So far as the NAACP was concerned, the arrest of the demonstrators and their prosecution under a city ordinance banning the distribution of “any handbill, circular, card or other advertising matter” was an obvious threat to freedom of speech. When the five people arrested first appeared before Magistrate Douros in the Night Court, their NAACP counsel argued that they intended “to stop the Ku Klux Klan from inciting dissension and riot between two peace loving people who fought side by side in France.” Douros, acidly commenting that he wanted “no stump speeches here,” adjourned the case to the magistrates’ court and released the women on parole while setting bail for the men at $200. Preparations for the case were made, including the calling of Griffith himself as a witness. But when the defendants actually appeared in court on May 12, it was clear that the judicial system was deeply embarrassed by the whole process. First, before the case began, Magistrate Robert E. Ten Eyck apparently ordered (though he later denied this) that numerous “well-dressed” black men and women be expelled from the part of the court reserved for spectators. Second, he was apparently intimidated by what he termed the “authority” of the defendants (by which he probably meant their war service, but also perhaps that one of the women was the wife of a former American minister to Liberia). Trying to dispose of the case quickly, Ten Eyck offered to dismiss the case if those accused promised to discontinue the protest. When they refused, he found them guilty of a misdemeanor but suspended sentence. NAACP lawyers promptly launched an appeal and six months later, Judge Tulley of the Court of General Sessions overturned the conviction on the grounds that the ordinance under which the five had been prosecuted “was never intended to prevent the lawful distribution of anything other than commercial and business advertising matter.”41
Although the NAACP publicized the campaign ending with Tulley’s decision as a major victory for free speech and the right of peaceful protest, it was clear that not everyone in the black community and its allies approved of the NAACP’s tactics. Alone among New York papers, both white and black, Fred R. Moore’s Age published no account of the original protest against the movie. “Personally,” wrote Lester Walton, the Age’s film critic, writing a few days later to NAACP Secretary James Weldon Johnson, “I do not see what good was accomplished by the demonstration you staged before the Capitol theater. You were playing into the hands of the enemy by giving them valuable advertising. Certainly you did not bring about the desired results: have the picture taken off.” Walton believed “that the best way to prevent the presentation of such pictures as the ‘Birth of a Nation’” was “to stop them in advance.”42 Walton was being unfair: he was writing with the knowledge that the existence of a city censorship board in Boston had made it possible to mount a campaign against the film before it opened, and that New York state had just adopted a censorship law that would affect the treatment of Birth in the future. But no such censorship board had existed in New York at the beginning of May 1921, and the NAACP had first lobbied the civil authorities before engaging in direct protest. Moreover, the new strategy adopted by the NAACP—their concentration on associating the film with the reborn Klan and looking for new allies against both—had (at the time Walton wrote) just been vindicated in Boston.
The Birth of a Nation was advertised for a new run in Boston, starting May 16, 1921. On the morning of May 15, a large delegation of African Americans and their allies attended a hearing at city hall where they lobbied and testified against the showing of the film. One of those involved was R. Butler Wilson, secretary of the Boston branch of the NAACP. “In our protest,” Wilson explained to James Weldon Johnson, “we coupled the propaganda of the play with the new Ku Klux Klan organization and the barbarous crime of lynching.” During the afternoon, the three-man Boston Board of Censors, set up partly as a result of the struggle against Birth in 1915, met to watch the film. At the end of the screening, Mayor Andrew J. Peters met with the two other members of the board and announced that the license of the Shubert Theater, where the film was to be played, had been suspended indefinitely (though the mayor also explained that the board would not prevent the theater from presenting an alternative film or play).43 It is probable that in highly Catholic Boston, the hostility displayed by the revived Klan toward the Catholic Church may have been a crucial factor in Peters’s decision: one of the organizations represented at the hearing had been the Knights of Columbus, an influential body among Irish Catholics.44 The NAACP’s decision to foreground the relationship between Birth and the new Klan was a shrewd one. “I think we made no mistake,” R. Butler Wilson declared two days after the mayor’s announcement, “in hitching up the film with the Ku Klux Klan.”45 Where the NAACP did make a mistake was in claiming the lion’s share of the credit for the film’s suppression. A press release announced that the hearing before the mayor had been the result of the NAACP protest and that R. Butler Wilson had “acted as attorney for the protestants against the film.” A sharply worded letter from the president and secretary of the National Equal Rights League claimed that the League “had an equal and co-ordinate role in the protest”; that even if the NAACP had got here first, the League had also pressed the mayor for a hearing; and that the NAACP’s account omitted “perhaps the most prominent figure in the hearing …, a man who went to the lock-up fighting the film in 1915”: William Monroe Trotter. In reality, Trotter and the nine witnesses he introduced had been allotted exactly the same amount of time as the NAACP’s Wilson to make the League’s case against Birth.46 Therefore, while the Boston campaign of 1921 against The Birth of a Nation succeeded while the one six years earlier had failed, both, as well as the unsuccessful New York struggle of 1921, served to emphasize divisions within the pro-African American community.
