205. Cripps, Slow Fade, 73–74.
206. Cripps, ‘The Making of The Birth of a Race,’ 46–51. Cripps argues (45–46) that The Birth of a Race was originally intended to demonstrate that the history of African Americans could be integrated into a broader story of “universal … human progress,” but that this idea began to unravel as the United States moved toward intervention in the First World War and the film’s producers became increasingly focused on making a film that would appeal to a mass market.
207. The Birth of a Nation did prompt a number of responses from black filmmakers determined to critique its view of African Americans. According to Thomas Cripps, such productions included three films from the Lincoln Motion Picture Company: The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (c. 1917), The Trooper of Troop K (c. 1920) and By Right of Birth (1921). Similar productions from the Colored Players’ Company were A Prince of His Race (1926), Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926) and The Scar of Shame (1928). Thomas Cripps, Black Film as Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 17–19, 29–30. According to Jane Gaines, black “race” films were produced in direct response to Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Her examples include three films produced by the Frederick Douglass Company: The Colored American Winning His Suit (1917), The Scapegoat (1917), and Heroic Negro Soldiers of the World War (1919). Gaines, Fire and Desire, 6, 97–98, 263. While the films so far cited by Cripps and Gaines did critique aspects of the unflattering view of blacks presented in Birth, they did not engage directly with the principal themes of Griffith’s movie. The one film that did was black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919), which presented questions of rape and lynching from a very different perspective to Griffith’s. J. Roland Green has argued that Within Our Gates was deliberately designed and structured by Micheaux as an attempt to contradict Griffith’s film. See Gaines, “The Birth of a Nation and Within Our Gates,” 177–92; J. Roland Green, “Micheaux v. Griffith,” Griffithiana, 60–61 (1997): 32–49.
208. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (New York: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 3.
209. Will (Juli Jones) Foster founded the first black filmmaking company in Chicago in 1912. His films, all shorts, “indirectly contested the one-dimensional black stereotypes portrayed in such popular productions as the Lubin Company’s ‘Rastus’ series.” Mark A. Reid, “African-American Filmmakers,” in The Political Companion to American Film, 3. Haynes tried to compel the big white companies to recognize the importance of “Negro comedies” starring black (instead of blacked-up white) actors. His Haynes Photoplay Company also attempted to sell the idea of a film about black businesses to Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League. “Biggest Motion Picture Deal,” The Freeman [Indianapolis], March 4, n.y., clipping; H. C. Haynes to Emmett J. Scott, March 18, 1915; both in Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress. Veteran black filmmaker William Greaves explained to a 1994 symposium on The Birth of a Nation that he had first become actively involved in films specifically to challenge Griffith’s view of the world. Craig D’Ooge, ed., “The Birth of a Nation: Symposium on Classic Film Discusses Inaccuracies and Virtues,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 53, no. 13 (June 27, 1994): 265.
210. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Memorandum to Dr. Spingarn and Miss Nerney of the Moving Picture Committee,” May 12, 1915, NAACPP.
211. Lorini, Rituals of Race, 219–224; Cripps, Slow Fade, 42–43, 69; “The Slanderous Film,” The Crisis (December 1915): 76–77; “Negroes Subscribe $1000 to Give Pageant Here,” North American [Philadelphia], October 13, 1915, NAACPP; Lewis, Du Bois, 459–61, 509. Also see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 374–77. While it did not involve Du Bois, another example of protest by pageant occurred in Chicago in August 1915, when the Lincoln Jubilee Exposition at the Coliseum put on a show depicting black history since Emancipation at the same time as The Birth of a Nation was running at the Chicago Opera House. “From Our Western Window,” The Congregationalist, September 9, 1915, NAACPP.
212. Secretary’s Report, Minutes of the Annual Meeting, January 3, 1916, NAACP Board of Directors, Box A-8, NAACPP; Lewis, Du Bois, 498–500.
213. All these scenes were objected to by the Censorship Board of San Francisco. Mary Ashe Miller to “Gentlemen,” March 2, 1915; cf. May C. Nerney to Gilbert D. Lamb, April 13, 1915 (on the New York cuts); untitled, undated memorandum on the cuts made in New Haven, Connecticut; Jose H. Sherwood to May C. Nerney, October 31, 1915 (on the cuts in St. Paul, Minnesota); all in NAACPP.
