Opponents of The Birth of a Nation were disturbed by press reports that a sound version of the film was in preparation. The director of the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation, a mainly religious organization founded in 1919 to fight lynching and other racial abuses, wrote to Will Hays of the MPPDA in July 1930:
It would be particularly unfortunate to give this picture a new lease on life at the present time. Because of the financial depression and the political situation, race feeling in the South is very acute. Lynchings this year have gone beyond what they have been in previous years and we are having almost weekly outbreaks of racial antagonism. The injection of a talking version of “The Birth of a Nation” would greatly intensify this.68
In reply to this and a later letter, Hays’s secretary Carl Milliken made three essential points. First, Birth had “become one of the classics of the motion picture industry.” Second, at issue was not a new version of the film but merely the addition of sound to the old print, to which he could see no reasonable objection. Third, with the arrival of the Production Code of 1930, if Birth of a Nation was really to be remade, “some changes would undoubtedly be indicated.” “My private opinion,” Milliken shrewdly added, “is that nothing much will happen and the revived picture will not get much circulation unless a controversy should develop.”69
A number of members of the NAACP clearly shared Milliken’s view. “There are some here,” Walter White wrote to the president of the San Francisco branch, “who feel that it might be the part of wisdom not to help advertise the film.” White, however, was also conscious that The Birth of a Nation “by its very excellence of photography and staging, to which is now added sound effects, make it … a most vicious and dangerous thing.”70 The question of what to do about the new synchronized version of Birth was discussed by the NAACP Board of Directors in New York on September 8. In the end, White reported to all branches, it was agreed “that open protest against the picture would only serve to draw public attention to the revival of the film … If the revival does not meet with the necessary financial success it undoubtedly will quietly be withdrawn.” The national NAACP consequently recommended that branches approach local authorities and request them to recommend that local movie houses not show the film. It also sought to enlist Jewish and Catholic organizations and various “church bodies” in its strategy of “quiet opposition” to the film.71
Over the next fourteen months, the new version of The Birth of a Nation was banned in many places: Detroit (Michigan), Portland (Oregon), Omaha (Nebraska), St. Paul (Minnesota), Glen Cove (New York), Montclair (New Jersey), Jersey City (New Jersey), and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). The statewide bans in Kansas and Ohio were reimposed.72 Discreet protests were also made in New Castle (Pennsylvania), New Kensington (Pennsylvania), and New York (where Walter White attempted to persuade the police commissioner to suppress it “to prevent its possible use as the means of recruiting or securing followers for a fast dying Ku Klux Klan”).73 No one from the NAACP ever admitted that the organization had perhaps made a mistake by giving so much free publicity to the fight against the film on its initial release. Yet the much quieter 1930–31 campaign proved far more successful in the number of suppressions secured.
Although the synchronized version of the film gained “quite a few bookings” in the first months after its appearance, those involved in its production soon realized that it would be nothing like the money-spinner the original film had been. Kemble ran into financial difficulties distributing the sound version, and the Aitkens, to protect themselves, were forced to cancel their contract with him. The 1930 version, by comparison with its predecessor, may have suffered from the lack of controversy—and thus publicity—attending its release. But the absence of crowd reaction at the première in San Francisco underlined what may have been the real problem: the movies in general had moved on, and what had seemed new and impressive to 1915 spectators was now not just familiar but rather staid and old-fashioned. Audiences of the synchronized version, according to the New York Times, liked the action sequences but laughed openly at the film’s archaic sentiments. “Today,” claimed the Outlook, “it carries but little of its old punch.” Because of the addition of the soundtrack, the film had to be speeded up from seventy to ninety frames a minute, and this may also have contributed to Birth’s declining appeal. The faster movement gave an air of unreality to the Klan rides. As the Outlook’s critic commented, the new speed made the movie appear “jerky, erratic, and ruinous to the eyes.”74
A 1936 advertisement for the sound version of the film. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-2427)