The success in Boston seemed to open the door to bans on the film in other places. In August 1921, declaring himself “opposed to any exhibition which has a tendency to incite race prejudice,” Mayor George E. Leach of Minneapolis, a strong opponent of the Klan, followed the example set by Mayor Peters and refused to allow The Birth of a Nation to be shown in his city.47 In California, a long campaign waged by attorney E. Burton Ceruti seemingly reached a triumphant conclusion at a conference called by Los Angeles Mayor M. P. Snyder when William Clune, co-owner of exhibition rights in the state, promised not only to withdraw Birth from the market in that state but also to destroy the film. This must have seemed to many in the NAACP as a (more successful) repetition of the struggle of January/February 1915, when Ceruti had been among the film’s very first critics and Clune had held its première in his theater. But more was at stake by the summer of 1921 than the fate of just one film. The main issue in Los Angeles and the reason many movie executives attended the conference organized by the mayor was the growing demand for censorship of the film industry in its home state. It was not so much the racism of The Birth of a Nation or its links with the new Klan that made it a target in California as its general propensity to rouse controversy. The movie industry, feeling very vulnerable, not only sought to avoid such controversy but it also tried to enlist the aid of the NAACP in defeating the supporters of censorship. In other places, the NAACP supported censorship as a means of suppressing Birth: in Los Angeles, it seems to have agreed to fight censorship in alliance with film producers and exhibitors, on condition that The Birth of a Nation be withdrawn.48
On November 24, 1922, advertisements in the New York press proclaimed that The Birth of a Nation was to be shown at the Selwyn Theater, on 42nd Street, for a week beginning December 4. Three days later, the press reported that the Reverend Oscar Haywood, a Klan lecturer and organizer, had announced that the Klan was beginning a drive to expand its membership in New York City. The coincidence of the two things, as NAACP assistant secretary Walter F. White and two New York politicians explained in a joint letter to the state Motion Picture Commission, suggested that Birth was “being reproduced in New York City again as a part of the campaign of the Ku Klux Klan to recruit members.” As in its recent campaigns in New Yor
k and Boston, therefore, the NAACP tried to strengthen its case against the film by associating it with the modern Klan. It also reached out to other opponents of the Klan, particularly Catholics and Jews. What was new, however, was the understanding that public protest and demonstrations might well be counterproductive, creating advertising for the film. “We are trying,” White wrote to the state director of the Knights of Columbus, “to prevent the showing of the picture without any publicity because that is exactly what the Ku Klux Klan and the producers of the picture want.”49 As in 1921, the NAACP protested privately to the mayor, the police commissioner, and the license commissioner of New York as well as the state governor. It also lobbied Will Hays, chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) established earlier in 1922, and Joseph Levenson, secretary of the state Motion Picture Commission.50 There was considerable irony in the NAACP’s approaching both Hays and Levenson, since Hays (a former postmaster general in Harding’s cabinet) had been appointed by the movie industry to make sure there would be no further censorship of films of the type adopted by New York in 1921.51 It was by no means clear what Hays, only a few months in office and—as his autobiography published many years later would reveal—an admirer of Griffith, could possibly have done.52 Inevitably, therefore, the main hopes of those who wished to stop the film came to rest with the new Motion Picture Commission.