214. According to May Nerney, the Boston cuts left the film “so mutilated as to be almost unintelligible.” Nerney to George W. Crawford, September 7, 1915, NAACPP.
215. Du Bois, as quoted in Lorini, Rituals of Race, 225; cf. S[?] Kenwood to May C. Nerney, August 31, 1915, NAACPP. Although Booker T. Washington had criticized The Birth of a Nation in a letter to the Chicago Defender, he had also been very concerned that attempts to stop the film might in the end only serve to publicize it. Washington to the editor, Chicago Defender, May 22, 1915, cited in Fleener-Marzec, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” 430; Washington to Samuel E. Courtney, April 23, 1915, in The Booker T. Washington Papers, 13, 1914–1915, ed. Harlan and Smock, 277. Lexington, Kentucky, provided a good example of what a failed campaign against the film could do. It helped make Birth’s six-day engagement at the Opera House, according to its manager, “by far the most largely attended of any production ever billed at a Lexington theatre,” attracting more than 16,000 spectators. Lexington Leader, March 26, 1916, 1, cited in Gregory A. Waller, “Another Audience: Black Moviegoing, 1907–16,” Cinema Journal, 31, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 20.
216. Cripps, Slow Fade, 64; “Spokane Censor Praises ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Motion Picture News [New York], August 14, 1915, DWGP.
217. Gaines, Fire and Desire, 263. On this point, also see Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 58, 61, 63, 64, 66.
218. Chas. A. Gird to W. E. B. Du Bois, August 20, 1915, NAACPP.
219. See, for example, P. A. Goines to W. E. B. Du Bois, August 12, 1915; Samuel E. Brown to NAACP, October 25, 1915; both in NAACPP.
220. Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors, January 5, May 10, November 8, December 13, 1915, NAACP Board of Directors, Box A-8, NAACPP.
221. Cripps, “The Making of The Birth of a Race,” 41.
CHAPTER 7
1. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 131–32.
2. Thomas Dixon Jr., “Civil War Truth,” New York Times, May 8, 1921, reprinted in Encylopedia of Film, n.p; “Mayor Orders More Cuts in the Nation,” Sun [New York], April 2, 1915, DWGP. According to Seymour Stern, Griffith did “considerable” research for his film. See Stern, “Griffith: 1—‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Film Culture 36 (Spring–Summer 1965): 34–36.
3. Henry Stephen Gordon, “D. W. Griffith Recalls the Making of The Birth of a Nation,” in Silva, Focus, 59; “Five Dollar Movies Prophesied,” Encylopedia of Film, March 28, 1915.
4. Griffith, “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America,” in Mast, The Movies in Our Midst, 132. In terms of numbers, Griffith had a point. Academic historians could reach only a small percentage of the population with their ideas. In 1890, only 157,000 Americans were enrolled in institutions of higher education, some 3.04 percent of the population aged 18 to 21. By 1910, the comparable figures were 355,000 and 5.12 per cent of the 18–21 age group. Only a minority of these, of course, would have taken history courses. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States—Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 211.
5. “When We Have ‘Movie Books,’” Post [Washington, D.C.], March 28, 1915; “A Prophecy,” Journal [Columbus, Ohio], April 4, 1915; “At the Majestic,” Sentinel [Fort Wayne, Indiana], January 28, 1916; “At the Post,” Moon-Journal [Battle Creek, Michigan], February 3, 1916; all in DWGP. Griffith was quoted in each of thes
e stories as claiming that by this stage, “the operation of a motion picture machine will be as familiar as putting a record on a gramophone.”
6. Grieveson, Policing the Cinema, 195, 199–202 and passim; “Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915), United States Supreme Court,” in Mast, ed., Movies in Our Midst, 136–43, quotation 142. The Supreme Court’s decision was also apparently based on the notion that movies could not convey ideas—something strongly refuted by The Birth of a Nation itself.
7. “Capitalizing Race Hatred,” Globe [New York], April 6, 1915, D. W. Griffith, “Reply to the New York Globe,” Globe, April 10, 1915, both reprinted in Silva, Focus, 73–75, 77–79.
