D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation

by Melvyn Stokes

  The vast profits generated by The Birth of a Nation also inspired Thomas Dixon to make films of his own, and at least in the short run, they provided him with the resources to gratify this ambition. During the summer of 1915, the novelist moved to Los Angeles where he established the “Dixon Studios” at Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue. Most of Dixon’s films over the next few years would have a clear didactic purpose. His first, The Fall of a Nation (1916), a clear attempt to cash in on the success of Birth, was a warning against pacifism and a plea for American military preparedness. An original feature of the film was that it was accompanied by a completely original musical score by Victor Herbert.166 Almost superstitiously, Dixon followed the traditions set by The Birth of a Nation. He filmed battle scenes (at a cost of $31,000) where those for Birth had been staged (Universal Field, now part of the Forest Lawn Cemetery). The film premièred at Clune’s Auditorium and had its East Coast opening at the Liberty Theater. The trade press was enthusiastic and the movie made a total profit of $120,000, but it never became a runaway success in the way that Griffith’s film had done.167 The next three film projects Dixon was associated with were all versions of novels he had written. The Foolish Virgin (1915), dealing with modern womanhood, was made into a film in 1917. (It proved so successful, it was remade in 1924.) The One Woman (1903) examined the links between socialism and the “new woman”; it was released in 1918. Comrades (1909), a novel attacking communism, became the film Bolshevism on Trial (1919), which despite its topicality—it came out in the same year as the “Red Scare”—was not very successful.

  In February 1921, Dixon’s own production company, which had actually produced only one film, The Fall of a Nation, went bankrupt. Curiously, this seems to have had a liberating effect on Dixon. Although he would direct only one more film, he had already written the screenplay for Wing Toy, a film about white-oriental miscegenation released in January 1921. In the next five years, he would write screenplays for ten more movies (one of which, The Mark of the Beast, 1923, he would also produce and direct). Some of these, such as Thelma (1923), were melodramas. Others were Westerns: Where Men Are Men (1921), Bring Him In (1921), The Trail Rider (1925), and The Gentle Cyclone (1926). All but two were adaptations of stories by other authors. In the history of the cinema, the most interesting of Dixon’s 1920s films was The Mark of the Beast. An intense psychological drama, involving just five characters, it looked forward in many respects to 1940s Hollywood films such as Lady in the Dark (1944) dealing with psychoanalysis. It also featured high-contrast lighting of the kind that would also come to be associated with noir films of the 1940s (Dixon was attempting, he thought, to bring the movies “up to date”). The film, which may simply have been too different for audiences of 1923 to appreciate, failed at the box office.168

  Essentially, Dixon’s involvement in the movie industry had ended by early 1926, though he would also contribute to the story that was the basis for Nation Aflame (1937), an anti-Klan picture made with the encouragement of the PCA’s Joseph Breen.169 The arrival in 1927 of the era of the “talkies” spelled the finish of Dixon’s screenwriting career: his novels had already shown that he was rather mediocre at reproducing dialogue. In the first half of the 1920s, despite his film work, Dixon had continued to produce a steady succession of novels that reworked earlier writings on the Civil War (A Man of the People: A Drama of Abraham Lincoln, 1920, and The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South, 1921), or Reconstruction (The Black Hood, 1924), or modern relationships (The Love Complex, 1925). In the summer of 1925, however, the deaths within a few weeks of one another of his elder and younger brothers made him eager to occupy himself with something new. Soon afterward he became involved in a plan to develop Wildacres, a beautiful area in western North Carolina, into a colony for creative people. By 1928, this real estate project, into which Dixon had sunk most of his money, was going well. Then came the collapse of the property boom, the stock market “Crash” of 1929, and the beginning of the Depression. Dixon lost nearly all his fortune and had to sell his home on Riverside Drive, New York; by 1934 he was describing himself as “penniless.”170

  Being Dixon, he turned to writing and lecturing as a way of making ends meet. In 1929, he published The Sun Virgin, a romance set against the background of the Inca civilization in Peru. It did poorly. In 1932, together with Harry M. Daugherty, he produced The Inside History of the Harding Administration, a defense of the late president.171 Working on this book rekindled Dixon’s old interest in politics. In the 1932 presidential election, he campaigned for Franklin D. Roosevelt and for the next two years was a strong supporter of the New Deal. By 1936, however, his politics had changed: believing the New Deal had been infiltrated by communists, he supported Roosevelt’s Republican opponent. A year later, he was rewarded by being given the sinecure clerkship of a federal court for the eastern district of North Carolina by a Republican judge.172 In February 1939, Dixon had a stroke. He made a partial recovery and with the help of his second wife, Madelyn (whom he had first met when she played the lead in The Mark of the Beast), he finished his last novel, The Flaming Sword (1939). This curious work was intended as a sequel to The Clansman. The heroine, Angela Cameron Henry, is the daughter of Ben Cameron and Elsie Stoneman, both now deceased. Angela at one point is hired, in a splendid piece of self-reflexivity, to promote The Birth of a Nation! Although this novel, together with Birth and Dixon’s earlier novels, has a black rapist, the main story revolves around the successful attempt of black communists (led by W. E. B. Du Bois) to take over the United States by force. The Flaming Sword was a critical and financial failure. In the last years of his life, Dixon was an invalid, frequently wracked by pain. He was also poor and largely forgotten by an American public that had once flocked to read his novels or see his plays. He died in April 1946.173