The NAACP, at Levenson’s suggestion, filed a formal protest with the commission against the exhibition of Birth. This group held formal hearings on the morning of December 2. At either this four-hour session or two further sessions on December 4, Griffith, Dixon, and their lawyers tried very hard “to prove that there is no connection between the original Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction days and the modern organisation of that name.” The film’s producers seem to have offered to add an intertitle to this effect and to have the same point made verbally before each showing. For its part, the NAACP argued that the film glorified the Klan, encouraged “racial and religious prejudices,” and fostered “a spirit of antagonism” toward blacks.53 At the end of the final hearing on December 4, the members of the commission viewed the film and by a majority of two to one (Levenson wanted to suppress the film completely) decided not to ban it. On December 20, the commission insisted that for screening of the film to continue in New York state substantial cuts would have to be made. These focused mainly on the scenes in which miscegenation was referred to, as in the representation of Lydia Brown’s relationship with Austin Stoneman, Gus’s chase of Flora Cameron, and Lynch’s pursuit of Elsie Stone-man.54 Later, the NAACP would express concern that the required cuts, or at least some of them, had not been made.55 But for the moment, they could only watch in frustration as the original, unedited film opened at the Selwyn Theater as scheduled. Much of the audience, the New York World reported the next day, appeared to be composed of members of the modern Klan who cheered each time a Klansman appeared on the screen.56 The only success the NAACP could point to (apart from the cuts to the film ordered by the censors) was that at a meeting on December 22, the 750-strong New York City Theater Owners’ Association went on record as opposing both the Klan and any further showing of The Birth of a Nation.57
Another state in which attempts to show the film and the Klan would become linked was Kansas. The Birth of a Nation had been kept out of the state by governors Arthur Capper (1915–1919) and Henry J. Allen (1919–1923). Allen was a strong opponent of the Klan, which first appeared in Kansas in 1922. Under his successor, Jonathan M. Davis, attempts were made to lift the ban on Birth. A first appeal to the governor in June 1923 to permit the showing of the film was met by vigorous protests from the NAACP and the Topeka Daily Capital, published by former governor (now U.S. senator) Arthur Capper.58 At the beginning of December, however, the NAACP was informed that the state censorship board, presumably with Davis’s prior sanction, had reversed its earlier stance and given its approval to the picture.59 NAACP committees lobbied the governor both before and after the board’s decision, presenting him at the second meeting with a copy of one of Dixon’s books on the Klan and pointing out “several paragraphs” that were clearly there to discourage “inter-racial feeling.” C. W. Comagor, chairman of the Kansas City branch of the NAACP, reported that Attorney General Charles B. Griffith, a staunch critic of the Klan, had apparently hinted that if screening the film caused “disturbance, rioting or trouble,” he would ask for an injunction to ban it. Comagor also suggested that the national NAACP launch an appeal to all Christians in Kansas against the film. In his reply, Walter F. White warned that “such a move would be exactly what the producers of the film would want. They would get a tremendous amount of free advertising and Klansmen in every city of the state … would immediately want the picture brought to their city.” Instead, White advised that NAACP branches fight to have ordinances adopted excluding the film from their locality. He also recommended making clear to the governor that support for The Birth of a Nation could well cost him the black vote that might help swing a close election. Finally, since it was “undoubtedly true” that the Klan was behind the movement to show the picture so as to help its recruitment efforts in the state, White proposed seeking allies against the film from other Klan victims, notably Catholics, Jews, and organized labor.60
