The Birth of a Nation and the Social Impact of Cinema
Behind the efforts of the NAACP and other organizations to suppress The Birth of a Nation from the very beginning lay the assumption that the film would have bad effects on its spectators, stimulating race hatred and even violence. As already noted, May Childs Nerney, the national secretary of the NAACP, told many of her correspondents of a young Southern white man who, on emerging from a screening of Birth in New York, remarked that he would like to “kill every nigger I know.”99 This subjective and possibly apocryphal story was accompanied by a number of cases in which the film’s exhibition actually did seem to trigger racial violence. In June 1916, for example, The Crisis highlighted the case of Henry Brocj, originally from Kentucky. Five weeks after arriving in Lafayette, Indiana, Brocj went to a performance of The Birth of a Nation. On leaving the movie house and apparently without any provocation or prior knowledge of his victim, he “fired three bullets into the body of Edward Manson, a Negro high school student, fifteen years old.” When the boy died, Brocj was charged with murder.100 Such random violence seemed to confirm the view of Birth’s opponents that the film had terrible effects on audiences. One NAACP observer later noted that “some of the investigators at East St. Louis [a major Illinois race riot of May 1918] found its influence.” “I also heard,” wrote the same correspondent, “that the mob and lynching at Springfield, M[iss]o[uri], coincided with the exhibit of the film.”101
Protesters against the film in New York in 1947. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-84505)
Worries about the impact of viewing The Birth of a Nation on its spectators fitted well with wider anxieties voiced since the opening of the first nickelodeon in 1905 on the challenge to social order and traditional moral standards of behavior posed by the cinema generally. Many of the movements for censoring or otherwise controlling the movies during the Progressive Era were based on the assumption that films encouraged criminal acts or sexual irresponsibility. In 1916, Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg published a pioneering study analyzing the powerful influences of feature films on their audiences. The techniques used by filmmakers (such as close-ups and cutting), he believed, gave their films great powers of suggestion so far as spectators were concerned. Münsterberg insisted that “the intensity with which the [photo]plays take hold of the audience cannot remain without strong social effects.”102
Reformers’ concerns in this period were focused mainly on children, who were regarded as the most impressionable and therefore the most vulnerable part of the movie audience. During the 1910s and 1920s, a number of surveys attempted to establish the impact of films on children who viewed them.103 Some tried to establish a straightforward statistical connection between children’s attendance at the movies and criminal activity of varying kinds. In 1926, for example, Alice Miller Mitchell conducted a survey of over 10,000 Chicago children drawn from three groups: children attending high schools and the last four years of grade schools, juvenile delinquents, and boy and girl scouts. The Mitchell study included one young subject, the inmate of a reformatory, who had committed a series of holdups to pay for his habit of daily movie attendance. This young man’s favorite films included The Birth of a Nation.104
There was an ironic footnote to the demonization of mulattoes in The Birth of a Nation. In 1932, Harvard sociologist Caroline Bond Day published a study of 2,537 individuals belonging to mixed-race families in the United States. She found that—making a real contrast with white-only families—only one of her subjects had ever been in trouble with the police. The individual involved was Edward Franklin Frazier who, as a young sociologist, had been arrested for picketing a performance of Birth of a Nation outside New York’s Capitol Theater in 1921.105 The early 1930s also saw the completion of an ambitious sociological/psychological project: the series of studies financed by the Payne Fund investigating moviegoing and its effects on young people. Eleven of these studies were published between 1933 and 1935. Their initiator, William H. Short of the National Committee for Study of Social Values in Motion Pictures (later the Motion Picture Research Council), was a fervent advocate of censorship, and the purpose of the studies, as Robert Sklar has commented, was “to get the goods on the movies, to nail them to the wall.”106 In 1933, popular journalist Henry James Forman published Our Movie-Made Children, a book in which he summarized the findings of the studies as a whole. As Forman recounted it, impartial scientific research had now finally established what critics of the movies had long asserted: that children were inspired by the