For the remainder of the 1930s, the new version of Birth of a Nation was shown sporadically in a variety of locations. Wherever it appeared, commented one newspaper, it was “militantly picketed by groups of fearless young—and sometimes not so young—white and Negro men and women.”75 As the decade wore on, the NAACP especially became increasingly concerned at attempts to legitimize the film by showing it in nontheatrical venues. In 1935, for example, the New York Young Men’s Hebrew Association voted to include it on the basis of “its artistic merit” in a program of evening films. After a brisk letter from Walter White, pointing out that “this notorious picture … more than any other one thing, was responsible for the revival a few years back of the Ku Klux Klan,” the screening was canceled.76 Less successful was the NAACP’s attempt to stop the showing of Birth to a class taking an adult education course at New York University in the fall semester of 1937. On August 29, Dean Ned H. Dearborn announced that this pioneering course in film studies, aiming “to make possible a comprehensive history and appreciation of the cinema,” would include the showing of thirty “film classics,” including Birth. On September 8, Walter White wrote to Dean Dearborn objecting to the plan to show Griffith’s movie. While conceding that Birth of a Nation “was one of the pioneers in certain techniques of the film,” White argued that it distorted the history of the Reconstruction era, treated blacks in a “vicious” way, had helped revive the Klan, and spread “racial and religious hatreds” which expressed themselves in lynchings and … movements like the Black Legion.”77 Initially, the NAACP campaign to persuade the university to abandon the scheduled showing of the film seemed to be going well. As one sympathetic university figure observed, Birth, “regardless of its artistic view,” was “one of the most outrageous [films] that has ever been produced from the social point of view.” It may have helped that the Klan was in the headlines in mid-September 1937 through the revelations that former senator Hugo Black of Alabama, nominated to the Supreme Court by President Roosevelt, had once been a Klansman.78 On September 24, a draft NAACP press release claimed that the film had been withdrawn, citing a statement by Dean Dearborn that “a substitute film will be used.” Six days later, however, course director Robert R. Gessner wrote to White informing him that such a substitution had not been possible. He went on to emphasize that the film was being shown only because of its “technical and historical importance.” But he also promised in his own introductory lecture to point out Griffith’s “racial unfairness” and assured White “that the injustice of the picture will be relentlessly scored.” Gessner, himself a writer on racial minorities (including Indians and Jews), was clearly embarrassed by The Birth of a Nation. But in defending his right to show it, he pioneered the strategy that would be used by most future teachers of the film: while praising Birth’s artistic qualities and technical innovations, he simultaneously deplored the racist values it expressed.79
For the NAACP, of course, this was not enough. Although many, from Du Bois to White, had been prepared to acknowledge that the movie represented a technical, even an artistic, achievement, they still wanted it suppressed because of its anti-black character and capacity for harm. NAACP spokesmen must have been dismayed in the 1930s to find Birth of a Nation beginning to acquire a new form of legitimacy through being presented by film scholars as a huge step forward in the history of
American cinema. Even realizing that aspects of the film’s racism had become ludicrous over time—one reviewer who watched the October 4 screening at NYU observed “that some of the anti-Negro episodes drew laughs from the audience”—did not weaken their opposition to the film’s exhibition “under any circumstances.” Thus, the NAACP quickly found itself fighting new screenings at the DeWitt Clinton high school in New York (as part of an adult education course) and at Wesleyan University.80 It also learned, early in 1938, that the Stone Film Library had addressed a circular to many schools offering them the chance of renting “this film classic of the Civil War.” The NAACP, which earlier had managed to persuade the New York Board of Education not to show the film at the DeWitt Clinton school, now managed to convince the board to ban the film throughout the New York school system.81 In its wider efforts to prevent the Stone Company from exhibiting Birth, the NAACP also acquired a most unlikely ally: in July 1938, Thomas Dixon brought suit against the Stone Film Library and its associates, whom he accused of having pirated their copy of the film, to restrain them from any further exhibition of The Birth of a Nation.82 Even more serious, from the NAACP’s point of view, was its discovery in early 1939 that the Association of School Film Libraries had included Birth among the range of films it offered. Since the new association had been created by the General Education Board, itself set up through the Rockefeller Foundation to improve the standards of black education in the South, this endorsement of The Birth of a Nation must have seemed to the NAACP like a slap in the face from a sister organization.83
At each stage of its struggle against The Birth of a Nation, the NAACP had used different tactics. In 1915, it had tried to put pressure on public authorities to have the film banned. Where it thought such moves might help, it had supported the introduction of censorship. It had also publicized its protest as much as possible. After American intervention in the First World War, it had tried, with more success, to put pressure on state governors and councils of national defense to suppress the film as a wartime measure. From 1923 onward, the NAACP had learned to rely less on public protests and demonstrations and more on the discreet pressuring of public officials. It continued this strategy with considerable success in the fight against the sound version of the film, released in 1930. At the end of the 1930s, however, it found this approach criticized from an unexpected quarter.
