D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  Mayor Evans’s concern over Bolshevism underlines the fact that new issues and discourses were beginning to dominate public attention in the immediate postwar period. The momentum acquired by the campaign against The Birth of a Nation during the last months of the war was sufficient to keep it going at least until February 1919. The NAACP fought hard to prevent the film from being shown at New Castle, Pennsylvania, on February 7 and 8. “As colored people,” Robert J. Nelson, the secretary of the Harrisburg NAACP, wrote to Pennsylvania governor William C. Sproul, “we have performed our duty in giving patriotic service in the fighting forces of the nation both at home and abroad and we feel that now, above all times, national unity should be maintained.” Sproul apparently agreed, passing on Nelson’s letter to the state censorship board “with an opinion on my part that the pictures in question are not only provocative of dissension and trouble but are unjust to our colored citizens.”14 Toward the end of February, the West Virginia legislature effectively made permanent the wartime ban on Birth of a Nation when it passed a bill drafted by H. J. Capehart, a colored member of the lower house, prohibiting the showing of any picture “calculated to result in arousing the prejudice … of one race or class of citizens against any other race or class of citizens.”15

  During the remainder of 1919 and 1920, The Birth of a Nation appeared far less frequently in newspaper headlines and NAACP reports. The fear of Bolshevism mentioned in November 1918 by Mayor Evans of Richmond crystallized into the “Red Scare” of 1919, with left-wingers of all kinds being persecuted. In this atmosphere, NAACP activists fighting for racial equality could easily be identified—and dismissed—as “radicals.” The rapid demobilization after the war together with the abandonment of price controls led to a combination of growing unemployment and rising inflation. A wave of industrial unrest, beginning with a five-day general strike in Seattle in February, contributed to fears of revolution, as did the posting of homemade bombs to businessmen and politicians and a number of simultaneous explosions in major cities. The summer and early fall of 1919 also saw a sharp increase in racial tensions. This was especially pronounced in the cities of the North, which had recently experienced a great influx of black Southerners eager to escape the poverty and backwardness of their own region and find employment in booming wartime industries. The return to peacetime conditions meant that blacks and whites were frequently competing for the same jobs. As friction between the races grew, there was an explosion of race riots; more than twenty-five took place, with the most notorious occurring in Chicago (July 27–August 2). When more than 200 African Americans were murdered in Elaine, Arkansas, in early October, the NAACP sent assistant secretary Walter F. White to investigate the circumstances underpinning the riot.16

  Consequently, the NAACP had enough to do in 1919 and 1920 without worrying as much as it had previously about the impact of The Birth of a Nation.17 When it relaunched its campaign against the film in 1921, it would do so in very different circumstances. Anxieties over the content of movies, coupled with a series of “Hollywood” scandals peaking in Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s arrest for the murder of Virginia Rappe, had led to greatly increased demands for movie censorship at all levels (federal, state, and local).18 By 1921, the NAACP would not simply be fighting what it perceived as a vicious film; it would also be attacking the apparent link between Birth of a Nation and a revived Ku Klux Klan.

  The Birth of a Nation and the New Klan

  There had been few references to the Ku Klux Klan in American cinema before the release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915. In 1905, the Edison Company produced The White Caps, a favorable view of a band of Klan-like vigilantes protecting helpless women (they are shown attacking a wife beater who is tied up and tarred and feathered). The White Caps, on whom the movie was based, were a group dedicated to maintaining moral values in the mountain communities of Indiana and Kentucky early in the twentieth century. Unlike the Klan of the Reconstruction period, they do not appear to have been concerned with racial matters.19 Six years later, Griffith directed The Rose of Kentucky, which presented contemporary night riders in his home state in a very unflattering way. Although race was referred to (the main male character is the owner of a tobacco plantation with what Scott Simmon refers to as an “integrated work force”), the Klan-type riders attack him not because of this but apparently because he has refused to join them.20 Until 1915, the only film dealing with the real Klan of the Reconstruction era appears to have been Kalem’s The Northern Schoolteacher (1909), showing the Klan persecuting a white Yankee schoolteacher in a Southern town. This portrait of the post–Civil War Klan as an evil, violent organization would not be challenged on screen until 1915, when Griffith presented the Klan as the heroes of Birth of a Nation, saving white civilization from the threat posed by armed and aggressive blacks. By mythologizing as “good” the violent Klan of former times, Griffith not only distorted history but inadvertently contributed to the reappearance of an organization that—away from the historical context of the 1860s and 1870s—even Thomas Dixon would dismiss as “evil.”21

