white woman comes to real work in The Birth of a Nation is to take in boarders; with the Civil War over and the South beginning to rebuild itself, Mrs. Cameron and Margaret put up a “Boarding” sign outside the Cameron mansion (shot 536). Otherwise, all they seem good for is strumming a banjo, stitching costumes for Klansmen, or fetching water in a bucket from the spring (shots 455–62, 466, 970, 984–85). The only truly independent act committed by a white woman in the film is Mrs. Cameron’s visit to Washington to plead with the president to pardon her son, and that is simply an extension of her maternal role.
This lack of agency on the part of white women contrasts with the relative activism of those who are mulatto or black: Lydia Brown is clearly identified as the source of Stoneman’s radical policies (“The great leader’s weakness that is to blight a nation”—shot 133); Mammy twice knocks down a man who is jeering the arrest of Dr. Cameron and plays a major part in her former master’s subsequent rescue (shots 1221–24, 1226, 1242–50). Such ascription of agency to mulatto or black women, while white women were presented as passive, may simultaneously have reflected Griffith’s racism (black women were consigned to the periphery of society in early twentieth-century America, so what they did could be discounted) and his traditional gender assumptions. Essentially, the film’s white women simply wait around to react to news from the public sphere dominated by men (“The woman’s part,” shot 452) or to wear pretty clothes to meet male preconceptions, as when Flora attempts to dress up for her eldest brother’s homecoming (shots 514–17). There is no suggestion that they have either the willpower or the ability to take their place in the political or economic sphere. Although Th
e Birth of a Nation was set in the past, it is difficult to contradict the notion that Griffith was using the film as propaganda for his own paternalistic view of women—that he was, at least implicitly, criticizing the “New Woman” of the early twentieth century who campaigned for the same legal and civil rights as men, including the vote.
D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Page 33