D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  In The Birth of a Nation, Griffith created a largely fictional view of the past that both commented on and critiqued existing American society. Most crucially, his film constructed a (supposedly historical) narrative of national unity based on an ideal of whiteness. The new element in Birth of a Nation, argues Linda Williams, “is that it links new feelings about race to equally new feelings of national identity, based on an overt celebration of white supremacy.” It demonstrated that movies were now “capable of forging a myth of national origin grounded in race to spectacular effect.”229 The problem, of course, is that it was a myth essentially based on error and exclusion.

  The Reaction of Black Spectators to The Birth of a Nation

  While many historians and film writers have addressed the campaign against Birth of a Nation launched by both black and white critics of the film, no one has so far attempted to assess the reaction of the movie’s black spectators. The whole area of black silent era spectatorship is itself comparatively unexplored.230 One problem faced by many black spectators was that they belonged to a community in which the most significant formal institution—the church—tended to disapprove of the cinema generally as frivolous and materialistic entertainment.231 With The Birth of a Nation, there were problems specific to that particular production. Given the amount of heat generated by the campaign against the film, most African Americans must have been aware of the film’s racism. On the other hand, it was clearly a film of considerable technical and aesthetic merit. Many blacks probably went to see it just to find out why it had generated so much controversy. One who did was black actor William Walker, who watched the film in a segregated African America movie house in 1916. Walker later recalled the reaction of the audience:

  Some people were crying. You could hear people saying, “Oh, God.” And some said “Damn.” … You could hear them because [of] the reaction of the people. You had the worst feeling in the world. You just felt like you were not counted. You were out of existence … I just felt like killing all the white people in the world.232

  Walker’s memory suggests two things: first, that to a racial audience rendered almost socially invisible by segregation, it was now made to appear historically marginal as well; second, that the film not only encouraged hostile, aggressive attitudes to blacks on the parts of whites but it also prompted some blacks to dream of violent revenge on whites. This, of course, was probably principally a male response; the author is unaware of compelling evidence about the response of African American female spectators to Birth of a Nation (although it might be conjectured that black women were among the “people” Walker heard crying during the film’s exhibition).233 Black women viewers almost certainly found no echo of themselves on the screen. At one extreme was the passionate mulatto, Lydia Brown, eager to seduce Stoneman to bask in his reflected glory (but who disappears from the second half of the film); at the other was the loyal but often comical figure of Mammy. Black women were as marginalized in Birth as they were in segregated Southern society. White women were the focus of the film’s attention, its heroines—and its real and potential victims. The achievement of Griffith’s film, suggests bell hooks, was to inscribe a “politics of race and gender … into mainstream cinematic narrative … As a seminal work, this film identified what the place and function of White womanhood would be in cinema. There was clearly no place for Black women.” Although Black female spectators who were “not duped by mainstream cinema” might well “develop an oppositional gaze,” hooks insists that there is no clear empirical proof of this happening in relation to Birth.234

  Many African Americans either avoided or were repelled by the film, but there is evidence that some responded in a very different manner. According to Samuel Edward Courtney, reporting to Booker T. Washington in the spring of 1915, two Boston blacks, druggist Phillip J. Allston and lawyer/dentist Dr. Alexander W. Cox, had not only endorsed the film themselves but had attempted to push an endorsement of it through the executive committee of the local branch of the National Business League [an African American organization].235 In July 1915, one black Ohio newspaper noted that “we saw a Negro newspaper the other day which endorsed The Birth of a Nation.”236 The Philadelphia Tribune, one of the oldest black papers in the country, thought it unlikely “to increase race hatred” and declared that “on the whole it was not so bad.”237 Several reasons may be advanced for such a stance. Not all imply approval of the film. The black community in 1915 was split by internal rivalries, including the struggle between Booker T. Washington’s supporters and the NAACP over who should lead the community. Some of these rivalries (such as the initiative of Allston and Cox in Boston) were expressed in the varied responses to Birth. Additionally, a number of blacks believed that the strategy of protest as a whole was misconceived. By providing the film with priceless free publicity, it greatly aided its commercial success.238

  It may be that some blacks, however, probably actually did enjoy the film. In explaining how and why this could have happened, the first and most obvious explanation is the film’s power. Karl Brown, Griffith’s assistant cameraman, testified to the dramatic effect of the Klan ride on the Los Angeles audience at the première: “every soul … was in the saddle with the clansmen and pounding hell-for-leather on an errand of stern justice.” According to Richard Schickel, even some members of the NAACP would later confess that while viewing the film, they had been caught up in the excitement and carried along with the rest of the audience.239

  Some blacks, including George L. Knox, publisher of a black newspaper, the Indianapolis Freeman, and A. E. Manning, publisher of a sister publication, the Indianapolis World, seem to have adopted a public stance in favor of the film. The two men spoke on behalf of Birth before the City Censors of Dayton, Ohio, apparently persuading them not to ban the film. According to the Forum, a local black newspaper, Knox “stated that he had seen the film three times, that it was all right, as it showed the love of the Negro for his master and the love the black ‘mammies’ had for the young white soldiers.”240 In contrast to Knox, other African Americans may have enjoyed the film because they did not in any sense see themselves or their ancestors on the screen. All the major characters who were both bad and black—Lydia Brown, Silas Lynch, and Gus—were played (and very obviously) by whites. “The transparent whiteness of those blacks,” observes Maurice Yacowar, “is a reminder that we see not the black man per se but a white man’s projection of a black man, an artist’s deployment of an image in a poetic fiction.”241 The use of burned cork, a traditional trope associated with minstrel shows, may have served to emphasize the film’s character as fictionalized entertainment.