  The new Klan came into existence as the result of a series of factors and events. On April 27, 1913, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was found raped and murdered in the basement of the factory where she worked in Atlanta, Georgia. Her employer, Leo M. Frank, was tried and convicted for the murder. Sentenced to death on evidence that was both sparse and confused, Frank, a Texas-born Jew raised in New York, was temporarily spared from execution when the governor commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Tom Watson was a prominent Georgia politician of the day who during the Populist revolt of the 1890s had supported the idea that poor whites should cooperate with African Americans. Over time, however, his views had shifted toward a virulent hatred of blacks, Catholics, and Jews, and he exhorted his fellow Georgians to redress the injustice of Frank’s commuted sentence. On the night of August 16–17, 1915, responding to Watson’s call, a team of twenty-five men who referred to themselves as the “Knights of Mary Phagan” abducted Frank from the prison farm where he was incarcerated, took him to Marietta, Georgia, near Phagan’s birthplace, and hanged him.22 Precisely two months later, according to Wyn Craig Wade, the members of this lynch party climbed Stone Mountain, eighteen miles from Atlanta, and burned a huge cross that was “visible throughout the city.”23

  Two weeks after the lynching of Frank, Watson, in applauding the lynching itself, had suggested in one of the periodicals he published that “another Ku Klux Klan” be organized “to restore HOME RULE.”24 It was not Watson, however, but another Southerner—William J. Simmons—who effectively relaunched the Klan in 1915. Born in central Alabama in 1880, Simmons was too young to have personal memories of the original Klan. His father, however, had been a member in the 1860s and Simmons grew up “fascinated by Klan stories.” Seeking adventure on his own account, Simmons volunteered to fight as a private in the Spanish-American War. Once the war was over, he became a Methodist circuit rider in the backwoods of Florida and Alabama. Simmons was not a very good minister, outraged many Methodists by his fondness for whiskey, and sank deeper and deeper into debt. In 1912, he was suspended for inefficiency by the annual conference of his church. For a time, he wandered from job to job before finally finding his niche as an organizer for a fraternal order, the Woodmen of the World. In 1914, he moved to Atlanta as district manager. Early in 1915, he was injured by an automobile and spent three months in bed. During this time, he began to dream obsessively of founding a fraternal order of his own, based on the model of the Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction days.25

  The way Georgians had reacted to the Frank lynching convinced “Colonel” Simmons (his honorary rank in the Woodmen) that reestablishing the Klan was a timely idea. Gathering together thirty-four men, including some supposedly drawn from the Knights of Mary Phagan26 and two who had ridden as Klansmen during the Reconstruction era, he applied on October 26, 1915, to the State of Georgia for a charter for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as a fraternal order.
A month later, on Thanksgiving Day, Simmons told his charter members that he planned to revive “the ancient glories” of the Klan by lighting another fiery cross on Stone Mountain. Since it was a cold night, only fifteen of the original thirty-four agreed to go with him to the mountain in the sightseeing bus he had chartered. On arrival, Simmons filled his canteen from a spring of sparkling water (making “a few remarks on purity and honor” in the process). He and his colleagues then gathered together some boulders to make a rough altar and covered it with an old American flag, laying a Bible on top of the flag. Simmons lighted the cross with a match and while it burned, administered the oath of membership. “And thus,” he would later assert, “on the mountain top that night at the midnight hour … bathed in the sacred glow of the fiery cross, the Invisible Empire was called from its slumber of half a century to take up a new task and fulfill a new mission for humanity’s good.”27