  Harry and Roy Aitken’s careers were pretty much all downhill after Birth of a Nation. Even though the board of the Mutual Company had declined to finance the making of The Birth of a Nation, it resented the fact that the Aitkens had organized a separate company (Epoch) to handle the distribution of what had turned out to be an immensely profitable film. This grievance helped bring other long-simmering disputes to a head and led to a board-room coup in which first Roy and then Harry Aitken were removed as directors of the company. With his usual prescience, Harry, seeing which way the wind was blowing, had already taken the precaution of organizing the Triangle Picture Corporation with himself as chairman.174 As its name indicated, Triangle brought together the three leading directors in America at this time: Griffith, Thomas Ince, and Mack Sennett. On the basis of the contracts he made with the three, Harry was able to sign up 600 theaters in Triangle’s first three months: in a pioneering version of the block-booking system, theater owners committed themselves to take all their pictures from Triangle’s exchanges.175 As Richard Koszarksi notes, however, this early move toward vertical integration of the movie industry “began to unravel almost immediately.” To get the Triangle scheme under way, Harry—who had little available money, since he had invested $200,000 in Griffith’s Intolerance—was obliged to borrow from the banks. Griffith seems never to have directed a picture for Triangle, limiting himself to a “nominal supervision” of his assistants. Harry also made a major error of judgment when, in imitation of Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players strategy of 1912, he began to sign up prominent stage stars to act in pictures for Triangle. The movies did not do very well and Harry was obliged to cancel almost all the contracts. The affair did not help Triangle’s reputation and cost the company several hundred thousand dollars. Worse, it created pressure from the banks toward greater consolidation of the movie business. This, in turn, led Harry to make a fatal mistake: he drew up a plan for a merger of Triangle with the Zukor and Goldwyn interests.176

  Harry Aitken’s main problem, as a movie magnate, was that he was good at launching ventures, not consolidating them. His modus operandi also revolved around borrowing large amounts of money at high interest rates
to underwrite the costs of expansion.177 Moreover, even after years in the cutthroat movie business, Harry and his brother Roy still retained a certain naivety. As part of the merger negotiations, he allowed Zukor and Goldwyn to examine Triangle’s books. Once aware of Triangle’s weaknesses and high indebtedness, Harry’s competitors not only withdrew from the proposed merger; they began actively to plot the Aitkens’ downfall.178 Joined together without Triangle, as the Paramount Pictures Corporation, they started to lure away Triangle’s stars with offers of higher salaries. By late 1916, the Aitkens were forced to sell the twenty-five Triangle film exchanges, in the process relinquishing the movie theaters that had agreed to show only Triangle pictures. Clearly, by this point, Harry was resorting to creative accounting, using dividends from Epoch and another non-Triangle company to keep Triangle afloat. Finally, in May 1917, Zukor lured Griffith away with an offer to distribute films that Griffith would produce himself. Over the next two months, Ince and Sennett also left. Triangle temporarily resorted to a strategy of producing low-cost movies without big-name directors or stars. Although Harry disapproved of this strategy, it might have been made to work, but in May 1919, the banks finally stepped in to take over active management of the company. Abandoning film production, the new managers began to sell off the company’s assets at a knock-down price, including the studio lot at Culver City (bought by Sam Goldwyn, it would eventually become the home of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Harassed by legal actions from Triangle shareholders accusing them of stock manipulation and conspiracy to defraud, the Aitkens went back to their home town in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where they could lick their wounds, handle the distribution of a small number of their old films, and dream of the day when they would recover all their losses by financing the remake of their greatest success. It was not to be.179

  Among the investors in Birth, it was not only Harry and Roy Aitken who ultimately suffered for their early success. One of the larger shareholders in the film after the Aitkens, according to the accounts of the Epoch Producing Corporation, was Robert Goldstein. Goldstein’s firm provided costumes and uniforms for the production. Rather than paying money for this service, Griffith seems to have persuaded Goldstein to accept payment in the form of $6,250 of shares in the picture (and Goldstein personally subscribed a further $1,000 in cash).180 The commercial success of The Birth of a Nation not only made Goldstein wealthy. It inspired him to produce and direct a film that would be a spectacular epic on the same lines as Griffith’s. It would be set against the background not of the Civil War but of the American Revolution. Shortly before the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Goldstein finished work on his fourteen-reel film. During the eighteen months of production, he had had to deal with unscrupulous partners, seemingly endless financial problems, repeated efforts to remove him from the picture, and continuous attempts at sabotaging the whole project (which he blamed principally on Griffith and his agents).181 His film’s opening in Chicago in May was delayed for three weeks by legal and censorship wrangles. It was alleged that the movie would “arouse bitterness and sectional feeling” against Britain (now a U.S. ally, since the American entry into the First World War in April 1917) and that the battles it showed would discourage recruitment into the armed forces.182