In April 1939, Robert E. Allan, proprietor of the Jewel Theater in Denver, Colorado, was arrested for exhibiting The Birth of a Nation. The local branch of the NAACP made the original complaint against him: by showing Birth, Allen had broken the city ordinance banning motion pictures “which tend to stir up or engender race prejudice.” The trial dragged on by means of continuances for several months. Finally, in February 1940, Allen pleaded guilty and was fined $200, with half suspended for sixty days. The importance of the case to the NAACP was that Allen was defended by the American Council of Civil Liberties (ACLU), which argued that the Denver ordinance was unconstitutional and violated the right of free speech. Reviewing simultaneous NAACP attempts to suppress the film in both Denver and Milwaukee, Roger Baldwin emphasized the ACLU’s opposition to film censorship per se. “Of course,” he wrote to Walter White, “there can be no objection to protests to motion picture distributors nor to picketing. But when appeal is made to the public authorities to take action, it crosses the line of legitimate pressure, and invades the field of censorship.”84 A few days later, when it seemed that the police censors of Detroit might follow the advice of the city’s Corporation Counsel and ban The Birth of a Nation on the grounds that it was “obscene and indecent,” the ACLU’s Arthur Garfield Hays wrote promising that “any exhibitor, who is prevented from showing the film on that ground, will have our support in a contest in the courts.” Making it plain that “we hold no brief for the kind of intolerance represented by this particular film,” Hays at the same time insisted that giving police officials the right to bar films in this way could open the door to all kinds of pressure and prejudice.85
The libertarian argument against censoring Birth was spelled out in more detail by Roger Baldwin in a letter to The Crisis several months later. The drawback with film censorship, Baldwin explained, was that if an anti-black film could be suppressed, so could a pro-black one. Laws designed to protect one minority “always stir up more prejudice than they prevent.” He cited the case of the law passed by New Jersey in 1935 to protect Jews by curbing Nazi propaganda—a law that had actually been used by Catholics to persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses. (Baldwin was too tactful, or perhaps too politic, to mention that eleven months earlier, Adolph J. Rettig, manager of the Ormont Theater in Orange, New Jersey, had been arrested and charged under the same law with exhibiting “the race-hating film ‘The Birth of a Nation.’”)86 The essential point made by Baldwin and the ACLU was that any “machinery of public suppression” necessarily threatened civil liberties. Those who opposed The Birth of a Nation, Baldwin argued, “have in their hands the means of boycott, picketing, demonstration, letters of protest to motion picture proprietors—and they should use them. Calling the police or prosecutor into action is quite a different matter. It creates bad legal precedents that can be turned as easily against Negroes as for them.”87
By the spring of 1939, the NAACP Board of Directors was once again rethinking its strategy in fighting Birth. The ACLU’s hostility to censorship may have been a major factor in this, but it was not the only one. There were signs, even before the Allan case, that some censorship boards were reluctant to act against a film that was now so old. “In view of the long history of the exhibition of this picture … covering a period of so many years,” wrote the director of the New York state censorship board in October 1938, “I do not think that I would be justified in taking action for the cancellation of the [exhibition] permit.”88 At its meeting on May 8, 1939, the board discussed both Roger Baldwin’s letter of April 25, outlining the ACLU’s opposition to the involvement of public authorities, and a letter from Dr. James J. McClennon, president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, suggesting an attempt to get Will Hays and the MPPDA to withdraw The Birth of a Nation from circulation. It decided both to write to Hays and to “use every means in its power to prevent the showing of the film.” The bravado of the second part of the resolution did not prevent some anxiety over how the ACLU might react to the first: Walter White wrote to Roger Baldwin asking for clarification on this point. Baldwin reassured the NAACP on June 17: “We have no complaint about the use of pressure on private agencies such as the Will Hays organization to prevent the showing of ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ but we do object to the use of police power to stop a film.”89