  If African American spectators were distanced from the blacks portrayed in the film by the recognition that most were really white, a further distancing may also have occurred because of time. The events represented in the film had all happened several decades earlier. It was entirely possible for those watching the film to regard it as an accurate reconstruction of history while simultaneously considering it irrelevant to the racial situation of the United States in 1915. The so-called Hampton Epilogue—the short film made at the Hampton Institute in Virginia and sometimes shown after Birth of a Nation had ended—emphasized the point that Griffith’s movie was concerned solely with the past. The makers of this short film (almost certainly themselves black) implicitly accepted the idea that African Americans had been accurately represented in The Birth of a Nation by advancing the view that Birth had failed to take account of the progress made by American blacks since Reconstruction.242

  Also, African Americans viewing the film may have created meanings from the experience that had comparatively little to do with the narrative white audiences saw on screen. Traditional film theory regards the theoretical spectator as essentially passive, positioned by the filmic text and the modes of signification with which it is associated but, in recent years, scholars have challenged this view. Researching how “real” spectators (especially women) respond to certain express
ions of popular culture, they have often seen them actively involved—through interactions between their own social and cultural identities and textual practices—in constructing a variety of possible meanings.243 The incentive to construct counter-hegemonic meanings may, of course, be especially great among viewers who are marginalized both on screen and in their own lives. While bell hooks writes of the “oppositional gaze” developed by black female moviegoers, Manthia Diawara regards the terms “Black spectator” and “resisting spectator” as interchangeable.244 If white audiences watching Birth of a Nation saw blacks depicted on screen as uncouth, aggressive, sexually rapacious, and corrupt, African American viewers may have read the film in a thoroughly oppositional or resistant way to construct meanings very different from those of white spectators. Above all, perhaps, to the disfranchised and persecuted blacks of 1915, the film may have appealed because it portrayed a time when African Americans had not only voted but had managed to elected both a lieutenant-governor and a distinct majority of the members of a state legislature from their own race, when they had dominated the judicial process, and—perhaps most important of all—when they had actually fought back against white oppression with guns in their hands.

  8

  After Birth

  The NAACP Campaign from 1916

  By the beginning of 1916, apart from statewide bans on the exhibition of The Birth of a Nation in Ohio and Kansas, the campaign to suppress the film run by the NAACP had largely failed. Over the next few years, however, the organization’s efforts to prevent screenings proved considerably more successful. Part of the reason for this success was that events encouraged the NAACP to adopt a new and more convincing argument. “The day may come,” observed Elijah Hodges with prophetic foresight in July 1915, “when we shall need the colored man’s help to defend the flag.”1 Black soldiers played a major part in the American expeditionary force led by Brigadier-General John J. Pershing that invaded Mexico in March 1916 in an attempt to capture Mexican revolutionary leader Francisco (“Pancho”) Villa, who had killed Americans on both sides of the border in an attempt to embroil the existing Mexican government in a war with the United States. The participation of these black soldiers was obviously very much in the mind of W. E. B. Du Bois a few months later when a proposal was made to show The Birth of a Nation at theaters patronized by soldiers in the Canal Zone in Panama. “Colored troops,” argued Du Bois, “have been giving too good an account of themselves recently to deserve having this vicious attack on their race in military posts.”2 Once the United States entered the First World War,3 and African American soldiers formed part of the American army fighting in France, arguments such as these were deployed with increasing strength and frequency.

  American involvement in the war brought huge pressures for social and political conformity. George Creel’s Committee on Public Information encouraged national unity and helped whip up popular dislike of German sympathizers and pacifists—anyone, indeed, who seemed to threaten the war effort. Soon, the NAACP found, the emphasis on patriotism and unity in public discourses could be exploited and redirected into its own campaign against Birth. “Especially at the present time,” wrote NAACP national secretary John R. Shillady to Mayor John F. Hylan of New York in February 1918, “when nearly a hundred thousand colored men are enlisted in the service of their country …, it would be damaging to the national unity upon which our success in the war with Germany depends to permit anything which would accentuate class feeling as between the white people and the Negroes.” Black critics of the film now represented it as an unprovoked assault on a section of the community that loyally supported the war. “The colored people,” reported a local newspaper in Juneau, Alaska, “declare it an insult to their race and unfair at this time when the colored population is fighting with their white brothers on the battlefields of France, as well as supporting all patriotic efforts such as the Red Cross, Liberty Loans, etc.”4 The appeal of such wartime arguments was demonstrated in June 1918 when the West Virginia State Council of Defense, responding to a request from a largely African American county, prohibited the showing of Birth of a Nation in the state for as long as the war continued. The resolution imposing the ban paid tribute to West Virginia blacks (who, it was said, were “loyal and patriotic” and had “cheerfully responded to all demands”). It also insisted that showing Birth would create tensions between the races that would prevent them “from working together in peace and harmony in … producing the best results for our national defense.” This success in West Virginia was followed by the decision of the film’s exhibitors in Ohio, at the request of Governor James M. Cox, to withdraw it from circulation after October 1.5