At its peak in 1924, the Klan may have had 100,000 members in Kansas. Yet it also had powerful opponents there, including Governor Allen, Attorney General Griffith, and William Allen White, editor of the Emporia Gazette, who got almost 150,000 votes running independently for governor in 1924 on an anti-Klan platform. In early 1925, the Klan was refused a charter and thereafter started to decline in the state.61 The history of the Klan in Kansas paralleled that in other areas of the United States, where there was a popular revulsion against the persecutions and violence with which the organization had become associated. To advance its agenda, in many states the Klan had become involved in politics and it subsequently began to be torn apart by factionalism and disputes over patronage. There were also several scandals, perhaps the worst being the 1925 conviction of the head of the Indiana Klan, David C. Stephenson, for the kidnap and rape of a secretary. Even the unsuccessful campaign of Democrat Alfred E. Smith, a Roman Catholic, for the presidency in 1928 failed to ignite anything in the way of a real revival. As David M. Chalmers remarks, “by the beginning of the great Depression, the Klan’s power and glory were almost gone.” The Depression further undermined its efforts at recruitment. As the Memphis Commercial-Appeal correctly observed, “Not many persons have $10 to throw away on an oversized nightshirt.”62
The decline of the Klan probably also accelerated the decline of the film with which it had become most closely associated. The peak earning power of The Birth of a Nation was from 1915 to 1922. In 1922, the president of United Artists, Hiram Abrams, was granted permission by the Epoch Company to distribute the film to cheaper theaters, where the admission price would be around fifty cents rather than the $2 that had formerly been the case for the best seats. Until 1926, with the film playing in many theaters and communities it had not previously reached, United Artists had been happy to handle Birth’s distribution worldwide. However, in 1926, with receipts falling fast, they handed the task of distributing it back to Epoch.63 NAACP campaigns against the film continued until 1926: it was banned in Camden, New Jersey, in December 1923; West Newton, Massachusetts, and Montclair, New Jersey, in July 1924; New Britain, Connecticut, in August 1924; and Hartford, Connecticut, in March 1925.64 In April 1925, the Supreme Court of West Virginia upheld the legislation passed in 1919 to bar the film from the state. Two months later, the Supreme Court of Ohio upheld the ban in that state, and in March 1926 Attorney General Crabbe ruled that the ban also covered private showings of Birth to Klansmen and their friends.65 After 1926, as showings of the film diminished, the NAACP campaign against it wound down. It would spring to life again with the release of a sound version of Birth in 1930.
Protesting the Sound Version
Af
ter 1922, The Birth of a Nation suffered from being shown in less luxurious theaters. One reason for the success of the original road show strategy had been the impressive sound effects and musical score, as played by a full orchestra. In cheaper movie houses, the film’s exhibitors were obliged to depend on whatever musical arrangements the management had to offer—an organ or perhaps a small band. The actual effect of the film on its spectators must have been considerably less. The innovation of sound across much of the movie industry between 1927 and 1929 probably made Birth seem even more passé. But in August 1929, Griffith watched with great interest the effects of a revival of The Birth of a Nation (together with Intolerance and Broken Blossoms) at a Los Angeles theater. Spectators queued for several blocks to see the films. The demand was so great that the screenings were repeated a week later, with equal success. While the movie house involved had done the best it could by having its organ provide a musical accompaniment to the screening of Birth, there had been no attempt to use Breil’s score. “I think there is no doubt,” Griffith wrote to his lawyer and fellow Epoch director Albert H. T. Banzhaf, “that if the Birth of a Nation were synchronized, so the small towns could hear the music, you could get a lot of money.”66
At a meeting of Griffith, Dixon, and Harry and Roy Aitken at New York’s Algonquin Hotel, it became clear that neither Dixon nor Griffith had sufficient cash to invest in a synchronized version of the film to incorporate the musical score and sound effects. Once again, as in 1915, the Aitkens agreed to try to raise the money. In some ways, it proved an even harder task: the long campaign against the film by the NAACP and other groups made potential investors leery. At last, George Kemble, who came from a theatrical background in Brooklyn and was a “fan” of the film, managed to raise the $150,000 that was needed and Griffith was asked to edit The Birth of a Nation down so that it could be synchronized. Kemble and Griffith collaborated together over the synchronization process, which was carried out by the Western Electric Company and took just under a year.67
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