8. Michael Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 287.
9. “D. W. Griffith’s Great Idea and How He Worked Out Historically Accurate Battle Scenes with 18,000 Actors and 3,000 Horses,” Sunday Star [Terre Haute], January 2, 1916, DWGP; “The Birth of a Nation,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 61 (Spring 1947): 32. Comments by those who viewed the film attested to the effectiveness of Griffith’s strategy of re-creating history visually. One observer, for example, recalled that “I had never seen a plantation, but now I could imagine I was walking in one.” Jungquist, “Viewing D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A First Hand Account,” 36.
10. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997), 17–18.
11. See John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 16, 18–20.
12. Such historians in the first part of the nineteenth century included George Bancroft, William Lothrop Motley, Francis Parkman, and William H. Prescott. In the last quarter of the century, Henry Adams, John Ford Rhodes, John Bach McMaster, Theodore Roosevelt, and Moses Coit Tyler can broadly be included in this category.
13. White, “The Birth of a Nation: History as Pretext,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 214.
14. Stevens’s Lydia Smith was transformed in the film into Lydia Brown.
15. Francis B. Simkins and Robert H. Woody, South Carolina during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932), 130. Also see John Hope Franklin, “The Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History,” 19.
16. Spears, The Civil War on the Screen, 38. Some reviewers commented on the resemblance of the film’s historical characters to their originals. See G. B. D., “The Birth of a Nation,” Moon Journal [Battle Creek, Michigan], February 4, 1916, DWGP.
17. Griffith’s treatment of Charles Sumner as a moderate and in some respects a racist (he clearly disdains Stoneman’s mulatto housekeeper) is both strange and inaccurate. Perhaps the best known of the “radical” Republican leaders after Stevens, Sumner was presented in the film as a brake on Stoneman/Stevens’s radicalism. In reality, Sumner’s approach to Reconstruction was very similar to Stevens’s. He advocated the “state suicide” theory (the view that by seceding, the Southern states had lost all their constitutional rights) whereas Stevens believed that the old states of the Confederacy should be treated as “conquered provinces.” Sumner remained a strong supporter of black rights until his death in 1874: Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 very largely as a tribute to his memory. See David H. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), passim.
18. Brian Gallagher points out that “no other silent film relies so heavily or so intricately on words.” Griffith used titles as a means of signing his work, as a way of including the audience in the narrative fiction, and “as a device for setting up a quasi-historical discourse which will be reified by that much larger portion of the film which is visual.” By using intertitles in this way, Gallagher argues, Griffith turned “what otherwise would be an exciting racist photo-drama into an ideological project whose aim is no less than the reformulation of a major segment of American history.” Gallagher, “Racist Ideology and Black Abnormality in the Birth of a Nation,” Phylon 43, no. 1 (1st. qrt., 1982): 73.
19. These facsimiles, Gallagher notes, play a role similar to that of the intertitles: they “root the film’s quasi-historical discourse in a realm that combines the ‘reasonableness’ of written history with the believability of ‘seen’ events.” Ibid., 75.
20. John Nicolay and John Hay’s ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: Century, 1890) was cited as the source for the shots of Lincoln’s call for volunteers and Ford’s Theatre. The shot of Grant and Lee was attributed to Colonel Horace Porter’s Campaigning with Grant (New York: Century, 1897) and that of the South Carolina House of Representatives to a photograph in a local paper, the Columbia State.
21. Kansas City Journal, October 26, 1915; “Facts on the Screen,” Sun [New York], May 23, 1915; both in DWGP.
22. “Ford’s,” Star [Baltimore], March 21, 1916; “‘Birth of a Nation’ Story of History,” Sentinel [Milwaukee], July 27, 1915 (cf. “A Reconstruction Story,” New York Times, March 21, 1915A, in Encyclopedia of Film); “One Point of Detail in ‘The Birth of a Nation,’” Post [Chicago], June 22, 1915; “Grant and Lee at Appomattox—in ‘The Birth of a Nation’—Grand,” Labor Herald [Kansas City], October 22, 1915; all in DWGP.