  Simmons was well aware at the time of his improvised ceremony of the existence of The Birth of a Nation. The film and the saturation publicity associated with it had already helped mold both fashion and social life in the North. Manufacturers produced “Ku-Klux hats” modeled after those worn by the riders in Birth and “KK” kitchen aprons. New York society ladies organized K-Klux balls and on Halloween, 2,000 University of Chicago students partied in Klan costumes.28 By late November 1915, the film had already been shown very successfully in several Southern cities and its first showing in Atlanta was due. Simmons realized that this offered an opportunity too great to be missed to publicize his new organization, which finally received its charter from the state of Georgia on December 4. Consequently, the same edition of the Atlanta Constitution that announced the opening of The Birth of a Nation in Atlanta on December 6, 1915, also carried an advertisement of the Klan’s rebirth as a “HIGH CLASS ORDER FOR MEN OF INTELLIGENCE AND CHARACTER.” The actual première was preceded by a parade in which Simmons and his first recruits rode down Peachtree Street wearing bedsheets and fired rifle salutes in front of the large queues of people waiting to enter the Atlanta Theater. It was, as Wyn Craig Wade has commented, “an enormously effective stunt.”29 Simmons understood the vital importance of rapid publicity for his new order, and fearing that The Birth of a Nation would encourage the emergence of rival Klan fraternities, he insisted that his own Klan was the true descendant of the original one.30

  As both film and revived Klan spread across the South, they became locked in a marriage of publicity-oriented convenience. Ushers in some states alternated between wearing Confederate uniforms and the sheets of the Klan. In many towns, Klansmen rode through the streets in full regalia in advance of screenings of the film. Newspapers published advertisements by the Klan endorsing the movie. Members of the organization distributed Klan literature outside movie houses in which it was being shown.31 By the early 1920s, as the Klan spread beyond its base in the South—where, as David Chalmers comments, “Georgia was its citadel and Atlanta its holy city”—it continued to exploit The Birth of a Nation as part of its recruitment and propaganda drive. In 1921, for example, the film was shown to two local Klan branches in Virginia and one in Portland, Oregon. In February 1922, the film was screened at two New York theaters, and according to critics, this helped the local Klan in its campaign to increase membership. Two years later, the U.S. Grant Klan of Chicago, Illinois, showed the film successfully over two weeks at the Auditorium Theatre.32 By 1925, when 40,000 invited Klansman paraded in Washington, D.C., the Klan was strong in many states of the North and West, including Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, California, and Oregon. The new Klan, at least outside the South, was no longer simply anti-black. Reflecting changing social circumstances, it was also critical of Catholics, Jews, Orientals, and recent immigrants—in fact, of all who were considered to challenge traditional American social hierarchies and values. Besides giving the new Klan an idealized view of its predecessor and important propaganda symbols (the figure of a Klansman on a rearing horse holding a fiery cross, copied from the film’s publicity stills, became the principal insignia of the order), Griffith’s film may also have appealed to Klan recruits for its clear endorsement of white supremacy and intense hostility to interracial relationships (“mongrelization”).33

  Despite the use by the Klan of The Birth of a Nation as a means of attracting and keeping its members, it is difficult to estimate the precise influence of the film on the expansion of the order in the early years after its reemergence in 1915. Certainly, as a contributor to the Confederate Veteran observed in April 1916, the film had “done more in a few months’ time to arouse interest” in the original Klan “than all the articles written on the subject during the last forty years.” “No one who has seen the film,” declared journalist Walter Lippmann in 1922, “will ever hear the [Klan’s] name again without seeing those white horsemen.” Asked in 1928 whether the Klan would have grown as quickly without the film, “Colonel” Simmons answered “no … The Birth of a Nation helped the Klan tremendously.”34 On the other hand, the really rapid growth of the Klan did not occur in the early years when The Birth of a Nation was at the peak of its influence and availability. By 1919, the Klan had only a few thousand members. Not until the summer of 1920, with the hiring of publicity agents Edward Young Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, did the real expansion of the Klan begin. By the summer of 1921, it had around 100,000 members. The further expansion of the Klan was aided by a series of critical articles about the organization and the violence with which it was associated that were published by the New York World and other newspapers in the closing months of 1921 (most Americans in rural areas were quick to support what New Yorkers condemned). It was also helped by the favorable impression created by Colonel Simmons when he testified before Congress in October 1921. By the middle years of the 1920s, the Klan, according to Nancy Maclean, may have reached a peak of 5 million members spread across the nation in almost 4,000 local chapters.35 It is impossible to say with any certainty what the precise role of The Birth of a Nation was in encouraging this increase; but as African American scholar Lawrence Reddick noted in 1944, “its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan was at least one factor which enabled the Klan to enter upon its period of greatest expansion.”36