films they viewed to embrace anti-social behavior. Moving pictures, Forman argued, especially crime movies, demonstrated criminal techniques in action and helped propel many young people “toward acts of delinquency and crime.”107 The movies not only predisposed some young people toward crime, however. The Payne Fund studies also stressed that they gave their youthful spectators strong and influential stereotypes of certain individuals or racial/ethnic groups. “The depiction of certain characters, nationalities, races, forms of life, etc., in motion pictures,” wrote sociologist Herbert Blumer in one of the studies, “is particularly likely to leave an impression on imagery because of their vivid visual presentations … They are likely, further, to be simple and unambiguous, and to be clothed with certain emotional and sentimental qualities which, one calculates, make their appeal somewhat irresistible.”108
As part of one of the Payne Fund studies, sociologists Ruth C. Peterson and L. L. Thurstone investigated the effect of showing The Birth of a Nation on the social attitudes of 434 schoolchildren from Crystal Lake, Illinois. The children, who were drawn from grades six through twelve, were asked in May 1931 to fill out a questionnaire designed to ascertain their attitudes toward African Americans. A week later, they were shown the newly released sound version of The Birth of a Nation. The day after viewing the film, they filled out the same questionnaire. The children’s attitude had changed enormously by the time of the second survey: they were now far more hostile to, and prejudiced against, black people. Nor did the influence of the film, which provided the most dramatic effect of all those measured by the researchers in their various experiments, prove short-lived. A follow-up survey suggested that much of the changed attitude persisted some five months after the film was first shown.109 The strength and longevity of this changed attitude, of course, may have reflected not simply the racist power of the film but also the children’s lack of knowledge about blacks generally. Little attention was paid to the race issue in (Northern) public discourse of the Depression era, and since there were no blacks among the 3,700 residents of Crystal Lake in 1931, it was probable, the investigators concluded, that very few children “had known or even seen Negroes” before viewing The Birth of a Nation.110 The dramatic impact of the film on the children in the study may be explained at least partly by their earlier lack of knowledge of individual blacks and of the race issue as a whole.
However flawed it may have been, the Peterson and Thurstone study for the first time offered what William H. Short, in a letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, referred to as “scientific and convincing evidence of the harm that has been done to the colored race by the showing of the film ‘The Birth of a Nation.’” Short, a former member of the NAACP, argued that the organization’s long campaign against the film had been “comparatively ineffective” because the NAACP had been unable to prove the damaging psychological and social effects it alleged. The impending publication of the Peterson and Thurstone book, Short promised Du Bois, would remedy this situation and “put a weapon of considerable value into your hands.” Clearly, Short was following his own agenda. The NAACP appeared to him a possible ally in his censorship campaign. He promised to send the organization a copy of the published study. In return, the NAACP agreed to “make the book known through our press service” and to use the material on The Birth of a Nation when protesting against future screenings of the film.111
“The studies of the Payne Fund,” wrote black scholar Lawren
ce Reddick a few years later, “document what we have all guessed from our own impressions; namely, that ideas of love, clothes, manners and heroism among adolescents (and others, of course) are directly traceable to movies … It is, therefore, important to inquire into what such a powerful instrument for influencing the attitudes and behavior of so many persons has had to say about the Negro.” Reddick set out to explore what he called “the social function of the movie in the realm of race relations.”112 He analyzed 100 films, determining that seventy-five were anti-black, thirteen neutral, and only twelve “definitely proNegro.” Hollywood’s anti-black bias seemed to Reddick a major social and cultural problem, given the emphasis of the Payne Fund studies on the impact of motion pictures on their audiences. He was particularly troubled by The Birth of a Nation. Although he recognized the film’s aesthetic merits—it was, he declared, “a masterpiece of conception and structure”—he still criticized it for being, “without question, the most vicious anti-Negro film that has ever appeared on the American screen.”113