  The controversy in Chicago was nothing compared to what awaited Goldstein in Los Angeles, where his film, The Spirit of ’76, had its West Coast première on November 28, 1917, in Clune’s Auditorium (where The Birth of a Nation had premièred nearly three years earlier). The melodrama was set against a variety of backgrounds—France, Canada, England, Massachusetts (Paul Revere’s ride and the battle of Lexington were shown), western New York, Pennsylvania (for the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia and Washington’s base at Valley Forge) and Virginia (for Lord Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown).183 The Spirit of ’76 apparently also contained a sequence in which British troops carried out a massacre of Americans. Sequences “showing British soldiers dragging women by the hair, carrying off girls and stabbing a woman” were now apparently objectionable since the United States and Britain were fighting on the same side against Germany in the war.184

  After the first two showings of the film, District Judge Benjamin Franklin Bledsoe issued a warrant for the seizure of the film. Next day, when Goldstein filed a motion demanding the return of the film, Bledsoe not only denied the motion but ordered Goldstein’s arrest for violating the Espionage Act passed in June 1917.185 On December 4, 1917, a federal grand jury indicted Goldstein on two counts in relation to the Espionage Act and one under the Selective Service Act.186 Once the case—with the deeply ironic name The United States vs. The Spirit of ’76—got under way, it rapidly became clear that in the atmosphere of the time Goldstein had very little chance of being acquitted. A procession of witnesses attested to his real or supposed anti-British sentiments and claimed (although this was untrue) that his film had been partially financed by Germans.187 On April 15, 1918, after a trial that according to one later scholar was “an exemplary case of the suppression of civil liberties,” Goldstein was convicted on the first two counts of his indictment. Two weeks later, Bledsoe sentenced him to ten years in prison and fined him $5,000. Although his sentence would later be commuted by President Wilson to just three years, Goldstein remains the only film director ever to have been sent to jail for producing a spectacular and patriotic epic on the subject of the American Revolution.188

  To say that a curse followed those who helped make Birth of a Nation would probably be going much too far. Unquestionably, however, some of those involved had a tragic destiny. Bobby Harron (Tod Stoneman) collaborated with Griffith on several other films, including Intolerance, Hearts of the World (1918), A Romance of Happy Valley (1919), The Girl Who Stayed Home (1919) and The Greatest Question (1919). By 1920, he was feeling an increasing threat from the competition of Richard Barthelmess for major roles, and at twenty-six, he was too old to go back to the juvenile leads in which he had originally come to fame. Harron died in September 1920 of a gunshot wound; it would always be unclear if this was an accident or a botched (if ultimately successful) suicide attempt. Wallace Reid had already appeared in scores of one- and two-reelers before he accepted the role of Jeff the blacksmith in The Birth of a Nation. But the publicity he gained as a result of his stripped-to-the-waist exposure for a few minutes in Griffith’s hugely successful film catapulted him into movie stardom. He acted in a series of films for the Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) Studio, doing particularly well in several films directed by Cecil B. De Mille. For half a decade he was the number one male box-office star in Hollywood. But in 1919, he was injured in an accident. Prescribed morphine for the pain, he swiftly degenerated into a drug addict. A pale shadow of his former self, he died in a clinic while trying to kick the habit in 1923.

  The main actresses in The Birth of a Nation had movie careers of varying success and longevity. Josephine Crowell (Mrs. Cameron), already sixty-six when Birth was released, continued to appear in supporting roles until 1929. Miriam Cooper (Margaret Cameron) was the leading lady in many films until the mid-1920s, but her career did not survive the coming of sound. Mary Alden (Lydia Brown), although best known for her films with Griffith, continued as a character actress until the 1930s. Mae Marsh (Flora Cameron), cast once again as a “desperate” woman in the modern section of Intolerance (1916), subsequently left Griffith and starred in several Sam Goldwyn movies of the late teens. Although she reunited with Griffith in 1923 for The White Rose (1923), in which she starred with Ivor Novello, she made relatively few films in the early 1920s and retired in 1926. She was lured back in the 1930s, usually in supporting rather than starring roles, and worked continually—if intermittently—until the early 1960s. She became a particular favorite of John Ford, appearing in several of his films, including The Sun Shines Bright (1953), The Searchers (1956), and Donovan’s Reef (1963).

  Of all the Griffith “creations,” Lillian Gish was the most successful and the most enduring. She was the
girl rocking the cradle in Intolerance (1916) and starred in later Griffith films such as Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921). Although beginning to detach herself personally from Griffith (who was increasingly enamored with the somewhat wooden charms of Carole Dempster) by 1919 and breaking with him professionally (over a money dispute) in 1921, Gish would remain a loyal defender of the director until the end of her life.189 She made a number of memorable films for M-G-M in the late 1920s, including The Wind (1928), but fell victim to internal studio politics. After starring in two films in the early 1930s, she spent many years working solely in the theater. Gish returned to the movies in the 1940s as a character actor and had regular roles in films for most of the next half-century. Among many other films, she appeared in King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946), Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), and Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978). Her last appearances were in Sweet Liberty (1986) and The Whales of August (1987), when she was in her nineties.