23. Stern, “Griffith: I—The Birth of a Nation,” 34–35; Brown, Adventures, 64–65.
24. Brown, Adventures, 57–59, 64—65.
25. Bitzer, “The Old Film in Half Tones,” DWGP; Bitzer, “No Electric Light All Sun Photography,” DWGP; “Billy Bitzer on Photography,” Conversation with Beaumont Newhall, January 20, 1940, DWGP.
26. Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision,” in Lang, The Birth of a Nation, 286.
27. “‘The Birth of a Nation’: Griffith’s Superb Spectacle,” The Muncie Post, January 14, 1916; “Greatest of All Movies at Bijou for a Week,” Evansville Courier, November 28, 1915; both in DWGP.
28. Ehrlich, “The Civil War in Early Film: Origin and Development of a Genre,” 80.
29. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 100. For Williams’s discussion of “what is melodramatically familiar in Griffith and Dixon’s film,” see ibid., Chapter 3.
30. Chadwick, The Reel Civil War, 21. Gordon had been a Grand Dragon of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan. Later, in 1889, he became the first commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism, 15; Blight, Race and Reunion, 127, 272.
31. Gordon, as one of Lee’s divisional commanders, had fought an action around Appomattox Court House early on April 9, 1865. Gordon’s message to Lee saying that he had “fought my corps to a frazzle” and could now “do nothing” unless supported by Longstreet’s corps (which was already heavily committed defending Lee’s rear) was the decisive factor—since Gordon had a reputation as “one of the most daring leaders in the Army of Northern Virginia”—in convincing Lee to surrender. Freeman, R. E. Lee, vol. 4, 120.
32. Griffith himself used the term “Lost Cause” in a newspaper interview in 1915. Asked what he thought constituted the “great appeal” of Birth of a Nation, the director replied “Because it’s the story of a lost cause.” Other examples of appealing “lost cause” stories cited by Griffith included Napoleon’s exile on the island of Elba [he probably meant St. Helena] and Christ’s crucifixion. “David W. Griffith Tells How He Entered ‘Movie’ Business,” Tribune [Chicago], May 30, 1915, DWGP.
33. David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 102.
34. Blight, Race and Reunion, 272.
35. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, 103; Blight, Race and Reunion, 211, 216–17, 221–27; Chadwick, The Reel Civil War, 8.
36. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, 103. The stories told by these writers reprised, in some ways, the “plantation” novels of the antebellum period that had been written to contradict impressions based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Twenty-seven of these works, according to Linda Williams, had been published between 1852 and 1861. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 101.
37. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, 103.
38. Chadwick, The Reel Civil War, 19, 21; Blight, Race and Reunion, 215–16; Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, 121.
39. Chadwick, The Reel Civil War, 21, 19, 22.
40. Cripps, Slow Fade, 26.
41. Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the Myth,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 15–19.
42. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 178; Ehrlich, “The Civil War in Early Film,” 77–78.
43. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 177.
44. This intertitle also puts Birth of a Nation in the same tradition as the Nationalist school of American history (Ford, Burgess, Rhodes) in assuming that slavery was the issue that started the war. Other historians would later advance different arguments: Charles and Mary Beard, for example, saw the conflict as an economic war between capitalists and agrarians. See Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1937, 2 vol. in one ed., originally published in 1927), especially chapters 14, 15, and 17.
45. Stern, “Griffith: 1—The Birth of a Nation,” 66; cf. W. Stephen Bush, “The Birth of a Nation,” in Silva, Focus, 25.
46. Bush, op. cit, 25–26; cf. Francis Hackett, “Brotherly Love,” The New Republic, 7 (March 20, 1915), 185, in Silva, Focus, 85.
47. “Birth of a Nation,” News-Press [St. Joseph, Missouri], November 20, 1915, DWGP.
48. In the second part of the film, the house servants, Mammy and Jake, are shown as even closer to the Camerons, sharing their postwar misfortunes out of loyalty and affection. They even play a major part in rescuing Dr. Cameron when on Lynch’s orders he is arrested as a suspected member of the Klan.
49. Sorlin, The Film in History, 89.
50. On this point, see Frederic Merk, Slavery and the Annexation of Texas (New York: Knopf, 1972); Robert E. May, John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002, first published 1973); Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Page 53