As Reddick, in 1944, saw Birth still posing a threat to black Americans by stimulating feeling against them, it is worth mentioning that social science would eventually suggest that this threat had virtually disappeared. One of the most fascinating and far-reaching effects of the Peterson and Thurstone Payne Fund study occurred nearly four decades later, after a vast migration of blacks to the North and all the heightened consciousness of racial matters that had been produced by the civil rights movement. A sociological researcher returned to the very same school in Crystal Lake, Illinois, that Peterson and Thurstone had investigated and repeated their survey of the impact of The Birth of a Nation, albeit with a somewhat different methodology. This time, using a control group and a revised attitude scale and allowing only three hours between the pre-screening and post-screening questionnaires, the researcher found that the power of the film to instill racial prejudice in children had largely disappeared. Little change was reflected in the children’s attitudes before and after they viewed the film: if anything, there was a slight shift toward a more favorable perception of African Americans in the later survey.114
Communists and Anti-communists Fight over The Birth of a Nation
During the late 1930s, as Janet Staiger has shown, The Birth of a Nation became caught up in an ongoing argument among members of the American extreme left.115 This controversy had its origins in the drive of the Committee on Industrial Organization (from 1937, the Congress of Industrial Organization [CIO]) to unionize steel and textile workers in the South. Many of the CIO organizers were either associated or were believed to be associated with communism. Moreover, black support for this new brand of unionization meant that left-wing activists were increasingly drawn to take a position on civil rights issues. During the 1930s, as Thomas Cripps has observed, “blacks became the darlings of the Communist party so that NAACP picket lines regularly drew white radicals who gave an unwarranted Marxist identity” to black protests and attempted to submerge them into their own struggle. At the same time, a much-weakened Ku Klux Klan attempted to revive its fortunes by reinventing itself primarily as an anti-union and anti-communist movement.116
The continuing significance of The Birth of a Nation for the NAACP, the film’s strong associations with the revived Klan, and the Marxist belief in the manner in which the economic base determined a society’s superstructure (what Marx referred to as its “social, political and intellectual life”)117 meant that it was almost inevitable, sooner or later, that the film would become a target for communist writers. Beginning in December 1939, David Platt published a series of articles in The Daily Worker, the main newspaper organ of the communist party, advancing the thesis that The Birth of a Nation had been part of a deliberate attempt by Hollywood, in collaboration with capitalist interests, to rule both whites and blacks by dividing them. However, the timing of this assault—only a few months after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939—meant that The Birth of a Nation would now become both a symbol and a focus of the wider disagreements among American communists and ex-communists. Platt’s attempt to use the film to demonstrate a link between racism and class exploitation was challenged in the New Leader by filmmaker and writer Seymour Stern. Almost certainly motivated by anti-Stalinism (the agreement with Hitler laying the foundations for the dismemberment of Poland had been preceded by the revelations of the purges and failure in the Spanish Civil War), Stern took issue with this view of the film, arguing that Griffith had been neither reactionary nor racist in making his film and attacking its critics such as Platt as “totalitarians.”118
Stern’s engagement with The Birth of a Nation did not end with his articles of 1940. In subsequent decades, as the world changed, he effectively appointed himself chief defender of both Griffith and his most controversial film. In the fall 1946 issue of the British film journal Sight and Sound, Peter Noble, an early student of the representation of blacks on film, published an article attacking Griffith as an “idol” with “feet of clay.” According to Noble, as well as being a pioneer of cinema, Griffith had been “a pioneer of prejudice” because of “his anti-Negro bias.” For all its artistic and aesthetic merits, The Birth of a Nation was guilty of “sheer vicious distortion” that made it the leader among those American movies “which have consciously maligned the Negro race.” It had been the first film to dwell (not once but twice) on the theme of the rape of white women by black men. It had offered “monstrous caricatures” of black politicians and servants. It also presented the Ku Klux Klan as the “heroic” rescuers of whites threatened by “black terror.” Noble suggested that Griffith later tried