Over the next few months, the NAACP and its supporters wrote to Hays protesting the continuing circulation of existing prints of Birth and suggestions in some quarters that a new sound version of the film was planned. Hays replied to Rabbi Stephen Wise in March 1940, reassuring him on both points:
You realize, of course, that the picture mentioned has been on exhibition for twenty-five years. It will doubtless continue to be booked by unaffiliated [to the MPPDA] theatres here and there. Unless a new controversy in the press should develop, which would call attention to it anew, it is my belief that no special public interest in or demand for a remake of this picture is likely to develop.90
So far as the NAACP was concerned, the MPPDA proved woefully unmoved by the danger the existing film represented. Its secretary, Carl Milliken, responded to Walter White’s insistence “that the … showing THE BIRTH OF A NATION in any form would be disastrous” with the bland assurance that recently “the circulation of the film has not been great, and we have had practically no comment from the public.”91
Hays and the MPPDA would not act to prevent Birth’s continuing distribution, the ACLU remained completely opposed to banning the film through state or local censorship, and the NAACP no longer believed it helpful to generate publicity for the film by mass protest; therefore, the only tactics left in the fight against
the film involved trying to persuade theater managers not to show it or attempting to discourage people from attending performances by picketing outside the theater concerned. The latter tactic seems to have been the most effective: in September 1940, a picket line outside the Art Theater in New York “succeeded in reducing the attendance at each performance to little more than a score of persons.” On December 2, 1942, only three hours after a picket line was established outside New York’s 55th Street Playhouse, the theater management withdrew The Birth of a Nation from the screen. Less than two weeks later, Lowell Mellett, chief of Motion Pictures of the Office of War Information (OWI) effectively promised that Birth would be prohibited for the remainder of the war. “We are assured,” he wrote to the NAACP,
that the War Activities Committee will take up the matter with any theatre already showing or contemplating the showing of this picture, and there is reason to believe that representations by the Committee will be sufficient in most cases to prevent showings.92
In the Second World War, as in the First, Birth’s theme of racial conflict invited official suppression because it challenged the dominant public discourses of national unity and social solidarity.
Once the Second World War was over, The Birth of a Nation was occasionally revived at art house and other theaters. As soon as it was advertised, however, as Roy Aitken despondently recalled, minority groups organized against it and their protests were often “very effective.”93 It was banned by both the Maryland state board of censors and the city censor of Boston in 1952 and by the Atlanta censors in 1959 and 1961.94 There would still be controversial showings of the film; it may not have been an entire coincidence that it was playing at a downtown movie house in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the riots against school integration broke out there in 1957.95 According to Pete Daniel, a typical Klan rally of January 1958 still featured a screening.96 But an attempted revival at the Lansdowne Theater in Philadelphia in 1965 was greeted by pickets carrying placards insisting “We shall overcome ‘The Birth of a Nation’” and asking “Is this Pennsylvania or Alabama?”97 From the late 1940s on, the main audience for Birth would be members of specialist film societies and college students taking courses in art, drama, film, or American history.98
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