  Fighting Both Klan and Film

  When the NAACP campaign against The Birth of a Nation resumed in 1921, the principal flashpoints in the struggle—New York, Boston, and Los Angeles—were much the same as in early 1915. What was new was the relative effectiveness of the campaign and the fact that the fight was no longer simply against the film but also against the revived Klan. Moreover, since the Klan was no longer just anti-black, the NAACP began to find new allies among those whom the Klan attacked.

  On April 26, 1921, Walter F. White, assistant secretary of the NAACP, wrote to the manager of New York’s Capitol Theater, the largest picture palace in the country, asking him to cancel the screening of The Birth of a Nation for a week from May 1. White argued that the film presented “in most erroneous fashion” the history of the Civil War, threatened to undermine the relatively good race relations then existing in New York by portraying the black man “as a vicious, lustful and horrible being,” and idealized the Ku Klux Klan. In reply, S. F. “Roxy” Rothapfel contended that some of the objectionable scenes in the film had been removed, that audiences were unlikely to be stirred to hatred by the depiction “of history of sixty years ago,” and that Griffith’s movie was both “a purely American production” and “a master picture.” The NAACP initially reacted to Rothapfel’s refusal to withdraw the picture in time-honored ways. As in 1915, it lobbied the mayor, police commissioner, and commissioner of licenses, only to be informed (again as in 1915) “that the city authorities were without jurisdiction in stopping the film.”37 It also sent a telegram to the governor of New York suggesting he use the “revival [of] this vicious and dangerous film as [an] additional argument for [the] enactment [of t
he] Lusk Censorship Bill into law.” Governor Miller may have taken the advice. Certainly, the Lusk bill, creating a state board of censorship for motion pictures in New York, became law in mid-May.38 But this was too late to affect the showing of Birth of a Nation at the Capitol. With no hope of redress from politics, the NAACP turned to direct action—action aimed more against the Klan than against the film. It arranged for a peaceful demonstration outside the movie theater, with around thirty black ex-servicemen in uniform (often wearing foreign decorations) handing out leaflets attacking the Ku Klux Klan for its “activities … today and in the past.” They were accompanied by three African American women in the uniform of the Y.W.C.A. who carried placards saying “We Represented America in France, Why Should ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Misrepresent Us Here?” When asked by the police to move on and not obstruct the sidewalk, they refused and five demonstrators (including the three women) were arrested.39

  The NAACP picket of the Capitol Theater in May 1921 underlined the changes which had taken place since The Birth of a Nation had first been shown in New York in 1915. The demonstrators, about a dozen in all, wore uniforms and decorations to draw attention to the experience of the war, a war in which blacks had served loyally and patriotically. Women played a prominent role in the protest since after the ratification of the Twentieth Amendment in the previous year, female suffrage was now a reality. The leaflet distributed by the protestors was essentially an attack on the Klan: it criticized Birth for supporting the Klan by distorting and falsifying history. It also critiqued the activities of the revived Klan in Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina and sought to broaden the base of opposition to it by asking readers if they knew “that the Ku Klux Klan is not only anti-Negro but anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic?” Finally, it raised the issue of censorship: readers were asked if they were prepared “to allow Ku Klux Klan propaganda to be displayed in the movies in New York City.”40