to make amends for his treatment of blacks by inserting a shot of a white man kissing a dying black soldier in Hearts of the World (1918); but in the immediate postwar period, as the number of lynchings in the South rose and 13 million blacks anxiously waited to see if they were to be allowed to escape “persecution and injustice,” he insisted that it was crucial to acknowledge “Griffith’s contribution to past prejudice.”119 In the following issue of Sight and Sound, responses to Noble from both Griffith and Stern appeared. According to Griffith, his attitude toward blacks had “always been one of affection and brotherly feeling.” Still a master of invention, the former director reinvented his own past, complete with mammy figure, to back up this claim. He had, he declared, been “partly raised by a lovable old Negress down in old Kentucky.”120
While Griffith tried to defend himself by manipulating nostalgia for the past, closely associating himself with the plantation myth and the legend of the “Lost Cause,” Stern’s defense was carefully crafted to fit with the emerging realities of the Cold War. At the beginning of the 1930s, Stern had been linked with Lewis Jacobs, Harry Platt, and Harry Potamkin as co-founders of Experimental Cinema, a left-wing film journal. Potamkin died in 1934, shortly before the final issue of the journal, but the ideas and careers of the surviving three had already begun to diverge by this point. Jacobs would remain an independent left-wing figure. In 1939, he published The Rise of the American Film, in which inter alia he argued that The Birth of a Nation constituted “a passionate and persuasive avowal of the inferiority of the Negro.”121 Platt joined the Communist Party, whose main newspaper published his own attack on Griffith’s film. Stern first became a socialist anti-Stalinist before, in the 1940s, staking out a position as a strident anti-communist. Nineteen forty-seven, of course, was a crucial year in both the development of the Cold War and American domestic anti-communism. In March, President Truman requested $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey to help their anti-communist governments and proclaimed what became known as the “Truman Doctrine,” offering American aid to all nations threatened by communist aggression or subversion. Meanwhile, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began its investigation into communist subversion in Hollywood. In May, HUAC interviewed its first “friendly” witnesses in secret session; in September, it began the public hearings that led t
o the identification and later prosecution of the “Hollywood Ten.”
Stern, anointed by Griffith around this time as his preferred biographer, would later be dismissed by Richard Schickel as the director’s “half-mad acolyte.”122 However, there was nothing half-mad about his attack on Peter Noble in the spring of 1947. Stern’s fervid anti-communism, the product of his own political trajectory from left to right, blended well with the atmosphere of the time. He began his defense of Griffith’s reputation in Sight and Sound with a deliberate attempt to depict Noble as a “red.” His criticisms of The Birth of a Nation, Stern argued, echoed the “anti-Griffith libel [that before World War II ] issued periodically, and often in … identical phrases, from certain publications in the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.” Elsewhere in his article, he accused Noble of “merely echoing in strangely familiar accents and phrases the astounding falsehoods and unbelievable nonsense on this subject which already have poured in volume from the presses of the N.Y. ‘Daily Worker,’ the ‘New Masses,’ the defunct ‘Friday’ and ‘New Theatre.’” Stern paid off another old score by accusing Noble of being greatly influenced by the “errors, falsehoods and fanciful misinterpretations” of Griffith to be found in The Rise of the American Film by his former colleague on the left, Lewis Jacobs. Much of his article covered ground that was already very familiar to Griffith and the film’s defenders: he contended that Birth was historically accurate and that it depicted good as well as bad African Americans. He also took the somewhat condescending position that Noble, as a non-American, could not be expected to know very much about American modes of film production. Two aspects of Stern’s argument, however, were new. He justified the Klan as a rejection of the “totalitarianism” of radical Northern Republicans, comparing their activities to the resistance movements against the Nazis in France and Norway during the war. In using the term “totalitarianism,” of course, he was clearly rejecting Stalinism as much as fascism. Finally, Stern contradicted the notion that movies such as The Birth of a Nation have effects: films, he maintained, “do not start attitudes or trends in political or social relations; they merely reflect them.”123
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