  The last few months of the world conflict saw the exhibitors of The Birth of a Nation increasingly wrong-footed by arguments focusing on the ways the film weakened the patriotism and social solidarity required for a successful prosecution of the war. In February, opponents of the film in Springfield, Ohio, gained a partial victory by having its showing on Sundays prohibited. In May, a local black organization in Texas launched an attempt to have the War Department ban the film from military bases. Also in May, William Monroe Trotter and his Equal Rights League managed to have Birth suppressed in Lynn, Massachusetts. In June, Nebraska attorney general Willis E. Reed successfully applied for an injunction to bar the showing of the film in Lincoln lest it “stir up strife and dissension at a time when harmony should prevail and hence was a hindrance to the successful prosecution of the war.”6 At the beginning of October, the governor of Alaska and the mayor of Juneau both acted to ensure that Birth was not screened in the capital city of the Alaska Territory.7 At almost exactly the same time as the Alaskan ban (which they may not as yet have known about), the NAACP launched a nationwide campaign to persuade state governors and state councils of defense to prevent the showing of The Birth of a Nation as long as hostilities lasted. It could have been that the NAACP wanted to re-assert its own leadership in the campaign against the film. But the precedent of Birth’s suppression in West Virginia and perhaps, above all, Ohio, also suggested that the time was ripe to press for the film’s banning or withdrawal in other states for the duration of the war.8

  Because critics of The Birth of a Nation could now reframe their opposition to the film in the new dominant tropes of patriotism and national unity, the campaign of 1918 had a much broader reach at the state level than had been enjoyed by that of 1915–16. A number of governors sympathized with the NAACP’s point of view. The governor of Kansas insisted that the film “has not exhibited and will not exhibit” in his state “so long as I have anything to say about it.” The governor of Oregon claimed that he had managed to secure “the partial suppression of it in this State.” The governors of Minnesota and Rhode Island claimed that if Birth was advertised for exhibition in their states, they would take action against it. The governor of North Dakota wrote to the Griffith Corporation requesting that the film not be shown in his state. Revealingly perhaps, the governor of North Carolina, Thomas Dixon’s home state, observed that the local authorities in Winston-Salem “for the reasons mentioned in your letter” had stopped an advertised screening of the film and “I do not think it will be shown here during the war.”9

  Even in 1918, however, opposition to The Birth of a Nation was far from unanimous. Some governors saw no problem with it (Mississippi), avoided the issue completely by insisting it was being shown nowhere in their state (Maine), argued that they had no power to interfere (New Jersey and Florida), or simply passed the whole problem over to the state council of defense (Michigan, Utah, and Wisconsin).10 The state councils themselves, principally composed of prominent businessmen and politicians, embraced a wide range of views. At one extreme was Utah, which expressed “full sympathy” with the NAACP’s stance and promised to use “whatever influence” it had to suppress films such as Birth. At the other was Connecticut, which disclaimed all interest in the matter since the film was not being shown there and, in any case, the subject was “not �
�� distinctively of a war character.” Interestingly, the State Council of California mentioned that “some time ago” the exhibitors of the picture had voluntarily agreed to withdraw it from the state for six months. Because it appeared likely that this agreement had now lapsed, the council informed the NAACP that it was once again “taking the subject up with them [the exhibitors of Birth] as suggested in your letter.”11

  So successful was the NAACP at mobilizing the discourses of wartime patriotism and national unity in aid of its once-faltering campaign against The Birth of a Nation that the momentum of its campaign persisted for a while after the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. Only a few days into the peace, Birth was supposed to run for a week in Louisville, Kentucky. Confronted with NAACP protests, and conscious that with demobilization beginning a victory parade was about to be held in his city, Mayor George W. Smith decided to ban the film’s exhibition by executive order.12 At the end of November, the film was scheduled for the Alhambra and Opera House in Richmond, Virginia, which had just re-opened after closing down for six weeks because of the influenza epidemic. The manager of the theater was clearly looking to Birth as a proven money-spinner to make good the losses caused by this closure. However, protests were made by black and white committees to Mayor Evans “that the picture is inclined to incite race prejudice among the lower classes of both races.” A conference of Richmond ministers also passed a resolution opposing any attempt “to stir up hatred between the negroes and whites …, particularly when … they have so recently fought with equal devotion the world’s battle for liberty and justice.” Perceiving the film as a means of encouraging friction between the poorer, less educated members of both races—and being particularly concerned by such friction at a time “when so many forces are contributing to the drift towards Bolshevism or anarchy”—Evans finally (and successfully) asked that the movie be withdrawn.13